"Walk against traffic so you can see the drivers faces," said my tutor, Jeff, a scrawny yet sexy skateboarder and self described Ritalin kid that I had flirted with in a drug treatment program one month prior. As I lingered around the telephone booth at Polk and Pine in front of the now defunct drag club Kimo's, my performance was vindicated when a man came walking up and invited me for a drink. I signaled my tutor to make scarce, confident I would meet up with him after the deal was done. We went to the QT, a packed little bar complete with a box for the amateur dick dancers. While the hookahs shook their junk in g-strings I found a space at the crowded bar and squeezed in with my guest. Trying to pretend as if I didn't notice or know Jeff who was nursing a bottle from a few paces away, I sank into just another gig for a character actor. I had been an actor in LA and had even achieved the ultimate actor's challenge by pulling a Tootsie in LA night clubs as I routinely dressed as a woman and fooled even the Persian mafia at the Roxbury. If I could do that, I could pull off the little lost boy routine for this mark. He bought me a drink and quizzed me about my story which I created as that mirroring a suicidal runaway. I saw right through his Captain Save-a-Ho routine but had no interest in being rescued. As we made our way out of the packed bar, I made eye contact with Jeff that signaled he would be waiting for me when it was over. I think I was taken to the Leland building across the street, but since it was gutted by fire less than a year later, I couldn't be sure but it made a good story. Forever after, I always identified the Leland as the place I had once lost my hooker virginity even though it was remodeled and reopened as a senior community. I knew Jeff was expecting me to come out with profit but I hated being nickel and dimed.. As I insisted on fares that were continuously marked down by the trick, I finally succumbed at a very discounted rate of $50 and all the change he had in his pockets. With my back against a tabletop, I went through the motions and was surprised it didn't feel any different than normal sex, i.e. non-paid. I was under the impression that my mission was purely mercenary. Pro hustlers didn't enjoy tricks, they just did them. When I exited the Leland feeling ever so accomplished and grown up, my balloon was deflated when I had to hand over my entire wad to Jeff who insisted he knew what to do with it. I never got any of what he did with it and went home feeling confused and icky for just being blatantly used. From then on, every time someone tried to recommend me to turn a trick, I was
always informed when it was over that the fee had already been paid to someone else. I usually failed to negotiate for myself becoming caught up in the moment and a little cock-crazy. If I could trust someone to take over the financial aspect of it for me, I may have been moderately successful but I was always left without after I had given it up. The Gulch was razed to make room for the Upper Polk and Russian Hill fancy merchant association and a great big church was built where the hustler bars used to be. It's all too painful for me to retrace since they tore down the stomping grounds of my 20s.
Ten years later, in a new apartment in the heart of the Tenderloin, I found myself enmeshed in a group of sex workers and seekers. For whatever reason, I had made acquaintance with a couple Nob Hill professors who started coming to me to find straight acting boys to fuck with. I had an arsenal of names I could call upon just from the trade I regularly came into contact with from living in the belly of the beast at Turk and Leavenworth. I had been mingling with the Polk street set of boys for a decade and knew how to gingerly tap dance around their fragile, sexual identities. Not one of them, no matter how many men they had been with would ever dream of identifying as homosexual. That was anathema and sure grounds for getting your ass kicked if the charade was ever challenged. I humored them along but was never able to ultimately convince them to take advantage of the easy money they could earn by merely whipping it out for a few minutes. "The view from his loft is fabulous. You can see all over the city and he doesn't require much," I tried to persuade. In the end, I usually had to convince that I could offer services just as good as the next best thing and came to insist on being duly paid. So, I wasn't exactly straight acting but my equipment was equal if not better than any closet case hustler I could find on Polk and I didn't steal.
The UC Berkeley profs who had a fetish for trade lived in a Nob Hill high rise across from the Academy of Art. I could speak their language of academia and the cover I was trying to convey as a street-savvy prostitute peddler was blown. Coupled with my increasing grey hair that giving me a seasoned salt n'pepper look, I knew I was getting too old for this behavior to be acceptable. In the words of Sylvia Sidney in Broadway Damage, I was one of the few who knew what a semi colon was. The quote is out of context but the sentiment is the same: I was slumming. My efforts at harnessing the trade were failing and I ended up accepting quick cash in exchange for oral sexual favors but no longer deemed in appropriate for what I had going for myself.
My little studio at Turk and Leavenworth was never short of eager hookers needing a way to do business. I decided to help some of them market their services on Craigslist by offering to write their ads. I had majored in Journalism, after all so this would be the perfect way to contribute. Back then Craigslist was pretty lax about who could post for what and they looked the other way on blatant solicitations for prostitution. That is, until I started getting creative with my copy. "Raunchy Rob fucks your filthy fetish," read one headline. Or buxom blond will be your bitch for the best buy." All were subsequently flagged and taken off the website. I was being singled out for my wit and my clients were left with no prospects. I started letting some guys use my computer and apartment to host their own trysts while I agreed to take a walk around the block for a cut of the profit. But more often than not, when the mark showed up, he was more interested in me that the person he had responded to in the ad. What was I supposed to do when opportunity knocked?
It wasn't my fault they found me more attractive than the scrubs I was letting share my space. Sometimes, a hooker friend recommended me and my attributes to stand in for him with one of his regulars. I was supposed to cut my friend in but was expected to work as an indentured sex servant for a pittance while my friend got most of my coinage. I had grown smart after so many years and refused to give up my earnings which led to resentment and behind closed doors secret meetings with the client who urged me to keep my dalliances with him secret from the Rentboy. I was never comfortable going all out and just getting an account on Rentboy because I expected hookers like that to be supermodels and my self esteem couldn't muster the audacity to tread in those waters. The friend I had who did it had long since gained weight past the hard body pictures he posted on the site and was getting by for virtue of his sizable assets. I would never have felt comfortable blatantly misrepresenting myself as an Adonis and showing up with adipose tissue. Plus there was the sticky, uncomfortable topic of money that I never liked to talk about. I did become better at asking for the fee upfront after too many times of having sex only to be told that pay wasn't understood to be part of the equation. The Castro doctor client I had gained through my Rentboy benefactor's proclivities soon became too peculiar for my personal taste and I was not attracted to him in any way which made it difficult and unpleasant for me to perform and put on the face just to be paid. I lost his number and let Rentboy continue working him.
A year or so later, the cast of boys I had accumulated were replaced by a group of gals. They related to me as one of the girls and I became an advocate for them to pursue sex work. I had long been supportive and sensitive to the plight of sex workers through my affiliation with St. James Infirmary vis-a-vis the needle exchange where I volunteered. I am a firm believer in the principles of harm reduction and champion San Francisco's status as an advocate of such tenets. I believed in any positive change, the first rule of harm
reduction and was eager to see it play out in managing drug use and sex work. The girls I let hang around my apartment didn't know or really care about the political implications of the importance of harm reduction but needed a place to post ads on myredbook.com and craigslist before the latter site started basically requiring a blood test and fingerprints. It soon became a common sight to see a number of girls lounging around my place while they wrote their online ad copy or put makeup on to prepare for the next date. If a girl wanted to do an in-call, I threw a slip cover over the clutter, spritzed a few vanilla notes into the atmosphere and created instant ambiance. Then I would greet the suitor in the lobby, take a walk around the block and receive a cut of her fee when I returned. It was an arrangement that worked most of the time until a couple girls started abusing the privilege by losing control of the situation. One girl broke my pedestal sink by using it as a perch one too many times and then emerged from the bathroom in hysterics and completely naked as she argued with the trick about crossing boundaries.The volume was getting too high for me to keep a low profile on the setup and I had to curtail the arrangement.
Through the drama, I was enjoying the connections I made with the girls. For instance I had one friend who
went by Candy Carnegie that set the tone of executive sophistication that I was trying to recreate. She was old enough to be described as the trendy term cougar but eschewed such pedestrian monikers and let her
body speak for itself. Her measurements may have been purchased but her body was a virtual canvas of tattoos to rival Kat Von D. She had left her life as a divorced suburban housewife from Santa Rosa and recreated her look modeled after Marilyn Monroe and Betty Page before putting the pro in prostitute. She was blond, built, buxom and inked enough to draw stares from the tourists we enjoyed taunting at Starbucks. :"Don't scare the straight people," we would tell each other. She was a mentor and mother hen to many of the girls such as 22 year old Haley who would sometimes team up with her and market as a mother/daughter tag team package. Hayley's working class roots were made obvious by the unpolished and brazen way she chomped her gum and screamed four letter epithets to get her point across. This was in stark contrast to the high brow ways of Larissa, another "hooker" who demonstrated her capacity for the finer things in life by charging three figures for the same services that Haley was peddling for a pittance. Larissa was an heiress whose inheritance was becoming less likely the more she rebelled and ran away from her roots to seek liberation she was exploring as a sex worker. She fashioned herself as a commodity which was evident by her expensive weave extensions and Ungaro lingerie. Felicity, perhaps the most experienced of the group
instructed the girls in the art of obtaining their fee upfront. "The bills should be fanned out when they're handed to you," she said. Felicity was 40 and had been working since she had graduated high school. She dressed in flowy whispers of black and her hair was always hidden beneath a scraggly brown or dirty blond wig. She piled on too much pancake foundation to hide years of acne scars and had once left my bathroom in a shambles after an entire container of tinted face powder exploded and mingled with the puddles of water she left on my floor from not closing the shower curtain. She had left in a hurry to introduce Genevieve, a fresh faced 20 something with a body to double date with one of her regulars. It was becoming increasingly more difficult for Felicity to satisfy her roster of regulars since she had been resting on her laurels and letting her appearance suffer. In an effort to keep them interested she had recruited Genevieve, a beauty who would surely upstage her if she didn't take care to control the way she was brought into the fold. "Every time I bring a new girl, I kind of sit in the back while they go at it," she sighed. Her desperation was evident in the harried way she left the mess in my bathroom and I empathized with her inability to age gracefully like Ms. Carnegie.
Sabrina was an MTF trannie hayseed from Arkansas who transitioned from gay boy to girl in the short year since she had washed up in the Tenderloin after the car she was traveling in from the South had broken down and been towed away. She had been working the ho-stro on Hyde and Post ever since. She was in the habit of routinely robbing her tricks and burning bridges. She had a slew of sugar daddies she depended upon to supply her survival ranging from a Mexican cab driver to an older white guy she called Fred. She cycled through them pretty regularly in the tradition of burn and turn.
Lacy was a 50 something MTF trannie who I had met when he was still going by Rick before she got double D breast implants and started making her way as a trannie sex worker. Rick was a man with a short fuse when I met him but after the female hormones kicked in, her personality became as lovely as she set her appearance to be. "I never should have gotten these damn things," she often bitched about her implants. She hadn't grown accustomed to the attention she garnered from living blatantly on the gender divide. She had lived several lives, first as a straight married before finally settling on trannie which she exploited to make money as a sex worker. These were my girls, my hookahs and my friends. I admired the way they were managing to make ends meet for themselves and sought to capitalize myself by hitching my train to their wagon. I moved out of that apartment 2 years ago and everyone scattered to the wind. I am very close to 40 now and know the sex work trade ship has long since sailed for me. I look back on that window of time with fondness because I did what I had to do. After all, a girl's gotta eat.
Through the drama, I was enjoying the connections I made with the girls. For instance I had one friend who
Sabrina was an MTF trannie hayseed from Arkansas who transitioned from gay boy to girl in the short year since she had washed up in the Tenderloin after the car she was traveling in from the South had broken down and been towed away. She had been working the ho-stro on Hyde and Post ever since. She was in the habit of routinely robbing her tricks and burning bridges. She had a slew of sugar daddies she depended upon to supply her survival ranging from a Mexican cab driver to an older white guy she called Fred. She cycled through them pretty regularly in the tradition of burn and turn.
