Rent Girl

Last Gasp, 245 pages, $24.95

Michelle Tea is a San Francisco-based firecracker, author of The Passionate Mistakes and Intricate Corruption of One Girl in America, Valencia and The Chelsea Whistle. She has a following and tours frequently, most recently with the anthology she co-edited called Pills, Thrills, Chills, and Heartache. Her work is usually straight-up autobiographical, but her swirling prose puts the text out into another realm, giving it a more literary and poetic quality than strict memoir. It's the style of an awake and busy mind that hasn't been subdued. Rent Girl has a simpler style than most of her stuff; rather, it has the direct style of the storyteller.

The book is heavily illustrated, but it's not exactly a graphic novel: Illustrations smash up against and around the text with little regularity and no surrounding boxes in sight. Have we all gotten tired of the term "sex work"? Good. Stories like these show the weird ambiguity of sex-based contracts, which vary from and pay better than traditional work.

One guy just wants her to lie there while he does cocaine and changes the channel a lot, and occasionally she has to pad around the living room searching for the CIA or his mother. Later she has sex with her butch girlfriend, in front of men, for cash. "Wild young lesbians want to put on a hot show for Generous Gentleman," says her personal ad. The first trick, Norman, sits naked, watching them:

"It was an absurd vision, the surrealness of the scenario was complete, to turn from this perfectly feminized version of my macho girlfriend and be face to face with a naked man sitting neatly in a chair, observing. Norman was a flushed orangey color, he blended into his surroundings like an insect on a nature show. And he looked like an insect, stroking his cock with controlled, careful strokes. What a freak, I thought meanly, and turned back to Eleanor, who pulled my fingers from her and rose up, pushed me on my back and started fucking me. I closed my eyes. The room was suffocating."

This is what I've been waiting for: stories about so-called sex work that have no ties to advocacy. It used to be such a societal taboo that people felt obliged to serve up positive memoirs about hooking-as a reaction to all the scorn and pity. Dolores French's bouncy Working is great fun, a light-hearted romp about a life of prostitution, but maybe we don't all have to do that anymore, us broke and inassimilable writers, when describing our adventures and desperate survival schemes.

Tea starts with the glamour of attending an all-hooker party with her girlfriend, a pro who later turns out to be a sociopath. She is one of those writers who finds the key to life experience is recounting outfits and their meaning:

"I saw a woman with chemical yellow hair bobbing in sprayed curls around her neck. Tons of eye makeup and stone washed jeans. I didn't know anyone who wore stonewashed jeans, I'd forgotten they existed. Stone washed jeans with little stone washed bows stuck at the tip of the slit in the ankle. Whoa."

Inept drug dealing and a steady diet of cocaine and cocktails are part of the story when she finally finds San Francisco, but refreshingly no voyage of the soul, told in the generic parlance of recovery, is attendant. Just compare Augusten Burroughs' Running with Scissors to his dull follow-up, Dry. Most writers should be banned from writing about their drug use until they are clean for a substantial period of time and have moved on to other subjects, like Richard Price or the great Gary Indiana; they're unable to keep up an actively tipsy nightlife while churning out top-notch and ever-changing material.

Neither prostitution nor cocaine seems to have destroyed Miss Tea, who is fresh as a daisy and will be touring with the book in the fall. This does not mean that hooking was a great thing to do, no matter how many anecdotes it provided. Her tattoos serve as reminders that she can never return to what used to be called the Life:

"The skull and crossbones, the nautical star, the ones I got poked into my skin by a friend, the firecracker on my back shoulder that actually looks like a tampon?for awhile every tattoo was a reminder that I didn't want my body to be saleable, each one worked to make me unhireable should I forget my resolve and, tempted by cash, and laziness, tried again."

The logic behind this: "Every whorehouse owner-operator liked to imagine theirs the cream of the crop, a real high-class enterprise, the exception to the sleaze stereotype. Having tattooed girls made a house seem low-rent. Especially tattoos that couldn't be stashed under a swath of cloth. A butterfly on the ass would escape the critical gaze of the boss and then it's just between you and the john, who no doubt could give a shit."

In the past, people had to put a positive or negative spin on sex work, out of obligation to their particular agendas, and we never got the real deal. Others came out of it so used up and disconnected that we certainly weren't going to hear from them. With books like Lily Burana's Strip City, David Henry Sterry's Chicken and Tracy Quan's Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl, this is changing. As the once-reviled feminist Andrea Dworkin has pointed out, male writers thought it was brave to go to Tijuana and visit the whores, but what about the whores themselves? Weren't they even braver? Didn't they know more?

The illustrations are good, but they only pick up about midway through the book. Oddly, the drawings of men are more telling than the first drawings of women. They do get expressive as the book goes on, especially when the stories move from Boston to San Francisco, which McCubbin portrays well. San Francisco has an intensely local scene of lesbian and transgender culture that the rest of the country couldn't even imagine-gender-neutral bathrooms are a hot political topic-and she knows this territory well.

Like the writing, the illustrations aren't masturbatory. The women are just too humanized and besides, it's plain to see that they would not like you, even if you were offering good money.