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At about the same time as Jackie came on the slob, Nikita was hit by the security guard. Jackie said, 'If I've told her once, I've told her a hundred times, don't give it away to arseholes and if you have to fuck and love someone at the same time, then become a dyke. At least it's a bit safer.' She's pretty badly bruised around the neck and face. She's lost her voice and her eyes are listless. Sharlena and I are going to visit her in hospital. I'm going to give her a couple of grand to cheer her up a bit. I doubt if she'll be working for a while. Even if she wanted to, she's rooted now. Her face is fucked. Poor kid. Jackie has just found out what has happened and she's furious. She says, 'I'm gonna fix that arsehole with a few fellas I know. He'd be easy enough to find 'round this place.' After Nikita recovers I'm going to take her to the donkey sanctuary down in New South Wales for a couple of weeks. She'd love it there, her hands on the hides of every dear donkey, as gently as her hands had been on the cocks, backs and scrotums of every man. If she had secretly held their hands in those rooms, it wouldn't surprise me. I've seen enough scrotums to last me a lifetime, and I don't need to see any more. I gather that most heterosexual women have seen between five and thirty scrotums, that's if they even bothered to look. They have seen scrotums that have betrayed or hurt them, and scrotums that had loved them forever or briefly. I want to touch as many donkey foreheads as I have scrotums in order to shift my perspective. But this might be impossible now.
Perhaps I would spend my entire life there, feeding them the sweet yellow hay. But I know that I'd be back. I had been so poor that I was terrified of being poor again. I wanted to do my photography. Besides, there was no hope in poverty. All the bravest dreams lay down and died there. It cycled itself into more and more poverty and finally it was death, like dirty water going down a drain to nowhere. That is where poverty went. There were thousands of dollars given, in order for a client to have a happy ending, whereas a donkey's life was worth little to nothing. The sex industry paid well because it was about male ejaculation and attention to the sexual needs of men. I was proud of what I did. Yet the world wasn't ready to hear the story from a woman's perspective. I still had to live the double life. I left through the purple side door into a city street that is barely lit by dawn. I trusted no one, had no close family, and very few friends in this world of so-called happy endings. I was the nurse of male sexuality and the parlour was a twenty-four-hour emergency service, where urgency was the big emergency. The lonely horny men were my patients - and the rich horny men, and the men who hated and trusted women, and the diseased men and the men who were silly and who betrayed their girlfriends. But mostly they were stressed out, shy, depressed or horny. They came in for fun times, intimacy and relaxation. They eventually came my way. So how long have you worked here to achieve your happy ending?
My one great fear is that when I am close to my own death, I will regret what I couldn't save or love. Jackie said, 'Well that's an exercise in pointlessness if I ever heard one.' Or I might regret why I didn't have the courage to live my life - all in the way I wanted to. A few years back a sparrow on a rooftop in a suburb of Perth in strong morning sunlight told me everything that I needed to know about the world and how to live my life in the space of a few minutes. I'm still trying to live up to that advice and to be honest this industry isn't helping me any. Birds are the great harbingers and they offer advice whether you like it or not. They're good at that. The bird didn't actually speak to me directly but it offered a picture of the world that spoke to my heart. I was fully alive in that moment. I want to save at least part of the world. I still believe in happy endings. 'I don't,' said Jackie, 'I just want to be left alone.' I gave her a lift to the hospital. 'Are you sure you want to leave?' 'Yeah, I'm leaving,' Jackie said, 'and I don't want my memories to follow me out.' |
