Lindy West and Jim Norton discussed/debated rape jokes on “Totally Biased” last week.  The shitstorm that came Lindy West’s way as a result is pretty horrifying to see, and also totally illustrates her point.  Here’s a link:

http://jezebel.com/if-comedy-has-no-lady-problem-why-am-i-getting-so-many-511214385

Now, I know you’re probably expecting me to go full force supportive of her side of the argument, but I’m not.  I’m not agreeing entirely with her specific opinion, but I am fully, without a doubt, supporting her right to have it.  I think that the negative response that she’s received is disgusting and undeserved, she has every right to express her opinion without fear of violent retribution.  And for that to happen, for angry idiots to think that threats of rape are a valid way to respond, and to say that she’s just upset that no one is trying to rape her, or that she has no chance of being raped (like it’s a fucking prize), only makes a stronger argument for the power of words, which was her side of the debate.  

[Btw: outside of a rape-play fetishist, no one is ever upset about not getting raped.  It’s just not something that incites envy.  You will never, ever hear a girl say “That party sucked for me. Kristie got raped left and right, but I just stood alone by the punchbowl all night.”]

I think that the problem doesn’t lie in the subject matter of a joke, but in the inability of the squishy-brained to understand that it’s just a joke.  Their ignorance endangers our ability to make those jokes without having to be conscious of social responsibility, which isn’t the job of an artist.  Sure, some (many, most) have the goal of making a difference, leaving their mark, being heard, but we shouldn’t HAVE to be aware of the shit that being misunderstood can lead to, because no one should ever take a joke seriously enough to rape over it.

I enjoy my freedom of speech, but I don’t enjoy that society has been dumbed down to the point that the First Amendment gets called into question (in casual debate, by non-government civilians, unofficially, and as was pointed out to me, incorrectly, which I didn’t know…) over art of any sort.  I like being able to make jokes about whatever I choose, but I hate knowing that some of my audience isn’t intelligent enough to recognize irony, sarcasm, or a host of other literary devices that make writing so much fun to do, and so rewarding when the intended meaning is recognized and appreciated.  

I’m not saying that my material is super-highbrow, and that one must have extensive formal education to enjoy it, I’m saying that some people are fucking stupid.  Some people don’t understand that a joke is, at it’s most basic, just that: a joke.  Not a behavioral directive.  A mockery of something that the comedian feels is deserving of it.  The responsibility of an audience member is to take in the entertainment.  To be amused. A comedy show is not a press conference.  Sure, you may walk away with a broader view of life and it’s meaning, but if you don’t, that’s okay too.  The audience member’s job is NOT to take everything seriously, or literally.  Remember, a comedy show is not a classroom, you are not a student.  You are a patron of the arts, fucking act like it.  After the show ends, go on about your life.  Don’t turn into some sort of henchman goon, protecting your jokester-guru’s honor.  If a comedian asks you to drink the kool-aid, DON’T.  Live by your own credo, not the funny words of someone who’s driven 600 miles for $200 more than once.  You should be embarrassed to take a joke more words-to-live-by-seriously than the person who wrote it.

A joke shouldn’t have to have a disclaimer.  People should be intelligent enough not to need one.

I guess what I’m saying is that if everyone knew to take a joke as a joke, this wouldn’t be an issue, and you’d be enjoying a blog from me about the intricacies of handjobs or lapdances or unrequited love right now., instead of getting soapbox-preached to about how it’s inappropriate to rape a lady for expressing her opinions.

This story has HEAVY use of “FUCK”. It’s also REALLY detailed. Sorry, I felt it was better to over-explain than to raise questions that distract from the continuity. 

                                    —————————————————-

4/19/13

Freaky Friday for sure! The silhouette of a man with a phone to his ear belongs to my ex-apartment manager’s douchebag hus

*      *     *      *     *     *     *     *    *     *     *      *      *      *     *     *

That’s as far as I got before the guy was back at the door to my peepshow booth.  His name is Sam and he’s a genuine, authentic, piece of shit.  He is the person I signed my lease with on my first LA apartment, which I also think of as my first experience with the “LA has 2 modes: deception and disappointment” phenomenon.  He is the person who gave me the creep-eye whenever he came into my apartment to not fix shit that I needed fixed.  He is the person who told me that I wouldn’t get my deposit back (despite the good condition in which I left the place. I filled my nail-holes, for fuck’s sake.) when we did a final walk-through as I moved out of that apartment.

Cut to Friday afternoon, 1:30ish.  This guy strolls into the peepshow, and stops at my booth.  I say hello, he tries to say something through his shock at seeing me there, and comes up with “Ummmmm…uhhhh….hi…so did you get your deposit back?”

To which I responded, “You know I didn’t.”

“So…uhhhhhh….you work here?”

Dumbshit. Fucking dumbshit. Fuck, fuck, fucking dumbfuckingshit. 

So he starts asking me about the place, says he works next door.  I explain it all.  He says “Maybe I’ll get money and come back.”, I nod and he walks away.  He stops by the back door and makes a phone call.

This is the point when I took the first picture, intending on writing a tiny little blog about how funny it was to see him there, how clearly uncomfortable he was, and how happy that made me.  If I were into blatant cliched foreshadowing, this is where I’d use it, to make you keep reading.

I begin to write, and as I was typing the word “husband”, I looked up to see him back in my doorway. 

“Ok, let’s do this.”, he said.

I explained how it works, he went in his booth.  The clerk came over the loudspeaker, announcing that he needed to pay admission.  I went to the front, explained I knew him and asked for his admission to be waived.  A kindness that he didn’t fucking deserve.

I did the peepshow.  As I was getting dressed afterwards, he banged on the door to my booth. I opened it, and he asked for a lapdance.  I finished dressing, found him (chatting with another girl), and told him to go up front to pay for the lapdance he wanted.  He did, and I stayed and chatted up the other girl, telling her what a douchebag he is, and how I was gonna get my fucking deposit back, $13 (the amount I receive from a $20 peepshow) at a time.  He returned, handed me 2 receipts (sometimes the guy gives us his receipt, which would denote what length of dance he bought) for $10 each.  Now, I know that a $10 receipt is either a 4 or 9 minute dance, but I was confused as to why he had 2 receipts.  I figured that he had a 9 (because he wouldn’t have 2 receipts for $10, if he only got a 4), so I  took him into the lapdance booth, set my timer for 8 minutes (screwing him out of 1 minute, I thought, because fuck that motherfucker), and began the dance.  After 1.5 minutes, I looked down, and saw a timer from the cashier counter sitting next to him, set for 4 minutes.  I stopped and asked him if he got a 4 or 9 minute dance.  He said 9, but since I don’t trust this fuckface to tell the truth, I paused my timer (I use my phone to time, never the store timers), and called out to the girl sitting near the lapdance area.  I asked her to go find out how long he paid for, she came back and called back to me from her seat, “He has 8 minutes left.”, thus making me think that he did pay for a 9.  

Towards the end of the dance, he began asking for my phone number.  I refused to give it, he asked what would make it worth it for me.  I said “Getting my deposit back”, and laughed.  He ignored that, and kept pressing the phone number issue, following me back to my room with it.  He kept asking “What if it was worth it, I don’t mean with dick, but just…you know…worth it?”, I kept replying, in increasingly detailed manner, “There is NO way it would EVER be worth it, there is nothing you could ever offer me that would make it worth it, because there is NO arena where anything you could offer would make YOU worth it.”

Finally, he leaves.  I walk up to the front counter, chat with the clerk about what a dick Sam is (and as stupid as the sun is bright, he actually bought 2 4-minute dances -equaling 8 minutes-  for $40, instead of 1 9-minute dance for $30), and ask for my money from the lapdance.  Now here’s how the lapdance payment works: sometimes the customer pays the clerk all of the money, and they hold it for us until after the dance, and sometimes the customer pays the dancer her portion directly. This is more of my awesome foreshadowing.  My earlier dance was one of the former, and I thought that this particular clerk was consistent in that manner.  I was wrong.  

“He didn’t pay you?”

RED.  I see red. I see blood fucking red.

This. Motherfucker. 

This motherfucker.

This fucking motherfucker who kept my fucking 2-months-rent-and-pet-deposit had screwed me one more time.  For $20. For work I did.  For work he was on camera receiving. No.

Nonononononononononononononnonnnnnononononono. NO.

The security guard/jizzmopper went to the appliance store next door, where Sam works, to get my money.  The clerk and I watched them arguing outside of our front door.  She joined them, adding another voice to the argument.  Sam said “She (the clerk) never told me, so I don’t have to pay.”, and I thought “Hey, this concerns me, and I’m a logical woman in her 30’s, I will go explain the situation in a non-argumentative way, and surely he will give me my deserved payment.”

No, seriously, that’s what I thought.

But, somewhere between taking my first step, and arriving at the doorway, that logical woman checked the fuck out.  I saw his ugly fucking face, heard him refusing to pay me, and lost my shit. LOSTMYSHIT.

I opened my mouth and nothing but a continuous stream of “Give me my motherfucking money! I want my fucking $20! Bitch, you will pay me my motherfucking money! You motherfucking piece of shit, you owe me $20! Pay me, motherfucker!  You got your fucking lapdance, where is my motherfucking money?” (and on, and on, and on along the same theme) came out. Loud and proud, it came out.  Poured out of my mouth, hung in the air, swarmed around his head like a bunch of pissed off bees.  My arm had raised with my finger cocked, ala DMX.  Y’all had indeed made me lose my mind, up in here, up in here.

He threatened to call the cops, and pretended to, holding his phone to his head and still arguing back, only halfway pretending to talk to the cops.  

I added “Yeah, bitch, call the fucking cops, YOU owe ME money, YOU have stolen from ME, YOU ARE IN THE FUCKING WRONG HERE, DUMBFUCK!!” to my litany.

He tried to provoke me into hitting him.  You have no idea how hard it was to resist.  I wanted to decimate that piece of shit.  To immolate him. I wanted to burn him to a dead crisp and sweep his ashes into the dirty gutter as an offering to the patron saint of fury.  I held my ground, and continued to scream at him.

He reached in his pocket and pulled out his fat fucking wallet “You want your fucking $20? FINE!”, he pulled out a Jackson and threw it on the ground.

I bent down, picked it up, came back up and screamed “You are the worst person EVER, you FUCKING PIG!”, turned and began walking away.

“Oh, I’M the pig?”, he oinked out.

“YES, YOU FUCKING CUNT!”, I yelled without stopping my pace.

I got to my room, closed the door, pulled my shade down, and cried my fucking eyes out.  I cried from the adrenaline.  I cried about the ugliness.  I cried about who I turned into.  I cried for the life that didn’t include this incident as a possibility.  And I cried for the one that now did. Mine.

Happening NOW!

My more recent blogs have been a bit flowery and overwritten in places, and I’ve kind of been getting off on mixing cliched metaphors.  I’m sure the phase will pass, even without your mockery. Ugh.

This is the first I’ve written in a while.  I just haven’t felt like I’ve had much to say worth sharing.  I’ve been trying to get a handle on the reality of my current conditions, while keeping my head above troubled waters.   

Before getting into the meat of it, I need to clarify: I do not feel like a failure because I do adult work, I feel like a failure because I am not making my living off of standup right now.  I would feel like just as much of a failure if I was CEO of Shithead Enterprises, Inc.  I feel like a failure because I made bad decisions years ago, letting the undertow take me down, and never got my head back above water.  

Hope springs eternal, and that should be a good thing, but it doesn’t feel like it anymore.  Let me illustrate: When I have to restock my supplies for work, i.e. buy more lube or wet-wipes, there is a tiny voice in my head that says, “Maybe I shouldn’t buy the regular size, maybe I should look for a travel size, after all, I may not be doing this much longer and I’d hate to spend the money on something that’ll just go to waste.” 

The truth is, I know that I will be doing what I’m doing for long enough to buy the regular size.  Fuck, it is more than likely that I’ll be doing what I’m doing long enough to buy the Costco size.  I could buy lube by the gallon, and it won’t go to waste.  But something in my head, some tiny kernel of this bullshit called “hope”, insists on believing that I’ll be living off comedy again really soon.  Like that’s just around the corner.  95% of my brain, the logical part, would like to kill that 5% that still believes in happy endings as an overall concept, not just as the reason I buy the lube.  That minority insults the majority.  I feel like 4 year old me, who really believed that I could grow up to be a princess, and it sickens me.

-However-

I can’t kill that little scrap of shit.  It will not die.  I stab it, poison it, choke it, beat it until it bleeds, and it just keeps getting up and coming back for more.

Where do I go from here?  How do I make lemonade from the lemons growing in the bed I made, and now lie in, tossing and turning over fading memories of when I felt accomplished?

Here’s how:

Peeping Com(ics).

I have been interviewing comics at the peepshow, in the booths, while giving them a full-on peepshow as we talk.  We’ve filmed a few interviews so far, and have more lined up.  I have amazing comics participating, and amazing friends helping me.  I am doing something that has a chance of leaving a mark, something that perhaps people will care about.  I don’t want to give too much away, but the topics are near and dear to me, and pretty fucking unique.  Not necessarily the most optimistic, but unique and very personal.  Each day of filming, I figure out more about it, make improvements, and actually feel creative excitement again.  So far, that is one of the most valuable aspects of the entire process.  The other being the discovery that I really do have true friends in my new(ish) home.  People with skill and talent that believe in me enough to give generously their time and energy to make my dream real.  I don’t feel nearly as isolated or ignored as I have in the past.  This project has given me back some of my lost happiness.

In the coming weeks, I will be launching an Indiegogo campaign to make back the money that I’m spending to fund “Peeping Com(ics)”.  I’m not asking for much, less than $5000.  So far, I’ve put my own money down, money I’ve made in the peepshow and at the private show place, [get ready for the overdramatic analogy of a lifetime…] thus turning prison bars on their side to create a ladder I can climb out of this hole.  If you can spare a few bucks, please do.  I appreciate it as a gesture of faith in the talent I have beyond shaking my genitalia at strangers.  If you don’t have a few spare dollars, that’s ok, I truly understand.  You can show your support in other ways, like by word-of-mouthing it to your friends and lovers, once the videos start posting to the website (www.peepingcomics.com) in early April.  Or by sending me a little note of encouragement.  Or by looking at your own misery and finding a way to spin it into a something better..

Oh fuck. I have a fantastic opportunity to actually do something that only I can do, and I just got hit in the head with a wooden board of self-doubt. Everything is lining up so nicely, and now I’m wondering if I can actually do my part of the thing. Being naked in front of strangers is totally comfortable for me, but I am physically shaking at the thought of doing it for people I know, a few of whom have seen me in flagrante delicto more than once. I can’t figure it out. Maybe I think that my body is good enough for a stranger, but far too shabby to try and pull off as sexy with comedians. That sentence doesn’t even seem real, but it is. I believe it comes down to respect, and I feel really insecure about being peepshow-naked in front of people that I respect. I don’t respect my customers. I appreciate them, but not for anything beyond financial gain. I don’t care about their lives beyond the exit door. Comics are my peers, but only technically. If it came down to having to prove the title with something tangible and current… So, based on my own feelings of failure, I suddenly feel foolish being naked in front of them. These people have real, true accomplishments, and I am doing something that will look stupid if it isn’t perfect. In my entire life I’ve never done anything perfectly. Never gotten all 10s. Fuck.

Last night I missed someone so much that it hurt to breathe.

Only here’s the thing: I don’t think I actually missed him as much as I missed what I hoped to have had with him, and what I convinced myself that I had some semblance of with him.  I missed the delusions I created about him giving a shit about me.  At least I could take some comfort in them, even if they weren’t the truth of the situation. Seeing the real writing on the wall leaves me with nothing.  And even if that’s what I had all along, it was easy to believe differently.  And last night, as I drove away from the jackshack, I felt more lonely than I can ever remember, and those delusions would’ve come in very handy.  I would’ve given anything to feel comfortable just texting him.  

See, after a solid weekend of pervwork, I felt -for the first time- spent.  I’ve seen a lot of dick-penis-cock-manroot-joint-weiner-jimmy-knob-purple headed warrior-disco stick-schlong-wang-johnson-tallywhacker-meat thermometer in the past 3 days, and as I left work last night, I realized that I actually had absolutely zero desire to see another.  Baloney ponies? I’ve seen the whole stable..

As I drove home, I wished that someone was there waiting for me, arms open, zipper closed.  His face was on that ‘someone’.  Of course, it’s just because he’s the most recent, but logical reasons aside, I would’ve given up every cent I just made to see him on my doorstep.

Only, that would never happen. That’s not the nature of what we had.  I realized the truth of what we had, or didn’t have, when it hit me that any random stranger who read his OkCupid profile would know more about him than I did after nearly two years of on-and-off intimacy.  That hit me hard.  Just typing it out has made my throat tight again.  That means it wasn’t a relationship, it was just me giving away a lot more for free than what strangers who empty their wallets to be able to merely watch me get.  I hate that.  I hate being taken for granted, and I hate even thinking like that.  It makes me feel dirty, like I’ve switched my personal sexuality to business, not pleasure.

I’ve been really upset about the whole “relationship” (for lack of a better term) since it ended.  Since before that, really.  Not for the specifics of him, but because he was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’ve repeated this pattern with men for years, and it has to stop.  I’m too old for teenage heartbreak.  Time passes fast, I’m acutely aware of it ticking away quicker and quicker, and I’ve wasted so much of it on people whom I no longer even know, but seemed very, very important in their moments.  I’m sickened and embarrassed by my own desire-masked-as-need for affection.  Not sex, but affection.  

As great as my cats are, they can’t hold me close and tell me that I’m special with my clothes on.

This is what I post when I haven’t eaten for 11 awake hours.

I’m on my second shift of a double at the private show place. I got here at noon, I’ll leave at midnight. So far, nothing’s gone on except in my head. There’s been no action today, no customers. The Golden Globes are on, which doesn’t seem like it would keep horny guys away, but LA is weird like that. I’ve been scheduled on almost all of the nights where more people than usual are planted in front of their televisions. I was here on election night, not a dick in sight the whole shift. Not even in post-election celebration/consolation.

Thankfully, I picked up extra hours yesterday and did pretty well. The peepshow treated me very well on Friday, and I was the only girl who made anything at all yesterday morning. Yes, I worked both places yesterday. I worked the peepshow from 10am until 4, then came over here from 5-12. Thirteen hours in stripper shoes yesterday, twelve today.

Who gives a fuck? No one.

I’m in a bit of an ambivalent depression right now. I’m waiting on booking any further road runs of my show until I get the new sales pitch for my show, one that sells it in third person. One that says “OMG, you want this show, it’s super awesome” (in more salesman-ish wording, of course), instead of the email I usually send, which doesn’t smoothly lead into using contracts with guarantees. I feel like the email I send out says “I’d really like the opportunity to bring my show to your venue, please, please, oh pretty, pretty please…”, and if I’m basically begging for the stage, I can’t then say “Btw, I have a $X00 or 80% door (whichever is higher) guarantee, and oh yeah, sign this contract that makes you legally responsible for helping promote”. This is now necessary because of the lack of concern and help from venues (shout out to Iowa City!) that I’ve experienced all too often in the past year that I’ve been working indie. That sentence was clunky, sorry.

Taking time away from being overly concerned with the touring of my show is weird and makes me panic. I feel as though not constantly working on booking will shove me onto a one-way road downhill. I don’t want to be like the people I knew as comics in Chicago who are now just civilians. The ones who moved to LA with high hopes and are now as dull as a pair of khaki Dockers. The thought of losing what shambles of a career I still have is the worst thing I can think of, and I have a pretty active (and, sometimes a bit catastrophic) imagination.

The sales pitch is being written by a friend of my father. I asked my father to do it, because he’s a really good at selling stuff. He’s also really good at passing the work to someone else, to whom it’s even less important than it would be for him, because of the lack of DNA connection. See, if you’re unreliable to your own kid, you suck, but if you’re unreliable to a near-stranger who someone else asked you to help, who cares?

If making me aware of my own non-priority was an industry, my father would be the Donald Trump of that shit.

Seems I have some daddy issues (she typed while at work, wearing next to nothing, lounging on a nasty couch, hoping to make a few bucks by inspiring a stranger’s masturbation…). Who could’ve guessed?

The more aware I become of how my relationship with my family has affected my life choices, the more futile it seems to fight for healing. And the healing is indeed a fight, one I feel every stupid day. Every feeling of unimportance, loneliness, unworthiness started at home. Every feeling of physical hideousness, of uncoolness, of fear of being the object of malicious mockery started at school (Thanks, classmates from Trailwood Elementary, Indian Woods Middle School and Shawnee Mission South High School. Go suck a soft dick!) . I’m not saying that my family is monstrous, they aren’t at all, they just have their own brain-noise to live with, which can make it difficult to find the loving family dynamic buried under the baggage. It’s like ordering lemonade and being given an iced-tea-heavy Arnold Palmer. Sure, there’s lemonade in there, but it’s just really hard to taste it through the iced tea. I love my family, I know they love me. Without exaggeration, I can truthfully say that I’d fight and/or die for them. They did the best they could, but one trampled flower can’t fix another’s broken stem.

My feet really, really hurt.

Hey, remember that one time, when I was all like “I’m done with the peepshow, I’m moving on”, and a bunch of blahblahblahblah about some healthy-brain/dignity/strength/hope-n-faith bullshittery?

Do me a favor: forget everything I said. Or at least have the grace not to remind me of it, because I have to go back to the peepshow.  It’s my best immediate option, and it hurts incredibly to know that’s my truth.  And probably my fucking destiny.

I’ll be fine with it tomorrow, but I’m not tonight.  I will be tomorrow, but tonight I’m indulging in a few hours of self-pity.  I will wake up tomorrow and feel fine about everything, I’m sure.  I will wake up mended and proud of myself for making this bullshit adult decision, but for tonight, I’m not going to force myself to be content or even just okay with the state of things.

The wine bottle is open, and I’m racing myself to the bottom.

This all began a long, long time ago.  The seeds were planted before I even knew I was a garden.

My first exposure (by choice) was when I’d sneak out to the garage and look through the Playboy magazines that my dad was storing for an incarcerated friend.  The women in Playboy were all golden-glowy and naked, but I didn’t know how they fit into sex.  I don’t think I even knew the word sex, at that time (I was YOUNG), I didn’t know what Fritz the Cat was doing with those nipple-licious lady-cats, I just liked comic strips.  I don’t know if I was scared of getting caught looking at the magazines, or scared to have to have a talk about what I was looking at.  Even before I knew what sex was, I knew I didn’t want to discuss it with my parents.  I didn’t want to know the facts, the mystique felt right, I just wanted to look and try to figure it out myself.  My parents never had “the talk” with me, and though I was raised in a very liberal, open-minded, accepting family, we just didn’t talk about sex.  Thankfully.    I had a curiosity about sex, without knowing what I was curious about.  Like being on the outside of a closed door, and catching a whiff of something inside, but not having any concept of what it was.  Imagine smelling shit before you knew what shit smelled like.  Or pumpkin pie, for those of you who have never had anything but positive experiences…

What made the idea of being a sex worker so alluring?  Before I was one, they struck me as the embodiment of sex, giving tangible form to the feeling of lust.  Like Aphrodite, who was always my favorite character in Greek mythology.  I saw it as a higher calling, a path that chose you, not the other way around.  Like monkhood, in principle.  Having always been Velma, I yearned to be Daphne.  I wanted to be one of the chosen ones, a muse for lust.  What could be more desirable than being the one that inspires desire?  This was when I thought that lust was pure nature and the same for everyone, not something individual and molded by nurture.

[READERS NOTE: I can’t make the accent mark work, so the word “lame” is intended as the metallic-shiny stretchy material, and not how you describe this blog when you don’t like it.]

When my fascination began, I didn’t know the term “sex worker”.   Had I heard that term from the start, I wouldn’t have been so enchanted.  “Sex worker” doesn’t sound sexy; it sounds like a frumpily uniformed person with a machine-grease smear on their sallow cheek, giving assembly-line handjobs.  Like the factory workers paid to search for Veruca Salt’s golden ticket, but with less enthusiasm.  That wasn’t at all the image that piqued my curiosity.  I was fascinated with the fictitious hookers of the late 70’s/early 80’s in all their gold-lame glory.  Tube tops.  Hotpants.  Big hair and overglossed lips.  Like paper-dolls, they were women who could’ve easily been in a Dr. Pepper commercial, if you just changed their clothes and added roller skates.  Don’t you want to be a Pepper too?  I did.

On a family trip to New Orleans, all I did was look for hookers and winos.  I don’t remember shit about the World’s Fair except that it had no hookers.   One of my favorite memories of the time I spent living in Chicago was seeing the streetwalking “ladies” on North Avenue.  They dressed in flamboyant hooker fashion, finally showing me gold-lame hotpants in action.  Living, breathing, action.  When I moved back to Kansas City, I saw the hookers that had probably been there the whole time.  I never would’ve recognized them as prostitutes though, because of how vastly they differed from my pre-conceived notion of what a hooker looks like.  They were dressed so blah.  Sweatpants?  Gym shoes?  Fucking gym shoes.  Get it together, you provincial disappointments, you can buy flashy platforms and shiny, lame whatnots in KC too, there’s no excuse for sweatpants.  Ever.  I’ve never been a fan of the “good enough, it’ll do” attitude.  Go big or go home.  I couldn’t understand how they expected to make any money without putting any effort into being a gorgeous sex-kitten.  Until I worked at the peepshow, I thought men who paid for sex were picky about looks.  I realize my naiveté now, you can laugh freely.

I had no idea that there was danger involved in hooking.  Law & Order SVU wasn’t around until the 90’s, and though I’m sure I’d heard of Jack the Ripper, I think I thought of him as a fictitious character whose story I hadn’t read, like Fagin from Oliver Twist or the Headless Horseman.  If anyone was in danger, I thought it was the men, who ran the risk of being lured to their lust-crazed deaths by these streetcorner mermaids.  I pictured their eyes popping out, and their heads exploding, steam-out-the-ears style, like a cartoon wolf.  No one in Kansas City was calling attention to violence against sex workers at that time; there were no visible advocacy groups.  It was before society felt any responsibility to help or fix, when prostitutes were avoided (by non-customers), not pitied, and not seen as victims of unfortunate circumstances.  It was before Julia Roberts gave a mainstream-approved face to sex work.  There was nothing I could see telling me that these women (I wasn’t aware of male prostitutes, at that time) weren’t living a thrilling and independent lifestyle.

The “independent” part is what’s most important here.  I’ve never been good at being unquestioningly obedient to authority figures.   I don’t blindly follow rules without good reason.  I don’t blindly follow anything.  Sex work seemed self-regulated.  I was living in Chicago, making most of the money I needed through comedy roadwork, but I needed just a little more.  I wasn’t doing well with the mainstream part-time jobs, as I don’t agree with having time to lean equating to having time to clean.  One night, in 1999, “Girl 6” was on TV, and it felt not just like random programming, but like the universe sending me a message.  So I looked in the adult-entertainment section of one of the free-press papers, and found an ad looking for phone-sex operators.  I stumbled upon the best possible phone-sex situation ever: an independent call-back service.  I answered to one person, the owner, Doreen (aka Mistress Helen).  The customer called her, paid her, and specified their kink.  She then called me, gave me the info, and I called the customer back and gave them what they wanted.  They paid a flat rate for up to 30 minutes, I made a flat rate for each call, regardless of how many of the 30 minutes that they used.  The usual goal was to get them on and get them off as quickly as possible, so I could take more calls per hour, and make more money.  I’ve always loved efficiency, don’t make something take 30 minutes, if you can get it done in (a brag-worthy average of) 8-10.  There were exceptions, the regulars who Doreen approved for multiple sessions.  She’d tell me that they could go as long as they’d like, then bitch at me for keeping them on for as long as I could (my record was 3.5 hours).  She was tempestuous and unpredictable, sometimes a sweet grandmotherly woman, sometimes a crotchety shrew.  But she always paid me accurately and on-time.  She died a few years ago, as could be expected (she was already pushing the edge of elderly when I worked for her).  In all the various make-ends-meet-that-comedy-didn’t jobs I’ve had since leaving her line, I can honestly say that none have been nearly as perfect for me.  I’ve been unable to find another situation similar; working for the corporate phone-sex companies wasn’t for me.  They have quality control people listening in on the calls, and giving commands on how to change afterwards, which was awkward and annoying.  There can’t be scripts, its phone sex, not a choose-your-own-adventure book.  I’m getting a dude off with my voice, not telemarketing.  At the most basic level, all one-on-one sex work is sought and bought to have a human interaction, and you just can’t script that.

Next blog, I’ll detail some of my most memorable regular callers.  It’ll give insight as to why I’m a great friend to talk to about really out-of-the-ordinary situations, as well as why I’m so comfortable calling a stranger “Satan Daddy”.

As always, feel free to email me with questions: susannaleeluckydeluxe@gmail.com.