$ANDWICH BLUES
Maxime Holliday
Translated by Celeste Ivy
On February 20th, 2021, I got into my car to visit the escort agency closest to my home. I was done with the restaurant business and I needed more time to make music. But the rent of my 4 and a half wasn’t going to pay for itself.
At the escort agency, the people responsible were two guys that vaguely seemed to be tweaking and the facilities were disgusting. I chatted with the girls there, smoking ciggies in the laundry room that doubled as their smoking room. The guys told me I could have started right now to try it if I wanted too but I didn’t have a bra, only panties, to advertise myself to the clients, so I left.
Whores are powerful witches, whether they know it or not.
In the staffroom, I meet girls with larger-than-life characters with whom I feel privileged to establish sorority-like bonds. I found a clan. The salon manager wears a scar across her face, a mark left there by her ex. She looks after her children and takes care of her salon and of “her girls” at the same time. She often cooks us small meals and puts them in the staffroom’s freezer for the cost of 5$. The parlor is well-kept and she gives us a cut of the room rental that clients pay. At the end of our shift we just have to tip the receptionist. With the additional money of the extras, when I work during the day, I make an average of 500$ per 7-hour shift.
When the salon had to close because of the pandemic and curfew, Nancy2, a colleague about thirty years my senior took me under her wing to go work at the hotel with her. She had experience of these things. You have to know which hotel to go to so as not to be reported by the staff, which app to download to get an anonymous phone number and which sites to post your ads on. The thing is: it’s also safer and less boring to work in pairs.3 In the end, I only went for two days and didn’t really like it. I found it too difficult to manage answering the calls and texts by myself, considering that a third of them came from guys who just wanted to waste our time and/or verbally assault us. In the parlors, the institutional facade and the receptionists spare us that.
All in all when the salon reopened a few weeks later, Nancy was no longer working there. I heard from colleagues that she had a fight with everyone and turned real paranoid. She thought I was an undercover cop because I hadn’t stayed to work with her at the hotel.
I kinda understood why though. Compared to her, I was fucking straight edge. I never use on tha job, I’m pretty much always chilling in my corner, working on my laptop and I obviously don’t come from the same social background as Nancy. The girls laughed their heads off that she’d think that because I’d have been a pretty fucking weird cop and very dedicated, let’s say. We had a good laugh about it, but I was a bit sour for real.
I live alone and I pay my rent, internet, hydro, gas, insurance, my car, my food, and my cat’s food. I produce my own music. I exercise. I have time to invest in each of my priorities. I’m now in a healthy, dynamic romantic relationship with a wonderful person. I’m dating a rare pearl and on my hands are tattooed oysters. In the hollow of my palms, like a precious treasure, I often trace their name and those of our lovers.
Sometimes, I’m afraid that customers will be disgusted by my leg or armpit hair -which I don’t shave- and turn aggressive. But I think often they don’t even see it. And I also think that sometimes they find it beautiful. In any case, I wear my hair actively, a soft accessory to the revolution of our bodies that starts in the bedroom.
September 2021; following my move, I started to work in a new parlor in Montreal. The owner is completely fucked up. The customer traffic is fine. Here we have to do the laundry ourselves and pay a 10$ fee per client to rent our room. Big girl from a small town switched games.
“ Working is whoring
Whoring is working ”
I wrote a letter to my mother to tell her about my work. We’ve always been super close and we had an excellent relationship. I thought it would bring us closer. That she would be proud to have a daughter who cared enough about the relationship to get over the fear and social stigma and share her secret. That she’d find it intense but would ask questions and trust me regardless. But her reaction was the worst-case scenario I could have imagined. She panicked. She asked me to stop right away by trying to send me cash. In fact, she was so unsettled that I suspect she or one of her close friends once had a traumatic experience related to sex work. Despite my patience and attempts to rectify the situation, she stopped hearing and seeing me. All that’s left is judgment and anguish. After a couple of months, she’s still as blocked as ever and I regret opening up because it’s excruciatingly painful to carry all the shame and hurt of my own mother. To feel that her support can be conditional. A difficult impact. I am weakened.
Once, I went with a friend to work two days in an extra club 4 in the middle of nowhere. The men over there had mustaches and smelled of a little milk or manure. They were farmers, not very rich, and they would dress up as nicely as they could to see the visiting girls from Montreal. Raymond5 knew I would be there that week and brought me earrings as a gift but never wanted us to go to the room to buy my services. It seemed like he was just really happy that a new person came all the way there and he wanted to feel like a provider for a beautiful girl. I left there burnt out with 2000$ and the bittersweet feeling of having had privileged access to the heart of a small, isolated, rural community, touching in a way as tragic as it was pathetic.
On November 26, 2021, I take the metro to a station I don’t know, to go do a shift at a downtown stripclub. I think I’m pretty brave, and for good reason. It’s the first time in my life going inside a stripclub and it’s to work. As usual in the industry, I learned how to do it right here and there, by watching others and with a few tips from a young girl super proud to show me what she knew. The boss was so aggressive and demeaning that when I left, at 3 am, I knew I’d never go back.
More than a year later, I met a girl who told me she once worked at this bar. And one night she was working and unable to move because she’d had drugs put in her drink, this same boss had ordered another dancer to take her out in the alley with all her stuff. The colleague in question refused and decided to take her to the hospital herself in her car. The boss fired both of them on the spot. The bar is Wanda’s, so be careful babes.
Since moving to Montreal, I’ve been involved in an autonomous militant committee run by and for sex workers. I find there solidarity, anger, love and intelligence. Courage, dignity and benevolence.
The sexual energy inside me is an immutable fire that requires only a few resources.
A fire that roars and heals.
I educate and curse.
I cast spells of all kinds.
I am a good witch and a bad witch.
Boy, make me a $andwich.
After learning from an activist book that, to avoid getting accused of “brothel-keeping”, a landlord could decide to evict his tenant if he suspected her of being a sex worker, I felt super unsafe in my own home for a full week. I felt inferior and fragile. Imagining the loss of my home, my balcony on which I have my morning coffee, the little birds in the vine. Having to start all over again, alone and dispossessed. The worst possible scenario.
I’m gonna arrive pretty tight at the protest. I stopped to print my speech at the stationary shop. I’m gonna lead a protest for the first time in my life. We’re gonna march to show that we exist and, above all, to shout that we want fucking rights. That we look out for one another. We’ll march and we’ll dance and we’ll scream, for us and especially for those whose lives are too fucked up to do all that.
These days when I go dancing it’s in the suburbs. In Montreal, I find the bars too posh and it disgusts me. I have no willingness to play the luxury game and anyway, I don’t have the casting it seems. I applied to two spots but the bosses aren’t calling me back. Finally, I went straight to Cleo even though dances cost 10$6 cause I can come & go whenever I want. I kinda see diversity in the staff so I suppose (I wish) that the management is less racist and fatphobic than elsewhere.
My best songs
for stripping :
M.I.A- Bad Girls
Ciara- Body Party
Troy Boy- Do you?
Rihanna- Sex with me
Beyoncé- Naughty girl
Future- Mask Off
Nathy Peluso- Delito
I left the parlor I’d been working at since my move because the boss was too toxic and it was starting to take too much out of me. Yannick Chicouane, if you’re reading this, know that all your masseuses, past and present, hate you and are plotting to ruin you. You’re a manipulative narcissistic pervert of the worst kind. A shitty pimp, a dangerous abuser. I curse you, and all the men who exploit women’s sexual power to make yourselves rich. Fucking loser. Fucking coward. I’m listening to Lingua Ignota and lighting candles of doom in your direction. If I catch you, I’ll eat you.
« I’m paid to lie to you
but I often
tell the truth. »
Jiz Lee
January 2023. I decided to go to school to become a sexologist. The first step was to take basic college courses that I hadn’t done because I studied arts. I found a new parlor to work in. It was the only spot that was hiring when I was looking at this time of year. It’s handjobs only. No fellatio, no penetration; no clients, no cash. I go mostly to study and see the receptionist I adore. If I’m lucky, I do one or two clients and walk out with 200$ cash.
One night at the bar, a client ran off to avoid paying my colleague to whom he owed money. I tried to stop him by getting between him and the door so he slammed into me and I pulled a ligament in my knee. There was a bouncer. There were police. Bouncers and cops are useless. In this industry, you have no choice but to take the law into your own hands.
August 2023. I have the ruined knees of a summer in high heels, but plenty of cash saved in a little wooden box to start my university studies off on the right foot. I went to a cottage by myself for 4 days to recharge before school. I found it hard to stop working because sex work is like part of my identity now. I wear the golden hoops Raymond gave me almost every day. I even let my mother wear them the other day when we took family pictures because she thought they were gorgeous.
When I got out of the lake earlier, I noticed that my watch had taken on water. You know, the beautiful watch I bought three years ago when I first started. The light still works but the numbers have completely disappeared from the screen. I wonder if I should take this as a sign that I need to take a break. Just enough time to find myself a new watch that will adorn my body to the height of all it has learned in the last three years.
Music sheet: Every Day Blues, Miroslav Loncar 1. For those who don’t know, the difference between a massage parlor and an escort agency is that in a parlor, the girls don’t move around. Also, when you work in an agency, the base price includes fellatio (and in the majority of agencies, in Montreal at least, they don’t even hire you if you don’t agree to perform your fellatios without a condom) and penetration. In massage parlors, the only thing that’s automatically included in the service the client pays for at the reception desk is a massage and manual masturbation. Everything else is extra, at the girl’s discretion. 
2. Not her real name. Not her work name either. A name invented for the zine.
3. Just sayin’ for those who think that the current legal model concerning prostitution in force in Canada (the Nordic model; also in force in Sweden, Norway and Ireland) is good for sex workers because the sale of sexual services is not criminalized, don’t get it twisted. All the other related things, which are criminalized, mean that working in a team, whether independently with one or multiple colleagues or in parlors, can be considered as pimping and brothel-keeping by the police. And that, you can be charged, arrested, and prosecuted for it.
4. A stripclub where the girls can do extras, ranging from a handy in the cabins to full service in a motel room adjacent to the bar.
5. Not his real name.
6. You should know that usually, it’s 20$. It can be worth going all the way to Rimouski to take off your panties.