On Feet and Legs
♠
“Ok, so lemme tell you a little about what we’re looking for here”, he said out of the side of his mouth. Mike was a big man, middle-aged, with a pock marked face and broad shoulders. The left side of his face was slack, causing him to talk out of the right side of his mouth and squint one eye. The overall effect was that of a pirate, despite his thick
“Ok, they gonna wanna touch your feet and your loigs. Your feet and your loigs. You understand? They’re not gonna touch you somewhere private, just your feet and your loigs. Below the knee. Almost always below the knee.” One of the strangest parts of his speech was his seeming inability to stop saying “feet and legs” over and over again, as though applicants for a foot fetish position would be unclear on exactly what part of their anatomy was being called for. This verbal twitch made more sense when he revealed his own interest in the business.
“Cause you know, you know, I, uh, I . . . I gotta foot fetish, you know? It’s not some weird thing, that’s how I got into this business. And you know, they’re the nicest guys ya evah met. I mean, I’m a nice guy. It’s just about the feet and the loigs. It’s about pretty young girls. Young girls. Men like to touch nice young girls. Their feet and their loigs.” He talked so quickly that it was nearly impossible to take in all of what he was saying. I was so involved in trying to sift through his words for some sort of meaning that when he asked me a question, I completely misunderstood.
“Have you evah done anything . . . adult?”
“Well, I mean, I have my own apartment and everything.” He looked aghast. I realized my mistake. Not adult as in, I have a checking account. Adult as in adult. I’ve always been told I interview well. Interviews while applying for college, office jobs, scholarships, and grants had always gone positively and had given me a certain amount of confidence. And now, here I was, completely blowing an interview to be a sex worker.
I had not, in fact, done anything adult by either standard. In addition to having successfully avoided the porn industry, I did not have a checking account at that point in my life. There was no need, as I had no money to put in it. I was broke and in debt, eating rice for dinner every night, and spending my days desperately searching for jobs. When I saw Mike’s add innocently posted on Craigslist, it somehow didn’t strike me as that farfetched. I had a friend who had put herself through college doing something similar, and she had always raved about what a great way it was to make money. “It’s not even really sexual,” I remember her telling me. “I mean, it is for them, but they’re freaks.” So sitting there in front of the computer screen, I felt like it was time to suck it up and take responsibility for my life. I needed money, I needed it fast, and I was just going to have to go the extra mile to get it. That seemed like the mature thing to do, pulling myself up by my bootstraps and all that. But that was sitting in front of a computer screen, and now, sitting in front of Mike, the whole ordeal seemed impossibly silly, the antithesis of maturity.
“And you know, they’re gonna, they’re gonna, you know, play wit themselves. They’re gonna touch your feet and your loigs and play wit themselves, you understand? Masturbate. But not on ya. Not really on ya, this is about good clean fun”.
This was the moment when I realized how out of my league I was. Not because the thought of masturbation was so abhorrent to me, but because I knew that he had clarified what “to play with one’s self” meant because he was worried I didn’t understand. And then, before I had time to fully take this fact in, he asked me to stand up and turn around in a circle. But not like that, he didn’t say “stand up and turn around in a circle,” he asked me to stand up and then made a circular motion with two fingers that is the universal sign for twirl and let me see you. I stood up awkwardly, turned in a circle and sat back down. I’ve never felt like such an idiot in my life. Mike and I momentarily stared at each other in vague disbelief. I think we both had the sneaking suspicion we were being mocked, and I think we were both right.
“Ok, lemme tell ya. You’re a good-looking girl. A good-looking young girl. But ya know, to be honest, and I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, I don’t know if you have that look, you know? That adult look. Its got nothing to do with looks. It’s about, uh, you know, uh, like you wanna . . . it’s like a very specific look. You wanna do this, maybe we can work something out, but I’m thinkin’, maybe you’d like to be like a secretary or something? Good money in that. You’re a good-lookin girl, after all.”
And there it was. After a stream of rejections from job after job, after realizing there was no way I was going to make my rent for the month, after borrowing money from everyone I knew, I was getting rejected from a job where men masturbated while holding my feet. I felt like I should be embarrassed, as though this was just one more in an endless list of debasements I had experienced since moving to
But looking at Mike, who did actually seem like a nice guy, foot fetish and all, it was hard to feel too bad about it. I’ve been a waitress for over five years and sometimes in restaurants we talk about feeling like we’re getting paid to look a certain way, act a certain way, and let men stare at us. And now a total stranger had sat me down and told me that whatever else I may be, I wasn’t cut out to be adult. I’ve been told worse. The next week I got another restaurant job, and with my first paycheck, I set up a checking account.
—CEP