Published by Repeater Books

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United Kingdom

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A Repeater Books paperback original 2021

1

Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright © Liara Roux 2021

Liara Roux asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

ISBN: 9781913462567

Ebook ISBN: 9781913462611

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books

Part One

Chapter One

Birth

#

I’ve been asked many times: When did you first think of starting sex work?

I remember lying in bed, quite young, praying to God, “Please don’t ever let me stop believing in You. I know that otherwise I would do a lot of drugs, convert to communism, and become a prostitute.”

During different periods of my life, I imagined myself in other careers. The earliest I remember was fireman. The second was quantum physicist. I then decided I wanted to be an electrical engineer, then a painter, a policy wonk, an academic.

But I would lie awake at night thinking of whores.

#

I was the firstborn. The first memory I have is of looking at my reflection. The mirror was slightly warped, shifting the shape of my face like a funhouse mirror as it spun in a mobile above my crib. I’m not sure how old I was.

Sometimes I wonder whether this memory is real or not.

My first word was not “mommy” or “daddy” — it was “kitty.” My parents had two older cats, and I loved them. I would chase after them, and at first they would run away from my rough and unpracticed touch. As I grew older, I learned the tricks of where to scratch to make them purr and rub their faces on me.

#

Perhaps that was where I first learned the joys of giving another being pleasure. It felt so good to have a sweet, warm kitty purring on my lap. I always wanted to make people feel good. My mother, at the end of a stressful day, would ask me to give her a neck massage.

That’s my favorite part of my work as well — making my clients feel pleasure. Feeling their tension, their desire, playing with it, directing it, touching them and stroking them to keep them on the edge of climax.

For many of my clients, giving me pleasure is their fantasy as well. Of course there are those who couldn’t care less, but for the most part my clients are very much concerned with whether or not I’m having a good time. When I’m at the height of my powers, I am.

Only last week I was sprawled on the bed of a luxury hotel in silk pajamas, eating berries while an older married man sucked my toes. He was older but taking testosterone, with the body of an Equinox personal trainer. He gave me a massage and admired my body. I came while watching him jerk off into a champagne glass. He drank his cum for me, swallowed every last drop, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. Our pillow talk was a Modafinil-fueled debate about the applications of Ethereum — I’m a skeptic, he’s not.

Sometimes I feel guilty for how much I enjoy my work. I’m a first-class pampered pet with a diet full of Michelin stars, flitting around the world in cashmere and silk, private jets, private cars. Of course, my life wasn’t always like this. I don’t think anyone who watched me grow up knew I’d one day be such a self-indulgent whore.

#

My preschool was one of those bizarre places on the Upper East Side where parents need to fill out an application for their child as though it’s a college, as if anything but their wealth and connections are granting them admission — a grotesque race to ensure your child has every opportunity to succeed. My mother, perpetually neurotic, had decided it was necessary.

It was my first day and I was terribly excited and nervous. My mother peeled me away from her side and handed me off to the teacher. I was surprised at how I loved the lessons. I loved the art classes and reading and learning to write. I was so anxious to succeed, to make my mother proud.

I would come home, sit beside my mother in her bed, and practice reading aloud. “How is it that adults are able to read without saying the words out loud?” I asked.

“It takes practice,” she said, “You’ll get it eventually. You’ll say the words inside your head instead of speaking them with your mouth.”

Learning to read felt like learning to breathe. Once I started, I couldn’t live without it. My mother would smile as she watched me tear through a pile of books as she read the praise my teachers wrote in my evaluations.

#

I first knew I was bisexual in preschool, because I liked kissing both boys and girls on the playground, but I also knew it was something that I shouldn’t talk about. I also knew that I wanted to be a boy — or, at least, I didn’t want to just be a girl — but I shouldn’t talk about that either.

The first kiss I remember having was with a curly golden-haired boy in preschool. We were both going down a slide; he went first, and when I got to the bottom, he gave me a kiss. One of the teachers scolded us.

“You can’t do that,” she said. “Why not?” I asked, annoyed.

I don’t remember getting any sort of explanation that made sense to me, about why it was so bad to kiss. Being queer was like the same thing; I’m not even sure anyone ever explicitly told me it was wrong when I was young, but I knew that if anyone found out, I would be punished.

It is strange how these ideas about what is taboo are communicated to children; how did I know it would be so wrong, without ever being told? Was it the way my mother’s grasp on my hand would tighten if we passed two well-dressed men holding hands? I was too young to store any of these little signs and signals into memory. All I knew was that if my parents found out, something very, very bad would happen.

But I loved playing house with the other girls: going into the kitchen play set and showing each other our underwear, exploring touch, playing doctor. We would walk around in a fierce group together, teasing the boys, making them follow our commands. I was a devious little leader. There were two girls at school I loved with all my heart. Mei Mei and Mishka. We were always together, the three of us, having group playdates and outings.

Mei Mei in particular was my best friend. Her mother was so elegant — so unlike my mother — always wearing dresses and perfume. My mother herself never wore makeup or did her hair; much of the time she dressed like a man. She would only wear dresses when she had to attend a formal dinner, as well as Christmas or Easter service. She was fiercely practical. My father would bemoan this, trying to gift her jewelry or flowers or take her shopping for clothes. She had a jewelry box full of gems she never wore. She would snap at him for wasting money.

Mei Mei’s mother would put us in coordinating dresses and do our hair up in bows. She would take photos of us together and share them with my mother. She would let us use her tea set and we would drink real tea from real gilt porcelain cups, unlike my other friends who had fake plastic tea sets. We always took such care; it was Ginori, she told us, and precious. We never broke a cup.

#

My cousins on my mother’s side lived close by. I loved visiting them. My aunt and uncle had a daughter that was older and a son that was just a year older than me. He and I got along so well; we would have sleepovers and listen to books on tape as we fell asleep. He was always kind and gentle.

My maternal grandparents also lived near, and I would visit them as often as I could. My grandmother was an exacting housewife, who tended to her houseplants with scientific precision. She always had freshly baked muffins available. Her apartment was always impeccable and beautifully decorated. I would hover around her vanity, sniffing her perfumes, walking through her closet, trying on her lingerie — much too large for me at the time. I loved the lace, the silk, her soft suede shoes.

She took a special liking to me. I think she saw in me that same exacting attitude, the same appreciation of subtle details. She would take me shopping and teach me how to tell the difference between cut crystal and pressed glass, between polyester and silk.

“Fashion has not made any advancements since the early Eighties,” she would say, furrowing her brow. “All that you see now is a mishmash of the old. They simply don’t make couture like they used to. Look at this. This dress should be finished with French seams, but instead they’ve serged the edges, not even sewn in a lining. The dress will fall apart. Inexcusable laziness.”

I nodded solemnly, flipping through Vogue by her side, not totally understanding what she meant but absorbing everything.

My grandmother would host Thanksgiving at their apartment, with elaborate spreads and festive drinks. Turkey and duck and pies of apple and pumpkin, stuffing and real cranberry sauce, and the most delicious gravy you could imagine, poured all over mashed potatoes from heaven.

Eggnog and hot toddies. My grandfather always had a drink in hand, relaxing in his Eames chair. I would hover in the kitchen while she directed the cooking. She timed everything just so.

The best part of Thanksgiving was walking over to my grandmother’s house the day after.

She would have cold cherry pie leftovers in the fridge: “It’s always better the day after.”

#

Family Christmas was usually at their home in the Keys, right on the beach. When my siblings and I were young enough, my mother would take us for the entire month of December, my father joining us at the end for the holidays.

My grandmother taught me how to look for shells. We would walk together every morning. She would teach me which were rare, what their names were. She had a collection of beautiful shells throughout the beach home.

Once one of her friends came over and asked where she had bought her shells. My grandmother was immediately cross.

“It’s worthless if you buy them. Anyone can buy a shell.”

My grandfather would take me and my cousins fishing in his boat. He taught me how to cast the rod, how to feel when you had caught a fish and how to reel it in. I loved him so.

We would put the fish we caught in a special portion of the deck, then head back when we had had enough. My grandmother would cook them for us, fresh from the ocean.

I loved those months: spending my days at the beach swimming and digging in the sand, watching the sun rise and set over the ocean, sitting on their balcony smelling the salt, hair blonde in the sun, blown in the wind, the reflection of the moon over the water changing with the tide. I hated leaving.

#

While at home in the city, my family went to a church nearby. It was in an old, beautiful building and it had a vibrant community. I remember running around with other kids on the lawn of the church, asking the older women to tell me stories about their youth. One of them, who seemed to take a particular liking to me, asked my mom if she could watch me during the day. Her children were older and she missed having little kids running around the home.

I have so many clear memories of her and her kindness. I recently came across old photos of me playing with her gentle old golden retriever, who tolerated my tugs on his ears. We would make snowmen made of marshmallows around Christmastime, and she would set up incredible bubble baths for me in her massive bathtub. She taught me how to wash my hair and how to blow it dry. She still texts me every year on my birthday, telling me she loves me, even though it’s been decades since I’ve seen her.

#

She gave me a type of love I didn’t get from either of my parents. My mother was always cold and removed. My father was either warm and loving or furious, yelling, violent.

He was always calculated with his violence, even if I didn’t see it that way at the time. He would spank my brother and me if we misbehaved. He would pull down our pants and bruise us.

He said we were lucky he didn’t use a belt, like his father used to.

My brother was good at pissing off my father; it seemed they couldn’t be in the same room for any period of time without coming to blows. My father couldn’t seem to control himself. He would grab my brother by the ear and drag him to his room. I would hear the screaming and crying behind the door.

After my father would hit me, he would leave me in my bed, alone, crying. I would sob, shuddering, under the covers; part of me desperate for him to come and comfort me, give me a cookie and a glass of milk, part of me needing him to stay away. I could not hold both my loving father and my violent father as one person, so instead he split into two.

#

My father’s side of the family lived in the South. Much of the family we did not see, for reasons I did not understand until much later.

We did often see my aunt and uncle and cousins in Alabama, whom I loved fiercely. They lived in a large house in the suburbs of Birmingham, but my cousins — one boy a year older and the other boy only half a year older, were devoted to the idea of being redneck southerners. They would joke that it was legal to marry your cousins in Alabama and howl in laughter at my and my sister’s grossed-out faces. They taught me how to use a BB gun and shoot at cans lined up on their fence, or at squirrels. I was a terrible shot. We would romp in the southern woods together, talking big game, braggadocious.

Once, my other aunt, who usually avoided us because of my father, came to visit. She brought kittens in tow. They were so small and precious, easily fitting into my small hands. Precious little balls of fluff. She and my father got into a yelling match behind closed doors — I could hear their raised and heated voices but none of the words — and she stormed out. I didn’t see her again until my maternal grandmother’s funeral.

#

My father’s mother was a hoarder and a recluse. My aunt said she was a crazy lady. My dad said she lived alone in a house with her little white dog, covered in dog piss and shit and trash that she refused to throw out.

I met her once while we were visiting my cousins at a Chick-fil-A. All I remember was she seemed anxious. The next time we tried to visit her, she wouldn’t answer my dad’s calls. He drove to her house and banged on her door. She yelled at him through the door, told him to go, said she couldn’t handle seeing people, that she was unfit.

He sat on her stoop and held his face in his hands; he looked like a little boy. He hovered by her door a little longer, face tilted up in longing, as if him wanting it enough could make her open that door. The next time I saw her she was dead.

Chapter Two

Graduation

#

Children from my preschool typically went to a certain elementary school, but I went to a different one, with a different feeder preschool. Most of the other children in my elementary school had known each other for years. I was wary of them. I didn’t quite understand them. We would play marbles waiting for our parents after school.

I crushed kindergarten, acing my report card every month. My teachers wrote effusive praise. They recommended advanced reading and mathematics courses. I was given a special evaluation and was told I would be entering an advanced math course. My mother and father were both proud. My father would help me with my math homework, teaching me a little extra every time.

I gradually became friends with a pack of boys who loved roleplaying as Star Wars characters. They would usually be honorable Jedi Knights and I was a Sith Lord. I would use my mind control powers on them, force them to turn against each other and do my bidding. At night, I would lie awake and think of our games and I would feel a tingling, an itch. It was the first time I remember being distinctly aroused.

One by one, these boys individually confessed their crushes on me and told me they wanted to be my boyfriend. I was frustrated. I didn’t want a boyfriend — I wanted a harem of boys I could mind control! Eventually, they grew jealous of each other, and we stopped playing together.

This was one of my first experiences of a friendship being destroyed because a boy couldn’t get over his romantic attraction to me. Throughout my life, this has been one of the most painful things to experience. A man confesses to me that he’s in love with me. When I express disinterest, the relationship is poisoned and withers.

To lose out on opportunities because an idiot man couldn’t keep his boner in his pants is infuriating — to have a sexual relationship framed as the price of admission, told that I am lucky to receive the attention, despite knowing they have mentored plenty of fellow men before, with no blowjob required.

I think of all the things I could have done, all of the things so many women could have done, had men simply let their longing go, and I feel a fury flare in my belly.

#

Around the end of my first grade, the old pastor at my church retired and the church decided on a woman as the next minister. My father was enraged. I was confused; I liked her. She made me laugh during her sermons. My father felt that a woman pastor went against the word of the Bible. Women were too irrational and unstable to lead. He protested but everyone ignored him or even laughed at him. Emasculated, he decided we needed to find a more traditional church. A church that respected men. Only now can I see how small and angry he must have felt to insist on such a thing.

The church he decided on was, ironically, only a few years old. But it claimed it was dedicated to the truth of Christianity, a truth that had been forsaken somewhere along the way. It was operated out of a local community center on the weekends, sermons taught in the auditorium, Sunday school in the classrooms.

This new pastor had a very academic style of sermon, often discussing the Hebrew or Greek origins of various words, why they were translated in a particular way. The Bible was taken quite literally, as absolute truth, which was quite magical to me at the time. I read it from end to end over the summer of second grade, feeling guilty as I skimmed the boring genealogies. I slept with it beside my pillow, reading it before I went to bed and when I woke up.

Obviously, the Bible is not an appropriate book for a child to read, with its lurid descriptions of incest and violence. I remember asking my mother a few too many questions about animal sacrifice and Lot’s daughters. She was unnerved, but I was hooked. It is strange to me that my conservative parents allowed me to read such a naughty book as the Bible. So many people forget the overwhelming horniness of Song of Solomon:

Your breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies. … My beloved thrust his hand through the latch-opening; my heart began to pound for him.

Once I had finished reading the Bible, I became insatiable. I wanted to read about other religions. The library near me had an entire section of children’s books about other mythologies and I devoured them. Among my favorites were Anansi, the trickster spider god; the story of Persephone and how her mother wept for her, creating winter; and the tale of Osiris, with its drama, betrayal, and rebirth. My elementary school art teacher, Mrs Smith, encouraged this fascination, drawing from mythologies from around the world in her explanations of different art histories. I would linger in her classroom, pestering her with questions about Fauvism or Aphrodite. She was always so kind.

I asked so many questions as a child. Educators like to talk about the different ways people learn: kinetic, verbal, visual. I needed everything. When I was younger, I loved the outdoors. I put everything in my mouth. I wanted to know what the leaves of my favorite maple tree tasted like. I ate grass. I pulled wild onions out of the dirt and put them, unwashed, into a muddy stew along with dandelion leaves and other plants I read about being edible. Of course it was disgusting, but I loved it. I would often be covered in mud, knees bleeding from climbing trees, hair an absolute mess.

There was a snake living in the park nearby that was incredibly alluring to me. It was a simple garter snake and I loved watching it. My parents told me to keep away from it, or it would bite me. I would leave small bites of food for it in the rocky area I knew it lived in.

One day, while taking a break from playing, I rested my hand on a rock. The rock felt fleshy and warm to the touch; I looked down, startled to see that I was actually resting my hand on the snake. I lifted my hand, and she slowly slithered away. She seemed to have no desire to bite me — a gentle creature.

Throughout my childhood I was intrigued by snakes. I was always confused why people were so afraid of them. There was the snake in the garden of Eden, and the evil lady who can transform into a snake in The Chronicles of Narnia. A friend of mine had a pet snake, and I would watch it curl around my arm, appreciating its smooth warmth.

Perhaps I’ve always been inclined to be curious about things that frighten others. I remember a boyfriend once getting angry that I called his cock “cute,” but to me it was! A soft, gentle, sweet cock. He wanted me to think it was large, perhaps even threatening, but I couldn’t. I think I’m drawn to men in general that are sweet and feminine; I myself am so masculine and intense. I want to be the pursuer, the top, the one in control. I might look innocent and soft, but I’m hardly a submissive.

#

When my mother would take us to the park as children, I would usually amuse myself by climbing trees. There was one tree in particular which was my favorite, and I would leave her little flowers, sticking them in her rough bark. One day, when my mother called to us, asking us to get ready to come home, I refused. I hid in the tree. She came to the base and called up to me.

“This tree is my mother,” I told her, “It’s my home now. I won’t be coming with you.” She left and an hour or so later I walked home.

I was chaotic and messy but I did have a sort of intellectual rigor behind the chaos. My grandmother and father taught me about different plants native to the northeast. We would go on walks and discuss the surprising lemon zing of wood sorrel. I would identify some poison ivy, then pepper my father with questions. I knew my skin would erupt in a painful rash if I touched it… but what if I ate it?

Perhaps my favorite thing about my father was how he humored my questions. We would talk about why poison ivy caused such a reaction, ways to prevent it (laundry detergent could break down the oils), particular reasons why the body would react so violently to it, why immune systems were so delicate, and how an overreaction or underreaction could prove fatal.

Usually, I would ask him questions about how different things worked, until it was time for bed. He would sit at the foot of my bed, fielding questions till we got all the way down to quarks. I would ask him endless questions about quantum mechanics, which he would do his best to answer until he didn’t know anything further. He would then tell me that perhaps one day I would be the one to figure out the answers to all those questions.

I would fall asleep, imagining myself in a lab somewhere, peering through a microscope, writing notes and reading endless studies.

As I grew older, it became harder and harder for me to reconcile this part of my father, who always encouraged my curiosity and questioning, with the religious and deeply moral father who insisted that dinosaur bones were placed underground as God’s method of testing our faith.

#

I became extremely cocky in class. I had a genius IQ and I knew it. They did their best to challenge me, but I was growing bored.

My second grade teacher hated my guts. I would read books under my desk in school during her math lessons. She would yell at me for reading, say I wasn’t paying attention, then ask me to solve the math question on chalkboard. I would look up, smirk and answer it, then go back to reading. What could she do?

I cringe looking back at what a dick I was. So many of the adults around me told me constantly that I was a generational talent, that anything I decided to do with my life would change the world. Once, I was at a dinner party with a few of my father’s friends. A man asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up.

“A quantum physicist,” I said, sipping my water.

“Do you even know what that is?” He asked, drunk and stupid.

“I borrowed a book from the library about it. I’m fascinated by the idea that electrons don’t exist in a single point location. My dream is to work on finding the Higgs boson. Do you know what that is?” I replied, with all the condescension I could muster.

My father laughed as the man flushed red and mumbled something. “Wise beyond her years, isn’t she?”

#

Sometimes I would beg my mom to let me shave my head, or at the very least cut my hair short. I hated my long hair, it was always getting in the way and getting tangled, and it hurt to brush. I would pull at it and cry. My mother was irate and told me that girls have long hair and boys have short hair, and that I was a girl, so I had to have long hair.

My mother would take me shoe shopping whenever I outgrew my shoes. My feet were always small growing up, so I never got to buy shoes that looked like the ones girls my age were wearing. The shopkeeper would measure my feet and direct me to a particular aisle where all my options were hot pink and glittery. Hot pink and glitter were no longer chic; I was a mature first grader. I wanted shoes that were cool.

My mother caved and let me shop in the boys’ section. I picked out plain gray leather sneakers. I would feel an illicit sense of naughtiness and transgression as I wore them walking down the street, wondering if anyone could tell they were meant for boys, not girls. Being seen as a woman always chafed. I didn’t fit into the mold and I resented being pushed into it. I just wanted to be whatever I was.

#

There was one boy that year I did have a crush on. I would walk over to his desk and come up with excuses to talk to him. We had playdates and built an elaborate train set together, drew with crayons, spun his father’s globe in the living room and pointed at places we wanted to travel to. His grandmother made us some rice and steamed veggies and I gobbled them up.

At the end of each playdate, when my mother came to pick me up, I gave him a kiss on the lips. His grandmother watched, smiling. He would find me at school and kiss me when out of view of the teachers. He moved away the following year.

#

I hated the girls at this school. They were vapid and blonde, like their mothers, preppy and boring. I missed Mei Mei; even going to different elementary schools, we continued our playdates until her father was transferred to his company’s branch in Hong Kong.

My mother made me join Girl Scouts. We were Daisies. The mothers were all friends with each other and the girls too. My mother stuck out like a sore thumb and so did I. I would protest before every meeting, crying hysterically, begging my mom to let me stay home and read.

We went on a camping trip, and I terrified the other girls with a terrifying horror story late at night in our tent. The other moms complained to my mom, but I didn’t know how to be anything other than the person I was. These girls were babies.

My teacher asked my mother if she wanted me to be moved up two grades. I begged her to say yes. I was friendly with some of the older girls, anyways, we had more interests in common. My mother shut it down; she didn’t want me to be socially stunted. I was permitted to take certain advanced classes, but was still grouped with other children my age.

#

I was often very angry. I would get into fights with my brother constantly. My parents were vexed. One day, they took a video of us after a fight.

“Do you remember why you were mad at your brother?” My father asked me. My face cold and angry, “I hate him.”

My father’s voice in the video, “I’m going to show you this in five years, do you think you will remember what he did that upset you?”

“Of course,” I replied, “It’s awful.”

Years later my father did replay the video for me.

“I was mad he took my favorite spoon,” I said, “He used it for his applesauce and he wouldn’t let me have it.”

My father was disturbed at the clarity of my memory. I think sometimes my parents did act carelessly around us, assuming their misdeeds would be forgotten in a few years. But I remembered everything. And of course I remembered that spoon, sterling silver, given to me by my grandmother. I’ve always been petty.

I felt the adults in my life regarded me as monstrously precocious — precocious to the point of being dangerous, a loose cannon, a powerful force that needed to be broken and reined in, like a wild horse. They would stare at me from afar and whisper.

#

Around this time my father started teaching my younger brother C++. Curious, I wandered over and watched them. My brother, with a short attention span typical of a five-year-old, lost interest quickly, but I was totally obsessed.

C++ was a newer programming language that my father was very excited about. He taught me the basics of programming quickly; he used to be a professor while in grad school and had a passion for teaching. Together, we made a tic-tac-toe game that learned from you as you played against it: it remembered all the previous strategies you used and would either use them against you, or prevent you from executing them.

My father remarked that he was surprised a girl was so into computer programming. My mother, before she became a stay-at-home mom, was an electrical engineer, who designed circuitry for consumer electronics like refrigerators. Despite this, I fully bought into his sexism. I considered women weak, physically and intellectually, incapable of rational thought. My father and I agreed that the only logical woman in the world was Ann Coulter.

I let myself believe I was exceptional and that no one would look down on me for being a woman. My brilliance was obviously self-evident, I felt, even though my father had initially decided that I wouldn’t be interested in computers. I believed the easy lie of meritocracy.

My mother was displeased with my interest in computers. She had decided to quit her job in large part due to the overwhelming sexism and sexual harassment she experienced while working as an engineer. She would show me photos of her working in Taiwan and I would ask her why she left. She told me that she thought I should stay away from tech, that it would be too hard. At the time, I thought she meant it would be a technical challenge, that she thought I wasn’t smart enough, but now I understand that her meaning was not so straightforward.

I became enmeshed with my computer. I would spend hours playing in terminal, writing little scripts. At the time, the only computer I had was a Linux machine. Red Hat was certainly not designed with children in mind, but I had fun playing all the open source games I could find to download onto it. Eventually, I built a computer with my father and started running Ubuntu.

I used to love chatting online when I was younger and terribly lonely. I would spend hours every day on forums, chatting with strangers that happened to share my interests. I learned HMTL and CSS so I could build elaborate webpages on Neopets.

My mother was very opposed to me spending too much time on the computer as a child.

She thought it resulted in me reading fewer books. My father intervened on my behalf.

“I’ve watched what she does online,” he said. “It’s still reading, just on the screen instead of on paper.”

#

In this age of computers, the autist is the new magician, intuitively communicating with the divine. Autism is a change in empathy; it is an empathy overload. Regular humans can empathize easily with other humans, whereas autistic people empathize with whatever their system of obsession is, be that humans or trains or computer chips. Just as neurotypical people might watch a rom-com and feel their heartstrings tugged by the music and the acting, an autistic person can get into the mind of any system, intuitively predicting its ebbs and flows.

When I was young, I had the traditional autistic obsessions. I loved my computer and playing Pokémon and train simulators. I had a few friends besides those I shared interests with, mainly nerdy boys, and those I barely engaged with, preferring to read or play on my computer. For the most part, I felt they couldn’t understand what I was talking about.

In second grade, my teacher had a long talk with my mother about this. She was concerned about my social development. My mother told me I must make friends. I was annoyed.

I started scoping out the girls in my class, trying to see who might be a good candidate as a friend. One girl, Natalie, stood out, but she already had a best friend. I eavesdropped on them one day in line. They were discussing who the best Disney princess was.

“How could I be friends with someone who only wants to talk about Disney princesses?” I thought.

I was frustrated. I felt no girls my age could possibly hold a conversation with me about anything I would enjoy talking about. But just like hiding my queerness, I knew that if I did not make friends with the other young ladies, something bad would happen to me.

I began to observe them. I learned how to smile at the appropriate time, how to time a joke to get maximum laughs. Eye contact was the most challenging, but I learned to push through my discomfort to meet people’s eyes. I read obsessively about how people related to each other, their body language, and what their body language communicated. I read books about psychology and how to be a good friend. I did my best to learn the system of normal human interactions and how to mimic it.

Eventually, I went on a playdate with Natalie and her best friend. Both of them were in my Girl Scout troop. I played with their dolls and we drew with crayons. I forced myself to learn how to appreciate it.

Autistic girls are less likely to be diagnosed than boys and they are more likely to have developed skills that allow them to blend in. What would I be like if I had been allowed to pursue my natural interests without being forced to do the tedious work of learning to pretend to be normal?

You could say autistic boys are perhaps too coddled. I am infuriated when a man is allowed to get away with creepy behavior just because he’s on the spectrum. Having been forced to learn basic social decorum, I know it’s possible to learn. I wish there was a middle ground, where I was still allowed to be a little weird, but still taught how to not act like an asshole, and boys were taught the same.

Some people are surprised when I tell them I’m autistic. I explain to them that most of what is handled in the background of people’s brains while interacting is in the forefront of mine. I will point out how they are holding themselves, the placement of their hands, the tension of their back, and what it communicates to me, and then explain how I’m holding my body, and the intent behind my body language. One on one, I can pass relatively easily, but in group settings, especially large group settings, my ability to process all the variables degrades rapidly. My contributions to the conversation are grating, my body language not quite the right vibe, my laughter not properly timed and a little too loud.

I have not been able to maintain a friendship with a neurotypical person for more than four years. That is the point at which any relationship begins to irrevocably degrade. I think they can tell that I am off somehow, that I am faking it. Something about me sets their teeth on edge — uncanny valley, strange alien desperately trying to be human.

Chapter Three

Pain

#

In third grade, I started getting a stabbing pain behind my eye that would wake me from my sleep in the middle of the night, screaming and sweating. I had no idea what was happening to me. It was absolutely terrifying.

It’s hard for me to talk about the pain of a cluster headache. My urge is always to minimize. The pain feels like a searing hot poker stick is being shoved into my skull through my eye socket. It really felt like I was dying when I would wake up at 2am, screaming and crying, and start to bang my head against the wall. Sometimes the pain was so intense that I would vomit or piss the bed.

The first few times it happened, my parents thought I had woken up from a nightmare.

They had me climb into their bed and held me, rubbed my back until I was able to fall back asleep. Soon, though, they began to happen every night. I became terrified of going to bed and my mother’s sympathy began to run thin. They took me to the doctor, who said I had a sinus infection and put me on a round of antibiotics.

The antibiotics had no effect on my pain, so they took me back to the doctor. She told my parents they were stress headaches, psychosomatic, and that I just needed to calm down and they would go away. In other words, I was faking it. It felt like I had been stabbed, like I was bleeding, like I was dying and needed immediate attention and relief, and everyone around me was rolling their eyes in disbelief.

If you have cluster headaches it changes you. I’ve met a few other people who have them; when you realize the shared experience, there are certain things you know they will understand. If you joke casually about the many times you’ve been suicidal, there will be no misunderstanding about exactly what you mean. When you experience intense, repeated trauma before the age of eleven, while your brain is still going through critical development phases, something happens to you.

Eventually, I stopped running to my parents. I had to take care of myself, try to soothe my own pain. I would lie in bed, trying to sob as quietly as possible so that I wouldn’t wake anyone. On particularly bad nights, I would go to the bathroom, lay my head on the cool tile, and bite a washcloth or my stuffed rabbit, Bunny, so that I wouldn’t scream. If I vomited or pissed in my bed, I learned how to use the washer and dryer and would clean my own sheets, so nobody would know.

#

I went from being a healthy child to getting sick all the time. On Valentines Day, I woke up feeling particularly wretched. I begged my mother not to send me to school.

“It will be easy,” she said, “Your class is just having a party. You won’t have to do any work.”

I was fucked up. The classroom was decorated in red crepe paper and delicate white doilies. The party had cupcakes and chocolates and all kinds of special treats, but the only thing I could eat without vomiting was Jello. I lay on the ground. One of the mothers who was volunteering at the party felt my forehead, saying I looked flushed, and sent me to the nurse.

I had a fever of 102 degrees, so they sent me home. I lay in bed and sipped Gatorade, my mother sighing as she tucked me into bed.

When I was sick, it was usually a stomach bug. I became an expert at making it to the toilet, or at least a trash can before I hurled. A few times I didn’t make it and vomited all over the school hallway.

The most embarrassing incident was during my gym class. We were running outside. It was early morning and still cool out, the type of chilly spring morning that would soon give way to heat. I felt nauseous but I tried to push through, trying to run as fast as I could, until I couldn’t. I got halfway across the blacktop before I spewed, right in the middle of everyone else, running in laps around me.

My gym teacher rubbed my back and gave me some water and they sent me home.

Another morning, still at home, I hadn’t slept all night, the headache wouldn’t seem to stop. I begged my mother to let me stay home. At home, when everyone else was gone, it was quiet and peaceful under the covers in my bed, and the splitting pain of the headache was easier to manage than it was at school, in a classroom of unruly kids and florescent lights.

I cried and I cried and I threw up all over myself and the floor. I hadn’t made it to the bathroom. My mother, losing her patience, snapped at me to clean it up.

“I’m sick,” I told her, “I don’t feel good. Something is wrong.”

“The only reason you threw up was because you were crying so much. Clean it up and get ready for school. Don’t let it stain the floor.”

#

A boy who lived in my building seemed to be my mortal enemy at the time. Our parents would leave us alone together after school, and I hated it. He would pull my hair, call me names, grab at my body. I would get in trouble for hitting him when he was bothering me. I felt he deserved it. He wouldn’t listen when I told him to stop. He would burst into my room while I was getting dressed and stare at me. He would pull off my clothes. I would ask him to stop, then yell, then hit him to get him off of me.

When I yelled or hit him, my mother would punish me with a spanking.

I felt like a cornered wild animal. He would scream into my ears while I was having a headache, and I would scratch him, and he would bleed and he would laugh at me and say I would be spanked again. Sometimes his mother would punish him too, but it did nothing to stop him.

My mother would tell me to ignore him, say that if I ignored him he would stop. Once I ignored him for nearly eight hours straight. I ended up locked in my room, him banging on the door, singing and taunting me. Nothing seemed to make him stop.

When I was older, in family therapy, I reminded my mother of this and how upsetting it was to be punished for trying to defend myself, for trying to have boundaries. My mother tried to tell me I should have just ignored him again, should have been the bigger person.

The therapist jumped in. “Sometimes, a kid needs to get smacked on the playground. Sometimes that’s an appropriate response, so they know not to cross that boundary again.”

Should I have just lain back and let him touch me however he liked without hitting him? What would that have taught him? Would he have done that with other women he met later in life?

I don’t think people can just lie back and let others bulldoze their boundaries. We all have the right to self-defense.

#

This was a lesson I had to learn with my father as well. In many ways, I felt like the sacrificial lamb of the community.

#

My father could not hear no, stop, just like this boy could not hear it. He loved tickling me. I hated it. There was one time I kept shouting at him to stop, it was so painful and overwhelming, but he wouldn’t, so I kicked him hard, in the face.

He was infuriated. He yelled at me until I was cowering in the fetal position under my covers and crying.

I would think about what happened and struggle with whether or not I had done wrong. It was so hard for me to know whether I was crazy, whether it was okay for me to say no, to ask someone to stop, to stop them myself if they were doing something that hurt me.

#

My father didn’t fully understand what was happening with the cluster headaches, but he did know I was in pain. Some nights he would climb into bed with me and hold me until I fell asleep. He would weave elaborate fairy tales involving dragons and princes and princesses who dressed up as peasants, who overthrew evil, who slayed dragons, who prayed to god.

Sometimes I would wake up with my father still holding me. Once I heard my mother yelling at him, saying I was too old for him to cuddle with, that he shouldn’t lie in bed with me like that. He didn’t do it again. The affection from my father, while inappropriate at times, was still the only affection I had received, and I longed for it. My mother never comforted me. She never told me she loved me.

#

My grandfather died of a heart attack after a hurricane had damaged their home in Florida. My grandmother was immensely sad, or so my mother told me. She sold the apartment in the city and moved to Florida full time. Her best friend lived just down the road from her; her husband had died too. They would cook together and walk along the beach, looking for shells. I missed her desperately.

#

I was always an avid reader, but now reading became something more: a way to cope with the pain. When the pain of the headaches was at its worst, my eyes would lose focus, cross, and I wouldn’t be able to read the words anymore, seeing double, but that part usually wouldn’t last for more than half an hour.

My headaches were seasonal, and during the peak of headache season, the pain would start around 9pm, quickly become overwhelming around 9:30pm. After that, it would taper off, and I would have a bit of respite. I would read an escapist fantasy novel, the type with a bookish female protagonist, misunderstood by the adults and peers in her life, who finds a way to escape into an alternative universe, one where she has special powers.

Those books saved me. I would read until 2am, when the pain of the headache would peak again. Then, as it died down, I would read again until I was calm enough to fall asleep, often around 4am. I would get two hours of sleep before I would have to get up to get ready for school at 6am.

The first year I had headaches, I tried to bargain with God. I was familiar with the story of Job. I thought I needed to be patient, but I began to question my faith, which was said to be natural around the age I was at the time, eleven or so. About two years into the headaches, in a moment of weakness, I asked a demon to possess me, if she would take my pain away. Yet there was no answer from the dark either. The pain persisted.

I begged my parents for a dog and they finally relented. The first night she slept in my room in her crate; she was whining and whining to be let out. It seemed to me she understood my pain. I let her out and she jumped into my bed, and I held her as I fell asleep.

Even though I was so young, I think if I hadn’t had that dog, I would have killed myself. The week before we got her, I had found instructions online for using a razor blade to slit your wrists in the tub. But she would lick all the tears off my face, come and lie on my lap whenever I was in pain, even if I didn’t allow signs of it to show externally. There was at least one living being who understood my pain was real, even if she wasn’t a human.

#

As I read and learned more about other religions, I read stories that were eerily reminiscent of the story of Jesus, and it seemed to me that the Bible itself was entirely unoriginal. These doubts scared me. My entire life philosophy was created around these binaries of “Truth and Lies” and “Good and Evil.”

If I began to question my Christian faith, which was foundational, I had to question everything. My parents, the church, the political figures my father listened to on the radio.

I began to develop two binary theories of the world: one where the Bible was absolutely true and one where it wasn’t. I knew that if I stopped believing in God as my church taught him, I would no longer be able to believe the things Rush Limbaugh said on the radio with such confidence. If there is no God, there is no one who justifies all the deeply unethical things carried out in his name. I loved this James Madison quote:

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”

#

There was a dinner when I was nine, at the home of an older member of my church. Their apartment was decorated very tastefully, and I remember staring at the molding, trying to memorize the design. I was wearing a shimmering green dress in a style that was popular at the time, slim with spaghetti straps, my hair in a low ponytail, and I had painted my nails a sparkly navy blue, a color given to me by my estranged grandmother. The father of the pastor examined my nails.

“That’s a very sexy color,” he told me, “Why are you trying to be so sexy?”

My mother, standing behind me, said nothing, but I felt her tense, as she often would, as though I was standing before a hungry tiger and she might need to snatch me out of its teeth. I said nothing.

It was around that time that I noticed the women in the church had begun to give me strange looks. I had started to go through puberty early and I was very pretty. The women looked at me like I was a dangerous, unruly beast. The men looked at me differently.

There was a book fair at my school, and my mother had given me thirty dollars to spend on books. I spent so long browsing, picking up different books, trying to decide the best way to spend my money. When I went up to the counter to pay, a mother who was volunteering at the fair grabbed my hand hard, holding it longer than I felt comfortable with.

“You’re very pretty,” she said.

She had a look in her eyes and a tone of voice that I didn’t understand. I sometimes try to think back and understand what her eyes were telling me. Was it anger? Jealousy?

Was it a warning?

#

Natalie’s best friend moved away in second grade, and throughout third grade she gradually became my best friend. She was a beautiful girl with soft brown hair and hazel eyes. We weren’t in the same class together, much to my dismay, but our moms would set up frequent playdates, usually at least once a week. We would play together in the park, gathering wild raspberries, pretending to be cats, or go swimming in her pool. She had a bikini. She wasn’t someone I connected with on an intellectual level, like Mei Mei, but I learned quickly there were other types of intelligence.

She would play pop music for us to dance to; she would tell me how to move my hips to look sexy, spray me with some of her Juicy Couture perfume, put a bit of lip gloss on my lips.

We would talk about whatever boy she had a crush on at the time. I thought she was so glamorous, interesting, talented. Natalie’s mother was obsessed with her daughter being a famous actress one day, and Natalie would tell me all about her little Broadway roles, or being a part of the children’s ensemble at the Met Opera. Of course I was a little in love with her.

Her mom would call us in for snacks. One time, she had made a few slices of buttered toast.

“Put honey on mine,” Natalie said.

Her mother spread hers with honey.

“Open your mouth,” Natalie said to me. “I want you to try some. It’s so sweet.”

#

Natalie and I were both part of the same Girl Scout troop. After Natalie and I became friends, I grew more comfortable with attending.

I didn’t really interact too much with the other girls besides Natalie — I wasn’t quite sure how to. At the time, I thought they disliked us; now I realize they probably saw us as closed off and removed.

We would have so much fun together, going camping or participating in whatever activities were required to earn badges. We were always the rowdy group. My troop leader was extremely fun and chill, and the other parents, more controlling, would look on with disdain as we made messes with glitter, shouted and laughed, continued whispering after lights out.

#

I hated school — before, I had loved it — but loved learning. But now I was in pain or sleep deprived or sick much of the time, and I had a teacher who, to me, seemed ill-equipped to handle a class of children.

He was desperate to be seen as cool, as chill, to have us like him. He would play guitar for us, which I found insufferable. I missed the rigorous but fair teachers I’d had in earlier classes. He would vacillate between having lax rules, to suddenly screaming at everyone for being too loud. I craved calm order.

I stopped turning in my homework because it felt stupid, repetitive, and uninspiring; and besides, I couldn’t concentrate due to my headaches. He didn’t know what to do with me — star student trotted around as school genius suddenly turned moody slacker.

#

The community I grew up in was very, very wealthy. I had classmates whose families owned private jets and sprawling vacation homes. My family didn’t have any of this, so growing up, I always thought we were poor. We were not.

My parents were not the best at money management. I would hear them arguing about money and bills behind closed doors, and always thought they were just one step from absolute ruin. They didn’t seem to have any idea of how to budget.

They gave us a weekly allowance of fifteen dollars; I asked if I could “save” it and then withdraw it later. Around Christmas, I asked for a year’s worth of allowance so I could buy my siblings birthday presents. I had been adding up the amount I should receive in my calendar; it was right around seven hundred dollars. My parents held a small meeting, then came back and told me they couldn’t give me all of that all at once. That was my first lesson in counterparty risk.

I think this is why I am able to deal so well with government interference with my line of work: I have no trust in authority figures or anyone else to honor their commitments. Friends are distressed to learn about civil asset forfeiture, where the American government can simply seize your assets and hold them indefinitely, even sell or spend them, without making a conviction. This type of bullshit, in my eyes, is only to be expected.

#

The next year my fourth grade teacher was an idiot; I don’t say that lightly. She infuriated me. It was her first year teaching out of college. Once, during class, we were examining a diagram of air pressure and heat. Hot air, which is less dense, is lighter and rises to the top. Cold air, being denser, falls.

My teacher talked about how incredible this was! She said that as air became closer to the sun, it was warmer. For example, the air on top of mountains is warm, while at sea level it was cold. I raised my hand.

“I believe the diagram shows that the hot air rises, not that it is naturally hotter at the top.

Do you really believe that air at the top of Mount Everest is warmer than at sea level, by a beach?”

She looked at me, flustered, “Yes, it’s just the wind blows and makes it feel cold.”

Later that month, she attempted to force us to have a debate about what Earth would be like if the atmosphere was removed. She assigned us into teams, putting me on the team that would claim the Earth would become unbearably hot without the atmosphere to protect us.

I rebelled.

“We already know what would happen! The moon has no atmosphere, it is around the same distance from the sun, and it is incredibly cold.”

I was frustrated that there was no higher authority for me to appeal to, that the other kids in class accepted this teacher’s nonsense as fact. I complained to my mother but she didn’t care. Years later, my friend’s younger brother was in her class. She was pregnant, again, having had a baby every single year since she started teaching.

“Why do you have so many babies?” he asked, “Why don’t you stop having sex?”

#

This was the year we had to pick an instrument to study. I had been receiving private piano lessons for years, but that wasn’t an option, so I was deciding between studying the flute or the violin. If the harp had been an option, I told Natalie, I would have picked that. She chose percussion.

“I love the xylophone,” she said, stretching her illicit gum with her tongue and blowing a bubble, just out of sight of the teachers.

Gum was extremely against the rules at our school. It was banned, they told us, because the janitors were constantly having to scrape gum off of every surface imaginable: the floor, the ceiling, lockers, desks, toilet stalls. Of course, this just made chewing gum even more alluring.

The boy who was the main gum dealer in school had his locker right beside mine. Every time we had break, crowds of kids would stand around, keeping an eye out for teachers, shoving crumpled five dollar bills into his hands. He would buy the gum on his way to school every day and spend his profits on Pokémon cards.

He would always offer some to me for free, with a wink, maybe because he thought I was a narc.

#

Ballroom dancing was a required class that year; I loathed it. I was passable at dancing, but I was awful at letting the boys lead. I always put my hands in the wrong place; I never learned how to let them guide me.

Tragically, I was not paired up with Dylan. We were in some gifted class together and I totally had a crush on him. I was forced to dance with some lacrosse player I would now call a douche, though I’m not sure I was familiar with that term at the time.

My skin crawled as he held my hands. One day, before we started dancing, I caught him picking his nose — so gross.

I was such a judgmental and pretentious asshole as a kid, but I think most people just assumed I was shy and nervous. People would try to get me to open up, and I would just be desperate to go back to reading Lord of the Rings.

#

In fourth grade, the night the latest Harry Potter book was released, I stayed up late reading it and I finished it. In the hallway before class, I teased Dylan, telling him I had finished it and that I knew the ending. He got mad at me and slammed his locker.

“One day, you’re going to mess up, and you’re going to fall asleep in class. Then you’ll think twice about staying up so late reading.”

I never fell asleep. On some nights, when I was particularly distressed, I would sneak out. My parents were so dead asleep that they would never hear the door. And the doorman, who had a soft spot for me, never ratted me out. Everyone thought that I was a goody-two-shoes, and no one expected a fourth grader to sneak out anyways. Sometimes I would walk for hours; walking seemed to make the pain of my headaches lessen. My dog would be my companion.

Thankfully, no one ever bothered me.

I knew that anyone I told about the headaches wouldn’t believe me, so I kept it to myself. Looking back at photos of myself during that time makes my heart ache. I can see the dark circles under my eyes, the pained smile.

#

I became very familiar with the waiting room at my doctor’s office: the wood paneled walls; the kind older secretaries who would dote on me, giving me lollipops and murmuring with my mother just out of earshot; the rows and rows of patient files.

At first the doctor just stuck to prescribing antibiotics, but eventually told my mother to give me different remedies: B-spectrum would help with my lack of energy, Vitamin D for my depression, melatonin for my sleep, aspirin for my headaches. None of it seemed to help.

My younger brother eventually developed migraines. He would lie in his bed, sometimes vomit from the pain, scream if the light got too bright. He went to see the doctor, and she immediately referred him to a neurologist, who prescribed him Topamax. His migraines subsided.

I asked my mother if she could take me to the neurologist. She told me to call the doctor myself. I told her I didn’t know how to make an appointment, how to talk to a doctor. She was irritated. I never saw a neurologist.

Of course, cluster headaches are much less common than migraines, and at the time research on cluster headaches was scant, especially for people who had a childhood onset of the disorder. But I never even got to see a neurologist; my pain was immediately written off as false.

A few years ago, I confronted my mother about this. I asked her why she allowed this to happen to me.

“I was just listening to the doctors; I thought I was doing what was best for you,” she told me.

I looked her in the eyes. “I needed an advocate, I needed an adult who believed me. If the doctor didn’t, you should have taken me to a doctor who did believe me. You were my mother; you were supposed to protect me.”

She asked if I could forgive her, and at the time I said I couldn’t. As we’ve grown closer, and she’s been there for me in other ways, I finally trust her enough to let it go, to offer my forgiveness.

My mother was at the time dealing with her own issues; she didn’t speak of them, but I later learned she was very sick. She would lie in bed all day. My father told me she was lazy, that she was a bad wife and partner. He said that her mother, my grandmother, had apologized to him, saying that she had failed in raising someone to be a good wife or mother.

Having no full understanding of what was going on, I was inclined to agree.

Chapter Four

Immolation

#

By the time fifth grade came around, fractures were beginning to form in my friendship with Natalie. She had a massive crush on this boy, Paul, who had mousy good looks and warm brown eyes. He did competition math. For a bit we had been in the same advanced math classes together.

“I’m going to do a perfume walk,” she told me in the bathroom as she applied more lip gloss.

“What’s that?” I asked, impressed with her seductive abilities. She turned to me, pouting slightly.

“You put on a bit of perfume, walk past the guy you have a crush on… if he turns and looks at you, then he has a crush on you.”

She did the perfume walk, but Paul didn’t give her a single look.

“I think he has a crush on you,” she said, looking me up and down.

For my birthday, she had gotten us matching Juicy Couture tracksuits. I had thought they were tacky… I hated rhinestones! But she had gotten it for me, and she said it looked good on me.

After that, I started to develop a crush on Paul. If gorgeous Natalie, with all of her feminine secrets gleaned from hours of pouring over teen magazines, couldn’t catch his interest, but I could — what did that say about me?

I asked a different friend, Eliza, to watch the two of us one day during recess. I walked past him, no perfume. He followed me to the other section of the gymnasium. I walked past him again, and he followed me again.

“He definitely likes you,” Eliza said.

Whenever he was my lab partner in science, I would wonder if he could feel the energy radiating off me. I thought he was so cute. I would meet his eyes in the hallway when we passed each other headed to class. My whole body felt charged — like a spring being coiled.

Natalie and I sat beside each other in health class. The teacher showed us a diagram of different breast sizes and told us that in a few years, we might have boobs this size.

Natalie whispered to me, “Yours are already Bs!”

The Broadway musical she was performing in went on tour. She was gone for six months. We would write each other letters, but I could feel that we were drifting apart. When she returned, she was cold towards me. I didn’t know why. We used to always tickle each other as a greeting; one day, she snapped at me when I tried to tickle her. I could tell she was annoyed by me. She started hanging out with different girls — the ones who wore eyeliner and shimmering blush on their cheeks, who hiked up their skirts as high as the dress code would allow. I would look at old photos and miss her, wishing we could have another one of our sleepovers.

#

Our friendship fell apart right before the school dance. We had already picked out our outfits for it. It was winter, so I was wearing an all-white ensemble: a white camisole with glittery lace and a white miniskirt. I watched as she danced with her new friends.

Paul’s older brother came up to me, Sprite in hand. He and Paul looked nearly identical, except he had already gone through his growth spurt.

“Hey,” he said, with a cute, lopsided smile, “You look good in white.” I was flustered but tried to play it cool.

“Your fly is unzipped,” I said, smirking, and watched him hide his attempts to zip it up.

#

Around the time Natalie pushed me away, I was making new discoveries privately. My church arranged a massive youth retreat that was coordinated with several other fundamentalist churches in New York State. We all went to a massive camp in the Catskills in the middle of winter.

The girls at my church were cliquish and hated me. There were five of them, all one year older, and they treated me like a little kid. I hated it. They would often offer condescending advice about sex and dating. One cornered me to lecture me about how gross kissing was. I was shocked, I asked her if she had ever kissed someone.

“No!” she responded. “But imagine your saliva mixing with someone else’s, their tongue in your mouth… Gross!”

I didn’t tell her I had had my first kiss years ago and enjoyed it plenty. I often look back and wonder if they could tell I was queer. Not that I had a crush on anyone at my church specifically, but I think I didn’t do as good enough a job hiding it as I thought. Well, I know I didn’t.

One of the girls from a different church on the retreat was very beautiful: Melissa. I would sometimes stare at her without realizing, thinking she would never notice.

But she did.

One day, late at night, when the youth pastors had built a huge bonfire, she came and sat next to me, and asked me whether I could roast her a marshmallow. Word had spread of my ability to get a marshmallow perfectly golden, totally mushy on the inside, without burning it.

I let her pull the marshmallow off the stick and watch her eat it. Bits of gooey marshmallow still clung to her fingers, and she looked me in the eyes as she licked them.

“So good.”

I swallowed and looked back at the fire. It’s hard for me to remember exactly what we talked about — recounting yesterday’s game of capture the flag, talking about what idiots the boys were, the cafeteria food — when all I could pay attention to was how close her leg was to mine, how she touched my arm when she laughed, how she rested her head on my shoulder as the fire started dying down, her hand on my thigh in the darkness.

We walked back to the cabins together, hanging back from the main group, still talking. It was dark and eerie, the noises of wildlife in the background, the darkness punctured every now and then by streetlights, spaced far apart.

“Do you like me?” she asked, suddenly, her voice a little more serious.

I knew she definitely didn’t mean what I hoped she might mean, so I told her, “Of course.”

She held my hand, and we walked back together in silence.

#

It’s easy to forget that at that time, especially in my church, it was definitely not ok to be gay. Larger conversations were being had in society, and some kids who were at my school came out; they dealt with bullying but nothing violent. My school prided itself on being progressive and diverse, featuring their Gay Straight Alliance club prominently in the school yearbook. Some of my friends, the ones who knew I liked anime, would tease me for liking girls.

“Everyone I know who likes anime is gay,” said one of my guy friends. “Come on. You know it’s true.”

I laughed him off. I didn’t feel unsafe telling people at school in particular; if anything, it might have made me seem cooler. What I was worried about was anything getting back to my parents.

People in my church were extremely homophobic. My parents, my mom especially, would rail against homosexuality as an awful sin. I heard whispers of people I knew being sent off to conversation therapy, or one of those awful boarding schools out in the middle of nowhere, where physical and emotional abuse were the daily norm. I was terrified that would happen to me.

#

Melissa always found her way to me during free time at camp. It felt strange to be pursued like this; it made my heart ache. One day, when we were walking to whatever activity was next, she asked me if I wanted to skip it.

“Do you want to go for a hike instead? We could, like, pray together, or whatever.” We laughed at the idea of us praying.

We walked through the woods together, our breath making little puffy clouds in the cold air. Her puffy winter jacket was so cute. We were silent as we walked. I yearned for her.

As we got further away from the camp, she stepped off the trail. I followed her. We wandered through the trees, and I tripped over a rock hidden under the snow.

We got to a clearing and she plopped on the ground, then started making a snow angel. “What about your pants?” I asked. “Won’t they get wet?”

I didn’t want her to freeze. At the time, I was paranoid about death from hypothermia.

She laughed, smirking, making intense and intentional eye contact with me. “They already are.”

I blushed at the implication. Seeing my flushed face, she stood up, walked to me, and kissed me. My lips were cold and chapped and the heat of her breath and her lips felt so good. I couldn’t hold myself back. I kissed her, putting my hands around her neck, pulling her in.

It was like everything I had been holding back for years came rushing forth. I pressed myself against her and we fell in the snow, our hats falling off, hair covered in snow, I rolled on top of her, kissed her again, then pulled back… just looked in her eyes. I had tears welling in mine and I went back for more. She wiggled, unzipping her coat, unzipping mine, and our hands were on each other’s chests, grasping at softness. I kissed her neck; she moaned and put my breast in her mouth. I pressed my face into her neck, a tear making its way out of my eye, and I licked her ear, gently nibbled it. After much maneuvering, she pulled off her glove and stuck her hand down my pants. The chill of her fingertips pressing into me.

#

We walked back to camp, our faces flushed. I don’t think anyone missed us or noticed anything, but I felt changed or marked in some way, like I was carrying a foreign object inside me, something under my skin. We went to that evening’s service, and I sang, closing my eyes, more tears trickling out of my eyes. Everyone thought me so pious.

That year was the year that I could qualify to be an official member of the church. There was a special class we had to take, and whoever demonstrated the most thorough knowledge and understanding of the Bible would win a $25 gift card to the nearest Bible store. One boy in the class I hated with a passion, and he pompously declared that he had taken a similar class before, so of course he would be the one getting the gift card. So I had to beat him.

I did in fact win the gift card — not that it was terribly difficult, not that there was anything I wanted to purchase at that store. I gave the gift card to my mom, who loved daily devotionals. After the class, the pastor needed to interview you to make sure that you were someone the church could accept.

When I went to the interview, I was terrified I wouldn’t make it, that it would be so transparent that there was something wrong with me. The questions were all softballs, but I answered them like they were incredibly fraught. Afterwards, my mother told me that the pastor had told her that my hands were shaking.

#

In sixth grade, I had decided I was going to try out for the school musical. Natalie was back in town and of course she assumed, given her professional experience, that she was a shoo-in for the role.

I went to auditions and tried to appear as confident as possible. I hadn’t realized we needed to prepare a song; I had assumed that everyone would be doing the same one. Most of the other girls had private voice lessons and had been spending months preparing their songs, as I later learned. The pianist whispered to me that he could play ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ if I knew it. I agreed to the plan.

I tried my best not to shake as I sang. The director started crying halfway through my song. Was I that bad? But then she clapped enthusiastically at the end, wiping tears out of her eyes. I told my mother proudly about my performance.

Natalie and I both ended up getting minor roles. Everyone was mad because we were doing some obscure play — because we were within a fifty-mile radius of Broadway, we weren’t allowed to put on any plays that had been put on in the past three years.

“Who the FUCK thinks a middle school musical would be any competition with a fucking Broadway production,” Natalie shouted at one of her friends, slamming her locker. Her mother made sure that Natalie’s SAG affiliation was clearly displayed next to her name in the play’s list of cast and crew.

#

By eighth grade, I was an absolute wreck from carrying the pain of cluster headaches and the cognitive dissonance of my family’s fundamentalist beliefs. I was unable to do schoolwork or even make it through most days without breaking down in tears. The conservative evangelical Christian belief system was really starting to get to me.

What is justice? What are its aims?

I just now googled “justice,” and the first thing to pop up was a clothing brand for teen girls.

As a child, the Constitution was discussed as if it was an extra book in the Bible. A sacred text to be upheld against all else. When I was older, my father even claimed that God had written it, using the founding fathers as his prophets.

I like to imagine Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence as though responding to a Twitter flame war with the British parliament, and the original Congress as a group chat. Somehow we’ve forgotten that the founding fathers were a bunch of drama queens, demanding duels to the death over ideological tiffs. Thomas Jefferson — the only Aries ever elected president!

The etymology of “justice” splits in two directions: that of “fairness, equity, exactly, snugly”; and that of “righteous in the eyes of God, legal rights, conforming to rules, authority.” Some people are even endowed with the title of Justice itself, given the power in court to declare what might be right and fair.

The word “just” has itself transformed from meaning “exactly” or “precisely” to “almost, merely, or barely.” One must think of how our concept of “justice” may have shifted as well.

The Etymology Online entry on “justice” refers back to Federalist Paper No. 51. If the Constitution is equivalent to the word of God, then the Federalist Papers were considered the letters from Paul written to the churches. The proper lens from which to interpret the intent of the Author. The 51st Paper was of great importance to me as a child — that James Madison text I love so much.

In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

The end of the quote, as one can see, makes clear the intent of the founders. The intent of the government to control the governed, and to control itself. How utterly puritanical! This quote lays bare so much of a very American obsessive compulsive behavior. Our need for rules for every given situation, dictating the best way to behave, and a need for signs everywhere, to remind everyone of the rules! Control, control, control.

I have been spending so much of my time lately reading the subreddits “Am I the Asshole?” and “Relationship Advice.” Often my favorite posts are those discussing HOAs, or housing associations. Most common in suburbs where people are rule obsessed in the extreme — they often dictate how you must keep your lawn, acceptable colors to paint your house, acceptable lawn ornaments, noise levels, etc. There are so many rules that it becomes quite impossible to abide by all of them without living a life so bland it could barely be called a life.

Of course, these rules are never enforced with an even hand, at least in the Reddit posts.

Some small-time maniacal psychopath manipulates their way to the top of the HOA leadership, mostly because no one else has the desire or energy to stop them. From their meager throne of President of the housing association, they fine neighbors they detest and are lenient towards those who act as their toadies.

HOAs were originally formed to collect small fees from the neighborhood to provide general upkeep — to make sure the roads and sidewalks were maintained, perhaps have a public playground or pool.

People are bizarre and strange creatures, lusting after power and fairness in the same breath. I like a particular study that tested people’s ability to accurately perceive the force with which they were hit. A mechanical arm would lightly punch someone and people were asked to reproduce the force of the hit on a pad that would record their force. The results were unsurprising: people hit the pad with far more force than they were hit. In a fight, this leads to an eternal escalation of blows, each insisting they were only hitting back with the same force.

How ghoulish and strange yet wonderful we are! Finding that balance between advocating for ourselves and advocating for others is near impossible. Of course anyone with power is likely to abuse it. Power does not corrupt; we were already there! Of course, I am an optimist, believing we as humanity are slowly developing our empathy. This bullying and brutish behavior is unsustainable at this point in our existence. We need balance.

#

My grandmother moved in with us after being diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time. The first time I had been too young to remember. She had recovered.

This second time, she was much older.

She brought with her piles of books. I would sit in her room with her and read them. She read very widely; my favorite books of hers were Amy Tan. She taught me to crochet.

She grew sicker and sicker. She lost all of her fat and her skin hung off of her bones. It was so painful to see her like this, so frail. She held onto the wall as she walked, rejecting my parents’ attempts to get her to lean on them until she couldn’t.

Her arms were still covered in the gold bangles she always wore. Her hands would shake as she held mine, as she taught me about something. My mother was always happy to see us together. Her health steadily declined over the year. She was in so much pain.

As her health and her breath grew especially precarious, her best friend from Florida flew up to be with her. My grandmother asked my mom and me to go for a walk while she talked to her.

When we came back, she was dead. Her friend was wiping tears from her eyes.

“She just wanted to say goodbye one last time,” she said, “I told her it was okay to go. It was okay to leave. She could be at rest. She closed her eyes and died in peace.”

I cried in bed that night and again after her funeral. I wasn’t necessarily sad she had died; I missed her. But it seemed like it was her time to go.

My mother knew my grandmother and I had had a special relationship.

“She always wanted one of the grandchildren to have her blue eyes,” she said, “You were the only one.”

#

Natalie quit Girl Scouts and I grew closer to the other girls in the troop. One girl in particular I had admired since we had been in the same kindergarten class: Ava. She was so brilliant.

In addition to Girl Scouts, we also participated in Science Olympiad competitions together. For the longest time, she had thought I was really annoying, and when our coach paired us together to take on the plate tectonics portion of the competition, she rolled her eyes and sighed.

But I slowly won her over, proving that even though I was weird and didn’t put any effort into most of my regular classes, I could be incredibly focused when I wanted to be. We would have sleepovers together, studying, attend lectures, and practice questions until we knew we were ready. We ended up winning a gold medal together and she started to like me.

She started sharing her writing with me, both poetry and little short stories. I would read them for her and suggest edits. She made me a mixtape with a bunch of indie rock and I started enjoying listening to music for the first time.

She and I and a few other girls started having sleepovers together, ostensibly to watch movies, but it quickly morphed into a writing group. We would all share our poetry, plays, and drafts of novels with each other, offer critique, collaborate with each other. We would stay up late and talk about philosophy, politics, art.

The sleepovers were usually at Ava’s house, at least at first. Her late father was an architect who designed the home himself. It was so beautiful and a little strange; I would walk through the hallways, admiring their art collection.

Of course I had a crush on Ava, and sometimes I felt like she had a crush on me too. I remember having dinner with her and a few other friends; towards the end, we were tired and leaning on each other, our hands resting together, her thumb slowly caressing my palm. One of the other girls looked over, stared for a few moments at her thumb rubbing me, then looked away.

One year she was off at a writing camp and called me, distressed, telling me one of the girls had confessed a crush, and that she didn’t know what to do. She said she didn’t understand why everyone thought she was lesbian. Internally, I was crushed, but I swallowed it and said that if the girl was a good friend, she would understand if the crush was unreciprocated.

#

Moving to high school, like the transition to middle school, radically changed my friendships. I was already cynical. I had watched the way my friendship with Natalie had ended and I knew some of my other relationships wouldn’t last.

Ava went off to a different school than I did, but we swore we would keep in touch for the rest of our lives, and at the time I believed it would be true. I went to a school that had a specialized arts program and I told the rest of the girl scout troop that I doubted we would be friends for much longer; I thought the group would splinter and most of us would end up drifting apart.

I was shocked that the other girls were upset by this. One girl, who I had always thought hated me, who would often make snide or condescending remarks about me, was especially upset. She told me it was important that we remain friends, no matter what happened.

Of course, we drifted apart. I didn’t really value those friendships and honestly had only ever engaged because it felt like I needed to — to survive, to avoid my teachers complaining to my parents again about my lack of friends. I instead grew closer to the people in the art program, who seemed not just to tolerate my strange ways, but celebrate them.

#

I didn’t get my period until relatively late, when I was sixteen. When it came to learning about tampons, I had to turn to the internet. My mother was terrified of sex — she wouldn’t ever mention it, nor anything related to the genitals, not even in a non-sexual way. Health class wasn’t much help either.

I think it’s common for people to say that children shouldn’t learn about sex from the internet, but for me it turned out to be my saving grace. I joined a variety of internet forums, some about psychology, others about technology. If I hadn’t been able to learn about sex on the internet, I would have had a very warped view of my body.

The cool thing about these message boards was that, while they did discuss the topic of interest, there were always separate boards where active members would discuss their personal lives. One of the boards I was part of was frequented by a dominatrix who lived in San Francisco. She and her husband had an open relationship and she was quite knowledgeable about sexual health. I am still grateful that I was able to have her as a resource when I was so young.

Communities like old internet forums were so different from the social media popular now. For one, there were so many of them. They usually centered around a specific topic of interest, so the number of people involved was naturally more limited. I think this humanized the relationships people had — it was more like a small town or village, where people might have feuds or flame wars, but always on a smaller scale.

#

My father was still indoctrinating me with constant lectures of conservatism to prevent the secular children of my school and whatever I was reading online from corrupting me. Mark Levin was my favorite of the talk-radio hosts. He was snide, sarcastic, analytical and approached all his arguments with an academic lilt. He referenced the Constitution in the same manner my pastor referenced the Bible. I would download every episode onto my iPod player and listen to him every morning as I walked to school and hung outside my locker, waiting for homeroom.

Rush Limbaugh, the most popular of the talk-show hosts, was too bombastic and always sounded like an idiot to me. I could never listen to him.

My father told me that he thought I had the makings of an excellent politician.

“I could never run, though I wish I could,” he said. “I have too many skeletons in my closet.”

He never told me what those skeletons were.

I remember going to one of the first Tea Party protests with my father. One ugly old white man was carrying around a racist sign with Obama’s face on it, in vaguely “tribal” makeup. The sign said: “SOME VILLAGE HAS LOST ITS IDIOT.” My father went up to him and told him to put it away.

“That sort of thing makes us all look bad,” he said.

#

Seeing my inability to focus on school as ADHD instead of the massive existential crisis that it was, my doctor referred me to a psychiatrist, who recommended I start a high dose of Ritalin. Ritalin made my insomnia and all other issues worse. Once, on my way to school, I heard someone calling my name; I turned, and there was no one.

After I said I had begun hearing voices, the psychiatrist told my mother he thought I had schizophrenia and that he wanted to put me under observation at a special center for a month.

She took me to a different doctor who instead said I was bipolar and started me on lithium.

The specter of going mad would drive me more crazy than I actually was.

My father’s mother died around the time I was starting to see psychiatrists. Her funeral was strange — I had never really known her. I got to meet all of the aunts and uncles my father had pushed away.

One was an aunt working at the Fed as an analyst, complaining that everyone had always assumed she was a lesbian, even though it was her brother who was gay. I was so excited to meet my uncle and his boyfriend, who I had heard so much about. I was glad that there was another queer person in the family.

At a barbecue after the funeral, one of my grandma’s cousins remarked there was always a crazy one in every generation of the family. Everyone looked at me, as though I was next.

My father always told me that I reminded him of his mother. She used to paint lighthouses, obsessively. Her paintings looked like she had learned to paint from one of those books sold for $1.99 at a craft store. Apparently, she drove to paint real lighthouses, but they always looked like a cylinder, shaded like a computer generated image. There was seagrass and sand, the sand flat, the seagrass made by scraping paint in a Bob Ross fashion.

For so long I looked down on this style of painting; I found it plebeian. My father always said she was an incredible painter and I never corrected him.

My own art teachers in high school thought little of me until my senior year. I skipped class and would hang out in the studio, painting and painting and painting. I was incredibly suicidal, pained and overwhelmed, and painting was a way for me to take all that was whirling inside me and put it somewhere else.

My art teacher looked at one of my paintings and said with surprise, “When did you get so good?”

I rolled my eyes at that one. I submitted my favorite pieces to the regional art fair and won a lot of awards, including first place for non-portrait art. I was annoyed again, as what I had painted was a portrait, just not painted in a particularly traditional fashion. I felt misunderstood. My ex-boyfriend won first place in portrait art with a self portrait.

I think there is a certain ease in letting yourself believe you are actually insane. If nothing you know is real, then whatever action you take is inconsequential, because you are delusional. What does it matter?

The interesting thing about lithium is that it also treats cluster headaches. I worshiped the drug for stopping the pain. And I started to believe that my headaches were not in fact headaches but bipolar episodes. The lithium, however, did not treat my existential anxieties. I did stop wanting to kill myself, but still wouldn’t deign to complete my homework, preferring to learn by instead reading books or browsing theory online.

#

One of my favorite books in high school was ominously titled Being No One. Thomas Metzinger, the author, theorized that the self and consciousness is just an illusion, something which evolved as a byproduct of our evolutionary drive: a pattern can more effectively defend itself if it has a sense of its own existence in the first place.

It is interesting to think of memes as having a sort of consciousness of their own; of course, we refer to them as viral, their contagion something which can harm or help, depending on your perspective. I think of the ancient virus which gave us the genetic code for the cord which binds fetus to mother in the womb, and of COVID-19, which has killed so many.

The word “meme” has been mostly reduced to an internet term. But of course there are the older memes, often religious. As we once gathered in temples of worship to have our reality dictated to us, now we worship at our phones, where new religions are built every day. The burning pitchforks and crusades of religious fervor are strategically geographically isolated, while digital flame wars are ensconced in our phones.

Religion is usually about controlling the reproductive power of women. One day, all of the girls from church were gathered together for a weekend sleepover. We were told we were like delicate porcelain teacups and we should have men treat us as such.

“Do you want to be like a coffee mug? Unappreciated, thrown out without a care if you break? Or do you want to be like a teacup, rimmed in gold, placed in a special cabinet and taken out with care for special occasions?”

Worst of all was the disposable coffee cup, Styrofoam and toxic. Heaven forbid we should ever be like that — to be used once and thrown in the trash! As a child, I was intrigued by the metaphor… endless Styrofoam coffee cups at all the coffee shops, used once and then tossed…. It does sound quite a bit like the lurid tales spun by sex trafficking organizations, painting tragic tales of millions of exploited women.

Perhaps while I am at work, I am like a very nice teacup in a fine dining restaurant: used by many, but handled for the most part with care. I certainly have no aspirations to be kept in a cabinet somewhere, gathering dust.

Chapter Five

Flight

#

I only dated two boys who were my age in high school. The first was the golden-haired boy who was my first kiss in preschool. We had gone to separate elementary and middle schools, but we ended up running into each other eventually.

He was a scene kid in a screamo band and had gotten into the habit of straightening his hair. We met at a mutual friend’s bar mitzvah. I was very into photography at the time and took my camera everywhere. I took a bunch of photos of him and I think he liked the attention.

It was only later, chatting on IM, that we realized we had gone to the same preschool. I asked for a photo of him when he was little, and there he was, my first kiss! I don’t think I told him. I always deny being a romantic, but now whenever I tell this story, my friends laugh at me.

He told me his dream was to be a psychologist, move to the suburbs and have a family. I was shocked that he didn’t want to stay in the city, or even if he wanted to leave, that it wasn’t at least for any other city!

I had a massive crush on him, but even at the time I knew it wasn’t going to last. Still, I wanted the first penis in my vagina to be his! I had plenty of experience with women by that point, but still hadn’t done PIV with a guy.

I think he was more anxious about my virginity than I was. I knew he had had sex before, so I was expecting him to sort of take the lead. He was very sweet, but had a hard time putting on the condom, and a hard time getting his cock inside of me, and I had no idea what I was doing, so I was of little help! I still smile when I think about us fumbling around.

#

My other boyfriend was in my art program. His work was beautiful and intense. He had dark hair and dark eyes and was very into jujitsu and football. But he was so gentle. I had certainly not seen myself falling for a jock, but he wasn’t really a jock. He was quiet and studious, with a dark sense of humor.

I was glad I was in the art program. Things ended poorly with him, as high school romances often do, with drama I barely remember anymore. But that art program was where I finally met people my age who weren’t too weirded out by me.

My senior year, my cluster headaches became particularly awful and I became deeply suicidal. I would usually just skip all my other classes and hang out in the art studio, working on my oil paintings. My senior art studio teacher, bless his heart, never ratted me out or told me I had to leave. I would just do everything I could to put everything I was feeling on the canvas.

While I was painting, I could just be — just see the things in front of me for what they were, and capture them as best I could. There was no pressure to perform for anyone else. Just looking at my piece, then my reference, stepping back, and starting again.

#

As I grew and began reconsidering my beliefs about the role and place of women, I realized my views on sex work were poorly informed. I started devouring all the information I could about sex workers; there was so much incredible theory I was able to discover online. It was not the sort of thing anyone at my relatively conservative high school was discussing, but I discovered there were pro-sex-work texts being written millennia ago. I started writing about it for my art class essays. I was transfixed by the idea that women could reclaim the power taken from them via the patriarchy by owning their sexual power.

I took a great deal of selfies as a part of my work for this class. I had been taking photos of myself for a long time by that point. I remember being quite young, maybe three or four, and watching my mother take photos using a disposable camera. I asked to use it. I took a photo of the sky, which I thought was very beautiful.

“Don’t waste the film,” my mother scolded me.

I loved taking photos; there was something so thrilling about being able to capture an image. I was so in love with being alive, I wanted to grab all of it and record it. I loved the thrill of waiting for the prints to come back from the lab. I would hold the negatives up to the light as my father explained to me how the chemical reactions allowed us to capture the light of a particular moment.

I occasionally turned the camera back on myself. I had no tripod, no fancy camera with a timer, and I was too young to figure any of that out anyway. I took photos of my face. I was too short to see myself in the bathroom mirror, so one of the only ways I could look at myself was through photos. Of course, the first few “selfies” (are they selfies if they’re handheld, only with a film camera?) looked strange, my face distorted by the close range.

When I was in high school, my parents gifted me a digital camera. I was incredibly excited. How cool to be able to iterate on photos so quickly — to be able to see how they came out! I would plug the camera into my computer, downloading all the photos, meticulously archiving them in carefully sorted folders. I took photos of my dog, my friends, my family, of plants I liked. I took self-portraits obsessively.

At that point, I also had a laptop with a webcam and, eventually a phone with a camera as well. I used every camera I had to take photos of myself. I would hold out my hand, or use a tripod and a timer. I posted everything on social media. In the beginning, when I was posting them, I don’t even think there was a word for “selfie.” At the time, the term was “GPOY” gratuitous picture of yourself — and the “gratuitous” part was really felt. I would pretend to be ironic, posting them, pretending I was a vain girl obsessed with my image. But of course, I knew by posting them, I was still performing the act of being a vain girl. The self-deprecation was meant as a shield against criticism. Girls are taught early that being too obsessed with our appearance is a sin.

As I was in this art program, constant self-portraits didn’t particularly disturb anyone I knew IRL. To be honest, I’m not really sure anyone cared, besides the few guys at school who thought I was hot. As I started reading more art theory, I began writing a paper about women, vanity, self-portraits, and social media.

I was becoming quite active online, boldly connecting with anyone whose thoughts interested me and messaging them. Some people were amused to talk with a child. Some people pushed my boundaries.

When I was young, my parents had warned me there were creepy older men out there who would try to take advantage of me. I foolishly believed I was smart and worldly enough to be able to tell if someone was trying to pull anything like that.

For the most part, I was able to tell when older men were being gross online. For better or for worse, I did as I pleased. I was a part of Alt Lit, a writing community that was exploring literary minimalism. As with most writing circles, there were certainly older men who loved the idea of access to all these young and eager teenage girls. Most of them were obviously awful, like Jeremy Lin, who wrote an entire novel based on an abusive relationship he had with a sixteen-year-old. I enjoyed the thrill of hanging out with him and his sexual attention, so I made a grotesque game of it: I would find an older literary man online, add him on Facebook, lead them on, let them think that I would fuck them, then disappoint them.

After Jeremy Lin, I turned my attention to Steve Roggenbuck. We flirted. I had made my Facebook look like I might be a young NYU student, but he thought I was far younger. He told me that he thought it could be fine to have sex with a girl who was fifteen, as long as they were consenting. I was disgusted. To me, if a man pursued me thinking I was eighteen or nineteen, they were maybe a little creepy, but not too gross. Steve thought I was younger than I actually even was and clearly got off on it. It made his poetry about dead girls rotting in the forest take on an even darker tint.

The way my future wife, Anna, groomed me was more insidious. We became Facebook friends when she was in her late twenties and I was underage. She was lightly flirtatious, but nothing over the top. She acted kind and nurturing, helping me out with an art project I was working on for high school. I began writing for her art blog and she said she would mentor me. I totally had a crush.

One day she commented on one of my photos, “You look so young.” It made me feel nauseous, uncomfortable, for a reason I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I didn’t want her to see me as young.

I remember walking with a friend who had just started her sophomore year at Pratt to MoMA PS1 for an exhibition that looked interesting. It was a video installation of some kind, dark and drony, violent feminist stuff. Anna came up in the conversation and I gushed about how lucky I felt to have her support, how cute she and her fiancé were.

My friend agreed, “They’re our cool art parents.”

#

One man, a minor poet who ran a small but popular press, more overt in his creepy ways, repeatedly asked me out on dates. I finally agreed and dragged along one of my friends from high school, who annoyed the creep endlessly. I still laugh when I remember the three of us walking around McCarren Park, him trying to figure out how to ditch my friend, me pretending to be oblivious.

Men like this love to prey on young and inexperienced women. For so long, having been brought up on media glamorizing the relationships between young women and older men, I bought into the idea that an older man would be a better match, that young women are naturally mature, that younger men weren’t worth wasting your time on.

The first time I heard someone counter that idea was in high school. A girl, standing at the locker beside me, mentioned to her friend that an older guy had messaged her on Instagram. “Gross,” she said. “He’s so old and creepy!”

I remember being shocked, having been trained to be flattered by the attention of older men. It’s true, though, older men are mega creepy for trying to date teenagers. Being older myself now, I can’t imagine wanting to date a teen. Honestly, they’re obnoxious, they’re loud, they’re desperate for approval in a way that is grating to be around. For an older person who wants to date someone they can manipulate, however, that desperation is quite appealing.

Men hunting for prey often set themselves up as gatekeepers in some way, like running some small literary press, a gallery, etc. Often it is a pursuit that earns them little to no money; what they’re interested in is not wealth, but prestige. Once they have created a glamorous image, respect from their peers, they initiate relationships with much younger women, telling them they’re mature, special, talented, that they don’t usually go for someone so young, but…

Looking back, I was so eager to see myself as smart, savvy, and experienced that letting myself see that I was being taken advantage of would have been a devastating blow to my ego. It’s a catch-22: in order to escape the grasp of these creepy men, you need to be mature enough to admit that you are too immature to handle a relationship with someone a decade older than you.

For the most part, I tried to avoid hanging out with the kids who went to my high school, or any adjacent social scene. I didn’t want to date them and I didn’t want to be involved in their petty drama. Everyone, besides a few friends I told about my little dalliances, thought I was an absolute prude. Sometimes the obnoxious and preppy boys would attempt to flirt with me, as a joke, and I would roll my eyes.

I saved my naughtiness for Brooklyn. At the time, I had an internship in the Garment District, designing clothing, so it was easy enough for me to tell my parents that I was working late, getting dinner with my boss, or staying over at a friend’s place. Instead, I would go to MIX film festival, a poetry reading in a loft, or a gallery show deep in Bushwick.

As I worked my art practice in high school, and started talking more about critical theory and feminist art on social media, I fell in with a group of much older women artists. It was exciting, hanging out with a bunch of cool girls who had just finished their MFAs and were starting to be taken more seriously by the art world. I went to a friend’s exhibition at the New Museum, feeling like I was beginning to find a place of belonging.

The word for “selfie” was starting to be used more. The Kardashians were gaining in popularity. People were skewering selfies in op-eds, claiming it was foolish teenage girls being vain and self-obsessed. Selfies were destroying the youth, or they were too sexual, or they were preventing people from reading. Whatever. I was infuriated.

I released a piece I was very excited about, something exploring self-portraits, narcissism, and women. That year, “selfie” was the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year. The New York Times started writing about selfies as a serious art form. It was cool to see people finally take selfies more seriously… just annoying that they still were not acknowledging the hard work all we teen girls had put into making selfies a serious art form!

I went to a college in New York after I graduated; I wanted to stay where the excitement was.

#

I was lucky when going to college and received a really generous scholarship. I had a blast; I had never been surrounded by people who were excited absolute nerds like me. I would wake up around eleven, have late breakfast in the dining hall, head to class, get lunch with my classmates and discuss Derrida, or debate what the best tabletop RPG was, or sit by myself with a massive bowl of food and shovel it into my mouth while reading whatever obscure text my professor had recommended to me that month. I’d then pull out my laptop and start typing until it was dark out, working on the long essays that were assigned for each of my classes.

Once it was dark, I’d head back to my dorm room. I’d either catch up on some reading or my dorm mates and I would host a party. We soon became known for being the “lesbian” dorm room, and girls would often show up extremely drunk, wanting to try out having sex with a girl for the first time. I vividly remember trying to work on an essay whose due date was rapidly approaching: my roommate knocked on the door, asking if I wanted to join in on the orgy in the living room… I shook my head, “Next time.”

Around this time, I started a long distance relationship with Anna. Soon after I turned eighteen and went off to college, she had started sending me overtly sexual messages. She was twenty-seven, almost a full decade older than me, but I felt like I was mature and I could handle it. I had studied feminism and thought I knew most of what there was to know about navigating any sort of weird power dynamics that arose. People online criticized our relationship, saying it was creepy for her to date me, but I ignored them.

One month, she visited from California and asked to meet up in person. I agreed. I remember thinking that I didn’t want to do anything sexual with her, at least not our first night hanging out. When we met in person, she told me I looked really young and she had been concerned when I told her I was eighteen that I wouldn’t be mature enough to date.

It was the perfect neg. I felt an incredible anxiety. I wanted to show that I was mature. We walked around for an hour or two, talking. I suggested we go to a hotel. She spent a long time looking for the least expensive room nearby. Then she took me there and kissed me. Then she started rearranging the entire room, complaining that the lighting was bad, shoving the bed against a different wall. She asked if it was ok for them to go down on me. I said yes, but I didn’t want it. She started fingering me. It was incredibly painful. She was trying to put as many fingers inside me as they could. She asked if they could try to fist me. I said sure. I bit my tongue and tried to moan like it was pleasurable. She seemed to believe it. She came six times that night. We had sex for six hours and then I fell asleep.

I woke up beside her in the hotel room, the sheets covered in bloody handprints. I had been on my period. She said she liked that. I considered whether I had been taken advantage of. I decided that I suggested it and that I liked her. The sex was painful, but I thought that perhaps that was the price of being loved. Plus, wasn’t it a bit exciting?

I didn’t tell her the sex hurt until years later. There was a period where we had sex every day, often at least three times a day, sometimes up to seven. It always hurt. I would initiate because I believed I had to, that it was my job, the work I had to do to be loved.

#

I spent my winter vacation with her; it went by like a dream. She got me an internship at a prestigious tech non-profit in San Francisco, where she lived. She was too loving, treating me to dinner every night, showering me with compliments, covering her Facebook feed in sweet and darling posts talking about our time together. I felt adored.

There were strange moments that didn’t fit in with the rest. I went with her to Berkeley to attend a lecture about Indonesian art that had piqued my interest.

On the way home, I was talking excitedly about the lecture, talking about how I really loved the intricate details of the shadow puppetry especially. She slapped me across the face, hard, in the middle of the street and stared at me with a strange look her eye. Then she began laughing. I started crying.

“Why did you do that?” I asked. “Don’t ever do that to me again!”

She told me she had thought it would be funny and apologized profusely. “I don’t know what got into me.”

It is a moment that disturbed me throughout the relationship. I tried hard to contextualize it, to smooth it over in the narrative our relationship, but sometimes I would lie awake at night and wonder Why did she do that?

You might wonder why I stayed. A large part was because I was young and naive, and Anna was good at rationalizing away all of my concerns. I’m not perfect either, I would think. And there was the cognitive dissonance too; she was so, so loving most of the time. The other moments, the moments where she scared me, I tucked away, telling myself they were just strange outliers.

One day, we were lying in bed and Anna asked me something about how birds migrate. “How should I know? Why don’t you google it?” I said, annoyed.

“Half the time you know these things anyways,” she said, pulling out her phone. I shrugged.

“You know, sometimes I feel like you’re a Russian spy or something. Why do you know all about these things? I imagine you were raised in some boot camp, trained, and then had your brain wiped, like a sleeper agent.”

“Ok,” I said.

#

After I went back to college, my health issues began to flare up. At one point, I was so sick I could hardly move. My roommate dragged me to the school’s health clinic. A nurse swabbed the back of my throat and it came out black and lumpy. She made a face and said, “Oh, you’re sick.”

My professors were upset I hadn’t emailed to say I wouldn’t be coming to class. I tried to tell them I had been too sick; they told me I couldn’t have been too sick to write an email. I was distraught and showed the email to my roommate, who laughed, “I basically had to force you to eat and drink water…”

At the beginning of school, I had seriously considered a career as an academic. After this incident, though, I was concerned. I was trying to get to a point where I was completely financially independent and realized most of the students around me were either taking on massive amounts of student debt or their parents were taking care of them. I heard whispers that the school was considering reducing the amount of scholarships they dispersed due to budget cuts. And of course, the scholarship I was receiving was completely dependent on my ability to maintain performance in my classes.

It becomes hard to focus on crafting complex theoretical essays when you are concerned about whether you will be able to make enough money. I was extremely frugal during my time in school. When I would treat myself to eating out, I would make the leftovers stretch for days. I would go to the dining hall and try to stay as long as possible, make two meals out of one dining hall credit. I would buy dry groceries in bulk and try to cook as many of my meals as I could. I had a credit card I paid off every month to try to build my credit, just in case. I probably could have let my parents pay for my expenses and been more comfortable financially. But my parents had made homophobic remarks over the years, and I knew kids who had been suddenly cut off financially after their parents discovered they were queer. I was scared that if they knew and decided to disown me, I would starve or become homeless. This was not a baseless fear; I had multiple friends who struggled for a long time after their parents disowned them for being gay. I was terrified of the same thing happening to me.

All of this anxiety caused a major flare-up in my cluster headaches. I didn’t want to be afraid anymore.

I started taking more computer science classes. While academia felt more intellectually appealing, a tech job seemed like it was more financially stable. At the time, I still idealized tech as an industry that was incredibly meritocratic. There was such a high demand for engineers that if you could program, you were basically guaranteed a job with high security and certainly you would be treated well. That would be the only way to run a successful company, right?

After my second semester, Anna convinced me to drop out of college and I headed to San Francisco to work at a startup. I was able to walk from our home in the Mission to my office; San Francisco was never too cold and it was always a pleasant twenty minutes.

Within a month of moving to San Francisco, Anna and I started couples therapy. We hadn’t really had any fights yet, but we both thought of ourselves as pretty crazy and figured it wouldn’t hurt.

I was firm about my desire to be in an open relationship. I was young and queer and had already had enough orgies to know that I didn’t wanna stop having them any time soon.

Anna had never been in an open relationship and she had been cheated on in one of her previous relationships. She said she would think about it

San Francisco has for a long time been a hotbed of polyamory, complicated queer and kinky families. Dossie Easton, one of the premier writers on the subject of polyamory, happened to have an office in San Francisco, and we decided to see a therapist that was interning under her.

Our therapist was just my type: an older woman with her hair always restrained in a tight updo or a braid, with a uniform of black A-line dresses, sheer stockings, and five inch heels. I just knew she had to be a retired former dominatrix. Privately, despite Anna’s disapproval, I was crushing.

She was incredible, recommending us endless resources on polyamory, explaining different relationship structures, reassuring Anna that plenty of people were able to be in sustainably open relationships. Because we didn’t have any immediate issues to deal with, we went every other week. I always looked forward to every session.

#

At first, the relationship was as idyllic as I thought possible. In contrast to my hyper-critical and angry parents, Anna was gentle, helpful, kind. We watched movies together on a projector screen she had set up in her bedroom, had brunch in the park near our place. We had a fantastic intellectual connection and it felt like we could talk endlessly about everything. She could always finish my sentences.

I spilled water once near her desk and had a panic attack, worried she would punish me for being careless. Instead, she rubbed my back and told me it was fine; I hadn’t spilled it anywhere near the computer, and she knew I wouldn’t make the same mistake again.

Anna believed me when I said I had cluster headaches. When my parents and my psychiatrist had called me crazy, I had begun to believe them. On some level, I truly felt I was deluding myself into being in pain. Trusting that I was experiencing actual pain, caused not by psychosomatic delusion but by a preventable physical mechanism, was key to my healing. One cannot seek treatment if one denies the root of the disease.

After I finally accepted my cluster headaches, I needed to actually treat myself. There is no cure, only preventatives and palliatives. LSD is one such preventative.

For a few months I told Anna I didn’t want to do any drugs, not even weed, because my grandmother was a bit crazy and I didn’t want to trigger that within myself. What if I awakened something terrible?

She put two tabs of acid in my hand and told me to take them, told me she would guide me through the trip and teach me some sort of secret about existence.

At first we were giggly and playful; she brought out paper and art supplies so we could draw. But I was more interested in talking and introspecting.

“You know,” I said, “I don’t particularly feel like I’m ‘tripping,’ more like my regular thought patterns are enhanced. I often think in this circular style anyways. I just feel more me.”

We had sex and she kept criticizing me, telling me that I wasn’t doing it right, so I asked to stop. She didn’t want to stop until she made me come, so I faked an orgasm. Then she told me that I was like a bad boyfriend, who only cared about his pleasure and wouldn’t ever care to get his girlfriend off.

Then she started talking about God. “God is the Joke,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, “God is the joke?” “Life is the Joke and God is the Joke, you get it?”

I did not, but I was game to try and inhabit that mindset, the mindset of God being the Joke. Later, when we were hanging out with friends, I made reference to Anna thinking God was the Joke. Her face twisted and she grabbed my wrist and told me not to speak of it again.

#

After doing acid, thankfully I did not experience any sort of schizophrenia or other mental aberrations. Many people I know need to take the next day slow after doing acid; they feel strange, not quite sick, more like they have gotten over the flu and are readjusting.

After doing acid, I feel balanced, calm, and deeply secure. My brain defragmented like a computer hard drive. My sleep is deeper and I wake up in the morning feeling refreshed. Anna seemed surprised that I wasn’t acting more “manic.” She had been diagnosed as being bipolar, so was very attached to the idea of me being bipolar as well. She said it was what made our connection so powerful.

I like to joke that LSD simply makes me more like myself. I am already intensely self-aware, constantly probing and weighing everything. For me, a high dose of LSD intensified that.

Our second trip together, I looked at Anna, who seemed to me to be a fairy. Her skin was a light pink, all of her pores slightly darker and shimmering. Her hair had green undertones.

Beautiful.

I didn’t want to have sex during the trip, but I didn’t tell her this. She was soon on top of me, and suddenly she appeared to me to be a demon. Her skin was purple now, the lines of her face intensified.

“Let me inside you,” she said, pressing against me.

Tripping, I thought she was a demon, asking to possess me. I thought about how vampires need to ask permission before they can cross a threshold. I tried to find a way to say no, but I spread my legs for her.

#

I trusted Anna with my life. One day, I had taken lithium right before I took my dose of LSD. The trip seemed more intense than previous ones, off kilter somehow. She livestreamed the first few minutes of the trip. I remember an internet friend saying, “Have fun kids!” We played a video game and I could barely see the screen.

Then, I was gone.

Instead, there was an incredible circle of light. Everything became incredibly complex, tiny, self-aware, and then less so, large and sprawling. I was in the circle, simply dissolved into it, with all things, beautifully and equally present in everything, growing into the fractal pattern, curling in upon everything else and then back out.

I awoke in the hospital, ego reconsolidated, Anna standing over me, crying.

“That was so beautiful,” I said, filled with a deep and utter calm.

Suddenly my mother was on the phone and I reassured her that I was fine. My hospital gown was a smooth cotton. I couldn’t stop talking about my ego death experience. The only thing I could compare it to was “The World”, a poem by Henry Vaughan.

#

I saw Eternity the other night,

Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright;

And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, Driv’n by the spheres

Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world And all her train were hurl’d. […]

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing, And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring; But most would use no wing.

O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night Before true light,

To live in grots and caves, and hate the day Because it shews the way,

The way, which from this dead and dark abode Leads up to God,

A way where you might tread the sun, and be

More bright than he.

#

I still think about that place. I had never feared death, but after experiencing dying in that way, some part of me longs to go back.

I have thought so long about why we must be separated from each other. Why must I be self and you be other?

I think, ultimately, love can reach its truest form only if there is an other. The universe, if it were to remain a muck of pure energy, could not hold itself. Being separated from God or love or the universe or whatever else you might call it is our earliest trauma.

I think this is why time in the womb is so important. Someone once told me that cats and dogs remember their time in the womb, that they are developed to the point of being able to have memories, and that this is why humans are always longing in a way that animals, perhaps, are not. We are born too soon, and unless our mothers cared for us perfectly, there was always that immense trauma of being helpless and uncared for.

I think our consciousnesses are separated so that we might appreciate the beauty of each other, and see the beauty of ourselves reflected back. The image I have of independence, of a man in a log cabin he built with his hands, perhaps with a dog, who hunts for his food in the woods, seems nearly impossible these days. How many people still live like that? Our lives are so intertwined, our roles so specialized. I have a doctor who treats my head, another who treats my heart.

I think of how capitalism facilitates this, how money flows through one hand to the next. Whoever controls the flow of capital can become a minor god, who must receive offerings to be placated.

What happens when you restrict or prevent the flow of capital to segments of the population? To women, to people of color, specifically Black and Indigenous peoples?

Some people say money allows independence. People call themselves “Financially Independent” or allow themselves to believe the money they have somehow shields them from disaster.

In the past, wealth did not necessarily refer to millions of digital dollars sitting in a bank somewhere, but usually a stockpiling of slow-perishing grain, rice or wheat. In times of famine or other lack, those with wealth, who carefully saved, could feed themselves, their family, and their community.

The incentives of capitalism prey on those same instincts, to gather materials to ensure future prosperity. The mechanisms of exploitation are now distanced from the mechanisms of acquiring vast amounts of capital. One can accumulate millions of dollars while sitting at a computer in their home, trading stocks, living in a way many would consider non-harmful to others. One can barely scrape by on the income of a Starbucks manager, earning enough for a Netflix subscription, rent, student loans, and perhaps a few creature comforts throughout the month. Yet the Starbucks manager is required by the job to enact violence of a kind on the employees they manage, pressuring them to come into work while sick, asking them to ignore the petty cruelties inflicted by the customers.

Perhaps the hypothetical stock trader even comes to visit this coffee shop, buying a fair-trade latte, tipping 100%. They do not directly hold Starbucks stock, but it is a part of an ETF they hold in their portfolio. When value is extracted from the Starbucks employee, it goes into their bank account. They profit more from the exploitation than the manager. Yet they can remain blissfully unaware of and removed from the mental anguish that they profit from.

When the sole profiteer of your anguish is your boss, the owner of the factory at which you work, it is easy to direct your ire, to demand better treatment, to strike. When the ownership is obfuscated and the manager is almost as oppressed as you are, it becomes more challenging.

#

After three rounds of acid, I didn’t have any cluster headaches for an entire year. I was so happy that I cried. At first I attributed it to the weather — San Francisco didn’t have the brutal winters of NYC that seemed to intensify the pain of my headaches.

#

I began hating my job in San Francisco. I do not work well for other people; I resented that I was not supported. I was more or less being forced into a marketing role, despite the fact that I had been hired as an intern, with promises of being trained. At this point, Anna and I were splitting rent. Despite the fact that she was pulling 180k a year from her tech job, she insisted on splitting expenses. I would anxiously budget every month, making sure I had enough money set aside for rent, my phone, food.

Anna was dating a cutie named Kay. They had met on OkCupid before I had moved to SF and we clicked once we met in person. They were working as a pro-domme at an infamous dungeon in Berkeley and were trying to break into Kink.com.

Anna would host brunches in the backyard of the home where we rented a room. I would pick loquats from the tree in the backyard, cook them with sugar and turn them into a sauce, serve it over pancakes or crepes, scramble some eggs. Kay would come over and I would sit on their lap; they would tell me about their work and the juicy gossip, the most perverted thing they had to do that week, some new skill they picked up. I was riveted. They knew I hated my job and suggested I try out sex work. I said I would think about it.

I mentioned to Anna that I was going to try posting an ad on Seeking Arrangements. She bristled. I was confused and upset; weren’t we in an open relationship? She told me she felt that sex work was misleading, that my clientele would think they were actually in a relationship with me, and that made her uncomfortable. Then she said she would worry about my safety. I told her that I was miserable, hated my job, and wanted to make more money. Sex work felt like my best option.

The next time we visited our couples therapist, I mentioned to her that I was considering sex work. Her face lit up and she suggested several books on the topic for me to check out as well as a few local advocacy groups. I devoured the books and did a bunch of internet research to make sure I knew everything I could about the topic. The pro-domme I was dating also very sweetly took the time to let me bounce ideas off of them. I created my Seeking Arrangements profile that week.

Part Two

Chapter Six

Warm Waters

#

Because Seeking Arrangements is private and free, a lot of people who are interested in sex work have their first experience there. I wanted to see if I was actually capable of doing the work. If it didn’t go well, then I wouldn’t have even shown my face to anyone; I could have simply deleted my profile and walked away.

I will always remember my first client very fondly. After setting up my account, I was inundated with messages: some of them rude and abusive, others so grandiose I was sure they were a scam. One guy stood out who seemed kind and eager about the whole thing, like he enjoyed paying for it, like the money was something he relished giving me as opposed to a tedious formality he tried not to think about.

I met up with him for lunch. I told him that, for the first meeting, I wanted to just talk and see if we were compatible and that I wouldn’t be heading back anywhere with him. He happily agreed and we ate somewhere I later learned was right in between my startup’s office and his home. He told me he ran a few strip clubs and that he loved taking care of the girls.

I liked him. When I got back to my computer at work I immediately messaged him asking if he’d want me to come over to his place sometime that week. His apartment was beautiful and had a smattering of BDSM equipment lying around — from his ex, he said. We went to the bedroom after chatting for a bit. We kissed and took off our clothes and I gave him a blowjob and we fucked.

We cuddled for a bit after. I was buzzing with excitement. I loved it. It was absolutely intoxicating. We hadn’t negotiated a price but he handed me five hundred in cash and a twenty for my cab home. On the ride back I stared at the cash in my hand; it felt incredible to have earned so much in thirty minutes. Easy money.

I had wondered if I would feel a sense of shame, of dirtiness. Instead, I felt happy. I had made this sweet older man’s evening, helped him feel cared for, and in exchange, he cared for me as well. I wouldn’t have to be nearly as anxious about money this month.

I think some people don’t realize what an act of love taking care of someone financially is. Giving someone money is a way of adding a little ease to their life; it is giving them control. Maybe they want to save it, maybe they want to treat themselves to something special. Maybe it’ll let them pay their electricity that month or get them a room for the night. Directly giving someone money is a sign of trust, that they know best what they want and what they need.

I saw that client quite a few times after that. Once, he invited me over to a party he was having with some of the girls from his club. He went into the bathroom to do lines with them, seemingly embarrassed but happy that I wasn’t indulging. “You’re a good kid,” he said.

He introduced me to a beautiful older woman nursing a drink on his couch. I asked her what she did.

“I’m a masseuse,” she said, uncomfortable.

I went on an embarrassing tangent about how masseuses are such healers as she sighed; I missed the euphemism.

He and I stopped seeing each other as much as I became more professional. I think he liked nurturing new girls. I felt very lucky to have seen him and glad that I went with my gut. The next few clients I was a little less discriminatory about; I knew that good ones were out there and I wanted to see all of the possibilities.

#

The next man I met called himself a tech entrepreneur. He suggested a fancy restaurant downtown to meet for lunch, near all the shopping.

He was reserved, handsome, intense. He told me he was raised Catholic. “That’s exactly my type,” I said, smiling.

After we were done eating, he called us an Uber. Uber was still a relatively new phenomenon at this point and the drivers still wore suits.

“I’m friends with Travis,” he said.

He helped me up into the massive black SUV, showed me a list of stores he wanted to take me to.

“I’m thinking business sexy,” he said, “Pencil skirts, almost sheer blouses…”

#

I did a little striptease for him in the changing room, and he moaned involuntarily. There’s something so alluring about those formerly Catholic men, their desperate horniness, the naughtiness… He toyed with his wedding ring as his cock pressed an outline in his pants.

I straddled him. He asked me if we could go to a hotel; he booked the Four Seasons on his phone. He brought everything out to the salesman and handed him his black card, put his hand around my waist and squeezed.

#

Back at the room, he kissed me, gently, holding back, slowly peeled off my clothes, kissing my bare skin as it was unveiled. I pressed myself into him, smelling his cologne.

“God,” he murmured.

We were both in our underwear. “You’re so wet,” he said, looking at me.

I slowly crawled across the bed away from him, teasing him with my ass, and he followed me, flipped me on my back, and I could feel his hard cock through his briefs.

“I want to make you come,” he said, slowly removing my panties, pressing his face into my bush, his tongue into my cunt.

“I want you to fuck me,” I said, sliding a finger under the elastic as if to strip him. He pulled back.

“I don’t fuck on the first date,” he said, with a devilish smile.

#

I love a man who knows just how to rile me up.

#

Why do so many men treat sex like they are a starving man at a buffet? They gorge themselves on sex as though they will never eat again, until their cocks are chafed and desensitized. They watch porn for hours upon hours, gripping their cocks in a death grip, as though this next orgasm will save them from having to ever ponder those dark existential questions haunting the back of their minds.

It’s so much sexier to fuck someone who savors it, who holds you in suspense, who moves with intention. And their intention is not just to get off, or to feel better about themselves, or feed their ego, but to feel pleasure.

#

True, utterly obliterating and consuming pleasure.

#

When sex can be a game, and both people are fully cognizant players.

#

When you meet someone’s eyes across the room and you are immediately overwhelmed by the desire in their eyes. Desire is something that needs to be cultivated, nurtured. Knowing that you both want it but you’re holding back.

I think of how many men whine that their wives are sexless and dull; whenever someone tells me that, I fantasize about seducing their wives. No wonder that is the greatest fear of some of these men! How easy it would be, to meet her at a dinner party, make that long and intense eye contact, put your hand on the small of her back or the back of her arm, whisper jokes in her ear, compliment her smell. Make no overt moves.

Maybe she’ll fuck him that night, thinking of you.

#

The rest of my sugar daddies were far less exciting.

There was the man who wined and dined me, dropped ten thousand dollars taking me shopping, booked a suite at the Ritz, only to say, “I won’t use condoms.”

I walked out.

Another man took me on multiple dates. I told him every time about some “bill” I was worried about paying, and he was like, “Wow that sucks.” Then eventually he sent me a text asking why I didn’t fuck him.

“I joined this site to find someone who was interested in taking care of me financially, so that I can take care of them in return.”

“Oh,” he said, “I didn’t realize I would have to do more than pay for dinner.” And that was the end of that.

#

I had been dipping my toe into sex work for around three months when people in Alt Lit began accusing major figures of rape and sexual assault.

Anna was one of the people who was accused, as were most of the men who had attempted to fuck me while I was underage. She had written an account of how she had previously violated the consent of many people she had dated, and how she was learning and trying to do better.

A girl stepped forward, showing screenshots of sexual messages Anna had sent her while she was underage, trying to hook up. Anna told me that it was a lie, scrolled through their message history. At the time, I didn’t consider that she may have deleted key messages.

Friends reached out to me, asked whether I was safe, encouraged me to leave Anna. I vented to one of my friends about Anna, telling him that I felt overwhelmed, that Anna had pressured me into sex as well, but that she was refusing to discuss it with me.

Anna, who had my Facebook password, read the messages and blew up at me. She accused me of talking shit behind her back. She messaged the friend angrily. She told me I had to cut him off or that our relationship was over. I didn’t know what to do. I certainly didn’t want to become homeless. Everyone I knew in SF I knew through Anna. I couldn’t go back to my parents. Mentally, I shut down. I blocked everyone on Facebook. I quit my day job after my boss started asking me questions about the accusations.

#

I still feel ashamed about how I handled this situation. Looking back, there were friends I could have crashed with, people who would have taken me in while I got back on my feet. But I was terrified, and in many ways the dynamic with Anna felt familiar. She was older and she seemed to have her shit somewhat together.

It has been hard for me to accept that I was also groomed and abused, that even though I liked it at the time, the attention Anna paid me while I was underage was totally inappropriate. I was not as mature as I thought I was… as she told me I was.

Even given all of that, the actions I took harmed others. Even if I was being abused myself, I carelessly invalidated the experiences of others and I defended Anna, publicly and privately. I destroyed treasured relationships with friends who had been there for me for years.

It is only recently that I started to reach out and apologize. It has been painful and scary and humbling.

It’s so easy to let yourself believe that extenuating circumstances can completely absolve you of any wrongdoing. You only hurt someone else because you were hurt, sad, afraid, because it was the only way you thought you could survive.

Even if those things are true, it is still important to own the mistake and to ask for forgiveness and to try to make it right however you can. This is something I am still working on.

#

After quitting my tech job, armed with the beautiful lingerie and designer clothing purchased by my sugar daddies, and some new photos taken by Anna in our apartment, I posted my first ad on Eros, a public ad site. My face was blurred. I got my first enquiry that very night and arranged a booking for the next week.

The first client to book me off Eros suggested a potential double with a girl whose ads I had seen around, Lauren. She was pretty and blonde and I asked if she wanted to meet up.

While we were getting tea together, a horde of twenty cops walked by, and both of us froze —instantly tense and uncomfortable. It was my first time meeting with another provider, and I was terrified they might have overheard and would arrest us, which, looking back, I now see is patently ridiculous.

People always treat my job like the appointments with clients are the interesting bits.

That’s inevitably what they ask about.

#

“What is your worst booking?

#

“What is the weirdest thing you’ve been asked to do?”

#

“Have you ever fallen in love with a client?”

#

As with most jobs, the work itself is rarely the most interesting bit. To me, the part that is the most intriguing is the politics surrounding the work. My relationships with my colleagues and how my anxieties have transformed during the time I’ve been working.

I used to be so worried that people would “know,” that they could tell who I am and what I’m doing and what the consequences of that knowledge would be. When I first started, I think many people really could read the situation at a glance. What is a young woman doing hanging off the arm of the old man in the hotel lobby?

To be honest, even then, no one particularly cared. And I think those that did feared the consequences of being wrong. What if we were a particularly affectionate father and daughter, or colleagues who had had a bit too much to drink? It would be too embarrassing to miss the mark with a confrontational accusation.

As I got to know Lauren, I learned she had gotten into the industry while she was underage. More than a few of the sex workers I’ve met while working started out that way. Often it was people who had a strained relationship with their parents, moved out early, and needed a way to make money fast. I know some people who did it for a short period, then left for another job when they could; others stuck to it because it suited them. I imagine an alternate timeline where my teenage nightmare of being homeless because I was queer actually happened. I’m fairly certain I would’ve become an underage sex worker then, too.

No one I knew who started while underage was honest with their clients about it. They always said they were eighteen or nineteen, if not twenty-one. They had fake IDs and everything else.

What is the solution there? Prohibitionists point to underage sex workers and insist this is why the industry must be eliminated. But what other choice did my friends have? Often they were turned away by shelters, wanted the semblance of a normal life, or wanted to afford to go to college. Even with student loans and scholarships, a part time job, how many teenagers unsupported by their parents could afford tuition, housing, and food?

Prohibitionists in general tend to say that the entire industry is rotten and exploitative. That no one could possibly enjoy this work in any form. What right do they have to speak over actual workers in the industry? How many bureaucrats working at insurance companies systematically denying coverage to customers enjoy their job? Which is more soul-crushing: getting paid minimum wage to tell someone they can’t afford a lifesaving medical treatment or getting $50 to give some asshole a blowjob?

It probably depends on who you ask. All the time, I have civilian friends tell me how jealous they are of how much money I make, of how the work is so easy. They’re jealous of my glamorous Instagram, my travel, my spa days. Of course when I ask them why they don’t do it themselves, well, there’s always a reason. The reality is, the public-facing persona has to look easy. So much of the job is making it seem easy and effortless.

#

There’s a perennial debate about whether or not sex work would exist under communism. It’s a tiresome question! There will always be people who want to pay for sex. There will always be people willing to sell it.

Something more interesting: under communism, how many people would voluntarily work their current jobs? How many are satisfied with their current working conditions? How many people would want to scrub toilets? Work in a call center? Pee in a bottle for Amazon? The debate about sex work is a strange fixation. Many people only work their current jobs because of economic pressures.

What is the best way to ensure women are not trafficked into brutal sex slavery? There’s many things that need to be done. To avoid people turning to sex work in times of desperation, we need a more robust social safety net. We need healthcare, childcare, food, and housing for all who need it. We need to fight against homophobic, racist, sexist, transphobic work environments. We need to support survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence, and all other forms of abuse.

We need immigration reform. Before I read Laura Augustin’s incredible Sex at the Margins, I assumed most undocumented workers who do sex work were forced into it. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Those who are “trafficked” across borders often incur a debt they need to pay to the one who gets them across; they are paying for a service and often feel a responsibility to pay it.

Undocumented women have two easily accessible career options: cleaning or sex work. Both are easy to do under the table, but sex work pays far better. If they want to make money fast, many choose sex work.

We need criminal justice reform. Many sex workers have a criminal record that prevents them from getting a regular job. I have a few friends who were “rescued” in a trafficking sting. They ended up being charged with prostitution and can’t even get a job bagging groceries. The cops terrorize sex workers. Sex workers are more likely to experience violence at the hands of the police than from our clients.

#

Because I had, in one fell swoop, cut off many of my friends, I threw myself into my friendships with Anna’s friend group and the new sex workers I was meeting. At the time, it was trendy for sugar babies and escorts to keep a Tumblr blog to document their adventures.

Lauren’s blog was very popular. I was always curious about whether or not she would mention me on there, so I would read it from time to time. She didn’t tell me it was hers, at first, but I could tell it was because on the day we met, she wrote a blog post about a sex worker she met for the first time and how nervous she was.

The next time we hung out, we got ice cream together at a very Instagramable shop. I asked her if she was dating the girl who was in most of her photos on social media, saying they were very cute together. Lauren insisted she was straight, but said she loved her friend more than anything. I asked if when they were drunk they made out, and she asked how I knew.

#

She came over for brunch once and sat at the kitchen table while I cooked, mimosa in hand. While waiting for the pancakes to cook, I came over and sat on her lap. She pressed her nose into my hair and breathed in deeply.

“You smell so good!” she said. I laughed and kissed her cheek.

“I was crying all last night because I’m not a lesbian,” she told me.

“If you want to be a lesbian so bad, then maybe you just are one…” I replied, “Do you want to grab my boobs?”

She cupped my boobs in her hands and squeezed, giggling and smiling.

#

A few weeks later, I invited a girl, Melinda, that I had mutual client with, to one of the brunches. It was becoming a regular thing, inviting fellow sex workers over for a weekday brunch. She seemed intimidated by me. I thought she was cool and wanted to be friends, but she seemed intent on a weird and combative dynamic.

Afterwards, she wrote a long rant on Tumblr about her clients who see girls with big boobs but ask her not to get implants. I was worried she was writing about my boobs and our mutual client. He never booked me again. Because I was just starting out and he was my only regular so far, it was a big hit to my income. I told Anna that I was pissed off at Melinda.

“Oh, I doubt she said anything to him,” Anna said, “Stop being paranoid.”

Years later, after I moved to New York, I visited San Francisco for a tour. This client reached out to me again and asked for a dinner date. Over dinner, he apologized that it had been so long. He told me Melinda had been jealous of me and asked him to stop seeing me.

#

The client who asked for a double with Lauren never ended up following through. I had a second enquiry, this time for a booking with a girl who had similar branding; we both obviously admired French New Wave. I asked her if she would get coffee with me before the booking.

When she walked over, I was shocked. She looked exactly like Zazie, a writer I was obsessed and totally idolized with in high school, who I met once at a reading.

“I’m so sorry if this is weird to say,” I told her, “But you remind me of a writer I knew…” “Who?” she asked.

“Do you know Zazie?”

Zazie had gained notoriety in the lit scene in NYC for writing thinly veiled and devastating accounts of her interactions with well-known writers. I worshiped her writing. She had been a major inspiration for much of my work in my senior year of high school.

She seemed a little surprised, but told me she was indeed Zazie. I tried to avoid fangirling too hard, but I told her I was a massive fan of her work. She was so sweet about it.

#

And so my first doubles session was to be with the writer who partially inspired my interest in sex work in the first place. It felt so elegant. I gushed about meeting her to Anna, who surprised me by being negative about the whole situation.

“Don’t get too friendly with her,” she said. “Why?”

“If she figures out who I am, she might tell our new friends I’m a rapist… I can’t start all over again.”

#

Zazie and I met our client in a business hotel in downtown San Francisco. It was crowded and we easily slipped up the elevator to his room. During the session, Zazie was shy but charming. I was infatuated. It was a quick one-hour booking, and then we were together on the street, waiting for our respective Ubers. I asked her if she would come to karaoke with me sometime.

“Oh, I’m too anxious for karaoke…” she said. I felt sad and I think she could tell.

“I really want to be your friend,” she said, taking my hand.

#

My worst client-turned-stalker started seeing me in my first summer. He saw me first at a hotel, telling me it was so I wouldn’t know where he lived.

“I work in Google’s security division, so I’m a little paranoid,” he emailed. He also asked if I was comfortable seeing a client with disabilities.

Presumably he was decent at his job, but he was also an idiot. The first time I saw him, he asked me a laundry list of obviously suspicious questions.

“What’s your date of birth? What high school did you go to? Where were you born?”

I didn’t answer any of his questions, of course, or answered them with lies. The only one I answered truthfully was my age, which I thought was harmless. He bragged to me about compromising the security of another girl’s site and figuring out her legal information.

I tried to have sex with him, but he flipped out, saying he was too anxious to do anything sexual. He didn’t reveal what his disability was… I wondered what it was.

“I just want you to lie on top of me,” he whined.

I continued to see him, both out of a desire to observe this strange human and because the money was good. He was weird. His apartment was grotesque and sad, with a towel in his bathroom that had a brown streak in the middle. It looked like it hadn’t been washed in years.

His bedroom was depressing, bed with no headboard, permanently unmade, sheets stained. The whole apartment smelled of sickly BO, of depression.

The first few times I saw him, he just wanted me to lie on top of him and kiss him. He was a terrible kisser. His breath was odd, almost smelling like whatever antiseptic they use to clean hospitals. He would ask me to watch YouTube videos with him. He kept pushing for information, for photos of my face, but I turned him down every time. I found sessions with him strange but tolerable. I told myself it was touch therapy for him.

Then he wanted to have sex. He revealed his disability: his muscles were extremely tight, so he was less flexible than normal. I did my best to maintain a neutral facial expression.

His cock was the most disgusting I have seen. I have seen many. It was poorly washed, so usually I would wipe it with a wet washcloth before I started. It smelled even after being cleaned and was limp, yet oozing precum. I put it in my mouth.

“Please go more slowly,” he demanded.

His sausage limp in my mouth, my hand slowly stroking it, as his gunky precum dribbled from the tip. I wondered if it was possible that I might die from how disgusting it was.

When he came, his cum was slightly yellow and chunky. It was so revolting I vomited in my mouth as I watched it. He lay in his bed, moaning and twitching.

#

Why did I continue to see him? Of course money, which at the time I had great need of. I also pitied him. Maybe I was helping him, being there for him?

He eventually convinced himself we were in a relationship. He asked to see me off the clock, to take me shopping. I gently told him no and he pitched a fit.

“I would be doing this for you! To spoil you!” He sounded like a five-year-old having a temper tantrum.

“If you really wanted to make me happy,” I said, “you would give me the shopping money and stay at home.”

He started crying. I went to leave the apartment and he clung to me. I slowly peeled his hand off my wrist and walked out the door.

#

He wouldn’t stop emailing me. The emails became increasingly deranged; I blocked his email. Then he started DMing me on Twitter; I responded only to tell him not to contact me further. He made a fake account pretending to be an escort and DMed me once again; once I realized it was him, I blocked him.

After this, there was a brief period of peace. Then he found my dating profile.

#

To find my dating profile, this man would have had to have gone through every profile for women my age in the Bay Area. From there, he was able to use his special role at Google to stalk me extensively.

He found my LinkedIn using some sort of facial recognition search, which was the only social media account I had forgotten to make private. After getting my legal name, he was able to find my address, Anna’s name, old art projects I had made in high school and college.

He began emailing me vague threats, telling me he knew where I lived. My first instinct was to panic; then I realized even if he did come to my home, there was no way he could take me in a fight. I ignored all the emails, sent them to spam once again.

Again, there was a period of silence for a month or so, before he figured out how to redirect my number. Because he was a Google employee, he was able to redirect my messages and phone calls to a Google Voice account. I realized this perhaps twenty hours in, when I found I wasn’t getting calls and Anna reached a strange voicemail when calling me.

Eventually, Verizon had to prevent my phone number from being accessed online because someone with an IP address in Mountain View, CA, keep redirecting my calls.

The only contact I get from him anymore is an occasional weird note telling me I changed his life, that he wishes he could see me again.

#

Anna was beginning to chafe against the couples therapist, who seemed to her to be too critical of our relationship. I had started to speak up about wanting to use the Hitachi a bit more, as our sex was sometimes painful, and the Hitachi was extremely effective at making me orgasm. I hadn’t yet told Anna that I was rarely able to orgasm with her sans vibrator.

The couples therapist mentioned a few sex therapists we could see together, or that I could see solo, who were experienced with helping people through such things. She questioned Anna why the Hitachi was so threatening and offensive.

“Wouldn’t you want your partner to experience pleasure?”

Anna told me that the couples therapist was discriminating against us due to our age gap; she thought Anna was abusing me. I disagreed. I didn’t see it. I just thought Anna was being an ass about the Hitachi and perhaps the therapist agreed with me.

#

And Anna was being an ass. She would pitch a fit like a six-year-old when I asked to use the Hitachi. It was uncomfortable for her, it wasn’t intimate enough for her. She would usually wear me down in these verbal battles, but as I began to work more, my vagina couldn’t take it. She would get excited if I yelped in pain. I asked if it got her off, my pain. “Honestly, it is hot that I’m rough enough that it hurts you a little.”

But it didn’t just hurt a little. Eventually I just said that if she wasn’t comfortable using the Hitachi then I couldn’t have sex with her.

“You’re violating my consent,” she said. “What?” I asked. “How?”

“If you will only have sex with me with the Hitachi, then you’re forcing me to use it.” I sat down on the bed.

“I am saying that I ONLY consent IF the Hitachi is used. I am fine with us not having sex if you do not consent if the Hitachi is used. You are the one who asked to have sex. You are the one who is now pressuring me to engage in a type of sex that physically hurts me.”

She pouted, she cried, she begged me to reconsider.

#

Eventually the couple’s therapist proposed seeing me mano a mano, one-on-one, sans Anna, and Anna and I could find someone else as a couples therapist. I was starting to process some childhood trauma that I had pushed down deep before, so I was into the idea of seeing this therapist solo. I’m sorry to get so meta here, dear reader, but as juicy as the details of my traumatic childhood may be, I’m not going to pretend this little memoir is any more confessional than it really is. I do need to keep some sort of mystery about me.

It was wonderful seeing her one-on-one at first. I grew even more certain that she used to be a dominatrix; she had all sorts of helpful tips related to sex work. She told me to go to one of the Korean spas in SF and get a body scrub. At first I pushed back.

“It’s too expensive, I can’t afford it,” I said.

She looked at me, bewildered. I was still splitting all my expenses with Anna and I wasn’t making nearly as much as I do now.

“Well,” she said, “please try to make room in your budget for it.”

#

Since becoming a sex worker, so many of my views on stereotypically feminine things have changed. I looked so different before I started; being conventionally attractive was, when I was younger, not a goal for me. I recently showed a beloved client some photos from my time in college, and he looked at me, shocked.

“Did you get a nose job?” he asked, “Or some other surgery?” I laughed.

“No, but I lost my baby fat, treated my acne, and plucked my eyebrows.”

Style and grooming are far more important to looking conventionally attractive than many people think. A good hair cut and color, trimming of the eyebrows or facial hair, the right lipstick, a touch of concealer… they can transform someone from looking totally average to a stunning beauty. I think people today are so used to women wearing makeup that it can shock people to see someone who doesn’t.

Taking care of your body is an important part of the work. I had a client who once told me he was massaged for an hour three times a week. His skin was soft and smooth, like a baby, his muscles without tension, smooth like a pampered Wagyu cow. I couldn’t stop stroking him.

I do Pilates or yoga three times a week. I am always exfoliating: my face, my body, chemical and physical exfoliants both. I go to the spa, sweat it out in the steam room, plunge in the cold pool. I have been peeled and microneedled and infused. At one of my favorite Korean spas, they even offer a service where they steam your pussy.

In this industry, it’s important to take care of your body. Not simply for aesthetic reasons, though those are important, but also for your mental health. At first, I resisted my therapist’s suggestion to get a massage or go to the spa; I viewed such activities as indulgent and expensive. There were more important things for me to spend my money on.

The first time I finally caved and went to a spa for the first time, I was incredibly anxious. While soaking in the tub, I kept glancing at the clock, promised myself I would try to stick it out for an hour. I left the spa after fifteen minutes.

Going to the spa became easier as I grew more in tune with my body. I have Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and at the times the symptoms were overwhelmingly painful, I would have joints randomly sublux as I walked down the street — my hip suddenly no longer properly in its socket. I had started physical therapy and the process was grueling. I felt so weak.

It was only after three years of physical therapy that my PT said I was strong enough to switch from a therapeutic setting to regular Pilates. I resisted. Wasn’t there some other sort of exercise I could do? I associated Pilates with the grating blonde moms of the students in my middle school. But I went and of course, like many things I initially resist, I ended up loving it.

Watching my body become more powerful and learning how to exercise delicate control over every movement gave me a new appreciation for it. For so long I had treated my body with anger and disgust, resentful that I needed to inhabit it at all. I began to go to the spa and actually enjoy it, taking pleasure in feeling my muscles react to the heat, to the cold, to touch.

#

When you are a sex worker, your body is your work. Caring for it and maintaining it is a part of the job! If you aren’t familiar with the industry, you might think it’s rife with STIs. Ultimately, anyone who has sex is opening themselves up to the chance of getting an STI. Even if you are in a monogamous relationship, your partner could be carrying something from a previous relationship, or could even be unfaithful.

Whores aren’t stupid. According to numerous studies, we actually have a far lower incidence of STIs compared to the general population. Most of my friends in the industry get tested frequently, even if they use condoms religiously. Plenty of us are on PrEP as well.

When I first asked my doctor about starting PrEP, they gave me a funny look. I had been seeing them for a year and they knew I got tested every three months.

“Have you ever had an STI?” they asked. “No.”

“You honestly probably don’t need to use it. Based on the number of people you have sex with, if you haven’t gotten anything yet, you probably use condoms properly and don’t need to have any extra protection.”

Nevertheless, I got the prescription. I had no side effects, so there was no reason for me not to take my Truvada pill every morning. I felt so much safer. My porn career would be over if I ever tested positive.

Enforcing condom use with my clients is relatively easy, even if some do protest.

Honestly, I only really have condomless sex with other performers on set. There is trust there. With clients, I would never, even if they produced a negative test. Results can be faked and I would feel the need to get tested even more frequently.

Some clients are truly delusional. They have no idea how to manage risk. There are forums where some of them discuss getting “BBFS,” or bareback full service, their slang for sex without a condom. The things they write are truly disgusting. One man wrote about a bareback session where he immediately went back to his car and doused his cock in Purell to “kill the AIDS.” Another client, a doctor, was arguing with me about using a condom. I asked him when the last time he had gotten tested was.

“I’ve never had to get tested. I’m safe.”

The state of sex education in America is truly dismal.

#

The hardest part of the work for me, and I think for many other sex workers, is maintaining our boundaries. Most of my clients are lovely, but some will push every boundary you have.

Emotional, physical, whatever they can. “Do you love me?”

“What’s your real name?” “Let’s skip the condom.”

“I know you said you don’t do anal but…”

For some, the boundary pushing is specifically what they enjoy. If you want to last in the industry, you get good at saying no firmly, but gently, so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings — magine a mother coaxing a toddler in a temper tantrum.

Occasionally, clients even change their behavior after watching you enforce a boundary. Sometimes they push just to see if they can; if you show that you won’t have any of it, they gain respect and stop acting out. When I was new, I would sometimes think that giving in and giving them what they want would make the rest of the session go more smoothly; it never did. They think you’re a pushover. They’ll just keep pushing.

I have friends who will show up to every session and intentionally act like a bitch, rude and cranky, and watch how the client responds. If he does his best to be chill, she’ll continue seeing him. If he’s an asshole in response, she’ll never see him again. Personally, I like being sweet too much. I am always kind (unless the client requests otherwise!) but I don’t hesitate to lay down the law the moment I need to.

If you do online sex work, maintaining boundaries is equally challenging. The moment I began showing my face, I blew up on Reddit. I hit the front page and suddenly people from my high school were texting me about it. It wasn’t my intention to have a porn career, but suddenly people were calling me a porn star.

As someone who grew up on 4chan, an anonymous internet forum with the most edgy content one can imagine, I have a very thick skin. When people accused me of being a narcissistic whore, I laughed. How unimaginative, I thought. My favorite insult: “She must think she has a gold plated pussy to be charging those prices.”

I think some of the internet nerds were at first entranced that I was invulnerable to trolling. I didn’t “get mad” — I trolled back. I knew the culture and I could turn their insults back on them. The thing about most internet trolls is that they are just sad, lonely kids. I never engaged in mass trolling as a kid — I was always just a lurker — but I knew people who did.

So sometimes I could even have vulnerable conversations with my trolls. Like my clients who misbehaved at first, once they saw I smacked them down and didn’t take any of their shit, their behavior changed.

A common joke about people who were on 4chan in the early days is that either you grew up to be a full-on Nazi or a cool queer person. That site was vile and intense. It drew people to it who were deeply wounded and felt misunderstood. There was gore, racism, bigotry in general, suicide, and sometimes people would even post child pornography — the worst of the internet.

Being exposed to that as a child certainly had an influence on me. But it also had some of the best aspects of the internet at the time. All the top-tier memes originated on 4chan. It was also where I learned that trans people existed; of course 4chan used slurs to refer to them, but they were there. People would debate politics, so I learned about Chomsky and all the other popular anarcho-communists. I was linked to Erowid, so I was safe when I experimented with any drugs.

So when someone calls me a dirty whore, I don’t take it personally. It would be hard for me to see that as anything other than them lashing out in pain. So I would call them a loser incel who hates women because he can’t get laid, and they would clap back calling me an entitled bitch, and I would say, “Why shouldn’t I be?”

Then, usually a few minutes later, they would respond saying something like, I am just sad and angry and lonely. And I would send them internet hugs and DM them, chat for a little bit.

Sometimes people just need to be held, even if it’s over the internet.

#

My understanding of plastic surgery has also changed dramatically since working in the industry. When I was young, I thought of it as something vain and therefore sinful. As I grew older and my feminism broader, I thought of it vaguely as something people could choose to do and it was fine. I never really considered it for myself, even after I started working. It seemed too expensive, and besides, Anna was always harshly against it.

Hilariously, many of my shitty early clients were also obsessed with it and particularly vicious when describing it. I had clients beg me to never get anything done, saying it would ruin me, or compliment me for being “natural,” saying they were disgusted by other women, despite the fact that I knew many of the ladies they frequented and claimed to love had had plenty of work done. It was laughable in many ways; the clients who were most obsessed about whether boobs were “FAKE” or not were also the ones who frequently deluded themselves about whether the experience of hiring an escort as a whole was a fantasy or not.

Of course sometimes we enjoy time with our clients, but part of our job is giving them that fantasy of a perfect date. Most clients understand this and are appreciative of the effort, suspend their disbelief in kind. Some, however, become increasingly neurotic about the entire experience.

“Do you really like me? Did you come? Are you sure? I want you to really like me. Do you think you would ever date me?”

Few things irritate me more than a pretentious man, fancying himself a genius, who is in reality an idiot. These men can be encountered in all walks of life, boisterously proclaiming their superiority through every word, because nothing arouses them more than their own obnoxious voice.

One of these men once accused me of trying to steal his semen, as though nothing would give me more satisfaction than carrying his child. I laughed. He was trying to flush his condom, the absolute idiot, so I made him carry it out of the hotel in a tissue paper, so that he wouldn’t clog the toilet. I lectured him, letting him know I made more money than him, and anyways, had no desire for his paltry child support, much less his repulsive spawn.

Few things make me lean into my mean streak more than condescension.

Of course some sex workers end up dating their clients, just as someone might date anyone they met at work. However, it is unwise to go into any commercial operation with the goal of it ending in a date; it is as foolish to try to hire a plumber based on his looks with the hopes of marrying him one day as it is to do so with a sex worker.

Chapter Seven

The Depths

#

I first met Amonie while she was touring San Francisco. She had long brunette hair and piercing eyes — light grey contact lenses. We’ve been told we look like sisters. At first, all we did was sit in silence and stare at each other, exchanging few words. She was incredibly beautiful. I felt a sense of longing come over me. I did not see her for many months, until I visited Los Angeles, where she was living, in part to see her.

We had a session together. We were all over each other. The client lay back on the bed and watched it happen. The sex was improvised but perfectly choreographed, timed as though practiced. The pace of our breaths and our moans, wetness developing, perspiring, swelling from pleasure.

We had a second session right after. He also lay back and simply watched. She got so wet that my fist slipped inside her easily — she said it had never happened before.

We called an Uber back to my hotel and we talked about psychedelics and the occult. She had a strange way of speaking that was removed and intellectual, until she became passionate —at which point the words spilled out of her like she was Joan of Arc, rallying the troops. I was so in love.

#

We got to my hotel and sat near each other on the bed. Stared in silence. Then we moved towards each other. The sex we had made me understand pleasure and care. How someone can look at you and understand what you feel and give you that thing you need to feel or hear without asking.

#

I loved the new friends I was making. On my second trip to LA I went to a special event, DomCon. It’s a conference all about BSDM, for professional and lifestyle alike. At the time, the only pro-domme I knew well was Kay, but I knew I wanted to know others. I was working as an escort, but my sexuality was absolutely dominant, not submissive.

I didn’t tell too many people at the conference that I was an escort; at the time, there was a massive schism between dommes and other sex workers. Many dominatrixes looked down on anyone who did anything that could be considered submissive for money. I told them that I was a domme, which was ultimately true: I did dominate men, even if I also fucked them.

While at a play party, I ran into the luminous Dominatrix Iris, who was leading an infamous writer whose work I was fond of around on a leash. He was silent, eyes downcast.

I had already fallen halfway in love with her online; her branding was impeccable, her style chic and sexy, a compelling mix of seduction, tease, dominance. In person her energy washed over me. I saw her across the room and she saw me too; we recognized each other. I walked over to her, googly eyed. She flirted with me and I flirted right back. We promised to see each other again soon.

Kay was at the same party, but I hadn’t seen them in a bit. I walked from room to room trying to find them. The party was in one of LA’s massive dungeons, each room with a different theme. One medical, for a nurse roleplay, another like a child’s room, for age play. I found Kay in a more traditional dungeon, with dark burgundy walls, a leather bench, and a massive cage.

They were suspended from a hook in the ceiling with some ropes. A beautiful older woman was the one tying them up, gently checking the ropes, making sure they were comfortable. She started teasing Kay, who was giggling uncontrollably, smiling broadly.

I immediately fell a little bit in love with the older woman, who introduced herself to me as Seraphine. Mistress Seraphine. I was flirtatious, then remembered myself, and gave the two of them some space for their scene. A little crowd of voyeurs had formed, and I busied myself making sure none of the creepy men touched Kay. One of them had brought a feather and begged me to let him tickle Kay’s feet. I shut him down.

While people involved in the kink scene like to claim that they know better than anyone else about the importance of consent, I hardly found that to be true. Consent is important in all areas of life. I found that often the men I met in these spaces felt they could get away with pushing people’s boundaries more than anyone else. Not just men who considered themselves dominant, but submissive men as well, who thought that because they were submissive, it was fine for them to be demanding and manipulative.

It’s an interesting way of thinking about power dynamics. Of course in BDSM, the dominant vs submissive power dynamic is obvious. The dominant is in charge, at least during the scene. Usually limits are discussed before play: Do you like being restrained? Hit? How hard?

Both dominants and submissive may have limits of their own, of course. Maybe a domme likes kicking, but not slapping; maybe she likes tying someone up but doesn’t want to hurt them.

The overt power dynamic between the dominant and the submissive can confuse some. The submissive, caught up in the fantasy of powerlessness, may feel comfortable demanding certain treatment. If a dominant says he wants to use condoms, for example, a submissive might feel fine pushing back, insisting on getting fucked without one.

After all, the dominant is the one in charge!

In a similar vein, if you are queer, you might have heard bottoms complain that there are no tops anymore. What is a top? The person who fucks, who penetrates, who makes the moves. For some, being a bottom can feel easier, in a way, passive. If you are the passive, receptive partner, then some might think you cannot be the one to cause harm.

Of course, there are power dynamics that exist outside of these simplistic roles, and can affect how they are actually played out. I remember doing a scene once with a regular client of mine and a dominatrix I hadn’t met before. When the dominatrix and I had a moment alone, she immediately started complaining to me about him.

“He pays me double to take off my bra during the scene, so I do it,” she said, “He calls it body worship but it feels gross. But I guess there aren’t any escorts in the area who offer fetish play, so he comes to me.”

The client, meanwhile, spent much of the scene delighting in acting like a total brat. With me, that was fine, because all of his behavior was within my boundaries; for her, however, it was painful. His jokes about being a horny and desperate pervert, about her being able to do whatever she wanted to him, rang hollow. After all, he was paying to violate explicit boundaries she had laid out. After he left, she lay out on the sofa, exhausted.

“I just keep reminding myself that he paid my rent for the month,” she said. “I get it,” I said, “The money is good.”

#

Through Dominatrix Iris’s Twitter, I found out one of her friends lived in the Bay Area: Domina Colette. Her Twitter was beautiful, subtle; her Instagram was totally French New Wave, with stunning locations. Her taste was clearly impeccable. I DMed her immediately and we set up a time to meet up. I took BART into Berkeley and she picked me up at the train station, offered me a weed pen.

“My partner is trying out a weed startup… would you like a hit?”

She seemed impossibly cool. Before we had even arrived at her house, we had discussed psychedelics, internet communities, witchcraft... The conversation was so good I felt like I was tripping. We arrived at her home and her slave was there, in a latex gown, cooking a stir fry for us.

“I was hoping to have it done by the time you arrived. I’m so sorry Mistress,” he said, eyes cast demurely towards the floor.

“Well, make it an extra day then,” she said. “An extra day of what?” I asked, curious.

“Oh, he’s in chastity right now,” she said, “So he’s not allowed to come for a bit. Every time he makes a mistake I add a day.”

I had heard of chastity play, but it was my first time seeing it in action. She went about it so nonchalantly, like it was nothing. It was so sexy. We settled down at her kitchen table and waited for the food to be ready. She offered me a bit of chocolate.

“Would you like to do some mushrooms with me?” she asked. “Of course!” I popped it right into my mouth.

“It’s a relatively low dose…” she said, “But it’s not exactly a micro dose…”

We ate, though I wasn’t particularly hungry. After we were done, we stripped naked and went to hang out in her hot tub. Her slave took photos of us, brought us strawberries, then left us alone. She fed me a strawberry. She was shimmering and beautiful; I felt like I could see her soul, darkness and light all in one. She had teeth.

We kissed and I felt like I was falling into her, she into me. The warm water of the hot tub only added to the sensation. We floated together, caressing each other, gasping and moaning. She felt so good. We moved out of the tub, cuddled in her living room, talking nonstop the whole way.

As I came down, she offered me a ride back. On the way, we talked about building something together, some kind of matriarchal society, a commune. The conversation felt so intuitive and free flowing, hopping from one idea to the next. I thought about her life, how beautiful it was, the fearlessness with which she led it. I tucked it away within myself, a glowing image of possibilities.

#

A month or so later was her birthday. She sent me an invite, a clever photo of herself with the party details. I asked Anna to come with me, but she didn’t want to, so I invited Lauren instead. It was quite the sight. When we pulled up in our Uber, there was a purple light leaking through the windows, subdued dance music. We entered through the front door and were greeted by a man in a masquerade mask and a frilly maid dress. He took our jackets.

“Please take off your shoes,” he requested, “Unless your shoes are essential to your outfit.”

My outfit was a skimpy bodysuit made mostly of Italian lace and heels in the same color, so I decided they were essential. Lauren seemed flustered at my lack of real clothing, but I felt so much more comfortable without. We made our way through the party; I was keeping my eyes out for Colette. One part of the crowd was very Burning Man: feathers and glitter and psychedelic patterns. There was another part that was more traditional BDSM: latex, maid outfits, six-inch pleasers, and a whole lot of leather. A little more my vibe. There were also a few VC type dudes standing around, fit, bald, nursing drinks, trying to seem cool in their suits. I couldn’t tell whether they were submissive, or kinky at all, or just vanilla and enjoying playing at being edgy.

Before I could find her, we ran into Iris. She had flown up from Los Angeles for the occasion. She was stunning in a latex bodysuit with a little masculine flair.

“Well, this is amazing,” I said, gesturing around.

There were girls in chainmail doing tricks in the aerial cloths overhead and people making out on the couches. Iris smiled at me, devious.

“This is Lauren,” I said, gesturing to her. Lauren, blushing, gave Iris a hug.

“I need a drink,” she giggled, and wandered off towards the refreshments. Iris put her arm around me.

“There’s someone here I’d like you to meet,” she said, flirtatious and naughty. “I think you will like him. I’ve been teasing him all night.”

We walked through the party together, holding hands as the men stared. A pretty young man was lying back on the couch, making polite conversation with a couple with wild matching makeup.

“Gabriel,” she said. “Have you been hiding away over here?” Gabriel looked over and immediately blushed crimson.

“No…” he said, staring at my tits then looking away immediately.

The couple scooted away as if on cue. Iris and I sat on either side of sweet Gabriel. I put my hand on his thigh.

“Iris told me you enjoy being teased,” I half moaned in his ear.

I noticed his cock immediately grew hard in his pants. He was very primed. He was already squirming around a bit, looking around to see who was watching. His shirt collar was open just enough for me to see his blush creeping down his neck.

“How long has it been since she let you come?” I murmured. He groaned.

“Iris,” he said, staring into her eyes with the desperate energy of a horny puppy. “You’re torturing me.”

She grinned. I asked if I could touch him, and he said yes, so I slid my hand down his pants. He gasped and looked around the room.

“What if people can see?”

“It’s a sex party,” Iris cooed in his ear.

He sunk into the sofa, body taut with arousal. I kissed his neck. His feigned protests died down as we teased him. A small crowd was starting to gather, but he seemed utterly unaware of where he was. I straddled him, unbuttoned his shirt, kissed his chest. He was tan and just barely muscular, in the sort of effortless way young men are. His cock was straining against his pants. I unzipped them.

“Could we go somewhere more private?” He asked, begged, looking up at me with his big brown pleading eyes.

“Don’t you want it?” I asked, “Wouldn’t you be willing to do anything for it?”

He groaned, biting his lip, barely meeting my eyes, groaning, “Almost anything…” Feeling devious, I climbed off him.

“I want some cake,” I said, and walked over to the refreshments. He lay there dazed and horny, pants still unzipped.

As I walked back to the room with the treats and the drinks, I finally bumped into Colette. She looked beyond gorgeous in some glimmering and ethereal golden bodysuit with chains. She put her hands around my waist and started kissing me.

“I LOVE YOU!” she shouted. She was rolling.

I kissed her back and we began to finger each other, toppled back onto a pile of pillows set up seemingly for this exact purpose. She smelled so good, musky and floral, dizzying. We pressed ourselves into each other, scissoring, kissing, caressing, tumbling through the pillows. I was sober but contact high and buzzing, totally enveloped in her love. I wasn’t aware of time passing, exactly, but I looked up and saw a crowd of people, a photographer shooting photos of us. Colette and I posed and I felt pleased that we were both such exhibitionists.

I stood up once again, helped her up, gave her a kiss, and wished her happy birthday, and continued making my way towards the drinks. Lauren was there, talking to Gabriel.

“I see you managed to get here before I did,” I laughed. “Is Lauren your ally, your attempt to escape the web Iris and I have been entangling you in?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Well, I can leave you alone,” I said, resting my palm on his chest.

He started laughing nervously, bashfully pulled me towards him, held me close so that I could feel how hard he still was. I was suddenly aware of how tall he was.

“Well, you shouldn’t do that,” he said. Precious.

I started on my slice of cake when I saw a beautiful girl with a Lord of the Rings tattoo on her thigh. She was wearing some cute lingerie and flirting with Colette on her way to the pillow room.

“Who is that?” I asked Gabriel. He looked over.

“I don’t know her,” he said.

And of course I was instantly on the prowl again. When it comes to beautiful women I am an incorrigible flirt. I followed her into the pillow room. She sat down and I sat down next to her.

“Hi,” I said. “Can I kiss you?”

We kissed and we were soon entangled on the couch. She was soft and wet and moaning in my ear. She started giggling and flipped herself on top of me, straddling me.

“This is fun,” she said. “What’s your name?” “Liara,” I said, smiling. “What about you?” “Akira,” she replied, shaking my hand.

I laughed.

“Nice to meet you!”

We were both laughing and kissing again. Someone handed her a vibrator and she made me come. We cuddled together and I was extremely content. Colette swooped by, ever the perfect host, and gave both of us kisses.

Iris and Gabriel were sitting nearby.

“It looked like the two of you were having fun…” Iris said mischievously. “Gabriel was trying to be polite but he couldn’t look away…”

Gabriel was now very red and couldn’t meet either of our eyes. Iris, Akira, and I all sat around him, stroking and cooing at him, kissing each other across his lap as he flushed and moaned. Occasionally Gabriel would get so overwhelmingly horny that he would ask me take his cock out and stroke it; then he would snap to, remember he was in public and that quite a crowd had gathered, then reinstate his modesty.

It was incredibly fun and then we all had to go home. Lauren and I split a car back, her telling me about some silver fox she had been flirting with all night, and me buzzing, glowing, replaying in my head every moment of the night. It was everything I could have wanted.

#

I began to tour once a month; when you’re working full time as an escort, it’s a good way to make money. I would post on sex worker forums and tweet about dates I would be visiting a different city. Then I would schedule bookings while I was there.

Often I would travel with Lauren; it was so much nicer to travel with a friend. Less lonely. Our first trip, we went to Los Angeles together. She drove us from San Francisco to Los Angeles. We took turns putting songs on a Spotify playlist, singing along. She had a gorgeous voice.

While we were in LA, we met up with Amonie, who I was freshly in love and obsessed with, despite knowing nearly nothing about her. She was mysterious without meaning to be —the kind of cool that only comes from reading widely, listening to endless music, watching obscure movies, and actually enjoying all of it. Whenever I try to keep up with her coolness I’m out of breath.

Some other girl, Alexa, had DMed me, seeming incredibly interested in meeting. Amonie said they had met, so I invited her over to hang out with us. When she came over, she asked if her partner, Douglas, could join. I told her I was fine with that. She told me that he used to be Dita Von Teese’s makeup artist, that he was an expert rigger, and a super sadistic dominant. I was intrigued.

He showed up, thinning, greying hair in a short low ponytail, his face looking dementedly cheerful, like a warped older gentleman who might in another life be cast as the star of a children’s television show. He was wearing a black T-shirt and black cargo shorts. Initially, he was incredibly respectful, telling me that Alexa’s previous dominant was abusive, and that he was doing the hard work of healing her. He showed me pictures of the deep bruises she had when they first started dating. He told me he thought consent was soooo important.

We hung out for a while. Amonie seemed vaguely uncomfortable, but I could never tell what she was thinking. We got dinner together. When the bill came, Douglas tried to pay it, but Amonie refused. She grabbed it. Her eyes flashed. She paid for it.

The next time I visited LA, Alexa offered to let me stay with them at their apartment. When I arrived, she picked me up from the airport and dropped me off. She had to go run errands, she told me, but Douglas would take me grocery shopping and I could pick out whatever I wanted.

This time, the vibe was decidedly off. Douglas seemed thirsty in a way that was distasteful. I felt his hunger and I immediately shifted into a more dominant headspace. I threw whatever I wanted in the shopping cart, had him push it. When we got to the checkout, I didn’t even pretend to offer to pay. I knew he was trying to fuck, though he hadn’t asked yet, and I was annoyed that he even thought I might have the slightest interest.

As we drove back to their apartment, he told me he would love to tie me up and suspend me. I told him I was a firm dominant with men and couldn’t imagine myself submitting to him.

“I have an unlimited menu, and a wide variety of skills…” he said.

“The only thing I would want to do to you is tie you down, gag you, and brutally fuck you in the ass. If that’s not on your menu, then we simply aren’t sexually compatible,” I told him.

He stopped pestering me for a bit and did some work on his computer. When Alexa got back, we went to the hot tub at their place and soaked together. She said it was fine if we were nude so I stripped down easily. Douglas’ eyes were bugging out of his head. I positioned myself so that he was out of my line of sight. I didn’t want to see him, grotesque as he was.

He brought us chocolates and I ate them carelessly. He asked if I liked them and I told him I wasn’t a huge fan of chocolate, but they were fine. He offered me weed, cocaine, Molly, champagne, and I said I was uninterested. I wished he would leave so I could just hang out with Alexa, but I didn’t want to upset her by asking him to leave.

Alexa went back to the apartment because she had to take a call, leaving Douglas and I alone. With my back to him, I rolled my eyes, knowing he would try to find a way to make a conversation. I got up out of the water, still fully nude, making no attempt to cover myself, and made eye contact with him, frowning.

“Could I tie you?” he asked. “No,” I said.

“It would be so hot for you to be suspended, and for your pussy to be on display for me, and for me to fuck you, your body swinging rhythmically with the ropes, letting me position you however I want…”

I made a face of disgust. “Congratulations, you just turned me off completely.”

Still nude, I walked back to their apartment, leaving him alone on the concrete patio.

#

While I had intended the rejection to be clear and decisive, it seemed it only made him thirstier still. Later that week, Amonie, Alexa, and I were having a threeway, and Douglas asked if everyone was comfortable with him joining.

“If Alexa and Amonie want you to, I’m fine with it,” I said. “But don’t touch me.” While everyone was in the middle of fucking, Douglas took my hand and placed it on

Alexa’s pussy. I removed it, then paused, and glared at him, making sure he held eye contact. “I told you not to touch me,” I said. “I’m done.”

I walked away from the bed and started getting dressed.

“I didn’t realize you really meant it,” he said.

My back still to him, I rolled my eyes, taking a deep breath so I wouldn’t lose my temper. Amonie silently got up and stood by my side, rubbing the small of my back.

#

Later that night, I had intense food poisoning. Shellfish. I missed the toilet on my first hurl, and pitifully attempted to clean it up. Alexa gently told me to sit down and gave me some ginger ale, cleaned the rest up for me. I told her my mother always made me clean up my vomit when I was sick and started crying. She shushed me like a baby and told me it was fine; she was happy to take care of me.

Douglas came down and hovered, making me uncomfortable. I felt like a weak animal.

After they left, I lay on the bathroom floor, knowing I wasn’t finished yet. I called Anna.

“I’m scared of Douglas,” I cried pitifully, half delirious. “I’m worried he will rape me.”

Anna was half asleep and mumbled something about how I would probably be fine, and besides, there was nowhere else for me to go.

I vomited a few more times and I crawled back to bed, half convinced I would die. As I lay there, feeling like death, I saw Douglas walk past my bed, cock fully erect, heading up to the loft where he and Alexa slept. I felt grateful that I was wearing pajamas.

#

The next day, Iris came by to pick me up; we were going to get sweets at one of her favorite pastry shops. Alexa was excited; she told me she was good friends with Iris and her business partner at the time.

“They recently gave me a tour of their dungeon, it’s stunning,” she told me.

Iris came through the door, glowing, statuesque, smiling, everything about her outfit, black silk button-down and loose black slacks, just so.

“Liara!”

I ran and gave her a kiss.

“I’m Iris,” she said to Alexa. “Nice to meet you.”

Alexa forced a smile and bid us farewell as we walked out the door. I reached for Iris’s hand as we walked through the parking lot to her car. You can tell a lot about someone from the way they drive around Los Angeles. I’m an anxious driver, muttering to myself; Iris is calm, smooth, handling complicated traffic with ease.

We got a table at her café and spent the afternoon feeding each other little forkfuls of cake and blushed at each other, talking about teasing boys while we played footsie under the table.

#

Amonie and I were so obsessed with each other. Anna would often complain she felt I would leave her for Amonie. I would shrug and tell her Amonie simply wasn’t into me like that. She was too cool. I tried to visit LA at least once a month.

Once I was over at Alexa’s incall space, which she rented out to other girls for bookings.

Amonie and I had just gotten through with an appointment and Alexa came over to pick something up. I was staring at Amonie intensely and we started kissing each other, wordlessly. Alexa came over like a jealous puppy, trying to see how she could get in on the action.

#

Amonie and I at that time barely spoke. We still just stared at each other. I wondered if she was trying to communicate with me telepathically; I surely was trying to with her. She finally invited me over to her apartment — a beautiful one bedroom with eclectic furnishings: a loveseat that looked like a seashell, a mirrored console table with small statues of Venus and Bastet.

She had just gotten a kitten and I carried him around as he purred in my arms. We lay in her bed and kissed. She put her hands in mine, squeezed, looked into my eyes, and kissed me again.

Chapter Eight

Endless

#

Lauren and I soon took a trip to New York. Both of us were excited; for her, it was her first time visiting. Every time I came back to NYC, I cried as soon as I saw the shimmering skyline, when the plane touched down, as the taxi crossed the bridge over into Manhattan. The feelings I had for the city felt like coming back to a lover in a long distance relationship. My heart twisted in my chest with joy.

I told Lauren to raise her rates for the trip. We both did well and we finally had our first double. We walked around the city together, all bundled up. It was winter and California girl that she was, she needed to buy a proper down coat. I took her around West Village, showed her my favorite spots.

“I love this, it’s just like Europe,” she said.

We held hands walking through the cobblestone streets.

#

Later in the evening, I looked up a jazz bar I used to go to when I was underage. Lauren loved jazz; she spent the night flirting with some silver fox and I spent the entire night staring at the pianist’s hands. When he was done, I made sure I was in an area he could easily speak to me, if he wanted, and he did. I complimented his hands, holding them in mine, stroking the fingers. I knew he could smell me, and I felt the tension of longing move through us, my hand gently touching his elbow, then his hand on my thigh.

#

I flew back home with a massive wad of hundred dollar bills in my purse. I was anxious that TSA would confiscate it, so I spent hours googling to make sure it was legal to fly with that kind of money. It was.

Anna picked me up at the airport and I showed her the cash in the car. She snapped at me. “Wait until we get home!”

I stuck my hand in the purse and held that cash like it was a sacred talisman. It was more money than I had ever made. When we got home, I counted it over and over again. Anna watched me, in her eyes a strange look I hadn’t seen before, that I couldn’t place.

#

The first extended trip I ever worked was with a client I had met that week in New York. After I got back to San Francisco, he emailed me to set it up. I had not even been an escort for a year and I had no idea what to charge. I made up a number and he paid it. He took me for a week-long vacation in the Bahamas. He flew us there on a private jet; I did my best to act unimpressed.

He was in a great deal of pain throughout the trip, some nerve in his shoulder irritated. His face was twisted up, he said he had been avoiding seeing a doctor. I massaged it, which he said provided temporary relief.

I would float in the ocean outside the his beach house, gazing up at the sunrise, the sunset, and he would swim through the water with the ease of someone who had spent summers as a child at the shore.

He was really good at giving head: slow, gentle, persistent. He was a guitarist and had intelligent fingers.

When I’m interested in a man, I always spend a great deal of time looking at their fingers.

I am attracted to people who move their fingers with intent and grace, skillfully, understanding how to grasp something gently but securely, keenly aware of the amount of force they apply.

What is it that is so arousing about precision? Someone who understands timing and rhythm, the right moment for a joke, a beat. The right amount of salt or the proper tool, intuition honed from years of practice.

I think, for me, the amount of focus is what I desire. To turn that focus in on each other, every exhale and movement seen, understood, so you never even have to say what felt good, because they already know.

#

I was finally learning how to get rid of my headaches. As I used a combination of illegal psychedelics and newly FDA approved pharmaceuticals, I learned that psychedelics did more than just stop the physical pain. They helped me work through the emotional pain of my headaches as well.

For so long I was focused on the physical pain of the headaches that I neglected a harsh truth: in many ways, the pain of not being believed, or having my pain minimized, was worse. I have felt healed by those who have seen me, like my neurologist, who specializes in head pain, especially cluster headaches. At my first appointment with her, she asked me to rate my pain.

“For the worst headache I’ve gotten?” “Yes.”

“Nine out of ten.”

She turned to me and looked me in the eyes. “Not ten?”

I looked down at my hands.

“If it was ten I would have killed myself.”

Things have certainly gotten better since I first had them. For one, I know the name and the method of action. A blood vessel in my head swells and presses hard on my trigeminal nerve. The nerve sends a signal to my brain that someone is stabbing something through my eye, into my brain. My brain responds with the most distress it can muster. I wish I could comfort it, like a child who’s had a nightmare: There’s no monster here. You’re safe. Go back to bed.

#

More recently, one of my most darling clients was in a deep pit of depression. He had come over to my apartment once to clean it while I was wallowing. He put on a dress and shooed me out, told me to hang out with my friends.

He asked me how anyone could stand to live in this world, with all of its pain and suffering. I asked him if he would be interested in trying mushrooms with me, because they had helped me decide to live, despite it all. I happened to have a low-dose mushroom chocolate on me and gave it to him as a test run, to see if he liked it.

For his second trip, I gave him five grams, brewed in a tea. I’ve had mushrooms more times than I can count and drinking tea is my preferred method of consumption. If you eat the mushrooms, the fiber in them is prone to making you both gassy and nauseous; this is uncomfortable under normal circumstances and potentially terrifying while you’re tripping. If taken on an empty stomach, you can begin tripping within fifteen minutes and completely sober five hours later.

Heat water to around 150 degrees Fahrenheit, or 70 degrees Celsius. This is the optimal temperature for extracting psilocybin, the active ingredient, without breaking it down. I like to add either lemon juice or vitamin C powder — vitamin C potentiates the experience, helping make the mushrooms as potent as possible. I recommend adding ginger and lavender as well, to ease your stomach and your nerves. Leave the mushrooms in the water for ten to fifteen minutes. If you like, you can steep them a second time, though they will have lost much of their potency.

Five grams is a lot, especially for someone who had only ever done psychedelics once before. I told him that it would be intense, but that he would get through it, and that I would be there for him every step of the way.

In the beginning, I played the John Hopkins psychedelics playlist, which they play for all the patients in their psychedelic mushrooms study. They’re testing its efficacy for end of life existentialism and depression. Around five songs in, he asked me to turn it off. I held him in his bed while he wept and described the colors he saw. For the most part, he was quiet and still, with his eyes closed.

He slowly came back down, opening his eyes, smiling, and grasped my hands. He told me he had been feeling an incredible disconnect from his wife; he described how he experienced her feelings and perspective during the trip, as well the feelings of his son.

The body metabolizes psilocybin into psilocin, which acts as an agonist on serotonin receptors in our brain. An agonist is something that attaches to and thus “activates” the receptor. It’s as if the psilocybin is running around in the house of your brain, flicking various light switches and rapidly changing the channel on your TV and radio. These random signals disrupt the way your brain processes information as well as the information it is receiving. Much of the research on the psilocin focuses on how it binds to the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor, but I believe its affinity for the other receptors plays into its potent effect.

LSD also latches onto all the serotonergic receptors. I recommend googling to see an illustration of how it clamps on; it’s truly remarkable. A single lysergic acid diethylamide molecule can remain attached to a serotonin receptor for hours, even as other mechanisms attempt to knock it off. It also shows an affinity for dopamine and norepinephrine receptors as well, increasing dopamine levels (think cocaine!) and reducing norepinephrine, à la Xanax.

Reading about the potent effects psychedelics have on one’s brain, you may be concerned about the potential for overdoses. As surprising as it may be, LSD and mushrooms are relatively safe, so long as they aren’t mixed with other drugs, prescribed or otherwise.

#

My time in SF was a blur. Growing up in New York, I was used to marking time with the seasons. I was always changing, growing, but in San Francisco I felt like I was in a rut. It seemed like nothing ever changed. After Anna saw how much money I was making, she wanted to buy a house. I told her that I thought it would be better to rent.

“Houses are so expensive,” I said.

Anna told me that she was worried about being homeless and that owning a home would prevent that. She had made a ton of money working freelance for tech companies that year and wasn’t sure next year she would make as much.

“Couldn’t the bank foreclose on it? What if we couldn’t afford repairs?”

But she was insistent. I tried to argue with her but she refused to hear any other options. I gritted my teeth. She found a real estate broker who had a house available for lower than anything on the market, but that the tenants who lived there would have to be evicted.

“That’s so slimy,” I told Anna.

She wanted it. She said that we could live in one of the rooms and rent out other rooms to offset the cost of the mortgage. I didn’t want to do it and her mother told her it was a bad idea.

But any resistance I expressed was argued with.

It’s hard to explain how painful arguing with Anna was to people who never witnessed it. Anna was like a dog who would not let go. She wouldn’t stop bringing it up until I said yes. She wouldn’t let me go for a walk to calm down, wouldn’t let me sleep. She would say, “We can’t fall asleep after fighting without resolving it.”

It was like a constant prodding. Even if it was something small I didn’t want to do, she would come up with convoluted arguments for why I was being bad or mean to her. I couldn’t watch a television show on my own or with my friends. If I was hanging out with someone and took longer than half an hour to text her back, she would call me incessantly, say something mean to upset me so that I would come home. The only time it was okay for me to take a while to text back was when I was working.

I was so drained. Sex work was overwhelmingly emotional and I didn’t have energy to stand up to her. I started to think that she was just right, that I was bad, abusive even. Our new couples therapist told me I needed to be reasonable, to be more willing to compromise.

Looking back, the things she demanded of me were often bizarre. She insisted that I sleep naked. Sometimes she would cry if I didn’t, saying I didn’t trust her. Often she would try to fuck me as I was falling asleep and it was harder to say no if I was naked. She would designate certain shows that I could watch by myself; everything else I had to watch with her or it was violating our “show monogamy.” I couldn’t be out too late except if I was working.

I started having panic attacks. She started to handle my work emails with clients. At first, I asked her to look over drafts, tell me if they looked reasonable. She would say it was awful and then rewrite it. I became insecure about my writing ability, so I would ask her to just write it for me. Eventually, she just took it over entirely.

She started to do the same thing with my text messages with friends. She would look at my conversations and say I left things too open ended.

“You need to be more clear and strict up front,” she said, “So that later on if they want to do something different, you can point at the text messages and it’ll be clear you’re right. Here, just let me write it for you.”

I was starting to think I couldn’t do anything right.

Anna decided we would buy the house. I had hoped we could live in Oakland, near my friends, but she said it would be too far a drive because she worked in the South Bay. We slept on an air mattress in the garage while she had the rest of the house remodeled. The house was in her name but she had me use all the cash from my work to pay for the remodeling.

“You know I wouldn’t screw you, right?” she said.

We got married around the same time. It was romantic and everything, Anna was over the moon giddy, but I felt so detached. I didn’t feel like I could protest.

#

Anna set up an intense and grueling tour schedule for me so that she could get all the cash in time. I was touring three weeks out of the month, taking local bookings my one week “off.” Sometimes I would have three or four bookings scheduled in a day. I would have to ice my pussy at the end of the day. I started to get sick all the time from the travel and the stress.

At the time, I was on a review site — The Erotic Review. I had stellar, near perfect reviews, and Anna didn’t want that to change. She would go ballistic if I ever cancelled a booking, even if I wasn’t feeling well. Sometimes I would show up to appointments sick, trying to push through. Once, I vomited in the hotel bathroom.

“I’m so sorry, I think I’m too sick to do this right now,” I told my client. “I can refund you or we can reschedule.”

“Are you sure? I don’t mind,” he said. I asked him to leave.

I began to hate my work. My reviews attracted the worst type of clients: desperate and delusional. They acted like any booking with me was like dinner at a buffet, all you can eat. They would try to squeeze as many sexual acts, positions, orgasms out of me as possible. Then they would document it all in a grotesque review on TER.

#

On my tours, I flew from San Francisco to LA, NYC, Washington DC, Boston, San Diego, Dallas, Toronto, Tokyo, Dubai, London, Paris, Hong Kong, Amsterdam…

I was touring Los Angeles and staying at the Standard downtown. The Standard is great because it’s a party hotel. They love it if you’re a hot girl staying there acting like a slut. That’s all a part of their vibe, the brand.

I was staying there with Lauren and Akira; they were drinking and we were all flirting with each other, making out. Amonie and Alexa were heading over, but I had a booking. I waited until they got there, gave each of them a kiss, then headed out.

I met my guy at some vaguely romantic restaurant, we sat in their garden filled with string lights and candles on the table. The food was fine. My client was a comic book writer, and he knew I liked comics so he brought signed copies of his work. I didn’t like his comics. I didn’t tell him, of course, just gave him compliments on the aspects I did like. He was nice enough, but I was eager to get back to the girls.

We went back to his place and had deeply boring sex that blew his mind. Blowjob, cowgirl, missionary, finish in doggy style. He came and we cuddled and I tried to locate a clock in his bedroom. There was none, tragically. Luckily, by this point, my internal clock was good enough that I could gauge when the booking was over.

“You’re amazing,” he said.

“Awww,” I said. “You’re pretty cute yourself !”

It wasn’t even a lie; he was pleasant to talk to. We talked about comics and Western animation versus anime.

“I’m definitely more of an anime nerd,” I told him, “Probably because anime is way less ironic. Western animation for adults is usually, like, South Park, or whatever is on Adult Swim. It’s not really my thing. I find it unmoving. I don’t want to watch something so episodic.” He laughed.

“Brutal. I’m friends with the South Park guy, I’ll give him your feedback.” I was so embarrassed.

“I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to roast your friend’s show!” I groaned and hid my face.

He hugged me and gave me a kiss and held my hand and then it was time for me to go. I called my Uber and went back to the hotel. I messaged the group chat asking what they were up to but no one responded.

I went back up to the room and found everyone in the massive tub. There was a champagne bottle on the ledge and everyone was giggling, makeup smeared, kissing each other.

“Ugh, I so need this,” I said, taking off my clothes. “How was work?” Amonie asked.

“Fine, you know,” I said, sorta shrugging.

I slid into the tub behind Amonie. She started rubbing against me and pinching me. Her eyes were super dilated. I asked her if she was drunk and she said no. We kissed, were making out. Someone else in the tub, I think it was Akira, slid her foot into my pussy. It was such a difference from the booking — beautiful, soft, fun, all entangled and warm and wet, sticky. All of us moaning together.

We all fell asleep in a pile on the bed. I was the first up in the morning, probably because I hadn’t been drinking. I ordered all of us room service, took a shower, did my skincare routine. I brought the food to the bed and made sure everyone got some coffee.

“Thank you Daddy!” they said, giggling.

#

Iris met me later that day, on the roof near the pool. She was as beautiful and stylish as ever, wearing her lingerie confidently, as if it was a bikini. I recognized it from the latest La Perla collection. We lounged on the chairs and sipped fruit juices while we talked and flirted.

Both of us had a fascination with the other’s work. Compared to many other pro-dommes, Iris’s domination style was very psychological and seductive; my escorting style was relatively kinky. Both of us adored tease and denial. And when I was with her, I saw myself in her; the way she was so easily able to read sexual tension, direct it, manipulate it. How to turn someone’s lust into an all-consuming passion, let them grasp at what they want and not have it.

When I play with people who enjoy being teased, the thing they are most shocked at is how content I am to deny them. I feel no remorse getting a man hard, making him think he might just have me, or I might let him come, and then denying him, locking him up. So many women enjoy the tease, at least for a while, but eventually want to give someone an orgasm. When I’m teasing, I couldn’t care less. Iris had been in the business for some time, and gave me some tips about putting my subs on a masturbation regimen.

“If they come very easily already, just put them in chastity and deny them,” she told me. “But if they have a difficult time orgasming, if you want to really tease them, you need to get them used to orgasming frequently. Have your boys masturbate at least twice a day for a month, then take away, then put them in chastity. Then they will truly feel agony.”

Iris and I dipped into the pool, floating around together, giggling, kissing, teasing each other.

“You’re the only one who can make me blush,” she said, holding my face in her hand.

#

We scheduled some play time later in the week with one of her boys. “I think you will like him,” she said.

I met them at a restaurant, one of those gorgeous places only LA really has, all glass and massive plants and dim lighting, sprawling in a way that would be far too expensive in New York. Her boy was beautiful, with a mischievous face, a sort of youthful enthusiasm like a horny teenage boy, though he was in his thirties. Iris and I sat on either side of him, the food was delicious, although I was a bit too distracted to pay much mind either way.

I rubbed his thigh and asked, “When was the last time you came?” He flushed instantly and looked away.

“Isn’t the fish delicious?” he asked, slowly peeking up to meet my eyes again.

I noticed his cock was already hard in his pants. I laughed and rested my hand higher, on his inner thigh. He melted, put his arm around my shoulder, pulled me in. It was like he was a live wire, freshly stripped, and I could feel his desire emanating off of him uncontrollably. I kissed his neck, which was flushed and hot with blood.

“Should we just get out of here?” he asked. Iris and I both gave an evil giggle.

“I think I want dessert,” she said. “Make sure to be a good boy and chew your food slowly. If you don’t, you might choke.”

After a painfully long dessert, he drove us back to his apartment. Iris and I sat on the sofa while he paced and puttered around his apartment, all hot and bothered, getting us water, offering us snacks, until we told him to sit down. I patted the spot right between Iris and I. He sat nervously.

I kissed his neck and distracted him while Iris went and got ropes out of her purse. I whispered dirty things in his ear about all the things I would let him do to me, and he kissed me back, hard, putting his hands around my waist. I started to rub his cock through his pants and felt his precum starting to soak through, leaving a wet spot.

Iris came from behind him and seductively ran the rope across his chest. He moaned, closed his eyes, whispered, “What have I gotten myself into?”

We got him out of his clothes. I told him I might fuck him if he put on some bunny ears, so he did. Iris and I took some Polaroid photos of this pretty boy in his boxer briefs and bunny ears. I kissed him, wiggled out of my dress, pressed myself into him, let him slip his fingers into my panties to feel just how wet my pussy was…

Then I told him I would probably fuck him if he put on a little maid outfit, so he did, and we took more photos, then Iris tied him up, and I sat on his face with my panties on and made him smell me, his cock painfully erect and wet in his little maid panties. I slowly stroked his cock, took it out of his panties as if to fuck him… then didn’t.

He looked at the two of us, giggling evilly, cooing at him, saying “Poor baby…” “I should have known it was too good to be true,” he sighed.

Iris untied him and we had popcorn, watched a movie together and cuddled. I gave each of them a little kiss and took an Uber back to the hotel, smiling.

Chapter Nine

Splitting

#

My budding relationships with other sex workers and even some of my favorite clients stood in stark contrast with my marriage. My relationship with Anna was steadily growing worse. The sex was still painful. She still hated the Hitachi. I barely wanted her to touch me anymore, but she would always guilt me into it, or love bomb me so intensely that I felt it was just a sacrifice I had to make. She did so much for me.

It’s one thing to fake orgasms occasionally in a relationship; it’s another to feel like you have to. Even worse, Anna would brag to everyone about her sexual prowess, how she always could tell if a girl was faking it or not. I would roll my eyes.

I began to notice that often the people she was most attracted to were those where she had power in the dynamic. Both of us dated outside of the relationship. She was especially drawn to people living in poverty, people struggling with addiction, people who were undocumented, people who were young.

There was one “friend” in particular who bothered me. They were struggling immensely with addiction and posted frequently about their precarious situation. Anna would send them cash or UberEats in exchange for nudes.

“If you care about them, why don’t you just send them money or food?” I asked. “Why do you need to make it sexual?”

Anna was upset.

“Just because someone is struggling doesn’t mean I can’t be attracted to them,” she shouted.

“I don’t think they need a romance from you. I think they need a friend. A mentor. Someone who is kind and isn’t just trying to fuck them all the time. They already have a boyfriend.”

Of course, I didn’t know the person well enough to know how comfortable they were with Anna’s overtures. Maybe it was just projection. Anna talked me into doing my emails as her full-time job, slacked off at her cushy tech office until she was fired. She called me on her way home and bragged about the severance. Now all of the financial pressure was on me. I had just turned twenty-one and now I was the breadwinner. Anna would make jokes about being my pretty housewife.

“This life is so amazing,” she said. “I feel like I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve to be this happy. I’m terrified I will wake up one day and it’ll all be gone.”

I was not so happy. I would stand on the roof of our home and think about jumping. I couldn’t stop dreaming of suicide. I didn’t even feel safe driving; rushing down the highway, all I could think of was jumping out the door and being crushed by traffic.

I began to have a recurring nightmare: I was in a car, in the passenger seat. The car was going very fast but no one was driving it. I had to reach over and grab the wheel before I crashed and died. I would wake up in a cold sweat, sometimes screaming.

My psychiatrist kept upping my dosage. More Seroquel, more Latuda. Sometimes I slept for twelve hours straight. I would go to bed at 2am and wake up at 2pm, take my meds, smoke a joint. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t feel anything. I stopped reading, stopped listening to music. It didn’t move me anymore. All I wanted to do was play video games, smoke weed, watch Star Trek.

Star Trek took on a special importance to me. It was sometimes the only thing that could help me fall asleep at night. Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard had a soothing voice. He knew how to make compromises. He was kind and empathetic, both to his crew and to whatever aliens they were dealing with. He was real with people when they fucked up and showed them how to make it right.

#

Work was nerve-racking but exciting all the same. I was intrigued by all these men who would talk so freely with me about their bizarre inner worlds, who would behave in the most revealing ways.

Sometimes I would wonder: is there something all clients have in common? I can only think of one: they all want to hire a sex worker.

Beyond that, it’s really hard to think of any single unifying attribute. I’ve had clients that were men, women, and genderqueer. I’ve had clients that didn’t want to have sex. They just wanted to talk or be held, to have a meal with someone, or take some photos.

Some of my clients have been married for decades, and I’m the first person they’ve ever had sex with, aside from their wife. Some of them are widowed and want to experience intimacy without having to get back into the dating pool. Some of them are virgins and want to get it out of the way with a professional.

Some of them are misogynistic, rude, and delight in making me feel uncomfortable. Some of them want to get as much as they can out of me. Some of them are lacking in empathy. Some of them are sweet, genuine, and loving, people I will want to keep in my life even if I one day exit the industry.

More than anything else, most of my clients are looking for a space where they can express their desires without judgment. Usually these are sexual desires, of course. Often my clients are married and they are unsatisfied in some way.

Some of you reading this must wonder, how could you sleep with all these married men?

At the end of the day, all I hear is the story of the husband. Unless the wife is seeing me too, as a part of the session, I’ve rarely had to interact with them. Once, I got an email from the wife of one of my clients. She was extraordinarily angry, asking me intimate questions, accusing me of destroying the marriage. I didn’t respond. That client hadn’t even told me he was married — hadn’t talked about much at all, really.

It’s hard to feel responsible for destroying a relationship when I was one of fifty or so sex workers that man in particular had seen, when he barely talked to me, just wanted something simple, and left before his time was even up. I was not some temptress who knew him, who went out of his way to seduce him. He found me.

I do hate the men who would talk poorly to me about their wives. I roll my eyes, sometimes even tell them off. I have no respect for an annoying man who talks shit about his tolerant wife. God bless her for putting up with you, I would think, imagining the awful stories she could tell me about his behavior. Some clients would complain that their wives no longer wanted to fuck them and I immediately knew why. They were selfish assholes. I thought of their wives as saints.

Of course, there were many reasons a married man might decide to hire a sex worker. Sometimes the sex has simply gone out of the relationship, but they want to stay married, but don’t want to have a messy affair. Sometimes they are simply slutty boys and get off on being bad, on the deceit and dirtiness of hiring a hooker. Or it’s a mid-life crisis. Or they’re in an open relationship. Or maybe the wife has told him straight up that she is done, getting a divorce once the kids are grown, and she doesn’t care what he does so long as she doesn’t have to hear about it.

I found them all so interesting.

#

There was the CTO at one of the largest tech companies in the world, who got blitzed on sake and laughed hysterically when I told him I knew JavaScript.

“Who would have thought I would be fucking a JavaScript programmer tonight,” he slurred as he pressed his face into my tits.

He wanted to go out for a smoke and he wanted me to come with him, so he ran into his wife’s closet and dressed me in her Burberry coat. I wondered what she might have thought.

#

There was the voice actor who sounded exactly like the cartoon character he played on television.

#

The famous director who could only come if someone was peeing on him.

#

The bestselling novelist who claimed he was seeing me for research, that he was only seeing me, would never normally do something like this. Later my friend told me he had seen five other girls and told them all the same thing.

#

The handsome celebrity chef with a hardcore BDSM fetish.

#

The programmer who wanted me to ride him like a pony.

#

By the time the house Anna had bought was done being renovated, almost every fetish was boring and rote. I can look at nearly any man on the street and tell you with a high degree of certainty what his fetishes are, whether he’s cheating on his wife, a basic psychological makeup.

“Mommy issues, adult baby, pathetic daddy dom, human toilet, thinks he’s kinky but is actually totally vanilla, pet play, actually a sweetheart and really good at giving head,” I said to a friend at brunch, pointing at the different men around us.

#

There were clients who stood out from the rest; one of my favorites was an incredibly handsome Saudi doctor who flew me to Dubai for a few days. He was brilliant, he had abs and light brown puppy-dog eyes, and he was a total anime nerd. He was polite to the point where I was unsure if he really liked me or not. I would blush whenever he kissed me.

We watched some old-school stuff — maybe Akira or Ghost in the Shell? We would have long, romantic dinners every night and I felt overwhelmed and flustered.

#

There was the overwhelmingly sweet consultant who had the added benefit of looking a bit like George Clooney, who took me out to a long and lovely dinner, who seemed painfully shy, who asked me what I was reading. I, half-jokingly, told him that I was only reading women or people of color for the rest of my life as I had read enough white men. He made me come and then sent me away, thanking me with a kiss for helping him get to bed.

Every time I saw him after, he brought a book or three written by women.

#

Sometimes my clients even ask me for relationship advice. They want to make their wife happy and they don’t know where they’ve gone wrong. Sometimes they simply don’t know what they’ve done.

I once had a client with an absolutely massive cock. It was astounding. I needed a great deal of time to warm up and lube to take it. He told me he always hurt his wife during sex and it traumatized him; he didn’t know why she was in pain. I told him he had a ginormous cock and asked if they used lube, or if she used a vibrator to loosen up beforehand. He looked at me, shocked.

“I’ve had people tell me that I was large before, but I thought they were just flattering me. Do you really think lube could help?”

I never ended up checking in with him, so I don’t know whether the lube ended up helping. I do think that our society has such an issue with people unable to communicate about their desires, wants, and needs around sex. People just tend assume they are all on the same page. And the lack of critical information about sexual health is astounding. A bit of lube, especially for older women who are entering menopause, would save so many relationships!

Even more than lube, how many more women would be more willing to fuck their husbands if the household chores were actually split evenly? I can’t tell you how many of my clients I’ve lectured about the importance of tidying up if they want a blowjob now and then. A man becomes far less appealing if you’ve had to pick up his socks and scrub the skid marks off his undies for decades.

My view on monogamy is clouded by my work. I’m more likely to assume most men are cheaters, even if they aren’t, simply because I’ve met so many cheaters. If I were ever in a monogamous relationship, which is hard to imagine, I don’t think I’d be too devastated by the cheating itself. Especially if they saw a professional and used protection. I would be more upset about the lying.

I know all too well that having sex with someone doesn’t mean you love them, even if you enjoy the sex. I think American culture can sometimes be so conservative and puritan that some people, especially straight women, can’t wrap their minds around this. I totally understand why my clients want an easy, fun fling with no strings attached, even if they are in wonderful and happy marriages. Not every act of fucking has to be this cosmic, spiritual love making act!

Sometimes you just want your nut.

#

My experiences in sex work are by no means universal. I am at the high end of the industry. Unfortunately, other sex workers often have far worse experiences.

Vulnerability begets vulnerability, in a deeply toxic cycle. Sex workers who are unhoused or those who cannot afford to purchase online ads often have to work on the street. This means they are often targeted by violent clients, who know they won’t be able to screen them. There is no digital trace of their encounter, which means that street-based sex workers, especially trans women of color, are frequently targeted by serial killers. They’ve realized that sex workers are the easiest people for them to murder without fear of being caught.

Many police officers even refer to deaths with sex workers involved as NHI — No Human Involved. No effort is put into solving these crimes, which often go unsolved for years, until the serial killer kills someone who is somewhat “respectable.” Then, all of a sudden, actual police resources are put towards solving the crime.

Because I can afford to turn down clients, have an assistant who screens them over email, and even check their IDs in person, I am very insulated from danger. Even when someone problematic has gotten through my screening, I have never had an issue either walking away or ejecting them from my hotel room. In this way, I am very lucky.

There was only once while working that I was genuinely afraid for my life. In the first year I was working, I had a client who got very drunk at dinner. As we were getting undressed, he wrapped a belt around my neck.

“No,” I told him, sternly, and unwrapped it myself.

I do think he was intending it as a sexy part of foreplay, not as an attempt to kill me; he was French, and I’ve found French men are very inclined to think stupid and dangerous activities arousing. But it still haunted my nightmares for months. I became acutely aware of just how vulnerable I was. It’s why I was always so stringent about my screening, despite the occasional whining of my prospective clients.

#

I began to have panic attacks before bookings with clients I hadn’t seen before or clients I didn’t like. I knew what was coming. How could I force myself to spend another hour with some gross man’s cock in my mouth? The way they would bitch and moan if I needed a break. I wanted to be more firm with them, but Anna told me that I had to appease them.

“Just get through the booking,” she said.

That might have been doable if my bookings were more sporadic, but they were constant. Every day, over and over. It felt like a grotesque merry-go-round, spinning from the lurid insides of some luxury hotel, another Michelin star tasting menu, another first-class flight, another evening getting fucked by some desperate man as I tried to focus all my energy on studying the hotel wallpaper. It felt like I always had some kind of stomach flu, but maybe it was just dizziness, from the spinning, the fucking, the endless disgustingly sweet desserts.

I tried to make myself believe that I liked it, that it was worth it, clutching the stack of cash in my hand, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

#

I started seeing a new therapist. She specialized in survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. Her website was so warm, explaining that her work was all about helping people build a sense of solid ground.

That’s what I needed.

Her waiting room was cozy and warm, with soothing and vaguely hippy iconography everywhere. Usually when therapists offer tea in their waiting room, they have cardboard cups available. She had colorful ceramics. I asked her where I should put my cup.

“Oh, just leave it in the sink,” she said.

She was much older than any therapist I had had before. I immediately noticed a tattoo on her arm: phases of the moon. She had an immensely calm energy. I know I’m not an easy client; it is really easy for me to pick up if a therapist is reacting a certain way to something I’m saying. She truly held space for me.

We didn’t speak much in our sessions; instead, she taught me a technique called pendulation. You call up a painful memory, let yourself experience all the sadness, pain, anger. Then you call up an opposite memory: a memory that feels affirming and good. You move back and forth between the memories until you are able to feel a sense of healing.

She never particularly gave me advice; even when I would ask for it, she would just tell me that I knew best, that I was strong enough to make whatever decision I needed. Her way of teaching was Socratic: she would ask me questions designed to lead me to my own understandings, my own values.

I noticed myself becoming less reactive. I could state a boundary and hold it without danger. I would step away from arguments, step away from conflict, take space until I knew how I wanted to respond.

I began to see my relationship with Anna in a new light. I started paying attention to patterns that I had ignored before. The words she used when she fought with me, the way her arguments shifted. I acknowledged that it wasn’t how I wanted to be treated.

One day I came into therapy incredibly distressed. Anna had spent thousands of dollars on comic books and hadn’t told me. She handled the accounting and had been keeping it secret from me. She told me that she felt like she needed to spend money like that because she felt like I didn’t appreciate how hard she worked.

“I guess it’s true,” I said. “She works more hours than me. Sometimes she’s sitting at her computer twelve hours a day. I sometimes have long bookings, but I’m usually not working that long.”

My therapist looked at me.

“Why does it matter if she works more than you? What about that is bad?” I struggled to find an answer.

“Just because one partner wants to spend more of their time working doesn’t mean the other person should have to, I guess,” I said. “I even want her to work less.”

My therapist nodded.

“Does this bring up any memories for you?”

“My parents used to get mad at me for not doing my homework, even though I was sick and struggling. They would tell me I was never working hard enough. That I wasn’t even trying.”

“Let yourself sit with that memory. Feel what it brings up.”

I started sobbing, heaving, curled up onto the couch, my hands clenched and my nails digging into my palms. I rocked back and forth as I felt how worthless I felt, how unloved, how desperately I wanted my parents to see that I was small and helpless and in pain. And I wanted them so badly to take me seriously. And they told me I wasn’t even trying, when really I was trying with everything I had.

My sobbing crescendoed, overwhelmed me, and I shook. Then it ebbed back. I thought of my neurologist, who believed my pain. I thought of my high school counselor who rubbed my back, who let me sit in a dark room whenever I had one of my headaches. I let myself feel seen and loved.

I wiped my eyes and blew my nose and breathed. In and out. I felt the sofa underneath me and the tissues in my hands. I listened to the water in the fountain running outside. I opened my eyes and breathed.

“Thank you,” I said.

#

At my therapist’s suggestion, I decided to go to a week-long meditation retreat. I was terrified that I would have a mental breakdown. No talking, no eye contact, no touch for a whole week! And I was someone who felt so addicted to interaction.

I was surprised that I actually enjoyed it. There were mandatory groups for people who were attending for the first time, where they would check in on us, ask how we were doing, to make sure we weren’t flipping out. Other people talked about the intensity, how overwhelming it felt. The group leader asked how I was feeling.

“Great, very calm, very relaxed.”

She looked at me like I was lying, or on drugs, but it was the truth. I think maybe if I had been born a few centuries earlier, I would have enjoyed being a monk at some remote monastery. I’ve read that older monasteries were often built over wells infested with psychedelic fungus. I would have liked that, I think, the stillness, constantly tripping and singing and reading and writing. I guess I would have been a nun, too, and they were totally having lesbian sex. And the psilobin from the mushrooms would have treated my cluster headaches, which reminds me that these odd traditions from the past usually happened for good reason.

It took scientists decades to realize psychedelics were an effective treatment for cluster headaches, when people had been using them in the past all along, until the government outlawed them.

Sometimes even if we don’t know how or why the cure works, we still gravitate towards it. It can be easy to forget that magic was once a very real tool for understanding and navigating the world. Before there was science, with its standardized measures of weight, time, and length, we had spells.

A blacksmith would be taught how to smelt iron not by using a stopwatch; instead, the time would be measured with the spoken word, a spell spoken with the proper cadence, which would produce the finest result. In this way, magic was truly useful. Wounds and diseases could be healed with similar invocations and giving of herbs or minerals.

I see today’s scientists as something similar to witches of the past. As anti-scientific attitudes spread, their methods are questioned. Scientific papers can be difficult for laypeople to parse. As science has grown more specialized and complex, the amount of time required to understand it has grown, degrees are required; and as cures to that which ails us become widely known and accepted, and people grow complacent, so they are questioned. For if the cure is so good you never need experience the illness, you may question the point of the cure at all.

I think this is why various archaic methods of understanding the world are coming back into vogue, as we grow to understand science as a tool and not an absolute arbiter of truth.

Something I have found very interesting is that many sex workers worship Lilith. Lilith is a difficult deity to understand, with many contradictory writings about who or what she is.

A google search will turn up descriptions of Lilith as a succubus who preys on women who are vain, who enters this world and the humans she possesses through mirrors. The aesthetics of contemporary understanding of Lilith are dark and gothic, depicting her with black or dark red hair with horns. It is said that to summon her you need to light black candles and sexual offerings of some kind are recommended. I have read descriptions of darker ceremonies in difficult-to-find grimoires dealing with child sacrifice.

It makes sense to me that sex workers, who already feel evil according to mainstream American morals, would be drawn to a figure such as Lilith. She is regarded by some as a feminist icon, someone who refuses to play by the rules of a patriarchal story.

Lilith is described in the Alphabet of Ben Sira as Adam’s first wife, before Eve, who was made of clay as Adam was, who refused to lie beneath him, who demanded to be his equal partner. She was thrown out the Garden of Eden for this sin, and copulated with Satan, creating an army of demonic children, her womb cursed so she could never have human babies of her own. Eve, who was made of Adam’s rib, was subservient to him.

The Alphabet of Ben Sira is said to be an ancient satirical text, written by someone of a neighboring region who wanted to mock the Hebrew religion.

Other people believe Lilith is another name for Ishtar, an ancient Sumerian goddess of war and pleasure. Still others believe Lilith was a minor demon and Ishtar was the supreme goddess.

Ishtar, also known as Inanna, among other names, was an ancient Sumerian goddess associated with the planet we now call Venus. She was wild, she turned men into women, she was not the goddess of marriage but of prostitutes. She was chaotic and generous. She is another deity quite popular among sex workers. She is believed to have been the last goddess the Israelites worshiped, the Queen of Heaven, before they became monotheistic.

We will burn incense to the Queen of Heaven and offer drink offerings to her, just as we, our fathers, our kings, and our officials did in the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem. At that time, we had plenty of food and good things, and we saw no disaster.

But from the time we stopped burning incense to the Queen of Heaven and pouring out drink offerings to her, we have lacked everything and have been perishing by sword and famine. JR 44:17–18

#

A while back, I went to see a friend who was studying to be an astrologer for a reading. He pointed out the placement of Lilith on my chart, conjunct my Ascendant in Taurus, and Venus conjunct my Sun in Scorpio, each less than a degree apart in separation.

“You will be seen as an embodiment of Lilith, at once threatening and alluring to men,” he told me. “For you, love is inseparable from your being.”

Chapter Ten

Mirror Stage

#

Amonie and I began to tour together; it was sublime. We would visit museums, and she always had some interesting spot in the city she wanted to check out. Best of all, we would work together. Because we looked so similar, nearly half of our bookings were doubles.

Appointments with Amonie became the absolute highlight of my career. I think the two of us were so in love that even the dullest booking was transmuted by how badly we wanted each other. Things that might usually be deeply revolting became the pinnacle of pleasure, all because I was doing them with her.

I think with her I truly began to understand that it is not the acts themselves nor the skill with which they are done that brings pleasure. Someone could move their tongue with all the talent in the world and leave me feeling nothing.

Desire is so elusive. After years of dating this girl, obsessed with her beauty and her mind, she told me that halfway through our time seeing each other she had gotten a nose job. She said it as though it was a shameful thing I must have noticed, but didn’t mention out of some sort of noble impulse not to embarrass her.

I hadn’t noticed the change. In the time that I’ve known her, she’s changed her body in many ways — tattoos, piercings, different sorts of plastic surgery coming and going — and her body has changed itself through the course of time. I told her recently that she could do anything at all to her body and I would probably still be just as obsessed with her. She laughed and smiled, agreed.

#

Usually when I was traveling internationally, Anna would travel with me. She would refuse to leave the hotel unless it was for a photo shoot. When we were in Paris, she wouldn’t deign to visit a single museum and whined when I wanted to eat anything besides hamburgers. I only got to eat two pieces of sushi in Tokyo because she only wanted to eat pasta. I think we went to six Italian places and only one sushi restaurant our entire time in Japan… deeply tragic. I felt immense sadness, all these beautiful photos of all these places I felt like I had never visited, because I almost never got to truly take a day off or roam around

It’s hard to remember the exact tipping point where I went from making a solid living doing sex work to making an obscene amount of money. Part of that is because Anna spent it all and because I was working too much to enjoy any of it. For most of my life, even my childhood, I have such distinct and clear memories. But the years spent living with Anna are a depressing, indistinguishable slog.

I was always anxious with her. Everything was a massive disaster; she would show me massive credit card bills and say we would be in incredible debt if I didn’t do another tour. I couldn’t figure out where the money was all going.

I do remember when it felt like the work started to change, how it went from feeling mostly benign or even fun to being mostly intolerable, when it all started to blur together.

#

It’s a cliché that people recommend curatives to people in the depths of depression that they are too depressed to be able to do: brush your teeth, drink some water, meditate, exercise, do some yoga, go to the beach, spend time with loved ones. When you are in the depths of it, these hot tips feel insulting, like the people suggesting them have no idea what pain you are experiencing.

Of course as I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that these things do help, at least to some extent. But when I was in the darkest periods of my life, I don’t think any amount of all-natural assistance would have helped. I needed drastic changes, sometimes changes to things that felt like they were out of my control. Being a teenager is hard. Your brain still isn’t fully developed, so you still need the guidance of the adults in your life. You’re also at the age, though, where the cracks in the competence of the adults surrounding you begin to show.

Pharmaceuticals helped me during this time because they numbed me. Experiencing my life raw and unfiltered at that time would have been absolutely unbearable. I mean unbearable in the sense of unlivable, something that I couldn’t have survived — I would have killed myself.

Now that I have real agency, now that I am in the driver’s seat of my life and I’m starting to really trust my own judgment, when I experience stress or pain, holistic curatives are what I turn to. Yoga, meditating, going for a hike, calling a friend: these are all coping mechanisms that are enough to carry me through bad times these days.

If we want to experience love, we will by necessity experience pain. Of course we can limit our attachments, if we want to follow that path, but that has never been my way. I love love, relationships, caring for others and things, appreciating beauty, and mourning tragedy. I have no desire to be enlightened, because for me, so much of the joy of being alive is the burden of it. The work of living and loving and caring is what brings me satisfaction. Putting it all into balance.

I like to think of myself as a hippy. Not the type to join a death cult, but the type to play around with chemicals in the lab, perhaps a professor at Berkeley. It’s easy to forget that many hippies are very much scientists; there is an image of them as purely New Age and full of flimflam. I wonder how differently it all would have turned out if there had never been a war on drugs. Why are people in power so obsessed with controlling spirituality and pleasure?

Of course, it’s how they maintain their power. By controlling people’s access to pleasure, in all senses of the word, they are able to control the people: drugs, sex, music, food, art, exercise, hard work, dwelling spaces, worship, and even friendships — forcing people to go through a middleman to access the joys of life is a way to extract value.

The psychiatrist, Pornhub, the social media site, the church, the museum, the gym, the landlord: how necessary are they really? In America especially, consumers are not trusted to make smart decisions for themselves. In many other countries, it is much easier to go to the pharmacy and request what you need. Marriages do not need to be approved by the state. Art is shown on the street; public exercises are done at the park or are just a part of daily living.

Worship is done in the home. The landlord is more pervasive, but how can someone own the land?

I understand people who are paid for maintenance, for making sure that living conditions are safe. But what could possibly entitle someone to ownership of the earth we all live on? It seems like such a foreign and strange idea to me.

#

I came home from nine days in New York of bookings back to back. Anna picked me up at the airport and I started crying. I was just so burnt out. She promised me we would have fun, take some time off and just play video games.

I invited Akira over to play some video games. We were sitting in the living room and I was about to take an edible and get incredibly stoned when Anna busted in. She told me that I needed to get ready because I had a booking in the South Bay in an hour and a half.

“I said I was taking the week off to relax after the tour,” I said.

“Well, it’s just a quick one hour, and we really need the money…” Anna said.

At this point, I asked Akira to leave the room. Anna berated me, telling me that I was being lazy, that we couldn’t afford to miss out on this booking. I didn’t have the mental energy to say no. I was crying when I opened the door and told Akira that we couldn’t play together, I had to take this booking.

#

Some days I would wonder about my old friends and acquaintances in New York, and google them. One of my old friends had a solo show at the Whitney, another had an incredibly popular pop up at Art Basel, someone else’s magazine had taken off. I would miss them.

I invited a bunch of escorts I was interested in being friends with to a dinner in NYC. Everyone seemed so cool and I was nervous meeting them. As we talked over dinner, I began to realize how many girls in the literary and art scenes in NYC were escorts. Two of the girls, Sophia and Mia, had been friends of mine when I was more active in the arts scene.

Some artist I had been familiar with while she was still going to Pratt had recently blown up for revealing that she had been doing Instagram as performance art, and talked about being an escort and a hot girl online. She was featured in a massively popular group show about social media at the Tate. We talked about how frustrating it was, that her work was borderline whorephobic, but that we loved it nonetheless.

When I told Anna about seeing them again, told her I was thinking of emailing other old friends, catching up, she forbade me.

“What if they outed me again?”

As if outing someone as a serial predator and a rapist is some great crime.

#

Anna eventually hung out with Sophia and Mia anyways. She traveled with me to New York to shoot some photos during my tour. Amonie and Alexa also flew out from LA; we all stayed in the same hotel together. Sophia wanted to go to a party together, so she swung by our hotel room beforehand.

Anna had a headache, so she had left some Tylenol on the bed. “Are these for me?” Sophia cooed, playing with the pills.

“That’s my Tylenol,” Anna laughed. “But you can have it if you want.”

Alexa had brought some MDMA with her. It was powdered and she was offering to put it in everyone’s ass.

“It gets absorbed faster that way,” She said.

Amonie and Sophia went into the restroom with Alexa. Anna lay on the bed in the hotel bathrobe.

“I don’t want to have an orgy,” Anna said. “I think it’s much cooler to have hot sex workers want to fuck me, but then I don’t actually fuck them. Like it’s cooler to turn down sex with a porn star than it is to actually have sex with a porn star.”

“Okay,” I said.

We went to the party, which was some new techno BDSM party that was super hot at the moment. Everyone was wearing leather and fetish gear. It was in some grungy Bushwick club and I loved it. Amonie was rolling and we made out on the dance floor, lit by strobe lights, as a short, androgynous DJ with a shaved head expertly mixed tracks. She fingered me and I moaned against her. Alexa, Anna, and Sophia sat in a booth, had drinks and watched the scene.

Beautiful nights, full of community, fun, and laughter, made the brutal amount of work I was doing almost bearable — my community and the joyous time I had with my favorite clients.

#

I love very easily. I can see the best parts of people without trying too hard, the things that make them delightful, their talents, their vulnerabilities. I love making people feel cared for. Perhaps that is a large part of why I started doing sex work in the first place.

I’ve often said to others that I love more than most. I care about strangers as much as many people care about their friends, friends I value like lovers, and lovers I would do nearly anything for. It doesn’t feel like a burden. If I took anything away from my Christian upbringing, it’s that loving others is a joy in and of itself. My cup overflows. Giving food to a hungry stranger or listening to a friend vent about their breakup over tea bring me joy. Being generous is its own reward.

Learning about boundaries and how to give on my terms was something that Christianity never taught me, though. We were taught to turn the other cheek. I had to learn how to walk away as well. Being generous doesn’t mean you need to be a martyr. You can help more people if you nurture yourself; bleeding out on a cross to prove a point only hurts the ones who love you.

For me personally, sex is something that is less emotional than it is for most. My colleagues themselves have such a range of views on the work.

Some, like me, get a voyeuristic pleasure from the work. Sex can be more about seeing into someone than about experiencing pleasure. Especially when I first started having sex, the novelty was particularly exciting to me; even if the sex was not orgasmic, or even pleasurable, just getting into someone’s head like that was so fascinating. I’m the type of sex worker, and there are many of us, who delight in strange requests from clients, who read about psychology and sexuality and apply it all in our bookings, approaching the work almost as a type of therapy.

Other girls I knew just unabashedly loved the sex. One girl went on and on about the multi-orgasmic romps she had with clients. When I first heard her, I thought she was bluffing. But as we grew closer, she would sometimes call me in tears, telling me her client wasn’t leaving his wife after all. Oh, I thought, you really are into him.

For some people, physical intimacy can feel overwhelmingly intense. One girl told me the work was traumatic for her; she felt she was giving something of her self that she would rather not. I was horrified when I heard this, of course. She was one of the most successful escorts in New York, beautiful, fun, loving, kind. I had done doubles with her and usually I was the one who took care of the actual fucking.

She told me she would sometimes make over eighty thousand dollars a month. She was supporting her family and she didn’t feel like she could stop. There was her mother, who was disabled, and her sister, who had a college tuition to pay. There were people who relied on her. What could she do?

It pained me to see her doing work that exacted such a spiritual cost on her. Even if the sexual aspect of our jobs felt largely impersonal to me, it was clearly sacred for her.

I’ve often wondered why sex is considered so sacred to so many. Don’t have sex with your friends, it could change the relationship. Perhaps it’s because my friends and I are sluts, but I’ve never had a friendship end over sex. Resentments or bad communication, in my experience, are far more likely to destroy a relationship. Perhaps it is the meaning so many people imbue sex with that gives it such power to kill.

Sex, for me, has never been about power. It’s always shocking to me when someone says that. Desire, of course, can give you power — but sex? The sex I have is usually just about pleasure.

But perhaps it’s inevitable that people who are unused to pleasuring themselves freely can’t handle sex. Some people seem to think you can only have a good fuck if you’re making love. I don’t think love necessarily has anything to do with sex, either. Sex can be an act of love, but so can making someone breakfast, holding their hand, giving them a thoughtful gift.

People complain about how fraught it is to be fuck buddies. Don’t fall in love…. Just talk about whatever you’re feeling, for fuck’s sake! Of course it’s always challenging navigating everyone’s boundaries: some people only want to have sex if they’re in a relationship, which is fine, or they only want to have sex with a condom if they’re not, also fine. Where most of these things break down is when no one talks about their expectations, or they lie.

Perhaps people’s misconceptions about sex have to do with a lack of experience. The first few times you orgasm with someone it does feel intense and intimate, of course. But you could say the same thing about going to see a personal trainer, the dentist, or getting your hair cut.

Personally, getting my hair cut is far more intimate for me than having sex; this person is going to physically change your body! They’re washing you, styling you, in absolute control over your fate. The first time I got my hair cut at a salon, I cried and cried. I hated how I looked. I insisted on cutting my hair myself for years, unwilling to trust anyone else with it. It took me years to find a stylist I trusted.

Is there something wrong with me, that I can come with a stranger whose name I haven’t gotten yet, on some crowded dance floor? Is it wrong that I feel comfortable fucking an older man who’s paying me?

It’s deviant, to be sure, but if it’s so wrong, I can’t say I mind. When I hear people talking about tantric sex, some sort of epic soul connection, I roll my eyes. Of course there’s an intimacy to sex, a baseline level of trust one should have with your partner… but at the end of the day, I’d rather have bad sex than a bad haircut.

#

When you are young, it is easy to idolize someone older you admire, who seems to have their life together. It is easy to ignore red flags and let others decide what your boundaries are, because you are still putting them together yourself.

Sometimes when you love someone, you give them power over you.

Anna hurt me. You can walk down many narratives of power and portray the relationship from different angles, like a doctor performing a biopsy: perhaps the overworked liver indicates alcoholism, or maybe it was the heart.

When my grandmother on my father’s side died, the sheer number of conditions they rattled off unnerved me. Ovarian cancer, obesity, heart disease, undiagnosed mental illness. When she had heard that I had cluster headaches, my inheritance from her, she broke down sobbing and told my father she should never have given birth.

Perhaps another disease she died from is misogyny. How many times does someone die of bigotry and we give it another label, putting the blame on their own body? What happens when someone dies of hypothermia, sleeping on the street? Was it really the hypothermia? What was the reason they were out that night? Did they not have a home, in the literal sense of housing? Did they not have a home, in the sense of safety?

We can put people in soulless beds in soulless rooms, give them something to numb the pain, and pat ourselves on the back and walk away. We sometimes do the same thing to ourselves. We let ourselves clench our jaws and not say what it is that needs to be said.

How do we dismantle this?

It is immensely painful and none of us are without complicity. Did I hurt Anna? I did. In different ways, of course, and I do believe ultimately the power dynamic was grossly in her favor. I was sixteen when we met. She was nearly a decade older than me, she had more money, she had institutional connections, and she had legal advantages.

Of course when you are young and in love, you want to make someone happy. And at the start of the relationship, while I was so eager to please, she was happy. I never told her I was unhappy with the way we split the bills, I didn’t tell her how much the sex hurt, that I rarely orgasmed, if ever. I didn’t tell her how angry I was.

#

Some people will read that I had an abusive partner during the start of my sex work career and believe that I was coerced into the work. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, it was something we had many arguments about: I wanted to do it, and initially Anna didn’t want me to. Finally, I laid down an ultimatum: I would be doing sex work — she could either get over it or we could break up.

It is a challenging thing to admit that someone you loved was abusive. While escorting, I felt more able to set boundaries. I felt comfortable telling my clients to slow down or to touch me differently because I wasn’t as worried about being rejected by them. I didn’t need their love, and there were plenty of men with money who were eager to see me if they refused to respect me. Some clients were absolutely sublime.

There was one client during those my first years that shocked me. I remember the sex felt perfect: no pain, just absolute pleasure. He was a writer and had written a memoir I liked. He was very eager, very neurotic, and very kind. Part of what was so hot was he had no desire to be in a romantic relationship with me and he was not at all jealous — we could really fuck with no strings attached. I remember laughing after, wondering why I could have such an easy, pressure free experience with a client, who was supposed to be scum of the earth according to what most people think of clients, while my wife pressured me repeatedly into the most painful sex of my life.

Last year in LA, I met up with him again. We had coffee first, in the hotel lobby. He’s someone I see every so often; he sees a few of my friends and we all adore him. He is cool, so I felt comfortable dressing casually. I was wearing a tie-dye shirt that said “Daddy” on it. “Do you like my shirt?” I said, smirking, mischievous.

He chuckled.

“I guess I am old enough to be your daddy.” “No!” I laughed, pouted. “I’m the Daddy.” He grinned.

“I like that.”

We went back to the hotel room and made out, kissed, tumbled around together, and it felt as good as it always had. He has boyish good looks that would easily make you think he’s in his thirties, but he told me he had just turned fifty.

“I don’t know if I can believe you!” I said, kissing him on the nose. “You’re a scoundrel.”

#

I fantasized about leaving Anna and running off with Amonie. But she seemed like someone I could never deserve to be with. How could I deserve to be that happy? To wake up next to someone who would smile at me, cook me something delicious, rub my tummy when I’m gassy. Who I could sit in silence with — a beautiful quiet.

The talking with Anna was incessant. If I didn’t respond to a text, I was in trouble. God forbid I leave my phone unattended to for a few hours while with a friend. She constantly spoke in narratives, telling me what role I was playing, explaining to me how I was bad, then prescribing the cure. My stomach was constantly in knots and I would vomit without cause. I felt I could never say or do anything right, but it was the strangest thing: when I told her something she did made me unsafe, I was told I was the one who was abusive.

I tried to break up with her, over and over, but often couldn’t even speak the words. I was afraid to drive, so she would always be sitting in the driver’s seat. I would watch the hills of San Francisco move by as I imagined my mouth making the words and my lungs pushing air through, my tongue moving with my lips closed.

“I don’t want to be with you.”

I would suggest it. I would look up apartments I could live in. I fantasized about moving back to New York. I fantasized about endless permutations of lives lived without her.

She told me that if I left, I would fall flat on my face. That I had no possibility of success without her. Who else could put up with me? I believed her. I was a mess.

So I worked. I made more money than I ever dreamed I could make. I toured constantly. I worked all day until my pussy was sore and bleeding and all I could do was curl up in a ball in bed and weep. I went to doctor after doctor asking them why all sex had become so painful to me.

My therapist said that it might be trauma induced. She asked if the sex I was having with Anna was consensual. I told her that I said yes to the sex, but when I didn’t say yes, it became an argument. I didn’t feel like I could say no.

#

I often had doubts about my relationship with Anna, but they always felt outweighed by the great kindnesses she bestowed upon me. Once I was rejected at the border of a foreign country — they figured out who I was and they didn’t want me to enter.

It was an utterly humiliating experience. I watched as an older, cranky woman picked through my belongings with gloves, grunted in disgust at the sight of my dildo. I started to cry. One of the other customs agent, who seemed to pity me for being selected by this nasty lady, handed me a tissue and a glass of water. I asked if I could play the video game I had brought while she searched. I couldn’t bear watching.

She demanded I unlock my phone for her and I asked why. She said it was a requirement to make sure I didn’t have child pornography on my phone. She scrolled through my text messages with my mom and I asked her why she felt the need to violate my privacy like this.

“Does your mom know what you do?” She asked, disgust on her face, her desire to make me cry further completely transparent.

I grimaced, unwilling to take the bait. “Of course she does.”

After the awful woman was done humiliating me, they marched me through the airport in handcuffs and sent me back to the States. They couldn’t find a flight back to San Francisco, so they decided to just send me back to LAX. When I protested, saying I wouldn’t be able to book a hotel, I wouldn’t know where to stay, it was too late in the night, they shrugged.

“It’s in California, it’s close enough.”

Although I didn’t find it humorous in the moment, it is funny how people in general think the distance between LA and SF is negligible — it’s a six-hour drive at least.

I will never forget how Anna drove down to meet me that night, speeding along the way. She called a friend and we were able to crash at their place. She held me until I stopped shaking from anxiety.

How could someone who would do all that be abusive?

I thought I was smart enough that I couldn’t be taken advantage of.

#

I doubted myself, my body, my pain. I had been trained to from childhood. Being seen is the antidote. Amonie held my hand when I was crying, both of us wordless.

In some ways, she showed me how to speak. I had always done LSD with Anna and, while I enjoyed it, I associated tripping with a near-unbearable anxiety. But Amonie took me to a beautiful and strange Earthship out in the middle of Taos, New Mexico. Off the grid, solar paneled, chickens in in the backyard and fruits in the greenhouse which modulated the temperature of the apartment. I had never had such a beautiful trip before. There was no anxiety. But she told me something that night that broke my heart.

We were lying in bed, and I was talking about Alexa, from Los Angeles. I was excited because she had finally broken up with her creepy partner, Douglas. When I told Amonie that Alexa seemed to be in a healthier spot, her body shifted. Her face grew dark and angry, disgusted.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The things they did to me… they were unspeakable.”

I told her that if she wanted to talk about it, she could. I held her. I was angry beyond words. I’m not sure she had ever spoken about what had happened before. But when she did, she was so powerful. She stood up from the bed, back straight. I watched as her self-doubt peeled away as she described what happened to her.

Sometimes in our impulse to protect others, we lie to ourselves.

#

Chapter Eleven

Cornerstone

#

My painting teacher in high school would always tell me, when painting from life, to never use the colors black or white out of the tube directly. Especially not black. You may think you see something pure white or pure black, he would say, but it’s usually an illusion. Learning to paint is learning to see the subtle variations of color, to see gradual shades and forms where others see flat colors and outlines.

#

In order to break up with Anna, I needed to stop painting everything in my life as black and white. She was not good or evil, she was not loving or abusive. She was both and she was hurting me.

#

Something that was blocking me from writing this book was fear of being honest. There are different types of honesty of course. You can tell the facts of the matter while twisting the truth. Sometimes fiction is more truthful than reality. Perhaps I am afraid of people seeing me as I am, imperfect, or seeing people I still love and seeing their imperfections as well. Can you write truthfully and still be loving? Will it carry?

Maybe sometimes the honesty is more loving. It depends how you cut it; I’ve certainly cut with words while being true to the facts but not to the whole. There is always another side.

I don’t hide much anymore. For years I lied compulsively about everything. What street I walked on as I walked home, who I was texting, compulsively encircling myself in lies, harmless and white, large and small, creating a confusing labyrinth that I always secretly hoped someone would penetrate.

Tylenol tells some part of our bodies’ defenses to turn off. It turns down the fever, the pain, the loneliness. I remember lying in bed with a doctor, a client, who was prestigious for whatever reason. He kept telling me that I needed someone to dominate me, to be a real man I could trust. I laughed him off. In a more vulnerable moment, he admitted that he often had patients in the ER who were alive until they “fixed” them.

“The minute we get their blood pressure to a reasonable place, their fever down, everything to a normal range, they die.”

There’s an idea of homeostasis. A natural return to the baseline. But not everyone can be at their baseline all the time. Obviously a runner’s heart shouldn’t be at a resting rate while they run. Why should someone’s heart be at baseline when they’re experiencing psychological trauma?

We are still learning about ourselves, in the individual sense and the larger, humanity sense. We don’t know why we do things. Now we think it’s better not to hit children. Maybe in the past, it made sense. The world was more dangerous. Maybe now, it gives us a disproportionate sense of fear.

We have access to so many resources. We could all be fed, clothed, housed in comfort and still have plenty. Why aren’t we? Is it a logistics problem? Is it a psychological one?

The choices we are presented with are rarely the binaries we make them out to be. There are endless paths branching out. Perhaps it’s easier to simplify, to try to find a “right” and a “wrong.”

Perhaps it’s all fine. Perhaps we’re just trying our best. Perhaps sometimes though, we’ve fallen so off course that we are justifying our harm to others in a profoundly destructive way.

Finding that balance is hard. We are bombarded with information, but we always have been. I think about how so many of the vibrant colors we see every day were not always so available. It’s easy to see a vibrant purple shirt, but back in Rome it was a costly luxury to see that vibrant purple, reserved and hidden away. Vibrant and dangerous paints, slowly killing the artist who used them. Was it perhaps just as harmful for the artist to not paint? How do you weigh these costs?

#

Our couples therapy became more fraught. As I grew better at setting boundaries in other areas of my life, I began to set them with Anna too. She did not take them well.

I told Anna I needed her to stop arguing with me about sex. She said okay, but she didn’t follow through. If I said no to any of her advances, she would tell me I didn’t care about her. So I told her to stop initiating sex with me altogether. She pouted, was angry, petulant. She would press herself against me and hump me, beg for it. One couples therapy session I talked about how I was losing hope for the relationship.

“You just need to be more patient,” the therapist said. I sat up straight.

“Be more patient?” I asked, an edge in my voice. “Anna is trying her best,” the therapist said.

Anna shook her head. “I think she’s tired of being patient with me. She feels like she’s been patient for a long time.”

I looked at the therapist, mouth agape.

“Are you really asking me to be more patient about being sexually assaulted?” Something shifted in me after that. I talked about it with my own therapist.

“That was definitely inappropriate for her to say,” my therapist told me, one of the only times she had said something so firmly. The couples therapist had reached out to my therapist to speak with her.

“Do you want me to?” she asked. “I will say I find it to be an unusual request.”

“No,” I said, putting my hands firmly on my thighs, “Thank you.”

#

I understand why the couples therapist was so defensive of Anna. She is very lovable and she makes herself so vulnerable. Often I would hold her at night and tell her that I saw her as this pure, lovely heart, like an egg yolk, tender and delicate, something to be protected. And she would nestle into my arms like a child. There is something very beautiful about someone who is capable of being vulnerable like that.

But she weaponized her pain against me. She saw that I couldn’t bear to see her cry. I don’t think she did it with malicious intent, but she needed to control the situation. Her crippling anxiety was all-pervasive. She was terrified of the world; she had been through so much. It’s not my story to tell, but I know why she felt that way.

I hoped that as I learned how to express my boundaries that she would learn and heal with me, but she didn’t. As I became able to see the situation from a calm, removed perspective, she grew even more emotional.

For months I tried to save the relationship. I loved her. I kept putting up new boundaries, giving myself more space, hoping she would see what I was doing and learn that if she wanted to be in my life, she had to respect me. But she didn’t.

#

In many ways, the worst part of being financially abused was how Anna spent the money. It felt all the more humiliating that so much of the money I earned went on buying comic books, toy figurines, and video games. One month, she spent over ten thousand dollars on comic books alone. I couldn’t understand how she spent so much money.

I was so patient with her. She told me she was afraid I would yell at her. I talked with her like she was a child, said we would fix it and asked her not to do it again. But of course, she did it again.

One day when I saw she had spent nearly three thousand dollars on comic books in one night, I broke down crying. She said it wasn’t that bad, we had enough to cover it. I asked her, how many hours did I have to be in pain for this money? How much did I have to bleed?

She told me she spent so much money because she felt unappreciated for her work. She claimed she was working harder than me and felt unappreciated. I had a friend, when I told her this story, years after we broke up, interrupt me here, angrily, shouting, “What work did she do? She sat in the house your pussy bought smoking weed, answering emails, jerking off looking at Reddit and your photos.”

I would cry and ask why a comic book or a video game was more important to her than my health. She would say it was her mental illness, she lost control. I would be so overwhelmed that I would vomit, shaking and crying.

At the end of our marriage, I had almost nothing left in my savings, compared to what I had earned, what I had hoped to save. Anna blew it all, spending money like water falling through her fingers. I was so humiliated that I didn’t tell any of my friends for a long time. I was lucky I was still able to work.

#

When I left, I did it in parts. First, I moved to New York.

#

I had been miserable for a long time in San Francisco. It is a complete monoculture. Almost everything there is for people who had made their fortune in tech: the food, the art, the parties. And everything that wasn’t designed to suit their needs was rapidly being priced out.

I missed New York, I missed the Met. I missed the lit scene. I missed the warehouse parties with good techno. I missed the subway and the parks and how people totally ignored you on the street. I missed my high school friends and my family.

Anna used to tell me that if I moved to New York, our relationship was over. Well, I was finally done with the relationship. I told her I needed to make the move. I couldn’t make myself miserable for a partner who valued the relationship more than my happiness.

She was distraught. She begged me to just be long distance. I confided in a friend that I thought we would break up before the year was over.

#

More than anything else, I was terrified of living alone. I love being around people. I love cooking and cleaning with them, watching a show, going out and doing whatever together.

I found being alone surprisingly comfortable. I was so much better at taking care of myself; I made myself breakfast in the morning and dinner at night. I would walk to Pilates and enjoy the brisk winter weather.

The only time I was really lonely was after dark; this is when I began to understand why some people watch TV every night. It gives you some sense of human interaction. On nights that I didn’t hang out with friends, I would watch a show. I could finally watch whatever I was interested in — such freedom!

I still missed Anna, on some level. We would text still, have phone calls. But I felt confident I had made the right decision. I knew I needed to be in the city. It was so wonderful being able to see all my old friends.

#

Through it all, I tried to remain friends with Anna. I told her I didn’t really want to have sex anymore, but that I still loved her. A friend told me that whenever Anna would talk to him, she would talk about winning me back.

She was a hot mess. She told me she was suicidal. She sent me photos of her cutting herself until I told her to stop. She wanted to sell the house. She said she felt like she had no friends in San Francisco. I asked if she wanted to move out to New York. Maybe I could introduce her to some of my friends.

She ended up moving into my apartment. I had convinced myself she would be able to respect my boundaries, but she wasn’t. I ended up regressing, feeling deeply distressed, anxious, overwhelmed. We would have blowout fights almost constantly. I ended up moving out, letting her keep the apartment and all the furniture I had bought for it. I couldn’t deal with her anymore. Getting space helped. She told me money was hard, so I paid for the lease, for the utilities. I made sure she had food and everything she needed. She kept answering my emails for me.

#

In so many ways, I was lucky to be able to leave Anna so easily. Of course there were psychological and legal ties between us, but financially, I was independent. Sex work allowed me to leave her. I learned the lesson very young that I had to be financially independent or risk losing all of my power.

My grandmother on my mother’s side ran and owned an independent business. I only realized this recently; for a long time, I thought the family business was my grandfather’s. She was always intense and my siblings were scared of her, but I loved her dearly. She was an incredible baker and her home was always impeccable. She would give me books on postmodern decoration and taught me how to sew.

Her company was an educational video production company. They sold videos to help people learn about basic subjects or prep for tests like the SATs. Obviously our industries are different, but I feel a connection to the work I do producing adult videos and my grandmother’s work. Producing videos of any kind is no small feat.

My mother, on the other hand, was a stay-at-home mom. My grandmother was very cruel to her, from the stories my father told me. He told me my grandmother apologized to him after he married my mother. She said my mother was too lazy to ever be a proper wife and my grandmother felt she had failed in raising her. My father told me this story intending to insult my mother and make me think she was lazy too.

Later, I found out the reason she was “lazy” was because she was sick. She had a thyroid disorder. I recently asked my mother why she had never gotten a divorce from my father.

“Well,” she said, “I can’t afford to get a place with enough bedrooms for all you kids to visit. He just keeps to himself and plays his video games. It’s not too bad.”

I always knew that having my own money could keep me safe. I never wanted to rely on any one man for my safety. The thought terrified me. I had seen people get into relationships with men they thought were wonderful and loving who slowly became more awful and abusive. But it was too late for them — they were housewives with multiple children. How could they leave? How could they get through the social stigma? How could they support themselves and their children?

#

While sex work is a way for queer people and women to reclaim some amount of power from the patriarchy, it’s certainly not the only way. Usually all you have to do is look at whatever Fundamentalist Christians are championing as political policy and run in the opposite direction.

Abortion, and really birth control of any kind, is a big one. Abusive men frequently use reproductive coercion to maintain power over women. It’s one thing to leave a relationship when you have no support structure, it’s another to leave a relationship when you have kids. Most women don’t want to leave their children behind, and it’s painfully hard to be a single mother, especially in America.

That’s why abortion is such a touchy subject. That’s why some states want to require the father to have a say in whether or not a pregnancy can be aborted. That’s why birth control pills are stigmatized as well: they give women autonomy in their relationships. Unlike condoms, which can be removed or tampered with easily, birth control can often be taken in private.

Getting your tubes tied is another powerful way for women to reclaim their reproductive autonomy. Yet some doctors will not allow it without permission of the husband. Or they’ll say someone isn’t old enough to have the procedure done.

Divorce is something Christians hate, but it can be an incredibly powerful tool for women who need to escape. In states that allowed no-fault divorces, intimate partner violence dropped dramatically.

Mutual aid is incredibly important as well. I’ve let countless people getting out of bad situations crash in my guest room, no questions asked. Sometimes they aren’t even someone I know personally, just a friend of a friend. Queer kids who needed a break from their family, people with black eyes that I don’t ask too many questions about. When I was young, people would do the same for me.

A guest room is nice, but for many, cash is even better. GoFundMe, Venmo, and other apps that let you send money directly to someone in need are critically important. Even if you live halfway across the world, you can make sure someone has enough food for their next meal and a room for the night. Whatever it is they need in that moment.

#

When I finally filed to get a divorce from Anna, I was surprised at the intensity of the shame and guilt that filled me. I thought I had shed the skin of Christianity, but I hadn’t. I wanted to be in a faithful, loving marriage, queer as though it might be. I wanted to work through all the hardship and the pain as a team, as partners. I felt like I was committing a sin.

It’s interesting what “stuck” from my religious upbringing. I don’t feel ashamed of being a sex worker, nor am I ashamed that I enjoy it, which I think would disgust many of the people at the church of my youth. In some ways, I must admit, the sinfulness of it all is part of the enjoyment. The act of transgression is a thrill, as is teaching my clients to fully embrace their sexuality, to learn how to transmute that shame and disgust into a potent pleasure.

My therapist used to always tell me to trust and listen to my body. If something gives me pleasure and it does not harm anyone, then it is fine. If something brings up pain, I need to sit with that pain and listen to why it hurts.

I am sure many people would hate sex work, just as many people would probably hate being a mortician. I can’t imagine most people enjoying handling a dead body, filling it with preservatives, painting the face to look appealing to the still living. Yet, many of my friends of gothic inclinations love their job of preparing bodies after death.

I think our culture is strange for its tendency to condemn anything we personally would not enjoy. We condemn others for getting abortions or for having too many kids, for landscaping decisions policed by absurd housing associations, for getting tattoos or dressing too preppy. I cannot for the life of me understand the desire to tell someone else that they must live their life in a certain way, especially for decisions that cause no harm to others.

I spend a great deal of time thinking about why a woman or queer person literally owning and profiting from their sexual labor is so inherently threatening to the patriarchy. Who from the patriarchy actually benefits ultimately?

#

I re-read bell hooks’s All About Love. She talks about how real love happens more easily when both parties are entering into a relationship with total freedom to walk away at any time. How many women in heterosexual relationships, especially in America, desperately wish they could leave their husband but cannot because their husband provides access to food, shelter, and medical insurance? How many men oppose abortion rights, equal wages, and other anti-discriminatory policies because on some level they realize this would give the women in their lives the ability to sustain themselves and be fully independent? What about women’s unpaid labor around their homes, estimated to be collectively worth ten trillion dollars?

I don’t think you can look at the numbers and deny that, overall, men have far greater economic freedom than women. Of course it makes sense to me that women who are fully dependent on their husbands detest the idea of sex work. It literally moves “their” money — ie, money they’ve “earned” doing unpaid labor around the house — to a sex worker. This sex worker, usually a woman or a queer person, is usually not dependent on any single man to support them. They can maintain relationships with a multitude of clients, placing less weight on every relationship individually.

This is an enviable position. Because, in theory at least, they can walk away and not lose everything, it is easier for them to maintain boundaries. They don’t need to rely on any one client for 100% of their income, so if someone does something that makes them uncomfortable, they can address it directly. If the person fails to listen, they can walk away from the relationship without losing their home or any other support networks they’ve built up, because their entire life is not built around one other person.

People love to discuss with great angst the ever-rising divorce rate. I like to point out that whenever states passed laws allowing no-fault divorces, the homicide rate against women dropped dramatically. Forcing women to stay in marriage is literally putting people’s lives on the line. So is linking marriage to access to health care. It’s obviously much easier to break up with someone if your ability to have food, shelter, and other basic necessities of life are not tied to maintaining a relationship with them.

Men benefit materially from this, of course, but I do think it is deeply psychologically wounding. I’m not sure anyone escapes the harm perpetuated by these dynamics. Men are faced with the overwhelming responsibility of being the provider, of showing no emotion besides anger, no vulnerabilities. Most men are trained not to cry from a young age.

Often, my favorite clients are the ones with deep wounds who need a healing touch. I have had some who, when I first met them, would flinch whenever I touched them. The ones who perhaps never had a chance to lose their virginity or who were hit as children, so their brains equate touch with pain. I like to hold them, gently caress them, and teach them about the types of touch that can bring pleasure.

So many of my clients need a space to not be Men. They need a space where someone else takes the lead, who guides them through the process. I can’t tell you how many men have come to me, telling me they have a challenging time getting hard and difficulties orgasming. Then, when we get down to it, they are trying to micromanage the situation, telling me to do this position or that.

I put my finger to their mouth and tell them that right now, they need to let the professional handle things. That I know what I am doing and that right now, they need to be in their body, not in their mind and in their mouth. To lie back, relax, and let me care for them, to only speak if something hurts or feels uncomfortable, and to let things just feel good.

They’re often surprised at how their body responds when they let themselves trust someone. I think perhaps because I’ve made that journey myself, it is easier for me to guide them through it.

I have been privileged in my work to coax tears out of those who haven’t cried in decades. It’s painful to watch, gut wrenching, the desire to cry and the fear of rejection fighting on someone’s face. I have spent so much time rubbing backs, cooing, reassuring people that it’s ok to cry. Teaching them what it means to be soothed, not hit.

Not every sex worker approaches their work this way; many prefer to make their job more about the physical labor instead of the emotional labor. They minimize conversations with clients, preferring to keep it all sexual: client comes through the door, hands over money, they fuck, he comes, he showers, he leaves. Sometimes their bookings can be over in fifteen minutes or less. It’s like changing the oil in car.

For me, the physical aspect is far less interesting than the emotional. I market myself in an attempt to entice clients who want to talk, to be cared for, to work through something. It makes the work fulfilling, something I can look back on and smile. It is, however, far more work. After an emotionally taxing client, I usually need to take the rest of the day off. It’s intense.

#

After I broke up with Anna, I stopped feeling that same sort of intense and stabbing pain I used to feel while being penetrated during sex. It feels strange to be in a space where I can walk away. I can say no. I can fire a client without having to justify it to Anna anymore. The funny thing is, even my clients like my attitude better as well. Those who’ve known me over the years remarked that I’m glowing, that I seem so happy.

Even now, I feel this unshakeable sense of a weight being lifted. That a part of the pain in my shoulders, passed down from my mother to me, is simply... gone.

While we were negotiating our divorce, she demanded ten per cent of my income, as “residuals,” for the rest of my life. I laughed in disbelief. She told me that a lawyer had told her that she was entitled to it. At the time, I was almost twenty-four. The rest of my life was, theoretically, a long time. We had been married for around four years.

She claimed she made me. That she wrote everything and designed anything that was ever worthwhile by me. That she was the one who created my connections, that if not for her, my friends would hate me. Hearing everything she was saying made me sick to my stomach. She sounded exactly like those asshole photographers she used to always talk shit about.

When that didn’t make me stay, she said I was abandoning her, that if I wouldn’t promise to take care of her financially, she would soon be homeless and starving on the streets. I asked her why she wouldn’t go back to working in tech, where she was making a comfortable six figures. Why did I have to take care of her when she was nearly a decade older than me? She sent me messages so harsh they made me sick. I stopped speaking to her for a while after that.

Chapter Twelve

New Love

#

In a family therapy session with my mother, when I was a child, the therapist discussed resilience.

“It’s a measure of how well you are able to cope with trauma,” he said. “Some people naturally have more resilience, some people have very little.”

My mother turned to me, rapidly, without prompting. “You’re not very resilient,” she said, laughing.

#

When I was a baby, I slept quietly through the night. My mother said I was so easy that she wasn’t prepared for my younger brother, who was more prone to crying.

#

I told my mother I thought I was very resilient.

#

All of my life, people have told me I was timid, shy, afraid, unable to get anything done, despite great potential. That I never tried quite hard enough. That I was weak.

#

That same therapist, later on, told me I had a powerful voice.

“You speak like you are someone much older,” he said, “You speak with authority. When you speak, people listen. It is like you have a powerful voice behind you.”

#

So much of recovering from trauma is learning to trust yourself again. It’s only when you trust yourself and your ability to make decisions that you can feel safe.

#

Sometimes people are shocked when they see me become firm and at how firm I can be. Once I was at a college party with my girlfriend at the time. There were two men, older, mid to late twenties, who were giving her vodka.

“Do you want some?” he asked, proffering a cup in my direction. “No,” I said, cold.

They were cute, but they were acting rude. My girlfriend was in a sexy dress with her hair done and I was in sweatpants and a t-shirt, looking like a dyke. They talked my girlfriend into going into a private room with them and she asked me to come along.

I considered myself bisexual, but my girlfriend strongly identified as a lesbian. One of the guys started kissing her, the other started kissing me. I bit him.

“I don’t want to have sex with you,” I said, and turned to my girlfriend, asking, “Do you want to be here?”

“It’s fine,” she said. “Do you want to go?”

I nodded. One of the men tried to stop us from going, picking me up, trying to kiss me, and I bit him again, drawing blood.

“Fucking bitch,” he said.

I walked my girlfriend home. Along the way, a cop car pulled up beside us on the street. “Are you ladies from Sarah Lawrence?” one of them said, leering, with that mixture of condescension and perversion older men reserve for queer women. My girlfriend cheerily told them we were and they drove off. We went back to the dorm room and she lay on my bed. “Thank you,” she said.

I always told her I was happy to try a threeway with a man with her, if she wanted, but I wanted her to be sober when we picked him, at least. She was beautiful, still is of course, and men were always annoyed at my presence. Cock block. She loved it, being able to flirt with them freely, asking me to play the possessive girlfriend so she would never have to follow through on anything she didn’t feel comfortable with.

My mom and I have a much better relationship than we did when I was younger, now she has given up trying to control me in any way, understanding that any attempts to do so will just drive me further away. She is still uncomfortable about sex, so when we talk about my work, we always step around the nitty-gritty of it in our conversations.

She still dislikes my job and wishes I was doing banal and safe. A small tidy office job. I sent her an article about how sex workers are treated by the church, and she agreed: all should be welcome. Another day I joked, “I’ve been loving using QuickBooks, I’ve been thinking about quitting to be an accountant.”

“Oh, I would like that,” she said.

I think perhaps we have different definitions of welcoming and acceptance. What is unconditional love? What is the lesson in the story of the prodigal son returning home?

I feel so proud of my work, of my success, and it stings that my mother doesn’t see it that way. I think if it was nearly any other career, she would be immensely proud of me. I feel loved, but misunderstood.

When I first told my sister that I do sex work, her first question was, “Are you happy?”

And when I told her I was happier than I had ever been, she said that was all she cared about.

#

I have a few sex worker friends whose families are unbothered, accepting, or even encouraging of their sex work activities. For many, though, their relationships with their families are incredibly fraught, especially with regard to their work.

Of course some parents would never be proud of their children, no matter how successful and accomplished they were. I have friends who are leaders in their field, who have been blessed with incredible financial success, marriage and children, whose parents still darkly criticize them at every turn.

For friends who aren’t American, sex work is often viewed a little differently. When I work in Hong Kong, I notice my clients from mainland China have vastly different attitudes towards sex work. I asked one of my clients about it. He told me that it was not considered shameful or emasculating to pay for sex, but instead it was a sign of success and virility. While most people probably wouldn’t want their daughter to become a sex worker, it wasn’t necessarily a sign of shame; it just wasn’t a prestigious job like being a doctor. Being a “gold digger,” dating a man for his money and prestige, is considered only natural.

Most of my friends hide their work from their families, afraid of the shame or condemnation, afraid of rejection or judgment. They craft complex backstories of teaching yoga or running a made-up business, running around to scatter little bits of truth that add credibility to these stories. Some even work secondary jobs, not because they want to, but just so that no one will know.

#

I hid my work from my mother for years, telling her I still worked in tech. Whenever anyone would press for more information, I would just tell them I had signed a strict NDA and couldn’t discuss it further. My mother never pressed too hard, but I held her at arm’s length.

A few years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer and I broke down crying. I didn’t want her to die not knowing who I was. I realized how badly I wanted a real relationship with her. I decided I would have to tell her, but I spent years dithering about it, trying to figure out the best way to say the words. Every time we would meet up, I would resolve to tell her, only to have the words freeze on my tongue.

Eventually, I wrote an article talking about how I wanted to tell her, but how I was afraid to say anything. I think some part of me felt like having it published would make her take me more seriously, show that I was still someone deserving of respect, that I wasn’t throwing my life away or acting foolish, that this was a real career for me. Instead of telling her directly how I felt, I sent her a link to the article.

She responded later that day asking me something like if I wanted to meet up for my brother’s birthday, and then a link to a cute animal video. I asked her what she thought about what I sent, and she said she was thinking about it. A few days later, she responded, saying she didn’t love what I was doing, but she still loved me. I have a pet theory that she went to a therapy session in between when I sent the message and when she responded, workshopping the response.

#

I asked my tarot cards what I needed to write about in this book. I’ve been using them lately for friends who are writing novels, helping them unravel the position of their character — pointing the plot home.

I drew the Tower and the Lovers, stuck together. The Tower is the card of destruction, rapid and overwhelming change, an institution torn down, but always something that needed to be torn down. In the deck I was using, it shows a medieval tower, the type a storybook princess might be trapped in, struck by a bolt of lightning.

The Lovers has an image that might evoke Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: harmony and love, perhaps the idea of innocence.

As a child, I sometimes felt that where my heart was, there was a great gaping hole, a black hole that sucked everything in. And when I was upset, it felt like this hole was ripped open, raw, incredibly painful. It was the sort of pain I knew not to tell my doctor about.

I believed I was adopted for many years, despite having a resemblance to both of my parents. When I was in fourth grade or so, I came across a folder of my ultrasounds, tucked into a bookshelf. I looked through it silently, then put it back where I found it.

My parents had suffered many miscarriages before my birth, one of them on Mother’s day. My father described picking up champagne and roses for my mother, for her last Mother’s day not-a-Mother, and bringing them home to her only to find her lying in bed, crying.

I told my mother once that it wasn’t right that my father yelled when he was mad, and she shrugged, helpless.

“That’s just how men are.”

There are so many ways to talk about things falling apart. I have this idea of capturing them like slow-motion breaking glass — a type of video I used to watch on YouTube. People act as though the internet has soiled children’s minds, introducing them to pornography, and I think of my clients who tell me they first saw a naked woman in their father’s hidden stash of Playboy s, hidden in the closet. What secrets would people find before nudie magazines?

As a child I was always searching for secrets. I don’t anymore, at least not in the same way; where would I look? I have no closets to snoop through but my own. Perhaps that is the same urge that drives us to gossip about celebrities or anyone who has a bit of micro-fame. Tearing down that image of someone revered, as if by rote, as we learned to do with our own parents.

After the pain of destruction comes healing. Wounds that lurk under the surface can go septic, or explode. Sometimes we need surgery to go underneath and dig up a darkened mass so we can heal.

#

I think the hardest part about growing up, at least for me, was accepting that there is no perfect love and that absolutes are rare. I was always such a perfectionist, refusing to turn in homework assignments unless they passed my impossible standards.

My father and his binary nature no doubt played a major role in this; he was all or nothing and his thinking bled into mine. I wanted my life to run like a perfect computer program, with crystal-clear logic, no bugs, completely efficient — pure.

But of course that’s an impossibility, and given my medical conditions and how they interfered with my abilities, I was forced to confront earlier than most that I could not consistently perform at a level of complete perfection, that in fact no one could. It’s still a lesson I’m learning. Perhaps I’ve never really changed, I just take it all less seriously.

My parents are imperfect, as are my friends, my lovers, my colleagues, my clients. I think even after my disillusionment with myself, I still clung to the idea that others could be perfect for me. This blinded me when people hurt me, turned my feelings about others black and white. I couldn’t see that someone could be complex and that sometimes the harm they caused could outweigh the kindness they offered, or vice versa.

For so long, I was so desperate to be in control that I couldn’t let myself believe that I was being manipulated. It is only in recent years that I have finally been learning to stop, to breathe, to try to look at the situation with an unbiased eye, to see gray and gradients of color where previously I might have seen only black and white, to forgive myself if I trusted someone who hurt me.

My mother is by no means perfect, a statement I think she would agree with. It hurts me that she still doesn’t fully see me. But she loves me and she is learning to care for me in the ways I need.

#

I am fascinated reading online conspiracy theories that say humanity was never meant to eat, that the idea of eating food is a distraction from God. People will write about fasting for months and its benefits. Or people like Jordan Peterson, who adhere to an all red meat diet, which fixed all that ailed him. He completely forgot to mention that a significant part of his diet was benzodiazepines; he recently had a doctor-induced coma in Moscow so that he could sleep through the withdrawal. I wonder if they give him a meat slurry through his feeding tube, so he can maintain the health benefits of his all-meat diet, now sans benzos.

My brother loves Jordan Peterson. I will gently poke fun at Peterson while we hang out, poking holes in his grotesque flailing against the vague threat of “postmodernism.” I ask my brother if he has ever read Foucault and he shakes his head. He wants a YouTube video to consume, one that will tell him about ancient mysteries and the confirmed identity of the Anti- Christ! (According to his favorite theorist, it’s Prince Charles.)

I think so much of the work that needs to be done by white leftists is in our own families. In some ways, it is easier to go to the protest and shout or post memes to share with our already hip friends. Family is triggering! But my brother knows I love him, regardless of his vote for Trump, and that I’m not telling him my political beliefs for no reason. He knows I’m not stupid. He listens and of course he doesn’t agree with everything. But he thinks about it. He knows I used to be very conservative.

So much of what is wrong with our society is the focus on the duality of absolute good and absolute evil. It infects nearly all of our discourse, justifying everything from the carceral justice system to cancel culture. I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have a perfect understanding of how humans should live, how to be a “good person.”

The reality is that absolutes are few and far between, and we humans are rarely capable of perceiving them clearly. It is important to see that there are almost always gradients of harm and care; often they are quite mixed up amongst each other. For a long time, I considered whether or not I should become a vegan. It was something that disturbed me immensely, that my life necessitated the death of others. I then considered the life of a plant; should I consider the life of a stalk of corn over that of a chicken? Do I value the chicken more because it expresses pain in a way that is similar to mine?

Do I value my life over the life of the chicken, or the life of the corn, or the life of the bugs which may have eaten the corn had I not? The answer, ultimately, is that I do. The corn stalk values its access to sunlight over the smaller plants around it. It chooses to consume and to live.

For so long, this seemed incredibly bleak to me, that we necessarily cause death and pain by our own living. One day more recently, I meditated on these thoughts after taking 5 grams of mushrooms. I looked at my dog and thought about how I would rather her eat me than ever have to eat her to survive. How could I treat any other living being differently?

We must give love to the corn and the chicken knowing one day we will kill them. And when we do kill them, we must do it in a way that minimizes their pain, fear, and suffering, to avoid wasting their death by cooking them with love and care, to celebrate and thank them for their sacrifice.

We are continuously learning about ourselves. While there are those who hurt others without a second thought, most people want to participate in caring for a community. When building any sort of habit, you need to give yourself space to make mistakes as you learn. This is true about changing habits and ending addictions as well as changing political beliefs. The first step towards ending racism, sexism, and classism is to accept that everyone, to varying degrees, holds problematic views and biases. Most humans have a strong desire to learn and grow; we just need to nurture it.

#

A few months ago, I went on a hike with my mother. She seems so much calmer than she ever was: she laughs and moves with less of that tension, as though she is a violin, tuned to a lower pitch, strings vibrating at a lower frequency, less shrill.

The card I drew next was the Star, which follows the Tower in the Major Arcana. The Star shows a woman beneath eight stars, pouring one jug of water into a lake, with another on the ground. It is a card of healing, of restoration. She places one foot in the water, the other on the ground.

My interest in the occult began when I was a child reading fairy tales: witches and wizards, good and evil, though sometimes someone thought to be good was evil, and sometimes it was the other way around. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time had a dramatic impact on me. I read all of her books. I checked them out in a massive stack from the library and tore through them ravenously, like someone who had not tasted food before. She wrote about Love.

In one of the books, the main character, Meg, must rescue her much-hated teacher. She is told she needs to name him, to find some part of him to love, or he will be consumed by the darkness. She comes to see he is not what she hated of him; she sees his pain and his small daily kindnesses.

I used to think my mother hated me and wanted me to suffer. That she loved my brother more than she loved me. That she would never protect me. My father told me when I was older that she always felt that he got in the way of our relationship, that he drove us apart.

For better or for worse, those books taught me that Love always prevails. Not just romantic love, but Love in the religious sense. In the Jesus red-text-in-the-Bible sense. I have always tried to push through that darkness, to find that hurt child inside the person hurting me, hold their hand and walk them out of the fog. The messier, adult truth is that not everyone wants to take those steps with you. Some people will stay with their feet planted down in misery.

It’s a cliché of course, but people need to want to change — rock-bottom or no, there’s no predicting it.

I always thought my father would be able to love me the way I needed, that he could grow to be the father I needed and move past his faults. He has sunken deep into YouTube and talk-radio world, ranting about Jesus and Trump, conspiracy theories. The kind and nurturing father I knew seems gone entirely. It turned out my mother was the one who grew for me. She was always trying to hold my hand, but I never felt it.

She always took me to the doctor, but she trusted the doctor over me. She read all the parenting books about how to raise a child, she was always trying to learn, to be better. As I learned more about articulating my needs and she learned more about loving herself, she learned how to love me as well.

The hike ended at the top of some old mountain. The air was humid and we were sweating and panting in the heat. We looked down at the view, pointed out different buildings, small and far away. A train cut its way through the landscape, too far away for us to hear it.

“Do you want some water?” she asked, handing me a bottle. “Sure,” I said, sitting down and gulping.

I set the bottle down in between my legs and rested. The sun shimmered on the lake down below. I wiped some sweat off my forehead.

“How are you feeling?” she asked, looking at me expectantly. “Good,” I said, smiling back at her.

#

* * *

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank my partner, who would prefer to remain anonymous, for always providing tea in the morning, boosting my ego when I was anxiety-spiralling, and reading endless drafts. I would also like to thank my editor, Tariq, for sending me clever little postcards and always being so encouraging, as well as giving me such a thorough critique. It was a pleasure having someone engage with my work, point out its flaws, weaknesses and strengths with such a discerning eye.

My friends and lovers were invaluable throughout the entire process. Whitney Mallett was an invaluable writing buddy and cheerleader; we had many late night conversations that surely influenced the way the book turned out. Anton Ivanov provided many helpful walks and pithy insights; I was struck by his ability to offer short observations that immediately clarified any ambivalence I was facing. Annabel Gat gave me an incredible card reading at a critical moment in my editing that helped me move forward when I felt impossibly stuck. Annalise read my work and supported me in every conceivable way. I am brought to tears considering the care and emotional support she has given me throughout this process and over the years. Tourmaline provided pure and divine love and clarifying light. Jake, Roo, Saya, Iris, Isa, Natalie, Freja, Lalit, Balint, Bee, Andy, Lillie, Tiffany, Mark, and Heather all let me FaceTime them and provided virtual and physical hugs throughout! I received support from too many internet friends to list here, all of whom I am eternally grateful for.

My darling clients were there for me as well. They would of course prefer to remain anonymous, but I would not be here without their financial and emotional support, as well as their kind and thoughtful advice!

I would be remiss if I failed to acknowledge my family as well. I am grateful to my mother for growing with me and continuing to love me despite my increasingly embarrassing behavior. I am thankful to my sister, who despite being edited out of this memoir, is one of my favorite people, someone I would count as one of my best friends even if we weren’t related. I am thankful to my brothers and wider family for all their love.

I am thankful as well for all of my teachers. My first grade teacher Mrs. K taught me to truly enjoy reading. My high school English teachers Dr. M and Ms. J taught me to love writing and engaging with a text on an academic level. Mr. M, my painting instructor, taught me the value of editing and knowing when a piece was done. Mr. D, my studio art teacher, for telling me he thought I would be successful whether I adhered to the rules or not. Dr. Porter during my brief stint at Sarah Lawrence opened me up to a love of postmodern critical theory. My therapist, Ms. Moon, taught me balance. Karen Nimereala, my voice teacher, helped me find my voice.

REPEATER BOOKS

is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree.