It happened suddenly. It happened without warning. One day I woke up and I was an old ho.
Talk show topics such as “Who is the Baby Daddy?” and “Surprise Honey, I’m Really a Lesbian!” are bigger components of ho lifestyle than blowjobs.
Let’s say there are two kinds of hos. The turn-outs: girls in their early twenties or younger. They pull into the massage parlour parking lot, late for their shift, in their dented sports coops with a nonfat triple caramel macchiato in one hand while they text message their turn-out girlfriends with the other.
Then there are old hos, like me, pushing thirty. Old hos knit booties for their next baby, read distance ed. textbooks and braid one another’s hair weaves in between clients.
Turn-outs sleep off their martini and ecstasy hangovers in the staff room. They doze off in impossible positions: their young necks kinked over a sofa’s arm, their scrawny legs akimbo.
That used to be me. The only thing that could wake me up was the parlour doorbell. The very second a client came through the door I’d tumble out of slumber, wander half-asleep into the lobby and line up beside the other girls for hire. “Hi, my name is Donna,” I’d yawn. Back then clients didn’t mind how bed-headed and bleary-eyed I was: they still chose me. I remember the way the old hos sneered as I counted my makes at the end of the night.
It is the duty of an old ho to keep turn-outs in line. I knew I was passing my prime when I caught myself saying things like, “Coco, you know you can’t wear a track suit to work. I don’t care if it’s baby phat. Go put your dress on, girl. This here is a business.”
Old hos have scars. We tell war stories that make the turn-outs wince and shutter. We’re superstitious. Lord knows I’ve slipped a little money under the parlour welcome matt as a good luck offering. But the greatest sign of aging is when an old ho begins to quietly reflect upon on her vocation: the hard times, the high times, the time wasted waiting for tricks and most of all – what did I do with all that money?
This happened to me in 2004. I’m pretty sure it was 2004 because The Ricki Lake Show had long gone into rerun. Daytime television – the quintessential timeline of massage parlours. Talk show topics such as “Who is the Baby Daddy?” and “Surprise Honey, I’m Really a Lesbian!” are bigger components of ho lifestyle than blowjobs. Confounded by these shows, we are witlessly drawn into ridiculing and relating to the “trannys” and “teen mothers” and “misfits” they feature.
I became fully conscious of my old ho status while watching an episode called, “You Dissed Me, But Look at Me Now: Today’s guests are former geeks who have become chic.” Before bringing out her guests, Ricki Lake mocked oversize “before” photos of the unfortunate-looking youngsters they were before “becoming chic.” Evidently, chic is synonymous to slutty. Braces were replaced by boob jobs. Coke-bottle glasses turned in for manes of bleach-blond hair. Guests flapped around the studio set in outfits skimpier then my work lingerie, hell-bent on proving they were no longer losers.
I’ll let you in on a secret. My own grade school pictures are equally awkward to those on the Ricki Lake show: ill-fitting corduroy hand-me-downs and bowl cut hair. This was almost okay when I was six years old. By junior high my Sally Anne finds loudly clashed with the masses of polo shirts and penny loafers. In seventh grade, my classmates scratched the words “loser” and “pervert” across my locker. In grade eight, bubble gum was stuck over my face in the class photo that hung in the assembly room. The truth is, I had stuck it there. Even I didn’t want to see my own face. It was simply easier being a wad of pink sticky gum than my teenage self.
I imagined morphing beneath bubble gum like a butterfly in a cocoon. One day, I’d peel it off and underneath I’d have the same spiral perm and diamond stud earrings as the popular girls. You see, I grew up in the age of the makeover movie; the meek shall inherit the prom movie. These films taught me that if I just hung in there long enough eventually a cheerleader would take pity on me and teach me how to do my make-up, or a rich prep would lose a bet and have to take me to the spring dance, or I’d discover that I was actually a teenage werewolf who even at 5’ 2” was awesome at basketball and all the girls would want to have sex with me.
I clung to the makeover dream for years. My dream shifted from high school sweetheart to winning big at the ho game. Maybe some dumb regular would buy me a condo or I’d land that mad money stint in Vegas. My “real life” certainly didn’t have any bling blang makeover potential. I am a poet, a homo with a weakness for broke-ass butch dykes, I dance burlesque – badly. I ought to tattoo the word ‘penniless’ on my titties and toss in the towel. If I was ever going to go from geek to chic, from trash to cash, I figured ho-ing was the only way. I constantly scanned the adult help wanted ads for the perfect gig. I chatted online for hours with potential sugar daddies. But even in my final days of sex work I still hadn’t discovered the place where the money was greener.
“Get out of that damn rub and tug,” my friend, Simone, told me. She was the one working girl I knew who was older than me – and she was a high-priced call girl. A grand a night was her norm and she phoned daily to tell me so. Simone had a much higher work ethic than me. Her clients were B-list actors who wanted to drum her face with their Viagra erections while she recited the lyrics to “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” (No shit.) Whenever her clients requested two girls and I accompanied Simone on these calls; each time I sped back to the parlour with a newfound appreciation for the meager men flopped atop the massage table.
“Come on. It’s not as if you can turn down the cash,” Simone would start whining before I had a chance to refuse. “Please.” She did have a pretty “please.” By all accounts, a duo date with Simone should be one of those rare times when I was turned on at work. Simone is so tiny she made me feel like a daddy when I’d sit her on my lap. A wry smokers laugh frequents her pouty lips. And she fucks women.
But oh no – why be attracted to a cute bisexual when I can develop crushes on the worst homophobes at the massage parlour? The hos that made me hot had fistfuls of gold rings and names like Champagne and Brooklyn. Girls who’ll knock you flat for no good reason. I’ve gotten caught ogling these girls from the corner of my eye. They were never flattered: “What up with the side-eye, bitch? You wanna throw down somethin’?” they’d threaten.
Yes. Yes I do. I want to throw it down with you right now, I’d think, as I daydreamed of parting their boot-clad legs.
