The English for Sex Workers Course

It started with an offer.

 “You want cock?” Fon asked the man who had just ordered a glass of Jack Daniels.

“Darlin, that’s my line,” he drawled as he pinched the girl’s buttocks. The small group of men whooped and cheered with the glee that erupts in the space between too much beer and too many spirits.

“Lime? What he talk about Kay?” Kay looked up from her crossword puzzle, smiling.

“You said cock,” she said pantomiming putting something in her mouth, “not Coke,” pointing to the can in the cooler. At this, Fon’s trademark smile with its abundance of teeth emerged and she laughed. “I stupid. Speak again.”

“Cock. Coke. Cock. Coke. Repeat.”

“Cock. Coke. Cock. Coke. You good teacher”

Kay realized she was drunk and in Teacher Mode and that these two worlds she vowed to keep separate had flawlessly merged

“Fon. I can teach you and the girls sex English. Do you want?”

“I poor! I no study.”

“No money. Free. Sanuk mak!”

Kay took a calendar from the wall. Beneath the picture of the benignly smiling King, she pointed to Tuesday and Thursday of the following week. “2:00. Here. Ok?”

Kay put the crossword into her backpack, took out a notebook and made notes as she would for any other new course, choosing topics and the language points for each. Knowing her students would be labelled “Elementary” at best, she kept it simple.

Body Parts, Verbs and Dirty Phrases, Small Talk, Minimal Pairs

She lit a cigarette, sipped on her gin and tonic, and studied the men watching a football match on a tiny black and white TV. The men hadn’t even glanced in Kay’s direction and she wondered what they thought of an aging white woman in a Thai whorehouse.

Kay gravitated towards the tiny bar after a long day of teaching because the darkness and artificially cooled air was armour against the brutal afternoon sunshine. Though there were a number of open-air bars on the beach, Kay cringed at the thought of being seen by her students who wandered in packs throughout the town.

A year earlier, Kay had been anchored in Indiana, waiting for her mother’s death to release her. She had been the only of the four siblings to stay and her sacrifice was rewarded first with rages and dirty diapers, but later as the sole heir, an ample enough sum to escape.

As she smoked and relished her fourth gin, she smiled at the irony of a celibate woman teaching sex language. In Indiana, there had been many lovers who had come and gone. Some needed to be forced to leave and there was one who had left by dying. Kay wasn’t sure if it was death or recently turning 50 that had slammed the door on her appetite. Having no cravings, she subsisted on gin, cigarettes, toasted cheese sandwiches, and crosswords.

The first week three “students” arrived, dutifully armed with notebooks and pencils. Unlike her daytime students, these girls approached the task of learning with a clinician’s detachment. Pussy, ass, mouth, fist, suck, harder, slower, lips, tits, pay were dull and necessary jargon to master. They grasped meanings quickly, but producing the unfamiliar English sounds left their tongues and jaws more tired than a night’s work. Kay hoped the context of the bedroom would elucidate utterances like: “sick cock”; “give hate”; “fear goose?”; “you in church”; “in my mouse”; “bro chop”.

After two weeks, word of Kay’s free English classes was the first positive thing to spread among the bargirl community.  Some only wanted a glimpse of the tall woman with spiky blonde hair and blue eyes and never returned, but a small core group arrived day after day, folders growing bigger with papers and notes. Kay gave them exercises and during the hour in a small back office at the bar, did games and role plays which sent everyone into hysterics. Toey was especially adept at a nasally “Bend over you whore” and Kay felt certain she knew which Aussie the girl was impersonating. They thrived on the feeling of being young schoolgirls again while simultaneously receiving something they had long come to believe was off limits.

During the seventh week, Kay noticed two things. One, she was drinking less, which given the cost of a gin and tonic, was the same as being paid by the girls.  And she was ravenous. Each day after the class, she finished her drink, hopped on a tuk-tuk and headed to a night market. She devoured bags full of pork satay skewers, tiny bananas, fresh spring rolls, hardboiled eggs, and bowls of noodles. The tastes were phenomenal, but it was the grabbing and pulling with her teeth, the slurping, the feeling of the smooth egg or rice paper on her tongue that sent her to bed full and exhausted.

In the third month she began to have dreams. Lurid, banal, plotless encounters with men half her age and twice as dark. In the waking world, teachers at her school began to avoid her eye. It wasn’t long before the head of the department called a meeting, smiling and offering treats, to tell her she would no longer be needed due to a cut in the budget. She knew they knew what she did in the afternoons but wasn’t sure if it was her whoring herself out to other learners or the whores themselves that got her sacked.

She continued to teach the girls and live off the money from her mother’s estate, rather enjoying the thought of how disturbed her mother would be to know the profit of the house and all its lace doilies went towards gin and bags of papaya for prostitutes. When the girls found out she’d lost her job, they held a secret meeting. Fon, the self-declared student leader, handed Kay an envelope stuffed with neatly folded bills. “For you. We pay.”

“You don’t need to!”

“No problem. You and we same same. Everybody a whore for someone.”