Free Working Sex by Annie Oakley Page B

shit with a smile for people who never worked a day in their lives, they modeled such dignity that it stuck with me. Even here now, as I recall the many effects of colonization present in my childhood, I can honor that somehow in the battle they taught me a spirit of survival that never considered death. Thank you, familia.
    When I was seven, I dreamed of being eighteen—going to
high school, preparing for my future and going to the prom like the white girls on TV. Stupid. In reality, I’m eighteen sitting in dirty hotel rooms with men up to three times my age, pretending I’m sexy in a body that don’t yet even know what sexy is. I never even went to more than a week of high school. Leaving home at fourteen, raised by the streets and by me, believing only in the protection of my dreams. I learned quick to rest with the fact that you do what you have to do.
    I hate rich people. The way they look at you, the way they talk, the way they walk through the world like the whole thing belongs to them. The way they’ll just about knock you off the sidewalk in the city and move up into anyone’s neighborhood, yet they grab their purses tightly when you walk by and treat you like you don’t belong there.
    Sometime I would sit up in those rich men’s houses with their marble steps feeling like any second they would realize who I really was and kick me out, afraid I’d steal their shit. Which I did, but in return they got my body for an hour or two, so I don’t think they ever felt robbed. I would sit with them in restaurants, half dressed, pretending I knew what things were on the menu, knowing my only tool of power in the situation was their hard little dick under the table. I think the way I was made them feel like they were rebelling. At the same time they were correcting the way I talked, they were imagining taking me back
home and how shocked and mad their parents would be. Whatever it was, I didn’t really care, because I got my shit.
    It got old, though . . . pretty soon I felt played out. I couldn’t even find the dudes with money anymore. I never had a pimp, well, only the pimp that is working for an amerikan dream that will never quite fit in the hands of people like me. Wait, I lied. I had another pimp once, an older Italian man. He picked me up right at my front door in a Lincoln Continental one day. It didn’t take me long, even being young and impressionable, to realize it didn’t make sense to make your money touchin’ and fuckin’ nasty dick, only to have to give it back to some motherfucker whose nasty dick you have to touch and fuck too. It seemed stupid, like working for free and for what? Oh yeah, that’s right, for “protection.”
    Let me tell you something, none of those johns ever pushed for more because they knew I wouldn’t hesitate to fuck them up. I never had to tell them that. I showed every one of them by the way I wasn’t afraid to look straight at them, and for whatever reason, whether fear or genuine respect, they never challenged it. See, when you tell most anyone that they have to pay for something they want hella bad, like, say . . . pussy, for instance, they’ll believe you. It’s about how you present the goods. If you hustle like you believe your shit is gold, they’ll believe it too. If you look them deep in the eye like you can see every inch of how bad they want
it, they will melt in your hand. You know why? Because wanting things makes people feel weak. And when people feel weak for something they can somehow “obtain” they’ll do anything. But, when a motherfucker can smell your hustle because they got one too, that’s when you got a problem. And that’s when you watch a man drive away with your dignity; still confused, only half realizing what he’s just taken, but it’s already too late. That’s growing up though.
    Fuck a pimp.
    By definition: pimp n.: One who derives income from the earnings of a prostitute, usually by soliciting business.
    And: prostitute