Decoy

 When my father called me a whore, I had some decisions to make. I could run away, but I was afraid he’d find me.  He had been a cop, became a lawyer, and subsequently his reach through law enforcement was monumental. I could try disappearing like my mother did, so thoroughly that I could be declared dead by a simple court proceeding. But that would take too long. I could call my own big guns, like the guidance counselor. But she might surrender me to the welfare state, foster care, group homes—which is another way of disappearing, but a messy and bureaucratically protracted method. Ultimately inefficient as well, because you tend to leave clues in your wake, like paperwork. There also was the possibility the counselor would do nothing. She was called a counselor, but she was more like a target, or a location. You could pick up your class schedule or you could shout your various woes to her. That didn’t mean she knew which classes you needed, or that she would act on your pain, your untenable situation. Maybe she was training us for a different, a more adult relationship with authority. Our parents. Our gods. Or Santa Claus. In those days, kids believed in nothing. Except, maybe, disappointment.    

I know this about the high school counselor because I tried to tell her where my father and I were headed. It was an old story: father hates daughter for making mother disappear shortly after birth;  stepmother hates daughter for reminding father of former wife; far younger half-siblings hate her because if all the adults are doing it, why shouldn’t we? You might say this story is as old as the profession my father envisioned for me; the first profession, according to the people who sit in judgment of such things. But if you think about it, it couldn’t have been the first profession, because there was no currency back then. No terms of trade, commerce, capitalism, or any other economic system, as we now understand them. And we best understand the things that we create. I told the counselor I wanted to graduate early so I could get a job, get my own place. I needed eight credits of work experience, but she said no, because then the school wouldn’t get the money it receives each day for my attendance from the state. Neither my independence nor my well-being was worth five thousand dollars per diem, apparently, in 1979 dollars. Nowadays it would be more like twenty-five thousand dollars.

That day in September, when the high school counselor wouldn’t let me graduate early, I went back to my college prep curriculum and carried on. “Carrying on” is what my father said I did, rather than simply conversing, speaking, talking. I had no idea how to engage in a civilized dialogue, he said. Why did you have my mother declared dead, I’d ask. Where is she? You’ve got to know. My father said I was capable only of wanting, needing, believing, even pleading; all empty reservoirs of feeling, and for what? he asked. A few weeks later, in October, when he called me a whore, it was too late to enact my original plan of getting out and away. The circumstances called for drastic action, and I came up with an idea.

Before we get to my idea, I’ll admit that I could have dealt with the why, or whatever it was I had done, to provoke my father into making the accusation. To say that I had no idea why he had called me a whore is a bit disingenuous. But whoredom is disingenuous work—more about that later. One thing I did not do, after he called me a whore, was look in the mirror, study my plain face, flat hair, my unremarkable body, and ask myself what it was he saw there. Because to do that would have given him too much power. It would have confirmed his talent at prophecy, acknowledged his God-like acumen, or grant him the status of a deity, elevated above the other lay people. But I wanted to demonstrate I had a power of my own: the know-how and follow-through to determine my own future. I would take his challenge, and show him that I, too, had discipline; that all whores do. Otherwise, how could they juggle their various guises and responsibilities, keep them straight in the chaos of their schedules?

I started with a rumor. Rumors are the choicest cuts of information: which narcotics to use, how and where to buy them; the vagaries of alcohol abuse, why and where and why not to indulge; boys to avoid; girls to sidle up to, for the best intelligence. Rumors contain the key to the underground economy. I knew this because there were several rent boys in my drama class, and I’m not talking about the gay ones. The gay ones were way out, ahead of their time and almost ho-hum. The rent boys were hetero on campus, but serviced men—mostly movie stars, we all heard—at work. They had cachet, or perhaps you thought you did, because you knew who they were. Rumors about girls were more numerous, but not as potent. It was almost like people had only one expectation for them, a downhill slide that always ended in the same experience.   

I did not need to start the rumor on my own. That took care of itself, since I dealt with the abstractions. I went to the no-tell motel across the street from our Liberal Arts Building and talked with the manager. For several days in a row, during lunch period. It doesn’t matter what I said, only that I was seen in his office, with its giant picture window. I made an appointment at the free clinic, told my girlfriends where I was going. I brought an extra set of clothes to school each day. Ordinary clothes, stuffed in a large canvas bag I carried everywhere. I swiped a pair of my stepmother’s fancy heels, some of her makeup, and a few of her slutty blouses. I made certain their sequins and rhinestones were plainly visible to the public. I never had to wear those outfits but left school as quickly as possible each day. No more extra-curriculars or hang- outs. I had to rush-rush-rush to an appointment, I said. I spent a lot of time in public libraries, laundromats, and community centers, where the beggars, addicts, and ne’er-do-wells supposedly gather. I feigned a lost appetite and an epic exhaustion during my classes and in the cafeteria. I stopped doing my homework. Well, almost all of it.

There was a boy I liked. Or I was supposed to like him. He liked me, allegedly. We had classes together. He was a student government type, and his career goal was to save the world, stop the draft, end all wars or hunger. He was serious when he talked like that, a messianic glaze in his eyes that was a little too familiar. I asked if I could borrow a couple hundred dollars that first week, and I paid him back the next. My lipstick and mascara were smeared and my hands shaking. I explained nothing to anyone.

Through this I discovered a few things that can’t be taught. Becoming the epitome of fashion, fantasy, and fast action to a host of men whose ideas about sex and relationships are seriously warped by loneliness or physical appearance, or most likely mental illness, is no picnic. But whores must make it look like one. Obviously, my father had no idea. How could he indulge in any act of empathy, especially since he had only been with one prostitute in his life; this, he promised.

And being a whore is not just a job. It is an entire repertoire of sorts: acting, avoiding, enduring. You also learn to know the worth of each person you deal with—not necessarily their price, because one’s price is readily apparent. Worth is deeper, more essential, potentially spiritual. The worth of my stepmother was eighty-two dollars monthly, which was how much my father paid on her life insurance premium. He said it was necessary, should anything happen to her while the kids were still little. He’d use the pay-out to hire a maid to take care of them. The manager of the no-tell motel had a relatively low price, considering, but his worth was immeasurable. My worth, I already knew, was part of a complex calculation that took note of socioeconomics, demographics, the overhead for administering a high school curriculum, and the cost of a collective bargaining agreement. Ultimately it boiled down to having my ass, whether it was either sitting in, or within reasonable proximity of, a wooden or plastic school-style chair at 9 a.m. each business day.

Or my worth could have dwindled down to nothing, after what I was hoping to accomplish with my reputation. Which turned out to be not enough. I humped around campus with my costumes and cosmetics like a soldier in the jungle for weeks. There was gossip, I knew; I heard whispers, or thought I did. Two of my teachers took me aside for brief interrogations. They confronted me with their grade books, wondered if this was a more serious case of “senioritis,” threatened to notify my counselor or worse yet, my parents. With my best funereal expression, I insisted that everything was salubrious, copacetic, uncontaminated. I’d try harder, pay better attention. They seemed relieved, if not convinced, that they had completed their due diligence. It wasn’t until I said what I wanted to do for my senior project that everyone got wise, or they got some of that do-gooder religion.   

Had I been adopted, or the victim of some disease, or had long ago and publicly taken up an interest or made a hobby of the most vile and appalling nature, I probably could have picked anything I wanted for my senior project. Kids with unhealthy, but firmly established interests in guns, poisons, and Nazis were encouraged to explore their obsessions, just as adopted kids were welcome to seek out their biological parents, and disease sufferers granted time and space to discover a cure. But to research the history of prostitution was more than the student body could take, ostensibly, and I was summoned to the guidance counselor’s office.  I don’t know whether the children of drug addicts, alcoholics, and divorce; or the casualties or witnesses to sexual or emotional abuse; or kids on welfare were dissuaded from pursuing what they knew best in the same manner. But I do know that proposing an investigation into certain modes of commerce was infinitely more alarming than the life I had tried to construct for myself, or the rough approximation of it.

The guidance counselor asked what I hoped to accomplish with my project, and I said acquaint myself with an oft-ignored subculture that had blossomed within a walkable radius from campus. She asked what it could possibly contribute to the tradition of scholarship at the school, and I replied, have you had a look around you, lady? Or maybe I said, I am expanding into field work, anthropology. Finally, she wanted to know if there was something I was trying to prove. Surely there must be a more tasteful approach. I implored her tearfully not to call my parents—or at least not my father, as he was the legal guardian of record.

The guidance counselor, all sixty inches of her, including the wart on her forehead, rose gravely from her chair, as if she could tower over me. Come with me, she ordered, and she led me out of her warren of an office. I thought my comment about my father struck a nerve, because fathers are particularly important to whores, or father figures. They are the ones who alternately drive or demonize their daughters into whoredom, by teaching them that degradation for purposes of survival is their only option.  Sociologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and others who intend to rescue fallen women have documented this phenomenon. Of course, there are other reasons women resort to prostitution; feeding a drug habit rating highly among them. But the role of the father is the most common denominator in the grand collection of whore testimonials. 

The guidance counselor and I walked through the hall that connected the cubicles of all the other guidance counselors. There sat the day’s collection of misfits, rebels, and future burdens to the American taxpayer, awaiting adjudication. We looked one another over, and knew our stories were the same, despite all the tweaks, subgenres, mashups, and cross-pollinations that brought us to this stage. My story may not be believable as others, because of how I tell it, or because of what you are willing to believe about a girl with my cunning and resources.

But my story is all that I have had, since that moment onward, when the guidance counselor opened a door and there sat my father, with a woman I had never seen before; the woman who would explain half of everything.