‘How was Hamburg?’ I ask.
He answers but I can’t hear him over the music. Then we’re making out and he’s finger-fucking me on the stairs. I’m loving it. My body wants this so much. His beard has really grown since last week and he seems to have shrunk but that’s just the ketamine confusing me; he’s handling my body with such confidence it must be him.
Do I wanna go with you? Sure.
In the bathrooms now and still not quite sure if it’s him. If we just had a few minutes to chat I could work it out but instead I’m asking if he has a condom coz my pussy is driving this and then he’s fucking me in doggy against the cubicle wall and he was able to slide in without any lube, even though condoms would usually cause friction, coz she’s just so wet and ready and has been all day, has been all week really. I am loving it. Loving that I didn’t even have to pull my underwear down, he could just enter me from behind. Loving that the stall doors are like saloon doors, they finish at your calves and so people waiting definitely know what’s up and can hear us. Loving that he’s fucking me even harder than last week. Loving that I’m finally having the spontaneous single fuck I’ve wanted to have here, so the time my ex fucked me in an alcove while I leant against a wanking voyeur as back support is no longer the most salient memory. Loving that after so many years of work sex and relationship sex I am unlocking the slut part of me which had been channelled into the professional but now is mine to revel in. And as he comes his arm reaches around me and with a sinking feeling I see that he has a whole arm tattoo and he definitely did not have that last week. And I turn around to him as he chucks the condom in the toilet and ask, ‘Do we know each other?’
‘No, did you think we did?’
‘Yeah, I fully thought you were someone I knew.’
‘Who?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
I go to leave and he says, ‘Here, have some of this,’ and gives me a pill to bite. I walk out slightly shell-shocked, splash water on my pussy in the sink in the hope I don’t get thrush. Wonder if I consented to that. Wonder where my friends are. Where are they all? I’ve dragged myself upstairs and they’re not here. The gardens shut soon; they’re probably there making the most of the outdoors.
Back into the cavernous depths; squeeze through the cattle crush of the downstairs toilets. There they are, sitting next to the ginormous rubber cock. ‘Guys guys guys I just fucked a guy by accident or maybe not by accident but in a case of mistaken identity and now I feel all weird about it also coz I was so fucked up I could hardly walk but I could talk and I could fuck, obviously. I used a condom, though, thank god I’m institutionalised like that, so no worries there, but, like, I wouldn’t have fucked him if I’d known he was a stranger so, like, what does that mean, is it like consent through deception? … Yeah I did enjoy it. And no he didn’t know I thought he was someone else, it wasn’t, like, calculated on his part. He was just in the right place at the right time, lucky guy, god I should never take speed, I get so horny it’s ridiculous, this is why I never touch G, last time I did I was humping my girlfriend at the time while chatting to her without even realising we were in public, so mortifying and now I can’t even be trusted going to the bathroom by myself without screwing someone!’
‘Babes,’ a friend says while peeking into his nostrils with a compact mirror, ‘if you thought he was the other guy the whole time you were fucking him, and we all know being turned on is mainly about what’s in our mind, then really you were fucking the other guy, so who cares who he really was?’
‘Yeah, actually, you’re so right and they had the same dick too, both circumcised, similar size, otherwise I would’ve realised it was a different guy when I put the condom on. Oh great, that’s fine then, for a moment I felt sick like maybe I had been assaulted but if I’ve been assaulted by anyone it’s my own mind. Help me up onto this block, will you, please, I’m too fucked up to jump and I wanna sit up here while we smoke a joint, that’s what you’re rolling, right?’
I have a drag and sigh back against the concrete, grateful to be in Berlin. London held me and let me blubber through her graciously – at a pizza shop in Notting Hill, at a ceramics store in Maida Vale, in an apartment on Gloucester Road, walking to the tube station near Hyde Park Corner – but I always feel so class conscious there. Took my top off at a rich kid’s party because it was hot and I wanted to dance more comfortably and forgot how conservative people there can be. I’m so used to the queer party bubble of Sydney and Berlin, where it’s normal to take off your clothes once it’s over twenty-five degrees and sweaty, and no one comments or touches, that I was shocked by the stares.
I’m trying to work out why being around young people with money makes me so uncomfortable, like when I’m at a party full of people who pay for sex and drugs rather than sell them. People who can borrow money from their parents and who maybe even own their own homes. People to whom a gambling addiction is ‘poker’ and not the end of the world, rather than the pokies and destitution. Do I feel secretly inadequate? Resentful? Or is it just that the class difference is tangible to me in a way that it usually only is when I’m being handed cash by a client in a bougie hotel? I’m confused by how I, as a working girl, fit in to a world in which another working girl would be hired to hand out shots topless and be treated as a spectacle? A guy there asked me why I still do sex work: ‘You know all these people now,’ he said. ‘You could get a job through them.’ I replied that I wasn’t into nepotism. It made me realise that I take pride in having taken care of myself financially, and I judge people who haven’t, which probably isn’t fair because they are just a product of a skewed system, like I am. And pride is often a cover for insecurity anyway, so is that what’s really underneath? I could couch my insecurity in the rhetoric of ‘eat the rich’, but I would rather analyse what it is of theirs that I both hate and want. The stability, the entitlement, the good seat to watch the world burn from?
Berlin feels classless, though of course it’s not, and it has its own problems. White queers gentrifying neighbourhoods that have traditionally belonged to Turkish immigrants. Gay clubs unwelcoming of femmes, as if masculinity is the peak of human expression. But in this moment, surrounded by queers who have left hostile countries and made their way along winding, treacherous paths to eventually reach this sunlight of our own conjuring, it feels like a utopia. A Colombian boy and I discuss our intense desire to fall pregnant and become parents, and absolutely anything seems possible as we watch a horde of lithe bodies pour out of the door, with eye patches and bandages and knee supports.
‘Why do you think queers are so obsessed with the aesthetics around injury?’ he asks.
‘I think it’s coz historically our bodies are seen as abject bodies – you know, like vectors of disease, ailing and failing, faulty and barren. We just lean into that.’
I don’t add that as a sex worker my body is especially viewed so: a vehicle for contagion and public health risk, used and abused, devalued and discarded. I don’t add that I want to be fruitful in spite of that, and maybe even because of that. I want to reproduce because people say it’s dangerous to and I know it’s not. My only fear is that my sins will be visited on my children, that they will be judged because of the labour of their mother, even as she laboured to bring them into this world with the same copper loins that conquered men. I don’t want my children to suffer, branded the offspring of a whore, as if this whore hasn’t worked every minute with their future in mind. I don’t add that I hope they’re born into a kinder world that my words have helped to create.
Thinking of bodies, mine is getting restless. Boots beating against the seat, my feet feeling my impatience before my mind is even aware of it. It’s time to dance again, for sure. That joint has evened me out and I’m over that blip of confusion, able to think again and even write if I tried, I reckon.
‘You guys wanna go dance? … Yeah, let’s go via the bathrooms. I’m gonna stay away from the speed this time, though – I don’t need anothe
r misfuck.’
There’s a hand on my arm, a straight blonde girl I’ve met once before who showed little interest in talking to me.
‘Oh my god, I heard you fucked that DJ, Fedonev! I want to fuck him too. I’m going to use the same line you did: that you don’t normally fuck guys but he’s really hot. He never fucks anyone – well done.’
‘Um, I said that coz I’m gay and it was true. It wasn’t a trap.’
Escape to the bathrooms. It’s like a sauna in here, other people’s sweat dripping off the ceilings onto me after evaporating up there from them, the circle of life – no wonder we all came away from here last time with that same mysterious sickness, pain in our kidneys, it’s like standing in a soup of shared microbes, I’m probably getting the residue of drug intake from someone three stalls down. What a wonderful world, though, and I am happy to be in it. Wonder what the London chick is up to; wonder if she’s thinking of me. Probably not. I’m not posh enough for her, just a fascinating distraction in otherness. A prostitute rubbing shoulders with the upper echelons, how thrilling! Didn’t feel like that with that guy last week; I felt as if I met him as an equal. I didn’t know who he was, though. If I had, would it have changed anything? I don’t think so. I feel confident that I’m as good as anyone else who has got things through talent. I don’t feel on the same footing with people who get things through family connections. No matter how smart or articulate or cultured I am, I’ll never be able to crack into that world of people whose parents have supped and holidayed and intermingled for decades and sometimes even centuries. But why would I want to crack into it? Why do I care?
I do my line off the phone case and tune back in to the others. They’re talking about that girl and how they can’t believe what she said to me, they all heard it. I can’t believe it either, really. But it’s got me thinking. K always gets me thinking, epiphany after epiphany on the dance floor. My thoughts swarm out into the cubicle conversation …‘It’s an example of the way we enshrine male creative talent as something that should be worshipped,’ I say, ‘and how idolising is often dehumanising, like, while she thought she was paying him a mark of respect, and me too, she was actually disrespecting us both.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, she had no interest in me before I slept with the DJ, which suggests my worth is somehow tied to who I sleep with – it doesn’t come from within. This is how women have been valued throughout history, you know. Groupies, muses, wives – they’re all secondary, known for their connection to the men whose creativity they inspire and support, not in their own right, reflected glory rather than basking in their own, like their work was overlooked for his.’
‘Girl, speak!’ And my friend drums on the stall wall with his fist, rolled-up note protruding like a business contract.
‘Well, this is my craft. Just as there’s another DJ working his craft upstairs right now, I’m working mine: words. I guess I’ve even used my time with him to fuel my own creative flow, if you can describe this monologue I’m inflicting on you like that, in the same way male genius historically has been stoked by women whose own lives or talents are sidelined or sacrificed to that greater objective: his output. That’s why it’s so insulting: it assumes my value can be changed by associating with someone, not through my own achievements. I also hate it coz it sets up such an awful power dynamic, of the mighty bestowing the glow of association on the lesser, rather than the meeting of two equals, which does both of us a disservice. Reduces him to just a flimsy frame of his DJ persona, reduces me to a foil.’
‘Babe, she’s a star fucker, and it’s sad if that’s really where she thinks her worth comes from.’
‘Well and that’s the other thing! Besides the fact that she talked about how I hit on him as if it were a tactical move rather than a genuine moment of honesty from me, the use of his DJ name rather than his actual name makes me think: do you actually want to fuck the person or the DJ? Like, what is with this complete obsession with artists that leads people to tender them like currency, to collect them like notches in a belt? How do we dismantle this cult of celebrity? And, like, I say that knowing I wield some weird power as someone with an internet following, and I’ve seen firsthand how “famous” people are no longer treated as who they are but just as what they represent. Like, he’s a person beyond his social capital. False idols only fail us, and we fail them in the moment we turn them into an idol, not a person. But I think the thing that upsets me the most is that it tarnishes what was a wholesome experience for me by reducing it to what could be “got” from it. You know, like social capital, guest list, whatever. She spoke as if I had scored something by sleeping with him, like I was lucky. When in reality we were both lucky, just as anyone is lucky to have a mutually beneficial joyful moment of human connection. I wanna say, be happy for me not for who I slept with, but that I slept with someone and I enjoyed it. I thought casual sex was ruined for me and I was wrong, and now the world is full of infinite potential. Isn’t it wonderful to meet someone stripped of any pretensions, have some fun and then go your separate ways, knowing the world is full of people you can meet and connect with? I know I sound sappy now and am ranting but, like, if I wanted something from sex besides that moment itself then I would have paid sex – I do that all the time. Actually, maybe that’s why I’m so sensitive to it, because I’m, like: Babe, I was off the clock!’
‘Just coz you’re a whore doesn’t mean everything you do is whoring!’
‘Exactly. Anyway. Whatever. Thanks for letting me rave, I’ve got it all off my chest now and the K is hitting me. Sorry for holding us all up from dancing.’ ‘Girl, never. We loved that. Wish you would say it to her face.’
We heave out of the bathroom into the melee waiting to embrace us, consume us, make us part and parcel of the masses, arms tied tight to our bodies by those all around us. I can feel other people’s skin against my skin, a long length of thigh pushed up against mine as our tallest friend shoulders his way through the throng. Night is coming and the club is filling up. Outside, I know, a line of silent trepidation stretches past the kiosk, past the taxi rank, each waiting for the nod or shake of the head that’ll define their evening. I think of how sex work has shaped the sex I have in my private life, the fact that I revolt at any suggestion of gain from sex, won’t even let someone I fuck buy me a drink or pay for my taxi ride home, in case they think I’ve come to them as Maddy and not as myself. I think of how in movies the most hurtful thing a lover can do to a sex worker is suggest that what she’s been doing out of desire she’s secretly been doing for money. That scene in Moulin Rouge where he throws cash on her, putrefying what was pure. Is it internalised whorephobia that I’m so determined to have an uncrossable delineation between my private life sex and work sex? Yes, I’m a whore, but only at work. Outside of work I have integrity. Is that what I really think of sex for gain, that it lacks integrity? Or does it lack integrity only when it’s not transparently for gain? To say, ‘I’ll fuck you for this amount,’ is fine and honest, but to fuck someone out of feigned interest when you actually have an ulterior motive is not. I think it’s the pretence I can’t stand.
I’m too much in my head. Need to just immerse myself in the surrounds. Going up the stairs now, god that sounds good. And as we rise up onto the main level a trans girl I know appears before us on the podium completely naked, shaking her hair like a wet dog, and I feel as if we’ve entered Valhalla. Just bodies and sound, the techno reverberating through the floor, and my mind starts to hear voices in the beat, and the voices are saying again and again as if they’re blessing me, Berghain bitch Berghain bitch Berghain bitch. And I think, that’s right, that’s what I am, a bitch who’ll suck on your cock and piss in your mouth and fuck you by accident in the bathroom and walk down a street unafraid and give you a fiver to get home and tell you everything on her mind and roll her eyes at a bore of a man and, if you’re lucky, spend some time with you and maybe, hopefully, one day, birth a child. The club feels me,
it knows I’m here, and I ride on the crest of this crowd, a bitch of the finest order, the crème de la crème of bitches, but no better than anyone else around because shouldn’t we all feel our majesty in being alive when we could all so easily be dead? It’s a miracle really and I was so close to killing myself and if I had I would never have felt this moment of being.
‘Is the music saying anything to you?’ I shout into my friend’s ear.
‘Not right now, but often it says, ketamine dancing ketamine, and even when I get home it’s still saying that.’
Maybe it’s not that profound; maybe I’m just fucked up. Still feel great, though. Wish all my friends were here with me in this moment.
I send a love heart to every single one of them so they know.
One replies immediately: hahahaha love you. Are you munted? It’s 5 a.m. here and you always send a love heart when you’re munted lol.
Well, I am, but it’s true all the same. I love them sober and not sober – it’s consistent.
There’s a guy pushing past me and oh my god it’s the guy I accidentally screwed! Now I can see better he really looks nothing like the first guy … He’s at least a foot shorter, has a beard, so many tattoos … The two men wouldn’t even be picked for the same police line-up (though their penises would). I guess they’re both vaguely Germanic-looking with blue eyes. Wow, I really am a lesbian. If it was a girl I’d banged I would know her face back to front, every freckle, from yearning over her social media.
Nothing But My Body Page 4
