I read memoirs because I love reading about a life splayed on the page as an art form. Eileen Myles’ “Cool For You” was sulfuric. It reminded me of soaking in rotten egg water in the woods right after my Mom died.  “Cool for You” was the medicine I needed on my tongue in the dark new alone. Myles took memoir structure and made it round, circling back to her mother, my mother, love and memory.

Joan Didion’s “Year of Magical Thinking” caught me in her butterfly trap of silent violence. Didion’s grief was a silver word sabre that left a scar where time froze in sudden death. All streets led back to that moment.

Michael Greenberg’s “A Writer’s Life” was clever, humble and vulnerable. He wrote the struggle from under a bridge in New York and emerged winged. He collected days like war paint swirled in his father’s palm.

Mary Karr is my favorite scrappy, gun-toting Erato. In “Lit” she’s a word wrangler and swallower of poisons. She’s a human love letter to sons and sisters with her sentences that smell like horses, chewing tobacco and lonesome dusty afternoons. “Lair’s Club” stomped the glitter from my sentences, by shining naked on the dirt.

James Brown’s “The Los Angeles Diaries” was a patchwork of vital moments that hammered the heart to the page and reminded me of the sadness that leaks through families and the stubborn love that punches through.

Lidia Yunavitch is a deep sea diver in the blood sea of words stroking her prose on the page in “Chronology of Water.” Her howl is a child death encased in a skin water song; Her pain is a familiar father hole girl pain.  I forgot I was suffocating until I read her memoir and her words were air.

Know what annoys me about stripper and hooker memoirs? They end all neat and tidy and hetero-normative and buttoned up. They end all Pretty Woman and diamond-ringed and Pottery Barned with the damaged girl who finally found mister perfect. Mister P fixes her and they buy a house and a puppy in a sweater and write thank you letters on monogrammed stationary.

The first problem is I can’t relate. I’m not the type of girl anyone has ever wanted to rescue. As memoirists, we tell ourselves things to comfort and flatter and forget; hardened brittle girls who long to land softly. But that’s not what really happened. If I were that ending, it would go like this:

You are like new.  You’ve got soaring self-worth and you’ll never strip again. You never wanted to do it in the first place. You never even think about it. You’ve swept the part of you that was for sale under the welcome mat in front of your reformed whore digs. The transactional psychosexual hard drive of your mind has been erased. You tell yourself this as you cut out your stripper heart. You toss it down the garbage disposal where it howls and you hope Mister P doesn’t hear the sound of stripper heart guts being massacred in your fancy kitchen.

Down the drain: is the night in the club in San Francisco where you stripped and fucked the young hot coke dealer with the neck tattoos and motorcycle helmet for five hundred bucks in the private room because you fucking felt like it.

Down the drain:  is the time the man’s wife ate your pussy for half an hour in the VIP room. And you came. And you were paid handsomely. And afterwards you fucked your boyfriend in his bed.

Down the drain: are the hundred lies you told about where you were, what you were doing, who you were doing it with, and those acts stoked a fire in your pussy that is very hard to put out. That’s gone too.

You tell yourself none of it happened to you. You scratch it away like some other skin. The friends who stood shoulder to shoulder with you in clubs and hotel rooms for years? You disappear them like a snuff film.

You walk away with French manicured hands and your husband’s American Express card in your purse and forget how your pussy gushed when a wad of sweaty hundreds was shoved into your fist while undulating on a man’s boner who fantasized about the tip of his cock between your slick lips in a room of electric need, probing you like a strobe light on your girl parts, making your spine vibrate.

You deny that you were drunk on their desire for you.

You sprinted out the exit all right. Left the dark bars in your stripper wake, saved from the big bad sex industry wolf, now that your self esteem has been restored. It appears as if you found love in the right places. You’ve retired the Pirate. You’re Snow White now. You’re white now. You tell yourself this. Clean.

This is not that ending. But it’s mine:

The dark bars appear in dreams. They’ve erected tents in your bones and you feel them burning holes, trails, sweating through your clothes, climbing up your throat and hips, waking up the heat in your crotch. They’ve been busy building fires.

You left the club. It never left you. At the grocery store you see a man’s neck and have an impulse to climb up his legs and lick his ear lobe. You watch him open his wallet and you count the bills out of habit. He looks you in the eye.

The smell of coconut lotion and bubble gum makes you see red lips, chest, nipples, pudgy thighs; the girl who clenched her asshole on stage to the beat of the music. The one with her locker next to yours; the one whose pupils were big as planets and she made over twenty-six hundred dollars that you watched her count at 4 a.m.  A dancing asshole, you thought. If only I had a dancing asshole. Vanilla, bubble gum, coconut lotion.

The Disney endings are not only written by high priced ladies from low places, I’ve read the same endings in male hustler memoirs. The let-down endings are all toweled off and group-therapied. The boys enter fancy rehabs and private schools. It pisses me off because it feels fundamentally dishonest. It makes me mad because I love reading memoirs and it comes across like a big fat, old-fashioned Americana-glazed donut dipped in bullshit.

This is not that ending.

I’m forty years old, stripping and giving handjobs to pay my rent. I’m lonelier than a leper at a DAR meeting. I have no clue how to leave this industry and enter the work force. The longer I stay out of the workforce, the harder it is to get into. I know how to do school, but I don’t know how to do a life. This is no one’s fault but my own.  This is where it’s at: I’m still doing this. I still want out.

Scrape Towards the Sunlight

I thought I’d end in the dark, fighting for my life in Los Angeles, with three bucks in my pocket, less than a hundred in my account, owing everyone I know money. I figured I’d get arrested again. “Once you start getting arrested, you keep getting arrested,” my friend P said. I completed the diversion prosecution program and am no closer to a teaching job.

What would Kathy Acker do?

Try harder. Scrape your way out of the spider den until your fingernails are bloody stubs. Rebuild yourself. Apply to PHD programs.

Maybe she’d say, “Fuck it. Strip and write your ass off.” Then she’d say something confrontational and genius about desire that I barely understand.

Desire is a fickle motherfucker. So are endings. I’ve written mine. It ends like it begins, with my heels in the dirt, looking up at the sun.

I received this letter from a man who reads my writing. Certain details have been omitted to protect the innocent.

Hey Antonia,

You don’t really know me, I guess, and this email is going to be very weird and personal but bear with me. I apologize in advance if I’m crossing a line but I have to tell somebody. I’m a fan of your writing. We have lots of little things in common.I’m a sober alcoholic, and I used to be somewhat addicted to meth years back as well. I’ve lived in some of the same cities as you. I’ve even been to Visions. I’m a writer and I’ve been published in some of the same types of publications as you. Aaaand I know my way around theescort and stripper business from the client side (also many years ago very briefly from the escort side).

Which is why I am writing to you. Something bad happened, I need to unload, and there’s nobody I can tell this stuff to.

I haven’t really seen any escorts for several years. I have a girlfriend, but she lives in another state, long-distance relationships are hell, and so I recently started seeing an escort who I’ll call Kris. I met her the usual way, one of the nationwide escort discussion boards. We had so much fun together, and not just of a sexual nature. We were both heavily tattooed. Our taste in music was so similar we got giddy when we talked about it. She trusted me enough to see her in her own apartment instead of an in-call, to tell me her real name. We talked about our addictions, and recovery, and our suicide attempts, and auto repair, and motorcycles, and writing, and life, and fucking everything.

She was a big whiskey drinker, which is what I used to drink before I quit. When we made out, I could taste the scotch on her lips, and it was exciting, to know the taste was there, going right up to the edge of what I could do without pushing any of my sobriety triggers, and when she figured out that I got off on it she’d drink some right before she kissed me. We talked about doing things together out in the world. We were planning a dinner date, we were thinking about hanging out together when a certain band came to town next month.

I know that this kind of talk is something that goes on between an escort and a client all the time and it’s just part of the fantasy, but this was different. This was sincere. I believe it. I knew she was on probation for a drug charge, I knew she still hadn’t let go of her addict friends, and I knew there was some drama in her life because of it.

A couple of weeks ago, after I left her apartment, she texted me and told me she was robbed by one of her addict friends. Every cent she owned except for the money I had just paid her. We texted a bunch about it. A few days later she texted me in a panic, saying she was getting evicted from her apartment because a girl who had just moved in as her roommate had made a scene which involved the cops being called. She was distraught. I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t know how to help. I know better, from past bitter experience and from hanging around AA rooms, that I can’t save anybody, and that I can die trying to save somebody.

Her last text to me at 5am on April 14 was “yeah im pretty much fucked”.

She went dark after that. I texted her a couple days later and asked if she found a place. Silence. I texted her two days ago and just asked “are you alive?”

And it turns out that she was dead. She was found dead less than 24 hours after she last texted me. OD of pills and booze.

I can barely get anybody to talk to me about this. There’s so much fear and so much confidentiality about this whole business. Nobody knows who I am, nobody knows what I knew about her, how I knew her. I can’t find out any more. But I know in my heart she killed herself on purpose. It breaks my heart. And I don’t know where to put this pain. She’s an escort. To the rest of my real world, she officially does not exist. She can’t exist. To her regular friends, I don’t exist.

And I know I have this compulsive savior streak in me, I always want to save people, I am a sucker for girls in distress. And I’m a magnet for girls like that too, they tell me I give off some hero vibe. The sobriety does this, I guess. I give off this illusion of stability to women like that. It gets me into trouble. But I cared about her. I don’t know how to sort out my feelings about this, how much of it is my own habitual white knight behaviors around girls like her and how much is legitimate. I don’t know if I should have tried harder to just be there for her on the last day. Did I take a break from texting her because I though maybe she seemed like she was gonna be trouble that I couldn’t afford?

Did I stop acting like a friend right at the very minute where she most needed a friend?

And then I think about how she doesn’t exist in my world of family and friends. Like when a spy is killed and the government has to deny any knowledge of their existence. Because of how I met her, she lives in my shadow world, in my other life, and I can’t publicly acknowledge any of it. And then I think about all those sex workers being killed by that serial killer up in New York, how for so long the police didn’t even open a real investigation, because they were just hookers, it’s not like anybody was really looking for them or would notice that they were dead. It’s like they weren’t real people, because of what they did for a living. And it makes me sick that in a way I am doing the same to her.

She had so so much bad shit happen to her in her life, so many demons, and she was trying so hard and she just didn’t know how to connect all the pieces. And she lost. And I can’t tell anybody how much it hurts.

I wrote a short story recently, before I met Kris, loosely based on a couple of women I used to know many years ago. The story is fiction, it’s an imagined ending to a much more ordinary relationship, but it’s freaky how much of that short story lines up with my experience with Kris. I told her about the story at one point, and then it got accepted for publication and I told her I’d send her a link to it when it came out because I knew she’d get a kick of out how similar some of it was.

And now she’s dead.

Antonia, seriously, I don’t know why I’m sending this to you. I just have to vent this all to somebody, somebody who understands how that business can be, somebody who won’t judge, somebody who is far enough away from my life that they seem safe. Thanks for letting me unload. It helps just to write this. I guess I should make it into a story, but like I said, I wrote the story before it all happened.

I’m sorry if it’s presumptuous for me to send this to you. I’m just

kind of distraught.

Dear Kind of Distraught,

I’m so glad you sent this to me, that you trusted me with this information. I can grasp the big picture as a client, sex worker, a sober person and would not criticize you for your experiences or your position. I should be working on this chapter on my book about Black Out Sex and the diversion program which is about being broke and terrified in LA after my arrest, but I’m literally aching after reading this email on Royal Street in a cafe where I like to write. So be it.

We do have lots of things in common, more than you know. It’s like we’ve been marinating in the same juices: guilt, shame, grief, anger. I think you’re wrong to think this won’t affect your sobriety. It already has. That’s why you’re writing me.

I’m devastated to hear about the loss of your friend and her struggle getting sober. I want to bang my fist through this wobbly table because it angers me so much. See, I recently lost one of my closest friends to an OD/suicide also. This is what happened:

We did sex work together in Los Angeles. I flew home in February from New Orleans because she was on life support and was going to be taken off of it. She was beautiful and smart, a photographer, a paralegal, a vegan baker, a partner, funny, fashionable, good friend. She struggled with her sobriety for many years. Jen wasn’t the type of alcoholic/addict who would smoke a joint, have a few beers then come back to AA. She’d shoot speedballs in her tits and end up living in her car for weeks with a dick in her mouth (she was gay). Alcoholism is no respecter of persons. It took her down like a plane crash. My heart broke every time she relapsed.

This last time, she asked me for help. She wanted to detox on my couch. My sponsor in AA advised against it, but I never had to tell Jen “No” because I was put in contact with a woman who gets girls beds in detoxes and scholarships to pay for them and Jen ended up back with her girlfriend that night and evidently had a bed at the detox waiting for her. She never showed up.

I don’t know how I would cope if I had told her “no” and she died. We talked a couple of times after she went home to her girlfriend and then I got the call she was on life support.

About the guilt: You pulled away to protect yourself and that is exactly what you should have done, for yourself and for Kris. Looking back, I guess the pulling away was a kind of spared from what you referred to as “You can die saving someone” syndrome. There is also the guilt from the deceit. There have been times that I kept secrets from people I loved and the person those secrets hurt the most was me. It kept me from feeling love-like a bullet proof partition between me and other people. It’s fucking lonely. I told my secrets and made amends-not an apology. An amends is changed behavior. I have no secrets today and feel like a person capable of love and trust because of that.

There is nothing you could have done to save your friend. That is what she was, your friend. It doesn’t matter if she was slinging coffee here on Royal Street or blowing clients for cash. She was a girl you enjoyed, cared about and spent time with. She was your friend.

Imagine that she’s free, now, released from the agony and torment she felt about the drugs, her life and her demons.

Let your heart break for a while until it begins to mend. That’s what I do when I think about Jen.

Also, I recommend hitting an al-anon meeting. Al-anon (adult children of addict and alcoholics) can help you with your tendency to get your self-esteem and self worth from “saving” people. The fact is, you cannot rescue anyone from the burning building of her skin. Even though you want to. Your asset has become a liability: caretaking gone horribly array. It’s probably from early training. It’s never about what just happened.

It’s always about what happened before.

Forgive yourself. This is a long road and you don’t have to go it alone. Reach out and get some support. Al-anon will provide some tools that I believe will be helpful to you in the area of intimate relationships and a room full of people who are compassionate helps. It has helped me.

Honor Kris by writing about this experience with dignity and extreme love for yourself and for her. You’re a good writer, judging from this letter.

Allow heartbreak to bleed out into your prose.

Finally, Let her go.

Good Luck, K.O.D,

Antonia

By the Request of a reader~For J. Knox:

There are pivotal moments that happen and you’re never the same after that.  Here’s a collection of some.

I love Books by Romy Suskin

Sunday:

In a large room were brownish grey cold metal chairs in sloppy rows. There were people I knew standing by a stage: A girl with pale freckled skin and slim ankles used to strip in the same clubs in New Orleans where I now dance. We talked about how to let go of someone who doesn’t want to be with you.

“It takes a long time,” I said. “Longer than you may think.”

There was nothing more to say after that.

Another friend with soft blonde curls and pale lips crossed and uncrossed her Heidi Klume legs. Her obsessive love for horses reminded me of my Mom, who had all of her teeth knocked out when she was eighteen by a horse, but wanted to ride them all the time. My friend with the curls has a barn and two children. I sit next to her every Sunday. We’re nailed to the spot: a silent knowing that we both lost our mom’s to cancer. Our eyes water at the same time from the same stories told from the podium.

*This week, I realized my life could fall apart in about 5 seconds and there’s no net in place to catch me.

“For instance,” my friend said, “I looked in the window and found my best friend dead of a heart attack this week.”  My insurmountable problems diminished to a pimple. “I’m not myself,” she said and walked away. Maybe in our times of turmoil and great pivotal moments of extreme loss, we are our best, most stark selves.

Years ago, an unusually beautiful girl with long silky black hair and eyes the color of stones complained about her skittery friends, I lectured her: “Know who your real friends are,” I waggled a finger. I was the broken record of a punitive, die hard loyalty I thought I displayed. She dumped me as a friend and kept rich actors and models streaming in and out of her life instead. What did I know? She’s the one in the mansion with a gazillion dollars and a fancy husband.

*We all have nearly a thousand friends on Facebook. But, who picks you up in the ER when a drunk driver busts your collarbone? Who would you call from jail? Who will bring toothpaste to your house and leave it on your doorknob in a white plastic bag when your mom dies and you can’t get to the store?

Sometimes I can’t get to the store.

Moving to LA:

I was talking with a girl about what it took for her to move to LA. She lived in her car twice.  When she woke up next to a beach near Torrance, a cop came up to her car and knocked on her window and said, “I heard you’ve been turning tricks in your car.” He searched her.“I just broke up with my boyfriend, she said. “I had nowhere to go.” She was turning tricks in hotels and John’s homes, not in her car. She showered at Bally’s fitness. This happened twice. She now lives in a great loft space and is cutting her album and still sort of turning tricks.

When I moved to Los Angeles, I thought I deserved a job because I’m entitled, bitter, jealous and over-educated.  High school dropouts have six figure salaries in Los Angles and I resented them. My saved stripper money dwindled fast and all my job leads were dead ends, so I answered adds on Craigslist for bartending gigs. I stood in line with a hundred other people for interviews on Hollywood Boulevard. The woman in the booth held my resume and sat with her elbows on the table. “You’re exactly what we’re looking for,” among other promising remarks. At one point, I thought she was going to make out with me when she reached for my arm to compliment my tattoos. She had spiky black bangs and was at least ten years younger than I was.  She never called me for the job.

*I never get what I think I’m gonna get.

I begged a famous ex porn star for a part time job in a clinic where I siphoned the piss of Ron Jeremy and got certified to draw blood. One of the porn stars catered events, so he gave me a sheet of names and numbers and I cold called a woman who needed people in Alhambra. I passed out crab cakes and scooped Carne Asada onto plates for women at baby showers. I opened beers, wedding after wedding. I poured cheap white wine into plastic glasses in my second hand white tuxedo shirt with stained armpits. We weren’t allowed to accept tips, so I tucked dollar bills in my black boots. When I unzipped them later, sweaty, crumpled bills spilled onto the floor and they smelled like my feet.

Every time my life is falling apart, there’s a baby shower that I’ve RSVP’ed to and no way out.

On the way to the last baby shower, I had just been dumped by someone I was in love with. I thought, “I could check myself in to a psyche ward, or go watch my friends eat cupcakes and open presents.” The last two baby showers, I chose the latter.

Recently, Someone I love was in the hospital and there was a moment where I could have driven many hours to the hospital, or stayed and waited for news. I did neither.

I attended Annie Sprinkle’s wedding, which was a wacky, seventh chakra hootenanny.  The seventh chakra is also called the violet energy cortex and it’s supposed to related to meditation, prayer and spiritual awakening; things I’m not good at. Annie Sprinkle represents the 90’s for me, which was also a time of feminist performance art and sex positive, radical fairy silliness, another pivotal time that changed the way I saw culture, society and sex forever. At Annie Sprinkles wedding, I sat in the pews and watched folks in purple glitter skirts sing opera. Someone wore a suit of balloons. People in purple tights and silly lavender wigs read stories while Annie Sprinkle renewed her marriage vows.

There was a dancer who appeared to be fighting something in the air that was tangled up in her while she sang. I feel that way all the time, I thought, knowing that I was sharing someone else’s pivotal moment with all of the purple people. I was part of the pageantry. Completely at home.

(2008, Los Angeles)

I hated dancing at Cheetahs on Hollywood boulevard. It was dead and depressing, full of cheap Armenian gangsters who never paid me for dances. They just sat around doing vodka shots with a tiny blonde stripper who twirled a scarf around on stage like a parachute. A friend hooked me up with a part-time job assisting a screenplay writer in Santa Monica.

The screenplay writer owned a couple houses with tasteful French lighting and Persian rugs. She lived blocks from the beach in a quiet neighborhood, had a hairy Burmese mountain dog with one blue eye and one amber, and a studious, hippie, live-in boyfriend. Rex was LA-ambitious: She woke up every day at 4a.m., did Bikram yoga then wrote until noon.  She encouraged me to do the same, but the only time I saw 4a.m. was if I stayed up the night before. The job was dreamy. I organized her dark wooden library and a cleaned out her garage. When I wasn’t buying dog vitamins or organizing Rex’s imported pine library office, I helped her with some research and editing, which was hugely flattering.  After all, she was a successful writer. I was in grad school. I was paying her bills on line and noticed her cash flow diminishing. “If I pay both your mortgages then you can’t pay me,” I said. She applied for a loan.  Her bank denied it, and I was let go.

Around that time, my friend Jayne decided to move back to Los Angeles from New York. She’d been doing erotic massage and was sober again after a long illustrious relapse. I’d stripped one night at the club out by the airport, The Loose Goose. It had a reputation for hiring older dancers. Inside it was bright as a cafeteria, with red booths where customers sat and munched on hot wings and cheese fries and drank cheap beer. The dressing room was a hovel and the manager was an elusive thug. He didn’t want me there. When I called to speak to him-which dancers had to do in order to get on the schedule-I got the “he’s not here” brush off. The Goose was a forty-five minute drive from my house so it wasn’t worth the gas if the manager refused to let me on the schedule. “You’re not ghetto enough to work here,” the DJ said to me. I didn’t argue. I took my crummy eighty bucks, got dressed and left. I asked Jayne for help.

“Can you pass me some clients?” I asked Jayne. Jayne got a lot of calls because she charged fifty bucks less than the other massage clients around town so she had overflow. She gave me the rundown:

“You make them lie on their backs, put oil on them for a while then turn them over and jerk them off.” Could it be that easy? I thought. I called the numbers she gave me and tried to set some appointments but it was harder than I imagined.

They wanted to get off in the next twenty minutes, not next week. Some clients spoke in quiet voices thick with deceit. Some were frank and matter-of-fact. Others wanted to talk endlessly about what they wanted me to do to them. It was hard to decipher if they were safe or risky. I went with my gut. It was a bad sign if they wouldn’t tell me anything about themselves, were in hurry to meet me or if they tried to haggle my price.

Jayne already knew some of them, like the punk kid from New York who worked for a band I didn’t know anything about, TV on the Radio.

The punk kid arrived an hour late by cab. I opened the door and led him to my bedroom where candles were lit and music played: PJ Harvey and Elliot Smith.

His skinny, black jeans were at his ankles in seconds. I’d planned to ask him to lie down first. I’d rub his shoulders for a while, like Jayne said, but the punk kid pounced on me the second we reached my doorway and we rolled around on my bed where he kissed me hard on the mouth and sucked on my neck. At first, I fought off his silver ringed hands and his tattooed arms. The brown plastic tub of coconut oil sat untouched on my bedside table.  The comforter was wrinkled. Pillows tumbled to the floor.  This was no massage; this was a wrestling match. I was losing.

Lesson # 1: This is nothing like dancing.

“Dude, you need to mellow out,” I said.

“What’s the matter?” he said with a terrible grin. I thought of Ian and his bony collarbone, his thin arms, his unending patience. I’d starting lying to him and I’d stopped putting out. The punk kid’s breath smelled like stale beer and onion rings. He had a lip ring and pierced eyebrow. My Mom’s death was a bucket of ice water on our sex life. I stayed frozen.

Lesson #2: I don’t like kissing clients.

A couple of minutes later, the punk kid jerked off onto my chest. I heard a loud crash as something fell to the floor. There were footsteps and a door opening. “Someone’s here,” I whispered.

“Get in the closet.” We were both visibly shaking.

Lesson #3: Close and lock all doors when you have a client. Even doors that are usually left open in the event that someone comes home.

Ian must’ve stopped by to grab something and he was about to find me with jizz on my chest and a kid with bangs lying naked on my bed.

“Hello?” I said while approaching my living room. My heart leapt. Not in a good way. How would I explain?

Terror. Silence. Snow on my tongue.

Two of my cats ran past me. One tackled the other. In the laundry room, they’d knocked my hula-hoop from its hook and opened a closet. My purses spilled out onto the floor. I picked up the mean, grey one and tossed him outside.

In the bathroom, I ran hot water and washed my hands with anti bacterial soap, soaked a hand towel and sponged off my chest.

“Sneak,” I whispered into my stone grey eyes and noticed there was still come on my neck.My black eyeliner was smudged and my lipstick was gone from the punk kid’s mauling.

Lesson #4: Shower thoroughly after each client in case someone comes home.

I walked to the kitchen and drank a glass of ice water until I stopped shaking then walked back into my bedroom. I opened the closet door, where my prisoner was still crouched down on a pile of my dirty laundry. I smelled cat piss.

“False alarm,” I said.

“That totally freaked me out,” the punk kid said.

“Your fly’s unzipped.” I grabbed his black t-shirt from the floor and tossed him his checkered Vans.

I dropped him off on Sunset boulevard where he had a tattoo appointment then I drove out to West LA to go to attend an AA meeting.

Touching strange men and lying about it made me prickly. I grew distant and skittish. I didn’t want to be touched. I was aggravated by Ian’s love for me. I wanted him to go away, but when he did I pulled him closer.

Seated 70's porn by Sheila Hiber

The massage thing wasn’t working out. I’d get calls and then nothing for days or weeks. This was no way to survive, I thought.

Lesson #5: Avoid time wasters.

Time wasters were clients who talked endlessly about what they wanted, they’d give me a shopping list: Dress me like a whore. Teach me how to suck cock. Bring me clothes and make me walk up to your house, etc. Time wasters weren’t the cleints who actually showed up.

I Told Ian I was working at The Goose while I met men in hotels, casinos and apartments as far away as Hermosa Beach and Torrance. One client near the Grove provided me with thigh highs and white eighties drag queen pumps. There were scratches on his white walls that looked like they were from acrylic nails and I imagined a woman like me, scared and frozen, wanting to leave.  The intersection near the Grove reminds me of stains on walls and giving him twenty bucks back because he came too fast.

The punk kid kept texting me:

“I almost had a heart attack”

While I drove to West LA, the sun was sinking in front of me. I raced towards it and couldn’t stop, like downhill skiing, hauling ass on pure snow that’s fast and bright and reckless. Stopping is not an option. Or is it?

Lesson # 6: There’s no going back now, which is a horrible feeling and also strangely arousing.

For the AA meeting, the only place to park was ten blocks away. I strolled passed businessmen in sports jackets and women wearing corporate pencil skirts. A chubby blonde with tattoos came up to me and threw her arms around me.  I bristled. “Are you new?” I wished I was new, but I was over ten years sober. I was spent, exhausted by clutching my secrets to my chest. I sat against a wall inside the room with hundreds of enthusiastic citizens with bleached grins and wondered how they could recover, become good people. No matter how hard they shook my hands or hugged me, the guilt attached itself to my ribs like a barnacle. I clenched my teeth and wondered why I bothered staying clean if I was just going to lie to people I loved.

I had to find my way back.

Backslide by Sheila Hiber

Dad insisted we leave in the middle of the night. He liked to get places first. I was cranky and eight years old and half asleep so when my big brother said, “We’re going. Grab your suitcase,” I carried my Marie Osmond Barbie into the orange and brown RV and followed him to the back and I slept with Marie, my Barbie Corvette, some Tinkerbell pillows and a pile of blankets.

Seven hours later, we magically arrived at Mount Bachelor in Bend, Oregon. There’s  snow everywhere. We unloaded the groceries and luggage into a cabin where there was a fireplace, hot tub and big kitchen. I called “top bunk” and climbed up the ladder. That night I fell off the top bunk and sprained my wrist.

I was a good skier. Learned when I was three years old from my Dad. My big brother raced and placed and won medals, but I was pretty fast. I didn’t use poles because they got in my way. I had a green and blue striped ski suit and K-2’s. I skii’ed with the adults by the time I was eight, not the bunny slope for kids.

On the mountain, the sun blazed on the soft snow and the glare was blinding. The tree limbs were heavy with soft powder. I liked racing downhill, going as fast as possible. I never wanted to stop. When I had to avoid hitting someone, I sprayed a white wave of snow into the air by pushing my heels down and angling tips of my skis up.

Snow Angel by Kent Geib

I skii’ed the moderate Orange chair with my Mom and brother but I wanted to go on the Black chair with my Dad. It’s the most difficult lift and I’d been working up to it. I wanted him to know I was brave.

In line for the Black chair, the sky turned grey and it snowed so hard I could barely make out my Dad. I could only see the edges of him. He’s quiet, which happened when he’s bothered by something. I sensed terror but I didn’t understand what it meant. We were waiting to catch the lift and the wind blew and whistled. The snow got even thicker so I moved my scarf around my chin to keep warm.

He was standing in the white silence, moving up the hill slowly. I knew he was next to me in a blurry white cloud. I heard him yell, “This is ridiculous. Let’s go back to the lodge.” He turned with his poles for leverage and I followed the sound of his skis hitting the icy surface with a hiss. It was a long way back to the lodge.

Years later I’d hear a story.

When Dad was in law school, before I was born, he went skiing alone and inured his spinal cord, dislocating the bone disks that made up his spine. If he hadn’t been rushed to a hospital for emergency back surgery, he could have been paralyzed. The scar is a deep shiny tiger stripe on his back.

The day of the whiteout on the mountain, he was afraid and couldn’t explain it to me in the blizzard. He wanted to protect me. It was the day I learned fear for the first time: a tense, cold silence like snow sticking on the tip of my tongue.

The next time was a couple years later. My athletic older brother played football. My Dad picked me up to see him play a game in Crescent City, a shit town, north of Humboldt. On the 101 freeway, the wind was blowing. I could tell by the way the Redwood trees swayed. It was beautiful, the way the tips danced as we zipped along in my Dad’s post-divorce blue and silver 280-ZX.

He explained that I was going to be introduced to Jill, the woman he was dating. On the side of the road, a Redwood tree cracked and fell down as we approached it. It was giant.

“Dad, look out,” I said. He sped up we raced below it, missing it by a fraction. It collapsed onto the freeway right behind us, blocking the Van and all traffic from passing through.

It was evening by the time we reached Crescent City, the electricity was out and windows were exploding from the hurricane winds. Roofs were destroyed by fallen Redwoods.

I met my Dad’s pretty new girlfriend in the dark with windows crashing from the storm. My brother’s football game was cancelled and he was on the bus back home.

We went to a restaurant, the only one in town that was still open, and sat in a booth and hoped the windows wouldn’t shatter. After the tree fell in front of us, I was tense and quiet. I clammed up as if my Dad and I were stuck together in a fear ball.“You’ll always be my little girl,” Dad whispered in my ear when he left my Mom and I standing on the porch. But I was no longer a little girl. I was already ten. I tasted fear on my tongue as I watched him walk silently to his car and drive away until I couldn’t even make out the edges of him.

snow prints by Kent Geib