Redefining Realness (27 page)

Two police cars—the normal squad car and a single-rider golf-car-like vehicle—arrived within ten minutes. I sat on a bench in Fort Street Mall as three officers asked me to relay the details of the attack. I felt naked, unprotected without my purse or identification, and inappropriate, like a girl with no keys to any home.

“Why did you go in the van?” asked the officer writing the report.

“He was giving me a ride home,” I lied, knowing that the truth couldn’t be written in the report.

“Aren’t you out here every weekend?” asked the officer who drove the cart, chewing his gum nonchalantly. I recognized him and his mustache. He never bothered us but did drive around the block every few hours, often stopping to chat with Rebecca.

I nodded with embarrassment. He wanted to squash this report and put me in my place as a prostitute unworthy of justice. His indignant tone said what all three officers were thinking:
There is no purpose in writing a report for you as you pretend to be a victim. You brought this on yourself.
I wanted to cry, because I realized the absurdity of my claims, of the fact that I had the audacity to report someone else’s wrongdoing to the police when I was breaking the law on
the regular. Still, I wanted to show them my worth, to say that I was more than just a teenage prostitute. I was different, special, worthy. I was a college scholar with promise and a 3.8 GPA. My cleavage-baring tank top and frayed denim miniskirt betrayed me. To them, I was nothing more than another hooker. No one would miss me if I went missing.

“Do you want to press charges?” the officer with the notebook asked in an exasperated tone.

I shook my head and watched as they drove away. I used one of the girls’ phones and called one of my regulars, Sam, whom I had been dating since my junior year of high school, to pick me up. I didn’t have the courage to return home. I felt unworthy of my own bed and stayed at Sam’s high-rise apartment overlooking Ala Moana Beach. I relayed the details of the attack while lying in his Notre Dame T-shirt.

Sam was in his late thirties, with sandy blond hair and large green eyes that always took me in with a warm compassion that I rejected each time he hugged me, touched me, moved deep inside me. Sam was from San Diego and had lived in Hawaii for about five years, working as a lawyer. He moonlighted as a photographer, traveling to Brazil, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Thailand to capture trans women for his friend’s popular pornography portal.

I cried myself to sleep that night and woke in the morning to the smell of eggs and coffee. He handed me a mug as I sat at his breakfast bar, where I saw the brightest blue ocean. I still marvel at the fact that I grew up surrounded by such powerful beauty, the Pacific Ocean nestling me in its majesty.

“You know, Janet, I was thinking,” he started. He was my only regular who knew my name and where I lived. “You don’t have to do this anymore.”

“You think I want to do this?” I said, swishing the sweet bitterness of the coffee in my mouth. “I’m too close to bow out now.”

“What if I gave you another option?” he said. “What if you let me pay for the rest of your surgery?”

“I couldn’t let you do that,” I said, tucking my knees to my chest, stretching his college shirt.

“Why not?”

“It just wouldn’t be right,” I said.

“What’s the use of me having money if I can’t help someone I love?”

His question lingered over breakfast. This was the dream of thousands of girls everywhere: for a man to love you, care for you, provide for you. It was the rescue, like Richard Gere climbing Julia Roberts’s fire escape in
Pretty Woman.
Sam was the embodiment of that dream, a husband or sugar daddy who was attractive enough and generous with his wealth. I knew women like Kahlúa and many others who had fulfilled that dream of having a man provide for them, giving them surgeries and resources. I could not try on their dreams; they didn’t fit me. To accept Sam’s charity would involve the ultimate compromise of appropriating someone else’s dream.

I realize this sounds contradictory, coming from the same girl who offered her body to men for half hours at a time. But I wasn’t for sale in that way. Never was. I couldn’t imagine looking between my legs and thinking of Sam’s pity disguised as love for the rest of my life. I wanted to be able to say I did it myself, on my terms, my way. To accept Sam’s gift would be to lie, and I had never lied to him or myself. I couldn’t accept his gift because I knew he thought he loved me. It was a one-way affection I’d profited from for years. Sam was aware that I was hustling every night to raise the money for my surgery, and only now, as I was so close to reaching my goal, just twenty-five hundred dollars away, he had extended charity. Acceptance of his offer would cost too much. It would involve my freedom under the unspoken understanding that I would then be
his
woman.

I declined Sam’s offer just a few weeks before I lifted off to Bangkok. I had finals coming up, though flash cards and all-nighters weren’t really on my mind. I was sacrificing pieces of myself nightly for the bigger picture: to exist in a body that represented me more fully. Using my body was easy initially. I owned it and used it to benefit me. I was born with it and had to live, love, and suffer in this world with it. It was mine to sleep with, profit from, and modify. I grew up in a world where the sex trade, like the modifications we all went through, was part of the pact, a part of the journey we had to go through as trans women.

There’s a level of competence and mastery involved in being good at hustling, and the constant attention from dates falsely boosts your self-esteem. The tragedy is when girls believe all they are good at is being some man’s plaything. When your self-identity and self-worth are tied up in how much money you can make and how many men want you, it can be scary not to rely on that identity; it can be hard to let it go and not know how to define your worth for yourself. Unlearning all I had been taught about who I was, what I could imagine for myself, what I felt was possible, and my tenets on love and sex and trust have been my biggest lessons. I’m still learning.

Sitting in Sam’s kitchen, I paused and experienced one of those check-in moments with myself. I sat there and thought,
You know you’re a prostitute, right? That you sought comfort in a regular after being attacked by another date, and now this date is proclaiming his love for you, his go-to fetish come true.
I waited for some sense of shock, for some well of emotion. This wasn’t the trans version of
Pretty Woman
. No one was going to climb my fire escape and rescue me. Nothing but a solution came. Not a good one, but it was a way out.

“How much do you pay those girls who pose for you?” I asked.

“That’s not for you, Janet,” he said with a skeptical look. “You can’t take it back once it’s out there.”

I
cringe at one thing when I look back on my adolescence. Reliving this decision, made over a dozen years ago, has been the most difficult part of my writing. I’ve thought honestly about softening it, maybe even erasing it from my history. My ego convinced me several times that I could deny it ever happened. But I know that excluding it from this chronicle of my life would be cowardly. It would mean I was actively erasing a part of my journey. Why tell your story if you’re not going to tell it in its entirety?

My decisions are my decisions, my choices my choices, and I must stand by the bad ones as much as I applaud my good ones. Collectively, they’re an active archive of my strength and my vulnerability.

I wish I valued myself enough to tell myself that there are in fact things you don’t
have
to do to survive. You can say no, but that’s the thing about vulnerability. I didn’t know then that I was at my weakest, my most exposed. I was too much of a survivor to admit it. I was busy fighting and didn’t have the luxury of weighing options and considering consequences. Instead, I quickly made the best possible decision
available to me at the time and found relief in having found a solution, something that would move me closer to my goal. I was fully in the moment of making progress, and it wasn’t until I evolved beyond survival that I realized what I’d done. No matter how vulnerable, how young, how exposed I was, I still can’t reverse this decision.

When I met Sam’s friend Felix at the sex toy shop on Nimitz Highway, I picked out a black camisole and thong hanging on a white plastic hanger. Felix, a pudgy, chinless man with sparse blond hair covering his forehead, questioned my choice, dangling a white lingerie and garter set in front of me. It was wrapped in plastic, sterile, never worn. “How’s this?” he asked in his jolly British accent.

“Cute,” I said, shrugging. I couldn’t care less about wardrobe; I had never worn lingerie before.

“Cool, we’ll get this, and you pick out another outfit,” he said. “Black is boring.”

Felix’s choice was sweet, innocent, virginal. I picked a Brazilian-cut bathing suit, which was more grown-up, like the seductress I felt men wanted in their beds. At the counter, Felix paid in cash, throwing a small pink dildo into the bag.

We drove his red convertible Jaguar, with a personalized license plate that boasted the name of his company, to a gorgeous house on the hilltops of Hawaii Kai.

“Would you like a drink?” he asked as he placed his keys on a side table in his living room.

“I’m fine, actually,” I said.

“Cool. Mind taking this, though?” he asked, handing me a bottle of water and a diamond-shaped blue pill. The Viagra was another nod toward his professionalism. He’d obviously encountered girls who couldn’t get erect because of estrogen.

I took the little blue pill in Felix’s bathroom, standing barefoot on his beige-and-blue-tile floor. It was the prettiest bathroom I had seen,
with a claw-foot tub framed by a glass wall with embossed leaves, something straight out of MTV’s
Cribs
, and a separate shower. With the white teddy, thong, and garters on, I leaned over his sink, the cold marble meeting my barely covered belly, and lacquered my lips with a generous coat of MAC’s Prrr Lipglass. I looked at myself in the mirror, as I’d always done when I got ready, and paused, hearing Sam’s words: “You can’t take this back.”

As on those dozens of nights when I got ready for Merchant Street, this was no different. No wave of emotion, no ache in my belly telling me to get dressed and go home. Nothing came. I flipped my blond braids to one side of my face, smacked my lips, and smiled.

I took a seat in a chair opposite Felix and his camera, which stood on a tripod. The leather chair was whiskey-colored, a few browns darker than I was, contrasting my skin, barely covered in the skimpy, sweet lingerie. The cheap lace scratched the backs of my thighs. When the red light lit, I looked straight into Felix’s camera and said my name and that I was eighteen. I resembled a teenage virgin bride on her wedding night.

“What are you going to give to us?” Felix asked, with his face shielded from the camera.

“Everything,” I said cheekily, placing two fingers in my mouth while rubbing my nipples with my other hand.

“Is that a promise?”

“Oh yeah, most definitely,” I purred, my glossed lips and legs spread wide-open.

“Why don’t you stand up and show everybody your body.”

I went on to pose in my lingerie, play with myself using my new toy, and blow Felix. We then moved to his bedroom, where he had sex with me, still unseen by the camera as I lay exposed.

“Baby, that was so fucking good,” he said, his chubby-cheeked face sweaty and red. With his cum still on my chest, he proposed that we
schedule another shoot, rounding out my fee to fifteen hundred. Accepting his offer was a no-brainer. It was the most money I would ever make at one time.

In Felix’s shower, I washed all remnants of him off of me. As I scrubbed my body, a sense of accomplishment washed over me, rivaling the scent of Irish Spring. I was just weeks away from flying to Bangkok, where I’d be changed forever. Dry and in my own clothes, I looked at Felix gratefully as he handed me $750 for the shoot, which I nestled in the side pocket of my handbag. I showed him my ID, proving I was the age of consent, eighteen, to appear in this shoot, and didn’t think twice about signing away the rights to my image.

Later that month, as promised, I returned to Felix’s for the second shoot, where I earned the remaining $750. A weight was lifted from my shoulders. My surgery was paid in full. No one could take the money out of my checking account. All I had to do was board that flight to Bangkok. I know now that the weight didn’t disappear. It was just replaced by another load, something I’m unpacking now. I’ve had to share that weight with Chad, with my mother, with Aaron. And each time I’ve revisited this decision, I’ve had to face myself.

All the compromises I had made created a crescendo of energy that led me to ultimately dishonor myself, to desperately create a situation where I was in front of a camera, smiling coyly. I’ve never watched the video in its entirety, but in the short clips I’ve seen, I can’t look past the image of a little kid who is trying her best to be sultry. I thought I was in control of that moment. I thought I was so adult. What strikes me isn’t the rawness of the shoot but my youth. My voice is undeveloped, high-pitched. I see how bad I am at being sexy. I see my impatience, how I desperately wanted Felix to come so I could get my money. I see Thailand and the proximity of a fulfilled dream in my eyes. I see that I’m still becoming comfortable with myself, and there I lay in a leather chair, sharing my half-formed self with
this stranger, his camera, and the objectifying male gaze, immortalizing the one part of my body that brought me so much anguish. I put it out there for the entire world to see.

I didn’t foresee the growing reach of the Internet, which now enables millions of people to download my image for a small fee and share it with thousands of others. As I write this, I think about those who will be able to access these images, screengrab them, and repost them for others to see. I didn’t think about the fact that when you put something out there, you can’t get it back. Sam had warned me. All I knew for sure at the time was that no one was going to do anything for me. So I did everything in my limited power to get what I needed in order to attain my not-so-simple dream. Limited resources, being backed into a corner, being told that you can do anything when nothing is really given to you, all breed desperation.