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I was on tour with a collective made up of current and former sex workers. There were twelve of us, and we were crossing the country in two vans. We started in Washington where the winter was mild and slid down the coast of California and then into the brown scrub of Arizona and New Mexico, where the sky was big and blue and stretched over the mountains like a tarp.
Our shows were always packed. One of the women lip-synched "Breaking the Law" with her vagina. Another, a burlesque dancer and one of the kindest people I'd ever met, did a number to Dolly Parton's "Proud to be An American" in which she pulled a roll of fake dollar bills out her ass. Byron was with me. He's a prostitute and he lives not far from where I live in San Diego, away from the old city where the bay wraps around the water like a croissant, and he would paint his face and tell stories about turning tricks in various hotels and how he felt like a healer. I kept getting sick, and Byron had all these vitamins and herbal potions he would give me, and usually I would get better. Other times, he gave me pills from a baggy filled with pharmaceuticals. He convinced me that the most important part of healing was faith. In Oklahoma, we took mushrooms soaked
in chocolate and sat in a field for six hours, razor grass six feet high, feeling like air rushing across a stream.
At one of the college panels in Kansas, Byron told the students he didn't use condoms when giving blowjobs and that he enjoyed swallowing his customers' come.
In Colonial Williamsburg, they brought a tub of water into the student center, and a preacher baptized students waiting in line for the show, pushing their heads under the water, shaking a Bible at the florescent lighting.
During the performances I read a story about my year as a stripper in Chicago. Compared to everyone else, I was so inexperienced; I felt like a loser.
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I didn't understand why anyone would want to be a writer. I had a much easier time understanding swallowing another man's come for a hundred dollars.
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There were twelve of us, and we shared three hotel rooms. One of the women, a former prostitute who had formed an organization to legalize sex work in Brazil, made a point of telling everyone that she wouldn't share a bed with me under any circumstances. She said it when I wasn't around, but one of the dancers told me about it. She said I made her uncomfortable.
There was a blizzard in Philadelphia, and I walked around the Liberty Bell while snow fell in sheets. The snows got heavier as we traveled north again. In Boston, five hundred people waited outside with their hands and ears freezing to see us perform in an abandoned theater at two in the morning.
By Maine, there was feet of the stuff and trees naked as phone polls. I'd lived in California too long and didn't know what to do about the weather. Also, when we were in Texas three weeks earlier, Byron fell on me and dislocated my knee doing karaoke, which sounds dumb, but it's true. I went to a sports doctor near the Texas capital, which is made from local red granite and filled with statues celebrating the Civil War and is the only statehouse larger than the national capitol. The doctor told me I would never heal but eventually my knee would stop hurting, and I would run and jump exactly the same as I had before.
The weather was pounding, like clouds throwing snowballs. Andre lived half an hour away from the college in a small town and he came to see the show with his girlfriend, Serena. Andre left the West Coast two years ago. We used to play poker together, and now he was living out here, in the northeast. He looked rugged and good, like a man who enjoyed chopping wood. He'd actually moved out here to be a writer, which is what I was or what I had been for a while, but I was at a point in my life where I didn't understand why anyone would want to do that. I had a much easier time understanding swallowing another man's come for a hundred dollars.
Andre had a beard, and big curly hair that was all red and black. I remembered him as grey, salt and pepper, but now he was chicory. Serena had moved up from Boston, where she had worked for years as a psychoanalyst. She was tall, and white as milk. They had both given up on big cities.
"We like it here," Andre assured me. He was teaching a course at the university. Serena worked in the coffee shop near their home. She didn't want to be a psychoanalyst anymore. When I asked about her choices, Andre gave me a look.
The coffee shop where she worked was on a steep rise, and the windows looked out on the tops of pine trees and oaks.
After the show, the three of us went for a drink.
"I'm glad to be away from those people," I confessed. It wasn't that I didn't like the people on the tour. I did, quite a bit. But we were
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Serena sat on the bed with me. She grabbed a handful of Vaseline.
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in vans together six hours a day, and the vans were crowded.
"Don't worry," Andre said. "At our place, you'll have your own room."
I hadn't had my own room in a long time.
They had the kind of apartment you can only have in out-of-the-way places unless you have a lot of money. There were at least three bedrooms and hardwood floors throughout. The whole thing cost what I paid for one-third of my crappy apartment back home. I wanted to stay.
They gave me a room off the kitchen with a queen-sized futon, a double radiator and a big stack of New York magazines.
"Keep the door closed," Serena said. "Unless you want to be woken up by the cat."
I lay down, paged through the magazines and played with myself for a little while. I thought about a black woman in Vancouver I'd been corresponding with. She said she hated it when men were into her just because she was black. I was trying to keep from her my own fetish for dark women, which made me feel vaguely racist, but I thought she must know.
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