The Unseen
It’s not typically obvious, even when you’re looking for it. Sex workers pass incognito because their livelihoods depend on plausible deniability. A slender young Black guy in a leather jacket sits down next to a sallow, balding grandfather in a suit and kisses him on the cheek. A tattooed woman in a slim black cocktail dress apologizes for taking so long in her cab, then slides under the arm of a svelte attorney that’s in town for a conference, and you could swear that he’d been wearing a wedding ring when you saw him the night before, but there’s none in sight now.
It is a subtle thing to tell apart your average date from your average business transaction. But if you’ve stayed in a hotel even a handful of times in your life, chances are you have seen at least one or two of the latter and just didn’t know it. Or maybe you noticed something about the situation that was off, but it didn’t clearly register in the moment. If you’re thinking about one of these memories now, or maybe even looking over the page at a potential pair of contenders who just crossed the lobby in front of you and thinking to yourself, Was that what he’s talking about? Let me be the first to say Maybe! Probably. If you’re second guessing, triple guessing, chances are you’re onto something.
As a bartender working in a hotel, one tends to graduate rather quickly from speculations to certainties. Not only can you begin to differentiate a date from a service, you can also identify the regulars. Different outfits, a change in hairstyle, but that person keeps turning up and always meets the same salesperson — or a constant stream of differing patrons. They have a few drinks. Maybe they go out to dinner. Then you see them, later, after midnight maybe. Hustling upstairs. Catching a ride on the elevator. Red-faced. Snickering. You didn’t see the money change hands, you never do, but that one always drops by and stays over.
Let me just get something out of the way here: I have no problem with sex work. In fact, from where I’m standing behind the bar, it isn’t so different from a lot of other forms of service, bartending included, and I think it should be legal. Unionized even. Charge a tax if you want to. Regardless of it being illegal, it’s not going away. It’s one of the oldest (if not the oldest) jobs in human history. Why not just legitimize it? Get the people who do it decent healthcare and some dignity for what they do. How different is it than an adult actor shooting a video? It’s certainly better, in my eyes, than the average politician or corporate executive screwing people out of a mortgage or paying for private planes and lavish dinners with taxpayer-subsidized credit, and they don’t get called whores nearly as often.
I take no issue with what sex workers do; I am simply fascinated by how they do it, and how others so easily seem to miss it, even when it’s sometimes occurring right in front of them.
Some of my favorite regulars from my hotel-bartending days were sex workers. I did not necessarily ever talk about it with them, but I knew. We all knew, the people who worked in the lounge. But since it’s illegal, technically, you can’t talk about it: not directly, at least. You might know it’s going on, and they might know you know, but nobody can come right out and point to what’s happening without making themselves vulnerable, potentially even liable in my case. It’s not just sex workers who need plausible denial. The same goes for the bartenders, the maître d’s, the waiters, the valets, and the cocktailers, who both do and “do not” notice this familiar hustle flowing around them.
It started off with noticing one or two of them. One young girl with full-on sleeves: bright and intricate tattoos consuming both arms. I always thought she was kind. Quiet. Kept to herself. She always met the same client: a man in his seventies, five-foot-nine with veiny, steroid biceps and paper-thin, spiky white hair. My crew and I learned from a few industry friends we knew at the Four Seasons, down the street, that the old man was married and lived in one of a handful of high-dollar penthouse condominiums on the top floor. He occasionally accompanied his aging spouse to dinner downstairs in the hotel, which I guess was sort of like his dining room, but he never brought his lawfully wedded wife over to our joint. We weren’t that kind of spot to him. We were a getaway. A secret place. We were in the same hidden compartment where he likely kept a separate residence, or a second cell phone, or a dozen bottles of black-market dick pills.
Another: a pale, slender girl who frequented our place. She always had a different client. She would show up early, order a ton of food and drinks, sometimes with a girlfriend, and then she would wait patiently for her john to show up at the bar. Sometimes, both her and her friend would go upstairs with him — sometimes, it would just be her. But she never once paid for a tab. We all knew to wait to drop the check until whoever she was waiting for showed. Nobody ever even raised an eyebrow when they saw the total. They smiled. They paid. These were just very, very good friends, you see?
“Do you want to charge this bill to your room, sir?” I enjoyed asking in these moments. I leaned forward, the corners of my mouth flirting with a smile.
“No! Uh, no, thank you very much. I’ll pay this one in cash.”
Of course you will, sir. You wouldn’t want a paper trail now! Then again: I saw plenty of people pull out a company card to pay for champagne and strawberries and New York strips and everything else you can imagine. I guess a write-off is a write-off, after all, when you can explain with a straight face that each exorbitant bill from bar or restaurant ___________ was the result of some deeply consequential “business meeting.”
(Again, I ask you: which professions should really be the social pariahs here, folks?)
Eventually, over time, there were more and more of these sex workers. In retrospect, they were likely always there, and I just failed to notice at first, like when you catch the hidden image woven into a drawing. It’s the same question of optics: If you’re not looking for it, it’s likely that you’ll miss it. But then, once you see it, you can’t unsee it ever again. Suddenly, that trick of the eye, that layer underneath, it will always reveal itself to you. And it was in this way that a thinly concealed part of my city stepped forward from the borders and the margins and smirked at me in the dull-pink lounge light.
Vee was a transgender sex worker that also worked full-time as a bartender. She dropped in for desserts and cocktails after she got off shift — and often, almost incidentally, it seemed, she would saunter upstairs with someone after last call. If nobody approached her, she would just sit and chat with us, making jokes about whatever happened to her at her day job. She shared some pictures with us from when she was younger, before the transition. It would’ve been difficult to guess this was even the same person. That was Vincent — this was Vee. And Vee was beautiful.
Most of the time, Vee and her entourage were discreet about what they did. They were careful to never discuss numbers or say anything specific about what was happening at the bar. On the surface, they were just a group of alluring, well-dressed women who would inevitably, routinely attract male attention. They did their thing, they tipped well, and they treated all the lounge workers with respect and kindness. But after a while, it wasn’t just Vee and her jovial crew. Or the quiet, polite girl leading the white-haired Roid maniac through the lobby on her tattooed arm. Soon, friends must’ve told other friends, who almost certainly told many other friends, who then told some dense, vast, unseen network of sex workers all over the greater Seattle area.
I imagined a game of telephone being played between these consummate professionals, where every major conference was on a list, along with every over-bloated wedding that spilled out of the Fairmont Hotel just around the corner, along with every big sporting event that would draw hordes of intoxicated potential clients. Every time our hotel sold out rooms for the medical-equipment conference at Seattle Convention Center or the Seahawks made it to the postseason, I pictured Vee calling her entourage, their faces each quickly populating the screen like a scene in a movie. Then everybody would dial another five, six, seven: in some loft condo with glistening, wall-sized mirrors; in a studio apartment with open closet doors that spilled out blonde wigs; on a houseboat named DeeVine where someone with a yellow-rimmed sun hat and pink lips sipped some kiwi-garnished cocktail. Then all of these, too, called another eight or nine or one-hundred more, until the talking boxes on the screen grew so numerous and flamboyant, and the chattering from the calls so cacophonous, that it all became just a tad overwhelming.
Suddenly, everyone on the screen gasped. A few seconds of silence passed, and then the motley assortment, that wall of tiny, talking faces, perfectly synchronized, said, “Now tell me again honey, which hotel was that you said?”
“See you there!”
Something like this must’ve happened because, one night, all of a sudden, it was a swarm. Our lobby was packed with suits, appetizers, and a live band: some corporation who had bought us out for the evening; everything paid for on the company dime. It was here that a coordinated assault of epic proportion occurred. One sleek, spotlighted prostitute after another strolled into our joint, then struck up a conversation, or did a quick lap to preview the goods, or positioned themselves amongst a handful of strategic high-tops, then gazed about at their loose-tied and inebriated prey. It was fascinating and somewhat unsettling to behold. I could not look away.
Almost every one of these workers eventually took someone upstairs. Some even came back downstairs, freshened themselves up a bit in the bathroom, and then dashed immediately back into the mix, only to return upstairs in someone else’s company, perhaps an hour or two later. If this were some more traditional open-air marketplace, every single proprietor present would have been selling out of their stock and weeping with joy.
Let it never be said that sex workers are not hard workers.
By the end of the night, there were fatigued, satisfied customers lining the bar rail with a hankering for chicken wings, flourless chocolate cake, and bottomless glasses of water. Several, hearing it would take twenty minutes or so, nodded appreciatively to me and some of the others working behind the bar and then excused themselves for a much-needed cigarette outside.
After that lucrative evening, some of the workers got a little too comfortable in our hotel. Not only did we have people working the room all the time, we now had a lot of people that we didn’t know, that we’d never seen before, and that weren’t even half as kind or as discreet as a professional like Vee and those like her were — who did not abide by the unspoken but obvious rules involved in this little dance. Some particularly nasty characters did not even bother to pay their tab when they received a phone call that they had waited more than an hour for, and then disappeared upstairs without a word to the people who’d been taking care of them in the bar. One particularly nasty character got into a shouting bout, with what looked to be a disgruntled client, in the middle of the lobby floor. When a security guard inevitably intervened, that flustered john in question pulled them aside and whispered to them at great length behind the host stand.
Some of our hotel regulars noticed some of our other regulars. Then a manager or two “noticed” (though I’m sure they had before). Then everyone in the lounge with eyes to see could scarcely help but observe it all around them. On one occasion, I watched a pair discuss time, and price, and other crude specifics, before visibly agreeing, standing, and strolling across the street together to a nearby ATM.
After a while, the hotel management had no choice but to crack the whip. Our entire staff were instructed to be on the lookout now, to be vigilant in identifying “lewd, illegal activities” and “questionable characters” in and around the lounge. If we saw something undeniable, we were told to report it to a security guard, who would themselves confront the individual(s) in question and ask them politely to leave, or call the police if necessary.
But the obvious trouble with this was that all except the most careless still played by the unspoken rules, still made room for plausible denial, still kept most of what they did in society’s shadows, borders, margins — at least to the extent that they refrained from counting out the bills fresh from a late-night withdrawal on our bar top. Confronting them gave no guarantee that you could even credibly accuse them of anything. In fact, confronting someone could even backfire in such a way that you could have a lawsuit on your hands.
The worst of the worst, the ones doing business on the nose, who behaved unpleasantly or indifferently to the staff, they were pulled aside. Told it was on camera. Asked if they really wanted to discuss these allegations with the cops. Whatever hustle they had going at that point was not worth it anymore. Sure, our joint was a real honeypot, but any spot could be like that. And so, most of these incautious hustlers quickly moved on the same way they had so hastily moved in, their ephemeral, eventful residencies concluding in a scatter of indignant-scoffing, stiletto-stomping, and glitter-nailed flourishes as they shoved open our lobby door.
The unspoken part of all this was that many of these people — the awesome ones at least; those that played by the rules and were kind and tipped well — were by then friends to our staff. Even those that were not in actual food and beverage jobs, like Vee, were treated as if they were. The service industry was the service industry, as far as we could see, particularly if you were a professional about it. There are certain rules and standards of service in the food-and-beverage industry, and though these codes are different in the case of sex workers, and though many of these are overwhelmingly tacit rules and standards, they exist in our realm just the same.
So perhaps it almost goes without saying that I and others never noticed when favorites like Vee hung out for a while, and then just so happened to find themselves a date. We saw, but we didn’t see. And that’s how it remained, until a raucous enclave of less-professional clientele was one by one purged from the lobby, and all that was left were the revered, reliable regulars. What they did with their personal or professional time? That was their business.
Wink.
The bar returned to that hazy state so familiar to bartenders in which there are numerous things that go unspoken, unacknowledged, “unseen.” Like say, for instance, that all alcohol pour costs are universally calculated with “the bartender percentage” worked in; i.e., it is understood, but not ever discussed, that bartenders occasionally give away drinks and pocket profits. That is how this industry works; along with the tips, it is what makes bartending so unusually lucrative. See, I’m not supposed to say that, but it is so accepted, that it is all but standardized in the food-and-beverage industry. Managers know — but they “don’t” know. They see — but they don’t see. So long as it’s done within reason. Give away the house like a reckless, belligerent idiot? That’ll get you on the wrong side of the bartenders that you work with before it will a manager. That is not how it works. There is subtlety, which I would go so far as to call an unspoken commission, and then there is thievery. There are professionals, and then there are dilettantes. And the idiots, the ones who argue out loud by the host stand, or stroll across the street to the ATM, or in plain sight steal money from their own till or pour complimentary drinks with abandon, these morons put all the people who play by the rules at risk. Professionals understand that comping food and drinks is part of the job, understand that charm and good service will earn you more money in a night than a lot of people make in a week. Amateurs disregard this process: they skip the steps, ignore the rules, and steal.
And so, when Vee drops in with a girlfriend or a coworker or two after she gets off shift, and I slide her a bill that’s missing one or two drinks and an appetizer on the house, understand that though I am just as much of a whore as she is, we both at least remain discreet, professional. Prostitution is a sliding scale, and the world has its range of guilty and innocent. I like to think that Vee and I, and those like us, fall somewhere in the middle: a warm, fuzzy space with dim lounge lighting, and stitched with subtle laughter, where borders and margins dissolve.
