I got a call tonight from an Australian phone number.  I picked it up and my friend Jackson’s voice was on the other end of the line.  In that second I was back in the peep booths in Melbourne, talking to him while I waited for lights to flash on– one hand mechanically massaging at my crotch, the other cradling the phone against my face, listening to his whirlwind voice spit out gossip.  

Jackson is the reason I started smoking.  I remember the night he came to visit me in Melbourne, a month after we’d spent a week locked in bed together.  I was so fucking excited to see him.  He’d asked to spend some time alone with my housemate, his friend Corey, so after work I sat outside the supermarket for an hour trying to waste time.  Eventually I ended up with arms laden with groceries for an epic date dinner.  I expected him to open the front door when I got home but he wasn’t even in the house.  In the kitchen I looked out the window and saw him sitting in the backyard, smoking cigarettes.  He looked distant, something in the way his eyes brushed through me -  I understood it wasn’t the moment of euphoric reunion.  He told me he’d just found out an old graffiti buddy had died, that he had had to call a friend to let them know.  I wanted to be okay with the distance he seemed to need from me.  To not need him to fuck me and not be obsessed with the urge to hold his hand in mine.  But then he did and we kissed and at first I felt cold and distant but then the taste of  tobacco slipped across my tongue and down my throat and it was warm and I wanted to keep still – stay there with his hands in my hair, pulling my face down to his so my housemates could look through the window on us and see.  See that this romance I spent all my time denying to anyone who would listen really did exist.  Then we went into my bedroom and didn’t go to sleep because we were fucking, real fucking unlike anything I’d done with my boyfriends or tricks.  Fucking where I didn’t know how to breathe and my whole body was desperate and I when I touched his body it wasn’t because I was expected to, instead I felt privileged and my hands were greedy and sure.  

In the morning we left my bedroom looking like hell and I was proud.  I was proud he had released his grief into my body and Corey and I drove him to the airport and I had no idea it was the last time we would hook up.   In the car ride home I allowed myself to admit that I was crushed out on him like crazy but when I got to America it was awkward.  All the magic got sucked into sadness and bad communication.  So I started smoking, because it tasted like kissing him, but also because I knew it was bad and I wanted to be hard and tragic at the same time.  

A Gift Registry:

I want an easy body.  A clavical that you can grip onto and a chest that sounds like a book slamming shut when a fist hits it.  A riot girl fag body – limpid eyed androgenous child growing into a sneaky, slightly hardened teenaged boy who keeps a key on a chain around his neck.  Or Glenn Danzig.  Maybe I could be Glenn Danzig?  Your fingers would make puzzle pieces around the thickness of my muscles that would soften out with age.  We forget that he used to be a beautiful punk boy, misogyny made him less delicate, but initially he had the look of someone who would cry and cry in your arms.   

I want to start driving again and on the road alone in a pickup truck or my first car from middle school, a 1983 volvo.  I would like it to be after sunset and it’s snowing, my glazed eyes watching a video game galaxy of snowflakes through the windshield. Listening to Nina Simone, epic, mournful music.  A portrait of smug sadness while I drive to a house in the mountains to my family.  My parents or a boyfriend or even close friends, as long as there is a history of challenged yet enduring love.  Mostly I want clean sheets and a dog to sit on my lap while we watch tv.  Bettie Davis rotating her giant pupils from one side of the room to the other.

I want to be woken up by sun on my face, the noise of dogs barking at vaccuum cleaners somewhere in the building.  I want hardwood floors, is that too glutinous?  To walk on clean swept shiny surfaces with pink, freshly showered feet.  Jars of nutricional yeast, pickled carrots, and homemade chili in the fridge I share with my housemate.  We watch movies in the livingroom, he’s a queen who hates the cops and loves fake eyelashes.  Maybe one night we come home drunk and get stoned then he ends up fucking me on the living room couch.  Grasps ahold of my wrist and twists it behind my back till I call mercy and end up with his dick in my mouth.  We never talk about it again but sometimes our noses brush while we are cooking dinner, then I rub where the bruise has faded away and smile, heat spreading through my chest.  

I want family.  To trip over my tongue keeping in sailor language around kids looking to pick up any glimmer of dangerous adulthood.  Sitting around a dinner table eating vegetarian pasta specially made for my weird culinary requirements and trying to frame my life in ways that are both honest but also appealing to people who live life having much different definitions of success than I do.  Getting to hear the life stories of people who have known me since I was a child.  Beyond that I want my chosen family, gay uncles and house mothers and a whole bunch of bratty brothers to wrestle with in Dolores Park, laughing hard but our hands grasping for shoulder to push into the sand are serious as can be.

I want work I can obsess over.  Come home and spend hours geeking out reading studies about.  Please no more prositution – it’s not that it’s harmful - I just want to grow in my body hair in peace.  In this work there will be boxes of condoms and needles that I will spend days dividing into sweet little gift packets with sticks of gum and vitamin c tablets.  Maybe in this job I can organize dance off’s for baby dykes and sassy faggots in training.  Or lino-print classes for sex workes who will draw amazing designs and start carving out lines, only to never come back to finish them.  And in between office hours I will learn to wake up at 6am, put on coffee to burn and write and write and write.  
 

I lived in the squat in Australia that was 10 units of a condemned apartment block.  Each of the first wave of social freeloaders got their own fully functional flat, institution pink bathrooms and ovens seeping gas connected in our hooker names.  I lived there after 6 months of complete transience.  My room with 2 inch foam for bedding and a pile of stripper drag kept me from having a complete mental breakdown while I waited for my broken arm to heal.  It was comforting to inhabit a space which felt so throughly mine despite the constant violence of eviction snatching out our breath.  

I dreamt of walking up to a pile of rubble and picking out slides of plaster, fragments of magic marker drawings of cats fighting dinosaurs from meth obsessiveness taking over my walls.  Other people dwelling on these dreams celebrated the concept of waste.  Burgeoning feral activists crawled in together and saved one apartment for their collective unflushable turds.  Would have parties spewing beer and ramen on the carpet and stubbing rollies out in the mess.

My room became cloistral.  I kept my lover from sleeping in there, instead we would have our theatrical sex in other ghosts abandoned buildings, wreckage far away from home.  One night after drinking whiskey in the park I let my best friends ex-boyfriend share my bed, he grabbed my ass and breathed into my ear in saccharine dreams.  At sunrise I left and ate figs by the side of the road waiting for him to stumble elsewhere.  I burnt candles to make it breathable again then read Bastard Out of Carolina and cried till I vomited.  Crazy was always creeping up my edges.  I took pictures of drool leaving my doll girl lips which my friend found and asked me if I had bulimia.  

I was so divorced from my flesh.  My craving to be male kept me running into walls and was in a full fledged war with my brain throwing out bombs of flashbacks and fear to keep me distracted.  I’m too tired to deal. Pummeling speed. speed. speed. and I tell Ross the gay deskman at the peep show my  secret.  Drawl out like it’s funny or normal – I wish I’d been born a boy.  A client fucks me in the private room while his stripper girlfriend reads text messages on her phone and recites oh. thats. hot. babe.  He pulls out and then semen is flowing down my back towards my plastic wig hairs.  They give me a card for a brothel in tasmania on the way out.  Can I go home now?

The taxi pulls into our cement parking lot full of rotting plums.  In the dark I drink an unstrained cup of christmas shoplifting chai, wrapped up in leopard print sheets.  Matt in number 6 will hang himself  in two years, but right now it’s the quiet of the parks surrounding us coming in through my window, real thankfulness for my own bedroom

After three hours of sitting on the couch I unwrap the spring rolls I made last night for the picnic and eat them.  The peanut sauce tastes too salty and the rice paper wrapping has turned into rubber.  Last night they were so seductive - crisp cucumber and coriander and kinda burnt tofu, but I like that.   I ate them with billee my glamorous train wreck crush.  He kept taking bites and then spreading his hands wide to reveal some story that often got lost before the conclusion.  The spring roll played a conductors baton.  I hadn’t seen him much since he and his boyfriend evacuated gay party paradise but even with domestication he still has pill problems, maybe our livers should take a break together?  We watch Night of the Iguana and Ava Garner is obviously much hotter than Richard Burton, but I’m not at the point of gay where I can admit that yet.  Everyone is covered in sweat and mania and I imagine that if I was watching this on mushrooms I would forget to breathe.  

Eric shows up for our date and sits on the couch with me.  I’m unsure of how to act.  I can usually sleep with whomever I want but despite make outs that slice off my layers of hustling detachment, I feel like he’s holding me at arms length.  It’s embarrassing.  Is being clear that I want to fuck him too eager or are attempts to mirror his evasive body language too submissive?  

On our way to the museum we watch the seals sliding over each other and baying out demands.  There is a wharf with 6 or 7 laying completely still.  Eric says they are probably dead and the tourists to the side of us look at me with active dislike.  
Enter the kingdom of museum mecanique.  There are anemic looking gypsy fortune tellers with eyes that flutter like epilepsy and your life spits out of the slot next to where the quarters went in.  We kiss. I hold my hand against the imprint that will tell us how hot our passion is.  It says lukewarm despite melding my body into his.  I prefer the Addams Family Uncle Fester challenge which threatens to electrocute us but just vibrates my hand like a pumped up hitachi.  We don’t break the circuit till the flashing light bulbs reach the highest level but then it just dies on us no las vegas music or smoke blowing in our faces in congratulations.  

When we talk, our legs dangling over the pier, I don’t have to play the hostess in the conversation.  He’s got the kind of stories that are thrilling and casually horrible.  They bring forth a sense of affinity I don’t feel that often with the good people of San Francisco.  My responding confessions come out unusually flat.  Maybe I’m trying to seem as unaffected or maybe antidepressants have wiped out all my ability to emote.  Death seems to be following us.  When he throws his chewing gum into the water a seagull goes after it and I look into this ocean of shit mutating deep sea creatures with our human compost.  The waterfront.  I eat crab for the first time in a blanched roll, it tastes like the vegan version of egg salad.  In the half asian half mexican restaurant we eat more dead fish.  I feel no guilt or even anxiety over getting caught in vegetarian disgrace.  Not until we have left do I remember what eel actually is - long creepy mermaids with myths of electricity pulsing from their slimy sides to ward children away - I might puke if I don’t forget about it.    

Before his trick at 11 we decide to get drunk in a park.  When we find the cement slides tucked away inside gay surburbia there are all these girls drinking red wine and being too giggly.  I take sips of whisky and we have the mandatory conversation about my transgenderism.  I’m so good at being a trans activist and so bad at not loathing being trans myself.  I can tell he doesn’t really have the same language down and he’s trying to be sensitive or enthusiastic about this elephant.  He talks about how much more socially acceptable it is, parents letting their tweens choose to take hormones and such!  And I say yes even though I mean no.  Yes it’s better but my brain is so mummified in how much badness there still is its quicksand, I’ll never escape.

I want to be normal and of course that is the vilest thing in the world to say but I want a gay boy body and history so sickenly bad.  Being interesting is only so satisfying before you wish you could get drunk and fuck someone you don’t know.  Lead them to the bathroom wordlessly and not have to discuss and consider and maneuver and guide.  
He asks me if I’m going to get bottom surgery and of course not because it’s so fucking expensive but maybe if I say yes I am then it will convey something about my truth.  He takes my head into his hands and says something kind and usually I hate that but now I lap it up.  The gaggle of hipster girls watch us grind into each other and make out taking sips of whisky in between wet kisses.  His pale eyes are shut and his tongue reaches into my mouth to push back grief.  I bite back.  I don’t know how to be a sweet lover.  Black eyes and choking is the only way I know how to fuck someone who isn’t paying me.  I had told myself I’d be more vulnerable as a boy, but I’m even more watchful and detached.  Fists slamming against my chest draw me back in though, crushing breast tissue underneath my binder.  We take turns fucking each other up.  “Why do you have to be so violent?”  And I apologize for not falling to my knees and begging to suck his dick although I sorta wish I was.  But I pinch his flesh between my fingers and punch him back.  He stands for it although maybe it’s too hard.  

We fly down the concrete on slabs of cardboard and leave our bikes to push each other against trees until he says that maybe when I slapped him it made his gold tooth loose.  Yuppies walking their dogs look at us nervously and I forget for a second my inconvenient body as we spin tales to travel together on monkey and puma train hopping adventures.  I slip the ring from a carousel machine from finger to finger and we say goodbye at the top of the hill before he goes to counsel and suck and fuck sad gay divorcees.  

By the time I get home I feel heavy and sad again.  It’s easier to fuck clients than it is to do this because it’s dangerously close to what I want, and then I pull away.  

I smoke outside while my housemates roar at each other with the sloppiness of all day drinking.  In my mind I fill out the questionnaire for chest surgery consultation and I set a date and then I have a flat chest and soon a deep voice, five o clock shadow.  I can think about how fucked up it is that honoring myself as male requires all this, these ways of chipping away my certainty that I will never get to be a boy.  Or I can let myself buy plans of movement and promise.  Of a foreseeable end to a life of waiting.  This is what makes makes me smile.

I haven’t written about work in a long time, I guess after a while the novelty of throat fucking and faked whimpers lose their freshness.  I have done a lot recently though, I like it because now I can do more than one trick a day - and many a week - without going crazy.  
I used to do that on purpose.  When I started going to therapy they asked me what the motivation factor for me seeking help was - I said that my ex had told me that he was worried about me.  That I don’t eat or sleep and I work too much, I do it to give myself an excuse to crash, because interpersonal troubles never seem like a good enough excuse to end up ruined and bedridden.  
And so now I’m doing booking after booking of full on ass fucking and public groping and hour long pure spanking sessions but it’s nothing.  Except I feel exhausted.  Last night I was supposed to practice rope bondage, try out suspension for the first time, but I started reading my diary from 2006 and then passed out by 10.  I keep wanting to do some lino printing, write some stories, but I lay down and flick through pages of brightness and internet text as a way of doing something without doing anything.  My version of prime time television.  
When I first got back from Australia I had a booking with my regular.  He is the sugar daddy of a friend of mine and he’s freaking out.  The dawning awareness of being taken advantage of is reaching him and days that she’s gone pull on him in constant aching pain.  I can tell, mostly because he tells me at length about it, in emails that go for pages in response to simple, mercenary questions.
He starts the session telling me that he’s not in the mood to be mean.  This person who fucks me with baseball bats and ties me up with rubber bands that cut off my circulation so I drop everything that enters my hands hours later.  He runs a bath and sits my smaller frame in between his legs in the stainless steel tub.  Hands softly run over my shoulders, stroke my hair.  I actually can’t do this.  I start taunting him to provoke something that doesn’t seem so sickeningly needy.  Maybe I should beat him up?  I start sucking his cock in the water, he pushes my head down as he’d done earlier, his hand twisted in my hair pulling me under while his fingers mashed into my ass.  But this is actually dangerous, my arms wont fit on the sides of his thick thighs, and I can’t keep myself from not falling face forward straight into floating public hair, struggling to breathe, close my mouth over his cock and try to not bite down in panic.  I’m kind of freaking out, he keeps pushing my head down violently, and the breaths in between are few.  Finally he comes and I lay back light headed and breathless pondering the dubious sexual safety of his sperm floating in the water around us.  
He gets out and gives me the towel, awkwardly pats me dry.  I tell him he’s not so tough, he picks me up and swings me around his shoulders, like I’m a little boy.  Holds me upside down until I plead mercy and then threatens to lick my eyeball.  But as soon as it rushed in, all the energy is out of him again.  We sit on the couch…I try and deep throat him and then he face fucks me till I choke up bile…no wait, that was the session before.  They are blending together, this work, these faces of hunched over rich men.  I know so much about them - their full names, addresses, the birthdays of their children, what jazz quartet they play with.  I don’t know why they trust me, I wouldn’t.  Perhaps the rich are daring some catastrophe to come into their lives or maybe they are just so desperate that they’ll risk what they don’t want to lose anyway.  
They must be so monstrous the lives they lead.  You can tell these men don’t get touched or talked to enough, they are like the abandoned babies you read about in psychology textbooks.  They are so desperate for it and they clamor to be recognized with promises and cash and favors, so much so that I’ve come to expect it now - but of course he wants to take me underpants shopping, of course I get a box of 50 dollar chocolates, of course he wants to build up an entire porn site around me - I am that special.  It makes me feel sad though, to know how little I think about them once the booking is done, how tricks sign off their emails to me - ‘I miss you’.

This is some writing I did at a workshop last night, I’m interested in criticism of the flow of my stories - I feel like my endings are always tacked on.  If you would like to tell me some ways of working on my writing I would really appreciate it

xxx

The cleanest I’ve ever been in my life is as a whore
As a stripper I wasn’t even close.  I would come to work sweaty and grotty, knowing that the white, yellow, and red lights would blur my bruises and scuffed knees into shadow.  I sweat under those lights and when no windows were open in the peep show I’d pick at my skin in the mirror, squeezing out white lines from blackheads with nails encrusted with dirt and chipped nail polish.
I wore the same filthy g-string for 2 months.  Too lazy to buy more than one pair of underwear that was going to come off anyway.  It stood up by itself, hardened from the sticky, cheap lube that I mauled my pussy with every day.  I did stage shows in between peep shifts and the stage had a line on the wall to which it got cleaned, above that line was a thick layer of dust, which I would brush my hand against every dance.  It took me about 6 months before I learned to prioritize cleaning my hands in between shows.  Many times I’d take my hand out of my cunt and it would be grey from the mixture of the dirt and gluish lube.
Once I shaved my legs and bikini line while in the peeps, I called it a special "show".  With privates I just did not give a fuck.  We only had fifteen minutes together and if they could tell that it was my body odor making the room feel trapped, they weren’t going to spend their precious little wanking time telling me that.

Conversely, as a prostitute, my life is lived in a shower.  I clean before work.  Cut my nails down in case I have to stick them up any asses.  I prepare with an enema in the bathroom, kneeling on all fours waiting for a housemate to open the door without knocking.  
Then during the booking it’s more showers.  They are always paranoid that it’s me that’s dirty.  So they scrub me out - "my little dirty whore needs a bathing, if you want to charge me for that pussy it’s got to be nice and clean!" It’s supposed to be humiliating or patronizing but it’s just boring.  Not because I object to the showers, just the show around it, and the implied tone that because I’m the one who takes the cash off their often dirty and smelly person that I will be the one infected, diseased, ruined…
Often even if the booking doesn’t start with a cleansing, it will move there eventually.  While they wash the sperm off their person before I let them touch me again, or for fetish bookings - a place to shower me in piss or my own vomit without them having to be confronted with the sight and smell of it past fantasy stage.
I had a john who face fucked me in a bathtub until I vomited up every bit of a sandwich I’d eaten for lunch.  The bread and cheese and tomato clogged the drainpipe.  We looked down at the trapped water with sprigs of bruised lettuce floating dismally on top and I said "I really need to learn to chew better."  
As a transboy, cleaning is a ritual beyond wiping off the vestiges of saliva and sweaty hand-prints.  When I was still a stripper I would shower in the locker room full of mirrors.  Take my wig off, then my bra and dirty undies, step into the shower and watch my makeup run.  Watch my body turn from harlot to androgynous and heterosexually undesirable under the stream of water.  Now I do this spell at home - take off my fancy ho clothes, wash myself anew, wrap myself in my towel, and redefine my body as mine again.  

you can try but you can’t buy me

For a grand and a half I can get:

New glasses

And in return, to be good for you, I get a manicure and a pedicure. Earrings to soften my face. In the peach coloured dress which matches my underwear set I still look like a boy in drag, but I turn my eyes into wide open tear rimmed orbs with thick makeup, I tilt my hips back in high heels and I replicate gender identity "fancy ho" for you tonight.

A harness and cock so I can be the one getting sucked off one of these days…

I trail fingers over your clothed flesh. I know how addictive a palm can feel rubbing over a thigh from W doing it to me during sleepy afternoons, and I replicate this move on you. I am playing you well, purring about made up loves that I anticipate you’ll have an appreciation for - bluegrass music, european countries, noir cinema. Knowing enough about them to be believable, but not enough so that there isn’t plenty of room for you to teach me. You keep ordering drinks, making me sniff out the fruits in this red wine or hint of orange and cloves in that $14 shot of scotch. I don’t want to drink any more or I wont have the control of my body that I need, and with the nausea that’s been hitting me for the last few weeks I worry that things could get awkward. I want to say "you don’t need to get me drunk, you’re paying for it, it’s guaranteed that you get to fuck me"…but I’m getting paid so well to be more tactful than that. I’m told of the places we’re going to go together - trips to Italy, a night at the opera, I will get an accordion for christmas. I feign excitement although I have no interest in you becoming my sugar daddy, I want this transaction to be completed as soon as possible. But I can’t help playing the daughter role, blushing and giggling at my own bland naughtiness

A night in a hotel so I can scream and cry while getting fucked by someone I desire

The bartender is consistently rude to us, I’m sure seeing a brigade of sweating middle aged men with pouty young women come in every night leave him weighed down by complicity. You don’t seem to get it, and every time he rebuffs engagement I have to make it up to you. I will soothe away every person you can’t buy. I will glorify you’re triumphs against a hard world. I will be interested and malleable to your words, but smart and independent enough that my coming around to your way of seeing things means something. I am yours.

A new bicycle to fly through these sweet expanding streets

In the hotel room you undress me quickly. I agonize so much about this, the energy and the money I spend buying girl clothes and underpants which have the ability to rip me to sheds when I’m feeling vulnerable, and it never really matters. To you that is, for me it’s necessary as a spell to create a character for whom this is a workable reality. I forget what we check off first - maybe I give you a blow job, or masturbate daintily, or maybe you jam your fingers inside me. Soon though, you are fucking me in the front, tossing me in between positions, arranging my limbs to make my hole feel better closed around you. Something feels different. Usually I like being fucked by johns, it’s physically enjoyable and signifies an end or at least an upcoming pause of pace. But the second that you cum, a spray of semen hitting my stomach and chest, it’s a drop into a pool of doom. Your orgasm was magnificent, I’ve never seen a man have multiple orgasms before, but it’s just a hassle now. I have to wait 10 minutes to ask you "so when did the condom come off?" You don’t know where it is, it came off sometime during your years of pounding me, and so you know…you pulled out. I fish inside myself awkwardly and find a scratchy wad of plastic hidden in the crevice against my cervix. You show me a vasectomy scar, you say "I’m safe, what about you…you know I have a wife and kids" so accusatorial, because of course, I’m the whore. In the shower I assure you that I get checked every month for STI’s. You don’t say how you know that you are HIV-, just a gut feeling I’m sure.

My rent for my cold windowless room in a city I’m fascinated by

When my best friend had a condom come off on her client, she freaked out on him, made him give her more money and threw him out the door. But she was in a brothel, I’m alone in this hotel with all my possessions scattered around. I’m too tired and drunk to make those kind of assertive movements, and at the base of it - I am perversely committed to my job. To finishing everything cleanly and compatibly, to not rob myself of the option of seeing this client again. So I stay, I turn on the vibrator and suck in my cheeks over your flaccid stretchy cock and I spoon into your body and pretend to sleep for my bargained 7 hours. You don’t stop touching me all night, all the time I hear it, on the tip of your tongue…GET UP WAKE UP YOU SAID YOU LIKE ME SO NOW SERVICE ME. 30 minutes to 8 I stretch and make my words slow and confused, I let you fuck me again while staying callous and cold in my body. You try to enter me without a condom under the pretext that we’ve already been there before, and I am so enraged, so FUCKING enraged. But I am almost out of there, I just have to make it through a little more, before you hand me a tip I go downstairs get a taxi and fall into my home.

Healthcare to change my body into something closer to my truth

W asks me how it went and I don’t want to give him this answer. I’m embarrassed that I still don’t know how to protect myself, that I didn’t know how to be charming enough to never be compromised. He rubs my feet and gets me back into my body, asks me solid questions into those blank hard eyes. We go to his room and he holds me, how can the same touch from two different people produce such different reactions in my nerves and blood? We are entwined and I am so distant but getting coaxed, brought back slowly slowly. We start fucking, and for once I wear more clothes than him. He wears underpants and I’m in jeans done up tight, we stick the hitachi between us and grind each other. Neither of us infiltrating each others bodies, neither of us taking each others space. This kind of sexless sex is healing me, and I growl and swallow and whisper: "bite me, please mark me". I can never be bruised for work, so that customers have an untarnished surface, but now he rips into my neck, mauls my throat, it’s so honest and real and desperately needed. It’s fucking outside of working outside economic survival outside exchange. Maybe he asks me if that trick was worth it, maybe I just ask myself while our noses touch. The worth of money fluxes but of course. It’s hard to see the real value in these stacks of bills let loose to spill out of my makeup bag, they have been debilitating addiction and fantastical freedom.

The chance to not work for a while

A couple days later I get an email from someone who does reference checks for workers, they are asking about this john of mine. I don’t know what to say, I feel weary and sad about my experience with him, but I don’t anticipate that it will necessarily be repeated. I don’t want another worker to miss out on the cash from a situation I feel blameworthy for. I say that he is generous and easy, but this little thing happened… I get a prompt reply that he will be denied a booking, that a client KNOWS when a condom comes off and that since he has not demonstrated himself as being responsible enough to take the correct action about it, he is not responsible enough to see this sex worker. I’m a little embarrassed because I don’t know that I wont see him again. I prioritize money over my mental health, I am a bad reflection on sex work because I use it to teach myself lessons in hardness. But it’s also so good to be believed, to have someone unquestionably take that big of an action on behalf of an offense on her community. It makes me want to work clearer to be stronger to not need to submit myself anymore.

I am throwing down money like never before. I buy a hitachi wand, a handmade glass dildo and a ball gag with money in my wallet. I saw an ipod on craigslist yesterday and then rode my bike three blocks to pick it up 15 minutes later, pulling 200 dollars off my roll of unexpected 20’s, plus an extra 100 just in case. I get shoes, some matching underpants, high heels…plus boy clothes to repay myself for playing frantic sweet girl with open holes. And still I have money rolled up and stuffed in my passport wallet, loose bills floating around in a pillow case..figures sifting through numerous bank accounts, different countries. When I got back to SF two weeks ago I was broke. Owed a grand in rent and bond, no bed, no furniture, hardly any clothes.

This is why this is an addiction. Why I put off gender transition. Why I make my life, my self, my body into a receptacle for living, breathing sex. Why when you are fucking me, rubbing your thumb against my dick, other hand pushing past the knuckles, I am holding back memorizing this moment. To see if there is something in this that I can later use, for pay.  

G is paying to train me to be an elite whore. He makes me do a handstand with legs spread, accuses me of having a smelly pussy and scrubs me out.  How can I expect to charge for my services when I have such a dirty snatch? I had smeared lube up there before to fake desire, but now once again I’m cracked and dry. I need to have all my holes open to him, open to any man, open to his fingers, his dick, his fists, his feet, his elbow, open my mouth to lick away his sweat, clean out his armpits, wipe clean his brow. He asks me for stories, why am I doing this, do I like pain, why am I a submissive, why am I a ho? "What’s your real name?" he asks me - "Celeste, listen carefully, I want you to stop being a whore with me. Be genuine, I wont have any pretense. If you can’t do that you can walk out of here - with the money, go on walk out." I breathe in and find a different way to act, eyes open wider - less mewing, more heaving.

He jams his fist inside me, wriggling it past my stretched out skin. I cough out cries while I buck my head against the pillow, trying to push his hand out, faked orgasm as my safe word. On the bed he pinches clothes pins on my labia and nipples, this is the exact kind of pain I can’t deal with. He pushes my dildo inside wrong side in and makes me crawl across the bed to his waiting cock. Kiss the inside of his thighs, no biting, no sucking, just tiny kitten licks. Drumming the head of his cock with my vibrating tongue, suckling on it soft and gentle while tears drip down my face every time the pegs get jarred.  I am going to vomit on him if this doesn’t end soon.  He finishes while fucking me, ramming into me hard, shouting all the things I will have to keep up with for those dollar bills.

I could write about this so many ways. Ways that make me sound small and damaged. Ways that make me sound so hard and untouchable. Ways that make me sound glamorous and smart and decadently sexual. And I don’t even know which one feels more real.

I breathe smoke out of my nose and say to W that after 3 days of people being obsessed with tying me up and invading my ass, I just want someone to be nice to me. I’ve asked him to also be on this quest.  I’ve picked him out to be the one who gets there first, so as to not ruin this for me forever, again. I wonder if he too needs my squeals of pain to keep up that hard-on, but he pushes the pillow against my face to keep me quiet. "Come on faggot, blow your load in my hand" and I see it coming. I’m scared and stay at the edge while he rocks inside me till I roll over and everything bursts hard and loud out of me. I keep shaking, he holds me tight, but I keep on shaking.

And this is my life here. 

The letters come in, home rushing back at me.  Skype dates, phone calls, emails with questions, replies to blogs - all of which, no matter what the rest of the content is, say "I love you."

My housemate is tipsy, his hips slide side to side and when he sees me he lets out an exclamation:

"After last nights conversation I had a dream that I fucked A!  You were in it as well!"

We work out that at probably the exact same time as I was fisting her, he was dreaming about it.  Another point for the concept of collective consciousness.   

He’s never been flirty with me before, but now he slaps my ass lightly as I do the dishes and invites me upstairs.  Last Folsom he had an orgy with 7 other boys up in that tiny room and I desperately want to go up, but I’m too nervous.  His friends are all beautiful, lean gay boys with groomed facial hair and jobs at whole foods.  They will think I’m cute, they will think I’m a dyke.  They’d probably make out with me as the cute wanna be fag, but if I sucked their stretchy normal sized circumcised dicks they would probably go soft in my mouth as they looked down at me, the line of my binder apparent against my thin shirt.

 But that’s ok.  I’d rather not awkwardly go downstairs "for water" and never return, once they become a mess of limbs, lines of muscle running from their stomach to inner thighs, tanned perfect shoulders.  I’m content to just hear about it tomorrow from T, maybe get silly and drunk with him one night, stare up into his clean blue eyes.  I’m willing to do this slowly but surely.

This is not hard.  I always thought it would be, that I would hurt or be attacked or I would get a phone call from all the people I’m scared of saying I’m not allowed.  But instead of falling it’s like swimming, big breast-strokes in a pool where everything is calm and sweet and makes sense.   

I lay face down on the pillow.  One leg lays between Lelani’s thighs, my other crosses over my naked thigh making a four shape.  Everytime the gun starts buzzing I hit bottom.  I stay silent and still but it feels like I’m falling into something deep deep dark - not because of the pain of the tattoo, but because of the space it gives me - to go into a quiet sadness I don’t have the ability to go into alone but I can’t do with anyone who might try to make me talk about it either.  

What is there to talk about?  

My families inability to negotiate language and privacy in a way that would keep us all safe and happy?  That the best way for us to continue to function is to keep our diseases our plans our sadness our histories to ourselves?  That divulging between two members of our three person unit may start ok, but the results always end up being tense and almost unbearably unpleasant.  My father says - "so was it rape or wasn’t it…and if it was why didn’t you go to the police?" he says "why didn’t you just come home if you were unhappy?" he says "we just don’t know why your so obsessed with abuse, I know that I never abused you."

This is the way that things are done.  I know that they are bad.  Habitual silence, reinforced policies of don’t ask don’t tell.  Denial.  Knowing that divulging of grief or inability will make you vulnerable to attack.  I know that all these things make me hard to be around and an unsafe lover and friend, but still when I’m threatened I keep a cold clear voice and ask you to please stop touching me, please walk away now.

I hear it in someone else as well.  He starts talking about how his sister makes him feel young and incapable, and when it becomes clear that I am actually listening he switches - no nevermind it’s different moving on..

I would like it if I could go to their house and we could not have a past.  Not talk, just bake almond and golden syrup cakes with lemon icing, just draw pictures of dogs and horses and nothing to do with death, just watch old movies and not talk about expectation differences of gendered behavior. 

I’d like it if, before one of us die from our frail, constantly failing bodies, things could be easy for a day.  Unconditional and permanent what families are supposed to look like.  But I don’t have the time, the patience, the ability to compromise, the honest tolerance and desire to make things work