[Serious answer] For a while I think I was the only call girl in Grand Junction advertising her services on Craigslist. They tried to cut off prostitution on Craigslist a few years ago and most girls left — they were scared, I don’t know, they’d get arrested? That’s what the warnings they sent you said would happen — but that didn’t work on me, fuck, I’ve been living on this shit side of the mountains for like a decade, I’m a cockroach of this profession. My ads don’t even get taken down. It’s an easy language. Looking for gen. s4p. Then there you go all of the lonely men of nowhere in your DMs. They take you to dinner and then take you ass up on their kitchen counters or, fuck, you take their shirts off and whisper like they’re that girl who almost blew them when they were sixteen but never quite let them have it. The thing I discovered then is that sand, or dirt like sand, is ubiquitous in the beds of guys ages ~20 – 65. Dirt in beds in the center of town, up in Redlands, in barren, fruitless Appleton (I’ve heard since it’s pretty up there in the summer but when I was there it was frozen hell). I’d ask them how they got all that dirt in their beds and they’d never be able to answer. They’d never want to. You don’t hire a call girl to talk about the weird sad intricacies of your shared strain of nowhere — they didn’t think you shared anything; they think you’re a sex angel from another planet. The thing is I got kinda hooked on it. Dirt in the sheets like a drug. It’d get subtly caked on to me. I learned to recognize the smell of it — sweet asphalt crumbs, ancient red sandstone crumbs, the chemical burn of the nitrogen they fertilize the peach trees with — this was the smell of Grand Junction. The way you take the drug is lying to an ugly man that you really, really, want to, yes, please, please lay it on me, lay yourself on to me, put it in me, while you lie in it. The dirt made me feel like I lived and had been living in a place. I’d had a sense for a while that I wasn’t really living a life, but was in a bad movie adaptation for a book that didn’t exist. The dirt in the sheets challenged that a little. You’re judging but someday you’ll feel exactly this way and you’ll run around your world wanting to claw your skin off until you find something like the dirt was for me.
So then for about five months I was the only call girl on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains advertising her services on Farmers Only dot com. You maybe remember the jingle from when you were coloring in a Dora coloring book on your Granny’s wormy green shag carpet and it came on in an advertisement between Fox News programs. Big broad ugly boy soldiers chattering their wax jaws about dangerous illegals and then, sweetly: you don’t have to be lonely, on… really a sound like a dream. Farmers, I was sure, farmers would have so much of that dirt all over their lives. The Craigslist men were almost always earnestly clean, like they’d just taken a strawberry bubble bath with a little rubber duck and scrubbed their balls with their mom’s shampoo. I was lucky that they didn’t ever change their sheets before bringing me in. Probably only their wives ever changed the sheets and they wouldn’t know how. But these farmers, I was sure, would have some dirt on them. They didn’t disappoint. For months I reveled in it. I licked the dirt off their necks and out of the tread of their boots. That drove them crazy. I’d clip their fingernails and suck the dirt off where it was left behind on their fingertips. I actually kinda liked fucking for money for the first time since I was a teenager, not cause I liked sex, I’ve always hated sex, but because I could interface with my drug of choice in a way you can’t with anything else. DMT, meth, expensive dispo weed, the things you can get easily up here: they can get in your head. But dirt can get all over you, and that’s how life is supposed to feel. I gave a farmer with some weird fetishes a blowjob beneath a fake palm tree at Bananas Fun Park at two p.m. on a 90 degree Fahrenheit weekday and I actually got turned on because I thought I could taste the really real real life Grand Junction dirt in the folds of the flesh on his uncircumcised penis. I was totally using all those farmers and probably being classist or something. But you probably make a lot of money if you own a peach farm up in Palisade, and I’ve been broke since no one tipped at my lemonade stand in second grade, so really, they’re using me.
Of course someone ruined it for me eventually. He picked me up from my house in white Ford F250 and I saw that car and thought yeah, this is gonna be one dirty guy, but by the time I sat down in the passenger seat I could tell he was genuinely physically clean, and not just hiding the smell of the earth with Macy’s perfume counter aftershave. We sat on the same side of the booth and ate French fries at the Applebees where I’m technically banned by the manager but all of the high school girls who hostess there think I’m pretty and kinda want to be me so they’d never kick me out. The thing is this guy was actually kinda hot and really sweet and had a great laugh and a great smile and if he hadn’t taken away the one thing that had made me happy in like three years I think I could’ve married him. I couldn’t recall having The Simpsons having a theme song and he sang the whole Simpsons theme song to me, which was mostly instrument noises he made with his mouth. My mom loved The Simpsons. He told me his mom really loved The Simpsons too, and that she was dead now, but he didn’t say it in a way where it became my paid job to listen to him cry and probably imitate his mom during sex, he just said it like it was something he was used to saying, and hell, I was used to saying that too. When we were taking our clothes off in his bedroom, in which dirty, heavy work boots were lined up cutely like sleeping kittens in front of a space heater — I gave those boots a long look — I got so comfortable I told him I’d started advertising on Farmers Only dot com because I was so hooked on the Palisade dirt. How it was the only thing that got through to me, lately. I threw in the lately to seem more casual.
I didn’t say anything about things being real, but he said nothing was real in Grand Junction. He said he’d sold his land and was moving to Boulder to open a music gear store — amps, he explained, not instruments — and that’s where people actually were. Dirt, what’s dirt, even? Are you sure you aren’t imagining it? I realized I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it. That’s where that source of a lot of fucking joy died for me. Idk if it’s universal but personally I have to believe that the things that make me happy actually exist. I found myself suddenly lonely, freezing cold, and completely unsure if anything would ever make me happy again I would’ve left but he’d already paid. He sucked my tits in a way that was supposed to be cute but totally wasn’t. Afterwards he gave me a $50 tip and told me I’d better get out of Grand Junction before I meet up with the wrong hick and get raped and get my head blown off with a sawed off shotgun. Again, trying to be cute. Go where? Boulder? Yeah, let’s all go to Boulder and found our own music gear stores. I tried to go on a few more dates with a few more farmers but I couldn’t tell if the dirt was real or I was imagining it. It didn’t go away, it just felt — you know, like trying to make out whether there’s a person with you in a dark room?
I went back to advertising mostly on Craigslist, sometimes here, on Reddit. I never saw or heard from that guy again. I can’t remember his name now. A couple months after that night I saw a story in the waste of paper county newspaper that a nice young guy who used to own some land up in Palisade crashed his Ford into a peach tree and died, probably on purpose. But I didn’t recognize the name, and that probably couldn’t’ve been him because that was weeks and weeks after he said he was leaving here forever. Or maybe his dream wasn’t real either. Anyway, the answer is yes, there are people who still use Farmers Only, including in Colorado. You’re probably looking for true love, but if not, DM me for rates.
— Lily Nobel is a fiction writer from Colorado currently residing in Windhoek, Namibia. Her recent work can be found in the magazines Chatterbox! and So to Speak.