…The depressed whore wakes up for her flight before dawn. Nothing ever good comes from waking up this early, she thinks: funerals, surgeries, insomnia, and work. She slept in her makeup because fuck putting it on so early. Still, it’s important to look hot at the airport: a space of surveillance, commerce, vague intrigue. You never know who’s watching you, always traveling under an assumed, or fragmentary, or nightmarish identity. In the Lyft she subtracts the cost of the ride from what she’ll be earning, also the friend looking after her cat, the work she could have gotten staying at home, the unquantifiable toll on her physical and mental health, and yet to remain still is never an option, not anymore, in this world in which stillness equals paralysis, inanition.
…She’s going to a mid-sized, charmless city in the Deep South. She’s looked up things to do in the time she’ll have off, which really isn’t much, just a long afternoon before her return flight, but she knows she won’t step foot outside the hotel for her almost two-day stay, she’ll be swallowed up by that cold, bright glare (the glare that afflicts schizo-amnesiac killers in a David Lynch movie) that never leaves you even when you close your eyes at night. But it doesn’t matter. After a certain point every place, like every client, is the same.
…On the plane she watches a movie about UFOs, the military-industrial complex, and the discreet charms of the Aryan race. She doesn’t really pay attention to the plot, but still, the movie stirs up unpleasant memories in her, a chain of associations achieved in detached reverie at thirty-thousand feet above the Earth. She stops watching the movie halfway through. She thinks about the date she went on the week before and about the last person she’d had a crush on, about those weird sudden ruptures in the relations between people, when the erotic suddenly turns rancid, a portal is opened up into a hostile and alien psyche, a face leering from within a hole in another’s face. She sighs: dyke melancholia. Two trans sex workers/artists/militants died this week (suicide, unknown causes). Two that she knows of. She didn’t know them but people she loved had loved them. The solemnity around these things gets old after a while, she thinks, without a pang of guilt. “Every suicide is a murder that should be returned to sender,” her friend had written in her manifesto. Every suicide of one of us, she’d meant. But if I were to go like that it wouldn’t be a murder, she thinks, it would just be me leaving, closing my eyes for the last time. She thinks about the god Mercury. She’d spent so much of the past years devoted to Venus, but now, on this plane, it’s Mercury who rules her: the god of money and messages: of writers, travelers and thieves. As the flight approaches its final hour, the older white woman sitting next to her remarks that she doesn’t get why everyone keeps the windows closed on flights these days, it didn’t used to be that way. The depressed whore agrees, says you’re turning away from this totally aberrational, sublime experience in order to sit in the numb discomfort of a buzzing metal box. Then the cute Latino guy sitting across the aisle from her asks about her tattoos, how long she’s had them, which was her first, her most recent. I only have this one, he says, revealing something indistinct on his wrist. It’s a matching tattoo with my wife. His wife looks over at her and smiles. We just got married, he says, flew out to San Francisco for the honeymoon. Aw, congratulations, the depressed whore says. Their little kid is with them, sitting in the window seat.
…At the Charlotte airport she has a couple hours to kill before her connecting flight. She sits down at a bar and orders a margarita, then another. She’s breaking her sobriety but she doesn’t care. Airports don’t count. The bartender asks her if she wants a third and she says no, just the check. She boards the connecting flight, lands. It’s dark when she gets there, but it’s not super late. She takes another Lyft to the hotel, where the client has left her name, instructed the receptionist to give her her room key. She drops her bags in the room and goes down to the hotel bar, orders some bougie drink with gin in it on the client’s tab, as well as a burger, fries, and wings. While she’s waiting for the food to arrive, she thinks about anal sex, about the advantages and disadvantages of not having a pussy in this job (advantage: there are a lot of chaser clients out there, disadvantage: there are a lot of chaser clients out there, and you can’t take nearly as many dicks in your ass, over the course of a week, a month, a year, etc., as you can in your pussy), she thinks about the importance of retaining balanced pH levels in your anus and digestive tract, remembers that meme she saw last week where some guy was tweeting something like “anal sex is totally not dehumanizing at all! give me a break, you destroyed your root chakra, it’s so over!!!” She takes the food up to her room. As she’s getting off the elevator a group of little girls looks up at her, starry-eyed. You’re so pretty, one of them says. Thank you, baby, she says. As she walks away she hears a different girl whisper: “that’s a man!” It doesn’t bother her, at least right now. She eats her dinner standing up while watching Marie Antionette, reflecting on beauty beyond all consolation.
***
…The next morning she wakes up groggy and hungover. That’s what three drinks will do to you when you’re sober, she tells herself. It’ll just feel worse if you feel bad about it, she reminds herself. She takes a shit, then another, then a third. She’s freezing in that bone-deep way you can only be freezing after a night spent in a strange, inhospitable place. The client wants the room frigid when he gets here, which is going to suck for her anemic ass, but at the same time it’s better than having him sweat all over her. She takes her morning meds, remembers to take Viagra, so she can top as well as bottom, does an enema, shits some more. In the shower she starts to feel half-way normal. She puts on her makeup. The client has glaucoma and said he didn’t care about makeup, but it’s not for him: it’s for herself, for Venus, for the otherworldly ideal of all whores. He said he preferred to see her “natural beauty,” a nauseating term, and had asked her to take out her septum piercing, a request she politely refused. She has some juice down in the lobby and notices an unsettling (unsettling, to her, and in reality) number of guests in military uniforms. The television in the lobby is tuned to CNN, where they’re talking about the border, “the crisis at the border.” A few days before she’d written a jeremiad on one of her Instagram stories, in between thirst traps and memes about cum, in which she said: “dk if anyone’s paying attention but some form of highly organized if opaque fascist paramilitary putsch/coup is taking place in the streets, at the border, everywhere…it began sometime this year, things are about to get very real…the major capitalist institutions in this country (media, finance, healthcare, etc.) see the writing on the wall and are quietly accommodating themselves to this new reality, if u are marginalized do not expect any institutional backing we are on our own.” She had resolved this year to tone down the apocalyptic anxiety in her speech, there was too much of it these days, it creates panic, makes things worse, but at the same time, she felt compelled to say something, it was all too grotesque what was happening, the dark settler core of this country in open revolt, some bad dream of a planetary holocaust. They want to turn the whole world into Colonia Dignidad, she thinks, a Nazi incest colony, or into Salo, a scatological orgy of methodical but meaningless violence. The reason she’d included healthcare among the institutions was she’d recently learned insurance companies had stopped covering body feminization contouring for trans women. It didn’t matter though, she was earning enough to pay for it and for even bigger tits at the same time, she wouldn’t go into hiding, would become a kind of hyperfeminine porno-surrealist image of herself, spit the taste of her own death back in their faces, the eroticism of her death, a sexual disappearing act. She realized that everyone in the lobby was casting glances in her direction. They all know I’m a whore and yet they can’t do anything about it, in this economy we’re all that keeps the hotel industry going, whores and the military, the lumpenproletariat of sex and violence, provided with free breakfast.
…She heads back to her room. She has nothing to do until 11 AM. She tries to pick up the novel she’s reading by this young author from Senegal, but a wave of lassitude overcomes her. She turns on the television.
***
…The client arrives. He’s a tall, lurching, well-built man in his mid-fifties with a reddish face, a potbelly, a Southern accent. She goes in to kiss his cheek and immediately he sticks his tongue down her throat. The money first, she says. He pays the remaining fifty percent, in cash: two months rent, she thinks. He’s clearly revved up, one of those clients who wants to “get his money’s worth.” She steels herself for a long afternoon. To put it bluntly, she finds this man physically repulsive. Usually she can work herself into some state of arousal with a client, some simulated eroticism, even through the pure degradation of it, but she knows right away that’s not going to be possible, so she prepares to disassociate. He has that hobbyist smell of performative, not actual, hygiene, as if not smelling like literal shit sets him above other men, confers on him an aura of desirability. There’s some chit chat in between making out, but not much. He doesn’t remark on how hot she is, tell her she’s beautiful, the way most clients do, who feel on some level genuinely lucky to be in the company of a girl they could never fuck without paying for it. To tell the truth, he takes her body, her presence, for granted. That’s one way of dealing with the shame, for them. She starts to suck his dick. Her stomach turns when she sees how massive it is. Usually a big dick turns her on, but now it’s just an extra imposition. He doesn’t moan, doesn’t shiver, as if he’s impervious to pleasure, as if a girl sucking his dick registers to him as the actualization of a purely mental desire, a check next to a picture on a foreign website in his mind. Now he wants to fuck her. She sits down on his dick and looks into his eyes, which are completely dead. A man kills pleasure in himself, she thinks, in order to kill off the specter of the other (a woman, the ocean, communism, the body, its obscure death, etc.). Heidi said every sex worker needs to learn some form of incantation, ritual, dance, in order not to assimilate the toxic energy of the client. But this hotel room is devoid of magic, it’s a place that lurks in one of the many hallucinatory trapdoors of reality, you can enter and you can leave, but it’ll still be there, room 203. The depressed whore thinks about random things, like tattoos she wants to get, the names of different streets she’s lived on, what year it is, the title of a Polish movie she once saw called Never Gonna Snow Again, how she never remembers any client’s name, even when his dick is inside her, you want this big dick?, the client keeps asking, yes Daddy, give me that big dick, etc., she grabs her own tits, squeezes them, hoping he’ll cum soon, but clients like this always delay cumming as long as possible, the point isn’t the orgasm but the prolongation of her own performance, luckily her own pornographic stream of consciousness, pornographic subconscious, is endless, inexhaustible, she always has a different way to moan, another whore face beneath her face, a way of emptying herself of all meaning, of the illusion of belonging to the human species, every year I become less human, more woman, she thinks, until finally his dick slips out of her. Now he wants her to fuck him. She puts on a condom, does for awhile. Cum for Daddy, he says. He slipped up, she thinks, made a mistake, she counts down from ten and fakes an orgasm, rolls over onto her back, sighs with fake dreaminess. Now he’ll have to give me a break for a while, she thinks. She looks discreetly at the time on the hotel alarm clock: four more hours to kill. Luckily, though, the client seems to have lost all interest in fucking. For the next four hours, they lie in bed together while he talks at her, a different kind of horror. He shows her various trans porn stars and escorts on his phone, remarks with taxonomic obsession on their bodies, their surgeries, their attractive qualities and aesthetic failures, which ones he’s fucked, which ones scammed him out of money (she fucked me, if I saw her I’d slit her throat, a long story about an escort who pretended to be in the hotel room while he stood in the lobby, arguing with her on the phone, how he figured out she was actually in England, the depressed whore laughs internally, to herself, takes notes in case she wants to start scamming herself), this one’s a man now, he said, meaning she detransitioned, he likes playing this game where he’ll show a picture of a girl and say, girl or boy?, by which he means cis or trans woman?, and she plays along, except she doesn’t say “boy” obviously, she says “trans woman,” wave after wave of dysphoria washes over her, to cope with it she starts to masturbate, especially to the porn videos, ooh I bet you’d like to take her cock, he coos, yes, she says, though of course she’s imagining herself as the porn star, thinking about how to make that a reality in the coming years, a couple of the girls are so blindingly beautiful, minor trans sex worker celebrities whom she already follows on Instagram, that she can’t help but feel jealous, he tells a long story about this girl in Florida who he kept trying to get to come visit him for a week at a time every month, but she says she gets too depressed staying in the hotel for that long, I don’t get it?, he says, she’d rather tour for the same amount of time, make $15,000 fucking a bunch of random guys, when she could make the same money with me for an entire week, when I don’t even have that much time to see her, between work and taking care of my mom, the depressed whore tries to explain how it’s not the fucking that’s the hardest part of this job, but she gives up, there’s no use even trying with some people, finally he puts down his phone and tells a more personal story, some jumbled concatenation of events that amounted to a tragic obscurity, intimate sorrow, that led to him losing the most successful gun store in his part of the state due to the machinations of a business rival and a corrupt judge, several years in prison, the boredom, missing his mom, getting out but no longer being able to own a gun, a supreme emasculation in his life, as if his life could be divided between the time when he was able to own a gun and the time after, the dark tedium of it all, there was even a pardon waiting to be signed by Trump, it was sitting on his desk, but guess what day it was?, he says, January 6, and so Trump never got to sign it, funny thing, how you think that was bad for the country but it fucked up my life way worse, he talks about the futility of the American prison system, then goes on to rant about illegal immigrants for awhile, finally says, I’ll jump in the shower and be out of your hair. When he’s out of the shower he asks how she likes the city they’re in. Well, I’ve only seen this hotel, she says. But I think I stick out here. How come?, he says. Well, I’m a whore, for one, and also I’m a Jewish trans girl with a bunch of tattoos. Oh we shoot Jewish people and trans girls on sight around these parts, he says, and bursts into a disturbing fit of laughter. He repeats the joke, cracks up harder. It’s only once he’s getting dressed that she realizes how blind he is, stumbling around the room, God I hate driving in the dark, he says, she realizes she wouldn’t care at all if he drove himself off the road and wrapped his car around a tree, it’s not that she hates him, men like him aren’t even worth it, it’s just that she doesn’t think his life matters, in anyway, at all.
***
…She takes a shower, calls down to order fresh sheets. There’s always that vague sensation of satisfaction afterwards, when it’s just you and the money, you and the night, when you feel like a bad bitch in spite of every difficulty and humiliation, relaxing into your depraved power, the eroticism of your freedom, and unfreedom, as a woman, as a whore, etc. She has a whole evening to kill. She decides to go down to the hotel bar. It’s a Saturday night. She orders a drink, and a burger and fries again. There’s a couple at the other end of the bar, who seem to be friends with the bartender. She buys them a round. It’s all on the client’s tab anyway. The bartender is flirting with her pretty aggressively, asks if she’s a dancer, keeps pouring her drinks. A beautiful tatted up woman sits down next to her. She works up the courage to start talking to her. Soon, they’re flirting. The woman sitting next to her is in the military, has two kids, she’s from Ecuador originally, is a bad bitch in her own way, or feels like a bad bitch. She tells the depressed whore how beautiful she is, her eyes, and then her hands, roaming all over her body. They go out to smoke. The woman kisses her. The depressed whore likes it, even though she knows the woman is straight and probably just fucking with or fetishizing her. Back inside, the two of them and the couple merge into one conversation. Sandra (the woman in the couple) starts to read the Hebrew tattoo on the depressed whore’s neck. Are you Jewish, too?, she asks. The woman in the military is shouting about how Sandra needs to do more to keep her man happy, how he’s a good Southern boy, etc. Sandra and the depressed whore roll their eyes at each other. Sandra’s boyfriend, the “man” she’s supposed to do more to appease, keeps ogling her, clearly thinks that he has a chance at a threesome. The woman in the military says that the two of them are “soulmates in another life,” repeats it several times. Things start to get hazy. She makes vague plans to hang out with Sandra the next day, be shown around town, but she knows they won’t see each other again. She turns to the woman in the military. I’m going up to my room, she says. Do you want to come cuddle? The woman in the military turns her down. The depressed whore feels vaguely embarrassed at her sentimental plea for human affection, but then decides she has no reason to be embarrassed, she had some fun with a hot handsy straight girl and now it’s time to go to bed. She takes her cold dinner up to the room and eats half of it before falling asleep. The next morning she checks out and then reads a book for several hours in the lobby. She arrives early at the small airport, sits in its quaint little lounge. While she’s charging her phone, a professional football player from Sudan, who plays for a team in northern Mexico, starts flirting with her. Have you always had those tattoos?, he asks. No, she laughs, I got them over time. For some reason, she tells him about Popocatépetl, about the snowy volcanoes of Mexico City, which are dazzlingly beautiful but at the summit of which you can go insane. He listens, raptly. Can I get your number?, he asks. You can have my insta, she replies. She puts her headphones back in, then heads to the bar. She orders a drink, knowing she’ll be back to her sobriety when she gets home. She reads her book for a while, then sees she has a message from the football player on Instagram: “just curious,” it says, “are you trans?” She leaves the message unopened. She decides to google his name and the first result that comes up is an article about how he was kicked off his D1 football team for sexually assaulting a hotel housekeeper. She boards her first flight, which is only an hour, and then later her second. On the second flight she watches a Gael García Bernal movie where he plays a gay lucha libre fighter: a bland and sweet movie that lulls her into a state resembling peace. For once, she thinks about nothing, or almost nothing. She hopes there’ll be turbulence, she wants to feel the tender proximity of death, but the long flight home is as smooth as can be.