I Am Curious (Thirty)

July 11

I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.

I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)

There’s nothing to it.

Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution — what a windy clinical word for the actual process — but I wouldn’t have believed it could be so, oh, what’s the word? Noninvolving?

That’s not exactly it. That was part of it, the feeling of this-person-he’s-fucking-is-not-the-real-me, and I suppose every girl has to feel that in order to keep from despising herself. And there is a certain amount of tripping out involved. I have always been good, perhaps too good, at being able to carry on a conversation, nodding in the right places, grunting uh-huh and mmmm and uh-uh, even contributing a phrase or a sentence now and then, without paying a dime’s worth of attention to what’s going on.

And you know, you can do this physically as well as verbally. It’s much the same thing, except it’s the body instead of the mind that is just going through the motions of participating.

I made forty-five dollars today. That’s at least twice as much as I could have made in any job I could have gotten, and in half the hours.

The sex part—

A flash. It was almost exactly the same as when I hit the hay with what’s-his-name, Edgar. The same thing! The same I’m-not-really-here, the same faint sense of contempt for the man I was with, the same general disinterest in what we were doing in bed, the same experience of getting a certain amount of pleasure from it but being too detached to really enjoy it, or even to really hate it, for that matter.

I don’t see why I can’t go on this way. It shouldn’t be too terribly hard to put away a hundred dollars a week. A hundred dollars is four or five tricks. (The New Math.) Four or five men a week and the rent is paid.

Went to the gay bar last night and got drunk. A little foggy on what happened, but I think I went home with a girl and I think we made it. I drank some wine before I went there, then had a bottle of cough syrup — terpin hydrate and codeine — you have to sign the book when you buy it and the druggist gives you an I-know-what-you-want-this-for-you-junkie-bitch look, but how else can you get high for seventy-nine cents?

Then all the drinks at the gay bar, which she bought for me, and whatever we had at her place. For all I know we had cocaine at her place. I really don’t remember. I have vague sex memories but they parallel a couple of freaky dreams I’ve been having lately, so who knows which was which?

The other thing, which I haven’t written about in here, and which I’m still not writing about because it scares me that much, hasn’t happened yet.

If it doesn’t happen soon I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, well, I guess I can always kill myself.

The girl is not entirely kidding.