About That Time I was A Hooker in Melbourne, Victoria

When I moved to Australia in September 2014, I did not know that I was going to start working at a brothel a few months later.

At 20 years old, I had only just learned that sex work was an acceptable—in fact applauded—line of work. I had been out for about a year and a half, and my year overseas was sparked by my first lesbian relationship—a long-distance romance that lasted about 9 months, initiated via a connection on OkCupid. While Shelby, an Australian woman from Brisbane, was living in Toronto, we started messaging and quickly fell in love. We made fast plans to be together IRL and even faster plans for me to get a working holiday visa to go live with her for a year. Despite being from (and eventually moving back to) Brisbane, Shelby spoke frequently about moving to Melbourne, claiming that it was “where all the queers lived.” When we broke up that April in a tearful Skype session, I decided I would still go to Australia. Instead of moving to Brisbane, I decided to move to Melbourne. I was 19, newly out, and eager for a coming-of-age life experience far away from the familiarity of my small-town life in Massachusetts.

Finding work was harder than I had anticipated. I had saved up $4,000, which dwindled rapidly. For the first time in my life, I was truly alone. I could call my dad and tell him how depressed and afraid I was, but his love language was hard truths, and he had no lived experience of successfully coming out of financial precarity to comfort me. “Come home” was the best he could do, but he never even dared utter those words, likely knowing that I would ignore his advice. He understood what it was like to be depressed; he did not understand what it was like to stop being poor.

Sex work was something that became apparent to me almost immediately. Not only was everyone around me doing it, but I had also entertained a job interview at a massage parlor where the interviewer emphasized that the services I would provide were exclusively non-sexual so many times that I could not tell if he was emphasizing this knowing that sex work was legal in Australia and customers might try some funny business, or if he was insinuating that the services were exclusively sexual without winking. Either way, I didn’t get the job, and I also got into a horrible bike accident on the ride home which permanently scarred my face. I felt desperate, pitiful, and again, afraid.

Things started looking up when a friend got me a job at a call center called Salmat, where I earned 25 dollars an hour working 20 hours a week doing data entry for “card-not-present” liquor sale transactions for the grocery conglomerate Cole’s. I sat at a computer all day with a headset on calling sometimes nice, sometimes mean, mostly male Australian bar and restaurant owners narrating their beer and liquor orders back to them. One guy got so used to me calling that he picked up the phone with an enthusiastic and incredibly Australian, “Aye, Macka!” every time I called. Other, less kind customers would sneer at me and hiss on the other end of the phone, “Is this really necessary? You already have my card details!” On top of hating the job for being boring and mindless, the hostility I received from customers grated on me. Things got worse, however, when I started getting pulled into the office on a semi-regular basis for making minor mistakes in the data entry. The fact that it was taken so seriously irritated me. Why were these people harassing me about petty mistakes when the entire operation was so menial in the first place? I started to become reactive and defensive as these interactions became more frequent and eventually found a job at a vegan bakery and quit.

The bakery was owned by Americans, which I initially thought was a good sign. Perhaps the cultural similarity might bode well in my favor and I could start to feel like less of a depressed, misunderstood outsider. I had experience working in a vegan bakery back home and was excited to be in an environment that felt familiar and more aligned with my interests. I was mistaken. The business owners, an American couple that turned out to be anti-vax flat-earthers, set me up to work twelve hours shifts completely alone after just two training sessions. The business was extremely disorganized and I left every shift feeling defeated, my bones and muscles aching from standing, mixing, and lifting for twelve hours, smatters of powdered sugar and chocolate cake batter pressed into my hair and clothes. What was worse, though, was that the owners made no effort to hide their dissatisfaction with my performance and did nothing to help me get better at the job. It became clear that they saw my performance as a personal defeat and, after asking me if I would come in a few minutes early before a shift so we could “talk,” they fired me. Feeling rejected and embarassed, I had a mini freak-out on them where I told them that everyone hated working there anyways. “You guys suck you know!” I blurted out in a frenzy of rage and panic. They looked at me and paused, uncertain of whether they were afraid of how much more I might lash out or overwhelmed by secondhand embarassment and pity. “It’s true! Everyone here talks shit about you and how much you suck at running your business!” I shrieked one last time, determined to have the last word. I picked up my roommates red bicycle I borrowed to ride to Ascot Vale and rode off. I was too high on adrenaline to start crying, but the tears flew from my face the second I hit my bed. What was I going to do now?

By then I had made enough friends that the people I actually spent time with and the more “random” queers I had befriended, whether on Facebook or IRL, were aware of my plight. Not long after being fired was I hired at a brunch spot in Coburg called “The Glass Den,” a name I still loathe with a passion. The cafe was given it’s ridculous name because it was quite literally a glass den—I’m pretty sure the building had previously been used for something more suitable for walls made of glass—but it was at the end of a weird cul-de-sac in an off-the-beaten-path part of an already-not-that-cool neighborhood. The cafe was frequented exclusively by lower-middle-class business normies who worked in some office building in an industral park one street over. Having worked in the service industry for over ten years as I write this, there is a quality that I have found in restaurants that is difficult to describe but extremely distinct, and The Glass Den had this quality. There are restaurants that I refer to in my mind as “fake restaurants”—establishments opened by aspiring entrepreneurs without a crumb of passion for working with food, often closing down a few years after opening due to their mediocre menu, mediocre service, and extreme inability to cultivate an environment where anyone would want to eat for any reason other than convenience or, worse, desperation. The Glass Den was exactly that—a fake restaurant.

But a job is a job, and a job I was given by a strange lesbian named Alex who was a little too friendly. It was the third job in a row that I hated, and it seemed like everyone around me that worked in cafes managed to get the best shifts at the coolest places with the best food and the best coffee and the best co-workers. The Glass Den was none of these things. The shifts were boring, dawdling on as I watched the clock and the same round of colleagues came skulking in at the same time every day for their mediocre meal. I had to get out. This was not the place for me. And I knew a couple of sex workers.

A friend of mine, let’s call her Dee, was the first person to really help me with all the practicalities of working at Collingwood Confidential, and to her I owe my life. Helping a rookie get started in sex work can be clumsy and, frankly, annoying. I might not have been green as a barista or a waitress, but I was certainly green as a hooker. I had no idea what to do and I needed the loving guidance of a seasoned prostitute to help me. On my first day, I borrowed a red babydoll chemise from Dee and a hideous, brown haired wig and a pair of black 90’s velvet platform heels from either another hooker or the box of random shit that sat in the back room of the brothel with the rest of the bored hookers. Waiting. I did not know just how much waiting I would do in that room over the next few months. But on that first day, I did not wait. I had just barely made it through the front door when I walked out of the back room to ask a question to the brothel manager and an impatient customer pointed to me in a flurry and exclaimed, “That one!”

And the deal was sealed. My very first booking. Twenty minutes, on my back, with the tongue of a smoker with a thick accent poking around in my mouth, humping me like he had somewhere to be and cumming was just another practicality of day-to-day life. In all honesty, I can’t imagine a better christening. For all the complex bookings that were to come, the simplicity and speediness of this coital frenzy was a relief. You might have a lot of questions by now—did he wear a condom? Yes. How did I know he didn’t have an STI? I squatted down and inspected his penis before making him get in the shower while I popped back into the backroom, freshened up, and stuffed a few condoms into a tiny purse based on what I thought I’d need after assessing the size of his penis. How did I even get the job in the first place? Was there an interview? Not really. The truth is that anyone can work at a brothel. All I did was sit down with a gay man that I never saw again in an unoccupied room and promised to return when I had completed my STI screening at a free clinic in the city. The brothel is the Uber of sex-work. There’s no real “boss.” You can come in and you can work and you can make money, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to you. It’s up to you to hustle. If my body was the car that picked up the passengers, it was up to me to get the oil changed. It was up to me to keep it clean, to get in the crevices and vacuum out the crumbs. It was up to me to get my nails done, to get my pussy waxed, to talk nice to the tricks, to butter them up, to convince them that I, out of all the other girls, was the one they should fuck. As it turned out, I was not very good at pretty much all of these things besides keeping the vehicle that was my body clean.

Did I give them my real name? No, I didn’t. In fact I went with something that was so ridiculous that a customer even laughed about it to my face one time: Matisse. Why did I pick that name? At the time I didn’t realize how gaudy it sounded and how, well, ridiculous, given that I was distinctly not French and distinctly American. But my sibling had a friend with the same name in high school and it was the first thing that tumbled out of my mouth when I fucked that random guy who pointed at me and exclaimed “That one!” within those first few minutes of being in that place I will never forget.

Did I get a lot of clients? No. Compared to many of the hookers around me, I was struggling. With all the love and care in the world to little 20-year-old me, I was a pretty ugly hooker. Let me explain: being a hooker is a job that requires some investment, both measured (time) and material (money). The best hookers had the best lingerie, the nicest, most well-done hair, the prettiest fingernails, the sharpest heels. The best hookers didn’t shave, they waxed. The best hookers didn’t haphazardly apply the same winged eyeliner they’d assumed since middle school, they looked in the mirror, considered their features, and applied their makeup to highlight the best of them without looking trashy. And if they looked trashy, they did so with purpose. If they looked nerdy, they did so pornographically. If they looked like a mom, they looked like a MILF. If they looked like a bad girl, they looked like an expensive one. If they looked like they’d stick meth up their ass and fuck you for two hours straight, they wouldn’t tell you, but you’d know by the way they dyed their hair jet-black and had just the right tattoos in just the right places. The “party girls.” These girls, these women, they were professionals. I, on the other hand, was covered in mostly stick-n-poke tattoos I’d done myself. I had turqouoise hair that I had hacked into some sort of bowl cut a few months earlier that had then been growing into some sort of bob. I had, as I mentioned before, initially donned a brown-haired wig, but it was so snarled and so obviously fake that I waffled between whether I should wear that or reveal just how alt and “ugly” I was on a shift-by-shift basis. The real girls weren’t doing that. If they wore wigs, they wore nice wigs. If they wore fire truck red babydoll chemises, they didn’t get them out of the free pile in the back room. They got them from a lingerie boutique in the CBD, and they spent their well-earned hooker money on them. And then they went on vacation to Indonesia. I was not going to Indonesia. I was not going anywhere. I was barely scraping by on my hooker money, and I spent many shifts sitting in that back room for eight hours straight without a single booking. On nights where I felt particularly impatient and defeated, I just went home. No one at that brothel was waiting for me. No one had pre-booked me. I had no regulars. I was, in all honesty, the carrot-ginger muffin that’s the only thing left in the pastry case at the coffee shop when you wake up late and they’re all out of crossaints. Good enough, but not delicious, and certainly not what you’d hoped for.

When I tell people about my time as a hooker and refer to the part where I was one of the uglier girls at Collingwood Confidential, my audience’s knee-jerk reaction is to scold me for self-deprecating. To be clear, although I wasn’t necesarily in love with my physical appearance then (or now, even, as I look back on it), I do not refer to myself as “ugly” in a self-deprecating way. It is important to understand how much I mean what I say: a hooker is a professional, and had I known what I know now, I would have put in enough effort to make myself attractive to the clients coming into that brothel. But I didn’t know. I didn’t understand, and no one told me. I was so young and SO inexperienced. I knew that there was something that the other girls had, but at the time, I was seriously not able to map it out fully in my mind. Another friend got into sex work right around the same time as I did and hit the ground running. They were making tons of cash, and fast. But they were an excellent make-up artist. They knew how to apply a wig cap and how to secure a wig to their head so well that even the smartest trick wouldn’t have known how fake that hair was. They were thin, they had no tattoos, they had far less body hair than I did, and they even had some novel experience as an internet-based dominatrix. None of my friends were going to tell me that I just needed to try harder to be prettier in a way that was attractive to men. Despite the fact that societal standards of beauty have their way of creeping into every crack of our lives, the queer community does a much better job of making you feel hot in a way that defies conventional beauty standards than any other community I have been a part of thus far. I didn’t know that I had to invest. I felt hot because I was hot to gay people, but I felt ugly at the brothel, and I knew why, but I didn’t really know. I didn’t know that a nice bottle of perfume and a nice wig and some nice heels and an expensive chemise and some better sweet-talk and a solid few hours on makeup tutorial YouTube would do wonders for my bank account.

But the clients weren’t totally non-existent, and I remember almost each and every one of them clearly. One man in particualr stands out in my memory as a solid reminder of how deeply perverted I am and always will be. A truly disgusting pervert, a balding man with stained crooked teeth of around 65 and the hardest dick I’ve ever ridden in my life. He wanted me to tell him about the first time I fucked a girl while I sat on top of him, my hands smushed flat against the sheet of grey hair across his chest. I obeyed by making up the most generic lesbian fetish I could think of: I was fourteen years old, and a friend of mine in private school fingered me behind a bush on school grounds. Panting and humping away, I explained my schoolgirl outfit to him in as much detail as I could. With his rock hard dick in my vagina, he chuckled and snarled, “You’re a naughty girl, aren’t you?” It was the most generic fantasy carried out with the nastiest man I have ever fucked in my entire life, and that was the erotic part to me. I loved how disgusting he was. I loved that his dick was so hard and that he had probably taken viagra to make it that way before entering the brothel. When our session ended, he called in another girl. I was disappointed that he’d chosen not to extend his time with me. I never saw him again, but he frequented the brothel and I remembered intro-ing him a few times after that.

What’s an intro anyway? I know you have more questions, and I have more answers. How did these people end up booking you? In the backroom, a row of soft leather recliner chairs lined the wall. Depending on the day, there was anywhere between one and seven other girls in that room with me. Bundled up in robes, face beat, the girls and I all looked up at two monitors mounted high up on the wall in between the two doors that led in and out of the back room: the door on the left was the door you exited to do intros, the door on the right was the one the receptionist flung open to shout, “intro, ladies!” or, “Matisse!” every time you got a booking, or to scold you for making a rookie hooker mistake.

On the monitors, we watched as the John’s entered the brothel, often feigning casualness and they sauntered toward the receptionist with their hands crammed in their pockets. I will never forget the casualness with which one painfully blonde, painfully bigoted Australian woman told me that she “didn’t sleep with colored guys” after I asked her why she’d be skipping a particular intro. I never talked to that girl again and felt an overwhelming urge to punch her in the face every time we worked the same shifts. Luckily that was not very often.

When it was time to do our intros, the girls and I stood and lined up in a row in front of the wall of recliner chairs, waiting for our turn. We could see on the left screen when a girl had entered an intro room, and as she exited the intro room, we saw her making her way back to the back room from the other screen, where she would wait to find out if she had been the chosen one. Sometimes they sighed when they came back to the room, reluctant to be chosen but knowing they needed the money and could not skip a booking if the trick landed on them as their coital suitor. Sometimes they came back in giggling, head tilted back as they cackled about a silly request from an old guy with a weird voice who held his finger in the air as he announced, “I’d like a girl who’d let me stick a finger in her butt.” When you saw the girls making their way back into the room, you knew it was your turn to do an intro, which was partially what the monitors were for.

What did we say when we did an intro? How does one “intro”? The shpiel was the same every time: I’m Matisse, this is what I offer, and if you’d like “a more intimate experience with kissing and cuddling, that’s an extra.” Those golden words: that’s an extra. That neverending joke: that’ll be an extra. You want that? That’s an extra. Anything beyond the most basic fucking of all time, and that’d be an extra. If you knew, you knew. “And by the way, I’m open to three-somes if you’d like to spend time with me and another girl.” Were those the exact words I said? It’s been so long that I’m really not exactly sure how I said it, but I will always know what was said. I’ll fuck you for this much, I’ll kiss you and cuddle you for more, and if you wanna fuck me and someone else, that would make my day a whole lot more interesting.

I once had a client who a girl saw on the screen and warned me about: he came on her face without asking, and he didn’t know that that was an extra. “It’s up to you if you want to take him, but just so you know,” she warned me. She was a girl I liked and trusted. In these environments, as much as there was camraderie, there were also petty people, bitchy people, and conniving people. There were girls who, for whatever reason, took pleasure in making life a little more complicated for you.

I decided to take him. I went upstairs and went through my routine: I took the booklet of cash, told him to undress and get in the shower, and that I’d be back in about ten minutes. He could lay on the bed and relax until I returned. When I did, I climbed onto the bed and told him in the sweetest, most syrupy voice I could, “Just so you know, before we start, if you want to cum on my face, that’ll be an extra.”

He stiffened and looked at me. Uh-oh.

“What do you mean?” He asked with an offended chortle.

“Well, one of the other girls told me you like cumming on the face, and that’s fine, but if you want to do that, you have to tell me now. And you’ll have to pay extra.”

“It’s alright!” He said, deflecting. “We’re just going to have a good time. It’s okay.”

It was moments like these that made me feel so juvenile, so small, so painfully inexperienced and unable to assert myself to the point that I seriously considered letting this guy jizz all over my face if it meant putting an end to the discomfort of the confrontation I was in the middle of. Why did he keep telling me it was okay? Did he seriously not understand what I was saying? No. That was not possible. There was no way that he could not have understood what I was saying. My words were abundantly clear. If you want to do it, that’s fine, I assured him, but it will be an extra.

Furious and increasingly aware that our session had begun and the clock was ticking, he kicked me out of the room, demanding another girl. I was glad to be rid of him, but I was immediately filled with dread as I walked back downstairs, suddenly panicked as I realized that I would have to explain my situation not only to the receptionist, but to the room full of hookers unwittingly waiting for me on the other side of the door. The receptionist was annoyed by the inconvenience of my greenery, but the real kicker was the older woman who reminded me of a a curly-black-haired, mean-spirited, chunkier, and far less theatrically talented version of Kathryn Hahn. With her pouty lips dangling from her rude mouth, she offered me an unsolicited reprimand which she undoubtedly took pleasure in performing for the entire room. Some girls looked up from their phones, unamused and uninterested in pausing whatever played back on their screen to watch the drama unfold. Others watched and listened attentively.

“So he’s just sitting up there!?” She asked me, appalled, and I blinked back at her, unsure of whether or not she was actually expecting me to answer her question.

“This is part of this job, darling. Okay? If you don’t want him, I’ll take him. But you can’t just leave him up there waiting. Do you understand?”

I nodded my head yes. Yes, I understood. In all my humiliation, I understood. I hated her then and still do. I hated her for refusing to extend some baby hooker compassion towards me and instead choosing to ridicule me in front of the room of other girls for her own pleasure, so eager to quell her own boredom. Despite knowing that she had a point, I could not understand why she was so irritated by a situation that really had nothing to do with her. The girl who had warned me just looked at me, blinking, too, apologetically. I sighed and sat down. The booking was no longer mine, and all humiliation aside, I could not have cared less.

The awkward bookings didn’t end there. One day, a crossdresser made a visit to Collingwood Confidential, and it was me he chose to exploit. It was clear from the start that he had a humiliation kink—one that I initially thought would involve only him being humiliated, but I would soon learn otherwise. He entered the brothel in head to toe cheap faux latex, donning a black waxy mini dress and long red knee-high boots, a tiny purse hanging from the crease of his arm. To be clear, I didn’t find his appearance embarassing or strange in the slightest. What was weirder to me then and still now is that men act like they aren’t into that kind of thing. But the humiliation kink was clear in his gestures, when he entered the front door he looked around sheepishly as he walked toward the receptionists desk. Likely to his disappointment, she had no reaction to his appearance whatsoever. “Naughty little man,” I thought to myself, “getting his rocks off for free.” These tricks were always trying to get their rocks off for free. I think he was expecting a bunch of hookers to leap from those numbered doors all at once and point at him, sneering and laughing, calling him a stupid little cuck. He would have loved that.

When he chose me, I was excited at first, assuming it would be funner and a little more gay-feeling than the generic missionary sex that lasted ten minutes and often involved sometimes boring, sometimes interesting small talk. I was also wrong about this. He was still a man, after all. He was lain on the bed when I entered the room like they all were. When I climbed up to meet him, he immediately asked that I lick his boots, but he had a strong accent that made it sound like he was saying, “Lick my boos.” It took me a few times of asking him to repeat himself before he started getting annoyed. “Lick, my boos.” Right. Lick his boots. Okay. Um, that’s an extra. Right? I panicked, of course. Surely having to lick someone’s boots would be an extra. What was I to do? Again, in a tizzy, I was faced with the painful reality of trying to cultivate intimacy with someone and convince them it was still worthwhile to try to fuck me or do whatever they wanted to make them cum while telling them they owed me even more money for it than they already paid. By the way, I don’t remember how much they paid per 20 minutes, 45 minutes, an hour, and so on, so don’t ask. All I remember is that it was enough, and it would have been better if I knew how to be a real hooker. And the brothel took a cut.

“Oh,” I told him, giggling nervously. “If you want to do that sort of thing, that’s an extra,” I repeated. He looked at me, puzzled and annoyed.

“Just lick my boos,” he persisted.

“I can’t lick your boots. That’s an extra. If you want to do anything kinky like that, it’s going to cost extra.” What didn’t he get?

Part of the problem was that I never believed myself when I said those words. Was it fair to charge him extra if he wasn’t even going to fuck me? If he wasn’t interested in fucking but instead wanted to use the fee he’d already paid to have me lick his boots, wasn’t that alright? I knew that the response from any seasoned hooker would be a full-body eyerolling emphatic NO, that is not alright, and that is an extra. Don’t let these tricks get away with shit. They’re just tricks after all. Always remember that. A trick is a trick, and they will get away with anything you let them get away with. With this trick in particular, fed up with the awkwardness and turned off, as they always were, by being reminded that he was paying to be in that room with me, he let it go. I would not be licking his boots. How did I know where those boots had been, anyway? I ended up giving him a sad hand job where he barely got hard and his dick was flopping around inside the condom. They always wore condoms. At least with me. I never knew—I still don’t—if some of the girls accepted more money for a condomless fuck. I don’t know how our booking ended, but I know we didn’t fuck and the memory of his penis struggling to get hard in that sad little condom is tattooed in my brain for all eternity.

The question of whether or not some girls chose to fuck without a condom for a little extra cash still looms in my mind. There were some things that we never talked about, and every brothel was different. What I do know is that one time a guy came in and chose me, but we had to kick him out after a failed penis inspection. Crouching down face to face with an angry, red, and eerily wet cock, I sighed and lifted myself to his eye level, explaining to him that I saw some concerning signs of an STI on his genitals and that he wouldn’t be able to see anyone today. He put up a fight. He did not believe—or perhaps he did not want to believe—that something was actually wrong with his penis, which honestly baffled me. Why not just go to the doctor, deal with your angry dong and get back to shagging? There were certain men that you could tell weren’t new to the environment of a brothel, which made me wonder if he got it from another hooker at another haunt. Either way, I had to call in another girl for a second opinion, unable to put my foot down and get him out of there on my own. She looked at his penis, squinting, then turned to me with the same sigh and look of certainty on her face.

“I suggest you go to the doctor and have your penis looked at,” She told him plainly.

“There’s nothing wrong with it!” He asserted and proceeded to grab the angry, red penis and jerk it up and down franticly with his hand, as if his ability to do so without wincing would covince at least one of us to fuck him. It was pathetic. We eventually got him to accept the defeat and get the hell out of our brothel. I was both proud to have noticed his infection and embarassed that I had to call in another girl to help me give him the boot. Sigh. Would I ever get better at this?

One of the worst situations I was ever in at the brothel, if you can believe it, was when I fucked a female client. It was a painfully slow night, and it was just me and one other husky girl who struggled to get bookings almost as much I did. She once told me that she fucked the same guy I had and said, “Yeah, the last time I fucked that guy, he told me I fucked like a man.” I still think about that statement all the time.

You can imagine my excitement when on that slow night, I heard the ding of the front door go off in our back room and looked up at the monitor to see a man and a woman on the screen. It would be between me and this husky girl who fucked like a man to get paid to fuck a woman, the real wild unicorn of brothel clientele. I gave it my all. I spent so much time talking to her during my intro. I had nothing but time. I was nervous as hell and I wanted it bad. Not only did I need the money, but how good of a story would it make for me, a gay girl, to get to fuck a woman for money at a brothel in Australia at a meager 20 years old? When the receptionist told me that this lesbian client, with her short, thin, blonde hair and softball butch aesthetic booked me, I was ecstatic. I nearly had to stop myself from jumping up and down with glee in front of the other girl as I prepared myself to enter the room.

How did I go about inspecting a vagina? I did what felt natural and gently pulled back the curtains of her labia to take a closer look. Everything seemed fine. She was nice. This was going to be fun. I went downstairs for a few minutes and came back up. And we just started talking. That was it. Before I knew it, fifteen minutes had gone by, and the phone rang. That meant five minutes were left, indicating that the end of the booking was nigh. Usually this is when you’d offer the client another shower if they wished. They’d probably be naked on the bed and they’d probably get up and pull their clothes back on after bathing for the second time, and I’d sit back counting the seconds until I could leave the room. But she wasn’t naked, and neither was I.

“What does that mean?” She asked me, aware of the look of surprise on my face.

“That means there’s only five minutes left of our booking,” I explained.

She looked horrified. “What?! What do you mean, five minutes left? We haven’t even done anything!”

She was fuming.

“Why didn’t do you anything? Why didn’t you do something! Do something!”

“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I thought you just wanted to talk.”

Let me explain. A lot of these clients really did just want to talk. I guess this was yet another one of my rookie hooker mistakes, but I genuinely thought that this woman was paying to be there to shoot the shit with someone in their undies in bed, like so many of the men wanted from me. Not always, but often enough the Johns spent the entire time with their dicks out but soft, just talking at me about God knows what. Trying to convince me to go to college and get a real job (yes, this actually happened. Wannabe daddies are all around us.) So when she was horrified, I was horrified. There was only one thing I could do: suggest that she extend the booking.

“I have to pay more?” She was not happy about this.

“I’m sorry, again. I’m sorry. I didn’t know—”

“How much?” She interrupted.

I told her the amount and she forked it over quickly but reluctantly and I ran downstairs at what felt like the speed of light. I proceeded to go back upstairs and fuck her while eating her out, an extremely awkward thing to do to someone who is pissed at you for trying to swindle them. I was obviously way too naive to be swindling anyone, no less my first and last female client that I was beyond thrilled to be spending a painfully slow and boring night with. I had just assumed, wrongly, that she was as lonely as the tricks I spent 99% of my time with behind those walls. I was so disturbed by the experience that I had to go home immediately afterwards. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to erase it from my mind. I felt like a fool. How could I have not known that in those short twenty minutes I should have torn her clothes off and given her the best blowjob of her life? I couldn’t have known, because I was honestly terrible at being a hooker. Time after time I was reminded of how bad I was at asserting myself, whether someone was trying to exploit me or someone needed antibiotics and a doctor or someone wanted me to shut the fuck up and do my job. I squirmed at every confrontation, unable to do what was integral to one’s success as a hooker: be the boss.

Not every interaction was like this. I had plenty of bookings that were totally ordinary. A favorite of mine is the guy who came in and just wanted a handjob, periodicially declaring, “noice,” or posing it as a question, “noice?” I never knew if I was supposed to answer. Every other time he asked I would just whisper back to him, yeah, I’d say, nice. I kept offering to go further, unsure of whether or not he was aware that sex was a part of what he paid for. But every time I offered he said no with the explanation that he had a girlfriend. I’ve always found that hilarious. Right, I wanted to tell him, but you do know you’re at a brothel and a hooker is jerking you off right now, don’t you?

Some other guys were pretty “normal” too. There was one guy who had an enormous dick who liked to come in and lay there, always a little or a lot drunk, talking senselessly and endlessly about himself and how much he had to offer girls like us. Another, more tolerable guy with a huge penis came in semi-frequently too, but I only saw each of them once. In fact, I never saw any of these Johns twice, furthering my complex that I was a shitty hooker. The second guy’s penis once caused a condom to burst open at the seams, clearly too enormous when erect to fit inside the walls of the slippery casing, something I didn’t even know was possible. We both looked at each other, surprised and puzzled, and I scurried off to the back room to grab another one, but I couldn’t find anything large enough. I was too shy and embarassed to ask anyone else in the room what to do when your client’s penis was too big for any of the condoms inside the establishment, so I just went back and offered to jerk him off without one, explaining that a blowjob was off the table. He was fine with it. He was nice. I didn’t mind him so much.

I think about my experience at Collingwood Confidential all the time. Would I actually have gotten more bookings had I just done all the necessary, often expensive and time-consuming preparation that so many of the other girls seemed to have mastered, or was it actually just that I was fundamentally too unattractive to a male audience to ever succeed as a hooker? The ordinary wonderment one has about their own work ethic crept into this experience just like it did with any other job I’d held up until that point—was I just not trying hard enough? If I left early because I just knew that no one would choose me out of all the other girls, was I giving up and being lazy? I’m not sure, but I do tell myself every time sex work crosses my mind that if I were to ever become a hooker again, there’s a million things I’d do differently. But the fundamental issue, something core to my personality, is something that I think might never go away. I am far too eager to please and far too non-confrontational to ever be able to assert myself as much as needed for this line of work, something I applaud every hooker on Earth for having such mastery over—among a million other things.

There’s a common misconception that sex workers do what they do out of desperation. This is often false, but not always. I, for example, was technically desperate, but not in the way that people fantasize when they (wrongly) make this assumption about sex workers. Sex workers are all around us. You and I both probably interact with sex workers more often than we will ever know. Sex workers are kind of unlike any creature on Earth besides angels, but if I had to compare the value of their work to another, I would say they’re a lot like hospice nurses. Underrated, almost a best-kept-secret until you’re forced to interact with one. And once you do, you will never unsee their power, their force. Sex workers have probably helped soften more unbearable men in this world than we could ever imagine. Like hospice nurses, sex workers soften the blow of the toxicity of the world, the pain, the chaos, the unbearable. Sex workers sit with suffering souls and make their existence more bearable for the rest of humanity. That doesn’t mean that I think all tricks are awful—quite often I hear from friends that they have clients who are just fine, ordinary people. I know plenty of sex workers who have clients that they genuinely look forward to spending time with. I know sex workers who see couples, sex workers who fuck other sex workers for discounted rates, sex workers who put immeasurable time and energy into making every person feel welcome in their sacred orbit regardless of anything that society has branded as unfuckable.

At the end of the day, we all need a little softening. Thank you, sex workers. I love you with all my heart and I promise to always honor you.