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It’s in the cards: the administrivia of phone sex

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I reached 800 callers this week. That means that 800 different, individual men have called me for help in getting off, over the last three years and nine months. I realize that’s not many, as far as the industry goes, but it’s about as many as can comfortably fit in my card box.
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I started out with a box that my checks came in, partly because that’s what I had on hand, and partly because I think I may have still had some wishful thinking that I wouldn’t be doing the work for long. When I reached capacity on the check box and was just hitting my stride, that’s when I went ahead and invested in a proper card file box, and the little alphabetized dividers, too. By now the dividers are getting a little frayed, but otherwise, very secretarial, huh?

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My format is this: On the front, upper left, their unique ID number. Next to that, their first name and initial. Below that, my stats, if they differ from my usual: actual age, eye and hair color, 42DDD (six inches smaller than my real band size), 5’9″ (one inch shorter than my actual height, does 5’10” sound intimidatingly taller than 5’9″, or am I just making shit up?). But if they want me to be 58 years old, or be a petite brunette, I write that down. Underneath that, what they want, with addenda, if it changes over time. Their state. Their birthday, if they tell it to me. Anything that might help me get a read on them and what they like to hear.

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The back of R.’s first card, before I knew how much was coming…

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The back of R.’s most recent card. He calls a lot.

Most of the callers only have one card each, but my regulars have two cards or more, paper-clipped together as time goes on. You can see the tops of the clips in the picture. The title of Most Cards is currently shared between two regulars, each of whom has six cards in their stack. A., one of my whiniest mommyfuckers, has racked up 216 calls, beginning May 16, 2009, while R, a cheerful butt-sniffer, has 215 calls, starting April 24, 2009.  That’s an average of about five calls per month.

Back then, I didn’t know that my regulars could be so, well, regular. It is obvious, from the way I started the first card that I had no concept of what this work would entail: at the beginning, my writing is huge and spacious, taking up lots of room. All of the cards I started in the first couple of months were probably like that. But there on those two callers’ cards, by the time I’d taken their calls for a few weeks, I started shrinking my handwriting down, save space, save paper, and now the formatting is all the same: two columns per side, top to bottom, 12 or 13 entries per column.

Doesn’t matter how tightly I scribble now, I’m running out of room. 800 cards take up a lot of room. At a certain point, probably in the next six months, I will need to buy another box, or at least a bigger one, and when I think about that purchase point, I have to force myself not to apply any significance or symbolism or measure of my intentions to keep going, to keep building my caller files. Or, you know, maybe, to not.

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OOOH, PICTURES! Mostly, though, I just use my words, as you will see if you poke around in this blog… Like it? Well, show your love NOW by pitching in some funds to get me and my solo play Phone Whore to the 2013 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Read all about it by clicking on the Indiegogo button below.

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