Free My Three Husbands by Swan Adamson Page A

back to the house after the clubs closed.
    â€œSweetheart,” Whitman said one morning, “we love you, so you’d better leave now, before we kill you.”
    My overachieving dads just hate it that I work at Phantastic Phantasy. Just like they hated it when I was an exotic dancer (I never told them about my stint as a lingerie model). I don’t know why they get so worked up about it.
    Just because you work in the sex sector doesn’t mean you’re a whore or a slut. I kept telling the dads that. Tremaynne didn’t mind. He was, like, totally cool with it. He thought it was like a form of anarchy from everything middle class and repressive.
    To me, it’s just a job. It’s what I do because I have to pay rent and my phone bill and keep my half-dead car running and buy food. I have to do all this with cash, baby, cash, because bankruptcy comes in like a tsunami and wipes out all your once-available lines of credit.
    Credit cards were my worst addiction. Before I went Chapter Seven, I’d racked up $18,000 worth of debt that I couldn’t pay off. For the next seven years, I can’t buy anything that I can’t pay for with cash.
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    When you work in the sex industry, you’re part of a secret inner world that the larger outer world frowns on. You have to accept that, and accept the creatures you meet. You all share the same environment.
    Most of our business at Phantastic Phantasy is video rental. We carry over a thousand titles, from nostalgic hits like Thanks for the Mammaries to patriotic offerings like Yank My Doodle, It’s a Dandy. Our gay collection is the best in Portland and features all the current superstuds, including Ricky Ramrod, Carl LaCoque, and the Falcon stable of sexual athletes. Yes, there is lesbian porn, but only straight men rent it.
    The front part of the store is video rentals and merchandise. All the street-facing windows are polarized because the people inside don’t want to be seen by the people outside. It’s like working behind a giant pair of sunglasses. The outside world is just a bunch of dark moving shadows that you can ignore.
    Bruce renovated the store last year, putting in red and purple carpeting and different colored lights. He lets people smoke in designated areas, so there’s always that nice comforting stale cigarette-smoke smell, like in my apartment. It’s a smell I grew up with because my mom and both dads used to be heavy smokers.
    In the back of the store, separated from the front by more racks of videos, there are twenty private viewing booths. There’s an assortment of gay and straight movies available in every booth. You choose your own selection from a computerized menu. It’s all very up-to-date.
    I sell people the one-dollar tokens that operate the movies for five minutes. I don’t go back in that area unless I absolutely have to. From up front I can see everything that’s going on because Bruce installed surveillance cameras after the city tried to shut him down for prostitution.
    It’s like watching some weird kind of avant-garde TV show where the set is nothing but a hallway and twenty doors and the action is people going in and coming out. It’s better than a lot of the video installations I used to watch in those art galleries the dads would drag me to in New York.
    Gay guys have sex back there, but I can’t see that because it takes place in the booths. There are also these side-by-side “buddy booths.” One guy goes into one booth, another guy into the booth next door. While they’re watching the movies, they can press a button and raise a screen between the two rooms. Then, I guess, they watch each other j.o. But the screen is not clear glass, so it’s kind of like peering at a shadow. Straight guys and other gay guys j.o. in their own private booths.
    But here’s the rub. On a little monitor up front, we can see which booths are occupied and tell