David Henry Sterry - Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals & Their Clients Writing about Each Other

JOHNS, MARKS, TRICKS, AND CHICKENHAWKS

JOHNS, MARKS, TRICKS, AND
CHICKENHAWKS

Professionals and Their Clients
Writing About Each Other

Edited by R.J. MARTIN, JR. and DAVID HENRY STERRY

SOFT SKULL PRESS BERKELEY | AN IMPRINT OF COUNTERPOINT

SOFT SKULL PRESS BERKELEY | AN IMPRINT OF COUNTERPOINT

Johns, Marks, Tricks, and Chickenhawks: Professionals and Their Clients
Writing About Each Other
Copyright 2013 by David Henry Sterry and Richard Martin

Paying for It Copyright 2011 by Chester Brown. Reprinted by permission of Drawn & Quarterly Press.

Diamond Bracelets Copyright 2008 by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.
Reprinted by permission of City Lights Books.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Sterry, David H.

Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks : professionals & their clients writing about each other / David H. Sterry and R. J. Martin, Jr.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-59376-554-5

1. Male prostitutesUnited States. 2. ProstitutesUnited States.
3. ProstitutionUnited States. I. Martin, R. J. II. Title.

HQ119.4.U6S74 2013

306.7430973dc23

2012040828

Cover design by Shane Lukas

Interior design by Elyse Strongin, Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.

SOFT SKULL PRESS

An imprint of COUNTERPOINT

1919 Fifth Street

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.softskull.com

www.counterpointpress.com

Distributed by Publishers Group West

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First and foremost, we would like to thank all of our contributors. We feel honored that they shared their stories with us. We would also like to thank our team at Soft Skull and Counterpoint Press. Working with our editor, Liz Parker, has been a joy. Many thanks are also due to our lovely and talented agent, Jim Levine, and the awesomely amazing Kerry Sparks, of the Levine-Greenberg Literary Agency. As always, massive props to the Snow Leopard, the one and only Arielle Eckstut. We would also like to thank Richard Eion Nash, without whom none of this wouldve happened. Finally, platitudes of gratitude to Leslie Levitas, Colman Conroy, and Eric Singer for editorial assistance.

JOHNS, MARKS, TRICKS, AND CHICKENHAWKS

Obsidian hair and copper skin, she walks toward me as I cruise in my beat-to-shit car through the seedy groin of the Tenderloin. Shes wearing jeans and a T-shirt. All the other hos sashaying down the stroll are like kabuki cartoon caricatures of hookers: glittery miniminimini-skirts, mammoth jackedup dcolletage spilling tit flesh out of halter tops, machete heels, and painted razor nails. Thats why I notice her. She looks like somebody I might hang out with. She doesnt look like a lady of the night. But I know shes working. I have ho-dar. Every time I see someone working, my spider senses start tingling. Im 23. Ive been retired from the sex business for six years. There was no gold watch, severance package, or golden parachute.

It hits me suddenly. I could just pay this girl to have sex with me. It strikes me how odd it is that Ive never considered buying sex, when I sold so much of it. Looking back, I wonder how could this have been. First, this was before you could look at a world full of women selling sex just by going to one of a million sex-selling websites. Second, everywhere else I lived, you had to know where the hookers were and go find them. Not in San Francisco. Here, theyre walking right down Geary like they own the place. Also, for the past six years Id been sleeping-on-peoples-couches, living-in-damp-basements, crashing-in-the-student-center dirt poor. Thats how I lived rather than go back to selling sex again. It saved my life at a time when I didnt have any money or people, but it left me bent, spindled, and mutilated.

So for the first time since I left the sex business, I have cash in my pocket and I am face-to-face with a woman I am actually attracted to who would give me sex for money. Plus, when I was a provider, all the clients I had sex with for money were at least old enough to be friends with my parents. So it just didnt seem like the kind of sex I wanted for myself. Fun sex. As opposed to sex for profit.

As I cruise in my beat-to-shit car I realize I dont want a professional. I was a professional. I know what it means to be a professional and have sex. It means that no matter how much you look like youre into it, theres almost always a part of you that isnt quite totally there. A part of you who is watching yourself performing acts of sex. And most times youre lying to the customer. Pretending that their stories are fascinating, pretending that theyre charming, beautiful, and intelligent, pretending to be really turned on and happy, when youre not. Like when you work in an office. No matter how much fun youre having, youre still at work. Youre almost always painfully conscious of that. There were very few times when I was selling sex for money that I completely lost myself in a moment of true sexuality. No matter how good it felt physically, I always had that very conscious awareness that it was my job to turn myself into whatever would keep the customer satisfied. Customer satisfaction. Customer gratification. Customer elation. Customer orgasm.

But now Im 23. I have money in my pocket. It hits me like a velvet glove that I could pay this excellent-looking young woman, who, under different circumstances, I could be dating, to have sexual intercourse with me. I never for one second wonder whether its right or wrong. I just know that I want to be a great, great customer. I had a couple of clients who taught me so much about life and love and sex and they were so sweet and fun and nice to me. As opposed to the customers who demeaned, polluted, and punished me. Who made me get naked and dressed me up in a French maids apron and made me clean their houses while they had wild sex with each other and snickered at me for $200 an hour. Which was $1,000 in 2012 money. That was a gigantic amount of money to me at that time. Just before I became a prostitute/rent boy/industrial sex technician, I fried chicken for a living. Now that was a terrible job. Wickedly hot, stinking and greasy, boiling oil spattering and burning your arms and hands. Plus you have to wear a ridiculous little paper hat, and you always, always, always, no matter how much you scrub, scour, and shower, have a thick patina of rancid stench surrounding you like a wet fart fog. But since I retired from the chicken-frying business, I have gone into fried chicken restaurants and felt absolutely no moral qualms about it. It was just a normal business transaction. Problem is, when I walk into a fried chicken restaurant, I get nauseous. I ate so much fried chicken when I worked at that fried chicken restaurant, I almost sprouted wings. It makes my stomach turn now, that deep-fried funk. I cant eat industrial fried chicken anymore. It makes me physically, emotionally, spiritually sick. I do not, thankfully, feel the same way about sex. Before I entered the sex business I craved sex. While I was in the sex business I craved sex. After I got out of the sex business I craved even more sex. During college, when I was an industrial sex technician retiree, I had many girlfriends. Perhaps girlfriends is not the right word. I always had a girlfriend. But I was also having sex with lots of other women. I always had five or six women friends who I really liked, and if it was late at night and I was in their dorm and I knocked on their door, there was a decent chance theyd have sex with me. That just was kind of the way it was at that time in history.