Callboys

by SororityProblem

  And so Marissa decided to write her own rules. She takes out her phone and types seven letters into the App Store search bar. Her pulse races and her stomach zooms to the bottom of her abdomen as her screen suddenly displays paragraphs and paragraphs of text:

  WELCOME TO MANCARD, it reads in chic black lettering. WHERE ALL YOUR COMPANIONSHIP PROBLEMS CAN BE FIXED WITH ONE PRESS OF A BUTTON. HAVE THE GUY OF YOUR DREAMS SHOW UP AT YOUR FRONT DOOR WHENEVER YOU WISH! (DOWNLOADING THE APP IS ONLY PART OF THE SCREENING PROCESS; YOU MUST BE APPROVED TO ACTUALLY BE GRANTED ACCESS.) (KEEP IN MIND MANCARD ONLY PROVIDES FRIENDSHIP; ALL OTHER SERVICES FALL TO THE DISCRETION OF THE USER AND ARE NOT UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF MANCARD LLC. ANY LEGAL TROUBLES WHICH MAY ARISE FROM THE USE OF MANCARD STRICTLY FALL UNDER THE FAULT OF THE USER, AND IT IS TO BE UNDERSTOOD THAT MANCARD LLC DOES NOT CLAIM ANY RESPONSIBILITY, FINANCIAL OR OTHERWISE, IN ANY SUCH MATTERS.) BEFORE YOU DOWNLOAD, PLEASE READ OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS.

  A shiver runs down her leg, but Marissa keeps reading. Next it shows a long list of rules, and they were weird:

  CLIENTS OF MANCARD UNDERSTAND THAT COMPANIONSHIP IS THE ONLY SERVICE BEING PAID FOR, AND ANY FURTHER RELATIONS, SEXUAL OR OTHERWISE, ARE THE CHOICES OF TWO CONSENTING ADULTS AND ARE PURELY ACTS OF COINCIDENCE. HOWEVER, IF SEXUAL ACTIONS DO OCCUR, IT IS UNDERSTOOD THAT ONLY SAFE SEX IS TO BE PRACTICED, AND THE FOLLOWING ARE STRICTLY BANNED:

  -ANAL PLAY

  -MATTERS INVOLVING DEFECATION/URINATION

  -ANY MEANS OF MOVEMENT RESTRICTION, SUCH AS ROPES OR CHAINS

  ALL OTHER SEXUAL ACTIVITIES MAY BE PURSUED, IF SO DESIRED BY BOTH CONSENTING PARTIES.

  Urination? Defecation? Constriction? Whoa. All Marissa wanted was a date. She didn’t know a clue about these things, mostly because she’d only had sex with only two guys in her life. Sure, she’d had lots of sex with those two guys, but still. Her lack of experience wasn’t due to some moral crusade or something; there just wasn’t exactly a long line of guys waiting to take her to Pound Town. When Marissa heard girls always identify themselves as being either Carries, Charlottes, Samanthas or Mirandas, she’d always frowned, because she wasn’t any of those- she was an Elaine Benes from Seinfeld. And which of the guys on Seinfeld were desperate to bone Elaine? Exactly.

  After Marissa skims through the rest of the rules, she reaches a questionnaire wanting to know about Marissa and her hobbies. She bites her lip and looks away. Hobbies? Did watching Bravo and eating Cheez-Its count as a hobby? How did she explain that she didn’t, well, do stuff? She used to dance as a girl, but now she was a recovering dancer. She used to go to Falcons games with her dad on the weekends, but now she could be described as a mild Falcons fan at best. Actually, she was aggressively mild at almost everything. Still, she entered “reading” and “jogging,” because she thoroughly “read” the menu every time she walked into Chik-Fil-A, and she bought new jogging shoes about twice a year to fool herself into thinking she was about to become a jogger before hiding them in the back of the closet and going to Chik-Fil-A. When it asks her to lists a fact about herself, she shrugs and writes “I’m not a bitch, I just look like one.” And then the final submission screen comes up, making a giddy little thrill bloom in her stomach.

  Was she really going to do this? Was she really going to buy a boyfriend, and basically pay for sex? It was wrong, she knew that, but it was also kinky as hell, and she felt a warmth blooming in her belly that definitely wasn’t due to the chilly weather. It made her feel weirdly powerful: after years of waiting for texts, sitting around for calls that never come, she was finally taking control back into her own hands.

  She thinks back to the photos of the ManCard guys. Guys with square jaws and twinkling eyes and hair that somehow looks good even when it was messy. Guys that would’ve never paid two seconds’ worth of attention to her in high school. Guys she’d wanted her whole life. As she stares up at the wispy winter clouds she thinks of the one thing that was missing the most from her life: love. Or at least sex. And suddenly the ManCard idea doesn’t seem crazy at all anymore. Because all Marissa knew deep down to the floor of her, where things were hard and true and real, was that she didn’t want to face the world alone.

  But Marissa didn’t even call boys. Was she really going to call a callboy?

  She pulls her iPad Mini out of her bag and scrolls through Twitter to distract herself and bide time. And that’s when she sees it: the quote from Benjamin Franklin, retweeted from some inspirational account by one of her old classmates. “Most people die at the age of twenty five,” it read, “and aren’t buried until they’re seventy five.”

  She nearly gasps as the quote slams into her like a runaway train and inhabits every last inch of her body like a welcome disease. Suddenly it was all so clear to her: growing up was giving up, and Marissa wasn’t ready to let life turn her into a zombie just yet. She felt the weight of society’s expectations pushing down on her more and more every day, and she was going to push back. Marriage, responsibilities, picket fences and Nissan minivans…those could wait, because she was about to have the most exciting quarter life crisis in history.

  And with adrenaline gathering in her blood like clouds on the horizon on a hot Atlanta day, Marissa takes a deep breath, bites her lip, hovers her finger over the Submit button, and lets it drop.

  VIII

  Head

  At noon Nate pulls up the address Ryan had texted him and sees two large white gates lording over him. As he scratches his head, an intercom comes to life next to him.

  “Name and purpose for coming?”

  He clears his throat, but it sounds hollow and meek. He does it again, all but forcing his voice to sound brave this time. “Uh, yeah, Nate Henry here. I guess I’m here to see Lena, or whatever?”

  “Ah. A newbie. Welcome to The Compound. Come on in.”

  The gate buzzes and opens, and Nate takes a deep breath and rides in. The Compound is a huge Mediterranean-style house, with tons of wings and porticoes. Nate would mow the lawns of places sort of like it as a kid, but nothing this big. He leaves his bike in the circular driveway and walks around back, and after he rounds a corner he finds something he never expected to see out in the suburbs: what looked like the set of a hip-hop video. A bunch of guys about his age were hanging around a pool in the courtyard, some of them standing around a bar and some chilling in the pool. Some were drinking, some were smoking weed with an assortment of groupie-looking girls hanging all over them, but everyone was having fun. Every guy was about his age, and seemed a lot like him. It was like the fraternity he could never afford to join…just a fraternity that got paid to fuck people sometimes, he reminded himself. But between working long hours at the restaurant, gliding in and out of class like a ghost, and lying on the living room floor all night staring into space while Addie played with Barbies or watched mindless Disney Channel shows, Nate’s social life had completely fallen through the cracks, and it felt good to be around a bunch of guys his own age for once. He couldn’t even remember the last time he’d simply grabbed a beer with a friend, and the thought made him frown.

  He spots Ryan, who saunters over and gives him a high-five. “Ah, Nate. I knew you’d have a change of heart. Follow me.”

  Ryan leads Nate through a sliding glass door and down a hallway, and suddenly it looks like they’re in the office of a technology company. A bank of computers is on one side and a break area with a small kitchen is on the other, and a host of guys slightly worse-looking than the courtyard crowd types away on Apple laptops throughout.

  “The business side of the business,” Ryan says with an amused smile. “It’s a weird mix, but hey, it works. The dudes outside are the one we send out to do our dirty work and bring back the money, and these are the numbers guys. We are just an Internet startup, after all, and we’ve got to end up in the black just like everybody else. Sweet, there’s Lena.”

  Lena, who was sitting at a bright red table drinking a cup of coffee from a mug saying PUSSY POWER in big black letters, looks up and
bounds over to them, wrapping her bony arms around Nate in a big hug. He likes her immediately.

  “Hi, I’m Lena. Something told me you’d come. Cool place, huh?”

  “Yeah, it’s somethin’ else.”

  “Ha, the rental payments are nice, too. And by nice I mean suicidal.” She nods at Ryan, who disappears into the courtyard again. “Come with me.”

  Nate follows Lena down another hall and enters her office, which looks like it used to be the master bedroom of the house. She grabs a clipboard and starts reading with a slightly bored voice while stealing bites off a donut in her hand.

  “Welcome to ManCard, providing women all over Atlanta with friendship and affection, bla bla. Please note that, as a prospective employee, you will only be hired to provide companionship, and anything else that may occur is the express decision of the parties involved…bla bla bla, prostitution is illegal, bla bla…”

  She sets the clipboard down on the table and looks up. “Okay, enough with the legal jargon. It’s just as boring for me as it is for you. Let’s just get to the questions I like to ask personally. How many sexual partners have you had?”

  Nate stares at her, taken aback by her forwardness.

  “Oh, come on,” she says. “It’s not that personal. Do you even know the number?”

  “It’s not something I count,” Nate finally says. “But I don’t hook up with anyone unless I’m wearing a condom.”

  She jots something down. “Okay, then, I’ll just say fifteen. You’ll need a physical but that can wait a few days. Do you have a girlfriend, or a wife, or anyone who could protest to this profession?”

  Nate looks down, Courtney’s face swimming in his mind. “No.”

  “Okay. How often do you have sex?”

  “Not much, lately, to be honest,” Nate says. “I used to put myself out there more, but I’ve been…distracted, and busy. I’d like to have more, though.”

  “Who wouldn’t,” Lena answers. “How would you rate yourself as a boyfriend?”

  “Zero.”

  Lena’s head tilts to the side. “Why?”

  Nate shrugs. “I’m as emotionally available as a rock garden, and I come with more baggage than a jumbo jet.”

  Something changes in Lena’s eyes, but what, Nate has no idea. “Fair enough. How would you rate yourself as a lover?”

  “A ten.”

  “Why?”

  He raises an eyebrow. “I thought you’d already interviewed my past conquests.”

  “Good point. I want to hear it from you, though.”

  He bites his lower lip. “I don’t know. I feel like I’m pretty quiet and reserved most of the time, but when I’m…in that situation, it’s like I become a different person. Maybe it’s because I have latent rage issues from my brother’s death, who knows. But I definitely get into the zone, big time. When I find a willing partner, I do whatever I want to her, whenever I want to do it, and I’ve never had one complaint.”

  “We can work with those answers,” Lena says with a pleased grin. “How often were you planning on working?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know anything about this stuff. I haven’t agreed to anything- I just wanted to come check things out and see if it’s for me, remember?”

  “Okay, we can decide on that later. Do you have any hidden talents, besides the obvious?” she asks. “Can you juggle apples, jump through hoops, do you know French?”

  “I know French fries and French toast, if that counts.”

  “Funny,” she smiles. “I like that. Now strip.”

  “What?”

  “Strip,” she repeats, a little annoyed. “Remember, I’m gayer than Rachel Maddow at a gardening convention, so unless you’re hiding a vagina in there, you have nothing to worry about where I’m concerned.”

  “Uh, okay….”

  Nate removes his shirt and jeans and places them on the table next to him. When he looks back over at Lena, she is staring at him with an open mouth.

  “What?”

  “You have the body of a professional athlete,” she says breathlessly. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “I thought you were gay?”

  “Hey, a girl can admire.”

  “Thanks,” he laughs. “I played football growing up. And baseball. And soccer, I guess, too.”

  “I can tell. Now take off your underwear.”

  “What?”

  “That’s pretty much the most important part of the whole ‘sex trade’ business, if you weren’t up to speed,” she says with a roll of her eyes.

  “Well, okay then.”

  Nate slowly steps out of his boxer-briefs and closes his eyes.

  “Whoa. I, uh… I wasn’t expecting that, either,” she says as Nate hears her write something down. “I think we’ll be fine in that department.”

  “Cool,” Nate says as he starts getting dressed again. “Am I done?”

  “Yes. Except for the audition.”

  A shiver runs up Nate’s back. He had almost forgotten about that. He’d been at ManCard for ten minutes and it was already cooler than anything he had ever seen in his life, but the boiling in his stomach reminded him of why he was really here…to have sex in front of an audience.

  He looks over at Lena, searching for an explanation. “…And how exactly is that supposed to happen?”

  She shrugs and points at the giggling girls in the courtyard pool as they chase the ManCard employees around with fruity drinks in their hands.

  “Groupies,” she says flatly. “We can’t get rid of ‘em around here. They’re mostly strippers and such who get bored of having to pretend they’re turned on by the dirty old men they dance for at the clubs, so they come down here to hang at the pool and get a little action before they have to go shimmy on Bill O’Reilly and friends for another twelve hours.”

  “And do they get the action they’re looking for?”

  Lena screws up her face like she had just smelled a dirty diaper. “I look down on it, because I like the boys to be at tip-top sexual shape for when they actually need to be performing, but I’m not firing anyone because of it.”

  Nate pauses. “And do you worry about them going out and running their mouths about the real purpose of this place?” he asks after a moment. Lena flashes a knowing smile.

  “Officially speaking, the only thing we sell here is companionship,” she says with a wink. “As far as anyone is concerned, this is just a fancy matchmaker’s office. And you’d fit in perfectly.”

  “I would?”

  “Yeah, you seem like a good guy, and from the looks of it, you could use some relaxation. And trust me, these guys know how to relax.” She starts pointing out the window at various ManCard employees…or male hookers, however you want to look at them. “That’s Big Mike, whose appendages live up to his name. The women who book him don’t walk straight for days. He came to us from an abusive foster home in Ohio at eighteen a year ago, and he hasn’t left since. Oh, and over there by the speakers is Crooked Ben. You can probably guess how he got that name.”

  “Do any of these people not have penis-related nicknames?”

  “Of course!” she cries. “That’s Crazy Mark over there by the Jacuzzi. He got addicted to pills and ended up in prison for assaulting a transvestite, and now he’s working here to pay his legal bills.”

  Nate shakes his head. “I should’ve have asked.”

  “Give it time. You’ll fall right in.”

  “Well where do I start with this audition thing?” he asks as he picks at his collar.

  She motions at the girls again. “Go pick a girl. Any girl. And then seduce her. It’s not that complicated. ”

  “What?”

  “Hon, female escorts just lay there,” she says as she throws him another annoyed look. “But with males we have to see what we’re working with. Get a groupie and pick her up like you would any girl you met at a bar. Be funny and respectful enough to get her to come home with you, and then cocky enough to get her to stay th
e night once she does. We have a bedroom with a fake mirror that I’ll be looking through. I’ll grade you as you go.”

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” he says. “It’s weird.”

  “What’s weird? You have a bunch of willing girls and a room to bang them in.”

  “Good point. Any rules?”

  “Just be a man, man. Women these days are sick of the pansies. The pussies. The guys with the skinny jeans and the goatees and the latte in their hands. My one rule for you today is that I want you to screw this girl so hard and dominate her so thoroughly, she won’t be able to either think or walk straight for a week. Go rope one, cowboy.”

  Hesitantly, Nate pushes through a French door and finds himself on the patio. A Drake song blares from the speakers and hazy marijuana smoke hangs in the air, and when he reaches the pool he stops and surveys the crowd of giggling groupies. Soon he spots a brunette who doesn’t look like the rest of them- she’s sitting on the edge of the pool with her feet in the water, her eyes guarded and her skirt and tank top more subdued-looking than the other girls’ flashy outfits.

  “Hey, I’m Nate,” he says as he walks up to her. Stripping in front of random people was one thing, but this he knew how to do. “Would you like a beer?”

  She smiles up at him. “Sure. And I’m Natalie.”

  Nate grabs two beers from a cooler and hands Natalie one before settling in beside her. Before he can say anything, however, one of the ManCard guys suddenly makes a loud whooping noise and jumps up on top of a chair as he holds up his phone.