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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
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Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling
Reviewed by Richard Weems
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In Rick Whitaker's Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling, the sense of imminent danger is like the danger in Cops – a little distant but lingering nonetheless. Always a possibility, sometimes we do not notice the danger until we are bored by the lack of it. Yet it would be unfair to approach this book wanting to relish such danger, wanting to be shocked by men sucking the dicks of men they are paying. Rick Whitaker's descriptions of the job are wonderfully fresh and trustworthy. The clients are realistically odd and sad and dreary – Midnight Cowboy with nothing to laugh about. He is sometimes a little too reticent of the nature of his clientele – he more than once alludes to people whose names he does not want to reveal since they would be familiar figures. Though this book is by no means an exposé meant to reveal the predilections of celebrities, it does manage to be a tease. |
 Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling Memoir by Rick Whitaker Hardcover - $12.60 Published September 1999 Four Walls Eight Windows |
The true exposé in this book is of Whitaker himself. His acceptance of situations is at times ghastly, whether it is initiating a threesome with an HIV-positive wealthy sod and later taking the other hustler home himself, or whether it is the insatiable needs in his addictive binges for drugs or anonymous sex or reading philosophy. Rick Whitaker lays the situation out with honest detail and direct language. He neither condemns himself or tries to excuse his behaviors, since either route would have ended with a droll attempt to excite in a melodramatic fashion an already intriguing situation – a hustler who thrives on getting paid for sex, whose passions for Wittgenstein and crystal meth come out as equally as his passion to fuck strange men in the sauna.
Fortunately, this book is free of the 'hooker with a heart of gold' banality. Rich Whitaker is a writer and an artist, the latter more than the former, and his life outside of the page is what truly seems to be his art form. There are numerous references to good books, a banquet for reading, as well as other aspects of a rigorously cultural New York City lifestyle here. At first, these can be mistaken as a superficial attempt to infuse a whore with soul. But through this book another truth comes to light – Rick Whitaker is an artist first and foremost, and his media is the chemical and the sexual and the cultural. In his later days of hustling, Whitaker finds it harder and harder to remember all his clients. He finds himself, as always, thinking more of the present and the future rather than the past. And his fire for what the present offers him is the main push that drives a reader through this book. His drug and alcohol addictions come from a desire to take in what is available to him in this big place they call the City. His jaunts through texts of philosophy or gallery openings stem from a sincere love for the arts. Even when on the job he shows us his talent for taking in the present moment and finding in it something for his own pleasure, whether it is dildo-laden submission to a Bill Gates-ian computer expert that brings Whitaker to orgasm before his Microsoft hardball player, or the exquisite scene where Whitaker satisfies a client with only a removal of his shirt, a squeeze of his nipple and a litany about his urge to rape the old queen.
What Rick Whitaker offers us in this book is his artistic soul, his need for thrills and his willingness to push the envelope to a near fatal level, and the way he survives it all.
But as glad as I was to be allowed to experience this soul, I found it unfortunate that it had to be conveyed in this form. Whitaker aspires to be a writer, but ultimately this book tethers the experiences it relates rather than allowing them to soar. The unfortunate romp into Whitaker's childhood is saved some interesting spins on Oedipal cycles and by Whitaker's admission that he does not know how all the information applies to his life as a hustler, but it also serves to highlight how the obligation to recount one's own history serves our endless delusion that one's biography will always explain one's life. Or perhaps Whitaker's childhood also serves to remind us that there is a living mind in this book, and we should too quickly judge or objectify this hustler as alien or other. In the end, we leave this book as we would leave someone we have only just met – maybe not entirely positive we like this person, but sure that we have come into contact with someone real and honest with us, and that alone earns at least a little of our respect.
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By the time you finish
reading this, Weems will have changed jobs. Now he will teach at a high
school in easy reach of go-go and a quaint old bar run by an equally old
dame named Francis who keeps a rocking chair by the taps. He will also
be teaching fiction writing at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey.
His second tattoo is official, and now he knows how addictive they are.
Numbers three and four are already envisioned, though no piercings have
entered his mind yet. Nothing, however, is certain.