I am an ambassador of reality and fantasy. I sit in on meetings and report back from two worlds. I contain multitudes.
Today was the first day I got played.
That means I’m pretty lucky. I’ve been doing this for a few years. I’m usually pretty exacting. And for getting played, it wasn’t much. It was supposed to be a $150 tribute for a half hour of telling a kid in Iowa that he was a loser for living with his mommy and daddy. He wanted to be called a bug. When it came time to pay, he bounced, and I cursed myself for not asking for payment upfront.
Another time, I had a hot tub date with a man who was so neurotic I could barely contain my laughter. I’d not counted the money in front of him as a gesture of trust, and I’d been shorted $50. I shrugged it off, because I’d essentially been paid to just hang out with him in a sauna and watch him fold and re-fold his towel.
There are so many things to internalize about sex work (or, rather, to try not to). Being occasionally played isn’t one of them.
I’m in a period of burn-out, a real, slow, anger-inducing burn-out (hence my last articles on emotional labor). There’s a reason why many workers take long periods off (if they can afford it) — to try to recuperate, to try to feel some kind of reconnection with the world, after turning slack against it.
I am on a trip right now, far from my city. I considered taking on work here, but I need a break. I need a break. I need a break. If I keep saying it, it will manifest in some way or another. One of my best friends is also here — we’ve rented a place in downtown, and I’m glad to see him. We make it a habit to see one another twice a year, since we live on opposite sides of the country. As such, I’ve never been to his city, and he has never been to mine. But we’ve met in strange places — Atlanta, Boston, New York City, Burlington. Timehop shows me that this time last year, he came to visit me while I was on a retreat somewhere near where he lives.
It shows us in the snow, near a train yard, near an old lumber mill that had been, it seemed, abruptly abandoned. There was a log with a saw still in it, as if the laborer had jumped ship mid-cut. When I think about this picture (so different from the city we’re in now, even though our apartment is still next to a train yard), I think about that novel, Sometimes a Great Notion. The logs rolling down the hill. The danger of being a lumberjack.
The first night here, my friend and I drank two bottles of wine. I almost never drink, and I began to swim through our sentences quickly. My friend and I (let’s call him Colin) have an intimate friendship; we met through a kind of camp. Camp life is not real. Camp life is up late and rising early. Camp life is living outside of your normative day to day. And because camp was our connection, for a few years I felt like a pull-down screen where he could project his manic-pixie-dream-girl fantasies. Colin is married, and has been more or less obscure about his romantic feelings for me. When he got married, I was his best man, and after the wedding, he didn’t speak to me for two months. I fell into a hole, he wrote, when he finally emerged.
When we see each other, we stay up late, rise early. We can be, like Rilke says, alone together, or happy in close-proximity solitude. We love one another deeply.
So, there we were, my first day in this other city, drinking wine and laughing louder and louder to be heard above the loud and violent trains outside. We crawled into our shared bed, and I turned from him to sleep. I felt his hand on my hip, slide up to my breast. And my body went slack, automatically turned, fell into the cracks of here and not here. It took me a moment to remember that this was my friend, not a job. I turned all the way toward him, and placed a hand firmly on his chest, pushed him away, shut it down gently. Bad idea.
But I’ve been in love with you for four years. He’d never explicitly said this until now. I flushed and went cold, my body still far from me, a satellite. I closed my eyes, and fell asleep.
The city I’m in is dark and gray. When planning for this trip, I’d hoped for sun, packed for sun. I brought six pairs of shoes for my seven-day trip, and have only worn my steel-toed boots, my more threadbare clothes. I find myself turning my back to any men — in restaurants, on sidewalks, on the subway. Colin and I haven’t yet talked about Monday night, though today we did have solo days — him, at a soccer bar where he met a girl, me, reading and writing and staring out the window at the trains going by. I haven’t felt much like exploring this city, which I have already been to, though in a different time, during a different season. I am also here, crash landing, and I recognize this. Colin and I have not yet talked about Monday night, but we have planned to meet up tonight for a drink and to talk.
He doesn’t know I’m a whore. He doesn’t know how carefully I maneuver myself to present in the world — how I straddle, 24/7, the lines between what we called the “civilian” world, and that of skin economy. He doesn’t know that his touch was so poorly timed, that my body turned cold against him and that he became, for a moment, another man I turned away from, another man I didn’t want to know.
I recorded myself talking into a voice memo today, a Jane Kenyon poem I love. “Evening at a County Inn.” I played it over and over. Sometimes, I put on headphones and listen to my own recordings as I’m trying to sleep. It seems narcissistic, to love the sound of my own voice. But I have a nice one, cultivated from doing radio and talking to men on the telephone. Its dulcet sounds are soothing. And, I spend so much time in the world voiceless, I think I listen to it to remind myself that I exist.
There is a line that is drawn in dominant/submissive relationships, a line of fantasy and reality. It is generally the dominant’s job to wrap scenes up and help transition them back into reality. I’ve dropped submissives for refusing to come out of the fantasy, for wanting to stay in it. I met a sub last week in a crowded, 24-hour diner at 11 p.m., an old punk rocker who hasn’t worked in 20 years because he makes so much money from royalties and band T-shirts. He told me of clubs in Europe, where subs have gotten lost, have been locked in cages and gagged for so long, their jaws have atrophied.
I am an ambassador of reality and fantasy. I sit in on meetings and report back from two worlds. I contain multitudes. So much of my prowess with this comes from surviving domestic violence, from being able to recognize emotional temperatures and diffuse or infuse. To be able to read desires. To be able to self-protect. So I can truly make my subs believe I own them, and I can truly care for them instinctively, unconsciously. It’s a skill I am grateful for, though it comes from darkness.
But when it comes to transitioning myself, I feel, on this trip to this city that is not mine, that I’ve gotten lost in a caged darkness, a ball gag in my teeth. I worry I don’t know how to navigate my intimate relationships outside of sex work — and I find myself turning cold against those who are warm against me, and expecting tribute from those who do not owe it to me.
I don’t take being played seriously because it is a man in a basement who got 10 minutes of my time for free — an expensive commodity, yes, but ultimately not about me or my body. I take more personally the effects of an inability to differentiate between fantasy and reality that the work has inserted into my body.
Colin and I will talk tonight and we will work it out, there’s no doubt there. I can tell him about feeling like a pull-down screen, and he will understand. He is not a man in a basement who is looking for 10 free minutes of my time. He understands reality, because it is the place we now occupy, outside of camp. And I tell myself these things, record these things, to play back to myself, until I finally, finally, believe that they are true.
