Whore of new york, p.1
Whore of New York, page 1
Published by Repeater Books
An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd
Unit 11 Shepperton House
89-93 Shepperton Road
London
N1 3DF
United Kingdom
www.repeaterbooks.com
A Repeater Books paperback original 2021
1
Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
Copyright © Liara Roux 2021
Liara Roux asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
ISBN: 9781913462567
Ebook ISBN: 9781913462611
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Printed and bound in the UK by TJ Books
Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Part Two
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Acknowledgments
Repeater Books
Part One
Chapter One
Birth
#
I’ve been asked many times: When did you first think of starting sex work?
I remember lying in bed, quite young, praying to God, “Please don’t ever let me stop believing in You. I know that otherwise I would do a lot of drugs, convert to communism, and become a prostitute.”
During different periods of my life, I imagined myself in other careers. The earliest I remember was fireman. The second was quantum physicist. I then decided I wanted to be an electrical engineer, then a painter, a policy wonk, an academic.
But I would lie awake at night thinking of whores.
#
I was the firstborn. The first memory I have is of looking at my reflection. The mirror was slightly warped, shifting the shape of my face like a funhouse mirror as it spun in a mobile above my crib. I’m not sure how old I was.
Sometimes I wonder whether this memory is real or not.
My first word was not “mommy” or “daddy” — it was “kitty.” My parents had two older cats, and I loved them. I would chase after them, and at first they would run away from my rough and unpracticed touch. As I grew older, I learned the tricks of where to scratch to make them purr and rub their faces on me.
#
Perhaps that was where I first learned the joys of giving another being pleasure. It felt so good to have a sweet, warm kitty purring on my lap. I always wanted to make people feel good. My mother, at the end of a stressful day, would ask me to give her a neck massage.
That’s my favorite part of my work as well — making my clients feel pleasure. Feeling their tension, their desire, playing with it, directing it, touching them and stroking them to keep them on the edge of climax.
For many of my clients, giving me pleasure is their fantasy as well. Of course there are those who couldn’t care less, but for the most part my clients are very much concerned with whether or not I’m having a good time. When I’m at the height of my powers, I am.
Only last week I was sprawled on the bed of a luxury hotel in silk pajamas, eating berries while an older married man sucked my toes. He was older but taking testosterone, with the body of an Equinox personal trainer. He gave me a massage and admired my body. I came while watching him jerk off into a champagne glass. He drank his cum for me, swallowed every last drop, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. Our pillow talk was a Modafinil-fueled debate about the applications of Ethereum — I’m a skeptic, he’s not.
Sometimes I feel guilty for how much I enjoy my work. I’m a first-class pampered pet with a diet full of Michelin stars, flitting around the world in cashmere and silk, private jets, private cars. Of course, my life wasn’t always like this. I don’t think anyone who watched me grow up knew I’d one day be such a self-indulgent whore.
#
My preschool was one of those bizarre places on the Upper East Side where parents need to fill out an application for their child as though it’s a college, as if anything but their wealth and connections are granting them admission — a grotesque race to ensure your child has every opportunity to succeed. My mother, perpetually neurotic, had decided it was necessary.
It was my first day and I was terribly excited and nervous. My mother peeled me away from her side and handed me off to the teacher. I was surprised at how I loved the lessons. I loved the art classes and reading and learning to write. I was so anxious to succeed, to make my mother proud.
I would come home, sit beside my mother in her bed, and practice reading aloud. “How is it that adults are able to read without saying the words out loud?” I asked.
“It takes practice,” she said, “You’ll get it eventually. You’ll say the words inside your head instead of speaking them with your mouth.”
Learning to read felt like learning to breathe. Once I started, I couldn’t live without it. My mother would smile as she watched me tear through a pile of books as she read the praise my teachers wrote in my evaluations.
#
I first knew I was bisexual in preschool, because I liked kissing both boys and girls on the playground, but I also knew it was something that I shouldn’t talk about. I also knew that I wanted to be a boy — or, at least, I didn’t want to just be a girl — but I shouldn’t talk about that either.
The first kiss I remember having was with a curly golden-haired boy in preschool. We were both going down a slide; he went first, and when I got to the bottom, he gave me a kiss. One of the teachers scolded us.
“You can’t do that,” she said. “Why not?” I asked, annoyed.
I don’t remember getting any sort of explanation that made sense to me, about why it was so bad to kiss. Being queer was like the same thing; I’m not even sure anyone ever explicitly told me it was wrong when I was young, but I knew that if anyone found out, I would be punished.
It is strange how these ideas about what is taboo are communicated to children; how did I know it would be so wrong, without ever being told? Was it the way my mother’s grasp on my hand would tighten if we passed two well-dressed men holding hands? I was too young to store any of these little signs and signals into memory. All I knew was that if my parents found out, something very, very bad would happen.
But I loved playing house with the other girls: going into the kitchen play set and showing each other our underwear, exploring touch, playing doctor. We would walk around in a fierce group together, teasing the boys, making them follow our commands. I was a devious little leader. There were two girls at school I loved with all my heart. Mei Mei and Mishka. We were always together, the three of us, having group playdates and outings.
Mei Mei in particular was my best friend. Her mother was so elegant — so unlike my mother — always wearing dresses and perfume. My mother herself never wore makeup or did her hair; much of the time she dressed like a man. She would only wear dresses when she had to attend a formal dinner, as well as Christmas or Easter service. She was fiercely practical. My father would bemoan this, trying to gift her jewelry or flowers or take her shopping for clothes. She had a jewelry box full of gems she never wore. She would snap at him for wasting money.
Mei Mei’s mother would put us in coordinating dresses and do our hair up in bows. She would take photos of us together and share them with my mother. She would let us use her tea set and we would drink real tea from real gilt porcelain cups, unlike my other friends who had fake plastic tea sets. We always took such care; it was Ginori, she told us, and precious. We never broke a cup.
#
My cousins on my mother’s side lived close by. I loved visiting them. My aunt and uncle had a daughter that was older and a son that was just a year older than me. He and I got along so well; we would have sleepovers and listen to books on tape as we fell asleep. He was always kind and gentle.
My maternal grandparents also lived near, and I would visit them as often as I could. My grandmother was an exacting housewife, who tended to her houseplants with scientific precision. She always had freshly baked muffins available. Her apartment was always impeccable and beautifully decorated. I would hover around her vanity, sniffing her perfumes, walking through her closet, trying on her lingerie — much too large for me at the time. I loved the lace, the silk, her soft suede shoes.
She took a special liking to me. I think she saw in me that same exacting attitude, the same appreciation of subtle details. She would take me shopping and teach me how to tell the difference between cut crystal and pressed glass, between polyester and silk.
“Fashion has not made any advancements since the early Eighties,” she would say, furrowing her brow. “All that you see now is a mishmash of the old. They simply don’t make couture like they used to. Look at this. This dress should be finished with French seams, but instead they’ve serged the e dges, not even sewn in a lining. The dress will fall apart. Inexcusable laziness.”
I nodded solemnly, flipping through Vogue by her side, not totally understanding what she meant but absorbing everything.
My grandmother would host Thanksgiving at their apartment, with elaborate spreads and festive drinks. Turkey and duck and pies of apple and pumpkin, stuffing and real cranberry sauce, and the most delicious gravy you could imagine, poured all over mashed potatoes from heaven.
Eggnog and hot toddies. My grandfather always had a drink in hand, relaxing in his Eames chair. I would hover in the kitchen while she directed the cooking. She timed everything just so.
The best part of Thanksgiving was walking over to my grandmother’s house the day after.
She would have cold cherry pie leftovers in the fridge: “It’s always better the day after.”
#
Family Christmas was usually at their home in the Keys, right on the beach. When my siblings and I were young enough, my mother would take us for the entire month of December, my father joining us at the end for the holidays.
My grandmother taught me how to look for shells. We would walk together every morning. She would teach me which were rare, what their names were. She had a collection of beautiful shells throughout the beach home.
Once one of her friends came over and asked where she had bought her shells. My grandmother was immediately cross.
“It’s worthless if you buy them. Anyone can buy a shell.”
My grandfather would take me and my cousins fishing in his boat. He taught me how to cast the rod, how to feel when you had caught a fish and how to reel it in. I loved him so.
We would put the fish we caught in a special portion of the deck, then head back when we had had enough. My grandmother would cook them for us, fresh from the ocean.
I loved those months: spending my days at the beach swimming and digging in the sand, watching the sun rise and set over the ocean, sitting on their balcony smelling the salt, hair blonde in the sun, blown in the wind, the reflection of the moon over the water changing with the tide. I hated leaving.
#
While at home in the city, my family went to a church nearby. It was in an old, beautiful building and it had a vibrant community. I remember running around with other kids on the lawn of the church, asking the older women to tell me stories about their youth. One of them, who seemed to take a particular liking to me, asked my mom if she could watch me during the day. Her children were older and she missed having little kids running around the home.
I have so many clear memories of her and her kindness. I recently came across old photos of me playing with her gentle old golden retriever, who tolerated my tugs on his ears. We would make snowmen made of marshmallows around Christmastime, and she would set up incredible bubble baths for me in her massive bathtub. She taught me how to wash my hair and how to blow it dry. She still texts me every year on my birthday, telling me she loves me, even though it’s been decades since I’ve seen her.
#
She gave me a type of love I didn’t get from either of my parents. My mother was always cold and removed. My father was either warm and loving or furious, yelling, violent.
He was always calculated with his violence, even if I didn’t see it that way at the time. He would spank my brother and me if we misbehaved. He would pull down our pants and bruise us.
He said we were lucky he didn’t use a belt, like his father used to.
My brother was good at pissing off my father; it seemed they couldn’t be in the same room for any period of time without coming to blows. My father couldn’t seem to control himself. He would grab my brother by the ear and drag him to his room. I would hear the screaming and crying behind the door.
After my father would hit me, he would leave me in my bed, alone, crying. I would sob, shuddering, under the covers; part of me desperate for him to come and comfort me, give me a cookie and a glass of milk, part of me needing him to stay away. I could not hold both my loving father and my violent father as one person, so instead he split into two.
#
My father’s side of the family lived in the South. Much of the family we did not see, for reasons I did not understand until much later.
We did often see my aunt and uncle and cousins in Alabama, whom I loved fiercely. They lived in a large house in the suburbs of Birmingham, but my cousins — one boy a year older and the other boy only half a year older, were devoted to the idea of being redneck southerners. They would joke that it was legal to marry your cousins in Alabama and howl in laughter at my and my sister’s grossed-out faces. They taught me how to use a BB gun and shoot at cans lined up on their fence, or at squirrels. I was a terrible shot. We would romp in the southern woods together, talking big game, braggadocious.
Once, my other aunt, who usually avoided us because of my father, came to visit. She brought kittens in tow. They were so small and precious, easily fitting into my small hands. Precious little balls of fluff. She and my father got into a yelling match behind closed doors — I could hear their raised and heated voices but none of the words — and she stormed out. I didn’t see her again until my maternal grandmother’s funeral.
#
My father’s mother was a hoarder and a recluse. My aunt said she was a crazy lady. My dad said she lived alone in a house with her little white dog, covered in dog piss and shit and trash that she refused to throw out.
I met her once while we were visiting my cousins at a Chick-fil-A. All I remember was she seemed anxious. The next time we tried to visit her, she wouldn’t answer my dad’s calls. He drove to her house and banged on her door. She yelled at him through the door, told him to go, said she couldn’t handle seeing people, that she was unfit.
He sat on her stoop and held his face in his hands; he looked like a little boy. He hovered by her door a little longer, face tilted up in longing, as if him wanting it enough could make her open that door. The next time I saw her she was dead.
Chapter Two
Graduation
#
Children from my preschool typically went to a certain elementary school, but I went to a different one, with a different feeder preschool. Most of the other children in my elementary school had known each other for years. I was wary of them. I didn’t quite understand them. We would play marbles waiting for our parents after school.
I crushed kindergarten, acing my report card every month. My teachers wrote effusive praise. They recommended advanced reading and mathematics courses. I was given a special evaluation and was told I would be entering an advanced math course. My mother and father were both proud. My father would help me with my math homework, teaching me a little extra every time.
I gradually became friends with a pack of boys who loved roleplaying as Star Wars characters. They would usually be honorable Jedi Knights and I was a Sith Lord. I would use my mind control powers on them, force them to turn against each other and do my bidding. At night, I would lie awake and think of our games and I would feel a tingling, an itch. It was the first time I remember being distinctly aroused.
One by one, these boys individually confessed their crushes on me and told me they wanted to be my boyfriend. I was frustrated. I didn’t want a boyfriend — I wanted a harem of boys I could mind control! Eventually, they grew jealous of each other, and we stopped playing together.
This was one of my first experiences of a friendship being destroyed because a boy couldn’t get over his romantic attraction to me. Throughout my life, this has been one of the most painful things to experience. A man confesses to me that he’s in love with me. When I express disinterest, the relationship is poisoned and withers.
To lose out on opportunities because an idiot man couldn’t keep his boner in his pants is infuriating — to have a sexual relationship framed as the price of admission, told that I am lucky to receive the attention, despite knowing they have mentored plenty of fellow men before, with no blowjob required.
I think of all the things I could have done, all of the things so many women could have done, had men simply let their longing go, and I feel a fury flare in my belly.
#
Around the end of my first grade, the old pastor at my church retired and the church decided on a woman as the next minister. My father was enraged. I was confused; I liked her. She made me laugh during her sermons. My father felt that a woman pastor went against the word of the Bible. Women were too irrational and unstable to lead. He protested but everyone ignored him or even laughed at him. Emasculated, he decided we needed to find a more traditional church. A church that respected men. Only now can I see how small and angry he must have felt to insist on such a thing.
