“Of course you’re not.” He smiled. “But just in case.” He took my hand and wrote something on my palm with his blue pen: Motel 6, Room 121. “Just stop by. If you’re curious.”

The room was rented to an old man, a retired condiment salesman and unretired dope addict. He looked too poor to do the drugs he did. He wanted me to smoke his weed before he fixed himself up, and I said fine, yes, I would. The pot unbuttoned my muscles like a patient lover takes off your blouse. Then he took his little plastic tool box into the kitchen. Come on back, he said. It’s stir-fry. He used a lot of slang, like he was proving something. He’d probably been a boy the other boys hadn’t played with much.

I remember a dish rack next to his sink, stacked with washed beer cans and nothing else. He crushed one flat and cooked the drugs on its base. I watched him shoot it up, snap off the rubber tubing, and float right into space. His big beard dangled like dryer lint. He had his mouth open and his head tilted back like he was drinking something trickling from the sky. He offered to make me some as well. I shook my head. His voice got mean, and he whispered, “You’ve got to come here with me!” He tried to push the pipe into my mouth. He wanted me to need it as much as he did. So I took some, like I’d taken Fiona’s burnt knuckles of popcorn, so I wouldn’t have to see his expression if I refused.

His mouth tasted dry and sour when we fucked. Afterward he gave me some crumpled bills and pulled a Bible and a box of crackers from his nightstand drawer. I sat on the edge of his bed, legs crossed, and watched him eat. I thought maybe there was something he wanted to read aloud. But all he did was look at me, confused. “You’re done,” he said. “You can go now.”

I started working for the man with the ponytail. He probably had a different name at home, but in the business he went by Bruce Black. He told me I was savvy. I knew I wasn’t. He told me I was pretty, too, though by then I’d heard it from so many men—men on the verge of coming, falling asleep, kicking me out—that I barely heard. I couldn’t see it.

Most of my clients were guys who hadn’t ever hit the big time. I could see it in the way they moved, the way they fucked, in their occasional acts of cruelty. They’d had dreams crushed out like little fires over the whole course of their lives. By the time I met them, it was already done—not only the Big Chance but even the dreaming about it. Now they were traveling salesmen and real estate agents working subdivisions. A lot of them had habits. They were usually fair and sometimes even kind, and that made me feel grateful—which made me angry. I was feeling thankful just because someone treated me like a human being?