Prologue.
Everyone needs a friend who is a good liar. Itâs never me. And donât get excited, no, I donât have a moral compass. I donât want to be honest, but Iâm a terrible liar. If you said âI think these jeans make me look too chunkyâ I would say: âyeah.â
This kind of thing is why I only had one friend growing up. She was a badass and didnât care about her hair. I wouldnât ask her if I look fat or whatever, sheâd just roll her eyes.
Itâs hard, since the only reason Iâm blunt is because of how little it matters if someone looks chunky. People just mostly look beautiful to me. Yet instead of just saying that I say something unintentionally soul crushing.
Eventually, of course, I made another friend. Happens to the worst of us. She is a *great* liar. I got to experience these novel concepts called affirmation and support. YEARS of observing her taught me to say: âI donât think these jeans would look good on anyoneâ or âThis store has really messed up sizing, nothing ever fits me eitherâ, and the crowd favourite: âYou should try this in a smaller sizeâ. Julz is either a great liar or blind. Regardless of what offensive metaphors I shout at myself he always responds, without blinking, with âyou look greatâ, but not like a âyou look greatâ, but a âyou look greatâ, like he really does think that I look great.
And I never accept this as a compliment. Itâs too generic. Hereâs a story of a real compliment: cute enough to be a hooker.
Act 1.
Around April 2015 I was at home, time was late and I was struggling to finish a stupid essay for stupid university. After submitting our bachelorâs dissertation we had three more essays to do and those three essays took more willpower than the entire 3 years of my course. I was at home rewriting the same sentence for the fiftieth time, when I got a message.
âLove SEX? Want to make some money? You could be making money doing the very thing you love, just text back with YES and weâll get back to you.â
And sure, most people would just leave it and not respond, or block the number. But not me at 22. To me this was a one way ticket out of essay hell. So I thought, wonder how much text recruited sex workers make these days in Southampton, and texted back âHOW MUCHâ. I used all caps to emphasise the seriousness of my intent. And I shit you not, the little bastard said, ÂŁ20.
And maybe I should have left it there, but I was insulted. TWENTY POUNDS AN HOUR??! What if the dude is weak sauce and is done in 3 minutes, which, letâs face it⊠anyway. Twenty pounds (at most) to have sex with someone who canât get laid in a student town for the price of a double rum and coke? Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel. Thatâs like running a personal sex charity.
Sure, maybe that would have been a good place to leave it. But though I donât have a moral compass, I do have a strong sense of justice. And you know at that point I felt my blood boil for the sisterhood and everything hit me all at once. Oppression, patriarchy, this son of a branch that thinks this is what my time and dignity are worth, systemic discrimination of actual sex workers who are just trying to get by in this life, the glass ceiling, the pay gap, it was all too much.
I also really wasnât feeling my uni work.
So I announced that I think this rate is unacceptable and that I would have him know that Iâm a soon to be Russel group university graduate and thereâs no better sex worker than an educated sex worker, so surely I should be paid more than someone without a degree.
He said, their clients didnât care.
I realised he wasnât getting the joke and so I said, holy fuck, you must be out of your goddamn mind, no, I am not going to be having sex for money.
But on the other side of rejecting my poor pimp was still the mind numbingly boring Environmental Sociology essay. So I decided to help him out. I texted him again and said that by the by, your scouting technique is terrible, you will never get people to agree to this over text. It sounds like youâre trying to scam people into buying insurance. Nobody would entrust their hoohah to a mailchimp. That sort of thing.
The pimp took the bait and asked what I would have done differently. He also asked to please send my response in an email since he really shouldnât be using this phone for texting.
The email was liamcorndog@hotmail.com.
I wrote a short essay about Recruitment and Retention of Sex Workers in Southampton, which resulted in a very brief back and forth via email. He realised I wasnât job hunting quite yet, and I realised this person I was talking to was probably going to be the only âclientâ of this operation. He also slipped up and mentioned that he did âweeksâ of research and only approached me and a couple of other people. This made me pause.
âWait⊠do you know who I am?â No response.
Act 2.
I was with Julz at a wedding in Edinburgh and got a text from a number my phone didnât know, asking me who I was.
I said, you first. So we tried to figure out where we met. He said his name was Manny (*name changed for privacy), he was an engineering student, same year as me. He also mentioned he was Muslim and some other thing, I forget now what it was. I said, I donât know anyone named Manny, but maybe you know my friend So and So, whoâs also an engineering student. He said the name sounds familiar. I said oh well, we probably met at a party in first year, that entire time period is a blur to me.
(I'm not being weird by the way, he described himself as âManny, im whatever years old, engineering, Muslim, etc.â I didnât choose to refer to him as Manny the Muslim, you know? He mentioned it to see if it would ring a bell. Whatever. Like I have to apologise to you people. By people I mean readers, not Muslims.)
That was that.
Act 3.
Fast forward another 3-4 months. I worked at a call centre through the summer for a small local telecoms business, and got a marketing job there after graduating. I continued working closely with the call centre guys. One of them was called Manny, same age as me, Muslim, my university, you see where this is going.
Iâm not considerate enough to have remembered the random text conversation I had several months ago. I also didnât have these separate events laid out, taken outside of their previous context, placed next to each other like Iâm doing for you right now. So I never made the connection between Manny the colleague and the other Manny that I only spoke to once, briefly, over text.
I had a colleague, Ethan. Probably the only sane person in that weird office. One day Ethan and I were finishing up our tasks for the day and making sure all the call centre computers were off. Ethan called me over and said: Hey Ana, look. Someoneâs saved their facebook details on this computer. It did the thing facebook does where the email and password are filled in, all you have to do is press âlog inâ.
I walked over and my brain went - - - ?
Right there, black on white, with the password next to it was my good friend liamcorndog@hotmail.com. My mind went racing. Did I do this? Did someone find out about my weird late night conversations about scouting sex workers and filled in the email field? Why would anyone do that? No, right?
But then⊠So I said, press it, press it.
Well, you already know. My only thought was, holy shit, this guy has a girl problem. The only messages on that account were outgoing. âHey!â âHey beautifulâ âHowâs it going lovely?â âYouâre looking sexy todayâ
Poor Manny.
I was shook. I felt dizzy. And I told Ethan about the conversation I had several months ago, and he said, quite appropriately, What the Fuck? And I said, I KNOW! He also said I was weird for having that conversation in the first place, which, fair, but like, whatever.
To this day itâs hard to believe I was working next to this person for months. I wish I wasnât so self absorbed and paid attention when we first met. Was he surprised when I walked into the room for the first time? He had to have known who I was! Was he worried Iâd figure it out? He should have been. And how did he get my number? I think I had it up on my facebook for a while, is that it? God, Iâm happy facebook is dying. What a curse on the world.
Epilogue.
Unfortunately I havenât seen him since. Universe has impeccable timing and he never came back to the office after that. Itâs not quite the end of Manny, though. He got automatically added to my Snapchat account when I downloaded it about four years ago. Once when Zoe was little he responded to my story: Do you have a kid now? And I said, yes.
And I was SO temptedâŠ
And then I got a text from him, maybe two years ago? It was a mass-text, letting his contacts know that heâs now a qualified mortgage accountant or something like that and should we need any help with that, heâs around.
I might regret asking this, but do you guys think I should tell him? Imagine, after all these years, I could finally find out: did he pick up on the no moral compass thing, or did he just think I was cute? Not like it matters either way, just need to know if I can add âcute enough to be a hookerâ to my twitter bio.
Anyway, who wouldnât want to be confronted about something embarrassing like this many years later? I just hope that heâs a better accountant than he is a pimp.