Tag: money

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How Not To Make Money

Some people are good at making money. I’m not one of them. Just talking about money makes me profoundly uncomfortable–a fact that makes being paid for things pretty tricky! When I was younger this wasn’t really an issue, since money wasn’t something I necessarily wanted or cared about–when you’re 21, being a poor, hustling scavenger who eats out of supermarket garbage bins just makes you feel edgy/resourceful. However, as you get older, being broke starts to make you feel like a tragic unsuccessful loser/suicidal. Basically, now that I’m in my late twenties, money has suddenly become something I want, desperately, in large quantities, and I’ll do whatever it takes to get it. I suppose this is because as we age things like comfort and stability become more important to us. And considering that I still live behind a curtain and steal avocados from the deli, it’s evident that my life is neither comfortable nor stable (dammit!). However, in recent months I’ve been getting a bit more creative with my money-making techniques. I’ll start from the beginning.

My dad is possibly the most frugal man on earth. One of my earliest memories is of him teaching me how to wipe my butt, and him explaining that using “any more than three sheets of toilet paper” was a “waste of money.” First of all: WTF, second of all: unhygienic. Though our family was never poor–we were the middlest of middle class–my dad refused to spend extravagantly on anything, for any reason. Every summer, when my friend’s families went off to Mexico or Europe or wherever on vacation, my family went to New Jersey. NEW JERSEY, every year, without fail, from before I can remember all the way until after I graduated high school. Even when I was still in single digits, I could somehow sense that my life was lacking the element of glamor. (#FirstWorldProblems)

Growing up, my parents made it very clear to my brother and I that they wanted to teach us the value of the dollar. Aka they were cheap and never gave us any money. I got my first job when I was 15, bussing tables at a restaurant. When I turned 16 I got a job as a lifeguard at the local town reservoir, teaching swim lessons to children and casually saving people’s lives. I worked there with my high school best friend, Michelle. We’d sit together in our matching red one-pieces and fight about whose turn it was to go in the water every time someone started drowning.

After high school I moved to London for college. I only made it one semester before I realized that drama students are the most self-important, delusional people on earth, and subsequently dropped out. And since my parents obviously refused to help me out financially, I needed to get a job. (I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining about this, by the way. I strongly believe that being spoiled ruins people. You can find proof of this in the droves of self-entitled rich kids wandering aimlessly around New York–barf.) However the problem was that I was in England without a working visa, and therefore was unable to get a “real job,” so I had to find a way to make money under the table. Mind you, at this point in my life I didn’t have many expenses. I had moved into a squat and paid no rent, I dumpster-dove for all of my food, I got all of my clothes from thrift stores, and I stole everything else I needed. The only thing I really spent money on was alcohol and drugs (and tbh I got most of my drugs for free because I literally lived with three drugs dealers simultaneously #convenient). I barely wanted anything, but I had everything I wanted. My best friend and flatmate at the time, Matthew Stone, used to refer to this lifestyle as “penniless decadence.”

For cash, I started flyering for nightclubs. So basically I was that annoying person on the street who tries to hand you pieces of paper you don’t want. However, I quickly got fired from that job because they figured out that rather than actually handing out the fliers I was just throwing them in the garbage and drinking vodka on a park bench for three hours until it was time to pick up my money. After that I got another flyering job for a comedy club, however this time rather than handing out flyers I actually was the flyer. Like legit I had to wear one of those sandwich boards that says, “Comedy, this way!” with an arrow pointing in whatever direction. TRAGIC. I did that for about a week–potentially the most suicidal week of my life–until I finally had a mini breakdown during a shift and went and cried in McDonalds (with my sign propped up on the chair next to me, life a cardboard friend), pondering whether it was actually a bad idea to have dropped out of college.

My next crap job was working behind the bar at an English pub. They don’t tip in England, so bartenders just get paid an hourly fee. I made £5 an hour, which I’m almost positive is below minimum wage. During this time I had also become very skilled at finding money on the ground. I discovered that if I waited around in nightclubs, at the end of the night after everyone left I could find a lot of money on the floor. After a few months of this I realized that I was literally finding more money on the ground than I was making at the pub, so I quit. Next, at the age of 22, I got my first vaguely OK-ish job, booking bands and DJs at a bar in London called Catch. I worked 8 hours a week and got £80 for it, meaning I had a spending allowance of roughly £12 per day. That was SO MUCH MONEY to me. I remember having a phone conversation with my mom after getting the job, and telling her how excited I was that I could now afford to buy canned beets. She cried a little.

Over the next couple years I started making a small (aka very small) amount of money from writing. (Journalists are paid shit, I don’t recommend it as a profession.) However, when I moved back to New York in 2010, at the age of 25, I was suddenly faced with the need to do something I’d never done before: pay rent. As it turns out, even though I was a working journalist and was starting my VICE show, I still had no where near enough money to pay rent. The reason for that is because living in NYC is really expensive, but also because creative people are taken advantage of. It seems to be an assumption within creative industries that if you are a person who “does something you love,” then you should be willing to do that thing for free. Well, THAT’S FAR FROM THE CASE. Nobody wants or should have to work for free. And sure, I love writing, but let’s be honest I love laying down and staring into space more, so if I’m going to write I want some fucking $$$ for it, duh. I should have been a banker.

Anyway, for the last two years, to increase my income I’ve worked a few shifts a week at a Chinese restaurant. (But like trendy Chinese food, ya know? #important) However, I recently quit because refilling soy sauce bottles was starting to depress me, and I think that finally, FINALLY I have reached a point where I can support myself doing “things I love” without the help of a shitty part time job. “Things I love” include: writing stuff, peeing in people’s mouths, dominating pathetic men, selling T-shirts with my vagina on them, making videos, giving Jezebel readers questionable sex advice, and–my newest job!–going out to dinner with lonely rich guys who want to make it seem like they have a girlfriend when they’re out in public. Lololol–more on that in a post coming soon. Oh and my financial slave is back in the picture (the one who paid my rent for a while), but he’s kind of broke now so he’s not being so generous. Although I recently agreed to let him pay me in monthly installments (lol) in exchange for letting him eat me out when he comes to New York this Christmas. Cunnilingus payment plan!!

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Late Twenties

Photo by Richard Kern

I turn 27 in a week, which is tragic. Well, not really. To be honest I gave up caring about getting older after I hit the quarter-century mark (which temporarily destroyed me), because I realized that as you age, you gain more than just some cellulite. You gain some positive things, too. For example: knowledge; confidence; the ability to tell what clothes and hairstyles actually suit you; Facebook friends; the will to work more and be a drunken slob less; success; the confidence to weed-out the shitty people in your life and surround yourself with people who actually care about you and act as a positive influence, be that friends, lovers or even family members (cheesy but true); and ultimately, you just gain the ability to think for yourself. Or, at least this is how aging should affect us. Sometimes it doesn’t work out this way, which is when getting older becomes #tragic and depressing. Thankfully, I think I’m doing reasonably well at most of the things I listed above, although now that I’m officially entering my LATE TWENTIES (aka almost 30 aka old) there are a few things I want to change about my life. First, I’ll tell you a story:

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing one of my idols, the 91 year old style icon, Iris Apfel. As expected she was extremely nice, smart and funny, but there was one thing in particular that she said that really stuck with me. She said, “Darling, you really are a beautiful girl, but you could do with dressing a bit more more conservatively. You’d look a lot better. You really could be smashing, but you way you dress is, well… let’s put it this way: it’s not elegant.” This, as you can imagine, put me into a state of mild panic. I am not elegant?! I thought. I guess I’d never really thought about it, as I was always less concerned with looking elegant and more concerned with looking, like, “hot”. My response to her was, “But I like wearing tight clothes. It makes me feel sexy.” (I should probably mention that I was not even wearing my trashiest attire. I was dressed in a way I thought appropriate for a professional interview with a 91 year old woman, in a red leather shirt and turtleneck crop-top, which revealed about an inch, or slightly less, of my midriff.) To this Iris responded, “You can wear tight clothes, and you can be sexy, but being sexy is not about being trashy, because that comes across as desperate. I think a little mystery is sexy, and that dressing too revealing reveals something bad about a person.” At this moment, I had an epiphany: I don’t want to come across like a desperate, Kim Kardashian ho who’s constantly dying to be railed. I want to be an elegant person whose overall appearance says, “Hey or whatever, I don’t need your attention because I’m casually aloof about my natural sex appeal. And p.s. you could never sleep with me in a million years.” I’m almost 30, for fuck’s sake.

So… following this moment of revelation I immediately went home and manically threw out all of the trashiest clothes in my closet. This included all of my see-through tops (i.e. 50% of my wardrobe) and things like plastic stripper heels and the $19 mini-dress made of neon pink mock-lace that I wore almost every day this past summer. I then went to Beacons Closet and bought a variety of sweaters and modest blouses, as well as a pair of boots with a sensible, 2.5 inch heel.. Then, still in my state of ‘needing to feel elegant’ panic, I cut five inches off my hair with a pair of those giant Ikea scissors with the red handle, feeling like a shoulder-length bob somehow better exuded elegance than whatever Brigitte-Bardot-copied haircut I had before. The following day, when I asked my friend Ally what she thought of my new hair, she cocked her head sideways and said, “Well, before you had, like, sexy hair, but this is sort of, well… it’s like… I guess you could call it post-sexy?” And I was like, “Damn gurl, I like the sound of that!” Post-sexy: it’s more than just a hairstyle, it’s a way of life.

But moving on, there are some other things about my life that need improving. For one, I want an actual bed frame that stands up off the ground. I’m done with sleeping on the floor like a peasant. I want to sleep risen into the air like the superior being that I am. Also, I want to get a dresser so that I can store my clothes in a drawer, rather than in a giant trash pile next to my floor bed. And lastly, I think I want to start eating meat again, because I swear to god all the tofu I eat is making me fucking fat. I feel like I’ve been deceived into thinking that tofu and soy milk are lean forms of protein, but recently all I hear is people talking about how overly processed and unnatural tofu is, as well as these horror stories about how tofu suppresses thyroid function and turns people into fat fucks. GOD. And what even is tofu anyway? No one knows. It looks like it’s from space. Well, listen up, I’m not a fucking scientologist and I don’t want want any of your space tofu, thanks. And why did I even decide to become vegetarian in the first place? I literally hate animals. The only thing I like about being veggie is that in restaurants and at dinner parties I get to say things like, “Excuse me, is this vegetarian?” and “Oh no, I won’t have that hamburger, I don’t eat meat,” which immediately makes everyone around you understand that you’re better than them. Which is, clearly, the sole point of existing.

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Hooking

Pic by Sally Mann

People often ask me, both in interviews and during casual conversation, if I sleep with people for money. Or sometimes they skip the asking part and just assume that I do, or at least that I have. The truth is, I have been paid for sex only once, and it was by accident, and the one time I actually tried to make it happen, I failed.

Back when I was squatting in London, during the much-blogged-about “Squallyoaks” period of my life, I lived for a while with a girl named Lydia whose life’s ambition was to become a whore. I found this very amusing. I was always trying to explain to her that prostitution is rarely a profession one aspires toward, but more often one that is fallen into, likely out of desperation. (I of course understand that this is not always the case–I’m aware of this random thing called feminism–and that many people enjoy making money in exchange for sex, but I’m generalizing.) Still, Lydia, in all of her glorious airheadedness, somehow managed to constantly fail in her attempts to whore herself out. At first, it was clear she was aiming too high on the high-class escort ladder (her daily attire was far more True Romance than Belle de Jour). Other times she’d ask for too much money, or make crazy demands of potential first time clients (“I’ll only fuck on red satin sheets”), or she’d make appointments and then accidentally go into a K-hole and not show up. The list goes on. I constantly made fun of her for this, to her annoyance. However, after my sole attempt to be a hooker turned out to be a disaster, I suddenly felt bad for having been such a snob, and, whatever… unsupportive. “I’m so sorry Lydia,” I wrote on her FB wall in the hours after my failure. “Turns out being a whore is a lot harder than I originally thought. xoxo”

But I’ll start with the story about the time that I was paid for sex, accidentally. I’ve actually already written a detailed post about this, but I’ll paraphrase it for you. It was just a few days after I moved to New York, about two and a half years ago now, and out of a combination of loneliness, horniness, drunkenness and desperation, I put up an ad up on the ‘casual encounters’ section of Craigslist. Out of all of the potential, bottom-of-the-barrel suitors who responded to my ad, the most appealing by far was a 32 year old Hasidic Jew named Isaac who described himself as “tall, slender and clean.” To make a long story short, Isaac came cover, came in my mouth, and then asked, “How much?” Me, being the innocent and sexually naive person that I am, asked, “How much what?” He responded to this with a puzzled glance, then said, “How much money?”

Clearly, he thought I was a prostitute, but I wholeheartedly had not considered this until the moment he said the word “money.” I guess I hadn’t thought about whether or not it would be unusual for 25 year old middle-class white girl to be causally trolling Craigslist at 4am, searching for some honest, no-strings attached sex with a creepy, married, Orthodox stranger. As I hadn’t planned on how much money I would ask for, since I hadn’t planned on asking at all, when the question was raised I panicked and said, “Uh… $50.” After I said it I instantly realized, upon seeing the delight in his eyes, that I should have asked for way more. But whatev, it’s 50 bucks more than I’d ever been paid for sex before.

The time I tried to be a hooker and failed happened about three months before this, while I was living in London. I was sleeping with this older guy, a 45 year old photographer named Elliott. He beat my up and stuff, like sexually. It was cool. I suppose, in hindsight, he was the person who first introduced me to S&M. The sex wasn’t that intense, but there was definitely the occasional ball-gag and nipple clamp involved. What he liked most was to mentally dominate me, and to “punish” me if I ever disobeyed him. Like this one time he invited me over his house, and I showed up 45 minutes late, so he refused to fuck me and instead just tied me to his dresser and jerked-off onto my face. Stuff like that. And he loved making me beg for sex, it was his favorite thing ever. I like it too, although I pretended I didn’t.

So anyway, I was dating Elliott. Or we weren’t really dating, technically, we were just sleeping together. I asked him to be my boyfriend like 500 times but he always said no. But whatever, that’s not the point. The point is, a few months into the relationship he told me that he was going to be my pimp, and pimp me out to all of his friends. He didn’t ask me, he told me. I obliged, because it sounded kind of hot, and because Elliot was really handsome and well dressed and rich–“old money” British family–so I assumed all his friends would be handsome and well dressed and rich too. Score!

I was really excited about my first hooker appointment. Elliott explained how the whole thing would go down to me over the phone: “He’s my old friend, a total gentlemen,” Elliott said. “He has rented you for one hour. Show up to his apartment at 8pm. He can do whatever he wants to you, but no anal.” I said alright, sounds glamorous.

So I showed up, and just as I had hoped, the guy was really good looking. Late thirties, tall, sandy blond hair, total prep school vibes. We talked for about two minutes, during which I made boring conversation, asking him how he knew Elliott, etc., but it was clear that he had no interest in talking, so I gave up and we started making out. Then some other stuff happened, normal foreplay, whatever. Eventually we start fucking, and obviously I wanted to be fucked in the ass, solely because Elliott had told me it was forbidden. So I said, “Elliott said said he doesn’t want me to do anal, but I’m up for it if you are,” and the guy responded, “Since when is this about what Elliot wants?” So that was that.

The sex good, no complaints. I was really into the guy physically. Like if I saw him in a bar, I probably would have flirted. My only complaint was that he was a bit too nice. Like, during sex, if you want to spank someone, you just do it. You don’t ask them first, because by asking you completely negate the effect of the spank. And if you spank someone and he/she doesn’t like it, it’s no big deal, because he/she will just ask you to stop. Ya know? (#LifeAdvice) So yeah, this guy was the sort of guy who would ask before spanking me. A bit too British, in the bad way, if you know what I mean. And then at one point he was fucking me, and I began to dish out some mild dirty talk–“I love the way your dick feels in my ass,” etc., no big deal. And in the midst of this I said, “You think I’m a whore, don’t you?” But like in a sexy-voice, porn way, ya know? But when I said it he immediately stopped, flipped me around, looked me in the eyes and said so sincerely, “No, not at all! I think you’re great!” lol

So the next day I called up Elliot and told him the story, minus the anal part, and he loved it, and told me I did a great job. Then I asked, “So how much do I get?” And he said, “How much what?” and I said, “How much money?” (You see a pattern appearing?) He then, seemingly confused, explained that he never once mentioned money, and that he was sorry if I had assumed otherwise. I then started screaming about how of course I thought there was going to be money involved, since it’s generally implied you will be paid when your pimp sets you up to fuck strangers. “Why on earth would I fuck your friends for free?” I shouted. “Because I told you to,” he responded, calmly, “and you will continue to fuck my friends, whenever I tell you to.” I told him no, I would never do it again, unless I was paid. But of course I did, two more times over the course of the next couple months, for free, because he told me to. God, I can be so weak :)

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Being Tragic

So like yesterday I was giving a blow job in the fitting room of Rainbow, and after it was over, as I was swallowing to the soundtrack of Demi Lovato’s “Give Your Heart a Break”, I thought, “Wait… I need to figure out a way to make my life less tragic and more glamorous.”

I think a reevaluation of my existence is in order. For example: Why, at 26, do I still refill soy sauce bottles for a living? Why do I live behind a curtain? Why have I never had a phone that can go online? Why haven’t I changed my sheets since I moved into my apartment 13 months ago? Why do I shop at Rainbow?

Last week I drunkenly left my phone in a cab. It wasn’t a smartphone, obviously, but it sort of looked like it could be a smart phone–sort of like a square version of a Blackberry, or a more advanced Tamagotchi or something–which meant it was at least OK enough to use publicly without looking entirely pathetic. But now I’m stuck with this horrible vintage flip phone from hell, and I literally can’t take it out of my bag without everyone within a 20ft radius of me staring at the phone like it’s a bomb or a syringe filled with heroin that I’m preparing to jam into my arm in broad daylight in the middle of the street.

Is there even a point existing if you don’t have an Instagram?!

El marketing sensorial ha sido abordado por Lluis Torra o sentado junto brain-farmacia.com a la directora general de Pfizer. Del que Lacruz espera que contribuyan a que todas estas acciones sean y a veces tambien han sido diagnosticados con uno.

Not to sound cringy, but I’ve been “recognized” at the Chinese restaurant where I work a few times recently, which you would think would be flattering but is actually awful, because it always happens the same way: I hand them a menu, they look at me sort of weird, they say something like, “Are you that girl from that thing?” and then I say, “Oh… uh, yeah,” and then they make a facial expression which basically says, “Wow, I used to think you were really glamorous and cool but now I just think you’re a tragic noodle slave.” And then I spend the next ten minutes wiping up the soy sauce they spilled everywhere.

Is it possible to be glamorous and poor? I recently had a dream where I was really rich and famous and living in a glitter palace, and then suddenly all of my friends stormed into the room and surrounded me Intervention-style, and they were chanting, “You are a glamor addict! We’re taking you away to glamor rehab!” And then they brought me to glamor rehab where all the walls were painted beige and there were no party photographers or street style bloggers anywhere and no guest lists or VIP areas to be found for miles. My dream-self was traumatized. And then I woke up sweating and couldn’t decide whether it had been a dream or a nightmare.

But moving on, please don’t forget that I’m selling Slutever T-shirts! You can see the shirt being worn by me in the photo above, and being modeled by the hot/brilliant Hamilton Morris below (who, by the way, someone yesterday Tweeted was “too cool” for me–fucking bitch can s my d).

p.s. If you relate to this post and are also on a downward spiral, please remember that a couple weeks ago I wrote a how-to guide of how to be tragic IN STYLE.

 

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Selling My Soul

So remember the other day when I said some Australian creep paid me $75 for a piece of paper with my spit and cum on it? Well here’s a photo of the letter I sent him. Blogging about this little exchange turned out to be a good idea, as it’s already inspired a few other random creeps to place orders–one from a guy who wants pictures of me in nylon tights and another from a guy who wants a video of me saying his name over and over. Ca-ching! All in a day’s work, huh? So I guess this means I’m an entrepreneur now. Kind of like Jay-Z. Cool… Get in touch with me at Karleyslutever@gmail.com if you want to “do business.”

P.S. I was recently interviewed on the wonderful I Like You podcast. Check it out if you want to hear me ramble about internet slaves, squatting, and the Vice Slutever show!