Scott Sherman
Third You Die
1
Listening to them bicker, interrupt, and compete among themselves for who had the most outrageous story, I couldn’t decide which of the sex workers annoyed me most: the busty dominatrix in her black leather halter, too- tight read-my-lips matching slacks, and spiked, knee-high boots; the spray-tanned gay porn actor wearing a muscle-clinging T-shirt and painted-on jeans; or the plushie in the purple dinosaur costume who got off dressing as one of America’s most beloved childhood icons.
“When men come before me,” the dominatrix said haughtily, her imperious tone implying that not only they but we didn’t deserve her time, “I give them something they can’t get anywhere else. The feeling they are totally taken care of, that they no longer have to be ‘in charge.’ I give them the release that can only be achieved with true obedience. I give them the freedom of abandoning control and letting someone else-”
“You give them a spanking and they give you a few hundred bucks,” the porn star interrupted. “You’re a kitten with a whip, honey. Not a cross between Mother Teresa and Sigmund Freud. You need to stop taking this shit so seriously.”
The dominatrix gave him a withering look that probably sent the submissives who hired her into quivering ecstasy. Her plain features knotted into a mask of extreme displeasure, thin lips and baggy eyes narrowing with practiced precision. “I wouldn’t expect someone like you to understand,” she sniffed. While I imagined that some women in her line of work role-played their arrogance, Mistress Vesper’s bitchiness was no act. Well, I suppose there was something to be said for finding work that suited you.
“Someone like me? ” The porn star, Brock Peters, was pretty butch, but I had a feeling that after a half hour of hearing Mistress Vesper’s pretentious characterizations of her “art,” he was about to go Real Housewives on her. The prodigious muscles in his shoulders rippled with tension. “You mean someone who has sex with guys for money? Someone like, I don’t know, you? ” He pointed his strong chin at her and pursed his mouth.
“As I’ve tried to explain,” Mistress Vesper sighed, “what I do goes beyond the merely physical. When I’m with a man, I give him the release that only comes with pain, with the abandonment of the ego and the embrace of the id, the ultimate satisfaction of surrender, of.. ”
I stopped listening. This time, it wasn’t my ADHD making me zone out. Rather, it was my need to find some way to rein this discussion in, to make it productive and interesting. After all, it was my job.
Up until six months ago, I’d have been on their end of the panel. A full-time professional call boy, I earned my living fulfilling the sexual needs and fantasies of a varied and well-to-do clientele.
It wasn’t work I was ashamed of or regretted. I made tons of money, I had a good time, and I was always safe and sensible. Like Mistress Vesper, although hopefully with less smugness and self-aggrandizement, I’d like to think I was a valuable outlet for men who genuinely needed professional companionship.
Still, I knew it wasn’t a long-term career. Sooner or later, my looks or luck would run out. I’d seen enough boys wear out their welcome in the business to know a forced retirement from hustling is never pretty.
Problem was, I wasn’t qualified to do much else. Although I’m no dummy, my attention deficit disorder made completing college really hard for me. So hard, in fact, I dropped out year one.
At the time, I hadn’t even been diagnosed. I just thought I was stupid and lazy. It was a potential-client- turned-friend, Allen Harrington, who realized the ditziness that everyone else attributed to my being blond was more likely a treatable disorder. He referred me to an appropriate doctor, and for the first time in my life, the mental haze through which I wandered parted enough for me to get stuff done. It was revelatory.
Now, liberal doses of Adderall make it a lot easier for me to focus and succeed. Someday, I tell myself, I’ll go back to school for my degree. But you know how it goes-“someday” is a moving target, and so far I haven’t hit it.
Allen did me another kindness. Before his death (his murder, actually, which I, ironically enough, was instrumental in solving) he left me a sizable inheritance for tuition when I was ready to resume my studies.
I have plenty of other uses for that money, but, out of respect for Allen’s wishes, and as a promise to myself, I’m letting it sit and gather interest. Someday, I tell myself.
I tell Allen, too, if he’s listening.
My world changed half a year ago when my mother appeared as a guest on That’s Yvonne, a morning talk show named after its host. At the time, Yvonne was America’s third most popular female celebrity. A sexy and spirited Latina, she enjoyed a carefully crafted public persona that was warm, caring, generous, and just risque enough to titillate without being offensive. She was a saucier Oprah.
Then, in a disastrous meeting that rivaled that of the Titanic ’s introduction to the inglorious iceberg, the beloved daytime diva crossed paths with my mother.
Shortly afterward, Yvonne’s career sank lower than the luxury liner had.
Like most of my stories, it’s a long one, but I’ll try to give you the ADHD version. A boy I used to have a crush on in high school, Andrew Miller, was working as a producer on Yvonne’s show. He booked my mother as a guest, partly as a way to see me again. Turned out, he’d known about my interest in him and was ready to follow up.
Had I known back then, I’d have been on him like pasties on Lady Gaga. Unfortunately, his timing was bad. By the time he contrived our reunion, the last thing I needed was another guy to juggle. Which was too bad, because Andrew was still hotness on legs. Long, muscled legs, that carried him with the confident grace of the natural-born athlete he was. Legs that even under loose khakis revealed rippling thighs you couldn’t but imagine nude as you…
Okay, I’m getting off track here.
Focus, Kevin, focus.
So, my mom was talking with Yvonne when the hostess revealed herself as a homophobic, anti-Semitic bitch. Unknown to both of them, the conversation was being videotaped. When Yvonne threatened to sue my mother for making her bald (I told you it was a long story), Andrew, who had long suffered under Yvonne’s imperious rule, leaked the video online. That was pretty much it for the woman formerly known as “The Darling of Daytime.”
When the producers of That’s Yvonne sacked her, they needed a new talker to take her place. By this time, the online video of her meltdown had achieved over five million views. Who better to replace Yvonne than the Long Island hausfrau who took her down? By then, my mother had appeared on Good Morning America, the David Letterman show, and even on 60 Minutes. It turned out her brash tell-it-like-it-is style, lack of personal boundaries, and borderline vulgarity that so embarrassed me growing up made her a natural for TV. Audiences found her a genuinely likable character-easy to relate to and impossible to look away from.
Of course, people stare at car crashes, too.
My mother made it part of the deal that Andrew be promoted to head producer and, thus, her TV career was born. The show, named after her, was now Sophie’s Voice. (Apparently, I was the only person in the world who thought a pun based on a book about the Holocaust was in bad taste.)
Four months after going on air, Sophie’s Voice was an undeniable hit. No one could say how long the ride would last (remember Ricki Lake?) but, for now, my mother and everyone else involved in the show was riding high.
“I’ve always known I was a star,” my mother told me calmly in her office, as her staff whooped and hollered after the show’s first month’s shockingly high ratings hinted that her fame was possibly more than a passing fad. “I’m just glad everyone else figured it out, too.”
“The only saving grace about your mother’s newfound notoriety,” my long-suffering father told me on the phone later that day, with his trademark blend of pessimistic optimism, “is that she was already impossible to live
