Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life

by Angell, Jeannette

  That year, I had some time to think about things. The end of December and the beginning of January were a quiet time for me, punctuated only by one or two parties. There was the compulsory faculty New Years’ cocktail get-together, a couple of Scrabble parties that Peach dragged me along to, and an oddly-timed costume party given by Irene. I went to them all and tried to be nice and have a good time.

  But what I really did, mostly, was think a lot about what was happening to me. I thought about what I had discovered at Luis’ house on Christmas Eve. I thought about where I had been, and where I might be going.

  It seemed almost that I was at a crossroads of sorts. My career – my real career, my teaching – was starting to look as though it might actually come to pass. I had been promised as many classes as I cared to teach, and it seemed a logical assumption that after a year or two of that sort of thing, I might be considered eligible for one of the scarce tenure-track position openings. Certainly I was building good contacts – at my own school and at the ones where I was invited to guest lecture. It was looking more positive, more possible – than it ever had before.

  On the other hand, it still wasn’t enough money. Not to pay my rent, my accumulated credit card bills (many of which were the work of Peter the Rat Bastard, but I had signed the receipts, more fool me), my student loan payments, my private (and expensive) health insurance, and so on. That kind of security would come only with the professorship, the real job, the one with a regular salary and benefits attached to it.

  So I still needed to work for Peach. The question was, how much, and how could I do it so that it wouldn’t impact my work?

  And all the while, the other question hovered over my thoughts, my lists, my plans. How could I do it so it wouldn’t impact my life?

  I had arrived where I was through no brilliance or extraordinary effort on my part. The class on prostitution, I realized, was what had really saved me. In the meantime, I wasn’t doing such a good job of saving myself. My teaching was deteriorating from the lack of sleep, the lack of time, the inability to function without the drugs that woke me up and the drugs that put me to sleep. I hadn’t done any cocaine since the end of the semester and had only drunk moderately at the holiday parties; but I was not deluding myself. Four classes a week, four calls a week, and I’d be back to my old ways. It seemed inevitable. And this time there wouldn’t be any glitzy new addition to the curriculum to distract attention from my erratic teaching, my late arrivals, and my occasional zombie-like behavior. This time there would be no way to cover my ass. It could be the end of my career, without it having ever really started.

  And Luis… I had no idea what to do about Luis. His own propensity for late nights had contributed to my problem. If I only worked for Peach on weekends, there would still be Luis during the week. I needed – I calculated rapidly on the edge of an envelope – I needed three, sometimes four calls a week.

  My New Year’s resolution was to figure out what to do. This was going to take more than an evening to think about. I watched the ball drop into Times Square, toasted Scuzzy with a glass of sparkling Vouvray, and went to bed.

  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried about Luis. He solved that problem all by himself.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Luis himself had seen it coming. “There are only two conclusions to a relationship,” he said once. “Either you get married, or you break up.” And it was fairly clear after a few months together that we weren’t on the path to getting married.

  I think that breaking up with Luis affected me more than I was willing to admit, or liked to think about. I got angry with him and with myself – I think that I was just plain angry, in general, for some time.

  Classes started up at the beginning of February. I was doing calls on the weekends, trying to fit them as much as possible into that space, doing two calls on a Saturday night and one on a Sunday, so that I could keep the week fairly clear in preparation for teaching again. Peach didn’t see the point, and I think that she was insulted when once or twice she asked me over after work for Scrabble and a drink, but I declined, saying that it would be uncomfortable seeing Luis there, and left it at that.

  Still, it was hard to avoid getting swept back up into that whole glittering scene again. I think that Peach deliberately tried to pull me back in, even when I resisted, not through any nefarious purposes of her own but simply because she liked me and missed me when I wasn’t around. She’d call me up and offer me dinner, saying that she’d arrange for me to meet a client afterward. I really didn’t want Peach angry with me, a situation that could potentially translate into lost income, so I’d go.

  There were at that time a fair amount of chefs and restauranteurs among our regular client base. When Peach suggested that we go out, that winter, it was almost always to the same place, her current favorite hang-out. It was an Asian fusion restaurant located in one of the major downtown hotels, very cutting-edge and chic, and Peach had somehow become friendly with the owner. He used her agency a lot: for himself, for friends, for visiting businessmen. He had some sort of arrangement with the hotel itself, and room keys seemed always to somehow magically appear in people’s hands.

  I saw clients in that hotel, waiters from the restaurant, sometimes visiting Japanese business connections or family members. They always brought up drinks from the restaurant, tidbits, appetizers. It was exceptionally good food. Once the owner told me that any night I wanted to stop by for a drink I’d be most welcome – and could more or less be assured of a client at the same time, if I wanted one. It was a sweet offer, but I never took him up on it.

  One of the men I saw there, one of the chefs in fact, one night solemnly handed me a business card. “It’s my new place.” He was going off on his own, opening a sushi restaurant in the suburbs. I wished him well, took the card, promised to look him up and immediately forgot about it.. As it turned out, he must have seen some sort of writing on the wall, because the fusion restaurant closed a few months later. I think it’s a steak joint now.

  Sometimes my past comes back to – well, not exactly to haunt me, but just to remind me that it was there. Last summer I was attending a conference held at Wellesley College, and got into a conversation with a colleague about food. “Oh,” she said, “you like sushi? Let me give you a tip: stay out of the city. Believe it or not, the best sushi restaurant in New England isn’t far from here!” And she cited the restaurant whose distinctive name I remembered from the departing chef’s new business card. So it’s nice to know that somebody else got out and is doing well.

  Odd little things like that crop up from time to time, reminders in the present of another life, one lived in the past. It’s not such a bad thing, to be reminded of where we’ve been, where we come from. I smiled at the memory; for a moment I wasn’t at a conference at all, but back in the hotel, with rich Japanese businessmen buying me cocktails, wearing a dress that had cost eight hundred dollars, feeling on top of the world. It wasn’t such a bad memory. I won’t go and have dinner at the restaurant, though. That chapter is over, and I love my life now.

  Besides, my husband hates sushi.

  But in the meantime it was February, I was teaching again, going out with Peach when I thought I could manage it without becoming too tired or doing too much cocaine, and working almost exclusively on the weekends.

  I was a lot healthier. Maybe it was all the sushi I was eating. But there was something else new, an edge that even I could see in my teaching, something passionate and radical that hadn’t been there before. I think that Luis’ attitude had touched a nerve that was still pretty raw. Assumptions and stereotypes are the result of a lack of knowledge, a lack of critical thinking – I’d always liked Emma Goldman’s phrase, “The most violent element in society is ignorance.” And I was more and more determined to do something about it. The anger that I had been vaguely aware of since his departure was finding both direction and expression.

  The first part of the prostitution course was strictly h
istorical. “Vestal virgins, and all that,” as my newly-appointed administrative assistant, Vicky, liked to say. I didn’t qualify for a teaching assistant yet, but Vicky was really good about photocopying and putting books on reserve for me, that sort of thing. It was a pity, really, that I couldn’t risk mixing my two worlds, because Vicky and Peach could have been great in business together. Vicky was gorgeous, ebullient, unflappable, single, and always short of money; Peach could have had her making a thousand or so a week.

  I liked to include male prostitution as was appropriate in the course, since the need to purchase sex transcends gender, age, and ethnic/racial identity. It wasn’t difficult to find examples in the ancient world, which for the most part was far more open and accepting of homosexuality than is our current culture. But, as is invariably the case in history, it didn’t mean that everything stayed that tolerant forever.

  I stood in front of my Tuesday morning class. I was preparing to shock them with information that they were not going to want to hear, that they could scarcely ignore, that might be the stuff of nightmares later. I’ve always marveled at people who see historians as meek, otherworldly innocents. They are clearly people with no knowledge of the cycles of violence and horror that make up the history of the human race. Historians, believe me, have seen it all.

  “When I was in graduate school,” I said to the class, “I had a friend who liked to say, ‘Constantine converted to Christianity, and it was all downhill from there.’” The class was relaxed, smiling politely, even offering a courteous laugh or two. “My friend was right,” I went on. “Constantine’s successor, Theodosius, made it illegal, upon pain of death, to sell a boy into prostitution. Unfortunately, the people carrying out his edicts distorted them, and instead of punishing the slave-traders who sold prostitutes, it was the prostitutes themselves who were targeted. In Rome, prostitutes were dragged out of the male brothels and burned alive in the streets, while a cheering crowd looked on.” Silence. No one was smiling anymore. “And,” I went on gently, “hypocrisy and human nature being what they are I think that we can probably imagine one or two of their regular clients as being part of that crowd.”

  I waited a moment, then got them involved. “So why do you think that homosexual prostitution was such a problem under Theodosius, when both heterosexual and homosexual prostitution had been practiced fairly openly in the Empire up until then?”

  There was another moment of silence, either to recover from the gruesome image I had summoned or to think about the answer; then a hand went up. “Because Christianity said it was wrong, and the Emperor was Christian?”

  I nodded. “Was the problem homosexuality, or its practice by prostitutes?”

  Another hand. “Both. Didn’t the Church say that sex had to be procreative? Neither homosexuals nor prostitutes are planning on making babies.”

  A titter ran through the class, a release of nervous energy. “Right. Good. I see you’ve done your readings.” I stood in front of the desk, leaning against it. I said, “There’s another reason, too. As the authorities saw it, homosexuality was in essence using a man’s body in the same way that a woman’s body is used in sexual intercourse. Who had a problem with that?”

  No hands this time. All right, so they’d done some of the assigned readings, better than nothing. “Remember Augustine, the poster child for misogyny? He said that – and I quote,” as I pulled the text from behind me on the desk and read, “’the body of a man is as superior to that of a woman, as the soul is to the body.’”

  Eyes were glittering now. I had them, and I had them in a place where they could listen, and hear, and think.

  No hands were going up now, but that wasn’t keeping them from talking. “You mean,” said a very young man from the front row, “that homosexuality was bad because it made men seem like women? That it’s all about being against women in the first place?”

  I shrugged. “What do you think?”

  I wasn’t trying to convert anybody here. I just wanted them to look at facts and be able to draw their own conclusions in a thoughtful and informed manner. I wanted my contribution to the next generation to be that they would not all be sheep, following blindly whatever sound-byte of information was currently being offered up by network anchors or political pundits. To learn, to assess what one has learned, and to take a position armed with more than simply feelings or hearsay.

  All right, so in my heart of hearts, I’m an idealist, and in that classroom, on that snowy morning, it felt as though anything could happen.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Teaching about the brothels of the Empire brought my thoughts back to how prostitution as a service is organized, and who benefits. Who makes the decisions about how a brothel, or an agency, or a service is run? How does that reflect on the well-being of its employees?

  If I had ever questioned my great good fortune in having gotten involved with Peach’s service first in my quest for employment with an escort agency, it hadn’t taken me long to stop doing so. About the time it took, in fact, to meet and talk with some of Peach’s other girls.

  Some of the younger women were accustomed to, and in fact wanted, something significant in the way of volume. Some of them were spending a lot of money – so much sudden cash can take its toll on one’s better judgment, especially if you’re young and feel invincible, feel needy, feel that this will go on forever. But that meant that they needed more of it faster than people like me did. So in addition to working for Peach, they worked for other agencies, ones with higher volume, higher turnover. Higher risks, too, though that may not have been immediately apparent to them. Peach couldn’t guarantee four or five calls a night; some of the other services could.

  And as I did doubles with them and occasionally gave them rides and met them at bars and parties, some disturbing realities began to emerge.

  I can tell these stories best as case studies, as individual vignettes:

  There was Paula. She lived in New Hampshire, where she was attending college. Her part-time bartending job came with a hidden built-in expectation that she would be sexually available to certain customers, and she walked out, breaking a number of bottles as she went. So she decided to choose when and where and to whom she’d be available, and took the Greyhound bus down to Boston two nights a week to work for Peach. Paula’s only requirement was that she had to be finished in time for the last bus up to Manchester.

  We met each other when we did a double together in Quincy one night, and I drove her back to the South Station to get her bus. We 188 were early, and I didn’t have another call, so we went to get something to eat at the Blue Diner, and talked.

  She had come to Peach, Paula told me, because of the way her first agency had treated her. “Lee, that’s the owner, he doesn’t let you use your own car or anything. So you’re always at the mercy of the drivers, and they’re all punks.” She lit a cigarette. That was back in the days when you could still smoke in public places.

  “What really did me in was last spring I was coming down to do some calls for him. So his driver meets me at the station and takes me to this place, this apartment, over in Dorchester somewhere. Lee had this new gig he was just starting; he was gonna start doing some of that Web sex stuff, you know, live video, and he was setting up this place as a studio for it. Only all he had so far was a bed, you know? So the driver left me there and they said they’d call me on my cell as soon as work came in.”

  I was horrified. “They left you alone to wait in an empty apartment?”

  Paula shrugged. “Yeah, well, it was that or a bar somewhere, right? One place is as good as another. But I’m not so sure it was empty, either. I think he already had the cameras in place, you know? I had this creepy feeling that I was being watched, that if I turned around fast I’d catch somebody staring at me. And I didn’t know who had the keys, so I didn’t feel very comfortable falling asleep. Anybody could have come in.”

  It transpired that the deplorable Lee had left Paula in this empty apartm
ent for three days. She couldn’t leave, because she had no money, not for the bus, not even for a taxi to take her anywhere. She had counted on coming down to Boston to make money, not to spend it. She called in, and was assured that there would be work very soon, and so she sat waiting, sitting under the one naked bulb hanging from the ceiling, in a state of readiness. One hour passed, two, then three. She called and called, and was finally told that if she didn’t stop bothering the service, they wouldn’t get her work at all.

  She fell into a fitful sleep, and in the morning got a call saying that there were no drivers available to take her to the station, but if she wanted to stay on, there would certainly be work for her that night. There was nothing to eat in the apartment, and the building appeared to be in a residential neighborhood. Paula was too afraid to leave, and in any case had no money with which to buy anything, and so ate nothing that day. She was sent on a call finally at four o’clock the next morning. According to the rules of this service, the driver collected the money, and this one did not give Paula any. Lee had specified that she was not to be paid until she went on another call for which she had been requested – the following night.

  She was dropped off yet again at the apartment in Dorchester at five-thirty in the morning. She still hadn’t eaten anything. She slept some during the day and was taken to the scheduled call at ten o’clock that night, after which she was duly paid – but had already missed the last bus to Manchester. She spent a third miserable night in Dorchester, called herself a taxi in the morning, and from the bus terminal called Lee and officially quit.

  Unbelievable? One might have thought so.

  Kimmie had worked for other services, too, before she and Peach found each other. Her past agency – also, I think not coincidentally, owned and run by a man – once sent her on a fishing trip out of Gloucester.