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/
you didn’t work the street unless you had to/ cars usually means oral sex/ two condoms are recommended for oral sex/ hiv came along and the reaction was a tired: now what/ reality/ more money/ no condom/ i never worked the street/ i worked the phones/ which meant i fielded calls from men who wanted appointments/ outcalls were extra/ but most men wanted me to come to them versus them coming to me/ me going to them could be dangerous/ you never really knew what you were going to find in any of the places where the tricks lived/ selling something/ everybody selling something/ walk backwards sing/ the sun vanishing at ocean beach/ call it what you like/ dead ends hyphenating street rant/ your fists pounding at the gates/ the cab drivers all knew you by your first name/ usually what you found was other whores/ men with money want that kind of intense attention/ six whores can give you a lot of attention/ it was not uncommon to run into the same whores two or three times a night/ men who hired multiple whores liked to pay by check/ usually this is frowned upon/ whores like cash/ but it could be sort of amusing when the trick would pull out his checkbook; it would be one of those big, ledger-like leather-bound checkbooks, the kind that made the sound of zzziiippp when you tore the check out/ these checks were usually good because these men knew that if the check didn’t clear, you’d be back, and often, they didn’t really want to see you around again/ the wife will let you in/ the gig is that you will fuck him while she watches/ she lights a cigarette/ the cosmic loneliness where the long, tedious nights play themselves out charade after charade all live here/ in this house of cards and gin/ cuts out the marrow of a glacial bone/ she’s a calibrated cobra/ you do not know what he is/ but you’ll fuck him if they are paying for it/ in fact, he’s a suit/ you always know a suit/ so you’ll fuck him a little bit too hard/ just on the other side of this is not for play/ this is for revenge/ the vivisecting stares of stones for eyes/ the synapses firing the big artillery/ you wondered what they really cared about/ a lagoon of stars/ or nothing/ it was never a lagoon of stars/ so us whores would all pile into a cab with our checks and wind up at mel’s diner at 4am/ did you see the warts on that asshole big as snowcones, girl/ we would laugh/ nobody going near that thing unless you’re a nurse/ then we’d cram into a booth at mel’s and be fallin’ on the floor laughing because we knew that each one of us had a nurse’s uniform we would wear over there if we had to/ whiteshoez, whitepants, whitetop, and a thermometer/ someone does their laundry/ someone cooks for them/ someone else brings the food to the table/ someone else cleans their toilet/ someone else makes their bed/ you are just the boy who fucks the husband because even humiliation is just an expenditure as ordinary as the gardener who cuts the grass/ you didn’t work the street unless you had to/ trolling for cars usually means strictly oral sex/ and while i did not work the street, i could not walk down polk street without cars pulling over/ you gotta call me, honey, i am not getting in that carwishyou/ where am i going?/ i’m going to the damn grocery store i gotta eat, you know/ no, i do not need a ride/ whatthefuck/ for this final climb down to gravity/ a vast purposelessness like they’ve just had too many babies born dead/ there is no song to even their unraveling/ between the delirium and the open mouths that sounds are supposed to come from, the ponies have gone home, the starting gates are empty/ she’s not so much as interested in him as to whip him with the dulled insouciance of her leeched-out eyes/ they have exiled themselves from loss and flesh; bird monsters, ichthyosaurus/ they have licked their own bones clean of earthworms and any turned inside out ornaments of regret/ |
99% of the boys' tricks (men who pay to have sex with boys), present in their communities, our communities, as heterosexual married family men...1 in 6 males is sexually abused by age 16 in the USA. Denial and embarrassment are not helpful cultural practices when attempting to prevent the trafficking and transmission of human rights violations and HIV.
having sex with a litany of people you hated drugs, drama, and demons, half-blotted by the darkness, las vegas is dragged behind a cadillac through the desert of defeat/ we all shared the same apartment/ a couple of the women had children/ i’d leave my outcall addresses with the women, and they’d leave their outcall addresses for the night with me/ just in case someone had to identify the body/ 6am: on the way home from the bellagio you stop off at a gas station convenience store to stock up on munchie snacks because when you got home by 7am you were going to smoke a ton of dope with whoever was coming home, just like you dead-dog-tired (many of my tricks paid me by the pound in marijuana) and the other hookers as they arrived home early in the morning with their aches and pains and stories of the tricks who drain any struggling soul dry rising from beneath the streets/ we would all crash and no one was up until about 3pm/ or until the kids arrived home from school/ please do not tell me you cannot mix up the explosive ingredients of sex and children/ where the fuck do you think children come from, the stork/ the bellagio was my second home/ if i got caught in there (whores are not welcome to mix it up with guests) even so much as having a drink in the bar, they would throw me into the street/ if i attempted to return, they would have beaten me up and thrown me back into the street/ i usually had all the arrangements made by the time i walked into the ballegio (the credit card would have had to have cleared), and i usually had a good idea of what the scene would entail/ i made it my policy to interrogate the potential trick because there had to be a melting of the minds as much as a melting of the bodies/ there were lots of things i would not do, and any trick who indicated that any of these things on my list was what they really wanted; that’d be the end of the conversation/ conventions were good business for me; especially religious conventions/ the born agains always only wanted one thing/ usually they wanted you to fuck them and while you were fucking them, they wanted you to talk dirty in such a way as to humiliate them/ i was to use the word pig a lot/ apparently, many of them were from agricultural backdrops and a “dirty shitting pig” was pretty low on the social totem pole/ i would not fuck them/ there were people i would fuck/ but the born agains were always a physical turn off/ they’re out of shape/ they’re sexually awkward, and they hate themselves and sex/ I would tell them: i will fuck you, you dirty pig, with a dildo/ this was usually acceptable/ it was the humiliation they were looking for/ sex was just the vehicle that got them what they wanted/ whoring is about giving people what they want/ i always found it strange that so many religious organizations (and school boards and teachers) had conventions in vegas/ sometimes little twists would happen like the trick would want the wife to watch/ i charged more for this and did not tolerate any negotiating once i had arrived; i would turn around and walk out/ you had to make it very clear to these people that you were in charge of the scene, and things like room service knocking on the door could not happen/ chances were good i would know the guy delivering the food/ i would usually have to pay for their silence/ it was easier if they just never showed up/ i called the tricks tricks because they were full of them/ all of them were designed to put the trick back in charge/ sex is inherently about power as much as it is about getting off/ casting off where my solitude could be shared, i often had the cab take me to the edge of the desert where the cab driver and i would watch the sunrise/ it’s a lonely town, one cabbie said/ it was a lonely town/ vegas will drag you down deeper than you want to go/ people are thrown away and trashed with infinite precision/ i choose to draw this circle around my head and bed/ you were on the inside of the circle or you weren’t/ that sunset of loneliness could be self-enforced/ a majority of the women were, in fact, lesbians, and all of them had been abused/ i would say: the survivors of sexual abuse — but i do not know that having sex with a litany of people you hated was much of a survival mechanism/ often, the women would simply crawl into my bed so they could hold me/ you would never find that with the men/ i know this life nailed to the wallboards/ the sharpening before each fall from grace/ i made more money than the women did so i would take them out to denny’s for breakfast/ mornings like milk and cigarettes and lipstick/ and smelling of chanel; these were the souls who had stared into the cauldron’s glare/ like dreams flying through the night eye level with my own/ SHOW ME YOUR LIFE |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
call it what you like
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|
 |
||
| (William Cleveland, Founder & Director, Center for the Study of Art and Community) | ||
Post new comment