by Tracy Quan
“Jack,” I said firmly. “I wish I could help, but my aunt is visiting. She’s staying with me for the next two weeks, and I’m completely tied up with family obligations.”
“Your aunt? Is she…? What does she look like?”
“My aunt?” I repeated crossly. For a moment, I forgot this was a made-up aunt. “I have to go!” Disgusted, I hung up on him. What is he thinking? Christ.
THURSDAY. 2/24/00
After stewing over the call from Jack, I decided not to bother discussing it with Allie. But when I saw her today in the cardio room at the gym, I forgot all about my resolve. She was on the recumbent bike, wearing a headset, which she removed when I appeared in front of her.
“Hey!” she said, quite innocently. “I’ve been calling you for two days! What’s going on?”
“What’s going on? You’d better straighten your life out,” I warned her. “That jerk has been calling me and making strange requests. He says you’ve been talking to him about doing a threesome with me! And he’s bothering Eileen as well.”
She looked around to make sure nobody could hear us. Still pedaling, she whispered, “That’s ridiculous! I never said that to him. And why is he bothering Eileen?”
“Because he can! You took money from this phone freak and now he’s obsessed. You weren’t supposed to see him or talk to him! Much less take money from him!”
Allison stared at the clock behind me and checked her pulse. There wasn’t a trace of remorse in her eyes. She was in another world.
“Roxana’s meeting me later at Zen Palate,” she announced breathlessly. “She’s coaching me for the radio show. We’re brainstorming. She wants to talk about changing the name of our group. What do you think of Sex Workers Organization of New York? SWOONY. You know, like SUNY? She thinks NYCOT is kind of retro, kind of eighties. Or maybe even seventies. You know, when everybody wanted to sound sexy. But now we’re demanding our place on the world stage and we have to be recognized as workers, like everybody else.”
“I see.”
“Want to come? I know she’d love to hear your take on this.”
“No, thanks,” I said coldly. “I have a regular at three o’clock and a bikini wax at noon. Some of us have business to conduct.” In other words, Fuck you—but I’m too ladylike to put it that way.
LATER
Allie has no idea what kind of trouble she could be courting. She thinks I’m exaggerating the dangers because she doesn’t know how unsafe this business can be when you’re careless. I’ve learned, the scary way, not to be cavalier with men’s appetites. Aside from that coke addict with the gun, there were a few others. And all they did was scare me. But that was enough for me. There was a guy who tied me up—because I let him. Because I was fifteen, curious about bondage, and completely clueless about the dangers. He was my fourth customer ever. But once I was tied up, he gagged me with my pantyhose, despite my objections. Not something I had expected. I was terrified because I thought he was going to kill me. After he came, he apologized for scaring me—and untied me right away. His apology spooks me to this day. I never let anyone do that again. What was I thinking? I was lucky he didn’t do any of the things he talked about doing while I was lying there, immobile and frozen with fear. I was lucky, in a way, to meet up with a man who got his kicks from scaring hookers; though I wonder if he graduated to worse stuff.
Allison has always had it easy. Despite all this “sex worker” babble, she hasn’t a clue what most hookers have to deal with when they start working. The wild-goose chases and time wasters. The risks you take. The stupid and dangerous mistakes you can make. If she knew what really goes on out there, she would think twice about playing hide-and-seek with Jack. Right now, she’s flattered by his air of desperation, by his money, and by his horticultural choices. Okay, so Jack isn’t a kinky john she picked up in a bar. He has never displayed the slightest bit of weirdness in bed. But the other day, what was that about hoping to surprise Allison with another girl? Customers are not supposed to plan “surprises.”
Straight people wouldn’t understand why it’s so dangerous for a client to show up at your building without warning. (Unless, of course, he happened to be a sexual freak.) But a customer who disrespects the whole concept of calling first—that guy is already flirting with the dark side of being a john. Especially if the john in question is a middle-aged guy with money. I mean, we’re not talking about a construction worker who wanders into a cheap massage parlor. Professionals demand that their clients behave like gentlemen, and while this might seem quaint or silly to the new girls, it’s quite a serious matter. It’s too easy for customers to get away with mistreating hookers; you can’t afford to have guys around who are just barely acceptable. They have to be held to a standard.
How can a girl hook for this many years in a place like New York and still be as naive as Allison? She walked right into being a private call girl, that’s how. Without ever working for an escort agency. Without paying her dues. Unlike me, Allison started out as one of Liane’s new girls.
I met Allie on a call at the Pierre, about eight years ago. I was alone with a client in my panties and heels, waiting for the new girl to arrive and doing my best to keep a very impatient gentleman amused. Roland had a plane to catch, but I didn’t want him to come before Allie got there—Liane would be furious, and justifiably so. I tried to distract him by pretending to be impressed with his Central Park view. It worked for about a minute. When Allie showed up, fifteen minutes late, I was immensely relieved. And we actually hit it off. We worked well together, like concert pianists who have practiced their duet many times. We faked it but it was fun, and Roland loved our act. He gave us each a hundred-dollar tip on top of our basic fee. Not bad for a first meeting with a new girl!
As we waited for the elevator to reach the lobby, Allie’s cheeks were glowing. She had been working for only a few months, and she was still excited by all the new places and girls, the new situations she was getting herself into. Like being late for a double at the Pierre and trying to find her house keys and her K-Y at the last minute and…all those things that can make a new girl so flustered. On the way downstairs, I could tell she was still a bit dazzled by the Pierre Hotel’s old-fashioned lushness. There’s nothing trendy or Schrageresque going on there; it’s a well-oiled, well-preserved Fifth Avenue institution, a very hospitable fortress.
Despite the panic on her way to the call, she had enjoyed performing well and getting paid cash for it. She couldn’t wait to spend it. Though she made me feel like some sort of Jurassic tart—I was a veteran by then—I recognized a kindred spirit. Or thought I did. We went to Cipriani’s for a snack and a drink, and as we got to know each other, I began to find out how little we really had in common.
4 Origin of My Species
MY FIRST TRICK WAS A BABY-SITTER’S CHILDISH LARK.
I was thirteen and Professor Andrews was a local celebrity, a neighbor, who caught my eye.
In the quiet Canadian city where I grew up, anyone who had ever lived abroad or who hung out in Toronto was considered cosmopolitan. Professor Andrews qualified on both counts. He took lots of trips to Toronto, which struck me then as glamorous. It tickled me to know that grown women were actually falling in love with this charismatic radical chic author-professor, while I knew the real G. Frasier Andrews. And I knew they’d be horrified if they found out what he had done with me. I was having a giggle at the expense of all those grown-ups who said, “You’re too young to have sex. You aren’t ready for it.” I sensed that there were things they would never be ready for.
While my parents knew I was on the Pill, I made sure they didn’t hear about my adventure with our neighbor. My mother created—and enforced—a ten-thirty P.M. curfew but had no idea what I got away with in the middle of the day.
It’s horrible, really, when you think about it—how cold a pubescent girl can be in the face of a pedophile’s lechery. I wasn’t a virgin, but I was ridiculously innocent. I had never felt full-fledged
physical desire. I didn’t know that mature women lusted after men’s cocks, didn’t know what that felt like or looked like—which is why I didn’t understand the adult admirers of G. Frasier Andrews.
So when I looked at his cock, I must have appeared more curious than appreciative. Professor Andrews was part of a summer project I had assigned myself just before the break: I was determined to start taking the Pill, to start having a Sex Life.
Sex was instinctual for Professor Andrews; I doubt that he’d ever had a Sexual Plan when he was my age. And where I was too clinical to know what passion was, he was unable to control the urges that were most dangerous to his reputation.
Sometimes I think of Professor Andrews as my first adventure in the business. But I was still living at home; I didn’t need the money, and it was summertime. I understand that summer has changed, that thirteen-year-olds now spend those months imprisoned in summer school and self-improvement day camps. Not then! I had lots of time on my hands.
The next summer, I ran away—to another country. Later, when I started hooking in earnest, I came to see Professor Andrews as an amateur trick. Having sex for money was, at first, a perverse little game that made me feel cocky and cool—different from my peers. But later, money became a necessity: it was food, freedom, the ability to control my life, to stay afloat and hold my head up without admitting defeat to my parents.
The boyfriend who took me in when I ran away to London was twenty-two, agoraphobic, and given to migraines that could last for days at a time. There were long silences when he would lock himself in the bedroom with a cloth over his eyes. His parents had purchased a garden flat for him in a row of mock-Tudor buildings right next to Hampstead Heath. They believed I was nineteen, an age Ned and I had settled upon as plausible when we set up house together:
“You look as old as twenty,” he’d said, rather skeptically, “but you act about seventeen.” I’d taken his word for it, though at twenty-two he looked about sixteen and sometimes acted even younger. “Maybe, when they come over to see me, you can just read a book. Look very absorbed. That way you won’t have to chat.” Neither of us wanted them to catch on that he was harboring a fourteen-year-old runaway.
Had they known that this person who roasted the occasional chicken, watered the hedges, cashed checks for their son, picked up his antidepressants, and ordered supplies from the milkman—and had time to explore the hotel bars at night—was actually fourteen, perhaps they wouldn’t have been so quick to label his girlfriend “understandably immature.” In other words, he couldn’t expect to attract a mature nineteen-year-old. I accepted the slight as a compliment to my camouflage.
When I told him, over a midnight snack of hot cocoa and oatmeal, that I loved him, he smiled patiently as if his mind were very far away—in another universe. Our lovemaking was one of the best things we had; he was the first guy I ever had time to relax with, now that I had no curfew. So he became the first lover I really needed to fuck. I felt new sensations and wavelike emotions when he was inside. And maybe I shouldn’t assign all the credit to our circumstances. He was a good lover, and I knew he was very fond of me.
Though he sometimes did strange and terrible things—once, during a twenty-four-hour headache, he tore up a glittery nylon jacket that was my favorite possession—he never locked me out of his home. In fact, he made me feel that this was my home, too, though I now realize that it never really was. He made sure I went to the doctor and the dentist, encouraged me to do all the household shopping (which meant I had a constant stream of cash), and sometimes—very rarely—got into a sufficiently normal mood so that we could go out together. In his own way, he took care of me.
His idea of a really good time was tinkering with the stereo, putting together Revox reel-to-reel tape recorders using spare parts, and then playing Mahler or the Moody Blues—loud. Sometimes I went to a shop on Mornington Crescent with a strange-looking list and picked up the bits and pieces that were required to add the finishing touches to a tape recorder. When I think about Ned, which I still do occasionally, I wonder if he blew out his eardrums listening to Days of Future Passed on that big cushiony headset that looked like Darth Vader’s helmet. I also wonder if he’s alive. I have a feeling he is. Crazy people have this strange ability to hang in there.
Between the help from his parents and the dole money he collected (Mummy and Daddy officially rented the flat to him and then doctored his rent book so he could collect extra money), we had an easy existence. Ned was “on the fiddle”—the middle-class fiddle—and it suited us both.
But his black moods reminded me that I couldn’t stay there forever.
The first time Ned locked himself in the bedroom, he locked me in there with him, too. When he refused to let me out, I became completely hysterical. At which point he unlocked the door, stormed out, yelling and swearing at me, and locked himself in the music room with a chair up against the door. It was terrifying, but—too young to know any better—I tearfully pursued him, banging on the door, demanding an explanation. Some part of me thought this was romantic. Soon that part of me had been deeply wounded. We didn’t speak for days. He called me terrible ugly names that I had never heard before. And when his mood had lifted, he was incredibly sweet again.
“Why did you do that?” I asked him. “Why did you lock me in the room?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said, sulking. “I’ll never do it again.”
“But—but—you have to talk about it!”
“I won’t talk about it,” he replied. And on went the headphones.
Only a runaway would tolerate such a housemate, let alone boyfriend. Only a boyfriend on a steady diet of MAO inhibitors would be so easy to snow. When I started turning tricks, he chose to believe any story I told him. And since he was sleeping off a headachy fit half the time, it was easy to sneak in and out of the flat. Ned had some deep flaws, but he wasn’t nosy. He was much too involved with his headaches to be a snoop. And geeks were not yet regarded as hot property. In 1980, very few attractive girls—even runaways—were interested in snagging (or shagging) a geek. And how many geek groupies, even today, would enjoy picking up spare tape recorder parts for a melancholy agoraphobic? We both had a pretty good “deal,” if you want to look at it that way; but I never called it that. I really did love him. He gave me a chance to make my way in the world.
When Ned made it clear that he was unable to discuss his craziness with me, I came to a private decision.
What I think of as my first professional trick was a guy I picked up at the bar of the Cumberland Hotel in Marble Arch. I was almost fifteen. It never occurred to me that being underage was something I could charge more for, so I told him I was nineteen. Too naive to realize that a pro shouldn’t drink, I had my first snowball, a frothy yellow concoction of 7UP and Advocat. A cocktail that could well have been invented by a child prostitute, actually! But it was the bartender’s recommendation, and it became my signature drink at that particular hotel bar. While under the influence of my first snowball, I negotiated this date myself—money, condom, sex—and was very soon upstairs.
In bed, I had no idea what a real professional does. I lay back and allowed my new customer, a gentle sweet-faced American salesman, to fondle me. I knew I was supposed to like it, so I made excited sounds. But I didn’t know I was supposed to use my mouth for other things as well. I had no intention of including blow jobs in my repertoire; I didn’t really like oral sex back then. Fortunately, he was dying to get laid, and very little could have turned him off. He was about thirty—“older” by my childish standards but young in real terms, if you think of him as a John. He slipped the condom on, entered, and came.
Then he started talking about Vietnam. He started crying. I held his hand but was more amazed than moved by his emotions. He had killed a very young woman in Vietnam, a young soldier. He had been treated like a hero when he went home to Houston, Texas, and someone had given him a job, right away…
Then he said somethi
ng about wanting to marry me.
“I can’t marry you!” I told him.
“Why? Have you been promised to someone?”
At first, I didn’t understand. Then I realized that the girl he had discovered in a London hotel bar was an exotic Asian flower, a mystery. (I had told him I was Malaysian because I thought it sounded sexy.) My appearance overshadowed my voice, which—to any thoughtful listener—was a North American teenager’s bratty twang gone slightly transatlantic. I had never been viewed as an exotic flower before, and I didn’t know how to be gracious about it.
For me, of course, he wasn’t foreign—not in that way. I had grown up in a small Canadian town surrounded by freckled Waspy faces. By faces like his. In fact, I found real Asians quite exotic, just as he did. But we didn’t get into that.
“We can’t get married,” I said, “because we hardly know each other! And I don’t believe in marriage.”
I didn’t, at fourteen.
I sometimes wish I could travel back in time and give this guy the benefit of a grown-up hooker’s attention. I’d be nicer. More aware of the subtleties. If I had been aggressive and slutty in bed, would he perhaps have been in a completely different mood? I’m convinced that my amateurish style—i.e., my tendency to lie there—came off as innocence (which, in a way, it was) and evoked his more vulnerable emotions. If I could turn back the clock (an ominous concept for a hooker) and be grown-up, cheerful, professional, my first bar trick would have been lying there with a smile on his face, forgetting his Vietnam stories instead of repeating them to a teenager.
But I wouldn’t even be seeing a guy like that because I don’t pick up guys in hotel bars. And I wouldn’t go near a dive like the Cumberland today. His room was clean but hardly atmospheric, a junior salesman’s hotel room. It wasn’t so bad, but it was still a dive.