Jade Sharma - Problems

Peter was gone. Ogden was gone. They just kept leaving.

“This is what you wanted,” my psychiatrist reminded me. I knew I had sat in that office with those plants I was pretty sure were fake (I kept reminding myself to touch them to see) and said how much better off I would be if we broke up. But there had always been a part of me that got off on shit talking Peter. It was a kind of showing off: look, I can have this thing and not even care I have it. Having a man wasn’t everything when you had a man. Maybe I took him for granted, or maybe he was kind of shitty. I couldn’t remember.

“I just want to die,” I wailed to Douglass as he was putting on his shoes to go score for me.

Douglass and I watched movies constantly and got high till we passed out. Sometimes Douglass made food. One time, he did the laundry. He never showered. His body reeked of musk, and it was like a cartoon stink cloud followed him. He left dishes right on the floor in front of the couch. He left syringes without caps on the sofa, on the floor, in piles of garbage. When someone was supposed to come over, I would scan the room and de-syringe it, fuming with rage at how stupid and dangerous he could be. If we had had a pet, it would be dead.

I chain-smoked in a thin black slip and slippers. I was content in my bubble. Nothing in this bubble could hurt me, if you didn’t count me. Life was going to be awesome and awful, beautiful and ugly. The most exciting things that were going to happen to me would not be anywhere near Crate & Barrel. They would be in bars and streets and dark places. I would wake up in bright places and laugh at sad things and cry over dumb things. I would never get married again. I would never get stuck.

* * *

The first time I had sex after Peter was with a woman, in front of the man who had paid me.

I had always looked at those ads on craigslist. Sugar daddy ones. I already liked older men. I was kind of a masochist. I loved sex. I needed money. So what if there was a male counterpart who wanted to spoil me? To treat me like a little girl? Sure, it sounded a little creepy. But creepy things turned me on.

Someone said to me once, “Don’t ever think with your crotch.”

I was going to think with my crotch. I wanted to feel hot and have men buy me shit. That could be a life, right? That could be a pretty cool life.

The first time I was nervous. He told me his name was Brian. He sounded normal enough: lived in Connecticut, married, two kids. A daughter my age. I lied and said I was twenty-five. I could have passed for younger but decided not to push it. His voice was nasal, and his picture was a vacation picture of him on a ship wearing a loud shirt. He looked so corny. I went back and forth with Douglass about whether or not to do it. Safety-wise it seemed all right: condoms and a hotel room. The only advice Douglass gave me was not to invite anyone from craigslist over to the apartment. Hotels seemed safe. A lot of people saw you. If you screamed bloody murder, someone would probably hear you.

I felt better when Brian said there would be another girl. She went to Columbia. He saw her regularly. Could both of them be weirdo psychos, like the couple that abducted that Jaycee Lee Dugard girl? Probably not. Then he texted that he found a third girl. I would be one of three girls, meaning a lot less of the actual action and safety in numbers. He hadn’t seen this other girl before either.

“I’m not normally like this. I don’t want you to think I just have three girls at once. This is so rare, like the moon aligned with the stars or something.”

Douglass was going to come with me in a cab and stand around like an extra so he could get a look at the guy, and then he would wait at a Starbucks nearby. If something shady went down, I would text “OK,” and then we weren’t sure what. Douglass said he would call the police at that point, because what was one dude going to do?

I never actually anticipated that Brian would be pretty hot. He didn’t look like his picture. He was wearing an expensive suit. His smile was disarming. He moved his hands when he talked, like Woody Allen.

There was no way the Columbia girl was twenty-two, but who the hell was I to out her?

He brought five condoms. She said, “You wish you could use all of those.”

“I know,” Brian said. “I do. One and I’m done. That’s what happens when you get to be my age.”

I went to the bathroom and turned on the water. I did a line and then another. Then I realized I wasn’t sure I was going to be alone again. I did most of the bag.

The Columbia girl told me her story while we smoked a cigarette outside, waiting for girl #3. “I was just checking out the ads. So I answered one, and then I met him at a Starbucks, but I couldn’t go through with it, so I actually just bailed on him. But he kept insisting I meet him again, so I did, and then I don’t know. He doesn’t take long. And he’s okay.”

Brian kissed me. It felt awkward while the other girl was there. She wasn’t that pretty.

I cuddled with him in bed. He felt my hair. He unbuttoned his shirt. He told me to suck his nipples. It felt oddly feminine to be sucking on a nipple.

The third girl was a trip. She was Puerto Rican. She walked in talking on the phone, loud as hell. “Yeah, this white dude, I’m here now, Julio, lemme get down to business.” She plugged in her phone and turned up the clock radio. Brian muttered something about his hearing and the horrible music. She didn’t care. She introduced herself as Liberty. I giggled. I was getting wasted on the wine Brian had brought.

Liberty came out of the bathroom in a crazy getup. She had a belly she was not ashamed of. Suspenders went over her tits and then clipped onto garters. A crazy booty and a tongue ring. She targeted me. Reeked of vanilla, which made me hungry and nauseous. She started sucking my tits and made a big show out of biting my nipples. Brian stood there with the Columbia girl going down on him.

I was on all fours with this girl licking my ass and finger-banging the shit out of me. I was screaming.

I played with her pussy, but it was so obvious I didn’t know what I was doing. She removed my hand and said, “Let me.”

Brian wanted to see Liberty go down on the Columbia girl. I went to the bathroom and did another line. When I got back to the room, Brian was lying down, and the Columbia girl was going down on him. I felt oddly competitive when he said she gave the best head ever. He asked me and Liberty to suck on his nipples.

“This is fucking awesome,” he said over the blare of the clock radio playing some actively annoying song with a techno beat.

Then I went down on him, but he wasn’t making the same sounds as he had with the Columbia girl. I wanted to be awesome at giving head. I was going to have to work on that. He looked directly at me and asked Liberty to go down on him.

Liberty got between his legs.

“Hey, no teeth!”

“Sorry, I like it rough,” she said.

“I said no teeth!”

“That’s the way I do!” she said.

“That’s better,” he said. “Okay, now stop.”

But she didn’t stop, and he grunted.

All that money and five condoms and this dude got off from a BJ after five minutes of getting head.

He said it was late anyway, and he had to get home. “Nothing like young women to make you feel alive.” I felt bad for his wife, as though I was part of a mean private joke he played on her. I hoped she killed him one day and got away with it.

I got three hundred bucks for forty minutes of accumulated action.

“Do you do this a lot?” I asked Liberty.

“Well, since I got out.”

“Got out?”

“Yeah, I was locked up for smoking crack,” Liberty said.

“Someone named Liberty wasn’t free,” I said, cracking myself up.