Chris Belcher - Pretty Baby: A Memoir

Pretty Baby

A Memoir

Chris Belcher

For my mother

I crafted this book from memories. These memories have beat themselves around inside me, have broken and splintered, one against another. And after it all, Ive translated them into story. I have tried to be faithful to the truth of those memories in the translation.

There are people in this book who have shared experiences with me, who have their own memories, their own truths. Ive changed names and identifying details to provide those people and their memories some distance from mine.

Very early in my life it was too late.

Marguerite Duras

You only remember the bad stuff.

My sister

I float on my back in a clients 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 privateneighboring balconies compete for the same view of the citythe 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 Ive been in a pool purified by salt, and Im 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 mans 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. Its gratifying, knowing I can take such a gamble and win. Like people who use heroinonly once. We all have to find out what were made of.

My girlfriend, Catherine, is sipping whiskey in New Orleans. Technically, shes in New Orleans to see clientssubmissive 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 its 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 theyll 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, youd be called delusional by everyone else.

Catherine had texted me late the night before to ask if I cared that she fisted her best friends roommate, since it was just for kicks, and I did care but I couldnt 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 yesterdays 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 waters edge, and I see his neon-white chest hair peeking out of the bathrobe hes wrapped around his body. The robe has replaced the suit jacket and jeans hed paired with New Balance sneakers earlier in the evening, an outfit that announced to the entire restaurant that hed 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 Catherines primary ruleno glass by the pooland 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 doesnt 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 hes 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 waters 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 pools 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 years 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 pools 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 wouldnt dare bare my tits to him. Not for some sense of propriety, or fidelity to Catherine, or the rules of dominance and submission; I wont show my tits because they are small.

Our family pool was aboveground. My parents explained that we couldnt 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. Im 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 tracksthe 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 Dads pool chemicals drowned out the stink.