A HUMBLELESS BEGINNING - New York City, December 2012
New York City is fucking cold in the winter. Nobody likes to tell you that before you move there. Springtime in New York is intoxicating, addictive. That’s what people mention when they talk about how incredible NYC is. They forget to add a section for how miserable the place is after the sun, like half the population of the city, heads south to Florida for the winter.
Welp, too late for me now. I had already moved here No refunds.
People move to New York for a boiler place list of acceptable reasons. They want to act. They want to sing. They want to try their hand at wall street. Break into the diamond business, or the gold business. Or the diamond studded gold business.
I moved here to sell my body for money.
This is a good early exit point for anyone who has a problem with that. I promise you, the life of a modern sex worker and the dirty little details and side effects of it only get…more…from here. Don’t let the door hit you n your way out.
I could buttress my justification of selling my body with arguments like “Everyone sells their body for money. You think coal workers and linemen aren’t trading miles on their meat sack for financial remuneration?” I could do that. It’s a true statement. But labor equity had nothing to do with my decision to start fucking and being fucked for financial gain. I just liked sex. A lot.
And, I was good at it.
If you don’t have a game plan, that’s a dangerous combination. You end up just giving it away to whatever shiny thing crosses your path. That’s what my freshman and sophomore years in college had turned into. Then one day I looked around at all of my classmates who were desperate to marry, or get pregnant, or were already pregnant. Crafting a life hinging on directly or indirectly tethering themselves to a man.
No, I don’t hate men. For better or worse, I am hopelessly enchanted by the divine masculine. I love men. But there has always been something I loved quite a bit more.
My freedom.
So at 19, I dropped out of college. Left suburban Maryland and moved to Manhattan. To pursue the life of having the guys that girls swipe right on pay me $1000 an hour to do what I was just going to do for free otherwise.
I had been here 4 and a half months. Honestly, the plan was working pretty well. The FiDi loves a young, pretty face. And I was happy to charge above market for my genetic lottery ticket. I’m going to go into detail later about my perfect little Midtown Mistress lifestyle. How magnificent, meticulous, and manicured it all was.
But I’m impatient right now. It happens at times. So I’m going to jump right in to the catalyst event which ultimately derailed, entirely, the life I thought I wanted so bad. It wasn’t a onece a century storm, or a terrorist attack. Truthfully, It was such an innocuous looking thing. Just the subject line of an email.
“SUBJ: Would you consider accepting bitcoin for you services?”
My life. Forever changed irrevocably in that moment. And I had no idea.