Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution (4 page)

I wonder ifI've been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But ifI'm not the same, the next question is, "Who in the world am I?" Ah, that's the great puzzle! LEWIS CARROLL, ALICE'S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND I first began working as a prostitute on a warm sunny afternoon in mid-August 1991. That afternoon changed unutterably every day of the subsequent seven years and, after that, will influence all the days, however few or many they may happen to be, so it's hardly surprising that it is burned on my brain. My 21-year-old lover's suggestion, which I had been mentally struggling with for hours, suddenly seemed viable, practicable, and even attractive in some of its components. 'I could be that woman: I thought. 'I could be strong enough to do that. It would put an end to this wandering, this never knowing where I am to sleep, whether it'll be this sofa or that bench. It would put an end to the constant pining for some fucking food or a cigarette and to the shoplifting I've never been any good at. It could all be over if I am just strong enough to do this.' In that way, I morphed it into a matter of courage, and I didn't have a chance after that. My boyfriend was as homeless as I was, and we were sleeping in the home of a friend of his, off the Infirmary Road, just minutes' walk from Benburb Street, then a well-known spot for prostitutes to work. I'd been with him less than a week. 'But I wouldn't know where to go: I said. 'I do; he replied. 'Come on, I'll show you: I followed him. And so the 'decision' was made, and within an hour I was standing on Benburb Street, back after my first job, and now, officially, a whore. The first job, of course, is one you'll never forget. I don't remember much about the second, and nothing of the third, but this is the loss of a new virginity of sorts, and, as they say, you never forget your first. He was about mid-forties, probably a bit older, and he had a balding head and wore spectacles. He pulled in in a white car and my boyfriend told him through the open window on the driver's side: 'Take it easy, it's her first time: I remember cringing at those words as the car pulled away; the hyp.ocrisy of the pretence at caring, after where he had just taken me. I consider myself very fortunate to have met that particular man as my first client, as he taught me a lesson I never forgot in all the years it remained relevant. The going rate, according to my lover's enquiries from one of the other girls, was ten pounds for a hand-job, fifteen for a blow-job and twenty for full sex. That man paid me thirty pounds to pull his prick with one hand, while leathering the arse off him with a thin flexible branch he'd stripped from a nearby tree as we stood concealed in woodland at the edge of the Phoenix Park. And so, from the very first job, I deduced that the perverts were where the money was. I was right. I decided after that first job that I couldn't do full sex. I could still smell his prick on my hand and the experience itself had been as disgusting as to be scarcely bearable. Imagining those fuckers moving around inside me was just far too much; the thought of it made me feel physically ill. So I spent the first day doing hand-relief alone and 'graduated' to blow.jobs within the next couple of days. I don't know what's happening on the streets now, but in 1991, almost all the girls used condoms for fellatio. The reality was that selling oral sex was a disgusting practice, condoms or not, but I continued to provide both these services on a near-daily basis. That situation continued for two years: it was that long before I had sexual intercourse f(,r money. My memories of that first day are splintered and broken. I know I did about six or seven jobs. I remember at one point getting out of one car and into another before I had time to alert my boyfriend that I was back from the last job. This happened because a car stopped right beside me just as I'd gotten out of the last one and he was standing at the far end of the street. I decided that it'd be all right and went ahead and got in the car. When I got back, he was angry and panicked that something had happened to me. In my naivete I interpreted this as caring, rather than the fear for his own skin he was more likely feeling. That night, when I lay down beside him to go to sleep, tears came from some indefinable place inside me. I'd have had trouble even naming it, the thing that was hurting me. I felt as though I'd woken up as one person that morning and was going to sleep as another; and in many ways, that was exactly what had happened. These words are coming much more slowly now. At this moment I am experiencing what must be the literary version of stuttering. I will write a line and stare at it for ten minutes. A decent-sized paragraph is an arduous feat. I am sure a psychiatrist, if I had one, would be inter.ested to dissect the material that must be wrung out, but I don't need a psychiatric dissection of the subject matter; I know why this is hard for me. Entering prostitution is to slip from one world to another and to remember the transition is to mourn again the loss of something pure, something good. I remember one other thing that really bears recording. It reminds me of the very odd feelings I had, so ill-matched to the situation, when walking out into my very first day of homelessness. Strangely, and conversely, in the moment I allowed myself to be coerced onto my first red-light street, I felt a surge of powerful decisive direction. I felt, for the first time since I had walked out of my mother's house, as though I were taking control. How stupid I felt when, in some later year while casting a contemplative look over the past, I realised that that feeling had been in response to giving my control away. Prostitution is widely recognised among those who have conducted research into it as a sphere of life often entered into by young teenaged girls who have left home much younger than is usual or recommendable. I know this now. I didn't know it when I most needed to. The major problem as I see it now was that the place I had come from made any extremity a perceived possibility. I was so ignorant of the nature of the world that to have gone on to be wildly successful in some respectable fashion seemed to have been every bit as likely as to have stepped, as I did, from the footpath straight into the gutter. I was so innocent I suppose, I just didn't realise how close I was to the edge. I understood, to a much minimised degree, the way the world worked. I knew while I was living in hostels that I was on the lower rungs of the social ladder; homes for the teenagers of dysfunctional backgrounds are clearly not distinguished places to be. I knew that at that time, I was living a lifestyle I didn't want as opposed to one that I did, but the handicap on my part was one of perception: I simply didn't comprehend the link between the conduct of today and the consequences of tomorrow. As I see it now, I was balanced on the outermost edge of society and the likelihood was always that I would encounter much adversity. I wildly underestimated the struggle ahead and the dedication and clarity of mind it would take to avoid such a probability; and that really was where the matter of misjudgement came strongest into play: I did not regard a future of disadvantage and destitution as a probability, but rather a possibility, as likely as any other outcome. In fact, it was more than a probability, much more. At fifteen, I had a well-developed body and a pretty face: the twin worst curses God could put on a homeless young girl. The likelihood always was that men would seize the opportunity to exploit me sexually, but when I first became homeless, I was patently unaware of that. I see prostitution now as an enemy that was able to sneak up on me because I hadn't the wit to expect it. A term which is commonly used by the proponents of prostitution is 'consenting adults'. It's a term that needs to be examined closely; firstly because it is not possible to consent to a lifestyle you don't comprehend. It is only possible to consent to a lifestyle as you imagine it to be, and it is not possible to grasp an accurate comprehension of prostitution until you are already immersed in it. Secondly, many of the prostituted are not adults, and so are in no position to 'consent' to any form of sex with an adult. Also, a huge proportion of adult prostitutes were, like me, not adults when they first 'consented' to it. The problem with recording an account like this is that it involves so many memories resurfacing. For the time being I'm just going to have to learn to deal with them. I tell myself that if I could live with the reality of these things as they were happening I'm sure I can find a way to deal with the memory of them. The difference is I do not wear that same armour any more. I am not telling myself the lies that are necessary for a prostitute to protect herself with, so in actual fact the memories are sometimes more painful than the events as I am no longer shielded from the fullness and exactness of their nature. You understand the nature of your surroundings as a prostitute, but you make great efforts not to dwell on it. While recording your history in prostitution, you must necessarily dwell on it, and that is the difference. In this way, the sense of reliving is somehow deeper on a psychological level than the original experience itself. Not to say that it is more damaging, but that it requires a person to reach more deeply into themselves, to examine their feelings thoroughly and to reach a deeper understanding of the damaging elements of the original experience. Itis well-documentedthat humans have the capacity to psychologically numb themselves in circumstances which they find threatening or traumatic. As Dr M Scott Peck wrote (in his fascinating study of human evil, People of the Lie): 'In a situation in which our emotional feelings are overwhelmingly painful or unpleasant, we have the capacity to anesthetise ourselves'. Before even that first day was out, I was already actively engaged in the process of shutting out the reality of what I was experiencing. Beyond that, I now perceive that before I had even arrived on Benburb Street, I was already engaged in the process of shutting out the reality of what I was about to do. I put a different shape on it, a different face on it; a face which was acceptable to me. The true face was very different. On Benburb Street, because the rates were so low and because I did not do full sex, I would often have to have my body used by up to ten men before I would make even a hundred pounds. For this reason working on Benburb Street was a particularly gruelling, dreary and miserable experience, especially as the winter months came in. It is difficult to describe how hollow a woman feels after she has been used sexually by ten different men. Of course the experience rarely stopped at the agreed-upon hand-relief or oral sex. Even when a man has accepted that he will not be putting his penis in you, he often has no compunction about shoving his fingers or other objects in you, and mauling you and biting you and trying to shove his tongue down your throat and everywhere else. I knew by the rabid dog-like behaviour of one particular client that he'd have liked nothing better than if he'd bit and sucked my nipples till they'd gushed blood. Years later I opened a newspaper and read that he'd been charged for trying to rip a prostitute's nipples off with his teeth. They made me sick, these supposedly 'ordinary'2 clients. This was the case from the first day I stepped out onto the street. There was nothing ordinary about them as far as I was concerned and if I'd never thought there was any body of men out there who'd make me long to meet perverts, the supposedly 'ordinary' clients of prostitution taught me different. Men with unusual sexual proclivities were less common on the streets, but I hadn't forgotten them and I always took the opportunity to make a regular client out of a man like this. They exhibited significantly less disrespect for women and simply made life easier. Although not all women will accommodate them, the benefits of seeing men with unusual requests is well known in prostitution circles. Since I had become aware of this, I began dressing in a manner that was designed to attract them. I wore a lot of leather and miniskirts with studded hipster belts, red lipstick and stiletto heels or thigh-high boots. I knew I looked like the quintessential whore, but I told myself I couldn't have cared less about that and anyway, I saw no sense in dressing demurely while I The term 'ordinary' here refers to men who pay for sexual services that would not be considered sexually perverse, i.e. intercourse, fellatio t'IC, as opposed to men who pay for sexual services that would be considcrt'd mat~idt� IIll�orm, like was standing on a red-light street in broad daylight selling my body for money. Who would I have been fooling? I reasoned that if I wanted to attract men with extreme tastes, I had to dress the part, and I was right. For this reason men who wanted to be dominated gravitated towards me. Strange as it may sound, I counted myself lucky. I remember the first girl I ever met on Benburb Street. She was the woman my partner had asked about the rates I could expect to charge. She was twenty-seven, slim and attractive, well dressed with longish fawn-brown hair tied up carefully and stylishly and her make-up was always perfectly applied. I remember her for several reasons. Firstly, because she was the first prostitute I ever met. Secondly, because she stood out on the street as a woman who took great care of her appearance, which was unusual there; and thirdly because she was uncommonly kind to me, always asking how I was and ifeverything was all right. She was the only woman I had met there at that point who, beyond showing me no animosity, actually offered me kindness. Finally, I remember her because she was raped and beaten by a man who picked her up on Benburb Street within weeks of my having arrived there. It was a particularly horrible attack. He raped her repeatedly and beat her to within an inch of her life. I remember the older women talking about it and about how she should have gone to the guards. They seemed to understand though, why she never did, which was something that was beyond my comprehension at that point. She started abusing heroin directly after that. The transformation was immediate and shocking. The weight fell off her. She'd been a slim girl to begin with but now she was a walking skeleton. Her hair became greasy and lank and she never tied it up any more. Her skin was deathly pale and without a trace of make-up. Her clothes were no longer clean or pressed and she stood on the street smoking
cigarettes one after the other with an empty vacant stare in her eyes and had no kind words for me any more, or for anyone. In my childish mind, I read so much into the fact that she never tied her hair up. I remember looking at it hanging around her shoulders and feeling that this was a concrete symbol that she was not the same woman, that there'd been some awful and irreversible alteration in her. I remember while looking at her feeling the thrill of an unnameable fear. The change in her was so complete, I felt as if her spirit had gone to some dark place there was no coming back from, but I wanted her to come back because I liked her and she was the only bit of comfort I had on that street. Sometimes she'd give me a watery smile when I stood near her and offered her a cigarette, but it was brief, gone almost before it arrived and never followed by conversation. Her addiction accelerated at an astonishing rate and worsened until she was barely recognisable as the same person and eventually I came to understand that there was no reason she should be, because she wasn't. I know today the fear I felt when I looked at her was the amplification of my already-present sense of the hugely destructive nature of what I was involved in. She was my first real example of that devastation and the living embodiment of something I was coming to understand I ought to be very afraid of. Above all, I thought that it was so sad, such a pity; such a waste of life. I don't know what ever became of her, but I would be surprised if she were not dead now. Chapter 1 "-'