GKM’s Middle Class Feelings

There’s something that I’ve been realizing lately, and that is that many rich people don’t realize they’re rich. They mask their wealth under words like “comfortable” and “doing well for now,” but at their core, they have a nagging sense of precariousness. They’re one wrong move away from “losing it all,” which usually isn’t the case. Most of the time they have other rich relatives; land or properties they own as passive income; or some degree of savings should “the worst” come to pass. And yet they live in fear and mentally down class themselves.

This is something I’ve been unpacking with GKM. I try to have occasional discussions about class consciousness, the monetization of political power and how that leads to corruption. I think that’s something that across the board, most people can agree upon. And GKM agrees. He sees big businesses holding greater sway over the way the country is run. But that said, he doesn’t see himself as a player in the equation. And I think part of it comes from running in an upper class social group where he is comparing himself to multimillionaires, historically rich families, and celebrities. When he situates himself in this sort of peer group, he finds that he is near the bottom tier of the very wealthy, but if he spent more time with the common folk *like me*, he would see that he is in fact, very wealthy.

He jokes, “Who else totals two Porsches in one year and survives? I gotta be alive for a reason.” It’s a good question to ask. Who totals one Porsche and has enough money and/or credit to sign a lease on another one? How does one accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt for one vehicle, let alone two? And then with the second crash, I wonder, how does one get into an incredibly expensive vehicle while buzzed and decide to drive impaired? He had been drinking during his yacht business outing and decided to drive back home to see me for our session, which led to the infamous second crash. Now none of this acknowledges the level of privilege the sentence, “Who else totals two Porsches in one year and survives?” holds. And we’re not even taking into account the whole assertion that he survived for a reason. When it happened, while I was worried he had been hurt, the second reaction I had was incredulity that he could have been drinking and driving and the police did not once consider testing his blood alcohol level. Instead they jovially chatted about business and complimented him on his car. The other question of why he survived two Porsche crashes is maybe less loaded if we just say that he survived two auto accidents and totaled two cars. Cars are pretty safe nowadays, and I’m personally not surprised he “survived” considering he purchased new Porsches, nothing second hand of course. Just because you get off without injury, it doesn’t mean you’re destined for anything. If I believed that, I would also believe that whole swathes of people did something to deserve their suffering. Believing there is an intentionality to the way fate doles out luck for you means that you must believe the other half of that equation. And somehow a bunch of BIPOC, poor people, trans people, otherly abled people, and other marginalized groups across the world seem to be disproportionately “unlucky”.

I suppose at its core, it is a belief system that people choose because it in some way validates their sense of purpose. But, godless absurdist that I am, I can’t help but see the holes in this ideology. And at times, it’s difficult to listen with professional neutrality when my clients go off about how god seems to be smiling upon them.

Monday night I drove out to Redondo to visit Gemini Ketamine Man, aka Charlie, after a recording session at my studio. There’s an art to going from a full day of one sort of work--an interview with BUST, podcast editing, coordinating an animation project, etc.--to the demands of sex work while making your customer feel like you’re “finally catching a break”. For them, it’s time to blow off steam and have fun. For me it’s just switching from one complex skill set to another. I have to pretend that dinner and sexy time with them is recreational, and not an activity that involves mental and physical strain. GKM and I have taken to getting dinner before rounding the bases. I’ve tried playing around with my look recently, to see what looks he gets into. I definitely pushed it one night when I arrived with braids and a punk look that involved a black t-shirt with Dennis Rodman's face and a wild gothic metal lettering, over a black circle skirt and my shit-kicking black chunky boots. It was the polar opposite of everything GKM is. He’s a 52-year-old finance bro who still keeps up with his fraternity brothers. He is visually as clean cut as one can be. I sensed that he wasn’t particularly thrilled with that look. So on Monday, I decided to keep it simple. I wore a flowy blue tunic shirt over dark skinny jeans. It was me at my most basic, and he loved it. He hadn’t wanted to go out to eat, but upon seeing me in my most basic form, he made the decision we should go out to dinner instead of staying in.

We drove to a restaurant in Redondo on the main strip near the beach and managed to get seated before the kitchen closed. It’s always a question when I’m out whether or not I’ll be carded; whether or not strangers will stare at us; whether or not we’ll get an obtrusive question about our relationship to each other. We’ve only really been out properly three times, this round being the third. The first two times we managed to eat in peace without any disturbances. But this time I got carded. I think it was a bit of nosiness on the part of our waiter. But it’s also a little alarming to consider that I might look underage. It’s one of those things that I dread as an escort and also as a person who is in an intergenerational relationship. The waiter didn’t comment or anything. He checked our IDs and continued on providing attentive service. But I noticed another woman in the waitstaff made a point of sneaking a peek at my face as she wiped down the table across from us. It was this subtext happening in the background that GKM was likely unaware of. What did it look like? Did I appear to be his child bride or sugar baby? For my part, I played it off accepting the tacet denial of anything untoward assumed about us. Maybe they were thrilled to see a fae getting faer bag, as I am anytime I see a conspicuous sex worker out and about.

Me: I’m so glad we got a seat before the kitchen closed.

Charlie: I know right? We always have the best luck.

Me: How have things been lately with you and Laurel?

Laurel is his eldest daughter.

Charlie: It’s funny you should ask that. I was looking through my box, you know the one, and I realized my father and grandfather’s wedding rings were missing. I went looking for them in Laurel’s room, and you know what I found?

Charlie: I found a piece of cheesecake she had hidden in her dresser. I kinda blew up at her and told her that if she’s going to behave that way she won’t be staying with me anymore. Can you believe that? I don’t like sneakiness.

Me: Wow, that is a lot. I mean, the cheesecake… But you should be careful using language like that. You don’t want her to feel like your love is conditional.

Charlie: Did I go too far?

Me: Well, it sounds like you’re alarmed and concerned about her behavior. And you want to dissuade her from these actions in the future. But I think to do that, you have to understand why she did it. And you don’t want her to feel like when she makes a mistake she could lose her housing, because that won’t lead her to be open. She’ll just get better at hiding things. I think you need to ask her why she was going through your things. Is she curious about you? Is it her way of getting to know you? Do the rings make her feel connected to you and her grandparents? And the whole cheesecake thing just seems sad, like she’s clearly ashamed of it and doesn’t want you to find out. I know you’ve been trying to help her lose weight, so she probably doesn’t want to disappoint you. And it could be a period craving. I mean, we all want things around that point in our cycles.

Charlie: I really love your insights, especially since you’re both scorpios. You’re totally right. I’m gonna call her and apologize when we get back to the house.

I’ve become a parenting-teen-and-tween-girls consultant for GKM. In spite of how disgusted I am by their charmed young lives, I love giving parenting advice, and I’m not bad at it.

Charlie: I don’t want her to ever feel like I don’t love her.

Me: Yeah, that would be no good.

Charlie: This weekend I got to have both of my girls over at once. It was the first time Lordess ever visited my place!

Lordess is his youngest daughter.

Me: Wow! Why was that, was it Harmony or did Lordess not want to visit?

Harmony is Charlie’s ex wife.

Charlie: It was Harmony, I think. You know how she is. But I think Lordess loved it. She already hung some LED lights around her window and started organizing her things. It’s funny how their personalities are total opposites. I think Lordess was a little jealous of all of the stuff Laurel has gotten, so I told Pallavi to take Lordess to Nordstrom and get her whatever she wanted so she could have her own things at my house. I just think, if I can get her two pairs of the same sneakers so she can have a set at my house and a set at her mom’s, we should just do it. I don’t want to make things anymore complicated when she wants to come visit.

Me: Pallavi is their nanny?

Charlie: Yeah, Pallavi helps out with Laurel and runs errands for me. I told her I’d pay her a little more if she just quit her other job and focused on us. She’s amazing, such a help. It’s “Pallavi” like “Paula-V” super easy.

Me: It’s a cute name.

Charlie: I’m pretty sure that in a past life I was Indian or something like that. I just feel so drawn to the culture and the spiritual aspects.

It all runs together at this point. Charlie is just Charlie. He means well but isn’t always the most aware.

We ate and returned to his place, and did what we do: which begins with making out while listening to 80’s metal playlists.

One day I was complaining to Matt, aka Longshoreman, about how all the men around me seem to have had a metal phase and he replied

Matt: Well you’re probably seeing men who are probably in their forties, and metal was big in the 80’s.

It was succinct and boiled down the phenomena. Add in the layer of largely entertaining white men, and we have an explanation for why the men around me still get moody to metal. But metal wasn’t what my parents were into, even though they were definitely partying in the 80’s. Metal just wasn’t especially appealing to them and a Black and Puerto Rican couple. And it’s clear to see why, watching a recording of a Black Sabbath concert, there are a number of flags waving in the crowd and among them are multiple Confederate flags. Metal and white supremacy go together like peas and carrots. Additionally, metal isn’t dancing music, and my parents were all about dancing.

GKM and I made out while the Black Sabbath show full of confederate flags played in the background. I know I’m making it sound like everything is terrible, but it’s not terrible. It’s fine. He’s respectful, hygienic, generous, and incredibly loyal. And at his core, he means well. He’s just naive because the world has allowed him to be naive. Some of us learn harsh realities early on, some people never have to learn.

Lately he’s been accumulating things in a little bag for our sessions: a mini vibrator, condoms, and the bag of K I left with him as a belated birthday gift. In writing this, I’m realizing that I haven’t told y’all about our ketamine trip. I haven’t talked about the fssw transition. I haven’t mentioned how integrated into his life I’ve become. Shit happens when you need to hang onto a client through an indefinite pandemic. I also didn’t really know how to write about it. It’s a version of coming out. I don’t want the customers who read this to come away expecting more of me than I intend to provide. I have to walk a fine line with these things.

There’s also something so banal about these things that they’re hardly notable to me.

To catch y’all up: Cherry wanted to do a ketamine doubles night with GKM, but at the last second, after I had prepped GKM and secured the drugs, she dipped out which left GKM and I doing drugs solo. It was the first time he had taken K since he participated in some experimental therapy involving supervised ketamine trips paired with psychotherapy. This is how he got his name, in case y’all wondered. I met him during this experimental therapy period, and the name stuck. He has not done any K since he finished therapy nearly two years ago. That night, I snorted a few bumps and he snorted a single small bump, and immediately “corpsed out,” by which I mean that he got overwhelmed and laid back with his arms crossed over his chest like a corpse in a coffin. He was fine, but deep in a K hole. Instead of having a chill session, I became his babysitter. I made sure he stayed cool, gave him a massage, ordered food, and made sure he drank water. And since then, he’s held onto the bag of K because he likes when I’m on ketamine. I’m a lot less uptight. For my part, I prefer being high on K whenever I’m getting fucked by a customer. Not that this is a rabbit hole I want to go down, but as a person who doesn’t really drink or do other hard drugs, it’s something I allow myself to do every now and then. And to address the fssw turn: this was accidental. One night I was horny and GKM was there when nobody else was, so I opened the door and set an annoying precedent. I don’t intend to do this with my other clients. It becomes expected, and I like that I’ve been able to mostly avoid fssw with my regulars. The issue isn’t really the sex itself. It’s more that it’s sex that I’m having for another person’s pleasure, which means my cervix gets bruised because it’s not lifted with arousal. But anyway on a positive note, I do feel like a Girl Scout that has earned her latest patch, except that I’m a whore and I’d prefer to just get more fssw apparel for my graduation.

Anyway, after hooking up, I laid beside him for pillow talk. It’s my moment to ask prying questions without it feeling obtrusive. Lately GKM has been processing his feelings toward his ex wife and the way they are now having to learn how to co-parent while being philosophically opposed. But they were together for over a decade, and I wanted to know what brought them together in the first place.

Me: How did you meet Harmony?

Charlie: Ha. It actually shows how funny she is. She lived out in Nevada. A buddy of mine was trying to get with her and somehow they ended up going through some pictures of him and our fraternity bros. She saw me and started asking who I was, what my name was and what I was doing. Needless to say, they didn’t work out. She told him to introduce us, so he gave me a call and I happened to be traveling out there for work the next weekend. So we met. She had been working the whole time for Coca Cola, Kaiser, Johnson & Johnson, but she was so funny. I used to say that she should quit her job and become a standup comedian. She graduated from Groundlings, which is--

Me: I know what Groundlings is.

Charlie: It’s like college for comedians. I still think she could do it. And there aren’t many middle aged female comedians, I don’t think, or maybe I just don’t know. But she was always really funny.

Setting aside the sheer number of middle aged female comedians who are killing it at this moment, it was maybe the only sweet thing Charlie had ever said about Harmony. I’ve heard a lot of complaints, and I don’t think I’d get along with the woman, but it gave me a new understanding of their dynamic and what had brought them together so many moons ago.

I know so much about everyone at this point. Our relationships are incredibly intimate. I know details about their families and they know things about mine. There is a lot of transparency, except the about the optics of our intergenerational relationships and the money that holds it all together. And maybe that’s just because I don’t bring it up. Maybe it’s easier to process unspoken. Maybe I’ll never know.