At that moment our dinner arrived, complete with precision-wedge tomatoes atop a salad wrapped tightly in yards of plastic wrap.
Ah, I thought. Now I understand. My triptych message was complete. My quest was doomed. But these signs must work in mysterious ways, I argued with myself. Anyway, was I going to let a measly tomato wedge tell me what to think? So I took control right then. I unwrapped that salad. I put a wedge in my mouth and chewed and chewed until it finally spit back its measly juice on my tongue. I tried to hope.
Nevertheless, by the time we landed I was sure I was either dying or pregnant. I must have looked stricken with fear and guilt, because as my companion said goodbye she leaned toward me and kissed me, the slightest edge of her tongue raking over my lips. Then she disappeared into the crowd, trailed by the wheels of her carry-on luggage. But her taste remains, warm, a little salty, as I stand here waiting for my bags. At times like these I understand the natural, beefy roundness of things and I want to weep from the joy of it. But I’m in a foreign country, where the customs are unknown to me, so I’ll refrain.
The Whore Gene by Lisa Montanarelli
I love money. No, that’s not quite right. I lust after it. As far back as I can remember, I was trading kisses for pennies and nickels on the school playground. My father was a gambler and my mother a whore. One morning when I was about five I walked into their bedroom. They’d been in Monte Carlo for a month, and I’d missed them terribly. I knew they’d gotten back late the night before – long after my bedtime – and I wanted to see them. I heard the squeaking of the bed and heavy breathing. I pushed open the door. My parents were lying naked on a huge pile of money. My father was on top of my mother, who was digging her nails into his back and groaning. I thought he was hurting her and started to cry. They stopped what they were doing immediately and my mother got out of bed naked, money sliding off her body to the floor. She picked me up, carried me over to the bed, and placed a wad of cash in my hand.
“Look,” she said. “Your daddy won this money. We’re having a good time.” Years later, I finally understood what she meant.
Memories like these have been flooding over me lately. Three years ago my mother was charged with pimping and pandering. Rather than go to jail she fled the country, and I haven’t heard from her since.
As a kid, I thought about money every night in bed, rubbing the spot on my body that felt so good. When my cunt began aching for something inside it, I slipped coins in. I was a human piggy bank. When I went to the bathroom at school, I’d find coins in my panties – coins I’d put in the night before, warmed from being inside me. They slipped out of me in class. When I stood up, they’d slide down my pants leg, as if I had a hole in my pocket. But no one guessed my secret, and I put more coins in. They jiggled, clinked, and slipped out onto the floor when I jumped up and down. I liked the weight of the cold metal. By the time I was in high school, I was a human pocket-book, walking around with rolls of dollar bills in my cunt.
It’s not that I can’t have sex with people. I can. But there has to be money involved. Otherwise my body won’t do it. I won’t even get wet unless money’s nearby. I have to be counting it, rolling around in a pile of it, or getting paid for sex. I’m the perfect whore.
Some of the other girls don’t think so. I work at the Coochie Ranch, a legal brothel in Washoe County, Nevada. As far as I know, I’m the only girl here who actually enjoys having sex for money. Oh, I’m sure the others do too; they just won’t admit it. They think it’s sleazy, degrading. As long as they don’t get turned on with clients, they can pretend they aren’t really whores. It’s as if they’re saving their virginity: if they don’t have orgasms with customers, they’re somehow pure. Gail says she’d be cheating on her boyfriend if she enjoyed sex with clients. Lanna says the pimp who turned her out taught her how to have sex without getting aroused. He got all his friends to fuck her, while he sat right beside her on the bed, coaching: “Just think about anything else – beaches, your kids – anything that doesn’t get you hot,” he said.
I think it’s sad that these girls don’t enjoy their work the way I do, but I keep my secret to myself. Not that I’m ashamed of it: it makes me one of the top earners at the ranch. Once a guy comes to my room to talk prices, he rarely ever leaves. Just talking about money turns me on. As I lead him to the cashier, I feel his come dripping down my thighs. I rarely ever put money in the bank. I keep the cash locked in my closet, so that I can take it out and roll around in it. And when payday comes, I get a rush as the cashier hands me the money I’ve been waiting for all week.
I’ve been having little orgasms with clients and with the cash in my closet all week long, but this is the big one I’ve been waiting for, tension building in my body. I take the envelope to my room, let the cash spill out on the bed, and run my fingers through it. I start counting and soon lose track of the numbers – lying on the bed, smoothing the loose bills over my chest, stroking my wet pussy lips. Since we can’t lock the doors to our rooms, I hide the money under my covers in case anyone walks in. I don’t want them to catch me masturbating in a pile of money. Sometimes I go on like this for hours, rolling over the greenbacks, soaking them in my sweat and come.
One day Suzanne, our Madame, calls all the girls into the parlour and announces that a scientist named Dr Maude Baine is coming to live at the brothel to study us. We groan; we’ve heard all the media hype about her study. She’s trying to find the so-called “whore gene” – a gene that determines whether or not someone will become a prostitute. A lot of people think she’s a total quack, but she’s still getting tons of publicity and government funding. She’s been on Oprah with a pair of identical twins who were separated at birth. The twins, Vanna and Lanna, wear the same skimpy white dresses and have identical blond perms. Reunited 25 years later, they are shocked to discover that they’re both prostitutes. Even more remarkably, they both charge $300 an hour for full service, and their specialities include Greek, golden showers, and strap-on play. All these weird coincidences are supposed to convince us that Vanna and Lanna are genetically predisposed to whoredom.
After the show, prostitutes’-rights activists and geneticists criticize her work, claiming that identical twin whores simply aren’t common enough to be statistically significant. Several whores come forward and claim that Vanna and Lanna met several years earlier and only became working girls after meeting Dr Baine. But despite widespread criticism and accusations of fraud, Dr Baine wins more grant money to study whore twins, and Vanna and Lanna quit prostitution and start a business making T-shirts and bumper stickers that say “Genes ‘R’ Pimps”. They donate 30 per cent of their proceeds to Dr Baine’s research.
Suzanne says we all have to participate in the study and consent to being interviewed by Dr Baine.
“Why?” asks Sheila, as we groan in unison.
“Because her project is funded by the federal government, and the brothel is making a lot of money off her,” says Suzanne.
“But what do we get out of it?” Justine asks.
“You might get some money for your participation.”
“She should pay us as much as our customers,” says Justine, “since she’s taking up our time.”
“We’ll see about that,” says Suzanne.
When Dr Baine arrives Suzanne calls all the girls into the parlour again. Dr Baine looks prim and schoolmarmish in her tailored gray business suit and pince-nez. She explains her study in the simplest terms, as though we’re children. She’s trying to find the gene that determines whether or not you become a prostitute. This gene, she says, accounts for the occurrence of prostitution throughout history and in all cultures.