In this journey back from the edge of oblivion, I have had to accept that during my time off, I have forgotten a few things that kept the ball rolling. I’ve had to strip back & slow down & reassess my strategies somewhat, and there have been a few false starts.
I had many different routines & strategies and copes designed to keep the Lani show on the road, a travelling carnival that relied on momentum & crossed fingers & the good will & humour & generosity of people who found my chaos charming and entertaining & a welcome relief from the mundane & sensible.
Unfortunately, if your life is held together with gaffa tape & glitter & good vibes, it might not hold up in stormy weather, and if other people see your theatre & whimsy as tacky & unwholesome, and you yourself as undeserving of a safe & comfortable life, they might just trip you up on purpose out of spite & bile.
The sex work community as a whole is incredibly varied, although minorities of every kind are over represented – it’s one of the only industries that is inclusive to certain sections of society, like the disabled population, the neurodiverse population, the queer population, migrant populations… the things that society vilifies & shames & excludes us for often make us seem mysterious & exotic & forbidden in a sexual context.
People who don’t want to sit with us still want to swap spit with us, they just don’t want their parents or friends to think less of them, and they think visibly associating with us is social suicide. And honestly, that’s fine. If you’re happy to pay my rates but you don’t want your judgey inner circle to yuck your yum or change their opinion of you, that’s your business & really none of mine.
Having said that, I’m not here to take anyone’s disrespect, just their money & maybe their virginity if they aren’t needing it any more. And I mean ANYONES disrespect. If I wanted to be habitually disrespected I could charge more as a submissive kink provider. I’m just not into it personally.
Which brings us to Tuggerah, to a little working class brothel called Aces. It’s tucked in behind a hot rod shop, nothing fancy. I don’t always need fancy, because fancy doesn’t necessarily mean safe & comfortable & a good fun happy time.
I called up a few weeks ago, and established that Aces is sex worker owned & run, all female/ all neurodivergent. Good so far.
My goal was to check my other pants pocket for some motivation to actually answer my phone & do my admin. I love every aspect of my job except for timewasters who think I have nothing better to do than answer shitty one word messages like “hey” and “available”. Sorry not sorry, time wasters and no shows/fake bookings are both like the Saharan wind, they dry me up on the inside & make me not want to answer my phone.
Since they have a person to do the admin for you in brothels, I thought why not go back to basics for a minute until I remember why I ditched brothels in the first place. As it turns out, I only needed a couple of little prompts to remember why I decided it would be better to go it alone.
My first shift was interesting – the carpark flooded, the street the brothel was on flooded, I had to move my car halfway through the day to avoid losing it altogether. Not their fault though, that’s just shitty weather & a low lying street with drainage issues. Blame the local council & the gods for that one.
The brand-new receptionist who started the same day I did told me to park in the business next door when it’s raining heavily. For the record, not her fault, she was passing on to me what she had been told & she was genuinely lovely and trying to help. Note that for later…
I think the second shift was the one we did by candlelight because there was no power & no backup generators. That’s definitely on the owner – power outages happen, and that’s why there’s meant to be an adequate “oh shit” fund when you’re running a business. Especially if you need electricity to heat your water, and they do. Cold showers is no one’s idea of a horny way to start the day.
At this point I’m still giving everyone the benefit of the doubt because that’s what I’m like – I assume people are a bit ditzy but are doing their best long before I assume they’re deliberately doing a poor job. Mostly because I’m projecting my own beliefs onto other people, but also a little bit because I’d rather believe people don’t know what they’re doing but that they could learn more & do better in the future than that they’re automatically malicious or dishonest. It’s less depressing.
On another rainy day, I parked where the receptionist had told me to park. A tiny angry ginger leprechaun of a man immediately drove up on his forklift & started telling me off & saying he would tow my car. I told him I’d move it in a couple of minutes (as soon as I had taken my big box of carnality into the brothel) and got the ok from him to take my things in.
The manager of Aces is V. She had been easy to get along with on the other days I’d met her, despite obviously going through some health issues at the moment. On this particular day, she was apparently not in the mood for speaking to other humans or for problems, and she tore absolute strips off of me for parking where the receptionist had told me to park.
She actually threatened to fire me for passing on the information about the tiny angry carrot top next door, and the fact that the new recep told me it was a safer place to park (not her fault, and I wasn’t trying to get her in trouble, just communicating the facts to the manager of the business so she could let the recep know it’s not a safe place to park).
I was shocked by her instant aggression and anger & pretty unimpressed with the blatant & unnecessary disrespect, and had to turn my back on her to compose myself & figure out how I wanted to respond. TO HER CREDIT she tapped my shoulder 5 minutes later, apologised profusely & said she was in a lot of pain & shouldn’t have taken it out on me.
We all have bad days, and I know people who have the ability to apologise quickly and well are rare & valuable. She apologised about another 16 times that day. After that day, she didn’t speak to me much. I figured she was embarrassed and gave her space.
But that brings us to the subject of tolerating disrespect, and the fact that I just don’t. I have one life, as far as I know, and it’s not going to be much more than a century long & that’s if I’m very lucky. Not nearly enough time to put up with rude, irresponsible, emotionally disregulated people who cannot behave with dignity or respect. It’s not my job to teach them their manners.
It’s my job to keep myself safe, meet my own needs, support my communities & make the world I’m stuck on a place I want to live in. Also to be an orgasmic good time gal, if someone’s paying me.
It’s not my job to put up with toxic behaviour from toxic people. It is my job to broadcast information that keeps my community safer, including information like which workplaces are run like a dogs breakfast if the dog is eating a lot of crack to kickstart its day.
So, let’s just state that shift fees are illegal. What’s a shift fee? A way to keep exploiting people if they are late for the shift they rostered on for. Sub contractors work for themselves, they aren’t employees, because employees still get paid when there aren’t any paying clients booking them. So you can’t legally fire them for being late – you aren’t paying them to sit around being pretty, after all.
So what dodgy brothel owners do to get around that & to force people to sit around being pretty for the whole shift is they charge a fine to workers who arrive or leave late, or who don’t show up. If that sounds wrong, that’s because there’s nothing legal or ethical about it at all. It’s a financial nipple cripple to keep people from exercising their legal right to manage their own time.
Imagine my surprise when on Saturday afternoon Boss finally wakes up – she’s been sleeping in the girls room with the heater blasting all day, so I’ve been sitting out with the receptionist to avoid heatstroke. She tells the recep who started the same day I did, who is brand new to the industry, to charge the new girl Kitty a shift fee for not showing up for Saturday day shift.
Fun fact, Kitty worked on Thursday, it was her very first day on the job. I know, because I taught her how to do a genital check before her first booking & gave her a little pep talk. Sex work is skilled work, and we teach each other skills like this on the job because Whore University isn’t a thing.
She was rostered on for Friday day shift, like me. Unlike me, she doesn’t have a car or a safe place to live & an encyclopaedic knowledge of whoring, so she’s way more vulnerable to predatory operators who don’t practice safe or ethical business methods when they’re unsupervised.
Kitty wasn’t rostered on for Saturday at all. She would have had to catch public transport on Friday to get into the brothel, only to find the place empty & silent. That’s already really poor form as far as I’m concerned. That poor girl.
To then tell the new receptionist to do crime & charge her a shift fee for not coming back the next day is fucking pathetic. I’m not one to be silent & let people abuse people more vulnerable than them, so I turned to Boss.
“Speaking of shift fees, can I get one free pass if I have to cancel? I was here before opening yesterday, I left a couple of text messages & tried to call, there was no answer.”
“Nah, fuck off, I messaged you.”
“Nope, I didn’t get a text message. It’s a two hour round trip, and I was here on time.”
“I fuckin messaged you.”
“If you messaged me, where’s the message? I can’t find it.” I open my messages & face my phone screen towards her, because we both know she’s lying. She doesn’t try to prove the message exists.
“I don’t fuckin give a shit, if you don’t show up you get fined”
“Ah ok. We don’t do each other favours then”. At this point, I start walking over to my things to start packing so I can leave, for good.
“What are you, a fuckin toddler who expects things to be fair?” She’s sneering, giving me the fish hook grin.
“No, I’m a person with self respect who expects to be treated with respect.”
“Get the fuck out!!! Get out! Fucking LEAVE!! You’re fired, fuck off, get out”
Boss storms out, the poor receptionist is surprised to say the least by what just happened & she looks a bit teary, she is worried about me but I’m more worried about her, because I’m not reliant on the income from Aces, I could always just answer my phone & do my own admin instead lol.
In fact, that’s an excellent idea, might just do that. Might even hire a receptionist again, what do you think? Better than getting financially abused while having to work in the dark with no hot water lol.