Holy Hustling

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If he does arrive (three out of four do), he'll arrive right on time. Like Jim, this afternoon. Jim is 26, good-looking, has a tattoo on one shoulder, comes from Brampton, Ontario. This was his first time with me, and only his second (he said) homosexual experience. He told me on the phone I'd have to tie him up and blindfold him to make him do anything, and that he wouldn't kiss. For some people, bondage is an exciting, highly theatrical scene. For Jim, it's a way of saying the whole thing wasn't his fault.

He undressed as soon as he got into my room. In polite society, this is where the veil is usually drawn. Let's lift the veil. This is what happened: I blindfolded him. Made him undress me. Tied his hands behind his back. Made him suck. I forced him to kiss me (in this case, 'no'meant 'maybe'). He finally came, by masturbating himself. He got dressed, thanked me, paid me, went home. We were together half an hour.

Which has all the banality, all the ordinary magic, of almost any sexual encounter anywhere. What is dazzling, almost humbling about that scene has nothing to do with my management of predictable combinations of body parts. What I find dazzling is the spectacle of human need: the extent, power, range of it. Need is a seething presence beneath the polite fictions of everyday lives. If it were a force field, the city would glow at night. You could hover above it and see the lines of light reaching out and crossing and missing and connecting, everyone pretending there is no light at all, everyone making their dinners, reading their books, watching their televisions. But I see it. I feel, on some nights, that I am tracking the current of human need, a current visible only to me and other whores, a current that will draw me to Baby Geoffrey, or to the 17-year-old high school student who hasn't figured out another way of meeting people, or to the Italian grandfather who's finally getting what he wants, or to the man who does nothing but tickle my feet and tape-record my laughter. There can be needs so sudden, so urgent, that I am called from shopping malls, bars, the lobbies of cinemas. There are needs so ordinary they can be satisfied simply by an orgasm in the presence of another warm, receptive body. And needs of quite byzantine complexity: I have given philosophy lectures in the nude; had sex with someone who could be excited only by touching the fillings in my teeth; been videotaped in a wrestling scene by a gentleman who brought along the wrestling outfits and my opponent. There are the occasional calls from women, the endless needs of married men, the straight men who want to be on the bottom once in their lives.

And there is always, always, the need for my shamelessness.

The best marriages ought to be shameless too -- sunny and clear-eyed in the face of infidelities and sexual extravagance. Many are not. Men go to whores to save their marriages and, on the whole, I think that is a service we provide. Our shamelessness acknowledges, welcomes needs. And we have no needs of our own.

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