Strange Days at the Secret Office
or, job-hazards of being paid not to judge
It’s strange to make money as a steward for other people’s fantasies; it’s even stranger when their fantasies align viserally with your own. This happened to me yesterday, and I won’t go into details, but someone called to elicit my freelance counseling services and mostly wanted me to listen to what he would tell his girlfriend (supposedly) if he lessened his nerves enough to do so, and by the end of the call I was thinking, “Is this guy an erotica writer? Because I’ve been polishing my skills in that form for decades and I think he’s better than me.”
That gave me energy to be available for them today, prepared for that wild reality that they could be basically anyone wanting anything, and all went well until it didn’t. I won’t go into detail on the bad side here either but suffice to say it got gross. Gross in a way that’s particularly gross to me in particular, and, as it happens, against the rules of the site through which I provide my services. This kind of guy, my more seasoned collegues tell me, is somewhat of an archetype in our theraputic industry and so, the decision to keep making sizeable chunks of change keeping my own hours in this work meant risking a call like that.
In a weird way, it feels a lot more comfortable to be repelled by a complete stranger who’s paying you to listen to their intimate inclinations than it does to be turned on by one. There’s no intimacy to sudden assertion, for that moment when you’re practically shouting, “THAT I do NOT want to hear about, I am ending this right here,” and he says, “Oh! okay, well, I’ll…I’ll talk to you later,” and I say, “No, you won’t,” and that’s that.
The opposite circumstance is much, much weirder. There you are, or, here I am, without the faintest desire to know who this person is beyond the ghostly presence of their disembodied voice and suddenly they’re achieving an effect that’s the last thing one would usually associate with a stranger who’s paying you and you’re left in, in my case, a hypersensory mood for the rest of the day that is perhaps fitting for a city in a state that’s experiencing Biblical rains. Everything feels like a dream, one that’s either an erotic feast or a nightmare by turns and one could bleed into the other if you let it. Two nights ago I was awoken by rain pelting at my windows (windows next to my head) so loudly that I was legitimately terrified. I, a New Orleanian, have never been afraid of a rainstorm before: I was away at college when Katrina hit and have only ever experienced Hurricane George, the long-feared event that, at the last moment, turned around and hit Biloxi, Mississippi as we looked wistfully out the window at our hurricane party.
But Tuesday night at 2:30 in the morning, I woke up and had to stop myself from screaming. Where I sleep, I’m surrounded by windows, luxuriously large ones, it’s a perk of our apartment, and I kept thinking, “They’re going to shatter. Glass will be embedded in my head.” Once that didn’t happen? My erotic imagination went into overdrive with an inexplicable multisensory vividness I have never experienced before. There’s obviously some kind of sex-and-death thing at play here but I don’t even know enough to begin to articulate what that connection might be, it’s all too new. Nothing about my life as it is now has any bearing on my life as I ever thought it could be. California, notorious for its epic draughts, is drowning on a scale that shouldn’t even be possible, and I’m a sex worker. I mean, counselor. I mean. I mean I mean I mean I mean I mean I mean I mean I mean I mean and what is meaning anymore?
I truly believe that talking unabashedly about sex work is a major part of disability activism, at least my brand of it, at least for now. I’ve said elsewhere that, while I bow all the way down to my fantastically talented, unbelievably eloquent, and celestially emphathetic collegues who’ve been bringing in the Big Bucks this way for many years, it’s too much of a head-spin for me to keep it up for that long. The bad shit’s terrible. The good shit is an overload to the system and a crack in all reason. The good shit is a lightening bolt, a drug. And I could get addicted to that drug: it’s unadulterated pleasure-mainlining without a single demand, a little too perfect for someone with the precise issues I’ve got. Fortunately for my overall well-being, those callers are too rare for me to ever expect such a fix. Also? I will not be surprised if the next time I talk to this same guy (he’ll call me back, he said so), he’s less of a dream. That just seems to be how these things go: you embark on an endeavor with little to no expectation, your mind is blown in a thousand unforeseen and wondrous ways, and the next time, well, you don’t get that first high again, right?
I would love to tell you the name I work under and show you the photos I use. I can’t do that for probably-obvious reasons, but I think I can safely confess to you that, while the photos are neither current nor representitive of any makeup I have ever actually worn before or since, they’re definitely me. And when The Good One called and kinda went off on how much he loved my voice to the point that I had to bite my tongue not to say, “…You know what I’m paid for, right?” he followed with, “and I don’t know if your pictures are real, but…”
I’m sorry, I would keep this to myself if my 28-year-old self were physically here as a seperate person I could tell, but since that’s not how anything works, I have to tell someone. Someone out there whose imagination is crazily compatible with mine liked those photos so much he thought they might be fake? He thought I might be lying about looking like me? I cannot explain in any language what a complete mindfuck that is. Even at 28, I would have gladly looked like someone else: my Latina cousins or Angeline Jolie circa 1997 or people I saw as a teenager in the French Quarter that I will never forget. The notion that someone who wanted to pass themselves off as a hot chick chose me, that’s…that’s the kind of compliment I don’t know what to do with.
The story behind the photos is, I have no idea why they exist. After a Dresden Dolls concert in Chicago, I noticed the tourbus outside the venue (which was near where I lived), and there were no crazed fans knocking on the window, which was odd, so I had to go do my part here. The Dresden Dolls, for those who don’t know, are notorious cult-celebrity Amanda Palmer and drummer-from-another-galaxy Brian Viglione. I knocked on the driver’s window, delicately, not crazily, ans the driver told me, “Well, Amanda’s gone, but Brian’s back there if you want me to ask him to come out.” I did, and out he came, and I wish I had the vocabulary for what this man does on a stage when there are drums involved, I do not, but suffice to say that being face-to-face with him felt like being face-to-face with a mythical creature I never wanted to stop believing in, a mermaid or a unicorn or one of those sexy centaurs from Fantasia.
I told him how phenomenal the show was and asked if I could give him a hug. He allowed it, and something happened in that moment of contact (to me anyway) that made me feel like I had to capture this moment forever, myself in this moment forever, because the entire walk home I was grinning so hard my face hurt and I kept saying, “I feel coked out!” which is funny, because I’ve never tried cocaine. All I had in the way of a camera was the webcam on my clunky 2007 laptop, and so, with said laptop, I took a lot of photos. Of myself. The exact act I went on a whole thing to you about not ever doing.
Little did I know that that spontaneous informal couch photoshoot would go on to be a major staple in my paid professional life. For years, they’ve been unceremoniously saved in a folder called Old Shit, subfolder Me in My 20’s, sub-subfolder Ugh! Photos! and now I owe them. I owe her. I owe myself for being her. I owe myself for the understanding that by becoming her I was tapping into something, though I had no way at the time of knowing what. I can’t say I still know exactly what: I’m along for my own ride, but some days I feel more prepared than others. I used to joke that if I was fully myself every moment of every day, I wouldn’t be remotely equipped to function in what’s largely considered “civilized society,” and the longer I do this open-secret job, the more I’m finding out that that’s true. Worklife by definition is an implicit contract to cut off a spiritual limb, or at least a finger, for a large portion of the weekday, and if your work requires the opposite act, that you actually draw from the most potentially terrifying depths of who you are in order to bring home the bacon, well, that…
I don’t know what, because I have not yet lived to the end of that sentence. There are trade-offs for hanging up parts of yourself along with your hat at work: a stable income, for example, that’s not built on the whims of an ever-shifting group of complete strangers. Sometimes, the notion of having some distance from myself in a workplace sounds like a relief: left to my own technicolor devices, everything gets so trippy and unpredictable and inconveniently sexual and it’s not always enjoyable, though sometimes it is. I can’t help but notice that for someone who’s never done any drug that’s not pot, I’ve made a whole lot of drug references in this entry. I guess I almost wish I was on something, because I feel like that would explain me. I believe I’ve been asked if I was on ecstasy by a total of three different people in three unrelated circumstances in three different US states, and I’ve never done ecstasy. Perhaps if I could bottle up whatever causes that, I wouldn’t have to scramble for freelance income.
Californians reading this: I’m pretty sure a water-apocalypse is better than a fire-apocalypse if we had to choose? I know this is the wreckage of climate change, but sometimes I imagine that decades of prayers for rain over dangerously-parched native plants turned to tinder by draught went wonky and now here we are, terminally wet in a place patently unprepared for it, utterly losing our shit, but I shouldn’t say our, because perhaps your trademark chill is prevailing. I, born without this chill, experience a sense of calm for probably 3 minutes at a stretch every day, but more than once.
If there’s anything I or my readers can do to make you or your families safer, leave it in the comments: resources needed or given, donations people should be making, precautions not often spoken of, etc.
What a life. What a year!