Guestblog: How much is that girly in the window? – Part 1

Courtesy of an anonymous friend, because we all know I can’t write blogs worth reading all the time. ;)

This is completely paraphrased and I can’t even tell you which of my friends originally said it, but it went something like this: There’s no such thing as a gateway drug. If you drink or do drugs, then you have made the decision to BE a person who drinks or does drugs. People, American people, too often are caught up in the minutia of the different negative connotations of abusing their bodies one way or another and attach their own version of righteousness or rationalize it however they want. The fact remains, you are fucking with your chemistry to achieve a certain effect.

How do you think this applies to sex? As boys and subsequently men, in our shit-talking circles be they around the sandbox, in the locker room, around the water cooler or snorting lines off the toilet tank in the rankest bathroom ever, I’m sure you’ve heard or have been the one saying, “I’d never pay for sex, never…ever!” And it would be said with the haughty self-righteousness of Alpha-Male Junior in training, wrapped and delivered with all the subtextual insecurity you could pack into one shitty little boast. But as you get older and try and fail and win and lose at sex-getting, relationship-having, girl-charming, you come to realize that that grey area and the notion of paying for it is a very wide river, with varying tides, ebbs and flows. We men, and even women, are always paying in one way or another for sex. It’s the natural flow of things. There’s a swinging pendulum and gain and loss and success and failure, but it’s safe to say 30 years away from the Swingin 70′s in our post-AIDS, post-celebutant, faux slut future, somehow, you pay.

That’s to say I am thinking of the first friend of mine to say he visited a prostitute. Granted, it was in Amsterdam. He said, “I had 3 things I planned on doing: smoking hash, getting a tattoo and seeing a hooker, and I did all three.” I was astonished in a way. I mean, I’ve always been a little naive when it comes to other people’s sexual activity.

In high school I kind of knew people were having sex, but I couldn’t picture it. Sex to me was a big black hole during puberty. Pre-puberty (we’re talking like 5 years old) I had managed to stick my dick in or around ever hole in/on my girlfriends. Looking back, playing doctor was kind of shockingly erotic — we knew we were doing something “sexual” yet were completely innocent. I remember standing on the corner with my girlfriend (yes, still around 5 years old, saying, “Let’s do it like in the movies,” and we kissed for a long time.

After my hormones kicked in I had no real sexual relations until about 16, so my only thoughts on other people’s sexuality came from porn, which my cousin introduced me to around 12, again I was shocked to finally know, to finally see what it REALLY looked like when people had sex. At least that was my impression until I actually started doing it. Even then, it probably wasn’t until my late 20′s with broadband internet that one could really see how awkward sex really was.

So here was my friend telling me about his training-wheels prostitute story. I say that because if you’re going to get a hooker, Amsterdam is probably the simplest and in its own way most sterile way to do it. It’s basically like going through the drive through. The only thing complicated about it is one’s own indecisiveness. Who to fuck?

Sex and drugs, then. You ARE the kind of person that would do drugs. You ARE the kind of person that would pay for sex, with money. With a real person. Or…

I saw my first prostitute a day after leaving what became a toxic two-month relationship with a girl I’d been doing drugs with all summer. I had smoked pot off and on since about 17. I tried coke for the first time at 25. I did acid, mushrooms and ecstasy somewhere in the middle. At around 30 I found myself on the other side of a glass pipe smoking crystal meth, as my future girlfriend, unbeknownst to me, a meth addict, looked on and said, “What the fuck are you doing.” Three summers later I was living in her apartment snorting meth 2 or 3 times a day, loving it until it became so chaotic I had to get the fuck out of there.

I was in Buenos Aires, I had just arrived about 10 hours earlier. I was with a friend who grew up there. Our night was ending and we were wasted. Smashed together in a cab, 4 of us were redirected to a brothel, which turned out to be the happiest place on earth. There were about 100 girls kind of clustered together around the bar, maybe about 45 or 50 guys scattered around the room, some playing pool, some dancing with girls, others watching sports, everyone was smiling. I was tired. Honestly, I was scared. I was sharing a room with a dude who was not scared, and was DOWN for it. That meant if he picked up a hooker there, we were in the same room, this was probably going to scar me for life. I HAD to get one also. I was coming down off meth, I was a basket case internally, but I really needed to get the girl and the drugs off my mind.

We talked about it for a second: Let’s find 2 girls who are already together and get this going before it gets any later and all the good ones are taken. We looked behind us and there were two decent looking, dark-skinned girls dancing with each other. About 10 minutes later we were out the door. I was about to be someone that paid for sex. Looking back, everything that happened during the drug-addled two months prior prepped me to see the reality of the dark side of male-female relationships. Sure it’s not nearly as negative as I am making it out to be, but then maybe what I’m talking about is just a colder, harder dystopic version of important attributes like COMMUNICATION and COMPROMISE that seem to go missing from most of your fucked up 21st century relationships.

I had 2 more encounters with prostitutes over the next 3 years. Both in Amsterdam. One was good, one was horribly unsatisfactory. In all 3 cases I came under 5 minutes and none of those orgasms felt like ORGASMS. They were like the kind of orgasms you have when you are full of anxiety and can’t sleep the night before a job interview, or a business trip with 24 hours of flying, or the LSATs. You pull on your half-limp dick just to get off and hope the chemical rush you get in your head will be enough to make you fall asleep. It’s never good like that.

I’ve thought about getting hookers about 1000 other times. But it’s all wrapped up in that same, “I’d never pay for sex…” bullshit. It’s not always as cheap as Buenos Aires or Amsterdam to get a hooker, at least one that wouldn’t be terrified to be with. To be with a LADY. Quality. But the finances also, one would want to believe, negate the notion of STDs, that the fine lady would be somewhat discriminating, even if most of her rich partners probably aren’t. But then I think back to my Amsterdam sex. Aside from her the base of her hand touching my pubic area, and my hands on her ass and tits, maybe her hair, my thighs and her ass, there was barely ANY actual unprotected contact. I mean, I barely was inside her. It’s pretty sterile, folks. In Buenos Aires I played with my girl’s pussy for a little while, much to her surprise and appreciation. That was really the only bodily fluid contact I can remember.

But here I am now. I’ve tried more drugs than most people would admit. I rarely do any. I paid for sex with a real person 3 times, with money, and haven’t done it since. Yet, I am now someone who does drugs, gateway or not, and I am someone who pays for sex.