Hobo Stripper

Davka has the van I wish I’d been living in for the last two years instead of this Astro. It’s an Econoline 150 with the 4.9. Practically the same gas mileage I get with way more space. She got it from a guy who got it from a guy who lived in it when he was working up on the slope. Guy #1 did the conversion and was apparently some kind of electrical wizard, and guy #2 “cleaned up the wiring.”

Look how awesome it is:

It’s so spacious. You could do yoga. Just not the standing up kind.

Check out the stove/kitchenette:

She made the windows all pretty already:

The electrical system is really simple, a wire running from the house battery to the starter battery that you physically connect and disconnect (I think she’ll fix that up with a solenoid so she doesn’t have to worry about it). It’s also really complex, hidden wires going to lights and a heater. Some of the lights it’s not really clear whether they’re running on the house battery or the starter battery. They have a sort of a circuit switch that turns them off/on, and I think that might be because they’re pulling from the starter battery.

Then the heater. The guy swore to me that he’d run it all night long on one fully charged deep cycle battery. I’m skeptical, but I’m also not heater smart. Does anyone recognise this heater? The switch in the middle is home made and selects for running on the battery or on 110v if you’re plugged in.

If anyone out there recognises this van and knows the original owner, please ask him to send a wiring diagram.

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…until the first time I went to Stephanie McMillans page, Minimum Security. These are anti-civ comics at their finest, or maybe at their only. Everything she writes (draws?) is so true, awesomely sarcastic, and funny at the same time. The first time I clicked, she had great stuff about polar bears and Alaska and salmon. Now it’s about blowing up credit lenders and rubbing dog belly.

Stephanie just wrote a book of comics with Derrick Jensen. Click on her left side bar to get it directly from her (buying local on the web: writers do best if you buy direct from them).

“Aw,” She says. “Poor baby girl, you’ve worked yourself half to death.”

“Mmhmm,” I nod sleepily, I have worked every day since I got to Alaska. It’s noon and I have to get up, even though I just got here and fell asleep in the driveway a few hours ago. Healer heard my alarm going off and yelled through her open bedroom window and my open van window for me to get up, and now I’m laying in her bed and she is smoothing the hair back from my face. I could stay here forever.

“What do you have to do today so early?” she asks.

She is foggy when I look up through my sleep haze, and I don’t want to explain it. She will worry and she will judge and she will make bad predictions that will worm their way into my reality. Her face crinkles with concern as she waits to hear what kind of injustice would rouse me from bed after 3 hours of sleep and 12 straight nights of working.

“Oh,” I say, and pry my eyes open. “I don’t want to tell you.”

She smiles. “It’s okay, you don’t have to.”

My eyes slide closed again and I let myself fall to sleepier levels of consciousness.

The hotel is nicer than I’d thought. A kitchenette, a big closet, a living room, and a bedroom. It’s the cheapest room available in the whole town. The first guy is Jim, and he pays for two hours of cock and ball torture. I’m an intense dominatrix, maybe too intense. I don’t have all the equipment anymore, but I’ve got some handy dildos, a strap on harness, and a hand full of rubber bands.

In his emails Jim said he was experienced in kink play, and now he tells me about it. Domme’s on business trips, sad attempts to get escorts to kick him in the balls when he’s here. He wants it to hurt. He’s all clean cut and professional looking, with a hint of body builder and a hint of gay. His voice is proud when he says that he’s never had enough pain before, never even approached too much.

“I’ll take that as a challenge,” I tell him.

An hour later he is spread eagle on the bed, my garters looped over his hands and around the bed posts. The Iris is buzzing away in his ass, and I’ve got his cock and balls all tied up with rubber bands. Snap, snap, snap. I’ve slid the rubber bands over his cock in a line and I snap my way down to his balls and back up again. Snapsnap. I pull one big rubber band out away from his cock on both sides and let go of it. He is in pain. He is in ecstasy. He loves it.

Before he leaves he tells me about his career and his girlfriend. She won’t top at all, but maybe next time he’ll bring her and I can top them together, he says. I don’t tell him I can’t top women, just can’t do it. I hug him goodbye, take Bro for a walk to visit the homeless guy who throws the ball for him, and lay down for a quick nap.

The next guy just wants to be fucked in the ass. I think he might be more touchy feely than the first guy, who didn’t do anything at all without being told, and I’m not sure how I’ll feel about it if he is. I have all the dildos washed and displayed, new condoms and prettied up lube out before he arrives. He is short, asian, and shy. A hockey player, he says, and he lays on the bed demurely.

“Pick one,” I present him with my dildo collection.

“Oh,” he blushes, “which ever one you want to use on me.”

I prop his ass up on a couple pillows and finger it. It’s huge, so I start with my biggest one. It’s black and curved, and slips easily into the ring of my new corset harness, which I’m trying for the first time. I put a condom on it and lube it up before teasing it around the edges of his asshole until he sucks it in.

I sit up and play with my nipples, watching him writhe beneath me as I pump my cock into him. This must be what it feels like to be a man. In a way it feels powerful, and in a way I don’t get it. He loves it, though, and I keep him on the edge of orgasm for an hour in all the positions I can think of.

The base of the dildo rests on my clit, and it feels great when I pump into him, but not quite as great as the harness I used in San Francisco a few weeks ago. This harness has a secret ingredient, though, a magic bullet. I pulled it out of the little pouch and turned it on, a nice strong buzz. He stared up at me and I slipped it into the little pocket on the harness, right between my clit and the dildo. Right away the super strong vibrations are pushing me closer to orgasm with every thrust.

I grab his hands and put them on my breasts, and his eyes get huge. Gawdess these guys are so much better behaved than strip club customers. The lube is just within reach, and I drizzle it all over his cock, which has been hard since he arrived.

“I want you to come with me,” I tell him, and that’s all it takes.

Afterwards I do Her laundry.

“You know you can tell me anything,” she says.

“I know. But I don’t want to make you worry and I don’t want you thinking bad thoughts and making them come true.”

“I won’t. Just tell me.”

“Okay. I’ve been fucking guys up the ass for money all day.”

“Aw, honey, is that all? C’mere.” She wraps me up in a big hug. “You know I’ll love you no matter what.”

It’s like a fairy tale.

After the laundry I ask if she wants to go shopping. I might not be rich enough to make doctors care, but I can get her some groceries. She has an extra vic today, so she thinks she can handle a quick trip to the store. Just as I get her almost in the seat she remembers her FBI hat. Can’t leave home without it, you know. It keeps the satanists away, so I run back in and get it for her.

At the store she gets in an argument with the guy behind the gun counter about the bones in women’s wrists and what gun I should get. He says he’s retired CIA, and she believes him but still tells him he’s wrong. It’s a moot point anyway, I can’t buy a gun from a store.

The same guy as last time follows us all around the store, staring at us. I give him the finger every time he comes up behind me, thinking I don’t notice.

“You know how it is,” She says. “They see people like us and they just get a hard on for us to try taking something.”

Yeah, I don’t suppose they see me and think I’m an honest girl, fresh from a hard days work of fucking guys up the ass, who would never steal. I don’t suppose they see her baggy sweater and FBI hat and think she’s concerned about protecting them from the satanists. There’s a spot on the wall, here, she told me once. She had a vision and saw where the satanists had held a séance and invited evil spirits into the WalMart.

He passes by us again, leans over her scowling.

“Hey,” I tell him, “would you back off? You’re in our space.” I say it all slow and serious, the way a cop taught me once when a guy was hitting on us in a gas station.

“Oh,” he says smiling, “am I?”

“Yes. You are.” I step forward and he steps back and She calls me over to reach the vaseline on the top shelf.

Right under his nose I pay the peanut butter price for almond butter, just to prove I can.

I’d played with strap ons before, but was never really impressed until a lovely experience I had in San Francisco recently. My friends strap on harness was made specially for her, and our anatomy is similar enough that the base of the dildo rested exactly on my clit, pushing firmly against it every time I pushed into her.

I thought I’d never find something like that for myself without paying a bunch of money to have it custom made, but I was wrong. The corset harness is the same, and it vibrates! And it’s pretty! It’s purple and ribbed and comes down in a perfect point in the center of my ass. It comes with three different sized rings for different dildos, and a bullet vibe that slips into a pocket right between your clit and the dildo.

As you’ll see (read) tomorrow, I’ve been putting it to good use.

“I think that’s the number one most valuable life skill, running,” I say as I flop down on her bed.

She’s a stripper from the rain forest who came to Alaska to get away from an abusive man, but now she wants to go back. I’m proud of her for running at all. So many people don’t. I don’t know what makes some people willing to pack up and run in an instant when their life is threatened, and other people completely frozen, refusing to take the smallest step towards safety, but I am fascinated to it.

I think I’m predisposed to running. I’ve been doing it since I was little. Even before I can remember my mom tells me about two year old me taking off with a team of two dogs, her tracking us through the winter darkness. The kind of running where you go back doesn’t count though, except maybe as practice. My real running, the kind where I didn’t go back, didn’t start until I was fifteen and realized, really realized, that I would probably die if I went back. So I didn’t go back, and I didn’t call, and I didn’t listen. I think it goes against our evolution, to cut ourselves off from someone we love. Could you do it? Could you miss him every day and never call? After the first time that piece of evolution was broken in me and I had no problem running away from an abusive sugar momma in Texas, a controlling religion in Oregon, a wanna be father figure in California who chased me around with a knife. It became easy, leaving and not looking back.

“Well I ran like my life depended on it,” she says, her eyes full of irony. Soon what is broken in me will be broken in her, and it is good. Her life depends on it.

She’s rubbing cocoa oil into her skin, all shiny blue black and tight, like a blueberry. I just got out of her shower, and I’m rubbing coconut oil into mine. It is beautiful like a sacred dancer ritual and she invites me to meditate with her before I give her a ride to work.

In the dressing room the women behind me talk about how strippers are light workers, and how their psychics told them they weren’t from here. They are aliens from Angelic Realms, and this comforts them. The dirt comforts me, my feet in the dirt, and I try to close myself to their comfort of dissociation. Strippers are dirt workers, I tell myself, blending purple and silver above my eyes. Dirt and sexuality.

The first men I sit with are baseball officiates, and they sneer at me, “you just want our money, don’t you.”

I’m a dirt worker, and I understand sometimes people are afraid to get their feet dirty, to trust earth without shoes. “Actually I saw you guys sitting over here all by yourselves and I came over to keep you company. Where are you from?”

Then their feet are in the dirt, and they like it. Soon one of them peels off a hundred dollar bill and tells me to dance for the other.

“I’ve had a bad day,” he whispers as I climb into his lap, and then he tells me about his son and his wife back home who called today to say she wouldn’t be there when he got back. I keep moving, brushing up against him, until he is fully in his body, which is much like putting your feet in the dirt. Ever since I’ve been using the Iris the muscles in my cunt are all happy and strong so that when I tighten them to move my pelvis they twinge and convulse in happy little ways. He buys more dances, and more, and then some for his friend, and then I have to go on stage.

The stage is half full of Seattle men, and Seattle men just never work for me. They bite. I’m serious. But I lose myself in the music and my skin, and crawl around the stage collecting dollars. When I get to the last man, the man with Davka, he gestures to her and tells me that she’s been explaining sex positive to him. “Yes,” she grins, “Tara was my first sex radical.” I laugh, take the dollar, keep moving.

540_Kendall__O2007carcasswolfbear.wmv

(Ahem. Ladies and Gentlemen who may be at work at, say, a Catholic school or something: there follow some pictures of breasts, among other things. You may not want to scroll down until you go home or otherwise free yourself of such strict wage slavery.)

Look, it’s like bunk beds:

Dinner for two:

Cross reference here, and bonus points if you remember this stream from last year.

Mists Of The Arctic

Last night I got tipped in Salmon and Halibut. It’s quickly warming in the cooler, it’s raining outside, and I’m canning and eating it as fast as I can.

I didn’t write anything yesterday. Or today. I meant to write something after work, but now I just want to go to sleep. Here’s something I wrote a while ago, kind of un refined.

“Hey! It’s her! It’s fucking her!”

I leaned out the window long enough to see the flash of a gun and dived towards the floor as Desire yelled at me.

“Get DOWN Tara-bear!”

I nodded mutely from the floor.

“Don’t ever look back when someone has a clear shot at you, Tara-bara. Do you want to die? Oh my god, I would die if you died in my car.”

“I know.” I pressed my knees into the floor and made each breath a breath towards Desire losing them, because of course she would. We were super heroine’s, Lillith incarnate, and we always came out alive.

“Hang on,” she said. “I’m gonna flip a bitch.”

We spun around, tires shrieking, and started flying. The engine was vibrating against my kidney and I felt like it was all connected, the muscles I was watching in Desire’s leg, the engine, my right kidney, my eyes, Desire’s leg. She was wearing the same purple skirt and no underwear that she’d been wearing, outside of work, since I met her. I have a picture of her somewhere, now. She’s hugging my dog who’s dead now, squatting in that skirt, her legs spread and her perfectly manicured pussy showing.

When she hit the brakes I thought the engine was going to jump into the car with us. I pulled my gun out from under the seat cushion, but she was just pulling off onto a side street, parallel parking, cutting the lights. We waited, waited, and waited. Nothing happened.

Finally she drove over a few blocks with the lights off and got back on the main road. “Do you still feel like going to the beach?” she asked.

“Not really. We forgot towels again.” I climbed up on the seat. Every day, we got dressed and drove together the hour to the strip clubs. Most nights we spent too much time putting our make up on, sitting in the bathroom picking our faces, and didn’t get to work on time to work. We were always so close, but we couldn’t work if we were even ten minutes late. Usually we’d just go to the beach, if we didn’t get to work. We sucked at finding actual beaches, though, so we’d just drive around in fancy rich neighborhoods until we found water. Then we’d tiptoe through back yards in the dark and wade out into the ocean naked. We always meant to bring towels, but since we always intended to actually work, we never did.

“Yeah, me neither. Let’s go to Kenny’s.”

“I dunno.” Let’s go to Kenny’s meant lets go get some more speed rocks and sit in Kenny’s bedroom where he lives at his mom’s house and smoke a little. For some reason this would make Desire pass out and not wake up for hours while I sat feeling all uncomfortable and jittery and paranoid with Kenny staring at my boobs. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept, but I felt fine.

I was shocked by how

fine

I always

felt.

“Oh come on. That was stressful, we deserve it.”

“Okay, but if you fall asleep I’m driving us to my house.”

“Okay.”

By the time we got to my house it was almost morning, so I carried Desire inside and tucked her into my weird little cot bed and left her there while I took the dogs to the park. That was my weird little double life, mornings hanging out with career women on their way to work at the dog park, wondering if I’d washed off the glitter make up from the night before.

When we got home from the dog park Desire had woken up and scrubbed my house, and was in the middle of making this huge meal. She loved to cook, and her food was so beautiful. We set it out all pretty with a tablecloth and matching plates, but we weren’t hungry. I was worried that I was losing too much weight, so I weighed myself and decided I had to eat ten bites. “Desire,” I said, “you should eat ten bites too. We do this every day and we never eat.” Then we fed the reset to the dogs, proud that we had done our parts for our selves with those ten bites.

That’s how it was, almost every day.

She found out she was pregnant a week before I left. I thought about staying, spending my life as Aunt Tara-bear. We would cook big, beautiful meals, and we could feed them to the kid instead of the dogs. I took her to the doctor, to the free clinic for poor girls who don’t know any better then getting pregnant, even though we’d both banked $500 the night before.

It was very dry and clinical in the doctors office. The nurse asked questions from a clip board. Last period? Check. Pregnancy test? Check. Drug use?

“Yes.”

The nurse didn’t miss a beat. “What drug?”

“Methamphetamine.”

“Last use?”

“Um, yesterday.” That was a lie. We were both trying to wean ourselves off it, but sleeping created a definite need for smoking in order to get out of bed in the morning.

“Frequency?”

“Like once a day.”

The nurse never looked up from her form. She didn’t say it was wrong, and neither did the doctor when he came. I wondered why nobody did anything. Desire and I, we did things. We knew right and wrong, we saw it all the time, we read it just the week before in the bloody, cut up tattoo of a dead stripper. We were born with avenging spirits, too: the knowledge of good and evil came with the knowledge of who should live and who should die. But neither of us did anything about this baby in Desire’s uterus, growing on the poisonous drugs we gave ourselves.

The day before I left her boyfriend had a day pass from jail. We took him to someone’s basement somewhere so he could do more of the shady things that he was in jail for already, and then we went out for breakfast. Desire said she was pregnant, and he called her a liar. All the way home he yelled and she cried in my new van that I would leave in. He took his car back, and he yelled some more. I put my dogs out in the yard, and I sat on my couch and watched. When he pushed her I pulled my gun out and told him to leave, pointed my gun right at this seven foot tall guy who spent all his days working out. He left, I was that powerful. She cried all night long and I sang songs about Alaska to the baby.

I gave Desire my Dodge-ness monster that I’d lived in when I came to LA and showed her how to reconnect the shift linkage with wire when it came apart. She spent an entire day shampooing the shag carpet that was everywhere in it, even the ceiling, and then I left.

I called her, nine months later. She had a new baby girl who was just perfect, and a perfect boyfriend. She could tell their love was intense because when they got in a fight they put each other in the emergency room. I was working the crisis line at a womens shelter. I didn’t know what to say.

I called again, in another year, and she had another baby. Same boyfriend. She said she’d tested positive for drugs because of some cold medicine she took and the state might take her kids. She talked too fast, I couldn’t understand her anymore.

A year later. Three kids. She was potty training the oldest, yelling at her to wipe her cookie, scrub

that

filth.

So, dear readers, I am asking for your advice, networking, and questions, and I’m going to throw it all into one post.

1. Do you read a magazine/website/anthology/whatever where my writing would fit? I want some quick credits to put in a book proposal, but slow responding markets that give me mad writer cred are cool too. Let me know where you want to see my writing.

2. Sex website people… I’ve been doing these vibrator reviews. They’re pretty fun. Soon they’re going to be appearing on another site (or two), but I’d like to get them on even more. Hobo Stripper Sex Toy Reviews. Like Dan Savage, my vibe reviews are so awesome I want them to be on every sex website out there. Free content for you, exposure for me. Email (hobostripper@gmail.com) or leave a comment.

3. Like Dan Savage again (haha), I’m going to start a weekly advice column. Ask me a question about van dwelling, sex work, herbs, sex, feminism, living, whatever, and I will answer it, once a week. Email your question to hobostripper@gmail.com, or leave it in a comment here.

I just walked into a parts store, rattled off the VIN of the new van and asked what the engine was, what the transmission was, if I could put a transmission from a 2 speed diesel F350 pick up in it. The guy behind the counter didn’t blink, he just looked up the information and found that he didn’t have it. Up here no one thinks it’s weird that a girl knows the difference between the 7.3 International IDI engine and the 7.3 DI Ford engine. They would think it was weird if you didn’t know.

When I was in Pennsylvania and I went to part stores the people behind the counter wouldn’t know what they were selling. They’d look it up in their computers and read it to me and have no comprehension. Further, they’d assume that I didn’t know either. In their minds some guy, some mechanical guy, must have told me what to come and ask. Because obviously women don’t know these things. Even regular people (ie, men) don’t know these things down there. Down there, you just take your car to people that know and you assume it’s some kind of rocket science.

Here women are regular people too, and why would you pay someone else to work on your car? Maybe if was an engine rebuild or an electrical problem or something really complicated. But if you didn’t know how to work on it at least a little, you wouldn’t be driving it. And if you pay someone to change the oil in the winter you feel pretty wimpy about not crawling under there in the snow and doing it yourself.

At the Ford dealership the man behind the parts counter looks at me like I’m crazy. What kind of idiot buys a van without knowing what kind of engine it has? After the last few months down south, I’m a little grateful that it’s my ignorance, instead of my knowledge, that’s shocking.