/Introduction/Boston: An excerpt from w4m
By Melissa Gira Grant
Melissa Gira Grant and Meaghan O'Connell took an unconventional route to publishing their book, Coming and Crying: real stories about sex from the other side of the bed. Writers in their own right, they also sought out a wide range of contributors, among them Tao Lin, Katie West, and Stephen Elliott. Rather than pitch endlessly to publishers, who are famously squeamish around subjects that defy easy (if marketable) categorization, they found their own backing from the internet community, using Kickstarter to drum up contributions. Their goal was $3000. By the time their funding drive ended, they secured over $17,000.
Now Melissa is working on a book of her own. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book w4m, the story of the end of the American red light district, told through twin travelogues by the same woman: a reporter tracing the spread of online prostitution, and a sex worker who uses the web to arrange clients in seven US cities.
*
My bags have no name on them because I have to give at least two everywhere I am going. To the man at the ticket counter, at San Francisco International Airport, at John F. Kennedy, at Ronald Reagan, at Logan, and at Back Bay Station and Penn Station, and to JetBlue and to Virgin and to American, and to at least three people along the way with badges and UV flashlights and wan looks on their faces, I hand my passport and I hand my boarding pass. I unload and load my laptop with one hand only. I know the legal limit for how much cash I can carry without declaring it. I put all my make-up in my carry-on to be safe because it would cost too much to replace and I will need it where I am going immediately.
In Boston I am a daughter and in Philadelphia I am a prostitute and in Seattle I am a lover and in San Francisco, and Washington DC, and in New York. I lift my suitcase from the carousel and take out my phone and I text my boyfriend and I call my mother and I check the email from my lover, and then I turn on my other phone. I’m going to the Four Seasons. I’ll be doing one night at Sofitel. His apartment used to be his girlfriend’s but she’s not there anymore. I can sleep on the couch, because my brother has the guest bedroom for the weekend of the funeral. We have a suite. We check in at three so let’s go to the museum now.
I am wearing the second nicest dress I own and I am walking from sculpture to sculpture in a garden in Philadelphia. I haven’t looked at a Rodin in person since Paris, since high school. I don’t bother pretending I care more than a sixteen year old memory can support and I don’t have to because today has been enough: the man who brought me here to be with him, his car he’s too comfortable in for it to be a rental which means he owns something that extravagant and fast, every day. We’re so temporary. In three days this won’t exist. I let him take my hand.
Letting his arm come around my hip in Seattle, I put my head as near his shoulder as it will reach. I don’t know him. Come, he said. I paid my own way. I never do. To prepare I bought two black mesh g-strings and a box of dark chocolates flavored with lavender and purple suede boots which I will destroy in Berlin in a few months. I told my boyfriend I had to go and I’d call every night and I love you and I just have to see other people. I could understand, my boyfriend said, if you were being paid this time.
The train to Boston from New York has a man on it who is old enough to be my grandfather, and we have a conversation about how there ought to be a new WPA for all kinds of projects, there’s so many things deserving of funding, and he’s a professor in Philadelphia, and he’s an oncologist. He is frail and sweet and doesn’t impress upon my attention at all. He wants to know where I am going and I tell him to my mother’s, not home.
In the room, there’s a faux leather menu, and it offers choices of American, Continental, or Asian inspired breakfasts. Local phone calls are still expensive but they know no one makes them. The stationary is in a black folio, a maroon cardboard block wrapped in gold fabric, on a piece of clear lucite next to the lamp. There are touch screens and towels and windows that don’t open, and signs to hang the towels again, and signs to call the twenty-four hour butler, and signs to order your choice of three breakfasts. Out the window, I see the bay and a lawn and the cars coming in and out all night. I put my suitcase in the closet. I toss it at the foot of the bed. I pull on a robe. I put my laptop on the desk and there is free wifi and it is called WelcomeHiltonGuest and W-MurrayHill and linksys and CopleyPlaceFreeWifi. I put on my music and I login to Skype and I look at my blog. I sleep naked in sheets so clean they are cold.
I love my boyfriend and he is not here. I call a friend in Los Angeles and I ask a friend from college to come and stay with me and there’s no one in Boston to rescue me from the wake so I send pictures of it to the internet. When my brother watches ESPN and ignores me after dinner I check Twitter and see that a famous prostitute named Ashley Dupre has just posted that she is at her parents’ house for Christmas, too, sitting on her brother’s bed and talking to him about just life and everything. When I have nowhere to go I go to the hotel I know the name of because a girl I don’t know much about was murdered there.
Now Melissa is working on a book of her own. This is an excerpt from her forthcoming book w4m, the story of the end of the American red light district, told through twin travelogues by the same woman: a reporter tracing the spread of online prostitution, and a sex worker who uses the web to arrange clients in seven US cities.
*
My bags have no name on them because I have to give at least two everywhere I am going. To the man at the ticket counter, at San Francisco International Airport, at John F. Kennedy, at Ronald Reagan, at Logan, and at Back Bay Station and Penn Station, and to JetBlue and to Virgin and to American, and to at least three people along the way with badges and UV flashlights and wan looks on their faces, I hand my passport and I hand my boarding pass. I unload and load my laptop with one hand only. I know the legal limit for how much cash I can carry without declaring it. I put all my make-up in my carry-on to be safe because it would cost too much to replace and I will need it where I am going immediately.
In Boston I am a daughter and in Philadelphia I am a prostitute and in Seattle I am a lover and in San Francisco, and Washington DC, and in New York. I lift my suitcase from the carousel and take out my phone and I text my boyfriend and I call my mother and I check the email from my lover, and then I turn on my other phone. I’m going to the Four Seasons. I’ll be doing one night at Sofitel. His apartment used to be his girlfriend’s but she’s not there anymore. I can sleep on the couch, because my brother has the guest bedroom for the weekend of the funeral. We have a suite. We check in at three so let’s go to the museum now.
In Boston I am a daughter and in Philadelphia I am a prostitute and in Seattle I am a lover and in San Francisco, and Washington DC, and in New York.
Letting his arm come around my hip in Seattle, I put my head as near his shoulder as it will reach. I don’t know him. Come, he said. I paid my own way. I never do. To prepare I bought two black mesh g-strings and a box of dark chocolates flavored with lavender and purple suede boots which I will destroy in Berlin in a few months. I told my boyfriend I had to go and I’d call every night and I love you and I just have to see other people. I could understand, my boyfriend said, if you were being paid this time.
The train to Boston from New York has a man on it who is old enough to be my grandfather, and we have a conversation about how there ought to be a new WPA for all kinds of projects, there’s so many things deserving of funding, and he’s a professor in Philadelphia, and he’s an oncologist. He is frail and sweet and doesn’t impress upon my attention at all. He wants to know where I am going and I tell him to my mother’s, not home.
In the room, there’s a faux leather menu, and it offers choices of American, Continental, or Asian inspired breakfasts. Local phone calls are still expensive but they know no one makes them. The stationary is in a black folio, a maroon cardboard block wrapped in gold fabric, on a piece of clear lucite next to the lamp. There are touch screens and towels and windows that don’t open, and signs to hang the towels again, and signs to call the twenty-four hour butler, and signs to order your choice of three breakfasts. Out the window, I see the bay and a lawn and the cars coming in and out all night. I put my suitcase in the closet. I toss it at the foot of the bed. I pull on a robe. I put my laptop on the desk and there is free wifi and it is called WelcomeHiltonGuest and W-MurrayHill and linksys and CopleyPlaceFreeWifi. I put on my music and I login to Skype and I look at my blog. I sleep naked in sheets so clean they are cold.
I love my boyfriend and he is not here. I call a friend in Los Angeles and I ask a friend from college to come and stay with me and there’s no one in Boston to rescue me from the wake so I send pictures of it to the internet. When my brother watches ESPN and ignores me after dinner I check Twitter and see that a famous prostitute named Ashley Dupre has just posted that she is at her parents’ house for Christmas, too, sitting on her brother’s bed and talking to him about just life and everything. When I have nowhere to go I go to the hotel I know the name of because a girl I don’t know much about was murdered there.
Copley Place Hotel, Boston. Photo by Melissa Gira Grant
I get on the Red Line, and I don’t call a taxi. I wheel my suitcase through the marble corridors that cut through a mall, where I haven’t been since I was nineteen and I sold chocolate there one summer. The mall is empty and there’s carols playing in German, huge and dramatic and radiant because there’s nobody there but me, nothing in the way of the sound and so it just rattles everything and takes up all the space between the stores and my body.
I’m in a hotel on Christmas. I’m not familiar with paying for hotels, but I am rolling my suitcase up to the desk, not worrying if I belong there or not, if I pass or not. I’m the only one waiting for the girl at the desk, and she’s tired, and she asks me, how many keys, Ms. Grant and I say, just one.
I take my one key and wheel around to the elevator, turning deliberately from the concierge though there’s no reason to. I note that you don’t need to swipe your key to reach my floor. I have no one to relay this information to later.
My harbor view is a complimentary upgrade, and this is what it is: snow just starting to drift in, a black patch of water split up by rows of squat brick buildings, and then me, on this floor in the teens, sitting in the window in a robe, ear pressed to the glass. I order a shrimp cocktail and a double shot of Chivas because it is Christmas, and even if it were not, this is Boston and it is already past midnight.
I drink slowly and I call Jay, who is in Los Angeles and has just seen the new Coen Brothers’ movie and is awake. I tell him how it makes more sense to be here, how I accepted my mother’s ride to the train station and her telling me that a few days earlier, a family friend saw my father at the mall. Which of his new wife’s daughter’s was up visiting, she had asked my mother? Could it have been a cousin from his family who had been with him? No, my brother, the only one who speaks to him, told her, when asked. The girls were all away already for the holidays.
There’s no reason for a woman in her twenties, I had said to her, to give a man in his sixties her time. Not for free. Maybe then, she said, he was there buying her a present.
Am I terrible, I asked Jay. Am I judging? I only ever accepted cash.
A few floors up from where I am sitting now, I write to Nikola, who has said he will be my recorder, and I lay back in bed with my phone and a notebook and a book that Meaghan lent me, Joan Didion’s The White Album, and a few floors up from where I read and I write, Julisa Brisman was murdered. Her killer is a man named Phillip Markoff. He hired her off of Craigslist, tied her up, robbed her, shot her, and left her for dead.
Prostitution is not anything extraordinary. It is business-class hotels and valet parking and flatscreen televisions, everywhere. It’s the muscle memory of checking your email on your Blackberry or looking at your text messages because everyone who listens to you, no matter what the hour, is there, and no one is here.
Prostitution is solitary.
In the morning I dress and finish my Chivas and sit in the lobby, under high-arched glass ceilings and limp and waxen plants. CNN is interviewing holiday travelers about their feelings on an attempted terrorist attack in Detroit, and a young girl in a pink puffy jacket is playing with her Flip camera and another girl sits across from her, not looking up for the video, typing on her Sidekick. Two pigeons fly down from the window and pick at Starbucks crumbs at my feet. I look up the stories about the Craigslist Killer on my phone on Google News. Julisa’s body was found on the 20th floor.
Prostitution is not your wife in her Christmas scarf announcing that she’s going to the bathroom and will you stay behind and keep an eye on things. It is not the food court. It is not your kid’s high school graduation in the same town you grew up in and your son’s new girlfriend just looking at you, waiting. Prostitution is not obligation. It is not being alone.
It is the same hotel, over and over. It’s the virtue and luck and money that brings you to its doors, holds you within rooms without end. It is this patch of carpet without any blood on it, where they found her, where I stand.
I’m in a hotel on Christmas. I’m not familiar with paying for hotels, but I am rolling my suitcase up to the desk, not worrying if I belong there or not, if I pass or not. I’m the only one waiting for the girl at the desk, and she’s tired, and she asks me, how many keys, Ms. Grant and I say, just one.
I take my one key and wheel around to the elevator, turning deliberately from the concierge though there’s no reason to. I note that you don’t need to swipe your key to reach my floor. I have no one to relay this information to later.
My harbor view is a complimentary upgrade, and this is what it is: snow just starting to drift in, a black patch of water split up by rows of squat brick buildings, and then me, on this floor in the teens, sitting in the window in a robe, ear pressed to the glass. I order a shrimp cocktail and a double shot of Chivas because it is Christmas, and even if it were not, this is Boston and it is already past midnight.
I drink slowly and I call Jay, who is in Los Angeles and has just seen the new Coen Brothers’ movie and is awake. I tell him how it makes more sense to be here, how I accepted my mother’s ride to the train station and her telling me that a few days earlier, a family friend saw my father at the mall. Which of his new wife’s daughter’s was up visiting, she had asked my mother? Could it have been a cousin from his family who had been with him? No, my brother, the only one who speaks to him, told her, when asked. The girls were all away already for the holidays.
There’s no reason for a woman in her twenties, I had said to her, to give a man in his sixties her time. Not for free. Maybe then, she said, he was there buying her a present.
Am I terrible, I asked Jay. Am I judging? I only ever accepted cash.
A few floors up from where I am sitting now, I write to Nikola, who has said he will be my recorder, and I lay back in bed with my phone and a notebook and a book that Meaghan lent me, Joan Didion’s The White Album, and a few floors up from where I read and I write, Julisa Brisman was murdered. Her killer is a man named Phillip Markoff. He hired her off of Craigslist, tied her up, robbed her, shot her, and left her for dead.
Prostitution is not anything extraordinary. It is business-class hotels and valet parking and flatscreen televisions, everywhere. It’s the muscle memory of checking your email on your Blackberry or looking at your text messages because everyone who listens to you, no matter what the hour, is there, and no one is here.
Prostitution is solitary.
In the morning I dress and finish my Chivas and sit in the lobby, under high-arched glass ceilings and limp and waxen plants. CNN is interviewing holiday travelers about their feelings on an attempted terrorist attack in Detroit, and a young girl in a pink puffy jacket is playing with her Flip camera and another girl sits across from her, not looking up for the video, typing on her Sidekick. Two pigeons fly down from the window and pick at Starbucks crumbs at my feet. I look up the stories about the Craigslist Killer on my phone on Google News. Julisa’s body was found on the 20th floor.
Prostitution is not your wife in her Christmas scarf announcing that she’s going to the bathroom and will you stay behind and keep an eye on things. It is not the food court. It is not your kid’s high school graduation in the same town you grew up in and your son’s new girlfriend just looking at you, waiting. Prostitution is not obligation. It is not being alone.
It is the same hotel, over and over. It’s the virtue and luck and money that brings you to its doors, holds you within rooms without end. It is this patch of carpet without any blood on it, where they found her, where I stand.
- 04/02/2010
