Do You Party?

If your thing is gone and you wanna ride on; cocaine./Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back; cocaine. – Eric Clapton

In yesterday’s column I mentioned that I rarely had problems with guys who were sober, but of course lots of guys are not remotely sober when they call for an escort.  And though many of them are just plain old-fashioned drunk, a large percentage are messed up on what I consider to be absolutely and undoubtedly the nastiest, filthiest, most disgusting drug it has ever been my misfortune to see people high on, namely cocaine.

Before I go on, let me remind you of what I said in my column on streetwalkers: I consider the current US drug policy to be a form of evil lunacy which we could no longer afford even if it were moral and reasonable. The United States currently incarcerates 0.756% of its population, which may not sound like much until one considers that it’s a markedly higher percentage than Russia, Rwanda or Cuba and roughly five times the world average. Almost a quarter of all prisoners in the entire world are locked up in American prisons, and of these almost a quarter are there for drug offenses.  Literally hundreds of thousands of people in the “Land of the Free” are imprisoned for years because they chose to entertain themselves in a way the government disapproves of.  Personally, I think drug use is rather silly; I never touch the stuff myself because I like to know what I’m doing when I do it and remember it the next day.  But my personal dislike for something is insufficient grounds for banning it; criminalization of consensual acts, including both drug use and prostitution, has no place in a free society.

That having been said, I must also point out that just as others have the right to do as they like with their time and money, so I have the right to be disgusted by their behavior.  And the one thing which disgusted me most of all the things I saw in my professional life was cocaine use.  Powder cocaine users like to believe they’re cool and sophisticated, but the effects aren’t all that different from those of crack and made the user just as ridiculous, pathetic and annoying to me.

First of all, cocaine users of both types never seem to recognize how utterly ludicrous they look while imbibing.  Powder users rub their noses over their little glass plates like some kind of cartoon hound dogs, loudly inhaling and then pulling back to blink and sniff.  The more they snort, the more their noses run, and soon there is a coating of dried snot on their upper lips.  Then there’s that crusty white stuff which develops in the corners of their mouths; I don’t know if it’s stray cocaine or salt deposits due to dehydration or what, but it’s just plain nasty looking and whenever I see it I am irresistibly reminded of a four-year-old who has not yet learned proper hygeine.  The crack user is no better, bending over his little pipe and reacting in much the same way after taking his hit; he doesn’t get the runny nose of the powder user for obvious reasons, but it seems to me that he trembles more and his eyes get more bloodshot.  And then there’s that godawful stench; whenever I got out of a crackhead call I immediately went home to change because otherwise the reek would cling to my clothes for hours.

But the appearance is nothing in comparison to the behavioral effects.  Drunks behave in lots of different ways, but all cokeheads act in exactly the same way, as though the drug feeds a little program into their fucked-up brains.  First of all, they seem to find it impossible to remain in one place for more than a few minutes; they keep wanting to change rooms, change positions, change activities or whatever else comes into their heads.  One wealthy cokehead I dealt with a number of times would actually want me to drive him around, going from a hotel to his office to his mistress’ house to his boathouse; it was so utterly exhausting that I never reduced his rate for multiple hours as I did for other customers.  The crackhead doesn’t usually move around quite so much, but he is far more paranoid than the powder user and will wander around between rocks, peeking out between or around the window-blinds and out through the peephole; if in a hotel room he will repeatedly check the towel he has placed under the door so the smell can’t get out.  And while the cokehead will usually let all of his coke strewn about in plain sight, the crackhead often hides his rocks, sometimes in multiple hiding places, and often demands a girl turn her back while he fetches it.  Once I had a guy who forgot where he put his stash, and I just quietly watched the time go by as he searched for it for almost an hour, then got angry when I said my time was up and I had to go.  I’ve even seen some of them hide their money in various places, so they have to go to several parts of the room to get the fee together! And while the cokehead usually loses track of time completely, the crackhead seems to know he has no time sense and will repeatedly ask how much time he has left, sometimes mere minutes apart.

The most pronounced effect, though, is the obsession with sex.  Cocaine clearly stimulates the sex centers in the brain, because while a man is under its influence he wants to think about sex, talk about sex and attempt to have sex until his money runs out, which is of course why he usually calls a whore as soon as he takes his first snort or hit.  I say “attempt to have sex” because he can’t; cocaine is a vasodilator and therefore prevents erection.  I’ve even seen cases where the effects are just starting to fade, and he’s actually beginning to get hard, but then he does another line or rock and promptly goes limp again.  This can be quite maddening, especially with crack users because they have a nasty habit of blaming the girl for their inability to get it up.  I once asked a medical doctor client why crack users so consistently believed they could achieve erection when they obviously couldn’t, and he explained that after the initial use one can, and that the sex is incredibly intense in that one instance.  After that first time or two, however, the rapidly-increasing levels of the drug make him impotent, so he constantly seeks to recapture that initial experience he can never have again.

Powder users don’t seem so concerned about their inability to perform; they just want to keep trying every conceivable position they can imagine, moving from the bed to the floor to a couch to a chair to the bathroom, etc.  But there is one perplexing syndrome I saw far more often with powder than crack: Homosexual fantasy.  Clearly, most of these guys are heterosexual; I simply can’t believe that 90% of powder coke users are closet cases, and besides they call for girls, not boys or transsexuals.  But once they’re high, they sure can TALK about it!  It’s rare that I went on a call with a cokehead in which he didn’t at some point start describing a homosexual fantasy; usually they’re about sucking cock, but sometimes it’s the whole shebang.  Sometimes they start making plans that they don’t actually intend to carry out, asking “does your service have guys? Do you know any with really big dicks?” and so on.  On rare occasions, they actually do carry it out; the wealthy cokehead I mentioned earlier told me he had done so on a few occasions.  I’m sure some gay activists out there will claim this “proves” that all men are at least somewhat homosexual, but considering that it’s caused by induced neurological impairment that argument is equivalent to saying all men are at least somewhat psychotic.  It seems to me to be just another side effect of the drug, like the restlessness and the sex-obsession.

As if all of this weren’t annoying enough, there are also physical effects to the user’s companion.  It’s impossible to be in a room with a crack-smoker without inhaling some of the fumes, and a powder user gets traces of it on his fingers, lips, genitals (when he touches himself as they often do) and less likely places, and that in turn is transferred to the lips (both sets) and nipples of the girl when he touches her or vice versa.  Since cocaine is an analgesic it causes numbness in mucous membranes (such as the tissues of the vagina) with which it comes in contact, and even such incidental exposure is enough to give a nonuser like myself headaches and/or dizziness.  Keep in mind that when a cokehead goes on a bender it can last for HOURS; the effects, though short-lived, are constantly renewed every time he takes a puff or jams his nasty fingers into one’s pussy.

Though crack users want to keep it all to themselves (and indeed have been known to accuse girls of stealing “rocks” they’ve already smoked themselves), powder users usually want to share, so they often call for an escort under the assumption that all whores are “party girls” who would be happy to do lines with them or even take payment in coke.  And certainly there are lots of girls who will; I always reminded such girls that no matter how they choose to take payment, my agency fees were due in US currency.  The title of this column is the universal interrogative used in trying to find such a girl; in my experience the verb “party” always meant to do powder cocaine, not any other drug or even crack.  When I was just starting out and still very infatuated with the prodigious sums I was earning, I welcomed cocaine users because they had money to burn and were willing to burn it on me.  Crack users generally weren’t so well-heeled, but I had one (the owner of a construction business) who would hire me to sit with him for hours on end, just keeping him company while he did his crack, because the paranoia made him afraid to be alone.  So, when I heard “Do you party?” my stock answer was always “No, but I don’t mind if you do.”  Sometimes that was a deal-breaker and I had to send another girl, and sometimes the guy would invite me over anyhow because I intrigued him or he just didn’t want to wait for another callback.  A few actually preferred my sobriety because I could keep an eye on them; the wealthy crackhead I mentioned above would eventually have nobody else because he trusted me implicitly.

As I grew older, more experienced and wealthier, however, I began to lose my patience with cocaine-induced weirdness, and I began to answer the dreaded “Do you party?” with a simple, curt “nope.”  This usually got me off the hook with powder users, but crack users never say they’re doing it, and since they nearly always sound totally lucid on the phone I never found out until it was too late.  These were the only customers with whom I ever rushed calls; instead of my usual 50-minute callout I would quietly ask the agency for a call in 35 minutes, because I knew that even six hours with such a man would accomplish exactly nothing.  Contrary to the refrain of the song from which my epigram is drawn, the only thing cocaine does MORE than lie is to steal from its user – time, money, health and sometimes even life.