My Three Husbands (7 page)

“What it would be like.”

“What d'you think?”

“I don't know. He seems to make my dad happy.” I sucked my lover's tongue deep into my mouth, then moved down to pluck at his little raisiny nipples with my teeth. “I know they have sex almost every day.”

“So do we,” Tremaynne panted.

“Yeah, but they've been together twenty years.” I did some quick math, the one thing I'm good at. “That's like over seven thousand times.”

“Wow.” Tremaynne reared back, looking at me. Those dark eyes with the long black lashes had the power to melt me. “What do they do?”

“I don't know. That's always been another fantasy.”

“What?”

“Watching two handsome guys make it.”

“Watching your dads, or, like, watching two handsome guys?”

“My dads are two handsome guys.”

“So, watching them.”

“It's just a fantasy.”

I could feel Tremaynne's hard stubby dick against my thigh. He eased me onto my back, cupped my breasts, and stared at my nipples as if they were two luscious desserts. His tongue flicked out, delicately licking first one, then the other, like a boy with an ice-cream cone in each hand.

“Oh, Venus,” he sighed, tenderly laying his head against my heart.

“What, babe?” I played with his hair.

“Am I doing the right thing?”

I assumed he meant getting married. “Yes,” I whispered.

“I'm afraid I'll hurt you.”

“You won't hurt me,” I said.

“You don't know who I am. Not really.”

“Do you know who I am? Really?”

He was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I think I do.”

I
kept giving Tremaynne chances to get out of going on our honeymoon with the dads, but he was like, “No, I really want to go.”

“We'll be in the car with them for hours,” I warned.

“So?”

“You'll have to talk.”

“I can talk when I want to.”

“You're not homophobic, are you? You'd better tell me now if that's a problem.”

“There is something I should probably tell you.” He cleared his throat and smoothed down his already smooth goatee. His eyes, usually so bold, grew shy. “I've had a couple of things with guys. Nothing serious. Just like you've had with women.”

His confession confirmed something I'd been wondering about.

Suddenly it was kind of a dilemma. Because I didn't want to make the mistake of marrying a gay man, like my mom did. Gay men make great dads, but, as Whitman once said, you wouldn't want your daughter to marry one.

“I guess you could say I'm sort of bisexual,” Tremaynne said. “Like you.”

“So, do two bisexuals make one straight couple?” I asked.

“I'll never be totally straight,” he said. “Not, like, totally.”

We looked at each other. It was Truth Time.

“You do want to marry me, don't you?” I tried to keep neediness out of my voice.

For a moment he didn't say anything, just frowned and looked deep into my eyes. It was one of those moments when everything's on the line. You either move on together, or back off forever.

“It's been, like, really intense with you,” he said. “But I've told you, and I'll say it one last time: Marriage for me isn't about sitting around in a little house with a picket fence and a baby on my knee and a nine-to-five job. You've got to understand that.”

“Did you ever hear me say that's what I wanted?”

“No, but it's what a lot of women want. Stability. Nothing wrong with it, but it's not, like, on my agenda.”

“It's boring,” I agreed.

He pulled in his lips and chewed on the bottom one, like he was thinking something through. “Even when we're married, Venus, I have to be free to go off and do my thing. My conscience demands it.”

“Can't I go with you?” I asked.

“It's not an easy life. I never know how long I'm going to be away, or what I'm going to be doing. There's never any money.” He took me by the hands and gently pulled me over to sit beside him. He was being really tender. “Venus, maybe we should call it off.”

“No!”

“Can you really accept me as I am?” he asked. “Not like you want me to be, but like I really am?”

“Will you—” I had to stop and frame the question as delicately as possible. “Will you, like, fuck other people when you're away?”

“There's no one to fuck when you're hanging eighty feet up in a tree,” Tremaynne said with a laugh.

“Tell me the truth.”

He nodded. “I'll always come back to you, Venus. As long as it works out for both of us.”

“Jeez.” I laughed and flicked away some excess moisture from my eyes. “You sound like a terrorist in a Tom Clancy novel.”

He looked at me, his face stern. “I'm part of a movement,” he said.

 

 

There I was with my wedding two days away and a free three-day honeymoon planned and I hadn't even asked for time off work. I was afraid Bruce would fire me if I did. I always worked weekends.

In the past, if I got sick of a job, I just stopped going. As a result, I had no references to show employers. On job applications I couldn't put down stints in the army and modeling school because I'd dropped out of both within a month. I couldn't type and working at a computer bored me, except for the chat rooms. In my fantasies I saw myself as a model or the star of my own TV series, but in real life it was like I had no aptitude for anything. When you're in that position, all that's left are the jobs in fast food, fast coffee, telemarketing, taking care of young kids, taking care of old people, or some version of scanning barcodes and stocking shelves.

Or you can work in the sex industry.

My job at Phantastic Phantasy was a last-ditch effort to remain independent after my bankruptcy. Otherwise there were only two alternatives: move back in with my mother or become a baglady. Living with the dads was not an option because I couldn't deal with all their rules and regulations. We tried it once, when I was sixteen and they'd just moved back from New York. I got the distinct impression that I was not welcome unless I made my bed every morning, hung up all my clothes, studied for hours every day, and stopped bringing my boyfriends back to the house after the clubs closed.

“Sweetheart,” Whitman said one morning, “we love you, so you'd better leave now, before we kill you.”

My overachieving dads just hate it that I work at Phantastic Phantasy. Just like they hated it when I was an exotic dancer (I never told them about my stint as a lingerie model). I don't know why they get so worked up about it.

Just because you work in the sex sector doesn't mean you're a whore or a slut. I kept telling the dads that. Tremaynne didn't mind. He was, like, totally cool with it. He thought it was like a form of anarchy from everything middle class and repressive.

To me, it's just a job. It's what I do because I have to pay rent and my phone bill and keep my half-dead car running and buy food. I have to do all this with cash, baby, cash, because bankruptcy comes in like a tsunami and wipes out all your once-available lines of credit.

Credit cards were my worst addiction. Before I went Chapter Seven, I'd racked up $18,000 worth of debt that I couldn't pay off. For the next seven years, I can't buy anything that I can't pay for with cash.

 

 

When you work in the sex industry, you're part of a secret inner world that the larger outer world frowns on. You have to accept that, and accept the creatures you meet. You all share the same environment.

Most of our business at Phantastic Phantasy is video rental. We carry over a thousand titles, from nostalgic hits like
Thanks for the Mammaries
to patriotic offerings like
Yank My Doodle, It's a Dandy.
Our gay collection is the best in Portland and features all the current superstuds, including Ricky Ramrod, Carl LaCoque, and the Falcon stable of sexual athletes. Yes, there is lesbian porn, but only straight men rent it.

The front part of the store is video rentals and merchandise. All the street-facing windows are polarized because the people inside don't want to be seen by the people outside. It's like working behind a giant pair of sunglasses. The outside world is just a bunch of dark moving shadows that you can ignore.

Bruce renovated the store last year, putting in red and purple carpeting and different colored lights. He lets people smoke in designated areas, so there's always that nice comforting stale cigarette-smoke smell, like in my apartment. It's a smell I grew up with because my mom and both dads used to be heavy smokers.

In the back of the store, separated from the front by more racks of videos, there are twenty private viewing booths. There's an assortment of gay and straight movies available in every booth. You choose your own selection from a computerized menu. It's all very up-to-date.

I sell people the one-dollar tokens that operate the movies for five minutes. I don't go back in that area unless I absolutely have to. From up front I can see everything that's going on because Bruce installed surveillance cameras after the city tried to shut him down for prostitution.

It's like watching some weird kind of avant-garde TV show where the set is nothing but a hallway and twenty doors and the action is people going in and coming out. It's better than a lot of the video installations I used to watch in those art galleries the dads would drag me to in New York.

Gay guys have sex back there, but I can't see that because it takes place in the booths. There are also these side-by-side “buddy booths.” One guy goes into one booth, another guy into the booth next door. While they're watching the movies, they can press a button and raise a screen between the two rooms. Then, I guess, they watch each other j.o. But the screen is not clear glass, so it's kind of like peering at a shadow. Straight guys and other gay guys j.o. in their own private booths.

But here's the rub. On a little monitor up front, we can see which booths are occupied and tell whether they're watching movies. No one can be in a booth unless they're putting in dollar tokens. If they aren't, I have to go back there, rap sharply on the door, and say in a loud stern voice, “You have to be spending money in there!” Tremaynne thinks that's the funniest part of my job.

Ever since the city tried to close him down for some health ordinance violation, Bruce keeps it very clean back there. Every booth has a roll of paper towels. Every time someone leaves a booth, Hosario or one of the cleaning boys goes in to mop the floor and wipe down the walls with this disinfectant that smells like pineapple and vomit. The bathroom is kept locked, so you have to ask for a key. That way we can keep it clean and stop people from going in there to have sex.

I've learned that nothing can stop people from wanting, hoping, or trying to have sex. Even on September 11, people came in to get their rocks off. Like Bruce says, “You can't put a lid on libido.”

So we're open 24/7. People flit in and out of that shadowy back area all day and all night. Sometimes drag queens with big feet and their balls strapped between their legs come in, trying not to look obvious in their wigs and makeup. Sometimes they're transexuals on the road to gender reassignment. Real cute students, real ugly middle-aged guys, men of eighty wearing bib overalls and cowboy hats—I've seen them all. People who look like professors and people who look retarded. We are totally wheelchair accessible, so sometimes guys drive their chairs in.

Every morning my first task is to make sure all the video boxes are properly arranged in alphabetical order on their racks. I wear disposable plastic gloves when I do this because sometimes the customers aren't able to control themselves while browsing. I told Bruce I would
not
wipe up wet or dried sperm from the floor, the walls, or the boxes. Hosario or one of the cleaning boys does that.

Have you ever alphabetized porn movies? That's part of my job.
Anal Olympics
goes before
Ass Class
but after
A Touch of Ass.

Those cover shots on the porn videos are really something. Lipsticked mouths with cum flying into them
(Saucy Suckers)
or running down cheeks like gobs of white snot
(Cum As You Are).
Heavily made up women holding up their beachball-size tits and winking
(Big Hot Mamas).
Rearends plugged by impossibly humongous pricks
(Ass You Like It).
Shaved pussies held wide open, like mouths singing in a church choir
(Clitty Clitty Bang Bang).

The fetish sections are alphabetized by fetish and by title.
Bestiality
comes before
Bondage.
The bondage covers are the ones I can't stand to look at. I mean the ones where it's the woman who's being abused. It's kind of hot when she's the one with the whip and lace-up stilettos. You can tell that the bondage video covers are fake, though, because the models don't look like they're really in pain. They just look startled. Don't ask me to describe the ones with animals. Someone should call the ASPCA about those.

Of course we sell magazines, too.
Chicks & Dicks
,
48 Plus
,
Open Wide
,
Cross Dressers Quarterly
,
Pussy Sandwich
,
Hanky Spanky.
They're all plastic-wrapped and electronically coded. If someone slips a copy of
Blowjob
under his jacket and tries to sneak out with it, the scan alarm at the door goes off. That's really a drag because then one of the assistant managers has to stop the guy and it's, like, really embarrassing to hear their lame excuses. Sometimes they go off into this belligerent denial, even when the proof's right there in front of them. You've got to be careful with shoplifters, though, because they might sue.

Phantastic Phantasy is usually as quiet as a library. It's like the reverse of the outside world. Nobody talks but the staff. I always keep the indie rock station cranked up so people won't feel so lonely and obsessive.

After arranging the videos, I check the merchandise. One of my jobs is to keep the display cases clean and to reorder items when we're low. There's a general sex merchandise warehouse I call down in San Francisco when we need stuff. There's this girl named Jamey I talk to down there.

It's not like we're good friends or anything, but I just had to tell her that I was getting married.

“Wow,” Jamey said. “Congratulations. Was it, like, hard to get the fucker to commit?”

Before I could answer, Bruce came in. He owns three Phantasy stores and runs around from one to the other and then to the bank. I never knew when he'd be around so I figured I'd better snag him about the honeymoon. First I wanted to impress him with my professionalism, though, so I whispered to Jamey that I couldn't laugh or talk anymore.

“Cough if your boss just walked in,” she said.

I coughed and flipped through my inventory checklist. “And let's see, I need four dildos.”

“Small, medium, large, or impossible?” Jamey asked.

“That Jeff Stryker one. We sell a lot of those.”