no damn cat, no damn cradle

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

Twin Peaks, 1990, dir. David Lynch

I can remember house parties in Oakland where I would walk past a bedroom only to be beckoned in by a casual acquaintance: Hey, she’s really open, do you wanna hold hands with me inside of her? And I would, of course, wrapping my fingers around a stranger’s fingers inside another stranger on a mattress on the floor, electroclash blaring tinnily from a burned CD, churning like the splattered cream in the 1977 Robert Mapplethorpe piece appropriately titled Double Fist Fuck.

Come with me as we venture into another room at this house party. I crouch over you, on my knees, my left hand holding me up. My right hand is a queer icon, a position on a hundred screenprinted T-shirts. The pads of my fingers pressed together, my nails short and filed. My elbow is hydraulic, my wrist dexterous, my knuckles flexing. You love being just a hole. You love for me to stake my claim in you.

I’m searching for something specific, something a breath orgasm teacher of mine named Barbara Carrellas calls the “Resilient Edge of Resistance,” a term she got from her teaching partner, Chester Mainard. She defines it as the sensation of being “awake and aware, but completely peaceful and relaxed. You want it to go on forever.”

I press you, searching for the place where you press back onto me, and I tenderize you like meat as I go. You are impaled on me, and every movement I make feels a thousand times larger than reality. I twist my knuckles. I pulse. I tug. I undulate. I open my hand and press my fingers together. I play you like music. You yank on me, and I let you take me with you. Bear down on me and melt away.

I’ve been fucked in my holes ever since I started having sex with other people. And realizing my potential to fist others is the thing I now know was missing where that kind of default sex was concerned. I love to top, to be in the driver’s seat, to be the emcee of the show. I crave giving people what I love to get. You don’t have to be at a fisting party to fist, but somehow, the act feels inherently exhibitionist even at its most intimate. It’s not just about me and you, or about the people voyeuring around us. In moments like these, I feel connected to the players at the Catacombs, their party technology and what my activist friend Blunt calls the technology of community. Queer pleasure makes space for everyone to fuck underground and outside the box.”]