"You're JUST a fucking WHORE." Could my boyfriend say that—mean that—my Guy, a former hustler himself? I had to face it—I was holding a dustpan full of broken glass and crumbled drywall, and I'd lived the American Nightmare before. My partner of one year had just left me, violently, for being a working boy.
"You're a whore, whores don't love ANYONE, and you never loved ME." His slapdash logic nonetheless cut deep. After a year of foreplay and pillow talk, hard core fucking and excruciating honesty, all our love had been reduced to a single tautological falsity.
It's an ancient school that teaches Harlots are callous and unloving, more, as Blake phrased it, the prostitute "blights with plague the marriage-hearse," bringing pain to the young and unsuspecting ensnared in his or her Devil's trap. But I didn't think my boyfriend, a former modern-day hustler, ascribed to the thought—despite heaps of evidence to the contrary, of an almost all-American regularity to tricking as well as the relatively low STI transmission rates in most sex-trading "populations," the belief persists that sex workers are immoral, disease-spreading predators. And don't forget innocent victims.
I identify with les immoralistes myself. "Many are the victims she has brought down." Proverbs 7:26
While I feel at a distance from other "normal" relationship-goers at dysfunctional moments like these, I have never felt so close to my moralizing Baptist mother as I scrubbed cakes of drywall off the floors—just like she used to, on her knees, crying with Comet® powder scraping the red off her fingernails. She wasn't a card-carrying "whore" like I am, but it was my step-father's word for her and she was never one to DEN-Y that Devil, as we say on Sunday. While I, on the other hand, have listened to too much Tina Turner, too many motherly shrieks of "You're traumatizing the children!" from behind closet doors, to take this particular abuse from anyone ever, and I mean ever, again.
I called the NYPD.*
And now we're over . . . but, I guess, it's our beginnings I wonder about. If I've always been a "whore," and he's known it, I need a reason why he didn't end it at the start, obsta principii. I need a reason why, after all our careful conversations, naïve theories—polyamory, free love—I couldn't see the undercurrent of disaster.
Is it possible to love and be loved while whoring?
On more dramatic, by no means characteristic, days like today, I wonder if I'll end like Zola's stigmatizing portrait of the prostitute Nana, diseased, French and unloved. I don't know which fate is worse ... In the meantime, I'll try to answer the unanswerable question, is it possible? by patching up the fist-sized hole in the drywall and sweeping the glass shards off the floors. Every dysfunctional, melodramatic and, of course, normal relationship needs its drywaller, I say, the partner who's left alone, sweeping up the dust we inevitably kick up, punch up, in our all-too-human "love."
*I called the Police Dept., but it was my friend M— who really saved me, my house mate, who came home that night and surveyed the damage and tried to force my flailing partner out the door—"Get Out! Get OUT!" He left, however, only when the officers arrived. No charges were pressed..
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