Jill Emerson - I Am Curious (Thirty)

I suppose I could get out of here. Except that I really like it here, and where am I going to go? I could find some shithole in the East Village for fifty dollars a month, but how long could I live there before I started to go crazy? It wasn’t too bad visiting Arnold and David at their apartments, although it was occasionally depressing, especially Arnold’s, but then I had them with me. I can’t imagine being alone in a place like that, returning to it after a day’s work pounding a typewriter or whatever you have to do to bring home a lousy eighty-five dollars a week.

There are these jobs they advertise in the East Village Other. Modeling, which means nude work of one sort or another. Once in a while I suppose it’s a legitimate job for a photographer who takes dirty pictures, but I gather that mostly it’s working in those modeling clubs where creeps bring cameras and take nude pictures of you, half the time without film in the camera.

(What sort of men actually go to those places? I mean, I can see a man paying a whore, but to pay money to click a camera at some bored, naked girl. I mean, why?)

They pay five or ten dollars an hour. Ten dollars an hour to have some goon snap pictures of you isn’t too bad. But I don’t suppose the work is very steady. Not the sort of thing you can count on. Those places must get shut down from time to time, or else the customers must get tired of the same old faces.

Faces?

Besides, it’s not much different from being a whore, except for being less interesting.

That’s what it all keeps coming to, doesn’t it?

Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t. I can’t think about anything else and I don’t want to think about this, certainly not for the time being. It was all something I knew I was going to have to face pretty soon. Another three months at the outside and my money would have run out, even if that son of a bitch hadn’t walked off with it. (Maybe I shouldn’t call him names. Maybe he was poor and he really needed the money. Well, he isn’t poor now. Now he has my fifteen hundred dollars, the son of a bitch.)

God, I wish I could get high! I mean really nice and high and just sit around feeling great for a couple of hours. I think I could face anything right now if first I could just get high and have a little time to myself, just high and happy. That mixture of grass and hash that I smoked with the boys. I would love to have a taste of that now and go off on one of those happy bubbly cerebral highs. Or that red crud that Eric keeps around the place, the sweet-and-sour rose petals, whatever the hell it is. Some kind of a sex drug, but you could take it and get high and skip the sex and it would be better than sitting around like this.

I suppose I’ll get drunk, which isn’t the same thing at all. And if I do, it’ll have to be on wine. I can’t afford anything classier. Not now.

I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.

I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)

There’s nothing to it.

Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution — what a windy clinical word for the actual process — but I wouldn’t have believed it could be so, oh, what’s the word? Noninvolving?

That’s not exactly it. That was part of it, the feeling of this-person-he’s-fucking-is-not-the-real-me, and I suppose every girl has to feel that in order to keep from despising herself. And there is a certain amount of tripping out involved. I have always been good, perhaps too good, at being able to carry on a conversation, nodding in the right places, grunting uh-huh and mmmm and uh-uh, even contributing a phrase or a sentence now and then, without paying a dime’s worth of attention to what’s going on.

And you know, you can do this physically as well as verbally. It’s much the same thing, except it’s the body instead of the mind that is just going through the motions of participating.

I made forty-five dollars today. That’s at least twice as much as I could have made in any job I could have gotten, and in half the hours.

The sex part—

A flash. It was almost exactly the same as when I hit the hay with what’s-his-name, Edgar. The same thing! The same I’m-not-really-here, the same faint sense of contempt for the man I was with, the same general disinterest in what we were doing in bed, the same experience of getting a certain amount of pleasure from it but being too detached to really enjoy it, or even to really hate it, for that matter.

I don’t see why I can’t go on this way. It shouldn’t be too terribly hard to put away a hundred dollars a week. A hundred dollars is four or five tricks. (The New Math.) Four or five men a week and the rent is paid.

Went to the gay bar last night and got drunk. A little foggy on what happened, but I think I went home with a girl and I think we made it. I drank some wine before I went there, then had a bottle of cough syrup — terpin hydrate and codeine — you have to sign the book when you buy it and the druggist gives you an I-know-what-you-want-this-for-you-junkie-bitch look, but how else can you get high for seventy-nine cents?

Then all the drinks at the gay bar, which she bought for me, and whatever we had at her place. For all I know we had cocaine at her place. I really don’t remember. I have vague sex memories but they parallel a couple of freaky dreams I’ve been having lately, so who knows which was which?

The other thing, which I haven’t written about in here, and which I’m still not writing about because it scares me that much, hasn’t happened yet.

If it doesn’t happen soon I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, well, I guess I can always kill myself.

The girl is not entirely kidding.

Still nothing.

What will I do? If Eric were around he would know what to do. I suppose he would help, but who knows? Who knows anything any more?

Maybe it will work out.

Except I know it won’t. I’ve never even worried about it before and this time I just knew.

It’s impossible. Everybody says it’s impossible. What do you do? Sue the manufacturer?

Except I probably forgot. I know I forget a lot of the time, I always have extras left over.

(Write it, you idiot! Go on!)

No, I can’t. I don’t want to. I guess I’ll go out and fuck somebody and make some money.

Yesterday I turned five tricks and all five of them wanted to be blown. All five. That was the only contact they wanted to have with me.

Why don’t they turn queer?

If I did nothing but that all the time I wouldn’t have this problem.

I was reading through this.

I’m really sick. Most of the time I don’t realize it. Or maybe I do deep down inside. All of that shit early on about making progress. Some kind of progress. The girl is going noisily out of her skull.

I have a feeling, too, that it’s not a good idea to drink cough syrup every day.

Fuck it. Maybe it’ll hurt the baby.

It really looked as though I would never write that last line. It’s funny because I’ve been able to put down almost everything else I’ve done, but now what I seem to be is pregnant — I’m never late, and God am I late now. And even now I can’t sit back and let myself gush about it. I’m really uptight about this. I’ve never been quite like this before.