The Honest Courtesan

The big difference between sex for money and sex for free is that sex for money usually costs a lot less.  –  Brendan Behan

Though it isn’t unusual for a call girl or escort to get a tip from a gentleman whom she has especially pleased, sometimes the extras are either generous enough to constitute a gift or else they’re in a non-monetary form.  It isn’t terribly unusual for a wealthy man to take a call girl shopping and buy her clothes or lingerie so he can enjoy watching her try them on, but that’s not really the sort of thing I want to talk about; rather, I want to mention a few instances of gifts which, even if they weren’t all that expensive to the giver, meant more to me because of the spirit in which they were given than more expensive treats given with less heart.

The one which popped into my mind yesterday, and which started me on this train of thought, was from a man I saw the Saturday before my birthday in 2000.  It was one of those really good calls in which one really feels a connection to the client and has a strong sense that she has made him very happy, the kind she feels he will remember for a very long time.  Somehow in the pillow talk it came up that my birthday was in a few days, and he asked how I planned to celebrate; I responded that I was still planning to work, but might go out to dinner with my business partner at the beginning of the evening.

He got that look of someone who has had a sudden thought, and asked “How much is your agency fee?”

“$100,” I replied.

“So of the $300 fee, you keep $200?”

“That’s correct.”

He then went to his wallet, pulled out $200 and gave it to me, saying, “This is so that you can turn off your phone at dinner and not have to worry about having missed a call, because I’m paying for the time.”

Now, though this man was not by any means poor, he didn’t strike me as extraordinarily wealthy either, and that $200 could have purchased him a second hour with me or several fine dinners.  But it was more important to him to give me that gift, and it touched me so deeply that the memory is evergreen almost ten years later; though I never saw him again, I can still clearly remember his face as I sit here typing this.  I don’t remember where Grace and I had dinner that night, but I’ll never forget the man who paid for it.

Another remarkably generous and heartfelt gift came from one of my regulars, a local I’ll call “Tony” who made quite staggeringly large sums with his specialty retail business.  He usually took me for two hours at a time, but one night he rather timidly asked me if it was OK if he saw someone different.  I assured him that it was perfectly OK and had Dawn give him a call.  I don’t think I’ve mentioned her before; she was an unusually intelligent busty blonde in her early 20s who looked about 17, and I don’t know if she was truly bisexual or just very open-minded, but I loved doing two-girl calls with her because she was very pretty and really got enthusiastically involved in them.  Anyhow, Dawn went to see him and checked in normally, then about 45 minutes later called back and I answered the phone.

“Checking out?”

“No, we were wondering if you could come over.”

“Oh, he wants us both?”

“Yeah, and he says plan to stay for a few hours.”

So I went on over, and Dawn explained that Tony had started talking about how nice I was and how beautiful, and Dawn agreed and told him that she enjoyed doing two-girl calls with me.  Well, that got his mind rolling, and he decided he just had to see it.  But not right away; he just wanted to have a sort of cozy evening first.  So we sat on the sofa, one on either side of him, drinking iced tea, eating popcorn and watching the South Park movie (which neither of us had yet seen) on video.  Then we laughed and joked for a while, and at one point he exuberantly declared, “Y’all are the two nicest whores I ever met!”  He immediately covered his mouth, then mumbled an apology while we laughed and told him that words like that didn’t bother us; this turned into a discussion of which terms we preferred, Dawn expressing a preference for “hooker” and I for almost anything other than the legalistic “prostitute”.  But even if the word itself had been offensive, he clearly meant it as a sincere compliment despite his homely way of expressing it.

Eventually, we did end up in bed and you can bet we gave him his money’s worth.  But when it was finally time to leave, he wasn’t satisfied with paying me for my three hours and Dawn for her four; he insisted on tipping us another hundred each.  But it wasn’t the money which made that night memorable, and he could easily afford it; rather, it was his honest admiration for us and his true and honest desire to entertain us as much outside of the bedroom as we entertained him in it.

One traditional way for a man to express his affection for a woman is to give her flowers, and it’s not unusual for a client to buy them for his date while on a multi-hour calls.  But several of my regular clients even sent me roses at home for special occasions, and the one I eventually married made a practice of sending them to me every month a couple of days before he came to town.  I don’t know how much they cost him but I loved getting them, and after the roses died I would dry the petals and keep them in a big bowl; there were eventually thousands of petals in it!  What made the impression was that he did it even though he didn’t have to; in fact, he kept getting them for me quite regularly until I made him stop after we were married.

I once received a more prosaic present from a regular client whom I’ve mentioned before, the crackhead contractor who used to hire me to keep him company for hours at a time, several times a week (I most recently mentioned him in my column of August 11th).  As I mentioned in that column he seemed to have genuine affection for me, though he rarely demonstrated it due to the self-centeredness which characterizes the cocaine user.  One night was an exception, however; it was one of those strange nights, not rare in New Orleans, where the weather had changed rapidly in a few hours.  When I arrived it was quite warm, but by the time I left three or four hours later it was bitterly cold and I had not brought a coat.  But he had accompanied me to the door as was his custom, and in a rare display of concern for another person he said, “You can’t go out like that!”  I assured him that I would be fine, but he insisted on giving me a beautiful suede coat which had belonged to his late mother.  It fit perfectly, and when he saw me in it he insisted that I keep it as a gift.  I still have that coat today; it’s absolutely the finest, most expensive one I own.  But as with other such gifts, it isn’t its value which makes it special; after all, it was just a hand-me-down which he couldn’t use himself.  It mattered because giving it to me required him to think about something other than his crack for a change, and I appreciated the gesture.

Of all professions, musicians seem most prone to giving small, spontaneous gifts to call girls; usually it’s a CD (or even multiple CDs) of their music or tickets to concerts, but one regular of Marilyn’s sent her a plane ticket and backstage pass so she could join him for the weekend in Houston (all expenses paid on top of her fees); it was the final inspiration she needed to get off the methadone (as I’ll discuss another time).  And on one memorable occasion, a client spent the entire second half of the call playing the guitar and serenading me with songs he had written himself.

Those of us in the “helping professions” often put a lot of emotional energy into our work; though we are doing it for the money, many of us do truly care about helping our clients and we therefore like to know that our efforts are appreciated.  On many occasions I’ve noticed gifts from patients prominently displayed in doctor’s offices; I’m sure it’s because those gifts touched the doctor and let her feel she had positively touched the lives of the patients who gave them.  In the same way, a heartfelt gift from a client lets a call girl know that she has given him something which has transcended both the commercial interaction and mere sex to create a true, albeit momentary, connection between two people which meant more to him than he could express in words.