The Johns (an excerpt)

For John - I bend the rules. Again: he isn't my john, though he is a john. "Our relationship" evolved into this thing in the room between us through lunchtime hookups in hourly hotels with no comforters on the beds; a practical measure that is so symbolic as to be absurd. Our relationship is fluid, which sounds nice but in practice means that it conforms to the containers it is put in, like in middle school science when you're learning about the different kinds of matter. We could shape these flasks and beakers ourselves, being creative and theoretically freethinking people. However, our containers are the shape of hooker and john, slightly remixed to look like a relationship.

And though I have lots of rules that protect me from the lurking harms and humiliations a sex worker can be subjected to by johns as a matter of course, I throw these rules out for John and others like him who aren't paying me for my time.

We misbehave, and we misbehave at each other. I let him do things to me that I would never let a john do. And I don't even mean anal. I mean the real messy stuff: no call, no show. Share me with friends. Snort coke off my toes. And in turn, I'm a lazy lover. I'm frequently not in the mood. Sometimes I fake it, and, worse yet, sometimes I'm not sure whether I'm faking it or not.

Some sex workers say that their johns made them hate men, but I like my johns a lot more than I like other men. My johns don't ever disrespect me the way John does. Or rather, they do, and I don't hesitate to show them the door, while in my so-called romantic life, the fluidity of our arrangement means that I can't get a handle on anything.

I'm reading the full piece, which was published in the anthology Coming & Crying, tonight at Titillating Tongues: NYC Erotica in Poetry & Prose, which is sort of funny because there's nothing that's "erotic" about this piece of writing.