Annie’s Breasts

I’m eating chicken breasts and thighs with my fingers tonight, in honor of the first night I got to seriously spend time with Annie Sprinkle. To all the whore sisters who’ve been questioning my sanity of late, this story is for you:

(“Annie’s Breasts,” Northampton, MA 2003, and read with the love you’d give a poor little rich girl)

This would have to be the first story. Annie’s breasts. My own mother’s brand of maternal love, that being suffocation, denial, and repression, kept me from going after that golden oldie of psychotherapy, the comfort of the tit. Throwing my head on momma’s boobies, and just letting out a cathartic, helpless wail was not in my cards, not until I was twenty three years old, alone in San Francisco, letting loose a little torrent of tears into the cleavage of Annie Sprinkle.

A few years after, when my actual cards were being read by my teacher, Mary, she asked me, “Does Inanna have any mothering qualities to you? Because that’s what you need right now. You need to know that your mother loves you. Not your birth mother. She’s not happening. You need to know, and not just know, but feel, in your whole being, that the Goddess is your mother and she loves you.”

It doesn’t sound like, “Jesus loves me, this I know, cause the child molesting priest, he told me so.” Not really. I’m sure a part of me felt so still, held mom at arm’s length still. My mom, my real mom, I knew it, was a whore — not the one whose cunt I first knew, but the one whose cunt first taught me. My cunt. My own.

I was my own whore-momma, until Annie. It wasn’t a new age rebirthing with crystal dildos or forced labor breaths that owed more to porno than Lamaze. It was just me, standing on uneasy legs in a tiny black box theatre in the Mission, holding onto candy I bought in the lobby to benefit some leftie-sex political cause. Annie was in front of me, taking questions from the stragglers. My legs were still gooey from the massage she gave me mid-show, cooing, “Are you old enough to be here? Does your momma know you’re here?” in that voice you use with clients, but that didn’t split us up — even though it should have, it didn’t. I had paid to be here, and if my self-consciousness had gotten out of the way, I would have told you, if you were the ticket taker, Yes, I’m here for a religious experience.

So Annie had run her Magic Wand (made by Hitachi, in this instance), over my shoulders and neck and back, as a twenty year old image of her flickered on the screen behind her, of starlet Annie with a similar vibrator on her pussy. I don’t remember much except I couldn’t overcome my total body silence, which, if you have ever shared a sexual experience with me, especially one running heavy with whoring, you’d know was dangerous. Am I dissociating, or helplessly blissed? The line is awfully thin.

“Come back to Northampton, Annie,” I said to her bosom, as we melted into an embrace. I thanked her for sending traffic to my website, sacredwhore, which was linked partially as a mistake from her site, as she knew the woman who used to own it. “Yes, I saw that — keep it up,” she said, in that heavy-light sigh. When I finally made it back to the car, I wept and wept. The trip home detoured to Ocean Beach so I could scream at the Pacific, “How am I supposed to do this? Why am I supposed to do this?”

I didn’t use the word problematic, but I would have if it weren’t so cold. Annie’s problematic, sacred whoring is problematic, being stuck for another two weeks in San Francisco with less than a hundred bucks is problematic. Between all the choices, I pitted working-class survival wits against adopted-elitist academese, and went with the most profitable (and therefore, least “problematic”) option. I did my first massage call and the fever broke.

Whore fever. What soothes it is salt water, and cash. Like the well-stocked womb I made for myself, where I’ve got a full bookshelf and my laptop and incense and my candles from the city I love like heaven, and not just heaven for whores. It’s never clear-cut, never one or the other, just spiritual, just for the money. It’s to stop the fever, and it’s to stay alive. It’s for God the Momma and for God Inside of Me. It’s for my cunt and for my wallet, and when those slits start melding more, the fever may break forever. Right now I just ask Momma for a healing salve when I start burning up, and when She comes, I do, too.