About To Retire

I moved to what some of my dear friends & colleagues call Ho Hill one year ago tonight. My lover at the time, the one who had said to me how he thought I could do “so much more with my life” than work in the sex industry, left me the next day. Some people had called him toxic prior to that moment, but that wasn’t what mattered to me then. I had just woken up for the first day in my new home, my first of my whole own, and I was all of a sudden much more alone than I had banked on.

So I fell in love with my Ho Hill, with the rent boys who checked their messages on the pay phone I could see from the window, with the girls in knee-high faux leather boots breaking hundred dollar bills at the Walgreens by the cable car at three in the morning, with the proud women walking the Tenderloin ignoring my taxi cab’s windows as I rolled through home at night, and the mamasans in the massage parlors watering the plants in the windows as I walked to my morning coffee, and the quick hustle of men exiting the strip club cum brothel sharing a building with the Church of Scientology and a Subway. I fell gooey, messy, shamelessly, naively, without full knowledge and precisely without full knowledge, for my hill, and the people who made it and who made San Francisco “it” for sex & the future in the first place.

I watched a women in spiky-heeled boots stride out of her cab and towards the callbox of one of the grander dames of the hill tonight, a great old building with an imposing foyer. She carried a floral print duffel, like a carpetbagger, and had the kind of pink and white dyejob that would usually mark her as not a whore at all. But the wisps around her eyes, the fine blonde ones, were curled, and the rest matted as if it had been under a wig. She straddled that line between don’tfuckwithme punk and takemehomefuckme that could be a working girl getting off work for the day, or just some hipster chick out to… yeah. It’s impossible to tell anymore, the little flares of prostitution the city once threw up for me wherever I walked.

And of course I wonder what my neighbors think, too.

A few weeks after I moved in, around Christmastime, I’d taken a boy home from a bar, a real defiantly tragic single girl gesture, something in all my experience I had never been (a single girl) or done (a boy, from a bar). My apartment door was hardly revolving at the time, but I did get a note slid under shortly after that episode, the woman next to me or under me, I never found out, complaining of noise (”men’s voices at a late hour!,” “loud music after midnight!”). I tried to knock on her door and introduce myself but she never answered it, though of course I heard her inside, watching television. A girl who worked at a “massage parlor” (really, a cheap one bedroom apartment up the hill a few blocks, since broken up, a respite for tattooed girls looking to make holiday cash) came by one night and I showed it to her and she insisted it didn’t have to be about sex, it wasn’t about sex, it was just me being paranoid and creepy and now knocking on my neighbor’s doors and what was I going to say, “It’s true, I used to be a whore, but I’m retired, and all this sex is for free, really, and please, don’t judge me, I pay my rent on time just like everybody else!”

Sex continued without interruption on my corner of the hill, and just the other day, my neighbor lamented my moving out, her loss of “such a nice girl,” even if I’m only “next door” by virtue of my address, not my behavior.

It’s that I’m moving off my hill that I can say any of this. My retirement complete that I can talk about it. My being in love that let’s me go back to when I lost it.

It’s because I fell in love with this hill, and then on this hill, that I said the words without reason just a few blocks up the street and again in my bed, when I wanted it and didn’t have it, when I had it in a moment and killed it with saying it, and finally, when I had it and didn’t know it and didn’t care and had to say it anyway. The fantasy of the hill gave way to the fantasy of a lover and then that, too gave way to something I could still hold onto in the morning, and not because he or she was there still, but because it wasn’t just about saying something hard in the moment: it was saying fuck the moment, this is what I live for.

The hazard of all this writing-in-the-moment, right? You live for a story, but if you write about your life, how do you not write about the story of your life? How are you not that observer, wondering how this will “play” later? You think I have a hard-on for the web because of some greater virtue? Fuck no, it’s the story: it’s that my story is there now, and I didn’t even have to do much but show up. Scores of photos, other people’s blogs, videos and videos I don’t even know about, and people, people who may wish they were never there with me, but there it is, there it’s been told, there we’re all told it, and even when all parties haven’t been recorded, the absence is just as telling.

I could say, I was a whore, I stopped, and now I’m in love. But that’s the reduction of my experience that made me so unbelievable to my lovers in the first place. It’s why being in love with a place made more sense. I can read her history, and then make it my own when my own actual history is so perpetually in progress that I have to get outside of it just to recognize time has passed at all.

I was a whore. I was chasing love. I lived here.

And, and I can never forget this, here, too.