CALL OF THE DAY: Dead Soul
It will be super strange to not do phone work for four months (my time off begins this Friday). I am used to being at home, and I like many of my callers. But there are a number of them whom I will not miss in the slightest, and he is one of them. I just came up with a name for him.
Dead Soul.
It’s partly the quality of his voice: monotone, grey, dead. He starts every call with “what are you up to?” Given the kind of call that he wants to do—involving my asshole husband bringing back three or four friends from work to toy with my two daughters and use me like the saggy-assed cumbucket that I am—like, I’m sorry, there are only so many ways I can answer that question. They almost all involve getting drinks for the men and re-entering the living room to find my daughters practicing their blowjob skills.
“What are you up to?” in this case is even more of a non-question than, say, “How are you?” The latter in a casual social environment implies an interest in laying down some good will, even though you both know that you aren’t going to say any more than a couple of words. In the context of paid phone work with a regular client, “What are you up to?” isn’t asking for anything new or real or exciting. I know that Dead Soul is not interested in anything new. He just wants me to push “play” on the same old shit, and that question is my cue. I spin it out as best as I can, he asks me questions that are astonishingly opaque about what he wants, and the whole thing clunks and lurches on for about eight and a half minutes, until he coughs and pauses and says, “Thanks, I’ll have to call you again.”
He doesn’t actually try to call me. He just works his way through the rota; we all have to take his calls. I don’t feel singled out, the way I do with Extreme Top. But I still dread his calls.
Because not only is he a Dead Soul, he is graceless as fuck. To be fair, it is not my clients’ responsibility to do phone sex gracefully. That is my job: to take whatever they bring me, their words and silences and weird jokes and reluctance, and in the middle of all that mess, to tease out their hot button—without actually asking them, “look, is this particular thing working for you?”—and push it until they come.
It’s a delicate dance, and I am a good dancer. Very good. I can dance with anyone, even Dead Soul. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a giant Pain In The Ass, and a LOT of work on my part. Dead Soul is a shit dancer, metaphorically. He is Dead Weight. Our calls involve me lugging him through this humiliation-scene ritual, which is, I don’t know, WHY DO I HAVE TO MANUFACTURE THE TERMS OF MY OWN HUMILIATION.
That is a rhetorical question. I know the answer. Dead Soul, by definition, has no soul and therefore no imagination. I mean, there are SO MANY EXAMPLES of women being sexually humiliated out in the world. How difficult would it be to go out and dip into that shit and bring some back, something more than “What are you up to?” How difficult would that be?
Not difficult for most. Too difficult for Dead Soul.