No One Thing
Laura LeMoon
I left twelve years ago, but his cruelty still lives in my bones. My body remembers the crushed glass lying on the floor like a memorial and the seemingly ordinary door that I would walk through to another life. And in many ways, to the same life in a different shade. No one thing is any one thing, my mom often told me when I was growing up. When I go to the airport, any airport, it’s the thing that slows my heart to a congealed mass. It’s the thing that sends me reeling back in time, through the black hole of grief. It catapults me to former selves and former lives I never wanted to meet again. But I also refuse to let this hold me back from my future.
In an Uber, as I glide past the black-and-white sign welcoming me to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, my stomach involutes into a sinkhole. With each heartbeat I hear a voice —maybe my own, maybe someone else’s—repeating, “You’re going to die today. You’re going to die.” It never truly dissipates until I am safely at my destination.
What I left still haunts me. It was 2012, in a dark room with air thick like unflavored gelatin. It was no particular day in 2012, because it was every day. We had no money, my love and I, so we lived in the basement of someone’s house in a town I didn’t know the name of, at an address that was also unknown to me. He’d picked me up from a San Francisco domestic violence shelter, where I had been staying for a month since I ran away from him the first time. I’m not from California, so all I knew is that we went north on the freeway. In our home, wherever it was, the only light was from the black Baphomet prayer candle that burned day and night, casting shadows on the dank walls. I didn’t know what else to do, so I sucked down a bottle of vodka straight from the container and passed out on the used bunk bed, my fresh bloodstains still on the covers. The candle burned and the devil watched me. My future called to me from across an empty field, but all I heard was the roaring of my own blood rushing through my ears and a numbness on my tongue. I tried to hold myself tight to keep from floating away, but floating away was all I could do anymore.
I waited in a pool of my own blood, in a pool of my warm drunkenness, for my love to come back home. I waited for him in more ways than one. I needed a syrupy word or even just a hand that wasn’t cruel. What I got instead was battle. What I got was sex that reduced me to ashes and the constant reminder that he was going to eat my flesh and hurl my bones into an empty field. With the caveat that no one would ever miss me. He pointed out which field when we passed it in his truck, and the wildflowers there reminded me of my childhood home.
My mom had told me once that she loves airports because she likes to imagine she could go anywhere in the world. I’ve hated them since I started running away. Domestic violence, homelessness—the only time in recent memory I’ve been to airports is to run toward or away from bad men. The second and final time I left my love in 2012, I told him my father had a heart attack and I needed to fly home to make things right with him. There were no Ubers at the time. The town was too rural for buses. For a taxi, I would have had to give a pickup address, which I didn’t know. So I lied.
I was so drunk when his truck pulled up to Oakland International Airport, I couldn’t see his face clearly except for his eyes. The same eyes that he’d looked at me with when we first met, like we’d already spent a lifetime together. That looked at me like I never needed to worry about not being chosen ever again. Before I got out of his truck at the terminal, he grabbed my hands with tears in his eyes because he knew. I know that now. It’s amazing the glimmers of acknowledgement shit men show you when they know they’ve been shit. “You’re not going to leave me,” he pleaded, “are you?”
The first time it happened, two years earlier, I was in his bed, pushing him away and yelling no. Once he was done, he tried to hold me tenderly. He said he was sorry in a hushed tone that was both fire and salve. He held me with his eyes that terrorized me but also made me feel seen, for maybe the first time in my life.
The things I’ve had to do to survive were part of the price I paid to be seen. Just being here today has come at a cost I won’t explain to you. Freedom in one moment became bondage in the next. Chains exploded into power. No one thing is any one thing.
After I left San Francisco I was hooking regularly to survive. And failing miserably at the survival part. But the thing about the sex industry is that agency and empowerment can exist side by side with exploitation and violence. Sort of like relationships with men. Sex work isn’t bad, a lot of the time. Sometimes it’s even fun. No one thing.
Although I’ve experienced everything you can imagine in the sex industry, from violence to sexual exaltation, I’ve never been raped or beaten or betrayed as much as I have by the men who were supposed to love and protect me. One night, after my love had strangled me for the first time, I started gathering all my clothes in a suitcase. He cried and reached out and grabbed my hands to hold them and told me with tears streaming down his face that this had always been his problem. I cried too with my hands in his, victim and perpetrator, but also just two flawed people in love. The sweetness he brought to me after the dark times sustained me through the turbulence. They also bonded me to him with a kind of sick hope. Holding complexity is the thing we don’t do, but need to.
Don’t feel bad for me because I had to become a sex worker. It was my liberation, albeit often coated in lead. Survival is ugly. But my survival was never just one thing.
There’s a feeling you get right before you’re about to turn a trick with a strange man, when you meet someone outside and see that they drive a green 1989 Toyota pickup with a key scratch across the passenger side door—the exact car your friend had to kick the window out of last week. There’s a feeling you get when they say they want bareback anal and will pay only forty dollars because they know we are nothing more than desperate prostitutes. Because all the other guys who responded to your ad that day refused to pay a fair price too, so there was no choosing. Not because sex work is inherently violent, but because men are taught that our lives are worthless. Sex work is dangerous because they want every bit of my body and my life, for nothing.
Then there are the repeated visits to Planned Parenthood for HIV tests and Plan B, tolerating the judgmental glances and pointed questions from the nurse who just can’t understand why you’re there so often and why you don’t just use condoms with all of your boyfriends. You survive it all. You are a gladiator in the arena, in the Colosseum of ancient Rome. Always waiting, waiting, waiting for the gate to open. As a gladiator goes, to the death.
Eight years later, I waited at Sea-Tac airport, waiting for the gate to go up. My new sugar daddy was flying me out to see him. He’d contacted me after I published articles about my experience as a sex worker. We’d been talking for a year at this point. He gave me money when I said my daughter needed back-to-school clothes. I don’t have kids. I don’t feel bad about lying, either. Prostitution is like the Roman Empire. There are no rules.
The night I had to work off the trip was one of the worst nights of my life. There was something cruel about this trick, his deadpan demeanor and the way he never once laughed at the many jokes I made to appear more affable and at ease. This is the drawback of sex work. Much like regular people might like their nine-to-five one day and hate it the next. Sometimes you only like the job as much as you like the client. I never felt higher than walking out of a good appointment where I was treated well and paid better. But I immediately felt a dark energy when this guy picked me up from the airport in his black S-Class and didn’t even smile at me or say hello. I had to spend the night in a hotel bed with him when my body just wanted to curl into itself like an October leaf.
When I got to the hotel, I texted my bestie with the hotel address and my mother’s phone number. “If you don’t hear from me by 8:00 a.m., call the fucking cops.” To have to plan for your own death multiple times a day, every day, has kept me always poised with a sword in one hand and a battle stance on my feet just waiting, waiting, waiting.
A year later, this same trick was trying to get me to come out and see him again. This time he wanted three nights. He kept saying, “This time, I’m not going to be so nice,” and I knew it was not hyperbole but foreshadowing. I had no job, and recent antitrafficking legislation had made sex work almost impossible to make a living on. I begged him for money, and he liked the smell of my desperation. I could tell because his voice was like a placid lake, never rising a note when he spoke. He told me he would give me more money, that he would help me with my daughter but that I needed to do exactly as he said. I needed to tell him in vivid detail about each one of the rapes I had endured. He wanted to hear how I liked it. How I wanted it. And he told me not to give him any bullshit stories either because he already knew everything about me, had read all of my writing, and would know if I was lying.
I never went back there. His desire for my total destruction made me back away slowly, silently, stealthily, because the worst thing you can do is let these men know that you know they have violated you. You can never name the thing. Never.
Getting out of the Uber and going through security three years later, I am now at the airport for an entirely different reason. I’m in front of gate 34 at Sea-Tac, waiting for my flight to Paris. It has been eleven years since I ran from Oakland. There is no one behind me in the little rows of plastic seats at my gate. Just me and my new blue backpack that I ordered from Amazon on payday, stuffed full with toiletries and snacks and my fear that I might be left without that which I need.
I am watching the people go by on their own journeys. My nails are freshly polished, my fingertips the color of the August sky at dusk. I pull out my phone and google, “What is French food?” because I’ve never been to France. I’ve never been to Europe. I went to Cafe Campagne in Pike Place Market once when I was a teenager, but I ordered the hamburger and fries. Or pommes frites, I guess they’re called, but I think it’s the same thing. I imagine eating real French food and sitting in the same cafés Albert Camus wrote in and enjoying life for once. Not surviving. Actually living.
I dreaded coming back to the airport, but I keep reminding myself, This time, you’re going toward something, not running away. I hear the call for my flight to Paris and throw up in the bathroom. With shaking hands I turn on the cold water to splash my face, hoping that the hard airport water will magically fix my nerves. No one thing.
This trip to Paris was a lifelong dream, an indulgence I arranged for myself when I finally got a full-time job as a recovery coach for people like me. I want to experience something beyond life and death. I want the luxury of being bored, of being a useless lump on the white goose down comforter listening to Paris traffic, eating soft cheese and fruit with flavor.
On a spring day with no itinerary, I sit in a bistro near Notre Dame that has been used as a restaurant since the 1600s. It has an odd but not unpleasant atmosphere of 1970s American kitsch within a crumbling seventeenth-century cottage. The waiter, who wears a deep purple velour suit, sets down a warm ramekin of coddled eggs with foie gras. The dish is called oeufs cocotte, or something real Frenchy sounding, and since there were no translations on the menu, I just picked it. I jiggle the ramekin and can tell the eggs are still wet from how they happily bounce around. I chalk it up to this is just how French eggs are made. I stroll along the promenade of the Seine and think of An American Werewolf in Paris. I come upon Les Deux Magots, where famous existentialist authors sipped strong coffee in small cups and chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes. It’s February and sunny, so I take off my jacket and tie it around my waist. I look up at the distant winter sun, then back to the cobblestone path ahead, and then walk on with no destination in mind except my next step.