A Common Pornography_ A Memoir - Kevin Sampsell [27]
One of my favorite people at Big Momma’s was Joan, a frizzy-haired bartender who would sneak into the kitchen several times each night and fish the biggest chunk of Roquefort out of the blue cheese dressing. I thought it was gross at first, mainly put off by the stink, but I learned to love it soon enough. Each night I worked with Joan turned into a blue cheese fishing battle.
By the summer of 1985, after I had graduated high school, I was dressing a little more strangely than most Tri-Citians. I would wear double-breasted dress jackets that Mom sewed for me, combined with stretch pants, Beatle boots, earrings, and shiny broaches. The boss eventually called me to the back and hinted that I was going too far, and without giving me a second chance, they fired me. When I got home that night, I tried to feel good about not having a job but I ended up on Mom’s lap, embarrassed and crying.
Cruising
I wouldn’t say I had a prostitute obsession, but when I was sixteen—just old enough to drive my Chevy Malibu—Maurice and I would cruise around east Pasco, looking at any cheap hooker the streets had to offer. We did so in silence, an unspoken pull toward what our small town had deemed “the ghetto.” The first few times we trolled this area, we just looked around, our imaginations coloring in details about every abandoned building and the discarded pieces of torn clothing that littered the cracked sidewalks in front of them. We eventually got comfortable enough to wonder aloud about how much the women charged for their services. We’d pull over and ask them sometimes, careful to strike some sort of balance between businesslike firmness and nonthreatening friendliness. The girls humored us, talking dirty and sometimes letting us touch their breasts. We must have looked out of place on those streets, two puberty-wracked white boys—me with my pimples and braces, Maurice with his red hair and freckles. Both of us were still reluctant virgins posing as street-smart kids.
There was one thrilling night when we actually let two of the girls in my car. They wanted a ride to a hotel that was on the other side of the tunnel that separated Pasco from east Pasco. Maurice and I listened in on their conversation during the ten-minute drive. They talked about clothes, cigarettes, and carrying guns. When we let them out, they walked to our windows and kissed us like we were their pimps.
This was around the time I started working at Big Momma’s, where I made anywhere from ten to thirty dollars a night in tips, which I carelessly spent at the record store. I hadn’t had a girlfriend yet—in fact, I had barely kissed a girl. But I was eager to have sex and had, coincidentally, been training for such an event for at least two years, masturbating regularly with my mom’s back-rubbing vibrator, timing the seconds it took for me to ejaculate, like some perverted scientist.
I had no prospects for girlfriends. I was shy and anxious and probably a little gross. But the prostitutes were hardly out of my league. Most were not pretty at all and actually rather unhealthy looking. If they were better looking, they probably would have been working in Seattle or Portland or even Spokane. That’s what I came to reason. Still, they were women who had sex a lot and, I imagined, could show me a thing or two. I wasn’t picky. I was desperate.
My sexual yearning came in two dominant fantasies: One was romantic love. I listened to sappy love songs by the likes of Lionel Richie, Peabo Bryson, and Luther Vandross and I cried my eyes out, wondering if I could ever experience the depth of love in their music. When they sang about happiness or heartbreak, I felt that happiness or heartbreak, minus the actual presence of a female. The other fantasy was simply fucking. As in, fucking anything that moved. Humping, screwing, boning. You get the picture.
I began forsaking Maurice and going out by myself. He was my only real hanging-out friend at the time, so it was hard to pull off sometimes. I’d get off work and call him to tell him I was just going home