Author, book doctor, raker of muck

David Henry Sterry

Tag: selling sex

How I Went From Selling Sex to Buying It

(An excerpt from the Soft Skull anthology Johns, Marks, Tricks & Chickenhawks, follow-up to Hos Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys)

Ho's cover

Ho’s cover

This is how I go from being someone who sold sex, to someone who buys it. I’m cruising in my beat-to-hell car through the seedy groin of the Tenderloin. She’s all obsidian and copper, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. All the other hos sashaying down the stroll are like kabuki cartoon caricatures of hookers: glittery miniminiminiskirts, mammoth jackedup décolletage spilling tit flesh out of halter tops, machete heels and painted razor nails. That’s why I notice her. She looks like somebody I might hang out with. Not like a lady of the night. I have ho-dar and I know she’s working. I’m 23. I’ve been retired from the sex business for six years. There was no gold watch, severance package, or golden parachute.

It hits me suddenly. I could just pay this girl to have sex with me. It seems odd that I’ve never considered buying sex, when I sold so much of it. But this was before you could see a world full of women selling sex just by trolling on a websites. Plus, everywhere else I lived, you had to know where the hookers were and go find them. Not in San Francisco. Here, they’re strolling right down Geary like they own the place. Also, for the past six years I’ve been sleeping-on-people’s-couches, living-in-damp-basements, crashing-in-the-student-center poor. That’s how I lived rather than go back to selling sex. It saved my life at a time when I didn’t have any money or people, but it left me bent, spindled and mutilated. Plus, when I was a provider, all the clients I had sex with for money was at least old enough to be friends with my parents. So it just didn’t seem like the kind of sex I wanted for myself. Fun sex. As opposed to sex for profit.

So for the first time since I left the sex business, I have cash in my pocket and I am face-to-face with a woman I’m attracted to who will give me sex for money. As I cruise in my beat-to-hell car I realize I don’t want a professional. I was a professional. I know what it means to be a professional. No matter how much you look like you’re into it, there’s almost always a part of you that isn’t quite there. A part of you who watches yourself performing acts of sex. And most of times you’re lying to the customer. Pretending that their stories are fascinating, that they’re charming, beautiful, and intelligent, that you’re really turned on and happy. There were very few times when I was selling sex that I completely lost myself in a moment of true sexuality. No matter how good it felt physically, I always had that very conscious awareness that it was my job to turn myself into whatever would keep the customer satisfied. Customer satisfaction. Customer gratification. Customer elation. Customer orgasm.

But now I’m 23. I have money in my pocket. It hits me like a velvet glove that I could pay this excellent looking young woman to have sexual intercourse with me. I never for one second wonder whether it’s moral, whether it’s right or wrong. I didn’t think that when I sold it either. It always seemed like a fair exchange of cash for services. I only felt ashamed when I thought of people shaming me. But right now, I just want to be a great, great customer. I had a couple of clients who taught me so much about life and love and sex and they were so sweet and fun nice to me. As opposed to the customers who demeaned, polluted and punished me.

I stop my beat-to-shit car. She’s walking slow and casual, like she has nowhere to go in her jeans and T-shirt. She looks like she could be on her way home from her job at Barnes & Noble, or on her way to see an independent rock band play at some cool club. I have shockingly vivid visions of what she’ll look like naked underneath me. I’m sex drunk.

I roll down the window. She leans down so her head is in the frame of the car window. It’s like she’s on my TV.

“Hey, how you doing?” Obsidian Copper has the darkest shiniest eyes. And hair. A tiny smile flirts on her lips. A tiny twinkle flashes in her fired-glass black eyes. Like she thinks the whole thing is rather amusing. I like that. That’s how I tried to be when I was an industrial sex technician.

“I’m better now that I’m looking at you.” Writing it down now it seems like a cheesy line, but I really did mean it. I actually made me feel better looking at her.

“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Obsidian Copper chuckles in the most endearing way. “Are you with cops?”

Talk of law enforcement kick starts my central nervous system, a jolt of adrenaline squirts out of my glands, my fight-flight alarm rings, buzzes and beeps. It’s like I’m the star of a really cool movie.

“Do I look like a cop?” I raise my eyebrows in a droll ho-stroll smirk.

“That’s what a cop would say,” she shoots back with a sly copper deadpan.

“No,” I say, “I’m not now, nor ever have I been, with the police.”

Obsidian Copper gets in my beat-to-shit car. Smells of grit, used booze, bus exhaust and the Tenderloin waft in with her. But underneath is a fresh smell of somebody who’s cleaned themselves recently with a nice soap, and hasn’t covered the whole thing up with toxic, eye-stinging perfume. When I smell her I want to have sex with her even more.

“Where to?” I ask.

“Just start driving,” she says, like we’re in some 30s noir movie, where she’s the dangerous dame and I’m the lovelorn palooka.

I start driving.

“So,” I say, “I used to work in the business.” I want her to know that I’m in the people-who’ve-sold-sex club.

“Really?” Obsidian Copper doesn’t seem surprised. I suspect it would take a lot to surprise her.

“Yeah, when I was younger. In Hollywood.” I never told anyone before, and it feels good. I’m realizing that’s one of the cool things about paying an industrial sex technician. I can tell her anything. I don’t have to worry about making some kind of future with her. All I have to be a good customer, and she’ll basically whatever I want. Of course I understand all that intellectually, and I saw it over and over again with my clients. Coma Girl. The 82-year-old who wanted cunnilingus just once before she dies. The judge in diapers. But I never thought about it from a consumer’s perspective. It’s very liberating. A couple of years after I got out of the sex business I became a marriage counselor. People wanted me to listen to their problems. They wanted to be understood. When I was an industrial sex technician about half of the women who hired me didn’t really even want sex. They wanted me to listen. They wanted to be understood. Often while I was naked. And they had all their clothes on. Many of them wanted me to touch myself. It made me smile when I realized that often the only difference between being a top-of-the-food-chain industrial sex technician and being a marriage counselor was that I had all my clothes on, I wasn’t fondling myself and I was being paid much less money.

“So, what kind of the donation are you looking to make?” I love how that word has become part of the hooker/ho/industrial sex technician jargon. Donation. Like I’m helping to help endow the Prostitute Scholarship Fund. They do this of course because if I was a cop, they couldn’t say they were trying to get paid for services. It was just a donation to the Ho’s Retirement Home.

The meter’s running. Time’s money. Money makes the world go round. It can’t buy you love, but it sure can rent you some. It’s clear this is going to be different than sex I have with my girlfriends. Some of them gave me love with the sex. Often they’d want to have sex for a long time. As a client, I am going to have to pay for every second of sex. And there will be no love. It doesn’t seem quite so sexy anymore.

“I have $100. I’m not sure what the going rate is. That’s what I was making.”

I’m driving. Away from the Tenderloin up the hill into the overpriced air of Nob Hill. I glance over at Obsidian Copper. Her face is wide, her cheekbones flat, her skin smooth and beautiful. If you tarted her up, she could probably be a model. Driving around negotiating with Copper Obsidian I have a pumping rush of sexcitement, my mind floods with images of her floating on top of me, lowering myself down on her, taking her from behind, letting the monster loose. This is so much better than feeling vacant, hollow, brittle, bitter, agitated, jangly, unsettled, unhappy dissatisfied. Which I so often do.

Obsidian Copper looks at me with those deep hard raven eyes, sizing me up, weighing risk and reward, her face a still lake on a warm day when nothing is moving. She is a closed book. Finally she says:

“Okay, take a right up here.” Her voice is as flat as her face.

“Where we going?” I’m quite excited that I don’t know where I’m going with Obsidian Copper. But I’m also acutely aware that this could be some elaborate set up to kill me and slice me into little bloody pieces and dump me into the bay. Which makes my heart jackhammer, pulse spike, and nerve synapses jangle. This is such a high. Like rock climbing. Or white water rafting. Or bungee jumping.

“I’m sorry I only have 100, next time I’ll have more.”

“Sure.” This time she’s got a small but obvious sneer smeared on her lips. Like she’s heard that line 1,000,000,000 times before. I wondered if maybe something bad happened to her. Me, I got raped just before I got into the sex business. And now I’m wondering if something bad happened to her. Maybe not. Maybe she’s putting herself through grad school.

I have a surging urge to help her. Yes, I am a Sir Save-A-Ho. I do in some way see myself as a white knight in shining armor who can rescue the damaged beautiful ho with the heart of gold and rehabilitate her, in the process earning her eternal gratitude and a lifetime of free sex.

“What your heritage?”

“I’m half Mexican and half Cherokee.”

When she says this she really looks Cherokee. I can see her people in teepees, hunting the buffalo, living harmoniously with Mother Nature, not treating Her like it’s our toxic playground wasteland. From gathering berries and growing corn and making pots to strolling through the tenderloin selling your sex for money. My grandfather was a coal miner in Newcastle, England. He’d go down underground while it was still dark, suck down cancerous coal dust for twelve hours, and come back out when it was dark again. I wonder what our grandfathers would think of us, selling sex, and buying it. Like I said, I didn’t ever think it was wrong to sell sex for money. But I often felt depleted and wigged out, like my hard drive swallowed a virus when I was exposed to the sexual horrors I encountered as my clients played out their insane monstrous fantasies. Looking at her now, all that obsidian and all that copper, I wonder what skeletons lurk in her ancestral closet. I want to ask. But I don’t want to be the stupid white man. And it’s really not stuff you chat about around the water cooler. Which is really what we’re doing here. But want to be her friend. To dive beneath that copper lake and see what’s in the hole in the bottom of her obsidian sea. I want to help. I want to save the ho.

“Go down to the end of the block, turn the car around.” And now we are back in business mode. Time to get this show on the road.

As soon as the car’s in Park I give her $100. I always wanted to get paid right away. Depositing the money into my pocket immediately made everything all good. The mantra of my employment counselor/pimp was:

Get the money up front.

So I make sure Copper Obsidian gets her money up front. I want to know her name. But I figure if I ask she’ll just give me a fake name. A nom de ho. And

I don’t want to be the cliché who asks her what her real name is. So I just avoid the whole name issue. Even though I really want to know her name.

She takes one leg of her pants off faster-than-the-human-eye-can-see fast. She’s reclining the seat as far back as it will go. She’s looking up at the ceiling. Not at me.

It’s so abrupt. And so not sexy. Even though looking at her with one leg and her vagina naked in my fully reclined passenger seat is crazy sexy, wildly exciting and completely distracts me from the fact that my personal house is on fire.

But I’m not ready for intercourse, and I’m not sure exactly what to say. I unzip my pants and take my not-hard cock out. It’s very different from sex with civilian chicks. They usually want to kiss, and touch, and some like to have saucy and naughty talk.

Obsidian Copper lies there like a cadaver. So I try to get enough blood into my sad flaccid penis so I can insert the thing into her prostitute vagina. The bloom seems utterly off the rose.

Obsidian Copper turns and looks at my unthrobbing manhood languishing in my hand like a comatose white worm. “Oh,” she says, “do you want some head?”

I’m impressed with her business skills. That’s exactly what I want. She’s being everything a good industrial sex technician should be. This is what I used to strive for when I worked. To give the customer exactly what was wanted. And get it done as quickly as possible.

“Yes please,” I say with appreciation and enthusiasm.

She leans into my crotch, while opening a condom and putting the closed end into her mouth. She unrolls the condom with her lips around my suddenly awakening tool, and works her hands and mouth like a combination suction machine/tourniquet, drawing the blood up and making sure it stays there. I don’t know how long exactly she weaves her fellatio magic. But it does feel so good that I forget it’s a business transaction for a minute. Or two minutes. Or ten minutes. When time stops having any meaning, it’s almost always a good sign. I discover another one of the other real upsides of hiring a talented industrial sex technician. It just feels so darn good. And again, it completely makes me forget about all that raging roiling boiling festering sickness that’s growling like a filthy hungry monster chained in my basement.

I feel like I’ve already gotten my $100 worth.

Then she’s leaning back into my reclined passenger seat, while guiding my rigid sheathed member to the tip of her. She licks her fingers and touches herself. Twice. She has such a great copper face. She’s concentrating very intently on getting me inside her so that thrusting can begin and blastoff can be achieved. She does not look sexy in any way. She does not look like an actress in any of the pornographic movies I compulsively obsessively watch.

She does not make kissy lips. Or roll her eyes ecstatically. Or stick out her tongue orgasmically. She looks like a carpenter trying to nail a hammer into a hard wall. I wonder if that’s what I looked like when I was trying to service my clients. I always tried to smile. I probably smiled too much. Like some hideous Joker rent boy.

I want her to look at me. I want to kiss her. But I never kissed anybody when I worked. Nobody I knew kissed anybody when they were on the job. It’s too intimate. So I don’t try to kiss her. But I want to kiss her.

Suddenly she has me inside her. Swoosh. She looks at me and gives me a smile. It’s very small. And very far away. Like she’s a hologram smiling from another galaxy. Like she doesn’t want to be there. That makes it sad. I know that feeling. But at the same time, she has her hand now on my ass and it’s thrusting me forward at the same time as she’s thrusting herself forward, and then pulling back, with lots of incredible swivel/gripping/suction/torque action. Highly skilled. Efficient and effective. Like a finely tuned sex machine

My soul and my body are in conflict. Her placid detachment is disturbing and I want to help her feel better. Whereas the piston-thumping shaft-drive pyrotechnic thrusting is driving my body wild. I can hear my orgasm calling me. It’s coming, and unless I stop it, it will be here soon. I want to stop it. I want to keep doing this all night, every night, for the rest of my life. But when I look at her face, I can tell she doesn’t wants to be having sex with me. I’m pretty sure I’ve only been having intercourse with her for maybe six or seven minutes. But I feel she’s done her duty, I should just let my orgasm come, so she can be on her way. Seems only fair. She’s been so nice.

So I shut my eyes. I let her push me in, squeeze me superhuman tight, and suck me back the other way, all of my pleasure centers firing up, turning on, shooting and spraying.

My orgasm is upon me, it envelops, overwhelms and overcomes me, it’s shiveringly, otherworldly, transcendentally ecstatic.

Then it’s over. And we’re done.

She has me out of her area so fast it makes the head of my penis spin. She’s back in her pants before I’m even back in my passenger seat.

“Can you take me back you picked me up?” she says like she’s a plumber who just finished snaking my drain.

Go from ecstasy to detachment so fast is like coming up from the depths too quick without enough oxygen, and I get the sex bends.

I want desperately to talk to her. To see where she lives. To buy her dinner. To go see some independent band at some cool club with her. I want to know her name. I want to know her.

“Sure,” I say. “Are you okay?”

She turns her head a tiny little bit and looks at me and nods a tiny little nod, with a tiny little grin, like she’s happy I asked. Then she says:

“Sure.”

I feel drained. Literally and figuratively. I want to go to sleep. And that vacant, hollow, brittle, bitter, agitated, jangly, unsettled, unhappy dissatisfaction is already creeping back.

“Hey,” I say, “I really had a good time. And you’re very skillful. I wish I had some more money to give you. I just wanted to say thank you for being… such a nice person.”

“Sure,” she says. But this conversation is clearly over. She looks 1,000,000 miles away out the window.

I feel desperate for some kind of contact with her. To get inside of her heart and brain now that I’ve been inside of her vagina.

“Hey,” I say as I park my beat-to-shit back in the seedy groin of the Tenderloin, “can I get your number? I’d like to see you again.”

“I don’t have a number.”

Soon as the car stops moving she’s out the door, slamming it shut.

I watch her walk away from me, until all that obsidian and copper disappears.

That’s how I go from the supply to the demand side of the sex business. For the next 15 years I have sex with more prostitutes/hos/industrial sex technicians than I can count. Or maybe I can count them, but I choose not to. I spend tens of thousands of dollars having sex with the best of hos and the worst of hos.

Finally I realize that having sex with someone who loves me is so much better than having sex with someone who loves my money, and I retire permanently from the buying and the selling of sex.

As I thought about my life as a consumer and provider of sex for money, I realized how all those relationships changed me. And I wanted to tell the stories. As well as help other hos, hookers, call girls, rent boys and their customers tell their stories. So, with the help of my partner-in-crime RJ Martin, Jr., we put together Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks, a book of real people from the sex industry telling their real stories. Because in the exchange of sex for money, a window opens into the soul. Come take a peek. Thanks for listening. If you have a story to tell, let me know. I’d love to hear it.

David Henry Sterry is the author of 15 books, a performer, muckraker, educator, and activist. His first memoir, Chicken, was an international bestseller, and has been translated into 10 languages. His anthology, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys was featured on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The follow-up, Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks, just came out. He has appeared on, acted with, written for, worked and/or presented at: Will Smith, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Stanford University, National Public Radio, Penthouse, Michael Caine, the London Times, Playboy and Zippy the Chimp. His new illustrated novel is Mort Morte, a coming-of-age black comedy that’s kind of like Diary of a Wimpy Kid, as told by Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver.

Legendary Dr. Carol Queen’s Shocking True Story of Weird Bible Sex @ Lusty Lady

Dr. Carol Queen tells about working at the infamous Lusty Lady and encountering a Bible spouting sexual enthusiast who asks her to do the WEIRDEST THING.johns marks cover cropped

From Johns Marks Tricks & Chickenhawks. To buy the book, click here.

Johns, Marks, Tricks & Chickenhawks: Professionals & Their Clients Writing about Each Other is the follow-up to Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, the groundbreaking anthology that appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. “Eye-opening, astonishing, brutally honest and frequently funny… unpretentious and riveting — graphic, politically incorrect and mostly unquotable in this newspaper.” It is a unique sociological document , a collection of mini-memoirs, rants, confessions, dreams, and nightmares by people who buy sex, and people who sell. And because it was compiled by two former sex industry workers, the collection is, like its predecessor, unprecedented in its inclusiveness. $10 crack hos and $5,000 call girls, online escorts and webcam girls, peep show harlots and soccer mom hookers, bent rent boys and wannabe thugs. Then there’s the clients. Captains of industry and little old Hasidic men, lunatics masquerading as cops and bratty frat boys, bereaved widows and widowers. This book will shine a light on both sides of these illegal, illicit, forbidden, and often shockingly intimate relationships, which have been demonized, mythologized, trivialized and grotesquely misunderstood by countless Pretty Woman-style books, movies and media. This is hysterical, intense, unexpected, and an ultimately inspiring collection.

Publishers Weekly: This collection of personal essays by sex workers and their clients vacillates    wildly from hilarious to depressing but never strays from being utterly captivating. Among the more amusing stories are a client with a “sweater fetish”, a woman who paid for her family’s Christmas presents by stepping on a man’s testicles in a pornographic film, and the dominatrix who got fired because she could not remove a client’s tooth. The phone sex operator asked to do cartoon animal voices for a caller is also not to be missed. Candid essays cover everything from the anonymous “captain of industry” with an appreciation for transsexual prostitutes, to the human misery of a pimp who turned out his own girlfriend. Some pieces are more meditative: Fiona Helmsey recalls meeting a kind client at a bachelor party who later died on 9/11, while Dr. Annie Sprinkle discusses her 40 years in the sex industry and her wish for “a more compassionate sex-positive society” in which “prostitutes and johns would be government-subsidized”. Though obviously not for the faint of heart, this book contains some courageous, raw, and intelligent writing that breaks taboos and smashes misconceptions. (Apr.)

To see on Publishers Weekly, click here.

Book trailer: Who Really Buys & Sells Sex

Great conversation w/ Jon Pressick on Sex Radio: Selling it, buying it, sex books $ love on Sex Talk Radio 4 Johns Marks Tricks & Chickenhawks

Interview with David Henry Sterry for Johns Marks Ticks & Chickenhawks in San Francisco Weekly by Chris Hall

Sexpert genius Veronica Monet on Rumpus.

Master graphic novelist & sexual revolutionary Chester Brown on Rumpus.

David Henry Sterry on Rumpus: Admit You’ve Paid for It.

Sam Benjamin on Creating Utopian Porn on  Rumpus.

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