I’ve mentioned this in passing in other pieces but I do think our community was ahead of the curve in terms of destigmatizing sex work and viewing it through a positive lens. This could be attributed to any number of things – the fact that we were punks, the fact that some of us were junkies, maybe just us being weirdos in general. If Christians actually stuck to what it says in the Bible most of Western civilization would be on the same page but we all know that’s not the case even if things have been moving in an encouraging direction.
I didn’t get to start hanging out in Downtown San Diego until I was 14. I had failed my 9th Grade Biology class out of pure laziness and one of my options to make up the credit was to take a Summer course at City College. Most of the time my mom would drive me but on the days where there was a longer session or lab I got to take the bus home. Even though the number 11 went right past my parents’ house back then I’d never actually ridden it before this point – me and my friends used to throw rocks at it but besides that I barely noticed it was there.
Now that I had a pretext for needing to be downtown and could convince my parents to buy me a bus pass I jumped head first into exploring public transit. San Diego probably has the worst transit system of any city I’ve ever lived in but at an age where I was too young to start driving but hadn’t ever learned to ride a bike having access to it felt like an unprecedented level of freedom. Falling in love with riding buses almost certainly played a role in me never, not even to this day, learning to drive.
Actually one of my biggest regrets involves a bus but it wasn’t a real one – it only existed in a dream. Around this time I had a dream where I crept out of bed and found a city bus idling on one of my neighborhood’s suburban streets. In the little marquee window where route and destination are displayed it said 72L THE BLACK BOX. In this dream I already knew that The Black Box was the name of a lawless smuggler’s cove that isn’t based on anything from real life San Diego but would presumably be over by the beach somewhere.
When I stepped on board the air was thick with cigarette smoke and slow, wheezy Zydeco music. The rear section held an entire pool table and an assortment of shady looking characters were standing around this table and idly playing with daggers in the nearby seats. The bus still had a few minutes until it was scheduled to depart so I looked for a seat but at the last minute I lost my nerve and stepped back off and returned to bed.
This wasn’t a lucid dream – by which I mean that I hadn’t realized it was a dream and could potentially control reality while it was happening but when I woke up I immediately regretted not sticking it out and experiencing The Black Box for myself. It’s entirely possible that within the architecture of this particular dream there wasn’t even an option to stay on the bus like when you’re playing a video game and suddenly run into an invisible wall.
Even in regular waking life it can sometimes feel like free will is merely an illusion.
Anyway I was supposed to be talking about sex work. From either City College or San Diego High the closest stop for the number 11 bus was the corner of 9th and Broadway directly in front of The Chee Chee Club. Me and my friends would call this place a “hobosexual” bar because it was kind of a gay bar and kind of a homeless bar and kind of a SRO resident on social security bar. Like all of downtown at this time it was rough and rundown compared to the more yuppified gay bars up in Hillcrest.
It looks like it still exists which is more than I can say for most of the bars on Broadway from this time period. I don’t know if the vibe is still the same as it’s been many years since I stepped inside.
I got tall and started growing facial hair fairly quickly. Not like I was one of those guys with a full on mustache in High School but I started being the guy to buy cigarettes or alcohol for my friends even though I didn’t drink or smoke. I could easily pass for quite a bit older than I was. Hanging out in front of The Chee Chee Club meant that I started getting hit on a lot.
For the most part this was something I felt comfortable negotiating and sometimes utilized for personal benefit. I became friends with a hairdresser in a nearby salon named Larry who backed things down to platonic when he learned I was only fourteen but I was able to leverage the initial attraction to get my hair dyed black for the first time for free. The only really bad experience I had was because I didn’t immediately assess the nature of a certain situation.
With access to all of San Diego county I became a dedicated thrifter and I had a certain pair of pants that were tighter than what I’d usually wear but I picked out for the old school airbrushed graffiti letters. They said “Billy Ray the Bandit” down both legs and had a microphone in the bulge area. I was walking between Broadway and Pokez when a much older man flagged me down:
“Young man slow down! Your legs are so much longer than mine and so much younger than mine! Would you like to come up to my apartment and watch television with me?”
If I had grown up as a girl I most likely would have gauged his intentions much earlier because similar things would have started happening to me at a younger age. I don’t think it was so much the fact that I was fourteen that I started getting this type of attention as it was that I suddenly started hanging out in “cruising” and “working” areas. I was naive enough that I thought his invitation to watch television was literal and he was just a lonely and slightly senile old man.
I told him that I didn’t have time right that particular minute because I needed to go meet up with some of my friends. This was true – I was generally trusting and approachable to strangers and if I hadn’t had anywhere to be in that particular moment it’s entirely possible that I might have followed him to his room and had an even more unpleasant experience. His face suddenly took on a cold, practical expression as he said:
“Oh I think I could make it worth your while. I pay pretty well.”
I’m sure the whole thing sounds relatively benign and I’m coming off as being incredibly sheltered but in the moment it made me feel absolutely horrible. It wasn’t that I was being propositioned by an adult man, I’d already gotten used to that and learned to deflect such advances without bruising my psyche, it was how transactional he was about it. I feel like I’m doing an absolutely inadequate job of describing what it was about this situation that got to me so much but in the simplest terms I felt lessened.
It can be a positive and affirming sensation to be objectified but for me in this moment it felt like a loss of agency. I had been carelessly and comfortably existing in my body and it felt like the context of my physical personhood was suddenly shifted and there was nothing I could do about it. I know that women are constantly subjected to this kind of thing the moment they go through puberty, if not before, but it was a wound to my ego.
When innocence dies to any degree there’s bound to be some bloodshed.
I’ve gotten more comfortable with the concept of being a sex work provider but my boundaries have essentially stayed the same – I don’t want external compensation to ever be the reason that I am engaging in an intimate sex act with another person. The definition of sex act is a little fuzzy here – when I learned that some people in my social circle were making large amounts of money for ejaculating onto a billionaire named Stanley Marsh 3 in Amarillo, Texas I would have happily done the same thing.
I don’t think I would have been comfortable with him ejaculating onto me or either of us performing fellatio on the other and so on for any amount of money.
Back in the ‘90s when all the girls in the “Spock-Rock” scene wore thick soled Tredair UK shoes one of my female friends was approached on the street by a man who wanted her to stomp on his hand in the backseat of his car. I think he gave her fifty dollars. I’m not trying to downplay the expertise or emotional labor that goes into doing kink/fetish work but there is a certain appeal in the idea of getting financially compensated for acts which aren’t usually considered sexual but do provide sexual gratification to a customer or John.
In the first decade of this millennium it started feeling like finding gigs for unconventional sex work was a major source of income for members of the underground and even became something of a flex. Broadly speaking the more “out there” something was the more likely it would impress one’s peers. There was a kid named Patty Puke who came around the Rockaway rafts and entertained everybody with stories about getting paid to stick his toes into somebody’s nostrils.
He’d do an impression of what this John sounded like when he started to get especially excited:
“Yes! Fuck my tight little nostril with your big girthy toe!”
It’s possible that he was exaggerating or even outright inventing the situation. Not everyone shares my dogmatic insistence on only relaying the truth as they remember it even if adding some harmless ornamentation might greatly increase the entertainment value of a particular anecdote. This story was especially popular but that alone should not cast doubts on its veracity – the truth is, as they say, often stranger than fiction.
Around this time there were lots of stories circulating about people in our scene finding work popping balloons, engaging in the bathroom functions euphemised as number one and two and putting out cigarettes on a particularly consistent customer who was active in a certain city’s music scene. I know all of these to be genuine due to either video evidence or consistent descriptions from multiple people.
I never found this kind of work myself but I also didn’t put too much energy into looking for it. Broadly speaking women commanded more value in this marketplace than men but there were no shortage of opportunities for willing males either as long as they were on the young and moderately attractive side. Not long after moving to Los Angeles a friend introduced me to an opportunity to make a “solo” or masturbation video.
The money wasn’t great but it did seem like a fair trade off to do something I’d most likely do anyway when it didn’t bother me that I’d be with a cameraman or have the result publicly shared on the internet. The company was called Alternadudes and its particular market niche was that the models all looked like they belonged to various underground subcultures.
I should have thought of a better screen name but in the moment I just went with the most commonly misheard versions of my actual first and last name. I’m not going to write it here but if we know the same people it should be relatively easy to figure out. At this point in my life I considered myself a goth but nonetheless was marketed in my short clip as a hippy – a bit of unfortunate pigeonholing that has dogged me my entire life.
Coincidentally I’m dealing with something vaguely similar now as the “goth keepers” at the r/goth subreddit have been taking down every attempt I’ve made to share music or talk about the lifestyle. In their depressingly narrow world view there doesn’t seem to be any room for a DIY approach to music in their definition of the genre. Even a project called Diving God which was musically built around the Hypolydian mode used to make music analogous to minor keys in literal gothic cathedrals didn’t make the cut.
Alternadudes was run by a guy who used to work as a personal assistant to Clive Barker and shot in a loft in LA’s downtown Spring Street Arts District. The day I arrived to make my video I wasn’t feeling especially sexy as my entire time in Los Angeles had been romantically lonely and left me feeling particularly unattractive. I forget how it came up but I mentioned something about what would happen if I put my balls on ice.
My friend Vanessa would often repeat a phrase she had heard somewhere about being bored to the effect of “you could put your balls on ice and race ‘em”. This made me curious to try this for myself and what happens is the testicles slowly constrict and crawl toward the body almost like living creatures to avoid falling to a temperature that would kill the sperm cells and render them ineffective. I remember a female friend in High School asking if I thought leaving your scrotum on an ice pack might allow you to “cum cold” as she found the most unpleasant aspect of swallowing semen to be the warm temperature and wished it was more like a milkshake.
In retrospect this girl, who I did actually have a major crush on, most likely intended this as a flirtation if not outright invitation but my confidence was so low in my younger years that I was almost super humanly oblivious to this kind of thing. Once I was dancing with a ravishingly beautiful woman at Mustache Monday when she took my hand and placed it against her bare breast in her leather halter top but my brain still somehow told me that she couldn’t possibly be attracted to me.
This was basically how I saw myself the day I went to shoot the Alternadudes scene so when I suggested the ice thing the camera guy was most likely eager for any change of pace from the morose and self deprecating answers I was giving to questions about how often I “got laid” and what not. He grabbed me a handful of cubes from the freezer and my scrotum lurched across my hand like a wrinkly pink amoeba. I guess he’d never seen this particular trick and reacted enthusiastically:
“That’s fucking hot!”
“Actually it’s fucking cold!”
I’ve never bothered to watch my own video but I imagine this exchange is the high point. Afterwards I moved to a white leather couch and coaxed out an unenthusiastic spurt or two with the aid of some generic straight porn he put on a TV just off camera. He asked me if I’d ever tasted it before and I said I hadn’t. He suggested I try it then but I demurred:
“I’ll hold off. I gotta have something to look forward to when I’m 90.”
It wasn’t a ton of money, only 150 bucks, and the rates for doing more hardcore scenes with other actors weren’t even that much higher. Either way I have my thing about having actual sex for money – if I was already going to have sex with a person due to mutual desire I’d be fine with doing it for a camera and getting paid but it doesn’t feel right to have money be the primary motivation.
Maybe it’s naive to think that nobody’s ever had sex with me specifically as a means to drugs or shelter but no scenarios jump to mind. Generally people I was already having sex with decide that they want to try taking drugs together as opposed to the other way around. There is one kind of questionable situation involving a person I met on a Greyhound bus but my behavior in that entire scenario is so mortifying and reprehensible I will most likely never write it up despite my usual shameless demeanor.
There was another way to continue making money from Alternadudes in a kind of “jerkoff pyramid scheme” where I’d get fifty dollars for every friend I referred who followed through with shooting a scene. The contact who clued me in had already made his way through all the potential recruits in the LA area but as I was already setting up shows for visiting friends in the noise scene this created one or two opportunities for an additional payday.
One friend said he wanted to do it but balked at the payoff, he thought he was worth more than the 150. He tried suggesting I give him my 50 dollar referral on top of his primary payment but I wasn’t about to agree to that arrangement. If it’s a DIY show everything goes to the guy on tour but this was something different. Ultimately I just think he wasn’t comfortable selling himself in this way in service of this kind of content – sometimes we don’t realize where our boundaries lie until it comes down to the moment of pulling the trigger and this just wasn’t for him.
There’s definitely nothing wrong with that and I’d much rather see him change his mind at the last minute than end up doing something he’d regret.
When me and LaPorsha got together a year or so later the trend in our social circle had shifted to couples making money from putting on live shows for voyeurs. I should clarify that I’m talking about one specific flavor of experience: people largely from stable homes and middle class backgrounds dipping their toes into the idea of sex work without engaging in more high risk behaviors like actual dates.
This is what I’m most qualified to speak on but it doesn’t represent the entirety of sex work realities for people in my community. There were people who engaged in, for want of a better word, direct prostitution for any of several reasons: they were interested in and genuinely enjoyed the work, they were young queer people who had lost all family support and needed to survive, they were fleeing an abusive home life, they needed to fund an addiction and had no other viable options or really any combination of the reasons I just listed.
My largely peripheral experiences should not be viewed as a definitive survey but rather a quick overview of what it was like to tangentially interact with sex work on one’s own terms from a privileged position in an era where it was becoming popular and trendy.
When me and LaPorsha started trying to make money from voyeur shows our opportunities and earning potential were absolutely curtailed by the fact that we were the “wrong” kind of interracial couple. I often say that money is the only language where it is impossible to be dishonest meaning that nobody ever spends it without wanting, or at least feeling obligated, to and believing that the value of what it is spent on corresponds to what is being spent.
It is easy enough to look at the numbers and see that Black adult entertainment actresses earn significantly less than White ones. I forget the name of the author but I was reading a New York Times article on the subject with the quote:
“Porn is the theater of the id and America’s id is racist”
Even in a situation where a specific consumer’s preference might be Black women whether they are looking for exotic dancers, adult film actresses, dominatrixes or old fashioned prostitution they will still be aware of overarching market forces that can be leveraged for their benefit to allow them to expect, in simplest terms, more for less.
This didn’t mean that we were forced to ask for a lower rate than our friends where the woman in the couple was White but it almost certainly meant that we attracted less interest and opportunities and more expectations that we might offer more than we were advertising. Our first session went relatively well. We went over to the Hollywood condo of what looked like a recently divorced lawyer type but I think he said he was an actor.
He offered us some champagne and extremely low dose Valium and was respectful of our ground rule of no direct touching. We were a bit too nervous to really enjoy the exhibitionist aspects of the whole thing but we were more capable of performing than in any of our subsequent sessions and it felt natural enough. We held back certain things to try to get a call back for a second session and he was the one to signal the end and never called again.
We made it clear that we had no issues with release on his part as long as he was the one to bring this about mechanically and ensured we weren’t in the line of fire as it were. He didn’t take us up on this – it seemed to be a first time for him as well and most likely he had expectations that the rules regarding participation and interaction might change in the moment.
Performance anxiety isn’t usually a huge problem for me but the added pressure of there being money on the line and multiple parties depending on my body fulfilling a specific function which is not entirely within my control made me look into performance enhancing drugs. I’d started going down to Tijuana and brought back some Viagra as it’s sold over the counter and easily available.
I didn’t take any nor was it offered to me for the Alternadudes shoot but I felt a lot better about that first voyeur gig after swallowing a pill. I took it just as we were riding the elevator to our client’s condo so it’s possible it hadn’t even kicked in yet and the whole thing was in my head. Not long after the session we started subletting a studio apartment in Koreatown which gave us the opportunity to do incalls.
Our next booking was a much younger guy, he actually seemed younger than us, and I made the mistake of swallowing my last pill the moment he pulled up in his car. I was worried that it might not have had enough time to kick in the last time around so I wanted to have a longer lead time. I met him at the door to our building and he followed me upstairs but the moment he saw the inside of our apartment he “remembered he’d left his wallet in the car.”
That excuse should be familiar to anyone who’s tried any aspect of this profession and obviously it was a pretext to bail on the whole thing and drive off. This could have been for any number of reasons: our ad showed our bodies but not our faces so it’s possible but unlikely he didn’t like one or both of our looks, maybe he didn’t feel comfortable in the building and was afraid he was about to get robbed or the most likely explanation: he never intended to follow through or pay the agreed upon amount but got a quick thrill from poking his head in and wasting our time.
This would turn out to have additional financial consequences when we got another booking the very next day and I hadn’t had a chance to get any more pills. This guy was probably closer to my age. I decided to try to power through without outside aid but found myself stuck in my head. We had already been paid so the only thing that could sabotage the gig at this point would be if I was unable to get an erection so of course I obsessed on this fear and anxiety and was unable to get an erection.
We had set up a “cuck chair” next to the bed and LaPorsha had put on music to cut through the awkwardness and prevent too many of the associated noises from being audible to our neighbors. Out of pure coincidence the song that came on from her Pandora was Depeche Mode’s Just Can’t Get Enough. It felt like time had slowed down to a crawl and the lyrics had subtly shifted to mock my impotence as no amount of mutual effort could seem to help me break through my flaccid reality:
“I just can’t get it up! I just can’t get it up!”
After what felt like an eternity I accepted the inevitable and in a cloud of shame and embarrassment proclaimed that I was pulling the plug. Because our John had already been inside our apartment and seen us naked we came to the joint decision that we would give him back half of the money. As LaPorsha went to retrieve it from the top of the night stand he commented in a bitter tone:
“Women! I’m surprised she hasn’t already spent it!”
While I wouldn’t say that I looked down on any of our clients this remark did cause me to question the attitudes and experiences that had led this guy in particular to pursue this specific service. Maybe I’m reading too much into it and he was just attempting to break the tension with a joke while subscribing to the entirely mainstream “woman bad” genre of boomer humor.
Mostly I think nobody in this small handful of furtive experiences really fit their designated roles. While LaPorsha and I almost certainly have an exhibitionist streak our motivations in these encounters were purely financial. I also don’t think any of our clients were purely voyeurs – they were most likely just horny guys scrolling Craigslist and Backpage that saw our advertisement as the best option in a particular moment or a step on the way to pursuing something more hardcore than what we were offering.
Most significantly none of these sessions featured a single orgasm although they may have been used as mental fuel for one after we left the picture by one or more of the aforementioned men.
After this last failure we decided to hang it up. The amount of effort we had to spend just reposting ads due to a breed of troll that derives satisfaction from getting them taken down, messaging flakes and tire kickers and having the same conversation over and over with optimists trying to order off the menu didn’t seem to justify the meager returns. Our energy was best spent elsewhere and I went back to pretending to be a superhero in Hollywood.
One amusing side note is that an old friend of mine from the underground music scene was in town cruising ads and hit us up. When I mentioned this in one of our recent conversations he said that he had recognized me but considering I used a pseudonym and hid my face it seems unlikely.
While I don’t doubt that we were among the least successful of our peer group I do suspect that the friends who claimed to be consistently paying their rent this way were unrealistically exaggerating their success ratio in a similar fashion to habitual gamblers. As I’ve already said it was definitely trendy for a handful of years and projecting an image of both financial success in this arena and minimal effort in achieving it held specific social status in the art, punk and noise universe.
Sex work is real work and like all work it is exhausting, draining, often depressing and carries invisible costs in uncompensated resources for the laborer. I’m not interested in placing it on a continuum against other avenues of survival but rather elucidating the reality that even for those who genuinely enjoy it, it still isn’t all roses and gravy.
It wasn’t long after we stopped using Craigslist and Backpage that these options got taken down allegedly to fight sex trafficking although it’s almost certainly had the opposite effect. OnlyFans wasn’t a thing yet and although Web Cam stuff had been big for a while we never really tried it because we rarely had stable internet access or housing. Around 2014 we were crashing at a friend’s house near MacArthur Park and decided to try this newer site everybody was talking about called Chaturbate.
Before putting on a show of our own we spent a few hours cruising what was already up there. I wish I could remember the name but we stumbled across a popular broadcast where a trio of conventionally unattractive Middle America looking folks in their underwear were sitting on a bed just hanging out and drinking Mountain Dew. It was a somewhat older couple and their slightly younger female friend but nobody had put any effort into looking like, in broad terms, an object of desire.
They had a long list of things they would not consider or even tolerate requests for – most notably sex acts of any kind between the male who was in the relationship and the female who was not. Regardless nobody seemed to be asking to see sex anyway. People evidently enjoyed just chatting and watching them hang out and were generously tipping for the privilege.
In an arena of fantasy they had found a way to monetize reality most likely because it was both unexpected and in short supply. There was something thrilling and mesmerizing about looking into their world – out of all the broadcast channels it was the one we spent the longest time watching and the only one I remember. I want to say their channel had a generic, location based name like “The Hills” or “The Hollow” or something.
I’ve had decent success throwing out descriptions and getting back definitive identifications so just in case anybody reading spent a lot of time on early era Chaturbate I’ll add a few more details. Both of the women were on the heavier side and the guy was balding and wore thick glasses – he kind of looked like a baby chick. I don’t have a lot of faith in this netting me a name but it would be awesome to see how they’re doing and if they’re still on the platform.
Eventually we started our own broadcast and tried to make money. Mostly people dropped by to gawk and neg us with vaguely racially tinged comments. We got a couple of very small tips – 5 tokens or less. I think it worked out to something like 50 cents a token and the website took a cut as well. When you got a tip a message with the user’s name and amount would pop up in yellow text in the chat stream along with a dinging sound effect.
We were nervous and this manifested directly into rushing things along when it would have made the most sense to take things as slowly as possible to make the most money. A user asked us how long we’d been using the platform and when he found out we were new he suggested we switch to a private room and give him a personalized show for the equivalent of fifty dollars.
It wasn’t as distracting as having a client in the same room as us but I still got too much in my head and struggled physically. It’s a dilemma specific to pursuing this kind of performance as a man – all the lube in the world can’t pull a hard-on out of thin air. Without getting too specific I was eventually able to goad out a dribbling finish at half mast with much assistance. It wasn’t particularly fun or satisfying for either one of us.
I most likely would have gotten over this form of stage fright with a bit more practice. It never seemed to be much of a problem when making content for art’s sake but it popped up, or rather didn’t, whenever there was money on the line.
Once it was over the dude peaced out and we tried to figure out how to cash out the tokens. That’s when we noticed that we still only had the five or six we’d gotten before turning the show private. With a sudden sinking feeling I figured out the ruse – this guy had figured out some HTML hack to turn his text yellow and manually type out a spoofed version of the donation alert. In our haste and nervousness we had failed to notice that the notification never made the accompanying sound effect.
It was the kind of scam that could only be pulled on noob performers exactly one time. Our remote voyeur specifically got off on manipulating green couples like ourselves into putting on a show with no compensation whatsoever. Ripping off and defrauding sex workers is a whole fetish in itself and although the thing was contact free it still stung.
Anyone who’s ever worked earnestly only to not get paid knows the basic feeling. To put things in a convenient circle it was the exact emotion that motivated the guy who stole and illegally distributed Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s sex tape. Like him our immediate impulse was to retaliate but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot we could do.
We could have tried to go back in the chat logs to find his username and report him to Chaturbate but this felt fruitless and like additional emotional labor. It seemed like the website most likely knew about this weakness in their tipping system and didn’t care – after all it didn’t cost them anything. We knew instinctually there was no chance of reimbursement on money that never existed in the first place: we’d been duped.
That killed any energy or interest we had for pursuing the voyeur gig as an online thing and we never went back to trying it irl. I was already on the old side for the average consumer when we started and although there’s a market for everything I don’t think I particularly enjoyed trying to market myself. If I’m going to be entirely honest it was mostly LaPorsha’s passion project while mine is more like this – the thing you’re reading right now.
She had her own journey with pursuing modeling, stripping and dom work for a few years until she accepted the inevitable conclusion. She didn’t have the same opportunities or earning potential as her non-Black friends and while Black women can definitely be successful in adult entertainment it’s only ever a token few. She posed for the same company that nearly every girl in the scene of this era did photos for but hers got put on a separate, less popular page called “exotics” – that about summed it up.
It feels like the social narrative around sex work has shifted because on one hand it’s become more normalized with OnlyFans but on the other hand there’s a significant backlash to that normalization. I guess the opposing forces always exist in society and always will – this story just tells what it felt like in a particular time and place to get what I would call an “average” amount of into it for my age and subculture.
I know that this particular account makes it sound boring at best and awful at worst but that’s because it’s a very specific flavor of experience. As a general rule of thumb most things you do for money are things you wouldn’t do for not money – it is possible to do things exactly the way you want but then it’s harder to get money for them.
Not impossible I hope.
Within this time frame we did actually make an artistic pornography film that I really enjoyed making and am proud of and genuinely think is hot but I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to sell or market it due to the rather intense social themes it is centered on. Anyway this probably isn’t the best place to talk about something that was done on our own terms and we actually totally like.
It would feel a bit like setting a maraschino Cherry on top of a pile of shit instead of an ice cream Sundae and why would I want to do that? In the words of Austin Powers:
“That kind of thing isn’t my bag, baby!”
Adventures in the Undiscovered Interior of Underground America 