The Fur Trade

I’m not terribly sure when it happened, but it seems to me that somewhere along the way my vagina became a unit of value. Suddenly it has its own black book value, which is sitting somewhere around a ten year-old family sedan, but in another five years will become a write-off if totaled. I have even started to wonder about what the ad would look like in The Auto Trader.

One refurbished, gently used set of women’s genitals. In trade there will be an expectation of a roof over one’s head, a meal in the evenings and the yearly remembrance of the day you answered this advertisement.

 My gender has made me into something to be provided for, and perhaps that was my first mistake in deciding, or rather realizing, that I would never have much of a career. When you flit from job to job, working as little as possible so that you will have time to do the things you love, men start to look at you like a sort of project that needs to be funded. As if by having sex with them on a regular basis and keeping the house in toilet paper you have become the most illegitimate Kickstarter campaign to ever exist.

 I find it really strange when men all of a sudden decide to offer to provide for me, “You’ll never want for anything baby,” they say, as if after a few dates they could possibly know what it is I want for myself, when I don’t even know.  Did my life really look so bad that you had to come in and offer me what you think will be a better one? I’ve been taking care of myself for a long time. Is this your way of saying that I’ve been doing a terrible job of it?

 And maybe I have been, but that’s my business. Because I have this terrible and very permanent thing called pride. I like the bombed-out apartment buildings that I live in with their bad 1980’s carpet in the hallways. I like that I know all of the homeless guys in my neighborhood by name so that when I yell at them for dumpster diving at two in the morning and waking me up it seems more authoritative. No one is going to stop rummaging for that pop bottle if all they hear is, “Hey you, knock it off.” As opposed to, “Hey Carl it’s two and I’m trying to sleep.” I do not know their names because we have parking lot parties every afternoon and we share whiskey out of the same paper bag. Although I like that I have the option to do such things if I want to. This is my squalid parade of a life, and I’d really like it if you’d stop raining on it.

 I understand that you think I need saving, that you’re doing a good thing, and it is kind of you to offer. But understand me here; there was nothing wrong with my life before you rolled in. I don’t need to go and hide out in suburbia where I’ll have to buy a telescope just so I can get a soupcon of the excitement that I could get just looking out my kitchen window. I don’t want to live in your mausoleum. Your house reminds me of a funeral parlor. I can’t decide whether to paint, burn it down or sell it while you’re at work one afternoon because I suddenly have a lot of time on my hands.

 If you move me in there will begin to have visions of myself donning the 1980’s blazer of my mother’s (because why would I ever buy business clothes?) and setting up an open house. Baking cookies and talking to whoever trounces through about the garage being just large enough to gas yourself in, the lawn just overgrown enough that it would look better paved, and the basement ridiculously large enough that why wouldn’t you consider building a bowling alley in it? Because while you were actually doing me a favor I’d look at it like you were taking away my right to vote.

 I have shitty jobs because I choose to have shitty jobs, and because at this point I feel it’s too late to try for anything else. At the end of a shift I have stories to tell about sixty year old women exposing themselves and a man who threw up in his own shoe. When are these things ever going to happen at your place of work? And yes, sometimes I have terrible shifts and I hate what I do afterwards. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t need to leave the house every day, throw on an apron and ask some asshole in a dark bar, who wants to take me away from it all, what the hell he wants to drink.