Adam* and I had our rituals. Every night, when he came back to the tour bus in a wave of sweaty, spent testosterone, he’d find me in his bunk, where I’d read to him from Jorge Luis Borges’ Poems of the Night.
“It’s like everything might just float away,” Adam said once during the three weeks we were together, pulling me in closer. We were somewhere between North Carolina and West Virginia, or Illinois and Missouri, driving down miles of divided interstate.
I met Adam when he hired me as an escort. From the beginning, he was different from my other clients: under 40, charming, talented, and good in bed. Our chemistry was palpable and over time, we turned rough sex into a genuine friendship. When I retired from escorting several months after meeting Adam, I kept him. On tour, he was both a client and a friend.
One June night, Adam collapsed on my lap, crying, and told me he wanted to quit his drug habit, but didn’t know how. “You do, too,” he said, tugging at my arm. His problem was cocaine; mine was pills. My heroin addiction, which I had proudly beaten six years earlier, recently resurfaced—sated only by daily doses of Vicodin and muscle relaxers. It grated on me. I felt pulled by Adam’s promise of both escape and newness.
A week later, I was on the road with Adam and his moderately successful southern rock band. The plan was to stay clean together. We settled in happily, traveling, eating Waffle House breakfasts at noon on most days, and sleeping together in a tangle every night. We held and reassured each other that the sharp edges of life would soften without the help of drugs. In time, we thought, sobriety would become easy like our friendship.
It stayed like this for two weeks. It was simple and sweet. Then, in Charlotte, our friendship changed. I noticed I was walking closer to him when we went for coffee, and that his hand lingered on the small of my back. The heat between us deepened.
Outside a truck stop in Georgia, Adam reached for my hand, pulled me close, and said, “I couldn’t do this without you.” That night same night, wemade lovegently in a hotel room. This new closeness was a surprise, but I felt myself sink into it.
I was terrified of falling for Adam, and tried in vain to stop the rush of affection. My feelings for him were real, but he was a client. As fond of me as some clients have been, their ardor is fueled by fantasy; it exists in what I choose to present to them, and what they want to see. A mutually constructed fantasy facilitates intense bursts of intimacy, but it always has its boundaries. I tried to remember this. I tried to remember the limitations surrounding my relationship with Adam: I was his confidante and sex partner; I could never be his girlfriend.
But it was too late.
We spent two weeks in constant proximity to each other, then separated for the July 4th weekend. Adam traveled to Nashville to work on a friend’s album, but when I balked at going to the city, reluctant to leave the reassuring cocoon of familiar faces, his bandmate Mike* asked if I wanted to spend time at his cabin in the country with his family. Green space and acres of woods called to me.
The experience didn’t disappoint. Mike and his wife Catherine* lived 20 miles from anywhere, and in the isolation of the forest, we built a fire and drank shots of bourbon. Catherine made me laugh as she recounted a story about Mike trying to order grits north of the Mason-Dixon while he was high. I got lost in her story and the cool Kentucky nighttime air.
“They’re a handful,” I said when she wound down.
Catherine’s expression faded into a concerned scowl. She told me to be careful of Adam, that she saw how I talked about him, and that he wasn’t someone I should trust.
Catherine’s warning stayed with me when Adam and I saw each other again the next Tuesday in a Louisville parking lot. We hugged and kissed, and he helped me lug my oversized backpack filled with books and worn-out clothes onto the bus. But that night, when I let my hands linger on his broad shoulders, he pulled away.
We spent another week together without talking much, and sleeping next to each other without touching. I didn’t know what happened, but was too afraid to ask.
As planned, I left the tour bus when we reached the West Coast, where the band played a few shows before flying east again. Adam and I were together for almost a month, and although I wanted to, I didn’t cry while getting into a cab bound for the airport. I felt far away from him already. “I’ll call you from the road,” he said as he kissed me goodbye.
After several days back home in California, Adam told me via text that he had met someone in Nashville over the July 4th weekend—“an angel,” he called her. Not a drug addict; not a sex worker. She worked in HR at an insurance firm. She was a good girl. Adam said he couldn’t see me anymore. I pined for him and blamed myself for dropping my defenses, for allowing myself to believe I was ever anything to him but a whore.
Despite knowing better, I ached for Adam to come back. So when he actually did, the elation I felt was overwhelming. Adam called me and said with a thin, pleading voice that he had made a mistake; he wanted me, not her.
The following week, he flew to California to see me. Our first night back together, we had sex like something terrible had been keeping us apart. I smiled at him and kissed him and told him not to leave again.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had,” he said, making it seem like whatever happened in Nashville was a forgivable mistake. Adam was here with me again; that’s all that mattered.
So it was a shock when he pulled out small bags of cocaine and heroin the next day.
My ears buzzed when I saw the bags hit my kitchen table. “Come on,” he begged me. I stared at the drugs. I looked at him and felt the sting of being put in my place, of being seen only as a junkie whore, the one he returned to when he wanted to use and have rough sex.
I took off my clothes, removed his, and after more than a month of sobriety, we snorted the drugs off of each other’s bodies. He touched me, but his hands felt far away.
When I asked Adam to leave the next day, I crossed my arms over my chest, and looked away. After locking the door, I rested my forehead against it, unsure of what to do next. I wanted to sink into the floor and stay there. I wondered if anyone who knew I was a sex worker would ever really think of me as anything but. I wondered if men would continue to dismiss the care and affection I showed so I could play a role in their sexual fantasies.
Over the next few days, I screened Adam’s calls, but also ached for an apology.I was stuck between leaving him, and accepting that he was gone.
Catherine from Kentucky recently told me that Adam was back with his angel in Nashville. I don’t envy her, nor do I care to participate in his Madonna-whore complex. Adam’s absence from my life is confirmation that I don’t need men who can’t envision sex workers as complex romantic partners, that I deserve more.
*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals involved
