“It was supposed to be a birthday surprise for this guy,” she explained to me when we met at one of Peach’s bar gatherings, some new hip place in the financial district, built into an old bank vault. “Well, actually, I guess that I was supposed to be the birthday surprise for this guy. The driver took me up to Gloucester, because Howie wouldn’t let me go on my own – they keep you on kind of a tight leash over there.” She shivered, and I looked at her curiously. Kimmie was stunning – blonde and leggy and with odd beautiful emerald eyes. She was also very nice. She did favors for her elderly neighbors. She volunteered with an adult literacy program. At that time, she was also a graduate student in chemistry and a single mother. The thought of someone taking advantage of her was intolerable.
“It was this gorgeous day, and they had me get there early, and wait down in the bedroom that’s in the bow – isn’t that it? The pointy end? The bed there was in a point, anyway.”
“The bow,” I confirmed.
“Okay, and so eventually we got out there, wherever it was we were going, and they stopped the motor. They all were on about their third beer and they had fishing lines overboard and someone came down to get me. It was a surprise, all right. To me.”
She didn’t meet my eyes for the rest of the conversation. She looked at the bright sofas lining the wall across from the bar, where Peach sat giggling with one of the owners. Kimmie had agreed to the daylong call, was assured that the entire time was paid for by the buddies as a gift for the birthday boy, and that he would be her only partner unless she chose otherwise. The choice was made for her, though. “It wasn’t rape,” said Kimmie, staring off into the middle distance, her voice soft. “I had to agree, though. Or it probably would have been.”
She had to agree, and that made it not rape? I still have problems with that one, even now, after all this time.
The kicker, though, came when the beers were gone and the boat finally got back to dock. She walked stiffly off, cold and sore and dazed. Her driver was waiting.
“Can you believe it, he interviewed each guy, found out if he’d done anything with me, and what, and he added up a fucking bill!” Kimmie bit her lip. “Howie knew all the time what was going to happen. He just hadn’t bothered to tell me.”
Angie did a double with me at a podiatrist’s place, and afterward I dropped her off at a bar in South Boston to meet her boyfriend. She was working two agencies at once – she preferred Peach, she said, but Peach didn’t always have as much work as some of the other services. Angie made it sound like show business, referring to Peach and the guy who ran the other service as “agents.”
She signed on each night with both services, and then signed off from one if she got a call from the other, signing back on again when it was over. It all sounded very complicated to me. She juggled her cell phone, her beeper, and bits of scrap paper the whole time she was in my car, making arrangements for later that night.
The other service was the Lee outfit again. “Shit, they want me to see Jerome,” she sighed.
“A difficult client?” I asked, sympathetically.
It wasn’t, it transpired, that Jerome himself was difficult; it was just that Jerome had made additional arrangements with the agency. “All I have to do is bring in this stuff from the driver; Jerome pays me for it along with the call.”
I wasn’t naïve about what stuff she was referring to. “How much stuff?”
She shifted uneasily in her seat. “Twenty-eight.”
I nearly went off the road. “Twenty-eight grams? Are you insane?”
She was examining her fingernails. They were long, fake, and blood red. “All I have to do is hand him the bag.”
“Oh, that’s all?” If Peter the Rat Bastard ex had taught me anything, it was about the various possible penalties for selling drugs. He talked about it incessantly. Didn’t ever stop his dealing in pot, of course; he just liked to talk about it. “So he drops you off in front of the place and you walk in and walk out an hour later without your little package, while he sits outside waiting for you, and this seems like a smart thing to do, no one’s going to wonder what’s up?” She squirmed again. “He drops me off down the street.”
Better still. “Angie, you’ll go away for fifteen years for that. It’s called distribution, and Massachusetts is very big on getting distributors.”
She turned in her seat to look at me. “Get off my case, Jen, okay? I have to do it, all right? I need the work. I’ve got two kids at home, I need the calls, and Lee isn’t giving me any unless I do favors for him. So just back off.”
I backed off.
Once I heard some of the stories out there, I realized that I wasn’t just lucky to have found Peach. What I came to understand was that I wouldn’t have lasted anywhere else.
I couldn’t have imagined working for a service where not only the menu is open to negotiation, it is also the callgirl who is in charge of dealing, and can and will later be blamed if the deal does not live up to the driver or the dispatcher or the owner’s expectations.
Elena, one of the many Russian girls that were active in Boston that winter, explained it to me. “It costs the client sixty dollars for you to walk in the door. That is all. He tells you what he wants, you add up the costs. To kiss and hug is forty dollars. Ablowjob is another sixty. If he wants regular intercourse, that is one hundred. And so on.”
And so on. A simple enough statement, but my imagination took hold of that one and positively ran with it. I imagined some of our more difficult clients, the ones who insisted on playing headgames, who wanted to continually assert their control over the callgirl. They were bad enough when one didn’t need to quibble over the price. But I could just hear them spending ten minutes (during which time I presumably would not be being paid, for no specific service had been selected) asking me what it was that I was going to do to make my blowjob “worth” that kind of money. Yeah, I’d call that degrading. And he’d have no idea that it was at least as degrading to him as it was to me.
It takes a certain mentality to be able to shift from that kind of bickering, confrontational, and essentially oppositional stance to being instantly sexually intimate together.
So, all in all, I was glad that I had found Peach.
I have to admit to sometimes having a sense of smugness. One night I was out late on a “real” date – a setup arranged by Irene – and we went down to Chinatown for soup and dun-dun noodles. Afterward, on the way home, we drove along Kneeland Street, with girls at every lamppost, every corner, tall and bright and a little scary. Instead of feeling grateful that I wasn’t there with them, I felt safely superior because I didn’t have to be. Peach’s agency may not have attracted Boston’s top politicians or Hollywood’s sexiest actors or Silicon Valley’s wealthiest CEOs, but being a rung or two below that was very nice indeed.
Well, I’m not proud of the feeling, but it was there.
The snow finally melted, sometime in late March. Everyone around here always says, “Well, don’t be so sure, remember the time we had a snowstorm in April?” which is what New Englanders like to say, even though in point of fact that one snowstorm was an aberration that was years ago and hasn’t repeated since. Midterms came and went, and I didn’t go on calls that whole week, because I wanted to concentrate. Peach didn’t have anything for me after that for three or four nights when I signed on, and I always wondered when that happened if it was deliberate or not.
I was at the health club, having swum twenty-five laps and spent another fifteen minutes with my eyes closed blissfully in the whirlpool, when Peach called me. The cell phone indicated one message when I took it out of my locker, and so I called her right back. “What’s up?”
“Oh, Jen, I thought you’d want to hear it from me.” Peach is nothing if not dramatic. “Bill Francis died.”
I groped though my memory. “Bill Francis?” Then I had it: one of Peach’s regular-regulars. I had seen him from time to time; he lived up on Beacon Hill in one of the houses that photogr
aphers made postcards out of. Nice man, I thought vaguely. Just another nondescript client. When it came down to it, most of them were. The really wonderful ones and the really awful ones were the exceptions.
Peach was going on. “I just didn’t want you to get upset, that’s all.”
“How did he die?” I asked. She couldn’t wait to tell me, that was clear.
“What I heard was, somebody broke into his place and he got hurt when he surprised them. I don’t know how, I just know he’s dead.”
I didn’t ask her how she had come by her information. “I’m sorry, Peach. You must feel awful.” And not just because of the loss of regular revenue, either: Peach talked with these guys, often several times a week, often for a long time. She got to know them. Some of them came to mean something to her.
Bill Francis hadn’t meant anything to me, though, and so I was surprised that night to wake up, crying and sweating, the dreams of death still wrapped around me like a shroud. The tears were running down my face, and even though I snapped on every light in the apartment, drank hot tea, and watched some late-night television, they were still there, waiting in the shadows around the edges of my consciousness, waiting for me to lie down again and become theirs.
I sat there, rocking rhythmically and unconsciously back and forth, as though rocking myself: the tears were running down my face and I couldn’t stop them. I barely remembered this man. I hadn’t been able to place his name at first. I had no anecdotes about him that I could remember, and nothing that he had ever said to me came to mind. He was just a client. And still the tears wouldn’t stop.
I wasn’t dreaming about Bill specifically: I was dreaming about loss, and grief, about everyone I had ever cared for who was no longer in my life, about my own fears of what was waiting for me.
The next day, naturally, I was doing On Death and Dying.
So I talked about my “friend” who had died, and about the nightmares I had experienced the night before, the bright and deadly images, and this segued naturally into a topic I had intended to do a little later but seized now instead, Death and Art. I did that because a great deal of art emanates from the subconscious, and the notion of death is so inextricably entwined with that of life; and from there I launched into a discussion of Goya, Dali, and Bosch.
I wondered, as I observed the class’ eager participation in the topic, how Bill Francis might have felt, had he known that one of his “girls” had reached others through him. I like to think that he might have been pleased.
Chapter Eighteen
In May, as classes were inching toward finals and the liberation of summer vacation, it was more and more difficult to keep students focused on the topics at hand. For that matter, it was more and more difficult to get students to come to class at all. College, I have found, runs a poor second or third to summer plans and spring sports.
Maybe some day I’ll go teach in China. Henry told me that students there honor their professors, feel privileged to be in class, and work their derrieres off. Not this year, however.
In Life in the Asylum, we talked about the use of restraints on patients. What was done in the nineteenth century, of course, was to simply tie or handcuff them to something immovable – a chair, a pillar, the wall. “So what have we learned?” asked a senior, rhetorically, sarcastically. “Now we use chemical restraints; we shoot them up with drugs so they just walk around like zombies.”
“Yeah,” agreed another. “Like that song – mirrors on the ceiling, pink champagne on ice.”
“Excuse me?” I hadn’t expected a reference to a song that was more from my generation than theirs, and certainly not one presented with a different interpretation than I’d always given it. “What are you talking about?”
“It’s an Eagles song,” he explained patiently.
“I know it’s an Eagles song,” I said. “But I always thought they were talking about using drugs.”
“Sure they are, it’s just the drugs are legal and prescribed,” the student confirmed. “See, I used to work on a mental health unit, as an aide. It was for kids – for adolescents. All the rooms have these mirrors in the corner and on the ceiling, so that when you glance in when you’re doing checks you can see what the kid is doing inside. And one of the drugs they used – I forget which one – the syringe had to be chilled, and the stuff in it was pink. So I’m figuring that the Hotel California was a psychiatric hospital.”
It was a new and fascinating sidelight on the neo-classics. I 195 encouraged him. “So you’ve actually worked in a modern asylum, a mental health unit. Can you talk about the use of restraints in your experience there?”
He looked around at his peers, self-conscious for the first time. “Well, I know it all sounds cruel and everything, but you know, it was like, sometimes it made sense.”
A whisper of disapproval shimmered around the room, an unspoken criticism of his words. “When, exactly?” I asked gently.
“Well, you know, these were, like, kids, and kids can get out of control sometimes. Like scary out of control. And there’s a point where you need somebody else to take control for you. Some of them, like, they calmed right down when they were put in restraints.”
“Yeah,” somebody muttered, “fascist tactics will do that for you.”
He was undeterred. “It’s not like that at all. It made them feel safe. Whatever scary things were going on inside their heads, they knew that we would keep them safe. The restraints told them that we wouldn’t let them hurt themselves.”
Another voice chimed in, and I let them go. I was drifting, going back in time to the night that I finally accepted that my mother was going to die, when I finally faced the stark reality of her cancer and what it was doing to her. I was with someone else then, it was before I met Peter. I remember us sitting in bed and me screaming and crying all at once, both enraged and in pain, and my boyfriend holding me down on the bed as I thrashed around. I don’t know what I would have done, that night, without him there. I felt terrible, but I also felt safe, I knew that he would not let it go too far. I wouldn’t go off the deep end, I remember thinking; he won’t let me go. Alone, I might have. So I had my crisis and he held me down while I raged at him, my mother, the world, God… and I survived it. Yes, I could certainly understand the occasional need for external restraints.
I returned to my body and listened to what people were saying around me. “Look, it’s a basic human right not to be imprisoned without due process. Putting people in restraints violates that law.”
“People in hospitals are always having decisions made about them that are not necessarily what they might choose. What if –”
I broke into the conversation. “Okay, time,” I called, making the appropriate signal with my hands, sports buff that I was. “For Wednesday’s class, write a short argument on the use of restraints on mentally ill people in an inpatient environment. You can champion your own point of view, but you’d better back it up with something besides your own opinion. See you then.”
They filed out, some of them still arguing. It felt good to have helped make that happen, to have been part of stimulating something inside their brains or hearts that caused them to care so passionately, and – oh wonder of wonders! – so near the end of term.
As for me, I was getting a headache.
I sat down at the desk and began shuffling papers, putting my notes away. Restraints, I thought… I may have been acquainted with them only academically in mental health settings, but I knew a hell of a lot about them from my other line of work.
Being handcuffed on a call was always problematic for me. Restraints don’t exactly fit into my definition of safe sex. In fact I refused, categorically, to be tied or handcuffed if I didn’t know the client. Well. Extremely well.
I relaxed the rule for regulars, once I got to know them, once I got to trust that they would stop when I said stop, that they would stay within the agreed-upon boundaries.
I think that bondage plays a role in just about everyb
ody’s sex life, even if only in the form of fantasies; and these guys were no exception. The DoubleTree Suites Hotel on Storrow Drive has a foyer that reaches breathtakingly up to the top floor, and a glass-sided elevator that carries you transparently past all of the floors below your own. The elevator allows its passengers to see everything they pass – lounges, waiting areas, and the occasional open door to a private room.
But just as a passenger can see, so too can he or she be seen.
One client, one of my regulars, stayed at the DoubleTree once a month, during regular business trips to Boston. He was in the habit of meeting me in the lobby, and he would immediately put the cuffs on my wrists. That excited him, doing it in a public place, doing it without saying a word, just the silent mechanical act. He walked next to me across the lobby, my hands clasped demurely in front of me, the cuffs barely visible to the casual observer. His favorite moment, I think, was riding the glass elevator with me in handcuffs, potentially visible to anyone who cared to look. It certainly provoked a physical reaction. Once, he actually did come in his pants, just riding that elevator.
I sighed and rubbed my temples. It was a useless ritual; it never helped the headaches, but I felt a need to do it anyway. Thoughts of restraints led one down a particular thought path. Handcuffs, for those who practice bondage and discipline, were just the beginning.
There was a lot of spanking. As long as I wasn’t tied up, that was fine with me, I could always get away from the situation if it became too intense or if the client wasn’t listening to me. They always did it in the light, so they could see the imprint of their hand on my ass. I became adept at gauging what kind of reaction they were looking for, if they wanted me to cry out, if they wanted me to be stoic.
When I got to know a client, being tied up was fine – and to be perfectly honest about it, a little kinkiness sometimes made the hour pass more quickly. There were all sorts of ways it could be done: wrists together behind the back, wrists together above the head, sometimes attached to the top of a doorway or the headboard of a bed; wrists tied to a piece of furniture. Once a client had me bend at the waist, then tied my wrists to my ankles, which works well in theory but is really obnoxious to maintain. We used handcuffs, string, hairbands, scarves… It was a safe place to play out the kinds of fantasies that they didn’t want to admit to, that they didn’t want to tell their wives about. Things that people saw in skin flicks, things that they read about, this was their opportunity to try it. To taste the forbidden fruit.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 24