So… there’s this little play that I’m doing this summer and fall. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Phone Whore. Really. It’s little. It’s just got me in it. I have a director and a tech director and a set builder, but on stage it’s just me in my pajamas. The set pieces can all fit in my 1991 Toyota Corolla, plus two suitcases, a duffle bag, an office-in-a-box, and a pantry-in-a-box.

(Oooh, an office-in-a-box? Sounds snazzy! What is it? Ummm… office and merch supplies thrown in a box. Same thing for pantry-in-a-box: rice, granola, sofrito, tuna fish, peanuts, and a good chef’s knife. In a box. As simple as dick in a box, but easier to explain to customs.)

ANYWAY.

A lot of my life is wrapped up in getting this show on the road, getting it booked into places, getting homestay, making a fantastic poster, and, well, packing my life in a box for five months and putting it on wheels. That in itself is fairly traumatic. But add on top of it, I’m basically committing to saying the same vulnerable, sexy, scary things (one audience member at the Boston opening weekend called it “intense”) for 50 or 60 shows over the next five months.

How can I tell that I’m scared? I find myself second-guessing my decisions, even with the positive feedback, even with the plans in place, even with the Montreal postcards done and sent to print, the first of thousands of cards I’ll be handing out to people this year with my face on them (layered over a fierce pegging narrative, a very readable wall of smut in 20% grayscale).

I keep bugging my director. It’s not too much? I ask. NO, she says, shut up.

I look at posts like this, about how coming out and sharing one’s story as a sex worker is a privilege, and I think, god, what I’m doing is so fucking self-centered and privileged.

And then I feel the weight of the responsibility, because I know that people are going to take me and my play as some kind of representation of the whole, and it’s not, it really isn’t, but that doesn’t matter, because in the larger scheme of things, that’s just the way it’s going to be interpreted. And then I try to sort out unnecessary guilt from necessary good intent, and that’s a bitch, let me tell you.

And then I think, what if people really like it and come out to it? I’m going to have to file taxes in Canada next year, jeezus, I still owe $7000 in back taxes here in my own goddamn country! Or what if people start stalking me because of it? And then I start to get an anxiety attack.

And then inevitably the phone rings. (Warm pork chops or an anxiety attack, the calls always interrupt something good.) (And actually another call came in just now, a 15-minute hand-job. Five bucks for me, yay!) But you know what? As busy as I am, making lists or trying to reach kinksters in Calgary or nailing down a venue in DC–even while on tour, because I’m sticking as close to my required shifts as possible–I need the calls to keep coming in.

For starters I need to keep making money. I don’t know how the tour is going to do. But beyond that, doing the calls calms me right the fuck down. It reminds me where the hell this all comes from, this play, my comedy stuff, the tour. A fifteen-minute titty fuck grounds me in the straightforward (which is not always to say simple) act of getting a stranger off. Audiences and reviewers and the public and, hell, community standards can be prickly little bastards, fickle and treacherous. But my callers only want one thing, and by god, I know beyond doubt that I am good at giving it.

Thanks, guys!

No Comments | In: Cameryn 101, Phone Whore on the road | tags: I'm an Artiste Dammit, Phone Sex, Phone Whore 2010 Tour, Social Issues and Damp Tissues. | #

There is a lot more silence in my work than I would have thought, had I been thinking at all about phone sex before I started doing it. And there are enough different kinds of silence that I would be fully justified in developing separate words for each…

• That silence between calls when I don’t have any of my other work to do, so I’m waiting for the ring and it’s not there. It’s echoingly empty, slightly resentful, a vacuum that goes on for-fucking-EVER.
• The silence you get on the street at 2:30 in the morning, when that other silence gets too much and I need to relieve the pressure on my ears. Outside, the silence is calm and dark and velvety, and I relax into it.
• The slightly staticky silence after the dispatcher calls me and I’m waiting for the caller’s phone to ring. That’s a busy silence, where I’m taking the two sentences the dispatcher gave me about what the guy likes and brewing up ways to get there. (Because no matter how many times I take a fart call, I just CAN’T figure out how to be smooth about it.)

Anyway, the silence that I’ve been thinking about most these days is more transient than these, harder to pin down because it blows by in my calls and I don’t even realize it’s there until afterwards, when I replay the conversations in my head and occasionally wonder, “How did I know to go there when the guy hardly talked at all?” It’s those sporadic silences, blinking open and closed like eddies in a rushing river of narrative, that I am learning to love.

There is where I catch my breath, and rather than immediately plunging back into the story, I sit still, even for a fraction of a second, and wait. And listen. I am silent, and the caller thinks he is being silent, too. But I can hear the creak of a chair, the slight whispering squelch of a well-lotioned hand, an involuntary intake of breath. Sometimes I even imagine that I can hear his brain humming along at high speed, like the subliminal whirr of a roomful of very expensive computers.

The quiet is not just for me. It is the space I make for my caller to sigh, or moan, or say yes, or add three more teenage girls into the scene, each with slightly different nipple sizes. Lacking visual cues, I need verbal ones, and there must be space for the caller to give them. I used to talk over my callers a lot, when I first started. I’m slowly learning to find the natural rhythm of the action, and when each phrase within our call comes to its natural conclusion, I pause. I wait. I am silent.

And then, because I only have 15 minutes, or 10, or 7, I take a deep breath and dive back in.

(I just realized that silent and listen are anagrams. That is exactly perfect.)

No Comments | In: Uncategorized | tags: I'm an Artiste Dammit, Phone Sex. | #