My Postmodern Marxist Agenda

Through the years I’ve touched a lot of people, pun intended. I’ve had conversations with men about masculinity, sexual dysfunction, mental health and mental illness, suicide, stigma, gender expression, and of course, sex work. Sometimes I wish I could discriminate against people with conservative belief systems, but I don’t really have that privilege. It’s hard gaining ground when a person's baseline belief system doesn’t value my life, my right to bodily autonomy, the histories of my peoples, people in my occupation, or many of the integrally important parts of my identity. Of course, the people who disbelieve in these things don’t tend to think that deeply about the effects their disbelief has. Super Bowl night, I picked up one of those regulars.

A bald man in his mid fifties sat alone at the bar eyeing the stage. I was feeling particularly introverted and could hardly motivate myself to talk to the drunken gaggles of post Super Bowl men looking for fun. A single, older man was more my speed. I approached him, making sure to hide my mangled hands and made my pitch.

“Hi there,” I smiled.

“Hello,” he replied curtly.

“What’s your name?”

“Melvin.”

“Selena, nice to meet you,” I winked, “You a Rams fan?”

“I’m not particularly either.”

“Same!” I sighed, relieved, “I’m not much of a sports person.”

“I like golf, but I’ve never been much of a football person. You don’t like any sports?” he asked, wary.

It was like a test I hadn’t realized was a test. He peered down, unsure what to make of me.

“I like sport climbing?” I offered.

“Never heard of that.”

The conversation paused and I searched for where else I could take it. I rubbed his chest in the meantime and moved my robe to show a nipple, which thankfully he reacted to. His face lit up with renewed interest.

“So… What do you do?” I asked.

“I’m a financial advisor.”

“Must be busy season for you, eh?”

“Well, not quite. It’s busy at the start of each quarter, then it quiets down until the next quarter.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

“I do.”

Another pause. He wasn’t giving me much to work with, but what was I expecting, talking to a glorified accountant? (No shade on accountants or financial advisors, the work y’all do is important and I need a fiduciary)

“Well…” I sighed, “I know you just got here, but could I interest you in a lap dance?”

“How does that work?” he frowned.

I explained the dances and locations. He settled upon a fifteen minute room after doing the mental math, calculating which dance would give him the most bang for his buck. I led him upstairs. It was a particularly hot evening in LA. During the day it had reached 90℉. I fanned my face, noticing the change in temperature from downstairs to upstairs.

“Hot day, isn’t it?” he remarked.

“Yeah. Crazy for February, but I guess that’s climate change.”

He looked at me sideways, “Just so we’re clear, you know the climate is always changing?”

“Yeeeeaaah…”

It doesn’t matter what he believes, I told myself. But I also knew from that statement where he stood. He had no idea who he was dancing with. In his world, I was the enemy: I’m the gender queer, critical race theory touting, academic elite, far far leftist boogeyman of his worst nightmares. However, all that aside, I have great tits.

I gave him an award winning lap dance and could tell by the end that he wanted more. We exchanged numbers and he promised to visit me again the following Tuesday.

That Tuesday I sat in my car, waiting for his text, unsure of whether or not I had the stamina to work. I was exhausted. On the way over I’d driven through rain, which is never a good sign. In California, a rainy evening kills business at the club. Californians are soft and hate weather because we seldom experience anything other than sunshine. Additionally, the lane directly in front of the club was blocked off for waterline construction. For the past month, we’d been experiencing inconsistent water pressure tinged with sewage smells, and finally the city sent a team to fix the issue. While we needed it, the timing couldn’t have been worse. My tits hurt. The last thing I wanted to do was be handled, but I couldn’t afford to miss work. Begrudgingly, I left my car, dreading the next five hours.

He arrived later than he’d promised, but I was glad he had shown up. Normally I don’t quote my extras prices over text, but I’d let him know ahead of time, so he would be prepared with cash. He hadn’t responded after I sent him my rates, which I worried was a sign he was chickening out. Thankfully, the lack of response turned out to be more of a symptom of him being a bad texter than not agreeing to my terms.

“Do we have time to sit?” he asked.

Normally I prefer not to waste time talking before I’ve gotten paid, but the club was more or less empty.

“Sure.”

“I hoped I could get to know you a little better.”

I nodded. I’m not the best talker, particularly about myself. While I’ve lived a colorful life and clearly can write extensively about it, I would not call myself a natural storyteller. I begin and skip to the ending without building any tension for fear of boring my listeners.

“What do you want to know?”

“Are you from California?”

“No. I’m from Oklahoma.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“Well, it’s flat, boring, and ugly. And the p–” I almost said ‘politics’, but stopped myself, “People are nice, but not my type,” I said gently, “Are you from California?”

“Been here all my life. I grew up in OC, back when it was all orange groves and it was safe to walk around, before all kinds of people moved there. It’s changed a lot since then. I moved around a bit: to a town near Sacramento, spent some time in the Bay, some time in Texas, but I always come back.”

“It’s hard to improve upon California.”

“Was this place open through the pandemic?”

“It shut down for six months, then quietly reopened.”

“Did you work then?”

“I didn’t go back until I’d gotten vaccinated.”

“Did you catch it?”

“No. You?”

“I caught it. It was the worst three weeks of my life. The first week I felt like I had the worst flu ever, then gradually I got better. I picked up a persistent cough that I still have. I must have caught it from a man I met at a bar. He kept buying me drinks, wanting to talk to me for some reason. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t need to pay. I could tell I make a lot more money than he does. He had come from one of those relocation centers.”

“The detention camps?”

“They’re more like placement centers,” he eyed me suspiciously, “Anyway, it was him, or it was these two other women. They also came from the centers and talked to me. I know, because right after I talked to them, I had Covid.”

I wasn’t about to get into the nuts and bolts of his blatant anti-immigrant sentiments. It was almost comical to blame contracting Covid on immigrants in a state that did no substantial contract tracing, but he had done it.

“Well, I’m glad you’re better.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“I have a sister.”

“Does she live in California too?”

“They moved to Berlin.”

“‘They?’ Are you talking about more than one?”

“No, that’s just their pronouns. They go by they/them.”

“One of them,” Melvin laughed and rolled his eyes, “What’s the point of that? Doesn’t it get confusing?”

“Not really.”

“That’s silly. Why would anyone want that?”

“Why not? Variety is the spice of life.”

“Okay,” he snorted, “These people just expect everyone to go around and learn how to address them, even if it makes no grammatical sense? How do you even use ‘they/them’?”

I could tell that beneath his flippant response, there was a real question.

“It’s the same as normal: ‘They went to the store. I gave them the ticket.’ It’s pretty simple. Linguistically we’ve always had a they/them singular. For example, if I said, ‘That student ran off,’ you might ask, ‘Where did they go?’”

He frowned, considering, “I just don’t understand why anyone would go through the trouble. I mean why not be a he or a she? I don’t get it,” he bristled, “Don’t tell me you’ve got some kind of crazy pronouns I’ll have to learn.”

I don’t like coming out to clients, particularly new ones, but sometimes the moment arises and I have to be the first nonbinary person they’ve ever met. I assumed Melvin had never knowingly met someone with nonbinary pronouns. It takes meeting one for the puzzle to begin coming together. While he was perhaps the most hostile type of person to my life, I figured I could possibly do some good by giving him a friendly face to project his beliefs onto.

“You can just use ‘they/them’ with me.”

“You too?” he clicked his tongue and crossed his arms, assessing me.

I shrugged.

“Well my pronouns are ‘fuck me’ then. Does that work?” he laughed at his own bad joke, “You’re very liberal– actually that’s not even the right word… You’re so far beyond liberal, you’re progressive. You’re the kind of person pushing things toward a future that is so different from my traditional values that I can’t even understand it. I’d have to learn so much to understand you, and I’m old, and tired of learning new things.”

He sighed, fatigued at even articulating the situation. It was a surprisingly vulnerable way of handling the world of differences between us. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was about to enjoy some sexy time with me. He could deal with this minor inconvenience for the major benefit of having his way with my body later.

“I spent my whole life having to learn so many new things, just to be good at my job, but I never enjoyed learning. I just want to be done. I’ve learned enough for my lifetime.”

“That’s understandable,” I replied.

Whether or not he wanted to, the longer he stayed with me, the more he would inevitably learn. Not that I’ve ever entirely changed the perspectives of people, but I have provided a bonus reeducation to many hard headed, conservative men.

He took me for a half hour room. Near the end we took a break. Watermelon Sugar came on over the speaker system and Melvin started humming along.

“For some reason, when I caught Covid, this song got stuck in my head. No matter what I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Eventually, I gave in and decided to look up the lyrics. I know them all by heart now.”

He quietly recited the lyrics along with the song as if in a trance:

Tastes like strawberries

On a summer evenin'

And it sounds just like a song

I want more berries

And that summer feelin'

It's so wonderful and warm

Breathe me in, breathe me out

I don't know if I could ever go without

I'm just thinking out loud

I don't know if I could ever go without

Watermelon sugar high

“I had no idea what the hell the song meant, so I looked it up. Apparently, it’s about eating pussy. Go figure. A whole song about eating pussy. Music used to be different, once upon a time.”

“Blues musicians have been writing raunchy music since the 30s.”

“Not like this.”

He paid me for the time and extras. He wasn’t thrilled about the price, but he seemed happy overall, and infatuated with me as oxytocin coursed through his body. I was a sign of the times, of a world changing around him that he would find to be less and less like the world he once knew. I was the chilling wind of progress he bristled against, and yet I’d touched him. And I knew for a fact he would be back for more of my Liberal Postmodern Marxist agenda.