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  I opened my mouth to speak, with my best feigned enthusiasm, but the man with the large belly cut me off.

  “I was kind of hoping Courtney and I could be alone, Mike.”

  Moët gyrated deeper into the lap of the man who had insulted her. The best man surveyed the room, his eyes stopping to linger on Moët. Based on her performance, he must have decided mine wouldn’t be necessary.

  “All right Steve-o, she’s yours, but you owe me. You can take her into that room in the back.”

  Another thing I didn’t particularly enjoy about bachelor parties were these public negotiations of my services that didn’t involve me.

  I picked up my bag from a chair and waited for the man to lead me towards the backroom, but he just stood there, looking at me impatiently.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  “You’re forgetting your cards, hon,” he answered. “You want to learn, right?”

  I looked over at Moët, in an attempt to communicate to her where I was going, but I couldn’t get her attention. She was bent over Kenny’s chair as if doing a backbend, her arms on either side of his lap, and her breasts upside down in his face.

  It was the one thing about the bachelor party the phone girl hadn’t lied about.

  Moët was a pro.

  Stephen and I sat in the backroom for the next hour and a half playing strip poker for prudes. He didn’t want me to take off anything beyond my bra and panties. All that left me to remove was my dress and shoes. He stayed in his boxer shorts.

  “Thanks,” I said, in acknowledgement of the diversion he’d tried to create in the other room. “But you didn’t have to do that. I’ve done plenty of bachelor parties.”

  “I saw your eyes, Courtney,” he said. “You looked like a deer in the headlights of life. Moët doesn’t have that look.” He ashed his cigarette into a plastic cup of beer. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself. I can’t get off on that. My name’s Stephen, but I also have a superhero alter ego. They call me Captain Save-A-Ho.”

  I laughed, even though he was calling me a ho.

  All of the men at the bachelor party that night, except for the groom’s best man, who it was mentioned he had known since childhood, worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, in Tower 1 of the World Trade Center.

  The phone girl told me that Stephen had called every night since the party to see if I was working. A few nights later, I was, and I was driven to his Brooklyn Heights brownstone. Five years before, he told me, he had split up with his wife who was living on Long Island with their teenage daughter. We went into his bedroom, and he reached into a dresser drawer and took out a small bag of white powder.

  “I got this the other night at the casino. Bought it in the parking lot. I’m not really sure why,” he said. “It’s not my thing.”

  I cut a line of it on top of the table next to his bed. Its consistency was both soft and crunchy, like some kind of salt mixed with soap. I blew it behind the bed when he wasn’t looking. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was fake.

  We had sex and his sweat rained down on me in salty droplets. His breathing quickly became labored.

  “I wish you could have seen me in my prime, Courtney,” he said. “Wait,” he ran into another room and came back with a photo album. There were pictures of him from high school playing football, pictures from what looked to be a college frat party, making me think of the bachelor party at the warehouse. “After your forties, hon, it’s all downhill,” he said. “But it was a great ride.”

  As I was leaving, he tipped me a hundred dollars, then made an all-too-familiar request.

  “Give me your phone number, hon. We can cut the agency right out of it,” he said.

  I’d been down that road a million times before and had learned the hard way that unless you had some kind of special line just for them, it never paid to give a client your phone number. It ended up abused, treated like a free phone sex line or a drunken confessional. So I compromised and gave Stephen my email address, my first one ever. My mother had just bought me something she’d seen advertised on television, and had bought for herself first. Not a real computer, something called an i-Opener, similar to WebTV in that it was just the Internet, a keyboard and a screen. Because my i-Opener had been a gift from my mom, it was registered through her account, and my email address had one very small difference from hers: the number one.

  As I wrote down my email address for Stephen, I stressed the importance of remembering this digit.

  “Don’t forget the one,” I said.

  “No worries, hon,” he replied.

  He forgot the one, and emailed my mom.

  As a sex worker, there are three questions you are asked constantly by clients. The first one is, “What’s your real name?” Clients are obsessed with this question. If they can get you to tell them your real name, it makes them feel special, elevated. The relationship is still a paid one, but they now know you as anyone who is important to you in your other life does. The disclosure also negates what may be the most important veneer a sex worker has: their anonymity. It’s a revelation that can be interpreted to imply “She either trusts me enough not to call out to her if I were to see her on the street, or she actually wants me to come up to her and say hello.” The second question clients always ask is about the circumstances that led you to sex work—in their minds, the circumstances that led you astray, from good girl to bad. The third question is “What gets you off sexually?” This is usually phrased, “Now tell me what you like.”

  I had never told Stephen my real name. It was nothing against him. I had told other clients my name in the past, but because “Fiona” came across as more exotic sounding than “Courtney,” in the time before the movie Shrek at least, to them it sounded like even more of a stripper name, and they never believed me. So I told Stephen that Courtney was my real name, that in spite of what he may have believed as Captain Save-A-Ho, there was nothing there to save me from—my private life and public life all blurred together as one. So when Stephen emailed my mother, he addressed the email in part to Courtney.

  My mother had gotten other emails meant for me after buying me the i-Opener, but nothing related to sex work, and thankfully, Stephen hadn’t written anything too revealing, just that he would like to see me again soon and had enjoyed our time together. My mother probably wouldn’t have even thought the email was meant for me at all if Stephen hadn’t addressed it not just to “Courtney” but to “Courtney Love.” He was being funny, but I was a big fan, and my mother knew this.

  In January of 2002, I was living with my mom and using her i-Opener when I came across Stephen’s email, then six months old. My exit from New York City had happened hastily the previous December when I had lost my apartment in a perfect storm of Xanax addiction and unpaid rent. Clients come and go from your life, your life and theirs mixing in hour intervals and dollar allotments, and it occurred to me as I read Stephen’s email that I couldn’t recall seeing him after August of the previous summer.

  I wrote down his email address, logged into my newly created Yahoo email account and wrote:

  Stephen-

  It’s Courtney. Sorry I didn’t get in touch sooner, but everything’s just been so crazy the last few months. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you. The loss of life is staggering. I don’t want to say too much now,I’d rather wait for you to respond first, but I’m no longer in New York. Hopefully I’ll be back soon. Just wanted to make sure you’re okay and let you know I’m thinking about you.

  Just as I was about to hit send, it occurred to me that my new email address might cause some confusion. It contained my real name, Fiona, followed by some numbers that were relevant to my life. I’d been so adamant to Stephen about Courtney being my real name that I figured it warranted some kind of passing explanation.

  This is my new email address. Fiona’s my real name. I was just trying to keep some distance, you know?

  I did make it back to New York, and in the summer of 2
002, I found myself working for the same outcall escort agency I had worked for when I met Stephen. One night, my driver for the evening took me to meet a friend of his, another driver for the agency, between calls. I recognized the girl his friend was driving for the night immediately—the big breasts, the wide, shapely hips. The only thing different about her was the sable color of her wig. It was Moët.

  “I remember you,” she said, getting out of the car to smoke a cigarette and empty the sand from her shoes. Her driver had just picked her up from a call she had done at the beach. “We did that bachelor party together, and you ditched me.”

  “I didn’t ditch you!” I said defensively. I had experienced the brunt end of other girls’ reactions to imagined crimes in the past.

  “Relax, mami,” she said. “You remembered where those guys worked, didn’t you? That company, in the Towers? What’s your name again, mami?”

  “Courtney.”

  “People can say whatever they want about us, and what we do, Courtney, but those men, that night, they didn’t have much time left. And maybe I’m crazy for even thinking like this, but that night, I know I showed them a good time, and they went home happy. Do you know what I mean, mami? I gave them my all that night, and I feel good about that.”

  How a Former Porn Star’s Sex Tape Helped Him Reclaim His Sex Life

  Christopher Zeischeggaka Danny Wylde

  Eight years into my porn career I landed myself in the hospital after swallowing too many boner pills for work. My erection wouldn’t subside, and it had to be bled out. After I started, more established performers schooled me on the pills, herbs, and injections I could use to maintain a raging hard-on for hours on end, something that was a professional requirement. A doctor told me that if I continued to take the drugs, I’d risk losing my ability to achieve an erection altogether. I was psychologically—and probably physically—dependent on ED pharmaceuticals to do my job. The choice was to either risk my sexual health or stop working altogether.

  It was one of the most devastating moments of my adult life. I quit my job overnight and lost my professional identity. For the next two weeks, I followed my doctor’s advice to avoid all sexual arousal. I refrained from touching myself because I had to. And because I was afraid I’d already gone too far—that I’d discover my inability to ever have sex again.

  To make things even crazier, I was at the beginning of a new relationship. I’d gone on two dates with a girl and we were crushing hard. I didn’t reveal the extent of my fears, but she knew we’d have to wait if we were to have sex again. And we did. The girl of two dates slept next to me during my recovery. Then she helped me to rediscover my arousal in its natural state.

  Shortly thereafter, the circumstances of her life changed, leaving her with a vulnerability that matched my own. Mutual uncertainty and emotional chaos allowed us to latch on to each other in the most intense way possible. If there’s something called “falling in love,” our course was speed railing through it.

  I looked back on my sexual history and realized that I’d done my first porn scene when I was nineteen. Prior to that, I hadn’t had a serious partner. My new relationship marked the first time in my life where I could experience sexual monogamy. Sex with my girlfriend was still a form of play, but something about it became more personal. After fucking a thousand people, I felt more attached to just the one.

  I didn’t miss performing as much as I thought I would. But there was a part of it that I didn’t want to lose completely. I liked the act of sharing my sex, and I liked the feedback. So I talked to my new girlfriend about making our own video—one that showcased the intensely personal sex we were having now.

  We had to set a date or I knew it wouldn’t happen.

  The morning of, we had sex. And again several hours later. It was normal. We were addicted to each other’s bodies. When we were alone together, I wanted as much of her as I could get.

  But the day was half over and we’d done nothing to prepare for our shoot. So I began to set up a couple of tripods and attach a few lights to the ceiling. She began to apply her makeup. Not that she wouldn’t have sex with me without her face made up, but this was intended for an audience. She wanted to feel beautiful.

  “What if our video isn’t as good as the one you made with your ex?” she asked. We were going to use the same start-up company to host our video. The content I’d created with my exgirlfriend was a big part of its launch. However, this attempt felt different. I was still a porn star the first time I shared my personal sex. The time away from performing made me feel like a boy playing games he hadn’t meant for others to see.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “We’re perfect together. It will be.”

  We dawdled along. She joked about no longer wanting to do the video. I suggested that we call it off. Then she reassured me that it was still a good idea. “I want everyone to see how in love we are.”

  Eventually, we found ourselves in bed together. The room was bright and silent. Two cameras pointed towards us. I’d hastily set them up. They weren’t even running at the same frame rate.

  My girlfriend laughed. “Who makes love with the lights on?”

  She was nervous, so I tried to calm her. But this wasn’t a way we’d ever made love. It was usually on her bed, but she’d have music or cartoons playing in the background. We’d already be touching, or I’d look at her a certain way and it would have to happen. We might be under sheets in the morning, or getting dressed to go out at night. Never with the covers purposefully pushed aside, drowned in silence, and peering over at a pair of prosumer lenses.

  The anxiety I’d felt as a young performer came back as strong as ever. We’d built this moment up to be the most perfect expression of our desire for each other. But my body was shutting down, and I was beginning to panic. I could feel the cameras on me even though nobody stood behind them.

  I’d done it a thousand times with people I’d barely met, and in the most stressful environments. Yet, I couldn’t get my cock hard while in bed with the girl I loved. I’d often whisper to her that I thought we could do anything together. Our post-porn video seemed like the worst act to prove me wrong.

  I moved on in hopes of repairing my fractured ego, and to prove whatever it is I thought she needed to know. Her legs opened and I put my mouth on her. It should have turned me on. But I mostly thought of it as something that had to happen.

  In a porn film, she’d be sucking my cock. So of course I should have gone down on her first. This video was about real life and real pleasure. I wanted my girlfriend to feel like I’d do anything to please her. Except it wasn’t working. My body was dissociating from my favorite act in the world.

  We tried having sex slowly, sweetly, while kissing, and lying close together. It felt like something that should be real, so I hoped that I’d be forced to believe it. Eventually, we stopped to laugh and smile awkwardly. We tried to take the pressure off ourselves. “This isn’t for the video,” she said. “But it’s cute what we’re doing.”

  I knelt between her legs and touched her. There was an apology inside of me that I couldn’t even speak. I think she understood. She moved beyond acceptance and offered something back.

  “You want to hurt me?” It was a game that had defined us from the beginning of our relationship. She saved our real-world sex video by making it real.

  I didn’t think of our sex as over-the-top violent, but we’d shoved needles through each other, and I’d slapped and punched her skin. Part of what made our relationship work was the constant affirmation of something slightly beyond reach. It was a mix of the utopian love seen in Disney films and the desperate, violent need to know someone written in Dennis Cooper novels. Our love had to be forever and our sex had to move beyond this life. We wanted our story to be some fucked-up fairy tale come true.

  So I choked and slapped my girlfriend and made love to her on camera. She responded in a way that made me forget about everything else.

  After years of porn, I thought
I’d worked past the fear of per-formatory sex. After ending my career, I thought it didn’t matter. The video with my girlfriend wasn’t supposed to be a performance. It was supposed to be real.

  We eventually got there—to some degree. But the reality of the first fifteen minutes (and maybe more that I edited out) is not necessarily the reality of our sex. It’s our vulnerability, our attempt to share something we’d developed just for each other.

  What happens thereafter is hard to define. It’s different than porn and different than reality. But I like the fact that not everything is accessible. I’m teaching my body to relate in a different way, and it feels good to know that some of that is only available to my partner.

  Our video shows how I make love to my girlfriend at home, but for “you.” It’s my nervous dip into failure because I think there’s something more you want to see. With the cameras off, though, it’s different. I like that you may never know how.

  What Should We Call Sex Toys?

  Epiphora

  I use the term automatically: sex toys. That’; what they’ve always been to me. As a sex toy reviewer, I spend most of my waking hours researching, photographing, testing, and writing about them. The term is commonplace, innocuous—in my seven years of blogging, I’ve never questioned it. Yet each day, as I wade through press releases and peruse manufacturer websites, I see that the universe seems hell-bent on introducing new alternatives into the vernacular.

  While others might cry “semantics!”, I think that the words we use to describe things have an impact on how they are perceived. In the case of the sex toy industry, where we have to claw and fight to even be seen as legitimate at all, this is immensely important. I do not believe that, as Shakespeare famously wrote, a sex toy by any other name would feel as good. Call something a “dong” and nobody will want to put that inside themselves.

  The trend probably started with manufacturers wanting to distance themselves from the term “novelty.” Understandably so: it’s an old-fashioned industry word that no longer applies. It sounds trivial and frivolous. Novelties are silly, laughable trinkets from Spencer’s that end up in the garbage. When I hear the word “novelty,” I picture a windup vulva. Although I definitely need a windup vulva for my office, such a product is not in the same league as a $150 rechargeable silicone vibrator that comes with a sleek gift box, satin storage bag, and warranty.