From “I’m Not Sorry and I’d Do it Again”
By Irina Sterling
Published 2020 by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House
Chapter 12: The Education of a Working Girl
Every woman remembers the moment she stops being invisible. For some, it’s the very first day she grows boobs. For me, it was waking up in a Beverly Hills recovery suite with a face that cost forty thousand dollars and tits that could stop traffic on Sunset Boulevard.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Transformations are only fun if you get to gawk at the before picture, aren’t they? So let me paint you one.
A twenty-one-year-old butter face, fresh out of the Corps with an honorable discharge and exactly $3,247 to her name, standing in her mama’s kitchen in Memphis while she screamed about how I thought I was “too good for family now.” Same linoleum peeling up at the corners. Same smell of cigarettes and Dollar Store air freshener. Same woman who’d spent my whole childhood telling me I’d never be nothing, not even a whore.
“You think that uniform makes you special?” she’d said, ashing her Virginia Slim right onto the floor. “You’re still just snaggle-toothed trash, and everybody knows it.”
I left that night with my seabag and never looked back. In hindsight, there were a few things in my closet I should have taken with me, but I honestly thought Mama would toss everything the second I was gone. Bad call on my part. Oh well.
That little business with the homeless man who grabbed me two blocks from the Greyhound station was another bad call. He thought a woman alone at night was easy prey. I thought he’d look better in pieces. I know they said his name at the trial, but I never bothered to remember it. I bet you didn’t either. Is anyone actually sad he’s gone?
Anyway…
Our homeless friend had obviously victimized someone else earlier in the day. Someone with a fat wallet. So his guile became my good luck, and I used that wallet to upgrade my bus ticket to a first-class flight to LAX. Figured if I was gonna reinvent myself, might as well start in style. I had some fool notion about breaking into Hollywood—maybe writing scripts or producing. Twenty-one years old and dumb as a box of rocks about how the world really worked, despite everything I’d already seen and done.
That’s how I met Aleksandr.
He was in 2A; I was in 2B. Russian, but not the tracksuit kind. The kind who wore Tom Ford suits and a Patek Philippe that cost more than most people’s houses. Silver fox, they call it now—that distinguished gray at the temples, the kind of lines around the eyes that made you think he’d seen the world and might show it to you, if you played your cards right.
“God damn you smell good,” I breathed out, not even meaning to say it out loud, but out it came.
The smile he gave me was something I’ll never forget. The way his eyes drilled into mine for what felt like a full minute before he let them drift down, taking a long appraising look.
“Who did you rob for this seat, Pchelka?
His English was perfect except for the way he said certain words, like they were delicacies he was tasting. He made everything sound like poetry or a threat, depending on his mood.
Reminded me of someone else who could command a room just by walking into it. A certain Captain who shall remain nameless, though you already know who I’m talking about if you’ve read this far.
By the time we landed, I’d told Aleksandr things I’d never told anyone. I didn’t realize at the time he told me nothing about himself in return, but it didn’t matter. I felt like I’d known him all my life, like he knew me inside and out.
“You have potential,” he said as we waited for our bags. “And I don’t think Hollywood would give you what you need to succeed. I don’t think those zhid would bring out your potential.”
“You’ll never make it in this town,” never sounded so sweet.
Dinner turned into drinks. Drinks turned into his penthouse in Century City. The sex was... instructive. He didn’t treat me like the boys in the Marines had, like scratching some kind of feverish itch and relief when it was over. He treated me like art he was appraising, turning me this way and that in the light, making notes on what could be improved.
“Your nose,” he said the next morning, tracing it with one finger. “Too strong. And these?” He cupped my barely-B cups like they personally offended him. “The wages of fitness, I fear. They make you invisible. Is that what you want? To be invisible?”
That word was like a slap and he kissed my tears away on the recoil.
I’d been invisible my whole life. Invisible to the boys in high school who looked through me to prettier girls. Or only saw the whiteness–something to be conquered, then laughed at. Invisible to the Marines who saw female before they saw Marine. Invisible to everyone except the ones who wanted to hurt me, and they only saw prey.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to be invisible anymore.”
That’s when he told me what business he was in.
He watched my reaction carefully. Probably expecting I’d be angry or afraid. But I wasn’t. I was intrigued. Here was a man who sold the one thing men would always pay for, who’d built an empire on their weakness, their need. It was brilliant, really.
“I don’t want you on the streets,” he said. “You’re not that kind of product. You could be exclusive. High-end. The kind of woman who makes men forget their wives, their mortgages, their careful little lives. But not looking like this.”
The surgeries took three months total. Rhinoplasty first—shaving down the bump that had marked me as white trash since birth. Then the breast augmentation, 34DDs that looked natural because Aleksandr didn’t believe in “obvious” work. Chin implant, so subtle you’d never know. Lip fillers that made me look like I was always about to whisper a secret. Chemical peels that erased the acne scars from growing up poor and eating garbage.
The veneers were the worst part. Invisilign wasn’t up to the task of fixing my teeth and metal braces take years to get the look you want. So Aleksandr had the orthodontist bust out the drill and saw my teeth down to absolute nothing, and placing perfect pearly whites in their place.
Absolute hell.
I’ve been shot at, had my bell rung after knocking my head on a table during a fist fight, but nothing compared to looking in the mirror and seeing a stranger for weeks while my face settled into its new arrangement. Aleksandr visited daily, bringing tea and books about art, teaching me about wine, about music, about all the things rich men expected their fantasies to know.
“Pain is just weakness leaving the body,” he’d say, which made me laugh because it’s what drill instructors say, though they probably didn’t mean it about tummy tucks.
When the bandages finally came off for good, I didn’t recognize myself. But for the first time in my life, I was beautiful. Not pretty, not cute, not “she’ll do in a pinch”—beautiful. The kind of beautiful that made men stupid.
The first time I went out with my new face, to a bar in West Hollywood, three men bought me drinks in the first hour. Men who wouldn’t have glanced at Crystal Barnett if she’d been on fire. One of them, a TV producer, actually walked into a wall watching me leave.
“You see?” Aleksandr said later. “They’re like unthinking animals. Show them something shiny and they forget their own names.”
He was right. But here’s the thing about being beautiful after being invisible—you realize men’s attention ain’t worth shit. They wanted me now, sure, but not because I was smart or funny or could field-strip an M16 in under a minute. They wanted me because I had tits that defied gravity and lips that looked like I’d just been fucked. The same men who’d have ignored me six months ago would now pay $2,000 an hour just to pretend I gave a damn about their problems.
It made me hate them a little. Or maybe more than a little.
Aleksandr knew this about me. Saw it, even. “That anger,” he’d say, “it makes you powerful. Men can sense it. They think they can conquer it, tame it. They’ll pay extra for the challenge.”
I wasn’t his only girl. I knew that. But I liked to think I was his favorite. His creation. Six months in, he took me to get his name tattooed in Cyrillic on my ribs. “So you remember who made you,” he said, though later I wondered if he wanted other men to see it and know I belonged to someone scarier than them.
АЛЕКСАНДР. Alexander. It’s still there, and of all my tattoos, it’s the one I love most. He sat next to me while the artist drilled it into my skin, his jaw set in a way that made me wonder if he was working not get a boner in the shop.
He hurt me sometimes. Not often, and never the face—bad for business. But if I fumbled a client, missed a cue, forgot to report something important, he had ways of reminding me who was in charge. He’d spent a lot of money turning me into a money maker and wasn’t happy if he thought I took that for granted.
Cigarette burns on the inside of my thighs. Bruises where they wouldn’t show. Once, he dislocated my shoulder because I’d let a client kiss me on the mouth, which was against the rules.
“Pain is instruction,” he’d say after, holding ice to whatever he’d damaged. “How else will you learn?”
I know what you’re thinking. “Irina… you killed men for less. Way less. How did you let him get away with that?” I hear you. And sorry, babes, but my answer is just gonna make you mad.
Aleksandr deserved to put his hands on me. Deserved to punish me when I fucked up. Just like my drill instructors, he was mean, coarse, and cruel to make me better. Always. He was hard and strong, and knew I could be too. I never came so hard in my life as when he fucked me after a beating. That’s how I knew he forgave me–that I’d earned his favor back.
The problem is so few men are in that superior position. They all think they are because they can open a pickle jar, but only a treasured few have the rank to kick my ass and live through it.
For two years, I was his prize creation. I made him more money than any three other girls combined. Men would fly in from Dubai, Tokyo, Moscow, just for a night with Irina—the name he’d given me because Crystal was “too American, too common.” They’d tell me their secrets, their crimes, their deepest shames, all while paying for the privilege of my pretended interest.
And then, one night in March, Aleksandr didn’t come home.
They found him in his car in a parking garage in Koreatown. Three bullets to the head, execution-style. Professional. I know there’s been speculation that maybe I did it. Maybe one day, Aleksandr went too far and I took him out.
No. Never. And if I had any idea who did kill him, they’d have been scattered in pieces all over town.
I was devastated. Not because I loved him—you don’t love a man like Aleksandr. But because he’d seen me, really seen me, when I was nothing. He’d made me into something powerful, something dangerous. Without him, I was just another pretty whore with no protection and no purpose.
I went to his apartment before the cops sealed it off, grabbed what I could. Money, mostly. The client list. And in his safe, something that changed everything: documents for his daughter, whose name he had lent me for client work. Irina Aleksova Sterling. Born the same year as me. American citizen through her mother. Died at fifteen in Moscow from pneumonia, though the death was never registered with the American embassy.
Her passport photo showed a beautiful brunette with sad eyes. We looked nothing alike, but that’s what forty thousand dollars in plastic surgery is for, isn’t it? To become someone else entirely.
I kept working for another year, building my own client list, saving every penny. But I was already becoming her—Irina Sterling, mysterious European beauty with a tragic past and a dead father who’d taught her the ways of the world. The clients loved the story. Hell, I started believing it myself.
By the time I launched my YouTube channel, I’d convinced myself that everything I’d written about “Papa” was true. Those cigarettes he smoked, the cologne he wore, the way he commanded respect—that was all Aleksandr. The only lie was that he’d loved me like a daughter.
But maybe that wasn’t a lie either. He’d certainly created me, same as any father would.
The funny thing about reinvention is that after a while, you forget what was real and what was performance. You notice I still go by Irina. I published this book under that name. My name.
Crystal Barnett is just a character in someone else’s story. A silly girl who thought men had something she didn’t.
But they don’t. None of them. They’re just perpetual little boys who need to believe they’re special. That they’re different from other men. That the beautiful woman they spend their life (and money) trying to acquire actually gives a damn.
The truth is, they’re all the same. Every last one of them. From the homeless man who grabbed me in Memphis to the senator crying about his mama to the Captain who never even recognized his own Lance Corporal when she was riding him like a prize pony.
They’re all the same, and they all end up in the same place eventually.
Some of them just take longer to get there than others.