The Polk Inn stood out in the tenderloin because of all the beige and glass next to junkies selling stolen bicycles and gizmos out front. Tranny hookers checked their weaves in the windows as they sashayed by and winos waved their lotto tickets in my face as they brushed against its elegant modern angles. Everyone was holding.

Clients at the Polk Inn participate in street economy, meaning, most of them turned tricks, hustled drugs or smoked dope with the ghetto blaster guy who bounced up and down the sidewalk, nodding his head to the rhythm of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” and singing the lyrics, “The ones we hurt are you and me.” Polk Street was their terrain. My job as a residential assistant was to enforce the house rules.

For instance, clients weren’t allowed to bring their swag into the Polk Inn.

We reserved the right to rifle through their backpacks and purses, but I never did. We buzzed clients into the front door and they willingly held out their hands to show the things they carried: a wrinkled brown paper sack from the liquor store full of cigarettes, candy and beer. My manager said their world was small and that they stayed within a four-block radius of the Polk Inn. But I don’t know. Some clients wandered, like Charlie, a gorgeous blonde, crack-smoking tranny. They had rules and they had chores, like they had to keep their rooms clean and show up for their meetings with their case managers in order to live there.

I became a residential assistant because of a guy who looked like a young hippie version of Robin Williams. He was a case manager who liked to jabber on about how he thought everyone was attracted to him—his boss, his co-workers and his clients. To my surprise, he hired me, regardless of my protracted career as a nude lap dancer in the tenderloin. RA was a counseling position that required no actual counseling, but my duties ran the gamut. At times I was a nurse, babysitter, DJ, watchdog, secretary and cook.  I distributed meds and dinners for a half-dozen 17-24 year-old HIV positive, mentally unstable, drug addicted clients. Then I encouraged them to dispose their hypodermic needles into the bright orange Sharps containers attached to the walls. During my shift, I recorded the clients’ notable behavior in a big black plastic binder that was kept in a drawer upstairs.

In the reception area, clients met with their case managers for counseling and to determine if they were progressing or declining—if the drugs were working. The phones rang non-stop while I sat at a computer and helped Jim with his cover letter. He was a dashing, gay, high-functioning client with an actual job in an office somewhere. His blazer, shoes and sunglasses were worth more than my Mission District apartment.

The case managers’ offices were dinky and crammed with file cabinets and folders.  I didn’t envy their job one bit, even though that’s the only way for an RA to progress. So, after I finished Jim’s cover letter, I hung around the office and handed out sack lunches to clients. I made sure they included a turkey sandwich, one Capri Sun, chocolate chip cookies and a cloudy red apple. When the clients were really good, I got to give them a movie pass.

At five, the case managers went home, the fog wiped away the sun, and we RA’s took over the Polk Inn.

 ***

Armando was short and thin, five feet tall and Latino, with loose khaki shorts and a studded black belt. He smeared grease on his slick black curls and wore a chunky silver rope chain that seemed uncharacteristically butch around his fragile neck. Armando had been a resident for a few months. He was twenty-two, and a cutter. Phil, the other RA, warned me. One afternoon, Armando sat in a chair in the courtyard, slumped over a black journal with a set of skinny pens, drawing. Once in a while he wiped a shiny ringlet aside with his right hand. Picked up another pen and shaded.

“Want a snack?” I asked him. He shook his head and tore another piece of coarse white paper from his journal and drew in loopy, magnificent detail. I looked over his shoulder at his drawing of a giant menacing orchid overtaking an angel wielding a sword.

“That is so good,” I said.

“I’m going to the Academy of Art.” He stood up. Looked at his work from another angle. Sat back down. His forehead was creased.

“Can you play some music? Phil always plays music.”

“Sure.” I saw CDs by Radiohead and Jill Scott that another RA left behind and popped in the Jill Scott.

“Thanks,” he said.

I looked forward to my shift on Sundays because I’d cook dinner early and make it a movie night. My usual dish was chicken smothered in olive oil and wild rice with almond slivers. I wore a red key attached to my wrist dangled by an elastic cord. It opened every door in the building and jangled against the refrigerator and pantry with a loud, tinny clank. I found garlic salt, butter and carrots in the fridge. Chopped an onion. I rifled through the dishwasher for cooking pans. Tossed the chicken and vegetables in the oven. While it cooked, it killed the antiseptic institution smell of frozen French fries and stale fish sticks. The kitchen had sliding glass doors that opened out into a patio where clients sat on aluminum chairs in the chilly, afternoon sun, smoking over silver tables. White plastic ashtrays were filled with rainwater. Butts afloat in the soot.

“Miss Congeniality,” played loudly on the big flat-screened TV in the community room. It was the movie they all voted for unanimously. Clients settled onto new, sturdy couches with fluffy cushions, a far cry from the ratty couches I lugged home from St. Vinny’s— more like scratching posts with springs that tickled your tailbone when you leaned back.  Allesandra, a Native American tranny and Revo, the junkie skateboarder, played Gin Rummy on one couch. I buzzed Jessa in. She waddled frantically up to her room, over eight months pregnant. I registered her jerky movements. They meant another fight with her boyfriend outside. Donald, the autistic happy redhead shuffled by in white pajamas and slippers. “Can I have a snack?” is all I’ve ever heard him say. I showed him cookies or an apple. He took the cookies. Shuffled to the couch for the movie.

A woman I didn’t recognize from the security camera in the front office rang the bell. She held hundreds of white lilies wrapped in Saran Wrap. Said they’re from a wedding. Could she donate them? Armando put down his pen and smiled huge.

“Lilies! My favorite! Can we decorate?” We spent the next thirty minutes cutting the tops off of water bottles with scissors and filling them with water from the kitchen sink. I unlocked the case managers’ offices. Armando pranced into the room, cleared a space on top the desks, placed the lilies in the center, and sauntered off with jerky dance moves. He threw his hands in the air as if to say, “Ta Da!”

“Can I have some in my room?” He asked, knowing I would allow it, that I was a pushover. He didn’t wait for my permission. I watched him carry two bottles of flowers up to his room, which was on the second floor, right next to the RA office. I didn’t see him for the rest of my shift, until I knocked on his door to give him meds.

When I did, he showed me two small, framed pictures of his mother and sister. Their faces were round and hazy like from an 80’s after-school special. He told me they don’t talk to him anymore because he’s a gay hooker. When he said it his eyes flashed wildly—practically flirtatious. He didn’t smile. My entry for him read: Armando was social, helpful and productive. He worked on his beautiful drawings and helped me decorate.

After filling out my time sheet, I rode my motorcycle a couple blocks up to O’Farrell in the wet cold night where I still stripped at The Century Theatre till 4a.m. I wasn’t allowed to tell my coworkers or the clients at Polk Inn that I stripped, or to divulge any personal information, especially my handful of years in AA. Self-disclosure was considered unprofessional. Besides, Polk Inn was a harm reduction gig. They didn’t want abstinence talk to scare off clients.

While on the floor of the club, I met a client who asked me to fuck him at a hotel for $800 the next night and I agreed. Over dinner, he drugged me with GHB and I knew something was wrong, so I guzzled water and shoveled food down my face as quickly as possible. No one knew where I was that night. I tucked the secret in my gut and hoped my shame didn’t spill out onto my clients. I was supposed to be stronger than that. I was supposed to be helping them. I was supposed to be a role model. I didn’t want to be shitty to them.

 ***

When I showed up for my next shift at the Polk Inn, all hell had broken loose. Allesandra died in a knife fight on the street and Revo disappeared for a couple days. Jessa was in the hospital in labor so she’d moved out of our facility and into the one that housed single mothers. I was reprimanded for allowing Armando to get anywhere near the scissors. “They could also cut themselves on the edges of those water bottles,” my manager said. He was right, but I didn’t feel remorse. I thought it was good for Armando to do something thoughtful and we shared a love of lilies—our favorite flower.

I walked into the kitchen, which is the first thing I do in any place to reset. I stood in the chilly glow of the fridge and considered my options. I swiped a Capri Sun and sucked the wet sugar from the spindly straw. It was eerily quiet under the florescent kitchen lights. Charlie rushed out the front door in a denim miniskirt and spike heels with a little wave. I was ordering Dominoes pizza in case some clients showed up for dinner when heard loud music blaring from upstairs. It was coming from Armando’s room. I grabbed his meds from the office and knocked on his door.

“Can you turn that down?” He opened his door a couple inches.

“Why? No one’s here.”

“I’m trying to order us pizza.” His eyes were two black holes.

“I’m not hungry.” I handed him his meds. He shook his head. Shut his door in my face. I ducked into the RA office and wrote in the binder:

Armando was asked to turn his music down. Refused his HIV and psych meds.

Downstairs, I gorged on three pieces of drippy pepperoni pizza and replayed the night with the client who drugged me with GHB. He’d offered me the water while we waited for our table in the restaurant. It tasted like soda water. Then I felt foggy and dizzy and almost peed my pants. I was shocked at how easily I’d crossed the line from dancer to hooker. Had the street economy invaded my skin and normalized it? I wrestled with excuses and found only bewilderment and shame.

I used my red key to open an empty client room and locked myself in the bathroom. Turned the light on. Stuck my finger down my throat. Threw up in the toilet. I hadn’t told anyone about the $800 GHB client. I wanted to sit in the dark and blast music, rock back and forth in my own emptiness. Rock my emptiness to sleep.

Disgusted with myself, I washed my face and hands and dried them.

Armando’s music played louder and louder.

“God damn it,” I mumbled. I walked down the hall and banged on his door. He didn’t open it.

“Armando!” I kept knocking. Louder.

“I’m coming in, Armando.” I unlocked his door and noticed my key chain still had some puke on it. I wiped it on my jeans. The door was heavy because he’d used a bookshelf to blockade it. I pushed my whole body against it, sliding the bookshelf towards the wall. Armando stood holding a wooden bat in his arms. His head was cut and blood dripped down into his perfectly tweezed black eyebrows. Blood was splattered on his hands and shirt. His eyes were fierce— lacked any of the softness from the other day. His gaze was ecstatic and free, like an angel floating in cool moonlight.

“I’m okay,” he said.

He let the bloody bat drop and it landed with a thunk. Both of us froze together, standing in the dark room with his blood under our feet. White lilies drooped pitifully on a wooden bedside table. My manager must’ve confiscated the water bottle, so they collapsed there, dying.

“I’m okay,” he said again in a raspy whisper. We glowed in the dark. I backed away, stepped into the hall and called my manager. Armando’s door slammed shut.

“Call 9-11,” my manager said. I didn’t want to. I didn’t want Armando to go anywhere. I wanted to throw a blanket over him and pat him on the head and hand him a sack lunch and a movie pass. Within a few moments that could’ve been thirty seconds or a half-hour, the door buzzed.

Outside, the ghetto blaster guy was still swaying to rap music. Behind him were six men in black helmets and kneepads. I’d never seen them before: the SWAT team. They wrapped Armando up and carried him away on a stretcher. His expression seemed to ask me. Why?

***

Photographs by Romy Suskin

Related Posts:

• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #8: The Sex and Politics of Antonia Crane
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #13: Bella Blue’s School of Three: Burlesque, Boys and Polyamorous Love
• “Pussy Fever” Loves “Locker 29”
• Why Are You A Prostitute?
• Nothing But Trouble: Hookers & Memoir
  The Rumpus Interview with Bruce Benderson

***

I got in Milcah’s maroon Scion at SFO. We’d never met before. A tiny white candle burned between us in the middle console and it made me nervous at first, but she was so astonishingly tender that nothing could possibly catch on fire.

The image I had of Milcah before we met was of a young hipster punk with black hair. She’d wear boots. A scarf. Her knees would be exposed. She’d glance at me between drags of cigarettes with her squinty filmmaker eyes. The eyes of filmmakers twinkle with obsession; they want to capture the uncontrollable. The same way surfers love the ocean, filmmakers are in love with light. She smiled with a full set of braces. She was much younger than I expected. And her phenomenal thick black virgin—never-been-dyed—hair fell over her face. Girls with hair like that fuss. They bind it, braid and spray, but not she.

Milcah films herself masturbating on the Internet for pay. We sat close at a picnic table in a vegan café and shared a dainty bowl of pink beet soup while I asked her why. Milcah’s twenty-two, the same age I was when I first started stripping in the 90’s. Back then, the girls I worked with made it look ultra sexy: Danielle Willis in expensive purple lace lingerie sets. Tattooed bellies that jiggled under black light: non-stop porn playing from old TVs that hung from the ceiling. Our eyes glowed beneath. Web cam porn seems like an ideal sport for today’s feminist sex worker. It’s solitary and self-reflexive with no audition, manager or boss. While masturbating for her clients, Milcah directs and films herself to her chosen music in her own environment.

There’s an unexamined notion that young women who decide to enter the sex industry are fractured/tragic and they march into the industry to fill a void, seeking the childish validation they were denied in their abusive homes. But, as Stephen Elliott wrote in a recent Daily Rumpus, “Sex work is not the abusive home.” The common ideology that sex workers are sad and sexually abused is sexist, the same way that Lacanian lack is sexist. On the surface, Milcah’s upbringing was unusual and difficult, but what is fascinating is how she has digested it; her extreme warmth and lack of bitterness turned her life into art.  Her story reminded me of Joan Didion quoting Georgia O’Keefe during an infamous interview: “It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest” (The White Album, 126). I pictured Milcah camming in her room on her bed, tea light candle ablaze and I knew that there was nothing lacking about Milk. She is whole.

***

The Rumpus: Sex workers never use their real names. Why have you decided to use yours? What if your family, grandparents or brothers find out? What will you tell them? What do you think their response will be?

Milcah Orbacedo: My full name: Milcah Halili Orbacedo. My sexual name: Milcah Halili, meaning Queen Beloved, my mother’s maiden name, my former “jealous girlfriend,” the woman whom my father molested in front of me and raped privately, a strong, lovingly severe, goof of a woman. Milcah Orbacedo is what I go by, my writerly name, and the name of my father who majored in journalism in the Philippines, a man of business, eloquence and charm. My name is important to me. As much as my parents have hurt me I love them with all of my heart, and I want to rebuild a new name for them, honor them. It’s my roots, where I came from, and I respect my past. I have so much pride in my name; I couldn’t possibly try to be someone else. I want my mother to be strong and my father to be understood, and the way that I feel I can do that is through taking their name, my name, and changing what it means with dignity. I think there’s a rapist in all of us, a person consumed by one’s hungers, and a victim, a person terrified of those hungers. But these are not ugly things; it’s just a part of the give and take of life. I honor and respect the extremes, acknowledge they exist, and choose to float uncomfortably in limbo, in between the spectrum, and carry myself with pride. However, I’ve always been afraid of my own voice. Something about permanence I think. Saying things out loud made them real, and as a child I learned how words could stay ingrained in you forever.

My brother Adriel already knows, he’s super chill and understanding. In fact, that boy’s taught me a thing or two about being queer. My brother Jeremy is cool with it as well. My relations with most of my family are estranged because most of them weren’t there for my brothers and me when I needed them the most, when my parents left. I’m assuming my whole family will eventually find out and if they should come at me with any judgment, I hope I have enough love in myself to say to them, “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me. I am grateful. But I’m okay and you don’t need to protect me. Only God can judge me. Please let me have my peace.”

Rumpus: Tell me about when and why your mother left, where your family is from, what your room looks like. What is expected of you as a woman in your family? When did you discover you were sexually different than other people?

Milcah: I’ve been moving constantly after my parents left my brothers and me. It’s a blessing if I stay anywhere over six months, a miracle if over a year. My father left to the Philippines when I was eighteen, my brothers were fourteen and thirteen. He was going to leave anyway to start a better life financially, but his departure was brought sooner when my illegally immigrated step-mom threatened to kill my half-brother, the police were called, and she got deported. Shortly afterward, my mom left us as well to explore America and find better financial fortune because she couldn’t afford rent here in California. My brothers and I had no money and home. I’ve been nomadic ever since. My mom came back a few months ago, started taking care of her kids again. I’ll be moving back into my mom’s garage until she leaves for good in June. Then, I’ll go back to supporting my brothers. I’ve always been an extra parent in my family. I was expected to mediate and pick up the other parent’s slack, clean up after any party’s irresponsibility, damage control. I’m sure this is what has lead me to my current professions and I know it’s not my job to take care of other people’s kids, but who else is going to raise these orphans? So, move back I must. 

I am twenty-two years old. When I was twelve, girls made me nervous. I had been a good Seventh Day Adventist Christian girl my whole life and it freaked me out. I thought I was gay for a while until I met a boy I swooned real hard for. Then, I fancied myself queer until I became obsessed with having relationships with men. I dropped labeling myself for a bit because nothing seemed fit. After a lot of false starts and dysfunctional relationships and lying to myself, I realized I am an asexual who is obsessed with the interpersonal narratives of sex. I see sexuality as fluid and labels as boundary placers instead of definite states of being.

Rumpus: That fluidity reminds me of Irigaray’s Speculum de L’autre Femme (1974) where she celebrates the multiplicity of feminine sexuality as a way to rupture conventional representations of women. How and why did you decide to start camming? What attracts you about being seen?

Milcah: I’ve been naked all my life. To be otherwise feels unnatural and suffocating to me. I decided to start camming the beginning of this year after doing a few nude photo shoots and having my friend film my masturbation. I heard camming was a good way to make money, and I thought it would be fun, that I would be good at it because I feel like I have really engaging conversations and I think myself amusing and why not. Intimate communication is my specialty, and I feel like I can reach people. Because I’m so comfortable with myself, I feel like I’m giving others the OK to feel comfortable within their own skin too. People really need to hear that, that they are OK the way they are, and they aren’t told that enough. We’re usually bombarded with messages and advertisements of how we are inadequate. Emotional manipulation sells.

Rumpus: You have a website/art blog where you point your finger at Stephen Elliott and myself for getting into the industry. You wrote:

Antonia and Stephen have instilled a passion in me for sexualities that oft get pushed to the margins, for infusing me with different views of expression and communication and love that too consistently gets overlooked.

Aside from outer influences, the internal forces driving my getting naked in front of the lens are:

I want to be fancied, however superficial that fancy may be. I want to use my sexuality to my advantage. I want to demystify the body. I want to change its politics. I want to change how we communicate, change language itself. I want to. Simply. I don’t care how controversial that is. I don’t find it a big deal. I care what people think. I want to be liked, perhaps not entirely, but at least enough that I can leave my house without it becoming a social-paranoia-ridden problema. I am not devoid or incapable of human emotion. I am not weird—at least not radically so—and I enjoy “normal” human activities just like any other Joe, but there are naked portraits of me online and I don’t care because I’m the one who put them there.

Milcah: You’re the reason I seriously considered doing sex work in the first place. I’ve always thought I’d be good at filming porn when I first became a filmmaker at the age of eighteen, but I figured it was just caprice until I happened upon your column. So, that’s why I’m so attached to you, I guess. You were my initial inspiration.

Rumpus: I hope it’s a positive experience for you-a place of discovery where you can thrive, personally and financially. I hope it will be useful to you in your life, that you love yourself and value yourself while being heard and seen and jerked off to.  Your response is wild because I once wrote a response to a letter from an eighteen-year old girl advising her to not strip, because it didn’t fit into her life plan (a job in law enforcement) so it would’ve been detrimental to her goals. When you talk about your videos, you get giddy. And it seems safer than other forms of sex work. You seem compelled to do this.

Milcah: I’ve found that my most regrettable rejections have been when I didn’t show myself fully and honestly. So now I exhibit, or neurosis comes. I’ve decided to use my real name because I’m not ashamed of what I do. The idea of having to split and compartmentalize myself makes me feel nauseous. I am not sometimes a sex worker. Work is sex, and everything is work. I am always working (workaholicism is a real affliction), always having sex. I am always communicating on some wavelength.

Rumpus: Do you see any similarities between being a caregiver and the sex industry?

Milcah: I feel like being a caregiver and working in the sex industry are very similar. You get to see people in such a stripped-down, childlike state. Caring for the old is as caring for children and caring for the sexual is as caring for the childlike version of oneself, the part willing to play. I believe that sex comes from the same kind of play and suspension of disbelief that we are allowed when we are young, that society fills our bodies with shame as we age, and that sometimes the only way to relieve ourselves of that shame is through sex. And sex is such a disarming thing. It requires certain vulnerability. In both professions, both parties have to trust me with their bodies. That’s a scary thing. It demands that I be open and understanding, which requires a lot of patience, and a willingness to play, to go along, to humor, to say, “Yes,” and to respect and protect the person whom I am servicing.

Rumpus: I wonder if that shame you refer to is the reason why this culture is so invested in punishing sex workers and their patrons? Also, I find your caring nature and innocence very refreshing in this context. What do you hope to accomplish while embarking on this career change or will this just be a supplemental side job?

Milcah: I am planning to switch from being a full-time caregiver to being a full-time Internet floozy in a couple of months. I hope to change the way people define and view sex and sexuality because both change for me daily and for some reason I’m often dismissed because of my fluidity. I want to tell other fluid people that they are okay. I hope to do this through my live shows and also through my porn. I think a lot of porn lacks breadth. I want my porn to be both aesthetically pleasing and erotic, to have breathe, embodiment and intimacy. I won’t do a vag shot just for the sake of a vag shot. I don’t have anything against it, it’s just not my style and it’s not what turns me on.

Rumpus: Why do you think people in this culture react so strongly against sex workers? Against clients? Against women?

Milcah: Human beings are so warped when it comes to hungers. Look at eating disorders. The same way we approach food is the same way we approach sex. The sex industry is the land of hungers grinning shamelessly at a society sullied in shame, and society’s got a monopoly on hungers, what’s okay to hunger for and what’s not. To feel hunger is to feel weak and vulnerable, and society is strange about feeling weak and vulnerable. These things get such a bad rap; we are not allowed to be these things when they are a natural part of being. We have to save face and be so strong all the time, because to be otherwise is unacceptable. I think people are just afraid to see others naked—it’s a threat to their own image, someone unwilling to ever be naked at all in their lives.

Rumpus: Have you ever felt exploited and if so when and why?

Milcah: Many times. Who hasn’t? Everyone cheats and gets cheated. That’s just a part of life. If I ever feel exploited, then I leave the situation in which I feel so. Otherwise, it’s consensual sadomasochism, and not in the healthy sense. I was exploited the first day I did a live show. I did a Skype show and I should have asked the guy to pay me first. I knew better, but either I hated and undervalued myself that day or I wanted to believe in the goodness of others because I’m gullible. He tried to make me believe he was to be trusted, communicating with me that he wanted me to trust him, that I could, and offering me advice on how to work my room since it was my first day. So, I gave him a pretty badass show for someone who’s never done it before. And when I realized I was scammed and I wasn’t getting paid, I cried a little and it didn’t feel any worse than how I felt when an ex-lover came in me when I told him not to. Or, how I sometimes feel when I feel like society generally undervalues me as a human being because of horrible educational cuts and outrageous prices on goods that get hiked up year after year while the value of the dollar goes down, when I am treated as a commodity instead of a person. Minimum wage is hardly enough to get by. I remember when my parents left I was working a part-time job for minimum wage. There was no way I could have survived if I had stayed working that job, which I couldn’t anyway because the business had gone under.

Rumpus: If you could film anyone alive or dead having sex, who would it be and why? You have a film about poly love. Do you have many partners? Is this an interest of yours?

Milcah: If I could film anyone alive or dead having sex… I want to say something hip like Tura Satana, but honestly I’d really like to film one of my friends in their forties having sex with someone they love. I feel like bodies in their forties are beautiful, a good mix of young and old, and I find them aesthetically pleasing. Maybe a single mother having sex, I don’t know. I’d like to take desexualized bodies and show others how sexy they can be. I’d also really like to capture intimacy communicated freely. I have many partners, but not in the way most people frame them. My partners are my friends. My friends are people whom I consider part of my tribe. I’m a relationship anarchist. My interest isn’t so much in having multiple partnerships but many friendships infused with a mix of romantic and a-romantic elements, a loving, supportive village. Partnerships are usually distinguished from other relationships due to their exclusively romantic and sexual nature, but my intent, my endgame in partnerships isn’t traditionally defined romance or sex. My sex doesn’t include genitals most of the time. I have sex with all of my friends because I like being intimate and naked, exposed to someone else, because to expose is to give and I love to give. I guess you could say I have a lot of queer platonic relationships. I feel very lucky. I mother everyone.

Rumpus: Are you concerned with the permanence of the footage? Do you have control over the footage? Why or why not?

Milcah: About as much as I’m concerned with the permanence of my writing. I think permanence is a myth. I’m not sure I believe in forever. I believe that in the moment, something can feel like forever. But once that moment has passed that forever is gone because if you ever recall that moment of forever again, you’ll be seeing it through another lens colored by whatever experiences you go through in the future. Your relationship to that forever has changed; it’s not really forever anymore. Lewis Carol once wrote:

Alice: How long is forever?
White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.

I believe in the fluidity of time too. I attribute that mostly to The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. Life is nonlinear. People will find different parts of my narrative at different times and usually not in chronological order. My films are a part of a greater whole, drafts, constant revisions refined over time. Each film is a frame of a larger roll, and to define an entire roll by looking at one frame is to misunderstand the roll completely. I have control over my films because I shoot them myself or I have my friends film me if I can’t do it personally. I also direct and edit everything myself. I have full artistic control and that makes the perceived permanence of the footage much less threatening. It means that there is less room for my integrity to be compromised.

Rumpus: Where do you want to be more than anywhere?

Milcah: Right now I’d especially like to be next to any one of my friends so I can kiss them on the cheek. Thank you for letting me be naked around you. You are my home.

***

Milcah’s videos, NSFW:

Gypsies’ Room

Would You Like the Belt, Good Sir?

Good Girl

Thank You, Everyone

Related Posts:

• Night of the Lilies
• Ending Violence Against Sex Workers
• Is Colson Whitehead smart enough to be a sex worker?
• The NYT Offends with its Sunday Book Review of Zone One
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #13: Bella Blue’s School of Three: Burlesque, Boys and Polyamorous Love

I first met Nadia on Bourbon Street and saw a kindred spirit in the dressing room, while sharing three inches of mirror space. Later, I sat next to her at the bar in our matching spandex stripper attire, dressed for success. She came from Florida. I came from California. We rooted for the Saints.

It was a tense game. The Minnesota Vikings and the Saints were tied, but the Saints won the coin toss and opted for a field goal. Before I knew her name, Nadia grabbed my hand and held it tight, looked straight ahead and said,“Have faith.” When the Saints won, the bartenders collapsed and held their faces in their hands and cried. We women screamed and the entire city was overjoyed. Nadia personified faith and strength, her spirit contributed to the Saints’ victory. A few months later, she met me at a coffee shop and told me her story that is true of many women I know. She told me about family trauma, abuse and racism- the way those memories eroded her spirit. It also made her stronger and more determined to interrupt the cycle of abuse. She pursued her goals in spite of her circumstances, and rebuilt her spirit. Six months after our interview, I met her for her photo shoot with Michael Siu and she’d quit the sex industry altogether. She now works full time as a private chef.

[Some photos NSFW]

***

The Rumpus: You said you were from Florida and that you danced here in New Orleans to put yourself through school. Where did you grow up? Where did you get your faith from, and what was it like?

Nadia Payne: I was born in Massachusetts in 1977. My Dad is Black Foot Indian and African American and my Mom is from Cuba. I have an older brother who is my best friend and one other brother. I also have a ten year-old brother who is a mystery. My mom said he’s a surrogate baby but I think a guy gave my mom this kid. He knows English, Spanish and French like her.

Rumpus: What were some messages you received about sex in your family?

Payne: I was raised a Jehovah Witness. In Massachusetts, my Mom had married a man who molested me for ten years from age 6-16. My Mom was beating me viciously, mentally and emotionally. My Mom is maybe a narcissist paranoid sociopath. She’s also a hospice nurse for children.

My stepfather got me interested in food and played the Dad role. When he left my Mom periodically, I felt that he left me, or rather like my boyfriend had left me. I was inconsolable. One time he took my little sister with him and left. One night my Mother came home at 3a.m. my Grandmother was with her. My grandmother is her hostage, like Stockholm syndrome. My mom snatched me and put me in the car, she asked me if I was being molested. She took me to an orange grove, which happened to be my friend’s property. She screamed at me. She asked me if I was being molested. She had a knife. If I didn’t tell her the truth, she said she would kill me and leave me in the orange grove. I was fourteen. My step dad was at work. He was a C.NA. and worked nights.

I remember the last time he left for good.  I was 16, he raped me (bent me over the toilet) and then left. I took it out on my little sister. She didn’t deserve that. My Grandmother knew it was going on, told my mom and she didn’t do the right thing about it. She attacked me instead Every time she told my Mom. I was scared something bad was going to happen.

Rumpus: How do you reconcile that abuse? Did you ever go to counseling? Do you have PTSD? Are you in touch with your stepfather still? Have you confronted him?

Payne: I bottled it up; kept it inside and my drug use had a lot to do with wanting to escape my situation. Probably, PTSD. I’m not in touch with my stepfather nor have I confronted him. I don’t where he is, which is safer.

Rumpus: What are the messages you received about sex in your household?

Payne: Don’t have sex. Don’t have babies. My mom would leave STD books around the house to scare us. She asked if I was pregnant, held a knife to my stomach. If I were pregnant, she would cut it out of me. Don’t use it-don’t have it until your married. My mother had also asked me if I would carry a kid for her when I was a teenager. I said “hell no.” I had one boyfriend in high school but I had been promiscuous in 8^th and 9^th grade. I gave a lot of head to test my sexual powers. I noticed the boys in church started to act different towards me, I distanced myself from the church because of the sexual hypocrisy. For example, after I had sex with the son of an elder in the kingdom hall, and he confessed, they told him it didn’t matter because I wasn’t baptized. After I returned to the Kingdom Hall, all of the brothers started asking me out to coffee or private bible study and they never spoke to me before that.  They had been gossiping about me and it made me not want to go back.

Rumpus: Did you ask anyone for help? Could you tell anyone what was going on?

Payne: My stepfather made it clear if I told anyone, that we would all go to foster care, and my grandma would have a heart attack and die. He threatened me so I didn’t tell her. I loved my sister and didn’t want us separated. I got good grades, I went to Kingdom Hall all the time, I did the housecleaning, helped my mom with the finances, and her nursing school homework. I parented her. I was her best friend and her enemy. One day she came to me and said, “he likes you and you can cook for him and make him dinner but you can’t have sex with him.” All this time, I believed that my Mom didn’t know. I found out last May that she knew the last four years. My brother told me he told her and my Mom beat him for not doing anything about it. My youngest brother just got out of prison, for multiple reasons. I love my brothers so much. He was in a gang let’s leave it at that.

I no longer hate my Mother because hate is a form of love, I am disgusted with her. I don’t speak to her. She’s a shadow person; she is not in my life.

Rumpus: Did you enjoy any of your classes or anything about school was it kind of an escape? Did you have any support from your peers?

Payne: I would rather go to school than be home. In 9^th grade, my stepfather suggested that my mother take us out of school to be homeschool’d so he could have more control over me. The home school was not accredited, so I had to go back to high school and had to catch up because I fell one grade behind. I have two high school diplomas. My favorite classes were English Lit and auto-mechanics for four years. I was also involved in the radio show we had at our school. It was an escape for me even though it was a different kind of hell. The only person who knew was a friend of mine who was gay and my boyfriend. My boyfriend helped me but later became abusive later on. My gay friend was someone I could talk to but I knew he had to fight his own demons so I wasn’t always comfortable burdening him with mine. The other kids didn’t like how I talked, and they found out that I was tough and a loner and they called me an “Oreo” among other things. They always wanted to fight me.  I never lost a fight. I did body building in high school, so that helped.

Rumpus: What jobs have you had and how and when did you first get introduced to sex work?

Payne: I worked at Morrison’s cafeteria a pick-a-dilly style restaurant. Tallied up food for the clients, worked at KFC, I did laundry at my Mom’s nursing home. Doing old people’s laundry. My best friend’s brother talked me into stripping when I was eighteen. He was a pimp and I didn’t know it. I will call him Rodrigo. We were “hanging out” and he said, “You could do this for a living. Since I am getting you this job, getting your nails done and giving you rides, you should give me some money.”  He was actually my stripper pimp. My friend said, “What are you doing?” She told me he was pimping me out. She sat me down and explained what that meant. I was naïve about all of that.

My mom told me she was my best friend. She stopped me from having friends my age. I was very excited to go to the mall, and get all dressed up. I never did high school events or socialize or have sleep over’s. I dumped the guy/stripper pimp when I was a senior in high school. I was rebelling against my family and against my abusive boyfriend and stripping sounded like fun. It was at first.

My boyfriend at that time knew everything that was happening to me and did nothing to help me. We ran away together to my mom’s friend’s house. I told my mom where I was. I had been doing competitive bodybuilding. I fought my Mom off me and she finally asked me if I was being molested. She asked me if I wanted to go to the police.

I am the only one in my family who walked in the graduation. No one came to my graduation.

I met a nice guy when I was dancing in a club. I met the guy, Mike from the club and moved to Tarpin Springs he slept on the couch and I slept in the bed but we became boyfriend/ girlfriend.

I went to med school to be a surgical tech but didn’t finish because dancing was sooner, faster, now and I was young and dazzled. I went to fully nude clubs and they treated me like cattle. I danced when I was with Mike for 2 years. I was his first everything. He was a chef. My Dad was a chef, my step dad is a chef and I’m a chef.

I’ve been around food my whole life. My mom stopped buying food for us when I was 14. We would have to fend for ourselves. We would eat Pot Pies and hotdogs, but she had a lot of culinary books, but whatever we were eating, we would pretend that the hotdogs were the fancy, pretty food, like the dishes in her books.

Rumpus: What were the clubs like in Florida? Was there racism in the clubs?

Payne: Scarlet’s was a great club. It was topless and we wore gowns on the floor. That’s when I started making consistent real money ($400-$500 night). The nude clubs were more of a struggle. I was happy to make a hundred or two hundred a shift there.

One night I was dancing on stage. A group of Italian guys were near the stage but no one was tipping me. A guy looked at me and said to his friend, “Why is this nigger still dancing over here? She’s not getting any tips.”

I heard him and moved to another part of the stage. The other tinted girls and I started working the other part of the room. I made like $700 that night. The girls that danced for the Italian guys made 2 or 3 thousand bucks. The white girls were looking at their money. It was all-counterfeit! Ours wasn’t. The managers had to collect all of their money and send it to the Feds. The tinted girls were all high fiving each other.

There is so much racism within the club between the whites and tinted girls and especially among the tinted girls, because money’s so scarce.

Rumpus: Can you give me an example of the racism you experienced in your life and as a sex worker?

Payne: You want to know something funny? The Klan marched at my school and I thought is was a parade in 6^th grade in Seffner, Florida. I told my Mom, “I saw a parade at school today with white robes and big pointy hats and they were waving at me and I was waving back.” The next day, she took me out of that school. I didn’t know what that meant.

In the clubs, the darker the shade of tint (skin) the harder is to get hired. And they have quotas: Black girl quotas.

Rumpus: How do you mean?

Payne: The club would only hire so many black girls so as to not attract too many black guys to not scare off the high rolling paying white guy customers. Some black guys don’t tip well because it seemed to me higher class the club, the less the black guys would pay because they would have to pay more for the girl, but they seem to want to give less and get more.

It’s intense between the girls. I’d get up to go to the bathroom or even sitting there with a client and they would pretend I’m not even there. They would talk to my customer.  The girls disrespect each other-the tinted girls. They mess with each other more than with the white girls. They all move in on the dude who likes tinted girls because that’s a specialty. I feel like I transcend that type of client, because I was never allowed to use slang at home. I had to speak in complete sentences and use the Queen’s English. My step dad would play a game with me where, I would read the word in the dictionary and learn that word. If I got the word wrong, I was whipped with an extension cord.

Rumpus: Why didn’t he just play Scrabble with you?

Payne: We did play scrabble, but this was our special family game. In New Orleans, I got hired at Hustler and Penthouse. I was in a cab one day and I told the cab driver I was working at hustler and he was surprised I was working there because I’m black. I tried Rick’s but they told me No. When I was in Miami, I was working with my friend who said she could get me hired anywhere. She looks like a skinny Anna Nicole smith. She took me to Scarlets (a different one) they said no, that I was too fat. I was bodybuilding at the time. I was fucking pissed because he hired ugly fat white girls. We went to another club and the manager took her aside and told her “we have our black girl quota.” She thought I’d been lying about that. She finally got it.   I worked at Ybor a fully nude strip club in Tampa for 3 or 4 years. I was the second highest paid girl there and the number one paid black girl there. When I started, I started making a 1K a week, and after that I started making $3,500 week.

Later on, I got fired from there so I went back to Atlanta. I heard about New Orleans from other dancers. I was supposed to be working in New Orleans during the weekend when Katrina happened. I saved a lot of money dancing especially when I was heart broken. My boyfriend, who I was supposed to get married to, split up with me. I got upset I saved 40,000 in four months dancing in Atlanta and gambling in Vegas. I actually bought a house in Florida. I played craps and roulette and had a sponsor.

Rumpus: Okay, explain the difference between the sponsors, customers and clients.

Payne: The sponsors know your real name. He takes you to spas and on vacation, gives you the princess treatment and treats you like a human being. Clients are regulars who see you in the club and you are their favorite girl. Customers come and go.  So, the sponsor and I would go Vegas to trips. He showed me how to play craps and roulette. I don’t like gambling out of the country because they cheat. We were at Harrah’s in New Orleans, three days after Harrah’s opened. I wanted to learn how to win. He told me to get all the chips.  I kept choosing numbers. Randomly. I won 1500 dollars the first time I played Roulette. Whatever I won I got to keep and whatever he won I got to keep half.

But back to the stripping story: I got arrested 5 times for drugs possession in Florida. I was hooked on cocaine. But really, I was hooked on my ego. So I got fired from the club and I started going back to New Orleans and reacquainted with my friend Rachel who got me hired at Déjà vu on Bourbon. I was staying at the Haunted House-the guesthouse on Ursuline where only dancers stay. I started working at Penthouse and turned my life around in five years time living between New Orleans and Florida.

In 2005, I got into culinary school, bought a car and a motorcycle. I got a job working at Tampa Stadium (football stadium) as one of the lead chefs. I did 122 salads every week during football season. I started at the beginning of the week prepping, filling orders and doing the salads. I discovered that I was good at it. But, my executive chef sexually harassed me all the time. I got used to that but kept at this job that I loved.

I stopped dancing for a while and wanted to become a great chef, but I became a starving chef. So I traveled to New Orleans every weekend to strip and still went to school full time during the week. I worked my ass off every weekend for three years and finished chef school. I decided to work on yachts to be a chef so I got certified. I became a private chef for people in New Orleans and Florida. This has given me a strong sense of real pride and accomplishment. Not putting smiles on their faces because I’m good at shaking my ass-which I am great at and a total bad ass-, but putting smiles on their faces because I’m giving them sustenance and food and comfort. It helped me to realize my own worth.

Rumpus: What would you like to see for women who are in the sex industry? Do you think they should go back to school? Do you think tinted girls will ever join forces and work together against the racism in the clubs and in the industry?

Payne: Prostitution should be legalized. I would like to see women to get unionized, and be shown more respect. For us to have more respect for ourselves. At the time, I wanted to stay grounded as a dancer because it was working for me. The business has changed. The backstabbing is worse than ever. When I started it wasn’t like that. It’s every man for himself now.  I’m lucky, because of my build, I was a kick boxer for 12 years, and no one really fucks with me directly. I would tell them this is not for the faint of heart, that understand that every dance you are giving a piece of your soul and how much of your soul is for sale? Or what price do put on your soul?

Every day is not going to be a money day. Some of those days and weeks, you’re not going to make any money so save it, put it away. Invest and educate yourself-school or not. School’s not for everybody. People wonder why dancers date scumbags? They do it because deep down a lot of dancers feel that what they are doing is wrong. People already see us as selfish gold diggers, so we date scumbags to show the world we are trying to save someone else because we cannot help ourselves. We are trying to redeem ourselves by dating scumbags, but it seems to backfire on us all the time. I hope my friends who dance stop dating assholes. The reason we date assholes is because we feel guilty and we don’t feel like we deserve better. Also, we want to help someone else. We want to rescue someone else because we weren’t taken care of when we were kids.

Rumpus: How do you think legalizing prostitution would help us?

Payne: It would be safer, less sneaky, more people getting tested, there would be set prices for dances instead of under cutting each other. Less competitive. More protection for the women. Fewer pimps. We’d work together to be cleaner, healthier, and happier.

Rumpus: How do you see your future? What will you do with the skills you learned dancing over the years? What are your goals?

Payne: I see myself getting out of the industry this year (2011). I’m currently writing a book about this life. I’m working on myself. My main goal is to help other molested children heal from the abuse. By being a private chef, I have to push it off to be in the right place. I want to be the bad-girl-gone-good. Not in a fairy tale sense, but in a real life sense. I want to take this chef thing to the next level and help children. I want to start a foundation-I want inner city kids to come and eat at my restaurant on Sundays for Sunday dinner and show them the how to cook. I want to go to schools and talk about sexual abuse. So many kids are being molested. It is prevalent in the black community.

Rumpus: Why is that?

Payne: In the black community, it’s taboo to talk to a shrink. There’s pressure to keep family business in the family. There’s a problem with the family structure: Guys don’t want to work and the mother’s working. Often the men: the uncles and brothers are home.  That’s when abuse happens. Who are the kids going to tell? More and more people are living paycheck to paycheck. My biggest goal is to provide someplace kids can go- to have someone to talk to.

Rumpus: Bad Girl Gone Good could be the name of your book. If you had a daughter that wanted to strip what would you tell her?

Payne: I would tell her the good and the bad. It’s not for the faint of heart. I’d tell her don’t trust anyone. Always be aware of your surroundings. Don’t leave with anyone. If someone is a regular, find out who he is. Google him. Be Safe.” I love you no matter what you do for a job,” is what I’d tell her.

***

Photos by Michael Siu, New Orleans.

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• Antonia Crane at RADAR

That’s where I met Bella. She walked in late from another gig, double dipping the Mardi Gras scene, which is what the smart girls do to stack paper during the festivities: they skate from gig to gig. She was the girl in gold glitter with tall legs solid as telephone poles. Her shiny black hair, now short, dripped to her tailbone. She kicked a strong leg behind her. A real dancer, I thought. Later I’d learn she also stripped at Penthouse and dated a friend of mine. There would be a night with the three of us in bed together, a beautiful black strap-on and my gorgeous tattooed friend between her legs.

Sex workers often live duplicitous lives, filing away family and love in separate neat boxes. I wanted to find an integrated sex worker, but I was hard pressed to find a stripper who’d talk about her kids or be photographed with them for The Rumpus.  The fact is, in the South, most girls I work with in New Orleans have one to three kids by the time they’re thirty years old, but few are honest about their jobs. I wanted to find a sex worker who would stand with me in that squirmy intersection where three seas meet: family, romance and sex work.

***

The Rumpus: Where did you grow up and what was it like? What were some messages you received about sex?

Bella Blue: I grew up in a really small town about 20 minutes outside of New Orleans in Belle Chasse. A large canal and the Mississippi River bind it. Most people who grew up there are still there but I couldn’t wait to get out. I wanted to be in the city. Growing up, sex wasn’t really talked about. I remember my Mom buying me a book that explained the technical things about sex (penis goes in the vagina). I also went to Catholic school for middle school and was taught that you were supposed to wait till you got married to have sex. I walked around until I was fifteen years old thinking that everyone around me waited until they got married to do the do. One of my most vivid memories of my sex Ed class (which was taught during RELIGION class) in middle school was my teacher drawing a cross-section of a man’s body with an erect penis. It was the most horrifying thing I had ever seen and couldn’t quite figure out how or why this was going to work for me one day when I supposedly got married and my future husband came at me with this thing sticking out of his body. I had switched to a public high school rather than sticking with the private school and everyone was definitely having sex but it was so normal that it wasn’t as talked about like it was in Catholic school. I lost my virginity at fifteen. I was drunk and my date was a senior and it was his prom. I don’t really recall a whole lot about it. Him and I are still friends to this day, fifteen years later. 

Rumpus: We have in common the loss of our moms. Can you talk about that and your relationship with her? What did she think about your choice to be an exotic performer?

Blue: My Mom died on February 20, 2010, of an aortic aneurism. We got close six months before she died. It was like she woke up one day and decided to stop personalizing my choices. She had been judgmental about my burlesque dancing and nude modeling. My mother was an addict but didn’t acknowledge it. She was emotionally manipulative. The vast majority of my life was spent terrified of what she we do or say to me—to get me to do what she wanted me to do. If I was happy in a situation with a boyfriend, it was hard for her, as if she were jealous. She needed to control me a lot of the time and because of that, we wasted a lot of time fighting. About six months before she died, things between her and I got really good. When I stopped expecting her to be a mom, that’s when she started to be one. Also I think something clicked where she really wanted us to be close and perhaps realized that some of her actions were mostly driving a permanent wedge between us. I was definitely no angel either. I could have done some things differently too. But, the important part is that we managed to work through some of that before she died. She was an excellent grandmother. She was always doting on my two sons. I really feel like they were one of the only things in her life that truly made her happy. She would have done anything for them.

Rumpus: You’re a single Mom with two kids and you are performing a lot of the time. What are some of the challenges you face?

Blue: I have one son who has been diagnosed with Asberger’s Syndrome: a highly functioning type of autism. [When he was] around 2 years old, I noticed that he wasn’t talking as he should be. It was comparable to someone with a hearing impairment. We had his hearing checked and all was normal. His communication skills were lacking and he had a tendency to parrot as opposed to coming up with his own original thoughts. His motor skills were a little off and he had a hard time in school with basic functions like coloring in the lines and using scissors. He was (and still is) sensitive to bright lights and loud noises. He also has some tactile sensitivities as well, such as tags in shirts, rough fabric, stickers, etc. Last year, I had taken the kids to the Texas state fair. There was an option to purchase a bracelet for a set price so the kids could ride the rides as much as they wanted. My youngest refuses to wear anything like this nor does he like stickers, stamps, or tags. These are little things to you and I, but are very disturbing for him. He wanted to ride the rides so bad but the thought of even having to wear that bracelet was so overwhelming for him that he became very upset. We had the option to buy tickets but we aren’t made of money and it would have cost a lot of it to let him have a good time. The frustrating part of this is that it was very difficult getting anyone to help us or understand the situation. They wouldn’t let me wear the bracelet for him. He couldn’t put it on his belt loop. Nothing. He HAD to wear it on his arm. We explained why he didn’t want to wear it. Still no help. Finally, after some help from our friend, the manager gave us some passes so he could ride the rides sans bracelet which was very generous and we were thankful and relieved. That’s just one example…

My oldest is totally opposite from my little guy. He’s into sports, fishing, hunting, etc. He’s a boy in every sense of the word. As he gets older and grows into a young man, it’s been even more of a mission that he not only understands what it is I do and that there is nothing wrong with it, but that it’s necessary in life that he be accepting of all people. In my line of work, my kids are exposed to so many kinds of people. Musicians, drag queens, dancers, and every kind of character in between. I also want him to understand that there’s no shame in being whomever or whatever it is you are. Sex and sexuality is a good thing, not a shameful thing, and that judging others by their choice of career or their sexual orientation is not acceptable. I forget that sometimes I need to explain things to him like what it means to be gay or what a drag queen is. I am so used to it and those things are so prevalent in our society, I forget that he might not know exactly what those things are. I also balance that with just being his mom and playing ball or building Legos with him. As he gets older, I want to make sure he feels comfortable talking to me about anything. Some of the most difficult years of his life are right around the corner and I want to make sure he knows he has a safe place to land always.

Rumpus: Does having kids make you question your decision to do sex work?

Blue: Sometimes I worry about later embarrassing them or them being ashamed that their mom worked in the sex industry. I just hope that they realize later on in life that I do what I do now to make sure they can have what they need and want later in life. Their education and their well-being is my first priority. Making a living this way allows me to do that. It allows me more freedom to be a good mom. I get to bring them to school, pick them up, go on the field trips, go to the school functions, etc. I might not be able to do all those things if I had a “regular” job. It’s not really any different to me than how a single mom who works as a banker must feel. I mean, it’s my career of choice. I personally think it’s really cool to be an adult entertainer, but I’m biased. My kids know what I do for a living. They know I am a burlesque dancer. And when the time is right I won’t hide the stripping from them either. They just can’t really understand that right now.

Photo by Michael Siu

Rumpus: I like that you don’t keep it a secret from them. I know a lot of sex workers who dance or perform and they hide it from their kids and family members, which I can understand because I think that relationships can be spared by not divulging unnecessary information. Like I don’t reveal certain aspects of my job to my dad over Christmas dinner. Though, he could Google me. I refuse to talk about religion or politics with certain family members because I am more invested in building a good relationship than I am in being right. At the same time, I refuse to hide that I am a sex worker, based on principal. There’s a girl who appeared in Playboy recently who I work with at The Bruiser and her pictures were absolute perfection. They weren’t raunchy but they were nude. I asked her if she had kids and she said no and then said, “I can’t wait to show my kids when I do.” I thought that was a cool attitude to have about the job. At the same time, I think it’s awkward for certain family members. Does your Dad know what you do? Do you tell your family members you are a dancer? If you do, do you feel you have to defend it?

Blue: My family knows that I am a burlesque dancer and that I perform and teach for a living. My older sister knows that I strip and she found out that from one of my blogs. She was very supportive and non judgmental. I have never come out and said out loud “yes ______, I do strip.” But, I think a lot of them assume. Some of my family are my Facebook friends, which has a feed to my blogs and such where I write about my adventures in stripping. So, I know that they know. They don’t judge me to my face and even if they do judge me, it really doesn’t matter to me. I pay my bills and take care of my kids…not them. So, however I choose to do so is my prerogative. We don’t really discuss it. It’s a little bit like a elephant in the room. I don’t go around announcing my champagne room experiences with them but if they asked, I would definitely fill them in on anything they wanted to know. I am not ashamed of it; I just don’t feel I need to shove it in their faces if they aren’t really comfortable with it.

Photo by Michael Siu

Rumpus: When did you realize you were different sexually than other people? When did you start doing sex work and why?

Blue: I was a pretty promiscuous teenager and into my 20′s. I was smart about it though and slept with people who I didn’t go to school with so I wouldn’t end up being the talk of lunchtime gossip. I had many a rendezvous with older men. Men that now, looking back, I see had no business having sex with me. But we did. I secretly was slutty and I was okay with it even though I knew the rest of the world would not be okay with it. Especially my family. I closed up a lot sexually when I was in my early twenties, due to a tumultuous relationship with my ex-boyfriend and lots of confusion about religion and sex. I had two kids out of wedlock and was having pre-marital sex with their father. His family was very religious and therefore, we were sinners. Deep down, I liked to watch porn. I wanted to do it in different positions. I wanted to be with women. I had a vibrator. But, I could never bring myself to even let him see me in the nude with the lights on. It was all very shameful. I started burlesque dancing almost 5 years ago and stripping three years ago. I started stripping because I just needed to make some cash here and there for tuition. I actually took about nine months off and didn’t do it at for a period because I didn’t really need to at the time. I also didn’t enjoy it then. I enjoy it now. It’s fun for me. I’d rather do fifty lap dances any day than have to work a nine to five job. I’ve recently dug into being more of a “professional” stripper because I’m saving the money to buy the building I’d like to buy next year for my burlesque school. It takes on a whole new life when you’re walking into that club with a goal to reach.

Rumpus: Say more about that: “It takes on a whole new life when you’re walking into that club with a specific goal to reach.” How is it different? What was it like when you were not driven? What skills have you honed in order to reach your goals as a stripper?

Blue: It’s different because of the sheer fact that I have a goal I am trying to accomplish. This is a means to an end. Not a career. It gives me more motivation and the clout I need when it gets hard and I want to quit. Stripping is one of the hardest things I’ve done. Not only physically demanding but mentally. Learning how to handle rejection, learning how to not tie your self-worth into the opinions of strangers as well as the dollar amount that you leave with at the end of the night. I have found that what makes me good at stripping is that I really genuinely try and find something interesting about each person I meet. With that, they can sense my sincerity and they feel that they are really cared for and desired for the time they spend with me. And more often than not, they are. It goes a long way for people. And it makes me feel good to give them that. Getting paid for that doesn’t hurt either.

Rumpus: Do you prefer stripping or dancing burlesque? Why?

Blue: If I had my druthers, I would pick burlesque. It’s certainly more glamorous than stripping, doesn’t have the long hours, and isn’t as physically exhausting. But, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy stripping too. In stripping and burlesque, I enjoy that my sexuality is celebrated. I enjoy being sexy and showing it off. I work hard on my body and I get to showcase it and make money doing it. I love pole dancing. I’ve learned a couple of tricks and am getting better as time passes. There are times during stripping where the men are mean. I don’t like that part. It’s not too often but it does happen. They forget that we are people and I guess it gives them a sense of entitlement to be mean to us. I’ve had a customer get a room with me, asked me to fuck him (I said no, of course), be extremely rough with me while I was dancing for him, and then jizzed all over himself at the end. He then asked me if I was really a boy. Amazing, right? My penisless crotch was inches from his face. I think that the roughness and his inquiry about me being a male was really his fantasy. I think he wanted to me be trans. You don’t have to deal with that in burlesque. People paid money for a ticket to your show. They want to see you and know that you are going to properly entertain you. They respect you. And in many cases, wish that they could do it too. You are less objectified in burlesque, if at all.

Photo by Massimo Pedrazzini

A great night stripping is one that doesn’t require me to be there till 4 or 5 a.m. and I make lots of money! I’m happy with a $300 or $400 but anything more than that is awesome of course. A great night of performing is when I have no costume malfunctions, when the crowd shows up ready to be entertained and all in all the show flows smoothly. I can’t say that in four years of performing that I have ever walked away from a burlesque show completely disappointed or unfulfilled.

Rumpus: We talk a lot about the challenges of being in a polyamorous relationship, which means that you and your boyfriend have other lovers separately and together, but you are the primary relationship. Tell me how this works and what you are learning so you can share with us how that is possible. How does stripping and performing complicate or benefit that arrangement you have with your boyfriend?

Blue: As far as my relationship, it has made me a better person in deciding to live this lifestyle. Monogamy is hard. Non-monogamy is hard. I am madly in love with my partner and our relationship is based on trust and honesty. I’ve never experienced anything more intimate in my life or in any monogamous relationship I’ve been in. In order to share your partner, you literally have to get over yourself and your hang ups and believe and trust in how your partner says they feel about you regardless of the fact that they are bedding someone else. Sex and other relationships outside of each other don’t change how you feel about one another and in a lot of cases, it brings you closer together. It’s difficult. I won’t lie. I have been through some heart wrenching situations in the last few months but the thought of going back to monogamy is a lot more painful than any temporary discomfort I may feel by our lifestyle choice. Just as my outside relations are separate from my partner and I, so is my work. I share all the details of my stripping, performing, and domme experiences with him but they are not related to our relationship at all. I like it that way. It keeps what we have just for myself and for us. It’s hard to put into words how special it is to me.

Rumpus: Well you just did. Sex workers tend to wear many hats/play lots of roles. Do the lines blur? Does stripping/burlesque work interfere with your personal life and if so, how? Does it add to it?

Blue: One new thing is that I’ve been sober since December. I think if I had decided to take on anymore than the burlesque while I was still drinking and using, that it would be a different story for me than it is today. I keep work as work, and personal as personal. The lines don’t really cross for me. I am very protective of certain aspects of my personal life because of the sheer fact that I share so much of myself with others as a performer and as an online persona (which I do happily and willingly) but I’m still human and I need things that are not shared with everyone that comes to a show, to the club, or “friends” me on Facebook. I think the thing I struggle with the most from time to time is my self-image and the acceptance of getting older and still doing this kind of work. I have a bigger goal in mind and I know that these methods of making money to meet that goal aren’t going to last forever. Some days I get down on myself. I feel like I should have “gotten my shit together” by now. But, who the hell set the standard of what that means? Society maybe. But, I don’t fit in with any of those standards by any means so no reason to start now. Everything I do adds to my life in some way. I have met some amazing people. I have worked hard for my name and recognition in this city. In a lot of ways, I help people. Whether they need some attention, some entertainment, or both. I can deal with that. It makes me feel good.

Rumpus: How do you want your future to look?

Blue: I want to own my building and have the New Orleans School of Burlesque fully operational. My biggest fear is growing old alone. I would really love to share a life and a home with someone one day. I want my kids to be happy no matter what it may be that makes them so. I want the next generation of burlesque dancers to hopefully be influenced by all the work I have done over the years just as I am influenced by the burlesque legends. If I could paint it out, that’s what I would paint it to be—in glitter paint.

Photo by Michael Siu

***

First photo by Jian Bastille.

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The metaphysics of self-representation are one of the most intriguing threads in the book. JAG can seduce, create distance, vent, mediate and he can disappear predators from fallenangels. In the phantasmagoric landscape of Internet dating, he is forgiven and washed clean, baptised: free to soar or sink. Using technological identity as his playpen, he is able to cross class, age and race and perform the roles that are demanded. He responds to the call: helping women fulfill their desires, but while assuming many identities, he traps himself into a lonesome corner, unable to accomplish his task (obtaining custody of his son). In the beginning of the book, I thought the custody battle was going to be paramount, but that aspect was more of a symbol of redemption: the recovery of something lost or sold. That lost thing was his identity.

–Antonia Crane

The Rumpus: I love the naiveté of the first scene, where JAG picks up the bus stop hooker who we will call “Daisy Duke.” He feeds her a hamburger and calls her a saint and a superhero. He describes her lips as “split cumquats” and he promises her a movie and the beach (read: creating new, virgin memories as if with a child–his son who was stolen away from him). She calls him a “damn faggot” and demands to be taken back to her pimp. In that scene, JAG’s innocence and romantic messiah complex is bleeding out everywhere and it made me love JAG right away. The hooker is so real. The scene is outrageous, humorous, tense and ironic. The narrator rejects the role of customer and is rejected as a suitor. So the book begins in a naked landscape of shirking roles. What kind of man is JAG at the beginning of the book?

Jesus Angel Garcia: What kind of man? A lost man, I think. Betrayed, broken, suffering, confused, clueless, amorphous but not closed, not yet, trying to be open, I believe, longing to connect, and determined to get his son back while dealing retribution to his ex.

Rumpus: So what’s the deal? Did JAG abandon the actual baby for other global babies? Did the book begin as one thing and expand? By the way, the custody battle thread as visible and invisible worked well.

Garcia: Thank you. I think you nail it with the actual baby v. global babies thread. The search for identity in the book was primary for me from the start–and it’s not only JAG’s struggle. It’s like a house of mirrors, maybe, of contemporary social interaction, where the reflections/refractions are kaleidoscopic, beautiful at times in the nobility of the effort, mostly bent in execution, no matter how well-intentioned or wide-ranging. Then there’s the micro/macro lens: the infant son and the infant-like neediness of JAG and the fallenangels, individual aggression and a global War Without End churning in the background, preaching from the First Church pulpit and the moral judgments, justifications and hypocrisy of believers and non-believers alike.

Rumpus: At first, I was sidetracked by your exciting characters and playful scenes, mesmerized by the sexual desire as a revolutionary fuel towards JAG’s identity search. I was an enthusiastic passenger on the cyber-ride, but what was missing for me was a tangible emotional risk. I found it, halfway through, in JAG’s desperate longing and failure to connect. JAG’s loneliness was like watching a computer explode. JAG was hooked on the surround sound of tech babes, using them to shield him from his destructive nature, to distance himself from the men in his life, and he lashed out by hurling his broken heart at a computer screen. He OD’d on the emptiness of the simulacra, crashed on the floor, having hit a spiritual bottom. It was like watching a cyborg melt. In that scene, the women were all cyber-chatting at once, and there were phantom connects, but mostly a ringing emptiness in the room. I think the best line in the whole book is this: “No one was reachable” (p. 221). I think this is where we are as a culture. All of our tech toys are built to connect, but what they accomplish is desolate isolation. Would you say technology is reshaping male identity? If so, how?

Garcia: I’m convinced technology is reshaping human identity, but I don’t know that it gender discriminates. We’re all cyborgs now, bound to our keypads and touchscreens and earbuds like never before. We can’t move through the world in a typical day without facebook or Twitter or logging on to our blogs of choice or texting or emailing or messaging or Skyping or downloading videos or mp3s or clicking from this to that to this to that nearly every waking moment. And if that’s not enough, talking heads or disembodied voices and sounds churn continuously in the background. That’s a lot of noise.

What this means in terms of identity might be something like we’re now more distant and less intimate while trying desperately to construct a solid sense of self through fragmented electronic interfaces rather than one-on-one contact. Even though we’re glutted with all this so-called connection, we’re hungrier than ever, yet we’re toothless: We’ve lost the ability to chew and taste and savor, but we’re really good at swallowing. If we’re lucky, maybe we spit up sometimes or dribble on ourselves. There’s your contemporary male (and female) identity: dribblers and pukers, jonesing for a French kiss.

Rumpus: For a guy who just bought his first cell phone last week, your book is chock-full of sophisticated cyber jargon. Are you on any dating websites? Do you have several online identities? Do you think we are lost as a society, driven to isolation or do you think we can use technology to connect as much as we can to hide? Do you think we are “just warm bodies longing for connection” (p. 140)?

Garcia: I used to do the cyberdating thing. It was (ehem) research for the book. I would sometimes play with identity just in the way I’d first approach certain women, kind of like using their profiles as prompts for fiction-writing exercises, to push myself as far as I could go, see what might come back. I’m a strong believer in putting yourself out there in any situation and going for what you want. You never know what you’ll get. Then you have to decide if it’s really what you want.

I think we are warm bodies longing for connection, but a lot of us have forgotten how to connect, what it means to be with another person without an e-interface as safety net or guard. The worst is watching people together at a bar or restaurant, each with a cellphone in hand, each checking messages or texting someone else. That’s so far gone. What? We can’t spend a few minutes or hours exclusively in the presence of another person we like or even love without needing to check in with our electronic lives? I think this behavior is what drives us to isolation. We’re addicts to elsewhere, as if meaningful connection isn’t what’s right up in your face; it’s the next thing, and the next, and the next. Seems like awful isolated disconnect to me. Pathological. And yet, sure, yeah, of course, we can also use technology to connect in positive productive utilitarian ways undreamed of just five years ago.

Rumpus: badbadbad is bursting at the seams with fascinating women who are outrageous in their demands and crackling with desire. The women perform different versions of the self. Helen Cixous claimed “artifice is on women’s side” because seductive masks travel beyond oppositional logic where women can dis-identify and play around, honoring life’s multiplicity rather than as a subjugation of the truth. In badbadbad, the women have multiple signifiers: Dream2live4evR (Remedios), the Vocabularist (Ms. V),  Blossom, Lil_Girl, Philomela, takemehigher, SexxxeeYoungMama (Shannon), Good Charlotte (the Reverend’s wife), Daisy Duke (saint, superhero and whore), ticktockclock, happyhappy, CondeeCandee, watch_me_now, sultrysuccubus and Kaddisha Lemonade. They demand pleasure; they demand to be taken back to their pimps; they demand pain, satisfaction, drugs, tater tots and orgasms. JAG taps that sweet spot between lover and savior. Forced to renegotiate his identity, and fueled by the guilt of his grave mistakes, he spends much of his time on this sort of alternative Christian dating website for women in need while on the clock working for First Church of the Church Before Church. Most importantly, he uses his identity to serve the needs of women and empathize with their suffering. So, JAG also subjugates the truth in a kind of feminist cyborg manifesto, serving women and exploring new roles. Was this your intention?

Garcia: Male versus female, straight versus gay, “white” versus “colored,” Christian versus non-, and so on. I was hoping with all the identity shape-shifting to punch holes in the rigid Western belief of duality as “reality”–everything is black or white, this or that, right or wrong, one or many – which includes conventional gender expectations: how we’re all supposed to act or be. I saw a tattoo at a recent Radar reading in San Francisco that said “Both And.” That’s the idea. Everything is both and, not either or. I like what you said above: honoring life’s multiplicity. When we roleplay or shift identities, are we really subjugating truth if “truth” (or self) is multiple (fluid)? Where we run into problems, I think, and this is JAG’s thing, is that roleplay is dangerous for everyone involved when you’re out of touch with yourself, when you can’t differentiate between fantasy and what’s real, tangible, authentic right before your eyes.

Rumpus: But the tech landscape (or cyborg community) always already blurs those lines, and then there are the fakers, the identity stealers and the posers. And there was JAG, who wanted to explore and showed up gangbusters for every role he was asked to play. He was kind of bottoming to the women.

Let’s talk about the women and what’s “real.” To me, they seemed more real than the ex, the brother and the lost son. The women in badbadbad are beyond real. When I was reading in the framework of the confessional structure, I thought, this is a manual for how to love and serve women. He is writing to his son about how to love. There’s a great line when JAG is reflecting on his chats with Remedios: “I wanted to wrap my wings around her and rock her back to health, love her like no one else could.”  Do you agree?

Garcia: Sure… yeah… one could argue, I think, that learning how to love and serve (and communicate and connect with) women – and putting such learning into action in our everyday lives – would benefit the entire human race. Of course, this extends to everyone, regardless of gender, all the time. But given the path of history and the iron fist of patriarchal rule and endless war that brutalizes countless lives – women and children being the most vulnerable in such situations – I think we might understand maybe everything there is to know about how to treat each other with loving-kindness by learning how to connect with the hearts and minds of women, which naturally includes connecting through the body. Not a bad deal, I say.

Rumpus: The women in badbadbad are complex and smart. They’re layered characters with histories of suffering and stories of sexual abuse, hormone-balance issues, fainting spells, ex-boyfriends and parenting struggles. There are also some very troubling scenes, sexually violent scenes, and a loaded S/M sex scene. JAG is compassionate and educated about sexual assault. He genuinely seemed to want to help and listen. I’ve never read a character like him before.

For example, there’s happyhappy, who was raped on a Christian college campus. She reached out to JAG requesting to relive the experience as directed by her therapist. This scene was emotionally risky, more than the elusive son and the anger towards the ex. JAG was becoming unhinged, and he seemed to get lost in his desire to please women. He was vexed. He struggled with the question: Who would he be as a man if he performed the rape? At the same time, it was clear JAG was keenly aware of the consequences of rape, the statistics, the PTSD and he was full of compassion.  Did this feel as risky to write as it felt to read?

Garcia: I guess it was risky because it’s not a place I would choose to go in my personal life. It’s a challenge as a writer – as a person – to empathize with multiple sides of a character or an issue to try to gain a fuller understanding of how we’re affected by what happens to us and how what happens to us affects how we behave. I believe rape and child abuse are the vilest crimes imaginable not just because of the extreme violation of the acts themselves but also in how they affect the victims for the rest of their lives. I don’t know how anyone recovers from such violence or manages to rebuild themselves or even continue living. Those who do so must have incredible power. 

Rumpus: The character ticktockclock also left a big impression, because there was a real lack of desire between her and JAG and that intrigued me. It was her emptiness that drew him to her and they existed in that emptiness together. Her house and her sexuality were the most depressing out of all of the women. It reminded me of Bataille linking sex and death to disgust. What was JAG trying to accomplish by meeting her needs while ignoring his own?

Jesus Angel Garcia: I think that’s where we really begin to see how he’s going down an ugly path that’s probably not going to turn out well. I feel like he’s trying to remake himself, latch onto a new identity, as this good guy who does for others, who does what’s “right” – that’s how he can be of use in the world – but by ignoring his own needs (does he even know what he needs? who he is? how to be?) he sets himself up for extreme self-gutting. What does he accomplish? He gives her a fleeting feeling of connection while further distancing himself from himself and, thus, everyone else.

Rumpus: CondeeCandee demanded toys and would never allow JAG to spend the night. My favorite scene with her is when she strapped on her “Dragon” and made JAG take it in the ass as she commanded. In a story that’s not driven by S/M relationships, it was a surprise to read that sex scene. The end result was that JAG decided she was too selfish and nixed her from the fallenangels website. Why such a strong reaction against CondeeCandee post-anal-penetration? Is her name a word play on “Condescended?”

Garcia: I like the condescension connect, though I hadn’t thought of it, I don’t think. His reaction, I believe, comes from being fucked over (and now literally getting fucked when that’s not exactly what he wants or needs) for so long in so many ways simply for being “selfless [in his] aim to please.” At this point in the narrative he’s struggling against self-imposed martyrdom and is finally fighting back. Axing her from the website, which is where so many of these characters “live,” is the best he can come up with for administering what he sees as appropriate justice.

Rumpus: The framework of badbadbad is a confession but it’s more of a transgression of that structure. At times, it’s more of a diary of cyber chats, and that changes the domain of the confession. As in Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto the laws in the cyber world are outside of Western myths and salvation history. She points to pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. The idea of a confession is very Catholic because there is a transmission of history coupled with the Western idea of inheritance. To paraphrase Avital Ronel, “Inheritance isn’t something you ignore – it’s part of you, you have to have a face with it and see where it traps you.” In badbadbad, there’s a bloodline issue, a custody battle, the birthright of the father, where male identity is being held up to the light and rewired. What I’m suggesting is you offer a traditional Western Christian framework and then blow it to smithereens. Is this accurate?

Garcia: I like how you put that. Yeah, I tried to pull that off. Thanks for seeing it. To my mind, Western paradigms about family, religion, politics, race, class, gender, etc. are largely a farce, driven by division, riddled at best with hypocrisy from all sides, and it’s all okay: Everyone’s a hypocrite, so it’s all good. Here, buy this new cell phone. You can download porn and a complete annotated bible in 2.5 seconds with a 4G connection for only $89.95 a month (plus applicable taxes and surcharges and a two-year contract required).

Rumpus: I loved the risks that were taken in scenes that were tense and horrifying. Your female characters were layered with meaning, including the character, Kaddisha who was full of surprises. Her name is Aramaic for “prayer for the dead.” I looked up almost all of your character’s names for clues to try to hack your codes.  I was pushing for JAG the whole way through to get his shit together and get his son back.  And, I wanted to cruise bus stops with him, eat a burger and listen to “Castles Made of Sand.”  Music is textured throughout your book. Can you talk about the transmedia aspect of your work? I heard one of the short films made it into a festival.

Garcia: No festivals yet for the film (I only finished it two days before kicking off this summer tour I’m on) but it was screened for the first time in its entirety at The Film Bar, a one-of-a-kind venue in Phoenix dedicated to indie productions. The nearly one hundred song references in the novel can be found on this YouTube playlist, which was the first transmedia idea I had for the book. From there, it blew up big-time.

As I mentioned in a recent Monkeybicycle interview, for me, a transmedia novel is a mashup. It’s a narrative that transcends the printed page, that fuses a wide range of storytelling techniques and technologies to essentially tell the same story in different ways potentially to different audiences who might not otherwise come across the work. It’s also the idea of translating literary constructs into other media or languages, which use other means of communication and thereby expand on the original story.

In practical terms, this means badbadbad combines a traditional print book, a soundtrack of original songs derived from the narrative and a five-part documentary film based on some of the novel’s themes. Then there’s the performance aspect of the live “readings,” which add another layer. Some badbadbad shows are simply a straight reading from the text, but more often than not they mix-match the various elements or incorporate a theatrical embodiment of a character, which changes the way the narrative is presented and perceived. I think my aim with all this is provocation and subversion – and a whole lotta hell-raising fun.



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[Editor's note: Some photos NSFW.]

I write between clients. There’s a yellow wall behind me, and fuzzy leopard print pillows on the floor. I sink into them with my computer while sun shoots golden light onto our bare legs. There are other women here: One with dark curly hair and ballet legs, another with a bubble butt who wears a magnificent, burgundy scarf and turquoise jewelry. Our phones vibrate. I whisper to the man on the phone and watch a pot of wild rice simmer. I tell him the address and the door code. Later he will be given a nickname, and that will be his all-access pass.

I write in a massage parlor between hand jobs. Among the women, there is talk of love and intention as they quote passages from Creating Money, and Sexology, but a happy ending is a hand job no matter how it’s accessorized. I’m okay with that. Outside on the balcony are clouds shaped like infected roots on the x-rays of teeth and a view of a canyon with eucalyptus trees. Through the smog, you can still see the Hollywood sign, but today all I see are faint white lines for the “Y.”

I write on a quilted disk pillow. A Tibetan prayer rug hangs above me. If I move, the red, orange and gold Buddha will tickle my left shoulder. I sip chocolate tea and edit my book. I’ve been out of grad school for two years and my book is not finished.  It feels like I’m writing the end now. It’s like being pregnant with a chain saw for two years; the final trimester blades whirring to get out.

Next to my computer is an iPad where I enter sixty-minute or ninety-minute appointments that happen in rooms with dark green sheets and crock pots where oil is warmed. I’ve never worked in a massage parlor before. I’ve been flying blind, meeting strangers in hotels with my arsenal of butt plugs and floggers, then sitting on my green couch with two cats beside me, waiting for the phone to ring. When I wasn’t panicking about money or getting arrested, I was writing.

Before my client arrives, I save my word document then light candles, scrub the shower and skate barefoot on a towel to dry the bathroom floor. Some of the women here fancy themselves high priestesses, and in their sessions they speak in tongues and use feathers to excite sensation. Another girl will put her lips near a client’s ear and make purring noises then giggle like a baby bird. My sessions are not elaborate. One thing I learned from the purring girl was the pillowcase trick, which involves blowing hard on a pillowcase, which has been placed on a client’s chest covering their belly and dick. Using my stomach muscles, I blow until I make a humming noise. I try to keep a straight face while doing this and promise to write about it afterwards.

I’m just learning the ropes. I drizzle coconut oil onto thighs and necks, rub shoulders and feet, slipping my legs underneath theirs on a massage table, pulling at them until they come. There is a loneliness to it that lands in my bones. I shower off afterwards, but my keyboard stays shiny from the oil residue on my fingertips, because I fall into the arms of writing after my clients are gone.

How I got here was an email that turned into a dinner invite–nothing like prancing around stage before coked up managers; grabbed then dismissed. The girls I met for dinner traveled to the jungle for silent retreats. They were both yoga enthusiasts with pierced belly buttons and deep tans. The food was pink: tuna tartare and blackened catfish. We drank filtered water from a thick glass carafe. Sex workers never eat at the cheap places.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

“No.”

“Lovers?”

“Sometimes.” I thought of the guy everyone sleeps with whom I told I couldn’t sleep with earlier today.  Another one was too fragile so I didn’t fuck him either, but now it was all I thought about doing.

The women wanted gelato so we strolled past a storefront with phrases cut out of linen draped in front of the window that said: “Falling in love is the worst. It makes you act stupid” and “You are my favorite.” My heart leapt for whomever strung those words across the window like a sky, but I walked away, knowing that sex work and being in love make sour bedfellows.

“What exactly goes on in the rooms?” I didn’t want gelato. I sat in an iron chair outside and watched them spoon the sugary glop into their mouths with no regard of the fat that collected on their thighs.  This made them suspect. I hoped they’d tell me the truth. Anything more than a hand job left me emptied out. Sometimes it took hours or days until I could feel something other than being spent. It reminded me of the Whipple procedure my Mom had to treat her cancer: her intestines were extracted, the cancer removed, but when they shoved her intestines back inside, it was never the same. Eating was a mess. “Sacred temple body work ending in a hand release,” she said.

“I’m not trained in massage,” I said. I don’t know why I sabotaged myself by telling her this.

“I’ll train you,” the girl with the bird laugh said. She gave me a tour of the place. We climbed a lot of steps to get inside, where there were orchids, light dimmers and feathers in vases.  The massage parlor was more like a spa with a communal kitchen and lots of animal prints, nothing like I’d imagined: grimy massage tables with old scratchy towels that smelled like bleach and come.

“You can write here,” she said.

***
First photo by Romy Suskin.

Second and third photo by Sheila Hiber.

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-John Sinclair

The best music and art erupts from immense suffering and revolutionaries are guided by great feelings of love. Combine the two and you get John Sinclair, a passionate supporter of blues and jazz music and former manager of MC5, a defiant, charismatic rock band from Detroit, Michigan in the 1960s and early ’70s. Sinclair and Tyner, the lead singer, matured into radicalism together. MC5’s audio onslaught and maniacal stage antics were great performance art and robust music, but their main goal was to overthrow the government of the United States.

John was in New Orleans for Mardi Gras for his annual participation in the celebration with the Mardi Gras Indians–also called the Wild Magnolias–where they have enacted their frenzied street rituals in the most ancient district of New Orleans since the late 1870s. I met John at a friend’s house last year, and we discussed a possible interview.

“I’m so sorry to keep you waiting,” John said. I’d waited for him for over an hour. It was the day after Mardi Gras and New Orleans was slow moving, dragging its heels back to some kind of normal. John showed up with his daughter and a man who was filming him for a documentary. The cameraman said he wanted to film our interview. I asked him not to. John kept apologizing. It wasn’t a big deal to hang out a while at Mary’s, I told him.

“Let’s go outside so I can smoke,” he said. For a tall, grisly man he’s gentle. I followed him out to a table where ivy curled around a fence. We sat under trees where I smelled basil and rosemary. His daughter brought him a po-boy sandwich. “She takes good care of me,” he said. He lit a joint and it glowed hot and orange. It’s all I could see in the darkness. His voice was sweet and gravely like Johnny Cash in his late years.

Sinclair’s been a beacon of optimism since the ’60s, when he was a fixture in the beatnik artist movement in Michigan. He was a jazz poet and worked hard to thrust the revolution forward. While the Civil Rights movement was simmering, the Black Panther movement was formed and the Avant-Garde Jazz Movement was stamping its foot. John was made chairman of the White Panther party, a leftist organization of white people who assisted the Black Panthers. He started the Detroit Artists Workshop (1964-68), did radio shows in the US and Amsterdam. He was the manager for the aforementioned spit-in-the-face-of-god-and-art band, MC5 in 1967-69 before he went to prison for his radical stance on marijuana.

Photo: © Barry Kaiser 2001 (all rights reserved)

John’s driven by a generous concern for the world in a way I can hardly grasp. At the same time his opinions are void of contempt for those too cowardly to speak up, or who have sold out. Squared-up. Listening to Sinclair talk, it became clear how peaceful and happy he was to be an artist, even though it’s not an easy life to be an agitator, a poet and a piss-poor Marxist. It’s like the decision to be a writer, encounter failure, piss people off, disturb and horrify family members. It’s baffling, but it’s the right choice.

After our discussion, I went to hear John read his poetry from his book It’s All Good, in the Gold Mine Saloon, a tiny bar in the French Quarter. Sinclair’s scraggly silver beard and frenetic hands jerked in the smoky bar. He swayed while he read and a woman in a floral dress danced wildly. I had a maternal urge to fetch Sinclair a napkin for his sweaty forehead, but I figured he probably didn’t give a shit and would be irked by my uptight middle-class tidiness.

John makes grubbiness look distinguished. In 1969 he was sentenced ten years for giving an undercover cop two joints right after Elektra records signed the MC5. He was already a rambunctious participant in the White Panther party. In a culture that’s numb and commercially creepy, where opportunism and moral caprice are normalized, celebrity is valued over intelligence, and fearless commitment to social change and emotive art is considered low rent, John poured forth images of love, cobras, gasoline and sex. In his poetry, I could hear the heartbeat of revolution.

***

The Rumpus: What was going on in Michigan that sparked your interest in the civil rights movement and particularly socialism and anti-racist movements of that time?

John Sinclair: As a kid, in Flint, Michigan, I listened to rhythm and blues on the radio. Introduced to the concept of black people and art, piped in from another planet. When rock and roll exploded in 1955, there was Chuck Berry and Little Richard, Ray Charles and Howlin’ Wolf. Where does this music come from? Who made it? I had to know. Black people. What was it about them? Grew up in all white farming community. I had to learn about it, there weren’t black people around in my small farming town in Michigan, so I went to the dances and saw their music. That’s where I got exposed to black people and their struggles, their concerns. Interracial sex was going on. I wanted to infiltrate their music scene so I went to their dances. From there, I got involved in the civil rights movement, joined the youth chapter NAACP and the urban league and I picketed with them.

Rumpus: How did the Detroit Artist Workshop begin initially?

Sinclair: I moved from Flint to Detroit to attend graduate school, but I dropped out. I wrote my grad thesis on William Burroughs: Naked Lunch. You had to have a second language and I didn’t give a fuck. I lost interest in where college was taking me. You didn’t have to square up back then. We didn’t want jobs. We were hippies. It mushroomed over a year or two. When I dropped out and they asked me not to come back. I became an activist. Detroit appealed to me because I’d already been driving there to hear music. I wanted to meet the beatniks and to become a beatnik myself.  I knew they were there and I wanted to merge with them. I studied the poets and jazz. I smoked weed and dropped acid. My biggest influences of that time were William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac. Henry Miller was a one-man literary movement. Hubert Selby showed the vivid darkness of the American dream. I loved Edward Merton Dorn (Gunslinger), Coltrane and Miles Davis. I was preoccupied with radicalism and social change. We wanted to make a positive change in the world.

Rumpus: Tell me about the Free Jazz Avant-Garde movement and your role there?

Sinclair: This was very underground at the time. Miles and Coltrane were hits in their field. I got attracted to Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman. LeRoi Jones was my hero because he wrote poetry that had music in it and wrote for magazines. There were only four people in America who were kindly to jazz musicians at that time: Baraka, a crazy guy named Frank Kofsky. We were championing the jazz movement in 1962. Experimentation was considered a threat to mainstream culture, the insidious marketing machine that’s about filling society’s heads full of their own products. They want to package and sell it. It’s a media culture — it has nothing to do with art, creativity and change, so I started the Detroit Artist Workshop to revolt against that.

Rumpus: How did you get involved with the counter-culture Black Panthers and Fred Hampton in the first place?

Sinclair: I dislike the word counter culture. Consider the word “counter” as in buying it over the counter. We were against mainstream culture, especially the consumer/media machine. I was not involved with Fred Hampton per se; I got first involved with Eldridge Cleaver who joined the Black Panthers. My attention was directed to the alternative newspaper in 1966 and the Black Panther leaders. Our circles in Detroit MC5 were followers of the party. We had an epiphany when we were going to release “Kick Out The Jams” with Elektra recorders. We wanted change. We were out to overthrow the government. We formed and supported the Black Panther Party and wanted to protect people who loved jazz and Rock n Roll from the racism and oppression within the government.

Then there was my arrest. I got arrested twice. Once in 1966 and then in 1969. I was an agitator and started the legalization of marijuana and was very public about my beliefs so they thought let’s show these young people they can’t get away with this. So I was the anti-symbol: We must take them on, was my motto. I was in prison for 2.5 years.  My first wife and my brother, they organized benefits, lobbied legislature to get me out of prison. I directed my manifesto as much as possible from prison. We were trying to pass new marijuana laws in Detroit. I was saved by John Lennon. He pressured the government to release me. Don’t fuck with a Beatle.

In 1970, the legislature went on vacation. I was desperate to make a change and they took a long vacation as the paperwork sat and collected more dust. It was important to put as much pressure as possible to make them reclassify pot to something harmless. I was just an irritant, a Michigan State political prisoner. My appeal was designed to overturn pot laws and I wouldn’t give up. December 1971, we organized an event in the basketball arena, when we got people to play, peace activist Jerry Rubin came and was hanging out with John and Yoko. He told them about me and convinced them to come play. Three days later I was released on an appeal bond. The Michigan Supreme Court overturned my conviction on appeal in March of 1972, and the state’s marijuana laws were declared unconstitutional. Our strategy was to overturn Michigan laws and we succeeded.

Rumpus: I was also arrested recently for prostitution. Friends of mine have been doing erotic massage with ads up online for over fifteen years and never got stung. Do you think this was deliberate? I’m out about being a sex worker. I’ve written letters to the LA Times. Am I being paranoid to think the LAPD sought me out? I’ve always wondered about women in the Black Panther Party. Were women in leadership roles?

Sinclair: It certainly seems well thought out and strategic. The thing you should know is they hate us.  As a militant leftist radical leader, I was a threat. What you’re doing and talking about publicly is a threat. In the Black Panther party, most of the women had leadership positions within the movement. They were powerful and beautiful with their big Afros, leather jackets, and berets. There were as many women as men.  But, now that you mention it, men were terrible sexists at that time. They acted in a way that was considered hopelessly sexist by today’s standards. One of their sayings was “political power comes out of the lips of a pussy, not the barrel of a gun.” They also put pressure on the female members not to have sex with anyone who wasn’t a revolutionary.

At that moment in time, you could do anything you could rise to do. If you wanted to do something, you could do it. They didn’t have to support you, but they couldn’t stop you.

Rumpus: In this social media landscape, marketing has become more and more invasive. People are encouraged to brand themselves, to have a platform. It’s all about moving product. Can a revolution happen in this age? If so, how? How do you remain principled in such a climate?

Sinclair: I spent ten years trying to convince people to do the right thing. It doesn’t matter what anyone else does, what matters is what you’re doing. Making good art takes nerve, sacrifice, and talent. It’s not an easy life. The government hates us. They got everyone else duped. I don’t care what they do. All of the musicians from my generation were given shut up money to go away. To stop being edgy. Once you’re a millionaire, you’re not interesting anymore. The thing that makes people great is need, desperation, and depravity. People have to suffer to change. After the mid 1970’s, many artists squared up and went to college, and their priorities changed. That’s okay, too. But, music no longer drove them to go for the throat with their creative intelligence and audio onslaught. It’s corrupted now. It’s about getting rich and famous now. I decided I didn’t want to do that. I decided to keep going with poetry and cultural agitating. Poetry never sleeps.

Rumpus: What you said about the artist as a creative engine stemming from need reminds me of this excerpt from Neela Banerjee’s blog on the Jaipur Literature Festival. The excerpt is “What Junot Diaz Said” regarding failure:

Anyone who works as an artist, there will be a moment when you will be deeply tried, where you will be challenged to your core self. I always say this and I will repeat it to the end of time: You don’t discover you are a good artist because you are awesome. You discover you are a good artist when everything goes wrong and it keeps going wrong, and you hang in there. And you hang in there, because you are driven by two things, your love of the form – I mean, how would you suffer years of “failure” other than you love the form? I love literature, … but also the knowledge of what we do as artists is the ultimate faith-based initiative. You are already assuming anything that you write, and anything that you do as an artist, will somewhere in the future encounter someone that will need it. You are putting your hand out into the darkness, with the faith and the hope that another hand will come back. You are already lost in the deserts of hope; you might as well hang in there. The nature of what we do is about believing beyond all possibility: I’ve come through to the other side, and I can safely tell you, the only thing that matters when you’re utterly lost in the desert as an artist, is that you keep going. That’s when you discover you’re strengths as an artist. To touch your strength as an artist is far more useful to an artist than success.

Sinclair: Make art that is about our humanity: anything that pulls on our heart is a good thing.  Anything that makes us feel more is great. It can be a struggle; it ain’t no bullshit. They used to call it transenergy. Oh, and stop buying shit.  Anything that’s against consumer culture and consumerism is helpful.

Rumpus: Do you still drop acid? How long have you been living in Amsterdam?  What authors inspire you?

Sinclair: No acid. Not anymore. I’ve been living in Amsterdam since 2003 and I have a poet’s residence at the 420 Café. I love Amsterdam with the old canals and the movement of huge amounts of weed. For fun, I read murder mysteries. But I also read Jane Cortez, Sonya Sanchez. Language is musical. I love Lorca. Toni Morrison is our greatest living writer. Specifically, Jazz.

Rumpus: You’ve won awards for the best radio DJ and you have shows in Detroit, Amsterdam, and New Orleans. What is your direct connection to jazz and particularly Coltrane? What do you hope to accomplish now as a radio personality and through poetry?

Sinclair: From 1991-2003, I volunteered on the radio; for the last 5 years I was celebrated as the world’s greatest DJ, Radio Free Amsterdam. I have Detroit Life Radio and I have a lot of fun making the shows by myself on my laptop: The John Sinclair Radio Show — Radio Free Amsterdam. I’m doing what I can do. We can’t do very much without any fucking money. I’m doing what I can do to express my feelings and thoughts about culture and play music that I’m deeply in love with: blues. I’m 69 years old. I don’t even have a housing budget. It’s easier than paying rent. I make young people take care of me. I’ve got to put out a query to raise $1,200 to buy a new computer. Mine was stolen while traveling from Spain. My pile of wealth is my friends and children and I’m head over heels in love. I didn’t think I could feel this way again, but I do.

***

All photos by Lexie Montgomery unless otherwise noted.

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A Conversation with Cheryl Strayed, who is against sex work, and Antonia Crane who agitates for sex worker rights, about sex work and feminism.

In Rumpus Women Volume 1, Cheryl Strayed wrote the stunning essay “Pussy Fever” in which she describes a pussy-crazed cultural climate and time she nearly showed up to be interviewed for a job as an escort. She didn’t show up for reasons she talks about in this discussion that have to do with being a bawdy, audacious feminist. “Locker 29” is my essay about grieving my mother and auditioning at a club in New Orleans after being fired in Los Angeles for touching a client.

Our essays are often mentioned together. They contradict each other but also bleed into each other with twin feminist DNA. In order to have a meaningful conversation that’s neither punitive nor PC, we moved around the mirrors in order to look at sex work, the psycho sexual implications and emotional cost of selling lap dances and sex acts, the component of sexual abuse, the thing about our deceased mothers, riot grrrls and sucking your cock.

***

"Antonia" (1995) by Farika

Antonia Crane: I very much loved and appreciated your essay “Pussy Fever.” I found it brave, enlightening, kind and generous.

Cheryl Strayed: Thank you, Antonia. The admiration is entirely mutual. I thought “Locker 29” was beautiful and moving. I was honored our essays were pressed up against each other in the anthology.

Crane: At the same time I was conflicted, because while I loved hearing your experience, I disagreed with many of your assertions. I’m no authority on sex work. In fact, I began my live nude dancing career as a lesbian, feminist sex worker in the 90’s when stripping was chic performance art. Because of what it meant culturally and who I was sexually, my experiences have been more enriching and empowering than many other women in the industry. Many women who are stuck in the sex industry are without other viable options and have kids to support. My decision to work as a stripper as a white, bald, punk lesbian, Mills girl looked different. Sure, I was broke and estranged from my family, but it was less out of actual desperation and more of what I will call “constrained choice.” By writing about my experiences, I hope to encourage sex workers to tell their stories and help each other, as opposed to the more widespread attitude that is shaming and criminalizing.

Strayed: I am not an authority on sex work either. But who the hell is? Is there one perfect woman to whom we grant all rights to say what she thinks about sex work? I think it’s interesting that we both feel the need to state our lack of authority on the subject of sex work before we give ourselves permission to talk about it. The fact is, we both have an awful lot of collective authority on the subject—you as a feminist and sex worker; me, as a feminist who was drawn to sex work, but opted not to do it. We’ve both spent a lot of time thinking about sex work. There are many things on which I am not an authority that I write and talk about without first establishing my lack of expertise. So my first question to you is why on this subject does there seem to be so much worry over who has the right to talk about it with intelligence and passion and insight? Why do you think you are not an authority, Antonia?

We are always—no matter what subject we’re discussing—coming from the place we occupy. Whenever I write something I’m simply telling you what I think and what I think is informed, expanded, distorted, and constrained by my life experiences, my biases, my interests and my field of knowledge. There isn’t only one way to think about something. We all have a right to speak from the authority we have. I’ve read your work—on both your blog and here on The Rumpus–and I’ve noticed that you’ve often been challenged by readers on this question of whether you can credibly represent all or any sex workers, when in fact you’ve never claimed to represent anyone but yourself. That sort of criticism is a way of closing down the conversation. It’s what we do when we are afraid of talking about things.

Cheryl Strayed in January 1992

And it was partially for this reason that I was perfectly terrified to publish “Pussy Fever.” I was pretty sure there would be a lot of people questioning my “right” to talk about sex work, because I’m not and have never been a sex worker. I’ve written incredibly intimate things about myself—about sex and grief and infidelity, for example—but writing about why I have issues with sex work seemed to be one of the riskiest things I’ve ever done as a writer. I struggled with it. I talked myself out of doing it. But ultimately, I decided to say what I had to say. I wanted to publicly grapple with a series of questions that have been haunting me privately–as a feminist and woman and human–for years.

My decision to do so has no intent of or interest in shaming anyone for anything. In fact, it’s very much in accordance with your effort to encourage sex workers to tell their stories. I want to hear those stories too—from sex workers and also from those who have something to say about sex work. I’m a story seeker. I think it’s the only way for us—and by “us” I mean the big us, the culture—to make sense of sex work.

Crane: My hope is to write about sex work in a way that’s passionate and thoughtful, like you did in “Pussy Fever.” You’re right about shying away from being an authority. One guy even called me “the oracle of all things whore related” which was intended as an insult, but made me laugh. That’s why I feel like I have to state that preamble, but you’re right. I am an authority on my experiences. Besides, there are plenty of people who’ve never given a hand job for green and they’re quick to state their opinions. People are uncomfortable being uncomfortable. So, now that we can admit the discomfort orbiting the sex work conversation, let’s get squirmy.

Strayed: The oracle of all things whore related? Damn. I want to be that.

But okay, sister: let’s get squirmy.

Crane: In your essay, you state that you’re afraid to sound “uncool” (not progressive? Pro-censorship?)  Then you say, “Sex work is bad for women and soul sucking for us all.” And finally, “Sex work has been framed as ‘cool’ by your cultural milieu” and because of that, coming out against it is “uncool in this era.”

Photo by Atty

In society, you are not the uncool one, my friend. If any professional company googles me, they will disregard me immediately for any job. My family’s eyebrows are permanently raised from my career as an adult entertainer for nearly 20 years. Now, as a 40-year-old woman I feel stuck. My friends have been shrugging their shoulders for years. The LAPD has made their point and thrown me in jail recently. Do you think men want to date me? They recoil from me as if from an open flame. Cheryl, I am a feminist. I am also an OUT, proud sex worker. I also know for a fact that sex work can benefit women personally, politically and economically because it has for me. I also know how scary sex work can be and how frustrating and demeaning it is to be systematically rejected all night, how easily a girl’s self worth can be deflated, the unflattering light that can be shed on our intimate relationships with men who aren’t doling out cash or sexual validation, how hard it is to leave the industry and how high-voltage this topic is for most people.

Strayed: Oh, absolutely, Antonia. I understand that a lot of people in the big, amorphous thing we call “society” have a negative opinion of sex work. I don’t share that opinion. And I don’t in any way doubt the real discrimination those who do sex work face from all the sources you name. That’s the reason I specified that my questioning the excellentness of sex work was uncool in my cultural milieu, which, I should say, is a rather big milieu in my own little personal life. It’s essentially the sea I swim in—artists, progressive thinkers, people who read The Rumpus, people who live in Portland, Oregon—where, as I write in “Pussy Fever,” the sex industry has a lot of leeway because of the way the Oregon Supreme Court has interpreted and defined protected speech in our state constitution. There is no question that the general feeling among what I think of as my tribe is that sex work is something to be in favor of, that it’s lucrative and perhaps empowering to the women involved in it, and that to go to a strip club is an edgy and fine way to spend the evening. So to question any of that feels uncool and impossible.

Part of what’s challenging is even establishing the terms of the conversation. I am so utterly uninterested in the are-you-for-or-against-it debate that’s rooted in a moral code that I find inherently immoral. You say you’re an out and proud sex worker, Antonia, and I think that’s great. There isn’t a thing I’d take away from you on that. The pieces you’ve written about your experiences as a sex worker? They rock my world. And yet, as I wrote in “Pussy Fever,” I think sex work—at least as it’s currently practiced—is bad for women and therefore bad for society. My intent is not personal warfare with a public agenda; it’s to make a personal inquiry of social consequence. I want to understand more deeply what sex work is, what it means to me, to women, to sex workers and their customers, and to those who condemn and praise sex work.

It seems to me we have neglected to have that conversation. “Pussy Fever” was my attempt to have it; to talk about sex work within the framework of my own moral code, which is, at root, a feminist one.

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• Why Are You A Prostitute?
• Night of the Lilies
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #13: Bella Blue’s School of Three: Burlesque, Boys and Polyamorous Love
• Nothing But Trouble: Hookers & Memoir
  The Rumpus Interview with Bruce Benderson
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #8: The Sex and Politics of Antonia Crane

This is a response for Bedelia, who commented profusely about sex work, house moms, and her experience as a hooker for ten years on an earlier piece I wrote for The Rumpus.

In October 2010, I met a man in a lobby named Joe and spent nearly twenty-four hours in the Los Angeles County Jail on a prostitution charge.

In the holding cell, a beautiful Hispanic eighteen-year-old girl asked me, “Are you a prostitute?” Her brown eyes were pools of dark chocolate. She reminded me of girls I stripped with back in San Francisco when I was a bald, lesbian feminist, ready to take down the patriarchy with my pierced septum, blubbery thighs, and my self-righteous anger.

“Do I look like a prostitute?” I sat on a metal bench, squished between two women, knee to knee. A black girl who’d been hooking since she was twelve was asleep with her head on my lap.

“There are five black women, a Hispanic woman, and you. You’re a prostitute,” she said. She turned around and hopped up on a ledge and looked out the tiny window, then back to me.

“Why are you a prostitute?” she asked. Her voice was just above a whisper. I chewed my lip.

“That’s a good question,” I said. If she were Andrea Dworkin, she’d accuse me of being a brainwashed drone of the patriarchy, succumbing to violence against women. But I’d never thought of myself as a prostitute. I’d never been a streetwalker or a call girl; never worked for an agency or pimp.

There was a loud buzz. The door was released. A muscular Hispanic butch with one very long braid walked in and hugged the gorgeous Hispanic lesbian. When they kissed, the cell heated up but made my throat itch, and the rest of the women coughed. The lovers had gotten in a bar fight and were covered in pepper spray. The black girls who were busted for pandering and prostitution told me to apply for O.R. This meant since I’d never been arrested before I could possibly be released without bail. They settled in and knew the ropes and followed procedure. One made a call for me to ask about my release.

Hours later, we were escorted upstairs. Told to stand against a wall. The light was dead and yellow. We were handed scratchy blankets, which were more like tarps. The jailers snatched my black tights and stuck them in a Ziploc bag, to prevent me from strangling myself with them. I coughed into to my hands.

I was buzzed into a cell where there was a woman asleep in the bunk below on a green cold exercise mat, with her clear stripper shoes on the floor below her.

The worst were the sounds inside: yelling, buzzing, coughing, and lights clicking on and off. I climbed on my top bunk where there were scribbles on the ceiling from polished nails. Words carved into the wall: “I love you, Mom.”

The only light was through a mail slot that looked out into the center of a room that had a payphone. Over a loud- speaker, names were called for court, but not mine. I rang the buzzer. My breaths were shallow. “Guess you’re staying till Monday, too,” my cellmate said.

“Stop ringing the bell or I’ll leave you in there,” a jailer barked through the speaker. Hours passed. Breakfast was dropped through the mail slot. I ate a sausage patty, then fell asleep under my jacket that smelled like sweat and vanilla. After a few minutes of silence, the skinny black tattooed prostitute stirred in the bunk below me.

She said “Fuck, fuck.” The layers of hell slowly sunk in: I was going to miss my flight to New York. My cats weren’t going to be fed. My car was going to be towed. My rent was going to be late and I was in a cage.

**

Photo by Alison Dyer.

Related Posts:

• “Pussy Fever” Loves “Locker 29”
• Night of the Lilies
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #13: Bella Blue’s School of Three: Burlesque, Boys and Polyamorous Love
• Nothing But Trouble: Hookers & Memoir
  The Rumpus Interview with Bruce Benderson
• RECESSION SEX WORKERS #8: The Sex and Politics of Antonia Crane

New Orleans has a textured and macabre history when it comes to the sex industry, particularly regarding house moms–that hybrid of manager, referee and babysitter. One story involves a double murder-suicide, love triangle between two house moms who worked at Scarlet’s in July of 2005. Patricia Tipton and Julie Carreras ended an eight-year relationship and had words with their lover, stripper Lark Bennett, and it ended in their deaths by gunshot wounds fired during the fight in Carreras’ home.

But, house moms are not out for blood. Like strippers, they survive on tips that they accumulate from dancers for the items and care they provide the girls backstage. House moms are hired by strip clubs to enforce the club’s rules about the dress code, schedule and conduct. They’re entrusted with a dancer’s cash, secrets and belongings. The house mom at Penthouse Club on Bourbon Street, Marty Morgan, has the ability to ensure a dancer’s place on the schedule or promptly get her removed from it. She’s the seated goddess Demeter, with her crock pot cheese dip and homemade watermelon soup. Her desk is an encyclopedia of all things stripper-related and her meatloaf is beyond amazing.  She’s the eyes and eyelash glue behind the scenes, and she cares deeply for the women in her midst.

After Katrina, people not only lost their homes, pets and families, but their careers as well. Marty Morgan is an ex-Olympic athlete and personal trainer who owned a gym that was destroyed by the storm. After Katrina, she started over.

I spoke with Marty in her apartment in Algier’s Point, a historic enclave perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River, which is linked to the city by a ferry line. It’s been the temporary home of Lucinda Williams and William Burroughs and is known for its immaculately maintained 150 year-old houses and quaint festivals. It’s also the place where eleven black people were shot three days after Katrina by a self-appointed, all white militia. They could have helped the refugees with food and water, since Algier’s Point was dry and unscathed because its levees held. Instead, they stockpiled shotguns and blocked roads with lumber for the ultimate neighborhood watch.

I interviewed Marty while she gave me a soothing footbath in ionized salt. Attached to the plastic tubs were wristbands that transmitted the vibes necessary to detox my entire body through my feet. We watched the water turn rust red, as if a brick had dissolved in hot water.

***

The Rumpus: Where did you grow up and what was it like?

Marty Morgan: I grew up in Farmington, New Mexico. I’m an identical twin out of five kids. I was close with my parents, but they both passed away.

Dad was a salesman and disc jockey and outgoing businessman. I had an at-home Mom who worked for the city and won an award for not missing one day of work in forty years. She died of lymphoma cancer at 5:00pm, the end of her workday.

I came to Baton Rouge to work for Dale Carnegie Company of “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” I took the course where you learn about your fears. Dying is the biggest fear, talking in public is the second biggest. The course was about conquering those fears. I worked for that guy for five years. I also played racquetball, where I met my husband, and we married a year later. This was 1982. We lived in Lafayette. Mal had three kids from a previous marriage; his oldest was eight. It was an insta-family and we had a honeymoon baby. My oldest daughter, Malin, was born in November of 1983.

Rumpus: What jobs have you had in the past; and how did you end up becoming a house mom in a strip club on Bourbon Street?

Morgan: I started working for the largest fitness company in Louisiana Elmwood fitness as a personal trainer and consultant. I loved working with people. I loved being athletic and training people to be more fit.  I swam competitively in high school and college, and made it to the 1972 Olympics in the backstroke and breaststroke. I tried to qualify for diving but missed it by tenths of a second. Being at the trials in Cincinnati was the high point in my life. I opened a private gym with a friend. We had our private clientele on La Barre Road. He owned all the Mardis Gras shops. We had that gym for six years. I would also go to people’s homes to train them privately.

My daughter, Malin, had rented an apartment, and she was doing the traveling and dancing thing when she was seventeen at Penthouse. She was helping support our household expenses. I worried every damn night. She worked and went to school. I called the club looking for her one night and they couldn’t find her. The next day she told me, “They don’t know my real name.” My ex-husband was traveling off-shore. He paid child support and helped get the kids into private school, but she was contributing to the household by dancing at the club. After Katrina, when I finally moved back in August 2007, Malin told me they were looking for a house mom at Penthouse, so I applied.

Rumpus: Tell me about how you left New Orleans when Katrina hit.

Morgan: We were going to New Mexico to a funeral. My father-in-law died on a Wednesday and my father died eight hours later. We buried my father in-law as Katrina was moving through the Gulf. We already had booked flights out of New Orleans, and we didn’t realize the strength of the storm. We ended up taking the last flight out that day, and the flight crew came with us. There were thousands of people at the airport hoping to get out. We were at the funeral home, and we’ve always had storms that were no big deal. To have all my kids with me was a blessing; they were all safe. The kids got texts about how bad the storm was. Windows were broken; but we were out of the flood zone in Algier’s Point. Our three cats survived. I worked for Intel and did a computer job while in New Mexico; and after the storm they interviewed us on TV and we felt like celebrities. Two years after Katrina, I came back to New Orleans.  Before that, I would fly back on weekends and rebuild our house. That included driving a U-haul with three or four refrigerators and counter tops, things that you couldn’t get at Home Depot; so I redid the house and flew back to New Mexico to work my four days at Intel.

Rumpus: What does the house mom job entail, and how do you feel about the sex industry?

Morgan: Mostly, it’s about financial and emotional counseling and telling dancers to “Get rid of that boyfriend.” I have to maintain a clean area in the locker room and kitchen.  I supply tampons, hairspray, deodorant, perfume, eyelashes, makeup, sewing kit, phone chargers, Q-tips, cigarettes, gum, mints, bobby pins, mouth wash, rubber bands, baby wipes, soda, water, scissors, brushes, curling irons, aspirin, Bepto Bismal, Gas-Ex, Midol and anything else you can imagine. I count their money. Actually, I’m the only house mom the girls allow to count their money. I check the girls in, meaning write their names on the schedule, supply lockers and listen to their problems. One girl wanted to talk for two hours because she had to have an operation on her ovaries. I’m behind the scenes, so whatever goes on out on the floor I’m away from it. My goal is to make sure there’s a happy place for the girls working here. I think the job of stripping is hard, and shouldering rejection erodes their self-esteem. If I can help them improve their self-esteem, I try. I make sure they always have a healthy meal available to them. I think of these girls as my daughters; and they do the toughest job in the world, because it’s a constant bashing of self-esteem.  But what they don’t understand is those people rejecting them don’t matter.

Rumpus: What is the most disconcerting thing you’ve witnessed while working on Bourbon Street as house mom?

Morgan: Recently, one girl said, “You’ve got to help me, I’ve got to get out of this situation.” She had a pimp who was beating her. She left to get her luggage and shoes out of her car and her pimp kidnapped her, beat her, and took her to Baton Rouge. The next day, she came back and asked for help again.

One of the cocktail waitresses called a cop friend, and another girl drove in from two hours away to pick her up. The barback gave her money for airfare to go home. The dancers all surrounded her. They would do whatever was needed to get her away from that guy. They snuck her out of NOLA and on a flight to Kentucky. It was disturbing, but all of the girls and the barback helped her become the thing she wanted to be. That girl is now a Marine.

Rumpus: I’ve never had a pimp. Why do dancers have pimps? It’s something I’ve never understood. The clubs have their own security. Please explain.

Morgan: Pimps are in and out all the time and they’re dumb parasites. It’s a fear factor. The pimp befriends a vulnerable dancer like a boyfriend. First he becomes her best friend in the world. He manipulates the girl to give him her money for security. The pimps drive nice cars. If he does a boob job for her in Miami, he charges her 100% interest. The girls that have pimps act like it’s a sorority, and amongst the girls and their pimps they keep secrets. When the boyfriend routine wears off, they threaten to take away all of the things the pimp bought with her money. These girls act scared, like they are always looking over their shoulder. Probably, the attraction to a pimp stems from loneliness. I think it’s a daddy thing and a bad boy attraction thing. I know girls who have gotten away safely. Two of them are still back in the club working without pimps now.

Rumpus: How has the recession affected you and your ability to support yourself as a house mom? Do you think stripping is a trap? How can a stripper transition out of dancing and earn a normal living again? How will you?

Morgan: We are a tourist town and there’s a lot of traffic, so we weren’t hit as bad as other cities; but there’s more growth for New Orleans to do.

Before the recession, the girls would make an exorbitant amount of money. The way they spent money was big time. I’ve noticed a huge change as far as what the clientele expects for their money and how clients are reluctant to part with their cash. There’s desperation among the girls. They have to make rent instead of wanting to dance. It takes the fun out of dancing for them. I remember one dancer making 2000 bucks on her first night, and she would be so angry and mean when she didn’t make anything close to that amount. Their lives will never be normal regarding money and earning again, and I want to help them with that.  I think stripping is a trap because you’ll never make that kind of fast money. It’s so hard to get away from.

There are girls that want to stop because they found Mr. Perfect. They’re back six months later. If they would invest their money and get some kind of cushion, they could buy a rental property and then step into something different that’s lucrative. One problem is, even on a bad night, they’re making more than most people make in a week, so it’s hard to completely leave the job.

I’m laughing at your last question because I’m as bad as a stripper. Why would I do something else, when I can make more cash in three days than others make in a 40-hour week?  My plan is to transition into managing my rental properties and running a bed and breakfast for strippers so they have a place to stay and work.

Rumpus: Do you suffer the same stigma as the adult performers because of your association with strippers?

Morgan: People look at me strangely if I tell them what I do. I usually don’t tell them. I tell them I’m a director of entertainment, or I own a candy store. I like my job and I’ll do it indefinitely. I always associate with strippers in and out of the club, so that’s an eyebrow raiser but I don’t care. My bed and breakfast is designed for dancers to stay and rent while they’re working here. I’m running a bed and breakfast for women who dance as strippers and anyone can see that. I don’t hide that.

Rumpus: How have you helped the girls improve their relationship to money and plan for the future?

Morgan: I talk to girls about investing their money, and I concocted a plan: to show them by example that it can be done. Since January 5^th I started collecting five-dollar bills. The theory is that dancers can have $40K a year just in fives if they hold onto them. Now my stack is up to seven thousand and I’m just a house Mom. I make a fraction of the money they make. I tell them they can do it too.

Rumpus: It’s now mid-November. How much have you saved in 5’s?

Morgan: By November I had $9,300 so I bought a 2006 car at a garage sale with 15,000 miles. It’s been ten years since I’ve bought a car. I will have over 10K by the year’s end, entirely in five-dollar bills from tips.

Rumpus: How do you feel about both of your daughters being strippers? Do you hope they will do something different with their lives? Do you want them to get out of the business? Why or why not?

Morgan: It used to terrify me when she started dancing because of the stigma you mentioned. After I learned what goes on in the club, I worried a lot less.  I would like to see both of my girls save their money and invest it so they don’t buy shoes with the cash. I want them to save and be smart with it. I would like to see them get out of the business before it makes them tired or worn out and before they hate it. One of my daughters is pursuing her pilot’s license. The other one is in college doing her elementary education to be a teacher. I would talk her out of that before I’d talk her out of stripping, because the education system in New Orleans is awful.

Rumpus: What’s hard about your job? What’s great about it? Will you do next?

Morgan: The hours are hard. I work from 5p.m.-7a.m. or 9 a.m. so it is long hours. It’s a hard job. Lately, the girls are more frustrated. You can see it; they have flare-ups and say things they would never say before, because the money is harder. Out of 30 girls, three will be drunk and out of control, so I have to deal with them. I tell them when they’re losing their pretty, which is code for “Stop drinking, or you’re going home.”

The hard part is I don’t know what to say. I encourage them to try to think about other lifestyles, and I suggest going back to school. One stripper already started an assistant company for businessmen from out of town. She rents cars for them and arranges all of their appointments and dinners. The nice thing about this job is I can continue construction four days a week because I only work three nights a week. It’s a good cash flow. My fee that the girls are charged is ten dollars per head. What I’ll do next is just run my own stripper orphanage.

Rumpus: Will you adopt me?

Morgan: Didn’t I already?

***

Photos by Romy Suskin.

The Rumpus Sex Blog.

More from Antonia Crane’s Recessions Sex Workers series.

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