Pretty Baby: A Memoir

Prologue

I float on my back in a client’s saltwater swimming pool, high enough up into the hills that the traffic on Sunset is faint. A house looms above me, three stories tall. It looks as if it could tip over at any moment and crash into the pool before tumbling down onto the Strip. Although houses in the hills are never truly private—neighboring balconies compete for the same view of the city—the courtyard is fenced, and an overgrowth of bougainvillea makes me feel like I am alone. I am alone. At that moment, the client has disappeared inside the house, has left me floating, gone to retrieve a bottle of champagne.

The pool water is hot. I said as much when I first waded in and the client told me he kept it that way, heated to ninety degrees so he can enjoy early-morning laps and hosting beautiful women in February, the coldest month of the Los Angeles winter. It is the first time I’ve been in a pool purified by salt, and I’m surprised by how still it holds me afloat. I suspend, effortlessly, and close my eyes, knowing that a woman should never close her eyes alone at night in a strange man’s pool. I am afraid of him, not because of anything he has said or done, but because I know I am supposed to be. Which makes closing my eyes, letting my ears sink beneath the surface to muffle the radio, feel like a dangerous game. It’s gratifying, knowing I can take such a gamble and win. Like people who use heroin—only once. We all have to find out what we’re made of.

My girlfriend, Catherine, is sipping whiskey in New Orleans. Technically, she’s in New Orleans to see clients—submissive men in town for grocery-store expos or poultry-industry conferences or management-guru lectures. Better yet, medical-sales conferences. Dental professionals’ associations. New Orleans is a hot spot for conventions, and so it’s also a hot spot for touring sex workers. A pro dominatrix can throw up a Backpage ad and easily pay for her hotel, buttery chargrilled oysters, beignets, and other indulgences, and still fly home with a roll of cash in her boot.

Catherine scans the New Orleans convention center website for events that seem like they’ll draw crowds of repressed male submissives with money to burn. After helping them burn through that money, she will stay down there a few extra days to party with her best friend, a woman who used to be a domme in Los Angeles but left to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond. She is known, at least to herself, as the Queen of the Quarter. In LA, if you called yourself queen of anything, you’d be called delusional by everyone else.

Catherine had texted me late the night before to ask if I cared that she fisted her best friend’s roommate, since it was just for kicks, and I did care but I couldn’t explain why, so I said it was no big deal. This morning, I imagined her waking up and ordering breakfast, fried green tomatoes with rich remoulade and crumbly biscuits to ease her out of yesterday’s decisions, and I got jealous for more than one reason.

Catherine taught me how to do this work, and it feels good to do it without her for the first time. To take my own risks: risks I probably would have judged her for taking. Somehow, the risks we are willing to take ourselves terrify us when taken by those we love.

I stand up in the shallow end and watch as the client reappears on a top-floor balcony, then starts to descend a staircase that zigzags down the back of his house, way down deep, three stories into the canyon where the saltwater pool suspends me. He walks over to the water’s edge, and I see his neon-white chest hair peeking out of the bathrobe he’s wrapped around his body. The robe has replaced the suit jacket and jeans he’d paired with New Balance sneakers earlier in the evening, an outfit that announced to the entire restaurant that he’d paid me to be there. He bends down and places the champagne bottle and two flutes on the terra-cotta tile, near the edge of the water. I think of Catherine’s primary rule—no glass by the pool—and smile to myself. With Catherine out of town and my job a secret, no one knows where I am or what I am doing.

The client doesn’t ask for my permission; he just drops the robe and dives in naked, dispelling the welcome anxiety I had been steeping in, that feeling of inching closer to the front of the line, a roller coaster tearing away with screaming passengers right in front of you. I can no longer imagine him strangling me to death. Now that he’s naked, I concede: I am not going to die tonight.

I love a saltwater pool, I say when the client comes up for air, filling the silence with a compliment.

He treads water, demonstrating buoyancy, then grabs for the edge.

Salt water’s denser, he explains, like a fourth-grade science teacher. Easier to float.

I take a flute and pour myself some champagne, then push away from the pool deck, glass in hand. I revel once again in the possibility that something terribly bloody might happen.

When I was a kid, our backyard pool’s chlorine was bitter enough to singe your sinuses. My father was a summertime chemist, testing pH balances, skimming dead things from the surface, setting little whirlpools to life behind his net. At twelve, I was desperate to free myself from the previous year’s bikini top, its pre-growth-spurt elastic cutting into the skin stretched taut over my expanding ribs. I paddled my feet underwater, hands on my sides, pulling the fabric away from my body and letting the water rush in over my nipples.

At twenty-seven, I spin around in the salt water, close my eyes, and picture my dad and the client together, holding hands at the pool’s edge, and then vanishing, at once, into thin air.

Wanna take off your top?

The client speaks and I open my eyes, shake my head, and take a sip of my champagne. I wouldn’t dare bare my tits to him. Not for some sense of propriety, or fidelity to Catherine, or the rules of dominance and submission; I won’t show my tits because they are small.

Our family pool was aboveground. My parents explained that we couldn’t have an underground pool because we lived too close to the railroad tracks and the boxcars full of coal, clambering down those rails, would crack the liner. I’m certain that was a lie told to explain why they had enough money to give their girls something pretty great, but not enough for something really great: a deep end and a diving board.

Those railroad tracks were right at the back of our small lot, and I learned from a young age to stay away when I heard the whistle sound as it crossed Midway Drive, the street half a mile down the tracks. I would never say I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks—the other side was a few acres of swampy marshland that was rumored to be a dump site for runoff from the coal-washing process, conducted at the power plant a few miles down the highway. It peeped and chirped its swamp song loudest in the summer, proof of life when Dad’s pool chemicals drowned out the stink.

When I turned eighteen and left for college, my mom asked me to come back one weekend to have my blood tested for C8, a chemical used in the production of Teflon. A chemical company with a plant just upriver from where we lived was paying for blood testing and medical monitoring of residents who may have had chronic exposure to the carcinogen. Unbeknownst to us, we swam in it every summer off the banks of the Ohio River. Seventy thousand people in the river valley turned over their blood for testing.

No matter. I’d gotten myself to California, where I use the cast-iron skillet my grandmother gave me before I left—no more Teflon poison—and I float in saltwater pools. I buy water bottled at the source. I know that if I drink too much champagne while remembering the railroad tracks, I might start to ramble about the chemicals used to wash coal, and the polyps on my uterus, and my persistent tonsil infections. I set the glass down on the pool’s edge and swim toward the client, determined not to embarrass myself.

I was in the middle of my twenties, at the beginning of a PhD program in the humanities, and at the end of my financial rope when I met and fell in love with Catherine, a woman who worked as a professional dominatrix in a BDSM dungeon that had been running for decades out of an unassuming house on a stretch of Venice Boulevard that had never been in a movie. I knew next to nothing about professional domination, but I needed money to stay in LA and Catherine promised to teach me everything there was to know about torturing men to get it. The key to success, I would learn, had little to do with skills in rope and a lot to do with how well you can mask your fear when you find yourself alone with a stranger.

I found that I was good at masking myself.

I learned the basics of bondage to hold men still and the art of tease to keep them hard. My worth for the span of an hour was measured in blood vessel and meat. Sometimes, I penetrated them, their hairy legs spread high and wide. Those things I did for money felt like sex. Other things did not. I had a regular who liked me to stand barefoot on the side of his head for twenty-minute intervals. I asked Catherine if this could damage him, break his neck or crack his skull, and she just shrugged: I don’t think so.

But there was no way to know for sure.

I regularly fed dog food and ketchup-covered Little Debbie cakes to a man who pouted and begged for more, rooting around on a filthy tarp like a starved piglet. I once dressed a guy up in leather puppy gear without realizing he wanted to role-play bad dog, and spent the better part of an hour running from a two-hundred-pound man drooling and humping and growling and nipping at my legs. He wouldn’t listen to my safe word. He claimed he hadn’t been properly trained and didn’t know that command.

Most of the time, the guys who came to see me would simply suck on my toes and jerk off while I called them mildly offensive names.

Other women prodded me for my shame when I told them I was a sex worker. They scanned me for my tenderest bits, listened for the cadence of my voice to change when I went running for my defenses. My manicurist, the woman who microblades my eyebrows—her tiny scalpel nicking cuts into my forehead, filling them up with ink—the professionals who women become intimate with in the upkeep of their femininity, all asked me, in one way or another, if I was ashamed of myself.

My aesthetician, for example, said that when she hooked up with guys she didn’t know, one-offs from Tinder, or guys who picked her up at happy hour, she’d be fine when it was happening. But afterward, she said, when she was back at home alone, she hated herself.

Getting paid for it must be worse, she prodded, hoping I would reassure her that Yes, I feel like a whore, and feeling like a whore feels bad, so you can thank your lucky stars that despite all the other indignities you are likely to suffer at the hands of men, you haven’t suffered this.

I never hated myself for being a sex worker, but these questions still ignited my shame. It must have been there, buried in a place I couldn’t access because I needed the money, and needing the money is always more present than anything we might have to bury inside.

There was a place where, absent the questions, shame still bubbled to the surface. It was the place I tried my best to hide.

In a grad school seminar, in a bright room with bright people, my classmates discussed queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s claim that we distinguish shame from guilt because guilt attaches to what one does, whereas shame points to what one is.

We talked about the ways that shame is contagious. It spreads across the blushed faces of those who witness a shameful act. I imagined my classmates witnessing what I had done the night before—the force-feedings or the cock teasing—and my cheeks flushed. They didn’t know who I was—that I was broke, that I would do things that they presumably wouldn’t do to stop being broke—and the threat of discovery was always with me, vibrating against the surface of my skin.

In the essay, Sedgwick describes a thought experiment she assigned when lecturing on shame to other grad students like us. She asked them to imagine a man walking into their lecture hall, stark raving mad, pissing on the floor. Although they would rather be anywhere else in the world than in that lecture hall, watching the breakdown of another human, witnesses to such an act are unable to look away. Shame floods them. They avert their eyes, hang their heads. Then they raise them, take another look. Shame moves us simultaneously in two directions: revulsion and empathy. I am nothing like that. Look at me, there I am.

Look at me, there I am.

1

When I was ten, my parents caught me messing with my father’s Penthouse collection. A small utility room opened next to the bathroom in my childhood home. I wasn’t allowed inside. A hot-water tank sat in the corner, and when one of us took a shower, a faint knock came from the inside, like a ghostly third sister. The opposite wall was stacked floor to ceiling with my dad’s hunting gear and a gun case, locked. A neat row of polished rifles and shotguns. I sneaked inside sometimes, pried my fingers into my father’s things, smelled his dirt, gun oil, and sweat. He had old coins and photographs of people I didn’t know. Once, with my little sister distracting our babysitter, I dragged a chair from the dining room into that utility closet, determined to investigate the things my dad kept on top of the gun cabinet.

I had seen pornos before, in my friend’s basement, packed into boxes ready to move out because her dad had cheated on her mom. As far as I could tell, the magazines on top of the gun cabinet were evidence that my dad was doing the same. Those women looked me right in my kid face and spread themselves open with manicured fingers.

I took the whole stack.

I hid the women who spread themselves open under my bed for days until I got a chance to escape, then ran with them down the railroad tracks that marked our property line. I threw them one by one off the overpass, into the creek below, where we fished for crawdads and minnows. Letting my legs dangle over the concrete ledge, spray-painted with swastikas and declarations of teenage love, I dammed up that tiny trickle of a creek with what I saw as my father’s infidelity. Despite my moralizing, I too felt the white-hot throb of desire that Dad must have felt for the centerfolds.

Weeks later, when he noticed they were gone, I was the only possible suspect, my sister still too young for perversion. First, a spanking for the immediacy of his anger, and a subsequent grounding for a chance to think about what a pervert I had been. I passed the time alone in my bedroom, masturbating to what I had seen in the magazines. My father’s betrayal became my own body’s. I never got to tell my parents that my intention was to save their marriage, a lost cause even then. If I had set out to be the good daughter, the hum between my legs betrayed me. I kept my mouth shut and accepted what I had coming.

An obsession with losing my virginity came soon after.

It wasn’t about pleasure, or scratching an itch. I could do that myself, with or without the magazines. If I tipped myself to just the right angle under the bathtub faucet and squeezed my toes like a fist, my pulse would stop thrashing between my ears and travel down. If I swiped my mother’s back massager and put it between my thighs—hidden like a fugitive in the tight space between bed and wall, boom box turned up to drown out the electric hum—I could undo my insides entirely. It wasn’t hard to steal the massager. My mom was a shift worker, in and out of the house with a lunch box and hard hat like a man. She actually used the massager to beat down her worn-out back.

Without surveillance, I had gotten away with it for years. I got caught only once, on a summer vacation when Dad stayed home and we brought my grandma with us to South Carolina: a fresh pair of adult eyes. On an overcast day, no good for the beach, we went to see a movie.

My vigilant grandmother asked the teenage theater attendant if the film was suitable for children as he took our tickets to A League of Their Own. He ripped them halfway and handed them back without comment.

It has Madonna in it, she whispered, loud enough for me to hear. I didn’t know what Madonna meant, but the teenager gave in, said we would be fine, and I was excited to find out.

After the movie ended, when we left the air-conditioned theater for the stifling minivan that had baked in the sun during our matinee, I climbed onto the floor behind the driver’s seat and draped my yellow blanket over myself to find a different kind of relief from a different kind of heat. Suspicious of a kid under a blanket in the humidity of a Carolina afternoon, my grandma snatched it up to find me underneath, hands down the front of my shorts.

Quit that! she shouted. It’s nasty!

I pulled it back out of her hands and threw it into the front seat, denying I’d been doing anything nasty underneath it. I wasn’t even masturbating to Madonna. I was masturbating to the alcoholic coach, played by Tom Hanks, who stumbled into the women’s locker room and took a long, drunk piss in front of all the lady baseball players.

None of that was why I wanted to lose it. When I thought of pleasure, I thought of lukewarm faucet water and the back massager. I thought of a chipped-white daybed squeaking under my weight while I squirmed and squeezed a pillow between my thighs, staring up at my Spice Girls poster. In the years of MMMBop and Wannabe, Scary Spice would eventually dethrone the middle Hanson brother as my number one girl crush. A boy was unnecessary. I didn’t want to lose it for a boy. I wanted to lose it because I wanted to be the first.

I was the first of my friends to start my period, and I relished being the most adult twelve-year-old in the room. It meant that I knew the answers to all the most important questions like, Will I have to tell my dad? and What if it comes in class? I dispensed advice like the tampon machine that should have existed in our elementary school bathroom. No, it doesn’t feel like peeing. Always keep a pad in your desk, just in case. Yes, it hurts. I reveled in the power given over to me by those doing the asking, and I wanted to hold on to it. For a twelve-year-old girl, power is hard to come by, and you take it where you can get it.

At recess, in the year I started bleeding, an older boy who had been held back for a second year of sixth grade lined a bunch of girls up against the concrete wall that separated the cafeteria from the playground. He was slightly browner than the greasy-haired white kids who had already learned casual racism from their parents. His friends called him spic like it was a nickname and not a racial slur. There in the line, he walked from girl to girl, making each of us tug our shorts down a little so he could check for hair.

If you have hair, he said, you’re not a virgin, peering into each girl’s underwear while his friend Eric kept watch for teachers who might interrupt the inspection.

I had a little.

I am though! I insisted. I swear! I may have wanted to lose my virginity, but I wasn’t going to have it taken away by a sixth grader’s speculation.

He gave me the go-ahead to zip up my Levi’s, but he didn’t believe me. He called Eric over from his post, doing crowd control by that point on the half-moon of boys watching and the long line of girls waiting. He grabbed the waist of my jeans himself and pulled them away from a stretch of my skin that had never before been touched.

Look, he said to Eric, and Eric looked.

A few days later, Eric scribbled a note that asked if I wanted to be his girlfriend and gave it to a boy who gave it to a girl who gave it to me. I said yes. Having a boyfriend would get me that much closer to losing it, for real, on my own terms.

Being Eric’s girlfriend meant sitting next to him on the school bus and calling his house in the evenings. I hadn’t liked Eric before, and I didn’t like him any more after weeks of listening to him play Donkey Kong with his brother through the phone. He laid it down each time it was his turn to take the controller. I sat on the line, listening to the mashing of his thumbs.

The issue of body hair that brought us together would also tear us apart. A month into our budding romance, Eric started sitting at my table at lunch. The unforgiving fluorescent lights of the school cafeteria illuminated the fine, dark hair covering my forearms, and Eric said he didn’t want a girlfriend who had more arm hair than he did. He said it in front of the whole table, and all the boys laughed. All the girls tugged down on their shirtsleeves. Twelve-year-old masculinity is just as fragile as it will be when those boys grow into men. I got home from school and shaved my entire body, a soft layer of protection gone. Freshly shorn, I hunkered down with my best friend, Becca, to plot the ends of our innocence.

Becca and I were in the same sixth-grade class, and on the last day of the school year, our teacher let us watch movies all day long. She laid her blond hair and gray roots down on her desk, exhausted after a year of babysitting restless kids whose parents sent them to school with lunch boxes full of white bread peanut butter sandwiches and Mountain Dew.

Becca was a tiny girl with stringy black hair and glasses thick enough to magnify her eyes if you looked at them from certain angles. Our classmates sat distracted by the brick of a television mounted in the corner of our classroom. A bulletin board’s trim drooped down over Crayola kid hands, traced and decorated: Thanksgiving turkeys. Our teacher had given up all the way back in November.

Becca pulled my notebook off my desk.

Let’s write the pact, she whispered.

We