Textbooks, a BLT and a Coke: My First Client

Editor’s Note: contains mentions of abuse and assault

The first time I had sex for money, I certainly didn’t feel empowered. In fact, I felt that the diagnosis of ‘crazy’ that had been applied to me for over the past ten years was now confirmed. Isn’t this what women who were sick in the head and damaged did, after all? That was what all the Tyler Perry movies and the church said. To make matters worse, I liked it. That was most shameful of all, according to the church and my mother. In the days after the trick, I flowed between being engulfed by guilt from my shame-based upbringing and masturbating gloriously about the experience. It had fulfilled many of my kinks and fantasies.

He was a good client: tentative over Craigslist Personals, and kept inquiring about whether I was a cop. Like an idiot, I told him my real name. I was too young, inexperienced, and without proper mentorship to protect myself. I gave away my name, and I allowed him to cum inside me without a condom on his word that he’d had a vasectomy and been tested recently. I was lucky to emerge from the encounter unscathed in terms of STDs. Accustomed to doing things on my own, I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was doing. I was in his car, speeding down the highway towards a pay-by-the-hour motel. 

I had been left to my own devices by my father, and I needed textbooks for the semester. He’d shown up at campus, unannounced as was his custom, to “check” on me. I speed walked over in the dark from whatever I was doing, knowing that “no” or “I’m busy” was never an option with my parents. After some cursory questions, he’d stated plainly, “I am out of money; I don’t have the money for your textbooks this semester,” and left, leaving me wondering what to do.

Isn’t this what women who were sick in the head and damaged did, after all? That was what all the Tyler Perry movies and the church said.

My parents’ inability to manage money was our private shame and a burden on me and my sisters. When my mother chose to invest what little money they did have (or could glean off a credit card) in a pair of kid goats as pets for me—thus partially fulfilling her pastoral fantasy of what our life would be once we’d moved to “the country”—it was only the latest in another series of earth-shattering financial mistakes which had begun with them buying a decrepit fixer-upper with a mortgage that they couldn’t afford, just before the entire U.S. real estate bubble blew up and we entered a global financial crisis. Meanwhile, my eldest sister sat miles away in her bare, white-walled apartment with only a bed and made the decision to be a hoe—but in the only acceptable way for Black women of the new millennium, by going out to clubs in D.C., New York, and Miami with the goal of meeting professional athletes, rappers, and R&B singers. The goal of her, and the many other aspirational young women of her generation, was to land a husband. At most, she only ever got a few leering second-string quarterbacks who bought her dinner and a Louis Vuitton carryall.  

My mother dreamed of a country lodge like the ones in her beloved black-and-white movies about wealthy white people in the British countryside. On top of that, we were all trapped in my father’s dream, which was to recreate his grandparents’ farm—his childhood reprieve from the beatings delivered by my own grandfather, a struggling alcoholic, who became incredibly violent after his trauma from the Second World War. Thus, goats were purchased, even as I wore the same shirt to school three times a week and my mother had only two pairs of pants to wear to work.

At school, I could not explain to fellow classmates why they could not come over to my house. There was a blanket agreement that telling people the truth of how we lived, in a house with no heat, would be shameful. I internalized this shame and colluded in keeping our secrets from relatives and classmates: the pipes that froze often, leaving us without water to drink or to wash ourselves; the way the electricity went out often and without warning; the mismatched couches donated from my wealthy aunt that still bore the melted candy stains left by my chewing cousins; the concrete floor my father tried to paint white; the three different kinds and colors of roof tiles on the roof collaged because my father kept running out of money; the four different kinds of siding and stone on the house’s face because he ran out of money again; the sick-bright orange paint running through the house because it was the only color they had leftover from a previous paint job at our old house; and the Biblical plagues of ladybugs, stinkbugs, and snakes which climbed over the windows, through the heating ducts, and out of any open crevice in the ramshackle old farmhouse during the summers. 

I internalized this shame and colluded in keeping our secrets from relatives and classmates...

Our silence about the unacceptability of our living conditions for the basic standards of hygiene, warmth, and care needed for three women was all-encompassing. One year after we moved to the property, a family friend asked me at dinner at her house what I thought of our new home: “I don’t like it,” I said, pulling a face. Then I brightened up, “If it was up to me, I would knock down the house and build a whole new one in its place!” After dinner, my mother pulled me aside and told me that I had “made Daddy sad” with what I said, and “needed to apologize.” The mission to protect our father’s dream and his ego was clear: our lack could never be his fault.

So I was not surprised when my father delivered his message. This was, after all, the same man who had, unbeknownst to me, broken into the locked box with the print of a polar bear on top where I kept about $100 USD in cash from unfulfilled Girl Scout cookie orders, and stole the money to pay for gas when I was eight. When I tearfully asked around the house why the lock on my box was broken and where the money was, he exploded and angrily told me the truth. I was not allowed to be angry, or sad. I was nine. When I was seventeen, he would ask me for money for gas, and I would reluctantly hand over all my waitressing tips from my after-school and weekend job at the pizzeria to his open, waiting hand. He at least had the shame at this point to thank me profusely, and look embarrassed about it.

Now, I was eighteen, and I had only recently broken up with my sugar daddy following his assaulting me. Had my sugar daddy still been in the picture, I could have gone right to him and asked for the $130 USD I needed for my textbooks in the spring semester of my freshman year of college. Pre-assault, he had been ready to buy me a car and start sending me checks regularly. Now, that option was gone. This was a problem which needed solving, and thus, I turned to Craigslist. Trying to sell pictures of myself on Craigslist had led to being scammed multiple times, and although I still didn’t feel well post-assault, I could see little recourse other than to jump right back in to in-person sex work.

This was a problem which needed solving, and thus, I turned to Craigslist.

Jerry was a good client, as they come, apart from his obvious-in-hindsight lowballing of me and predatory boundary pushing. He’d done this before, as I noted from his immediate knowledge of the pay-by-the-hour motel after I’d refused to come to his house for the booking. We made chitchat in the car, and I checked the backseat for any goons or weapons before hopping into his truck. There was a white lumpy garbage bag, and when I asked him what was in it, he said, brightly, “Sheets! For the bed!” I appreciated his hygiene.

The operators of the vertical lift gate at the motel complex’s entrance smiled warmly and genuinely at me. Jerry spread the motel bed with the clean sheets he’d brought from home, and lit a candle at the nightstand table. It was all very sweet. We laid down on the bed fully-clothed for a bit, and then I initiated a gentle kiss. I remember that he smelled like poults—newly hatched baby turkeys—an aroma I knew from the month-long work exchange I’d done on a commune the summer before. He began to suck my breasts, which I adored, and then we half-undressed. 

In the car, he’d told me in great detail about this fleece he was wearing, a grey one with a print label and some colored embroidery that I’d never seen before. Jerry explained to me that he liked to make investments in companies, and that he’d just started to invest in this American outdoor retail brand that he felt sure would take off. I wasn’t particularly interested, but I always remembered the interesting name of the brand lettered on the fleece he never removed during our session (sweat city). At the time of writing this, the brand he was an early investor in is worth approximately 3 billion USD; you’ll see upscale wealthy white people wearing these fleeces and jackets all the time, and I still curse myself for blocking his number after the session in panic and fear—I could have been well taken care of.

I remember that he smelled like poults—newly hatched baby turkeys—an aroma I knew from the month-long work exchange I’d done on a commune...

I thought I looked beautiful in the mirrors on the ceiling, and I adored the pink décor of the motel room. He moaned in my ear about how he couldn’t believe he was “fucking this hot eighteen year old.” I was pretty turned on myself from the excitement and danger of what I was doing, but it was over very quickly. Afterwards, I peed out his cum in the toilet and felt a bit numb in the aftershock. When I came out, he gave me my money in clean, crisp, twenties, and it was the most beautiful sight of green folded between my fingers and the smoothest sensation of brand new cash from the bank. I was used to crumpled, recycled, soiled money. This money was fresh.

He stripped back down the bed, extinguished the candle, and I took one last look at myself in the mirror on the ceiling before leaving: you did it, I said triumphantly and a bit distantly to myself. I agreed to see him again on the car ride back to my dorm, and gave him a peck on the cheek before scrambling out of the car. I was alive! I didn’t die or get murdered! Everything was okay! I took a deep shower to get the baby turkey smell of his skin off me, and went to sleep.

When I woke up the next day, I felt awful. Also, horny. The voices of my mother, my sisters, the ominous voice I’d always imagined God reading the Bible out loud in as a child, rang cruelly and critically in my head. What did I do? I didn’t feel I could come back from this. What I could do was go to the bookstore and get my textbooks, which I did. I used the last of the money to order myself my usual freshman year takeout delivery dinner—a BLT wrap, fries, and a can of Coca-Cola, and that was it. The money was gone almost as soon as it had come into my grasp. I’d blocked Jerry and vowed to never do it again. He found me on Facebook, as I’d given him my real name, and I blocked him there too. Maybe I could just pretend like it never happened. At least I had my books.

What did I do? I didn’t feel I could come back from this. What I could do was go to the bookstore and get my textbooks, which I did.

I consulted with a friend at the time who came to visit me on campus, but she didn’t really seem to understand what I was talking about. She came from a sheltered background, and sex work out of need rather than “for fun”—she always fantasized about performing at Amateur Night at a local strip club and winning the cash prize—literally did not compute with her brain. I gave up trying to talk about it, and focused on putting it behind me. Until I didn’t.

It has taken much time to acknowledge the way sex work as a career, as a life-generating power, is ingrained into my skin. I’ve been getting free shit off the way I look since I was twelve, and transacting my time and body for cash for almost half of my current lifespan. I auditioned and was hired at a strip club shortly after this encounter, but unrelated events which endangered my health and wellness made it impossible for me to continue working in the sex industry that summer, or for a while after. 

It took about two years for me to get officially “back in the saddle” so to speak, after my first full-service session. At that point I would try doing online content managed by a former cop who also managed quite a few of the local Black sex workers in my area, including a friend of mine. The shame of being a sex worker has finally sloughed off me since leaving the United States; it is simply a culture that is unconducive to sexual freedom. I will always remember and, in a certain way, treasure my first time: Jerry, if you’re reading this, call me!

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