Prostitution, just the facts

Trauma. Didn't realize I had it. What from?

I was a prostitute. I’m traumatized by hundreds upon hundreds of strange men – let me back up.

Just the facts.

In March of 2010 I responded to an ad on Craigslist for a sugar baby. I bought a wig because my hair was short at the time. I met the man in Yaletown, and after we chatted I decided it wasn’t for me. Instead, I replied to an ad by Ishq, a massage parlor. I interviewed, got hired, and began my career as an escort.

I got my first client during my first shift. I wore a long, brunette wig with bangs, a beige teddy, and black stilettos. I was 22 years old. He was middle-aged, white, fat, and short. We did it in the Indian-themed room, which had a large bed, silk curtains, beads, a futon, a chaise, a shower – whatever.

He hobbled towards me and started kissing my mouth, my breasts. He touched my breasts with his hands. My legs wobbled in my too-high heels. He toppled us over onto the bed and proceeded to mount and penetrate me. There were other details, including a condom, but all I remember is that he reminded me of a pig – excited, squealing, and grunting.

My body grew hot. In that moment, it and my brain created a system for computing physical arousal in the presence of disgust and the absence of desire. I would go on to use this system every day that I worked. It severed the link between “sex” and “yes”; I became a voluntary participant in my own rape.

I believe every victim of sexual assault develops this system. A mouth sucks my breast, a finger rubs my clitoris, a hot breath in my ear as something penetrates me – the nerves of sexual stimulation fire away while, elsewhere, I swallow disgust, I curl up in horror. My feet want to run away, but this is where we are. By whose will, I don’t know. But we’re here.

He comes, it’s over, and I have cash in my hand, easier than anything I’ve ever seen. Thud. That’s me, landing at the bottom of the rabbit hole. I’ll travel in Wonderland, on and off, for the next five years.

Just the facts?

I worked at Ishq for two or three months. I made friends and enemies – with the girls. The clients came and went in a blur of latex and semen. Powder, lip gloss, deodorant, baby wipes, body spray with scents like cotton candy, vanilla, and rose, and Listerine. Listerine after every client. Listerine after every cigarette. Half-eaten greasy takeout (20 bucks a pop and no big deal!), and the doorbell rings. Drop everything. He picks you – Listerine. In and out.

I learn more about my vulva and my asshole than I'd ever expected to. I become accustomed to the breeze between my thighs. The smell of saliva on skin wiped clean with a solution of rubbing alcohol and lavender follows me home. In real life, I begin dating a sexually adventurous girl with a shaved head, and I learn how to let myself orgasm – finally. With the money I’m making, I’m able to fly us both to Europe.

After Ishq, there was Great Pharaoh. Where Ishq bore an elegant staircase and four-star rooms, Great Pharaoh felt like a laundromat. I start getting drunk after work and emotionally abusing my girlfriend. I leave Great Pharaoh.

Web-camming will be better, I think. I get a job web-camming. I work from home. I masturbate for pay. I remember smoking in between shows, and one time someone in the chat room typed, “Smoking isn’t good for you.” I jumped up, shocked. My cam wasn’t supposed to be on in between shows. What else had they seen? Who was watching me?

A couple of months into web-camming, I swallow a cocktail of pills while drinking, with the intention to end my life. Released from the hospital after being treated for an acetaminophen overdose for three days, I return the tripod and camera to the company that hired me.

Fast forward four months, I’ve got a new girlfriend and she takes care of me. We’re all codependence and kink. It’s time to go back to work, I decide, so I start at Spa 540. (There are so many more stories to tell. I wasn’t trying to tell a story. Just the facts.)

Fact: I enjoyed the spa. To this day, it was probably the most stable employment I’ve ever had. The girls were nice. Sure, we were all batshit crazy prostitutes, but the particular group of girls at that intersection of space and time struck a harmony that kept genuine laughter flowing through the staff room. It felt like a legitimate workplace in an alternate universe made only of women. The booking girls had our backs.

Cigarettes in the alley. Sushi from downstairs. Couches and mirrors, mirrors and couches. Lockers and gossip. “How was your session?” I was afraid of the girls, like you might be of cliques in high school. Now it looks to me like we were lost, all of us. If you asked us, we each had a reason for being there. It made sense at the time. We were surviving, somehow. The spa handyman said to me one day, “Someone should drag you out of here by your hair. You don’t belong here.”

I attempt to go independent. I do some Craigslist work. Some hotels, some in-calls with the help of friends who have a condo set up. Different names, different wigs. Even a website at one point. It isn’t for me.

I want out, so I get a job in a phone-sex call center. Fully-clothed, fully legal, nine-to-five. The work both arouses and disgusts me. I quit. After five months of unemployment, I return to the spa. There I remain until I enrol in acting school.

Fast forward. Acting school is coming to an end. I’ve transformed. From a cocoon I’ve emerged a butterfly, and I can’t believe it but I’m on the doorstep to Hollywood. For real. I didn’t think it was possible, but I’m being handed the keys a moment before I blow it. I’m the next Mila Kunis, they say. My eating disorder has me by the throat, and I start shopping for sugar daddies. I’m auditioning for projects attached to the likes of Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg, then bussing to the Fairmont Waterfront to have sex for money. I go home and binge and purge until sunrise.

I pull myself together and do the honorable thing. I give up the trade and start working in restaurants. It’s hard. A few months later, I dabble in sugar daddies again. I can’t do it. One of them I sleep with, the other one I walk out on, exiting the Shangri La at 2 AM before he asks me to return the money he’d advanced me. Things are shifting. I have a newfound self-respect stemming from the work that I’m doing as an artist. I close the door on sex work forever – or so I think.

A few months later I’m doing a play and the producer has cast himself as my thirty-year-old boyfriend even though he’s in his late fifties. It makes my stomach turn, and I begin to have nightmares about him.

Whether it’s him or the pressures of my barely-budding career, I begin to fantasize about pulling the plug on the life I’ve started building and disappearing somewhere to work in the sex trade until I die. I spend hours on the set of my first TV gig plotting my return to the trade. (The demon that got me into sex work does not want me overcoming him.)

I’ve had eight months of recovery from bulimia at this point, and I begin to relapse just as the play is going up. I go on antidepressants, they are too strong, and I spend a month in bed, sleeping, bingeing and purging. They do without me for final rehearsals, and I show up just in time for opening night.

I make it through the week of shows somehow, then dive headfirst into food addiction and away from my life. I get a normal nine-to-five. (The plan is to hide away and get fat – to quell my fire.) About a month into the job, I start working at Platinum Club, a massage parlor downtown, on Saturdays after each work week. I can’t remember why. The money?

Fighting bulimia, I work a Twelve Step program and learn to pray. I pray in the bathroom of the massage parlor on my knees. I ask my Higher Power how I can be of service to my clients and the girls that I work with. Thy will, not mine, be done. I begin to wonder if my Higher Power wants me there.

This is the first time I’m working with extra weight on my body. I watch myself riding clients in the mirror, stomach protruding, face round, and I recoil. A regular client gifts me with workout gear from his clothing company and says, “This is for your New Year’s resolutions.”

One day I tell the booking girl that the work makes me sick, and I quit without notice. I keep working the nine-to-five. Tension builds at the office, a toxic environment. I snap. I quit. I submit an application to a reputable massage parlor in town, The Fox Den, and get back on the horse.

Only now I feel too old. The jig is up. I’ve eaten all my feelings, and I’m getting comments from clients about my weight. Either they send me back because I’m heavier than they expected, or they argue with the booking girls that there’s no way my tits are real (they ordered naturals).

Once upon a time there was mystique around the work. It once was political, queer, educational – now it’s pathetic and dirty. Wonderland has faded from view. The massage parlor is just a shop, sitting above a hair salon with the windows blacked out.

I’d take a knife to my gut over another pair of paws yanking my swollen breasts.

I quit at 28. If I were a rock star, I’d be dead. So I shelve my self-destruction, and hopefully call it a day.

*

Epilogue

She called it a day.