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What’s It Like To Be A Street Prostitute?
I was high as a kite when I got in the car and now I’m higher still. Every time things go right and you get a normal guy, not a nut, a cop, a non-payer, it feels like the world is your stage. Money, control, drugs, dudes, drama, excitement, attention, sex, nightlife “love,” glamor — I slam!
The dude is high too. Like me, he’s relieved he didn’t get robbed or stabbed or attacked by unseen accomplices, what used to be called the Murphy. Sure his wallet is lighter and he risked arrest and having his car impounded. But he got away with it — and doesn’t even feel like he cheated on his wife since it was just oral sex.
I do this for drugs but it’s also what I do when I’m on drugs. You couldn’t do it straight because you’d think about the dangers, disgrace, your parents and your teachers. Plus when you’re high getting in cars is fun! You’re dressed up, people “like” you and you’re making a huge hourly wage. You even wonder, in your drug haze, why all women don’t do this.
I look good. I may be hooked on meth, alcohol and cigarettes, I may not have eaten a nutritious meal for a year, I may not have been to a doctor or a dentist for five years, but the long legs with high heels, the emaciated torso and the big hair is stopping traffic. The straight women give me hate looks.
“Your husband will be late for dinner,” I want to say to them but I never have. The worst I’ve done is on a Saturday night when the dates come down my street, I’ll say “hi” to a cute dude I don’t know just to watch Muffy or Mindy or whoever the hell is on his arm lose it and ask him how he knows me. “Honest, I’ve never met her,” he insists.
One time another woman and I were waiting for the bus and I began to worry she thought I was working when I was legit and really getting on the bus. What a shock when the bus came and SHE didn’t get on because SHE was working. Who knew?
How does a nice girl turn out? A broken family and drug habit help but essentially the customers turn you out. You’re walking around the city with no job and no money and monkey on your back and the cars start stopping and pulling to the curb like an X-rated runway. They know your profession before you do.
My first exchange happened on a Saturday night when a guy who noted my high leather boots followed me into the vestibule of my apartment, crouched down and began licking my boot. In less than a minute he handed me money and left. I barely saw his face. The only words we exchanged were the “thank you” he said. I didn’t feel repulsed, sullied or offended– I felt exhilarated. Where are more of these guys? When he drove by in a car a few days later, we both knew the drill.
One of the first cars that stopped for me was a foreigner who barely spoke English. I told him what I cost and he wanted to bargain. I thought, I’ve sunk as low as a woman can sink and you want to bargain? It was one of the few times I got out. Another time, a truck driver tried to bargain with me in a Travel Lodge parking lot. This time I also walked away but he came running after me and agreed to my price.
The guy at the appliance store was one of my first meets. He is physically repulsive — maybe 300 pounds — and mentally repulsive. (“When you and me gon hook up” seems his only line.) But he’s set me up with several repeat customers — I have to do him and his brother in perpetuity — and more importantly he gives me drugs. The first time I got in his car he took me into the basement of his store which was such a dungeon I would have been praying to God if I believed in him. The fear of chainsaws and meat hooks actually cut through my meth high for a minute.
These johns all seem to know each other and more importantly they know other men. Many set up “trees” where they bring me their friends who pay full price while they get a discount or free. Not only is sharing a sex op a “boy thing,” most men have a little pimp in them and want to exploit “johns.”
One guy who drives a Jaguar knows a pharmacist who staged a robbery and has a lot of merch. He even gives the guys he sends me merch to give me. He had polio as a kid and is very short. He is not married. We talk a little; I don’t dislike him. He says he would marry me but someone like me would never stay with one man. He was shot in the face in a holdup recently and his jaw has been reconstructed. It is very odorific and makes sex unpleasant.
Another of my regulars owns a hardware store where we sometimes do it. He pays me every week whether or not he sees me and actually calls it my “allowance.” It is hard to square his fatherly manner with his lewd lifestyle. Another girl he sees sends me her rejects — a group of fat men who can’t ejaculate because of the drugs they are on. She thinks she’s dissing me but I need the money.
Another of my regulars is a big hedge fund trader. I hear he is rich but he pays no more than anyone else. In fact he pays less; he insists on meeting in a hotel room near financial row and deducts the room from my pay. He is also fat. I sometimes wonder what would happen if these fats guy expired while they were with me.
Mr. Hedge Fund has other rich friends including one who actually drops my cash on the floor and orders trades on the phone while I work on him. These guys could never be Sugar Daddies because I hate them. They invite me to meals (right–knowing their plans for my mouth) and on their yachts like I buy their lifestyle if I could just get past this selling sex thing. In fact one guy who pushed the escort thing and forced me to socialize with his friends in a bar crawl that lasted all night, I robbed him when he passed out in a motel. I left the door open so he would think the staff did it.
I also won’t do men in groups because they turn into rapes. You can control a one-on-one situation but you can’t stag parties and drunks. Once at a motel on the edge of town with no phone or switchboard because the office closed down, a whole group of men who knew I was in there broke in and mauled me. I had two choices: do it or do it and get beat up. It was terrifying and humiliating. When you’re outside the law, you can’t go to the police and say “I wasn’t paid.” Your lifestyle is your consent. The guy who set me up in the motel, told me later he went and shot out the windshields of the guys who did it. All I could think was, you knew the people who did this?
– Anonymous
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What’s it like to live in Venezuala
I don’t know about the rest of the country but in my state the long lines are out of control. The government implemented a system in which you are given only one day of the week to be able to buy and this is decided according to your ID number. If your ID’s last number is 1-2 you can only buy on Mondays, if it’s 3 you only buy on Tuesdays and on and on. That doesn’t make the lines any smaller but I guess it would be even worse otherwise. Until recently people used to wake up really early in the morning, usually 4 am, to go to the store and be first in line, waiting several hours until the stores are open or it’s their turn to buy. My family tells me they’ve been waiting in lines as long as 8 hours to get a bag of milk, 2 bottles of cooking oil and flour (to make arepas). Recently they banned people from making lines before stores where opened and started issuing buses with military officers taking anyone who’s outside a store before it’s open and detaining them for 24 hours. I’ve heard they make then clean the military’s establishment but I have no way of backing this up. They call the buses “Dracula’s Bus”. This hasn’t stopped people from trying to get to the stores early in the morning so what they are doing now is hiding in the bushes so the military can’t spot them until they are able to buy.
People used to buy groceries monthly or bi monthly. Now they are living day to day, buying enough food to be able to eat for that day, as opposed to the whole month or 15 days like before. This is due both to the lack of funds to buy enough groceries for a whole month and because of the food regulations which only let you take a fixed ammount of food in your allowed shopping day. The “basic goods basket”, which is the ammount of money required to buy basic goods for a month is priced at 40,000 bsf, while the minimum monthly wage is at 7000bsf. 1kg of meat, which is enough to make 1-2 meals for a family of 5 costs 1000bsf. So with minimum wage you are able to buy 7-14 meals in a month without waging in electricity, water, garbage disposal, cable, telephone, internet, school, clothing, etc.
People spend their days thinking what line are they going to be in tomorrow. You often hear “I have to go to [store] tomorrow, they are going to sell [item].” Every day, that’s all that’s in their minds. If they are driving by the city they are constantly checking lines, trying to see what item’s being sold at the moment. If they see people with bags on the street they slow down to try to see what did they buy. “What does he have in his bag?”, “Damn! Look! They got toilet paper! God Dammit!!”. They sometimes open the car’s windows to ask “Hey! Where did you buy that from!?”.
This situation has created new jobs. The so called “Bachaqueros”. People whose job is to be on a line, buy regulated items and then resell them by many times its original price. People who don’t have the time to be on a line has to give in and buy items to the bachaqueros at whatever price they ask for, making the whole business insanely profitable.
And that doesn’t even include the whole Colombian border situation. There are many many more issues happening right now but I just focused on the grocery shopping part of it since that’s what you asked for. Again, this is specifically in my state, the rest of the states can be either better or worse off than mine.
– ciberaj
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What’s it like to have your film flop at the box office?
When you work “above the line” on a movie (writer, director, actor, producer, etc.) watching it flop at the box office is devastating. I had such an experience during the opening weekend of Conan the Barbarian 3D.
A movie’s opening day is analogous to a political election night. Although I’ve never worked in politics, I remember having similar feelings of disappointment and disillusionment when my candidate lost a presidential bid, so I imagine that working as a speechwriter or a fundraiser for the losing campaign would feel about the same as working on an unsuccessful film.
One joins a movie production, the same way one might join a campaign, years before the actual release/election, and in the beginning one is filled with hope, enthusiasm and belief. I joined the Conan team, having loved the character in comic books and the stories of Robert E. Howard, filled with the same kind of raw energy and drive that one needs in politics.
Any film production, like a long grueling campaign over months and years, is filled with crisis, compromise, exhaustion, conflict, elation, and blind faith that if one just works harder, the results will turn out all right in the end. During that process whatever anger, frustration, or disagreement you have with the candidate/film you keep to yourself. Privately you may oppose various decisions, strategies, or compromises; you may learn things about the candidate that cloud your resolve and shake your confidence, but you soldier on, committed to the end. You rationalize it along the way by imagining that the struggle will be worth it when the candidate wins.
A few months before release, “tracking numbers” play the role in movies that polls play in politics. It’s easy to get caught up in this excitement, like a college volunteer handing out fliers for Howard Dean. (Months before Conan was released many close to the production believed it would open like last year’sThe Expendables.) As the release date approaches and the the tracking numbers start to fall, you start adjusting expectations, but always with a kind of desperate optimism. “I don’t believe the polls,” say the smiling candidates.
You hope that advertising and word of mouth will improve the numbers, and even as the numbers get tighter and the omens get darker, you keep telling yourself that things will turn around, that your guy will surprise the experts and pollsters. You stay optimistic. You begin selectively ignoring bad news and highlighting the good. You make the best of it. You believe.
In the days before the release, you get all sorts of enthusiastic congratulations from friends and family. Everyone seems to believe it will go well, and everyone has something positive to say, so you allow yourself to get swept up in it.
You tell yourself to just enjoy the process. That whether you succeed or fail, win or lose, it will be fine. You pretend to be Zen. You adopt detachment, and ironic humor, while secretly praying for a miracle.
The Friday night of the release is like the Tuesday night of an election. “Exit polls” are taken of people leaving the theater, and estimated box office numbers start leaking out in the afternoon, like early ballot returns. You are glued to your computer, clicking wildly over websites, chatting nonstop with peers, and calling anyone and everyone to find out what they’ve heard. Have any numbers come back yet? That’s when your stomach starts to drop.
By about 9 PM it’s clear when your “candidate” has lost by a startlingly wide margin, more than you or even the most pessimistic political observers could have predicted. With a movie its much the same: trade magazines like Variety and Hollywood Reporter call the weekend winners and losers based on projections. That’s when the reality of the loss sinks in, and you don’t sleep the rest of the night.
For the next couple of days, you walk in a daze, and your friends and family offer kind words, but mostly avoid the subject. Since you had planned (ardently believed, despite it all) that success would propel you to new appointments and opportunities, you find yourself at a loss about what to do next. It can all seem very grim.
You make light of it, of course. You joke and shrug. But the blow to your ego and reputation can’t be brushed off. Reviewers, even when they were positive, mocked Conan The Barbarian for its lack of story, lack of characterization, and lack of wit. This doesn’t speak well of the screenwriting – and any filmmaker who tells you s/he “doesn’t read reviews” just doesn’t want to admit how much they sting.
But one thought this morning has lightened my mood:
My father is a retired trumpet player. I remember, when I was a boy, watching him spend months preparing for an audition with a famous philharmonic. Trumpet positions in major orchestras only become available once every few years. Hundreds of world class players will fly in to try out for these positions from all over the world. I remember my dad coming home from this competition, one that he desperately wanted to win, one that he desperatelyneeded to win because work was so hard to come by. Out of hundreds of candidates and days of auditions and callbacks, my father came in….second.
It was devastating for him. He looked completely numb. To come that close and lose tore out his heart. But the next morning, at 6:00 AM, the same way he had done every morning since the age of 12, he did his mouthpiece drills. He did his warm ups. He practiced his usual routines, the same ones he tells his students they need to play every single day. He didn’t take the morning off. He just went on. He was and is a trumpet player and that’s what trumpet players do, come success or failure.
Less than a year later, he went on to win a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played for three decades. Good thing he kept practicing.
So with my father’s example in mind, here I sit, coffee steaming in its mug and dog asleep at my feet, starting my work for the day, revising yet another script, working out yet another pitch, thinking of the future (the next project, the next election) because I’m a screenwriter, and that’s just what screenwriters do.
On to the next campaign…
– Sean Hood
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What’s It Like To Do DMT
Drifting deeply into the visual ebb and flow of the DMT I just walked through the thin fabric of the visual fractal fantasy. It was like a gauze layer of the dream just separated and boom .. it was like walking from a dark night into a brightly lit casino in Las Vegas. I felt like I had walked behind the scenes into a series of rooms. Everything was prime color cranked up to it s fullest potential. The images were clear, crisp and vivid. many times more vivid then the early pre-room images.
There were two people a man and a women or a girl and a boy. They appeared to me like simple balloon computer generated images. As soon as I stepped in the room, they glided up to me and spoke directly to me. They kept saying welcome back and words like: the big winner, he has returned, welcome to the end and the beginning, you are The One! As I looked around the room I felt the sense of some huge celebration upon my entry to this place. Bells were ringing, lights flashing fear began to rise in me as I felt the deep change in my world. The sprites begin to lead me around the room showing me how all my life they had been preparing me for this return. I was shown dozen of experiences simultaneously in my life, that had lead up to and been clues to this moment. I was shown in a flood and a onslaught of images, thoughts, situations, raw feelings that everything had been building to this moment. That this moment had been planned.
They told me it was a gift. That I had been selected to be The One. I felt feelings of huge relief, excitement and fear in the sprites. At this moment in the experience I became afraid for my life. I felt that this gift would cost me my life. I did not want to be The One. The sprits felt this fear in me and begin to hold my hands and arms rushing me deeper into their world. I felt their fear and I begin to believe that I had stepped out of the dream, out of the drug, out of my body and mind and into this super world. I begin to believe in the transformation. As I walked deeper I could see standing in the middle of the room, in the center of this place, an object similar to an hour glass. It was slowly turning over. I became aware that this vessel, as it tipped over, transferring its contents from the small red end to the larger blue end was transforming me. I felt my humanity slip out as I was filled with this new powerful light. A light of greater perception, of clarity. It felt like returning home. It felt familiar. It felt like I was waking up from a hollow, pale dream of reality. I felt god like and omnipotent. I realized the this gift was not only a gift but equally a death sentence for my physical body. I felt like I had been chosen to receive this not out of benevolence but out of a need to release this power and perception There had to be The One, to relieve the others. There had to be The One who perceived completely. I felt like Christ at the moment of realization of godhood and the inevitable moment of his crucifixion. I also felt like all this knowledge and perception was far too large to be processed by my physical mind and that death was the obvious transition.
As this moment of realization hit me I felt the sprites smile and step back. They told me I WAS The One and this WAS real and that it would never end.
They said do you not believe….. then see.
At this moment I sat up (in the real world) and opened my eyes. This moment true panic set in. I was deeply hallucinating. The real world was being covered, transformed into a psychedelic kaleidoscope of energy. Every surface had something like movie film, one image after another lined up like film shown through an overhead projector. These were the prime images of our symbolic nature. Slowly rolling over every surface. like the sprites of the objects. I felt I was seeing time in a singularity. I felt like I was seeing the symbolic patters like a second perception of true meaning. In the real room there were two people sitting next to me. When I looked at them I felt reassured momentarily. Then they exploded into dozens of two dimensional layers of light. Looking like computer generated futurists paintings. Wafer thin halos created the shapes of my friends. Dave looked up at me and said Welcome Back causing me to panic. Because when he said welcome back I did not think it was back to reality but back into the fold of this super world I was in. Back as there chosen one or at least one amongst them. I perceived Dave and Poon as personal guides or Guardians or gatekeepers there to welcome me into this new exalted state. That moment striped me of my world, my truths leading me to believe that my hallucinations were truth. I once again had the crashing feeling of winning, of being chosen, and being forced to receive this unwanted sentence of total vision. I had this crash as I could see once again the cause and effect of my being there and the price I would have to pay. I was the Bean King and the price of my gift would be perceptual transcendence but physical death.
At this time I felt a collapsing feeling as I gave in to the experience excepting my fate. I remember thinking that the hour glass had turned a little farther and I was pouring out of this life into my new one. I said out loud I am dying. Then I lost the support of my body, my self, my existence and I began to drift.
Dave then touched my leg I remember being drawn back into my body and thinking to hell with this I am not going to die, not yet and I felt the sprites smiling around me looking at me. I felt the fear. I felt the exhilaration of my visions. I was back in the sprites room. Even though this place was vibrant and psychedelic it was within my ability to comprehend. The sprits began there pitch at me being a winner and The One. I felt they were taking me back down the hallway to open those iconic, electric vision and to my death. I then said out loud again I am dying to which Dave responded only three more minutes and you will be all right.
Three more minutes.. Three more minutes was like a life raft that I sailed out of that world. As soon as I was able to believe that in three more minutes I would be normal again and everything began to fade. I felt in control of my body and my life. Slowly I drifted out of the their world, back through the gauzy world of colors and patterns. With a little extra coaxing from my friends I was able to wake up and separate my self from that moment.
I still vibrate from the experience.
I am very grateful to have been with my friends.
– C.G.
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What is it like to be in a relationship with someone with depression?
Last week I ended a 2-year relationship with the girl I loved, partly as a result of the depression she’s been battling most of her life and through all of our relationship. It’s 3am right now and I feel the silence of her absence in the pit of my stomach. The short answer to your question is that no matter how strong and smart you think you are, you are more likely to be taken down by their depression than to lift them up out of it.
The really sad thing is that she is great in so many ways — beautiful, intelligent, driven, and has great sense of humor (ie: she laughed at my stupid jokes). Despite her positive qualities, her attitude and depression slowly poisoned our relationship.
The thing about depression is that it’s never on its own island — it’s never just “feeling down”. It comes with major life issues that the individual either can’t or won’t change for themselves, coupled with awareness of those issues. The result is a helplessness, a meekness, and a lack of self-esteem added on to whatever issues caused the depression in the first place. It’s a difficult spiral to escape from.
Her issues did not originate from her, as they rarely do. They came from a tough family situation (neglected as a child, divorced parents, abusive mother, suicidal sibling, et al.). Because I understood where her issues came from I didn’t hold them against her. Early on, my empathy for those issues even brought us closer together.
She would often say “you’re the only positive thing in my life”, which was a flattering statement in the beginning but it became a source of pain when she was still saying it two years later. It was demoralizing to me — I thought I would eventually be able to ride out the storm of her current problems, perhaps help her see a new perspective, and help bring other positive things into her life.
Instead she suffocated me. She had no friends that she trusted, her family was in shambles, and her career was just getting started. I think she clung to me because I kept her from being alone.
She viewed my friends as a threat to my affection for her and viewed her friends similarly. She was jealous of literally anyone or anything that took my attention away from her. As I write this I realize how silly it is but she got jealous of books– sometimes if I’d read for long periods she would feel unloved and ignored and imply that I was reading too much.
I was never doing enough to prove my love for her. No matter what I’d say or do I was never showing her that I really wanted to be with her badly enough. This was hard because I actually wanted to be with her and I loved her. I began to doubt myself and my ability to make her feel good about herself and our relationship.
I thought somehow I could be separated from her negative view on people and the world and stand apart to be a positive force, but in the end she viewed me with the same untrusting, jealous, jaded eyes as she did everyone else. The fact that I thought I could stand so broadly apart from all her other experiences seems ridiculous to me now, even though I believed her at the time when she insisted that’s what I was to her.
Because I was the only positive thing in her life at the time (according to her), when things were off in the relationship it thew her into a tailspin. She threatened suicide and I believed her. She kept the shower curtain closed for aesthetics and there were days when I came home and I felt panic rushing through me because I fully expected to pull the curtain back and find her in the tub with her wrists slashed.
Happiness was never a given — it always came with difficult or impossible contingencies. She couldn’t be happy unless her entire family was happy. She couldn’t be happy unless she was doing something positive for the world with her career. She couldn’t be happy in a cold climate. She couldn’t be happy unless I was happy. The sentiment of these contingencies sounded noble but the result was that she was never happy and nobodies happiness grew by being around her.
She thought her problems were largely due to chance. “I’m an extremely unlucky person” she would say.
I felt guilty that I couldn’t help her more, and I felt guilty that I wasn’t doing enough for her. Eventually when I had thoughts of leaving her I felt guilty that I would be reneging on commitments and my expressions of love for her. I felt guilty that she might commit suicide. I had negative flashes of her funeral, and that I’d react by curling up by her grave for days and crying that I had let a fundamentally good person die. I felt guilty about the things that were happening to her because I felt responsible.
In the end the depression that poisoned her attitude toward life poisoned our relationship and made it near impossible to live with her. I was drowning and I had to make a decision. The worst thing is that I still care about her deeply. I want to be with the person she is when all these negative traits are silent. I still want her to be happy and succeed, and it makes me feel miserable that I couldn’t help her get there. Worse, I have become a part of the problem– another chapter in her sad biography.
I learned many things:
I separated her issues from her and attributed them to the experiences which were outside of her control. This was a huge mistake. Experiences influence people but it is their job to recognize and sort out the issues.
Guilt is a powerful weapon and I let it eat me alive. There is a line between helping another person out and being consumed by them. I need to give people the responsibility to help themselves and recognize that I can’t make fundamental changes in other people. It’s hard enough to change myself.
From now on I am going to ask people “do you think you are a lucky person?” I think that question says more about the intrinsic attitude of a person than any other.
Your partner should encourage your personal growth through friends, family, and physically/intellectually stimulating activities. They should be happy for you, not threatened by your growth.
Emotion is always stronger than logic.
Phenomenal sex is heroin.
Love is a game that brings our own weaknesses to the surface and mutes those of the other. There’s no escape once you’re in, but the truth rises to the top over time.
– Anonymous
The post 5 First Hand Accounts Of Different Life Experiences appeared first on Caveman Circus.
