“Yeah,” Amber said. “I pray sometimes.”
“Well, are you saved? Are you a Christian?”
“I think I am, but I don’t know.”
“Let’s just be sure,” Crystal said. She said the Sinner’s prayer—Heavenly Father, I know that I have sinned against you and that my sins separate me from you. Amber repeated it after her and received Jesus Christ.
Amber stopped crying. She smiled a big smile and gazed upward, weeping gratefully, praising God, praising Jesus, praising and praising until her voice was a hollow whisper. Crystal sat and watched her, thinking how fucked up it was, coming down off a crack high and praising the Lord.
II.
MARIE
New Year’s had come and gone, and so far, for Sara Karnes, 2007 had been a disaster. The telemarketing job had ended, as had the job at McDonald’s. Things with her boyfriend were strained. They fought as much as they slept together, and they hadn’t lived together since losing the hotel room. The only bright spot was Maureen.
Sara said she hadn’t known what her new friend was really doing at the massage appointments. Later on, she would chalk that up to gullibility. Even if she had suspected something, Sara might not have brought it up, for fear of ruining a good thing. Maureen was throwing Sara fifty dollars just for driving her to the appointments. Most of the time, she would dart back out in ten or fifteen minutes; if she stayed the full hour, Sara got a hundred. Being paid for sitting and waiting seemed like a good deal to Sara. Moreover, every time Maureen got in the car, she filled the gas tank.
It took a while for Sara to realize that life wasn’t going that well for Maureen. The red tape of Maureen’s life seemed exhausting: Sara got tired just watching Maureen juggle custody of two different kids with two different dads. Some days she had Aidan, other days Caitlin, other days both, other days neither. If she had the children and a massage appointment, the kids went to Missy’s, which sometimes prompted an uneasy negotiation. Despite the money she was making, Maureen’s life seemed to be closing in on her. She and her roommate had been a month or two behind on rent for a while. By spring, they were being threatened with eviction. She was constantly worried about Steve calling social services and arguing that their boy should live with him. Maureen knew he was waiting for a reason to try.
Maureen couldn’t find a regular job, and not for lack of trying. She had answered want ads for receptionist positions, for a job greeting shoppers at Walmart, but wasn’t hired. Again and again, she turned to Sara and her car to make enough money to pay the rent. Their lives intertwined. Sara’s boyfriend did some dealing, and Maureen became a customer, buying ecstasy and pot and sometimes coke to stay awake. He was good to Maureen at first, charging just forty dollars for a gram of coke and allowing her not to pay up front. Maureen would give him her food-stamp Electronic Benefits Transfer card as collateral. That arrangement worked only as long as Sara and her boyfriend were together. As winter turned to spring, Maureen accused him of trying to take extra money off of her EBT card while he waited for her to pay. Sara didn’t believe Maureen at first, but he couldn’t hide what he had done forever, and when Sara learned the truth, she left him.
That left Sara homeless for real this time. Maureen came to Sara’s rescue again, inviting her to stay on the couch at the apartment in Norwich. She didn’t charge Sara rent and even paid for all the groceries. Sara couldn’t believe it, though she soon learned that being a friend of Maureen’s meant being on the receiving end of an almost embarrassing amount of generosity. Turning a blind eye to whatever financial pressures she was under, Maureen had taken in other friends, including a girl named Penny. When Sara started thinking that Penny might be using Maureen, she realized she couldn’t talk, since she was freeloading, too.
They all needed money, not just Maureen. As summer approached, no great solution seemed to be presenting itself. Sara wasn’t sure how much longer they all could stay together. It took until June for Sara to learn that Maureen had a plan. Both of their birthdays were coming up. Sara turned twenty-five on the eleventh, Maureen three days later. With whatever money she had made from appointments, Maureen booked a hotel room at Foxwoods and threw a party. The room overflowed with friends Maureen had made over the years at the casino. Sara got drunk, and not long before the sun came up, she and Maureen went back to the apartment. They were alone for the first time all night, and Sara noticed how Maureen’s expression had changed. She seemed serious—completely sober.
“I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
“What?” said Sara.
“You like to have sex. Why don’t you get paid for it?”
Sara had always liked to think of herself as an operator—someone who could talk anyone into anything. Now she realized that Maureen was in a whole other league. She fell silent as Maureen explained that before Aidan was born, she’d been going to New York for a few days at a time, but only every now and then, when she needed the money. She wanted to start again, with Sara as her partner.
“Do you like it?” Sara asked.
Maureen told her it was fine. In New York, she was a different person.
Maureen had posted her first ads on the Eastern Connecticut/Adult Services page of Craigslist three years earlier, not long after she had showed her friend Jay DuBrule her photos. She had used her mother’s name, Marie—a choice that she never explained to anyone who knew enough to ask. The replies had been instantaneous. She asked Jay if he’d come with her. He drove her to a few people’s houses. She taught him the procedure: She goes in the house, and Jay calls her five minutes later; no answer means trouble. If she answers and says everything’s fine, that means he paid her and she’s good. “Then I’ll be out within the hour,” she said. And out she’d come, a hundred dollars richer.
The sex itself she insisted she could handle, but the johns were too close for comfort. Many of them were men who lived in Groton and the surrounding towns—guys whom she easily might run into later at ShopRite or Cory’s or Wendy’s. And the money wasn’t quite what she had hoped, or at least not as much as she knew she could make a short distance away, at the casinos. Though Mohegan Sun was out of the question—her mother still worked there—Foxwoods was wide open. Maureen waited until Caitlin wasn’t visiting from Mystic and booked a few nights in a hotel room at the casino. Before her first outing, she taught Jay how to freshen her Craigslist ad, editing it every now and then while she was out so the ad would bump up to the top of the list. The casinos brought Maureen to a different class of john—out-of-towners, from all over New England and New York and beyond, with more money and willingness to pay for what they wanted. They treated girls like entertainers, like professionals. This felt more like a business now, and Maureen preferred that. She met a few other girls, including one named Chrissy—a boy dressed as a girl, really. Missy later told friends that it was Chrissy who invited Maureen on her first trip to New York.
Manhattan was the ultimate moneymaker, Chrissy said—filled with tourists and businessmen and bored rich people. If she got a hotel room and posted an ad, she could make a thousand dollars or more every night. Maureen’s initial trips there were brief, just a day and a night, with Chrissy at first and then alone. She asked Jay to drive her, but he declined. He had two jobs and custody of his daughter, and truth be told, he didn’t feel quite as bold about going to New York as Maureen did. When she came back, Maureen had talked with all her friends in bright, breezy tones about her experiences. She spun it as an adventure: The men she met were all young and good-looking and nice to her. The hotel was luxurious. The city sparkled. She was exaggerating, but the money, at least, was real—piles of bills that she nonchalantly stacked high on her dresser. Some of her closest friends, as well as Missy, would say later that what Maureen was doing didn’t satisfy her soul—that the spiritual, cosmically curious Maureen had nothing to do with this. But it wouldn’t have been difficult for Maureen to be open to the possibilities. After so many years of depending on others, she could leave respon
sibilities at home and become another person for a while—all under the pretext of making money so she could be a responsible parent. And the attention: Seen the right way, the job was one where people were so eager to see her that they were willing to pay money. For the length of a call, she would be desired—a star, famous, loved, rich.
The logistics weren’t ideal. She had to give Steve a story to explain her time away; since he hated talking to Maureen’s family, she said she was staying with them. She managed to keep Will out of the loop, too—that was necessary; he was too volatile and protective to allow it—but not Missy. She needed her sister to know where she was; otherwise, she’d have nowhere for Caitlin to stay when she wasn’t with her father in Mystic. By then the sisters’ relationship had become tense. Although the trips to New York had upset Missy, there were limits to what she could tell her older sister to do and not do. She was too afraid of alienating Maureen to talk about it. Caitlin was old enough to overhear Maureen making her plans. When she was within earshot, Maureen called them “modeling trips.” Around Jay, Maureen was less discreet. The work demanded something other than romance—something sharp-edged and practical. When she talked about the work with Jay—managing Craigslist postings, fielding phone calls, meeting strangers—he thought for the first time that his friend was more than whimsical and mystical and lighthearted. She was tough. Not that she would fight, but that she would never let anything get to her. To do what she did, and in New York, of all places, took a certain fearlessness.
There also were hidden costs—anxieties that Maureen couldn’t tamp down. On July 5, 2004, the year she started traveling to New York, Maureen had another premonition, which she dutifully recorded on her MySpace page:
Having serial killer dreams again . . . Love is hemorrhaging in my head, fading away with every beat. Maybe all it takes to keep alive is smoking it to death.
For Maureen, the money also promised freedom from Steve. But when she became pregnant with her second child, a boy named Aidan, she and Steve grew closer. Maureen had used condoms as an escort; there was never any doubt in her mind that Aidan was Steve’s child. Steve wanted the baby, and part of Maureen did, too—another baby to care for, now that Caitlin was growing up and living mostly with her father.
The pregnancy brought the New York trips to a halt, and when Aidan was born, in 2005, Steve was a devoted father. Maureen went searching for work, never keeping a job for long. It took a year for the relationship to fall apart, and for Maureen to go off on her own with Aidan. By then, Steve was paying all the bills, and Maureen had next to nothing of her own. When the telemarketing job at Atlantic Security didn’t pay enough, the massage appointments began.
Now, with Sara as her new protégée, Maureen was ready to go back to New York. The city presented the solution to everything all at once. The money would help Maureen support both Caitlin and Aidan, prevent her eviction and keep a roof over her head, and maybe even liberate her from Steve once and for all.
They hadn’t even left for New York yet, and Maureen had become a different person—all business. “I’m gonna hook you up with Vips,” she told Sara. He was her guy in New York, the one who could almost guarantee a successful and profitable trip to the city.
While Craigslist was still free—the website wouldn’t start charging five dollars per Adult Services listing until 2008—Vips, or Vipple, had a JavaScript program that would keep posting and reposting your ad so it stayed at the top of the list, never getting lost in the shuffle. Vips charged a flat fee of $150 a day for his services, and he spent a good chunk of his spare time trolling modeling websites to offer his services to girls thinking of getting into the game. That, Maureen said, was how she met Vips. From the start, she had built Vips’s fee in to her overhead, along with a hotel room. Even with those expenses, Maureen told Sara that if she did anywhere from five to seven calls a day, she could walk away with one to two thousand dollars for every day she worked.
Sara called Vips from Groton. He had an Indian English accent. He told Sara he wanted to meet her. She and Maureen were talking about going down to the city that weekend anyway. They left the next day, taking the train instead of Sara’s car. Maureen said Manhattan parking-garage fees would be an added expense—sixty dollars a day to park was money they could be spending on cabs for outcalls.
Maureen was seasoned enough to have developed some rules. She started sharing them with Sara on the Amtrak ride into the city. Rule number one was always follow your instincts: If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Maureen said some of the johns were cool, but some of them were shitty. No amount of money can save your life. Rule number two was to view all outcalls suspiciously, but if she ever agreed to one, stay in Manhattan. Don’t go to Queens. Don’t go to Brooklyn, even if it’s just over the bridge in Williamsburg. Staten Island, no. The Bronx, no. Only some parts of Manhattan were allowed. Unless it was a regular call, Morningside Heights was a no, as were Washington Heights, Harlem, and Alphabet City. Sara spent a lot of those first days with a city map in front of her.
The Maureen issuing all these directives was different from the carefree girl Sara had met six months earlier at the telemarketing company. This new sense of seriousness seemed to Sara like an unintended consequence of the escort life. Maureen would explain that, too: You got onto Craigslist to make more money than you could ever make at a real job, but sooner or later even that started to feel like a grind.
The first order of business in Manhattan was to meet Vips and see about getting Sara onto Craigslist. They left Penn Station and checked in to a hotel on West Thirty-seventh Street, a few blocks away. Maureen, who had posted on Craigslist already, told Sara she had a call. They walked a few blocks to the Marriott Marquis in Times Square and got in one of the glass elevators. Before the doors closed, in walked an Indian guy with a port-wine birthmark that covered a good part of his face. As the elevator glided upward, soaring over the hotel lobby, Maureen introduced Sara to Vips.
The view from up high in the Marriott elevator left Sara spellbound. When it came to a stop, Maureen got off but told Sara to head back down. “Just go with Vips,” she said. “I’ll call you when I get out.”
The two went down and walked around Times Square while Maureen worked. Sara learned a little bit about Vips—that he was indeed from India, and while he wasn’t technically a pimp, it was something to which he aspired.
With Sara, Vips kept things light. “Look, there’s Samuel L. Jackson!” he said, pointing, and Sara, distracted by her first time walking past Madame Tussauds, just nodded. On their second time around the block, she realized he’d been pointing to a statue.
“Ha!” Vips said. “I got you!”
Sara laughed. “Can we go in there?”
“No,” he said. “It’s mad expensive.”
Vips agreed to post Sara’s ads for the usual fee. Later on, through Maureen, Sara met a few of Vips’s associates. There was Tony, a producer of porn movies who worked out of the Film Center Building on Eighth Avenue, and there was Al, a big Italian guy who made noises about being connected but seemed to work mainly as an associate of Tony’s—a “modeling agent” for adult films. Vips was the low man on the totem pole—an Internet troll, a wannabe pimp and porn producer—but he was the only one Maureen seemed to know well. Tony and Al were guys Maureen had been hoping to get to know better, guys who might help her stop doing this one day. She had told her friend Jay DuBrule that porn was legal and safer and easier than what she was doing; it resembled a legitimate entertainment career and was one step closer to the life she dreamed about.
Sara was heavier than Maureen, but she was a definite type—busty and sultry, like Anna Nicole Smith or Jessica Simpson. In need of a working alias, she chose Monroe, a nod to Marilyn. Vips had set up Sara’s ad using someone else’s picture. Sara was appalled when she saw it. The girl looked older, with the same blond hair, but fatter, with her leg propped up all the way in the air near her shoulder. Sara couldn’t believe how little the picture looke
d like her, though later on she felt like that got her more tips—guys saying, “Oh, you’re so much prettier in person!”
Next, Sara learned Maureen’s rules for security. The person who comes with you—and someone always has to come with you (another important rule)—doesn’t have to stay in the room during the call; too many guys check closets and bathrooms for lookouts. But the chaperone does have to stay on the block. If there’s a restaurant across the street, the chaperone sits and takes a load off for an hour. The escort phones or texts when inside to say all’s well. The calls were all business for Maureen. If a john paid for an hour and he finished in five minutes, Maureen was done, too.
As a trial run, Maureen set Sara up with a regular of hers named Patrick. He was Asian and young, about Sara’s age, and he lived in a pretty apartment not far from the old Studio 54, which blew Sara’s mind. His place was nice, but when he said he was paying a thousand or two a month for the one-bedroom, Sara’s jaw dropped. “It’s location that you pay for,” Patrick told her. They spent the better part of the afternoon together. He’d brought coke, and now he had “coke dick,” so he took a long time to perform. Sara got into it. She was fine with giving head under regular circumstances and didn’t see any reason not to like it now.
Five and a half hours passed before Maureen burst in, furious. “We’re leaving! Now!” Patrick gave them all the cash he had and wrote a check for the rest made out to cash. Maureen said that they normally couldn’t take checks because johns could cancel them (another rule), but Patrick was a regular and a friend. On the way out, Maureen snapped at Sara, “I couldn’t do all these calls, because you were too fucking busy.”
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