I live in a condo on West 14th and Oak by the Jewish market where you can buy the best perogies in the city. I own a mountain bike. Drive a Beemer. Deb lives down the street. When she laughs too hard she sprays beer out of her mouth. Because I’ve started hanging out with her wife-in-law, Paula looks at me through that thin veneer of prettiness, and smiles at me in that I’d-stab-you-if-I-could way.
But I’m smart, I make money. Girls wonder how I do it.
Paula doesn’t say nasty things to me. She knows better. I get my respect. I knew Paula was fucked up. I never knew how much until the night in the Korner Kitchen when she was hissing in my ear, telling me about the robbery.
The streetlamp shines down on Deb and me and the corner store. All the action for us starts in the Helmcken Street parking lot, because if a trick won’t pull over and take a cab from there, that’s it for the date before it even begins.
I like working on Helmcken. From here we can see the Korner Kitchen, the window sill littered with a line of Styrofoam takeout cups, can see who’s going in, who’s coming out, who’s spending more time taking coffee breaks than working.
A.C. told Deb right in the middle of their having sex, while A.C. was pumping it in and out, just like that he said to Deb, “Paula doesn’t make love like a woman.”
Deb tells me this in the cold, under a streetlamp, flicking her cigarette into traffic. Girls stand around the block, their elbows touching like paper dolls, two of us on one side of the alley, three or four girls on the other.
Deb puts on bedroom eyes and imitates a man’s voice. She says, “Now you make love like a woman. And then he gave me the ring.”
Paula doesn’t make love like a woman. What does she make love like then? An alien? A zombie? I’ve seen her on doubles, when two girls take one guy (“One starts at your nose, one starts at your toes, and we meet in the middle”), or when two girls do a date with two guys in the same hotel room. But, naturally, there’s no comparing what a working girl is like with a trick and what she’s like with her man. You have to call both “sex” because there’s no other word to use. But “sex” with tricks is about as interesting and erotic as peeling potatoes, especially since we mostly do fake lays. As in, there’s no penetration. As in, we make the trick fuck our hand and they can’t tell the difference, because they’re wearing two condoms and there’s so much KY slathered everywhere.
Now you make love like a woman.
Does Deb moan as she stares into his eyes, no shame in her own pleasure? Gazes locked as she comes, her eyes not letting go of his?
I imagine Deb on her back, looking at A.C., the roundness of her potbelly, the soft rolling hills of her breasts. He grabs her ass, fingers digging into her flesh. What does it feel like to make a man lose control like that? The sun rising through the curtains. The room smelling like sex. Maybe it makes you feel grateful. To know you’re part of something bigger than yourself.
The two-carat diamond, rose-cut, catches the streetlight. They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Maybe if you turn out late — the difference between turning out at fifteen and turning out at twenty-five — you’ll just always do stupid things on the track by accident. You’ve already lived too much square life to not have bad habits. Like carrying a wallet or wearing a diamond ring to work. But I put aside Deb’s stupidity and try to take pleasure in her excitement. I nod politely and give her a big grin.
Paula bought A.C. the Mercedes he drives. A.C. has a reputation for having his shit together; he doesn’t smoke crack, saves his money. Jesse Diamond, my people, is not together. But at least he never hits me with a closed fist, always an open hand.
Pimps sell you love, and considered from a mathematical angle it’s a tidy arrangement, considering we get money from the tricks we turn for something a lot of them want to pretend is love too.
When I first came to Vancouver on a PCL bus and a ferry, to work the streets in a new city, I wanted to see if the high track stories I’d heard were true, that girls, for instance, regularly made a g-note a night.
I wanted to see what the high track was like and keep all my money. Not pay some man to tell me I looked “fine” over dinner in the new ho clothes he’d bought me so I could earn him bank on the track. I’d dabbled with pimps in Victoria, but I’d always worked as a renegade.
So I lied on the high track when the girls asked, Who’s your people? I made one up. It felt like a game.
But the high track’s not a place to lie and get away with it, so when things became nasty, I chose Jesse, to save my ass. I’ve been with him ever since. Jesse Diamond isn’t all bad. Tracksuit, long Jheri curls, and a Morris Day mustache. The night we met I had the feeling that anything could happen. The air seemed as full and rich as a piece of cake, and I wanted to swallow it whole or at least slip a piece into my pocket. I’d met better-looking guys, but he could talk, and he made me feel beautiful.
A.C. has given Deb — his tip — a diamond ring.
“She already hated me,” Deb says. “I wonder what she’ll do now.”
Ever since Deb came along, Paula seems more hollow than she used to be, and colder. Her head like a porcelain doll’s seems more like a glass flask about to explode. I watch her, waiting for it.
She’s changing. There’s a current of nervous energy underneath, high-voltage. Everyone can see that A.C. has a soft spot for Deb. For real. And Paula’s humiliated.
Deb can’t keep to herself what’s making her happy, and soon everyone knows about the ring.
Paula’s regular has a wardrobe full of fetish gear: leather cuffs, spreader bars, x-frames, sleepsacks, nipple clamps, gags, and whips. He’s into bondage and obedience training. Paula orders him, at twice the normal hourly rate, to lick cabernet spills off his kitchen floor tiles with his tongue, and then punishes him for his defiance if he takes more than a second or two to get down on all fours. Typically she flogs his ass, making him pay her for the privilege. Paula keeps his beatings below the neck, so no one at his law firm knows.
There’s nothing wrong with spanking a guy or whipping him for money. I’ve done it myself. Kinky starts at two hundred dollars and goes up from there. Though I usually feel like laughing halfway through. I just can’t take myself seriously when I say, “Crawl across that floor, slave, and call me mistress.” I have one regular who gives me over a thousand dollars when he smokes crack. I just think up nasty things for him to do and stash the cash — until he runs out of money or coke. The last time, I hurt him more than he wanted; it was an accident. I hadn’t realized the buckle was whipping around and hitting him where it shouldn’t have been, in the ribs. His bruises were so swollen they were wet-looking.
Most of my regulars are salt-of-the-earth types. One talks to me about Akira Kurosawa films and shows me photos of the commune where he grew up. Another gave me an electric guitar, another a Günter Grass book as a present. I have regulars who are loggers, or fishermen, who tell me about all the places they’ve been and all the places they’d still like to see.
Paula. She’s different. But you already know that. Paula passes the pictures around in the Korner Kitchen.
We’re in the last booth. She’s squashed herself in next to Deb. Andrea sits with her ankle-length black sable across from us, and I’m thinking, Why us? Why now? But it’s because the diner is full of girls and designer purses and compacts brought out over the scarred tables to fix lipstick and powder noses, and there’s nowhere else to sit. Everyone came in like bees in a hive, and now I’m stuck in a booth with Paula and Andrea, when all I wanted to do was sink into the softness of the red vinyl seat and massage my toes.