Seeking and Finding an Arrangement

As I’m writing this, I’ve been struggling to think about anything other than the election, but it’s not as though life has stopped. It’s plowed forward even as Nevada’s vote counting has come to a screeching halt.

I gave up on What’s Your Price after a series of dead ends. I had spoken to so many men who eventually balked at my price or who rushed me and lost interest after I wasn’t willing to meet up with them at a moment’s notice. I know that’s the name of the game with sugar shopping, but it was frustrating, and after a point I kept seeing listings for the same handful of men, over and over again. There were new faces. I realized the pool I was searching through was pretty small, so I decided to bury my more than half-decade-old hatchet and re-examine Seeking Arrangement. I figured it couldn’t hurt, and at least with the site billing itself as a sugar dating service, the men on there should have some expectation that they would be taking on a financial burden. Plus, I imagined the website had updated plenty since I first ventured to create a profile back in 2013. I was a wizened whore now.

There’s nothing more exciting than crafting a profile. To me it’s like playing a game, picking the right pictures and crafting the “about me” text boxes. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea. Clearly curating my image and writing about myself is my conceit, I mean you have made it this far. I don’t agonize over my words, in fact I type it and forget it. This time I had to be particularly careful because SA is one of those sites where you really have to be careful with what you say, because the site is vigilant against solicitation, and explicit sex work. My first version of the “about me” section got flagged because I listed my Instagram and Patreon links. Apparently that counts as promotion, and it’s not allowed. In other interesting news, if you create a sugar baby account in LA, the founder of Seeking Arrangements might show up as a potential daddy. He has a profile and is using the site, trying to add additional concubines to his collection.

It’s easy for me to wonder about the role of race on the site. I didn’t put on my whole ★Selena★ look with a long straight ponytail because that sort of thing doesn’t work well IRL. A clip-on pony will be detectable if not immediately, then at some point. I figured I might as well be me. But I do think that it’s apparent who the site is for. You can tell from the front page where we see a white woman and an older white man featured as the faces of Seeking Arrangement. I long for the day when I see a non white woman as the face of any adult web page. I long for the day when non cis/able/youthful/skinny beauty is the way we rope people in. These sites perpetuate white supremacy (and all the other stuff I rail against) by doing what they do, but they clearly don’t care because white supremacy (et. al) sells.

Anyway, I took an aggressive approach to this round of daddy shopping. I paid to promote my page for 24hrs and messaged a number of potentials. I took phone calls with a few of them, text chats with others, and I ran into a lot of the same issues. My price point is too high but they like my look; they don’t want someone too experienced; they want a monogamous relationship, etc. Additionally, I ran into a few scams. The first was one I should have sniffed out from the start, but I was hopeful. I mean, LA has money and I know from experience what people are willing to pay for in person sex work. Lordt knows how much people have paid for me to grind on their lap all night. Getting my $750 minimum should not be this difficult, and yet it has been thoroughly vexing.

The first scam offered me a $900 starting weekly allowance, which to some might have sounded too good to be true, but I’m a spoiled babe. My first thought was, “Why not just round up to $1000?” We exchanged emails, and then the hustle began. They’re all so similar, so I’ll explain for anybody out there on the verge of getting scammed. Firstly, they write a lot. Scammers go into detail about who they are, what they do, how they are so affluent.

“I’m an oil man in Arizona working on setting up a drilling operation for the next few months. I also invest in natural minerals including gold. I don’t have time to date, which is why I’m here. And I like you very much. But I won’t be able to meet until Covid is contained, but I want to send you an allowance until then just to talk and keep me company.”

They offer you a sizable amount of money, but the catch is that they only do bank to bank transfers because they are unable to use Venmo/PayPal/CashApp. They may even try to cover and say something like “I didn’t ask you for your account number, I just asked what bank you use,” but it’s all a ploy to gradually collect your data. They might ask if you have any credit card debt or some other bills you want paid and then gather your information that way over time, asking for a screenshot of the bill so that they can pay it for you.

As soon as they started evading basic e-wallets, I knew the man was a scam. More disappointingly, I ran into a lesbian scam, which was quite a let down because the woman whose picture they used was pretty cute. I wanted to have a sugar mama so badly that I considered lowering my rates for the sake of the experience, but in the end the ma’am was a scam.

Evan joined What’s Your Price out of curiosity and also found himself chatting with a number of scammers. On the client end, the common scam is that a woman schedules a date with you, and then the day of, reinforces that she is coming by for the date, but along the way “gets a flat tire and needs cash to fix the flat”. Dealing with these sites can be a real drag, but eventually we both found people to break the barrier from URL to IRL.

Now I have the difficult job of writing about him without writing about him. I want to keep this person as anonymous as possible, because he explicitly asked me to do so. To honor his wishes, I will change a variety of crucial details about him from story to story. After plenty of internal debating about the issue, I realized that while I owe my customers a degree of consent, I also owe myself the space to talk about these experiences. Sex work is difficult. We take on a lot of risks and accept a level of abuse whether it be via the language customers use to demean us or the way the law forces us to accept that our safety and protection will not be guaranteed. Additionally, my work has never been intended to soothe the fragile hearts of the men who follow me. It has been about sex work, by a sex worker, for sex workers. I go into the grittiness and complexity because I have the gift of not giving a fuck about what my family or colleagues think about me. I’m out. I’m loud. The next phrase should be, “I’m proud,” because we queers love a good rhyme, but ya know, I’m also proud. I also have to write about it because it was an outcall that challenged me in many ways and that I’m still processing as a sex worker. I started writing about my work because I wanted to remember for myself. I wanted to recall every bit of this experience, and I love that I have collected so many stories over the course of my relatively brief career. I’m still learning and growing, and within the time since I began, my style has changed and the way I view my work has shifted. It’s all a lot more human. It is not perfect, and maybe it will be my undoing, but ya know, yolo. So with that preface, let’s get into it.

I had a few minutes prior to the Cyber Clown Girls online strip club event, and I was very jittery. It was a combination of election stress, performance anxiety, body shame, and too much coffee. I was not mentally prepared for the show. I don’t think many of the performers really were. There was too much at stake with the election and too much damage we were already living in the wake of. To kill time, I began messaging people on Seeking, and one man open-endedly asked to schedule a time to chat on the phone. Since I had a moment, I offered to talk briefly before the show. And that’s how it began. He was pushy. He wanted me to ditch on the show and see him instead. He was promising me $800 for the evening. I told him that I couldn’t ditch out on the show. I’d made a commitment to my friends, and I intended to follow through. I offered to visit him after we finished. He pushed to see if I could leave earlier, and eventually I bargained for something in between: I would perform both of my sets and then leave shortly after. He CashApped me a $100 deposit to demonstrate that he was serious, which I appreciated. I’d been dealing with so many flakes. Actually being handed money was refreshing. He promised he would pay me the rest as soon as I arrived at his house. I tried to pull additional information from him, but he was very cagey. Eventually I flatly laid it out for him:

Me: I am a small woman doing the work I do, you are a strange man who could murder me. I need you to trust me a little because I have to trust you a lot.

I call myself a woman for clients because cishet men are out here struggling to sort blocks, and non cis pronouns are calculus to them. He reluctantly agreed to a Zoom video chat. He sent me the link and then suddenly we were seeing each other for the first time. I put on my best “I’m a baby angel, don’t muder me” smile. He was tall, kinda wiry. His eyes buried themselves under his ample eyebrows. He returned my smile with his own awkward one. It was reassuring to put a face to his online ID. He went from being alarmingly pushy to coming off as more of a nerd with slightly underdeveloped social skills. I didn’t know if the name he gave me was really his name, but I assumed it wasn’t, considering how hyper cautious he was about even hopping on our Zoom call. I had to make a decision whether or not the risk might be worth it.

I called Evan as he drove home from a WYP date and he reassured me saying

Evan: Homeboy’s already leaving a paper trail.

Evan and I were doing the same things but on opposite ends of the continuum. I was considering providing, and he had finished purchasing. Observing our parallel paths was very touching. I sent Evan my location and the man’s address, then gave Evan a detailed description of the gentleman. If I was going to die, it wouldn’t be a secret. I also shared my location with Starr and Cherry, for extra protection.

I finished both of my Clown Girl performances and zipped off to see the new guy. He lived in Hermosa, which was a bit of a trek, but since it was 11p, I knew there would hardly be any traffic. When I arrived, I took a picture of the license plates of the cars parked in front of the building and the front of the house. Partially with the hope that one of those cars might be his, partially to upload a picture to the cloud with the date, time, and location of my last breath if I got merked.

Shortly after I texted him that I’d arrived, my client appeared. The lovely thing was that as soon as I arrived he pulled out his phone and sent me the other $700, and then complimented my appearance.

Wes: You’re exactly what I was looking for. This is perfect.

I was at least secure in knowing I was getting paid. He’d run me through his ideal order of operations over the phone prior to meeting, so I was somewhat prepared. I would arrive and as soon as I stepped into the apartment he would start undressing me. He wanted to be in charge. We would have protected sex for anywhere between an hour to an hour and a half. He wanted condom-less oral, but I got him to settle for oral with a rubber. He had wanted me to stay over, but I was not considering that option. I planned to stay for two hours and leave. I would not be haggled into an extended stay after pushing for a last minute, late night, private residence outcall.

I was a little terrified, which might sound paradoxical. How can one be just slightly terrified? But that was how I felt. From the video chat, he seemed polite and normal if a little nerdy, but of course, true crime lover that I am, my mind went to BTK. Serial killers are able to blend in and have friends. It’s a lot harder to murder if you have no social skills. I had to blindly trust Wes a little bit. To further bolster my sense of calm, I decided to play a mind game of “If I was a gay on grindr”. My gay male friends do anonymous meetups for sex all the time. There is hardly any exchange of information, no decorum, just straight (gay) fucking. After listening to years of bathhouse and cruising stories, I decided I would handle this moment like a gay man.

“Anonymous sex is normal. I can handle this. I will get through. I have a penis.”

God, sometimes I really wish I had a properly hermaphroditic body, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Anyway, as soon as I walked into the doorway of his home we began kissing. He led me upstairs to his room which was nearly pitch black. A vague halo of blue light could barely be seen around the edges of his blackout curtains.

Me: Can we at least have a little light*.

*as a treat?

Him: No, I prefer to have sex in the dark.

I worried he might have a weapon hidden; or a friend somewhere who would ambush me (Although he wouldn’t really have needed a second person to take me down. I am so small.). I was worried he might have a camera recording everything somewhere, but the beauty of cameras is how shit their night vision is 99% of the time. After I ran through my worst case scenarios, my fear began to dissipate. I realized the most likely reason he wanted the lights off was body shame. He probably didn’t want to think about how I might be perceiving his body, and not having a light on made the issue a little easier.

I had’t given a condom blow job in ages. It seems terrible for everyone involved.The giver has to deal with gross rubber tastes, the receiver gets a pretty wack version of an otherwise good thing. It’s not terrible, and many people are there for the mental of it, but it is not ideal. I was very dehydrated after dancing, and well, life. I had hardly enough spit to give him anything other than a dry kitty tongue.

Wes: Spit on my dick.

I attempted. I imagined a puff of dust coming out instead.

Me: I’m pretty dehydrated.

Wes: Oh! I’m sorry, I should have offered you something. Do you want some Gatorade?

Me: Do you have any water?

Wes: You don’t like Gatorade?

Me: Not really. I’m a water kind of gal.

Wes: Okay, I’ll go get you water in a second. Let’s just fuck for a bit longer.

Me: Okay.

I let him go at it for a bit longer, then he went down to the kitchen to grab me a cup of water. I grabbed my phone to check the time. We were about thirty minutes out from my hard leave time. He returned with a glass of water.

Me: Thanks.

I gulped the water, greedily. I hadn’t had time between the show and driving to Hermosa to hydrate. I was still a little grody from dancing and had Gorilla Snot pole grip on my hands, which I forgot until--

Wes: Spit on your hand and stroke my dick.

I followed his directions, only to remember the Gorilla Snot as my gunky hands wrapped around his condom wrapped penis.

Me: Oh shit. I forgot I have pole grip on my hands, so now your dick is covered in Gorilla Snot.

He laughed. Sex is so funny, maybe even moreso when it’s anonymous.

Me: That’s gotta be one of the best sentences I’ve ever said.

It was maybe the least intimate sexual encounter I’d ever had, and I credit that largely to his desire to begin our interlude as soon as I stepped into the doorway. And yet, as we went on performing the act of intimacy, we began to develop a connection. The whole encounter went off without any issues, and I left $800 the richer.