My dad used to play a game with me. After he suited up for work in a jacket and tie, he’d dig in his pockets for change then he’d ask me, “Who’s the President on the coin or bill?” If I guessed right, I’d get to keep the coin or bill. I rarely got it right. I didn’t understand that I needed to value the coin. I had to want it. I didn’t want it. I just wanted to follow my dad around before he walked out the door and into his silver-blue Chrysler. After my parents divorced, whenever I wanted something extra (a ski trip with a friend, a dress for prom, new clothes) my mom’s response was “Money doesn’t grow on trees” then, “ask your dad.”  He’d given her the house, the car and me. He paid alimony.

            I could tell he didn’t want to give me extra money. Maybe he wanted to teach me the some-people-have-to-dig-ditches-lesson. My dad got up at 5a.m. every day and worked until 5 or 6pm. He still does. He built his own practice from an empty building on a quiet street to a thriving business. Asking was so uncomfortable that I learned that I’d rather drink a pint of my own piss than ask anyone for help.  

A staircase to the sky

    By age twenty-two I was already lap dancing in San Francisco’s seedier strip clubs, hell bent on being self-sufficient. My mom was wrong. Money did grow on trees; I just had to figure out how to climb the damn thing, snatch it and steal off with it. I wasn’t afraid to work. I would earn the shit out of that money. In sex worker circles, there are names for girls like us; our relationship to earning: lazy bitches, wolves, hustlers, money- makers, campers, sharks or cougars. One of my managers called me a “piranha,” and by this he meant, I only left bones. “Other girls are sharks,” he said. “They take a chunk and move on.”

            With practice and time, I found out what men wanted: a counselor, comedian, sex therapist, bartender, a hand job, a hug, a nipple in the face, a counseling session, an escape,  and mostly, to feel desired. Unlike most women who had the sense to make a mint and pursue non-stripping careers, I only got better with time. I blossomed into a piranha. I also got older, injured and twenty years later, stood at a crossroads with a boyfriend and MFA, unsure of how to quit. I’d aged out. 

          At the end of 2011, I quit. It wasn’t a parade kind of leaving with cymbals crashing, drum rolling or high-fives. I didn’t have fifty G’s in the bank. It was a gentle leaving: one night after a mediocre Wednesday night at the Bruiser, I walked onto Bourbon Street into the drizzle with my stripper bag full of my costumes and shoes in search of a cab with this knowledge:

$1=Washington

$5=Lincoln

$10= A. Hamilton (non-president)

$20-Jackson

$100-Bennie Franklin

    On the Rumpus, Stephen Elliott writes daily emails that are often beautiful, thoughtful springboards that launch me into thinking about stuff: movies, plots, books and money. Yesterday’s Daily Rumpus, “The Artist and the Apartment” therumpus.net/subscribe/ was borrowed from Janet Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer.” The content of Stephen’s email gracefully referenced her interview in The Paris Review www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6073/the-art-of-nonfiction-no-4-janet-malcolm that was sent to me by my friend D. I found it compelling, so I shared it with Stephen, who also likes Malcolm. In the Paris Review interview the journalist scoured Malcolm’s apartment looking for details, some secret pathway into Malcolm’s personality. Stephen’s DR followed that line of thinking, as he mused about the importance of a tidy apartment. I also borrowed from the Paris Review piece.

Art in Downtown Los Angeles

    In it, Malcolm said, “You have led us into deep waters,” a response to the journalist’s comment that Malcolm’s apartment was “carefully unpretentious,” which had a nice sting. I took the murky terrain idea and used it in a story in which I write, “I’ve led you into hazy terrain where you might call my behavior “acting out” or a “reckless act of despair.” I knew seeing Joe could seriously fuck up my life, but who gives a fuck? I thought. I have to pay my rent.”  Taking our cues from writers we admire is as bold as lunging over a table and licking their faces. The writers I licked in 2011 were mostly Cheryl Strayed, Lidia Yuknavitch and Michael Ondaatje, but there were others too.

      Which brings me to the epic texter, Marie Callaway and her story about the writer she fucked, and then blogged about while exposing him. There’s a romance associated to work that’s considered “raw” because it’s unfettered by formality or training. This also goes against what I’ve been told and what I believe (and what Stephen has said in many DR’s to the point where it borders dogma) that you have to write for ten years to be good.

     That’s not always the case. There will always be a Marie Calloway hanging around; a star that burns bright for ten minutes then dies. Also, there will always be a fresh voice that stands out from the rest like William Burroughs, Kathy Acker and Sara Gerot (Black Clock #14).

Storefront Silverlake

     I don’t know if Marie Calloway is a twinkling voice that will last. Time will tell. Stephen recently interviewed her about her text message story. If you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about, skip everything and just read this essay by Roxanne Gay about it: http://htmlgiant.com/web-hype/the-price-of-revelation/

             In the DR interview, Marie Calloway mentioned doing sex work and brought up the class differences, which is interesting. In the interview she mentioned girls who were fucking for $40 and I don’t know where she’s writing from, but I’ve never heard of such cheap prices that weren’t junkies living in their car with cocks in their mouths.

            It’s true, we, the people (99′ers) were broke and pissed off in 2011. The bleak economy changed the way everyone experienced and thought about class  (the driving force behind RSW http://therumpus.net/2011/11/recession-sex-workers-14-phoenix-rising-an-interview-with-nadia-payne/ also on The Rumpus). I think of sex workers as a hole in the class argument.

    For instance, my friend Jen was raised middle class-ish. Then her father got hooked on heroin. By the time she was a teenager, she was doing heroin with her father, who sold her out of his van. She would call a liquor store to reach him. She later got clean, became a paralegal to the stars, drove a jag and made $75K a year. Then she went back to sex work, specifically doing sensual massage (handjobs) in NY and LA. Which is how I originally got into the sensual massage game—she passed me her clients when I was in grad school. What class did she belong to? How about the nice girl from Jersey who got involved in an international prostitution ring?   My friend L has stripped for years in LA and NOLA. She’s from a semi-rural depressed economy in Indiana. Her parents had money. She calls herself “spoiled.” But her dad lost his business and now when she visits him, she sleeps in a cot in the kitchen. She’s getting all A’s in college where she’s attending. She’s decided to do escorting on the side. What class is she?

It’s not as simple as making a good decision or bad decision. There are only decisions.

Palm Desert 2011

                                          There is always a price to pay.

    It seems  like a million years ago, J and I were feature dancers at the Market Street Cinema. We had a certain amount of money we needed to make, we put on four shows a day: 11am, 4 pm, 7 pm and 11pm and then worked the audience, by giving lap dances. We were two of very few white women at that club and were considered the “clean girls.” At first, I thought it was because the girls found out we didn’t do drugs or drink alcohol, but it was because we didn’t do any “extras.” Then the club jacked up the stage fees to $180 every four hours and everyone started doing handjobs, including J and I, leveling the playing field.

In this molting, I hope to write like a motherfucker in 2012. 

Our little Xmas Tree

Lastly, thank you for your generous donations to my blog: reading me or sending money. You know who you are.

2012-Bring it.

   It was time to leave. The empty Tularosa apartment had tacks and bobby pins embedded in the ratty, brown rug along with ancient hairballs from my fussy male cats. The window ledges were covered in paw prints where they sunned themselves for the last eight years.

       I held the last garbage bag in my fist and stole a long glance out the windows. There was my view of Griffith Park, the observatory and the Hollywood sign. There was the giant jacaranda tree now withered and red, dropping dead, wet blossoms. And downtown: there were the buildings in a grey cluster, circling the hazy lavender sky. I’d exchange one fig tree for our Christmas tree, decorated with antique ornaments, a lemon and orange tree out back. I’d leave a shared deck for a private porch to sip espresso with my sweetheart. I’d depart from Flore Café in search of the one supreme taco truck in Highland Park.

            The last thing to go was my motorcycle, which wasn’t my dream bike at all, but an affordable replacement bike–a right now bike. My favorite bike was Grace Landing, a cherry 1971 blue Honda CB 550-4 with the original paint job, and, she hated Los Angeles.

          She stalled on Sunset Boulevard in the August heat. The potholes on Beverly were hell on her wheels. The stop and go on Wilshire made her start smoking. She seized up, refused to particpate in my hour and change commute to Century City. A beautiful girl with brown hair and blonde bangs told me to ask Roberto because he fixed motorcycles out of his one bedroom apartment in an alley behind Circus of Books in Silverlake.

            “Bring it by,” he said. I towed her to his house and I sipped coffee on his steps, and got a migraine, which were consistent at the time.  Every Sunday after the breakup with the stoner, one look at the sun and rainbow prism zig-zags appeared on faces and cars. When I looked at Roberto, he had rainbow prism horns. I laughed, knowing I had twenty minutes before the puking began. Just enough time to  chit-chat, diagnose the bike and get home to my cool, dark bathroom floor.

             “You have fuses?” he asked.

            “Yep.” I showed him my tiny glass fuses I always kept in my jean jacket pocket.

             “Give me a couple,” he said. Roberto stood in a circle of tools;  three motorcycles deep in friends’ bikes. He had cute flirty orange 70’s Honda in his kitchen (he built if for an ex-girlfriend) and lots of clown paintings on walls. His house looked a lot like mine, with rusty 1950’s blenders and vintage aprons for curtains. Roberto was a dark cloud boy; an ex-junkie with permanently greasy fingernails and a quiet Bad Santa sense of humor. We talked about motorcycle like they were lovers.

            “It was love at first sight. I drove her straight off the showroom floor from Scooteria in SF. Honda in SF right off the lot. The name on her title was “Grace Landing.” Seriously. That was the name of the lady who left it sitting in her garage for over ten years while she collected dust, which is why I had every cable, wire, carb and clutch replaced. New battery. When I first got her, she died on Folsom five times so I’d push her all the way to the Hansen brothers. She took a lot of work and cash to get going. When she finally ran, she started in the fog, hail, rain and even snow. Every day. Every night.  I slid on wet cardboard on hills, I leaned down too far, stalled out on the occasional steep hill, but I never dropped her and she never dropped me.”           

            Roberto nodded and tinkered with a bike he built from scratch. It was matte black with no ignition, no mirrors.  Grace Landing stood next to it. He got her started.

            “I think I finally built the bike that’s going to kill me,” he said, smiling at me then his bike.

       He had a patch over one eye from rogue metal dust that flew in his eyeball while welding his bike. I didn’t know how to respond, but I admired his drive. 

      A year later, I sold Grace Landing to a hipster over 4th of July weekend in LA, when I was a few hundred short my rent. The buyer was a hipster and it was his first bike. He could afford to pamper her.  I’ve sold the clothes off my body for a burrito. I’ve sold lap dances, my own company, the touch of my skin, but selling Grace Landing was the only time in my life I regretted selling something I loved.

              I didn’t realize that until it was too late. 

Smoke by Brian Perkins

    It’s Christmas and I think about Roberto and  Grace Landing. I still look for her on the road, at the BBQ joint on Angeles Crest highway, in parking garages around LA and on Sunset Boulevard. I thought I spied her on the street and waited for the owner to arrive for a few minutes, then bailed, fearing I’d seem like a slimy stalker.

             Roberto didn’t get killed by the bike he built. He shot himself in the heart with an ak 47.

A while later, his bike showed up at my friend’s shop. I bought it, but never got it running. The guys at the shop worked on it, gave it a new battery, tinkered around with it for months on my dime. They tried to start it with the wires, but it was mocking and quiet like Roberto. “I’ll take that one instead,” I said, pointing to a puttering brown 1974 CB 450 Honda, which I still have. When I look at it I think of Roberto sometimes and wonder if he was looking out for me, that he didn’t want me riding his bike. Fucker. 

        I left a fabulous two-bedroom Victorian apartment in the Mission in 2002 to follow my stoner boyfriend down South after he announced, “I’m moving to LA with my band.” We crammed into a lime green apartment the size of a bathtub across from a gas station on off Sunset Boulevard where I awoke to the sound of Armenian Senior citizens hocking loogies outside our bedroom window each morning.

            I’d left my soaring lap dancing career behind in San Francisco, bought a bullet-holed, 1978 crap-brown Disco Nova from a guy named Clyde for three hundred bucks. I drove the bucket to Simi Valley at 5a.m. to learn how to draw blood so I could work at a clinic where I tested porn stars for HIV so they could stay on the payroll. 

            I was born to hate Los Angeles. It’s in my Northern California DNA. We had a burl plaque hanging in our house with black letters carved neatly: “I Don’t Give a Damn How it is done in LA.” I clenched my teeth and gripped the steering wheel in hundred-degree heat with no air conditioner, learned to tie a tourniquet and crack jokes, while porn stars told me about their kids and boyfriends. I filled tubes and spun purple black blood and only one guy passed out in my chair. When he came to, I realized I had to ditch Hollywood and the stoner. 

            I learned that to break up with someone I had to wait out the shakes, allow the breakup worms to crawl up my throat and out my mouth. I’d stave off migraines for a few months. I left the harmonica playing stoner with his patchouli-drenched armpits, his bong and his orange Tupperware jar full of quarters on Curson Street and I drove another U-haul to Silverlake where I subleased a Spanish bungalow apartment on a quiet street called Tularosa (tulip+rose) where my friend Sheila was storing her stuff before she moved in with her girlfriend. 

            I allowed Los Angeles to melt me with her ridiculously un-snowy Christmases and her unconvincing rains that grew on me like a bright fungus. Tularosa had trees that grew so ferociously that their roots punched through sidewalks and mutilated the landscape and their conviction made me giggle with relief. Silverlake, my new neighborhood, was Hispanic and queer, with avocado trees that stretched their limbs across the street to the other side, with branches so hefty, they made ghost shadows on the ground below. Tularosa was where Bird of Paradise plants grew big as buildings like Audrey II and orange and pink bougainvillea smashed through the neighbor’s fences, grabbing at the sun. In the U-haul, the stoner’s cat and I both howled and trembled so much it was hard to see the freeway and drive. Black streams of mascara made tracks down my face. I didn’t unpack my boxes for weeks and I used that U-haul memory as a reason to avoid moving. I’ll stay here forever, I thought.

            The sublease became my home after I met the landlords, a soft spoken elderly Hispanic couple who called me “Mija” (“my daughter,” “my girl,” or “honey”). I made an offer on the apartment that was painted the color of raspberry ice cream and had a Pepto Bismol pink kitchen, red bedroom and lots of windows with views of the trees.  I stacked my collection of 1950’s blenders on top of the refrigerator and hung my six black velvet bullfighting paintings that I swiped from junk shops in S.F.  The walls were repainted recently. I had two accent walls the color of Tapatio hot sauce and my room was four shades of grey. In my mailbox, I got letters and bills for Carlos and Miguel. I asked the landlord, Anita about the history of the other tenants.

            “Who’s Carlos?”

            “My bother, Carlos died of HIV.”

            “In the apartment?”

            “One time he was so feverish he jumped out the living room window and landed on the lawn, then crawled back up the front stairs.” She chuckled. “He was covered in blood, like a horror show. He was real confused.” Places contain memories. I never intended to stay in Los Angeles. I’ll give it five years, I thought. It’s been nine. I’ve lived in the Tularosa apartment for eight.

               Carlos threw himself out the front windows, and fell onto the grass below, where the stoner’s cat loved to play. I recently smashed eight windows in the living room while pole dancing in a rainstorm.  The pole slipped off the ceiling and six little glass panes fell onto the ground. In the driveway, I buried the ashes of the stoner’s eighteen-year old cat,  picked limes out off the tree and squeezed them onto steamed zucchini. I’ve eaten figs right off the vine at the bottom of my stairs, ripped open the flesh and stirred them with yoghurt.

Life and death swirl in every room and in each corner on Tularosa:

In the kitchen: I made my mom’s lemon bars, sat in a chair while my friend bleached my hair and ate cheese. I’ve made out with boyfriends fed hungry cats and listened to podcasts. I’ve had photo shoots, had arguments, made my first blueberry pie and made thousands of cups of tea. 

In the bathroom: A junkie I dated shot dope. I wrestled needles out of my friend Jen’s hands years ago. She died this February of an overdose.  I gave two different men their first golden showers. One paid me.

In the bedroom: I slept with my mom in my bed one mother’s day then drove her to Vegas to see Celine Dion. This was the last vacation we took together because shortly after Vegas, she was diagnosed with bile duct cancer and battled illness for three years. I fell in love with a comedian who didn’t love me back. I hugged my boyfriend and cried for my mother night after night. He never knew I was crying. My nephew, stepbrother and stepfather and mother have all slept in my bedroom. I’ve massaged clients in my room for cash and had a one-night stand with an actually kind of well known rapper. I’ve fallen in love again and again.

In the living room: I rehearsed burlesque routines, memorized a lecture on Hubert Selby for my senior lecture at Antioch.  I tied a naked boy to a chair and blindfolded him, then invited my girlfriend in to take pictures. I gave a five hundred-dollar girl/girl naked show on my couch to a guy who found me on My Space with my friend, Bunny. We called the guy “the kid” because, although he was our age (mid-30’s), he dressed like a fourteen-year old surfer. During the blowjob, I surprised him with a tight slap on his cheek which made all of us laugh. After that, he was referred to as “the kid I slapped.”

In the living room:  I adopted kittens, I hung my mother’s wedding dress in the closet, the stoner’s plants grew into enormous trees and reached the ceiling. I wrote and wrote.

            “Who’s Miguel?” I asked Anita, holding en envelope addressed to him.   

On the deck: I’ve sat with my mother in the sun on blue metal chairs and read books.

She adored the stoner’s cat. My bluesman got on one knee and proposed to me there. I got engaged.

In the driveway: I’ve broken up with men. I’ve dropped bags of groceries on my toes. I’ve slipped on the stairs in spike heels.

In the driveway, Anita watered her cactus and lavender plants. I mounted my 1974 Honda, which I had kick-start to get it to turn over.

“Miguel, my other brother, died in a motorcycle accident,” she said.

“Be careful, Mija.”

 I put on my red, white and blue helmet. “I’ll be careful,” I said. There were tears in her eyes as my bike sputtered down the driveway. Or maybe they were mine. 

Humboldt

When I reached for dollars to pay for my coffee at Cafe Leche, I couldn’t find the picture of my mom.  I kept it between my CVS card and VONS card behind my Driver’s license. I panicked, holding up the line of rabid coffee addicts, but it was gone. “Do you want a receipt?” the boy with the black bangs asked. The people in line crossed their arms. It was the only cafe with electricity today. Line out the door.

            “What?” I asked, thinking Shit. I must’ve tossed it in a trashcan outside that 7-11 while I cleaned out my wallet because it wouldn’t close due to being stuffed-not with money-but with expired gift cards, receipts and business cards with my notes scribbled on them: TP, cat food, toothpaste.

            “No.”

             Outside that 7-11, a scraggly homeless guy squatted against the wall with his dog and watched me empty my wallet into the trashcan. His eyes were on the loot.           

            “There’s nothing worth anything.” I shrugged.

            “Was wonderin,” he said.

Portrait by Romy Suskin

In the picture, that was the size of two postage stamps, my mom was around thirty-five and tan, smiling in the sun wearing a big floppy hat and a flowered bathing suit top. The top could’ve been worn by the likes of Jane Mansfield or Scarlet Johansson.  At eighteen, her teeth had been knocked out by a horse, one of several accidents with horses that resulted in stitches in her face and mouth. Her replacement teeth were even and white, her Dentyne smile was relaxed and warm. Her fierce love for horses, stubborn and life long. She always got back in the saddle, and insisted that horse play a major role in our family vacations, but I could never forgive them for their volatile skittishness. It seemed misdirected and unfair. Even though there are still horses being boarded on her property, I barely go near them, beautiful and majestic as they are. I’m both comforted and scared of them. They’re not to be trusted.

             In the picture, it was summer. Mom reclined against the back of a seat on our white ski boat named, “Moonraker” or Dream weaver,” like band names from the movie Boogie Nights, airbrushed in cursive on mirrors from the county fair. On the moonraker, while my parents sipped Lowenbrau, I drank Fresca and Tab. I worried about calorie intake by age nine, got my period at ten, and was barfing by eleven.  My mom’s brown wavy hair was in ponytails under the floppy hat.  I remember thinking she had such pretty hair as I watched her ski behind the boat on doubles, her tan knees and tight life jacket with delicate girl buckles fastened across her perfect “C” chest. She floated on the top of water and held the handles of the taught rope, arms straight out in front of her, strong, determined. “Hit it!” she yelled.  She always got up and she stayed, until she let go of the handles and lifted her arms in the air while the rope dropped lightly into the soft water. She sank too. But it looked more like floating.

            Waterskiing trips were decades before the lexicon of bile duct cancer: carcinogenic free radicals. Whipple surgery. Abnormal cell count. Dead cells. White cells. Radiation. Chemo. Weight loss. Hair loss. Four abdominal surgeries.  Feeding tube. Going septic. Bile duct cancer loves gall bladder cancer loves pancreatic cancer. She loved horses.

            I don’t remember ever getting up on doubles, but my memory’s a loser: I tend to remember my failures. My dad liked to impress. He’d give thumbs up to my mom at the steering wheel when he was ready to go. She’d gun it.  He skied on a single ski, thighs bent and bulging, white ripples on either side of his bent knees. I remember his mahogany ski red as dirt, skidding on top of the water. He leaned over on his side, his elbows out, handles touching, facing each other against his chest. He dared the rope to slack, the water sprayed like a couple of wet wings sprouting from his calves. He leaned so far his ear nearly touched the water. “Down!” I yelled and raised the orange flag high in the air so the other boaters would see that we circled around to where he bobbed in the water. We’d wait to hear if he wanted to do it again. “One more,” he said. I have my dad’s thighs. According to him, I skied on them too, on doubles. I did get up. And, I need to keep getting up.  

             I’m not grieving according to plan. The pie chart is all askew. I’ve climbed out of the sex work cave but I’m still enraged. The helplessness shows up when I’m in her house, the guilt sneaks up and I have an urge to die. I jog and do yoga to burn off the anger but it leaks out. I look like her when I wear my seventies jackets. I didn’t get a birthday card from her again. She was great with cards. She had the kind of penmanship that lands the job, in the days when that mattered. I cried myself to sleep in my boyfriend’s arms the other night. Inconsolable. I kept her picture in my wallet and made her crock-pot chili but it still leaves me motherless. I miss her. 

            My impressive dad who built his own house and business, did all his own plumbing and still gets up at 5a.m. to work every day at age 70, compared skiing memories with me over Thanksgiving. I got some things wrong.

For instance, the Mt Bachelor snow blizzard when I learned fear in a whiteout. I remembered standing in line inching up the steep hill to grab the T-Bar chair lift and then returning to the lodge because he acted weird, quiet and scared and I couldn’t see. He remembered this: I was seven or eight. I’d been skiing for four years by then. We were on the T-bar chair lift at Mt. Bachelor. We rode up the mountain and the blizzard began when we were at the top and needed to get back down. He was scared.

It was white and silent and icy. We couldn’t see but I could hear him.“Stick close by,” he said. I remember my green and blue snowsuit with snow melted on it.  I listened for the clicking of my dad’s skis smacking ice. I remember the silver starfish shape of his pole hitting the ground, brushing against my K2 ski. He was made of sounds that day: “Stay close,” he said. Click Click Click. White snow surrounded us, and I followed the tips of his skies.