Callboys

by SororityProblem

  “My pay from my last job just showed up in my debit account. Time to rage, boys!” he screams as everyone cheers. He jumps down, opens a bottle of cheap gas station champagne, and sprays it on the crowd. As Nate watches he realizes he could get used to this- shockingly so- but first he had to gain entry.

  And that required gaining entry into Natalie’s pants.

  “So what brings a nice girl like you to a place like this?” he asks. She flashes a confused smile and shakes her head.

  “Oh, I’m not nice. I just started dancing at Crazy Jane’s on the highway so I can pay for my DUI probation. A coworker wanted to party today, and she knew a guy who worked for ManCard, and….here I am.”

  “Ah. Got it. There are worse places to be, though, I reckon.”

  Suddenly she looks away. “Yeah, that’s what my ex thought, too, before this place chewed him up and spit him out.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I should be asking you while you’re here,” she tells him as she nods his way. “Did you make a wrong turn on the way to prep school or something?”

  Nate squints, still unable to get the weird feeling from her comment about her ex out of his guts. “I don’t know what you mean. I pretty much just came to check things out and see if I wanted to work for the company for a little while.”

  “Well be careful. And make sure you knock before you go into the bathroom,” she adds dryly.

  “Why?”

  “You’ll find out soon enough. So where are you from?”

  They shoot the shit for a few minutes, and as one beer turns into two and then three, Nate feels Natalie warming up to him- along with other things warming up in his pants every time he glances over at the water dripping down her golden legs as she splashes them in the pool.

  “Hey, I’m gonna go check out the accommodations,” he says after he notices her throw a particularly conspicuous glance at the crotch of his jeans. “Do you want to come with me?”

  She appraises him for a moment, then seems to decide on something. She nods. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  Nate takes her by the hand and leads her into the bedroom Lena had told him about, and sure enough, a false window was across from the bed, disguised as a large mirror. Nate couldn’t deny it- the thought of having an audience made a warmth rise in his throat, a warmth that only blossoms as he closes the door and turns to face Natalie.

  This was it. This was his zone, the one time he could get out of his own head. He didn’t have to think about custody wars, Rochelle and her runny nose, or any of the other bullshit that piled up in his life like bills in his mailbox. He knew he was about to let his alter ago come out, unleash the performer inside him, and take Natalie on the ride of her life.

  “By the way,” he says quietly as he sits Natalie down on the edge of the bed, places one knee on each side of her, and positions himself on top of her. “When I told you to come with me, I meant ‘cum’ as in ‘c-u-m.’”

  ~

  Lena watches Nate through the false mirror with wide eyes. Her hunch was right. He was an absolute natural.

  “Lay back and put your arms out,” she hears him growl. “Now.”

  She watches with glee as he completely dominates the groupie for the next half hour. Lena had been instructed to find take-charge guys, because women these days were sick of metrosexuals and wanted masculinity, etcetera etcetera. But she had no idea Nate would be like this. She had never been turned on by a man in her life…until now. And that thing he was doing with his toe…he was perfect. ManCard was about to make a fortune.

  With a glint in her eye and fire burning in her belly, Lena uploads Nate’s picture onto the ManCard app and waits for the requests to roll in.

  ~

  Some time later Nate stumbles back into Lena’s room, pulling his shirt over his head as he rubs his eyes and tries to smooth his unruly golden hair. His poor partner still lay in bed, dazed, confused, and thoroughly spent. Lena pitied her- even when she got dressed and made her way back into the courtyard, the poor thing still wouldn’t be walking straight for a while, just as she had instructed.

  “You’re hired,” Lena says immediately. “Do you accept our offer?

  Still bleary-eyed, Nate stares down at his shirt. “Um. Can I use the bathroom and think for a minute?”

  “Sure. Take your time. Go to the end of the hall and hang a left.”

  Nate limps down the hall and pushes open the door, and the following events happen almost too quickly for him to comprehend. A very beautiful girl was sitting naked atop the closed toilet lid, her legs spread, and a muscled guy around Nate’s age was crouching between her legs snorting something off an area Nate could see because the guy’s head was hiding it.

  As they both look up at him, Nate starts stuttering and backs away. “Oh, sorry, uh…didn’t see you there, let me just go, sorry again.”

  He turns and starts pounding down the hall again, his vision distorting with rage. Suddenly it hits him: he’s at a whorehouse. What in the hell was he doing? His grandmother’s disappointed face hovers in his mind, making him shiver with unmitigated disgust with himself. He catches Lena in the hallway, holding her iPad and staring after him in confusion.

  “This isn’t for me,” he says as he pushes past her. “I’m not doing this. Sorry. Goodbye.”

  “What? Why? What happened?”

  “It’s just not for me. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, come on!” she calls. “What are you doing?!”

  “Leaving, like I said.”

  As he storms out onto the porch, about to go for good, Lena stands taller and throws out one last plea:

  “You could’ve been one of the good ones, you know.”

  Nate stops and slowly turns around. “I’m just not cut out for this. The money, the drugs, the fancy house. I’m too…normal.”

  “You are cut out for it,” she says, “you just don’t want to accept it yet. Everybody wants this, Nate.”

  He turns and heads for the steps. “Not me. I don’t.”

  Desperate, Lena cups her hands against her mouth. “Okay, I guess this means you don’t want the three thousand dollar signing bonus, then. In cash.”

  Nate stops in his tracks once more, thinking of the photo of Addie in his wallet. He faces Lena one last time.

  “The what?”

  “I didn’t get to tell you about that part, did I?” she smiles. “The bonus, given to you in cash the minute you sign on the dotted line. You go on one date, and if you don’t like it, you quit. But you get to keep the money anyway. In fact, I might have someone for you tomorrow night. She’s young and fairly attractive. Will you be you free?”

  Nate tries to talk himself out of it one more time, but he can’t. Addie needs him. His shoulders fall.

  “I guess I will be now.”

  “Atta boy. Come with me,” Lena says as she leads him back into The Compound. “You know,” she says smugly as they walk back down the hall, “I knew you’d sign on. From the moment I met you, I knew.”

  “How?”

  “Two things. The first was the hunger, the desperation I saw in your eyes. You’d do anything to provide for your family and I could see that.”

  “…And the second?”

  Lena smirks. “The way you looked at me before you knew I was a lesbian for sure. I may be gay, but I can still pick out a guy with an insatiable appetite for sex. You’d be sleeping with this many women anyway, babe, you just wouldn’t be getting paid for it.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he says with a little laugh. “But thanks anyway, I guess.”

  Lena pauses at her office door, the lift of her cheeks telling Nate that she is smiling. “Strange, stupid boy,” she says. “You get an offer to sleep with women for money- every young guy’s dream- and you almost throw it away because of some moral crusade.” She turns to him. “You wanna know the nickname I had already decided for you?”

  “Sure.”

  She points at his head, a devilish smile on her face.
“We were gonna call you Thick Nate. I just didn’t think I’d be referring to that head.”

  IX

  Complications

  At the FBI Regional Office in downtown Atlanta, Special Agent Burke Watkins smiles serenely as the clip plays again and again on his computer screen. Each time the guest repeats the phrase “pimp with a Wi-Fi connection” like it was some type of joke, Watkins chuckles to himself.

  “That’s right,” he laughs. “Keep smiling, Meehan.”

  Watkins had first learned about the app from his own niece. The poor overweight girl had showed up at the Watkins family Thanksgiving with a boy ten stratospheres above her on the attractiveness scale, and from the moment she’d waddled through the front door, Watkins knew her date had not come on his own accord. His intuition had proved correct, and now Big Mike, as her date was known, was slowly feeding him information from the inside. And only hours before, Watkins had finally been granted access to ManCard’s entire computer database, which he was now poring over for any details that might help him make his move.

  Watkins could already taste the fame he was going to earn from this case. Sex, technology, money, promiscuity masquerading as feminism- it had all the hallmarks that the modern media drooled over. For an unknown field agent, it was a dream. He was going to start at the bottom, get a few moles, and then go straight to the top, exposing investors, bosses, and most of all, the wealthy clients sidestepping the law to cure their loneliness. All he needed now was another mole to cast a wider net and then a high-profile client to catch the attention of the press- maybe an heiress or a businesswoman, perhaps- and the rest would fall into place spectacularly.

  “That’s right,” Watkins repeats as the clip plays on a loop. He reaches for his Seroquel and pops a pill, the only thing keeping his Bipolar-triggered mood swings from ascending into full-fledged manias. “Smile for me, Meehan. Smile like the star you’re about to be.”

  Watkins hunches over his keyboard and gets to work.

  ACT II

  THE TRANSACTION

  X

  Bravado

  Marissa’s phone vibrates, making an electric bolt of adrenaline shoot up her spine. The medical forms she’d emailed to ManCard had been approved, and now it was her turn to access the app and pick a guy for the party. But that wasn’t the source of her terror at the moment: before she could do that, she had to face the one thing that terrified her more than dating a male prostitute, the force of nature that could make even Marissa’s mother quake in her thousand dollar stilettos all the way from her senior living community in Hallandale Beach, Florida: her grandmother, Bubbie.

  Just because Bubbie lived in Florida now and wasn’t there to ruffle Marissa’s hair and fuss over her didn’t mean she couldn’t call once a week and basically do the same thing over the phone, and today she had arranged for a call at two PM. After answering the phone Marissa made her favorite snack, pickles with hot sauce, and then lay out on the bench in her kitchen nook overlooking the sweetgum tree in her backyard and prepared herself for the Bubbie Inquisition.

  “And how is your job treating you?” Bubbie asks after they exchange their usual pleasantries and gossip.

  “It’s great, Bubbie. Keeping me busy, I guess.”

  “Good, good. Now I need to grab your ear about something,” she says more seriously. “It’s about your cousin, Macy.”

  Marissa groans. She’d been hearing about Macy Simmons, the perfect blonde overachiever of the family, ever since she could remember, and her recent engagement to an equally blonde law school student had only kicked her grandmother’s Macy worship into overdrive.

  “Now, before you roll your eyes, Marissa, remember that Macy is the toast of Dallas, with her own high-paying job, her own snazzy little apartment, and she’s just landed her Prince Charming,” Bubbie says. “You could do with a little Macy in you, you know.”

  Marissa smirks. From the looks of the disastrous Facebook pictures Macy was tagged in every weekend, half the single guys in Dallas had put pieces of themselves in her, too. She considered telling Bubbie that she was a millionaire now and didn’t give a damn about what Macy did, but she refrained.

  “That’s nice,” Marissa says instead. “And tell me, has she pulled her head out of her own ass yet, or is she still walking around with it inserted up there?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, sweetie, but it needs to end right now,” Bubbie says. “It’d do you a lot of good to go out and find a guy on an upward trajectory, too, not some putz you met at the Netflix theater.”

  “Bubbie, Netflix isn’t a place you go to, it’s just a service you watch on your iPad at home. And I’ve got some plans later, actually.”

  “Honey, in my world, laying on your couch with a bag of chips while watching romantic films on cable does not constitute as ‘plans,’” Bubbie tells her. “You should go out and, what do they call it these days, get ‘turnt?””

  “Oh my God, Bubbie, please do not ever say ‘turnt’ again.”

  “FRANK,” Bubbie suddenly yells away from the receiver, “I told you, your oxygen tank is at the foot of the stairs! Stop yapping, I’m on the phone!”

  Marissa sighs as her grandmother’s second husband calls back an unintelligible response from downstairs.

  “Then it’s by the refrigerator!” Bubbie responds. “Don’t get your dungarees in a twist, I’ll be there when I can! And I’ll check the email machine later, your damn chess partner can wait five minutes for a response!”

  Muffled noise comes from the receiver as Bubbie returns the phone to her ear. “Listen, honey, I’ve got to go soon, your step-grandfather is driving me crazy. You know I can’t work those damn email machines, not since I tried to buy a Mac in the ‘90s and your poor grandfather thought it was a printer and tried to stuff a bunch of papers into it and ruined it, God rest his soul. Anyway, just promise me you’ll put yourself out there more and land a man. You know my arthritis is flaring up more and more every day, and Dr. Lauer says my lungs could fill up with fluid at any moment, and my kidney doctor says my levels are-”

  “Yes, Bubbie, I get it,” Marissa interrupts. From a stubbed toe to a seasonal cold to mild pinkeye, Bubbie was always turning minor mishaps into urgent health catastrophes, and her constant quests to scare everyone into thinking she had mere days to live had lost their shock value years before. “You want grandchildren before you die. I’ll work on it, I swear.”

  Great, Marissa thinks when she finally hangs up five minutes later. Just great. Yet another person putting pressure on her, and just another reminder that Marissa was single, alone, and pathetic. Not that she disagreed, as everyone else her age seemed to be going places but her. Her degree in Social Media Strategy had landed her nothing but a part-time bullshit job working for a media company, and she knew she was going nowhere fast. If your early twenties were when you were supposed to figure out what you wanted to do with your life, then your mid twenties were when you were supposed to actually start doing it- and so far, Marissa hadn’t done much. Ever since graduating from the University of Georgia she’d heard the same things from her mother over and over: when are you getting married? When are you going to find a real job? When are you going to start your life? In Marissa’s view, living with your parents in your twenties in general was an experience equal in pleasure to sticking red-hot needles into your retinas. She had a full apartment over the detached garage, but still. All the other people her age are off building their careers, starting their families, finding their lives, and she was sitting there in her high school bedroom, listening to her mom ask her when she was going to do the laundry. Ten years ago it was cute, but now it was just unbearable and unnatural. Her mom hovered, she meddled; she heaped judgment and disappointment onto Marissa as easily as when she’d drop a sweater onto her shoulders on her way out the door when she was eight.

  “Marissa, Michelle Pho from down the street just got her Nurse’s license, why haven’t you done something like that?”

&nb
sp; “Marissa, I heard Andrew Sylvan from your drama class was just a finalist on America’s Got Talent, when are you going to do something big, too?”

  And it was even worse these days, when people broadcasted their happiness and success on Instagram like the evening news, everyone could keep tabs on how amazing so-and-so was doing through Facebook, and everyone knew someone who knew someone who had just sold their app to Google or whatever for a hundred million dollars. Oh, hi, Marissa, remember me, your old high school friend! Good to see you! What’s that? You’re sleeping in the same room you did in high school, watching your friends achieve things you probably never will, your life an endless hallway of uncertainty and disappointment? That’s cool. My cousin just became a tech billionaire!

  Not even to mention how condescending Marissa’s mom got whenever one of her friends got engaged. The Facebook story would pop up at noon, and by one PM her mom would be texting her telling her to go out to the Buckhead bars that night to find a med school student or small business owner. In reality Marissa couldn’t even walk into a bar anymore without feeling older than that woman from Titanic. Ever since approaching twenty-five she had noticed some big changes in her party habits, and the stages of this went somewhat like this, categorized by her age at each stage:

  19: OMG my older sister just got me a fake ID, let’s go to this cheesy dance club and chug vodka out of water bottles in the parking lot before stumbling in and getting groped by weirdoes all night!

  21: Going out is awesome. All my friends go to the same dive bar every weekend and I get to catch up with them over craft beers and the occasional Fireball shot. Yay!

  23: I’m starting to feel a little old. Why is my best friend ditching me for her new boyfriend every weekend? All these people at this club look twelve. Should I stop going out so much?