I always forget how much I love doing Sidewalk Smut
I don’t know if everyone understands just how much I love doing Sidewalk Smut. I forget this myself, during the long months when the weather is just not good enough for this.
And then when I finally sit back down to the typewriter, I remember. Of course the conditions have to be right—right neighbourhood, safe location, reasonable average income per hour, a convenient way to store and transport my equipment—but when they are right, Sidewalk Smut MAKES ME SO HAPPY.
I really like the pitch I have honed over the years. It’s quick and breaks the process down simply, and people either see the radical potential in the process and their jaw drops, or they are a little weirded out for some reason and they excuse themselves and move along.
I enjoy pitching the price to people. I especially like putting all of my fuck-you energy in my voice with assholes who I can tell are going to want to haggle about the price. With those fuckers I pull out something like, “I’m an award-winning playwright and a phone sex operator, so it’s a bargain at twice the price,†and I load it up with calm assurance and a raised eyebrow. I learned long ago not to haggle, and I can tell in advance when someone is going to pull some snide haggling out because bespoke erotic literature just isn’t a priority for them, or maybe they actually think the whole thing is hilarious and they and their mates want to have a go at me. Shutting that down with a look down my nose, accompanied by a clear, firm statement about the value of my services, is a real pleasure.
I am more than a little addicted to the adrenalin of not knowing what I’m going to write until the moment that I start writing. Once the customer puts that money in my hand and walks away, that’s it. The clock is ticking, and oh lord, I hope something good comes into my head! These are harrowing moments for me, especially now that I’ve stopped smoking. I used to meditate on the interview for as long as it took to smoke one cigarette. Now I have to keep checking to make sure that I don’t stay lost in my whirring, perverted little imagination for too long. Gotta get cracking, is constantly the feeling, and that’s terrifying!
I love to high-five women who like butt sex, or who just learned how to squirt. Well, really I like to high-five anyone who tells me something really secret or something awesome they discovered in their own sex life, and then they watch me to see what my reaction is. Don’t worry, my sweet little babies: IT WILL ALWAYS BE A HIGH-FIVE.
I love to talk with customers who maybe don’t normally get their desires validated out in mainstream media: queers, kinksters, old people, fat people, geeks, people with disabilities. I don’t get all this mix every shift, but I do get at least some of them, and the way they bloom into the conversation as it goes along and they realize that I won’t be mocking them in anyway, it’s kind of amazing.
The sneering lads who walk by the Smut Stand, they don’t see what I see. They see a fat, middle-aged, butch lady with glasses talking to other normal-looking people. They look at my sign and think that it’s misleading advertising somehow, that I am not sexy enough, in their estimation, to write about sex. Sexy stuff should be written by sexy people, according to their way of thinking.
These folks don’t understand that the exciting bit is what they’ll never see. The sexy stuff is what happens when I ask a customer what they like, and they pause to think about it, maybe for a long time, because they can see that I am serious about this craft and they want to make sure to give me their best material.
I love what people give me. It is a real honour. That’s what happens out there on the Smut Stand, as much as the sexy stories. It’s amazing.
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