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By Andrea Rodriguez

June 5, 1999 | I remember every one of them. The guy with the pimply back. The guy who talked to himself in the bathroom and seemed gay. The one with the awful scars. The one who had to get stoned to work up the nerve to call me. I remember every time. One once asked me if I was a cop. One just wanted to play with my toes. One was hyper, maybe on drugs, and kept pestering me for intercourse. There was the one who wanted to rub various objects in the room against my nipples. Then there were all the ones who kept telling me how different I was. What did I know about it? Nothing. But then I knew very little about anything else, either. Why did I get into it? Did I need the money or the adventure?

One semi-homeless, punk-boy sex worker once asked me if I was slumming. The question surprised me and I didn't know how to answer. He answered for me that I wasn't because I allowed myself to be moved by people, that I saw beyond their "street-currency," as he put it. Now that I'm out of it, back to my studies and with a middle-class boyfriend, I'm beginning to believe he was wrong. About me and about his definition of not slumming. After all, those "authentic" people from his strata weren't ever particularly open to anyone.

Yes, I was open to those desperate sex workers still reeling and eternally disordered from childhood molestation and abuses that had landed them on the street without a high school diploma. On the street, you cannot simply offer, as I was allowed to offer, a nice massage and a hand job. You have to perform what we in the industry referred to as "full service." But in as much as I was open to them, I was also open to their diametric opposites, the clients.

For many, the clients -- rich white men desirous of often insidious beauty ideals -- were the locus of danger. They had the prejudices, the diseases, the spontaneous rage that we were vulnerable to. They were the enemy. But that's not how I saw them. I didn't carry the survivor baggage, the callused resentment of someone forced into this work from an unprepared and unwilling age. To me, the men were the fearful ones, nervous, ashamed, pitifully grateful for any amount of sincerity, any genuine response. I never learned how to be detached from them. They seemed to need me too much. For them I saved up my energy and affection. From them I returned to my room, invigorated and high with anonymous love. So high and full, in fact, that I found myself fooling around freely in my spare time. Who didn't deserve love? Who, rich or poor, didn't bear a piece of my perfect lover?

Who, on the other hand, was worthy of all my attention? Nobody could lay a claim to me because at work it was all understood and at play, I made clear it was play. I could thus float above earthly attachments while diving into the depth of the apparently seedy. I could be present in my nudity but clothed in my pseudonym. I could act the desperate street girl to make a play-space for my unfeigned sensuality. I could risk the dangers my college friends worried over to revel in the safety of my success as a nurturer, an object, a giver of counsel, a masseuse.

"How did you get into it?" A common question. I believe if it hadn't been one way, it would have been another. I met a girl, she gave me a number and suddenly I was in a dark place, holding a man's body to mine. It was so easy, so pleasingly aestheticizable. It brought back memories of curiosities I'd always had. Once, long before, I'd considered having been a prostitute in a past life. I'd always related to them, somehow. My best friend said I was glamorizing sexual commerce, making it perversely desirable and objectifying the victims. How had I known?

I remember pushing my hands into the back of a huge man I straddled like a horse, and hearing him mumble something about Nirvana. I'd been distracted as I massaged him, and worried that my lack of focus would leave him displeased. Realizing that I was in fact performing beautifully brought back another old dream. Years ago, I had been a dedicated Buddhist. I had read of a breathing exercise in which you sucked in all the pain of the person before you and then blew into them pure blue goodness. I had tried it repeatedly with my clinically depressed sister, managing only to fill myself with the black I was trying to remove. Now here I was, filling strangers up with visions of their own goodness, with renewed images from my eyes of themselves as strong, handsome, capable men, one flesh-filled hour at a time. All without depleting my own store of strength. At the end of that hour, the huge man said he felt too good to move. He then reached for his wallet and, unsolicited, handed over a 50 and two 20s on top of the $200 he'd already paid.

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