The Complications of Camwork and Quarantine

📅 April, 2020

〚ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ ғʟᴀsʜʙᴀᴄᴋs + ᴅɪssᴏᴄɪᴀᴛɪᴏɴ, ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴏғ sᴇx-ᴡᴏʀᴋ ᴀs sᴇʟғ ʜᴀʀᴍ, ᴀɴᴅ ɪᴍᴘʟɪᴇᴅ sᴇxᴜᴀʟ ᴛʀᴀᴜᴍᴀ/ᴀʙᴜsᴇ〛

Free time. That was something about the pandemic. Sure, there was a lot about it; abject panic, boredom, uncertainty, blame, et cetera et cetera. But after the initial terror dissolved out into indefinite uneasiness, after more frequent hand-washing morphed into the shelter-in-place orders, the end result was that people were home more. With nothing to do. Nothing to do but eat and sleep and smoke weed and jack off. 
New York City itself was in the red; contaminated and coding, shutting down, shuttering doors and windows. 
For Kohao, business as a camboy had never been better.
...But selling his show meant treating his body as something with a price tag; being on camera more meant being an object more. And with one of his roommates and so many of his friends out of work, with no gigs to keep them all afloat...He ended up being an object a lot. 
He’d throw himself into a haze and watch his own act, detached, from across the room; sitting spiritually on the dresser and letting his body be “Bennet.”
...Or “David.” Because God, that was coming back, wasn’t it?
When he finally ‘came to’ and returned to seeing the world in first person, he’d wander—sore and shaking and dehydrated—to the shower, and sit in the fetal position, feeling used and disoriented. Often he’d forgo the soap: It was pointless. He’d always be dirty.

Going on a month into it all, a late afternoon found him worn raw, his hair still wet from his too-long shower that couldn’t wash him clean, beelining again for the liquor after calling it a day. He poured the last two shots the rum bottle had to offer into a glass. Drained it. And started crying.
Chey had been working on his laptop in the living room; Anarchy beside him, watching something on Netflix, and both of them startled.
“Gunner, hey, whoa—what’s going on?” Chey asked, scrambling to standing and heading hestationless toward Kohao, arms already halfway extended. Kohao leaned into his offered embrace without thinking about it.
“Lie,” Kohao said tearfully, “Just do me a favor and lie and say I’m worth anything. Anything more than my goddamn fuckability.”
Chey’s hug tightened protectively and he made a distraught noise at the back of his throat.
“Holy shit, KO, I won’t be lying. You’re worth—you’re worth the world. What’s going on?”
Kohao couldn’t find the words to explain; it seemed the dictionary had fallen short on him and he couldn’t manage to find equivalence to the nausea, to the self-disgust, to the itch, the itch, the awful, I’m-being-watched crawling itch under his skin that made him feel like there were still eyes on him even now. Like he was naked despite being dressed, like he was on auction and up for sale in his own kitchen. 
“I’m a fucking whore.” 
The hug he’d accepted was suddenly uncomfortable; he didn’t want anyone touching him, not now, God, not now—but he also couldn’t bear leaving the protection that Chey’s arms offered. Kohao dug his nails into his palms, tucked his fists to his chest, and screwed his eyes shut. He felt young, folding up like a child.
David. David David David. ‘Davie.’
“You’re not. Please don’t say that about yourself, Kohao,” Chey said sadly, breaking through the fog somewhat—but the clarity felt confusing to Kohao: That was his name. It also wasn’t. He was six. No he wasn’t. Twelve. No he wasn’t. Sixteen?
Nothing happened, nothing happened, nothing happened.
There were hands on him. Chey’s, Chey’s; they were safe. He knew that. But were they? 
Suddenly feeling restrained and scared, Kohao shoved away and ducked desperately out from the arms around him; his heart pounding as he scrambled backwards without really knowing why. He immediately felt too distant and wanted to be shielded again. But no, please, God, he didn’t want to be touched.
“Chey…” he whispered, partway to pleading, but held up his hands to ward off any approach. His own voice sounded deeper than he expected. The floor seemed too far away.
Chey looked a half-inch from heartbreak but didn’t move, and Anarchy came up beside him, eyes wide and confused.
“What’s happening?” 

“It’s April of 2020,” Chey said softly, not responding to Anarchy and instead talking to Kohao. “2020. You’re twenty-four years old. You’re in a band—”
“I know,” Kohao interrupted, pained but feeling clearer-headed both from Chey’s words and the near-decade-deep familiarity of Anarchy’s voice, “I know. But we’re not playing any shows right now and we need to pay fucking rent, don’t we?” He put his hands to his face, uncomfortably close to tears again. “I’m here and I know it but I’m so far away. I’m in too many pieces. I’m not making sense, I can’t make sense, it’s all broken inside my head.”
“You don’t have to make sense,” Chey said gently. “Please talk to us, though. Tell us about the pieces.” He stepped backwards and out of the way, tugging Anarchy by the arm, so that they weren’t cornering Kohao in the kitchen. He gestured to the living room.
“C’mon. Please. Let’s sit down.”

Kohao nodded despite his aching throat but didn’t want the wide berth or the anxiety in Anarchy’s expression. His footsteps faltered on the way past the breakfast bar and he stared at Anarchy for a moment, feeling miles away from his best friend. He wished he’d been cutting instead of crying; wished he or anything at all made sense; wished he could matter, somehow, as himself or his self destruction—but he just kept failing outright or falling fucking short.
“I don’t have any words, K-O, but I’m here,” Anarchy said, shattering the distortion. “I dunno what’s going on exactly and I don’t wanna touch you and freak you out, man, but I’m right fuckin’ here for you. You said for us to lie and tell you you’re worth more than...than whatever. But you’ve gotta know it wouldn’t be a lie for either of us. You’ve gotta know I’m not measuring your worth like that. I never will. And I never did.” Anarchy’s voice was tight and honest; he swallowed hard and Kohao felt thrown back in time, though less traumatically than before: January 2018, sitting in the light of sunset on the bed, that same desperately-needed, tight-throated tone of truth: “I’m with you the whole fuckin’ way, anyway, right? Through everything.”
This is ‘everything,’ Kohao thought to himself, and the silent ‘so I need you with me’ must have come through in his expression or body language because Anarchy stepped forward—and Kohao rushed instinctively to meet him mid-way for a tight, brief-but-protective hug. 
“...Thanks,” Kohao mumbled as they parted.
“Of course.” The sincerity was stabilizing and one of Anarchy’s hands stayed on Kohao’s back as they walked to the living room together with Chey—only dropping from between his shoulder blades when they all sat down on the sectional: Chey to Kohao’s right, Anarchy on the left. 

“Okay...okay. Talk to us,” Chey said softly. “What’s happening?”
He sounded gentle and earnest as always, but there was a strain to his voice that had crept in a few days ago when he’d started feeling the effects of his decision to stop going in for methadone, and Kohao hated that he couldn't help; hated that he could be making things worse, that his friends kept paying emotional tolls for being near him. Chey comfortingly touched his shoulder, though, and he couldn’t bear to stay quiet.
“I’m sorry. I don’t wanna be doing this to you or making you hear this and have to deal with it but my head’s all fucked up; I’m in a goddamn haze so much now.” Kohao lifted his head and stared toward the hallway, in the direction of his bedroom. “I’ve gotta cam. I have to, we need to pay the fucking bills and keep the lights on and buy food. I need to do it but I have to be Bennet to do it but sometimes I come out of it too young. Out of being him, I mean. I’m already not making sense, I know, but I’m so fucked up. I’m him but I’m not, I’m me but I’m not; I don’t know where I am half the fucking time these days. Or who I am. Or when I am. I can’t talk about it, I can’t think about it, but Chey—you know what fuckin’ happened a few weeks ago, before the world started ending, and I swear to fuck it’s coming back but I can’t take it.” Kohao’s voice shook and he saw Chey’s sympathetic lip-bite in his periphery, alongside Anarchy’s look of confusion. 
“It’s—It’s memories, ‘Key, and I...I don’t want them,” Kohao said haltingly, to clarify. “I think I’ve been killing them for years somehow and now they’re coming back. Sometimes I want to fucking cam just to get away from it all or make it...make it make sense but it’s just making it worse; it used to give me something but now…? It all keeps bleeding together. In the kitchen I knew it was you, Chey, I knew you were you but I still couldn’t stand to be touched and I got stuck on my age again...Fuck. Maybe I’m all of me at once now so I don’t feel like me at all. I don’t know myself but I fucking know I don’t feel like myself. ...I don’t feel like something with a self.”
Kohao’s throat seared in the space after his sentence ended, and Chey’s soft, heartbroken intake of breath from beside him shattered any composure he’d managed to hold onto: He hunched over and started half-sobbing into his knees: 
“I wanna be worth something to people, anything, so I cam! It’s all I can do now, I can’t go out, but it’s all the same anyway: I just end up being some empty fucking object! Literally a fucking hole, that’s what I am! I’m only as valuable as I am empty; I’m only of fucking worth if I’m EMPTY ENOUGH FOR SOMEONE TO FILL.” Kohao slammed his fist into his thigh. “FUCKING KILL ME.” 
A hand caught his wrist and kept him from hitting himself again, and Kohao looked up to meet Chey’s pained eyes.

“I won’t do that. So can I hold you instead? Please.” Chey opened his arms and Kohao remembered listening to his heartbeat back in March; matching their breathing until he felt like himself again. “Home’s right here. Safety’s right here. I promise.” Chey’s words from then echoed in his head and even though it felt so vulnerable as to be painful, Kohao leaned into the offered embrace, chasing safety. Arms closed around him again but this time didn’t throw him back into youth, fear, or both: He cried, twenty-four, into his friend’s shoulder. Kohao startled slightly when he felt Anarchy’s hand on his back again, but recovered and allowed himself to welcome the additional comfort.
“You can’t do this anymore, K,” Anarchy said, rubbing his thumb over the ridge of Kohao’s spine. “You can’t, it’s fuckin’ killing you. We’ll find a way to make ends meet. You have to stop camming.”
Kohao pulled back to turn towards Anarchy, caught off-guard.
“What? No, we need the money, I can’t just—”
“What we need is for you to not be in agony, Kohao,” Chey interrupted. “I know how to code a bit, software shit and all—I can do more of that, freelance. Some bands are doing performances on Twitch or other places, we can try that out. We can put out new merch designs. We have so many other options than you suffering like this.” Chey swallowed hard, looking unbearably sad. “Where have we been, K-O? Where have we been for you? We’ve let this go on so long.”
“What? It’s not your fault,” Kohao said blankly. He felt disoriented. “I’ve been doing it for years, I...I thought I wanted to, I thought I liked it. It felt...it felt right somehow. It’s just that now…now stuff is coming back and it—it’s all…” Kohao felt nauseous. Dizzy. The floor seemed distant and blurry again so he seized Chey’s wrist, seeking stability. “...it feels so fucking wrong.”
“Then it’s time to stop,” Chey said gently, leaning forward to offer the comfort of closeness again. “I know you’ve said twice already that you can’t talk about it; about the things coming back to you. And that’s okay. But if ever and whenever you are...I’ll be here.”
Kohao nodded somewhat hollowly, staring at the floor. He knew at some point he’d have to talk about it all. Have to stop pushing the pieces away. In the moment, he hunched over again, feeling defeated.
“...That goes for me, too, K,” Anarchy said. His hand remained, stable and warm, on Kohao’s back. His thumb traced out a familiar looped shape. “We’re all behind you: Infinite to the end. As always.”
Kohao breathed out.
“Thanks. Yeah. As always.”