Author, book doctor, raker of muck

David Henry Sterry

Category: Mini-memoir Page 1 of 2

I Kicked My Opioid Addiction with Marijuana on Daily Beast


After I had my knee replacement I got addicted to opioids in about ten minutes. This is how I kicked my addiction. I wrote this as a cautionary tale for anyone with pain. Or anybody prone to addiction.

I Kicked My Opioid Addiction with Marijuana on Daily Beast

Why I Love Turning 60

60. Today I am 60. Six months ago I was freaking the frick out about turning 60.  My grandfather  had been dead of black lung disease for decades before he could turn 60.  Tupac was dead 35 years before he could reach the big Six Oh.  It seemed like most of my life was behind me, that I should be planning my funeral and writing my obituary instead of my next book, shopping for adult diapers and boner medicine instead of buying a new pair of skinny jeans.

I’m a softball addict.  The first step is admitting you have a problem.  In January a bunch of my softball nutjob friends rent out the soccer dome and start practicing for the upcoming season.  We play Friday morning 9 AM.  Of course at that hour it’s mostly old retired softball codgers, coots and coffin-dodgers.  I took my turn hitting, and as is my wont, I whacked the ball around pretty good.  When I finished, a bunch of ancient softball zombies stampeded toward me.  Well, more tottered than stampeded – you could hear the metallic hips and knees clicking, clanking and clunking as they got closer.  They all wanted to know if there was any chance I was turning 60 this year.  I confessed that I was.  One after the other the softball geezers tried to make a compelling case for why I should play on their team.  They warned me that all the other captains of all the other teams were a bunch of one-foot-in-the-grave asswipe dirtbags.  Suddenly I realized.  I was the hot spring chicken studmuffin being feverishly recruited for Over-60 softball.  Instantly my world changed.  Instead of thinking about my funeral I was contemplating how I was going to dominate these old bastards, put my foot on their turkey wattle necks, smash their pacemakers and crush the life out of them.  When you’re a softball addict, it gets no better than that.

It dawned on me that apart from wonky knee, my body is in great working order.  I weigh the same as I did when I entered college a hundred years ago.  I achieve wood without taking a pill.  I’m no longer a slave to my penis.  It’s now who’s a slave to me.  Or rather, we work together with mutual respect and affection.  I have a brilliant, lovely, talented, sexy wife, who for reasons unbeknownst to anyone, loves and adores me.  I have a brilliant, lovely, talented, hysterically funny, slime-loving, fidget-spinning nine-year-old daughter for reasons unbeknownst to anyone, loves and adores me.  But more than that, I feel a calmness, a peace, an enjoyment of life that I’ve never had.  I don’t feel like I have to rush around everywhere.  I can say No to people who invite me to stupid stuff I don’t want to go to.  I have work that feeds my mind and soul.  There’s always great food to eat.  I have a house with a mancave hooked up to a giant TV where I can watch every movie or TV show ever made. 

For reasons still unknown to me, when I was a teenager, I decided I’d like to live to be 120.  Suddenly that seemed possible.  In which case, I’m only halfway through.  Imagine what I could do with my newfound peace and alleged wisdom in the next 60 years.  One of my life goals is to be the fastest 100-year-old on the planet.  Suddenly that too seemed possible.  Yes, in our youth-obsessed culture, sometimes I do feel invisible.  But I don’t care anymore.  For most of my life I constantly compared myself to others.  Naturally, being a rabid PTSD survivor, I always ended up with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.  There was always someone smarter, more handsome, more sexy, more accomplished, more successful, just plain better.  At 60 I find myself comparing myself to me.  Am I the best person I can be?  Am I making the world a better place?  Am I helping out people less fortunate than myself?  Am I being a great dad?  A great husband?  A great American?  A great citizen of the world?  But perhaps most importantly, a great softball player.

And that’s why I love turning 60. 

David Henry Sterry

David Henry Sterry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me & Sally: A True Interspecies Love Story

Sally and I are hired to act in a Michelob beer commercial. The theme of the spot is evolution. I am cast as a Neanderthal Man. Typecasting.

Four hours I sit while a crew of highly skilled make-up artists glue thin layers of skin-colored latex over my face, transforming me from end of Second-Millennium American Homo Sapien into a caveman: gigantic forehead with a scary hairy monobrow, wee sunken eyes, a flaring nose cauliflowering across my cheeks, thick rubber caveman lips, and huge wooly mammoth-eating fake teeth. I look for a long time in the mirror but I can’t find myself in there anywhere. I feel the strong desire to grunt and snarl and hump someone from behind.

Finally, I am ready for my introduction to Sally. Her handler comes up to me, very serious. “Don’t make eye contact at first. Let her come to you. Get down on her level and don’t make any quick movements. Be very calm and very still. They sense fear. She can jump six feet straight up in the air, and she’s ten times stronger than a human being. Sally’s jaw is so strong she could snap your arm in two like a twig. It’s really important she doesn’t feel any fear coming off you.”

All I can see is my bloody hand dangling out of her mouth.

Sally comes out of her trailer, hand-in-hand with another trainer. I squat down to her level. Avert my eyes. I can feel Sally’s stare as she inches slowly towards me. I’m so scared I have no spit. There’s a small crowd gathering, all quiet tension, waiting to see what Sally will do to David the Neanderthal. Finally she’s right in my face. Since I’m not making eye contact for fear of having my Adam’s apple ripped out, I smell her before I see her. She smells clean, wild, untamed, of the earth. I feel myself calm when I smell her. Slowly, ever slowly, I turn towards her, raising my head like a simian Southern belle, bringing my eyes up to meet hers.

Wise, curious, clever, keen, deep, sharp, smart, mysterious animal passion beams from Sally into me, jolting my soul and rattling my bones. Her face is a picture of puzzlement, brows knitted, head tilted to one side. As she stares into my half-man, half-monkey face, I find I can read her thoughts: “What are you? You’re not one of them, but there’s no way you’re one of me…Really, what are you?”

Sally sniffs me suspiciously, moving her mouth to my jaw. Her hot breath on my lips, I’m trying desperately not to visualize her biting my nose off. Sally brings her lips to my cheek, puckers, and covers my face and lips with tiny sweet little kisses.

I’m overcome, undone, head-over-heels in love with Sally. She puts her arms around my neck and hops into my arms. The crowd oohs and ahs, witness to the start of a great love story.

For the rest of the shoot, whenever Sally sees me, she runs up to me excited as a bride, jumps up in my arms, and covers me with kisses. We cakewalk around the set, handholding, swooning and spooning. I’ve never known a female who was so openly, unabashedly, good-naturedly affectionate. Work laws for actors like Sally are very strict, due to decades of abuse. So we can only show our affection in 12-hour shifts.

In the commercial I, Neanderthal, will be sitting next to Sally, while an actress, playing a waitress, flirts with me. We block the scene without Sally. The actress walks up to me stiffly, just lobbing her line in my general vicinity, like a lazy newsboy tossing an errant morning paper:

“Hey, Good Looking, come here often?”

It’s bad. Bad, bad, bad. The director stops everything, walks over to her all cocksure and says, “I need you to hot it up, honey, make with the goo-goo eyes, like you did in the callback, babe.” She promises she will, and shoots him an obligatory sex-baby look, which evaporates into disdain as soon as the director walks away.

Lights are tweaked. Camera focused. Hair, make-up and wardrobe are fluffed, patted, and tucked. Finally hundreds of highly paid technicians and advertising geeks are ready to make commercial magic.

Sally is brought in, hops up on her stool next to me at the bar, and kisses me on the cheek as I whisper sweet nothings into her ear.

“Scene 4, take 1. Roll camera!”

“Camera rolling. Speed.”

“Sound?”

“Speed!”

“And… Action!”

The actress walks towards us like a nervous hamster at a cat show. Even I can smell her fear. She starts to make very tentative flirty eyes in my direction.

Sally goes bananas, jumps up on the bar, bares her teeth, and hisses, looking like she’s going to rip this poor spooked woman’s heart out, show it to her, then eat it. The actress’ scream curdles blood as she runs wailing and weeping through the set, and out the door.

I thought the advertising geeks should have used that in the commercial, because it said more about evolution than any of the lame shit they came up with. But no, they decide to write the waitress out of the commercial.

Then it’s 6:30 p.m., and we’re way behind schedule. So they send some junior flunky over to Sally’s trainer and he asks if they can get Sally to work overtime, because if they don’t get all her shots, they’re going to have to bring everybody back for another day and go way over budget.

The trainer looks at the mad man like he’s a lunatic and says he seriously doubts Sally will want to work overtime, but he’ll see what he can do.

6:45 PM. The ad geeks huddle, whispering toxically. A much-better dressed executive walks up to the trainer. They’ll pay whatever he wants. Name the price.

The trainer smiles and slowly reminds the executive that Sally’s not particularly financially motivated.

“Well then we’ll give her all the damn bananas she wants,” says the better-dressed executive.

“Well,” explains the trainer patiently, as if he’s talking to a dumb animal, “Sally already gets all the bananas she wants, but I’ll see what I can do.”

6:58 p.m. The best-dressed executive hustles over to the trainer.

“Listen, I don’t care what she wants, we need to get three more shots before she leaves, is that clear?”

You can see the trainer’s about to lose it, wishing to God that he only had to deal with reasonable animals.

But before he could say anything, it’s 7 o’clock, exactly 12 hours after Sally started working. Sally steps up on the bar, and slowly, dramatically, like the consummate performer she is, raises her left arm over her head, and slaps her wrist three times where a watch would be. She jumps down, grabs my hand, and pulls me toward the door. Sally and I proceed through the set and straight out the door, hand-in-hand, a bride and Neanderthal groom heading for our abba dabba honeymoon.

They’re forced to bring everybody back the next day, and Sally is hailed as a hero. When I ask the trainer, he tells me that Sally has an extremely acute sense of time. Because she works so often, she knows exactly when 12 hours are up, and has figured out that by making the sign for time, not only will her day be over, she’ll also make everyone love her and get the Big Laugh. All day, whenever it’s time for a meal, or a break, everyone from actors to Teamsters raise their left hand up over their head, and slap their wrist three times where a watch would be, in silent homage to Sally. Much to the amusement of everyone except the ad geeks, who seem basically jaded and disgusted by pretty much everything except what swanky restaurant they’re going to eat at that night.

As for me, by the end of the shoot I’m madly in love with Sally. But alas, we were from different worlds. As her trailer pulls away a great wave of terrible sadness washes over me and I’m not embarrassed when big silent tears roll down my Neanderthal cheeks. Ours was a love that could never be.

Sterry

About David Henry Sterry

David Henry Sterry is the author of 16 books, a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, and co-founder of The Book Doctors.  His first memoir, Chicken Self:-Portrait of a Man for Rent, 10-Year Anniversary Edition, has been translated into 12 languages, and is being made into a movie by the showrunner of Dexter.  His book Hos Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys appeared on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.  He has featured on NPR, the London Times, Washington Post, and the Wall St. Journal.  He writes for the Huffington Post, Salon, and Rumpus.  He can be found at www.davidhenrysterry.com.

I Was Paid to Have Sex with an 82 Year Old Granny

Beautiful funny poignant empowering story of when I was a 17 year old manchild idiot sex worker given as a birthday present to an 82 year old. From Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent, my Memoir.

6 Word Memoir: Abuse, Redemption & Salvation

Raped, survived, self-medicated, hyponotherapized, wrote, redeemed

chronology 422

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was alone in Hollywood & a very charismatic man wearing a shirt that said SEXY asked me to his place for a steak dinner. Most expensive meal of my life. Steak was drugged, he raped me, & destroyed who I was. I became a drug & sex addict, then went into hypnotherapy, and eventually wrote a memoir called Chicken about the whole thing. Now I have a beautiful family & I write books & such.

To find out more click here.

 

 

I AM SURGICALLY REPAIRED

I’m surgically repaired. Rotator cuff untorn.  I plan 2 b up & running in 10 days.  Although surgeon says 6 months.

surgery

Rainbow, the Hippie Yoga Chick Who Paid Me to Learn About Tantric Sex

From my new book Chicken Self:-Portrait of a Man for Rent, 10 Year Anniversary Edition chicken 10 year anniversary cover

I was 17, studying existentialism at Immaculate Heart College, when I got sucked into the sex business in Hollywood.  I didn’t mean to.  It’s not like I thought, “I have no money, I have no family, I have no resources, I think I’d like to have sex for money.”  I was just in the right place at the right time.  That’s how it is with lots of the sex workers I know.

Sporting my nut hugging elephant bells, I arrived in Laurel Canyon, an enchanted eucalyptus oasis in the middle of this Hollywood smogfarm metropolis.  As I entered the log cabin house set behind a wildflower jasmine jungle, a solid block of patchouli incense musk nearly knocked me over.  With driftwood tie-dye batik beanbags windchimes macrame´ hanging plants and Mexican day-of-the-dead skeleton art everywhere, it looked like Woodstock exploded in Rainbow’s house, as this boomed out:

“Driving that train, high on cocaine, Casey Jones, you better watch your speed”

Rainbow had long straight grey hair, feather earrings and a floor length tie-dye dress with a dopey hippie happy face on it.  No make-up.  No shoes.

“Namaste.  Enter.  Would you like some ginseng tea?” wafted out of Rainbow.

The customer’s always right.  When in Rome, drink ginseng tea.  While she fetched me tea I survey lots of pots of pot plants.  Rainbow returned with my tea in a psychedelic homemade mug with a drawing of some dopey hippie happy face on it.  The tea smelled too earthy and dank for drinking, but I brought the Mother Earth medicine scent up to my lips and siped.

It was good.  And good for me.

“Do you dig the dead?”

Rainbow looked at me like she expected something.  I was confused.  Was this some weird necrophilia deal Mr. Hartley, my employment counselor/father confessor/fairy godmother/pimp, forgot to tell me about?  I made a mental note: Find out what’s the going rate for having sex with dead people.  But perhaps more importantly, do I feel comfortable shopping a dead person?

“I believe Jerry Garcia is the physical embodiment of the Godhead, don’t you?”

Jerry Garcia!   The Grateful Dead.  That’s who belonged to that dopey hippie happy face.  Jerry Garcia!  I saw me digging a grave and putting a gratefully dead Jerry Garcia in it.

“Oh yeah, Jerry Garcia is a total Godhead.  Yeah, I definitely dig the Dead…”

I trotted out my best hippieboy smile.  Actually, I couldn’t’ve cared less about the Dead.  Or the dead.  Rule #5: the customer is always right.  I was there to get paid.  I looked around for my envelope.  No envelope.  I didn’t like that.  I was looking for a low-maintenance score, get in, get out, badda bing badda boom.  Relax, cowboy, you’re gonna get paid, go with the flow, flowing, in the flow.  Hey, someone wants to pay me to say Jerry Garcia is the physical embodiment of the Godhead, that’s Easy Money.

“Give me your hand,” Rainbow said.

I gave her the hand.  She took it.

“You have big hands,” she said.

In my line of work that was a compliment.

“Thank you,” I said.

She looked at me funny, like it wasn’t a compliment at all, just a statement of fact.  But she didn’t really seem to care, she looked into my palm like it held the key to the sweet mysteries of life.

GET THE MONEY UP FRONT

GET THE MONEY UP FRONT

GET THE MONEY UP FRONT

 Only the newest greenhorn in Greenhornville doesn’t get the money up front.  This is what separates the rank amateur from the hard working professional.  You’re not here to have a good time, Charley, you’re here to get paid.

But Rainbow had produced nothing, and I could tell she’d be just the sort who’d get all bent if a guy mentioned something as crass as cash.

So I sat and stewed as Rainbow gazed into the crystal ball of my palm.

After she stared at my palm for what seemed like a month, Rainbow was starting to seem demented.  I was convinced she was a Charlie Manson groupie with a garotte she was going to use to sacrifice me and the goat I was sure was in the backyard.

I was starting to have serious doubts about Rainbow.  About this whole line of work.  I had enough money.  I could excuse myself like I’m going to the bathroom and walk out and just drive.  But again the question: Where would I go?  Who would I go to?  I had nowhere.  I had no one.

“You’re a very old soul…” Rainbow concluded.

You said a mouthful there, sister.

“…and you‘ve lived many lives…you were an explorer and sailed all over the world… and you were a sultan with many women.  You were a mighty warrior in battle, and you were a slave on a plantation…”

Rainbow looked into me like she had periscopes that went through my eyes.

That was when I noticed her for the first time.  In all the confusion I hadn’t really seen her.  She had deep eyes, steel-colored with flecks of cobalt.  A big Scandihoovian Bergman madly-suffering but eternally hopeful face.  I half expected Death to walk out of her bedroom and challenge me to a game of chess for my soul.

“You’re here to learn a lesson, and I’m here to teach you…” Said Rainbow.

Okay, it’s a hot-for-hippy-teacher thing.  I breathed easy.

“Do you know what tantric sex is?” Rainbow asked.

I could dish some semicoherent gobbledygook about ancient mystic Asian sex, but she wanted me to be the blissfully ignorant manmoonchild, so naturally I turned myself into whatever she wanted me to be.  That was my job.

“No, I don’t…”

Rainbow handed me a smile, and led me through a translucent tie-dye cloth door into a bed with a room around it.  It was the biggest bed I’d ever seen.  Overhead, high in the tall pointed ceiling was a skylight, where incense curled up thick from fat Buddha bellies; candles tossed soft little drops of light everywhere; elephantheaded Indian gods with massive genitalia copulated with lionheaded goddesses; statue women stared with dozens of breasts; a halfman halfbull was inside a godhead with a doghead; Japanese paintings of Jade-looking beautybabies intercoursed in every position imaginable, one leg up over an ear, the other wrapped around a head; Old French postcards of cherubinesque honeys were Frenched and doggied; a guy went down (or would that be up?) on himself; and a shrine of rosebudvaginas and phalluspeni smiled.  Pillows and cushions plump velvety; blankets, fur, and fat cloth made me feel like a cat, and I wanted to roll around getting my belly stroked while nubile handmaidens fed me catnip.

A sculpture of a vagina started talking to me: “Hi, David, welcome to the party, come on in.”

And in the center of it all a big picture of a dark man with long black curly hair and brown magnets for eyes that kept staring at me no matter where I went in the room, it was freaky.  He was hard and soft at the same time.  I’d never seen the guy, but he looked familiar, like he was the kind of guy who could set you straight if you were floundering around.  And I was so very full of flounder at the moment.  I made a mental note to find a wise, kind, benevolent guru teacher as soon as I left Rainbow’s.  I’m still looking.

“That’s Baba Ram Wammmalammadingdong,” said Rainbow.

I was sure she didn’t really say that, but that’s what it sounded like to my 17 year-old man child idiot ears, all Dr. Seussy.

“He’s the master of sensual enlightenment.”

That’s what I wanna be when I grow up: master of sensual enlightenment.

“Sexual transcendance can only happen when you are connected to the life force that flows through all living things,” breathed Rainbow.  “You have to open, I mean really open, all of your… shock absorbers.”

Years later I would realize it was my chakras and not my shock absorbers that needed opening, but at the time I couldn’t care less.  I’d open my shock absorbers, my athletic supporters, my cookie jar, whatever she wanted.  I just needed to get paid, and I needed to get paid IMMEDIATELY.  I was seeking enlightenment through cold hard cash.

“Why don’t we start by meditating?”

Rainbow settled into a big comfy-womfy cushy cushion crosslegged, and motioned for me to do the same.

I balked.  I’m naturally curious by nature, I was very interested in the whole third-eye transcendent sex thing, and picking up some exotic kinky eastern sex tips would’ve been grand, but I had to get my money UP FRONT.

I sighed quiet.  I knew for a fact it will not help us achieve harmony with the life force that flows through all living things if I told Rainbow she needed to pay me IMMEDIATELY.

I was dreadfully dithered.

But just when things were looking their most dodgy, the gods smiled upon me, and Rainbow, God love her, new what I needed and could not ask for.

“Oh, shit, you need some bread, don’t you?” she said.

I could’ve cried.  I saw this as a clearcut sign that I was being taken care of by something bigger than myself.

Rainbow got out of crosslegged, rummaged through an old macrame´ bag, and returned with four skanky twenties, a nasty ten, a funky five, four filthy ones and a bunch of loose change, then handed me the whole kitandkaboodle.

I was starting to dig this crazy chick.  I could see her scrimping and saving to give herself a treat.  Me.  I was the treat for my trick.  I vowed then and there to be a pot of gold for this Rainbow.

“Opening the gate that leads to the garden of earthly delights can only be achieved through a woman’s pleasure.”

Rainbow paused to make sure I got it.

“Opening the gate that leads to the garden of earthly delights can only be achieved through a woman’s pleasure.”

She looked at me intensely, so I understood how important this was.

So I thought about it hard.  It was comforting to have someone telling me what to think about.  I didn’t have to make any decisions, and that moment, decisions were just disasters waiting to happen.

Garden of earthly delights.  A woman’s pleasure.  A woman’s orgasm.  Tumblers click in my head, a lock snapped open, and I saw the light.  A woman’s pleasure was the key to sexual ecstasy.  Now that I had my money, I was keenly interested in this whole thing.

“A man can have multiple orgasms… most people don’t know that, but it’s true.  And I can show you how to do it.” Rainbow said with absolute conviction.

Multiple orgasms?  Hell, I had one and it nearly kills me.  But I was crazy curious to see if I could incorporate some clitoris into my penis.

“There’s a line where your orgasm is, it’s kinda like a waterfall.  See, it’s like you’re in a beautiful warm river, and the current is pulling you along, and you’re headed towards the waterfall, you’re getting closer and closer… until you’re hanging right there on the edge of the waterfall, but you’re not letting yourself go over.  You just get inside your own orgasm, and you can stay there as long as you want, as long as you don’t release.  Do you know what release  means?”

Yeah, I think I got the idea.

“No, what do you mean?” I asked.

“Your release is your ejaculation.  So you can orgasm without ejaculating,” Rainbow said carefully.

And the weird thing was, I knew exactly what she meant.  River, waterfalls, release, the whole shebang.

“I know it sounds totally… far out… but if you can wrap your cosmic mind around this, you’ll always have lots of groovy lovemaking in your life.  You probably won’t get it tonight, but it’s something you can always practice.  By yourself, with a partner, doesn’t matter.  In the words of Baba Ram Wammalammadingdong, ‘Practice makes perfect.’”

I was starting to really like this Wammalammadingdong guy.

“Wow, that sounds… far out.” I’d never said far out before or since, but Rainbow ate it up like wavy gravy with a tie-dye spoon.

She took off her robe.  She was the only industrial sex customer I ever had who took off her clothes while I still had mine on.  And for an old broad (again with the proviso that anyone over the age of twenty-five years was Old) she had a riproaring body.  Supple muscles firm lithe and graceful, breasts slung low, with big brown chocolate kiss nipples in the middle.  Mental note to self: as far as books go, don’t judge them by their covers.

Rainbow seemed to be one of those rare people who was actually comfortable with her own naked body.

“You have a beautiful body…”  I would’ve said it whether it was true or not, but in this case it was true, which did makes it easier.

She liked it.  She wasn’t desperate like lots of my other clients, but she liked it.

“Do whatever makes you happy,” said Rainbow.

“Do you want me to take my clothes off?” Just trying to keep the customer satisfied.

Wow.  Whatever made me happy.  Reminded me of my mom.  No one said that to me in real life, never mind when I was chickening.

Seemed like if you were gonna learn to orgasm without ejaculating, you should be naked.  So I took off my clothes.  Rainbow set opposite me crosslegged on that continent of a bed.  I tried, but I just couldn’t get the crosslegged thing going.  My pedophile grandfather’s coalminer soccerplaying legs were just too unyielding.  I was tugging and pulling, cuz I was trying to suck it up and play through the pain, but damn, that shit hurt.

“Don’t do it if it hurts.  Don’t do anything that hurts…” Rainbow flows.  You gotta hand it to the hippies, when it comes to peace and love and all that business, they really know their shit.

Rainbow showed me how to deepbreathe, and we deepbreathe until we felt the life force flowing through us.  I didn’t actually feel the life force flowing through me as such, but she did, and that was good enough for me.  The crumpled bills in my pocket were filling me with the life force.

Rainbow and I Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhmmmmed for about a fortnight.  Eventually I did feel a little lightheaded, like when I first smoked a cigarette.  But hey, if she wanted to pay me to breathe and say om, that was rolling off a log for a chicken.

Finally when Rainbow was om’d out, she took my hand, placed it on her breast, looked me in the eyes, and with a hypnotic smile showed me how to roll that mammoth mammarian poolcue tip between my thumb and forefinger, and it got bigger and tighter, until it felt like it was ready to pop, while she made airsuck sounds of pleasure.

I could smell her now, Rainbowing as she made my hand the axis between her legs around which she gyrated, nestling my head into her neck and whispering, “Kiss me soft…”

I ate her neck like a fruitcake while she revved in growly moans, everything moved in rhythm like a well-oiled sex machine, the fur blanket softly soft as she guided me like an air traffic controller.  Then Rainbow replaced my hand with my mouth and she huffed and she puffed like she was gonna blow the house down, jimjamming and earthquakeshaking.

I smiled inside.  I was getting a crash course in the fine art of a woman’s orgasm, and I was getting paid for it.  America–what a country!

“Now I’m right there,” she pants, “…if I let myself, I’d go right over the waterfall… but… I’m… not… I’m gonna stay… right here and let the… waves roll through me… there’s one… slow down… Stop!” Rainbow squeezed, fists clenching and unclenching like a baby breastfeeding, “…now slow… there’s another one… ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh… God…”

Rainbow let rip with a top-of-the-lungs scream.  A gigantic little death.  When she collapsed at the tip of my tongue, I understood for the first time what they were talking about, as time warped, Einstein smiling somewhere, eternity in a second, infinity in a grain of sand.

I thought of busting my ass in the grease of Hollywood Fried Chicken.  I thought of my father slaving away at the explosives plant.  I thought about my grandfather shovelling coal down the mine.  I sure as hell wouldn’t be getting black lung disease from this.

A rainbow slowly descended from Orgasm Mountain, while I stood next to her, nakedly rolling my big huge rock up my big huge hill.

After a brief intermission, Act II began.  She pulled me into the river, took me right to the edge of the waterfalls, and then stopped.  The most important thing, she said, was to turn off your mind, and move into your body.  You can’t think and swim at the same time.

Once a man plunges over the waterfalls in his barrel, of course, it’s all over for him.  For a while at least.  So you have to be very careful and really pay attention.  I practiced getting right on the edge and just sticking there.  And it was good.  When she did something particularly compelling, I felt the spray in my face and the pull of the fall, and by God, quivers did quiver me, then I quickly pulled myself back.

Rainbow was my Seeingeye sexdog.

“Wow, that was groovy…” I said, when it was clear we were done.

Groovy?  I couldn’t believe that came out of my mouth, but as usual I’d ceased to exist in my need  to please.

I didn’t know what to do next.  Should I hang out?  Were we friends?  I thought for a minute.  I still didn’t feel that creeping mudslide of depression I usually got after I worked as a chicken.  I was just a little confused, that’s all.  But looking around I could see myself moving right in here and being the sextoy for all of Rainbow’s old greatbodied freakyhippie chicks.  Sounded like fun, I think, as I grabbed at another salvation flotation device.

“I have something for you…” Rainbow was sweet as you please, slipping into an old soft tie-dye robe.  I followed at her heels like a naked chickenpuppy.  She reached in a drawer and I was expecting a nice fat juicy tip.  Twenty, maybe fifty.  Instead Rainbow pulled the out a feather.

A feather.

“It’s an earring,” said Rainbow.

I had to work hard not to show how totally disgusted I was as I took out the rhinestone in my ear and replaced it with the feather.  I looked in the mirror.  To my amazement, I actually liked the way it looked.  Kind of tribal.  Even though I silently scoffed when she presented it to me, that feather became a war souvenir, and I wore it on and off for many years.

And whenever I did, I thought of Rainbow.

She kissed me on both cheeks.  She thanked me.  I thanked her.  She didn’t say we should get together again soon, or that we should stay in touch.  I loved that.  I did what I came to do, we both got what we wanted, and that, as they say, was that.

Rainbow was the only trick I ever had who gave me more than I gave her.

Motorcycling away from Rainbow, floating on my feather earring in the sweetness of the cool Laurel Canyon night, I was high on Rainbow’s free love.

That she paid for.

If having sex for money were always this good, I’d still be an industrial sex technician.

David Henry Sterry is the author of 16 books, a performer, muckraker, educator, activist, and book doctor.  His new book Chicken Self:-Portrait of a Man for Rent, 10 Year Anniversary Edition has been translated into 10 languages.  He’s also written Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys: Professionals Writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex, which appeared on the front cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review.  He is a finalist for the Henry Miller Award.  He has appeared on, acted with, written for, been employed as, worked and/or presented at: Will Smith, a marriage counselor, Disney screenwriter, Stanford University, National Public Radio, Milton Berle, Huffington Post, a sodajerk, Michael Caine, the Taco Bell chihuahua, Penthouse, the London Times, Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a human guinea pig and Zippy the Chimp.  He can be found at www.davidhenrysterry.com.  https://davidhenrysterry.pairsite.com/

 

Bacheloretts, Bulging G-Strings, & Dick-Filled Lap Dances: Deconstruct Male Stripping in the New Millenium

Chippendales2Rumors of the death of male stripping in America are greatly exaggerated.  I know, because recently on a dark dank Saturday night, I took the Queen of LA Stripper Intelligensia, 5’10” Private Dancer/Nordic goddess Nica Jensen, to the seedy sweet scrotum of Hollywood, Arena Nightclub, Santa Monica & Highland, where The Hollywood Men were reportedly going to be shakin and bakin their moneymakers, while frenzied females shriek & wave seas of money for dick-filled lap dances.  Needless to say, me and Nica are highly skeptical.  We’re early.

The club seats 500 people.  So far there are only 7 lovely Latinas at one table, decked out in the height of East LA fashion.  One wears a white wedding veil.  One is in a wheelchair.  They are already drinking heavily.  Looks like we’re in for a long night.  We’re greeted by Dan Remington, the emcee/part owner of The Hollywood Men.  He’s a 16 pound bowling ball of a guy with slick hair and matching handshake, surrounded by a surprisingly nice smile.  He is, and will remain, fully clothed, and is the only performer who will be able to say that.  He tells us that December sucks, it’s the worst time of year, which is true in so very so many ways, in my opinion.  You can see he’s a little worried that no screaming ladies are going to show up, and without them, it’s a very different show.  But during the bachelorette season, Dan tells us, there are 500 women here 3 times a week, in fact they had to move here because they outgrew the last place.  Guys come from all over the world to audition, if you’re interested just call, make an appointment, come down, one guy was just in last week from Europe, came all the way here to be a Hollywood Man.  A kind of pilgrimage, I guess.  Nica wants to know how many of the guys are gay.  “NONE,” Dan Remington blurts a little too loud, then says softer, “None of the guys are gay.  They’re not gay.”  During the next 12 minutes he will tell us like nineteen more times how not gay all the guys are.  Later Nica will say, “Me thinks the lady doth protest too much,” and I will laugh.  Hard.  Nica wants to know if any of the guys are married.  We are told they are not.  “They all have girlfriends,” Dan says, then leans in with a smile, “but almost all of them fool around.”  Later Nica will tell me she has no trouble believing that, and I will laugh again, though not as hard this time.  Nica wants to know where men sit if they want to watch. Dan tell us that no men ever come here to watch.  In all these years, only one gay male couple came, and when they saw what the show was, they left.  So none of the dancers or hosts or waiters are gay, and none of the audience is gay men.  But what would happen, Nica wants to know, looking down at Dan, if a guy wanted to come and watch?  “Well, we would sit him wherever he wanted to sit.”  This satisfies Nica, which is a good thing, cuz you don’t wanna piss off Nica.  Next we’re ushered into the dressing room to meet the brains and buns behind The Hollywood Men, the Sultan of Shwing, the King of the G-String, the dean of American male stripping, 1998 Playgirl Man of the Year, Scott Layne.  If you called Central Casting and asked them to send over a male stripper, Scott Layne would show up.  Even in sweats and a tank top, Scott exudes an utter American maleness, gunboats bulging, buff with mantan, hardbody with soft smile, chiselly cheeks with charmy eyes.  I’ve known Scott since New York Chippendale’s, where we worked together, and he first became a star under the late great Nick de Noia, the Grand Daddy dandy of modern American male stripping.  I’m happy to see him.  And he me, apparently, as evidenced by the big bear hug he lays on me.  Hug-wise I give as good as I get.  Not in a gay way.  I want to emphasize that.  It’s a deeply heterosexual hug, the hug of men who’ve fought together in the trenches of the battle of the sexes, comrades in codpieces, me armed with roller skates, tux and microphone, Scott with the smallest G-string the law would allow.  The show’s gonna start in half an hour, and I ask him if he’s nervous.  “Why would you be nervous?” Scott and Nica answer at the same time.  The mark of a true professional.  Nica wants to know what the chances are of a woman buying a ticket, attending the show, and taking home a Hollywood Man.  “Depends on how good looking she is,” Scott smiles.  Sounds about right.  Nica wants to know what Scott thinks turns a woman on.  “For me, it’s all about sharp moves, quick moves, that are sensual and sexy without being graphic.  I hate it when guys get graphic, that’s not what most women want to see. And I hate when dancers don’t pay attention to older women, to women who aren’t traditionally hot.  Look, women are all about the chase.  Men want to cut to the chase.  Women love the tease in strip tease.  Men are like, ‘Bend over and show it to me.’”  Nica nods.  Sounds about right.  We’re ushered back out into the club, and glorioski, there are like a hundred women buzz-cocking around, power-drinking, primping, whispering, giggling, babbling in gaggles, a dozen white wedding veils waving like snow covered clouds drifting towards the land of Marriage.  As the ladies chill, mill, and spill female hormones, half-nude spandexed cuffed and collared hunk Hosts hustle drinks and smear muscle-bulging flirtatious bodacious charm all over the women.  All of a sudden this seems like it could be fun.  The women seem like they’re already having a blast.  With each other.  Every little grouplet has the same kind of hair, the same kind of outfit, like different tribes, all with their own unique plumage.  I don’t see one single woman here by herself.  They are pack animals.  Female strip clubs are loaded with lone wolves.  Nica starts drinking.  This is a good sign.  She leans over and tells me that in a female strip club, if you say the girls are into having sex with each other, this is considered a very good thing.  I tell her I think it’s the specter of a homophobic Puritanical low-touch erotophobic machocentric culture.  Nica agrees.  She chortles: “And for God’s sake, how do they know they’re not gay, what do they do, give them all some kind of gay test?”  I laugh at that, too, as I imagine having to take a gay test: fashion sense, artistic ability, fellatio skills.  More women are streaming in, and by Jiminy, there must be close to 200 women  here.  Me and Nica are impressed.  Our waiter is cut, ripped, lean yet pec-heavy, hard-haired and ab-happy.  It looks like it would hurt your fist if you punched his stomach.  He doesn’t seem gay.  He doesn’t really seem straight either.  He seems kind of asexual to me.  Like he’s a Ken doll, and if you took down his black Spandex, a smooth bump would be there.  He seems like an accountant.  Nica asks him if he dreamed of being a topless waiter when he was a kid.  He laughs and says that he did not, that’s it’s a great part time gig.  Nica asks him what he does apart from this. Turns out he is an accountant.  Seriously.  When he’s gone I ask Nica if she thinks he’s sexy.  She looks at me like I’m stupid.  “Not my type,” says Nica.  “If there was some nerd here with glasses and a slide rule in his pocket, that would be more my speed.”  Then all of a sudden, BOOM! lights go down, sound goes up, and Scott’s voice booms through the room: It’s Showtime.  There’s smoke, there’s a big video screen, there’s crazy swirling lights, and when the first Hollywood Man busts onto the stage, a scream comes up from the ladies, a primal lioness roar that rattles my teeth, rolls through my bones, and lights up my balls like Chinese New Year, as I’m hot-wired right into all that grrrrl power.  Nica looks over at me.  She’s into it.  The women are into it.  She leans over and whispers: “There’s a lot of really beautiful women here, aren’t there?”  I nod in agreement.  There are.  5 Men pop out onto stage and do a hiphoppy Fosse meets Backstreet Boys choreography, and the women are up on their feet, like at a Southern Baptist church when the spirit lifts the congregation.  Nothing like this in a female strip club.  Big video presentation, clips of movies and local news segments featuring the Hollywood Men show, in front of all that tight seemless choreography.  The men do take their shirts and pants off in the opening number, but not until they take off their jackets and shirts, unbuttoning and removing little by little.  When they get down to their skivvies, the estrogen laden roar bounces off the walls.  Now we’re into the numbers.  Each is almost a Jungian American archetype: Top Gun, An Officer and a Gentleman, the Cowboy, the Fireman, the Vampire.  They all start off with lots of costume, surrounded many times by other dancers.  Slowly they take it off while lip synching, until they take down their underpants to reveal their teeny G-strings.  When they get to this point, they all make the same move: they turn around and bend over, their asses shining like a big happy heartmoon.  The women seem to love that.  They writhe, they undulate, they simulate intercourse, poundpoundpounding into the floor. They pour oil on themselves. The men touch themselves on their covered penis areas quite a bit.  The women seem to love that, too.  But honestly, after a while, the perfect smooth hairless chestpecs and the perfect smooth hairless 6 pacs, and the perfect smooth hairless asses all blend one into the other.  Mind you the women are great.  They are so much fun to watch.  I love how they enjoy the show through each other.  Understand this: in terms of sexual orientation, I am 70%, 20% lesbian, and 10% gay, so this show is not, as has been pointed out repeatedly, intended for me.  But I did 2 years at Chippendale’s when it was the hottest show in New York City, so I know my way around men taking their clothes off.  Plus, that’s why I brought the lovely and talented Nica, because she likes men and finds them sexual.  Plus she’s taken her clothes off in front of them for money, and she’s not ashamed to say so.  Plus she’s watched a lot of men watching women take their clothes off.  So after every act, I turn to Nica and I ask, “Was that hot?  Did that guy turn you on?  What that sexy?”  Every time she shakes her head and says, “No.”  It’s not that she’s having a bad time.  She’s actually enjoying the show.  It’s just that none of these beekcakey bodies is beaming out any real sexuality.  That’s what it seems like to me, and Nica confirms this.  Then Scott Layne comes out, and she sees why he’s a star.  He’s Danny Zuko from Grease, ducktail, tight leather pants and jacket.  Behind him on the screen is John Travolta playing Danny Zuko from Grease.  The effect is cooly postmodern in a Warholian way.  The movie icon duplicated by the live male stripper icon.  And Scott pulls it off, the same cocky shy nice intense calm vibe beaming out of both of them, stripper as movie star.  Only Scott actually sings.  He’s got a mike, and he’s singing.  At first I don’t believe it, because his rockabilly Elvis thing very good.  But then there’s a little slip, and it clearly is him singing.  Nica turns to me and she nods and says, “Wow, he’s really good.” And you can see it really isn’t the meat, and it’s really is the motion.  It’s the power and the skill that comes from having perfected a craft, being able to channel the Sex muse effortlessly with talent.  Scott blows the roof off the joint, as the women go gaga.  Afterwards I ask Nica if she thought he was sexy.  She hesitates.  Thinking.  “He’s really good.  I really enjoyed him, he’s a total pro, the guy is really talented.”  Next up comes a guy in a bad female wig and skirt, with balloons shoved down his feminine sweater.  It’s as if Jerry Lewis has decided to become a male stripper.  Nica is intrigued.  To a hip hop Spike Jones-ish soundtrack, this guy does an old school burlesque silent comedy number.  And he’s fucking funny.  With amazing control of his body.  Slowly the wig, sweater and skirt come off, and he’s sporting a goofy Clark Kent meets Devo wig, with a Superman shirt.  He shifts the balloons from his chest to his crotch, magically transforming them from huge breasts into gigantic balls.  And the guy is an astonishing mindbending breakdancing fool.  Isolating his body and moving the parts independently of each other in freakishly funny bendability, in the great tradition of vaudeville eccentric dancers like Donald O’Connor, with the good looks and athletic muscular grace of Gene Kelly, all filtered through new millenium streetwise edgy urban modernism.  It is a breathtaking performance.  I ask Nica if he was sexy.  Her eyes have gone a bit dreamy in the middle of her creamy round face, and she nods her head: Yes.  Nica’s got a crush on the guy. I ask her why.  She tells me it’s because he diffused the manufactured, corporate asexual vibe with HUMOR.  That ironically, a nice dose of humanity is still what entices more than a shapely butt and a bulging G-string.

Now one lucky gal who wins a lottery gets to sit on a chair in the middle of the stage.  5 guys disrobe down to their wee G-strings and towels.   Then they gather in a tight circlejerk formation around her, facing her, and appear to remove their wee G-strings while opening their towels and exposing their johnsons and willies to her.  The audience goes nuts and bananas.  I thought if I was surrounded by 5 beautiful women and they all exposed their nakedness at me, I would like to see that.  That is probably a sight that I could work into a fantasy that I could masturbate to.  In fact now that I’ve thought about it, maybe I will.  Okay, I’m back.

Now all that remains is the up-close-and-personal, interactive, hands-on segment of the show, where the Hollywood Men actually come out into the audience, and the women wave the money, or plant in their cleavage, or in their panties peaking out from under their tight jeans.  And I’m telling you, when they climb down from that stage like so many Collosuses of Rome, it is an absolute free-4-all.  Unlike in a female strip joint, there are no beefy security guys to stop the clients from mauling the dancers.  And the fur is definitely flying.  There are at least 6 dancers, naked but for small black underpants, working the room.  And I mean working.  You hear little random screams and squeals and shrieks as little knots of females gather around dancers like menstrual blood clotting.  Every veil-clad bride-to-be in attendance gets at least one lap dance, and most of them get many.  The dancer generally comes over to the woman with the dollar bill flag flying (either held by herself, or more usually, her friends) and the dancer takes the bill, then undulates around and into the woman.  Many breasts and necks are nuzzled.  Male faces are buried into crotch areas.  Female hands stroke and fondle and feel up smooth hairless powerful male chests and bellies, and grab a package or two.  Sometimes a dancer literally disappears into a forest of females, so you couldn’t even see him anymore.  The 7 Latinas who were the first ones in the place are whooping and halloring and dancing.  I have to admit it’s great to see a woman dancing in a wheelchair.  Then she gets a lap dance, and the guy is really great with her, sexy and nice and respectful.  She’s digging it.  Then the bride-tobe gets her own lap dance, and she digs it even more.  I gotta say, the room is really hyper-charged with sexenergy.  Next to me, a truly stunning woman has stuffed a bill in her thong panties peeking out from under her tight jeans.  As she slides down onto the booth/chair, the bill disappears.  She tried unsuccessfully to fish it out.  He tries grabbing it with his teeth.  With as little success.  She unbuckles her belt, unsnaps her jeans and parts the zipper like it’s a pare of beautiful vaginal lips, revealing her stunningly sexy lower belly.  The dancer hesitated, then goes down.   He nibbles around the bill, then slowly and seductively pulls it out of the string of her thong thing.  I have to admit I was jealous.  I wanted to be that dancer.  This moment illustrates the best of the audience participation section, what at Chippendale’s used to be called the Kiss & Tip.  I did see a couple of the guys pull women’s hair, yanking heads into crotches with what I thought was too much force.  Some women seemed to like that.  Other seemed put off when the dancer moved away.  Regardless, MUCH MUCH money exchanged hands, and MANY MANY hands roved over ACRES & ACRES of naked flesh.  I wanted to give Nica the opportunity to have a lap dance if she was into it.  I was curious what her reaction would be to getting one, having given so many herself.  I asked her if she wanted one.  She nodded enthusiastically.  This is just one of the things we love about Nica. Guess who she wants a lap dance from?  Funny wildly talented smiling sweet guy.  Naturally.  I have to admit I felt a little odd asking this guy wearing nothing but tiny black underpants if he would give my friend a lap dance, but only because all that gay talk before the show made me afraid I would disrupt the delicate balance of the show.  Me, I don’t give a shit, I just want Nica to have her lap dance.  So I find the guy and tell him what I want, and he’s the very model of accommodation.  Nica gives him the money.  The guy’s got curly brown soft hair, as opposed to the hard sculpted look of so many of the other guys.  He looks her in the eyes as he pulsates and undulates rhythmically before her. She sinks down into her chair as he moves in closer and closer to her until his smooth supple rippling skin is inches from her lips. Nica seems to be really enjoying her lap dance.   She puts her hands on his chest.  He is gentle with her, but still seems capable of rocking her world.  He is professional, but slightly removed, an amazing mover with a supple lithe physicality and a serious soulfulness, although he doesn’t seem emotionally engaged like he did on stage.  He spends a good 5 minutes with Nica before he kisses her on the cheek and takes off.  Nica’s cheeks are flushing and her eyes are alive.  I ask her if she enjoyed her lap dance.  She says she did.

Then it’s on to the big slam bang finale, and Scott’s bringing the show home.  Everybody gets their bows and applause, and then the lights are coming up.  I go over to the 7 Latinas who were the first ones in the place.  Turns out the lady in the wheelchair is the mother of the woman in the white bridal veil.  They’re laughing and carrying on and having a grand old time.  Turns out the veiled bride-to-be is getting married next Saturday.  Her boyfriend knows she’s here.  He told her to go out and have a good time.  That’s why she’s marrying him.  She points out the dancer Nica has a crush on and says, “Tell him, ‘Oh my God!”  Just tell him that for me.  ‘Oh my God!’”  Her mother in the wheelchair points to a picture of Scott.  “Tell him that I’d like to take him home.”  Everyone hoots and hollars.  You can tell they’ll be telling this story for a very long time.

Me and Nica head backstage to the dressing room.  Many men are in various stages of sweaty robing and disrobing.  Nica sneaks peaks.  Scott bounds over.  I tell him how much I enjoyed his show, and how Nick his mentor would have been proud.  Scott seems genuinely touched.  Nica thanks him for a great show.  Tells him what a great entertainer he is.  It’s nice to watch, one pro to another, acknowledgment always meaning more coming from a peer.  “I’ve been doing it long enough, I better be good at it,” Scott smiles with wry self-deprecation.  “How long have you been dancing?” Nica wants to know.  “Over twenty years,” Scott says. “Not bad for being 42 years old, huh?”  Nica cannot believe Scott is 42.  I can.  Nica wants to know if we can interview her favorite dancer.  Scott hooks us up.  Chris Watters is his name.  2 T’s.  With his clothes on he seems smaller.  He’s well dressed casually, groomed, moving with an easy animal grace.  He seems shy and earnest.  He’s traveled all over the world dancing for women.  He got his start Jane Mansfield style, only instead of at Schwabs, Chris was minding his own business dancing in a nightclub in Boise, Idaho, when a guy spotted him and recruited him into the male exotic dancing business.  He’s currently running his own music production company, CMW Productions (cmwproductions.net) while going to school studying business administration.  His parents are into him being a dancer.  They’ve seen the show and they dig it.  Nica wants to know what he’s learned about women taking his clothes off for them.   He smiles and thinks.  He’s a thoughtful guy who chooses his words carefully.  “I see women from a totally different point of view.  I see women at their worst, when they’re drunk and rude.”  Pause. Thinking.  “I put up a lot of walls.”  Pause.  Thinking.  “Some dancing… table dancing, makes you feel creeped out… it’s too much… people cross boundaries.  I like it a lot better when I can just get out on stage and do my thing.  Women dancers are a lot more protected.  It’s weird feeling like an object…”  Pause. Thinking. “it makes you feel creepy… people can be so… I come home with scratches, and bruises, and bite marks, and I have no idea where they came from… it’s scary… sometimes rich women make you feel like shit, they think they can say anything they want, and they say cruel things, sometimes, they’re drunk, they look down their nose at me… it can get really ugly.”  Pause.  Thinking.  “Like I said, I see women at their worst.”  Nica wants to know if Chris is married.  He confesses that he is.  Me and Nica shoot each other knowing glances.  The wife’s a gogo dancer.  Not a stripper, he says a little too quickly.  Like we’d care.  But that’s part of this world, those fine lines that distinguish what you will do and what you won’t.  Take off your clothes. Leave on your G-string.  Sell a kiss.  Let a customer touch you in your most tender netherparts.  Selling your sexuality is a tricky thing, and the shading between trick and performer, john and gigolo, hustler and dancer is crucial for mental stability.  You set your boundaries, and that is how you define yourself.  A lot of male strippers at I worked with at Chippendale’s sold sex, but they would never call themselves a whore.  Whereas, when I’ve worked with women from the next class of sex worker down the foodchain, the street ho, many embrace their ho-ness, “Yeah that’s right, I’m a ho, so you wanna fuck with me, I have got to get PAID!”  Nica wants to know if he’s planning on having kids.  God love Nica, she’s keeping us on track.  Chris smiles that crazy sweet sexy shy smile:  “Yeah.”  I ask what he’d say if his son turned to him and said: “Daddy, when I grow up I want to be a male stripper!”  “No way!” he laughs very loud.  He’s got a nice easy laugh, which he’s laughed a couple of times, but this laugh is loaded with jaded cynical world-weariness.  Nica wants to know why not.  “Dancers get lazy.  It’s too easy, the money.  There’s no work ethic in this world.”  He starts to say something, then hesitates, as if his internal censor stopped him.  I ask him to elaborate, but he shies away.  It makes him more interesting, that there is something withheld.  Nica wants to know what he thinks women want.  “Confidence with a smile.  Even if you can’t dance, if you really have a good time out there, women like that. “  Pause.  Thinking.  Smile.  “I try to use the golden rule.  I do to others what I would want done to me.”  Hard to argue with that.   Nica shakes his hand.  I shake his hand.  Solid handshake.  Single pump.  Firm without having anything to prove.

As we leave Nica says what a sweet fragile soul he seemed, and confesses how she wants to rap him up in her arms and give him a big long hug, because he seems like he’s been so wounded.  She’s surprised.  She never thought guys would feel so much like she does about taking their clothes off for money.   She reflects how heterosexual male stripping is more akin to the neo-burlesque movement that is sweeping the country, as opposed to the more anatomical direction female stripping has evolved into, where girls make a series of poses which illustrate what they would look like having sex.  “If you can’t show them what you’d look like fucking, forget it, you’re not gonna make any money,” says Nica, and I can’t argue with that.

Then me and Nica walk out into the Hollywood night, where it’s not raining men, it’s just plain raining.  And I can say without hesitation that male stripping is very much alive and kicking, kissing and tipping, every Friday and Saturday night in the City of Fallen Angels.

What It’s Like to Get Hit By a Car on a Motorcycle

Weaving and gunning, he whipped it down Fell, timing it just right, so he hit the synchronized lights just as they changed, right on the edge of out-of-control. Divisidaro, Fillmore, Steiner flashed by: boom, boom, boom, George cruising Lili through each light as it turned green, one after another, like magic.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it coming, some big American junker-mobile running the light. That bastard’s gonna hit me, George thought, he’s gonna run that light, and he’s gonna hit me.

Imagine the smallest split of a second you can. Now split that an infinite number of times. That’s how long it took for George to think all that.

George’s eyes were wide as CD’s, utterly concentrated, totally focused. If he had not been, he would have died. If he’d had to, at this moment, he could have lifted a refrigerator off a loved one.

The driver of the American junker was drunk. His name was Ozwaldo Grzylwrsklnzwzykoski, aka Oz Grizzly. He had been drinking beer, then vodka, then beer, then vodka. He had somehow driven from Las Vegas, where he had been drinking with a relative who offered him a job breaking a man’s knees in Lodi, California. Oz was going to check into the Royal Viking Hotel, where he planned to dry out and have sex with several transgender sex workers. He actually should have been making a right turn, in which case this incident would have never happened. But he was so stoopid drunk, he ran the red, right at George, so blurred he couldn’t even focus on the steering wheel right in front of his eyes.

George lifted Lili’s front tire off the pavement. That, combined with the heavy screeching back-tire breaking, caused her to skid away from the Oz mobile.

Oz churned oblivious through the light, completely unaware he was perilously close to manslaughtering U vehicularly.

Lili seemed to be defying gravity itself as she flew sideways on Fell towards Market St.

And just as it looked inevitable that Lili was going to slam head first into the back panel of the passenger side of the Oz mobile, God seemed to intervene. Or maybe it was just George being all he could be.

Either way, George managed to get Lili to just clip the back of the Oz mobile’s passenger side bumper.

This stopped Lili’s forward momentum just enough so that with George flying forward at the same speed he had been, he flew over the handlebars down Fell St, head first.

Joseph Plantune, aka Joey, a homeless man who believed that aliens were coming for him imminently, looked up from the trash can he was mining, and saw a George flying through the air. He didn’t notice Lili or the Oz mobile. All he saw was the flying George. Head first. This caused Joey to sprint down Geary away from Fell, screaming, “You’ll never take me aliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive!”

Holy shit, George thought, I’m flying through the air. With the greatest of ease. Hey, I’m even making a joke as I fly through the air. He seemed to fly forever, flying, floating parallel to the ground, headfirst. If only I had a cape, I could be Superman.

Then George realized he was gong to come down and hit the pavement. He did something smart now. Instead of thinking, he let his body take over. George was lucky that way. His body just naturally took over when it had to. When all around him were losing their heads he was inhabiting his body.

And his body, like most all bodies, knew exactly what to do.

And his body did it.

As it came down, George’s body naturally tucked, his shoulder rolling down towards the road, his helmeted head shielded by his right arm coming up, and as gravity took over, plummeting him towards blacktop, he landed on the flat of his forearm, rolling forward in a moving ball of humanity like a tumbler in thick black leather.

George’s body was all loosey-goosey, easy-jointed as it made contact.

And somehow he managed keep his roll going, as if he had been coached from an early age by a brilliant but cruel Rumanian gymnastic coach.

And when the roll was over, he popped up on his feet and stood there facing away from Geary St.

Stood on his two feet in his two boots.

Unscratched.

Unscathed.

Untouched.

Wait a minute, he thought, how did that happen? Did that happen? Did I just fly through the air, and do some crazy stunt man shit? How the hell did I do that? It wasn’t you, stoopid. That was God. God just saved me. Sent you a message. Do your job. Look after the boy. Thank you God, and I will not ever forget that you saved my life here. From now on, I do the right thing. Sex is highly over-rated. George made a note to himself: have that tattooed on your penis, young man.

Then he had a thought that moved him to action.

Lili.

Oh no.

Please God, just one more thing, I swear this is the last thing I’ll ever ask for: let Lili be okay.

George turned and ran back towards Geary.

There she was.

Lili.

Lying on her side.

Battered and bruised.

That beautiful old lady, scraped and scuffed.

He reached her, got down on his knees.

Put his hand on her, feeling for a pulse.

Oh please, be okay.

She’s dead.

What a night.

This is the worse night of my life.

I did this.

This is my fault.

If I had just minded my business and not been chasing my tail, he wouldn’t have gone skag hunting and Lili would be sitting under her cover where she belongs, having sweet Indian dreams.

Damn me.

Too late.

Somebody beat me to it.

George stroked her violated tank, gouged deep in the belly.

George ran his hands over her twisted front fender.

George let his fingers linger on her twisted handlebars.

George couldn’t bring himself to touch her scratched to hell forks, shock absorbed in shock.

Sadly he got himself to his feet.

With forlorn care, he lifted her to her wheels.

He slipped down her kick-stand and gingerly leaned her that way.

Lili groaned as her bent gnarled mass her rested on her stand.

She’s upright anyway, George thought.

He straddled her, without resting any way on her seat.

Looking at her handlebars was like seeing an injury victim with a badly broken leg, where the shinbone is pointing one way, and the foot is pointing the other.

Carefully, lovingly, George put his hands on her handlebars, and with the touch of an expert chiropractor, he pulled them back towards their natural resting place, like twisted a neck to bring it into alignment.

To George’s surprise, the handlebars moves easily back into place. In fact, they slid too far, so they were out of kilter the other way. Very easy he slid them back so they were centered.

Okay, George smiled, maybe it’s not so dire. Maybe she’s okay. Maybe we can coax her back to life. Maybe she’s just got a sprained hip and some minor contusions. Maybe there’s just a lot of blood from some superficial wounds.

George now dismounted and went to the front of Lili. He could now see that her front fender was bent badly, but if he was very tender with her, he could twist it back enough to be able to drive her, then take her to the shop and get her all shiny and new, like a virgin Indian touched for the very first time.

George took her into his hands and softly manipulated Lili, bending the metal so that it moved away from the tire. It did. It worked. It was an ugly raw wound, but at least it looked more normal now, and would not interfere with her smooth rolling.

George went back around and straddled Lili once more.

Barely breathing, he touched the key still hanging in its hole. He turned it into the Off position. He stopped and heaved a deep sigh.

I mean it Lord, if you give me this one thing, make this one thing okay, and I will never let you down again. Let her come one. Let their be light.

George switched the key back into the On position.

Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, she turned on, the front headlight shooting out a beam of white into the black night.

Okay, said George, that’s it, you win. From now on, no shit, it’s the straight and narrow for me, no bullshit.

George then calmly, moved the lever out for better access, and my his foot primed her a couple of times, while giving her a little taste of gas with the hand accelerator.

He snorted three quick blasts of breath, and kicked down on the lever.

Lili sputtered and spurted, like a heavy smoker trying to wake up in the morning.

But George nursed her into consciousness by opening the choke on the left of the engine, pulling out the knobby pin so the engine gasped air and gas and the pistons sprung to life, pumping like porn stars as Lili finally righted herself and purred.

Oh Lord, thank you, now I know everything’s gonna be alright, George thought.

And he really believed it.

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.

Opening the Blind Eye — Who Are Child Predators and What Must Be Done to Stop Them

“There is a great looking chicken new to me on the swim team … he looks to be 14. Tall but built pretty well in his chest, and blonde and great smile. I fantasized about his asking me to help him get used to the jacuzzi naked.”

127NFRonaldKlinemugshotThis is from the diary of 61-year-old Judge, Ronald C. Kline.

Do you find this shocking and unbelievable?

I do not. At the age of 17, I became an under-age prostitute: a chicken. One of my clients was a judge. The Judge paid me $500 (and this was 1974 money) to verbally and physically abuse him. As soon as I laid eyes on him I felt mean, hateful, loathing. I imagined him up on the bench looking down at me righteously. At the same time I felt sorry for him, and I wondered: Who pumped their poison into this guy? At that moment I vowed I’d never work again. Afterwards I went and bought a day-old birthday cake and ate until I passed out.

Judge Kline has been charged with six counts of possessing child pornography, (including over 100 images of child pornography and a commercial videotape in his home) and child molestation.

Internet pedophilia is rampant. Children are bought and sold, imported and exported like slaves all over the world.

From the cover of Newsweek, to the front pages of the New York Times, to 48 Hours TV news magazine, there have been countless stories detailing how priests have been abusing children for decades all over America.

I am not shocked. I am not in disbelief. Sadly I’ve seen it too many times. And not in the bad part of town. In the nice neighborhoods where I grew up. We must accept the fact that child sexual exploitation is not something that just happens in the ghetto, or in Mexico, or Bangkok. It’s happening on your block. In your nice neighborhood. On your block.

America has turned a blind eye to the problem of adults in positions of power and privilege sexually victimizing children for too long.

So what is to be done?

Stop treating prostituted kids as criminals. When a youth is arrested for prostitution, the question inevitably asked is, “Did the child agree to the act?” This is the equivalent of asking an assaulted child if they agreed to being beaten. Almost all of these kids have been subjected to terrible trauma, and must be given the psychological, emotional, and physical help they need, as well as the skills required to move on.

Stop passing kids from agency to agency to hospital to foster home, and allow kids to have a say in what happens to them when they’re rescued from sexual exploitation. And make sure they have a safe place to go.

Make more safe houses available for kids that are actually SAFE, where survivors can get medical, psychological to help them re-integrate into society.

Prosecute pimps and johns who abuse kids with vigorous laws and enforcement, and multiple charging (statutory rape, child endangerment, and RICO statute) abusers. 4) Create a Child Protection Czar, who would coordinate and facilitate organizations on a local and national level.

Spread public information for kids, parents and educators on how to talk about this subject: not as sex education, but as violence prevention.

Establish an 800 number that kids can call day or night that will refer them to a local agency where they can get the help they need.

Form a group of survivors who can help set policy, and talk all over the country in schools and churches and community centers.

The laws have to be stiffer, and their enforcement much more vigorous.

Parents must calmly and rationally tell their children that there are a few adults who are sick on the inside, and not on the outside. And this grown-up might not be a stranger. It might be someone you know. And the sickness makes them want to hurt boys and girls. No matter what any adult says, boys and girls don’t have to do anything they’re not comfortable with, and if anyone tries to make them, they need to tell their mom and their dad and their teacher.

We want our heroes and villains in clean discreet categories. We want our heroes to be pillars of society. We want our sexual villains to be fringe freaks, grotesque and easily recognizable. But the fact is that predators are hungry for our children in all walks of life. Sexual predators aren’t all pockmarked men in stained raincoats. Sometimes they’re gardeners, priests, uncles, and yes, even judges.

I hid the fact that I had been a prostitute for many years, and holding all those secrets and all that trauma nearly killed me. I went from the penthouse to the outhouse on a slow painful ride down the razor’s edge. Part of the reason I couldn’t tell anyone was that I grew up in a British household where one’s upper lip was always stiff, and I could not ask for the help I needed. But part of it is a terrible prejudice that exists in our culture against kids who’ve been prostituted. I felt my identity had been spoiled, that I was worthless and undeserving of love and help. I wrote a book about my life as a young chicken, and when my book came out, I “came out” as an ex-prostitute. I immediately felt the effects of having my identity spoiled. Many of my immediate family no longer speak to me. I am no longer invited to family gatherings. One of my best friends told me point blank it was my fault that I was raped. Hate the crime, not the victim.

If I could talk to Ronald C. Kline, this is what I’d like to say: “I was hired as a 17 year old to abuse a judge, and it left deep scars in me which took years and years to heal. Please, I beg you to get some help. Find someone who can assist you to express your desires appropriately. Innocence is the most precious thing in the world. Once it’s gone, you can never get it back.”

David Henry Sterry is the author of Chicken: Self-Portrait of a Young Man for Rent 10 Year Anniversary published by Soft Skull

 

911: The Power of Small Town Independent Book Stores

DowntownSisters911 said the sign as we edged into the central Oregon town of Sisters.  We weren’t sure if that was the population, or a cry for help.  It was Saturday afternoon, and we were booked into Paulina Springs Book Company as part of our Putting Your Passion Into Print Tour.  In fact we had put together this event to sell our books Satchel Sez: the World, Wit and Wisdom of Satchel Paige, and Pride & Promiscuity: the Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen, because our publishers, Simon & Schuster, and Random House, had told us it would be very difficult to do a successful event in a bookstore revolving around Satchel Paige or Jane Austen, both of whom are dead, and most likely will remain so.  But Kate Cerino at Paulina Springs seemed to think differently, and had insisted on doing an event about Satchel Paige, instead of Passion Into Print.  So there we were.

We walked into the store at 4:40 for our 5:00 event, and apart from Kate, none of the 911 Sisterites were there.  Our expectations, which had been extremely low to begin with, plummeted as we spied the 30 empty seats sadly facing one lone chair, which was staring off into space self-consciously.

As we strolled around Sisters, we noticed that all the shops were closed, and no one was around.  It was like a Twilight Zone episode.  We began to wonder if there really were 911 people in Sisters, or if we were going to be abducted by author-starved aliens who would make us write books day and night for the rest of eternity.

Well, imagine our surprise at 5:00 when we returned to find Paulina Springs Bookstore packed with 35 of its 911 occupants.  3% of the population.  If this was LA there would’ve been 300,000 people there.  Our jaws hit the floor.  Those melancholy chairs were now full and happy, brimming with Sisters bottoms, all waiting for us to say something intelligent, insightful and witty about Satchel Paige.

I scanned the crowd, and it suddenly hit me: there were only two people under the age of sixty in the audience.  Talk about your target audience.  Afterwards, the crowd asked great questions, and many of them shared their own Satchel Paige stories.  It was America at its best, oral history flying all around us, right there in Paulina Springs Book Company, Sisters, Oregon, population 911.  Turns out almost everyone there had seen Satchel pitch, which is not as strange as it might seem, since he barnstormed North America from Moosejaw to Miami.  One woman told a story about when she was a little girl and her father took her to Comiskey Park in 1948 so she could see Satchel pitch against the Cleveland Indians.  As she told us, her eyes glowed like gold as she lit up the room.

Towards the end of the event the Oldest-Man-in-the-Room raised his hand.  In a voice weathered with age but still going gangbusters, he said, “I was the batboy on Satchel Paige’s team.  My uncle was his manager.  I used to ride in his car with him.  He was fast.  He would have made a great race car driver, Ol’ Satch.”  He stole the whole show in about twenty seconds.

After the event, the Oldest-Man-In-the-Room approached me.  He had several hundred thousand miles on him, but his smile was wide, his mind was tack-sharp, and he had incredible posture.  Made me stop slouching just looking at him.  He thanked me for writing the book.  Then he told me that he had one of Satchel’s old gloves.  I said I would love to buy it from him.  He said, “No, sir, I want you to have it.  Give me your address and I’ll mail it to you.”  I insisted on paying for it, but he wouldn’t hear of it.  He gave me his pen, and I wrote down my address for him.  He carefully folded the paper and put it in his pocket.  Then he stuck out his hand and I took it in mine.  It was old and thin, but the grip was strong, with a little pump at the end.  I hope I’m shaking hands as well as that when I’m 80.  After we said our heartfelt farewells, I was distracted by someone asking me to sign a book, and this led to another signature, then another.  As I signed the books, I was so happy when the buyers asked me to make the inscriptions out to their grand-sons and grand-daughters.  Then it hit me: this is why I wanted to write the book in the first place, so the next generation would know about Satchel and his 6 Rules for Staying Young.  As I signed, I felt a tug on my sleeve.  It was the Oldest-Main-in-the-Room.  I smiled to myself.  I figured he probably forgot something.  “Sonny, you got my pen.”  I cracked up, handed him the pen, and smiled as I watched him walk away slow but steady, overjoyed at 44 to be called Sonny.

We thanked Kate, she thanked us, then we all patted each other on the back for quite some time.  We promised her we’d be back when my memoir Chicken comes out in February, and she said she was looking forward to it.

Everyone in the store bought a book.  It was the most successful event on our whole 13-stores-in-15-day tour.

As we packed up to leave Sisters, population 911, Arielle turned to David and said, “You never know.”

 

D & A: Why did you buck conventional wisdom and bring an event revolving around Satchel Sez: The Wit, Wisdom, and World of Satchel Paige into Paulina Springs Bookstore, when most publishers say in-store events about baseball players don’t work when the ballplayer is dead?

K: Someone in the store heard David being interviewed by Scott Simon on National Public Radio, and thought it would make a good event.

D & A: Why did you think an event about a Negro Leagues legend would work in your store when there are so few African-Americans in your town?

K: I don’t really think about it like that.  We try to only bring in great events, so when people come to see an event here, they know it’s going to be interesting.  Like all independent bookstores that have managed to survive, we have very loyal customers, and they support us.

D & A: So, you don’t make automatic assumptions of which books will draw crowds, and which won’t?

K: No, not really.  We just try to bring in high-quality authors we think will put on really good events.

D & A: Your store has such a nice feel in it, it seems very intimate.

K: I think that’s important.  A lot of people are intimidated by writers.  A woman came to an event here and she said she’d always wanted to go to one of these events, but she felt intimidated.  We have a very casual feeling here, and I think that makes a big difference.

D & A: And you had books I’d never seen before.

K: We’re able to hand-select the books we sell.  I think almost every book in this store has been read by someone on the staff, or was recommended to us by a customer.  One of our customers lives most of the time in Berkeley, and she comes into our store to buy books.  I asked her why and she said, “You guys always have seem to have great books I can’t find anywhere else.”  And she’s from Berkeley, where there are so many bookstores!

D & A: Your event was the most successful on David and Arielle’s 13 stores-in15-days Northwest Tour.  Why do think the event such a success, in a town with 911 people?

K: Well, that’s a little deceiving.  There are actually about 10,000 people who live in and around Sisters.  But I think Paulina Springs Book Company is in many ways an intellectual center here in Sisters, and, in fact, for the larger Central Oregon community.  The store’s owners, Dianne Campbell and Dick Sandvik, have worked very hard over the past nine years to develop strong audiences for our in-store events.  People really pay attention to who we bring in.  Like a lot of small towns all over America, many well-educated, interesting people live here.  People have chosen to move here because it’s such a great place to live.  We really work hard to get the word out on our events, and we benefit a lot from word of mouth in the community.

D & A: Do you think that publishers sometimes underestimate small-town bookstores’ ability to sell books and stage successful events?

K: Most definitely!  We have a very hard time getting publishers to send their authors here.  We’ve been very persistent, especially at making direct contact with writers.  Authors like Sandra Dallas, Barry Lopez, Ivan Doig, and Craig Lesley came to Paulina Springs despite reservations of their publicists – and had great receptions and wonderful experiences.  We think it’s time publicists and publishers took note that their authors might make a bigger splash here, rather than being part of the background noise in the big city.  I was cleaning the files the other day and I found a note from Pete Fromm addressing this very point.  “…the entire way to Boise, where the Barnes & noble experience was pretty much a bust.  Meeting you guys, the dinner and the reading at your store turned out to be one of the high points of the entire trip.  Thanks for pestering the publisher to get me there.”

D & A: That was our experience, too, Kate.  Thank you so much for talking to me, and thanks for making us feel so welcome.

K: Thank you.

Why I Took My Daughter to Feed the Hungry on Thanksgiving

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“I’m starving,” Olive announced one day last week is. She’s my daughter. She’s six.

“You’re not starving,” I said, “you’re hungry.”

Epiphany. Laugh-of-luxury child has no idea what it means to starve. To not eat. To be poor.

Yes, she understands there are Poor People. But it’s an intellectual construct. Like knowing there are Emus or Mexican Jumping Beans.

I don’t want Olive to be one of those pampered, entitled suburban white kids who thinks of Poor People as the Other, to be denigrated, looked down upon, ignored, pitied from afar, used for cheap labor and/or cannon fodder. I was raised in lap-of-luxury suburbia, but I was taught that Poor People are just like you and me. Only they don’t have money. Or opportunity. Or a bubble of affluence surrounding them. I was raised to believe that it’s our obligation to give back. To help. To take care of those less fortunate than ourselves. I want my daughter to understand that the corporate-fueled greed which has corrupted this country is EVIL. I want her to understand that people are more important than profit. I want her to understand that it’s important to help people who are less fortunate than ourselves.
I know what it’s like to be poor. When I was 17 I was cast out, and lived in poverty for a decade. Food stamps. Dank basement apartments that cost $25 a month. Trying to choose between buying three slices of pizza or a used paperback. Figuring out how to become an expert shoplifter. Turns out I liked stealing more than I liked being hungry. But I was lucky, I’m white, I was educated, and I was loved and taken care of as a kid, told I could be whoever I wanted to be whatever if I worked hard and did the right thing. And I did. So by the time I was 30, I had returned to a lap-of-luxury life. And I want Olive to have an idea that is like to be poor, without her actually having to be poor herself. I know that’s not entirely possible, but I want to do all I can to help her understand.

So we decided on this Thanksgiving to volunteer to feed hungry people. We took Olive to Roosevelt Elementary School in Union City, New Jersey. We prepared her by telling her there might be some homeless people there, and they might dress and possibly smell different than us. But they were just like us. Only they didn’t have money. Or much chance of getting money. Or a fancy house or a fancy car or a fancy TV or fancy food. Olive has dreams of someday becoming a waitress. (Or an artist. Or an Olympic gymnast. Or an architect. Or a ballet dancer. Or a writer.) So the idea of getting to be a waitress for poor people on Thanksgiving was exciting to her in a way that only a six-year-old can get excited.

The volunteers at Roosevelt Elementary School were a rainbow coalition of all ages, races and sizes. There was festive bunting with “Happy Thanksgiving” festooned across it. Kids had made Thanksgiving art placemats that were totally cool. There was tons of food.

The vibe was festive, happy, thankful and giving.

IMG_20131128_112518_653Then the Mayor walked in. I was not expecting to meet the mayor of Union City on Thanksgiving. But there he was. In the flesh. He looked like one of the volunteers. His name is Brian P. Stack. He was born and raised in Union City. This was his brainchild. He started doing this on Thanksgiving when he was 14 years old. He handed out chickens back then, because he couldn’t afford turkeys. During the week of Thanksgiving he handed out 18,000 turkeys. Well, not personally. But his people. I asked him why he did this.

“I just know there’s so much need here, and I want to help.”

Politician has become a dirty word. They’re rich people who make dirty deals behind closed doors. They espouse goodness, while they lurk around public bathrooms looking for illicit hookups; they smoke crack like it’s going out of business; they cheat on their wives, their kids, and the people who voted them into office while they line their pockets with filthy lucre that’s meant to help those less fortunate than themselves. I didn’t expect on this Thanksgiving to meet a politician who gave me faith that America is not totally corrupt. There are still public servants who are, you know … public servants. Who serve the public. Instead of the other way around. Brian P. Stack seems to be in the business of making the word Politician mean something good again.

Then people started showing up to eat. Young, old, and in between. I was in charge of salad. Olive was in charge of rolls and cranberry sauce. She really got her waitress on, welcoming people, asking with a chipper smile, “Would you like a roll? Would you like some cranberry sauce?” She was the youngest one serving food by 25 years. She made people smile.
And they kept coming. At least 300 hungry mouths were fed by the time we finished. And lots of them took containers of food to go. They ate, they talked, they hung out, they ate. Some by themselves, some with their boy/girlfriend. Some with their family and kids.

After about an hour we took a break and Olive had a roll, some cranberry sauce and a giant helping of salad. There we were, eating with all the Poor People. After she finished eating, Olive looked around and said to me, “Dad, the poor people look the same as us.”

Point made.

I asked Olive if she was having fun serving rolls and cranberry sauce.

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s super fun.”

She was right. It was super fun. It was pure joy. With no hangover.

I looked up and all of a sudden we were almost done. Apparently time moves quickly when you’re helping people.

As we were leaving, Olive looked at me with a big six-year-old smile and said, “I want to do this again next year!”

And so we shall. So we shall.

The Whore Wars

HosHookersjohns marks cover croppedIt took me a quarter of a century to transition from teenage rent boy to best-selling author, but soon after I did, I was invited into the office of the prominent book agent. “David,” he said as he leaned back in his air ergonomic Aeron chair, “whatever you do, don’t get stuck in the sex ghetto.” So I left the sex ghetto, and wrote several books on very straight subjects. On five of those books, the publishers would not allow me to use my real name, because I have the stink of fornication upon me. But the sex ghetto kept singing her siren-sweet song to me. So I plunged back in and co-edited an anthology in which the contributors have one thing in common: they worked in the sex business. Absolutely no one wanted to buy this book–agents, major publishing houses, smaller publishing houses, university presses, even the tiny presses that publish exactly this kind of book. Finally after two years, and dozens of rejections, we landed at a small but well-respected independent publisher. In the end, after we paid all the contributors, we lost money putting together this book. The publishers only printed 2500 copies. Dan Brown has sold that many books since you started reading this piece. But somehow this little book that nobody wanted has put me at the epicenter of the Whore Wars, a fierce and ugly battle that has been raging for years in the sex ghetto.

In the world of sex for money, there are two armies. The decriminalizationist, largely liberal lefty, “sex positive,” it’s-all-good camp. Many are turning tricks to finance their master’s degrees; others are dominatrixes who are equally at home deconstructing the Marquis de Sade and flicking a cat-o-nine tales; lots of very organized loud lesbian activists. Even though they’re always telling you how empowering it is to be a sexual healer, most are either retired, or looking for a lucrative exit strategy because when you retire from the sex business, there’s no golden parachute. They argue that prohibition makes criminals out of hard-working Americans who are just trying to make sure baby has new shoes. Across the road is the abolitionist, mostly conservative, Christian-tinged, prostitution-is-slavery, everyone-is-trafficked, it’s-all-bad camp. They are mostly academics who wear dowdy clothes and look like they haven’t had sex in years; quasi-neo-feminists who claim to speak for the downtrodden victims of commercial exploitation from the lap of luxury; and not-for-profit activists who overcame brutal beatings on the mean streets as junky hos. They will trot out statistics that prove everyone in the sex for money world was sexually abused as a child, and that everyone who trades their body for cash is brutalized by charming but subhuman pimps, traded by smugglers of human flesh. Except for the reformed junky hos, none of these people have ever turned a trick. Not surprisingly, abolitionists and decriminalizationists alike seem to want to simplify this ridiculously complex subject so it fits their agenda.

In 2002, when my first book and I came out, I was recruited by both sides. And before I looked, I leapt. Just say yes. A good recipe for getting yourself into the sex business in the first place. So I collected writing from both the groups. My mission was to give voice to the entire spectrum of this underrepresented population, to humanize these creatures who are reviled and glorified, worshiped and spat upon in the sex ghetto. I invited everyone. If you lived in the Life, and if you had a story to tell, regardless of whether it was polished prose or a diamond in the rough, you were welcomed with open arms. I very consciously didn’t grind my political ax. In our book $2500 call girls, $100 rent boys, and $10 crack hos are bedfellows.

Most everyone, except me and my co-editor, thought this book would fly under the radar and die a slow painful death, probably out of print in a year. But on August 23, 2009, all that changed. That’s when our little book rather shockingly appeared on the front page of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. That’s when it got ugly for me in the sex ghetto.

Usually, a book or an idea gets attacked from the right or from the left. But I’ve got both sides calling for my head on a pike. One side thinks I am, “Deplorable… dishonorable…” The other is, “Disappointed… pissed off…”. I have no idea what percentage of people who toil in the world of sex for money are doing so voluntarily, and how many are doing so against their will. In my experience, it’s virtually impossible to get reliable statistics. It’s not like a census taker can go to a “massage parlor” where trafficked women are being kept against their will (as was the case in several recently busted in the Bay Area) and interview the slaves. Or from an independent contractor who gets her tricks through craigslist. Or, for that matter, from “Ashley Dupree,” after she’s had her way with Elliot Spitzer. And so many of the statistics we do see from the left or the right are manipulated to fit their agendas. The fact is, right now, in big cities and small towns across America, a hard-working sex worker who is not being coerced, who is doing this of his or her own free will, is making money having sex with someone. And at the same time, a victim is being used as a sex slave by the most hideous, vile creatures ever spawned. That’s what’s going on in America, and whether we like it or not, the sex for money business is booming.

Quite simply, our society is sexually ill. It is broken. I believe the vast majority of Americans do not come close to getting all the love and sex they want. So they try to buy it. I believe this book has generated such intense interest in part because the oldest profession seems to be the next taboo being exposed in the limelight of the American zeitgeist. Mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, incest, one after another have been trotted out and examined like a bug under a microscope. Jim Carrol’s The Basketball Diaries, Kathryn Harrison’s The Kiss, Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life and William Styron’s A Memoir of Madness were all deeply personal accounts of aberrant behavior that had been previously swept under America’s rug. And now it seems like the world wants to know, who are these people selling sex? Why are we buying so much of it? Who are these hos, hookers, call girls and rent boys that make everyone from Catholics to Orthodox Jews to Islamic fundamentalists to Mormons regular guests in the sex ghetto?

This book was an attempt to answer that question. It took no sides in the whore wars. Should it be legalized? Prohibited? It seems both sides want the book to take their position. But it doesn’t. Our agenda is to let these hos, hookers, call girls and rent boys speak for themselves. This is why we opened our book with Post-Porn Modernist Annie Sprinkle’s “40 Reasons Why Whores Are My Heroes.” And followed it with Oakland’s diamond-hard mochaluv’s: “Being a Ho Sucks.” Are whores heroes? Does being a ho suck? Yes and yes.
However, as we put this book together, one thing became clear. Until we take the millions of dollars and man/woman hours currently being directed at adults who, having weighed their economic options, choose of their own free will to exchange sex for money, predators and peddlers of flesh who operate in every major American city, largely ignored by law enforcement, will continue to flourish. People who sell sex will continue to be in constant danger of being abused and beaten by both johns and the police, with no legal recourse. While savage killers like Gary Ridgeway, the Green River Killer, continued to prey on women in that world because, in his words, “I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.”

If this book helps people see that men and women who have sex for money are mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers, I will be happy. If it shines a compassionate light into the sex ghetto, it’ll be worth all the slings and arrows slung my way in the whore wars. But if nothing else comes out of all this, I hope the words of the legendary Georgina Spelvin, anthology contributor and star of The Devil in Miss Jones, ring out from between the covers of our book. “Do your part. Take a hooker to lunch.”

Shame on Joe Paterno & Penn State & a Plea to Abused Kids From a Rape Survivor

 I was raped. By a large, athletic, violent man. I was young, naïve, and defenseless. Being the victim of this unspeakable violence destroyed the kid I was. Every single day I am internally tortured by this abuse I survived over three decades ago. I became a drug addict. I tormented everyone who was stupid enough to love me. It took me years, decades, just to be able to function without indulging in self-destructive behavior on a daily basis. I was lucky. I had a family that stuck by me. I had resources to eventually get help. I healed myself with the help of a hypnotherapist, writing about my abuse and telling my story, and the love of a good woman. But I vowed that I would try, in whatever small way I could, to speak for boys and girls who are not as fortunate as myself. Who don’t have the resources and love in their lives. Needless to say, I was greatly affected by the news that Jerry Sandusky, a man who built an organization that purported to help kids, has been charged with violently and sexually abusing them. There are even reports that he pimped them out to other adults, in order to further his own apparently grotesque needs. I’m filled with rage. I want him to suffer as he made these defenseless boys suffer. I’m filled with fury at Joe Paterno and the other officials at Penn State University, who were complicit in this horrible alleged abuse. Who helped to hide this monster. He is every bit as guilty as the man who actually allegedly perpetrated these deeds of shocking cruelty. I’m filled with disgust for the fans of Penn State who continue to stand by men who allegedly enabled pedophiles. Why aren’t they in the streets expressing solidarity with those boys whose lives were ruined? Why aren’t they in the streets expressing outrage that men who pretended to have the best interests of boys in their hearts, were actually hiding and enabling the most vile creature imaginable? But mostly I’m filled with sadness for these boys who suffered so miserably at the hands of adults. I want to help. I want to tell these boys, these young men, the survivors, but they are not alone. They can get help. They need to tell their stories. If there’s anything I can do, please just let me know.

Tripping the Light Fantastic, or How I Learned to Play Hockey on Acid

At 16 I’m shipped away to Boarding School for my sins.  The school is full of bright, gifted, spindled, folded, and mutilated teenagers, almost all of whom have been kicked of at least 1, if not several, other institutions of learning.  Believe me, I fit right in at Boarding School.

darrow lacrosseWe have the worst hockey team in the history of the league.  Our first game we get beat like 31-1.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to let in 31 goals in 30 minutes?  Any way you do the math, that’s over a goal a minute, ladies and gentlemen.  The best player on the team is Joe Skyfeather.  We call him Joe Starfucker, and he likes that.  He’s our goalie.  A great goalie.  After every game he’s one huge Iriquois welt.  He says if he wasn’t a hopeless Indian drunk already, he’d have to start drinking heavily.   The one good thing about losing 31-1 is that when you score that 1 goal, man, you celebrate hard.

Half-way through our season, we’re 0-5.  We’ve scored 4 goals, while allowing about, I don’t know, maybe a kazillion.  We’re going to play our sixth game, on the road, against Andover, 1 of the hoitiest of the toity prep schools in America.  As we’re getting ready to leave, Rat comes in all excited.  He’s just scored some acid from his brother who’s out on parole and laying low in Rat’s room.  I’ve never taken acid at this point, but the word from Rat’s brother is that this is the trippiest shit he’s ever seen.  And apparently he’s seen some pretty trippy shit.  And there’s enough for everybody.    Rat whips it out.  I’m expecting some bubbling liquid in a laboratory beaker, with smoke and prisms and colored lights.   But no.  It’s just an 8 x 10 sheet of paper.  He peels something off, and with an impish grins, places it on his tongue and downs it.  He holds it out for us to join him.  Everyone sits and stares.

“Come on, you sorry bunch of pansy-asses.  We gotta go show those rich bitches what it means to be play this game with a head full of the trippiest shit in the Berkshire Mountains.  We gotta show the world that we may be the worst hockey players in history, but we’re the all-time greatest partiers.  We gotta let our freak flag fly, man!’

Rat’s speech stirs something within me.  In all of us.  We’re castoffs, misfits, the throwaways of our generation.  And suddenly we’ve got a shot to go down in school history, turn ourselves from laughing stock into folk heroes, talked about around campfires for generations to come.

Still, no one wants to be the first to follow Rat down the road to Infamy.  Eyes are averted.  Feet shuffled.  Harrumphs abound.

It’s times like this that turn boys into men.  While us white suburban bourgeois laddies sit with our thumbs up our collective ass, it takes a young brave from the reservation to lead us.  A boy warrior whose ancestors have been raped and pillaged, lied to, deceived, mocked, vilified, burned out of the land they loved, hunted down and destroyed like vermin.   Joe Starfucker.  He rises slowly, a beat-up rented mule of a goalie with long, straggly scraggly raven hair.   He walks with the weight of the ages to Rat and sticks out his tongue.

hanson_brothersRat grins like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

“Yeah baby, that’s what I’m talkin’ about.  Joe Starfucker, you are the man!”

Joe closes his eyes and crosses himself, while Rat places the tab on his tongue like he’s giving Holy Communion.  When Starfucker swallows, everybody whoops and hollers.   Rat then dispenses the rest of the acid like he’s High Priest of the Order of Psychedelic Hockey, a cross between the Pope, Timothy Leery and Wayne Gretsky.

Beevo, Nevs, Harry the Hoagy, Fat Phil, Dougy the K, even Lurch, all gobble down their medicine.

When my turn comes, I’m shocked to find out that the tab of acid is actually a thin little transparent Mickey Mouse.  I smile as I swallow my electric Disney coolaid, visions of Snow White and her freaky dwarves stoned off their nuts, as Jimi Hendrix wails “Some Day My Prince Will Come” in the background.

It’s quiet on the bus to the game.  Scary quiet.  Everyone’s bugging eyes at each other, trying to see if anything’s happening, wondering if this really is some trippy shit, and if it is, what it will be like trying to play hockey against the masters of the universe Andover superstars while we’re massively loop-de-looped.

Then suddenly  we’re pulling into Andover.  You can smell the money.  At least I think that’s what the smell is.  The dorms are all swanky swank swank.  The grounds are manicured to within an inch of their strangulated lives.  The boys are wearing their spiffy little blue blazers, and their spastic little tassley shoes with their dorkadelic little preppy haircuts.  If you weren’t high on some trippy shit already, looking at all these Young Republican bootlickers-in-training would make you go all wavy gravy in a New York minute.

I’m still not feeling any effects, and frankly I’m beginning to wonder whether Rat’s brother sold us all a bill of goods, as we troop into the Taj Mahal locker room, looking at each other for any tell-tale signs of synaptic scramble.

lsdNot a word is spoken as we don the tools of ignorance necessary for us to get the inevitable ass-whupping we are about to take.  Our coach, Mr. Clament, the Clam, a besotted French teacher, senses something is amiss.  He clears his drunken throat, and launches into a Win-One-For-the-Gipper speech.

About half-way through the Clam’s speech, his face starts melting, his tongue flicks out like an iguana, and his eyes spring loose from their sockets like those eyeball glasses that hang down and wobble when you move your head.  His nose spreads out like Silly Putty smushed as his eyebrows do the Australian crawl across his face.  His lips are wax candy and his teeth are changing colors like the Wizard of Oz’s horse: red to green to blue to orange.

I shake my head to try and clear it, but that just makes little fireworks with tails shoot across the inside of my eyeballs in wonderful waving watercolors.

I look around. Everyone’s shaking their head, eyes covered with potter’s glaze, like a flock of sheep who’ve just been converted to Christianity.

The Clam reaches his drunken crescendo, expecting a rousing jolt of competitive manchild testosterone.  Nothing.  We just sit there, staring like big mouth bass, tripping our little brains out.  He’s dumbfounded, and decides his next logical move is go into the bathroom and drink, so he shrugs, turns, and disappears into the bathroom to drink.

“Is this some trippy shit or what?”   Rat pops his eyes out of his head and rolls them around, and the laugher lets loose – KABANG! – and we chortle like whacked-out bobbing head dolls.

The Andover superstar uniforms are shiny and new as the masters of the universe prepare to use us as the tools of their athletic glorification.  They look like bourgeois marionettes to me, stooge puppets of the paramilitary fascist state.  The thought of cutting their strings and watching them crumble cracks me up, and I catch an edge of my skate on the ice, tumbling down, and sliding headfirst into the boards with a loud crash.  The game hasn’t even started yet, and I’ve already checked myself.  Our whole team stops their pitiful warm-up, stares at me, and gets the giggles, tittering like schoolboys, kids in the stands pointing fingers and laughing at us, Andover superstars glaring with smug, condescending menace.

slide_294923_2397851_freeThen suddenly the game is starting, and the crowd shape-shifts, all beautiful fuzzy colors that only make sense when you look at the whole thing from a distance.  When I focus on any one person, the face seems to disintegrate and lose focus.  Or maybe it is me who’s disintegrating and losing focus.  Hard to say for sure.  The referee looks like a big fat zebra.  I chuckle thinking about the lion waiting for him at the watering hole after the game.

The puck takes about six weeks to drop from the fat Zebra’s hoof to the ice.  I discover I don’t have to move my legs to skate.   I float over the ice like an angel on a wave of feathers.  Beevo is winning the face-off now, and the puck shuffles back to me.  It takes its sweet time.  It realizes time is sweet.  I stop it with my stick, which bends and waves in my hands.  An Andover superstar rushes headlong at me, snarling like an overbred hound from hell, but moving in slow motion.  I sidestep him with the greatest of ease.  I have to stop myself from laughing it’s so much fun.  My bones are almost-congealed jello, my skin tingles with the fire of Godlove, and my third eye is wide open.  I see Harry the Hoagy streaking with trails like a comet up-ice and I can see the line the puck will travel to get to him before I even make the pass.  So I flick my stick and the puck goes on that exact line, like a geometry equation only I can see.  As if Harry the Hoagy and I are connected by a Higher Power.  The puck nestles gently on The Hoagy’s stick.  He cuts between the two Andover behemoth superstar defensemen and suddenly he’s 1-on-1 with the master of the universe goalie, face to mask, stoned off of his nut.  Harry the Hoagy starts to go right, the goalie bites, Harry changes his mind, slides the puck onto his backhand and eases it into the gaping mouth of the goal like Casanova scoring with the Queen of France.

We stop.  The crowd is all stunned silence.  The Andover superstars flabbergast.  Then it dawns on us.  We scored a goal.  We’re ahead for the first time the whole year.  We free-form to Harry the Hoagy and do a group hug interpretive dance celebration, Fosse meets Bullwinkle.  The fat Zebra has to come get us to re-start the game.  We’re too busy celebrating.  We’ve never celebrated being ahead in a game before, and we have no idea how it’s done, or when it’s supposed to be over.

The whole game is like that.  Lurch hits a guy so hard he airlifts him up off the ice and knocks out his whole family.  Rat is a whirling dervish, breaking up plays, leading rushes, poke-checking guys who aren’t even there.  Fat Phil is a man possessed, moving like one of those graceful hippo ballet dancers in tutus from “Fantasia”.  And Joe Starfucker,a well, Joe plays the game of his life.  Stick saves, pad saves, glove saves.  At one point he makes a save, and his glove flies off.  The puck rebounds right back to an Andover superstar, and he fires again.  Joe Starfucker reaches out and catches that puck with his bare hand.  This time even the Andover superstar crowd has to give him a big ovation.  They don’t want to, you can tell.  They have to.  He holds the puck over his head, he’s showing it the Great Puck Spirit, then bows deeply, as if he’s a Japanese kabuki actor.

largeLate in the game, the Andover superstars manage to sneak one by Joe Starfucker, after they roughed him up in the crease, which as anyone who’s ever been roughed up in a crease knows, is nasty business, and strictly illegal to boot.  The game’s winding down, and the Andover superstars are sharks who’ve smelled blood.  But the acid still floods our collective brains with the power and beauty of Mother Earth and Father Sky, and we match the superstars hammer for tong.

There’s a minute left to play.  We to get a face-off deep in superstar territory.  Beevo takes the face-off, the puck falling like a big black penny from heaven.  Beevo flicks it easily back to Lurch at the point.  Lurch winds up and takes a Paul Bunyon swing at it.  However, he mostly misses, catching the puck on end so it flutters like a drunken butterfly toward the net.  The Andover superstars are caught off-guard.  They’re expecting a bullet, clenched and moving towards the upper left corner of the goal, where it is happily headed.

I see the puck fluffernutting towards me, getting bigger and bigger as it calls my name:

“Here I come, David – here I commmmmmme…”

I see myself gently flicking the puck, caressing it lightly like a well-loved lover past the Andover superstar goalie.  So I reach up with my wavy stick and kiss the crazy gyrating puck with it.  The Andover superstar defensemen and goalie are already off-balance because it is loop-de-looping instead of shotgunning, and when I flick it, the puck tumbles down and right, leaving them grasping at air straws.

Gently lovingly it bulges pillowy into the billowing netting of the goal.

The buzzer sounds.

BUZZZZZZZ!

The game is over.

The silence sits on the ice like the gods have pushed the mute button.

David has slain Goliath.  Not with a stone and a slingshot, but stoned with a headful of totally trippy shit.

We skate over to Joe Starfucker and jump on top of him, flopping around on the ice like a huge undulating amoebae, until they cart us off.  In the locker room our clothes jump off our bodies.  We sing in the rain of the shower, then have a wild raucous ride home.

Word of our triumph, and how achieved it, spreads like wildfire through our little community.  Of course we never win another game all year.  Never even come close.  Rat’s brother gets put back in the slammer, and that’s the end of the great Acid Experiment.

But for one glorious winter afternoon, we were one with the universe, Kings of the World, and we did it tripping the light fantastic.

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The Birthing of Olive Annabell Maureen Sterry, or How My Daughter Got Born

Olive Annabell Maureen Sterry IMG_0080was determined to make an immediate splash, which she did by making her mother’s water break at five o’clock in the morning on September 11. Olive’s due date was September 5 so technically she was a week late, although obviously the due date is an artificial construct of a society that wishes to control this most uncontrollable of events. But this artificial due date would come to influence Olive’s birth in a profound and terrible. Because she was “late” she was not allowed to be delivered in a nice quiet birthing center suite with a big tub and a double bed, kind of like a cheap room in a Ramada Inn redone by Laura Ashley. This was the first in a series of maddeningly arbitrary decisions which were forced upon Olive by the hospital which made her life, and all our lives, so much more difficult, and seemed solely motivated by fear of litigation rather than the safety and well-being of Olive Annabell Maureen Sterry. So Olive had to be born in the madness of the delivery room of the hospital proper, and by the time she was born, the hallway was sick with contracting cervixes, and babies were practically flying out of uteri.

Olive’s mother basically felt nothing out of the ordinary for the 18 hours after the breaking of her water. Unbeknownst to her cervix was having a series of teeny tiny mini-contractions. I don’t know who Braxton or Hicks are, but I hope one day to have a contraction named after me. Having both seen so many movies and television shows where a pregnant woman’s water breaks, and then she has to frantically give birth in the back of a taxi, Olive’s mother and father were confused when the water so monumentally broke, a tsunami of fluids gushing willie and nilly, and then … nothing. They went to the hospital, they were examined, and were told to go home. So Olive spent the night in her mother on the day the water broke.

The next morning Olive arrived again at the hospital, and she was checked in in utero. The mother and father could not understand how this could be labor. Laughing and cracking jokes, thinking about next year’s line of mismatched socks and chilling with friends and family. Then a woman came into the hospital who was also very very pregnant. But she wasn’t laughing and cracking jokes. Pain flashed furiously out of her face as her body wracked. She was flushed and cramped, wet with mad perspiration, insane pain beaming put of her eyes. Clearly, Olive’s parents thought, there’s labor and there’s labor.

Olive’s mother was now hooked up to machines, prodded and probed, jabbed and stuck, measured and examined. A microphone was placed on her belly, and Olive’s heart was broadcast out of a speaker, while numbers appeared on a screen, and a printout spit from a computer, all synched to the heartbeat of Olive.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

The one constant in the whole birthing process was the heartbeat of Olive. Rocksteady, pounding, it was magnificent and inspiring. Through the thick and the thin, the pushing and shoving, the tears and fears and panic and triumphant, you could’ve set your watch by Olive’s heartbeat.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

And so they all assembled: Olive, her mom, her dad, her mother’s mother, her mother’s godmother, her dula and her midwife, with a series of nurses, technicians, doctors, drug dispensers, and the occasional cleaning person making cameo appearances. The contractions were displayed on the graph, next to Olive’s heartbeat.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

They were small and irregular, these contractions, especially when contrasted with the heartbeat of Olive. And they stayed that way for many hours, while everyone chatted, yacked, laughed and swapped stories. It was like a party in a really depressing apartment without any music or alcohol. When Olive’s grandmother and grandfather left the contractions suddenly intensified. Olive’s mother’s eyes glazed, a dazed trance dancing on her face, her breath short, all of a sudden she wasn’t participating in the happy banter. And there on the contraction graph, a huge spike, the line jumping straight up all the way off the paper. It lasted for 30 seconds maybe, but it seemed so much longer, because it was so intense.  I lived through many earthquakes in California, and that’s kind of what it was like. An earthquake. Thirty seconds takes a month and a half to pass.  And then it was over.

IMG_1972 copyOlive’s mom had asked the midwife and the dula over and over, “When is it going to be Active Labor?” The dula turned to Olive’s mother and with dry sly wit said:

“Now it’s Active Labor.”

This new phase of quaking just kept going on and on and on and on and on and on, until time lost all meaning. But Olive still wasn’t coming out, and no one quite knew if her mother’s body was ready.  No one knew, of course, that Olive was a behemoth.  The midwife didn’t want to give an internal exam, for fear of infection, due to the fact that the water had broken so long ago. At the suggestion of the dula, Olive’s mother had been working diligently for months on the Big Ball, perfected a series of exercises which loosen the hips and pelvis. During this contraction marathon, she balanced furiously on the Big Ball, huffing and puffing and working her way through the spasms that wracked her body, telling everyone that Olive seemed to be sinking lower and lower and lower. Although at the time no one referred to Olive as Olive. Olive’s mother and father did not know Olive’s gender until they saw it. They had decided on the name Olive quite early on, but they had struggled to find a male name. Turns out they needn’t have bothered.

Finally, after too many hours of too much contracting, the midwife decided to determine how close Olive’s mother’s body was to being ready. Turns out it was not very ready at all. And by this time Olive’s mother was whipped into exhaustion, from over-exertion and powerful pain. She would start shaking, sometimes a leg, sometimes both, sometimes her whole body, violently involuntarily shaking. It reminded me of runners at the finish line of a marathon shaking uncontrollably, having lost control of their body.

The doctor wanted to cut into the belly of Olive’s mother and yank her out.  It had been too long since water had broken, and if something went wrong he and the hospital would be libel. Olive’s mother said, No, please don’t cut me.  Her father said , No, please don’t cut her.  But the clock was ticking and the doc was a picture of institutional fiduciary grimness.  Olive’s dad got so mad he wanted to punch the doctor in his smug face.  Her dad managed to repress that impulse.

The dula and the midwife took the great white doctor aside and they had an animated discussion.

olive sept. 20 040The image of the scalpel cutting into the flesh and Olive being ripped out made everyone edgy, tweaky and manic, especially since people hadn’t slept for such a long time and were freaked by the possibility that after all this, the baby could die.

After much deliberation and discussion, the doctor split and the dula and the midwife returned looked very happy with themselves.  Something was inserted somewhere to try and make the process happen more quickly. This seemed to have little effect.

After more deliberation and discussion, it was decided that a drug would be injected to induce labor. And a pain relieving epidural seemed clearly in order.

The Anesthesiologist marched in.  Crisp, meticulous and immaculate, a pin would look sloppy next to him.  He seemed to have a spotlight shining on him.  He wheeled in a large metallic box, like a magician, and laid out all his tools on its flat surface. I once worked as a fruit picker, with migrants. The way they attacked a fruit tree was a work of art. They didn’t seem to be moving that fast, but everything happened so rapidly you couldn’t follow it.  It was surreal. That’s what the anesthesiologist was like. He had a small needle inserted near the spine of Olive’s mother so quick you thought your eyes were deceiving you. Then he threaded what looked like a metallic fishing line into the hole. Or I’m assuming he did, I didn’t see it happen, all of a sudden it was just there. I don’t even think the man spoke a word. Then all of a sudden, like the Lone Ranger, he was gone without even waiting for Thank You.

Instant relief bathed the grateful face of Olive’s mom. Her face was drained of pain, fear, tension and anxiety. The contractions kept coming thick and heavy, although Olive’s mom was bearing them much more easily. But still her body was not ready for Olive to come out. So Olive’s mother slept, gathering her strength. Recharged and revived, the inducing drugs working away, the epidural was discontinued. It was time.

This is where things got freaky.  The midwife actually reached her hands into the womb and started manipulating things inside Olive’s mother. You could see Olive moving around through the thin skin, thrashing and kicking as she was sucked downdowndown into the canal as her heart beat:

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

59 hours and 45 minutes since the start of labor, the body was finally ready. The grandmother and the godmother and the husband and the dula and the midwife prepared with the mother for the final push. With the midwife’s fingers expertly manipulating inside the body of Olive’s mother, the pushing began again.  Three to each contraction.

On and on it went, with each contraction the midwife exhorting, imploring, encouraging the mother to keep pushing even when she could push no more, three pushes, with the breath held, then release and sink into the bed.

Suddenly there it was.  A miracle.  The top of the head. Even though it was clearly visible it was completely unbelievable. Even though you knew it was going to happen, it was incomprehensible. Even though you understood what was going on, it was ununderstandable. Even though it was impossible, it was actually happening.

The grandmother wept and wept, as she helped, great tears of joy and release, and the godmother kept saying just the right things at just the right moment to relieve the tension. The dula was here there and everywhere, supplying what was needed even before it was asked for. The husband whispered in the ear, and supplied the oxygen. And the midwife was like the captain of the team, organizing, letting everyone know what they should do in a commanding yet gentle voice, always knowing what to do, with her hands deep inside the body of the mother, moving and rearranging and allowing life to enter the world.

A third of the head was pushed out and then went back in again at the end of the contraction. And then there it was again with another contraction and push, the whole head, even as they watched they kept asking themselves:

“How is this happening?”

The midwife started yanking on the head with what seemed like, to the interested observer, shockingly violently aggression. The father had a sudden vision of the midwife ripping his daughter’s head right off, the poor headless baby flailing its arms, while the horrified head looked on.

But no, the midwife’s magic fingers slid Olive right out of her mother.

A collective gasp filled the room. The mother was overcome with relieved jioe de vivre and unspeakable metaphysical physical soul opening exhilaration and awe.

Suddenly there she was:

Olive Annabell Maureen Sterry.

Alive, laying on her mother’s chest, still attached by the cord to the inside. The midwife and dula rubbed Olive with sweet vigor. Olive’s tiny yet huge lungs filling with air, and she gave out a small surprised cry, like: Wow, I’m really here!

IMG_2890The father cried copious tears overflowing with a love that he had never felt.  He saw Olive learning to talk and walk and read and going to school and learning to drive and falling in love and getting married and having a baby of her own, eternity in an instant, infinity in an infant’s eyes.

And that is how, after almost 60 hours of labor, Olive Annabell Maureen Sterry came into the world weighing a whopping 9 lbs. 2 oz at 2:19 p.m. on September 13, 2007.

David Henry Sterry on Salon: How Writing a Book Led to the Love of my Life

My first piece on Salon.  Thanks to Arielle Eckstut. To read on Salon click here:  http://www.salon.com/2013/02/14/i_wrote_my_way_to_true_love/

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“You should stop writing these stupid movie scripts and write about your life, it’s so much more interesting.” Janine, my hypnotherapist, was not being unkind. She just had no filter. And she was right. That was the most infuriating thing about Janine my hypnotherapist. She was always right.

I had just gotten a three-picture deal with Disney. Well, it wasn’t really a three-picture deal. They hired me to write a script for one of their moronic ideas (Sinbad in the Army with dogs), and in the contract they locked me up for another two movies for slightly more money each time. But at the bottom of every page was writ in small letters: “We can terminate this contract for any reason at any time for perpetuity and eternity in this and every other conceivable universe and pay you NOTHING.” I asked my agent and she said I could tell everybody I had a three-picture deal with Disney. Even though I didn’t really. And that, in a nutshell, is Hollywood, baby.

But the thought of telling the truth about myself made me hot and clammy, sticky and jittery, teeth tearing into cuticles till they bled. I was much more comfortable working on my buddy script about two 12-year-olds who go to Vegas and beat the mob. Or my mobster-becomes-a-vampire script. Or my “Some Like It Hot” cross-dressing baseball script.

But I’d always wanted to write a book. So that night I started writing one. It was liberating. Gave my obsessive mind something to focus on besides my own sex-addicted self-loathing.

Turns out I wasn’t quite ready to tell that story yet. I hadn’t hit bottom. I was still living in my beautiful Craftsman home in the hills of Echo Park with my beautiful red sports car and my beautiful sex-denying fiancée. I hadn’t yet been fired by Disney, my Sinbad/Army/dog script unmade, my fictitious three-picture deal evaporated in a puff of smoke. I hadn’t yet been dumped by an entirely different beautiful damaged narcissistic sex-denying fiancée whom I DIDN’T EVEN LIKE. I hadn’t yet been whacked over the head with a metal pipe at 4 a.m. in Harlem by an angry disenfranchised crackhead while pursuing a transsexual thief masquerading as a female sex worker. That was when I hit bottom. The bottom of the bottom.

I decided I would try to get my book published. By this time I was living in the nasty skanky hovel in Venice Beach where you could satisfy all your crack needs by sticking your head out the window and yelling, “Yo!” I’d hang out at Muscle Beach with the steroid-bloated weightlifters and tourists and wannabe actresses, actors, screenwriters, producers, directors and other local whack jobs, begging people to read my book. Eventually I sent it to a woman who used to be my commercial acting agent in New York City. She said she loved my book, and asked me if I’d mind if she gave it to her goddaughter, who was a literary agent. “Do I mind?” I scoffed. “Are you kidding me? I will name my first child after you if you do me this kindness.”

I sent the Goddaughter Agent my manuscript. By that time it was called “Mort Morte.” A week after I sent the script I called to make sure she had received my manuscript. Contained herein is a valuable lesson for anyone doing business. Disregard the Follow Up at your own peril. Goddaughter Agent confessed sheepishly that she had lost it. I rolled my eyes, thinking to myself: What a bunch of buffoons these New York literary agents are. If I had done the typical writer thing, and assumed that the universe hates me, that I am a no-talent hack, and that the agent was rejecting me, I would not be writing this story now. But I did the Follow Up. My motto, which I adopted in Hollywood: I will not stop until the person I’m pursuing says yes or takes out a Restraining Order.

I sent her another “Mort Morte.” A month later, having heard not a peep from her, I called Goddaughter Agent. I didn’t snarl in a snarky voice, “Why haven’t you read my manuscript yet?” I was as nice as pie. I give good phone. I asked her how she was doing, cracked a joke that made her laugh. I never mentioned my manuscript. She promised me she’d read it as soon as she could. Later I found out she was Jewish. Well, she still is. And I was so nice that she felt guilty, and my manuscript moved up about 3 inches in the 12-foot pile by her desk. This was before the Internet, when people actually sent manuscripts through the mail! Can you imagine?!

One month later to the day I made the same phone call to Goddaughter Agent. Nice as pie. Unbeknownst to me, my manuscript rose a whole foot in the 12-foot pile. Nine months, once a month, I called her. One human gestation period. We could’ve had a baby in the time it took her to read my manuscript. Finally, guilt drove my manuscript to the top of the pile. By this time, we had a nice banter going. An idea popped out of my mouth, as if the Muse had pushed it out. I told her I was coming to New York for Christmas. She told me that if I did, she’d read my book and take me out to lunch. Of course I had no plans at all to go to New York for Christmas. I quickly accepted her lunch invitation 3,000 miles away. As soon as I hung up, I frantically bought a ticket to New York.

She took me to a swank restaurant, one of those places agents take writers when they want to impress them. She had seemed in my mind on the phone from 3,000 miles away like a very amiable dowager. Not at all. Turned out she was 20-something, totally cute, great smile, fabulous laugh, smoking hot body, kind eyes and spectacularly stylish, like she just stepped out of a magazine featuring wildly intelligent cutting-edge fashionista intelligentsia 20-something Manhattan babes. I was one smitten kitten. She told me she loved “Mort Morte.” And she had smart things to say about changes she wanted me to make. I was so used to getting the dumbest dumbass notes from Hollywood studio hacks that it was like a fragrant breeze on the first day of spring. She said if I made the changes, she’d represent me and my baby/manuscript. I was ecstatic. But there was something more. I liked this woman. A lot.

That night I couldn’t stop thinking about her. So the next day I called her and asked her if she wanted to hang out. She said she’d like to hang out. I later found out she had plans she broke for me. Nothing sexier than someone breaking their plans for you. We went to see one of Billy Bob Thornton’s most forgettable movies. I can literally remember nothing about it. Except that I was with her. Then she asked me if I wanted to go to a French restaurant near her apartment in Brooklyn. I was pretty sure that was dating code for: I want to hook up with you. Turns out I was right. The French restaurant was spectacular. But not as spectacular as she was.

Suddenly we were in her ridiculously stylish Brooklyn brownstone. She was so much fun to talk to. Religion, politics, books, America, the world, the universe. Einstein was proven right again, time really is relative. An hour passed in a minute. At a certain point she asked me in a funny, teasing and altogether endearing way, “Every first novel is about the author. But this book isn’t about you, is it? You didn’t kill your father and three of your stepdads, did you?”

I laughed. It was funny. The way she said it. What she was saying. Normally, I would’ve given her some lame retort that masked who I really was. I was like an anti-superhero. Instead of having a secret identity that was amazing and saved people, I had a secret identity that was a twisted grotesque monster bent on destroying me and all those who cared about me. But I decided to take off the mask. I was not going to lie about who I was or what I’d done. If she didn’t like it, that was her problem. I was so exhausted living a lie. I was ready to be set free by the truth. I’d hit the bottom. The bottom of the bottom.

So I told her everything. About the man who abused me when I was 17. About being sucked into the filthy underbelly of the Hollywood sex business. Becoming a drug addict and a sex addict and doing my time with Janine my hypnotherapist. I thought it would feel terrible to say all that to someone I was interested in. Just the opposite. It was such a load lifted. The black cloud that had been thunderstorming all over my life parted and the sun shone and the birds chirped and the angels sang. It was a transcendent moment. I thought if I told someone I was interested in about my sordid shameful dirty secrets that she’d be horrified and run screaming away from me. Just the opposite. Goddaughter Agent was fascinated. Spellbound. “That’s the book you should write.” Exactly what Janine my hypnotherapist said. Only now, I was ready. I didn’t care anymore. It was so good to be Out.

I moved in with Goddaughter Agent that night. I didn’t know I was moving in with her, but it turned out I was. Her name was Arielle. Well, it still is. She came out to visit me in Venice Beach. She was even better than I’d imagined. She helped me put together a proposal for my real story. That became a book called “Chicken.”

But much more important, I found the love of my life. Arielle AKA Goddaughter Agent. Two years after the Billy Bob Thornton movie and the French restaurant we were married high on a hill overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge. A couple of years later we made a baby together. I know it happens all the time, babies being made, but it still strikes me every day as being spectacularly magical that two human beings, without any help at all, could make something as complicated as a human being. Olive. That’s what we called her. Well, we still do. She’s 5 years old now. Einstein proven right once again. That five years has gone by in about 10 minutes.

“Mort Morte” never got sent out by my agent/wife. As soon as we got married, she fired me as a client. But I still wanted to get that book published. I kept showing it to people over the years. Everyone seemed to love it, but they all thought it was just too weird. So I decided, at the suggestion of the lovely and talented Arielle, to go after a world-class artist to make some illustrations for my book. This led me to a French Canadian named Alain Pilon. I contacted him, and sent him my manuscript. He loved it and agreed to make a bunch of illustrations. All the while I kept tweaking and polishing, buffing and shining, making it better and sending it out there.

Finally, one day, to my shock and amazement, there it was in my inbox. An email from an editor who said how much she loved “Mort Morte.” I was used to this by now, and I knew the next sentence would be about why they couldn’t publish my quirky, wacky, coming-of-age Alice in Wonderland meets Tin Drum novel about gun violence and kids in America, and a boy who really loves his mother. But wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, this editor said she wanted to publish my book. I was gobsmacked. I showed the email to Arielle. We danced and made happy happy sounds.

Twenty years after I started writing that book I finally got it published. I’m a different person now than I was then. But every time I look at the beautiful Alain Pilon cover of “Mort Morte” I am filled with joy.

And that’s how writing a book led me to the love of my life.

David Henry Sterry is the author of 14 books, including his memoir, “Chicken,” an international bestseller that 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. His new illustrated novel is “Mort Morte,” a coming-of-age black comedy about gun violence and children, and a boy who really loves his mother.

Having Sex with Craigslist Prostitue/Escort/Ho/Industrial Sex Technician: A True Story

This is from a reading I did at Litquake, in Vesuvio’s, the historic North Beach literary watering hole.

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Rocking Long Island, Death at Joseph-Beth, Killing in the Big Apple, & an Ivy League Pornographer

As Thanksgiving rolls its turkey neck towards us, Christmas looms ominously around the corner, and one more year of my life expires, we’re super stoked about the next stop on the Essential Guide Rocks America tour: We’ll be rocking LI, NY, Thursday, Dec 2, 7pm. Pitchapalooza: Book Revue in Huntington Long Island, with special All-Star publishing celebrity guests James Levine of the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency, and Mauro DiPreta, Vice President of It Books, ( HarperCollins)

It’s been an insane month, an insane fall, an insane year.  We just performed in 13 cities over the course of three weeks: from the Big Apple to Tinseltown; Miami to Seattle; Portland to Pittsburgh; Denver to St. Louis to San Francisco.  We had dizzying triumphs and brutal failures.  Our book, The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published was officially released on November 3, and we haven’t even had time to celebrate yet.  I’ve toured by myself, with the Sex Worker Arts Show, with Arielle, and with the stars from the Chippendale’s Male Strip Show.  I’ve never toured with a three-year-old.  Especially a three-year old who is Olive.  She more fun than all of them.  We were worried about what was going to be like to shlep her around America with us, but she proved by far the most resilient and cheerful member of the team.  Here are our reports from the road, deep in the trenches of the publishing wars.

Denver Pitchapalooza on New Books West http://bit.ly/9yG2on

Big Love from the Big Read Festival in St. Louis bit.ly/akI1Xg

Movie: Great Book Pitch: Winner of St Louis Pitchapalooza, Zach Stovall pitching his book about being a fat bald white guy http://bit.ly/hV6LAU

The Essential Guide Rocks America Tour Kicks Off: http://bit.ly/dbk39k
#2: 1st Stop Washington DC: the Borders Incident: http://bit.ly/cQ11fj
#3: NPR Love in DC: http://bit.ly/9bCUcl
#4: Pat Conroy & Scarlet O’Hara On the Road to Pittsburgh: http://bit.ly/aVBAH5
#5: Death @ the Bookstore – The Murder of Joseph-Beth in Pitsburgh: http://bit.ly/dpYTnj

#6: Miss Ida, Daryl & Olive Chillin in Steel Town http://bit.ly/aLZS22

#7: The Beauty of Loganberry Books & the Universe’s Lollipop http://bit.ly/abOTPR

#8: Dawn Cracks Early in Cleveland  http://bit.ly/axLCDP

#9: An NPR Homey, Finding Happiness @ Books & Co & the Dayton Airport Blues  http://bit.ly/cwd6lo

#10: Stuck in Dayton on the Day That Would Never End http://bit.ly/cfipH1

Our awesome Editor Goddess Savanna calls it as she sees it on our Pitchapalooza Barnes & Noble, 86th St., with publishing titans Larry Kirshbaum and Bob Simon.  http://bit.ly/bcHFaZ

The Art of the Pitch and our B & N Manhattan Pitchapalooza on Publishers Perspective. http://bit.ly/bcHFaZ

#11: I Love LA! –Hollywood & the Jewish Men-Scared http://bit.ly/9Ci5dB

#12: Vromans Versus Dancing with the Stars, Riding a Donasaur, & a Minnie Mouse Who Needs $ http://bit.ly/bXYdQ8

Arielle talks about five books that will help you turn your passion into income, and dispenses wisdom from her years as a literary agent and entrepreneur on LearnVest. http://bit.ly/hGG1OW

Bradley Charbonneau of Likoma Island & the Book Doctors talk about Effective Author Websites http://bit.ly/bmW8Fj

Arielle interviews Robert Grey of Shelf Awareness on seven ways to get an independent book store to stock your book. http://bit.ly/ea3UJ2

Sex Worker Literati  – Sun Nov 28, 7pm, Bowery Poetry Club

The story of How Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys Ended Up in Bed with TV’s Friends Co-Creator http://bit.ly/hG8nVN

Very excited to be riding herd with Zoe Hanson over another cavalcade of Glamorous yet seedy art babes, Ivy League pornographers, filthy poets and nasty dancers from the belly of the beast.

MOLLY CRABAPPLE http://mollycrabapple.com/ – Illustrator for Marvel Comics, NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Neil Gaiman, & your neighborhood fire eater. Creator of Scarlett Takes Manhattan and The Puppet Makers, an upcoming web series for DC Comics. Creator of Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School, alt.drawing salons in over 100 cities. Speaker at Museum of Modern Art, & South by Southwest. Caffeine addict.

SAM BENJAMIN http://www.ivyleaguepornographer.com/ – Brown University graduate, a former go-go dancer, and the director of over one thousand Los Angeles-based interracial gangbangs, gay and straight. His book, “Confessions of An Ivy League Pornographer,” is a memoir of a youth well spent.

PUMA PERL http://pumaperl.blogspot.com/– Puma Perl is a lower east side poet/writer/performer/producer/ex-narcotics enthusiast/recovering junkie who relives it all in her work. She is the author of Belinda and Her Friends and knuckle tattoos, and, with Big Mike, is half of DDAY Productions. She believes in the inclusion of gratuitous sex and pointless profanity in her writing and performance art..

BIG MIKE – Creator of “Big Mike’s Big Show,” author of two books, Sibling Rivalry and 81 Pounds, and was crowned Best Neptune in the Mermaid Parade, 2004.

DR. ALEX KINNEY – PhD in Pornology, Professor of Filth & Debauchery, elocutionist, professional dominator, rough trade specialist, hedonist scholar, and hung like a horse.

DAVID HENRY STERRY – Former teen manchild ho, satirist, muckraker and author of 12 books, including Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys, which is being made into a dance piece to take the Lincoln Center by a top Hollywood producer, as well as Chicken, which is being made into a TV show by Showtime. www.davidhenrysterry.com

ZOE HANSEN – L.Z. Hansen came to New York City in and as an is a1984 at seventeen years old from London England searching for the American Dream. She found it wearing crotchless panties and 6 inch f*ck-me pumps, running a high-end Manhattan brothel. Now she writes and performs about it. Check it out. http://lzhansen.com/

MISS MARY CYN – classically trained actor with a BFA from NYU who takes her clothes off in bars. She is the founder and co-producer of Original Cyn, the partingest show in New York, and a member of the troop Epic win, Burlesque FOR nerds, BY nerds. Find her on facebook or look her up at www.marycyn.com

http://www.bowerypoetry.com/

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=158916630815835&index=1

With Thanksgiving a couple of days away, I feel very thankful.  For our amazing publisher, Workman http://www.workman.com, our Editor Goddess, Savannah, and all of our family there, from Susie Bolotin to a beloved colleague who passed away recently, the extraordinary copyeditor Lynn Strong, http://bit.ly/gVdcz.  Thankful for all the amazing panelists we had, Larry Kirschbaum of LKJ http://www.ljkliterary.com/ Bob Miller new Publisher of Workman, Martha Moody http://www.marthamoody.net/ Nancy Martin http://www.nancymartinmysteries.com/ Lee Montgomery of Tin House http://www.tinhouse.com/ Michael Schaub of bookslut http://www.bookslut.com/authors.php?author=Michael%20Schaub and Alison Hallet of the Portland Mercury http://www.portlandmercury.com/ Vince Rause, Anne Trubeck http://www.annetrubek.com/ Sharon Short, author of Death by Deep Dish Pie http://www.sharonshort.com/ Allan Fallow of AARP http://www.aarp.org/ Electroboy himself Andy Behrman http://www.electroboy.com. Betsy Lerner, author of Forest for the Trees  http://betsylerner.wordpress.com/ . Johnny Evison http://www.jonathanevison.com/ and Kurtis Lowe in Seattle. I’m thankful for the enormous kindness we received from our good friend Jessica Goldstein, who threw an amazing book party for us in Washington DC, and invited all for NPR friends.  I’m also thankful for all the incredible booksellers and lovers who gave us so much generosity and expertise.  Jim Levine of Levine Greenberg Literary Agency http://www.levinegreenberg.com/ Steven Sorrentino, Director of Author Promotions for Barnes & Noble, and Edwin Tucker, CRM of 86th St. B & N http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ Harriet Logan of the incredible Loganberry Books http://www.loganberrybooks.com/ Kevin Sampsell http://kevinsampsell.com/ of Powell’s at Barnes & Noble, Dayton NPR book guy Shaun Yu http://www.dpr.org/people/shaun-yu.htm, Sharon Kelly Roth at Books and Company http://www.booksandco.com/ Ed Nowatski of Publishers Perspective http://publishingperspectives.com/, Mitchell Kaplan of Books and Books http://www.booksandbooks.com/ and the Miami International Book Festival.  My sister Liz, Daisy White, and all the other great babysitters who help us out with Olive.  Thanks to all the great writers for all their amazing pitches.  And of course I give thanks for Olive and Arielle, my ex-agent and current wife.

How Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys Ended Up in Bed with TV’s Friends Co-Creator

This story starts when I was 17, alone in Hollywood with $27 in the pocket of my nuthugging elephantbells.  I had just arrived to begin my collegiate career at Immaculate Heart College, where I planned to study existential under a bunch of radical nuns.  That night, while admiring Marilyn Monroe’s handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, I was approached by a very charming man wearing a shirt emblazoned with the word: SEXY.  He invited me back to his place for steak.  Turned out to be the most expensive steak of my life.  The steak was drugged .  SEXY raped me.  I escaped with my life.  But the happy-go-lucky lad who breezed into that apartment died in that room.  SEXY killed him.  I sprinted out of there broken and bleeding.  Within the week I was in the sex business.  I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.  The part of my brain responsible for emotion was engorged, and the part responsible for communication shriveled.  I was a living breathing fully-loaded semi-automatic weapon just looking for an excuse to go off.  So given my economic situation, (making minimum-wage frying chicken), my alienation from my parents, and my newly acquired mental illness, it seemed absolutely like my best option.  I was in the sex business for nine months.  One human gestation period.  But it changed me forever, and in ways I wasn’t even aware of for years to come.  Certainly I had great times in that world, and made gigantic money for a person my age and with my work experience.  But I also downloaded the sexual trauma I encountered in that world, and it infected me like a virus.

I became a sex addict and a cocaine addict.  Which is not nearly as much fun as it sounds.  In my mid 30s I realized that if I didn’t change I was going to die, or my penis was going to fall off.  I’m not sure which scared me more.  I knew I had to find a panic mechanic.  Fast.  Since I was living back in Los Angeles, naturally I found a hypnotherapist.  She gave me some tools to stop my sick twisted behavior, and helped me unraveled the huge gnarly knots inside myself.  I was a professional screenwriter at the time, so she suggested I write about my experiences.  Thus was born my memoir Chicken.  Writing down the most miserable things that ever happened to me helped me understand why I became a man child rent boy.  It helped me embrace my inner ho.  See myself as the survivor not the victim.  Accept responsibility and not blame everyone else.  Appreciate the good and not obsess about the bad.  Do things that made me happy and healthy instead of miserable than sick.

When that book came out it changed my life and I was so grateful I was overwhelmed by a fierce desire to help somebody.  Be of service.  So I decided to start a writing program for people who’d been arrested for prostitution.  For two years every Tuesday me and my ex-literary agent/current wife would go down into a basement of a nonprofit organization and run a writing group.  The hos, hookers, call girls and rent boys we worked with wrote shocking, funny, smart, mind-blowing, jaw-dropping stories.  And they always left the workshop in a better mood than they arrived.  As did we.  Part of my mission became to put a human face on these people who are glorified and stigmatized, worshiped and reviled, spat upon and paid outrageous sums of money.  Thus was born the anthology, Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Boys.

One of the great things about sex workers is that they are amazing networkers.  They pretty much have to be.  So I put out the word that I was looking for writing by people in the sex business.  Me and my partner Richard Martin were flooded with submissions.  I was already the author of a bunch of books by then so I started shopping the anthology.  I showed it to my agents.  Not interested.  I showed it to other agents.  Even less interested.  I showed it to publishers I knew at HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Random House, and lots of the big boys of publishing.  They laughed at me.  Or ignored me.  On to the small publishers.  Nothing.  University presses seemed like the next logical choice, since this is really a piece of American oral history.  No pun intended..  I actually got the head guy at Duke University on the phone.  He told me in a disdainful, dismissive, condescending, adenoidal and freezing cold tone that this was certainly not the kind of book published by Duke University.  He told me they preferred material that was much less vulgar, rude, crude and illiterate.  Finally I approached places like Joe’s Publishing Co., where you call the number listed on the website and a guy answers, “Hi I’m Joe, can I publish your book?”  Even Joe turned me down.

After a year my partner Richard was ready to give up.  I was furious.  I knew I had something valuable.  Even though “experts” from the top to the bottom of the food chain told me that I was a deluded, moronic ex-ho.  Objectively, in the face of universal rejection, I should’ve quit.  I did not.  Me and Richard worked our asses off to make the proposal better, refining, buffing and polishing.  Then I came up with the title.  I did it with this game that we use to come up with titles.  You get a bunch of your intelligent friends, if you have any, you get a bunch of drugs and alcohol, and you write down every single word you can think of related to your subject.  Then you just start mixing and matching.  That’s how I came up with Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Boys.  And I kept asking every single person I knew, wherever I went.  Finally I got connected to a guy named Richard Nash, who ran Soft Skull Press. A week later we had a book deal.  They gave us such a tiny advance that by the time we ended up paying all the writers, me and Richard lost money on the deal.  But we were ecstatic.

We were even more ecstatic when our Little Ho Book That Could, the redheaded step-child nobody wanted, ended up on the front page of the New York Times Book Review. I happened to be in Hollywood doing my Sex Worker Literati show to promote the book, when I got a call from my agent.  Marta Kauffman, co-creator of Friends, wanted to talk to me about the anthology.  I was excited yet slightly confused.  Why was someone in the center of American culture interested in our book, which was so rooted in America’s dark, dank, filthy underbelly? I tried to imagine a show about a group of perky, attractive, funny, fresh-faced BFF-sex workers trying to deal with life, love and turning tricks.  Sure, I thought, why not?  As I drove up to our meeting, I was expecting much Hollywood slickness.  But Marta was just like people I worked with in the theater for 20 years.  After we had our getting-to-know-you chat she told me how taken she was by Hos, Hookers.  How she had a vision of the characters and stories being brought to life as a modern dance piece, realized by some breathtaking choreographers.  Would I be interested in something like?

My eyes popped while jaw dropped.  I would’ve never imagined this scenario in million years.  But I liked it.  Sex is, after all, the ultimate primal dance.  And when sex is exchanged for money, a window opens into the human soul.  What a great way to let people to take a peek.

Yes, I said.  Yes.

Writing down the worst thing that ever happened to me was the final piece of my odyssey from out-of-control self-destruction, working at Chippendales, acting on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, writing screenplay for Disney, living in a fancy house in the hills; to getting my head cracked open, almost dying from a massive coke overdose, having my house stolen, and going bankrupt; to making Ross, Rachel, Joey and Chandler end up in the same sentence as Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Boys.

David Henry Sterry is the author, with Richard Martin, of the anthology Hos, Hookers, Call Girls & Rent Boys.  He runs the monthly reading series Sex Worker Literati, giving voice to sex workers telling their stories about the exchange of sex for money, at the Bowery Poetry Club in NYC. The next show is November 28, 2010. https://davidhenrysterry.pairsite.com/ http://www.facebook.com/sexworkerliterati

American Manhood, from Mantle to Manchild Donovan & Why America Can Win World Cup 2010

Thanks once again to the Huffington Post for giving me some love. Nice to see World Cup fever is spreading.

http://huff.to/c4OEri

I’m 10. An American boy. When I walk into my first English sweet shop in Coxlodge, the tiny ex-mining village of my ancestors, it’s like entering a strange, exotic parallel universe. There’s candy, but it’s all different: Smarties, Crunchy Bars, Gob Stoppers. There’s newspapers, but they have pictures of naked women in them. This totally blows my little 10-year-old mind. Pretty women with naked knockers right there in the newspaper! What a world! And there, on the counter, is a box full of unopened soccer cards.

My little heart soars as my pulse spikes. Some of my earliest and most exhilarating memories involve my mom rewarding me for good behavior by buying me baseball cards. They’re one of my earliest attachments to a culture that was bigger than me and my family. An identity in the world. A way of defining myself by belonging to American institutions like Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle and the Yankees. These iconic ballplayers are the heroes of my very early Wonder Years. Larger then life figures with extraterrestrial skills and talents you can count on in your hour of most dire need. Men who, even when limping, bloodied and bowed, triumph against seemingly insurmountable odds, and bring glory to you, your team, your tribe, and your country. These cardboard images of the best of the best were talismanic objects that stood for an ideal of American Manhood.

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Be prepared, brave, noble, kind, help your fellow man and be good to your school, your girl and your mom. So in that little sweetie shop outside Newcastle, I’m practically trembling with excitement as I plunk down my 10p (even the money’s different! big huge gigantic pennies!) and grab a pack. A whole new set of heroes unfolds before me. Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks, Bobby Charlton. I read about their superhuman exploits. The bone-crunching tackles, the rocket laser goals, the humanly impossible feline-like saves.

That’s when I first fall in love with soccer. Later that afternoon my budding romance is consummated with a bunch of local lads playing soccer in the little hardscrabble patch of scabby grass behind a block of industrial flats. Again I’m entranced by this parallel universe I’ve fallen into. These kids are just like the kids I play with back in America, only instead of pretending to be Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Willie Mays, we pretend to be Bobby Moore, Gordon Banks, and Bobby Charlton.

Now I’m 52. An American man. When I walk into my local soccer store in New Jersey, my heart still does a little hop skip pitterpat jig of joy when I see a box full of unopened soccer cards on the counter. $2.50. That’s what they cost now. As I start to open the first pack I have a mad flashback of that Coxlodge sweet shop of my ancestors when this is all it took to make me madly in love with life. To my mom rewarding me for being a good boy by buying me packs of baseball cards. To those Men who were the Olympian Gods of my childhood. At 52 I don’t rip open the pack anymore. Now I savor it. Take my time. As I uncover the first card I’m flabbergasted and gobsmacked. It’s Landon Manchild Donovan, arguably the greatest goalscoring threat America has ever produced. He’s the very first card in the very first pack. It is clearly a sign from the soccer gods. Obviously they’re telling me that Landyman is going to have a huge World Cup. I immediately make him my pre-World Cup favorite to win the Golden Boot for most goals scored in the tournament. If I was a betting man I’d lay a wager on that right now. When I look at the next card I’m both awe and dumb struck, can hardly believe the information my eyes is feeding my brain. It is… Tim T-Ho Howard, arguably the greatest goalkeeper in the world today. Mouth agape, eyes googly I’m like: These are the first two cards of the first pack I buy of 2010 South Africa World Cup soccer cards, are you kidding me? I’ve stated publicly that I think America’s going to win this World Cup. People scoff. Mock. Ridicule. Deride. But I don’t care anymore. I’ve never been able my entire life to muster any kind of religious belief. And I have tried. God, how I’ve tried. I envy those people who can believe in a religion that gives them spiritual ease and peace. A benevolent God, a Heaven full of angels and puppies and unicorns and all the people you’ve ever loved, who come running up to you in slow motion with open arms and hearts when you die. I don’t know why, but from since I was a little kind I believed that we create our own heaven and hell right here on Earth. I’ve never seen any evidence of what an afterlife might be. I believe in science. Matter is neither created nor destroyed. So whatever I am will turn into something else. I’ve just never seen any proof of what that something else might be.

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But in New Jersey last week when I opened that pack and I was blown sideways by the first two cards being the two hotshot superstars of American soccer, it struck me with a transcendent ecstatic flash that this ridiculous irrational belief I have that the United States is going to win this World Cup gives me great comfort. Sweet solace. Soccer succor. On June 12, against England, our former imperialist, colonialist oppressors, USA opens their World Cup 2010 in South Africa. Join me won’t you, and dive into the peaceful waters where awaits the blissful baptism of a true Believer. I know the more mojo, hoodoo and juju we can send through the power of our collective will to Team USA in South Africa, the more likely it is for our dream to come true, to see Lando and T-Ho hoisting the World Cup over their heads and forever basking in the pantheon of soccer gods with Booby Moore, Gordon Banks and Bobby Charlton.

David Henry Sterry is co-author, with Alan Black – San Francisco legend and notorious soccer lunatic – of The Glorious World Cup: A Fanatics Guide, featuring internationally renown soccer junkie Irvine Welsh, soccer crazy best-selling author Po Bronson, and the best soccer writer in the world Simon Kuper. A laugh-out-loud ride of a guide for the fanatic in all of us. https://davidhenrysterry.pairsite.com/category/books/

Truth or Fiction: Voting for the President By Reading His Memoir

Truth or Fiction: Voting By Memoir


Memoirs have been a source of raging controversy.  Seems some memoirs are more true than others.  A memoirist makes a deal with the reader: what I tell you is real, and you judge me by my stories. I think about this way too much because I’m a memoirist. So when it came time to choose the next leader of these great United States, I dove into the wordpools of these memoirists who would be president.   I started with John McCain’s The Way to Bravery. First off, McCain didn’t even write his memoir.  And the book reads like it was written by the captain of the football team who had the smart kid do it for him.  The facts are all there, but it’s generic as a can of beans with the word BEANS written on it. The book’s peppered with war stories, and he talks about America watching the Iraq invasion with shock, awe and a thrilling pleasure.  It dawned on me as I read this book that the John McCain in this book is the archetypical American John Wayne male.  A man who’d rather fight than talk. 

 

Barack Obama did write his own memoir.  Right off the bat, I like that.  In the world of books we talk alot about voice.  The voice in Dreams from My Father is so strong and personal.  A scene in an airplane to Africa, home of Obama’s father, stuck in my mind.  An Englishman bound for South Africa talks about the poor buggers of godforsaken Africa.  Obama feels silent fury, but even in the midst of rage, emphasizes with the man and questions his own basic beliefs.  If anything, this is a man too stuck in his own brain.  But a man with poetry in his soul.  He seems to be the model of the new American male. A thoughtful, sensitive international man of the world.    

 

I have no clue how the economic plans of either candidate will dig us out of this gaping gasping chasm.  But memoir wise, Obama feels the real deal, while McCain feels a fake.  I’ve heard the pundits pundicate that the authentic maverick John McCain has let his true story be edited to the point of fiction, so that he doesn’t comes across like a man who wrote a memoir about courage.  Obama, with his thoughtful, elegant prose, comes across like a man who’d rather talk and fight.  A man true to his memoir.

David Henry Sterry is the best-selling author of nine books, an award-winning comic/actor, an activist, and a man who has not worn matching socks in 20 years. kept his first memoir, chicken, is being made into a TV series by Showtime.  His new memoir, Master of Ceremonies: a True Story of Love, Murder, Roller Skates and Chippendales is the story of when he was at the epicenter of one of the great party cultures of all time, skating around in a tuxedo while Rome burned.

HOW TO NOT GO CRAZY WHEN A BABY’S SCREAMING IN YOUR CAR

Olive has really discovered how to smile, and apparently she enjoys doing it very much. 

She had her first Thanksgiving at her grandfather’s birthday party.  Everyone was very nice to her.  She had a very good time. 

At one point on the trip back in the car, she woke up and went absolutely berserk, a death rattle of the scream that shrieks from the depths of her up her lungs shoots through her throat rattles off the top of her skull and careens out horrifically. 

In a small enclosed spaces like a car it makes you feel like plucking your eyes out.

Arielle wanted to stop the car and comfort her. 

I said, just let her scream for a minute and see what happens.  It’s okay to be furious at the world.  It’s a very natural reaction to the human condition.  Let’s see if she can figure out how to calm herself down. 

Sure enough about three minutes later she was asleep, and slept the whole rest of the trip. 

Being responsible for another human being’s existence makes for a series of seemingly life altering decisions every day.

It’s not dull. 

And when she smiles in my face it’s like the universe is a rose opening just for me.

I Hate My Boss

I Hate My Boss

I’m losing my mind.  I haven’t quite lost all of it yet, but I’m close.  I can’t sleep.  I can’t eat.  I’ve lost interest in sex.  I’m always exhausted.  I’ve lost so much weight.  I look in the mirror and I see a ragged skeleton starring back at me. And my mind races down these tracks: This is not who I want to be!  This is not the life I want!  Why am I letting this man destroy me?  Everyone else in the office just seems to go about their business.  They talk about their wives, the latest sporting events and fashions.  And he seems to have no effect on them.  He’s just their weird obsessive abusive pain-in-the-ass boss.  But every time I see him my bile boils and my colon twitches and my jaw clenches and I get damp under my arms and I feel this almost uncontrollable violence springing up in me, wrapping blackness all around me, these sick twisted images appear in my mind like a horror film director has hijacked it, I see myself  jamming that PDA right down his throat until he chokes on it; bashing his fat smug mug in with his precious laptop; cutting the break cable on his gas guzzling bourgeois breeder SUV.  I have planned his death so many times.  And yet I am too much of a coward to pull the trigger and that makes me loathe myself all the more.  I try to go about my business like everybody else, to be normal.  But every little thing he does crawls beneath my skin like an insect and pumps me full of venom, releasing into my bloodstream and infecting my fevered brain. When he starts talking about his fake liberal politics, always complaining about Bush and the war and the environment, I have to resist the urge to puke all over his suit.  And he’s always going on and on about how he hates the Man, when the rich and brutal irony is that he IS the Man.  And I happen to know he didn’t even VOTE in the last election, because he made everybody work all day that day so that nobody could vote.  And that terrible toxic temper.  Mean for the sake of mean.  Nasty for the sake of nasty.  Cruel for the sake of cruel. Last week I accidentally spilled tea on his desk and he went mental, I could see it in his eyes, this evil insanity, he went totally berserk, screaming and yelling and calling me an idiot and a moron and implying that I was inferior in every way to him, as well as being a pedophile and a homosexual.    O what a rat bastard that paunchy two-faced cheapskate tightwad bitch is.  In front of other people, he’s always telling me what a great job I’m doing and how I’m gonna get a raise, I’m gonna get more vacation time, a better health plan, but it’s all complete bullshit, and as soon as we’re behind closed doors he berates me and tells me what a loser I am, how without him I would be nowhere, that I am a complete waste of space.  And after awhile, of course, you start to believe it.  And he’s always making me work nights and weekends, ridiculous stupid hours, all nighters, so I’m walking around sleep deprived and hallucinating, while he stands behind me cracking his whip across my back, until I feel flayed and bloody.  And he thinks he’s so funny, always making those stupid lame jokes, always expecting me to laugh my ass off at’em.  Seriously, if I don’t laugh he’ll actually say, “Didn’t you think that was funny?”  What am I gonna say?  “No, it wasn’t funny, you’re about as funny as a nun on crutches carrying a crippled orphan.”  I should quit.  I’ve rehearsed my speech so many times, this marvelous rant in front of everyone, in which I expose him once and for all to be the incarnation of arrogant hypocritical incompetence that he is. But do I?  No.  Why?  I have pondered this question over and over because if I don’t do something this is going to kill me.  Or I’m going to kill him. And here’s the sad ridiculous and truly pathetic thing: I’m self-employed.
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The Joys of Moving Across Country When You’re Pregnant

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Well, we did it.We put all of our stuff into boxes, hired burly man to put them in a giant truck, stuffed our most valuable (mismatched socks, my mother’s ashes) stuff into our Rav 4 and waved goodbye to our life in San Rafael California, where the sun shines all the time, and the deer are so friendly that we frequently found them rummaging through our refrigerator when they had the munchies.Packing, for me, after several months of doing it, was a source of almost unspeakable horror.the more I packed, and more than was to pack, one pile would disappear and 2 more would rear their heads.It was like a dream you have where you’re running as hard as you can, but you’re not getting any closer to the house where those men are molesting your girlfriend, or whatever particular thing you run towards in your dreams.

Several times I just broke down completely, weeping like a hurricane as I tried to decide whether to throw away some postcard my mother sent me 35 years ago, or some fab picture of some babe I boffed in 1979.All the fevered letters, the sweet notes, passionate poems, the broken hearts on both sides of the Highway of Love.It just plumb wore me out sifting through all the shit of my life and figure out the difference between junk and my stuff, what was trash and what was treasure.And of course I turned 50 on June 2.Half a century.If I live to be a hundred it’s already half over.And of course we were writing two books under a ridiculously preposterous deadline.And of course my lovely and talented wife was pregnant.All evidence points toward the fact that it is my child dancing in her womb, only time will tell.So there’s that.

But the results of all these churning tributaries of life feeding into one giant waterfall was that I lost part of my mind, and I’m just now getting it back.My hands have been aching.Ever since the move.While they were sore before that, but they really started aching during the move.A combination of deep sharp pain, slow strangulating pain.Throbbing burning pain, and the psychological pain that constant pain inflicts.The slightest difficulty became a source of intense irritation which flamed into rage so quickly it gave me the bends.Tracking down and talking to computer technicians, phone company lackeys, insurance brokers, tax record officials, it was all just beyond me.

Luckily, I had a lot of help, mostly from my lovely and talented wife, who as I said was pregnant, and continues to be so.Also, Judy, my moms widow, she packed about 17,000 boxes, all by herself.She’s from Minnesota, so she has that good Midwestern work ethic, and she was one box-packing fool.She was like a cartoon character, you stand there and all watching her arms and hands whirring all-around, and suddenly another box was packed and she was taping it shut, easy peasy, Bob’s your uncle.And mind you, I started collecting boxes and packing several months before the move.So it’s not like I was unprepared.

But the more I packed, the more my mental health deteriorated, until finally I was blinded by the light, and suddenly a migraine had somehow slithered like a computer virus into the mainframe of my brain.Apparently when you have a migraine it’s basically just everything tightening up and compressing.It feels like my head is in a giant vise being tightened by a circus strongman with an anger management problem.Then I start to see these lights in the corner of my eyes, only when you look right at them, they go away, so you’re not really sure if you’re actually seeing the lights, or if it’s just some floater that you see in the corner of your eye sometimes.But then I get this kind of disorientated, off kilter, askew feeling.It’s not so overpowering that you can’t carry on a conversation or brush your teeth or pack a box, but there’s definitely something wrong.Then I really really really see the lights in the corners of my eyes, and that’s when I know I’ve arrived in Migraine City, where excruciating agony awaits everyone who steps off that train.It used to be at this point in the migraine, I would get a knee buckling, chest heaving, jaw tightening pain started in the middle of my brain and worked its way out seismically.

However, since I started working with Dr. Marty Rossman, and his amazing creative visualization techniques, I am able to get through the whole thing now with basically no pain at all.Here’s what I’d do.I get myself in a cool very dark place, somewhere soft I can lay down and be very peaceful.I imagine a very happy moment from my past: a beach in Hawaii where wild horses cavorted on a hill 200 yards away, and the warm warm ocean broke in gentle waves.In.Out.In.Out.And I time the waves with my breath.In.Out.In.Out.Then starting at the soles of my feet, I breathe cool blue soothing light into my body, moving up little by little, toes, feet, ankles, calves, knees, and usually by the time I get to my poor wracked brain, I am asleep, and usually I sleep for a couple of hours.When I wake up and I’m groggy and it’s hard for me to put words together, and I’m logey, there’s tapioca pudding where sharp thoughts should be.So that’s what packing reduced me to: a useless, incoherent, blithering idiot.But somehow I got by with a little help from my friends.Then all I had to do was drive across the United States of America.With my lovely and talented wife getting more pregnant by the day, furiously trying to finish writing these books, and wrap our minds around the fact that very very very very soon we were going to be new homeowners, new parents, and new New Jersey-ites.

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America is huge.And tilted.All the nuts and flakes eventually roll to California.And what you realize as soon as you leave California, is that you were one of the nuts and flakes.When you get into Nevada, and Wyoming, it’s almost incomprehensible how much land there is no one living there.Land as far as the eye can see.And then some.We drove and we drove and we drove.Then we drove and we drove and we drove.It was actually really fun to just get to talk with each other, without the phone always ringing, and some emergency or other to have to face down.And it was an excellent way to write a book.I would drive, and my lovely and talented wife would type with the laptop in, of all places, her lap. I think our child is either going to be madly in love with books, or will hate them with a fiery passion.

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Cheyenne, Wyoming is not nearly as exciting as you think it would be.Basically it seems like a rundown, time-worn western town where everyone seems a little too anxious to talk to someone who’s not from there.We went into a pawn shop and the guy behind the counter with more nose hairs than teeth roped us into a conversation that was literally about the weather.And he would not let us go.We tried to extricate ourselves over and over again, to no avail.He did everything but physically restrain us from leaving his store.It took some classic misdirection involving the unborn within my lovely and talented wife’s belly to get us the hell out of there.But you can get a really good steak in Cheyenne, Wyoming.Omaha is also a very good town for getting a steak.We were going to get married on the trip across the country.Mostly for insurance purposes.Seriously.That’s what we’ve come to as a culture.Got to get married so you can get health insurance.Plus we thought it would be fun to get married while my lovely and talented wife looked so gosh darn pregnant.So we asked about getting married in Salt Lake City.We figured, it must be very easy to get married there, since men historically had so many wives in Salt Lake City.No, turns out it’s actually quite difficult to get married in Salt Lake City.Our waiter said he thought it was because they were trying to discourage polygamy.We had a very nice gay Mormon waiter in Salt Lake City.And I wondered what it must be like to be a gay Mormon in Salt Lake City.And I thought about Matthew Shepard and how those homophobes crucified him.

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The open spaces of the planes and prairies are very peaceful and restful.The people we saw there seemed very well fed and friendlier, more interested in other people than folks on either coast.Everyone wanted to know when the baby was due, if it was a boy or girl, what name we picked out.Miles and miles and miles of rows and rows and rows of corn and beans and wheat.There’s so much food and so much space, and you wonder, How is anyone hungry?How is it that people don’t have a place to live?

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Chicago is a very cool town.There’s all this amazing stuff going on, blues festivals and world-class theater and food that makes you happy to be alive.We treated ourselves in Chicago, took a day off, and did some chillin.We decided to go to the Ritz, and have their brunch.We had done that in Atlanta when we were on our book tour, and it was so decadent and disgusting and fun.In Atlanta there were three rooms with stations of food in them: meats of every kind and breads of every kind and salads of every kind and the even had a chocolate fountain.A chocolate fountain!Nothing says fun to me like a chocolate fountain.So we walked in about two o’clock to the Chicago Ritz, pregnant and roadburned.They did have a lot of stuff and the stuff was good, don’t get me wrong.But they only had a few kinds of bread, a few kinds of meat, maybe a quarter of the stuff that was in the Atlanta Ritz: certainly no chocolate fountain. We were sitting next to two Uber Alpha males.They were in their late 40s even on a Sunday they were in their killer suits, and tasselly shoes. I always feel like scruffy lad next one of these Alpha Males. Like they are Men.And I am a boy.So the one guy turns to the other and says, “I don’t want to hear about how your kids are sick, or your wife has cancer, or your car needs new tires, I don’t give a shit.You either put up the numbers or you don’t.If you have the numbers, everything else works itself out.If you don’t have the numbers, I don’t want to hear any of your bullshit.”

Either I forgot how disgusting, despicable, and deplorable New York City is, or I’ve completely changed since I moved in away from here in 1993.Or New York City has changed since then.Because it really sucks now.It’s abusively loud, it’s ridiculously expensive, would it is becoming one huge super Mall, where they’re trying to drive out all artists, and the artisans, and regular people who aren’t billionaires.Plus, it smells like sour kiss and old man’s balls.Don’t ask how I know what old man balls smell like, trust me you don’t want to know.Here are some of the highlights from my first week in New York City.

·I got two moving violations for ridiculous shift I didn’t even do

·I got three parking tickets

·the window of my car was smashed in, and all the license and registration material was stolen, clearly an attempt to steal my identity

·my wallet with my drivers license is, the keys to my motorcycle, and hundreds of dollars was stolen

·a cab driver tried to run me over while I was rollerskating on 6th Ave

And it was so hot and humid and muggy and some stinky.I really began to think that it was all a big mistake, I was yearning for California so bad to hurt.We moved from apartment to apartment, staying with our kind friends, trying not to wear out are welcome.We were urban Bedouins.Which is not easy when, as a couple, you are getting more pregnant every day.We did finally finish our books though.Except for a few dribs and drabs, Be Artists In the Me, and The Writer In Me are done and dusted, put to bed.Plus we had a really fun party, where people gave us a lot of stuff for the new baby.Much of which I could not readily identify.It was really great to see people I hadn’t seen in so long.And we went to see a show called Spring A weakening.It’s really a great piece of work.It’s all about repressed sexuality and adolescents.Something which I have been studying, formally and informally for many years, and in fact the subject of my next book, which will be a ghost story about a Shaker baby skeleton aerie in a wall at a boarding school.John Gallagher Jr., who won a Tony for his work in the show, was unfucking believable, just electric.And we saw a fantastic movie called Once, and evolution in the musical, Irish, incredibly real, simple and moving.And I got to play a lot of soccer, with people from all over the world.So that was cool.

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We took control of our house on August 1.The people we bought it from had lived here for 50 years.And they have done basically nothing to improve the house for 49 of those years.The electricity was installed by Thomas Alva Edison.The entire basement was constructed from asbestos.So on August 2, asbestosis removers, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, architects, interior designers and decorators, colorists, general contractors, carpenters, and tradesmen of every ilk swarmed through our new home, painting, plumbing, electricing, madly removing asbestos.And then it was a crazy — toward the finish line: getting everything done before our stuff arrived in and/or the baby did.There was much sanding of many floors, paint was ordered and applied to walls, sinks were bought and installed, electrical boxes mounted on the walls, telephone and cable hard wired into this beautiful old house.It really looked for a moment what our stuff is going to arrive before the stain on the floors was dry.I kept having this image in my head of the movers tromping in with our stuff, and traipsing staying throughout every square inch of our house.But somehow, miraculously, almost everything was done by the time our stuff was due to arrive on Monday morning at 8:30 a.m..By about noon on Monday, we looked at each other and had the same thought.Where are the movers with our stuff?Because they certainly weren’t here at our house.So we called up the moving company.Turns out the driver was in Maryland, or Memphis, or Minneapolis.I can’t remember, someplace that started with an M. but they certainly weren’t in Montclair were our house was.And is.It was definitely a case of movus interruptus.So we had to do it all over again the next day.But this time, our stuff came.It was amazing how much of it just seemed like junk to me.I would open a box and think, Oh my God!Did I actually pay to have this moved?What is this?Is this mine?Oh my God!Two large movers, and one short Hispanic man bugged all of our stuff from the truck into the house.After about an hour, but the short Hispanic man started grumbling in Spanish, disgruntled and dismayed.As he walked up the narrow, steep stairs with another heavy boxes, he kept moaning No Mas.This became his nickname around our house: No Mas.It took them eight hours to haul all of our shit into our house, but finally it was done.We were in.Hallelujah!

Many said we were insane to try and move across country while Arielle was pregnant.Into a house that was basically in shambles.But we did it.And we are both very very happy in our new home.And the baby is due today.

After having been through this ordeal, I do have one piece of advice.If anyone out there is thinking of moving:

JUST SAY NO!!!

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Why I Hate SAN FRANCISCO

Yesterday I had an appointment with my Pilates instructor Jesse Singer, she runs SF Pilates on Market Street, spitting distance from Powell, where the world-famous cable cars originate, in the buzzing heart of the City, throbbing with freezing tourists, dead-eyed wage slaves, S&M slaves and their masters, masters of the universe barons of business, mumbling junkies, designer mothers with designer babies, beggars, borrowers, and thieves, high-end fashion models and lowlife hustlers, pseudo-Christian ranters and street dancing juveniles trying to become the next Michael Jackson, while the cable cars clang clang clang. I live in Marin, 24 minutes from this spot if I drive my Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster. My appointment is at 1 p.m.. If I drove in my car the journey might take an hour, and I knew for a fact that there would be nowhere to park and that didn’t cost a lot of money. Plus I love driving my Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster, and I feel it’s one tiny contribution I can make to this earth, to drive a vehicle that uses so much less fossil fuel, emits so much less toxic shit, takes so much less room to park. I grew up on the cusp of a generation who took those things quite seriously. Making the world a better place, thinking globally and acting locally and respecting the mother of us all: Earth. So it was a total no-brainer. I drove my 75 miles-to-the-gallon Harley to my one o’clock Pilates session with the lovely and talented Jesse Singer at SF Pilates.

Sadly, I was unaware that the City of San Francisco had declared war on her own citizens in such a sick, militaristic, police state way. I did not fully understand the City of San Francisco was now in the business of shaking down the very people who make it what it is. But her before I get to that, another reason I hate San Francisco is that as soon as you approach the Golden Gate Bridge, as breathtaking as it is, the temperature drops at least 15°. And when you’re on a motorcycle, that really sucks. Plus, people are so self obsessed that they pool are round in these enormous vehicles and don’t seem to be aware that there are other people driving on the roads with them. Many people in San Francisco seem to be under the mistaken impression that they’re shit doesn’t stink. And this certainly is evidenced by the way they we cruise willy-nilly in their vehicles, committing blatant acts of turn signal neglect and stop sign abuse. As I was slaloming along Lombard Ave., I found some space in the right lane, trying to beat the ridiculous traffic light pattern that makes it virtually impossible to go from one end of Lombard to the other without being stopped a half a dozen times by red lights, and I was making good time. Without any warning, a soccer mommish SUV with a very put together MILF yammering away on her Blackberry, decided to turn right from the middle lane. Thank God I have developed a system for handling these kind of situations on a motorcycle. I always operate under the basic assumption that everyone who is driving anywhere near me is trying to kill me. It’s kind of like I’m in my own action movie, I’m a hunted renegade and some evil government villains rife with greed and corruption are trying to have me assassinated. It’s a fun way to do something constructive about the very real danger inherent in driving a motorcycle. So I had already sized up the soccer mom and her SUV, already imagining her swerving into me, taking a shot at me with her state-of-the-art semiautomatic weapon, complete with its own silencer. So I am completely prepared for her unconscious attempt to kill me, and I jam on my brakes in plenty of time not to die.

So I make my way down to Market and Powell in plenty of time. I cruise around the neighborhood. I don’t want to park in the seedy groin of the Tenderloin, where crackheads, psychopaths, and other maniac lunatics who would love nothing more than to steal my Harley Davidson 1200 Sportster linger and loiter. So after cruising around the neighborhood, I park up on the sidewalk very unobtrusively, parallel to the street, next to a parking meter. I was very very careful not to block the sidewalk in any way. The same way I’ve been parking in San Francisco for years. I was always under the assumption that we had an understanding, the City of San Francisco and me. Yes, there is a parking epidemic, that’s obvious, we both acknowledged that, so we work together. If I can find a place to park my motorcycle where I’m not getting in anyone’s way, where I’m being respectful to others, I am allowed to park there. Because honestly, if everyone drove a motorcycle, or a moped, or scooter, around the Bay Area, it would be so much better for everyone in the smallest and the biggest of ways. So I locked up my Harley, and I went and had a fabulous Pilates session with Jess him e Singer of SF Pilates.

Try to imagine if you can the shock and horror I felt when I returned to my innocent with Harley, looking sad and abused and violated, with a parking ticket issued by the City of San Francisco sticking out of her. Imagine my rage when I discovered the City of San Francisco, who I thought was my friend and ally and partner, was extorting me for $100. $100. $100. To park, minding my own business, not hurting another soul. So that’s what it’s come to. A city full of millionaires run by fascist bastards extorting their own people, sucking their citizens dry run.

And that’s why I hate San Francisco.

If You Go too Far, You’re Lost: A Golfer’s Nightmare

I had a dream last night where I was playing golf with Jack Nicklaus and two other professionals, one looked like a dude from India or Pakistan or Fuji and the other was just your average old garden-variety professional golfer. A big gallery was watching us. We had all missed the green, and were looking at difficult approaches to saving our pars. The first golfer hit a fabulous flop shot, way up high in the air, it landed softly very close to the hole, and the appreciative gallery applauded. The ball rolled toward the hole, looked like it might go in, but at the last second it slid off to the right and almost came to complete stop.

But it didn’t. It kept trickling, wouldn’t stop, just kept rolling along. It rolled slowly down a previously unseen slope, picking up speed as it went. It bombed toward a small creek running along the edge of the green, with a bridge over it. I thought to myself, That ball is going in the water, damn that sucks, he hit such a beautiful shot. But instead of rolling into the water, the ball was funneled towards a hidden hole, where it disappeared, like in a miniature golf putt putt course.

The gallery groaned and sighed in dismay. The ball disappeared under the creek, you could hear it clunking down the tunnel, and you could feel the tension in the crowd as they waited to see where the ball was going to end up. Finally it spit out of the ground on the other side of the creek. It flew into the air, and landed next to a muddy, swampy bog where some very hungry looking alligators were lurking, lounging, ready for a midafternoon snack.

In the background I could hear commentator saying what bad luck that was, what a great shot he hit, and how almost no one survives Alligator Alley, as the locals have dubbed it. Wait a minute, I thought, how did I miss those alligators? Were there always alligators there? Does the PGA know about this? Lanky lizards, that doesn’t seem right!

I was standing on the other side of the green from the alligators, with Jack Nicklaus, the Golden Bear, the greatest golfer in the world has ever known. He is studying his upcoming chip shot. It’s a big green, and the hole is in the middle, so there’s plenty of room to run a pitch right up to the hole, leaving the ball below it for a tidy up and down, thus saving par. The only difficulty is that you have to get the ball up over a small blooming cactus garden that sits between Jack and the green.

Cactus garden? How had I not seen all those beautiful blooming cactuses? Radioactive reds, outrageous oranges, blinding blues. So I said to Jack, You just going to pitch and run that up to the hole, eh? After all, he’s executed shots like this a million times before. Hey, you don’t get to be the Golden Bear for nothing. But Jack shakes his head, worried, purses his thin lips, exposing his white teeth. No, it’s a lot trickier than it looks, he said. If you go too far, you’re lost.

Wow, I thought to myself, Jack is a deep guy. If you go too far, you’re lost. Jack Nicklaus is a really profound man. Who knew? Jack studies his shot, talks to his caddie, the gallery is restless in anticipation, the TV commentator is whispering about how everything rides on that in this shot, how hard the shot is, but if anyone can do it, Jack can. Jack addresses the ball, performs a few waggles, then strikes it.

The white ball travels in a majestic arc over the Technicolor cactus blooms and lands exactly where it should on the green green. It’s rolling straight toward the hole, tracking like it’s metal and the pin is a magnet. The commentator excitedly whispers how this may go in the hole, and the crowd is going berserk, ready to erupt explosively when the ball goes in. Closer and closer it rolls. You just know in your heart that ball is going in, there’s no way it can’t, this is the Golden Bear after all.

And yes, the ball actually hits the pin. It can bounces straight up into the air, and it seems to take forever as it plummets down down down, and now the crowd is holding its breath, you could hear a pin drop as the pin quivers in the hole. And the ball disappears like a rabbit down the hole. He did it! the commentator shouts, Jack did it again!

The gallery screams and shouts and whoops and hollers. As do I. What a champion, what clutch performer, that’s why he’s the greatest that ever lived. And then suddenly the ball pops back up out of the hole. It hit the bottom of the cup too hard, it was going too fast, and the golf gods spat it back. The crowd groans and moans as for the ball skitters away from the hole, picking up speed as it rolls away, off the green and coming to rest in a sand trap. Jack stoically shakes his head, like he somehow knew this was going to happen.

But wait a second, the ball is disappearing, the trap is actually quicksand! And the commentator whispers excitedly that Jack is going to have to go in after it, and there’s a very good chance he will come out alive. Well, the commentator comments, it’ll be a fitting end to a heroic golfing career.

Quicksand? Since when has there been quicksand on the PGA Tour? I’m gonna have to talk to my union a rep about this, there’s got to be something in the bylaws about alligators and quicksand! Now it’s my turn to hit my shot. I know exactly what I want to do with the ball, I have my 64° wedge, but I can see the shot so clearly that I need to make.

I want to clip the ball with some backspin, to make it check up just below the hole. But all I can think about is those alligators and that quicksand, and now on the left side of the green I notice that there are land mines. Landmines? What the hell are land mines doing in the middle of a golf course? Now I see myself blown to bits, my blood and guts shooting into the sky and landing all over the green. I am paralyzed with utter fear. There is no shot I can hit that will not result in all horrifying painful death. If you go too far, you’re lost. And then I wake up hyperventilating in a cold sweat.

Good morning to me.

How My Book Was Banned by the Prostitutes, Hos & Sex Workers

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I was excited when I agreed to be the token breeder whiteman on the Sex Worker Art Show (SWAS) tour that bumped, ground and belted its way all across the USA.  Ten well-met ex-sex worker women, one fine transgendered fellow and me, a forty-six year old ex-gigolo-ho-rentboy.  I will now tell the true story of how my book got banned by the prostitutes, and how I became a better man for it.
It starts at the beginning, on the West Coast fish-netted leg of the SWAS, a traveling menagerie of musicians, artists, spoken worders, exotic dancers, and madcap activists, all of whom have worked in the sex industry.  As I fly up to Portland, I’m excitedly optimistic and trepidatiously terrified.  But I believe that despite our differences, there will be room for their whore stories, and my whore stories; that we will represent this under-represented population who’ve been reviled and glorified, jailed and inhaled, raped and worshiped, put on a pedestal and spat upon for centuries; that we will celebrate the humor and the beauty, the anger and the tragedy, the pure power of the artist-whore who makes people squeal and feel and laugh and cry, and screams that the emperor has no clothes on.  Personally this is the next step in my attempt to unite my above-ground suburban whiteman half and my underground-raped-ho’-drug-addict half; so I can become my whole truth-telling, sweet-hearted, spreading, evolution-friendly, being-of-service self in every moment.  As opposed to the apologizing, desperately-attempting-to-make-every-single-person-like-me self which I manifest so often in public.
Opening night I arrive at the club a mass of jangling nerves, the world-weary-weight of whiteman’s burden yoking and choking me, terrified that in this sex worker world a 46 year-old Caucasian breeder will be booed, heckled  and hated, will never in a million years be able to rock the house.  It’s January cold in rain-as-usual Portland.  I stalk skittish through the skeevy club, like a freaked animal trying to pretend everything’s normal, but knowing he’s going to be eaten alive.
Luckily my need-to-please is so powerful that it provides me with an immediate opportunity to be useful.  There is much roadie work to be done: guitars, amps and costume boxes need to be humped out of the van, down the stairs, hump hump hump.  I like it.  Gives my mind and my muscles something to focus on that isn’t my own miserable failure and the irrational fear that everyone’s gonna HATE ME.
After there’s nothing left to hump, I settle into the basement dressing room like a dog in a room full of cats.  There’s flesh everywhere: overflowing, undernourished, hard, soft, rippling, cut, hanging, shaved heads and coochies, beaucoups of tattoos.  Everyone’s preparing, as if for a religious celebration or battle, laying out costumes/uniforms and artifacts/weapons.   Sweat pants magically morph into seamed stocking.  Chunky boots into stiletto heels.  Wooly scarves into feather boas.  T-shirts into slit-happy minis and tit-lifting corsets.
A quick sample of backstage banter:
“Are you gonna do your puke number tonight?  Oh, okay, cool, but try to keep it on the tarp.”
“One time I was doin’ phone work, and this guy says, ‘Yer a twelve foot giant, and yer sitting on my head.’  Thank God for the mute button, cuz I’m laughing my ass off.  Then I get myself together, you know, and I’m like, (Deep Butch voice) ‘Yeah, baby, I’m huge, I wear size 24 shoes.’  That drove him wild.  He was my regular after that, and he always wanted me to describe how big my shoes were.”
“One trick likes me to feed him dog shit.  He loves it.  Every week he brings me these baggies full of dog shit.  And he’s a really clean guy, you know, he practically squeaks when he walks.  He’s really sweet, you know, really quiet.  But the funny thing is, I keep picturing him going out in his neighborhood with his little plastic bag and following dogs around waiting for his dooky snack.
“Why can’t people be naked on the outside?”
“I love it when people say, ‘I’m not hungry’, like that has anything to do with eating.”
“I got tired of the being the ho with the umbrella.”
A sex worker artist is scrambling to get her computer working, crazed mumbling, she flicks her lit cigarette near my feet and snarls, “Put that out!” dark blackness ripping out of her.  A direct order.  My Achilles heel, I can’t stand somebody ordering me around.  Rankles my dander, raises my hackles.  But she’s clearly in distress, so I put the cigarette out with a friendly smile.
Back upstairs the club is suddenly alive.  Freaks in fishnets and preppies in plaid, trannies with hot fannies and shy guys in ties, vinylized virgins and rubberized radicals, lots of leather and plenty of pleather, piercings in tongues, lobes, noses, nipples, lips, and places you didn’t even know there were places, middle-aged men in diapers, lone wolves and vampy vipers, divas and dykes, piss queens and fisting mavens, CLEAVAGE, CLEAVAGE, CLEAVAGE, dandies with candy, women dressed as men, men dressed as women, women dressed as men dressed as women, and some who have clearly not made up their mind.
A bunch of grrrrrrrls crrrrrrrrowd around a drinking table: ultrawhite spiked mohawk, one you’d swear’s a beautiful boy in a greasemonkey shirt, and a shaved babe you just know could punch yer lights right out.  Lots of piercings.  Running up and down ears.  Lips.  Eyebrows.  Noses.  I visualize them all naked.  Pierced belly buttons, labias, nipples and clits.  What a drag to have to go through the metal detector at the airport.  That’s my first thought.  But boy o boy they’re having fun, laughing and carrying on.  I’m slightly surprised at the number of extraordinarily hetero couples.  Going to see sex workers doing art is apparently a valid breeder date these days.  Go figure.  Some tough leather men.  Dandies flapping, flitting and drinking in kooky outfits.  Flocks of goths in vampire colors.  Women.  Young.   Middle-aged.  Old.  Women.  I’m agog with a child’s wonder as I wander happily in this estrogen-happy land.
I approach a woman in her early thirties: beige pants and a sweater, very Portland.  I asked her why she’s there.  “When I was little I found out there were strippers, and when I asked my mom what a stripper was, she hemmed and hawed and she didn’t really answer me, so I knew whatever it was, it was forbidden, it was bad, and of course that just made it more appealing, and I really wanted to do it.  Then I discovered there were prostitutes, and I really wanted to do that.   I still do, I guess, I mean I’d like to just try it to see what it’s like.  I’m a baker.  I have my own company.  I bake cakes, cookies, pies, muffins, everything.”
Annie Oakley, emcee and inventor of the Sex Worker Art Show, introduces the first performer to the packed-tight crowd and they roar in approval. When Ducky DooLittle sashe¥s on stage like four feet and ten inches of N’Awlins bordello lampshade, beaming sexy and sweet: “Hi Portland.  I’ve had a lot of good sex in Portland!”  The crowd crawls into the palm of her hand, and purrs there, as Ducky kicks us off with a bang.
I can’t focus, I’m all caged pacing.  Each performer’s a blur of words: trick-hating, dope-shooting, hilarious harrowing narratives, rap and rhyme, my time getting closer and closer until it’s me, it’s suddenly my turn, she’s introducing me, and I’m up onstage, in the place where I can really be whatever I want to be.  When I make fun of stupidwhitemen like myself, they laugh loud as one, and the transcendent wave sweeps through me, as they now crawl into my palm and purr.  When I do the part about me getting raped, there’s that brutal stark silence as they all soak it in.  And there it is, that’s why I’m here: to speak for all of them, the raped boys and the raped girls.  I guide the audience back in, and before I even know it, my twelve minutes are up, and damn man, my slambang ending works like gangbangbusters, and I’m off to a thunderous ovation.  I did it.  The 46 year old whiteman rocked the house.  Afterwards I’m accosted, as I almost always am, by women who’ve been ripped open and torn apart.  They buy my book at the merch table where all the other books are.  I sign my books.  I listen to their stories.  I feel their relief as they confess, toxins fuming out of them like invisible radiation.  Hugs are exchanged.  And I understand why I’m here: to speak the unspeakable, and to hear the unheard.
In Eugene sex worker’s/artist Violet Rae brings two young women up from the audience and teaches them how to strip.  The squat&thrust, the turnaround bendover peekaboo, the pussypat and the shimmyshimmy shake.  After some initial timidity, the two amateurs let loose their goose and get funky with their chicken, flaunting their raise-the-roof sexsexsexiness, bringing down the house.  After the show I run into one them: she’s early twentyish, backwards baseball cap over tight blond hair, two large rings in her lip that make her look like she’s a large fish that’s been caught a few times but always manages to wriggle away.  Statuesque cheeks and blazing eyes, she’s fabulous farmboy hot.  Her grrrrrrrrrlfriends buzz around her like she’s a rockstar.  Which, for tonight, she is.  I ask her if she had fun.  “HELL YEAH!”   I ask her if she was nervous.  “Oh yeah, definitely, I was mad nervous, but Violet Rae, she was like, so totally great… she made me feel like I could totally do it, so I was like, ‘I can either stand here and be a dork, or I can just go for it.’  So I’m like, ‘What the hell, might as well go for it.’  And when the crowd started goin’ apeshit, I’m like, ‘Wow, this shit rocks.’  So then I really started going for it, you know, and I’m just like… wow!”  Funny how much more articulate she was with her body than she is with her words.  I tell her she was really great.  She takes it in.  Looks right at me: “So were you, man.”  She opens, moves in for the hug.  And I give it to her, a hug of tremendous breadth and depth, a hug that takes its time and doesn’t need to hurry.  If you’ve never been hugged by a 22 year-old dyke who really means it, you have no idea what you’re missing. And there it is again: this is why I’m here.
Four shows in, I’ve humped luggage, dozed fitful in vans, woken at dawn, busted and rebusted my ass to get it right every night.  They’re crazy cheering audiences, they so want to interact, to fly their freak flag by embracing us.  In our 2-van posse driving from Portland to San Francisco, we have a great midnight dinner at some divey lizardy truckstop, we walk in like rockstars, all heads turning, we’re got our own little tribe, and it’s dead powerful.  It’s someone’s birthday and Annie Oakley has a cake and we all have this great chocolate bomb of a slice.  And then suddenly it’s 4 AM and we still have a huge chunk of road to go to get to the Golden Gate, and everybody’s dog-tired.  So I volunteer to drive, and while everyone else sleeps like cranky babies, me and the amazing shotgun-riding Ducky DooLittle tell each other our stories in whispers all through the long humming road night.  As the sun also rises and we pull into the Bay Area, I feel at one with my sex worker sisters and brother, in that van, in the trenches, with this traveling-circus family, being my true self.
After the first four shows I take a break from the tour because of prior engagements.  Fast forward to fifteen days later, I’m rejoining the SWAS in New York City, at the Knitting Factory.  I immediately resume dragging bags and luggage humping.  Hump hump hump.  Before the show starts Annie Oakley pulls me aside and says, “We have to talk.”  It’s one of those classic moments, when you go stone cold, cuz you know someone’s about to break up with you, or fire you, or tell you somebody in your family just died.  Well, Annie explains softly and sweetly, it seems Certain Unspecified Performers have complained that my book is racist.  She says that the Unspecified Performers claim I speak disparagingly about female genitalia.  She is sympathetic on this point, as she herself speaks disparagingly about female genitalia in her part of the show.  Reeling, I rock back, my mouth freeze-dries and my palms clam.  Do not apologize!  My brain screams, anytime anyone defends themselves against something like this, they immediately start to sound like a huge lame-ass.  Annie Oakley informs me that I am to censor my performance.  DO NOT DEFEND YOURSELF!  But my need-to-please, my irrational fear that EVERYONE HATES ME, and my stiff British upperlip betray me and I pathetically mumble, “Wow, I’m really sorry.”
DAMN ME!  This is not who I want to be.
Annie Oakley then informs me that my book will be banned from sale on her merch table, where everyone else sells their books.  She tells me she hasn’t actually read the book (which been out two years) but she suspects that the charges of racism are probably true.
Sledgehammer to the knees buckles me.  Lightheaded now, shortbreathed, the tears start to rise up from the well.  And here I utterly fail.  To be my genuine self.  I stop the tears.  The upper lip stiffens, and the flow of sadness is arrested.  Why didn’t I show her my pain, the real me under the smiling and the apologizing?  Why did I revert to being a stupid whiteman?  Annie Oakley encourages me quite sweetly to continue on the tour if I want, but I will almost certainly be the object of angry confrontations, and/or cold shoulders.  Now I err once again.  I do the one thing my brain has been screaming at me not to do.  I defend myself.  And even as I’m shoveling it out, this is what it sounds like to me: “Blah blah blah, yada yada yada, blah blah blah, yada yada yada.”  My voice has ratcheted up into that whiteman-in-anxiety whine, and even I have to admit that I sound like a guilty guy trying to weasel his way out of something ugly, until I actually utter that ultimate racist-defends-himself line: “Seriously, some of my best friends are black people.”  Annie Oakley explains that I probably wrote something racist and didn’t even know it.  Not that I necessarily did, because again she hasn’t read my book.  But since she doesn’t know for sure one way or the other, and she really doesn’t want to marginalize oppressed people, my book will be banned from her merch table until further notice, and I will censor myself.  Annie Oakley, like almost everyone on the tour, is white.
I smile sickly and I apologize, apologize and smile sickly, pretend like everything’s normal, like I did when I was a boy ho on a date that went horribly wrong and I wanted give the money back and get the hell out of there, but I couldn’t, so I disassociated and left my body, just bit the bullet and took one for the team while I kept that hunky dory expression plastermasked on my face.  Through what looks like a pathetically insincere smile, Annie Oakley tells me she feels really bad about all this, but her hands are tied.
As she strolls away, my repression turns me into an angry sleuth, and I sniff around pissed, trying to figure out which ho accused me of being a racist.  Could it be Scarlot Harlot, the kind-hearted activist?  No, I’ve know her for years, and I humped her bags everywhere we went, she loves me.  Could it be Erochica, the brilliant Japanese 2003 World Burlesque Champion?  No, she stayed at my house, she was so happy to see me, big squeal of glee, big hug.  Could it be the transgendered hiphopper?  Possibly, he’s one of the only non-whites on the tour.  Dubious though, he seems so way laid back, so live-and-let-live, so mindin’-my-own-beezwax, so like somebody who’d talk to your face about this kind of thing first. Could it be the shortstoryist who writes about her days as a street tweaker, petty thief, and hardcore ho?  No way, she too stayed at my house in SF, I hung out with her husband and played with her beautiful mixed-race grandchild.  Suddenly I feel all sick and twisted.
Sadly one of the aftermaths of getting violently raped is that I often imagine there is danger and trouble all around me, even when none really exists.  Suddenly here now I feel like the ultimate odd man out.  In a self-loathing daze of crazed confused alienation I wander around making eye-contact with each and every one of my fellow performers.  Every single one of them smiles in my eyes like everything’s normal.  They’re all so nice.  It hits me then that it’s not just the unproven accusation of racism; it’s the making-ugly-accusations-behind-your-back-while-smiling-to-your-face-backstabbingness of the whole thing.  It’s really creepy.  We’re not exchanging ideas, being brothers and sisters.  That’s what I’m here for.  But they don’t seem to want a discussion.  They seem to have tarred me in abstentia.  It’s all gone so terribly wrong and become so very disturbing.  I am disturbed.  And here I fail again.  I withdraw into my withdrawal, watching myself go slow through the motions, smiling and chitting and chatting as the pink elephant of racism waves its mammoth member around the room.  Not who I want to be.  Not at all.
Now the Rants began in my brain.  Don’t they understand that censorship and book banning are tools of totalitarian religious fanatic fascism?  That’s what rabid fundamentalist do to books they haven’t read and condemn out of ignorance.  It’s what happens when people knee-jerk at words without trying to understand.  Idiots and nincompoops banned Huck Finn for exactly the same reason these supposedly enlightened people are banning my book.  Now I’m listening to the show through new furious ears.  Ears that have been boxed and bloodied by the long arms of unsubstantiated racist rumors.  A female performer comes out and says, “I hate men but I love c*ck.”  And it hits me like a ton of dildos.  She hates this whole group of people for no other reason than the accident of being born one sex and not another.  This is a group of which I am a member.  I imagine myself coming out and saying, “I hate women, but I love pussy.”  Or, “I hate black people, but I love black pussy.”  They’d hand me my roasted balls before they ran me out on a rail.  It’s hate-spewing prejudice in a hate-filled world.  She is not only permitted to say this, she is encouraged.  And the things is, I want her to have the freedom to say it.  I want to hear it.  But why is there room for her voice, but not for mine?
And then suddenly it’s me up next.  I’ve been doing this stuff for 25 years, and Annie Oakley gives me the worst introduction I’ve ever had in a quarter of a century.  After the show my friends will ask me, “Why does that emcee hate you?”  I’ll say, “What do you mean?  She doesn’t hate me.”  “Well, it was like a cold wind whipped in when she introduced you.  She called your book a novel when it’s memoir, she said you looked all nervous, and then she mumbled your name.  And she said such nice things about so many other people, and nothing nice at all about you.  It was weird.”  I don’t even notice at the time.  I’m overjoyed to be back onstage, a place where I can control everything, including myself.  And I’m extry-sharp tonight.  It’s packed again, and I have a blast, leaving with a broad roar, blasts of cheers and whistles and whoops and hollers and there in that moment I am happy once more.
As usual, I’m approached by the curious and the damaged.  People want to buy my book.  Like a smuggler I take them into a dark corner to sell them my banned black market book.  They tell me their stories.  I listen.  It’s so good to swim in that river of confession and redemption again.  I sign the books clandestinely, wondering in my sick agitation what would happen if I got caught selling my banned book.  Usually I would help hump all the stuff up all the stairs.  But tonight I don’t feel it.  I leave with some straight friends from the straight world.  Used to be I wasn’t straight enough for the straight world, nor ho enough for the ho world.  Now that I’ve come out as a raped hoing boy, I’ve lost and/or cut out many of my alleged friends from the straight world.  But those who’ve remained accept me as I am, and those are the good ones.  O how they make me laugh as I recount the idiocy of Annie Oakley and the Sex Worker Art Show.  They reflect on what a terrible thing it when an oppressed group takes on the worst characteristics of the group oppressing them.  Yet, they sigh, it seems somehow inevitable.
That night after I go back to the little room where I’m staying, I feel like I’m losing my mind.  Finally I lay my raging head down upon my bed, beyond tired, hotwired and brainfevered but determined to go on with the tour.  To unite my selves.  Who am I kidding, I can’t sleep.  So I call the CEO of my company.  She tells me I would be an insane person to continue on with the tour.  To be attacked and/or cold-shouldered would gut me.  As soon as she says that I start crying.  I cry on and off for the next week, all those stopped tears pouring out with interest.  Plus, says my CEO, I can’t in good conscience support an organization that bans books without reading them.  She reminds me that I am violently opposed to oppression, suppression and censorshipping of all kinds.  I argue with my CEO that it’s probably only a couple of people, that to run away would be chicken.  My CEO laughs: the name of my book is Chicken, which is American slang for a teenager who engages in indiscriminate sexual activities for money.  My CEO says that with my personality I’d have to be not only insane but a masochist moron to continue with a group who obtusely accuses me of the type of blind hatred I’ve been trying to eradicate for decades, and the thought of me lurking around like some haunted hated freak is too much for her to bear.
Again I lay me down to sleep, pillowed head on bed.  Should I stay or should I go?  I just cannot get comfortable.  I toss.  I turn.  Toss. Turn.  Toss.  Turn.  Toss.  Turn.  Suddenly the sky’s lighting and OH GOD NO!  It’s morning.  I scrunch into the far corner of the bed and somehow find a position of comfort.  Suddenly I’m in my Victorian Painted Lady dream house, with the turret, the long sweeping staircase, the four poster bed with see-through canopy.  This is the place I am most at home in the whole world, the place I’ve been looking for ever since I was a raped hoing boy.  People upstairs tiptoe and whisper.  I know with dream certainty that certain unidentified sex workers are upstairs, and they are here to kill me.  Pulse pounding heart thudding thumping breath noosed tight chest constricting as the sex worker women creep down the stairs.  To kill me.  I run hide in the kitchen, and crouching in a broom closet I can see through a hole peeping like a wee boy.  They stalk, predator for my blood as I shiver in the closet.  I can’t die here, not in this house.  Clunky boots and stiletto heels tromp and spike silently stalking me.  Holding breath, I’m smelling cleaning fluids and broom shit.  They pass, I bolt to the next room, it’s an exhausting deadly hide&seek, cat&mouse: I will not die tonight I keep telling myself.
Sweating awake I shake my hot horrified head, gut in knots, balls aquiver.  It’s clear I cannot continue with the tour.  Here in this unfamiliar room in New York City I am suddenly more alone than I’ve ever been.  I crave a sex worker I can have sex with, dive into and forget my sorrows with, soothe my ache, and ease back into my drug addict ho world.  This is part of my illness.  This is what I did for years after I retired from the sex business.  Peeling back the next layer of the onion, I realize that’s not what I really want.  It’s like an itching rash.  You scratch it and it feels good at first.  But you have to keep scratching, which just makes it itch worse, and before you know it, you’ve scratched so hard you’ve got an itchy bloody mess on your hands.  What I really want is to drink from the cup of human kindness, and bask in the arms of someone who really loves me.  But I’m away from home, and don’t know where to turn.  So I call up a friend.  She advises me to get some really good food first.  Then write all this down.  And when I write it all down, the itch disappears.  Go figure.
In the end I am grateful that I had the opportunity to confront the worst part of myself.  Grateful to take the next step towards uniting my selves.  Yes, my book was banned by the prostitutes.  And yes, I am a better man for it.

Google: Friend to the Author, or Fascist Corporate Totalitarians?

Google: Friend to the Author, or Fascist Corporate Totalitarians?

“Dude, djoo hear what Google’s doin?” Spud (not his real name) sounded all tweaky and freaked out through the phone.

“No,” I said, “what’s Google doin?”

“They’re stealin’ our books, dude!” Spud spat.

“What are you talkin’ about?” I spat back.

Spud is a very good writer. But I’ve learned you have to take everything Spud says with several tablets of salt, because Spud loves his conspiracy theories, and is happiest when railing against how the Man is ripping him off.

“Okay, check this out,” Spud launched. “Google, they’re downloadin’ every book ever written. EVERY BOOK EVER WRITTEN!!! That means your books, and my books, dude, they’re scannin’ em and they’re puttin’ on-line for free. FOR FREE.”

“Really?” I had a small panic. That would be bad for business. Very bad.

“Yeah, dude, even as we speak, in an underground lab in Mountain View, they gotta team of Umpa Lumpa’s scanning round the clock, my man,” spewed Spud, “and cuz they’re worth, like, 40 kazillion dollars man, they they think they can just like, rule the universe. It’s imperialistic totalitarian corporate fascism, bro, it’s like 1984, like Animal Farm, like Lord of the Flies, they’re like Attila the Hun of the cyber-world man, they’re rapin’ burnin’ and pilagin’ – “

“Spud, slow down, man, come back–“

“And now they’re comin’ after you and me, dude, talkin’ food off our plates, they’re violating our inalienable constitutional rights, they’re like AT&T used to be: ‘We’re Google, we don’t care, we don’t have to.’”

After I talked Spud out of going to Google’s Mountain. View campusand blowing it to Kingdom Come, I hung up the phone, shaken. I make my living writing books. I have a Young Adult book coming out in April, and I had a vision of kids all over the world downloading my book, printing it out and reading it for free.

FOR FREE!!!

I had a vision of my first six-month sales print out: 0 copies sold. Which would mean when I go to sell my next book, that’s the advance I’d get: $0.00. And how am I gonna fight Google? I’m just one sadsack geek pecking away on my G5. They’re Google. They rule the Cyberworld, an omniscient, omnipresent omnibeast that would crush me like a crusty bug and turn me into road kill on the information super-highway.

That night I had a terrible dream. A giant head, not unlike the Wizard of Oz, was hovering over me, booming:

“I am GOOGLE! I will make millions off the sweat of your brow and the genius of your brain! The great and powerful Google has spoken!”

I bolted awake sweating cold bullets, determined to fight this axis of evil with every fiber of my being. Over breakfast I vented about the attack of the killer mutant Google to my lovely and talented wife, Arielle Eckstut, who, thankfully, is the rational half of our partnership. She’s been a literary agent for a dozen years, sold hundreds of books to publishers large and small. I like to say she is one of America’s top literary agents, but she hates when I say that, so I won’t. She’s also the author of three books, two of them with me.

To my surprise, Arielle had a very different perspective on the whole Google fiasco. “Look,” she said, “the hardest thing for the author is just getting people to notice your book, if Google can help you do that, great. Only 10% of books earn back their advance, so they go outta print. Look at Satchel Sez.”

Satchel Sez is one of the books we wrote together. It’s about the Negro Leagues legend Leroy Satchel Paige. It was an American Library Association pick of the year for teens. It came out in ‘01. It’s now out of print.

“We have the last ten copies of that book. Wouldn’t it be great if every time someone Googled ‘Ol Satchel they could find out about our book and read it? That’s why we wrote the thing, so people would read it.”

“Yeah,” I sighed, “it’s so sad, it’s like that was our first kid and it died on its fourth birthday.”

“And what about Mort Morte?” she continued. Mort Morte is a dark, twisted subversive experimental novel I’ve written that I haven’t tried to sell yet. “No one in publishing is going to give you any money for that book. It’s too weird for mainstream publishers. Imagine if Google could help you reach 100,000 college kids who download that book, and they each told a friend, etc, etc, you could then go speak at colleges, and make money that way. You could go to Hollywood and make a very strong case that you already have a built-in, reachable audience for a movie. It would increase your stock as a writer. And what about business books or medical books? A lot of people write books because they have important information they want to spread. And once these books are out they then use them as a calling card. Like Marty.” She’s referring to Dr. Marty Rossman, a client of hers who has a medical practice in Northern California. He’s an expert on chronic pain and has written several books about it. “He could put his book on Google and get it linked to his office, and sell his DVDs, and his CDs, and his services as a lecturer.” Arielle was really hitting her stride now, like a thoroughbred coming around the turn at Churchill Downs.

“And what about Seth?” She was talking about marketing guru, Seth Godin who is famous for giving away his books for free. “He thinks that ideas you give away, you put them out in the world for free, and then people come to you and pay you when they need ideas. Lots of books would be great on Google: poetry, books of essays, short stories. People who are self-publishing. Self-publishing is so huge now. It’s so hard selling a self-published book. Why wouldn’t you want your self-published books on Google, so billions of people could have access to them? Besides, people who love books really love books. They’ve been screaming about the death of books ever since the talkies. But people will always buy books.”

At that point all I could do was shake my head and take a deep cleansing breath. After I gathered myself, I said: “Okay, but you wouldn’t want Google giving away PYPIP for free would you?” Putting Your Passion Into Print is the second book we wrote together. It came out in September 2005, and it is still a healthy growing baby, all vital signs very good. Arielle thought for a second.

“No,” she shook her head, “ I wouldn’t.”

The universe is a strange, mysterious and beautiful place. And the gods are a bunch of merry pranksters. Soon thereafter I got an email from Barbara Lane, from the the Commonwealth Club, a San Francisco institution, where the best and the brightest come to present and debate Ideas. They were having a panel discussion and asked me if I would like to present the perspective of a book writer. The subject: Google’s announced plan to scan every book ever written and make them available on-line FOR FREE!

Naturally, I accepted. Game on! This discussion was to be broadcast on National Public Radio. When I told Spud he almost wet himself he got so exciteed, and implored me to kick some Google butt.

The panel was moderated by Moira Gunn, host of Tech Nation, and consisted of: Bill Petrocelli, owner of Book Passage, a renowned independent bookstore; Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian and Internet Archivist; Professor Pamela Samuelson, Director, Berkeley Center for Law and Technology of UC Berkeley; and Google lawyer Alexander McAlbrae.

Plus me. Naturally, I Googled them all. Including myself.

That night, the Commonwealth Club was packed and buzzing. I felt slightly out of place with all these mucketymucks, but I sucked it up and put on my game face. When the light went on a hush fell over the room, and I swear I heard the Google’s lawyer sphincter snap shut, although I do have an overactive imagination. They grilled the Google lawyer to a crisp, and though he did get a little lawyery, he made it abundantly clear that Google had no intention of scanning and scamming, of uploading books they didn’t have rights to. Of course, he said, we’re going to obey all copyright laws and we’re not out to steal anything in any way shape or form. We want to make information available, while not ripping anybody off. At the end of the whole show, the Google lawyer said: “Google loves authors.”

“I’m glad Google loves me,” I replied. In fact, it became clear to me that Google has no intention of making my current book available for free to anyone. However, they now have “Satchel Sez”, they’re scanning it in a basement in Mt. View, and it’s gonna be available for anyone in the world to look at. And with the 100th anniversary of Ol’ Satch’s birthday (or one of them anyway) coming up, I’m tickled pink. I’m seriously considering putting Mort Morte, my dark twisted subversive novel, up there for free too.

The Commonwealth Club evening was, for me, a true eye opener. One observation: it’s amazing how when you become a billion dollar business, people start to automatically hate you. I hope one day to have this problem.

So, I called Spud up the next day and after he vented at me for being a sellout lackey puppet of the paramilitary industrial state, I explained the whole thing to him. His reply: “Dude, you gotta hook me up with Google.”

Audio:

https://www.commonwealthclub.org/events/2006-01-01/should-books-be-free-online-googles-plan-stirs-controversy

The War on Whores: The European Conference 2005: Sex Work, Human Rights, Labor & Migration

You may not know it, but there’s a world-wide war on whores.  And George W. Bush is leading the forces, just like he is in Iraq, where the death toll mounts daily.  All over the world, he has tied United States financial support to his agenda of making prostitution a crime, with willing sex workers and the clients criminals.  I found this out recently at the European Conference 2005: Sex Work, Human Rights, Labor & Migration in Brussels.

   Sex Workers' Rights For years there’s been a raging debate between abolitionists who want to make all exchange of sex for money (whether voluntary or not) illegal; and sex workers who view the willing exchange of sex and money as a work issue, not a moral issue.  The abolitionists, many of whom have never had sex for money, often contend that any exchange of sex for money is slavery. 

The sex workers, all of whom have exchanged sex for money, are adamant that they should be able to make money in the sex business if that is their choice.  And they insist that they should be able to do it in safe, sanitary conditions, with the same rights as any other worker to ply their trade.
Abolitionists have often used the trafficking issue (the international buying and selling of sex slaves) to cloud the voluntary exchange of sex for money.  Many claim that if sex work is decriminalized, trafficking will flourish.  However, the fact is that in America, sex work is illegal, and there is much trafficking.  In the Netherlands, sex work is legal, and there is much trafficking.  Furthermore it is clear that by focusing so much energy on criminalizing willing clients and buyers in the sex business, these resources cannot be used to fight real sexual slavery.
Traditionally people in the sex business have not had a voice in how we are treated.  We are jailed, deported, beaten, silenced.  Academics, social workers, lawmakers and do-gooders have spoken for us.  And we’re tired of it.  That’s one reason this conference was organized: so sex workers can speak for ourselves about the deadly serious issues that are at the core of the debate about sex for money.
Here’s what happened to me at this historic gathering.  On Thursday October 14th I arrived sleep deprived at the Mercure Royal Crown Hotel in Brussels, Belgium for the.  Excited, thrilled, yet terrified that I would be shunned and ostracized for being an ugly American stupid white breeder man. This is what it’s now like for an American abroad.  Even as I arrived, my fears were quelled as I was greeted sweetly and immediately put me to work assembling documents.  I was quite pleased to be put to work, as I come from a long line of beasts of burden, and as an ex-whore, I live to please.
As I stuffed manifestos into whore-red folders, I heard my old friend Scarlot Harlot downstairs practicing a speech in Russian.  Apparently “bitch” is “bitch” all over the world.  Why did I travel 6,000 miles to be here?  “Connect.  Celebrate.  Challenge.” That’s what the folder said. Challenge the world’s perception of sex workers, prostitutes, whores. Attitudes, laws, policies, rights to work safely and move freely.  Connect with my European sex worker friendly brothers and sisters. Celebrate good times, come on!
In the conference room, 75 or so current and former sex workers and allies congregated, mingled and chilled.  Art hung on the walls: rentboy photos eating breakfast; line drawings of whore heroes; transgender warriors and brave streetwalkers. And in the corner was Scarlot Harlot’s Whore Store.  For the whore in all of us.
My earlier trepidation now seemed ridiculous.  I communed with sex workers from Russia to Washington.  Suddenly I was face-to-face with the one and only Margo St. James, legendary icon activist and all-around hot mama.  I have, of course, heard stories about her for years.  Even performed at benefits for St. James Infirmary and Coyote (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics), sex worker institutions she co-founded that provide help with medical, mental, professional, legal, financial and compassion needs in my San Francisco.  It’s slightly odd to finally meet someone you’ve admired for so long.  And such a relief when she is so smart, funny, down-to-earth and mad sexy.  We talked about SF’s history as the sexual capital of America, the Hooker’s Ball, Dizzy Gillespie, cokeheaded lawyers and crooked-ass cops.  I thought how odd it was to travel to Brussels to meet a legend from my own hometown.
First night a big group of us went out to dinner.  Picture the scene: 17 sex workers dropping in on a nice unsuspecting Brussels restaurant at 10pm Friday night.  A Scottish lap-dancer sat next to me.  Apparently the women in Scotland pay a deposit before their dance shift, are required to do a couple of stints on stage, then do their lapdancing in a booth, which is carefully monitored by a closed-circuit camera. No touching policy is strictly enforced.  So there is a real sense of safety in the workplace.  Juxtapose this with SF, where I recently spoke to a lap-dancer who told me the woman have to pay to work, and if they don’t make the $300 they’re charged for a night, they lose their money, goodbye, sayanora, tought luck, baby!  And in the booths she descibed, which woman are often forced into, the door is locked, and they are left unprotected.  Coersion, rape and forced sex often ensue.  And the cops don’t care, cuz they’re often the customers.  Again I am embarrassed to be an American.
On the other side of me was an English sex worker man I’d been corresponding with electronically.  Part of the joy of this conference was putting faces to e-mails.  He was charming in a way only the English can charm, and whip-smart, with a fascinating story: from evangelic angelic English school/choir boy to wildly successful hustler.
Finally I dragged my raggedy ass to bed at 2am and slept until 5am, when my brain popped open and started gyrating wildly around the room.  Sadly I was unable to find any way to stop it.  Next thing I knew it was 9am, and I crawled like a dazed Kafka cockroach down to the conference room.
An absolutely radiant sex worker woman living now in the UK was decked out in a sexy boustier type deal, with a big feather headress flapping exotically on her head. She instructed us to blow up the red balloon on our seat, write something on it, bat it around the room, grab another, and write something on it.  It was grand fun.  And a beautiful sight, watching 99 luft ballons flying around the room, with all those whores batting them about.
Favorite things I saw on a red balloon: “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can rent some for awhile,” and “Practice random acts of kindness.”
Then they were popped:
BOOM! BAM! BANG!
We were then addressed by the committee who put the whole conference together.  What an enormous undertaking: getting everyone here, translating everything into four languages, picking a clear agenda everyone could agree on.  The most basic goals were laid out:

·        Creating a network for sex workers and allies to share information easily and instantly
·        Getting sex work addressed as a labor issue, and working to get sex workers rights to free movement and safe work, with dignity and respect
·        Drafting and ratifying a manifesto and a declaration to state our needs and desires

It was stressed that people who want to make money from sex of their own free will should have the same human rights as everyone else: protection from harm and harassment, sanitary working conditions, a living wage, freedom of movement.  But often when sex work is legalized, prostitutes are forced to register, often with their home addresses.  They are given mandatory health tests, and often this information is made public, causing stigma and sometimes violence to be heaped on the worker.  Many times they are taxed outrageously, and can have their children taken from them with no recourse.  Of course where sex work is prohibited, the workers have no rights at all, and can be abused by clients, employers, and the police, which sadly happens all too often. To view the issue as a labor/human rights/migration issue seemed a good start in improving the world for people who want to work in the sex industry.
In the afternoon I attended a Network Workshop.  The idea is to create an international network where information of all kinds can be exchanged instantly and freely.  The problems inherent are enormous and obvious: no money, no existing infrastructure, too many languages, every country with different customs and laws, so many workers underground and inaccessible, shadow players in a dark dangerous game. A sex worker who lives in French told a horror story of an African woman working in Paris in deplorable conditions.  When she complained to the government, they assured her they would help.  Instead they used the information to swoop down on the area and make massive arrests, deporting many many women who were working there without documentation.  And nothing could be done.  The French sex worker reflected that if there had been a network in place, perhaps the sex workers could have been warned.
Next was a media workshop, which I had agreed to help facilitate.  It was distressingly depressing how many of my fellow sex workers had media whore horror stories.  One transgendered sex worker living in Norway told about being interviewed extensively, then getting quoted in the paper in a tiny box with a huge unflattering picture above and a caption that read: “WHORE REFUSES TO PAY TAXES!” Time and again the media portays us as sadsack immoral slut dregs-of-society losers, or sex freaks in miniskirts bending into car windows. A general theme emerged: Control the interview, plan and rehearse your message, and deliver it kindly, nicely and relentlessly. And as with all whore work, it if feels weird or bad, JUST SAY NO!
On to the Manifesto.  A statement of needs and desires by sex workers themselves, not policy makers, social workers, or deluded do-gooders who have no idea what it’s like to actually do the the work. The Manifesto addresses everything from working conditions, to migration, to labor practices, to securing basic human rights, respect and protection.  So many of these conferences devolve into pointless theorizing and painful in-fighting.  But here is a real document with real substance written by real sex workers.
Another joy of this conference: the conversations you would never ever have anywhere else.  After we rehearsed for the show we were going to put on, a new stripper friend said, “Please don’t tell anyone about the buttplug, I want it to be a surprise.” I assured her that no word of the buttplug would pass my lips.  And I was true to my word.
At the group meeting Sunday morning, a sex work expert reported that new German legislation doesn’t decriminalize sex work, but now it is tolerated.  Sex workers are expected to sign contracts if they work in houses.  But there is much mistrust, and many workers don’t want to sign them.  Part of the problem is that the workers don’t know about changes in the law, so they’re in the dark about their rights. Legally, it is not against the law to run a house of prostitution in a residential neighborhood, but because of ignorance and stigmatization, many houses are being closed down.  And in every sector their are small variations in law. Apparently in Germany, politicians and government officials are so ignorant about how the sex business works that they tax sex workers when they aren’t even employees.  A pleasure tax is also levied on sex workers, who are not allowed to deduct legitimate expenses.  So they often have outrageous tax bills.  And with the change in law also comes a crackdown on migrant workers, who are deported, even though many have nowhere to go, and face horror stories when they are dumped back in the home lands. On the positive side, the law is a start towards legitimizing sex work.
Laura Agustin’s presentation on migration and trafficking followed.  Apparently there’s a great discrepancy between what is actually happening in the world, and the hysteria that is presented by abolitionists and the media.  Yes, of course there are slaves of all kind being trafficked in the world, but all too often the reality of migrants willingly exchanging sex for money is ignored, and the worker suffers for it.  This makes it all the more difficult to track down real traffickers who are using humans as slaves. Only when governments acknowledge and respect the right to travel and trade sex for money will migrant sex workers get the rights and protection they desperately need and deserve.
An Italian sex work legend, who for many years has been studying human and sexual rights, as well as discrimination and persecution among woman and the transgendered.  Sex workers, she said, are perceived as victims, and stripped of all rights and abilities to determine their own fate. Sex workers and migrants are the subject of racism, violence and abuse.  The perpetrators are not pursued or punished.  The message was: This must end.
A sex worker expert who now live in Swedish presented the new Swedish model of controlling sex work.  Apparently, for better or worse, the Swedes believe that the whole world should adopt their social policies, so they are madly going around trying to get every country under the sun to run sex work the way they do.  The only problem is: What they do doesn’t work.  Their idea is to arrest and prosecute the client.  Which is better than arresting and prosecuting the women certainly, but the point is, why are they arresting willing buyers or sellers at all?  The feminist-driven Swedish government argues that criminalization will empower women, making them less susceptible to being talked into the business.  And their theory is that trafficking will be stopped.  However, the reality is much different.  Sex workers can no longer afford to be choosey about picking clients, since the clients are fewer, scared and edgy.  So often times only the violent, extreme buyers are left.  And if something does happen, the clients, who used to be able to help police, now no longer cooperate for fear of being arrested themselves. Undocumented workers are shipped out.  Police clandestinely film sex workers, trying to collect evidence against buyers.  Sex workers are now loathe to carry condoms, which can be used as evidence of having sex for money. And in Sweden, the government will not listen to the sex workers themselves.  But the Swedish expert said he is bound and determined to “stop the virus from spreading” and urged us to help stamp out this terrible policy, which tramples all over human rights of sex workers.
Gail Pheterson and Margo St. James then gave a presentation, complete with pictures and text, about the history of the sex worker rights movement. They have had a wonderful partnership as academic/sex worker, and this reflected in their beautiful give-and-take rapport.  They said that from the beginning they didn’t back away from words used to denigrate prostitutes, which is why they called the inaugural event, The First World Whore Conference.  This was in 1985-86.  Twenty years ago.  From the beginning, prostitute rights and women’s rights seemed to them intrinsically linked, and they’ve been working (with varying degrees of success) for years to get feminists to understand this, and have sympathetic support for sex workers.  “We are all for rights of sex workers and against violence, exploitation and slavery.”  Gail and Margo did a very interesting thing from the beginning: they dressed up civilian allies as whores so that no one could tell the difference.   We are not who you think we are.  We are not freakish amoral monsters.  We are brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers.  We live next door, up the street, and down the hall.  Looking at Margo and Gail, it was impossible to tell who was the academic and who was the ex-whore.  They quoted Norma Jean Almodavar: “There’s a difference between politicians and prostitutes.  There are some things prostitutes won’t do for money.” I laughed.  We all laughed.
Ana Lopes and George Martin talked about starting a sex woker union in the UK.  Ana got a job in the sex industry, liked the work, but was frustrated that she was stigmatized, had no labor rights, and was treated unfairly, with no recourse. So she and fellow sex workers met in her apartment, with no money, no resources, and formed the International Union of Sex Workers.  They put up a website, recruited more members, and went about making themselves into a valid union.  After being rebuffed by many many organizations, they contacted the George Martin and the GMB.  They found they had much common ground, and joined forces.  They wanted to establish sex work as legitimate labor, thus helping with training, individual benefits, legal representation and rights, as well as better working conditions.  And now they have actually made a recognized union.  Forcing people to see sex work as a labor issue as opposed to a moral issue.  And in giving invisible sex workers a face and a structure to be seen and heard.  Ana and Martin were inspirational indeed.  Sex Workers of the World Unite!
Sunday night was the party/performance, at a nightclub in Brussels.  The place was packed to the rafters with sex workers and allies in all their feathery finery.  Wigs, slits, tits, stilleto heels, big hair, short skirts, silk, leather and lace.  By the time the show started the atmosphere was electric, like being in a cloud just before a lightning storm.  After two beautiful poems by two beautiful French sex workers about activist warrior Gristeledes, Scarlot Harlot, looking like a cross between Mae West, the Statue of Liberty, and a Madame at a Brothel in Heaven, brought the house down with her unique blend of vaudevillian sloganeering.

Stop the Wars On Whores!!!
Outlaw Poverty Not Prostitutes!!!
Keep the Government Out of My Underpants!!!

Solitair has legs longer than I am, a black river of hair running down her impossibly long back, huge spotlight eyes that shine on high beam, and when she paraded onto the stage to the tune of “I Like the Way You Move” in a tiny purple see-through teddy, a hot shiver ran through the room.  Lean lithe and lovely she played the crowd like it was a violin and she was Itzak Perlman in a purple teddy.  And when she bent over and moved her G-string to reveal the butt plug, I was gratified that I had not revealed her secret, because the stunned pindrop silence, full of gaping mouths, stolen breath and bugged-out eyes, was priceless.  To shock this crowd took some doing, but Solitair did it in spades.
I was next, and as I looked out at all those beaming sex workers faces from all over the world: the rentboys and ladyboys, the whores and the hustlers, the disenfranchised and the reviled, the hated and the desired, the objects of revulsion and lust, I was overcome by these people, who had all traveled many miles to be here, to try in some ridiculous way to make the world more fair and humane and safe.
I have done my show, or bits of it, almost a hundred times, on three continents. This was the only time I have been translated on the spot into Russian and French.  Strange and amazing to say a line, then wait and hear my words in Russian.  Then French.  I had been a little worried that it would be too long and too weird.  But for me it accentuated how we were doing something global, and yet incredibly personal.  In my show I portray a client who was a tantric sex expert.  My piece climaxes when she has the mother of all climaxes.  I’ve always said that Orgasm is the ultimate international language, and this proved true on that Sunday night in Brussels.  It felt like we all came together in a celebration of sex work and being human.
Gypsy Charms, my new Scottish stripper friend, had asked me to play a client getting a lap-dance from her.  After the dance I was to yell at her, growling gruffly about what bad her body was.  To me this illustrated a subtle part of sex work that I felt over and over when I was in the business, that no one had really discussed at the conference.  How clients inflict their sexual pain on the sex worker.  How as a whore I absorbed so much sexual illness from my clients.  As a race we seem to suffer so much sexually, and sex workers are a well into which the world dumps its sex misery.  In the piece, I was told to reach up and touch her, which is strictly forbidden.  When I did it, she reached back and slapped me.  The crowd reacted audibly, happy to see an abusive client get some of his own back.  I thought of the men standing outside the booths in Amsterdam, drunk and screaming horrible degrading things at the women behind the glass, laughing like sadistic barbarians.
After the show an amazing DJ ripped some crazy mad tunes, with all manner of Afro/Latino/Eurotrashing rhythms thrown into the pot to create a tasty stew. Boys danced with boys.  Girls danced with girls.  Boys danced with girls.  Girls danced with boys.  Trannies danced with everybody.  It was a slamming jamming euphoric release.  A celebration.
Monday morning, blurry-eyed but bushy-tailed we loaded into buses and headed for the European Parliament.  By this time I was so sleep deprived I felt sure that if my head weren’t tethered to my body, it would float away like a red balloon.  As we approached the huge gleaming glass and metal structure of the European Parliament, its modern majesty made it feel like we were about to enter a center of money and influence. We had to get individuals badges and go through the metal detectors, adding to the effect that something terribly official, and potentially dangerous, was happening here.  It was a fabulous contrast: all of us queer birds dressed like bureaucrats and politicians rubbing elbows with all the straight-laced button-down bureaucrats and politicians.  The room where our meeting took place looked just like you see it on TV.  A table with microphones on a platform in front of many long curving tables with microphones, going back 30 deep, with chairs for about 250 people.  Around the perimeter, behind glass partitions, sat the translators from a dozen or so countries.  Nice gig, I thought, sit around and wait for somebody to speak in your language, hope they’re not too longwinded, then hang out in the European Parliament.
Entering this room was surreal.  Made everything seem more real and possible, because after all, here we were, in the very seat of social power, where laws are changed, compromises are hammered out, and policy is made.  An official from the Green Party, which sponsored us, spoke about how much we have in common.  We both want to stop violence and abuse, and get rights in place for all sex workers.  The funny thing is, you could not have picked this Green Party politico out of a line-up of sex workers.
An Italian member of the European Parliament showed up.  He was attentive, energetic and seemed like quite a sharp fellow.  He talked about putting the sex work struggle in the broader historical context of the struggle for human rights by any underrepresented, oppressed, reviled, stigmatized and beaten down group.  The Italian Parliament said he was going to take our Declaration to other politicians so they can study it, and make changes accordingly.  He said he was on a committee that was responsible for spreading democracy and human rights all over Europe, and that he was going to push our agenda of civil rights and the fight against repressive punitive laws and regulations.  Most importantly, he thought that making sex work seen as a profession would be a huge step.  He suggested we hook up with other organizations to build our power base, and to find specific violations to draw attention to the larger issues.
Then he did something amazing.  He actually signed our Declaration.  Right there in front of all of us.  Out in the open. In the European Parliament.  When our Chairperson asked him, he said he would sigh it, “Very happily.”
When ten basic demands were read by sashed sex workers, a chill went through me, and a feeling of triumph spread through the room.  Stop criminalization, prejudice, violence, ignorance, cruelty and abuse, to ensure that people can work and move free and easy, proudly and with dignity.
Afterwards I thought what we really should do is film our members having sex with all the major leaders of Parliament, then blackmail them into giving us what we need.  Hey, by whatever means necessary.
WARNING: If you ever eat in the European Parliament, DO NOT have the salad.  The green beans were wilted, the corn tasteless, and the shredded carrots a disaster.
So now we had to load into a bus and go to the Street Demonstration.  If you’ve ever tried to move 150 sex workers through the European Parliament you know how difficult that can be.  Somehow we succeeded.  Then suddenly there we were on the steps of the Brussels Stock Exchange.  I thought ruefully of all the bankers who rent us, then revile us.
We were all given red umbrellas, and as we assembled with them on the steps, it was a beautiful sight, like a field of blooming poppies with sex worker flowers growing under them.  A huge banner read:

SEX WORKER RIGHTS = HUMAN RIGHTS!!!

Instantly it was a mob scene, as onlookers gawked and gaped, glued to the spectacle of the whistle-blowing whores dancing and chanting:  “VOUS COUCHEZ AVEC NOUS, VOUS VOTEZ CONTRA NOUS!!!”  You sleep with us, you vote against us!!!
Journalists hungrily buzzed about with notepads, microphones, movie and still camera, hunting for the nectar of the right angle to make the news.
Suddenly there were sirens, and the police showed up.  My first impulse as an American was that they were going to arrest us. Great! I thought, this is the best thing that could possibly happen.  I saw us on the front pages of the London, New York, Los Angeles Times, on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera:

150 SEX WORKERS ARRESTED IN BRUSSLES!!!

Alas, sadly, they were only there to keep the peace.  After about 45 minutes, we took off through the streets of Brussels, a police car clearing the road for us.  It was a joyous celebration, and a challenge to the public: we’re here, we’re not who you think we are, and we’re not going away. Globally and locally.  As we moved through the streets of Brussels singing and chanting with our red umbrellas and our banners, we were cheered and waved at by walkers, drivers and passersby.  I also heard that a couple of Belgians saw us and said, “They should all be killed.” They should all be killed.  They should all be killed. We passed a group of boys, 8-10 year olds, on bicycles.  They started cheering and shouting sweetly with boyish enthusiasm, staying with us for quite a while, having a fine old time.  I smiled as I thought that maybe when they grow up they’ll have an image of sex workers as fun, smart and political, instead of uneducated, drug addicted wretches of society.
On the march, one of the member of our contingency was passing out cards for our organization.  She gave one to an onlooker, who looked at the card, then looked at us, and asked what the card said.  Our member translated: “These are sex workers.” Onlooker looked at the card, looked at us, and asked, “What’s a sex worker?”  Our member explained, “People who work in the sex business, like prostitutes and strippers.” Onlooker’s eyes went wide: “Ï am a stripper and a prostitute. And and transsexual.  May I join you?” Our member said we would love to have her.  She introduced Onlooker to one of our own transsexual sex workers, and they walked arm-in-arm through the streets, telling each other their life stories.
Yes, of course, there is much to do, the situation is dire, but I for one, left excited, encouraged and inspired.  From the streets of Brussels to the European Parliament, our voices are being heard.

TOP TEN LIST FROM THE EUROPEAN CONFREENCE 2005
1.     European Parliament member signs official sex worker demand document
2.     Whore Manifesto created and ratified
3.     Margo St. James and Gail Pheterson stroll us down hooker activist Memory Lane
4.     10 sex workers read our needs in European Parliament
5.     Hearing whore stories from around the world
6.     Demonstrating on the steps of the Stock Exchange then dancing in the streets
7.     Meeting sex workers from Greece, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Russia, Scotland, England, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Belgium, Germany, and God knows where else
8.     UK strippers
9.     Sharing a room with tantric massage expert
10. Getting my ass squeezed by a lesbian, a gay man, a straight man, a straight woman, and a transsexual all in one day

As an added bonus, I have included a list of things I think every activist should know.  Enjoy!

10 COMMANDMENTS OF ACTIVISM
1. If thou marcheth in the streets, weareth comfortable shoes
2. Talketh not for more than three minutes if thou hast nothing to say
3. Putteth the needs of the group before thine own
4. Forgeth not thine business cards
5. Getteth contact information from everyone thou meeteth
6. Eateth apples instead of candy
7. If thou hast a roommate, tryeth not to snoreth
8. Listeneth more than thou talketh
9. Findeth solutions instead of bitchething about how bad everything is
10. Smelleth good
David Henry Sterry

To view pictures:  http://www.espacep.be/

Here is the Manifesto:

SEX WORKERS IN EUROPE
MANIFESTO

We come from many different countries and many different backgrounds, but we have discovered that we face many of same problems in our work and in our lives.

Within this document we explore the current inequalities and injustices within our lives and the sex industry; question their origin; confront and challenge them and put forward our vision of changes that are needed to create a more equitable society in which sex workers, their rights and labour are acknowledged and valued.

This manifesto was elaborated and endorsed by 120 sex workers from 26 countries at the European Conference on Sex Work, Human Rights, Labour and Migration 15 – 17 October 2005, Brussels, Belgium.

BEYOND TOLERANCE AND COMPASSION
FOR THE RECOGNITION OF RIGHTS

We live in a society where services are bought and sold. Sex work is one of these services. Providing sexual services should not be criminalised.

Sacrificing sex workers for religious or sexual morals is unacceptable. All people have the right to hold their own personal religious and sexual morals, but such morals should not be imposed on any individual or determine any political decision.

We wish to see a society in which sex workers are not denied social power.

We condemn the hypocrisy within our societies where our services are used but our profession or businesses are made illegal. This legislation results in abuse and lack of control over our work and lives.

We oppose the criminalisation of sex workers, their partners, clients, managers, and everyone else working in sex work. Such criminalisation denies sex workers of equal protection of the law.

Migration plays an important role in meeting the demands of the labour market. We demand our governments acknowledge and apply fundamental human, labour and civil rights for migrants.
The right to be free from discrimination
We demand the end of discrimination and abuse of power by the police and other public authorities. Offering sexual services is not an invitation to any kind of violence. The lack of credibility of sex workers must end.

We demand that crimes against us and our testimonies are taken seriously by the justice system. Sex workers should, to the same extent as anyone else, be presumed innocent until guilt is proven.

Defamation of sex workers incites discrimination and hatred. We demand that sex workers be protected by anti-discrimination legislation.
The right to our bodies
Sex work is by definition consensual sex. Non consensual sex is not sex work; it is sexual violence or slavery.

We demand our right as human beings to use our bodies in any way we do not find harmful; including the right to establish consensual sexual relations, no matter the gender or ethnicity of our partners; regardless of whether they are paying or not.
The right to be heard
We assert our right to participate in public forums and policy debates where our working and living conditions are being discussed and determined.

We demand our voices are heard, listened to and respected. Our experiences are diverse, but all are valid, and we condemn those who steal our voice and say that we do not have the capacity to make decisions or articulate our needs.
The right to associate and gather
We assert our right to form and join professional associations and unions.

We assert our right to demonstrate publicly.

We demand the right to form business partnerships, both formal and informal, and to participate in social projects.
The right to mobility
We assert our right to be in all public spaces.

We assert the right of all persons to move within and between countries for personal and financial reasons, including seeking gainful employment and residence in the area of their choice.

The trafficking discourse obscures the issues of migrants’ rights. Such a simplistic approach to such a complex issue reinforces the discrimination, violence and exploitation against migrants, sex workers and migrant sex workers in particular.

Violence, coercion and exploitation related to migration and sex work must be understood and tackled within a framework of recognising the worth and fundamental rights of migrants.

Restrictive migration legislation and anti-prostitution policies must be identified as contributing factors to the violation of migrants’ rights.

Forced labour and slavery-like practices are possible in many trades. But where trades are legal and the labour of its workers recognised, it is more possible to denounce and put an end to the violations of rights and prevent abuse.

We demand our governments prioritise and protect the human rights of victims of forced labour and slavery-like practices, regardless of how they arrived in their situation and regardless of their ability or willingness to cooperate or testify in criminal justice proceedings.

We call upon our governments to give asylum to victims of forced labour and slavery-like practices, and to provide support to their families and friends. Failure to do so perpetuates their exploitation and further violates their fundamental human rights.
Abuse in sex work
Abuse happens in sex work, but does not define sex work.

Any discourse that defines sex work as violence is a simplistic approach that denies our diversity and experience and reduces us to helpless victims. It undermines our autonomy and right to self-determination.
Restrictive legislation contributes to discrimination, stigma and abuse of sex workers.

We demand our governments decriminalise sex work and end legislation that discriminates against us and stigmatises us. We demand the right to report abuses against us without risking prosecution.

Granting rights for sex workers would allow them to report infringements of their human rights.

We demand protection from those who threaten us and our families for exposing them.

We demand methods that allow us to remain anonymous when reporting grievances and crimes against us.
Abuse of young people in sex work
It is essential that education focuses on empowering young people to have sexual autonomy. We demand that support, services and outreach be provided to young people to give them real choice and the possibilities of alternatives.

Young people should have a voice in legislation and policies that affect them.

OUR LIVES

Being a sex worker
Society imposes an ‘identity’ and ‘social role’ on sex workers that goes beyond the recognition that we use our bodies and minds as an economic individual resource to earn money.

The ‘identity’ and ‘social role’ imposed on us defines us as intrinsically unworthy and a threat to moral, public and social order; labelling us sinners, criminals, or victims – stigma separates us from ‘good’ and ‘decent’ citizens and the rest of society.

This stigma leads to people seeing us only as ‘whores’ in a negative and stereotyped way – the rest of our lives, and the differences amongst us, become invisible. It denies us a place in society. To protect ourselves and to ensure we have a place within society most sex workers hide their involvement in sex work, many absorb the societal stigma of shame and unworthiness, and live in fear of being exposed. For this reason many sex workers accept the abuses inflicted upon them. The social exclusion that results from the stigmatisation of sex workers leads to denial of access to health, to housing, to alternative work, separation from our children and isolation.

Societal perceptions impose a moral hierarchy within the sex industry – based on migrant status, race, ethnic origin, gender, age, sexuality, drug use, work sector and the services provided – adding to the stigma and social exclusion of certain groups of sex workers. Amongst sex workers themselves there are those who agree with such views. We assert that all sex workers and all forms of sex work are equally valid and valuable and condemn such moral and prejudiced divisions.

We recognise stigma as being the commonality that links all of us as sex workers, forming us into a community of interest – despite the enormous diversity in our realities at work and in our lives. We have come together to confront and challenge this stigma and the injustices it leads to.

We assert that sex work is a sexual-economic activity and does not imply anything about our identity or value and participation as part of society.

Active citizenship
Sex workers should not be perceived purely as victims to be assisted, criminals to be arrested or targets for public health interventions – we are part of society, with needs and aspirations, who have the potential to make a real and valuable contribution to our communities.

We demand that current mechanisms of representation and consultation are opened up to sex workers.

Privacy & family
We assert our right to be free from arbitrary interference with our privacy and family and to marry and/or found a family.

We are capable human beings, who have the ability to love and care for other human beings – as any human being does. Our work sometimes gives us more financial security and time for a child or partner than other more time consuming and lesser paid work.

The labelling of our partners as pimps and exploiters/abusers simply because they are our partners, presupposes we have no autonomy and implies we are not worthy of love or relationships denying us the possibility of a private life.

We assert our right to establish personal relationships and have self-determination within those relationships without judgement.

We demand an end to discriminatory legislation that prohibits us from being with and/or marrying the partner of our choice and criminalises our partners and children for associating with us and living off our earnings.

The labelling of us by social services and courts as unfit parents and the removal of our children, simply because we provide sexual services, is unjustifiable and unacceptable. Such stigmatisation removes our ability to seek support and assistance if we need it in relation to parenting or abusive relationships for fear of losing our children.

We demand an end to such discrimination.

Media and education
Our voices and experiences are often manipulated by the media and we are seldom given the right to reply and our complaints are dismissed.

The portrayal of sex workers in the mass media all too often perpetuates the stereotypical image of sex workers as unworthy, victims and/or a threat to moral, public and social order. In particular the xenophobic portrayal of migrant sex workers adds an additional level of stigma and increases their vulnerability. Such portrayals of sex workers give legitimacy to those within our society who seek to harm us and violate our rights.

Alongside the misleading images of sex workers, our clients are represented in the media as being violent, perverted or psycologically disturbed. Paying for sexual services is not an intrinsically violent or problematic behaviour. Such stereotyping silences discussion about the reality of the sex industry – it perpetuates our isolation and obscures the actual violent and problematic behaviour of a small but significant number of clients.

Prejudice and discrimination against sex workers runs throughout our society. To overcome this we require our governments to recognise the actual harm that is being done to us, and the value of our work, and support us and our clients in educating and informing not only those in public authorities but also the general public to enable us to participate fully in our society.

Combatting Violence against sex workers
Sex workers experience disproportionate levels of violence and crime. The stigmatisation of sex workers has led to society and public authorities condoning violence and crime against us because it is seen as inherent to our work.

We demand that our governments recognise that violence against sex workers is a crime, whether it be perpetrated by our clients, our managers, our partners, local residents or members of the public authorities.

We require our governments to publicly condemn those who perpetrate actual violence against us.

We demand our governments take action in combating the actual violence we experience, rather than the perceived violence of prostitution put forward by abolitionists who are seeking to eradicate all forms of sex work.

– Time and resources now spent arresting and prosecuting sex workers and non-violent  clients should be redirected towards dealing with rape and other violent crimes against us.

– Mechanisms must be developed to encourage and support sex workers in reporting crimes, including early warning systems amongst sex workers themselves about potentially violent clients.

Health and well being
No-one, least of all sex workers, denies there are health risks attached to sex work, however, it is a myth that we are ‘dirty’ or ‘unclean’. In reality we are more knowledgeable about our sexual health and practice safe sex more than the general populace and we act as sexual health educators for our clients.

We call for our role within society as a valuable resource for sexual well being and health promotion to be recognised.

Stigma remains a barrier to health care for sex workers. Prejudice and discrimination occur within healthcare settings where sex workers experience degrading and humiliating treatment from some health care workers.

We demand that all health care workers treat us with respect and dignity and that our complaints of discriminatory treatment are taken seriously.

In furtherance of the health and well-being of all sex workers we demand our governments provide:
– access to health services for all migrant sex workers
– access to needle exchange and drug treatment options for dependent drug users
– access to treatment options for all people living with HIV, without which many may die unnecessarily.
– access to transitional treatment options for transgender persons

Registration and mandatory testing
Registration and mandatory testing of sex workers has no preventative value, particularly while there is no requirement for clients to be tested. Where mandatory testing still exists one of the consequences is that clients assume sex workers are ‘healthy’ and resist the need to use condoms as they do not see themselves as a threat to the sex worker.

Registration and mandatory sexual health and HIV testing are a violation of sex workers human rights and reinforce the stigmatisation of sex workers as a threat to public health and promotes the stereotypical view that only they can transmit infections to clients.

We demand an end to registration and mandatory testing.

Entitlement to travel, migration, asylum
The lack of possibilities to migrate put our integrity and health in danger. We demand that sex workers be free to travel within and across countries and to migrate, without discrimination based on our work.

We demand the right to asylum for sex workers who are subjected to state and/or community violence on the basis of selling sexual services

We demand the right to asylum for anyone denied human rights on the basis of a “crime of status,” be it sex work, health status, gender or sexual orientation.
OUR LABOUR

Our bodies and minds are an individual economic resource for many people in many different forms. All forms of sex work are equally valid, including dancing, stripping, street or indoor prostitution, escorting, phone sex or performing in pornography.

For some remunerated sex remains part of their private sphere, as such they operate out side the labour market.

For many others sex becomes work, while some work independently, others work collectively and many are ‘employed’ by third parties. For them it is an income generating activity and must be recognised as labour.

Alienation, exploitation, abuse and coercion do exist in the sex industry, as in any other industry sector, but it does not define us or our industry.  However limits are placed when the labour within an industry is formally recognised, accepted by society at large and supported by trade unions. When labour rights are extended it enables workers to use labour regulations to report abuses and organise against unacceptable working conditions and excessive exploitation.

The lack of recognition of sex work as labour and the criminalisation of activities within and around the sex industry results in sex workers being treated like criminals, even if they do not break any laws. Such treatments alienate us from the rest of society and reduce our ability to control our work and our lives. It creates greater possibilities for uncontrolled exploitation, abuse and coercion – unacceptable working hours, unsanitary working conditions, unfair division of income and unreasonable restrictions on freedom of movement – certain groups of sex workers such as migrants are disproportionately affected by unacceptable working conditions.

We demand the recognition of our right to the protection of legislation that ensures just and favourable conditions of work, remuneration and protection against unemployment.

We demand that sex work is recognised as gainful employment, enabling migrants to apply for work and residence permits and that both documented and undocumented migrants be entitled to full labour rights.

We demand the creation of a European Commission Ombudsman to oversee national legislation on the sex industry.  This can be a newly created post or be made part of an existing role.

Professional and personal development

We assert our right to join and form unions.

We as sex workers require the same possibilities for professional development as other workers. We demand the right to be able to develop vocational training and advice services, including support to establish our own business and work independently.

We assert our right to travel and work in other countries. Access to information about working in the sex industry and its different sectors should be available.

We demand that foreign education and qualification be recognised appropriately.

We demand that anti-discrimination legislation is applied both within the sex industry and for sex workers seeking alternative employment given the specific difficulties sex workers face as a consequence of stigma.

We call for support to be provided to sex workers who wish to further their education or look for alternative employment.

Taxes and welfare
We acknowledge every citizens obligation to financially support the society in which they live.  However, when sex workers do not receive the same benefits as other citizens and while our right to equal protection of the law is denied, some sex workers do not feel this obligation.

We demand that we have access to social insurance which gives the right to unemployment and sickness benefits, pensions and health care.

Sex workers should pay regular taxes on the same basis as other employees and independent contractors and should receive the same benefits. Taxation schemes should not be used as a means of registering sex workers and issues related to stigma and confidentiality must be prioritised.

Information on taxes must be accessible and easy to understand, and provided in many languages for migrant workers. Tax collection schemes should be transparent and easily understood for workers to avoid exploitation and abuse by employers.

The purchase of appropriate goods and services, including health services, where paid for, should be considered tax deductible.

Health and safety at work
Our bodies are our business. In order to maintain our health we require free or affordable safe sex products and access to health services.

We demand our governments prohibit the confiscation of condoms and other safe sex products from sex workers and sex work establishments.

We demand our governments provide free or affordable access to sexual health care for all sex workers, including vaccinations for preventable diseases.

We demand the health care needs of sex workers be included in all health insurance schemes and that sick pay be available for work related illness as with other occupations.

Violence within any workplace is a health and safety issue. Our employers have an obligation to protect us and to take action against those who violate our right to be safe within our work.

We demand that our governments take our health and safety seriously and promote safe working environments in which violence and abuse will not be tolerated. To this end we urge governments to establish emergency telephone advice lines through which sex workers can seek advice and report abuses anonymously.

Working conditions
The fact that sex becomes work does not remove our right to have control over who we have sex with or the sexual services we provide or the condition under which we provide those services.

We demand the right to engage in sex work without coercion, to move within the sex industry and to leave it if we choose.

We demand the right to say no to any client or any service requested. Managers must not be allowed to determine the services we provide or the conditions under which we provide them – whether we are employees or ‘self-employed’.

We demand the right to fair conditions of work – such as entitlement to the minimum wage, breaks, minimum rest periods and annual leave. Such conditions should also apply to those who are nominally ‘self-employed’ within a collective workplace.

We demand an end to unacceptable practices such as requiring sex workers to consume alcohol and/or drugs at work, to pay excessive costs for food, drink, services and clothing in the workplace.

We demand that health and safety be prioritised in our workplaces and that for those who work independently in public places their health and safety also be protected.

We demand that employers comply with data protection legislation and that our personal details are treated confidentially and that any abuse of our personal details be taken seriously by the authorities.

Legislation regulating working hours and conditions is complex, it is important that clear and accurate information be provided to sex workers and displayed within workplaces about their rights, such information must be provided in many different languages to ensure that all migrants have access to this information.

To improve our working conditions it is important that we have opportunities to self organise and advocate for our rights. We call upon trade unions to support us in our self organisation and in our struggle for fair working conditions.

We call for the establishment of designated areas for street prostitution, in consultation and agreement with sex workers, to enable those who work in public places to do so safely, without compromising an individual’s choice to work wherever they choose; such areas will enable us to work collectively and facilitate appropriate services, while the police can ensure we are free from the interference of criminals and other undesirables.

Decriminalisation of sex work
Selling sexual services and being a sex worker is often definined in our societies as criminal, even when neither is an actual criminal offense. The hypocrisy of current legislation is that it criminalises many of the activities within the sex industry that enable us to work collectively and safely. Such legislation – which governments tell us is to protect us from exploitation – actually increases our alienation and gives greater possibilities for exploitation, abuse and coercion within our industry. It treats us as legal ‘minors’ as though we are unable to make informed decisions.

We demand an end to legislation that criminalises us, those we work with and for, organisers and managers who follow good practice, our clients and our families.

We demand an end to legislation that denies our freedom of association, and restricts our ability to self organise.

We demand an end to legislation that denies our right to freedom of movement within and between countries

We demand the right to be able to work individually or collectively; as either independent workers or as employees with the full protection of labour rights.

We demand the right to be able to rent premises from which to work, to advertise our services and to pay those who carry out services for us.

We demand the right to use our earnings in any way we choose.  We demand the right to be able use our earnings to support our family and loved ones.

We demand that sex work businesses be regulated by standard business codes, under such codes businesses would be registered not sex workers.

We demand the right to spend time in public places and support the call for designated public areas for street sex work, in consultation and agreement with sex workers, whilst not removing an individual’s right to work wherever they choose

We defend the right of non-violent and non-abusive clients to purchase sexual services.

In order to make sex work safe for all we demand that criminal laws be enforced against fraud, coercion, child sexual abuse, child labour, violence, rape and murder within the sex industry.
(Pictures: http://www.espacep.be/)

A Foole’s Rules to Live by from Satchel Paige, Michael Caine, Groucho & Me

Satchel_Paige

groucho_2363267kMichael's FistsGet the money up front

Don’t ever be too full for dessert

People with happy pets live longer

The only way around is through

Never underestimate the power of a great apology

Trust in a kind universe, but hide your valuables in a very safe place

Bitter failure, brutal rejection, and relentless misery are fantastic fertilizer for comedy, and laughter is the shortest distance between two people

Listening is easier to do with your mouth shut

Learning the rules is the best to understand how to break them and get away with it

Don’t keep swinging when a fight’s all over

Age is a question of mind over matter.  If you don’t mind, it don’t matter

Work like you don’t need the money, love like you’ve never been hurt, dance like nobody’s watching

Sincerity is the most important thing in life, and once you’ve learned to fake that, you’ve got it made

The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about

Fool me once, I’m an idiot, fool me twice I’m twice as big an idiot

The bigger they are, the harder they can hit you

Killing time turns you into the living dead

Outside of a dog a book is man’s best.  Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read

Don’t mistake a short memory for a clear conscience

Be like a duck.  Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath

If you think that something small cannot make a difference, try going to sleep with a hungry mosquito in the room

A human without passion is like apple pie without the apples

Never make a decision when you’re angry, or shop for food when you’re hungry

A friend is someone who tells you when you’ve got a piece of stray food on your lip

You can’t stop the birds of sorrow from flying over your head, but you can stop them from building nests in your hair

People are like teabags… you never know how strong they are until you drop them in hot water

If it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger.  If you haven’t worn it in a year, throw it away

Use your body for more than carrying your brain around

When you surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are, you prove you are smarter than they are

Never trust a dog to watch your food, and never try to baptize a cat

One cannot change the past, but one can ruin the present by living in the future

People are divided into three classes: those that are immovable, those that are movable, and those that move

One good father is worth more than 100 star athletes

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of preachers

Never spit when you’re on a roller coaster

Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups

Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things

Your character is your destiny, and your refrigerator is not the place for science projects

Never interrupt when you are being flattered

In disagreements with loved ones, deal with the current situation, rather than everything that’s wrong with everyone except you

Read between the lines, think outside the box, and be nice to old people, cuz with a little luck you may be one some day

Memorize your favorite poem

Don’t judge people by their relatives

When you lose, don’t lose the lesson, and when you win, be nice to the loser learning the lesson, cuz sooner or later that loser will be you.

Giving and receiving love makes humans happy, therefore it’s the hardest thing to do

It’s very important to smell good

The wise person is the one who knows how little they know – when I finally realized I didn’t know anything people started telling me how smart I was

Drugs, Litquake & the Edinburgh Castle

I just got home from the Litquake Writers on Drugs show, the place was packed, jacked and wacked, 200 litquakin’ loons crammed into the Edinburgh Castle, where the ghost of Irvine Welch pukes in the bathroom, and oh man the joint jumped, rumbled, rattled and rolled, 9.8 on the Richter Scale.  Alan Black the masterful master of ceremonies, was the very model of Scottish hospitality, all nettles and good cheer and the blackest of humor, invoking the dead who’d perished in the Castle from overindulgence and intemperence.  What a wag that Alan is, if you’ve never met him, do yourself a favor, introduce yourself at the Caslte and have a blather, he is a true Olde School wit.  BTW, Litquke was actually conceived at the Castle, in the front room, i’m not sure what bodily fluids were exchanged but the fetus was made and life began there.  From such humble beginnings, Litquake has become such a huge amazing phenomenon.   I was very happy to be at the Castle for Drug Night.
 

Before the show I was hanging out all alone, rehearsing, in the upstairs back room where they normally have readings, when I met another of the evening”s performers, Ed Rosenthal, one of America’s most famous marijuana advocates and a writer and publsiher.  He asked me if this was the place to smoke weed.  I said I thought this was as good a place as any.  He kindly asked me if I would like to join him.  I thanked him, and explained that I can’t perform as well when I’m stoned, it throws me off my game.  Funny to be performing a drug story in a night full of drug stories, and not be able to be on drugs because it would make my performance suffer.  At one time in my life I would have said yes, got stoned, and agonized about it, got all FREAKED OUT, and been all tight and weird and destroy my own self, then fall deep into a funk and go engage in some Behavior, as my AA friends call it, that stuff you do to destroy yourself.  I was happy to have evolved enough to recognize what was in my own best instance, and to act accordingly. That made me happy. But when Ed pulled out his pipe and happily lit up, getting quite lit up in the process, I was suddenyl sad.  Imagine how great Ed Rosenthal’s weed must be.  Later when he went out to perform he confessed in a tiedied stoner voice that he didn’t really remember anything of his life up to about a week ago.  He got a big laugh.  I was struck by how he had evolved enough to make comedy out of his life. And I thought, ahhhh, yes, that’s why I moved to San Francisco.  Ed did a mad rant about how insane it is that the government is sinking all this time and money into  fighting the war on drugs when so much else is mucked up in the world, and thanked San Franciscans for helping him make legal history in fighting the evil bastards of the Dark Side. Jayson Galloway, Professor of English author of Viagra Fiend, deconstructed his six favorite drugs, from acid (worst) to ecstacy (favorite), elborating on the pluses and minuses of each.  Favorite line: Cocaine is a dillatante drug.  Quite right.  Fascinating that meth (#4 on his list I believe) got booed.  Meth apparently is no longer sexy.  Unless you’re on it.  Before you crash and just want MORE METH.  R.U. Serius, looking deliciously Hobbitty and puckish, read a hysterical story about growing up and doing drugs.  Favorite scene: He’s listening to some local dude talk about eating some girl out, and he has no idea what that means, so he assumes it’s about cannibalism and wonders why there were no arrests afterwards. Favorite line: Something he learned that has stayed with him the entire rest of his life: When you’re in a group experimenting with drugs, NEVER GO FIRST.

Then came the break, and I was disturbingly nervous as I did my warm-ups and stretches.  They’re going to hate me.  I could see it so clearly.  Kept flashing on this time I was performing in a nightclub in Edinburgh and they turned on me, I was so bad, I sucked so hard, I bombed, I died, I crashed and burned.  It kept recurring, that flashback of the sick cold failure clamming all over me, wrapping its icy fingers around my neck with an ever-tightening chokehold.  I fought the image as best I could, using Jedi mind control techniques: I countered the failure flashbacks with memories of when I had fun, when I flowed sweet and easy.  At the Assembly Room at the Fringe Festival.  Last year at Litquake when Furlinghetti opened (yeah right!)for me.  Doing a sketch for HBO where I was a leach lover. Emceeing at Chippendales one Saturday night when I was whipping the Ladies into a frenzied froth.  Every time I did, the failure flashback faded.  Still, it was exhausting.

So after the break, the music finally gets turned off, and Alan makes the crowd shut up.  He’s like a great dominatrix, he just demands respect.  So naturally he gets it.  They shut up.  He’s giving me a great intro, and I take a moment to look out at the crowd, all baited with anticipation, so much human energy waiting to have fun, and I have a profound sense of well being, like where in the world would I rather be? 200 humans just waiting be to entertainment, desperatley wanting to be entertained, and I didn’t have to lift a finger to get them there. I had a deep feeling of gratitude to the universe, so lucky to be there in the now of that moment, and I felt a sense of accomplishment, like I worked so hard to get there, the years of stand-up and the years of writing and writing of writing, and the hours and hours I spent working on this story I was about to read,the revising, the re-writing, the tinkering, the buffing the polishing, it all lead me there.  As I looked at the crowd, all those faces, eyes shining, souls hungy for something to wrap themselves around, to transport them, make them laugh and feel and be alive with all these other humans, I felt like part of a long line of history, of people gathering to share their stories, to rejoice in the beauty and terror of being alive on the planet with all the other humans.

I was gonna do some sort of introductory remarks, some witty chitchatty small talk, but feeling the crowd, I sensed that I should just dive right into the telling of the story.  It felt like they wanted to be told a story, so I gave it to them.  Right from the very beginning I could feel the room come with me.  It’s hard to describe how you know that, you can’t quantify or measure it, but my God you can feel it.  When a crowd is bored or resistant, or turned off, it’s like when a date goes bad.  You can just feel it, and if you’re not careful you panic and work harder to make it better, only that just makes it worse.  But when you feel them with you, that crowd, it’s electric, and you feel you can do no wrong.  So, at the beginning I was getting laughs from lines that I never got laughs on before in that story, which is always a great sign, but not abnormal, when you have a large jacked up crowd crammed into a small intimate space.  But then when I came to the part in the story where a character makes an impassioned plea for everyone to all take acid together before the big hockey game against the hoity toits at Andover, I really let loose, and shouted out the lines with all my mojo flowing, amd the crowd roared eruptingly, man what a krazee rush that was.  The best drug of all, I thought, this is the best drug of all, being up here and getting all that laugh love and riotous crowd happiness, riding through my veins finer than the finest China White.  I’m getting goose bumpies just stting here typing this, it was so overwhelmingly purely joyful.  Addictive? Perhaps.  Hangover? Never.

So then I got to the part where we’re on the bus going to the game, as everybody waits for the acid to kick in, and in the story it gets quiet. Scary quiet.  I hadn’t planned to, but I lowered my voice to a whisper, and then just stopped talking to let it sink in. Pindrop eery silence fell night over the room.  In a club so crowded that kind of silence is stunning, and for me, pure gold, mana from heaven, mother’s milk, possibly better than an orgasm. No, better than an orgasm for sure, cuz you can have an orgasm in your room all alone.  It takes 200 other humans to create this spooky silence, where no one is breathing, and even the machines seem to be holding their breath.  Again I hadn’t planned this, but I just stopped talking.  Let it sit there and sink in.  Early in my career I could never have done that.  You have to have absolute trust and faith to stop talking like that.  To give the moment its full due takes a kind of blind faith.  But I felt it.  And I just let it be.  Trusted myself and my instincts.  Trusted the crowd.  Trusted the story.  It was like a comedy time bomb.  After a few stunned seconds of stunning silence, the reality of the moment in the story, where everyone is waiting to feel the acid come on, sinks in to the audience there in that room.  And they get it.  They are one with me and I with them, and that is when I feel God in that moment of union and communion transcendent and holy in the very best sense of the word. I scanned the room with wide eyes, feeling that feeling from the story fully and truly, of waiting to feel the acid and watching the faces of my teamamtes to see if they were feeling it too.  And the more I looked, the more they laughed.  It’s just the coolest thing to get that huge a laugh from NOT saying anything.  This is when Einstein is revealed to be a genius.  Time for me becomes palpably relative.  This moment just keeps going on and on and on, the laughter washing over my shores all warm and wet and tall and tan and young and lovely.  When I die and my life flashes before my eyes, I hope this is one of the moments I relive.  As the laughter faded, I dove right back, and I felt myself riding that crowd like a dragon I trained and made my own, flying through the air, with the greatest of ease, swooping and diving, spitting fire at will.  It was just so easy.  Effortless ecstacy. The crescendo happened right where it should, we all climaxed together just like it’s supposed to be. To the golden sounds of the crowd giving it up, I floated off the stage and up the stairs, the high on all the love I’m getting.

The rest of the show was a blur to me, but Kate Braverman, transplendent and noirish in black, and Michelle Tea were amazing.  Michelle read from Rent Girl. I was reminded again what a great reader and writer she is, which is rarer than hen’s teeth, (as my poor dead mom used to say) and she’s so styly to boot.

As we were leaving the club Arielle turned to me and said, “Boy you coulda gotta lotta pussy tonight.”  I smiled at her and said, “Honey, I’ve got all the pussy I want right here with me. ” And I gave her a big wet sexy kiss.  I guess we’re just a coupla knuckleheaded romantics.  The one sad note of the evening was that I invited a writer who I’m working with to come and talk and network.  She’s got, irony rearing its fat head, a terrible drug problem.  She showed up wacked out of her skull.  Didn’t even stay to watch my part of the show, never mind let me introduce her around afterwards.  She called my cel phone while I was actually on stage.  In her message she said she had a headache.  Headache, my eye.  The fact that she had to self-medicate herself to the point of stupification made my heart sink like a sad loadstone.  She couldn’t do what was in her own best interest.  And she’s such a talented writer.  I want so much to help her, but then I wonder why should I bother if she can’t show up.  It’s not enough to be talented and to to want it.  You gotta show up.  It’s nearly 4am now and I should be sleepy but I’m still so high and wired from my performance.  I guess I’ll go read Crime and Punishment.  I started it about a week ago, and man, that bastard can really write.  Thanks San Francisco, you made my night.

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