WARNING: EXPLICIT IMAGERY & COLLOQUIAL LANGUAGE

"i believe you" : Show Me Your Life, Sexwork

these are the people... we do not exist familiar in any room/ as long as we remain invisible, you never have to look at our little black books/ at who our tricks were (in some cases still are)/ their husbands and their fathers and their brothers and their girlfriend’s husband, too, and their ministers and their doctors and their stockbrokers and their cops and their politicians and their bosses and their co-workers and their colleagues and their priests and the people they tell their secrets to/ these are the people who pay to fuck us/

***

The sun went down the edge of the Blueridge Mountains today. A clenched fist of black done in black that oozes silhouettes in blood like red like writing Sanskrit in the noontide sand, which every writer knows will burn your finger down to bone in the writing of the story. Trust me, witch.

You write it, and they will show their faces on your doorstep in the night and there will be a pilgrimage of torches with them. To light their way. To you. Wherever you might be.

I can sit up here at the top of the mountain. Night arrives. It’s dutiful. It’s dark as Bibles and all their accumulated memories. But not to an Ipad. It’s never dark in Ipadland.

Sometimes I just have to come up here to be alone. My house is filled with people, kids, dogs, noise, music, technology blinking and drinking in the juice. I write in the whirlwind. I live in one as well.

I am told that people are saying my work and my voice are too militant to be included in any dialogue on AIDS.

Simple. Then, fire me.

Oh, but then you don’t own me to fire my white ass, bitch. Do you. Whoever you are.

I look around. All I see are the shadows of the Blueridge Mountains in the dark. But wait! There has to be an army somewhere forcing people to read my work. There must be soldiers who are holding eyelids apart and compelling people to read every word I write at gunpoint.

He’s too militant for, oh, poor us, to read, oooohhhh, I beg you not to make me read him. They can never finish that sentence, these people.

Nice people have been forced to eat their own testicles.

I’m not nice. I’m not volunteering to eat my balls.

Make me.

I came to the top of the mountain to think and then to blog on my Ipad.

Is that impertinent enough for you.

***

The amazing thing about my life is that I can love another human being at all. And yet I love them fiercely, arrogantly; I will fight you for them.

They’re ALL creative.

Make something or get out of my way.

***

When anthropologists look for the bones to know a culture, they should be looking for the whore bones. Whores see everything.

My father would wrestle me in the living room and cover me with kisses. Then he would beat me up. Anyone who thinks abuse and illness is not connected needs a doctor.

The first time I ever ejaculated, I was being whipped. I was required to stand naked and facing the wall with my arms out, and keep them there. My instructions were not to move. I had been a very naughty boy. Now, to be whipped. He tore the skin off my back. My cock grew quite hard and I came on the wall. How does that work.

I would not know. But I know this: there was something in that act of ejaculation against a wall that was about defiance. I was there to be punished and to feel pain. Cum on his wall was not what he was after. He was out for blood and he got it. But cum on his wall said a lot of other things. These were not things my father wanted to face. It was 1961 and I was eleven. He was big and cruel and dangerous. But I had won. It will be a fight between the two of us to the death. He’s already dead and I will be.

For years, I could rationalize it as a child by telling myself two things: 1.) He wasn’t in his right mind, whatever that was. And  2.) It wasn’t sexual because he was insane.

He was insane, alright.

After I came on the wall, I turned around and vomited on him and his whip. My life was making me sick.

Bring your torches to my house. We are the witches here. Illness and abuse are connected.

***

Whores like to tell themselves two things. 1.) They love me so much they will pay to have sex with me. 2.) I can handle any situation.

***

People to whores are cops, tricks, cops, tricks, junkies, Mexican girls who work at the check cashing place, cops, tricks, and The Women. It is the world that has gone mad. Not the whore.

Most of my tricks just wanted to talk and they wanted me to listen and seem engaged. We are talking WHORES here. And whores have what is known as whore drama. Whores usually have vast amounts of this everywhere they go. Whores are trainwrecks. I don’t care how many hours at the gym they spend. Whores are trainwrecks. Whores pretend. They’re actors. It’s show business. You want the whore to seem engaged. Okay, I’m engaged.

I’m still here. Did I win? Did I cum on the wall? Trust me. I came on the wall. Packs and packs of memories like running with the wolves. Bones. All of us will be bones soon enough.

***

As a whore, I only allowed my highest-paying clients to fuck me and they loved fucking me long and hard. You are thinking they were ugly trolls. Nothing could be further from the truth.

John is thirty-five. He’s a California exec who now works at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and he wants to fuck me when he wants to fuck me. There is no time for social games in his life. It is a regulated life. There’s time at the gym and then there’s fucking me.

I know a fancy downtown hotel with a playroom to die for. We go there. He whips me I cum and then he fucks me. The wire transfer is like clockwork first of the month. John is never late and picking up little boys with anal warts on Polk Street is not his style.

There was nothing left to chance in what I did. It was fuck me, pay me, if you fuck me again, you’ll pay me again, Johnnyboy, fuck me, pay me, and then get the fuck out of my way because I have other places to attend to.

Johnny wanted the night once a year. He needs someone to sleep with Christmas eve. Johnny paid for my kid’s Christmas. We never fucked on Christmas eve. I just held him. We talked about our lives. I was not surprised to learn he had been abused.

Me, too.

Over and over and over and over and over again until I got dangerous. Really dangerous. I wasn’t going to take it without a fight, and I could fight. I did it well. I had gone to lots of trouble to learn how.

There are some things I do not want to know.

***

Most of the men who fucked me were cops. Most cops (I swear on the Bible) just want to know if you might have any idea what to do about their bad backs. I am serious. The more bad back nonsense I could throw at them (crystals, yoga) the less they fucked me.

One of my playrooms was just around the corner from the county jail south of Market Street. I would ring up The Women (the male whores called the hookers The Women, this is a subculture) and casually ask how much they were charging tonight. If I needed money fast like ATM time (whores LOVE money) I could charge twenty bucks less than The Women and I would get the cop traffic.

I never went anywhere with men I did not know. You play. You pay. I did. I am.

Some cops are into (you know who you are) very, very serious sadomasochism. We are talking life and death whipping here.

This is how it works. Larry the Cop has busted Jimmy the Creep’s chops for selling heroin to high school cheerleaders. And you think I am making this shit up. Silly you.

Larry the Cop informs Jimmy the Creep that all of this arrest business and going to prison for twenty-five years (San Quentin, not far away) could be washed off the pig slop butcher’s table. But…

Larry the Cop asked me if I wanted to attend the whipping.

I did.

Jimmy the Creep sold heroin cut with meth. Climbing the walls is not exactly what China White had in mind. In this particular whipping, the blood flew everywhere.

This was not good hygiene or safe sex.  

I can’t say that Jimmie the Creep was alive when I went home to shower off the blood. I do not remember him. All I remember is that blood makes my eyes sting like a bitch.

I remember screaming. Jimmy the cop like an animal. Tokyo is very gay, you know. Gay, gay, gay.

Two cops took me to a Chinatown (I lived in Chinatown) rooftop and beat the shit out of me because I could not find them to pay them. Reality Numbah One: You pay cop. Cop go away. I swear, I could not find them to pay them. I was busy. Expenses.

I’m on my back in a pool of blood thinking: That helicopter hovering over you is either the cops or they’re a film crew or they’re aliens. I never found out. They left. I staggered home from Chinatown and was very ill for weeks. My kidneys were bleeding and then they stopped.

As a whore, you’re simply going to meet your fair share of psychotics.

You just hope you’re not one. You hang on tight.

***

I loved Chinatown. Still do. I loved the alley at Trader Vic’s. I loved drugs. All of them. I loved how the sign at Trader Vics turns a certain purple Charlie Parker glow. I love LSD most of all. I loved riding my bike out to Ocean Beach and staying on the beach all night next to roaring fucking bonfires. Junkie paradise.

I could tell myself I was above the boys on Polk Street. I never did Polk Street. Never.

The thing I miss the most about whoring isn’t even the drugs. Sustiva and Marinol are just fine, thank you. I miss the motorcycle boots. Harley Davidson mototcycle boots. Not PUNK. I said Harley Davidson. Just fuck me.

Illness and abuse are connected.

***

There were even critics who critiqued my porn books. Do these people have a LIFE. No, they do not. How is that my fault. I don’t get it.

People go after my politics or I’m too militant or I am really Ethan Frome or i am a child trafficker from Transylvania.

I get accused of being fantasmagorical (I have no fucking clue what it means)

BUT… no one ever notices that it’s very rough sex with characters who themselves lead very rough lives in very rough places. That is all it is.

It’s what I know.

The chances of my allowing you to whip me are not good unless we’re talking seven figures.

Seven fingers would be security.

***

I don’t fuck anymore. I’m impotent. Nothing gets my dick hard. Radiation did it.

And the rest of it was just on fire.

Once I was ignited. And let it whirl into flame. Night arrives dark as bibles. Reaching the sky, making it dangerous with its red. 

Bring your torches to my house. We are the witches here.

***

“The Inventory of Goodbye” by Anne Sexton

I have a pack of letters.
I have a pack of memories.
I could cut out the eyes of both.
I could wear them like a patchwork apron.
I could stick them in the washer, the drier,
and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?
Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.
Besides - what a bargain - no expensive phone calls.
No lengthy trips on planes in the fog.
No manicky laughter or blessings from an odd-lot priest.
That priest is probably still floating on a fog pillow.
Blessing us. Blessing us.

Am I to bless the lost you,
sitting here with my clumsy soul?
Propaganda time is over.
I sit here on the spike of truth.
No one to hate except the slim fish of memory
that slides in and out of my brain.
No one to hate except the acute feel of my nightgown
brushing my body like a light that has gone out.
It recalls the kiss we invented, tongues like poems,
meeting, returning, inviting, causing a fever of need.
Laughter, maps, cassettes, touch singing its path—
all to be broken and laid away in a tight strongbox.
The monotonous dead clog me up and there is only
black done in black that oozes from the strongbox.
I must disembowel it and then set the heart, the legs,
of two who were one upon a large woodpile
and ignite, as I was once ignited, and let it whirl
into flame, reaching the sky
making it dangerous with its red.

the problem of male-directed sexual violence remains largely un-documented. the reluctance of many men and boys to report sexual violence makes it very difficult to accurately assess its scope. the issue of disclosure is further challenged in localities during a pandemic of legal penalties and social prejudice attached to men-who-have-sex-with-men and homosexual activities. sexual violence is however a mechanism by which men and boys are placed or kept in a position subordinate to other men and has NO relationship to generally accepted notions of homosexuality as consensual relations between adult male partners.  sexual violence is an exercise in power and humiliation. it is abuse.  violent sexual abuse and illness are connected at the hip.

"Angels of the love affair" by Anne Sexton

'Angels of the love affair, do you know that other,
the dark one, that other me? '

1. ANGEL OF FIRE AND GENITALS

Angel of fire and genitals, do you know slime,
that green mama who first forced me to sing,
who put me first in the latrine, that pantomime
of brown where I was beggar and she was king?
I said, 'The devil is down that festering hole.'
Then he bit me in the buttocks and took over my soul.
Fire woman, you of the ancient flame, you
of the Bunsen burner, you of the candle,
you of the blast furnace, you of the barbecue,
you of the fierce solar energy, Mademoiselle,
take some ice, take come snow, take a month of rain
and you would gutter in the dark, cracking up your brain.

Mother of fire, let me stand at your devouring gate
as the sun dies in your arms and you loosen it's terrible weight.


2. ANGEL OF CLEAN SHEETS

Angel of clean sheets, do you know bedbugs?
Once in the madhouse they came like specks of cinnamon
as I lay in a choral cave of drugs,
as old as a dog, as quiet as a skeleton.
Little bits of dried blood. One hundred marks
upon the sheet. One hundred kisses in the dark.
White sheets smelling of soap and Clorox
have nothing to do with this night of soil,
nothing to do with barred windows and multiple locks
and all the webbing in the bed, the ultimate recoil.
I have slept in silk and in red and in black.
I have slept on sand and, on fall night, a haystack.

I have known a crib. I have known the tuck-in of a child
but inside my hair waits the night I was defiled.