Working Sex

by Annie Oakley

  In the dark, the dark of that bed I think of grey, more colorless than childhood, we actually did it. I think of his penis which I believe was small but I thought of as Italian, kind of shapely and uncircumcised, is that possible? I’ve seen hundreds of penises yet I still don’t think I can tell the difference, but that makes me more of a lesbian than a whore, or someone congenitally disinterested in stepping up to the mike. He pushed his not so hard part into my not so defined part. I thought of this sexual experience occurring in folds. It was like sex between two flowers. Not beautiful, but not unfriendly, occurring in slow weighty cascading silk. Which was our lethargic drunken inevitable sex. We grunted and plunged I think, not for long, I think I allowed and even enjoyed it in that I was a witness to my body taking part in an animal unknown having made a deal as if I were my father and I had sold my daughter in exchange for some furs and a bottle of wine. I wasn’t so much in season as drifting through the yard, and the thought grew bright in my father’s head, why not her. I am that one.

  i was in bed alone. You know how you can kick your legs to the left and the right in a huge hotel bed, but still you feel a little lost. I looked at the clock, 5:30. It was summer so it was already light. Now there was blue a huge square of pale morning blue and Attilio Viola was sitting on a chair in front of it having a cigarette. There was a balcony and he had the door shoved open and his smoke was blowing out. He didn’t know if I was watching him and he didn’t care. His leg was folded over his knee. You could tell he just enjoyed being a man in a body. Probably went to the beach. With his family. Maybe he had a girlfriend in Italy. Sort of a cream-coloured guy. He was just sitting there smoking in his cotton briefs and a sleeveless T-shirt. A thin gold chain around his neck with a tiny gold medal. Not quite getting old, but he will. Soft rounded shoulders. He’s looking out at New York. What a great city with its plunging skyline and secret roofs and signs and cars already on their way. I suspected it was a melancholy moment for him. We had all drunk a lot. He probably does this all the time, picks up girls in strange cities and pays for them. He said he’s going to London next. I looked at him and I thought about that, the paying, and I couldn’t imagine how I would bring it around. Hey can you give me—I don’t know, three hundred bucks would feel right. Rent and some stuff. What am I worth.

  But he just looked sad looking out over this city that wasn’t his. He was northern Italian. It was so far away. He looked back at me for a moment and gave me a little pirate grin. Hey he said in his quick Italian and then he returned to his smoke. I began to get dressed. I didn’t ask for it. I said, hey. And got dressed. I left him in the window just like that. I left him alone with his view.

  the night plays like pingpong in my head

  Mattilda, a.k.a. Matt Bernstein Sycamore

  I wake up and I’ve wet my bed, one of my socks is filled with piss, the bathroom floor is soaked. I almost pass out on the bus, come home and sleep for twenty hours. All because of this trick who brought tequila. And I don’t even drink tequila. He came over and started chopping limes. I said I’m only gonna have a shot or two, put down that knife. He said I’d never hurt you—you know that, don’t you? I said I’m just afraid of knives. He said you can tell by the eyes, look me in the eyes. His eyes were practically glazed over. He poured me a shot, handed me a lime and asked if I had any sea salt. Before I knew it, the bottle was close to empty, I was on the ceiling licking salt off my hand and chewing limes. He tried to stick a hundred dollar bill up my ass, and I went to the bathroom. Came back and the money was gone. I said did you just put that hundred back in your pocket? He said what hundred? At some point he gave back the money, like it hadn’t been in my asshole or anything. Then he said I’ll give you another hundred if you get hard again. I’d just come in his mouth, and I hate having my dick touched after I come, but for an extra hundred, whatever. I said pour me another shot, and then he was sucking my dick again, before I knew it I was hard. He wanted me to fuck him. I tried, but couldn’t stay hard: no big shock. We took a break, he asked me if I’d go to Mexico with him. We’d sit on the beach and drink margaritas all day. I said first you’ll have to give me that other hundred. He said you’re not charging me by the hour. I said I just got hard. He said yeah, but you didn’t fuck me. I looked him in the eyes. He looked away. That’s when I got dramatic. I said look me in the eyes, and I stared right at him, right at his eyes. He couldn’t hold my gaze. I said the eyes don’t lie, and I kept staring right at him. He got all nervous, kept repeating that I hadn’t fucked him, he’d already given me a hundred. I was through. I said listen bitch, you better take out that hundred or I’m not calling you again. He said I don’t have another hundred. I said do you think you can work me? I said honey I’ve been turning tricks since I was fourteen, and I went into the kitchen for effect. Or water. Then I came back, picked up that tequila and took one big swig. I said you and I both know, and I looked him right in the eyes, you and I both know that it’s not about the money. He reached for the bottle and I pulled it away. I was swinging the bottle in the air, if he’d taken out the money right then, I would have ripped it to shreds.

  degrade

  Emi Koyama

  degradation

  is not trading sex for money

  but it is exchange

  of social security number for food

  degradation

  is not stripping away minidress

  but it is not having curtain

  covering me in a public shower

  degradation

  is not faking orgasms on the phone

  but it is faking compliance

  with the court order

  degradation

  is not even being raped on the street

  but it is the doctor asking me

  “why does it bother you if you fuck

  strangers anyway?”

  jimmy

  Nomy Lamm

  dear jimmy, where are you? i’ve been back on with the service for a week and a half and you haven’t called yet. i know i was gone for a while but i guess i just thought you would always be there. i know it was complicated, but you have to admit there was a genuine feeling in there. i wonder how you are. i feel like i’m betraying your confidence, telling all these people about you. but we never promised each other anything.

  Sometimes I think about him, walking around in the world in his business suit. I wonder if I would recognize him if I saw him. Would I be able to tell? Other people might guess that there is something churning hard under the surface. They would probably never guess what it was, mostly because they wouldn’t want to know. But I know. And there is still a part of me that thinks that it matters. All the nights he would call me from the middle of his escapades so I could encourage, prompt, humiliate, degrade, pass the phone around to my friends so they could laugh at him. Make him cum.

  Why would he need me, if he has his mistresses, his roommate, his dogs, his snake, his conferences, his cucumbers? But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  Let me introduce him.

  The phone rings. I answer it and hear a mechanical chime. Press one. The dispatcher comes on, “I have a request for you, it’s James Roberts, he can go as long as he wants.” The phone chimes again and we are connected.

  “Hey Jimmy,” I say. “How’s it going?”

  “Mmmm,” he says. “oh, oh, oh.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Playing,” he says. I hear it. Unevenness of voice and breath. Something being done to him.

  “That sounds fun,” I say in my girly voice. “Tell me about it.”

  Imagine, now, that you are me. You live on the ground floor in a neighborhood where Cubs fans and frat guys parade around, frequenting the Irish pubs, the Mardi Gras-themed sports bar next door, and occasionally the palm reader upstairs. You live alone and barely pay rent on your freezing-cold roach-hole apartment by working five nights a week taking calls. You are in a relationship with a female-bodied genderqueer who you call your boyfriend. You have phone se
x with men in the pantry while your lover watches TV and listens to your fake orgasms. The work suits you especially in the winter because the cold makes your back hurt and it’s better not to have to leave the house.

  “Ohhhh,” Jimmy gurgles. “I’m getting fucked.” He sucks in air through his teeth and whimpers. I can’t remember the last time I had actual sex with my lover. My disability has been particularly disabling lately, and the phone sex has driven a bit of a wedge.

  “You’re pathetic,” I tell him.

  “I’m sorry mommy. I know, I’m a pathetic faggot,” Jimmy’s voice is little.

  “That’s right, you’re a dirty, pathetic faggot,” I parrot. He enjoys this technique—repeating key phrases back and forth. I listen to him grunt as he gets pounded and I get a clear picture. I know what he’s doing.

  “Boris is about to cum, mommy,” he tells me.

  “I knew it, you fucking pervert,” I say. Boris is Mistress Tabitha’s dog. A Great Dane.

  The next line is unwritten. There is no summing up, no justification, no one true feeling about the experience of listening to a man get fucked by a dog. Understand me. When you are on a phone-sex call you are experiencing it, you are complicit. You can laugh about it later, but during the call it’s a reality. If you were me, by now you would have listened, dozens of times, to this man stroke, suck, and get fucked by this Great Dane. You would have encouraged him, degraded him, rode through it with him. The first time I experienced this, I felt like something in me was fundamentally changed. I didn’t stop it. I couldn’t. I didn’t want to.

  A memory came back to me, of a dream I had when I was thirteen. A dog with a boner. It built up and built up until he came with a bright shower of color, leaving me with the feeling of shame and release. My friend and I would always tell our dreams to each other on the walk to school. That day I was embarrassed. I hemmed and hawed and when I finally told her she looked at me like I was gross and said, “That’s it”?

  The dog cums. That’s it. Shoots a load of jizz up Jimmy’s ass. I listen to Jimmy groan and take it, then slide off to suck the cum off the dog’s cock as it softens.

  “Oh, mommy it’s so good. It tastes so good. It’s sweeter and more liquidy than a man’s cum.” No. Don’t want to know. Shut off. It’s just words. Blah blah blah. La la la. Jimmy gives Boris a Milk-Bone and says “good boy,” then decides to climb onto the giant dildo he has suctioned to his yoga ball. I think this is a great idea and go “boing, boing” with him as he rides his bouncy ball, telling me stories about a conference he went to recently with Mistress Tabitha where they did a demonstration with Boris. He is particularly proud because he won the Biggest Slut trophy for getting fucked by every man (and dog) there.

  If you are a phone-sex operator reading this you may be thinking to yourself, This is all in this guy’s head. And that’s what I thought at first. But over time I came to see the difference between the men with hyperactively surreal fantasy lives and Jimmy, who I believe actually did at least 90 percent of what he talked about. Rather than grasping for stereotypes and glamorizations, as many men do, I feel Jimmy was reaching for every real experience that he could possibly pull into his fantasy. He wants everyone, everything involved in his sex life.

  “Oh, mommy, is Stacy there?” Jimmy begs. Stacy is the name I gave to my lover after the time I told Jimmy my boyfriend was there. But when he heard the voice in the background he said, “That sounds like a girl.” Ever since he has begged to talk to Stacy.

  “Yeah, she’s here,” I say. “Stacy, Jimmy wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell him I think he’s a dirty faggot,” my boyfriend calls and Jimmy groans.

  He insists on talking to her and I ask how much it’s worth to him. He promises me a thirty-dollar tip and I get “Stacy” on the phone long enough to spit a couple of awkward half-hearted insults at him. The phone is handed back to me and Jimmy is ecstatic.

  “Oh mommy that was so hot,” I can tell he’s getting closer. “Oh mommy, talk in that baby voice, please, mommy,” I can hear the ball squeaking in the background.

  “Dat’s a good widdo baybee,” I say.

  “Oh, I love you mommy,” he coos.

  “Good widdo baybee, good boy,” I say.

  “I love you mommy.”

  “I love you baby.”

  “I love you mommy.”

  “I love you baby.”

  A friend once asked me “Is that okay for you?” when I said that I sometimes tell clients I love them. It’s not hard for me. I don’t even feel like I’m lying. Doesn’t mean I have any intention of taking the relationship further.

  But I guess you could say that Jimmy and I took it further. It just happened naturally. One night, while he recounted the exploits of his weekend, I said, “You use condoms, right?” His voice changed then, and he said he did, usually, probably not as much as he should. “It’s important, Jimmy. You need to be safe.” I didn’t know how this would go over. I don’t usually interject wake-up calls into phone-sex sessions. But after that night he would often refer to it, telling me, “and I made them use condoms, and I thought about you, and it made me feel so good that you cared.”

  Not everything about him was quite so sweet and tender. My boundaries were pushed, often, like the period when he was always shoving a snake up his ass. A real live snake with slithery skin and a flicking forked tongue. I said, “Isn’t that suffocating the snake?” and he said, “No, they go in holes naturally, they burrow.” I went along with it and listened to him take fifteen inches, groaning as it wriggled into him. I drew the line at him fucking the dog. I said, “It’s one thing to let it fuck you, but a dog can’t consent to you fucking it.” He seemed to get the point, though he argued a little, but ultimately he didn’t do it, at least not on the phone with me. He was as desperate for my approval as he was for my disdain, so he would apologize profusely every time he knew he crossed a line.

  So after a year and a half of talking to him a few times a week, as weird and deep and twisted and real as the connection was, he just felt like a normal part of my life. Not taking up any more energy than he was paying for, and giving me good stories for later. My relationship with my lover ended and I got into another one with a trans man who would sometimes get on the phone and be Jimmy’s daddy. Jimmy paid $50 for that. I’d go on tour and come back and Jimmy would always call within a couple of days, saying, “I missed you mommy.” Sometimes he would disappear for a few weeks and then reemerge with more crazy stories and new fetishes being explored. One time he told me he had taken to shoving a cucumber up his ass and going to the mall with it inside him. “I saw two people I knew,” he told me, groaning with the memory, “and I talked to them. It was so hot.” I wondered what those people thought of the interaction.

  He was insatiable. There was no endpoint, he was in constant expansion. He attended frequent sex gatherings where he was always the star, dressed up in his wigs, heels and hose, thigh-high boots and lipstick. He even managed to get action as a regular suit-wearing dude staying at hotels on business trips; I loved his story about the knock-knock game that preceded a porn-watching and blow-job fest with the businessman in the room next to his. One particularly tender moment happened on Christmas night, when I got to inaugurate his new Real Doll, by naming it Trent and making him say “I love you Trent” while he fucked its tight rubber hole. I marveled at the breadth of his vision and the depth of his appetite. I loved him for living it, for doing what felt good, as much as I was taken aback by the scope of his entitlement, access, and compartmentalization. I bet he’s a very good businessman.

  At a certain point that winter, I started to get really burnt-out on phone sex. I was sad that my relationship wasn’t working and that I had more intimacy with random dudes than I did with my long-distance lover. I was grossed out to have their issues occupying space in my precious new studio apartment. And I was pissed off that I had to struggle so fucking hard to claim my sexuality, when these men have the resources to occupy
other people’s space with their unexamined shit. I couldn’t help feeling invaded with every call, and my cute, sweet, friendly persona became more bitter and monotone.

  Nights passed without intrigue while Jimmy found new outlets. A kinky new couple who he played with. They met over the Internet, then at a local café and went back to their place together, where he fucked the husband and the wife fucked him. “Uhhh, mommy, it was so hot,” he gurgles at me. I stare blankly at the computer screen, click click click, playing solitaire. “Wow.”

  “Oh and mommy, I told them about Boris, and she wants to try it, wouldn’t that be hot mommy?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Click click.

  “Wouldn’t that be hot, to watch Boris fuck her pussy?” I can hear his hand slapping his cock. Another childhood memory comes back to me. I’m ten years old at my dad’s softball practice in the park. I’m petting this big white fluffy dog who knocks me over and keeps jumping up on top of me. It’s freaking me out, and my dad and all his friends are laughing so hard it takes them forever to pull him off of me. “What was he doing?” I ask. “He was trying to hump you.” I hide my face from all the laughing men. Any one of them could be Jimmy.