Working Sex

by Annie Oakley

  “Okay, out you go,” she puts her head back down on the pillow and gestures, a run-along-now gesture with one hand.

  “I was just looking at your pictures,” I say.

  “Honey, it’s too early for a picture show, now let yourself out before I get mean.” Alf stands up, stretches his back way up high, and looks at me like you better leave now. I mouth goodbye to him, close the door as quietly as I can behind me.

  but two days later when I show up at Nana Jimbo’s, Nicki is nonstop teasing me, shaking her finger and saying stuff like, “Where have you been Hannah-Rosanna-Dana? You think you can just leave your old granny sitting in a wheelchair for days on end while you run around town?”

  And this is how it started. First we were hanging out once a week, then twice a week, and then I found myself over at her house every other day or so. In the afternoon I would call her to see what she wanted for dinner, then I would go to Safeway for the evening’s groceries, pick up any prescriptions she had waiting, and a little present like a mini nail polish set, or a shiny balloon on a stick that said Happy Birthday! or Congratulations! and then I’d show up at her door. She would open it in a bathrobe with her hand on her hip, give me a half smile and a “you again?” But she was always thrilled with her presents. She lined all the nail polishes up by color on top of the TV and was beginning a balloon collection by the window, keeping them until they were hovering, wilted, a foot or so off the ground. After she celebrated the gift of the evening, I’d cook dinner for the two of us while she watched Cops, Alf rolling around on his back on the linoleum floor under my feet. After dinner we’d smoke her bright green medical marijuana and she’d school me on old films from her collection of home-recorded VHS tapes. Sometimes her other friends would come over too. Like Paul, a real young performer from Nana Jimbo’s, who was a boy most of the time. There was also Babette, this crazy girl from Brooklyn, real girly and small but with a voice that gave her away. I started walking Nicki through the Tenderloin to Nana Jimbo’s on the nights she performed. It didn’t feel safe to let her go alone which seemed to really insult her when I would even allude to it. She would roll her eyes with her hands on her hips. Say stuff like, “Hannah? Who do you think you are, saying this to me when you’re just a child? I’ve walked on every street in this city since before you were ever born.” She’d say, “If I was gonna get killed on the street, somebody would have done it when I was young and pretty, not old and tired!” Nicki told me she wore slip-on heels so she could slide one off quickly and nail anyone that dared. I had seen this happen at the Chez Paree. One night when I was in a lap dance I heard a girl screaming angry from somewhere down the hall. I jumped up and pulled the curtain back and saw Lexie, Doni, and Angel running in that direction. And then the brawl spilled out from behind the curtain, four girls total now, heels in hand, raining down on a big guy who was curled into a little ball. The kind of ball they teach you to do under your desk at school if a nuclear weapon should come your way. The kind of position that could never ever save you.

  One night when it was just the two of us we passed a joint back and forth after dinner, our plates on the coffee table, empty and stained with red sauce from the lasagna I had made. We were watching Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, one of Nicki’s favorites. She kept hitting my knee and saying, “Pay attention Hannah, this is the best part!” Then it would be the creepiest, weirdest scene ever. Like when Bette Davis dances around with a big bow on her head, holding a doll in the dark living room. Nicki would laugh and laugh and I’d end up laughing too mostly because it was funny to see Nicki laughing so hard. Laughing till tears came out of her eyes and she had to cough into a napkin.

  When it was over we sat in silence for while, then Nicki turned to me, said, “You know Joan Crawford used to beat her children with a hairbrush.”

  I looked over at her, she was nodding with her eyebrows raised up high, her skinny hand running over Alf’s back.

  “I hope you never beat me with a hairbrush,” I said.

  “I might start.” She was smiling at me so wide, and then she stuck out her hand and ruffled my hair. Like I was a dog, or a little kid, and it felt so good to be so small.

  nicki turned out to be the best remedy for heartache. Every time I started to talk about Bella, even just mention her name, Nicki would snap, “Shut up! I can’t hear you!” stick her fingers in her ears and sing fake opera, shaking her voice and looking up at the ceiling. It always made me forget about whatever sob story I was about to tell. It always made me laugh. It was like spring-cleaning. Sweeping Bella right out the door every time she came in.

  One morning I woke up at home, stretched in bed, listened to the muffled sounds coming up from the street below, the sun cutting into my eyes as I sat up. I got dressed and ready to go eat the lumberjack special at the Pinecone Diner on Turk. I reached into the jar in the bottom drawer of the dresser and pulled all the money out. Only five twenty-dollar bills left. I sat down on the bed, holding the bills in my hand and stared out the window. I felt shocked, even though I shouldn’t have been. Time away from sex work was measured in the length of my leg hair, my pubic hair, my armpit hair, and I had a good quarter inch of fur taking over. Bella had cleared out half our savings, I’d been avoiding the Chez Paree because I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. I’d been ignoring Chris’s calls for a couple of weeks, plus I’d started to spend more money, now that I had Nicki to spend it on. I peered out of the window at the street below. A gray-haired guy, teetering on legs like two twigs, was ripping up a loaf of bread and throwing it into a swarm of pigeons gathering on the steps of Saint Mary’s Charitable Services. I have to call Chris. I have to go back to the club. I felt an impending doom deep in my gut. The pigeons were getting crazy, becoming a blur of gray wings. I was watching him swing a leg out trying to kick them back. I looked back down at the money in my hands, the doom in my gut creeping up to my throat. The apartment felt too tight around me.

  I stuffed the money in my pocket, headed out, down Ellis. Eventually I found myself at Union Square standing under the statue, watching rich ladies go in and out of Tiffany & Company. Outside of Tiffany’s there was a red and yellow umbrella with a hot dog stand underneath it. It reminded me of the boardwalk in Long Beach, Coney Island too. I should save money, eat a hot dog for breakfast, I thought. But then a sign caught my eye in the window of a tiny coffee shop a couple of doors down, a red Help Wanted scribbled on cardboard sitting behind the glass. That’s when it occurred to me. It occurred to me so suddenly I might have jumped, startled. It was like a bright yellow light bulb popping up over my head. Something so obvious that I had never thought of before, I could get a regular job. I could get a regular job, like I was a regular girl. Like none of this had ever started.

  I headed towards the shop, crossing through a steady current of pedestrians to tuck myself into it. I stood in the doorway blinking a little, making out a few crumb-covered tables and chairs haphazardly placed, a family of flies buzzing a tight circle in the middle of the room. I looked up at the counter. There were pastries, individually wrapped in plastic, stacked in little towers behind glass. The guy working was the only one there, too skinny, wearing sunglasses, leaning on his elbows watching me.

  “What’s the starting rate?” I asked.

  “Minimum wage.”

  “What’s that?”

  He laughed like I was so lame for not knowing, shaking his head back and forth.

  “$5.15.”

  “$5.15?”

  “$5.15.”

  “An hour?” I asked.

  “Ya, what else would it be?”

  I sat down at a table, pulled out a pen and an old receipt, and wrote on the back.

  $41.20 before taxes, for the entire day. I looked at the guy behind the counter. He looked back at me. I wondered how he lived on that. He must sell drugs when he’s not here, I thought, which suddenly explained the sunglasses. I made four or five hundred a night in the club and six hundred a night with Chris. How lu
cky am I! I worked a few nights a month instead of every single day wearing sunglasses in the fly airport, pouring coffee. I had all my days to walk around, cash in my pocket, in exchange for a few shitty nights each month.

  It’s so strange. The way the world can think you’re nothing. That your life must really suck. When really you are so free. I’m so free, I thought. I looked out the window of the café, the trees shaking in the wind, shaking their shadows onto the street. People flying in every direction. From where I was sitting I could see the sky, a long column of it, blue and still, between two buildings. I’m free, I said to myself again, and saying it changed me, momentarily at least, like a parachute popping open over your head when you’re falling so fast.

  I got up and walked out, down to the pay phone on the corner, which was greasy and smelled weird so I had to hold it an inch away from my face. I called Chris, told her I was sorry for being a flake and made plans for a date that night. Then I called Nicki and left a message saying that I wouldn’t be over for a few nights, that it was time to make rent.

  in the evening, I took a shower and did my makeup. I scrounged around for the cleanest outfit I owned, pulled all kinds of crumpled up stuff from under the bed and the bottom of the closet in my search. I finally chose a maroon dress that came to my knees, a cardigan over it, the little black jacket Bella had bought me to arrive to work in, and black heels, normal ones, not stripper heels, so I could walk to Reds in relative peace. I stood in front of the mirror for a moment. It felt funny to be in girly clothes when I’d been out of them for a couple weeks. I pressed my hands down my dress trying to smooth the wrinkles. Looked at my face, my eyes heavy with black mascara, and my hair falling in wet curls on my shoulders. I thought of my mom for a moment by accident. How happy she’d be to see me like this. I heard her voice saying things like my beautiful daughter, and words like presentable and proud. It made me laugh a little, grabbing my purse and heading for the door, how in real life nothing adds up all the way.

  I got there before Chris, and chatted with the bartender Lusha whom I’d befriended in a real casual way, ever since I’d begun meeting Chris there. I assumed she knew I was working, because she always stopped chatting me up the minute Chris arrived. Lusha was a very tired-looking Russian woman. I thought she was in her early fifties until a night at Reds when a big sheet cake came dancing out in Pat’s arms, and the whole place was clapping and when it landed on the bar in front of her it read, Happy 39th Birthday Lusha We Love You! in green cursive. I remember looking up at her, amazed. She looked liked she’d been a sailor on a ship that chased storms, for the last one hundred years.

  Chris sat down, pulled my drink out from under me and took a sip of it, her little lips squeezing around the two red straws. “Hi handsome,” I said smiling. I looked at her. Her dumb fish face. Her shirt buttoned too high. I looked down at the straws in my drink. Contaminated, I thought. If I wouldn’t kiss her then she should know better than to put her mouth on my straws. My heart started to sink a little. I’m free, I’m free, I’m free, I said to myself, over and over again like treading water. I got Lusha to make me another drink, and gave my contaminated one to Chris. She thought it was so sweet, like I was buying her a drink when I’d never done that before.

  Chris launched into a never-ending rant about work. The department had made her take an apprentice, an especially clueless one, and I was saying comforting things. Stuff like, “That sucks, Chris” and “It’ll take him a while to learn, but he will.” But I was just hearing myself say it.

  She was so arrogant and could never stop talking. It was so annoying. Maybe her diarrhea mouth is part of the reason she can’t get a real date, I thought to myself. I was fake listening, sometimes wandering with my eyes by accident, watching my hand on her knee, seeing my own legs, my heels hooked on the bottom wrung of my barstool. There was something so strange that always happened the minute Chris arrived. I’d feel fine all day and then we’d meet up and I’d die a little. Not die exactly. Float in and out of myself like I was on mushrooms when I wasn’t.

  When we got to her loft I just let her have it. She said “Tiiimmm-berrrrrr!” and laughed like she was so funny, as she pushed me from standing, face down onto the bed. It was rude and not funny but I didn’t care. It would be easy this way. My chest against the bed instead of her. The radio was on quietly, and she’d lit a few candles while I was in the bathroom as if it would mean something. But the radio and the flames blurred and then floated away. I was sinking now, like a submarine, right into the mattress. It didn’t matter what she was doing, what she was whispering to me, what I was whispering back. I was so far under water now. The blankets and pillows pulling me down like a net. My eyes closed and webs of light, like drops of paint hitting a window, would flash across my eyelids. But if I tried to focus on one, it would disappear and a spot out of clear view, to the right or left, would break open with light. And then further back from my eyes I could see the front of an aluminum boat moving gently backwards on top of the water, moving in a rocking motion. And the light was bouncing off the water and the boat so that everything would go white for a moment and then return into view. I pushed my hands down, felt the hot-ridged metal of the bench I was on. I felt my bare feet in a little puddle at the bottom of the boat, warm from the sun, and then I turned around, looking behind me. There sat my grandmother. My grandmother with a firm grasp of the oars, lifting them dripping out of the water, leaning forward and then dipping them down, again and again. This motion over and over and the light bouncing. I looked at her arms, how strong she was, and then down to her legs, free from the braces and brand new. Her legs and feet uncurled, sturdy and muscular. Then I saw her face. Her soft face, and her eyes, big and shiny, and her eyebrows smooth, not wanting anything from me. I worried for a moment that she might be angry, that somehow she must have known what I was doing with Chris, but if she did, she didn’t show it. She just looked at me with all this soft love, like she was trying to row towards me even though I was there in the boat with her. The oars lifting, dripping from the water, then dipping down to pull again.

  college graduate makes good as courtesan

  Veronica Monet

  Born to working class parents in 1960, I was taught the value of a dollar early on. I never had an allowance and considered children who did to be strange creatures from another world. In my family, everyone did their share and worked hard with their hands. One never expected to get paid for doing one’s chores. My father had little use for formal education. He only went as far as the eighth grade and even seemed to possess a certain amount of contempt for book learning. On more than one occasion, he slammed my textbook shut with the following proclamation: “Put that away, I have some real work for you to do!” “Real work” was without fail something that would put sweat upon my brow: raking, hoeing, hammering, hauling heavy objects, etc. My childhood was this constant struggle between my simple roots and the more educated future I dreamed of. On the day I was moving out of my parent’s home and into a college dormitory, my father took me aside for a father-daughter talk. He implored me to forget this silly notion of getting a college diploma and stay at home with him and my mother. He promised me that the education would be a waste of time and Uncle Sam’s money (I was the recipient of government grants due to our family’s low-income status). Since I was destined to marry and have children by the time I was twenty-one, I certainly didn’t need an education in order to be a proper wife and mother.

  My father’s speech was ill-timed. The year was 1978 and the feminist movement was in full swing. I knew I did not want to be a wife or a mother. I wanted a career. I wasn’t sure what I wanted a career in, but I felt certain a college education would help me get there. I majored in psychology with a minor in business administration. Much to my chagrin, there were many female students in the liberal arts school who joked that they were getting their “MRS degree.” I bristled at the thought. I took my education and eventual career seriously. Maybe I would get a master’
s and become a counselor. Maybe I would take my bachelor of science degree into the business world and climb my way to the top of some corporate ladder. What mattered most to me was making it in a “man’s world.”

  Upon graduation, I set about doing just that. I secured a desk job at a small telecommunications firm with the intention of working my way up. I took a myriad of on-the-job classes in everything from customer service to the installation and repair of small electronic-key phone systems. When my supervisor was fired, his phones, paperwork, and technicians were rerouted to my desk. I was in charge of everything except signing the technicians’ checks. Department revenue went up considerably while I was running the department. I was elated. Surely a promotion would be forthcoming. But my reward for doing two jobs at once without a pay increase was getting to train my new supervisor. I had to tell him everything. He spent more time at my desk asking me silly questions than he did at his desk doing his job. After this humiliating experience, I surmised that my climb to the top was going to have one major obstacle: my gender.

  Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t give up that easily. I struggled for another six years. When that job didn’t lead to success, I tried another company, another position, more classes. . . . My last straight job was in 1988 as a marketing representative for a radio station. My boss would assign me accounts with the following admonition: “You take this account, Veronica, he likes a good-looking pair of legs.” I hoped my sheepish smile would not give away my mixed emotions of being complimented and insulted simultaneously. My efforts to land these accounts usually ended with the potential client admitting he never intended to buy advertising time with my station; he just hoped he could talk me into going out with him. And then I remembered a rule of business from college: Never define the product for the market—let the market define the product. Maybe I was selling the wrong product. If my clients wanted me, why not give it to them? And instead of only making 10 percent commission, I could take 100 percent.