I saw this gorgeous whore today. Amazing. The kind of girl who, when she turns to the side, you're amazed that she can live being that skinny, that beautiful. Really, really fucking astounding in her pink vinyl. Decent tits too. And a real pro.

I was talking to some homeless people at the 7-11. In fact, I'd been talking to a couple of them earlier. One was trying to get off alcohol and drugs. The other was probably insane. She said that she was a writer too and gave me a photocopy of a typewritten manuscript, all in caps, of a story she'd written -- apparently, a children's book, though she kept talking about both what a great play it would make and how much she wanted to do the cinematography. The manuscript was weird, largely incoherent but beautiful in a strange sort of crazy way: it began with a dialogue, the speakers not given, of a girl talking about how she pressed her side and a star was in her hand, but when she opened up the star, there was a soul inside. Like I said, strange but also strangely poetic stuff. Incidentally, it was full of spelling errors like "BY" for "BUY" and each page was photocopied at a bizarre, off-kilter angle. She'd sent it to Oprah because she didn't trust the publishing companies not to plagiarize; there's logic. This woman was certain that Oprah would read it and see its instant best-seller ability, as well as its merchandising potential. Oprah, to these two, was at least a minor goddess, though I'm not sure they knew of what. This woman had also sent a complete original manuscript without a photocopy.

The whore came later that night as I went for a quick coffee and snack, most of the stores closed. And I liked talking to these people. They had trouble following a conversation or remembering your name, but they were kind. Maybe that's part of panhandling. Maybe that's part of the deferring to others that you learn when you have nothing, count on other people to eat, and fear the cops fining you for sleeping. But some of it was genuine, based on our brutally honest conversations about how God could deal them the thefts and whatnot that they'd endured despite, they swore, frequent prayer.

Angel was her name, though I doubt it's on any birth certificate. (I want to get back to my whore.) Gods, she was astounding.

I have this problem. I have no problem with prostitution -- if a person wants to rent (not sell) her body and a person wants to pay to use it, fine; I'd even go so far as to say that the specifics of the deal, including condom usage, are up to them, though I'd like to know that people are making informed decisions, and I wouldn't mind the state paying for that. My problem is that I couldn't enjoy sex with her. I couldn't even get aroused. I thought she was stunning, would have loved to have used her body, but it just didn't interest me. These are, of course, generalizations, but they remain true. Bobby, a homeless man who had his radio stolen last week and who sleeps at a bus stop on his duffle bag filled with all of his possessions on Earth, and who was quite enthusiastic to show me the remarkably high quality of a flashlight he'd picked up for a dollar that day, said that he was already starting to get an erection just talking to Angel, who'd greeted him and asked what he was doing, making small talk. I told Bobby that I was in my twenties but that he had a better dick than me. It's my problem, you see.

I love sex, or can at any rate. But knowing that I was paying for it would ruin it. Or, more specifically, suspecting that she wasn't eager to please out of love, or at least affection. That it wasn't freely given. That's the lubricant, in more ways than one.

All I could think to do was talk to her. She darted off, excusing herself "on business." Christ, this amazes me. I've seen it before, but not often enough for it to get routine. She walked across the parking lot and entered some car by the passenger's side, a car that a customer had just boarded. I wondered if they had a pre-arranged appointment, but that didn't make sense. There was quite a pause before she re-emerged and, while it is possible that she performed oral sex in that time, I rather doubt it; probably her price was too high or he wanted to do something with her that she didn't want, like take her to some secluded spot.

In any case, she rejoined our group. The other guys started a few sexual innuendos. Men often think that women don't pick up on these. They think the reference to sex followed by an uncharacteristically deep laugh is only picked up as a sexual reference to the female present by other men. Not true. It depends on the woman. This one, yes -- she knew what was going on, that these men who she'd been so nice as to say hello to had begun to treat her as a sexual object as well. And that's fine; it's like treating a mechanic as a guy who works on cars -- not exactly inappropriate, but not exactly ingratiating or treating them as a person.

And she was a pro. No sooner had she joined us than she was on her cell phone, checking on clients. I asked her if she had an ad in the paper. She said no, that she gave out business cards. And then, suddenly, she was seizing the moment -- off to a man waiting at the crosswalk, who, after a brief chat, suddenly decided not to cross the street and instead walked back down it the way he'd come, the two of them holding hands.

It was a shame, really, as I almost desperately wanted to talk with her. I feel somewhat like Concrete, Paul Chadwick's comic book character, encased in a rock-hard body but compelled to put images of nude women on his walls, or like an old man, still lustful but without an erection. In truth, my penis works fine, but, while I certainly know lust, I'm more interested in aesthetics. I'm more interested in her story. What I really wanted was to sit down and talk to her, both to have the company of such a beautiful woman and to ask her the million questions that flowed from my brain as if cascading from a waterfall. Obvious questions, perhaps, about her work, but also questions about art, about what classes in school she liked, and, fundamentally, about her dreams. If you want to get to know a person, or even understand them, you get to know their dreams.

I want to take photographs of her, nude or otherwise. And I want to talk to her. Fucking? Perhaps. I certainly could use it. But it's the kind of thing that, unless it's tremendously mind-bendingly good, you forget after a while. It's like the movies. Your first dozen or hundred movies, you remember well -- they're an experience. These days, it's all I can do to remember that I saw most movies; I can't even remember the basic plot, or who starred in a film I saw all the way through, in the theatres. Often, I don't even remember that I saw the movie at all, though a bunch of people will remember going with me and I'll eventually begin to remember certain details, as they are provided to me by others insistent that I was there. Sex is sort of like that. One remembers fucking so-and-so. One might even remember certain actions. But one rarely remembers the feeling itself. And, like those first movies we saw, time tends to fade those details of even the most formative, mind-altering of early sexual encounters. Sometimes one remembers liking a sex act, or sex with someone, like one remembers liking a film, but cannot really remember that film, that someone's sex, or that act; merely the faintest impression remains, a memory of a response, a memory of a memory. That is to say that fucking, in and of itself, casual and left as that, is not much more interesting a prospect than anything else one is going to, essentially, forget the next day. But finding out whether this gorgeous and professional whore likes math or literature, Stephen Spielberg or Oliver Stone -- now that's fucking interesting.

The one time I've ever been in a strip club was in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was there to see an opera with some friends while an undergraduate, and they -- a female and a male, actually -- lured me from the bar across the street. The club was even less than I'd expected, which wasn't much. And it wasn't the quality of the club. It was the pointlessness. The desperation inherent in those men, sitting there, clearly erect yet unable to touch, unable to expose themselves, unable to fuck even when the girl made the rounds and did a lap dance. These men are paying to be teased and that's enough for them, or at least better than not having any sexual stimulation at all. It's pathetic, and I don't necessarily mean that in a derogatory sense; it's just sad to see them, frozen there, paying for something that doesn't seem to make them happy, just like addicts do.

For myself, I don't like getting aroused and not being able to fuck. I resent being teased. I get enough of that on the street. I get enough of that from billboards and mini-skirts and see-through shirts with nipples protruding on the streets or on the bus or in a classroom. It's visual sexual harassment of the visually aroused, just as the sexual harassment our law has criminalized deals with harassment of the verbally aroused. The fact that we criminalize the one and not the other betrays the anti-male bias of our laws, and that's not a pretty thing in our culture in which, just today, I was subjected to a teacher reading Margaret Atwood writing about how an older man can keep it up longer, which supposedly made up for his age -- a quote that, if reversed, could quite possibly get someone arrested, or at least yelled at. A casual reference in a narrative to the fact that some character's girlfriend had a tight pussy, which made up for her age, or some other physically undesirable trait of hers, would be instantly labeled as sexist. Not to mention that many women -- most, in fact, according to the best sex research in the world -- prefer shorter sex sessions to long, and that almost ninety percent of American women, hardly known for their sexual restraint, consistently say in surveys that they prefer cleaning the house to having sex. Never mind all that. Never mind that I, as a teenager, had sex for twenty hours straight and have never had trouble keeping it up with a desirable and willing partner. No, let's forget all that and sit in such a culture, paying for the pleasure of having our cocks teased.

I don't think so.

Women who dress in clothes invented to seduce men, clothes that a century ago would have been scandalous for their overt sexuality in terms of the radical amount of flesh they show and imply, should not consider themselves so above the stripper; both behaviors are designed, consciously or not, for male visual arousal, for the male gaze, typically with no intent to follow through. It's hilarious how we're taught in the West that male sexual gazing at women is threatening, even when the women in question are virtually naked, everyone just pretending women woke up one day and decided to dress that way, presumably because it's somehow liberating to show one's legs and cleavage to the world. Men, meanwhile, supposedly possessing the liberation women only just attained, or so our feminist mythology goes, never to work almost naked as an expression of that liberation. The obvious fact that such clothing, not unlike the decorative effect that earrings are intended to produce, is designed to attract men (which we'd more readily admit if studying another culture or an animal species) remains an uncomfortable one for most, despite the remarkable blinders required to avoid such a reality, however uncomfortable. If one really hated the male gaze, as most Western feminists and indeed our laws claim to do, we really should convert to Islamic clothing for women if we want to so much as feign consistency. What we get instead is a cock tease on every street, while the stereotypical male equivalent, say an electronic device attached to men that constantly plays a male voice which soothingly promises marriage and commitment over and over, would be unthinkable.

The point being: I get enough of this every moment I'm outside, my window is open, or my TV is on. I don't need to pay to up my dosage of torture, already so constant that I've grown accustomed to the pain. That I don't need.

So, in the strip club, unable to leave because my friends were staying, I turned away. I rotated my seat and, instead of leaning backwards on the rail, I put my arms over it, which let me drink my liquor without being provoked. Because, after all, I found the girls attractive. Had they been modeling nude, I would have had no problem. That's an aesthetic experience, not a sexy one per se. It's like getting an erection at an art gallery: it happens, but that's not where the mind is. But in a strip club, it's all about arousal. And there's nothing, for me, attractive about it.

Not only is there no hope of completion, but there's an obviousness to it -- it's hardly an original idea to glide up and down a pole, twirling off one's clothes. What is it with those poles anyway? I get that they're sleek, metallic -- they have a certain sexiness in an automobile sort of way. But they're decidedly un-phallic as phallic objects go. Detach that pole from the ceiling, and it gets a bit better, aesthetically. But as it is, it looks like the girls are rubbing their genitals, breasts, tongues, and buttocks on a structural support. But then again, I detest the so-called "money shot" that has come to dominate printed pornography; the obviousness of a spread vagina, not generally an aesthetically pretty thing in the first place, cannot compare to the subtle arc of an ass, the unique shape of a pair of breasts, the careful positioning of a body's posture and dress.

Moreover, there's the fact that the presentation is made to a room. There's nothing personal about this sexual offering, or display; it's not you they want to arouse, or please, or even get money from. It's a room full of people, people a person thinking at the time has little in common with. Why would that be erotic? Its only eroticism comes from the whorish nature of it, from the feeling that this woman's sexuality is available to all, from the depersonalization not of the woman but of the men that, as with the infectious group dynamics of a gang rape (or, perhaps not ironically, the dynamics of masked sexual orgies or sexual encounters in the dark), allow the men the sexual liberation provided by their very anonymity and military-like depersonalization -- an anonymity that, by way of the mob mentality, allows them to do whatever they want, feel whatever they want, and not feel so bad about it. Gang rape as a phenomenon is a sign and product of male guilt about sex, about violating, about extreme sexual desire; if we seek to eliminate it, we should embrace and, in fact, coddle that extreme sexuality, cultivating proper channels for it, rather than repress it. In any case, the prospect of being one customer among many doesn't attract me. The attempt to entice fails in me when simultaneously performed to a room of largely drunken slobs or impersonal businessmen. Once again, there are implications of arousal in this setting.

I don't like to be teased, whether sexually or with hints of career success or "possibilities" -- I want my pleasures be to fully attainable; it's the joy of attaining that interests me, not the hope. I don't go for the obvious, generally, which I usually just find boring. And the idea of being one sexual partner, at least visually speaking, among many just turns me off. So I faced the other way.

When the girl I liked the best was making the rounds, she tapped on my shoulder and asked if I was okay. She said this didn't look like the place for me. Drunk, I told her it made me depressed, then tipped her anyway and arranged for her to return and talk to me after her rounds. She finally did so, and we had a splendid conversation. She was trying to earn money to pay for college, said that she wasn't thrilled with her job but that it paid okay, and that she had trouble keeping boyfriends, among other bits of information. I tipped her again, told her she was beautiful, and gave her my number where I lived further north, in case she wanted to talk. She never called and might have just been getting money from a stone, as it were, shockingly earning tips from someone turned the other way and clearly not participating. If so, I hardly minded. I was glad to talk to her.

I wonder how many strippers and whores get this, some sensitive artistic type who wants to buy them coffee and chat, safety assured, no strings attached.

I have wanted, since before visiting the strip club, to talk with a prostitute. I consider it invaluable as a writer, but I also just find it interesting. Anyone can pick up a prostitute; hell, the prostitute will make the first move in some places. But what I'd like is to sit and have coffee, to cut through the bullshit, to earn a bit of trust and get a feel for the life of a prostitute, but also for those crazy particulars that make each of us stand out as people.

Maybe that can be my hobby: finding prostitutes to take to cafés and talk about live with.

I hasten to add that there is that pain, however slight, at watching the sexy girl, prostitute or not, go home with someone else. Even when one is not attracted. Even when one is, but is not seriously interested in fucking. There's still that pain for me: I should have that -- I would like that, even if I weren't interested, even if it was only to talk.

And there's a concomitant jealousy of the john who gets to fuck her. Even when on doesn't want to. Because he did. Because there's some inherent value to that, however outweighed by other factors, like getting to hold a great painting in the flesh, not just in a book or under glass, even if one's held great paintings before and knows that, exhilaration notwithstanding, the experience means little without a history there, a context in which that painting means something against one's fingertips.

Try explaining this to a girlfriend.

I'd like to write a book, sometime, consisting of nothing but interviews with whores. Not the few television documentaries on the subject, or the books with their own agenda. Just conversations between an artist and his whores, who he did not fuck. A charming little coffee table book, Talks I've Had with Whores, in which politics, aesthetics, and life gets thrown around between the distinctive artist, free with all of the issues discussed here, and a series of people who happen to rent the use of their body. Sort of like Charles Bukowski with the whores, but the subjects discussed are more elite and avant-garde. An bizarre artistic and literary artifact, certainly, but also an attempt to demonstrate, for the reader, the strange and complex combination of allure and disinterest that goes with beautiful but somehow undesirable women, the whore being only the most acceptable to point out as undesirable.

Publishers should feel free to e-mail.

NOTES

This essay was first published as Apollonian Bacchanalia #23 on persiancaesar.com on 29 August 2002, where it was described as being "on a whore I saw, recollections of a strip club, and on the dynamics of such encounters."