The breakout Australian debut of the year, Come, from Melbourne sex worker Rita, is an utterly addictive yet important read.
Following the love, sex and death she has experienced in her career so far, Come debunks everything you think you know about sex work, while also offering a raw, realist portrayal of the trade. Following Rita’s journey from stripper to adult film star to sex worker, artist and philosophy student, her prose could easily be inhaled in one sitting, while her honesty makes her one of Australia’s most original and honest voices in recent memory.
The below is an extract from Come, A Memoir by Rita Therese, published by Allen & Unwin and on sale March 31.
Come by Rita Therese – Extract:
This is an edited extract from Come by Rita Therese, published by Allen and Unwin, out March 31st.
We have had three hours sleep over the last 48 hours. We’ve made our rent, our flights home, and a profit. We get into our king-sized bed, draw the shades and take Xanax. It kicks in, I’m warm and sleepy and I snuggle up close to Brittany as we watch The OC on my laptop.
‘Dude,’ I say, ‘how fucking fun was that?’
Whore beauty
Shave your junk
Men’s razors. The Gillette sensitive kind. If you use women’s razors you end up with stubble and razor burn. Sit on the floor of your shower, cover your pussy in shaving foam, and always shave in the direction of the hair growth. Pull the skin taut and don’t forget about the bikini line. You won’t slice your clit off if you shave over your labia but don’t apply the same pressure as you would to the rest. Don’t skimp on the shaving foam but if you’re all out, hair conditioner works too. Shave from in to out around your butthole. The trick to not getting enormous ingrown hairs is to rub after wax moisturiser into your pussy when you get out of the shower. You want the kind that beauty therapists use but anything with tea tree oil in it will work.
Fuck on your period
How much time do you have? If the booking’s that night, go to the sex shop. Don’t go to the busiest one, especially around a full moon, because you’ll climb the stairs, go to the counter and—in a hushed voice—ask for menstrual sponges and they’ll say, we just sold our last one. Every hooker in town has her period and they’ve all come to the same Club X on Bourke Street to get a sponge before disappearing into Crown Towers or The Hyatt. You have to go to the Crazyhorse Cinema, the peepshow on Elizabeth Street. When you walk down the stairs, you can hear the sound of women moaning and screaming from behind velvet curtains. There’s a rhythmic thudding and lube suctioning and popping. There’s a booth where you pay for tokens but the guy there always has sponges in stock, because it smells like semen and air freshener, and nobody wants to go in there. Scurry out with your big bag of sponges (never buy one, always get them in bulk). Or stroll out, because you don’t care. You like that it’s sleazy.
Get in the shower, squat, and use one of the long acrylic nails on your fingers to scoop out the clots of blood from your vagina. Watch in fascination at the black matter that slides down your fingers and turns to pink foam in the drain. Once you’ve scraped your pussy clean, insert the sponge like a tampon. Push it as far up as it can go without it getting lost.
Last-minute booking? Car sponge, chopped into a square. Even less time? Kitchen sponge, the one with the thick foam and the scourer on the other side. Chop the scourer off and cut a square of foam. Boil it if you have the time.
I should have told you earlier, when you were at the cinema, to get the pink condoms. Blood turns into girl cum. Pink condoms make it invisible. I always forget and I’m a heavy bleeder, so as soon as I hop off a hard condom-covered dick (never in reverse cowgirl or doggy—too easy for them to spot the bloody condoms) I bring my hand down to jerk them off, whipping the condom off in one fell swoop and then I toss it to the other end of the room. Pink condom now.
The clients least likely to be freaked out by your period are the ones who’re married with children. Those are my favourites.
Get rid of BV
You bare-backed your boyfriend, didn’t you? I don’t blame you; it feels good. I’ve spent eight years fucking with condoms on and now I’ve developed a cream pie fetish. I’m a sick freak, perverted by safe sex. When I get into a monogamous relationship all I want is my lover to fuck me and fill me with cum. I want to go to the toilet and pee out cum. Porn stars get to, why can’t hookers? But you pay a price for that cream pie when the acidity of your lover’s cum throws off your pH balance. Expect a double down on that when you are home in your sweatpants, free bleeding and watching a movie and he walks in, in his hi-vis shirt, smelling like sweat and with calloused hands from working all day. He pulls your comfortable pants off you and fucks you on the couch, fucks you bloody all over the throw rug. Pink cum.
The next day you’re preparing to work, you are peeing and then the smell hits you. Somewhere between a piece of salmon left out in the sun and vinegar, a wet pussy but not the kind you like. See, if you were smart, you’d already have a packet of Flagyl in the cupboard. My favourite is the pack of five which you take in one fell swoop and kills every speck of bacteria but will also make you projectile vomit if you have a glass of wine before your booking. You don’t have the Flagyl, because you always forget to ask for a repeat. Make an appointment at the bulk-billing clinic in the taxi on the way to the hotel.
No time? Buy a bottle of Pump water and some apple cider vinegar. Take off the lid, tip out a bit of the water and add a capful of the vinegar to the water. Put the lid back on, and douche with that. It’s semi sterile (I think).
(I take no responsibility for any of this medical advice.)
Deal with thrush
You’ve taken the Flagyl and your pH is back to regular. The antibiotics have killed all the good bacteria in your body and now candida has taken over. You fantasise about scratching the inside of your vagina with a steel baby bottle cleaner. Your favourite undies are ruined. The thrush is so bad that when you wipe, your pussy feels like sandpaper. You also need to work tomorrow.
Try not to make a salad in your pussy. Shoving garlic or coconut oil or yoghurt might soothe it for a minute but then it stops working. The candida eats the sugars in the coconut oil and multiplies. The yoghurt (natural, no sugar) works better if you just eat it. The garlic . . . well, I never quite understood that one. It just left my vagina smelling like a warm souvlaki.
Go to the chemist. Get the oral tablet, generic brand. Get the Canesten cream or tablets you insert up in your pussy. When they say, have you had this before? Just lie. ‘Only once or twice,’ you say, quietly, so you don’t have to tell the entire queue your slutty medical history. One time, my burning vagina and brain a hungover, pounding mess, I hissed at them, ‘What, you got a cure for chronic thrush back there I don’t know about?’
Sit at home, in your big cotton undies, with a sanitary pad on and your pussy smeared in the cream that stops you from scratching it raw. The sanitary pad is there because in the morning, when you wake up, the pellet of Canesten will have dissolved and your vagina is expelling it. Not fun to clean off your sheets, trust me.
Ass pimples
Have you ever dragged a fingertip along a strip club’s stage and then inspected what’s on it? No, because you aren’t insane. Let me tell you—grime. Dirt. Bacteria. Dried sweat.
Baby powder from girls clapping their hands together before climbing the pole. Tiny wood splinters from the lacquered floor and spilt sugary drinks that get tracked on the soles of 8-inch clear heels. You are rolling in that. Then when you are done rolling, you go and grind your bare ass on men’s laps and their dirty jeans. You do that for eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours. The next morning you wake up and see it. A big, red zit right on the middle of your ass cheek. You turn and look at your chest—peppered with tiny scratches from stubble grazing it. Another cluster of pimples starting to pop up.
Come home and wash your whole body with Cetaphil and then apply a thick layer of Benzac.
Haemorrhoids
You did an anal booking today, and it hurt. You don’t know what happened; maybe you weren’t in the mood. You go to the toilet when the client leaves and you fart out silicon lube and go to wipe, and then you feel it. Your butthole feels chewed up and spat out. You remember the line from that Sheila Jeffreys book you had to read (to counter argue) at university, where she talked about going to the strip club and staring at ‘swollen anuses’ and you were like, Sheila, what the fuck are you talking about?
The haemorrhoid gets bigger and bigger. It feels like a tiny grape hanging out of your butthole. What the fuck, you think, staring at it in the mirror. Because you’ve never had one before you freak out and make a doctor’s appointment. You can’t sit properly on the hard, plastic chair in the waiting room. You know that if you tell the doctor it was from doing anal at work, she’ll be weird. Backing away from you and putting gloves on just to speak to you, applying hand sanitiser as soon as she has to touch your arm to take your blood pressure.
So you say ‘Oh my boyfriend and I did anal,’ as you bend over to show her your haemorrhoid. She starts telling you that you need a colonoscopy to check there aren’t more up there. You decide not to tell her you are well acquainted with the passage of your rectum, considering you stick a finger up there every time you douche to check you didn’t miss anything.
You leave with a script, and a referral for a colonoscopy. You look down at the referral sheet you have to hand the front desk and in big, capital letters it says ‘ANAL SEX CAUSED HAEMORRHOIDS.’ You decide not to hand it over. You’ll take the chance on this one.
Massage oil
The massage parlour hands you a huge, squidgy bottle. The oil is a sinister, murky pale yellow and slick to the touch. You are supposed to do your body slides and wank men off with this mysterious liquid. You get into the room and do your thing, slippery and wet. It gets in your freshly washed and blow-dried hair. It gets in your pussy, on your asshole, on your face. When you finish at the end of the day, you stand in the shower and have to lather and rinse twice and you still feel sticky. As you leave you notice all the other girls have bulk-sized bottles of Sorbolene moisturiser. The next day you wake up and your entire back and boobs are covered in cystic acne. You go back to work, covered in concealer and foundation and pick up your bottle from the counter. You take off the lid and sniff it. You know this smell and you can’t place it. A girl catches you doing your own personal sommelier experience and leans over to you.
‘It’s vegetable oil,’ she says.
You go to Coles and buy a bulk-sized bottle of Sorbolene. Your acne goes away.
Keep your face on
You have three bookings, one after the other at the brothel. You get there early, so you can sit and do your make-up. It’s perfect, your first face. You primed, you buffed your foundation in, did a perfect contour and baked under your eyes. Your eyeliner is winged and your lashes, applied with tweezers, are flicked out perfectly. Highlighter on the cupid’s bow, the cheekbone, and in the corner of your eyes to disguise that you didn’t sleep last night. You don’t put on lipstick because you aren’t a fucking amateur. Clear gloss. You don’t apply a setting spray. You need this make-up runny.
You come down from your booking and you have two minutes before your next one.
The first time, all you need to do is mash your foundation brush around your mouth where the client licked off all your make-up. You use the back of your hand to wipe the foundation from your lips and drag the brush under your eye to pick up the mascara flecks.
The second time you mash foundation around your mouth and over your whole face. You go at warp speed, dragging bronzer into the paste on your skin, a heavy contour but nobody will notice in this light. While you’re doing all this, Listerine burns in your mouth. Spit in the sink and readjust the lash that’s starting to flick out.
Your third client is your favourite. He face-fucks you until your mascara runs, he flips you over like a rag doll and fucks you holding your face into the pillow. Have you ever wondered why brothels have such dark linen? It’s because of sluts like me who like being brutally fucked by some towering tradie and slobbering on to the pillow as my eyes roll in the back of my head. If that was white . . . you come, even if you didn’t mean to. You go back downstairs with your hair sticking out, an eyelash stuck to your cheek and your work wife gives you a look in the mirror as she’s doing her lip liner.
‘Good booking?’ she says.
‘Mmm,’ you say.
You don’t even care about your face at this point. You mash, peel off the lashes and buff the remainder of the winged liner in.
You go back out and get booked again and again. Not because your make-up is perfect but because you smell like a woman who just came. David Attenborough narrates over the top, the other males in the pack sense the female is on heat and seek to mate with her.
Prep for anal
One time I was on this Facebook feminist group and somebody asked how everyone prepared for anal sex. I felt my fingers fly across the keyboard, my favourite how-to ever. A girl commented on my post and she told me everything I said was wrong, dangerous and incorrect. I’m a nurse, she says. Well bitch, I reply, I’m a whore and this is how I make my money.
You aren’t going to shit on them. The only time you will shit on them is if you do the cocaine they got from South America, brought back in a tiny vial in their suit jacket. You’ll shit on them because even though you did everything to prepare for that booking, that was really good cocaine. The coke was so good the client who gave it to you wouldn’t stop following you around his beautiful, architecturally designed home complete with beautiful marble bathrooms with beautiful toilets without any beautiful doors. A shiny object distracts him, and you bolt downstairs, ready to expel your bowels that felt empty up until you hit that second fat line. You only get to take half a shit because he’s back again, clutching a bottle of red wine and you have to stop, wipe and quickly flush before he notices.
You’ll shit all over him because you are high as a kite, watching porn on his projector, him fucking you in the ass and you come and then look over at the beautiful white linen. Oh dear, you think. He doesn’t book you again.
In short:
Insert one Microlax up your ass. Spit on your fingers beforehand and lube up your asshole. Don’t take oral laxatives because you’ll shit for hours.
Start having your shower. Wait anywhere between 1–15 minutes before you feel your stomach grip and fling yourself onto the toilet bowl. Shit.
Get back in the shower, and start lathering yourself in body wash before realising you need to shit again.
Do this until you shit out the sign there’s nothing left up there. It’s a viscous, mucus ass booger—like a big snot. It’s better to get that out now, because otherwise it might attach itself to a butt plug and when you pull that plug out, it will fly across the room like an Olympic gymnast and land neatly on the bed.
Take a douche with warm water, not hot. Hot water will set fire to your sphincter. Get into doggy position, head closer to the ground. Squirt till you can’t squirt anymore, get up, and fart into toilet bowl. Inspect. Do this until the water is clear.
If you want to take one last extra precaution—spit on finger and put up butthole. Remove, check.
Maybe this is why I get haemorrhoids. Maybe that nurse was right.
Look good under stage lights
Ignore everything the beauty blogger who wants dewy skin for her stroll down the French Riviera says. Skip straight to the tutorial for drag queens. Drag queens can teach you a lot about doing your face for the strip club. Queens are painting for stage lighting and dark clubs. They are painting for the back row, and sometimes it’s the guy sitting the furthest from the stage with the most money to spend.
Cop a load to the face
You are kneeling on the floor of the hotel room. If you’re lucky, the carpet is soft. If it’s not, which is how it usually goes, you’re already starting to get burns. You don’t have to break the mood—just grab a towel from the bed and place it under your knees so the cleaner doesn’t have to scrub semen from the floor the next day.
‘Oh yeah,’ he says, jacking off and looking down at you.
Don’t say; don’t get it in my eyes. It’s pointless. Men cannot aim when they come, unlike the professional porn star he’s watched countless times. He thinks he can, but he’s going to get cum in your hair, up your nose and most definitely, in the middle of your retina.
Find the sweet spot between staring up at him with your big, come-fuck-me eyes and also at his ball sack and dick. If you stare at them too much, they get stage fright. If you don’t look at them, they’ll lose their hard-on or think you are disinterested.
‘I want you to blow a big load all over my face,’ you say, as you lick their balls. You just want to go home, to be honest. There’s a new episode of Married at First Sight you want to watch. This one has been hard work—you’ve fucked like it’s an Olympic sport. You know this is a guy who watches so much porn he’s forgotten what it’s like to use something other than his hand to come. You could literally be his favourite porn star, right there in the flesh and he’d still have to finish this way.
‘Ughhhh,’ he says.
‘Oh yeah babe,’ you say, ‘are you gonna come? Come all over my slutty whore mouth. I wanna be your fucking cum rag.’
At this point, tilt your chin back, open your mouth and stick out your tongue and close your eyes that have a full set of freshly done Russian volumes. Pray to god that he aims nose down and not on your lashes.
He’s jizzed on your nose, your cheeks; it’s on your tongue. Keep your eyes shut and ask for a towel, which he will race to get you. Keep your eyes closed, bring your hands up to your eyes first. Check if there’s any cum, and if there is, wipe the towel gently down. Don’t rub. Open eyes, make sure they aren’t burning, and remove rest in bathroom. Try not to gag on the taste of his jizz. Roll whatever’s left away from your taste buds (the middle of my tongue works best for me) and hack it into the sink. Do not let it simmer for your senses to pick up. Whatever you do, don’t think about that one porno you saw where twenty guys jacked off into a Vitamix blender and it was just this slurry of greyish semen and then BRRRRR goes the blender and then that girl chugged it, and you ran to the bathroom and threw up while your friend laughed hysterically.
Fix yourself for an overnight when you’ve left your toiletries at home
Your client has extended and wants you to stay the night at his hotel. You are getting along so well, he wants to spend more time with you, and it feels good. Until you realise you don’t have your cleanser, your deodorant, a hairbrush or even a toothbrush.
You are not blessed with the epidermis of a supermodel or even a mere mortal. You have skin that explodes with clusters of pimples from just one night of sleeping in your foundation.
It’s time for bed and you look in your whore handbag. Please god, you think, let me have it packed in here. You find it, the comb you swiped from the hotel you were at last time, the hotel with the little drawers of brushes and cotton pads that you dearly wish you were at right now. Use it to detangle the knots in your hair from the hours of sex you’ve had.
You also have baby wipes—and his toothbrush. You use it, and don’t tell him.
Take the bar of astringent hotel hand soap and use a hot flannel (not the one you wiped your pussy with earlier), and double cleanse. Your face feels like sandpaper. Mascara runs down your cheeks. You use the baby wipe, more burning, to clean your eyes. Moisturise with the lavender smelling body lotion and wince as you think about the paraben and alcohol content and hope to god there’s a shred of lanolin in there.
Come back to bed, and when your client sees you, looking pink and raw, he says, you look pretty without make-up on. You hope he can’t see the acne scarring or the purple bags under your eyes or the zit you picked in the bathroom in the magnifying mirror, strategically placed next to the hand soap.
Come down from a coke booking
It’s 7 a.m. You notice some of the girls trying to be a wifey and cleaning up these idiots’ empty bottles of Grey Goose and putting away their coke plates. You know it’s time to leave when that starts happening. You aren’t cleaning up jack shit, but you know why they are doing it. The coke buzz has worn off and all that’s left is the gritty amphetamine alertness, just hands looking for things to do to stop the buzz in your brain. You are out of here. This isn’t your first rodeo. You glance back at the newbie hooker, who’s stacking the dishwasher in the penthouse apartment. You are torn between putting her purse in her hand, her coat around her shoulders and stuffing her in a taxi, and swiping the plate out of her hand and telling her to snap out of it. When did you become so hardened?
You have your sunglasses with you, because you knew it was a party booking. You also have a coat, because you want to look less like a coked-out prostitute as you hail a taxi at 8 a.m. on a busy main road while people who look like the guys you just fucked go to work.
Years ago, you would have tied one on. You would have texted one of your friends who’s always up for it, bought another bag and sat down on the balcony, wrapped in a dressing gown. You would have made Bloody Marys, with tabasco and fresh wedges of lemon. You and your friend would have played Fleetwood Mac, instead of that rhythmic, heart palpitating techno you’ve just listened to all night. Your friend would get the same buzz you had fifteen hours ago and you would have just felt more awake. Your teeth start to grit, and you wonder if you should have just gone to bed instead.
You’re older and wiser now and you know the serotonin and dopamine stores, what little you have as a depressive, are gone. They’ve been mined, and you need to go home.
The best way to come down is to clean.
You get into your apartment, and your cat runs between your legs. You pick it up and press its fur to your face and hear it purring loudly. You stand like that for a while, rocking your cat back and forth.
Draw the blinds. Put on Fleetwood Mac, but quietly. Take out the trash, stack your own dishwasher, and put away your make-up that’s strewn by your mirror. Strip the bed and remake it with fresh linen, spray lavender oil all over your pillows. Light candles, burn incense, sage your room. Feed the cat, empty its litter box. Use every last scrap of your nervous, anxious coked out energy to make your house cosy and inviting again.
Get into the shower and have it hot. Scrub yourself from head to toe, wash your make-up off, tone and moisturise. Put on your soft pyjama pants, your big band t-shirt. Brew a pot of camomile tea and open your ‘medicine’ box. You’ve got a stash in there. Xanax, you think, that’s what I feel like.
Sit down on your couch, your cat on your lap, your house perfect and clean, your cup of tea and your Xanax kicking in. You’re going to feel a bit shit, a bit edgy, a bit fucked still, but cartoons are helping and so is the fact that on your coffee table sits a big wad of cash.
Put a condom on
You are in a booking with another girl at the brothel. Clients do that sometimes, point at you and some other random girl and say, ‘you two.’ You and the girl look at each other. You’ve said hi once or twice, but now you have to fuck each other and him.
After some fooling around it’s time to fuck and you go to get the condom, clumsy and all thumbs. She sees you, takes it and rips the corner with her teeth, spitting the foil out the side of her mouth like some old-time cowboy gunslinger shooting tobacco into a spittoon. She pops the condom in her mouth and rolls it onto the guy’s cock using her lips.
Holy fuck, you think, that’s impressive.
Wash your expensive lingerie
You pull the set of lingerie you spent three bookings worth of money on out of the washing machine. It was white lace and now it’s the colour of old gym socks. The lace has pilled and greyed from the black sock you didn’t notice.
FUCK, you scream, into the empty apartment. Your cat stares at you.
Go to the supermarket and get a plastic bucket. If you don’t have one, you can use the tin container that comes with your rice cooker, which you do for several years because you never make rice anyway. You get a capful of wool wash and a nail scrubbing brush and you separate the reds, whites and blacks and hand wash them in your rice cooker bowl. Use the nail scrubber on the crotches of your expensive lingerie to get rid of girl cum and fake tan and period stains from when your sponge leaked. On the tough ones, apply a paste of Napisan for colours and let it sit. Don’t put them on your communal clothesline because your pervert neighbour will steal them to jack off into. Drape them over the couch in your apartment and let the central heating do its job.
When a client rapes you
Sit at the bottom of your shower and let the water pound down on your back. Try to imagine the night washing off you and going down the drain like your friend said. You can still feel it, the weight of that body bearing down on you, holding you in place. The memory shifts, you second-guess yourself. Was I raped, you think, or am I imagining things? A memory of something you read, about the further you are away from the woman dragged down the alley by a stranger, the less credible you become.
Sit at the bottom of the shower and try to cry but you can’t. You have learnt now that you have to keep going on because if you let this break you every time you’d never work again.
Sit at the bottom of the shower and think about your ex-boyfriend and wish he was here right now to fold you into your bed and remind you that not all men are evil.
Sit at the bottom of the shower and wrap your arms around your naked thighs and curl into a tight little ball and try to come back into your body.
Sit at the bottom of the shower until you can stand again.
