The banker texts you in the cab, “Get home okay?”
This is the part you don’t understand. You understand the violent aggression. You understand why they pay you. But what is this thing about making sure you get home okay? Or when they throw in cab fare as you’re leaving, or when they take you to buy a warmer coat, or when they give you old sweaters or lectures about how you are actually smart, or they ask about what you want to do with your life. Almost always, if you see a guy more than once, he will broach this subject and tell you that you can’t do this forever. You tell him you know. You tell him you are in college. You tell him it’s just for spending money.
You go through five hundred bucks in two days. Even though you don’t spend it all on dope. Dope makes the money go faster. It just does, no matter how you cut it. You can have money or you can have dope, but you can’t have both.
You are proud to tell anyone who knows what you do that it’s no problem to back out if you don’t like the way a guy looks, or if he rubs you the wrong way. One guy tells you he looks like De Niro and refuses to send you a picture, and you meet him at a shitty McDonald’s on shitty Delancey Street, and he walks in looking like Joe Pesci in a coat that doesn’t fit. You don’t know how you are going to do this. You don’t want to be with a fat man. He says, “I’m not what you expected, huh?” And you both know. And then he shakes your hand and leaves.
They want you to beg to be fucked. When they allude to their aging body, you turn away. Women can get validation from each other and from men. Men can’t get it anywhere. They work constantly and watch their bodies get old, and they think, Why bother going out? I can’t get laid anyway, and so they look to meet you. And you want to tell them there is nothing wrong with them. It’s like talking to a fourteen-year-old girl. They just don’t believe you, no matter what you say.
The best one is Jimmy. He uses the phrase “incredibly boring” five times in ten minutes when talking about his education, his job, and his life. You drag out of him that he created some kind of algorithm that makes wealthy people even wealthier. He asks you if you know what a hedge fund is. You say, “Sure,” because you don’t care. He takes you to a shrink’s office he sublets to some woman. He is short. You stand face to face. He tells you to put your hands on his shoulders. He tells you to open your mouth, and he looks at your teeth. You think for a split second he is going to squeeze your throat. But he touches your hair and asks you to take off your top and pull up your skirt. He jerks off for a couple of minutes while you just stand there. Then you go down on him, and he finishes in your mouth.
Jimmy talks fast and makes jokes. He is meticulous about putting everything exactly the way it was before you leave the office.
“I need to erase all evidence we were ever here.”
“That’s exactly what murderers do.”
After shifting the ottoman back and forth, he backs up and looks around the room, and says, “Something is a little off.”
“Maybe it’s your conscience.”
He kind of grins.
He sees you once a week. He writes you e-mails about how he thinks about you on your knees. You think about being on your knees, and how he gets his cock out of his pants and boxers like he’s going to piss, and you take him in your mouth. You think of how he takes his tie and flings it over his shoulder and looks down at you. You look up at him and he closes his eyes and the camera zooms back, and there is a businessman getting a blow job in this room.
All he ever wants is for you to wear a skirt and give him a blow job. He tells you that you are his therapy. When he kisses you, he grins and takes out his Trident gum. He is boyishly handsome. He tells you he never lets anyone take his picture because he is too self-conscious.
His cock always smells like soap.
He loves clever company names and company mottos, like the porta-potty company, “Call A-Head.”
“Get it?” he asks. “Like a head is a toilet!” He claps his hands and smiles. “Love it!”
Jimmy asks you if you’ll just have a drink with him.
When you lie on the couch with your legs in his lap, he talks about the death of his sister. You listen, and he asks, “I’m not wasting your time, am I?”
On the cab ride home, you always feel high.
You meet a European guy at the restaurant of a fancy hotel and enjoy the best meal of your entire life. Octopus, both crispy and soft. Melted dark chocolate with hazelnuts on top spread on lightly salted, toasty bread. Real food is a shock to your system. You want to puke after having subsided only on yogurt for who knows how long. You feel all the carbs and sugar invade your veins like dope. You are buzzed and then so tired you can hardly keep your eyes open. You go up to the room and leave him to flirt with a black woman with short hair and big tits. You snort a bag and take a shower, trying to wake up. He comes in while you’re in the shower. You go down on him for a few minutes, and then he leaves. You stay in the shower forever. When you come out, you two fool around. He eats you out until you pretend to have an orgasm. You have a screaming and shaking routine, and you do it. Then he says he’s tired and falls asleep. The food feels heavy in your stomach, and you wish you could puke it up. You watch half an episode of Top Chef and then the rerun that comes on after it.
In the morning he tries to put it in your butt but you refuse, so instead he jerks off into your butt crack and then leaves five hundred bucks in cash on a dresser. He says he is in a hurry, but you can stay as long as you want to. The room is rented for another day. You put on the softest robe ever. You stuff all the toiletries into your purse.
It seems like kind of a shame to leave a beautiful hotel room, but you are out of drugs and there is nothing on TV.
When you leave you can’t wipe the smirk off your face. Five hundred bucks. Five hundred.
Sometimes if you leave your fate to people, they don’t disappoint you. When no one’s looking and it doesn’t matter, a stranger can change your whole life for a little while.
Then you have three bad dates in a row.
A sad man takes you to a shitty Indian restaurant. He is so lonely, he tells you.
You stare at his wrinkled shirt. You wonder if his wife is dead.
An asshole who yells at waiters and is abrupt starts grabbing at you and then takes you to a hotel room. When you go down on him and his dick falls out of your mouth, he smacks you, hard. He laughs. You try to laugh, trying to play it off like you’re both enjoying this game. Sick, weird fuck. He says he is forty-five, but he has to be pushing sixty. You stop and say you want to leave. He surprises you by paying you in full and then sharing a cab with you. He jokes around with you like you are best pals.
Then one night you go to Brooklyn. You think it’s funny because for you, this is a desperate move. You imagine all these junkies at NA sharing their rock bottom story, and yours would be, “I knew I wasn’t myself when the train left Jay Street and plunged deeper into Brooklyn.” The date consists of talking to a British guy. He ends up walking you back to the station. By then you kind of hate him. On the way back to the apartment, you talk to your mother, and she bothers you about seeing a dentist. You turn the corner down the alley toward the back entrance of your building. You feel your hair being pulled. Your mind is trying to figure out what the fuck is going on. Who could it be? You think, This is not funny! and then you are being thrown onto the cement. As you fall, you catch the eye of your assailant, a crazy-eyed young woman with a red bandanna. There are two fuzzy figures behind her. You are completely vulnerable lying there on the ground. You see cash has fallen out of your purse. Your mind tries to put together what is happening. This can’t be rape because it’s a woman. This can’t be a robbery because no one is interested in the money. They are surrounding you. In slow motion, you see her big boot draw back to kick you, and you think, This is going to hurt. You know by the impact that this is serious. Your vision dims. You think about how in cartoons stars appear when someone is hit in the head. You wait for the pain, but there isn’t any. Your hearing isn’t working right. You see their mouths moving. Nothing. Then the murmurs fade in and out. “Oh shit!” you hear one of them yell. Something is wrong. The other two kick you, one in the gut, which makes you curl over, which sets you up to get kicked again in the head, and then you hear noise and register it as laughter. They run off. You stand up, and you are missing a platform shoe. Do you take off your other shoe, or do you look for the missing one? You hold one shoe and your bag, and they didn’t even take the fucking cash, so you have to pick it up. Your phone is probably fucked, and the battery is lying on the concrete. Now the pain hits you. Your stomach feels like it’s bleeding. Your hand touches a swelling eyelid. Now the fear hits you; they could come back. You can’t stop shaking. They could come back. You have never felt so vulnerable. Blood pours out of your knee where the stocking has ripped. You make it to the back gate, about ten feet from where you were attacked, and you call “help” through the gate, but there is no one around. It can’t be past nine. Where are the dog walkers and the parents with their kids coming back from the grocery store or play dates? You are shaking, but you manage to put the battery back into your phone. You thank fucking Christ as the word “Sprint” swirls around. Douglass picks up after one ring. Once inside, you try to lie down and discover you can’t. Douglass wants to go out and look for them. “They ran,” you tell him, hoping he will stop being a dude, put away his figurative cock that wants to protect you, and just be comforting instead.