Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  Some of us find that a little creepy. If you can imagine having sex with me, without my knowledge or participation, that’s at the very least invading my privacy. If you can imagine having sex with me, if you can masturbate and bring yourself to orgasm while imagining having sex with me, then can following me, even forcing me to actually have sex with you, be so very far away?

  In any case, women in general don’t share the threesome fantasy. For one thing, women are pretty much taught that another chick around your man is bad news: she’s the competition, the predator, the enemy. So it’s hard to really get into an imaginary scene where you’re sharing him with another woman. And immediately on the heels of that thought is the inevitable voice of insecurity: what if she’s better? What if he likes her more than me? What if he can never go back to straight sex? Does this mean that I can’t satisfy him by myself?

  The guy is thumping and pumping and thinking about how he can keep from coming too fast, and she’s already got the divorce papers made out, her own future as a sexual failure assumed, the weight of rejection and loss already heavy in her gut. Then he looks at her and says, “Come on, lick her pussy, get into it!”

  Threesomes that are what you might call amateur, so to speak, that involve people who are already in a relationship of some sort and know each other prior to the sexual encounter, are really difficult to pull off. I’ve tried, and I’m pretty good at detaching sex and love and possession and fun, and I haven’t had a lot of success, so I can’t imagine what other people do. Maybe that’s why callgirls do so many doubles, because it’s so tricky to do a threesome with people that you know.

  And it really is tricky. The reality is that almost always somebody ends up getting hurt. Frankly, folks, don’t try this at home; the fantasies you have require (even though you may not know it) trained professionals. We just make it look easy.

  I had a threesome once with the rat bastard boyfriend and a woman who had until then been my best friend. Maybe I had told her too many times that I couldn’t leave him ‘cause he was too good in bed. Or maybe there was something else happening…. It wasn’t planned; I tried to stop it when it started, and it was awful. I ended up sitting on her bed with tears running down my face while he fucked her; and when I attempted to go down on him, she pushed me away, saying, “I’ll show you what a real woman can do.”

  Something like that takes a while to get over.

  Callgirls do doubles, as a two-girl-one-client situation is called, all the time. After all I just said, you may be surprised to hear that most callgirls really like doubles. Not, however, for the reasons you probably imagine.

  First, there’s the money. He’s paying double – the same rate, once for each of you. So you know right away that he’s got money, and that if you play it right, you might be able to get him to extend for a second hour. And that’s so much better than leaving and then going on another call. It’s not that we mind the sex, or the time: it’s running around, convincing someone else on the phone that he really wants you, finding the place, trying to figure out what he wants; all that is difficult, sometimes stressful. Even when you end up liking him, the time you spend setting up the encounter and beginning it was not pleasant. So, if you play it right, you could stay here where you already are, comfortable, in control, for the same amount of money. And it’s easier to talk a client into extending the time if there are two of you. You can pout. You can caress. You can compliment, you can feed whatever fantasy or need or desire that he’s already revealed to you. And if by some miracle he hasn’t come yet, or still wants to come again, you can put that off to a second hour. (Pouty, semi-childish voice: “But we were just getting started! There are so many more things I want to do to you… you excite me so much…”

  Unless he was determined not to stay, or had an appointment, or not enough money, I could usually persuade clients to extend when I was doing a double. I had my techniques, my phrases, and my repertoire. And I loved doubles because they gave me a chance to see another girl interact with a client, see what was in her repertoire, maybe pick up a phrase, learn from her, make my own interactions fresh.

  Besides all that, doubles are just plain less work. If the client is someone who takes a lot of effort to bring to orgasm, you can take turns. If you’ve already been on two calls and feel a little sore, she can do most of the fucking. If one of you really doesn’t like kissing, and the client wants to, chances are the other can fill in. It’s not competition, it’s never that: on the contrary, there’s a sense of solidarity, of being in this together. Something like the bonding between actors, I think, and the giddy relief afterwards when the show went well. It’s a peculiar bonding – there are women that I know solely because I’ve gone down on a man with them – but it is real.

  If the client is difficult, you’re not dealing with him alone. You have eye contact with each other, send messages. One woman I worked with was faking an orgasm while the client licked her pussy; meanwhile, I was trying to make her laugh. I had my hand on her breasts, of course, in case he looked up; but we were holding in our giggles. Those are good calls. Sometimes the reality of what you are doing for a living can get oppressive, and laughing at the absurdity of it helps.

  One night Peach called me to do a double, and – unbelievably – on the way to the call I started my period. No one wanted to miss the call: not Peach, not the client, not my partner. Had I backed out he may have been patient while Peach located a replacement – or, more likely, he might have cancelled the call. We didn’t want to take that chance.

  I put my arms around the other woman – whom I had just that moment met – and kissed her cheek, murmuring sexually, licking her jawline so he could see. Then I moved up to her ear. “I just got my period,” I whispered. “Can you help me cover?”

  She pulled back and gave me a long kiss on the mouth. “She’s incredible!” she exclaimed to the client as the kiss ended. “You have such good taste, to find someone so special. I am going to love making love to her.” She turned to him and ran a hand up his inner thigh. “And I’m going to love having you watch me eat her pussy.”

  And it worked. By feigning a spontaneous and powerful attraction to me, she set up a situation where she could essentially control my body. She could pretend to engage in oral sex with me, while entertaining him with her ass, or me with my tits and moaning so that he didn’t watch too closely. If he attempted to go down on me or fuck me, she could pout and pretend to be jealous. “No, no, that pussy is for me, isn’t that what you wanted?” And then she could segue into an invitation to keep his attention away from me: “Come here, I can’t wait another minute, she’s gotten me so wet, I want your big cock in my pussy while I suck her tits.”

  In exchange I filled in with a lot of the activities that took more effort: I concentrated on his cock, so that he wouldn’t get too jealous: I sang his praises as she was singing mine. He fondled my breasts and pinched my nipples as I licked his balls and ran my tongue all around his cock, teasing him over and over until he groaned and I started in earnest, pumping up and down on his cock with my mouth. He had let go of my tits and was watching me give him head, and all the while my partner was caressing my ass and talking dirty, talking about fucking me, how I liked to take it from a girl, just like she was giving it to me. And I moaned in apparent agreement and excitement.

  It was one of the few times I didn’t mind that the client didn’t want another hour; I was cramping and wanted to be in bed with Scuzzy and a hot water bottle and some idiotic sitcom. We rode down in the elevator in near silence. “Do you need a ride anywhere? I asked tentatively. “No,” she said. “I have my car. Are you holding Peach’s money, or anything?”

  “I can if you want,” I said. “I’m seeing her on Tuesday.”

  She handed over the bills, already separated out from her own, folded into a neat little discreet packet. There hadn’t been a tip, but that was all right. It had been a good call. We weren’t too tired. The client had a good time. Later he compliment
ed Peach on being the only service in town that had real lesbians who also loved to be fucked. He felt he had gotten his money’s worth.

  We walked through the lobby in silence. Only one person behind the desk: it was one of the big anonymous hotels at the Winter/Wyman exit in Waltham, hotels that grew up around the technology start-ups and giants and technical wizards of route 128, for geeks flying in from Cupertino and Seattle and Japan. No one was interested in geeks. If it had been a downtown hotel, he would have given us a knowing smile and would have masturbated later, thinking about us.

  At the door, I hesitated. “Thank you for being so cool about that,” I said. “I didn’t know until it happened on the way over.”

  She shrugged, her eyes and mind already on the remainder of the evening. “No problem,” she said. “See you around.”

  And so the same woman who twenty minutes before had been kissing me deeply and passionately, her tongue skimming around my teeth, the same woman who had been sliding her index finger into my ass and inviting a stranger to watch her do it, the same woman who had been sucking my nipples… that woman walked briskly away, her keys already in her hand, clicking off her chirping car alarm, unlocking her car before I could even remember where mine was parked.

  This woman had made it work. I had done nothing, really, but follow her lead. She had taken the news and gracefully and professionally made sure that the curtain went up, the actors played their parts, and the audience was happy. I wasn’t sure how to thank someone – especially someone I didn’t know – for doing something that intimate.

  The point was moot: I never had the opportunity. She left it all here, in this lonely parking lot beside a businessman’s hotel in Waltham: it was over, there was nothing to express. All that she knew of me was the contours of my body, the feel of my lips, my ability to synchronize with her in a rich intricate sexual dance performed exclusively for one man. She wasn’t thinking about the performance she had just given, the show that had just ended. She was already thinking about the next one.

  A real professional. You come to appreciate that, in this line of work

  Chapter Fourteen

  The semester ended, I handed in my grades, and got paid. The checks went into the bank, some of them actually into a brand-new savings account. I paid cash these days for nearly everything else: it was callgirl currency.

  Despite the fact that I was apparently becoming the darling of the lecture circuit, and had four classes guaranteed for the spring semester, I wasn’t feeling especially good. Not like I had felt in the fall. Maybe it had to do with things not looking fresh anymore, the snow all brown where the plows had pushed it aside, the dirty slush on the sidewalks, the deep-freeze state that we call winter.

  Or maybe it was because I was doing too many drugs.

  Luis was not particularly helpful in this regard. He had friends, Colombians, who gave him a special price, so he always had coke on him, and we nearly always did it throughout our evening and night together. It was usually fun, making love and stopping for a swallow of wine, Luis laying out a line of coke on my naked breast to snort, lots of laughter, the feeling that you could go on forever.

  But the reality was that I was thirty-five, and I couldn’t go on forever. I was doing coke regularly now in the mornings, just a line, but what does that mean, when you have to do a line every morning just to be able to function? “Breakfast of champions,” I’d mutter, ritually, as if the phrase I had borrowed from one of Peach’s other girls were a talisman, and I’d bend over the scratched CD jewel box and transfer the line of cocaine from there to my nostrils. Then coffee, two or three coffees, and then class. I couldn’t imagine not doing it. It was my habit, my routine; it was what I did. It never occurred to me just how sick it was.

  Then, at night, I’d have done more lines, either out with Luis, or out on a call, lines that kept me alert, focused, and able to keep going. By the time I got home I was physically exhausted, yet unable to sleep, so I turned to pills.

  I was grateful for the winter break between semesters. I didn’t have to feel as pressured, as manic about everything that I needed to get done. The break would be good for me, I decided. I would start working out again. I would take long walks. I would get lots and lots of sleep. I’d cut back on the cocaine. These were all necessary changes: four classes were awaiting me at the end of January. When school started up again, I would have to be ready. I would have to be at my best.

  I promised myself, also, that I’d do a lot of calls over the break, so that I could do fewer of them once classes started again.

  So I told Peach that I could work a little more frequently for a few weeks. She was, predictably, delighted. It was then that I finally got to see Mario.

  I had heard about Mario long before I ever met him.

  I had done a double with another girl named Lori at the Ritz, sometime back in November. It had been a great call; we snuggled together and petted each other for a while and then she went down on the client while I kissed him. He came fast, which was hardly surprising, as he had been masturbating the whole time he was watching us play together. He didn’t appear to mind. He paid Peach’s astronomical price (we were getting one-eighty each, above and beyond Peach’s fee), and was beaming in sheer delight as we left. He had confided in us that we were the first white women he’d ever had sex with. I wondered how the comparisons were panning out.

  “That was a great call,” I commented in the elevator. “He was really nice.” I meant it, too: you get so you really like people who treat you well. In this business they are sometimes hard to find.

  The elevator stopped and we got out and crossed the lobby. The doorman held the outside doors open for us, his face expressionless.

  I always wondered if they knew. I expect so; I understand that at many hotels the doormen double as procurers. “Totally,” Lori sighed when we were out of his hearing. “I’m having the most totally ultra week.”

  I guessed that was positive. With Lori’s version of English it was sometimes hard to tell. “Where you parked, Tia?”

  “Under the Common.”

  “Me, too.” We crossed the street and skirted the park itself, an automatic nighttime precaution for women. She sighed. “I, like, saw Mario like twice this week, can you believe it, I’m thinking skanko week, and then I got him and now this dude tonight, it, like, rules, ya know?”

  “Who’s Mario?” I asked idly, more to be polite than anything else.

  She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “No way. Tia, no way, you don’t, like, know who Mario is? Oh, my God. Oh, my God, Tia. You haven’t seen Mario? Oh, my God.” Lori made up in vehemence for what she may have lacked in eloquence. She also, to my relief, started walking again. It was way too cold to be hanging about on the sidewalk. I’ve never been to Chicago, but I’d lay even odds that in the winter, the wind whipping down Boston’s boulevards and across the Common puts us right up there in the competition.

  “Listen, it’s like, you’ve got to ask Peach to send you, oh, my God, he’s like, the best. Well, like the easiest, you know what I mean?”

  I wasn’t entirely sure I did, but I nodded encouragingly. “So why are you telling me about him?” We did not, as a rule, want to share our best clients with each other.

  Lori didn’t even hesitate. “As if it would bother me. As if. Don’t even go there, ‘kay? That’s so lame. This guy has girls in every night, he sometimes has lots of girls, there’s enough to go around.” She lowered her voice confidentially. “He’s, like, somebody in the Mafia, you know, but I don’t think he whacks people.”

  I managed not to smile at her appropriation of Hollywood’s version of organized crime-speak, and I said instead, “Well, I’d imagine that not everyone has to actually do that. What does he like to do, besides being in the Mafia?”

  I really was asking about sexual preferences – well, that’s our job, after all – but Lori had other things to say first.

  “Well, it’s like he owns this really cool stor
e, it totally rules, ya know, it’s over on Newbury Street, it’s all leather stuff, jackets and purses and stuff. I went in once, and he was there, and gave me this huge discount on a skirt, it was too cool, he treated me like I was special, like I was his girlfriend or something. It was like, hello, is anybody home, I wasn’t exactly like his age or anything, the dude is so old, but everyone in the store was smiling and bein’ nice to me anyway. And you should see the skirt, Tia, it rocks! I wore it the next time I went to see him, you know, to thank him.”

  She went off to find her car and I didn’t think of the conversation again until one night in January when Peach was complaining about how slow it was.

  Just to have something to say, I asked her, “So, Peach, who’s Mario, and how come I don’t get to see him?”

  Peach sighed. She had to send girls out together to do doubles or share rides, but she didn’t have to like the ensuing exchanges of information. Peach was a great one for centralized control. She would have made it big in the Soviet Union; she probably had a Five Year Plan for the agency stashed away somewhere. She told people what she decided they needed to know, and got irritated when they found out other things on their own. “He’s a regular,” she said. “I’ve never run you by him because he likes really young girls, the college students, the ones that look seventeen or eighteen.” And, presumably, who communicate in mall-speak.

  The age issue was a persistent concern, though it rarely became a real issue. By that time I was thirty-five, although thanks to good genes and persistent working out I passed easily for ten years younger. Anything more was pushing it. I usually was billed as mid-twenties, and a graduate student rather than from the other side of the podium.

  Peach was apparently pursuing the thought on her own. “You know, Jen, that’s actually not such a bad idea,” she mused. “I think he’d like you, you know, if he can get past the age thing. I’ll think about it. You’ve got a car, that’s a plus, he’s way out in Weston somewhere with no T access and it’s expensive as hell to take a taxi. I’ll see what I can do.”