Jade Sharma - Problems

Douglass came in and put the bundle on the coffee table, already ripped open. I didn’t count the bags. I didn’t care how many Douglass had taken from my portion. I would later, when I was down to my last two, but right then it was a bounty.

“Stay away from needles,” Douglass said as he wrapped a belt around his arm. He used his mouth to hold the sleeve of his shirt up. He put the needle in his arm. His mouth let go of the sleeve. His eyes closed. He went, “Damn!”

Even after the sickness subsided and the sweats stopped and that warm feeling came and another movie started, I was still not okay. When you go through day after day of numbness, you forget what feelings are like.

Douglass said, “When you’re so strung out, it takes more than what you’re used to to feel okay.”

“We should get clean,” I said.

Douglass nodded.

He said, “You are still young, but I’m running out of time.”

He said, “You can do something, or you can be a junkie. You are fooling yourself if you think you can do both.”

One of the only good things about getting high with Douglass was that he didn’t nod out like most long-term users.

The real junkie nod is frustrating to watch. They slowly droop forward until they are completely bent over. They keep dropping their cigarette. You watch them light it, lean over, drop it, and then wake up and pick it up and then instantly drop it again. You watch their head fall forward until it hits the coffee table. Every time, they say they are just tired. Every time, they say, “No, I’m awake,” and they light a cigarette and they slump over and they drop it. And you want to scream, “Put out the cigarette and just lie down.” How fucking hard is that?

“Why can’t he just lie down?” I asked Elizabeth the time we watched Noah do it.

“I don’t know why,” she said.

Douglass told me, “I have Tourette’s. I don’t know I’m doing it, so if I do it, just tell me and I’ll stop.”

He would hop and holler and make loud nonsense jokes and repeat himself over and over.

Sometimes I would say, “Can you please stop?”

“Stop what?”

My ass felt itchy, so I got in the shower, turned on the water, turned around, and spread my cheeks so all the water went inside my ass. I was freezing cold. There’s probably some guy out there who would be turned on by licking shit off your asshole. Whatever weird thing you can think of, there has to be some freak whose favorite thing in the world is that exact thing. When you think of everyone who has ever been born and everyone alive right now and every human that will be alive until an asteroid hits us or global warming sets off a series of natural disasters or we just ping-pong from planet to planet and leave colonies behind, out of all those people, there has to be someone who is into whatever your mind can come up with. Like some guy who jerks off by rubbing his dick on different kinds of cheese, or some guy who eats bugs as he jacks himself. Then there are the weird things everyone knows about, like men who are into amputees. I bet there’s some guy who jerks off by rubbing his cock on books. Like his dick gets paper cuts, and he cringes in pain, but he kind of loves it more than anything in the world.

I cleaned my room. I cut up magazines and made a collage on the wall. I could do whatever I wanted. I played music, and I read a book about Chinese factory workers. I was pretty grateful I was not a Chinese factory worker. I was lazy.

I took a bubble bath and felt like a movie star.

The weeks flew by. I scoured craigslist personals and met men. I vetted them through e-mails and phone calls and made sure they were my particular type, older white businessmen. Here were the surprising things: they were attractive, smart, and funny, and most of the time, I would have hooked up with them without getting paid. Except I needed the money.

They liked to tell me their philosophies. “You always have to pay with a woman. You can pay in installments by taking a woman out to dinner and buying her presents and taking her to shows. Or you can find a nice young woman and just give her the money up front and know for sure you are going to get laid.”

“If I go to a bar and pretend to be interested in whatever she is saying and hook up with her and then lie to her, that’s somehow more ethical by society’s standards than telling you what I want up front and paying you for it.”

They all told me how much they wanted me to enjoy it too.

Among my friends, there was a gender divide when it came to turning tricks. The women were interested. Amy told me she was kind of jealous. Elizabeth said she could never do it, but she could see how it was perfect for me. My male friends thought it sounded like the worst thing ever. But girls know it’s really not that big of a deal to give head or get fucked or have a guy come on your face. As a girl, you’ve probably been pressured into fucking at least once, and have probably pity-fucked some loser once, and over time you’ve done enough stuff that you really didn’t feel like doing that eventually it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal.

I didn’t think the response from my male friends had anything to do with safety. But they knew all their ugly, nasty desires and didn’t want to think of some man doing those things to me. And no matter how progressive they were, they didn’t think I could actually enjoy hooking up with these guys. If I did, that only meant I was damaged somehow. They all implied I was dumb and naive, that these johns were the ones winning, and I was dumb for being happy to get paid.

I was worried that after having these experiences, sex would be boring forever. When it was plain vanilla, or when I would lie there, thinking, I could be getting paid to do this .

People said women who did this kind of thing had no self-respect. I had no idea what that meant, because I got off on doing it. I liked meeting these dudes and hearing their life stories. I liked being told I was hot. I liked being told what to do. It was the first time in my life I felt like I was getting paid for being me. When they handed me cash, I felt like a champ.

Sometimes I wondered if I was harming my psychological well-being by validating my inner desire to be treated like shit, but what turns you on turns you on, I figured, and if being treated like shit made me feel really fucking good, then good for me, right?

Imagine a world where people didn’t have hang-ups. Where I could have gone to a job interview, and said, “I’ve been hooking up with men for money, but I think I want to try working here now.” Where I could talk about it with people the same way other people talked about their jobs. It wasn’t fair I had to have these secrets when I didn’t feel like I was doing anything secretive.

It isn’t always so straightforward. Sometimes they will say things that stick in your mind. You don’t know why, but once in a while, they talk to you in a certain tone and call you a whore, and you want to punch them in the face.

You meet a real estate agent at a bar on the Upper East Side. He tells you the story you’ve heard before, a million times over, about why he is on craigslist: “I work all the time. I don’t have time to meet anyone.” You giggle too much. You are giddy. He eyes you. You shift in your seat. He doesn’t. He talks about work. He drops names, acts arrogant, shows off. You act like you can’t believe how talented and rich and well connected he is. He asks about school. He asks you where you’re from. You lie and say Virginia. He asks about your background. You lie and say you’re half-white and half-Indian. He asks you how old you are. Twenty-five, you lie. You grow tired of answering questions.

It’s easier to lie about everything. You’re playing a role. They aren’t falling for you . You’re a twenty-five-year-old college kid whose boyfriend dumped her. That’s your story. They all say, “Fuck him. Believe me, you’re better off this way.”