An End to War Pt 2: Tuesdays with Selena

I hoped he would recognize me and save me the trouble of anxiously searching the unremarkable array of men in the club, with the hope that seeing him might jog my memory. I’ve flubbed a customer relationship this way before. I forgot what a man looked like, and he left without revealing himself to me. I kicked myself, but it’s not easy keeping them straight. All men look alike after a while. Thankfully, this time I recognized him as soon as he came in.

He’s larger, with a tight crew cut and a gray button down shirt he wears tucked neatly into black slacks. I waved him over and perched on his knee. So many initial meetings are cursory. I catch their name, what they do, where they’re from, but not much beyond the basic logistics of their lives. Most of the time, it’s not until the second or third visit that we get into anything important.

“I have more time today.” He said, checking his phone. “An hour until my next trip.”

Storytelling is about showing, not telling, but sometimes it’s hard to put all of the memories in order. For a while, I didn’t want to write about him. I’ve felt a little cursed to sully the relationships I write about, turning them over, considering them from all angles, thinking too deeply about work. Plus the relationships have an intimacy that words can’t convey. Every story has a purpose, and every narrator has an agenda. I didn’t want my mood to paint him incorrectly because I liked--

“I remember you! How’s it going, Jose?” Axel, the floater, asked as he popped over to our table.

“It’s ‘Juan,’ like number one.” Juan said graciously.

“Gotcha! I’ll remember it next time.” Axel promised.

Axel did not in fact remember the next time.

I liked Juan. At first I hadn’t thought anything of him. I’ve been deep in my misandry lately, irked by the mere existence of men and their ideas. It hasn’t been entirely their fault. It’s part of a deeper ongoing bout of depression. Normally my world is bathed in rosy hues, but that has not been the case for the past few months. Sometimes, everything is wrong, and me most of all. But Juan was actually a good man.

“How are you doing?” I asked.

“Much better now that you’re here.” Juan replied.

“Same. It’s been a long night.”

Juan purchased a half hour with me, and after a while, looked more tired than aroused. A lap dance can be whatever you want it to be. It doesn’t have to be dry humping, and even if it is just simulating sex, there’s a lot of intuition going on on my end. Most customers like a specific thing, whether it be tender touch or being able to take control, and what they want shifts during the dance. I sensed that Juan wanted comfort more than eroticism, so I began massaging his neck and shoulders as I sat in his lap, holding him close. He relaxed into my touch and shut his eyes.

“Let me know if you want me to keep dancing.” I said, checking in.

“I’m enjoying this.” He murmured.

“Good. You look so tired.”

“I didn’t get to bed until three last night, and then I had to pick someone up from the airport at seven.”

“Geez, that’s not enough time to rest.”

“It’s okay, I only really need four hours of sleep.”

“You need sleep. Everybody needs sleep”

“I take naps. I can fall asleep anywhere, even standing up. It used to get me in trouble in school. I’d sit in the back of the class and take a nap, but somehow I’d remember everything. The teachers got so mad at me once, she called on me and said, ‘Juan! What was I just talking about?’ and I repeated everything back and had three questions on the topic. All she could say was, ‘Keep your eyes open.’ Nobody knew how I could do it, but I’ve always been able to.”

“Wow, I wish I had that talent.”

“It came in handy, especially in college.”

“What did you study?”

“You may not think it by looking at me or what I do now, but I studied pedagogy.”

There’s nothing more heartening than to hear from someone else who studied something completely unrelated to what they do now. God bless the dreamers who studied anthropology only to go into insurance sales, or the bail bondsmen who majored in English. We are kindred spirits and the educational system is trash.

“That’s really cool. It’s important to consider how things are taught.”

“Wow. Not many people know what ‘pedagogy’ means.”

“I think a lot about it. A lot of my work involves teaching and making complicated concepts accessible.”

“I was working on the same thing! I was translating Pedagogy of the Oppressed so that it would be more digestible.”

“I love that. Too much of academia is written for academics!”

“And then it doesn’t get to the people who need it most. When I read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, my whole life changed! I was a Reaganism Republican. I believed in pulling yourself up from your bootstraps. I used to upset all of my mentors, until one day they gave me that book, and then suddenly I was like ‘Oh my god, none of what I thought is true’.”

“It was that way for me when I started learning about postcolonial theory. It was like the world opened up to me, and I saw myself. I mean, it was Fanon, and-- what’s his face, who wrote about orientalism?”

“Oh god, I haven’t thought about him in forever!”

I scrunched my face, trying to remember.

“God, it’s going to kill me not being able to remember. It’s been so long since I was in school.”

“I would never have thought I’d be talking about critical theory tonight, in a place like this.”

I loved school, and I was an excellent student. I loved speaking the language of academia, citing theorists and applying critical analysis to my daily life, but I knew that if I wanted to actually make a difference, I would need to find a way to make these complex concepts emotional and personal. It’s one thing to talk about critical race theory, it’s another to talk about my grandparents receiving death threats for leading a chapter of the NAACP in rural Louisiana in the 60s.Theory is intangible, but theory points in the direction of people’s lived experiences. I can talk about sex worker rights and dignity until I’m blue in the face, but people latch onto a story about what it’s like to decide to work a shift at a strip club immediately after being raped. There is color and texture where there once were words that make people’s eyes glaze over.

In my heart, I’ve always seen myself circling back one day, when I’m older and can’t whore like I can now. But academia is an exclusive environment, where, if you can’t talk the talk, you aren’t allowed into the club. When I was in college, the first to leave were Black students, partially because of the stupidly expensive cost of the school, but primarily because they felt unwelcome and explicitly shut out. If you weren’t integrated into Whiteness, you didn’t make it. I only made it because I’d grown up in a predominantly White place and knew how to integrate, but that came at a personal loss. I knew more about Whiteness than my Blackness or Brownness. And when I considered becoming an academic, I knew that the people I would reach in an institution would not be the people who need it most. It would be the privileged few who could afford it, and maybe a few people like me who feel the friction of existing where they aren’t welcome.

“They didn’t want to publish my book, because they didn’t like how I wrote, because I wrote how I talk.”

“It’s such bullshit. It’s gatekeeping knowledge.”

“I told them that, but they didn’t listen. One day I’m gonna publish it on my own.”

“You should.”

We spent the rest of the hour talking about Edward Said, Foucault and Freire. I suggested books to get him into the sex work liberation movement. I felt guilty that we were spending $700 worth of time talking. I worried I wasn’t doing enough of the physical work of sex work: I wasn’t grinding or getting anybody off. I was just being my bookish self. When I’m not dancing during a dance, I worry that customers will feel cheated, even though I know that sex work is about so much more than the basic mechanics. How many men have I held while they’ve cried? How many heads have I stroked while people nestled into my bosom for comfort? There’s a bit of emotional whiplash going from one type of “dance” to another. One moment I’m guiding a nervous man on the spectrum through how to relax into touch, the next I’m forcibly removing the aggressive hands of a man who doesn’t understand consent from my pussy. But that’s part of the job: being prepared to handle whoever comes your way.

And yet, sometimes gentleness is the most unnerving. It’s when I question if I’m actually working, if I deserve to be paid the rates I’m paid. I feel like an imposter, accepting more than I’ve earned, even if I’ve earned every cent just by being there and accepting the rest of the burdens of the job. I accept the kindness alongside the stigma, fear, criminalization, ostracization from other workplaces, micro and macro violence, and all the secrets I have to keep. The price is a cumulative valuation of everything, and that’s why it’s so high.

From that night on, Juan began visiting me every Tuesday. It was like Tuesdays with Morrie, except with less dying and more tits and twerking.