Lisa Lou - Red Velvet: Memoirs of a Working Girl

First published in Australia in 2006 by
New Holland Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Sydney Auckland London Cape Town

www.newholland.com.au
1/66 Gibbes Street Chatswood NSW 2067 Australia
218 Lake Road Northcote Auckland New Zealand
86 Edgware Road London W2 2EA United Kingdom
80 McKenzie Street Cape Town 8001 South Africa

Copyright 2006: Lisa Lou
Copyright 2006: New Holland Publishers

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers and copyright holders.

A record of this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

ISBN 9781741104134
e-ISBN 9781921655098

Lisa Lou was born in Devon in the 1960s. She studied English literature in Exeter and moved to Australia in the 1980s to escape crippling poverty in London. She has lived the life of a gypsy in England, Germany, Denmark, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. She has been a wife, a witch, a lover and a mother.

Lisa has lived with prostitutes, transsexuals, drug-users, bisexuals, gay people and fetishistson the periphery of the underground and the underworld.

As well as a working girl, she has been a beauty consultant, make-up artist, fashion designer and retailer, and promotions and entertainment coordinator.

Lisa began writing to deal with her bipolar affective disorder, which makes real-life experience acute and a life of fantasy more comfortable. She practises Buddhism and aestheticism.

I live in red rooms
dim lights
all night
water washes my skin
but doesnt clean me

hands rip my flesh
sweat doesnt touch me
words are distant sighs
but the dream is real

my friends laugh their questions
knives cut my clothes
cut my body

you can touch me, tell me, ask me
understand the words
speak them
intrude with your noises
keep me awake
demand more
laugh, entertain, pretend

you can never
dig in the dirt of my knowledge

Im paid for but never owned.

Melbourne at the end of the 1980s.

I had given up my three children to their father because I was at the end of my rope.

I knew that the day I hit my son.

Id never hit him before.

I had almost run out of options, but I had two options left:

Option One: Become a prostitute.

Option Two: Suicide.

I thought about suicide a lot.

My father had abused me to the point where I hated myself, and my husband to the point of despair but not quite to self-destruction.

This was to be my journey to empowerment.

Throughout my marriage I was inexperienced and so inhibited that my husband never saw me naked. One night, towards the end of our marriage, after a particularly mediocre session of sex, he said to me that if I had to rely on fucking to make a living I would starve to death.

I laughed about that later.

I wanted to prove him wrong, about everything hed ever accused me of. I wanted revenge. At the time I wanted revenge on men. But, more importantly, I just needed to survive.

Prostitution was to become an enlightening and often educational career.

I had a creative mind. I survived. I flourished.

I felt special living a glamorous, sensual existence, far better than the lives that ordinary people had. I did it with style. I became an actress, a dancerpart entertainer, part psychoanalyst. A mental acrobat, a seductress creating one fantasy after another.

I became the fantasy for many menand a few women.

The men I saw treated me like a princess. They valued me more because they were paying for me. They valued me more than their wives. They certainly treated me better than they treated their wives.

I knew that other people saw me as living in some sort of moral twilight, visiting five star hotels, working in brothels and losing myself in nightclubs, sleepwalking in a drug-induced haze.

I survived all thiswithout permanent damage.

This is a story about me, how I became a whore, how I sold myself and what I did to earn a living. But its important that you know that at the time my clients were not with me, they were with their fantasy, and it is this detachment that allows us, the women who work in the industry to give so much of ourselves night after night after night.

I want you to see my clients the way I saw themas damaged children. I always felt compassion, even tenderness, for them and I am eternally grateful to them for their support, financially and emotionally.

Well, most of them anyway.

Many women not only survive this profession, they thrive. The skills they learn to deal with people empower them in their relationships, in business and in all aspects of their lives. Ive known women who started in the worlds oldest profession with nothing and ended up property owners, directors of companies, starting new careers, and entering into happy marriages and having well-adjusted children.

I was fortunate. I was one of the lucky ones.

Lets be alone together now. Follow me. Come with me.

They liked me to look artificial, it contributed to the fantasy: the slut image. After all, I was an insatiable slut who loved it. The mask of carefully applied make-up helped me assume my role in this, my private theatre.

As I moved with the languid grace of a cat, diffracted light from nine candles of varying sizes and a side lamp threw off a golden glow as though a bed of daffodils had burst into bloom around me.

My delicate floral perfume moved through waves of a haunting Arabian love song, mingling with thin trails of grey smoke from the candles of varying sizes placed on the dresser and windowsill.

I bent to the old dresser to light the wick of an oil burner scented with geranium and rose.

Sitting with my legs spread wide, I pulled a tangle of lingerie onto a thinning Persian rug. From the large, wooden bottom drawer of an old dresser I sorted coordinating pieces; separating a dark-grape-coloured lace G-string and bra with a plain satin suspender belt and black lace-top stay-up stockings.

I liked dressing up.

A plump grey and white cat, who Id named Miss Piggy, sauntered inarrogantly and made herself comfortable in front of the bar heater. She licked her dainty white paws and gazed at me with a blissful, contented look, from half-closed eyes.

I let her stay for a while, recognising a kindred spirit.

I fastened the school gym skirt that just covered the tops of my stockings and buttoned a short, white cotton school shirt; left open at the top to show my bra and the creamy curve of an uplifted breast.

I tied my hair in two pigtails, high on each side of my head, fastening them with black satin bows. I dragged a pair of shiny black stilettos from under the bed, ready to slip on at the last minute.

Kneeling on the floor next to the bed I peered into a small silver mirror propped against a pillow. I applied plenty of thick, pale concealer to cover faint dark shadows beneath my eyes, that gave my face the look of a Japanese doll. I outlined my lips with a pencil and applied dark-red, matte lipstick that stayed on well. I gave my eyes a smoky outline, smiling at my reflection, pleased with the overall effect.