Prose & Lore, Issue 3: Memoir Stories About Sex Work

by Audacia Ray

I felt filthy and I took it inside myself and cared for it as a mother would her child.

I kept to myself

100% of the time.

The most lonely years o...

I never interacted with neighbors; I spoke to people at work and when I went to buy cigaret...

had never had this sort of a life and so I didn't miss it or feel compelled anymore to go and find it.

The isolation was regularity, and masturbation became religion and sustenance for me. I’d come to a point where I actually

never decorated, never bought so much as a clock for the walls, and never spent more than a few hours there at a time.

The isolation and depression had gotten to me.

No one could have known how I really felt, and if they did, they’d certainly have never been able to get through the stress and depression to see I needed to leave the Manor, for my own health and safety.

For one reason or another, I need to have things build up to a basically intolerable level before I move around;

My freedom smelled like an empty home, that is, the smell of nothing,

waiting for my signature perfume to waft through the each crevice and cubby I’d yet to discover.

Black women first (as that is simply who I am) who would tell me about the struggle for an acknowledgment of our femininity and our struggle to be embraced by others and perceived as feminine by our lovers, while labeled masculine by the rest of the world and more.

I’d try explaining survival sex work and how, regardless of their reasons for being sex workers (be it necessity; choice; or more likely, a mix of the two), all sex workers were still people and they all still deserved rights, respect, and laws built to protect rather than endanger them;

but it was clear, even though these were extremely educated people, my arguments fell on ears which were, to put it plainly, unable to hear.

most of these people I’d fallen in intellectual love with over the course of my wonder years had never met a sex worker other than the occasional exotic dancers they’d ogle on impromptu pub-crawl weekends, or the sad stories they’d see and hear about in their anti-sex work “feminist” groups, and when given the chance to wax poetically regarding sex work, were mo...

knee jerk response more than a fraction of a moment...

I’d left the business once before, misguided by a notion that, in order to prove my Christianity, I had to leave behind those filthy sins and the sinful life I’d created for myself out of necessity.

and I was left alone with my sweet puppy and a bottle of wine

I was alone.

The whole world was silent when the light came on inside me.

I’d slept, prayed, moaned, and worked my way here.

I knew Jesus Christ himself was fully aware of exactly how I’d earned the money to afford this place and to solidify having a viable future in it. I knew God on high was looking down on me and knew exactly how many orgasms I’d had and had to fake to be able to move into this house.

More than that, I knew He didn't care.

I was Rahab even though some

considered me Jezebel.

Work is work; a paycheck is a paycheck.

“Why am I alive? Why am I alive? I don’t want to be here.”

They were addicts, alcoholics, or men with psych issues who had tried to kill themselves or gotten into some catastrophic accident, leaving many of them paralyzed. In an expensive city like San Francisco, they had no means to ever leave the

nursing home, to even locate an apartment without stairs.

It felt like there was very little I could do for them besides gi...

because the reality was there was no real money or infrastructure to carry out the ongoing su...

started having nightmares in which my paralyzed clients would decide to throw themselves off buildings, except they would reach out, grab my ankle, and pull me down with them.

My bones were degenerating and I needed a lot of sex to keep a coating between that physical reality and my own mind.

An escort. An escort. I’d known the word, but when he said it, it was like a little diamond in my palm.

“And what about me being disabled?” I challenged. His answer was: “I mean, your arms and legs are kinda crooked ‘n stuff, but you gotta fine ass and you are super tiny, so that makes you like a super amazing fuck toy.”

as I had been told by the media, could get me killed.

Blind in one eye, low vision in the other, lacking cartilage in all major joints, I certainly couldn’t run from anyone.

I’m talking, drill-a-hole-in-my-head-and-keep-me-partially-alive-as-a-fuck-zombie-for-days kind of death. I think I believed that because I dared to be an escort as a tiny, straight, physically-disabled white girl from a good family—that

that I deserved to be swallowed whole, tortured, and destroyed.

he didn’t look like a 20-year-old kid anymore; he looked like a strange and altered being.

“When I get out of here, I will come and kill you

for this.” Kill me for getting him to the hospital. When he said it, I felt like I dropped instantly into a dark hole that was loca...

what if the one that would kill me was the one who had been my safety in the first weeks of opening to sex work? This seemed horrific enough to be true.

We started our own Yelp tour of chicken and waffles places in Oakland.

He looked adorable and weird strolling among all the exotic erotic San Francisco sex-artsy people in his hoodie and low-hanging baggy jeans.

This kid wanted to drop his cat off before he ODed.

I called 911 and he wasn’t really dying, he would get arrested and that would fuck up his whole parole thing and his path to being a chef.

There was no way I could social work this one out. This fucking kid—he had no business to call me like that. It was no longer about him. It was about me, and I wasn’t going to live with my own feelings about what I should’ve done if he died.