I WAS VISITING MY GRANDMOTHER in Alabama one summer and marveled at how much the digital age had propelled the likelihood of getting dick in the dusty backwoods towns that populated this quadrant of the state. The entire county had become a virtual whorehouse overnight.
This one cat hit me up while I was taking a nap at my grandmother’s house after church.
“Do you want an 80 or 90 massage?” said the message.
“Fuck yeah I do!” I responded.
He lived fifteen minutes up the highway, and when I got to his house I was taken aback by the scene.
It was a dirty apartment with clothes everywhere. The man did not look like his pictures. In fact, he looked like death. He had a frozen expression and a frozen vibe in general; like, it took him a noticeable amount of time to think and form sentences. He had track marks from shooting up all over his arms and legs, and his left leg was swollen and infected. He was limping on it.
About that time two preadolescent boys came storming into the apartment. They both referred to him as “Dad.”
“We have to wait till my boys go to boxing practice, then we can fuck,” he explained.
Heaven help me, I stayed because I am nothing if not the worst mix of willfully nonjudgmental and horny.
The boys left on a Boys and Girls Club bus that honked for them outside.
The man waved his sons goodbye, closed the front door, and pulled out his dick, which seemed to be the only thing about him in working order. He got me on all fours and let loose something wild, but I was startled by the way he kept repeating “I’ll eat your ass for an extra twenty dollars.” I wanted to unpack that statement but I was too busy getting fucked in the ass real good, arching my back and licking my lips and all things of that nature; then I came.
I put my clothes on and tried to leave when he blocked the door.
“Where is my ninety dollars?!” he said, looking frantic.
“Come again?” I said, in this what-the-fuck-did-you-just-say-to-me kind of tone.
“I said in my message do you want an eighty or ninety massage. I just massaged your asshole right now—where’s my money?” He pushed me back and stood in front of the exit to the apartment, suddenly menacing.
I explained to him that I assumed he meant minutes and not dollars and that real hookers say things like “looking for generous” in their ad or at the very least post a dollar sign. I almost had the nerve to say that if I were to pay for sex, he (though a lovely person) wouldn’t be my first pick, but decided not to talk shit to a junkie who might actually kill me.
We somehow agreed on twenty dollars (as it was all I had in my bank account). He grabbed me by the arm and escorted me to the ATM located at the end of his street.
I could only imagine that his street was “the ho stroll”; cars kept stopping and eyeballing us closely, and with his hand around my arm like this it must’ve looked like I was under pimp arrest. It was emasculating.
We got to the gas station and I had half a mind to scream like a white woman that he was holding me hostage, but it felt like that could be a massive misfire. Also, all I could think about were those two sweet little boys and their dismal fucking circumstances and hoped that maybe five dollars of the money would go to them.
I gave him the money and left the gas station a free man, save the rude-ass comment he hurled at me from the opposite side of the parking lot, walking away with junkie bloodshot eyes and furiously limping.
“NEXT TIME DON’T PLAY WITH A NIGGA, NIGGA,” he screamed.