when I want to, so long as I’ve made a hefty dent at the end of the week. I don’t make enough money to get by on this job alone, so I hustle. Truthfully, I was hustling before I took this job, and if you ever see a documentary film about strippers, or prostitutes, or hustlers, they always say something like: “I couldn’t make enough money waiting tables, so I started turning tricks and here I am.”
With me it was the opposite.
The fact that I work alone also means that, in some ways, I have no proof of the work at all. I have no product. Other than my fingers, I have nothing to show for it, no physical manifestation of time passing. Hustling is the same. If I flatten myself out enough (in my head, I mean) then it’s easily forgettable. And because it’s a secret, an almost invisible transaction between strangers, it doesn’t really exist. But I will—reluctantly—say this: all the anonymous numbers, all those forgotten histories, the injuries and surgeries and remarkable recoveries, they hide in my fingers. Where the sex work goes, I don’t know.
The burned woman? She held a pair of scissors that pressed on that knuckle, and she tucked bobby pins in that tooth, where over the years they carved out a little nick in the enamel. She was a hairdresser.
Right now I’m sucking this guy’s cock in his rented BMW, and as he starts to fuck my face his balls tighten up like he’s going to explode, and it’s shoved too far down my throat for me to practice my practiced technique.
When I look over at my hand holding the armrest of the door, my fist is clenched tight around the brown leather and the dust starts to settle over my eyes. I reach down and start rubbing my finger across his asshole, then pushing it up until I can’t get in any farther. He squirms, then moans. Not pleasure or pain. It’s a moan of not knowing, of losing control. There is no before and there is no after, there is only now, like the queasy instant just before you sneeze.
He shakes, stops thrusting, grabs my ears, presses my head down. His cum squirts in three short bursts into the back of my throat and it’s sour and acrid and awful.
I swallow.
Tomorrow, I think, it won’t be so bitter.
Chapter Two
When I get back to my apartment my friend Louis is playing Nintendo and he offers me the second controller. “I challenge you to an all-night tournament of endurance,” he says.
I make a joke about whether he means playing Mario Kart or having sex. His eyebrows rumple into a dark V, and he pushes the controller into my open hand. I kick off my shoes and take off my shirt. “One game,” I say. Without looking at each other, only watching the screen, we start talking. “How long have you been here?”
“Most of the day,” he says. “I thought you would be home. I played Nintendo mostly.”
“You’re at a disadvantage then, already worn out.”
“Nope. I’m in the zone. Plus, I got past the Water Fortress. You steal the flute, play the Song of the Wind, and then the door explodes.”
“Cool,” I say. “I could never figure it out.”
“A fairy in the Dark Lands tells you how to do it.”
“Which level should we play?”
“Surprise me.”
“I think there’s something wrong with the Flower Cup. It gets fuzzy and blinking somewhere around the fourth heat. But I’ve been playing all day, so I don’t know.”
“Star Cup it is.”
“Let’s not argue over who gets to be the Princess.”
“You’re always the Princess.”
“She has the best acceleration of all the cars in her class.”
“Her cornering sucks.”
The little cartoon carts line up on the screen, the balloons fly, the crowd roars, and the little Nintendo traffic light begins its countdown to go. “Louis, my dear, prepare to die.”
We tear through the mud, slinging banana peels and turtle shells at each other, sliding off the track, through tunnels and over secret ramps. I eat a mushroom, which hits me with a burst of speed, and I dash across the screen. Sound effects explode into the room.
“I found a box of Jell-O in your cabinet, so I made that,” Louis says. “And then I thought what if they could engineer Jell-O to include all the necessary vitamins and minerals. So that a person could live solely on Jell-O. Forever and ever.”
I met Louis five years ago when a basically good-looking white-collar guy from Cleveland hired us to fuck while he watched. We cabbed up to the W Hotel and waited in the blue-haloed lobby, talking about whatever—the weather, a new restaurant, other small talk I’ve forgotten. Mr. Cleveland arrived only a few minutes late (not uncommon) and we fucked and he got off and it was very vanilla, only what he asked for. Then he paid us an extra hundred bucks to sit around with him and talk about ourselves. Mostly when they pay you to sit around and talk what they really want is for you to sit around and pretend to be interested in their boring-as-shit lives while they fondle your nipple or smell your hair over and over. Pretty icky.
Louis and I exchanged numbers, figuring if we ever have to fuck while somebody watches, we’d be glad to fuck each other. And it happened a few more times, but not too many. And then, almost invisibly, instantaneously, Louis graduated to legit model status, signed an exclusive contract with Calvin Klein, and started to get paid buckets of money for doing what he used to do for a lot less—stand around in his underwear. All of a sudden, he was plastered all over bus stations and subway cars. He stopped hustling and moved into a loft in Tribeca.
Louis zaps me with a lightning bolt and I shrink to the size of a pea, puttering across the grass where I’ve skidded off the road.
“Take that, Princess!” he shouts, and zooms across the finish line.
Chapter Three
We’re sitting in Central Park listening to the Metropolitan Opera do Tosca for the Fall Festival. The grass in all directions is covered with quilts, sheets, blankets, people sitting on flattened out garbage bags. The music is blaring and families are sitting all around us, eating picnic dinners and talking to each other.
“Doesn’t she throw herself off the parapet?” I say.
“Not tonight. It’s in concert only,” Farmer says, rustling in the blue zippered bag that he always carries with him. I have never seen him without it.
“Well, that’s a disappointment. There should still be a big jumping scene.”
“Quit complaining. I think there are fireworks later.” The grass brushes against my legs and forearms. It smells fresh and moist. I like it. “Hey, Simon,” he says. “There’re some red balloons floating away.”
“Where?” I bend my neck around.
“Over there.” He points. “Let’s watch them until we can’t see them anymore.”
Farmer’s lips tighten into a tiny grin. Wispy clouds and birds crowd the violet sky, which is framed on all sides by the skyscrapers, Central Park South and Central Park West and the Fifth Avenue penthouses. I squint, refocusing, as the balloons shrink and drift away. They get lost in my eyes, and I lie back down, frustrated.
“I can’t watch anymore,” I say.
Farmer’s side is pressed against mine. He takes a breath and I know what’s about to come out of his mouth is going to be something honest and sweet, and whatever it is, I probably won’t understand. Farmer is everything good about humanity rolled into a squat, wrestlerlike package. He has read every one of the one hundred greatest books according to the Modern Library Association, even the boring ones, and he must read the entire New York Times every day—the print edition. His glasses are broken, not in the middle, but at the hinge, and he’s repaired them, flawlessly, almost invisibly, with