Full Moon Mixtape: Scorpio

I only worked at the phone sex line for about nine months, through my sophomore year of college and into the summer. It was my first job in New York, and the only job offer that didn’t involve selling my body.

I’d spent months applying for jobs as a waiter. I’d worked coffee houses back in Ohio with no trouble. I learned, pretty quickly, that food service in New York was a different proposition. The restaurant owners would take you in back, have you shrug your coat off, turn you around. They’d scan you up and down with their eyes before asking a single question. After this was done, they would tell you whether or not you had “the right look.”

I didn’t have it. Waiters in New York were often models or actors between gigs, was the thing, and patrons got used to exceptionally, professionally beautiful people handing over their burgers and $13 cocktails. The owners expected you to look like you could book a gig. I couldn’t, and for some reason, the few occasions when I did have “the look” felt shadier than the ones where they turned me away after checking for a thigh gap.

So those were the job offers I got in New York — that and the guys who sometimes leaned out of their cars and asked “how much” when they saw me standing with friends on the sidewalk. The city wanted one thing out of me, and I preferred not to deliver that thing in person. The ad in the Village Voice promised “up to $15 per hour.” (“Maybe even $20!” the recruiter promised.) I was 19 years old, maybe even 20, and I wanted to know everything about sex. A job where I got paid to interview people about their fantasies sounded like a great idea.

This story ends in a dark place. I’m warning you. No-one warned me, which was the problem.

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Seriously: This essay gets disturbing. If you have any sensitivities or triggers, judge your own comfort level as you go forward.

Phone sex calls were paid by the minute. That’s how the customers paid, so that’s how we got paid. We received a base rate to sit in the call center and take calls — it was a big, beige floor, covered in cubicles, same as any office, but they kept the lights turned down to protect our privacy — but that base rate wasn’t $15 per hour. It wasn’t even $10. If we made that kind of money, we made it through the sweat of our brow. So to speak.

“The average guy takes about five minutes to jerk off,” we were told at our first training session — there were training sessions, around a conference table; the whole thing was disturbingly normal — and so, if a guy finished within a few minutes of starting a call, we hadn’t really done anything. We got paid per minute, for every minute over ten minutes, because that showed that we had worked to keep him on the line.

The job wasn’t to get the customers off. It was to stop them from getting off — to distract them and lure them into unrelated conversations, preferably until their money ran out. You had to be their best friend, their mother, their confessor, their favorite ex-girlfriend, their all-time best first date, and you had to do it all with strangers, at the drop of a hat, using no information but their names — assuming those names were real. Ours weren’t.

Sometimes it worked. I learned to be funny, working a phone sex line. If you could make a guy crack up, he’d forget about his boner, but he’d also keep talking to you. Later, when I was a writer, people were always insultingly wowed by the idea that I could land a punchline — it’s like, feminist, but it’s actually fun to read!!!! — and I never told them where I’d learned, or how I knew that, if you slip the jokes in at a regular rate, people will keep listening to something they don’t want to hear. I was funny because I had to be funny. There is no tougher crowd than a guy with his hand on his dick.

Those were the good calls: The regulars, the girlfriend experiences. If you were really lucky, you’d get a cocaine call. Men on cocaine want nothing but the most depraved sex imaginable, and they also can’t come, because they’re on coke, and if you mention anything remotely connected to their interests, they will go on a two-hour-long monologue and wake up in the morning with life-destroying credit card debt and a bill they can’t explain to their wives. Men do the same thing now, I’m told, but it’s called “podcasting,” and you have to subscribe to their Patreons. We got paid. We got perks: There was a leaderboard in the main office, with a list of the operators who had the longest call times, and if you won that month’s contest, you got a gift card to Sephora.

Like I say: It was a normal office. Boring, even. They kept it that way because of what might happen.

Most calls weren’t good. Most men realized that you were trying to talk to them, and they got angry — or they called to talk, but only to say things they couldn’t say to women in person. The customers usually had wives; they had girlfriends; they had female bosses and coworkers. They hated all of those women, so, so deeply, in ways they could only confess to women who weren't allowed to talk back: My wife’s a bitch, she won’t even take it up the ass for me. She’s such a used-up, saggy old cunt. I’m sick of looking at her. If I have to hear my boss screeching at me one more time I’ll choke her out and fuck her on top of her fucking desk, how about that. Stop trying to talk to me, you dumb whore, I’m trying to jerk off here. Shut the fuck up, you stupid cunt. Why don’t you just suck my fucking dick and stop trying to have a conversation about it. Useless bitch. Fucking slut. Whore, whore, whore.

The hatred in their voices was a tangible thing, dripping through the phone receiver like sludge. It was thick, black, sticky. It was the substance I was left coated with when all the squishing and moaning stopped.

I had never even seen porn when I took the job. I made my boyfriend show me some of his; he thought he was in for a hot night, and I screamed aloud in horror when I saw what a blow job looked like from the outside. Maybe the early 2000s was a weird time for pornography — Paris Hilton’s leaked tape, Britney Spears fantasies, Girls Gone Wild and Barely Legal; it was a time when straight men were encouraged to fetishize very young women, and specifically the idea of young women being forced or tricked into things they didn’t enjoy doing — or maybe I, specifically, wasn’t mature enough to hear certain things without taking them personally.

Either way: I was usually the youngest person on the floor, and I was also one of the most popular people on the floor, and those facts were not unrelated. I wasn’t particularly good at the job. Lots of the other workers had done in-person sex work, whether they were dancers or escorts, and they knew their business. Men didn’t call me for expertise. Men called me because, unlike those other women, I actually sounded like a teenager. They called me because it was their chance to hurt a kid.

I had to take every call, as they came. I was not allowed to hang up on any of my callers. Once something started, I had no ability to stop it. That was the other thing I learned at my first training.

I’ll skip past the rape calls. Shall I? Rape, name-calling, spitting, slapping, choking, beating; teacher-student, neighbor-babysitter, daddy-daughter. Sometimes daddy-daughter stuff from guys who had actual daughters, which they would tell you with a certain shaky, malicious satisfaction that meant they knew the confession was terrible.

You can have all these fantasies without being a piece of shit. These guys had those fantasies, and were also pieces of shit, which was not a great introduction. They knew I wasn’t enjoying myself; some of them, many of them, liked it more because I wasn’t enjoying myself, because they needed to feel powerful, and they liked yelling insults at some poor kid who had to get them off afterward. Yes, mister, sorry, mister, what would make you feel better? What do you want to do to me now? The only ones I was allowed to refuse were the incest fantasies, because FCC communications laws forbade incest and bestiality. You had to tell them it was the FCC’s idea, not yours. You had to suggest an alternative option, like “babysitter.”

Those calls were hard to take, but they weren’t outside the human average. One thing my coworkers noticed about me, right away, was that I had a tendency to get callers who fell outside that range. The guys I got weren’t kinky. They weren’t just boorish straight dudes. They were spiraling, angry, scary, keeping something very bad just barely under wraps.

“You get all the psychos,” my boss said, bluntly. “You ever think you bring it out of them?”

It had to be my fault, the fact that I got the psychos, for the same reason that it was technically my fault for taking calls; we were legally within our rights to hang up at any time, they told us at the training session, but our calls were being monitored, and girls who hung up weren’t “good earners.” Did we think it was in the company’s best interest to keep us employed if we weren’t good earners? No, right? So…

The threat hung in the balance, in the thing unspoken. Everything happening to me was technically consensual, in that I showed up to work and I was paid to be there. Everything happening to me was technically non-consensual, in that I needed the job, and thus couldn’t refuse or even set terms.

If you tried to talk about this, nobody would understand. They all thought phone sex was funny, or sexy, or shameful. They’d back away, trying not to look grossed out, or else they’d want to hear a story — who had the weirdest fantasy? Everyone asked that. They all wanted to know that the “weirdest fantasy” wasn’t theirs. The “sex-positive” feminist literature of the time had no answers: In order to be a Sex-Positive Feminist, you had to hold that Sex Work Was Empowering, that you were a Sacred Prostitute, that you were Sexually Liberated and Healing People. The idea that it was just a job, and that most workers got treated like shit, hadn’t yet gained traction. Michelle Tea’s books got it right, but she was the only one, and even she played it cool.

I developed a stock answer to the “weird fantasy” question. (It was the guy who wanted to hear about the cast of Friends having an orgy — could he be any more aroused?) I didn’t tell them about the black slime, the hate, the words dripping off me at the end of the night. I didn’t tell them that I had started having nightmares, that I couldn’t always sleep. I didn’t tell them that I was drinking more, or that I had stopped eating, my body dwindling away beneath me, less and less of me to hurt. I didn’t tell them how never seeing the callers’ faces made it so much harder; they were no-one, and they were everyone, anyone on the street could be the guy who hurt you last night. I didn’t tell them about the rage; how I’d walk down sidewalks, noticing how men expected women to just automatically move out of their way, the same way they expected me to let them call me a bitch and a whore and a cunt without ever talking back, and how sometimes, I’d put on combat boots and stomp down the sidewalk toward them, playing chicken. If they didn’t dodge, I’d body-check them toward traffic. Live and learn, you fucks. Not everyone gets out of the way.

I didn’t talk about that, because no-one would understand that, because they all believed the job meant that I was a bad, dirty person who deserved what I got, and I didn’t want to hear that I deserved this. I kept it all locked up, down in the dark, where people couldn’t see it. I didn’t mention Jack at all.

“I got a snuff caller,” one of the girls on my shift said. She was the other big draw – my age, hired the same day I was. “‘Jack.’ He called three times already. He wants to burn me to death with lightbulbs.”

The older women on the floor scolded her. Snuff calls were also banned under FCC regulations. She was supposed to take the guy’s caller ID number — not his credit card, they didn’t trust us with that, but a long, nine- or ten-digit number that flashed on our incoming call screen — and report him to the bosses. Supposedly, they’d put a flag on his card and stop taking his calls.

“If you don’t get him blocked, he’s just going to call the other girls,” the older workers said, but the girl just laughed, and shrugged, and quit about a week later. Jack didn’t call the experienced operators. He called new hires. So, eventually, Jack called me.

Have you ever just known someone is wrong? Have you felt it, in your gut: That visceral danger, the sense of limitlessness, the idea that normal human rules do not apply and anything might happen? Have you looked into someone’s eyes and kept on looking, down and down and down into nothing, at least once?

I can tell you what Jack wanted, although my memory goes dizzy and shattered around the actual words. Even if I could recall them precisely, none of it will sound to you the way it did to me. It’s just letters on a screen here, just fantasy. But I spent all night, three or four nights a week, talking to guys who wanted to intimidate me. I heard top voices, and I heard dom voices; I heard small men trying to act big and weak men trying to be tough. I heard a whole lot of guys who were just plain assholes. I heard that hundreds of times a week.

Jack’s voice wasn’t like anything else I'd heard. It was wrong, a primal wrong that my body understood before my mind could catch up. He hadn’t even said his name yet. I just knew. He said “hello,” and I felt the kind of cold that radiates from your bones.

It started. He was going to tie me to the bed first. He’d choke me with the belt for a good long time. It would cut into the skin of my throat and my throat would bleed. The veins in my face and neck would burst. Then he’d take the lamp and bash me with the bare lightbulb. It would burn my tits, and then the glass would shatter and shred them, and the bare wire would sizzle into me, brand me. He’d just keep beating me. My rib cage would cave in, and when it was bashed down concave, when he could see the ribs sticking out from the broken skin on the sides, he’d pull my legs apart and he’d

He wants you to be scared, I thought. My mind was still working, although my body and voice were frozen. That’s the point. This whole thing stops working for him if he doesn’t scare you.

The second thing I thought was get his fucking number.

“Wow,” I said in my bubbliest, most teenage voice. “That’s hot.”

He was going to pull my legs apart and slice his way in as I bled out from my shattered rib cage, and then he’d rape me in my own blood, he’d rape me as I lay dying, he —

“Mmmm, wow,” I said. “What if I suck your dick next?”

“What?” he said.

His voice broke. The wrongness of it broke, for a second. He was just confused. It works, I thought, and started scribbling down his ID number on the note pad in front of me.

“You’re not going to be able to suck my dick,” he said. “I’m going to kill you. Your bones will be sticking out and you’ll be shaking, and then I’m going to get a blow-torch and melt the fat off your tits. I’m going to burn your eyes ou —”

“Wow,” I said, aggressively Valley-Girling the vowels for him. “You have a big imagination. I love it when a guy, like, takes control.”

The voice had gone full Paris Hilton, by now. Bored, bubble-gum-popping, blank. It didn’t say I defy you, it said I’m barely paying attention to you.  Six digits down, just a few more to go.

“I’m not —” Jack said. “I don’t —”

He was sputtering. His voice had gone up an octave. He sounded almost human now; he was a horror-movie monster, pulled into the light, so I could see he was all latex rubber and corn syrup. He was the Wicked Witch, and I had tossed a bucket of water. He was melting, melting.

“Mmm,” I said. “Tell me what you’re going to do next, babe. I’m, like, so into it.”

I heard him grunt in disgust. The phone clicked in my ear as he hung up. In the last few seconds before the screen cleared, I wrote down the final digits of his ID number. I felt a surge of bleak, furious triumph. See, Jack? I thought. See? Not everyone gets out of the way.

Then the phone rang, and I had to pick up. It was another rape call. Standard stuff, breaking into your bedroom at night, maybe some daddy-daughter thing, I can’t remember. I started sobbing and telling him to stop, and he thought it was part of the role play, so he kept going, getting off on how hard I was crying and how real it sounded, and eventually, once he’d finished, someone picked me up out of my chair and pulled me into the break room. She held me. She had to hold me for a long time.

I gave Jack’s ID number to my bosses. “We’ve got a Jack the Ripper,” she told the payment office, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “Delightful,” said the lady whose job it was to block his card. Maybe they really did block it. It seemed less mercenary than usual, but rules is rules. God bless the FCC.

They said “a,” not “the,” and they weren’t shocked. Jack wasn’t the first or only caller of his kind; he probably wasn’t the last. I didn’t stick around to find out. A few months later, I got a job typing data into spreadsheets, a job I could put on a resume, and which paid so, so much less than phone calls. Now, “phone sex” is outdated and cheesy. Girls do video calls from home. Maybe it’s better if you can see their faces. Maybe it's harder. I’ll never know.

You can say that I was just slumming, that class and race allowed me to pass through sex work without accruing any career damage. That’s true. You might be angry at me for not telling you this story earlier, though I could see no way to tell it — I didn’t agree with the second-wave feminists who say that sex workers are brainwashed victims, and I couldn’t agree with the third-wave feminists who said sex work was liberating and empowering, and I was so nervous about having my story used to hurt people that it was easier not to have a story at all.

You can tell me that it barely counts, because it was legal, because no-one saw me or touched me. I told myself the same thing. I said that the job was just talking; that I was getting paid to have conversations; that it was probably safer than food service, because I’d seen the way those restaurant owners sized me up and I knew that I wasn’t getting through a shift un-groped. I told myself that no-one ever actually touched my body, so it couldn’t be assault.

It wasn’t my body I risked, though. It was my belief that the world was a good place, and that I was safe there. It was my ability to meet a man for the first time and see a stranger, not someone who might have once called me a dumb whore and told me to gag on his dick. I couldn’t stand to see the world naked, all at once. I couldn’t bear knowing how much all those men hated women.

Of course, I wasn’t a woman, but I’d been treated like one; treated, specifically, like the class of woman that men can hurt without facing consequences. I don’t know what to make of that. Plenty of men do sex work, but I doubt they did it like this. I’m not a woman, but sometimes, in my nightmares, I’m still a phone sex operator. I run out of money, or I lose my job, so I just walk right back into that big beige office with all the cubicles. No-one makes a fuss about me coming back. No-one even notices. I just sit down and start taking calls, like I never left.

I couldn’t get undressed for a few days after Jack called. Nakedness was too vulnerable, too scary; it looked too much like what he had been picturing. When I finally did strip down to shower, I couldn’t recognize myself in the bathroom mirror. I never felt perfectly connected to my body, but this was different. I was hanging outside myself, staring at my reflection with clear, impartial judgment. I had never seen it before. It belonged to a stranger.

“It’s so small,” I said, marveling at it — this body, the only thing that kept me alive, the only thing I had to sell; the thing that determined how everyone saw me and treated me; the thing that held all of my thoughts and experiences, that gave me my identity and my history and my name. It was such a fragile thing, so temporary. It was built to last only a few years. At any moment, someone could come along and break it, and I’d be gone.

“It’s so small,” I said, over and over. “It’s so small.”

Thanks for reading, and enjoy your full moon. This one's bloody.

At my other job: Sex and power and violence and fear are acutely interlinked this week. I wrote about the end of abortion rights and bodily autonomy in the United States; the inherent violence of forcing people to give birth; and how uniquely scary it is to be a transmasculine person at a time when our right to control our bodies is being challenged on every front at once. When you're done reading, donate to your local abortion fund. They've been preparing for this a long time, and they have a plan to keep people safe.

This seems like a great time to remind my mother that she is NOT ALLOWED TO READ THINGS I WRITE ON THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!!!!! Sorry, Mom.