Wicked Wednesdays: when I was thirteen I married Rome
When I was thirteen I married Rome, and it was also there that I discovered whores. Both events were accidents.
My parents had saved for several years so that we might go. It was, for all of us, a first trip to Europe. It was the mid-80s and the exchange rate was very kind to us as Americans. Suddenly, Europe was a reasonable middle-class dream, and with me enrolled in Miss Hewitt's I and excelling at nothing so much as Latin, it was imperative I see the world for which I was being trained. To save money, and because she is a romantic, my Jewish mother demanded we go at Christmas.
It was the end of the era of no-frills air-travel, which meant we were actually served food on the plane (which still had a smoking section, which seems hard to imagine now) and my mother didn't have to pack fried chicken she cooked up early that morning and packed in plastic produce bags stolen from the supermarket. But I was a picky eater and found whatever it was they served off-putting. I'd been air sick on airplanes to Florida as a child, so the whole thing just seemed like a bad plan to me, and I was having none of it. Which was pretty fortuitous, as it turned out, as my parents got food poisoning from the plane food, and it dogged them our entire trip.
Which meant I was thirteen in Rome without, for the first time, over-attentive parents. And because I was the only person in our family comfortable with the money, with the street directions and, even marginally (Latin and French made it possible for me to get by, albeit weirdly) the language, I had real freedom for the first time in a place where I knew no one and nothing. So I went out, not because I had permission, but just because I just avoided asking -- after dusk and before dawn and late in the night if I woke up for no reason -- and I walked, all over Rome, fantasizing that maybe here I could have friends. After all, I wasn't as ugly in Rome as I was in New York. And New York meant I was special, right? People would want to be my friend. Maybe? I hoped.
But I was, and am shy. I didn't know how to say hello to people or how ask for what I wanted beyond staring at it, so I did not make friends in Rome, not really. But I sat on steps and on the lips of fountains in the places where other youths congregated, some Italian, some touristing, some runaways, some just snuck out for a few hours, most older than me by less than you'd think, smoking definitely, drinking often, and sometimes, yes, taking money for what they could.
I had stylish clothes, and could carry myself a certain way. I could make my eyes look hard. And it was enough for me to be not chased from these places by my not peers, who would sometimes ask me for cigarettes or offer me wine or explain, because I was there to have it explained to about this boy they were fucking this week, and that boy, sullen now over there on the other side of the fountain, they were fucking last week. I nodded, eagerly, and let me lack of language hide my often intense naivete. When I got scared, or overwhelmed, I would leave, walk miles, and find another place, full of children to sit and pretend I belonged there. It rained nearly constantly, and because Rome is all history, when my parents asked what I saw, I could say the names of plazas and churches, and full of lies, I was safe.
After two weeks, we left for Florence, where the situation with my parents was mostly the same. But Florence was lonely and haunted and whatever it was I pursued there was far less tangible than the sights I'd seen in Rome; I love Florence, with all my heart.
Just before New Year's we returned to Rome, my parents mostly recovered. My mother decided that for New Year's Eve we should eat in a neighborhood she had read about in a newspaper: Trastevere. She said it would be like New York's Soho, which then was not the Rodeo Drive it is today. I hear Trastevere is different now too, but then the woman at our pensione said we were mad. It was very, very dangerous there, and we must not go. No taxi would take us besides. So we hired a car in advance to drive us there, and it abandoned us a block away from the restaurant and sped off. We walked on unlit, cobbled streets to the cave-like restaurant, which was lit only with candles and where all cooking was only over fire and in brick ovens: I am not even remotely sure the place had electricity. Surely, we saw none that night.
We ate for hours, sat at tables with strangers, artists and eccentrics all, who nodded and smiled at my parents like I was a good child when I noted, but did not explain the places I had seen in Rome. Just before midnight, a child came around with baskets of streamers, encouraging us all to grab some for the turn of the year. My parents had me stand up on a chair to throw my streamers, and when midnight came I did.
At that time, I wore a small silver lover's knot on my pinky. It had been a gift from my grandfather when I was four, and now only fit my smallest finger. In that restaurant without power in the dark in Rome at thirteen, the lovers knot flew of my hand and clearly hit metal. We all heard the sound. We looked, everyone at our table, across the floor, in water pitchers, in bread baskets and food dishes, anywhere it might have scattered, but we never found it. Always one to cry at such things, my parents were in a flurry of worry, assuming I would immanently melt down. But I saw no reason to; it seemed reasonable that Rome, city of whores and ill parents, charged a toll. Because no taxis would come to Trastevere, we had little choice, but to stay out until dawn.
Rome wasn't the first or the last time that I was aware of the sort of trouble and survival that's out there for those without other choices. If I'm frank, I can tell you that if asked at six, I would often say I wanted to be a cocktail waitress when I grew up, because I'd seen it in a film and the currency of flesh there seemed obvious to me: pretty girls were good girls and value should be measured. It's a feeling I never really lost, even if I also never aspired to be a whore, so much as I always felt like I needed to know if I could. It's a funny way to be drawn, the sort of thing that implies trauma or sin, but to me, has always just struck me as a happenstance of my personality or movies I watched with my babysitters even when I wasn't allowed.
When I went to work at the dungeon, it was, in many ways, a sort of inevitability, but not of ambition, but of knowledge. I had to know I could do it. And I had to know what it was I wondered if I could do. As with most things, like love and countries, it wasn't really what I anticipated, and it left me lonely, disappointed but also in possession not just of powerful secrets, but of myself. Sex work isn't empowering for everyone. And it isn't dangerous for everyone. But my own lens tells me it's usually at least a little bit of both. There may be easier and better ways to find things out about yourself and your fellow man, but sometimes some of us simply take the road
that's open because we discover it is less off the beaten path than we may have been previously led to believe.
[ Like my adventures in Italy as a young teen, Dogboy & Justine is a story about a world hidden in plain sight and secrets far more common than most people want to admit. If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting our projection by commenting here, boosting the signal or contributing to our Kickstarter fundraising drive. We still have to raise
almost $3,000 in the next six weeks to secure the funding for our workshop production. ]
My parents had saved for several years so that we might go. It was, for all of us, a first trip to Europe. It was the mid-80s and the exchange rate was very kind to us as Americans. Suddenly, Europe was a reasonable middle-class dream, and with me enrolled in Miss Hewitt's I and excelling at nothing so much as Latin, it was imperative I see the world for which I was being trained. To save money, and because she is a romantic, my Jewish mother demanded we go at Christmas.
It was the end of the era of no-frills air-travel, which meant we were actually served food on the plane (which still had a smoking section, which seems hard to imagine now) and my mother didn't have to pack fried chicken she cooked up early that morning and packed in plastic produce bags stolen from the supermarket. But I was a picky eater and found whatever it was they served off-putting. I'd been air sick on airplanes to Florida as a child, so the whole thing just seemed like a bad plan to me, and I was having none of it. Which was pretty fortuitous, as it turned out, as my parents got food poisoning from the plane food, and it dogged them our entire trip.
Which meant I was thirteen in Rome without, for the first time, over-attentive parents. And because I was the only person in our family comfortable with the money, with the street directions and, even marginally (Latin and French made it possible for me to get by, albeit weirdly) the language, I had real freedom for the first time in a place where I knew no one and nothing. So I went out, not because I had permission, but just because I just avoided asking -- after dusk and before dawn and late in the night if I woke up for no reason -- and I walked, all over Rome, fantasizing that maybe here I could have friends. After all, I wasn't as ugly in Rome as I was in New York. And New York meant I was special, right? People would want to be my friend. Maybe? I hoped.
But I was, and am shy. I didn't know how to say hello to people or how ask for what I wanted beyond staring at it, so I did not make friends in Rome, not really. But I sat on steps and on the lips of fountains in the places where other youths congregated, some Italian, some touristing, some runaways, some just snuck out for a few hours, most older than me by less than you'd think, smoking definitely, drinking often, and sometimes, yes, taking money for what they could.
I had stylish clothes, and could carry myself a certain way. I could make my eyes look hard. And it was enough for me to be not chased from these places by my not peers, who would sometimes ask me for cigarettes or offer me wine or explain, because I was there to have it explained to about this boy they were fucking this week, and that boy, sullen now over there on the other side of the fountain, they were fucking last week. I nodded, eagerly, and let me lack of language hide my often intense naivete. When I got scared, or overwhelmed, I would leave, walk miles, and find another place, full of children to sit and pretend I belonged there. It rained nearly constantly, and because Rome is all history, when my parents asked what I saw, I could say the names of plazas and churches, and full of lies, I was safe.
After two weeks, we left for Florence, where the situation with my parents was mostly the same. But Florence was lonely and haunted and whatever it was I pursued there was far less tangible than the sights I'd seen in Rome; I love Florence, with all my heart.
Just before New Year's we returned to Rome, my parents mostly recovered. My mother decided that for New Year's Eve we should eat in a neighborhood she had read about in a newspaper: Trastevere. She said it would be like New York's Soho, which then was not the Rodeo Drive it is today. I hear Trastevere is different now too, but then the woman at our pensione said we were mad. It was very, very dangerous there, and we must not go. No taxi would take us besides. So we hired a car in advance to drive us there, and it abandoned us a block away from the restaurant and sped off. We walked on unlit, cobbled streets to the cave-like restaurant, which was lit only with candles and where all cooking was only over fire and in brick ovens: I am not even remotely sure the place had electricity. Surely, we saw none that night.
We ate for hours, sat at tables with strangers, artists and eccentrics all, who nodded and smiled at my parents like I was a good child when I noted, but did not explain the places I had seen in Rome. Just before midnight, a child came around with baskets of streamers, encouraging us all to grab some for the turn of the year. My parents had me stand up on a chair to throw my streamers, and when midnight came I did.
At that time, I wore a small silver lover's knot on my pinky. It had been a gift from my grandfather when I was four, and now only fit my smallest finger. In that restaurant without power in the dark in Rome at thirteen, the lovers knot flew of my hand and clearly hit metal. We all heard the sound. We looked, everyone at our table, across the floor, in water pitchers, in bread baskets and food dishes, anywhere it might have scattered, but we never found it. Always one to cry at such things, my parents were in a flurry of worry, assuming I would immanently melt down. But I saw no reason to; it seemed reasonable that Rome, city of whores and ill parents, charged a toll. Because no taxis would come to Trastevere, we had little choice, but to stay out until dawn.
Rome wasn't the first or the last time that I was aware of the sort of trouble and survival that's out there for those without other choices. If I'm frank, I can tell you that if asked at six, I would often say I wanted to be a cocktail waitress when I grew up, because I'd seen it in a film and the currency of flesh there seemed obvious to me: pretty girls were good girls and value should be measured. It's a feeling I never really lost, even if I also never aspired to be a whore, so much as I always felt like I needed to know if I could. It's a funny way to be drawn, the sort of thing that implies trauma or sin, but to me, has always just struck me as a happenstance of my personality or movies I watched with my babysitters even when I wasn't allowed.
When I went to work at the dungeon, it was, in many ways, a sort of inevitability, but not of ambition, but of knowledge. I had to know I could do it. And I had to know what it was I wondered if I could do. As with most things, like love and countries, it wasn't really what I anticipated, and it left me lonely, disappointed but also in possession not just of powerful secrets, but of myself. Sex work isn't empowering for everyone. And it isn't dangerous for everyone. But my own lens tells me it's usually at least a little bit of both. There may be easier and better ways to find things out about yourself and your fellow man, but sometimes some of us simply take the road
that's open because we discover it is less off the beaten path than we may have been previously led to believe.
[ Like my adventures in Italy as a young teen, Dogboy & Justine is a story about a world hidden in plain sight and secrets far more common than most people want to admit. If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting our projection by commenting here, boosting the signal or contributing to our Kickstarter fundraising drive. We still have to raise
almost $3,000 in the next six weeks to secure the funding for our workshop production. ]