Aloud sigh. I was supposed to feel sorry for putting her out. “All right, Jen, I’ll take care of it, just be ready for Ben, okay?”
“You’ve got it, Peach.”
The other great thing about Mark in Chelsea was that he didn’t care what you wore, as long as he could take it off in a hurry when it came time to tussle on the living-room carpet. Lots of buttons were out. Comfort, happily, was in. I put on a pair of sandals and a light summer dress with a zipper down the front for easy access. It was, in addition, the coolest thing I owned. Mascara. A hint of perfume.
Here endeth the preparations.
Ben called about a half an hour later. “I’m downstairs.”
“Be right there.”
I grabbed my keys and the purse I used for work – no money, no ID, just lipstick and mascara, a couple of tissues, and three or four condoms. Just in case.
Ben was in a large old American car of some sort. The first thing I noticed was that all the windows were rolled down. The second thing I noticed was that there were already three women in the car.
Neither of these observations was exactly rocking my world.
“Get in, get in.” A bit on the impatient side, our Ben. Not sure exactly where he meant, I opened the back door and joined the girls already sitting there. “All right.” He had a list in his hand. “Tracy first. Brookline, right?”
The red-haired woman sitting next to the far window in the backseat drawled, “Yes. Coolidge Corner.”
Ben pulled aggressively away from the curb, swerved to barely avoid an ancient couple attempting (the nerve of them!) to cross on the crosswalk, and hit the radio. Rap. Loud, pulsing rap.
Curiously enough, there was a time when I liked listening to this. The anthropologist in me, no doubt. The message, then, seemed more sincere, more raw and more real. That was before it started talking about getting bitches pregnant and blowing people away, back in the days when it was a snapshot, a message, a story of lives conceived and endured in poverty and hopelessness. When it reflected a lived experience, rather than a celebration of the worst consequences of the life it had previously witnessed. I even remembered, unexpectedly, some of the words that had been an influence in my life and thought. “Rats in the front room, roaches in the back, I can’t take the smell, I can’t take the noise…” Who was it? An odd name… right: Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. Back in the eighties, back when it was communication rather than posturing, before the gangsta rap, the denigration of women, the celebration of testosterone. I must be getting old, I thought – I was about to say: back when the world was innocent.
My grandmother always said that the world lost its innocence with World War One. She hadn’t seen nothing yet.
Back to the present, which was difficult to ignore. Just breathing was a bit of a challenge, even with all the windows down. Shalimar and Obsession were battling for precedence in the back seat. They didn’t blend well, and I began thinking fond thoughts of John and his air-conditioning and his alternative rock.
By the time we made it to my stop (“Yo, Tia, Chelsea, right?”) we had gone from Brookline to Newbury Street with a brief detour to allow the blonde in the front seat to alight in front of a wrought-iron gate on Beacon Hill. Ben kept bending over something next to him in the front and I had a sneaking suspicion that all his subsequent sniffling wasn’t the harbinger of a bad cold. I paused as I got out and leaned in through the open front window. “I’ll be ready in thirty-five minutes.”
“No can do, babe.” I could see him better now, and unless I was paranoid and delusional, he was snorting coke out of an issue of People magazine that was on the seat next to him. The requisite credit card and rolled-up bill were in plain view. I was taken aback for a moment with the enormity of what I had just seen.
Heaven help us if we were pulled over. Heaven help me if we were pulled over. Good-bye, job. Good-bye, future. I was seriously pissed off.
I jerked my attention back to what he had just said. “What do you mean, you can’t do it?” My voice was sharp.
He sniffed. “Got a schedule to keep. Tracey’s two hours over in Brookline, but Tiffany’s hour’s almost up and then Lisa’s time’s gonna be coming up. Be back in an hour.” He gunned the engine to impress me with the importance of his schedule.
I held on to the door. “The client doesn’t want me to stay an hour,” I said. “He’s a regular, and I’d like to keep him happy.”
“Hell, just give him another blowjob, that’s what’ll keep him happy.”
Had he been standing in front of me, my response would have been immediate, physical, and temporarily disabling. As it was, there was only one obvious course of action. “Oh, okay, you’re right,” I said brightly. “Oh, wow, you’ve got People? That’s cool, it’ll give me something to read while I’m waiting for you to come pick me up.” Before he could react, I grabbed the magazine and stepped back from the open window, fanning myself with it as I did so, opening all the pages, practically in his face. Who knows how much coke fell out of its pages into the car, onto the street? I didn’t care. There are people who think that men don’t say things like that anymore. I know better – most women know better – but here at least I didn’t have to just take it.
I paid the price, needless to say. Ben never returned. Try finding a taxi in Chelsea on a hot summer night. Now try being an attractive woman finding a taxi in Chelsea on a hot summer night. You get my drift.
Peach was furious. “Ben’s pissed at me now. What happened?
You think drivers grow on trees?”
“No, apparently you get them out of cesspools!” I was just as mad. It was one in the morning, my easy call had turned into the Trek Home From Hell, there was obviously no chance of a second call, and now she wanted to yell at me?
“He told you to get an extra blowjob. So the man’s a pig. You’ve got to be able to take a little misogyny,” said Peach. “You get it from clients all the time.”
“Yeah, and that’s why I don’t need it from somebody who’s supposedly working for me. I get paid to take it from them, Peach. But let’s not even go there, because that’s not all. You know he had coke out in plain sight on the front seat?”
Silence. She hadn’t known.
I pressed my advantage: “That’s why he’s pissed, Peach, I accidentally messed up his stash.” Well, maybe not so accidentally. But she didn’t need to know that. And he hadn’t worked it into his tight little schedule to score some more. “You know what would happen to us if he got pulled over? With us in the car?”
What I really wanted to rant on about was the assembly-line approach to escort transportation, but I knew that this would get her where she lived. Peach prided herself on her record. Since she had been in business, none of her girls had gotten badly hurt, and no one had been arrested. This was risking the second alternative, big time. I pressed my advantage still more. “You’ve got a fucking time bomb there, Peach. He’s not just using, he’s using in public. He’s using while he’s driving your girls. He’s a fucking disaster waiting to happen.”
She believed me. That was one of the good things about Peach: once she had decided to trust you, she really trusted you. Peach knew me better after a few weeks than people who had been in my life for years knew me… She knew I wouldn’t lie about something like this. “I’ll get back to you,” said Peach, using her distant voice, the voice she used when her brain was in high gear.
“Just don’t do it tonight,” I snapped. “I’m signing off. I’m taking a long bubble bath and drinking a gallon of water. News flash, Peach: there aren’t any taxis in Chelsea. And the bus is on hourly rotation. It was an education, truly. Good-night.”
“Wait –” But I’d already hung up on her. I liked that. It wasn’t often that you got to hang up on Peach: she usually did the hanging up.
I got my Civic back the next day and did everything but kiss its new tires. Since then, I learned that Ben was, comparatively speaking, mild.
Some of the other ser
vices require callgirls to use their drivers. They require it as a means of control, and they overwork the girls at the beginning, saying that there is a five call minimum per night, and then when the girl is falling asleep on her feet the driver offers her a line or two of coke. Just a little pick-me-up, on the house, just because he thinks she’s nice and wants to help her out.
But the next time it’s not on the house, and the girl is up to a six-call minimum, and the driver always has something on him. (Peach tries to get women drivers when she can, but with those other services, it’s always a him.) Before long the girls can’t function without doing lines first, and their money is all going into the driver’s pocket.
So Ben wasn’t too bad, I guess, when you consider the alternatives.
Cocaine was what everybody was doing then. Ecstasy hadn’t yet made its comeback in the clubs, heroin had lost its chic, and, thanks to a significant South American population in the Boston area with ties back home, cocaine was the drug du jour.
It was impossible to avoid if you spent any amount of time out at night. Cab drivers made suggestive remarks concerning procurement. There were lines in the ladies’ rooms in all of the clubs, girls waiting not for the toilets but for the counter space.
Most of our clients got high. I did it, too, but for an entirely different set of reasons. I did it because No-Doz and espresso coffee just weren’t cutting it with me anymore.
What I hadn’t considered in my brilliant Master Plan, you see, was exactly how much I’d be burning the candle at both ends.
On Death and Dying was conveniently scheduled in the late afternoon. Most of the nurses taking it got off shift at 3:30, so the class started at four. Not so Life in the Asylum, however. As a very junior faculty member, I was given the dreaded eight o’clock slot on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I am convinced that a.m. stands for “(I) am miserable.” I had never been one for early mornings to begin with; and my current moonlighting made the aversion even more pronounced.
Try getting home at two in the morning, still in work mode: nobody comes home from work and goes straight to bed, right? You have to unwind first, to decompress. So you have some wine or some herbal tea, maybe take a bath, maybe read a little or watch TV. I mostly read: late nights were the best time for the mystery authors I love, Michael Connelly and Kathy Reichs and Tony Hillerman. Eventually you fall asleep, and just as you’re coming to the really good part in your dream, the alarm goes off. It’s six-thirty in the morning, and in another hour and a half you will need to be bright, entertaining, and – most of all – awake. And you hit the snooze button one too many times to have the leisure to wrestle with the espresso maker in the kitchen.
It’s bad on the other end, too. You decide that tonight you’ll only do one call, an early one, and then get to bed because you only got four hours’ sleep the night before. So you go on a call at eight o’clock, a perfectly reasonable time, but the client likes you and decides to extend… and extend… and extend. By eleven you’ve run out of witty and/or sexy things to say, you’ve run out of little games and trade secrets, you’ve run out of – well, energy. But you want him to call again, you want him to ask for you, so you need to recapture that joie de vivre that picked up and left about an hour ago.
The short-term solution for both, of course, was simple. A line of coke in the morning (“breakfast of champions,” as one of Peach’s other girls liked to call it) that at least clears away the cobwebs and gets you functional. Then, at night, you make a brief trip into the client’s bathroom for a pee and another line, and suddenly you do get that second wind after all, and you leave with a great deal of money and the knowledge that he will indeed ask for you again.
Logical. Simple.
Not particularly healthy.
Even without unscrupulous drivers forcing drugs on the girls, it’s easy to see why so many of them end up with problems. There’s a lot of alcohol involved in this line of work, a lot of drugs. If one is at all susceptible, one is inviting the Bogie Man to come right on in and take up residence.
It wasn’t just us, either. It seemed for a few years there that everybody in town was doing coke. That was in the days before so many of the cokeheads committed suburbicide – got married and had kids and bought SUVs and spent all their money on soccer camps and a new deck in the back of the house, and couldn’t buy cocaine anymore. It seemed too bad: they were the ones who ended up looking so tired all the time. They probably could really have used it.
I was lucky. That’s all; it’s not through some special skill or attitude that I survived my years working for an escort agency without developing serious problems with drugs or alcohol. There is, apparently, nothing addictive in my personality. I did way too much cocaine and drank way too much alcohol and didn’t get caught in the Bogie Man’s lair. Pure dumb luck.
Otherwise, if I had had the requisite addictive personality, if I had come to need the substances… well, if I were one of the fortunate ones, I’d be writing these lines from rehab. If I wasn’t one of the fortunate ones, I would have given up teaching, given up my life, I’d be living in a crack house and exchanging blowjobs for rocks. I’ve seen it happen.
I got out. Not everybody did.
Chapter Ten
I met so many addicts when I was working as a callgirl.
You meet a lot of people, of course: all sorts of people. You do that in any profession; but prostitution seems to attract the extremes.
I first met Sophie when I went on a call for Peach. Sophie, who worked independently then, was already with the client when I arrived. He had contacted her directly, then called the agency to turn it into a double.
It turned into one of the best calls of my career. Sophie and I were immediately in synch with each other. She was gorgeous, Chinese, with perfect glossy black hair and a body to die for. We amazed the client, had great fun together, laughed and played and finally found ourselves at eleven o’clock in a hotel corridor with a lot of cash in our hands.
“Come back to my house for a drink,” she suggested. “Let’s take the rest of the night off.”
It sounded like a good plan. We had gone through three bottles of Mouton-Cadet with the client, and aside from everything else, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about driving further than I had to. We were in Framingham; she lived in Natick, the next town over.
Besides, I really liked this woman. She had quoted Pascal while we were in bed working together. She spoke English, Mandarin, Cantonese, French, some Vietnamese. Most of her sentences, unaffected and spontaneous, sounded more like a poem, or a song, than like a real conversation.
I called Peach and signed off, and went home with Sophie.
Her apartment was quirky, filled with large papier-mâché animals. A giraffe towered over the chair where I sat down; a tiger prowled in front of the big bow window. Wildly colored birds hung overhead. A zebra guarded the entrance to the kitchen; some unidentifiable marsupial perched in the bathroom. They were everywhere, their bright colors contrasting with the heavy cherry furniture that took up the rest of the space.
Sophie handed me a bottle of Sam Adams and got on the phone. Within twenty minutes we had visitors, three very young men, all of them very attractive, friends of hers. None of them Asian, but I didn’t make anything of that. Not then.
They brought with them what seemed that night to be an infinite supply of cocaine.
So we sat and drank and talked and passed round the CD jewel box to do lines. Sophie kept disappearing, and when I went to find the bathroom I took a wrong turn and found her in the kitchen, cooking the coke, making it into freebase to smoke. “You don’t mind, do you?” she asked. I shrugged. It was her house, I was buzzed and extremely attracted to one of her guests. She could have been shooting it into a vein, for all I cared.
But I did care, in the end. Sophie and I became friends. And through our friendship I learned, the hard way, what everyone who knows an addict learns eventually. Sophie’s only, real, primary, exclusive relationship was
with the drug, no matter how hard she tried to convince one otherwise. It would always be with the drug. People were ancillary, secondary. She could like people, she could love people, but she did not need them in the same way that she needed coke. She would have betrayed anyone, or done anything, for cocaine. In the end, that was all she wanted, needed, or cared about.
Of course, I knew nothing of all that at the beginning. I could handle doing drugs and still have a life; naïvely, I thought that she could too. I thought that most people could; and, besides, she didn’t fit the profile of an addict. She was strong, bright, intellectual, caring.
It took me a long time to learn that the one had nothing to do with the other. To learn that the Bogie Man doesn’t discriminate; and why should he settle only for the poor, the uneducated, the desperate? Why not take someone vital and brilliant and filled with potential instead?
I tried very hard to save her, and got extremely hurt in the process. I lost a great deal of who I was, of what I had, to my belief that I could save her.
I remember hearing someone talking about heroin, once, I think on a PBS documentary. “You know what?” he said. “The first time you shoot up, you might as well just go right out then and there and rent yourself a U-Haul. Bring it to your place, load up your stuff, your house, your girlfriend, your friends, everything. Might as well lose all that stuff upfront. Get it over with. ‘Cause, guaranteed, you will, eventually. You think you won’t. But no one gets out. It’s just a matter of time.”
I didn’t understand those words when I heard them, but it didn’t take me long, once I was in the business, to catch up. And it didn’t just have to be about heroin. Crack was just as damning.
That’s all very well in theory, of course. But if you want to rip your soul apart and ensure a minimum number of nightmares per month for the rest of your life, then care about an addict. You’ll never be the same again, I promise you that.
I’m not sure how to articulate this, to explain my fascination with Sophie. I loved our conversations, her insights, her sudden high giggle. I loved the way that she talked, her words reflecting her native language’s ability to communicate through allegory and symbolism, a way of arranging thoughts that translates poorly into western prose. When she wrote, it was like reading haiku. When she talked, it was like listening to a poet, the words creating bright images of things one had never imagined.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 13