capitalism.txt

Maria

San Francisco, USA

Income: -$4100 p.a.

Debt: $11,200

Maria had a system in the shower. There were enough girls working here that the next impatient person would start pounding on the door within two minutes, so there was no time to soak and relax. You had to be clean and daisy fresh for the next client, that was the rule here. Perhaps it kept them in business. Perhaps there were other things to compete on except price. Pits, face, ears, cheap mouthwash that tasted like bleach. Then the bulk of her diligence for downstairs. Some girls would just swab with a wet washcloth and be done. The subtlety of their natural body odor was noted and mildly envied by everyone else, who more or less had to scrub.

Maria pulled her little kimono back on, walking gingerly back to the lounge. This was where, sometimes, a punter came to view them and choose the one he liked best. It was rare, thankfully. The first few months she'd felt degraded to the point of tears, but after so long it was mainly boring and exasperating. They all had the same expression of apelike childishness, from the Japanese businessman to the drunken frat boy. She had often wished you could just turn round and bend over for the men instead. They were far more interested in people's backsides than people's faces, after all, and at least she wouldn't have to watch them drool. And! And, with a little coordination the whole exercise could end in a protesting crescendo of farts from the line of outraged female arses, flushing the bastard out of the room like a gassed rabbit. She suppressed a giggle.

This time Mai was sitting there as well, puffing on a Pall Mall and looking contemplative. "Hello! You going home already?" said Maria. Mai looked up and smiled. "Yeah I go home now soon. I get next week off from Karla."

"Oh, you're lucky. Going back to China?"

Mai threw back her head and laughed. "Yeah one week. After one week enough China. I go my friend grandma sick in Oakland. You chi shan, Maria. I go back China when I dead, maybe."

"I go back to Bolivia when I dead, maybe." said Maria, sombre and facetious. She liked Mai, as she would have liked any kind-natured woman with a tongue so blackly sharp.

The language barrier, double-walled, also helped. Maria's dealings with her Spanish speaking colleagues were terse and cold by now, as fluent and lucid conversation would strip away all the gentle fictions that softened the truth. You were a prisoner of the parlor, the USA and your own circumstances, in that order. And every last cent you managed to make after you paid what they said you owed and the interest from what they'd said before was, in the final analysis, a cent you'd stolen from the other girls. One time Inez's regular had come in while she was sick; a dark little Sri Lankan whose name Maria couldn't remember had taken care of him, but then neglected to hand over the money he left. So Inez waited for her in the parking lot with a baseball bat, and broke her arm and jaw. There were approximately seventy dollars at stake here, but everyone agreed it was the principle of the thing. Inez was here legally, and the other girl wasn't, so that was the end of that.

Mai was now changing back into her jeans and sweater, and Maria politely looked away, pretending not to notice when she fished a sizable baggie of rattling white things out from its uncomfortable hiding place and secreted it in her boot. Maria wasn't judgemental. She did a little coke or meth herself once in a while, generally on the job to make life bearable. It wasn't hard to come by. A substantial fraction of the clients here were cops, who had an understanding with the management and could thus use the facilities free of charge whenever they wanted; but for some reason they often felt the need to remunerate in kind, a line or a rock at a time. Maria had never gone so far as to hand over her own money for drugs, though, and it looked this time like Mai had. A fun week was on the cards, with her "friend's grandma" who made her eyes light up like so. The last two years had ruined Maria for that sort of thing. She might, possibly, have been able to tolerate a boyfriend who consented to never, ever, have a sexual thought about her. Mai astounded her, not least because romantic liasons were frowned upon. They tended to foreshadow someone's retirement.

As Mai stepped out with a hurried word of farewell, Karla came in leading an elderly Asian gentleman behind her. "Maria, you're free? There's half an hour, more if he wants. You good?" She was astonished at how old and withered he was; surely the sunken lips, bald pate and liver spots couldn't belong to a man under seventy. She gave a well rehearsed smile and took him by the hand, wondering how to avoid hurting him.

There were ten rooms, and only one door was open - the crap one, with the leaking pipe in the ceiling and the resulting permanent wet spot in the centre of the mattress. Shit. "How you doing, baby? What you like, baby?" she asked him, with the first words of English she'd ever learned. He grinned at her toothlessly. "Massage." he answered. Her stomach churned. Wasn't this someone's grandfather? "Okay," she said, "massage."

But it didn't go well. He recoiled and shivered when the first few drops of baby oil hit his skin. "No. No." he said with tense politeness. "Skin bad. Hurts." he added, by way of explanation. Fair enough, she thought, and began to gingerly palpate the flabby sagging expanse of flesh and hair. "More strong." he said impatiently, then mumbled something to himself. By degrees she found herself applying as much pressure as she dared. This was awful. Her wrists, arms, and the small of her back were all starting to ache.

She wanted to get to it as soon as possible, so she could fall away and become detached from herself the way she'd learned to do. It was like every time a pore or wrinkle in the old man's back touched one of the nerve endings in her fingertips it gave an unwelcome jolt to her awareness. And there were millions upon millions of them every second, combining into one howling signal of pain and disgust and despair. Ten minutes. Ten minutes had gone by. Even this old fart couldn't need any more warming up. She called up another automatic coloring noise from her repertoire - a dense, sultry throat-laugh - and reached for his wilted genitals.

Everything after that remained a blur in Maria's mind - screams, gasps of indignation, pointing fingers, hands clasped to mouths, voluble censure in earthy and eloquent Hunan dialect, nine doors opening, eighteen alarmed faces peering out, then sounds of panicked dressing and an indeterminate number of unreassured feet making for the exit. Karla, not knowing whether to look terrifying or terrified. Qian, one tit hanging crazily out of an off-skew robe, press ganged as interpreter.

The gentleman had back pain. It had said "Massage" on the door. He knew how to check his dictionary. This was a clean country, wasn't it? You spoke your mind here, didn't you? He was seventy eight years of age, what did they think he was capable of? To assault a senior citizen who'd done no one any harm - and so on, and so on. He was dissuaded, at length, from calling the police (the management's contacts could only do so much to protect them). Maria recalled this all, reviewed it in her mind as she stood with her back to her bedroom door, a miserable BART ride later.

One of her roommates was snoring. The other, listening to something loud. She doubted it would stop her sleeping. Nothing would after such a day. Her eye fell on the icon, fallen face down on the windowsill, and her heart yelped. A terrible omen! She snatched it, kissed Christ's image like Oksana had shown her, then crossed herself.

The icon was one of the things she loved most. She felt unworthy of a cross now, like it was blasphemy to hold one near a body so defiled. But even though it came from half a world away, the Orthodox image and the Catholic symbology she'd grown up with weren't so far apart. And it was the last connection with Oksana who'd been doomed perhaps by a client or the heroin she'd been taking, shuttled in and out of emergency rooms as the opportunistic infections grew worse and worse. With the ticket to Moscow she'd bought with her last money, the daughter she prayed to see again before she died, and the plane that left one day too late.