My Initiation - Learning how to Swim with Sharks

My Submission for Sun Magazine's "Reader's Write" - on the topic "Tips"

In the fall of 2002, my best friend and I stumbled into the storefront of a spa. I had just been fired from my last restaurant job days before, after consistently showing up to work stoned and being a bit too spacey. I had completed my final semester of college earlier that year, and was convinced that I would never succeed at holding down a real job and that I was completely, totally screwed because I was a weirdo artist hippie freak. I spent days wallowing in despair, and strongly considered ending my life.

It was just days after that state of despair, with a shaved head, a pair of broken-in blue jeans with blown out holes in the knees, a black turtleneck from a thrift store and a pair of broken in Birkenstock sandals, that my friend and I entered into the spa. We had called the phone number in the classified ad the day before, and walked through the front door and were immediately immersed in a totally innocuous looking lobby with Enya soaring in the background and vanilla scented candles on display.

We were hired on the spot. Before we had even walked through the door and sat down on the couch, we were already hired. We chatted with the boss lady, and had a short conversation in which it was explained that we could make up to $2,000 in cash per week, and that we would be giving light touch massages wearing lingerie.

We were very confused, financially desperate, totally broke and completely naive; neither one of us had ever given a massage before and we didn’t know what we were getting ourselves into. We laughed together in the car, at the inconceivable notion of making $2,000 in a week! Before our first shift, I went to Victoria’s Secret to buy some lingerie, and showed up for my first shift with my shaved head and blown out blue jeans, not knowing that my life was about to be forever changed.

It was explained to us that clients would walk in and pay for their service at the door; we would be paid half of the door fee. And then the rest of our income would be paid in tips. We made most of our money from tips.

Clients would walk through the door, enter into the lobby with Sade crooning in the background and vanilla scented candles, and the women on that shift would line up and present themselves to be chosen. The clients, who were all men, were then escorted back to a massage room with pastel blue walls, black and white photography, a massage table with crisp, clean white sheets and a sink in the corner.

On my first day, I made hundreds of dollars - maybe 300 to 400 dollars on my first shift. My very first client ever was a Middle Eastern businessman that walked in wearing a suit, had a hard edged, stressed out personality, and he transformed into a big baby, naked and convulsing in my hands after demanding for a happy ending. By the end of the first day, we took turns sharing notes and realized that all of our clients had demanded happy endings, and then gave us generous tips. It didn’t take us long to come to the realization that we had landed in a brothel. I called it the Phallus Palace.

The experiences that I endured during my 8 months in the Phallus Palace were among the most difficult and most challenging experiences I ever had during all my years in the sex work industry. The men that came in there knew it was a brothel, and they truly had no respect for the women that worked there. The clients routinely pressured the women to see what more they could extract from the women who worked there. They would offer more tips to see if they could get the women to bend, and if they would be willing to give more than happy endings. Many clients I encountered during my time there were entitled, pushy, borderline abusive and frequently didn’t respect boundaries. Many clients pushed boundaries to see how much they could get, in exchange for giving as little as possible.

I had a memorable experience of going to work one morning, and interacting with a client who had just come off of an all-night-long bender on coke and alcohol, who was abusively belligerent and basically wouldn’t take No for an answer, and who was so checked out of reality and so psychotically self-centered that none of the women wanted to touch him - no amount of money thrown in our faces was enough to pay for that kind of abuse. But clients like that were rare exceptions.

I liken my initiation into the sex work industry with this analogy. It was like being pushed off a pirate ship gang plank into shark infested waters, having never learned how to swim before. So I had to learn how to swim at the exact same time that I had to learn how to become best friends with all of the sharks and make all of the sharks fall in love with me, and I had to learn how to give all of the sharks exquisite moments of ecstasy. It was quite the initiation.

The money we made changed my life and transformed my experience of money forever. I went from destitute to a baller, practically overnight. Once I made $950 in cash in one day, and the following day I was able to pay the final amount due at my college - $948.52 in exact change - and receive my college diploma. I paid off all of my credit card debt and cut it up, vowing never to have another credit card ever again. I bought myself my first laptop. And I transformed; from a bohemian poet stoner chick with a shaved head, into growing my hair out and buying myself nice things.

During my time at the Phallus Palace, I sat in the corner reading Gary Snyder, Kerouac and Martin Prechtel’s writings about their visionary spiritual pilgrimages and explorations in Zen Buddhism, while sipping on carrot juice - and I dreamed of making my escape into my own spiritual pilgrimage and being lead by synchronicities and intuition. So after 8 months working there, I saved up thousands of dollars, left the Phallus Palace and left the Midwest forever, and discovered myself in the forests, mountains and rivers of the Pacific Northwest that Gary Snyder wrote about - and my life began a new chapter.