Tales of a NYC Sex Worker, Part 5: Only the Lonely
By: Melinda Night, Brooklyn Beck, Call Girl
Tags: Unemployment, Twitter, Loneliness, Debt, Covid 19

March comes in like a lion, and goes out… never. It goes out NEVER.

Photo by Gantas Vaičiulėnas on Unsplash.

My life came to a grinding halt in March of 2020 because of COVID-19.

So did New York City and much of the rest of the world, of course. Your life might have come to a halt too, and if it did I’m really sorry about that.

But an awful lot of people managed to carry on with the business of their lives. My now ex-boyfriend Matt was working from home and presumably getting laid on a regular basis with his “instant soulmate.” My mom’s law firm had her working from home. Even my dad’s job in restaurant supplies didn’t go away, he just had a rough go of it for a while.

I was terrified for the first two weeks of lock-down after Matt and I broke up because I was certain I must have caught COVID-19 from him banging that rando he met and “fell in love” with on St. Patrick’s Day, but thank God nothing happened. I heard at one point later that Matt had contracted COVID himself, but then I heard it wasn’t true after all.

I spent the first two months of lock-down on my phone almost constantly, battling tens of thousands of other people to get through to the New York State Department of Labor so I could validate my unemployment benefits claims and start receiving actual benefits. My checking account quickly ran out of cash, and even once I eventually got through and started receiving the weekly payments, they wouldn’t cover my rent.

I hated doing it, but I had to ask my mother for help. She took over paying my rent directly, and we transferred my credit card to her name. We decided that she would make the minimum payment on the card every month and any further payments necessary to keep the balance below the card’s spending limit. I would continue to use the card for essentials, but now she would receive the statements and help me decide what was essential.

Mom claimed that it wasn’t a problem for her to shoulder the additional financial burden, especially because she wasn’t commuting into the city for the time being, but her savings on that weren’t coming anywhere near my rent payment. She even insisted that these weren’t loans, that she was helping me because she could, that she just wanted me to have as fresh a start as possible when I got back on my feet. But I knew exactly how much she was spending to keep me afloat, and I was determined to keep track.

Thankfully, the federal boost on unemployment benefits meant that the total actually did cover my rent, although just barely. And if worse came to worst, there was now an eviction moratorium in place, so if neither Mom nor I nor both of us together could cover my rent for a while, at least I wouldn’t end up on the street — yet. For the time being, it would just mean more debt.

In the meantime, half a million other people had lost their jobs in New York City alone. I couldn’t very well waitress from home, and I wasn’t trained or qualified for much else. Some women started finding their way to OnlyFans, an online membership platform for selling sexy photos and videos, but I knew that wasn’t for me. Forget that doing it “right” would require an investment in equipment; strangers drooling over images of my body parts behind anonymous usernames also felt awfully cold and impersonal to me. I had no problem with it in principle for any women who chose to do it, and I still don’t. I hope they’re all making tons of money and enjoying their work. But I also didn’t think a short and moderately chubby girl like me was likely to do well against much hotter competition.

Even if none of those obstacles deterred me, my family had a strict rule against putting images of our faces online, on social media or otherwise. A cousin of mine had gone through a hellish, years-long stalking nightmare that only ended when the creep landed in jail for an unrelated crime. Putting our faces and our lives out there simply wasn’t worth the risk, not on Facebook, not on OnlyFans, not anywhere.

There didn’t seem to be any other good options for work-from-home jobs that other people weren’t better qualified for, and I couldn’t afford to risk my health and my life by working on-site anywhere — assuming I could get a job anywhere in the first place.

So I basically did nothing for months.

I kept in touch with family and friends via Zooms. I baked banana bread. I binged “Tiger King” and a lot of the other shows everyone was binging, though I tried to keep my paid streaming subscriptions to a minimum by piggybacking on other people’s accounts. I watched movies Mom and my sister recommended, and I listened to 70s and 80s music Dad sent me. I cried at viral videos. I made some effort to keep my curvy shape from getting too much curvier by doing a little yoga. I wandered up to the roof to see the sun a few days a week to try to keep my sleep cycle normal, and I was pretty sure I was the only tenant who knew the lock on the door to the roof was busted, but I wore a mask every time anyway. But for the most part, I was confined to my 450 square feet, and it gradually felt like the walls were closing in on me.

Sometime in October, I joined Twitter knowing that I wouldn’t have to use my last name or show my face, and I made a few online friends while I tried to learn how to be funny in 280 characters or less. The Presidential election came and went. My sister Dina and her girlfriend Cassie got engaged to be married, the first really wonderful news we’d all had in months. Dina even asked me to be her maid of honor, which made me cry.

The holidays came and went, with family Zooms that became increasingly depressing because I couldn’t hug anybody. The attempted insurrection came and went. Inauguration loomed, and we started to hear about vaccines and roll-outs and which medical conditions might qualify people to get jabbed early.

All that time, I managed to do most of my shopping online, and I was able to do laundry in the building’s basement in the middle of the night to avoid other tenants. But there were still things I needed help for, and occasionally my second cousin Terry would drop by to give me a hand. We weren’t close, but geographically he was the closest family I had, and he was a good sport. He took all the precautions he was supposed to, right down to wearing a mask in my apartment almost 100% of the time.

Halfway through January, four days after his last visit to my place, Terry called me and told me he’d tested positive for COVID-19 and was quarantining at home for ten days. He insisted I shouldn’t worry because we’d taken all the right precautions and his symptoms were fairly mild anyway, but somehow I knew. I just knew.

On the day Joe Biden was sworn in as President of the United States, I woke up with the worst headache of my life. I took some Tylenol, but by mid-afternoon I also had a bad cough. The ache spread to my shoulders, and I had a fever by sundown. I went to bed praying that I would magically be all better when I woke up, even as I knew it wouldn’t happen. Thursday morning I felt even worse, and when I made a cup of coffee to try to calm myself down, I couldn’t smell it or taste it. When I started crying, it triggered the closest thing to an asthma attack that I’ve ever had. I called Mom, and she could hear the fear in my voice. She took charge right away.

“You need to call an ambulance now, grab your insurance card and your ID, take your phone and your charger with you, and update me as often as possible. Hang up now. Go.”

I’d been hearing sirens almost constantly for months since lock-down began, and having nightmares that one of them was meant for me. Suddenly they were all coming true. When the EMTs brought me out the front door of my building on one of those sitting gurneys, there was a crowd gathered — twenty feet back but gathered nonetheless, to see who the latest victim was. I wanted to hide my face, but it was too late.

“Melinda!” I heard a familiar voice yell, and I turned my head to see Dev and a few of his friends, all wearing masks and running up to the ambulance as they loaded me backwards into the cabin. One of the EMTs held them back from reaching me, but Dev waved to me. “You gonna be fine, Baby girl.” I didn’t believe him. He was the last thing I saw before tears filled my eyes and the door closed.

I’ve already talked about how awful my time was in those two hospitals battling COVID-19 and trying to end my own life. Making it home from that ordeal nearly six weeks later should have been a triumphant moment, something to celebrate. But as much of a commotion as I’d made leaving in an ambulance, I arrived home unnoticed by Uber just after sunrise. Every part of that month and a half embarrassed me, and I didn’t want to talk to anybody about it. To top it off, even though my senses of taste and smell were back (and basically normal, thank God), my short-term memory was now constantly failing me. I reached my 23rd birthday with about as little fanfare as I could possibly manage. Then those ridiculous middle-of-the-night attacks of extreme lust started.

I didn’t reply to emails from friends except to confirm I was home and recovering, and I declined every Zoom invitation. I didn’t sign back onto Twitter for months because I didn’t want to learn that nobody had missed me, much less have to explain why I’d been gone. I didn’t leave my apartment at all, and I didn’t let anybody inside again either. Everything I needed, I ordered. If something had to remain broken until the pandemic was over, so be it. And as disgusting as the amount of debt was that I’d racked up between Mom and my credit card before COVID-19, the non-covered hospital and medical bills started arriving soon after. You don’t always get to choose an in-network provider when your life is at risk, so now I was screwed.

I still had no job or any hope of one. Unemployment insurance was better than expected because of the federal boost, but because of my hospitalization there were seven calendar weeks I wasn’t eligible to collect at all. And all told, I now owed nearly a hundred thousand dollars.

And there was no end in sight.