“I just want to be clear,” he was saying. “For the two hundred dollars, we can have sex, right? I mean, I can come? Maybe twice?”
Well, it wasn’t exactly subtle, but I was used to that by now.
“Let’s just get comfortable with each other,” I suggested, remembering to put the purr into my throat, “Then we’ll see what feels good.”
He brushed that suggestion aside. “But we’ll be able to have sex, won’t we?” He should have sounded anxious, but he didn’t. He sounded like he was talking from a script. “I mean, for that kind of money, I expect to go all the way.”
Odd expression, I thought, for a man in his forties. Something was off. The last time I had had this feeling, it was innocuous, the guy was just embarrassed. Maybe it was okay this time, too.
Or maybe it wasn’t.
I put my wineglass on the floor and cleared my throat. If I was wrong about this, I was going to look foolish and I might lose the call, but this time I didn’t think that I was wrong. Maybe I had finally been in the business long enough to have developed a feel, a sixth sense about this kind of thing. “Sir,” I said, loudly and clearly, the purr a thing of the past. “Are you a police officer?”
He was. I could see it in his eyes even before he stiffened, glanced at the mirror on the closet door, cleared his throat. “I was given to believe that you came here expecting to be paid for sex,” he said.
“You were misinformed,” I said sweetly. “The dating service called me and said that you wanted to spend an hour with a young lady. You were visiting Boston, maybe I could show you around and we’d hit it off.” I was glad I’d worn my loose sweater and not my black lace “uniform” shirt. “And I never go to bed with someone on the first date. Since that seems to be the only thing you’re interested in, I guess this won’t work out.” I stood up and picked up my coat. “So I’ll ask you again: are you a police officer, or just an asshole?”
The Gospel According to Peach says that if you ask that question, you’re home free. If you ask and they say yes, then it’s fine, there was a misunderstanding; Peach owns a dating service. If they don’t answer the question, and they are a cop, then any subsequent arrest won’t stick: it’s entrapment or something like that. I was vague on the details, but I did remember the general idea.
He stood up with me and pulled a wallet out of his pocket. I thought for a moment he was going to try to get me to take money, but then I saw the badge. “I need to see some identification,” he said.
The adrenaline that had fueled me until now was gone, and I suddenly felt scared and vulnerable. I couldn’t be arrested; if I were, I’d never teach again. Not even evening classes in some community center. Never. Nowhere. “Why do you need ID?” I asked. He had pulled out a pad of paper.
“Routine questions,” he said. “Your name?”
“I don’t have to give you my name,” I said. “You brought me to your room under false pretences. Once here, I refused your advances and tried to leave. You tried to get personal details about me. What I’m thinking here is stalker, potential rapist, I don’t know.” He glanced again toward the mirror. I said, “Any video taken here will get thrown out of court, so don’t try to scare me.” Good thing I had a client who was a lawyer. Good thing my lawyer-client had wanted to impress me with his knowledge of the legal implications of my profession. Good thing I had found our conversations interesting, and had listened. Never knew I’d find them helpful.
He said again, “Your name and address, please. You’re resisting an officer in the performance of his duty.” He looked smug, and all of a sudden I had had enough. Enough of the smugness on men’s faces, enough of playing to their fantasies, of making their pleasure my profession. Enough of the husbands who lied to their wives and fucked callgirls to make themselves feel superior to their poor faithful ball-and-chain. Enough of the pornography, the games, the role-playing. Enough of consorting with the enemy, the man who loves you and hates you all at once and can only resolve that conflict by blaming you for his unease, by taking away your humanity and making you into an object.
Madonna. Whore. Virgin. Slut. Tits. Ass. Womb. Feminist bitch. Medusa. Circe. Penelope. Wife. Prostitute.
This cop in front of me was just as into who I was (not Jen, not Tia, but a generic “hooker”) as the clients who paid for their time with me. The only difference was he had managed to get a job where he could be a voyeur and get paid for it instead of paying someone else. Sweet.
I suddenly had had enough. Enough of putting up with bad behavior while condoning it with my participation. Enough of serving needs that should have been dealt with on mental health units.
Enough of lying, of purring, of playing the game and feeling oh-so-superior just because I had a fistful of cash at the end of the night.
I took a deep breath. “I’m leaving now,” I said to him. “If you try to stop me I’ll start screaming attempted rape and I won’t stop until you’re back in uniform and your wife is asking for a divorce. I came to your room for a drink and a little socializing. You’ve done nothing but talk about sex since I got here.”
The connecting door to the next room opened and another man, older, walked into the room. He opened the closet and turned off the video camera that was mounted on a tripod inside. He looked tired.
“How did you know?” he asked, simply. “How did you know he wasn’t a trick?”
I stared at him. “You’re out of date, I think,” I said. I wondered if it was only me to whom my voice sounded on the edge of hysteria. “I’ve never heard anyone actually say that, before tonight. But maybe I don’t move in the right circles.” I slid into my coat. “Go down to Kneeland Street,” I said. “I’ve seen women there, if you slow down in your car, they’ll come over and talk to you. I’ll bet some of them turn tricks, and work for pimps, and talk about their johns. I’ll bet you can find your stereotype there if you look hard enough.” I turned up my collar. “What if I had been a callgirl, Officer? What would you look like, taking me in? I’m not wearing any makeup, my body is pretty much covered up, and I am obviously educated and intelligent. Just like your wife, you’re thinking. Or your sister. Or your daughter.” I thought he was going to say something; he made a sudden movement that he checked. I was exhausted, and nothing was going to change. Not here, not anywhere.
I called Peach on my way out of the lobby. “Watch your back, girlfriend, I almost got arrested.”
“What happened?” She thought I meant I had gotten pulled over, or something.
“Your new client with the good vibes was a cop, babe. Video behind the mirror and everything.”
“What? What happened? How did he pick us?” Usually the police went after the “big services, the ones in the Yellow Pages, the ones that could make a splash.
“I don’t know. I told him it’s a dating service. It’s fine, everything’s fine, but I’d watch out for a while if I were you.”
“Are you all right?” She was a little late in saying it, but I knew that she was sincere. She was doing her best. No; she thought she was doing her best. She really believed that she could make anything all right by her voice, her laughter, her concern. I had fallen for that for three years. I was starting to see through it.
Besides, I was in no mood for an argument. “I don’t know, Peach. I’m going home, I’m taking a shower, and I’m throwing out all my work clothes. I’m going back to being poor for a while. I need to be teaching. I need to – God, I don’t know. I don’t know what I need. All I know is that this isn’t it.”
She tried to get me to change my mind, of course. I had made a lot of money for her; in the end, I was requested more frequently than the twenty-year old blondes. A lot more frequently. I was helping to define who Peach was, to help her settle into her niche. I wasn’t going to be easy to replace.
She had helped me make a lot of money, too. I won’t say that it wasn’t tempting to do it, to ignore my inner voices and my pride and my feelings and just do it. Spread my legs, say yes,
baby, baby, yes, and then go home and pay the bills. But I was troubled by an active intellect. And it wasn’t making sense in my head anymore.
I’ve always made the assumption that life is easier if one is stupid. I stand by that assessment.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I don’t know, in the end, exactly why I left.
I’m not even sure that it matters. Take your pick: I left because I got scared, or because I got hurt, or even because I grew up, grew out of it. Or for a whole lot of other reasons that I may not even be aware of myself.
In the end, I think that I left because it was simply time to leave.
The business had given me what I needed. It gave me financial security while I prepared myself for my career. It gave me an opportunity to feel beautiful and desirable just at the point in my life when Madison Avenue was telling me that I was over the hill. And maybe, too, it gave me the thrill of having lived on the edge for a while, of having done something illegal and glamorous and gotten away with it.
I know that a lot of women leave and come back, because they miss it. They miss whatever it was that it did for them, or because there isn’t a lot of work out there that pays as well. A lifestyle becomes a habit if you don’t watch out.
I was lucky, because I had known from the beginning that it wasn’t forever. I knew that my tenure was finite, that time and gravity were going to take their toll on my body, that I would eventually encounter a situation that my beleaguered ethics couldn’t justify away. I had known, from the beginning, that it wasn’t my real life. It was wonderful in part, I think, precisely because I knew that it was temporary, ephemeral, impermanent. Knowing that, I could leave it without destroying myself in the process.
I had my own strengths. I had been alone for a long time, alone for years in fact, except for the months I had lived with the rat bastard.
No: come to think of it, I had never been so alone as I had been when I was with him. So even that didn’t count.
I knew how to fill my own empty spaces. I didn’t ignore them, or deny that they existed; I accepted them and did not allow them to make my decisions for me. By the time I left the escort business, I was teaching full-time, I was learning t’ai chi, I had stopped doing cocaine, and I was beginning to write another book.
I won’t say that there were no regrets. Sometimes, even now, when it’s around seven o’clock, I’ll stop and wonder what’s going on tonight. Who’s working, what clients will call, that sort of thing. It won’t be anybody that I know, not anymore: time has moved on, in this business faster than anywhere else.
But the names don’t matter: the needs will always be the same. I know that telephones will ring, drivers will be pulling up to suburban houses, girls will fix their makeup in the vanity mirrors. I remember – with no regrets – the clients posturing, demanding, angry or pathetic or ordinary. I know that tonight, as every night, money will change hands. Slim lines of cocaine will be laid out in somebody’s bathroom. Callgirls will give pleasure, excitement, mystery, hope, enchantment. And the clock will be ticking all the time.
I stop and I think if it; then I shrug and head out to the bike path for a ride, or I load the kids into the car for a visit to a bookstore, or I’ll remember how seductive I used to be and I’ll entice my husband into our bedroom to make sure that I still have the touch. He assures me that I do.
Living your own real life, I have found, is one hell of a lot more interesting than being a professional enacter of somebody else’s fantasies.
I still live and work in the Boston area. I have changed my name, have gotten married. I am happily working as a writer now, and find myself challenged and fulfilled by the work that I do. Scuzzy has a microscopic backyard in which to pursue his never-ending fantasy of catching a squirrel.
My husband continues to deal with his knowledge of my former profession. Once, I asked him how he would feel if ever any of his friends found out about my having worked as an escort. “You know those commercials where they say, ‘trained professional, do not attempt this at home’?” he asked. “I’ll just tell them, well, we attempt this at home!”
In those months after he read the e-mail I had written to Roger, I think that it took Tony a long time to rid himself of the myths, of the stereotypes. He thought he was pretty liberated. I put all of his notions to the test. He is a better man than most for being willing to go through it with me.
*
Peach is doing well, these days, too. She is married, owns a house. She is no longer the center of a glittering circle of admirers, and she frequents the gym more often than she does the city’s newest clubs and restaurants. She travels. She has cook-outs.
I don’t think that either of us can remember the last time that we stayed up, still dressed and jazzed and a little railed, drinking and partying, to meet the dawn. I don’t think that either of us regrets it.
I can’t really tell you anything about the rest of the people I’ve talked about here. While I am not ashamed of this part of my past, neither am I attached to it, and any connections that I formed then are no longer particularly relevant to my life. I feel some sadness for some of them. I don’t think that that will ever go away.
I do expect that some of the women went on, as I did, to claim their career and family choices, enabled by the experience. I also expect that many others did not know when to quit, mismanaged their money, left themselves minimal options and no exit strategies. It is a world that encourages that kind of thinking.
But I still, sometimes, find myself with the same Secret Smile playing with the corners of my mouth, when I’m having a bad day and the kids are being difficult and I have a stack of papers to grade… I remember, then, the glamour of those days. And it does, still, make me smile.
Epilogue
As I am writing this book, a number of years after the events I describe occurred, I have to issue a caveat. This morning I listened to a report on the BBC about girls from poverty-stricken countries in eastern Europe being trafficked as prostitutes to serve the “needs” of the peacekeeping troops in Kosovo, and I found myself feeling slightly nauseous.
I am appalled, even now, at the ideas and misconceptions concerning prostitution and women’s participation in it. I remain baffled by and angry at the common assertion that the men who employ prostitutes are normal, but that the women who engage in the trade somehow are not.
I have here told one story – mine. I willingly and in fact deliberately entered the employment of an escort agency. At no time, then or now, do I regret having made that decision, or having held that employment.
Because agencies like Peach’s exist, agencies that do not exploit or injure or corrupt their employees, a number of women like myself were and continue to be able to attain some measure of financial security in a society where it is statistically difficult for a woman to do so.
I am aware, however, and most urgently want you to be aware, that many women are not in this profession because they hold doctorates and need to pay off student loans. Many women are in fact forced, raped, lied to, torn from their homes and lives and given nothing in return… and, to top it off, treated then as morally inferior beings because they have been used to satisfy both the sexual and monetary appetites of supposedly morally superior beings.
Many females, a whole lot of them children, never had the luxury of my choice. And that has not changed. Only the faces, only the names change. There is, it seems, a never-ending supply of young beautiful bodies to satisfy the varied requirements of the predators of our world.
Many women experience what I describe briefly in this book: the slavery of drugs that was imposed on them deliberately so that they in turn could serve as slaves in a business that regards their lives as cheap. Addiction is a horrifying illness. To see its seeds sown and nurtured on purpose, to see life after life ruined for the profit of others, is in my mind beyond criminal. I hope that Dante has a very special ring of Hell reserved for the people that do this.
The only way to stop
this trafficking in and profiting from the use of women’s bodies is for prostitution to be legalized.
Legalization will open it up to regulation; and regulation means safety.
I have a positive story to tell.
I’m not at all sure that my experience is that of the majority of the women involved in this business.
I started to write this book to answer some of the questions that you might have about the business of mid-level escort services. I am ending it with a request that your interest not stop here. Please refer to the short bibliography and the Web sites that are listed in the Appendix (for what academic can write a book without inserting at least one Appendix?!), and read more about the business.
And please don’t be so quick to call us hookers, to dismiss us, to judge us.
We could be your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, your daughter. Even your college professor.
No, I take that back. It’s not a matter of saying that we could be.
Statistically, we already are.
Appendix
The Web, as you know, is in a constant state of change, so these sites may or may not work for you; but if you go to any search engine and query “prostitution,” you’ll be able to access these and other sites, some informational, some less so.
In the same way, new books and articles on the subject are always appearing in print. I’ve arranged the ones that I’ve encountered into three sections: books on prostitution for a general audience, books for a more academic and/or activist audience, and fiction.
I hope that you’ll find something here of use to you
Web sites that might be useful include
www.prostitutionresearch.com. This site, run by the nonprofit San Francisco Women’s Centers, includes pages on Basic Information, Quick Facts, The Law, trafficking, Prostitution and Violence Research, and a number of other articles.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 29