AK SAINI
FANTASY
Richard was my favorite client. He hired me twice a month and paid extra to pretend to rape me. He enjoyed the struggle but I refused to risk injury by staging a fight. My body is not in small part how I earn my income. Moreover, there is an element of trauma, even when you know it’s pretend. The extra money would not compensate for the lost income I would endure if I found myself physically or emotionally immobilized by his fantasy.
We negotiated scenarios that played more to my interests: submission, taboo, and the lazy luxury of playing unconscious on the job. We played make-believe that he slipped a drug into my drink, that he used a rag of chloroform to force me to sleep. Once, he got creative and used his doctor privileges to supply needles for a staged injection. When he pulled them out of his bag mid-session I panicked without breaking character. I wrenched the still-packaged needles from his hands and threw them into the abyss of a bedroom dimmed for seductive effect. He could not know, I rationalized, of my needle phobia. He represented too much of my income to even consider ending the session. When I raised the issue of my phobia during our post-session pillow-talk debrief, his response was simply, “I figured.” I told him in the future I don’t want any more surprises.
He complied. For a while. Until, like many men, he chose to stop complying. A few sessions later I was splayed wide with my hands tied above my head. He placed an exposed switchblade on my chest in between my two breasts bouncing from the cowardly force of his fucking. I knew he would not hurt me and yet I knew he already had.
FETISH
The best and worst thing about working at an agency is that you never talk to the client until he shows up at your door. The “agency girl” takes care of answering phone calls and booking your clients. You’d like to think the agency girls thoroughly screen everyone but you also know that they work mostly—if not entirely—off of commission, so their primary goal is to close the deal. She will likely never meet you—much less care about you—and probably feel little to no accountability for whatever happens to you as long as she gets her cut.
When my agency girl tries to set me up with a trick that I don’t want, it turns into a grudge match. “I’ve got a great client for you,” she says as a preface to giving me a client that she knows I’ll find undesirable. “An easy domination guy.” I don’t do domination. She knows this about me, and I know she knows this about me, but I tell her again. “Oh c’mon,” she says. “You don’t even have to do anything. Just hit him and call him names. You really want to say no to easy money?”
Yes, I reiterate, I really want to say no to “easy” money. I don’t explain why or why not, I never explain why or why not—it should be enough for her to know my boundary. She responds too quickly that it’s all good and he will come see me anyway, meaning she went ahead and booked him without telling him anything about my boundaries, and I would just have to deal.
“I don’t do domination.” As soon as he walks through the door I tell him and can see in the expression on his face that he was not informed of this fact prior to arrival. “Oh c’mon,” he says. “You don’t even have to do anything. Just hit me and call me names. You really want to say no to easy money?”
Yes, I reiterate, I really want to say no to “easy” money. He responds too quickly that it’s all good and let’s do the session anyway, meaning he will spend the next hour pushing my boundaries, and I would just have to deal. But I don’t do domination; it triggers memories of child abuse, so I tell him to leave.
There is a glint in his eye, and with it I now know that he’s folded my resistance into his fetish. He says he won’t leave, asks me what am I going to do about it, tells me he won’t leave unless I do something about it. He reaches into me to extract the rage he wanted all along, using a combination of aggressive obnoxiousness—repeating that he wouldn’t go no matter what I said—and passive-aggressive feigned ignorance—pretending he didn’t understand that I ordered him to leave at all. I know what he is doing, and I know he knows I know what he’s doing, but it is still working.
Finally I give in, everything blurs, I am my father, I am the abuser, I hit until he is on the floor, then I kick and kick, until I am sick and sick wells up from inside and overflows along with the rage, and I vomit and vomit. He leaves satisfied. He tips extra for the vomit.
BAREBACK
The wealthiest people are the ones who will haggle with you the most. This one is relentless. I wrench an hour-long booking from him with a fifty-dollar discount. For screening purposes, he provides his name and instructs that I call him through the front desk at the Four Seasons to confirm it is real. It checks out.
He doesn’t seem as much of an asshole in person. He sports a long mustache curled at both ends. He spends the first half of our session telling me of his rise from the slums to riches.
Once in bed he immediately tries to enter me bareback. I block him with one hand and use the other to toss a condom at his dick, which is instantaneously rendered flaccid. “But why can’t I??” I just glare at him. “Please??”
I tell him either fuck me with a condom on or I’m leaving, and I make it clear that even that is a gift. “Okay, fine,” he says, and turns me onto my side to spoon. I let him rub his raw cock between my asscheeks long enough for him to get hard and then reach back to put on the condom with or without his support. I feel his erection fizzle again, him fumbling to jack it hard again, eventually giving up, removing the condom, and again trying to enter me bareback. “Are you fucking serious!?” I exclaim and pick up the semi-used condom to slap him with it several times in the face. Furious, I dress, take my money, and leave while he pleads with down-turned eyes for me to stay and pretend what he did was not a violation.
I get to the exit and realize my coat is still upstairs. I consider leaving it up there in spite of subzero Toronto winter temperatures, but my phone is in the pocket. I never want to see him and his stupid mustache again, but my phone is the foundation of my business.
I can’t remember his room number. I am in shock. This is what shock feels like, I contemplate at this most inappropriate moment, you can’t remember basic things like the number of the room in which you were just sexually assaulted. I go to the front desk and ask that they direct me up to his room. I am visibly shaken and stuttering about my missing coat with the phone in the pocket. The front desk person calls up and, to both our surprise, he agrees to have me come back up to collect my coat.
When I get back to him, he is waiting at the door with my coat and a look of guilt, but not remorse. He is sad that he was caught and about the potential consequences. He says he is sorry for upsetting me and wishes me the best. The shock has yet to wear off, I think, so I just grab my coat and go.
A couple months later I am with my “Captain-Save-A-Ho” client. A “Good Guy”TM who asks with saccharine concern whether I’ve ever been raped in this line of work, as if discussing such topics in the company of virtual strangers is the kind of intimacy for which you can pay. I shrug, shake my head no, and say, “That must be awful, though. I’m thankful it’s never happened to me.”
When the Captain is in the shower, I glance over to the bedside table and see Stupid Mustache staring back at me from the cover of a magazine, featured as a paragon of the Horatio Alger Myth of the American DreamTM, an immigrant who built himself up from the working-class slums of his home country in the Third WorldTM to becoming one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
ENFORCEMENT
He emails saying he wants to see me for the whole night at the Ritz. He says he doesn’t have references but I can meet him at the bar in lieu of screening. Typically I require at least one reference from another escort to verify that the client is safe but I am too broke to be picky so agree even though I know no legitimate client would book at the Ritz (the room is too expensive to waste on a date with a hooker you’ve never met) and I doubt this will end well.
Without the luxury of feeling overwhelmed, I navigate the chandeliers and marble of the expansive Ritz lobby to the hotel bar with an artifice of self-confidence. I saddle up beside the one single man that I profile as my guy—dressed business casual and conspicuously alone among a panel of couples—and ask him if he is waiting to meet me. He says no, he is not who I think he is, but let’s have a drink. I tell him no thank you, I’m waiting on someone, and relocate to a seat on the other side of the bar. Over the course of the next hour, diners ebb and flow from the surrounding stools, none of them there for me, and it becomes clear that he is almost certainly my guy. I sit back down beside him and ask, “Are you sure you’re not looking for me?”
Again he says no but with the open-ended intonation of someone with an agenda. He’s too calculating to be a trick. He’s a cop, I realize on a subconscious level. I can’t let myself know this in real life because I want the money bad.
We spar back and forth about whether he will buy me dinner or if we will proceed directly to his room. Of course, he needs to not have dinner with me, because it muddles the prostitution charge the more it looks like we are on a date rather than a simple exchange of sex for money. And he needs me to name my price, to solicit him, because the criminal justice system will call what he’s doing to me entrapment only in the narrow circumstance that he explicitly proposes we engage in criminal prostitution. Still not having named a price, I follow him up to his room. I rationalize I am safe as long I don’t initiate anything, knowing full well that this idealized sense of safety is a chimera in a reality of crooked cops.
On the couch of his suite at the Ritz, my mind’s eye confirms everything my conscious mind was denying: this is a sting operation. They were, and are, common in Michigan. Exhausted, worn down by the dance we were doing, the swirling temptation of a payoff in the context of poverty, I name a price. I mutter it, let it trail off my tongue at the end of a run-on sentence.
He leans in and asks me to confirm my fate, “Did you say you want XXX dollars for us to spend the night?” Everything stops now, whirs to a halt. I disassociate and float overhead to observe the situation. From this bird’s eye view I can see the rest of his team poised to act in the adjoining bedroom of the suite. I could see that they might take turns raping me before taking me to the station, where they would realize I am an undocumented immigrant and I would face the threat of deportation or jail time, or jail time followed by deportation. I saw my life further unravel from there into homelessness and, when there was finally nothing left, suicide. I was not going out like that, I decided, and sprang into action.
I knew the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. I knew that if I stopped to look back at the scene of sin, these ignorable boars foraging for an innocent kill, I would dissolve into a pillar of salt, finished. And I knew, just as when you are dealing with a wild animal, not to run away or signify fear.
I walked briskly out of the suite and down the hall as his calls for me to return burned into my back. I willed the elevator to arrive before he could catch up to me and before I could look back or run or signify fear. I didn’t look at myself in the mirrored elevator; I just stared at the numbers as they approached “G” for the ground floor and when the doors opened I kept my pace and gaze forward, nodded goodbye to the concierge, and pushed forward to the parking lot. Good I didn’t valet my car, I thought, otherwise …
But I couldn’t consider that, couldn’t look back, couldn’t signify fear.