Rendezvous Massage was in Richmond. Richmond is a mostly immigrant community. Vancouver as a whole is more segregated than perhaps any other city in Canada. It boasts of multiculturalism but reeks of racism. It's not simply that the whites who populate Vancouver itself don't want to live with immigrants, it's that no one community has it in mind to tolerate other communities. Richmond is mostly east Asian. Many of the clients at Rendezvous were Chinese. However, the vast majority of clients were south Asian, either Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi. Few spoke English well and even fewer adopted the theory that women are not inferior. Even for the escort industry, the disdain with which they treated women was extreme and vicious.
The second client: Amy made calls to clients when I was hired. She sold me as a very white girl with big breasts. The appeal of large breasts, I could understand. The appeal of whiteness, I could not. South Asian men love the Barbie type. The blonder, the whiter, the more anatomically exaggerated, the better. This client threw money at me to get me onto the table.
I remember him well. East Indian of some variety with a turban, which of course he took off. These men take breaks from religion when it is convenient for them. The turbans stink nearly as much as their bodies. I don't know what the motivation is for not washing, but those men stank like they'd never washed. I have never seen an East Indian client without gagging. The stench of BO is overwhelming. The stench of their unwashed ass is overwhelming. The stench when you peel back the foreskin is.... I don't know. It has the power to make me queasy, make me recoil with dread, at the thought. I think the problem is that those odours preceded violence. When I smell BO now, or when I smell unwashed skin, I get anxious and cagy.
He fucked me with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. With East Indian men there is no asking. They do not indicate what position they'd like you to take, they do not request. They move you and they fucking mean it. You could be on your back, crushed by odour and oily flesh, and then they yank you, twist you around, and jerk your limbs over. There is no concept of respect, there is no awareness of the human body. You are a dog on a table and if they are not sinking their fingers into your vagina with the intensity of a heated curling iron, you are lucky.
I bled on the condom and shouted, enough. In a trance of orgasm, he ignored me, spreading my legs to go deeper. I bled more. By the time he came I was blank.
Blankness was a state I could easily achieve at that point in my life. It started who knows when, probably after becoming cognitively aware of the power of my drunk, angry father. In a way, it helped me continue to escort. In a way, I thought that if life wasn't hard, if you weren't fighting, you weren't gaining anything. My fights had always been about survival, now they were about money. That second client was bad and that was somehow fine with me. When you grow up fighting, you think, it doesn't matter what else is done to me now, I'll be fine, I can do anything, nothing can really hurt me more than what has already happened. Plus, the survival instinct, if fostered from a very young age, is powerful. Escorting was the most pragmatic choice, financially, for a girl at university full time, in a city that costs too much for what you get. I hated Vancouver, hated everything about it. I lived with Auralie at that point. I remember when I turned to her one day in her car and I said, I hate this city. She said, me too. I still hate that city. My mother is now threatening to retire to Vancouver Island. I'm finding it difficult to explain to her exactly why I don't want her to do that.
