I.

There, obviously, is something wrong with him. It‘s not quite clear what. Obviously there is something wrong with him, yes, but what is not quite transparent. As if his behavior was a silhouette of something else. Something that, like a liquid reflection in water, shows a clear outline but remains blurred within the consciousness of all that look at him, not understanding that what they see in him is themselves. Out of this one of the most cliché of question emerges, a cliché that has been bothering his colleagues for years. „Are you gay?“ Cem asks him, as if asking that question was a dare. But the only answer that he receives is laughter. And this laughter is insanity to him. You hear it often, here, on the conveyor belt, this loud, obnoxious laughter. It’s the reason why people say he’s crazy. But the question asked was both quite serious and, in spite of the reaction it obtained, asked in all sincerity. So what is so funny about this question? The answer is: everything. 

The conveyor belt we are standing in front of is made of cold, relentless steel that only knows one velocity: it‘s own. You have to adapt your speed to that of the line, if you want to survive, or go under in a flood of packages, if you refuse to do so. Remember: an hour consists of 100 units, percentages to which you have to add your own 100 percent or drown. What the hell are you doing here? Stand up, stand straight, be a man. Yes, be a man. Johnny is laughing. Cem is giving him a bitter glance, as if to say ‘Why the hell are you reacting this way?’ while the factory vomits the next series of cardboard boxes onto the belt. Management gives a damn about how jammed up the line is. This is how they generate their profits, after all. This is how they produce capital. And nobody gives a damn about how you feel about it. The rest of the team doesn’t give a damn, because they want to get done in time. Time is money, gentlemen. The faster you work, the less we must pay. But the freer you are to do as you may. So, as you can see, it doesn‘t make a difference how much income we have. See? The packages are falling from the overcrowded belt, indifferent to life. Don’t worry. We can clean up this mess when the number of packages decreases, when the flux of our income makes a pause. – “I‘m serious,” Cem says to Johnny, “Do you want to go to the Club B with me?” – He asks this question in all sincerity, as if it were unthinkable to say ‘No.’

– “Look, Club B has beautiful girls! You like beautiful girls, don‘t you? Look! You give them money and they dance for you! Look! You give them money and they do a striptease! Don‘t you like a good striptease? Look! You give them money and they give you a lap dance and you give them money and they take off their clothes. Honest to God! Look, I‘m not making this up! Look!“ – “Cem, can you check this postal code for me, please?” – “Don‘t you like women, Johnny? What are you, gay? Is that the reason you don‘t like women? Aren’t you a man?“  – Johnny is laughing again. But Cem just won‘t stop babbling. He‘s like a machine that is constantly producing, though it still seems quite unclear what, until Johnny gives in one day, because he can‘t convince this guy to shut up. – “They also have a brothel next door,” says Cem, “in case you want to fuck.”–

#

The entrance smells like vinegar. The entrance smells like cleaner. A man staggering out the door squeezes a ‘club dollar’ into Johnny‘s hand. He doesn‘t need it anymore. Security and the man at the register give Johnny and Cem a warning glance. The beer is on the house. Inside, men are whistling at a performer from the shadows of the stage. Look at her body. Her body is the light, adaptation to the rhythm, to the music, gyrating its hips up and down the pole like a cold, steel machine. Cem steals the club dollar out of Johnny’s hands, throws himself onto the stage, and places the dollar between his lips. Floundering like a fish on dry sand, he holds the dollar up with his mouth like a flag in the wind, a declaration of expansive plastic. And like a fish, he almost chokes on it. The dancer looks down on him with a smile of spite, then does her job, going down on all fours, leaning over, and taking the dollar between her lips, slowly pulling it out of his mouth with her teeth. The crowd cheers, as she holds it up to the audience, kneeling over the customer staring up at her crotch. The floor wreaks of vinegar, vinegar and stale beer.

Across from Cem: a man strips his wallet. He wants to see his money dancing on the table. You are not allowed to touch what you are allowed to see, but it surely touches you to see it. That’s what this spectacle is about. Nobody comes into this club to look into a woman’s face. It‘s sometimes fun to play with these men that aren’t allowed to touch you. You look into their faces, but they don‘t look at you. Our body is the only anonymity that we still possess in society. The people in this joint aren‘t interested in anything else than that. They want to possess and feel something other than themselves. – The dancer at the table is taking off her clothes. Nobody in this club is here to look into her eyes and see her smile. Cem, for instance, is staring between her legs, as if it were totally unbelievable, the fact that there are genitalia between her legs. Nobody comes into this club to look a woman in the eye. And that‘s comforting, because with everything that they want from you in this seedy club, you really don‘t want anything much from them in return.

The dancer smiles. Cem is pulling another club dollar out of his pocket, while she lets the rest of her clothing fall to the ground playfully: one hand coy in front of her mouth, the other shy in front of her sex. As if. Men don‘t have a body anymore. They have money. They are allowed to watch the world that they have created, but not to touch it. Reality isn’t intimacy. Intimacy is a fantasy. – There is something wrong with Johnny. He takes a hard look at the strippers face. He is as cold as ice, untouched, while all the other men around him are cheering wildly. They have come to spend and will do so with a wallet full of cash. Johnny feels disgusted by himself and lonely. What does pleasure actually mean? He leaves Cem behind at the table. Passing the margins you can see a dancer, clothed again, counting her money. Go ahead. Look into my face: it doesn’t matter how much money you give me. You will never own me. I will never be your property. Johnny goes past her and out the entrance. To his left, he sees a stairway. Johnny is lonely. He gives the stairs a long, hard glance. What he yearns for is romance. Prostitution is the most boring job in the world.

II.

Prostitution is the most boring job in the world. What you mostly do is wait. Wait for someone to come by, wait for that guy that already came by to finally come, one last time. It’s annoying when things last longer than they must. But that is better than being hung out to dry. The whole matter is not as frequent as you think, on some days we have fewer customers than on others. Welcome to the lottery! On some days we get our days worth, on some days not a damn thing happens. On some days we don’t get our days worth, but on the weekends something is always bound to happen! Don’t forget your 160 Euro rent per day. In a normal establishment 50 percent of every fuck goes to you, the rest to management.  But then, there really are nights when absolutely nothing is happening. How the hell do you pay for those? Welcome to the lottery. Come in, buy a ticket! You, too, have a chance at winning society’s grand prize!

Now come on, don’t be so cynical. We all play lottery, even the police. Raids, after all, are one of the few instruments that the police possess to go against human trafficking. The number of raids, however, since prostitution has been legalized in Germany, has risen; sometimes independent of the rates of trafficking itself. The free market, after all, is governed by supply and demand, and we all have to register ourselves, even those who are here illegally and afraid of being deported. Yes, we are supposed to officially crucify ourselves in our curriculum vitae so that the government can play the good Samaritan for the alt right and right wing. They are, after all, offering us ways out of prostitution. Not so much though, if you are an underpaid nurse. They don’t offer ways out of that.

The last time she visited the unemployment office they offered her a job at a fast food restaurant for the same shitty pay and the same amount of overtime, scrubbing the floor with vinegar, scrubbing the floor with cleaner. Rags for those that have riches. That’s the reason big companies offer those jobs up to unemployment offices. You’re an I.T. professional, huh? Have you ever considered starting a career as a janitor? Nadja would rather do sex work than do that because she can set her boundaries here. It doesn’t make a difference to her, if she is inserting a catheter into a man’s penis or riding it off. It does not really turn her on. Well maybe the catheter does. Placing it is somewhat fun. But what is interested in is not men, it’s money. Like a waitress in a restaurant or a clerk in a store, she simply wants to pay her bills. Aside from that men don’t interest her, which, as she finds, makes her job easier. It’s an interesting way for her to get know people, she notices. However, this club in particular is a shit hole she looks forward to leaving. She has a mind of her own after all and knows how to use it. There is no way in hell she is going to work for an employer by which she feels underpaid. There is no way in hell she is going to let others get the best with her. This fellow coming around the corner, however, looks just like her type of guy, a bit shy, friendly, big build but overall he seems harmless, so she makes him an offer he cannot refuse.

Now look at Johnny. Johnny is in a room with Nadja. He gives her 160 Euro for the hour, takes his clothes off, puts them on the chair. Nadja is 22 years old. But what draws him to her is not her age or her looks, but her scent. Whatever it is she smells like, it has the scent of strawberries. Something about that scent associates with his need for warmth. She takes her clothes off. He feels naked, vulnerable. She is beautiful. Not that beauty you know from advertisements, another kind of beauty. His eyes wander down a scar, her belly is not quite tight, but he likes her body just the way it is, with no claim to who she is. He looks at her and knows that he is lonely, yet does not understand what he actually wants. That’s when she starts to touch him. A moment that takes time. She puts a condom on him and rubs some lube between her legs, in order to mechanically let her body gyrate up and down, synchronizing her movements with an ‘Oh’ that has nothing to do with how she actually feels. Is that what men want from women? – Johnny tries to be tender to her. His lips want to kiss her neck. – “No kisses,” she says sharply. His mouth retreats. In the mirror next to the bed he observes the scene from outside his body, the reflection of a fat white, maggot, copulating between the slender thighs of a beautiful woman. His stomach is churning. He wants to stop, but this is what he payed for: to take a good look in the mirror. So, he keeps on going in spite of all the disgust piling up inside him. – “Concentrate,” he hears her tell him, while he’s having sex with her, “Concentrate.” – Could he finally come?, she asks him. He looks her in the eye and realizes her desire to finally make due with her shift. – “Johnny, I’m so proud of you,” he can hear Cem say in the inside of his mind, a notion that revolts him, “You have finally shown me who you really are.”–

             Breathing slowly, he asks Nadja, if everything is okay. She tells him not to worry. He‘s a nice guy. Johnny asks himself if nice means good or if there are no good customers, just nice ones and ones that aren‘t nice at all. Nadja explains to him that she has seen worse. One time there was this guy who almost overstayed his visit, because he was unable to come. Had he taken less cocaine that might not have been the case. He might have almost turned violent, hit her, if security hadn‘t come. That ‘s his own doing. Her face showed an expression of satisfaction, when she told him about how he was dragged off. You have things like that more often on the weekends, men that believe that they can get away with anything. The beer, after all, is on the house. But she also notes that she has worked in places which are literally nicer than this place, which is consistently raided by the police. During the last raid they took away her mobile. She can’t call home. The owner of the joint, she explains, was called before court for tax evasion. The brothel, like society, is a factory: sex workers make the money, but the owners are the ones who, as a rule, get rich. That‘s why prostitution was legalized in Germany.

In Summary: Of the 160 Euros Johnny paid, half go to the brothel. 160 is about what Nadja has to make for the house per day, excluding what she needs to make for a living. Two half-hour blowjobs or a one-hour fuck. Overall, Nadja made 80 Euros this hour, 60 of those Euros being what Johnny makes per day, on a five hour shift. Tax payments excluded.

#

– “I didn‘t know you were that desperate.” – Cem is surprised, when he hears those words aimed towards him. He turns around and realizes that the person saying them is a woman he once flirted with in a bar. She and her friends are just coming from the disco. It is as if he were naked, vulnerable, and he doesn’t like that feeling, having just come out of the club, where he was firmly convinced of having… what exactly? Looking back through the glass doors of the club, he sees the cleaning lady at the entrance, wringing out her rag, sludge dropping into clear water. Cem snivels. He can smell it through the doors. The floor wreaks of stale beer, stale beer and vinegar.

#

It‘s cold when Johnny comes back home that morning, cold and dark. His apartment, however, still is empty. That hasn’t changed. He sits down on his bed, still smelling that familiar scent, that scent of strawberries, strawberries and the red light district. Sweeping over his bed, his hand reminds him that he now is its sole occupant. The person that once used to sleep next to him is gone. He no longer has a boyfriend. It annoys him that he can’t get rid of that scent. He misses him and, stripping off his clothes, heads for the shower, with the hope of washing the scent of this night off from his body. And so he tries to scrub his memories away inch by inch. Watch it all flush down the drain following streams of warm water mixed with soap. For one moment it all seems possible. He dries himself and gets into bed only to wake up to the fact that her scent is still in the air. Johnny turns on the light, disturbed by the fact that her scent is still present. It is not quite transparent what is disturbing him, but something is clearly wrong. Getting back up from his bed, he goes back into the bathroom and confronts the mirror. Standing in front of his reflection, he looks at himself with a stern gaze, laughing inexplicably as tears flow out of his eyes now that he has survived his trial.

About the Author

Daniel Schulz (he/him) is a U.S.-German writer known for Kathy Acker in Seattle (Misfit Lit 2020) andpublications in journals such as Gender Forum, Fragmented Voices, Versification, Cacti Fur, The Wild Word, Flora Fiction, Steel Jackdaw, The Milton Review, anthologies such as Heart/h (Fragmented Voices 2021), Get Rid of Meaning (Walther König Verlag 2022), and his chapbooks Welfare State and No Change to Abuse (Back Room Poetry 2023). IG: @danielschulzpoet