Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

I have no idea if anyone knew what she was talking about; and there were some of us who wished she’d drop the “tip” part of that phrase.

  “It’s not the eighties anymore,” Peach would say airily, and rather repetitively. “No one tips these days.” And she was right: very few did.

  She’d negotiate if necessary to include the cost of a driver, or if the client lived really far away; but her fee was always the same. One hour, sixty dollars. Two hours, one hundred twenty dollars. She never asked for more, even when her end of the deal was labor-intensive. That made up, I suppose, for the times when it would take her two minutes flat to set up a call.

  Of course, she was doing much more for that money than just setting up a call. I reminded myself of that fact on the nights when I was out in rain, or sleet, or humidity, and would think of her in her pleasant surroundings reading novels between telephone calls, and resent the comparative ease of her part of the transaction and the difficulties inherent in mine. She did all the screening, which you couldn’t pay me enough to do; and she ran the risk up front, having her name and telephone number published in the Phoenix.

  And she really did take care of her girls. I’ve seen the most extraordinary things happen. One night I was over at Peach’s apartment when a call came in from one of the new girls, an eighteen-year-old college freshman, crying because a client had spoken roughly to her. Peach was furious, and had the client on the line in a matter of seconds. “I don’t care,” she said. “You had no right to say that. Don’t fuck around with me, Cory, she’s crying. You’re just being a bully, and she was young and scared and you took advantage of her. I’m ashamed to know you!” She hung up on him, and she cut him off for weeks after that.

  That was one of Peach’s fundamental rules, and one of her secrets of success: mess around with one of her girls, and you won’t see another one of them soon.

  Of course, I have a feeling that, for a lot of the regulars, that was part of the game, part of the attraction of it all. It was almost a kind of aural S&M, with a fantasy “Mistress Peach” yielding a symbolic whip and telling them that they’d been bad boys.

  If you were a client and Peach was mad at you, she’d just hang up when you called, no matter how bad business was. You’d have to work your way back into her good graces. Contrition went a long way: “Please, Peach, it’ll never happen again, I was wrong…” Presents also helped: Peach always seemed to have almost magical access to free tickets to sold-out concerts, cocktails “on the house” at trendy restaurants and bars, stacks of chips appearing out of nowhere when she went to Atlantic City.

  She loved it, of course. Who wouldn’t? She loved the glitter and privilege and the limousines. She loved the role-playing and the perks and the attention that it brought her.

  True story: it was Thanksgiving, the first Thanksgiving that I was working for her. I didn’t have anyplace in particular to go, no one to be with, and she invited me to her apartment in the South End, where a small number of people would be celebrating the holiday together. I was beyond thrilled.

  As it happened, I was in Louisiana for the funeral of an elderly aunt at the beginning of Thanksgiving week, and I spoke to Peach on the phone from New Orleans. “Do you need me to bring anything?” I asked, automatically; it’s what one does to be polite. “Yes,” Peach said, “I need a VCR, mine’s broken; can you get one? I’ll reimburse you. There’s a tape I play every Thanksgiving.”

  Did it occur to me to say, “I’m coming straight in from the airport, that means I have to get it here, in Louisiana, why don’t you ask someone closer”? No, of course not. Peach had asked me, had entrusted me with this mission. “Okay, sure,” I said.

  Try flying coach class with a VCR. I got there too late to check it, and it was too big to go under the seat in front of me or in the overhead compartment. I sat in my place, grimly hanging on to it, and the take-off was delayed while flight attendants conferred as to what to do. Other passengers, all too well aware of what (or, more specifically, who) was causing the delay, glared at me. I can’t say that I blamed them; I’d probably have cast the first glare, myself, in their place.

  The situation was resolved when an alternate place was secured for the box, and we arrived at Logan not too much later than planned.

  Snow was swirling and a cutting wind bit into me I staggered to the taxi stand, with my purse, my suitcase, my carry-on briefcase… and my VCR. I’d lost a glove, a swatch of hair was in my eyes, my makeup had worn off hours before, and I was anything but grace personified. If at that moment I had told anyone that I was a prostitute, they would have dissolved into hysterical laughter. I looked like a refugee from a particularly competitive electronics sale. And the most amazing thing of all was that I didn’t mind. It was for Peach. She made the most demanding and inconvenient requests and favors sound logical and even appropriate. It was one hell of a skill.

  Peach always found a way to make things work for her. Even her business – she managed special deals with clients, with employees, even with the newspapers that ran her ads.

  She was extremely competent. And what she was doing, at the end of the day, was not exactly rocket science. In terms of numbers, it’s not all that expensive – or difficult – to set up an escort service.

  You need to advertise, of course; but even that needn’t be outrageous. Some of the bigger services in town – Blue Moon, Temporarily Yours, Midnight Express – took out half-page ads in the Yellow Pages, which I assume were phenomenally expensive. They could afford to: they had staff, offices even, marketing budgets. They also had the potential for really scary arrest records.

  An agency like Peach’s flew under the radar: she was one person, maybe twenty girls at any given time. She was simply not worth arresting.

  She carried two ads in the Phoenix, week in and week out, one advertising the agency, a separate one for employment. Back then, that cost three hundred and forty dollars a week, payable in cash. She never paid in person, of course. I frequently had that job, for which she offered the princely sum of twenty dollars: she’d wait until I’d done enough work to be holding that much money for her (it only amounted to six calls, after all) and would have me go over to their offices and pay for the next week’s ads. Sometimes it was me, sometimes Luis, sometimes one of the other callgirls.

  I often wondered what the sales people at the Phoenix thought of this procession of people paying the charges for an escort service. I can’t imagine what they thought on certain of the days that I went there, my hair unstyled, wearing no makeup, sometimes in sweats if I’d been working out.

  The second ad she ran was for attracting employees.

  I dislike the term recruitment; that gives an impression of shady characters standing around schoolyards or something, or else evokes brightly colored lies about the joys of military service. It’s not even like Peach ever actively recruited anyone, at least she never did while I was working. In general, people found her.

  Like me. I went looking for her. I at least knew where to find the ads; I’d already seen the relevant section of the Phoenix, and I expect that its counterpart exists in most local community and alternative papers. Open any of them and you’ll see, usually at the bottom of the ad for the service, some phrase like, “Accepting Applications,” or “Discreet Attractive Ladies Wanted.”

  Don’t get too excited about your timing: they’re all accepting applications, always, all the time. One of the first questions that even a regular client asks is if there’s anyone new. New to the agency, new to the work. No matter how beautiful and sexy and compelling a woman is, they’ll still reject her in favor of novelty, of variety. I don’t know if it’s about wanting to put their penis in as many women as possible, or if it’s a forlorn hope that the next girl will be the one, the best lay, the sexiest woman on earth. Whatever the reason, it’s one of the things that gets us a little cynical about men. But we’re in the business of meeting their needs, not questioning their motivations, so every service wants new faces, fresh bodies, a
ll the time. Employment is almost guaranteed.

  The problem with the newspaper ads, from Peach’s point of view, is that there’s a fair amount of screening that has to take place. Women call her for all sorts of reasons. The curious, those looking for an illicit thrill, those who do not understand the nature of the business (“But I just want to have dinner with him!”).

  She screened out the too young, the too desperate (they are the ones with the potential to make mistakes, to get hurt), the too dull. Then she shepherded them through their first encounter, after which, if they found that it was not for them, she might have to do some crisis counseling.

  Of course, she stacked the deck in her favor. She almost always sent new callgirls to Bruce, or to one or two of her tame clients who were like him. Kind. Nice. Reassuring. She tried to make it as good for the girls as possible, and because she did, her girls developed a fierce loyalty to her, a loyalty that survived bad calls and bad times, that made them want to be part of her world, part of her agency, part of who she was.

  Peach used her own judgment about trusting new employees – and she wasn’t always right, either. I remember one new girl who stole a lot of money from Peach and then took off for parts unknown.

  Two of her most reliable callgirls, women she considered to be friends – one of them went on calls, the other worked the phones – learned the business from Peach, then left to start their own service, taking a number of clients with them when they went. It happens. It’s not exactly a situation one takes into small claims court. But for all the times that Peach was wrong, there had to be a hundred times that she was right. She knew and understood people. And she made you feel that she cared deeply about you. Sometimes she would call, and my voice might be off a little, and the first thing she would say was, “What’s wrong?” And you knew, you absolutely knew, that Peach would do whatever it took to make things good for you again.

  Her secret? Simple, but seemingly impossible in the world of the night. She was sincere. She really, honestly, cared.

  And that was why, occasionally, she got taken. But she also got some terrific callgirls, and she had some great clients. In general, life was good.

  The best way to avoid getting cheated by your callgirls is through referrals.

  Alot of the girls who worked for Peach actually were in college, and most of them had friends. It’s not something that they generally advertise about themselves, of course; but one generally knows one’s friends well enough to know who might be open to the idea, and who might be repelled by it. A referral means that there’s a better chance that the girl knows what she’s getting into, that she’s already familiar with the pay rates, the expectations, the requirements, the limitations. It makes Peach’s life much easier – not to mention safer.

  And safe sex, as we all know, is the best sex of all.

  *

  If you look through the advertisements for escort services, either in the yellow pages or the newspapers, you’ll occasionally come across some promise of honesty. And I’m here to tell you that that is the biggest lie of all.

  I remember one of my early clients, the first week that I was working, was absolute torture on the phone. He kept grilling me and grilling me about the specifics of my appearance. Was I sure about my weight, was I telling the truth about my bra size? He kept going back to make sure that my story was consistent with what Peach had already told him: “And what did you say your actual measurements are again?”

  As it happened, I was calling him from the parking lot of a shopping mall, where I had just spent an unpleasant hour looking at my reflection in the fitting rooms of Cacique, buying lingerie, so it was a bit of a sore subject, my physical imperfections. He agreed to see me, and I immediately called Peach back to confirm. “Peach, he kept going on and on and on about my looks, what was that about?”

  She shrugged it off. “Oh, he had a bad experience with another service; they told him the girl was gorgeous and she was missing teeth or something.”

  I went to the specified hotel with a sense of dread, because of course (following Peach’s instructions) I had lied. In my case it was truly a technicality: I worked out, but the reality is that muscle does weigh more than fat, and I weighed far more than my appearance suggested, so I routinely told people what they wanted to hear. No client, hearing the truth, would have considered seeing me; but once he did see me, he never had any complaints.

  In the end, it turned out to be one of my best calls ever. The guy was nice, the telephone attitude had totally disappeared, and we shared a lot of laughter and fun. He eventually became one of my regulars, a huge bonus, as I never had to go through the telephone question-and-answer thing with him after that.

  But the issue of lying is a major one in the escort business.

  I asked Peach about it, after that first episode. “Why would the service lie about the girl? They’ll be proven wrong as soon as he opens his door.”

  We were sitting at a booth in Legal Seafoods, and she was more interested in the menu than in conversation. “Well, something that blatant, yeah, you don’t do that. That’s really stupid. No one’s going to call back if they think you’re trying to screw with them.”

  I had already decided what to order, the only thing I ever order at Legal’s: mussels in fragrant seafood sauce. “So…?”

  “Face it, we all lie. You know that the client is going to want to see you once he sees you, right? But you also know that if you told him your real weight, or, for that matter, your real age, he wouldn’t.

  So you lie. Doesn’t hurt anybody. He gets what he wants, you get what you want.” She closed the menu. “Mussels in fragrant seafood sauce,” she told the waiter.

  “I’ll have the same thing, please,” I said, and waited for him to leave. “It still doesn’t leave us with a great reputation.”

  Peach frowned at me. She always hated talking about the business. Oddly enough in view of her profession, she would only discuss sex if it was absolutely, positively necessary. “Men are sheep,” she said. “They’re told what they want by the media, the porn industry, the advertising agencies. They don’t really understand what they’re looking for. They think they want Pamela Sue Anderson. They also think they know her measurements and what she weighs, and I guarantee that they’re wrong on both counts. Guys don’t have a lot of imagination when it comes to what they find sexually attractive: they like what they’re told to like, and assume that’s the only path to sexual nirvana.”

  So that was why Peach lied. She told her clients what they wanted to hear. She knew that her girls were good, that whomever saw the client would delight him; but he wouldn’t believe that if her description of the girl was too far off the Pamela Anderson model.

  So she lied, the clients loved the girls she sent, and everybody was happy.

  Lenin said somewhere that a lie told often enough becomes truth. We are, all of us, inventing ourselves over and over again, every day.

  I was talking about Peach’s late-night salons, gatherings at her apartment after she shut the phones off for the night, where a selected group of us would sit, drink, do lines, and discuss everything from politics to architecture. Wittily, of course. Some nights we’d play games, Pictionary and Taboo and Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble. We were as contrived and clever and self-absorbed as any French eighteenth-century salon of would-be literati, the difference being that we knew it, and were not above poking fun at ourselves.

  And it was fun – I have to say, it was great fun while it lasted. I’d do one or two calls, then head over to Peach’s place around one o’clock in the morning, play and stay until five, go home and sleep. Not every night, of course: I was teaching, I had lectures to prepare and papers to grade. But it happened often enough to give my life a sort of edge, a sense of being someone exciting, of having Another Life. It may all have been a chimera, in the end; but it was still a lot of fun while it lasted.

  On this particular night, Scrabble was being played, and wine and lines of coke being distr
ibuted. I misplaced my wineglass somewhere, and the man next to me touched my arm and extended his own glass. “Here, have some of mine.”

  I looked up. It was Luis, who sometimes drove for Peach and went to business school by day. I accepted the glass and he held my eyes as I drank from it, then returned it to him. “Let’s play,” he said.

  We shared that glass of wine, and then another. We played Scrabble and Luis won. Eventually people started trickling out of the apartment, and Peach yawned and went to bed; still Luis and I stayed there, talking to each other as though mesmerized, a large quilt over our shoulders, snuggled together, a perfect fit. We talked about his childhood, and mine; we talked about the ethics of business and the ethics of academia; we talked about… oh, I don’t even remember, anymore, what we talked about. What I do remember is that we fell in love.

  Which presented some interesting and unanticipated moral issues. When love is for sale, how do you give it away?

  Chapter Thirteen

  And so I got involved with Luis Mendoza.

  I didn’t notice any deterioration in my teaching, not at first. I’m honestly not sure that anybody else did, either. At first. I was getting less and less sleep at night, and yet was managing to carry it off, mostly because being in front of a class was so incredibly energizing and exciting for me that the adrenaline high saw me through.

  But papers were being passed back late because I wasn’t getting around to reading and grading them, or because I fell asleep at the table while trying to.

  Okay, so I was a little late. I rationalized my concerns away: I knew professors who were extremely late. Hell, my dissertation advisor had lost my French language proficiency exam, pretended for six months that he still had it, and passed me purely on the basis of not being able to prove otherwise. So I was in decent company.

  I didn’t think about it a lot. It would just be for a little while… a few late papers… a few under-prepared lectures. I could survive it.