We met at a diner in Burbank, not far from his office, he said. It wasn't like the diners I'd frequented in my youth. I remembered those to be faded and dingy, tables stained by coffee and sticky with drips of syrup or jelly. They were where you went in the early hours of morning before sunrise to shovel down pancakes and stave off a hangover. The waitresses were old and weary. But this was L.A., where everything looked like it belonged in a movie. This diner was shiny and brightly lit with chrome trim wrapped around everything. We slid into a glossy vinyl, curved bench in one of the booths. The waitress left us with two oversized, laminated menus, spiral bound and many pages long—a typical diner menu, but again, the shinier, more photogenic version. The waitress, who was no doubt an actress too, was young and pretty in her pink uniform with white trim. Her teeth were as white as the piping on her dress. I wondered what she thought of me. Did she think I was wearing too much makeup for lunchtime or that I was too young for my date? He was easily twenty years my senior. Maybe she thought I was his daughter.

I'd met him at the Star Strip Too (sic) on a slow day. It had been five hours into my shift, and I'd only made about $25 so far that day, so when he took me back to the lap dancing room and tipped me an extra twenty for each dance, he became my favorite customer. When he came in a second time that week to see me, he became my regular. The third time he came to see me, he asked if I'd do a private show for him in his office later that week. He said he'd pay me $200. It had been a terrible week, and I needed the money for rent. He seemed nice enough. He didn't seem like a crazed killer prone to eviscerating strippers and eating their organs for lunch. So I said okay, which kind of surprised me because men had asked to meet me outside the club before, and I'd always resisted. But I was tired. Stripping was really hard work. By the end of a shift, my whole body would ache. My face would hurt from smiling so enthusiastically all day long. I'd pretty much worn through the cartilage in my knees. And the physical hardship wasn't the worst part. The worst part was the hustle and trying to convince customers that you were worthy of their attention and money. After seven years in the business, my body was wearing out and my psyche had become tattered and thin.

"So, do you like dogs?" I asked, keeping the conversation light as I nervously twisted a corner of my napkin. I had no idea what was expected of me or exactly what would happen when we were done eating. He'd asked for a private show, but what did that mean? Would there be physical contact involved? Or did he really just want "a show"? I hadn't thought it through very far when I'd said yes.

Conversing was made harder by the fact that I wasn't Shelley. I was Sheila. Sheila wasn't an up-and-coming, published author. She didn't have a teacher boyfriend and wasn't a former choreographer. She wasn't a college graduate with friends and dreams and a life, although she used to pretend to be a current college student. But at 28 years-old, she was getting a little old to pull that off.

When we finished eating, I was both relieved that the small talk portion of the date was over and terrified about what was to happen next. Was I stupid to do this? He seemed harmless, but what if he turned violent? What if he overpowered me? As I worried, he walked me to my car. I smiled back at him as I got into my beat-up, sun-bleached convertible. This was before GPS, so I had to follow him to get to his office. He'd been truthful—it wasn't far. Somehow, that comforted me.

His office was in a nondescript building in a nondescript office park. Inside was a single room, small and gray and depressing. I don't recall what his occupation was—something dull and middle management like an accountant or a real estate lawyer, I'm sure. Maybe his own business because the office had a private entrance from the parking lot. The furnishing was sparse—just a big metal desk with chairs, a file cabinet, and a couch along one wall. He plopped down comfortably onto the couch, legs spread open and grinning like the Cheshire Cat. I swallowed dry spit. He waited expectantly.

Should I get naked? Was I supposed to dance? I should've brought music. Fuck!

"Oh wait, hold on," he said cheerfully. "I got you something!" He went to the desk and opened a drawer, from which he withdrew a medium-sized, silicone dildo, still in its plastic clamshell packaging, which he carefully cut open with a scissor. The dildo was big, purple, and ugly, but I pretended to be excited. Well, maybe not quite excited, but at least pleased. At the same time, I tried to appear nonchalant, as if I did this every day. I had to seem experienced, or he would take advantage of me. Men were like that. I stroked the dildo and gently swiveled my hips, warming up. I could do this.

Although my stripper friends and I vehemently protested being called prostitutes by people outside the business, much of what we did to make money in the clubs, namely lap dances and VIP, was pretty fucking close. We even called each other "hooker," a label that was an offensive slur when used by outsiders, but was permissible for us to use with each other, provided the tone was playful and not accusatory. Being accused of hooking out of the club was a short prelude to getting fired.

At least this was how it was for my friends and me. It wasn't so simple for many of our colleagues. Like every other workplace, there was a hierarchy—unintentional, but it was there. My cis, mostly hetero, mostly white friends and I, still young and pretty and college-educated or in college, were near the top. At least we had a chance of making it in the clubs. But there were many other women who did get called "hooker" in all seriousness, who did get fired for it, and who didn't have any choice but to come back the next day on their knees, begging the boss for a shift. My friends and I had options for the most part. While we chose to make a living off of our bodies, some of our coworkers had nothing but their bodies to live on.

In any case, although what I was doing might be close to full-service sex work, it wasn't quite prostitution—was it?

To my surprise and disgust, after giving me the dildo and before sitting back down, the man unzipped his pants and let them slide to the floor. He wasn't wearing underwear. Still grinning, he removed his tie and unbuttoned his shirt, leaving it on but hanging open. His chest hair was thick and rust-colored, tinged with gray. I looked away. Well, not really away because that might have offended him, but I looked at his forehead instead of his full face when I smiled, neither meeting his eyes nor looking down and acknowledging his stupid, fat pink dick. He was ridiculous with his pants around his ankles and his old hairy balls hanging out, but he looked at me as though I should be turned on. So I lowered my eyelids to give him a sultry look, even as I kept my gaze focused on his forehead. Still, I was freaking out inside. Even with his pants down, this man could hurt me. Nobody even knew I was there. But I didn't leave. I was tough, I was brave, and I was doing this.

I still had no idea what was expected of me, so I just started dancing—swiveling and switching my hips and running the flats of my hands over my skin as if I simply couldn't wait to touch myself. It felt stupid to be dancing without music, but $200 was $200, so I kept going, stripping as I danced. The AC hummed and blew cold air down on me. Time seemed to stretch endlessly. I sank to the floor to transition to playing with the dildo—although if he thought I was going to put it inside me, he had another thing coming, just saying. Maybe I dramatically licked the toy for effect, but I would never, ever have inserted something in any orifice—not even my mouth, but certainly not my twat—for the entertainment of a man. Not for 200 bucks, anyway.

Dear God, I was bored. Was he going to come or what? Because of lunch, this little adventure had taken more than an hour already. I was tired and wanted to go home. Standing back up, I licked the dildo again. It smelled like petrochemicals. I turned around and bent over, flashing my ass in a traditional stripper move and stroking the crack with the dildo. I happened to see through the triangle of my legs that the man's dick was in his hand, but still soft. Well, fuck. This was not going well.

I moved closer to him. Enough kidding around, let's get this shit done. So I slipped back into my thong and proceeded to give him a lap dance, just as I would've in the club at this point (although his dick wouldn't have been out in the club). No way was I straddling his naked lap or touching his pale, flaccid torso with mine, but I did do the common stripper move of bracing myself with my hands on the sofa behind his head and leaning in close. I rubbed the side of my thigh up and down his dick, discreetly moving back and away every fifteen seconds or so the same way we did in the clubs to prevent the men from coming on us. Not that they didn't come in their pants anyway—and probably more so than we knew because the sleazeballs who did that on purpose typically wore a condom underneath their clothes.

The whole business was pretty gross, but it was a living, and it wasn't the worst job out there for a young woman without career-ready skills in the 1990s. Many legitimized, low-wage jobs were awful or didn't offer enough compensation to live on. For example, I could attest to the terrible monotony of office work. I'd worked in my father's office briefly as a teen and in just a week, had known that I did not want to do that sort of work long-term. I recalled sitting numbly in front of a computer, entering data into forms: Type, tab. Type, tab. Select, tab, return. Type, tab, type, tab, select, tab, return. It had felt like my heart, brain, and spirit were dully rotting away. Not even rotting but fading away, almost too quietly to see them go. I didn't think I'd be able to continue making art if that were my job. Furthermore, because many of the legitimized jobs women do don't pay a living or housing wage, even women content in their straight jobs often find themselves having to resort to sex work to make ends meet. When I'd lived in New York City, I'd simultaneously had "real" jobs teaching dance to at-risk preschoolers and doing massage. I'd known one stripper who'd also worked at the public library and another who'd worked in a dress shop. A lot of care work, such as elder care and even social work, often doesn't pay enough to live on either. When I told a social worker friend recently that many sex workers end up going into social work, my friend said, "Those women are making poor decisions." When I said that some women go the other way—from social work to sex work—my friend said that that made much more sense.

The guy finally got hard, but the lap dance I was giving was still taking forever and I began to wonder if he even wanted to come. Maybe I'd misjudged his intentions when he'd taken out his dick. Maybe he just wanted me to look at it? But if he didn't come, how would I know when the show was over? I rubbed my thigh against his dick more aggressively, trying not to notice the feel of his flesh touching mine. I leaned closer and closer to his naked chest, so close that his belly briefly grazed my own. I tensed but kept going, doing the best job I could, and to my relief, he finally came. Luckily, not on me because I'd jumped back in time. So gross, but at least it was over, and really—I told myself—it had been a pretty easy $200, all things considered. Still, I was shaking when I left. As soon as I was safely ensconced in my car, I lit a cigarette and smoked with great gulping breaths, the tang and heat in my throat burning away the bad taste in my mouth. I was grateful not to have been raped or murdered. I knew I was lucky that my boundaries, few that they were, had been respected. I comforted myself with the promise that I would never meet a customer outside the club again.

By a year and a half later, my life had evolved significantly. When my lease in L.A. had been up, I'd moved in with my boyfriend, Seth. We'd gotten an apartment in Pomona, a city about halfway between Los Angeles and Corona, where Seth taught third grade. His income was stable but meager—as a new teacher, he only made $25,000 a year, or about $12 an hour—so I was still dancing. Our apartment was in a poor neighborhood mostly populated by Mexican immigrants. One of our neighbors sold homemade tamales out of our shared driveway and the elementary school down the block had Spanish tile on the roof and a bell tower like a mission church.

We liked our neighborhood, although Pomona on the whole was pretty sketchy. Roadside memorials dotted the streets between our neighborhood and the 60 freeway. Our apartment was so infested with roaches that you couldn't leave a plate out in the kitchen, or they'd be all over it. We had to hang mosquito netting beneath the ceiling to catch the little buggers when they fell down from between the acoustic tiles.

I was still working in L.A., but now at a club called Cheetah's. It was on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood and got a decent crowd, mostly made up of people from the music, T.V., and movie industries. Not big stars, who went to the clubs further west, but up-and-comers. I remember David Arquette coming in frequently to play pool. I made more money at Cheetah's, and it was a little less gross than the Star Strip because it was only topless, not nude. "Lap" dances meant merely dancing in front of the guy in a bikini, not touching him other than maybe occasionally brushing your thigh against his. Honestly, after having danced full nude for the past four years in San Francisco and when I first got to L.A., I found the rules to be kind of restrictive. I mean, you could get fired for flashing a nipple during a private dance—very different from San Francisco, where we'd essentially done whatever we'd wanted. Some women had done nude lap dances or more in the VIP booths, while others hadn't done lap dances or VIP at all. But whatever we'd chosen to do, we'd had agency in it, and that had mattered a lot.

I had a regular at Cheetah's named Rick who came in twice a week. He was a good tipper when I danced onstage, and he always paid for two lap dances. He spent on average about $150 on me every week, which swiftly became the base to my income, partly because paying me handsomely and regularly meant that when Rick was in the club, I belonged to him. I couldn't sit with or pay attention to anyone else. That was the way it worked with regulars.

Rick was ginger-haired with a wiry beard and skin pinked by the sun. He was probably about forty-five years old, if I had to guess, so he was old, but not disgustingly so. He was friendly and generous. He frequently showed me pictures of his wife, a beautiful Cuban woman he'd met in Miami, and said that the only problem was the language barrier between them, which was why he came in to talk to me. In my head, I was like, sure man, whatever gets you through the night. Still, I liked Rick, and he was pretty innocuous, even if he did beg to meet me outside the club every time he was in.

As the weeks wore on, he became more insistent, and one week at the end of the month, when Seth was between paychecks and we'd just paid our student loans and were down to $6 in our joint bank account, I said yes. It had been a couple of years since dancing for the guy in Burbank, and the experience had softened in my mind. The way I remembered it now, it had been a quick and easy $200. Though I knew that this time I was supposed to have actual sex—Rick had been clear that that was what he wanted—I figured it wouldn't be so bad. Again, I didn't think it'd be very different from the VIP and lap dances I'd done for years before moving to Cheetah's. The icky part might even be quicker.

I talked to my best friend, Sydney, who'd had a Sugar Daddy for years. Basically, whenever she needed money, she called him, and whenever he needed company, he called her. She made it look easy, and l was jealous. Sydney told me that I could charge Rick $300 to $400, depending on whether I gave a blowjob or had actual sex. Four hundred was the cost of a new Tempur-Pedic mattress that I had my eye on, so I was like, kismet. I wanted to surprise Seth with the new mattress, so I didn't tell him about my scheme. I figured I'd tell him later. Seth would never have presumed to tell me what to do or not do with my own body, plus he supported me in everything I did—even when my choices were less than stellar—so I knew that he wouldn't be mad. But he had more common sense than I did and might have tried to discourage me if I'd told him what I was planning to do.

It was a Friday afternoon. Rick was due to arrive at one pm, which would give us plenty of time before Seth would be home from school at three. At about noon, I put out my massage table and tossed a sheet over the daybed we used as a sofa. I figured I'd start by giving Rick a massage because I didn't know how else to preface the sex act. I arranged a bottle of tequila and sour mix for margaritas on a snack table. Then I made myself a drink and swallowed it down. I poured another and sat down to wait, continuing to drink while I waited, trying to calm my nerves. Now that it was really going to happen, I questioned and regretted my decision. But I was determined to do it anyway. I wasn't going to wimp out. I could handle this.

By the time Rick arrived, I'd had several drinks, and time and space were liquid. I flowed to the door and let him in. My dog's hackles went up, so I moved her to the bedroom and returned to the living room. Rick sat stiffly on the edge of the daybed.

"I've never done this before," he said.

I probably said, "Me neither," or maybe I kept my inexperience to myself. Maybe I told him to strip and get on the massage table or maybe he just did that on his own. By this time, my tongue was thick and my vision blurry.

I recall his freckled back, shiny and blotchy with sunburn. I recall rubbing it. I recall him being unable to get hard, and in my head being like, really?? but also being relieved. I recall being naked and face down on the daybed, unable to stand up anymore, waving him away—"Just go," I said. "Go! Go!"

And then, nothing. I passed out.

Obviously, the situation could have turned out really badly. It probably should have turned out badly. He should have raped me, beaten me, and left me for dead. But instead, I came to in the bathroom, still naked, some indeterminant time later with Seth shaking me awake. When I opened my eyes, he hugged me tightly.

"I thought you were dead," he said. When I explained what had happened, he stared at me incredulously.

"Next time you decide to do something crazy, could you call me first?" he said. He shook his head in stunned disbelief but also hugged me again. He said that we didn't need a new mattress.

I got dressed and returned to the living room to clean up the sheet and margarita fixings. My purse was on the coffee table. When I went to pick it up, I saw that Rick had left me $200 despite the fact that we'd never had sex. So not only had I survived, but I'd also made a little bit of money. Not enough for the Tempur-Pedic, but still.

When I went back to the club the following week, I figured I'd never see Rick again. But in fact, he came in the same as normal. He bought me a shot of Patron, my favorite. He paid for a lap dance and tipped me well. We laughed awkwardly about what had happened the week before. He showed me pictures of a house he was buying in the Florida Keys. Everything was essentially the same as before except that he stopped asking me to meet him outside the club, and soon he stopped coming to see me at all. Despite having survived my attempt to shift from stripping to full-service sex work, I never tried it again. It wasn't for me. In fact, in a little while, I stopped stripping too. Just walked out one day because I'd had enough. Seth and I got married and had children and moved to Connecticut. I got a master's degree in creative writing and began teaching.

Our two children, both of whom are gender non-conforming, have newly become adults, and I worry about how they'll make a living, even with college educations, in a world where low-wage, soul-killing jobs pay proportionally even less than they did in the 1990s. Where the cost of housing is even higher than the cost of living. Where there are even less entry-level jobs for new adults—legitimate or illegitimate. Where young women and marginalized people have even less chance of satisfactory employment. Where even fewer artists can hope to "make it" in an increasingly corporatized and monetized world. Where AI and other technologies promise to make earning a living even more difficult for all but the elite few.

It's not that a college education can't help you get a good job—of course it can. Higher education is still the best way to increase economic mobility for most young people. But for a young person graduating without a professional network, career contacts, or generational wealth, the struggle to become sufficiently employed is real. I recently saw a former university student of mine mixing paint at The Home Depot and it made me want to cry. Not because he was mixing paint, but because he'd wanted to be an exercise therapist when he graduated. But in the end, he couldn't find a job in his field that paid better than mixing paint at The Home Depot.

Of course, I'm not saying folks should go into sex work if they struggle to make a living. Sex work is difficult, painful, and dangerous, and it's not for everyone. Still, and as I've said, it's not the worst job out there for many young people, especially women and those from marginalized communities. If we don't want sex work to be the best or only option for many, then we need to make other low-wage work, such as care work, office work, and restaurant work, enough to sustain people, both financially and as human beings. And for God's sake, let's decriminalize prostitution. Women deserve the right to use their bodies any way they want or need to.

Besides, capitalism keeps us all on our backs. Sex workers understand this perhaps better than anyone and despite their marginalized position in society, frequently fight back with collective action and political activism. They form labor unions and mutual aid organizations. They fight not only for themselves but for all migrants, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, disabled people, and black, brown, API, and indigenous women. Sex worker artists continue to make art against all odds. These things give me hope for us all.

In her essay "Life at the Margins: a Roadmap for the Revolution," queer sex worker, author, and activist Leila Raven writes that "our alternative lifestyles are not signs of our brokenness but rather signs of our survival against all odds, symbols of our resistance and our ability to envision a world where we all take collective responsibility for the safety and well-being of our whole communities, where we see caregiving for each other not as a burden but as a given” (Working It: Sex Workers on the Work of Sex, ed. Matilda Bickers, peech breshear, and Janis Luna, PM Press, p.23).

A world where people take care of each other sounds nice. I hope we get there. In the meantime, let's make work more workable. Let's stop reproducing the systems of oppression that have made sex work necessary for those who would prefer not to perform that type of labor. Otherwise, it's all whoring.