Turning point…

I have had SUCH A HARDDDDDDDD weeek.  I thought that my trial ended this week instead of last week, and every morning after my accident I kept walking around my apartment going,”Wait a second?  Where’s my CAR??” in shock, as if I hadn’t remembered that it had just been in a wreck and that it was going to probably be at a body shop for at least a week.  

When I got into the accident, I was NOT even stoned.  I have had the displeasure of being in many many car accidents both my fault and not my fault and I have walked away mostly * unhurt each time. (If there is some force watching me, seriously, it is the one that watches me DRIVE!  not park, because I get $1000s of dollars in parking tickets every year)  I have not been medically insured since I graduated from either undergrad or grad.  I have not needed even an ambulance ride at any of the accidents.   Well, I’ve turned them down, because us uninsured poor folk often have to make choices between how much are we going to bleed to death and how much is this shit going to cost me and will I live to see the bill?  It is really FUCKED UP, our healthcare system, as we know.  

The accident was at most 50% my fault.  I don’t know.  Insurance will decide but I feel he was speeding and came out of nowhere.  I am just thanking my lucky stars that my passenger did not get hurt.  There was one time I was driving a really large rental van with like 15 high school students to Gay Prom.   We hit a bump and it felt like the fucking axel just broke!  I was SO scared but just hiding it so the kids wouldn’t freak out.  But I felt like we could have ALL been dead, but made it.  Another Amen.  I don’t know what happened but the problem fixed itself.  

So I’ve been very depressed but pretty functional (on some days, barely).  I have been overworking myself with running my organization, and THAT is how I got into an accident.  Plus, my passenger was a heavyset woman with big hair and I didn’t have as much view as I normally would have…but anyway.

I’ve been dazed and confused all week whenever possible.  Prince Valium serenades at night, bong hit like a mother’s nipple to ease anxiety..oxycodon ( which made me SO DOPE SICK, from too much (ONE TINY PILL) ! This shit is STRONG.  So it took a day to recover from that fiasco..I could neeeeeevvvvveeerrrr be a junkie where if you are not high you are sick as a dog.  No way.  But in the same ways that some of the most wrecked and trashed junkie drug addicts with swells and boils and absesses and their sunken eyes look at the distance.  EVERYONE finds themselves where they are supposed to be, I think and it is up to us to pull ourselves out of it again and again and again.  Life runs in patterns and in cycles.  People are comfortable with cycles and patterns, and they sometimes don’t even notice that they are repeating them.  And sometimes we repeat them for years and never get out of them alive..  I know it is not my fate to be that trashed street prostitute, or to be addicted to any substance thank god, but I DEFINITELY SELF MEDICATE WHEN TIMES ARE TOUGH.  It’s not even a conscious decision.  I do it instinctively.  I AM without a doubt a lifetime medical marijuana patient.  It is the stability in my crazy life.  Without it it would be worlds worse for everyone, but sometimes it, even is just not strong enough..

I am not the scabie junkie whore on the outside, but my fate of late is to find her  and support her.  But I feel JUST as stuck as she is, just a different story, a different drug: the survival and prosperity binges that come with the work instead of heroin drug binges)…” I know that it has been my fate to be in the sex industry for over ten years because I have been seeking to replay power struggles that i have and continue to have with men, male privilege and power, white privilege and power, sexism, sexual violence and patriarchy.  I have replayed 1000s of possible scenarios involving confrontation, body, boundaries and safety, most of which I have triumphed over and a few notable ones in which I have lost.   So the healing is starting to be cancelled out by the re-traumatization of what happens in the unpredictable world of working “the streets.”  ( I call my work the streets, craigslist is the streets, because the way we hustle, the danger level is equal to streetwork…)

The last 10 years  has been an AMAZING AND WORTHWHILE JOURNEY.  it has healed me and made me confident with men in ways that nothing other than sex work could.    I am not ending my sex work career. (Nooooo)  I think once you’ve done it, it’s always in you if the right offer comes along.  But I just know when I have gotten to the end of a certain chapter…It’s going to be hard, like i said, because I may end up being unable, like many a sex worker to quit cold turkey because there are not other immediate finnancial options.  But I’m going to try.  At least for 2 weeks.  Just so I can get my head back on straight….

I am tired of being in the same repeat movie over and over and over.  This is exactly how and when I knew that the end of my stripping career was coming.  I am now absolutely SICK officially of being an agency escort, I mean, I was before, but more so than ever before…and I HAVE TO listen to that…It has at times felt like a deep, sobbing sadness, full of fear and post traumatic stress disorder  and I still have to work.  Because it is work….and if I don’t work, I can’t eat, drive, pay my rent, more…This is the pain of prostitution that no one in the movement wants to talk too much about because the anti-prostitution activists will misrepresent our true emotions and highlight only that one quote.  

But I know of no other way that is instantly gratifying and will solve immediate problems and needs.  But I NEED to get out of AGENCY escort work.  It is not only endangering my life, it is ruining the sex work industry and making clients hate sex workers that rip them off and don’t do what they expected or promised for exhorbitant amounts of money.  

On Monday, I am going to inquire about substitute teaching again.  NOT HIGH SCHOOL.  Just little kids.  No correcting papers, not lesson planning.  Painting and drawing and running around the school yard.  Since all my beautiful nieces and nephews (I have 5 of them, all 8 and under) are sooo far away I cannot get my fill of the joy that I have with being a big kid but being an adult barely with younger kids.  (And teenagers, for that matter).  Children have healing qualities to them.  That’s why when people are down and out they have some kids.  But then when they are your kids their healing qualities are mixed with all the other stuff which you may not want but are stuck with.

So, I am going to try to substitute K-6 in LA again, stepping into a primary classroom for the first time in like 5 years.  TEaching at Cal State LA has helped me to see my future as a college teacher.  I recently got another paid invitation to speak at the University of Buffalo September 24th.  That was the impetus for me to start getting my shit together and touring colleges getting paid.  BUT….I feel like EVERY YEAR I am saying that.  And every year I keep thinking that sex work is the answer because that’s how I can afford to do all the Mariko Passion shit, but its not even giving me the money that I need to record and produce the songs for my demo or even pay for fucking piano accompaniment at $40/hr…

But the truth of the matter is that I have never known real money UNTIL I became a sex worker.  If I was teaching, I would still be making $2300 a month after taxes, working 60+ hrs a week.  I still work the same amount, but my escorting pays for the salary that I don’t get for running SWOP.  All the other “choices” that people say that I have are half the money that you usually make from sex work.   I often don’t even know how I could survive at the level that I do without using the survival method I have used for the last 10 years.  I WON’T let myself starve, I will try my hardest to NEVER have to live with roomates again, or below my current living standards, which really are not that lavish, knowing I have the skills to pay the bills.  Most women who have been broke or homeless would agree.  Sex work is economic empowerment for so many.  From girls migrating from Northern Thai villages to work in bars in Bangkok, who travel from the Philipinies to Japan, to me when I was kicked out my house for having a tattoo, to many other stories in which cases we SHOULD have perished, we triumphed in high heels and a g string and boa, no less.  Even though I have once brought home a 5 digit pile of CASH from a client all at once, I am still barely middle class.  No home, no foreclosure worries, no health insurance, no assets, huge debt, bad credit.  I have no idea HOW to be that home owner that’s fretting right now even? 

 But, If I knew someone who would PAY ME, EMPLOY ME for being EVERYTHING THAT I FEEL THAT I AM AND WANT TO BE AT THE MOMENT then i could QUIT sex work forever.  But no one even comes close.  Singing and Art.  When I get paid to do creative work, I am at one of my highest highs.  However, when I get paid a shit ton of money for doing sex work that doesn’t involve actually having too much sex I am also at another one of my highest highs.  Go figure out the connection and email me.

I practically BEGGED my sugar daddy for a stable job with his company, or a contract job doing stuff that I already have experience in, but no, he would rather throw money and gifts at me and keep me like a muse who has no real use except to pleasure him.  You are one of the most intelligent women I know, he would say, [but all you can ever be to  me is my escort].  This is what I know when I walk into these mansions in the HOllywood hills, with their koi swimming in waterfalls, with their $5000 chairs around a dining table, high rise sky lofts in downtown Miami or LA.  Will it EVER be ME inviting some hot escort to my place for an hour in these lavish surroundings??  Will it ALWAYS be the other way around?  Is THIS the BEST that I will be able to get?

I think being a famous something in the art or music industry is the only thing that will satisfy me…Then I could make it to that TMZ Hollywood level: where everyone is a hooker but no one admits it openly and the clientele is not hourly but they are your “friends.”

The anti-prostitution-ists are always asking us,”If you could ANYTHING else would you still be doing sex work?” and it’s so hard to reply to it because you know that there little brains don’t comprehend complex ideas and everything that I have done with and in my sex work is a complex continuum.  Well, if I could be a world touring recording artist and live off my music and art alone then of COURSE, dumb shit, selling pussy and “my time”  is supposed to only be a stepping stone.  shit.  Stripping was a stepping stone to escorting, and I would never consider stripping again.  I never wanted to consider teaching again, not in high school or elementary.  But I think it is the furthest most opposite from what I am doing now that that would be good for me to heal.  Working with kids is wayy more immediately gratifying than working swop stuff…Doing sex worker activism in LA is like I have written, being Mariko Passion of Christ…bleeding and dragging myself through the streets of LA.

Ha, I thought the thirties were supposed to be easier..  And how I totally thought that I kneeeewwww the BIG ANSWER at 30.  Life was going to be smooooth form 30 on, I thought.  Well, it never ends or becomes smooth for too too long, just to keep you dancing.  But I thnk that we do stuff to make it that way.  And I am a big fan of trying to affect your path with radical changes.  (I once cut off all my long hair to QUIT sex work forever in a ritual!  I was going to be a butch dyke and be a car sales MAN instead of be a sex worker…that just made me MORE OF A WHORE!!)..But I am burnt the FUCK OUT.  And If I don’t change paths soon, I am going to self destruct…!!!

there is a writing fellowship that I am going to apply for soon.  I really want it.  It would give me a part time income and I would be writing, which as you, who have become fans of my reading know that I LOVE to write.  I have to write.   I have always been a prolific writer and fast typer…but when I was 26 I tried to exit out of the sex industry and I sent 100s of resumes to different companies and got NOTHING.  That was hard times, kind of like these man, but I really thought that those would be over!!  Dammit!

well, I am waiting for my prince to do his magic so I can lay down next to my awesome loving amazing boyfriend..(we were fighting all day, but finally we’re good again…)