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Archive for August, 2010

Regulars (Part Two)

Posted in Call types, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on August 11, 2010| 23 Comments »

An unfortunate thing about this world is that the good habits are much easier to give up than the bad ones.  –  W. Somerset Maugham

Yesterday I talked about some of my favorite regular clients, but today I want to discuss some other regular customers who for one reason or another aren’t on quite the same level.  Though these gentlemen were good and reliable customers whose needs and habits were just as predictable and trustworthy of those I discussed yesterday, they weren’t as likely to provoke a smile from any particular girl for reasons which will become clear.

The first of these are service regulars, who always patronize the same escort service but enjoy seeing different girls.  One of ours was the Programmer, who clearly enjoyed talking to me on the phone almost as much as he enjoyed seeing whores.  I was the first girl from our service he dated, and though he rarely saw me after that we always spent at least ten minutes on the phone when he called before finally getting around to talking about what kind of girl he wanted that night.  Eventually we developed such a rapport that I would call him whenever there was a new hire, and he would see her as soon as possible and report back to me about how she treated him.  He was especially good for this because he had some chronic health problems which required medication that tended to make him go limp, so he wasn’t the easiest customer to deal with and was therefore a good test of a girl’s patience and manners.  One night he called, and after an unusually long discussion I asked what sort of girl he wanted that night; he replied, “You know, I haven’t seen you in a long time.”  It was true; though I talked to him quite often, we hadn’t actually seen each other in a couple of years.  So I went on over, and while I was working on him I noticed him looking at me quite intently; when I gave him a quizzical glance he said with a smile, “I had just forgotten how pretty you are.”

Not all service regulars are that nice; the Hotelier was similar to the Programmer in some ways, but in other ways very different.  He was the manager of one of the larger, more expensive downtown hotels and had neither the time nor the inclination for a girlfriend; he would’ve seen two girls a week if we could have provided him what he wanted.  The reason we couldn’t was that his requirements were too rigid; not only did he rarely want to see the same girl twice, but any girl we sent had to be as small-busted as possible.  Doug once said to him in exasperation, “There are only so many titless girls in this city, you know!”  To make things worse, even the few girls he would consent to see more than once didn’t really like visiting him; he saw Barbie several times that I recall, but she complained that he was both rude and unnecessarily rough.  He was never rude to me on the phone, though, which leads me to suspect that he was a bit of a snob and treated me with more respect because he could tell I was his intellectual equal.

One night this seemed to dawn on him, and he said, “You know, Maggie, we’ve been talking for months but I’ve never seen you.”

I replied, “You wouldn’t like me, love, I’ve got great big titties!”

A few weeks later I offered to drive a girl who had no car to see him, and when he heard I was coming he insisted on coming out of his house to meet me.  As I reached out to take his hand, he looked down to my chest and said, “Wow, I see what you meant!” I had to laugh at the absurdity of his responding to my comment so long after I had made it.

Men who treat whores carelessly during sex aren’t unusual; most appear not to realize just how rough they’re being, and some even respond to girls asking them to be more gentle.  But I had one regular who specifically wanted to treat me that way; in fact, it was because I could take it that he became my regular.  He was turned on by being really cruel during sex, calling the girl dirty names and giving really vulgar orders, and even slapping her bottom during rear-entry sex with considerably more force than most men apply.  This was not an unconscious or uncontrollable impulse on his part; he was a married man whose wife did not allow him to act thus with her, so he had to find a whore who would.  On our very first call he told me what he wanted to do and I replied that it didn’t bother me; after that he saw me every time he was in town for months.  But lest my reader think this man a cad I must point out that he was scrupulously polite before and after; it was only during sex that he felt the urge to abuse his partner.  In fact, he once got so carried away with his insults that it must have worried him, because he suddenly stopped and said to me quite calmly, “You know I don’t really mean any of this, right?”  I assured him that I understood it was just a sexual thrill for him, and he launched right back into calling me filthy words with great gusto.

Regulars of this sort aren’t as pleasant as the usual type, but there’s still a comfort zone in knowing what to expect from a client, even if it’s something difficult.  As I once told Grace after a visit with the Sadist described above, this is part of the social function whores serve; we allow men like him to experience the “perverted” desires that horrify their conventional, sexually naïve wives.  The Sadist didn’t ask to be the way he was, and an experienced and understanding whore allowed him to release his impulses so that they did not break out in some destructive and uncontrolled manner with a woman who could not possibly comprehend them.

The Sadist wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, but neither was he the sort of regular who really tried one’s patience like the Diver.  This young man worked offshore, and like most in such positions he worked two weeks on and two weeks off; because he was a specialist, however, he might be called back at very short notice and so always made the most of his time at home.  As you can probably guess he was extremely well-paid, and so could easily afford to hire a whore several times a week while on land; unfortunately, few girls wanted to see him.  It isn’t that he was rude, physically repellent, cheap or anything like that; it was that he was so addicted to porn that he seemed to sincerely believe that intercourse was some sort of endurance contest.  A call with him was always the same; there was invariably porn on the TV when one arrived, and within minutes of completing the credit card paperwork he was in the saddle and riding away, with the girl positioned so he could watch his movie while inside her.  He wasn’t interested in massage or anything else and only wanted a few minutes of oral stimulation, then it was straight to work nonstop for the next hour.  We all tried to bring him to completion more quickly than that, but nothing ever worked (and Aphrodite knows I tried everything I could think of and a few things I invented on the spot).  He just kept going and going and going like a piston in a cylinder until he heard the phone ring for callout, then finished right on cue.  The man could easily have done porn; he could go for as long as he liked, then climax exactly when he wanted to, and that was never less than at least 45 minutes (leaving no time for cleanup, getting dressed or anything else).  I’m not sure whether he just wanted to spend every possible minute rooting, or whether he was laboring under the common male delusion that women really want it to go on for that long, but in any case it was both painful and exhausting and left one so sore that any calls after him couldn’t help but be unpleasant.

Then there was the Crackhead, whom I’ve already mentioned in my column of July 14th; he owned a construction business until he smoked it all away, and would pay me to babysit him for two to four hours, often several times a week, while he smoked his crack.  And that’s all it was, babysitting; he talked about sex a lot, but never actually wanted to do anything (unless you count asking me to watch him while he played with his own nipples).  Sometimes he wanted other girls, but because he was paranoid and belligerent he either scared them away or refused to see them twice.  I was the only one he would see repeatedly, week in and week out for over a year, because I was neither afraid of him nor interested in smoking crack, and he therefore knew he could trust me neither to steal his stash nor freak out and run away as some other girls had.  He honestly seemed to have a sort of genuine affection for me, and often asked me philosophical, scientific or historical questions between “rocks”.  Grace hated my going to see him, and my visits were certainly both difficult and unpleasant, but I am nothing if not pragmatic and couldn’t resist making $500-1000 per visit, several times a week, just by sitting around (often fully dressed) and putting up with his weirdness for a few hours.

Men like the Crackhead, the Diver and the Hotelier, though difficult to deal with, were still in the end legitimate regulars because they were willing to spend large sums of money on a fairly regular basis.  But there were other men who couldn’t be called regular customers because they rarely if ever purchased anything, though they certainly called often enough.  These were the nuisances, and though I can’t think of what true educational purpose tomorrow’s column about them might serve, I believe you will at least find their stories entertaining in a train-wreck, tabloid television sort of way.

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Regulars (Part One)

Posted in Call types, tagged , , on August 10, 2010| 14 Comments »

Fun is about as good a habit as there is.  –  Jimmy Buffett

I doubt there is a reputable whore alive who would disagree that the best of all clients are the regulars.  There’s just something very nice about picking up the phone to hear a familiar voice and name asking for a date; one knows who he is, what he looks like, what he’s about, what he expects and enjoys and what his quirks and drawbacks are.  One can have real two-way conversations with them, and they often care enough to ask about how things are going (and to actually listen to the answer).  There are rarely any surprises with regulars; they’re like comfortable old shoes that can be depended on to do what they’re supposed to do without causing problems.  I would like to write about a few of my regulars, not just to share this very pleasant aspect of whoring with you but also so that, on the off-chance one of my old regulars should read this column and recognize both me and himself, he’ll know that I still remember him fondly.

My quintessential regular was the Fisherman.  He was the owner of a sporting-goods store and a rather large fishing boat which I used to find his house in the dark since it lacked house numbers and otherwise looked almost exactly like the neighboring ones.  He lived only a few minutes away, and I had seen him so many times I was willing to take checks from him (which is usually a no-no in our business for reasons which should be obvious).  He always called early in the evening, and the calls went something like this:

“Maggie, are you busy?”

“Oh, hey! No, not right now.” (He had a knack for calling when I wasn’t).

 “How soon can you get here?”

“About fifteen minutes?”

“OK, see ya.” 

When I walked in he always had his check waiting, always for the full amount.  He’d ask how I was doing while I was putting the check in my purse and calling in, then we would adjourn to the bedroom; it never took long, and he always leapt up afterward and got in the shower immediately.  After sex this otherwise-taciturn man grew quite talkative; I would come into the bathroom and clean up while he was showering, and he would tell me where he was going that evening, what was happening in his life, etc.  When I first started seeing him in the spring of 2000 he was recently divorced, and often asked me for advice on what sorts of things he might do with his small daughter when he had her for visitation; he would’ve known what to do with a son, but felt at a loss with a toddler girl.  As she grew older he could of course ask her instead, and every time I came over he would proudly show me new pictures of her or brag about her various accomplishments.  Then after I got dressed and was about to leave (perhaps 20 or 30 minutes after arriving) he would ask, “Hey, Maggie, can you hold that check until Friday?”

“Sure, no problem.”  And it never was.  He inevitably asked me to hold it a few days, but never more than a week except one time when he saw me twice in a single week and asked me to hold the second one ‘til the second Friday.  We knew we could trust each other; I never deposited his checks early, and he never bounced one on me.  It went like that about twice a month for six years, except for a short break around 2003 when he had a girlfriend for a while.  Our interaction was friendly, mutually rewarding and based on mutual respect and trust; who could ask for more out of a business relationship?

There was another regular with whom I had a similar relationship in the post-Katrina period; he actually only saw me for about six months, but it was at least once a week for that period and sometimes more.  He was an engineer for one of the companies involved in the cleanup, and was living in one of those extended-stay type hotels which are essentially furnished apartments with a kitchen and everything.  His job was both highly stressful and extremely exhausting, and he needed a full back massage each time before proceeding to sex.  By the time we were done he was absolutely drained and generally fell deeply asleep, but he knew he could trust me so our interaction soon evolved into a pattern which required as little effort as possible on his part.  He would call my agency and ask Gilda to have me come over; he didn’t want a callback at all, and was content to wait even if I was busy on another call.  After getting the message I would proceed to his hotel, where I was admitted by the night clerk (who soon knew me well) and went up to his suite.  He would leave the safety latch turned to as to prop the door ajar, and when I entered he was nearly always asleep so I would undress and gently wake him; he would then ask me to take my fee from his wallet and after calling in I would give him his massage, provide whatever sexual favors he wanted, clean him up and then tuck him in.  By the time I was dressed he was loudly snoring and I would collect his dirty clothes from the floor, toss them into his laundry basket, turn off the lights and gently tiptoe out, closing the door as quietly as possible and ensuring that it was locked before calling out from the stairwell so as not to wake him.

The Psychologist was also in a very stressful position, though obviously of a different kind; for two years near the beginning of my career he saw me once a month for two hours at a time, and like the Engineer needed a massage to unwind.  Because his stress was psychological rather than physical he required the full treatment; incense, music, and a long period of gentle touching after the massage and before the sex, then conversation afterward.  He always used every minute of his two hours, but I didn’t mind; he was very sweet, incredibly appreciative and made me feel like a very special and important person, plus it made me feel good to help a person whose job was to help troubled adolescents.

Another of my favorite early-career regulars was the Salesman; he was the district manager for a large food company and called me every time he came to town, and since he always stayed in the large hotel directly across the street from the apartment complex in which I lived at that time I never bothered to check in or out with him; I just went over when he called and came home when I was done.  Like the Psychologist he always made me feel special, and he was always willing to wait if I was busy; because of this (and his incredibly talented fingers) he was one of the few customers with whom I consistently enjoyed the sex.  He was promoted sometime in 2001 to a position which didn’t require travel, and though I was happy for his success I was sorry to lose him as a client because I really liked him very much.

Then there was the Electric Man; he was an executive for a large utility company who came to town about once a month, rarely staying in the same hotel twice because the company travel agent booked it for him.  He differed from most regulars in that he did not always want the same thing; in fact, he asked for something different nearly every time and I was happy to oblige because he was so damned nice and so very appreciative.  I think his fascination for me dated to our very first meeting on Halloween of 2000; I usually dressed attractively but demurely, but since many people were out in costume that night I tarted myself up like a sort of Gothic streetwalker in a black miniskirt, black lace top, fishnets, black lipstick and eye shadow and a black veil.  He simply loved it, and often asked for me to bring some special clothes or to try some unusual activity.  Once he even asked if I could indulge his fantasy of being one of two guys making love to me at the same time, and a close male friend was happy to assist me!

Though I really liked all of these regulars, there was one who was head and shoulders above the rest; though it’s not unusual for clients to fall in love with whores they see often, the opposite is rare because of the emotional barriers we keep up to prevent just such an eventuality.  But the love of one of my clients was clearly so true and sincere that it commanded my attention and eventually wore down my barriers; I grew from liking him to loving him, and when he proposed it was completely different from the score of other proposals I had received in the six years since Jack had left me.  I could not resist his offer of a lifetime contract, and a few years later retired entirely from seeing other clients to concentrate on that one most favored client I am now proud to call my husband.

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Traitors to Their Sex

Posted in History, Perception, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 9, 2010| 36 Comments »

There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women. –  Madeleine K. Albright

From the very beginning, feminism has been a movement as divided in its sensibilities as women are divided in ours.  While many early feminist leaders were concerned with issues which affected all women of every class and situation (such as reproductive freedom and social, legal, economic and educational equality) and by their efforts reshaped Western society for the better, the majority of rank-and-file feminists (especially in the US and UK) were unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional.  But whenever I dare to make statements like this, I am often countered with a disingenuous “Feminists are just people who want women to have equal rights with men.”  If only that were true!  Certainly some feminists were and are like that, and Goddess bless them for it, but then as now most simply used the movement as most people use any political or social movement, namely as an excuse to control others.  While the best and brightest early feminists were working to win rights for individual women and thereby strengthen liberty for all people, the majority were working to do the exact opposite by imposing their own prudish, repressed, Christian, Victorian and feminine sexual morality on the 85% or more of society who were none of those things.

These conflicting attitudes about freedom of choice vs. conventional Victorian sexual morality can be seen in the person of Josephine Butler (1828-1906), who recognized that English law of the time (especially the Draconian “Contagious Disease Acts”) stripped prostitutes of their rights as Englishwomen and so campaigned tirelessly for the repeal of those laws for 16 years.  At the same time, Butler (like most Victorians) believed that women were essentially asexual, and so could not accept that any woman might freely choose to exploit the male sexual appetite in order to earn a living; the very idea was anathema to her rigid Christian thinking.  She therefore concluded that it was actually whores who were the exploited ones, childlike victims of male lust who had been forced into lives of “degradation” by male oppression.  Like so many people both then and now, Butler was so convinced that her opinions were “right” that she imagined anyone who believed differently must be suffering from some form of impaired judgment.

Butler was very charismatic and attracted many middle-class feminists to her cause, but after the repeal of the Contagious Disease Acts in 1886 prostitutes were no longer the cause célèbre; when they refused to repent their whoredom and embrace “honest work” and conventional morality the feminists abandoned their sympathy like yesterday’s newspaper and declared war on our entire profession, vowing to abolish it entirely.  Butler founded the Social Purity Alliance, an organization dedicated to imposing middle-class Victorian standards of chastity (i.e. repugnance for sex) onto men, and it was but the first of a host of similar organizations which sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the 1880s and ‘90s.  Though the movement boasted a number of high profile men (such as William Booth of Salvation Army fame and the American health-farm proprietor John Kellogg, who touted corn flakes as a “cure” for masturbation in adolescent boys), the overwhelming majority of its members were female.  And though many of these came from conservative Christian backgrounds, many others were former Butlerites; middle-class “feminists” had shown their true colors and abandoned the drive to win rights for the disenfranchised in favor of one which aimed to restrict the rights of everyone.  One goal of the social purity movement was the imposition of universal temperance (eventually resulting in Prohibition in the US), but the more important one for our purposes was the war on whores.  While male rulers had always been largely content to “control” or ghettoize prostitutes, the purity crusaders vowed to wipe us from the face of the Earth, and their newfound political clout (which increased dramatically after women were given the vote in almost every Western nation in the first two decades of the 20th century) resulted in an unprecedented wave of harsh, repressive laws directed against the women who so offended the retarded sexual sensibilities of their privileged bourgeois sisters.

The purity crusaders used many propaganda weapons against prostitutes, but chief among these were disease scares and the “white slavery” hysteria.  As several times before in history, whores were vilified as dirty plague-carriers, and this campaign of misinformation was so well-organized that the notion is still deeply imbedded in the public consciousness a century later despite ample evidence to the contrary.  But the “white slavery” propaganda was even more effective; the unholy alliance of middle-class feminists and puritanical religious zealots managed to convince the public, the media and governments that there was a huge international trade in underage girls, abducted and forced into sexual slavery in foreign countries.  The fact that there was absolutely no evidence for such a vast conspiracy made no difference whatsoever; the public devoured lurid stories of child prostitution, and throughout the Western world (especially in English-speaking countries) voluntary adult prostitution was banned or severely restricted under the excuse of combating involuntary prostitution of “children”.  The brothels were closed, girls were forced into the streets, and the pimp as we know him today first appeared; in the name of “freeing” women from male “exploitation”, these so-called “feminists” had actually surrendered many women into a new form of male domination.

The war on whores reached its peak in the 1920s, but ran out of steam when the Great Depression gave middle-class feminists something more important to worry about; that was followed closely by the Second World War.  But once Hitler was safely buried and the dust began to settle, the stifling conformity of the 1950s inspired a new generation of feminists.  As in the first wave of feminism a hundred years before, the best and brightest feminists concerned themselves with the big issues and the rights of individual women, while the majority of rank-and-file feminists were once again unimaginative middle-class white women who were primarily concerned with their own peeves rather than the very real needs of women who were lower-class, nonwhite or unconventional.  One of the big issues this time around was sex; as I discussed in my column of July 20th scientific inquiry had at last exploded the myths about female sexuality which drove so much of the first feminists’ agenda, and for the first time in modern history “respectable” women were free to think and talk about a subject previously restricted to their whore sisters; the so-called “sexual revolution” had arrived.

Unfortunately, the evaporation of the social purity movement had not resulted in an equivalent evaporation of the morality laws it had foisted on the populace, especially in the United States; far too many Americans are subject to a peculiar delusion I call “lawheadedness”.  A “lawhead” is one who believes that man-made laws are actually based in objective reality like physical laws; he is unable to comprehend that the majority of laws are completely arbitrary, and therefore views a violation of a “vice law” with the same horror that normal people reserve for rains of toads or spontaneous human combustion.  Though lawheads are a minority of the population they are disproportionately represented in positions of power, with the result that once a law is on the books it cannot usually be removed by any means short of armed insurrection.  Despite the fact that in the 1960s many Americans became far more accepting of prostitution and other sex businesses, this was insufficient to cause prostitution law to even be questioned, much less repealed.

In the sexually “liberated” climate of the 1960s, many true feminists found this situation abhorrent.  They rightfully recognized that laws against prostitution are discriminatory in the extreme because they criminalize the only profession which is overwhelmingly practiced by and controlled by women; these early second-wave feminists understood that repression of prostitution is the repression of a woman’s right to decide what to do with her own body, just as surely as banning abortion or birth control was.  And since feminists were working to abolish the latter laws, it only made sense that they should work to abolish anti-prostitution laws as well.  But by the early ‘70s the first-wave pattern was starting to repeat itself; the white, middle-class feminists who made up the majority of the movement monopolized debate and elbowed the hookers out, forcing us to start our own separate rights organizations such as COYOTE and the English Collective of Prostitutes.  As yet there was no open hostility between whores and mainstream feminists, but sexually-repressed caricatures like Kate Millet were working to change that; here’s a quote from Millett which defines her view:

Prostitution, when unmotivated by economic need, might well be defined as a species of psychological addiction, built on self-hatred through repetitions of the act of sale by which a whore is defined.

Recognize the Victorian rhetoric?  It’s the old “whores are subhuman” dressed up in modern pop-psychology drag.  Millett and others like her started to pull feminism in a Neomarxist direction, transforming what had been a positive movement about making women equal partners with men into a vicious political organization whose catechism was the old Marxist poison of class warfare, except with “patriarchy” substituted for “bourgeoisie” and “women” substituted for “proletariat”.

By the end of the ‘70s feminism was in turmoil, torn between the true feminists and the sick, bitter Neomarxists and their “gender war” rhetoric.  But once AIDS appeared on the scene the war was over, and the misandrists had won; the modern Puritanism engendered by the AIDS scare shifted the balance of power to the anti-sex position, and sex workers of every kind (including everyone from porn stars to lingerie models) were demonized as gender-war “Uncle Toms”, as typified in this quote from anti-whore activist Julie Burchill:

Prostitution is the supreme triumph of capitalism.  Worst of all, prostitution reinforces all the old dumb clichés about women’s sexuality; that they are not built to enjoy sex and are little more than walking masturbation aids, things to be DONE TO, things so sensually null and void that they have to be paid to indulge in fornication, that women can be had, bought, as often as not sold from one man to another.  When the sex war is won prostitutes should be shot as collaborators for their terrible betrayal of all women, for the moral tarring and feathering they give indigenous women who have had the bad luck to live in what they make their humping ground.

There is the Neofeminist position in all its histrionic, collectivistic, misogynistic, anti-sexual, completely-detached-from-reality putrescence; whores are evil, Burchill is saying, because by our comfort with sex we make prudish women like her look bad.  Like the “learned” men of the 19th century she portrays us as stunted creatures incapable of free moral choice, “things to be done to” in her words; note, however, that it is Burchill who so characterizes us, not her imaginary “patriarchy”.

So in almost exactly a century, we’ve come full circle.  As in 1910, we’re still being blamed for spreading disease despite ample evidence to the contrary.  As in 1910, authorities justify laws banning voluntary adult prostitution with the excuse that such bans somehow magically help them combat child prostitution and white slavery (only now they call it “human trafficking”).  As in 1910, we are characterized as subhuman monsters somehow different from other women.  And as in 1910, our worst enemies are not men, but a certain type of twisted control-freak woman who is perfectly happy to kick her sisters in the teeth in order to advance her own selfish, prudish, repressive agenda.

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Nothing in the Dark

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged , , , , , , on August 8, 2010| 30 Comments »

There is nothing in the dark that isn’t there when the lights are on.  –  Rod Serling

Lots of people of both sexes have an inexplicable desire to have sex in the dark.  Personally, I find this completely incomprehensible; I can’t imagine why anyone would prefer to perform any activity without being able to see what he’s doing.  If an amateur wants to let a man fumble about and grope her in the dark I suppose it’s her business, but any professional who lets a client turn off the lights is a fool.  There are too many things she needs to keep an eye on, and too much that a sneaky customer can attempt undetected in the dark.  Usually, customers will comply with a request for light without protest; when they gave me trouble I would say, “What’s the point of paying for a pretty girl if you can’t see her?  If you wanted to turn the lights off you could’ve saved yourself some money by hiring an ugly girl!”  Usually this provoked a laugh and he would acquiesce, but once (and only once) a man adamantly refused to even remove his clothes until the lights were off.  Obviously I could not accept those conditions, so I returned his money (less my $50 cancellation fee) and left; I shudder to think what he was so desperate to hide from me under concealment of darkness.

The human papillomavirus (HPV), cause of venereal warts and cervical cancer

The most likely candidate is of course evidence of venereal disease; contrary to the popular stereotype so beloved by governments, bluenoses and misogynists, whores have no desire to contract or spread disease, and as I mentioned in my column of August 6th the incidence of all sexually transmitted disease is much higher among promiscuous amateurs than it is among professionals (some studies estimate as much as 5x higher).  While self-proclaimed “good girls” believe they are safe from STDs because they only have sex with men they “care about”, whores labor under no such delusion and so we have to be careful.  As I repeatedly told customers, “I have a life outside of work and have no desire to ruin it with a venereal disease.”  Condoms do greatly reduce the risk of disease transmission, but they don’t eliminate it entirely; after all, they do occasionally break and venereal warts can be transmitted even when they don’t (through microscopic abrasions in the skin of the genital area).  So it is extremely important for a whore to check her partner for signs of infection, and refuse contact if she detects any; obviously, good light makes this task much easier.  Working girls have recognized this necessity since at least the 18th century, belying the “dirty whore” stereotype, as evidenced by the thorough examinations described by brothel-going diarists of the period.  I examined  each customer under the guise of stimulating his genitals with my hands, but if I noticed even the slightest nonconformity I asked him to explain it, and if he couldn’t do so both instantly and convincingly I proceeded on my own judgment with a strategy ranging from putting a condom on immediately (before I even touched him further) to breaking off the call and advising him to seek medical attention.  I only had to do the latter once in my entire career, and the gentleman was so grateful that I had detected a problem he had not himself noticed that he told me to keep the whole fee.

Another reason for keeping the lights on is the one we talked about in the aforementioned August 6th column, namely the self-destructive male aversion to condoms.  Since all reputable whores (and even most disreputable ones) are adamant about condoms and few can be budged on it for any reason, some men resort to trickery to get their way.  One such trick which I heard about from older girls (though I never experienced it myself) involved using a pin to make a hole through the condom while still in its packet; a condom so doctored will appear intact when rolled onto the penis, but will break and roll down as soon as the man starts to thrust.  Since the inside of a woman’s vagina isn’t sensitive enough to notice the difference, she cannot discover the deception until it’s too late.  The obvious way to foil this is to insist on using one’s own condoms, but sometimes a client is very large or has some other physical problem (such as a penile deformity or latex allergy) which gives him the excuse of requiring his own.  I always carried a few large-size condoms for well-endowed clients, but an inexperienced or less prudent girl might not think of that and it still leaves the possibility of mere personal preference for a certain brand or type (such as the expensive lambskin variety, which BTB does NOT prevent disease).  With the lights on, however, even this does not present a problem; a wrapped condom is intact if it feels like an air pillow (i.e. presents resistance to pressure applied by the fingers).  Even an invisible pinhole allows air to escape, resulting in a visible (and sometimes audible) deflation when the package is squeezed.  I suppose the test could be performed in the dark, but it’s much easier in the light.  And once the condom is on, what’s to stop a man from removing it in the dark?  It didn’t take me long to get so deft at getting a condom on a man that I could do it in one smooth motion (or two if the roll-down was performed orally), and I know I’ve seen guys whip them off when we’re done just as quickly as I can get them on.  So I have no doubt that with a bit of practice a sneak could get it off so quickly in the dark (especially when changing positions) that the girl wouldn’t even notice.

There are plenty of other things a client might attempt besides condom hijinks, all of which are easier to foil in the light.  One never knows what sort of props, instruments or tools could be hidden within easy reach, and I’ve even heard of cases where a second guy hides in the room either to listen or to change places when the lights are off (neither of these has ever happened to me, but I’ve seen weirder scams so I totally believe that men have tried it).  It’s also reassuring to be able to see one’s purse (containing one’s mace and stun gun) so in extremity one might potentially be able to go for them, and furthermore I suspect that being able to see a woman’s face helps the client to remember that she is a human being; for a man to slip into thinking of her as just a thing for his pleasure can have very unfortunate results (as discussed in my column of July 26th).  Obviously, none of these possibilities are remotely as common as condom issues, but the Law of Very Big Numbers guarantees that at least some of them will happen in the course of thousands of calls.

One final and extremely important reason for keeping the lights on is time management; since we charge by the hour and our progress is monitored by the agency (independents are often monitored by a friend, driver, husband or boyfriend) it is important to keep track of time not only to avoid going over, but also to make sure the customer achieves what he wants to achieve within that allotted time.  “Hobbyists” who see escorts often complain about “clock-watchers”, but the truth is that we are all clock-watchers because we have to be, not only for commercial reasons but for reasons of safety.  The difference between a girl who is branded a “clock-watcher” and one who isn’t is subtlety; I stole glances at my watch while doing other things, such as wrapping my arm around the client’s neck during intercourse.  And there’s a huge difference between rudely telling a man what time it is and gently guiding him so that his pleasure isn’t interrupted by the call-out.  Proper time management allowed me to lie beside my client afterward (if he wanted that), clean him off with a warm washcloth, chat for a little while and get dressed in a natural manner rather than a rushed one, thus making the experience seem far less artificial.  And none of that is possible if it’s too dark to see one’s watch!

The widespread obsession with having sex in the dark derives from the perverse but persistent notion that sex is somehow dirty, bad, naughty, vulgar or otherwise shameful; it is therefore performed furtively in the dark like a crime rather than being celebrated in the light like the natural, wholesome pleasure it truly is.  Amateurs who have sex in the dark are only cheating themselves, but a professional girl who lets her customer turn off the lights not only endangers herself, but also allows her client to rob himself of the full experience of her company.  Nobody would expect a lawyer or a surgeon to perform his professional duties in the dark, and asking a whore to do so is just as ridiculous.

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How To Be a Stupid, Greedy Whore

Posted in Current Events, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on August 7, 2010| 38 Comments »

The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels; the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid — these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money’s worth.  –  Polly Adler

I’ve written a few times about women who pretend they aren’t whores, but are.  In My Humble Opinion, any woman who takes money in exchange for sex is by definition a whore.  It doesn’t matter if she is married to her customer or not, nor whether the price is discussed before or after the act; and it doesn’t matter if the money is granted by a divorce court or blackmailed out of the customer or taken in the form of gifts or squeeze or salary or “child support”.  If a woman takes any form of compensation from a man that he would not have given but for their sexual relationship, she is a whore whether she admits it or not.  The only difference between such women and those legally defined as prostitutes is that most prostitutes are honest and bound by professional ethics, while whores-in-denial are not.  So if any woman (especially the one whom I discuss in today’s column) decides to take issue with my inclusion of her in my profession, all I have to say is “If the shoe fits…”  If you don’t want to be defined as a whore, don’t take money from men with whom you have sex, and if you’re going to take money from them at least have the decency to give them what they pay for as true professionals do.

Karen Sypher (in middle)

This news item came to my attention yesterday; it’s about a whore with a terminal case of what we call Platinum Pussy Syndrome, the pathological belief that her favors are worth vastly more than those of other women.  If this stupid bitch had simply charged a fair fee and given her customer his money’s worth we would never have heard of her, but because she developed delusions of grandeur and tried to victimize her client rather than trading fairly with him she dishonored both her family and our profession and will spend several of her declining years in prison (to say nothing of the bad karma she has incurred).   Of course, when she gets out she’ll be assured of a book deal (promoted on the daytime talk show circuit) in which she whines about how she was “victimized”, but that will merely prove my point all the more.  Obviously, this entire column is only my opinion; I can’t know what was going through her mind, and the only facts I have are those determined by the court, but I think those facts speak for themselves.

The following is paraphrased from an AP article:

A Louisville, Kentucky woman was convicted Thursday (August 5, 2010) of demanding millions of dollars from Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino to keep their one-night stand in a restaurant secret, then falsely claiming he raped her after he reported the extortion to the police.  Karen Cunagin Sypher, a 50-year-old former car-show model, was found guilty of three counts of extortion, two counts of lying to the FBI and one count of retaliating against a witness.  She stared at the ceiling as the verdict was read, while one of her sons wept openly.  Neither Sypher nor her attorney commented as they left federal court following her eight-day trial, but one of her sons, Jacob Wise, sneered “Thanks for taking my mother away, guys,” at prosecutors. (Nice way to shift blame there, Jake! – Maggie)

The case involved a 2003 sexual encounter between Pitino and Sypher at a table inside a restaurant closed for the night; some months later she told him she was pregnant and he gave her $3000 for an abortion, but he then heard nothing more from her until last year, when he received three threatening phone calls and two letters demanding cash and gifts to keep the tryst secret. One of the letters showed to the jury was a handwritten note from Sypher that asked for cars, tuition for her children and her mortgage to be paid off.  Pitino reported the blackmail attempt to the police and testified that Sypher “came on to him” (witnesses described her as “persistent and flirty” that night) and that the sex was consensual; after she was charged, Sypher unsurprisingly retaliated by accusing Pitino of rape.

Unfortunately for Sypher, her threatening phone calls were recorded and played back in court; jury foreman Glen Elder told The Associated Press that the panel went through the charges line by line and there were no disagreements during about five hours of deliberations over two days, while other jurors said the recordings “played a major part” in their decision.  The charges carry a maximum sentence of 26 years in prison, but under federal sentencing guidelines, the penalty will likely be lighter; Sypher will remain free until her sentencing on October 27th.

Now, let’s look at how this greedy, incompetent amateur botched the whole deal.  First off, it’s both incredibly unethical and amazingly stupid to ask for payment after delivering the service rather than agreeing on a price beforehand; unethical because it allows price-gouging, and stupid because there is no guarantee that the client will pay up.  If he refuses to pay it can’t even be considered a rape since no price was mentioned in advance.

Next, I think it’s safe to infer that this idiot didn’t require Pitino to use a condom, because if she had he wouldn’t have believed her claim of pregnancy.  Clearly, she was laboring under the delusion we talked about yesterday, that “good girls” don’t use condoms; I would point out that “good girls” also don’t seduce strangers, screw on restaurant tables, blackmail people and make false accusations of rape, but that would be stating the obvious.  According to the popular delusion (shared by police as also discussed yesterday), asking him to use a condom would have made her a whore; funny, I would think it was the request for money which defines whoredom, but I guess I’m just silly that way.

Then there was the request for an exorbitant amount of money; $3000 for an encounter which both testified lasted mere minutes is far beyond the going rate even for a porn star.  But Pitino was foolish enough to pay up, and Sypher netted $2570 on the deal ($3000 less the $430 the abortion actually cost, according to medical records presented at the trial).  That’s more than I’ve ever made in a few minutes, and had she been less greedy, stupid and evil she would’ve walked away with a fat fee for a very easy call.  But as I said at the beginning we’re dealing with a serious case of Platinum Pussy Syndrome, which in its terminal stages can induce brain rot leading to the delusion that one’s sexual favors really are worth ten (or a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand) times those of other women.  I might theorize that she contracted it via car show modeling, except that I’ve also done that without developing even the most minor symptom of the disorder.

And I’m very glad I didn’t; over the course of six years Sypher (is that her name or her IQ?) seems to have developed delusions so grandiose that they destroyed both her ability to perceive reality and her minimal capacity for moral judgment.  She not only decided that her amateurish performance was worth millions of dollars, but that it was morally acceptable to demand retroactive payment years after the fact and to attempt to collect it via threats rather than by honest negotiation.  And when her scam was foiled she descended to that most reprehensible of actions, the bogus rape charge; such accusations not only harm the accused, but also cast doubt onto truthful accusations made by other women.  The “Potiphar’s wife” dodge is the last refuge of a moral imbecile who has been caught doing something she shouldn’t; it is a repugnant act of infantile self-centeredness which places her reputation above the personal safety of all of her sisters.

Unfortunately, Karen Sypher is not alone; as I pointed out in my column of July 12th, whores-in-denial vastly outnumber those of us who are honest about it, and while we are persecuted for our honesty their dishonesty is rewarded and abetted by the legal system.  Had Syfwhore stopped with her demand for “abortion money,” she wouldn’t even have been technically guilty of breaking any man-made law because our paternalistic legal system holds men accountable for the voluntary sexual behavior of adult women (except for legally-defined prostitutes, but that’s a discussion for another day).  Since she did not quit while she was ahead, however, her astonishing stupidity, appalling immorality and truly mythic greed qualify her as the first inductee into my Hall of Shame, a list of whores (whether admitted or not) who have dishonored our profession by their incredibly disgusting behavior.

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Cops and Condoms

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on August 6, 2010| 16 Comments »

Thou rascal…hold thy bloody hand!
Why dost thou lash that whore?  Strip thine own back;
Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind
For which thou whipp’st her.  –  William Shakespeare, King Lear IV.vi.

As I mentioned in my column of August 4th, many cops seem to have some kind of weird issues with condoms.  I suppose it springs from the more general lunacy that only “bad girls” use condoms, which is of course why in the developed world the incidence of all sexually transmitted diseases is as much as 5 times higher in promiscuous amateurs than in professional girls.  This dangerous prejudice is certainly the basis of police claims that a woman carrying condoms in her purse constitutes “evidence” of prostitution (New Orleans police procedure is to refer to such condoms as “prostitution paraphernalia”), but it goes far beyond that; in my experience and that of other girls, many cops seem to consider the very existence of condoms to be a personal affront to their masculinity.

Many men become completely irrational where condoms are involved.  The general consensus seems to be that condoms interfere with their full enjoyment of intercourse, and though health officials deny it vehemently how could it be otherwise?  Besides, I’ve had plenty of men whom I trust (and who were not trying to convince me to let them ride bareback) tell me the same thing.  But even if it’s true, why in the world would any sane, educated man want to risk unprotected sex with a whore?  Yet they do, and constantly; I daresay any working girl will tell you that at least one out of six customers (some girls say as many as one in three) will try to talk her into unprotected sex.  Some even offer more money for the privilege; I let my girls know that I would instantly fire anyone I caught consenting to this.  Venereal diseases and HIV are nothing to take chances with, and venereal warts nearly always lead to cervical cancer later on.  But despite these things being common knowledge, and despite the false but popular stereotype of the “dirty whore”, some 16-33% of men are willing to risk serious disease in order to increase their sexual pleasure for a few minutes.  We hear it over and over again:  “It’s like taking a shower with a raincoat on,” or as Englishmen say “It’s like eating a sweet with the wrapper on.”

As soon as a client started this stupidity with me the kid gloves came off; in response to the oft-repeated line “I trust you,” my usual response was “Well, you shouldn’t; you don’t know where I’ve been.”  If necessary, I would add “Remember, any girl who agrees to let you have her without protection has probably already agreed to the same thing with lots of other guys.”  That usually shut them up, but sometimes I had to go beyond that to “It’s this or nothing.”

So, given that cops are men first, it stands to reason that they would be just as averse to condoms as other men.  Other men, however, are not in a position to turn that aversion into de facto public policy.  The very fact that cops use condoms as evidence against prostitutes tends to discourage the more ignorant type of streetwalker from carrying them, and groups ranging from health officials to AIDS prevention charities to prostitutes’ rights activists have complained about cops’ incredibly irresponsible habit of confiscating as “evidence” the free condoms distributed to streetwalkers.  The collective belief of the police that persecution of victimless misdemeanors is more vital to society than prevention of disease is certainly no more imbecilic than the ordinary man’s disregard for his own health and that of his wife, but it affects many more people.  In other cases cops seem to take sadistic glee in destroying condoms; the whore-turned-activist Gloria Lockett described two separate incidents in which cops searched her car, found boxes of condoms, and methodically punctured each one with knives before letting her go while laughing, “Let’s see you use those now!”

During my time as a stripper in late ‘90s New Orleans, the cops came up with a no-win game involving condoms.  A plainclothes vice cop would approach a woman he suspected of being a prostitute and ask, “Do you have a condom?”  If she answered in the affirmative he would arrest her for prostitution, and if in the negative he would arrest her anyway and claim she had offered to have sex with him without a condom (a felony offense if she tested positive for hepatitis, HIV or venereal disease).  This odious practice only stopped because they were getting far too much bad publicity from arresting ordinary housewives or even professional women who in their ignorant little minds “dressed like hookers.”  One such incident involved the mother of one of the other strippers with whom I was friendly; the poor thing almost became hysterical when her mother called her from Orleans Parish Prison to tell her daughter she had been arrested as a streetwalker!  But even though the condom question was later forbidden, the tactic itself was still used for several more years; I once had one of these scumbags try me in an elevator with “Are you working?”  Luckily I recognized the pattern and understood the peril of answering with a simple yes or no, so I directed a withering gaze at him and in my haughtiest tone huffed, “Excuse me, but I don’t ‘work’!”

I have been told by a number of cops (some of whom had engaged my professional services) that the majority of them dislike or even look down on vice cops, whom they consider sleazy.  Obviously I have no way of knowing whether this is true or not; the speakers may have merely been projecting their own feelings onto most other policemen.  But if it is true, I can see why; I imagine most cops like to think of themselves as the “good guys”, and would therefore have difficulty identifying with men who enjoy tricking people, victimizing women and raiding video stores to steal porno movies.  And enjoy it they do; the stories above demonstrate this, as does my arrest (described in day-before-yesterday’s column).  And if that weren’t enough, I also heard it directly from a retired vice cop.

He made an appointment for incall (in other words, he came to my place) and paid as soon as he walked in the door.  Then since it was a hot day and he looked flushed, I offered him some iced tea.  We were standing in the kitchen while he drank his tea, when he said “I need to be honest with you about something; I’m a cop.”  I must’ve turned white, because he immediately followed that with, “Oh, don’t worry, I’m not here to arrest you; I’m retired.”  That made me feel slightly better, but it was still a damned uncomfortable situation.  Still, I had a job to do and he could already arrest me just for taking the money, so I put on my best professional manner and tried to break the instant ice-pack by asking what sort of police work he had done.

Then he dropped the second bomb.  “Vice.”

“If you were a vice cop, what the hell are you doing here?” I asked with commendable restraint.

“My wife is sick and doesn’t want sex any more, but I still need it,” he said.  “We’re human too, you know.”

“I don’t doubt that, but you made a career out of persecuting women who were trying to make a living providing exactly the service you are now trying to buy.”

He laughed.  “You don’t think we believe in that, do you?  It’s just a game.  Most vice cops wouldn’t give a damn if prostitution were legalized, and most hire hookers just as often as the next guy.”

“Then turn around and bust them the next time the department decides it’s time for a crackdown.”

“We don’t usually do it in the same place,” he said, then repeated “It’s just a game.”

“Not for the girls,” I said.  “Your ‘game’ can have serious consequences for them.”

“We can’t help that,” he said.  “We do our jobs, just like you do.  So why don’t we get to it?”

Some calls are barely like working at all; others are hard, draining work.  This one was as difficult as anything I’ve ever done professionally, not only because I considered the client morally reprehensible but also because the whole time I was working on him, he kept up a constant monologue of all the tricks and scams in which he had participated to catch whores.  It didn’t take me long to get his number; his so-called “honesty” was in actuality sadism.  He had derived sadistic enjoyment from deceiving whores, getting sex from them and then arresting them, and now that he was retired the only way he could get a similar pleasure was by hiring a girl and then regaling her with his disgusting war stories while in bed with her.

I wasn’t at all surprised when he called again a few weeks later, nor when he requested a different girl, nor when Cynthia (to whom I gave the call with a warning about him) called me back to tell me that he started telling her about his vice cop career in the initial phone conversation.  After that I basically put him off; I wasn’t going to subject any other girls to that, and I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t grow increasingly more sadistic with time, but neither did I want to get him angry by turning him down cold.  So, I would pretend to assign the call while actually doing nothing, then call him back after a while to say there was nobody new available (he wanted a different girl each time, of course).  But even if his sadism alone weren’t enough excuse for me rejecting him as a customer, there was one more reason which (since you’ve read this far) probably won’t surprise you in the least:  He had, in addition to everything else, tried to bribe and trick both Cynthia and myself into letting him have us without a condom.

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The Only Working Girl in New Orleans (Part Three)

Posted in The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , on August 5, 2010| 22 Comments »

Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion. –  William Blake

Despite the New Orleans Police Department being incredibly shorthanded in the months following Hurricane Katrina, somebody still thought it was important for time and money to be spent pursuing petty thefts by streetwalkers.  Having come to this rather odd conclusion, some other genius decided that the best way to catch a streetwalker was to set up a very expensive “sting” operation involving a luxury hotel room and several hours’ pay for 15 detectives.  This series of brilliant “law enforcement” strategies resulted in the arrest of exactly one call girl, namely yours truly, who with one phone call was able to secure release before they even found time to fingerprint her (an oversight which pleases me to no end).  Owing to the fact that I’m in excellent shape and was wearing flats that night, they didn’t get the satisfaction of causing me to be caught walking the streets after curfew; owing to my stubbornness they didn’t even stop me from working the rest of that night nor any night in the months that followed.  Final score: NOPD zero; waste, fraud and abuse several thousands of dollars.

Doug was astonished when I returned to work within half an hour of my release, but Luke was even more so; as I mentioned in my column of August 3rd he had retired from escorting himself due to extensive legal difficulties resulting from the state attempting to prosecute him for prostitution, “crime against nature” (which I defined yesterday), and “assault with bodily fluids” (a post-AIDS law used mostly to persecute gay prostitutes and people who have the bad judgment to bleed on the cops who beat them up).  Luke called me the next morning and said, “Maggie, I am in awe.  After my arrest I never went back full-time, and it was months before I could even do it part-time.  You are hard as nails, girl!”  I was really proud of myself for impressing my colleagues, not only because it made me look even more professional but also because it showed everyone that the efforts of the police to repress me had entirely failed.

It was at least a week before the police report on the arrest was available, and Perry sent me a copy; I had not thought it was possible for my opinion of the moral character of most cops to sink any lower than it already had, but I was very much mistaken.  The “report” bore no resemblance to reality whatsoever; it read like a porn-movie script written by an unimaginative 14-year-old.  The writer described a long phone conversation between the Judas Goat and myself, full of disgusting details and words I wouldn’t like to use even if I were paid to say them.  The imaginary hooker of this conversation was clearly too inexperienced to know that one simply doesn’t talk about such things on the phone, and had apparently drawn her terminology from a cop boyfriend because I’ve never heard a real escort use those phrases.  This woman (who according to the report spoke black dialect) even offered extra services for extra money, which I never do.  Reading this garbage made me even angrier than the actual arrest had; I had expected an exaggeration but not a total falsification, and I asked Perry if we could get the case dismissed on those grounds.

“What do you mean, Maggie?  The cop will lie under oath to say it’s all true, and the others will back him up.  You haven’t got a chance that way.”

“But the judge can hear for himself that I don’t speak black dialect; doesn’t that call the whole report into question?”

“The judge doesn’t care; he already knows the report is a lie.  Cops lie all the time, but that makes no difference to him; all he cares about it his conviction rate.”  I already knew that, but the last remaining part of me which was still capable of a tiny particle of trust for the legal system did not want to hear it.

“So what do we do?” I sighed.

“You just want this to go away, right?” asked Perry.

“Right.”

“OK then. Prostitution is a misdemeanor; he’ll give you about a $200 fine which you can make back in one call, and I’ll get him to expunge your record.”

“What about the felony charge?”

“What felony charge?”

“Crime Against Nature.”

“There’s nothing here about that; they must have decided they couldn’t make that one stick, so they dropped it and went for the quick fine.”

Well, at least that was good news.  “So, we’ll just plead no contest and pay the fine?”

“Yes, I think that would be best; the judge gets his conviction but it won’t be on your record, so what do you care?”

But on the day of court Perry came out to where my husband and I were waiting with some annoying news.  “He won’t accept the nolo contendere plea.”

“What? Why not?” I asked angrily.

“Because he’s a dick, and he’s trying to run for a state judge position so he wants it to look as though he’s ‘tough on crime’.”

“So what does that mean to me?”

“He’s still willing to do the plea deal I told you about, but you have to plead guilty and swear that the charges are correct exactly as stated.”  (There was a special legal name for this kind of plea but I don’t remember what it was).

“Wait, I have to get up there and say that everything happened exactly as stated in that idiotic report?”

“Yes. What difference does that make?”

“But I didn’t do or say any of that!”

“So what?  He’ll expunge your record anyhow.”

“But that’s perjury!”

He sighed.  “Maggie, you’re right.  But you can’t win this on facts; if you insist on telling the truth the cops will lie, the judge will rule against you, you’ll get the same fine and the judge will be pissed off at you for rocking the boat and he’ll deny the expungement.”

“But you said the judge knows this report is a lie!”

“If he doesn’t now, he certainly will after seeing and hearing you in court.”

“So he’s forcing me to commit perjury.  That’s a felony; what if he backs out on the deal?”

“He can’t.”

“What do you mean he can’t?”

“If he does, the whole system collapses.  If he backs out on a plea deal nobody will trust him anymore and his career is over.”

I sat quietly for several seconds, then turned to my husband.  “What do you think I should do?”

He said, “I understand how you feel, but your standing on principle won’t accomplish anything.”

“So, you want me to lie under oath?”  He nodded.  “Then order me to do it.”

He and Perry both looked at me.  “What?”

“You’re my husband; tell me I have to do it.  At least then I won’t feel entirely responsible.”

So he did, and I agreed to the deal.  I went into that courtroom and committed a felony in front of 200 witnesses in order to receive a more lenient sentence for a misdemeanor, because the judge forced me to do so in order to further his political career by one miniscule fraction of a percentage point.  It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, and it bothers me to this very day.  Yes, I know I had essentially no choice; I also know that in the grand scheme of the universe one whore’s lie isn’t exactly catastrophic.  But the fact is that I was coerced by a government official into violating my principles, and in that moment the last atom of respect I had for any government official at any level evaporated.

Aside from the arrest and its related difficulties, the autumn passed smoothly and very profitably; I paid off some rather large debts, and December 1, 2005 was the single busiest day I ever had (ten calls).  But no bubble can go long without bursting; as I mentioned before a number of out-of-town escorts appeared in December, and by January many local girls had reappeared.  Also, FEMA’s dismal record of payment caused many contractors to pull out or at least tighten their belts.  By Mardi Gras the boom market was over; a much smaller amount of business was being divided amongst a much larger number of girls.  As if that weren’t bad enough, my health was beginning to suffer; I was overworked and the various mold spores and God-only-knows-what-else in the air was starting to have a serious effect on my sinuses.  My mood was beginning to degenerate with my health, and that in turn affected my professionalism; by June my husband told me he thought it was time for me to retire.  Of course I protested, but he insisted that I had worked long enough, and with my 40th birthday only a few months away it was high time anyway.  I knew he was right, and so I resigned myself; around June 30th I did my very last call, and we went home the next day.  It had been an amazing year, full of some of the best, worst, strangest, most memorable and most profitable experiences of my entire professional career, so all in all I have to say it was a fitting conclusion to that career.

We’ve gone back to visit every year since then, and in the opinion of this native New Orleans isn’t the same city it was; something essential is missing, something which made it unique and alive and special.  Oh, people still live there and business is still carried out, but there’s a sort of emptiness at the heart of it all.  As my husband observed, it’s like a Christmas tree, a thing which appears to be alive but is actually dead and only maintained in the semblance of life by artificial means.  No matter what politicians, advertising agencies and a few diehards will tell you the old New Orleans is gone forever, and though I’m no seer I can confidently predict that the city growing up in its place will become more and more like every other city in the country until it retains no more than the image of its former self.  And that, my friends, is a damned shame.

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The Only Working Girl in New Orleans (Part Two)

Posted in The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 4, 2010| 7 Comments »

Whores perform the same function as priests…but far more thoroughly. – Robert A. Heinlein

Between mid-September and late November of 2005 I was the only call girl in New Orleans; the number of streetwalkers steadily increased during that period, and after Thanksgiving a few out-of-town escorts decided to capitalize on the lucrative market, but for about ten or eleven weeks I was the only agency escort in the entire area, and the only local girl until carnival season started in January.  The NOPD was at a fraction of its normal strength due to evacuation, wholesale desertion and the firing or arrest of cops who had been caught looting, assaulting citizens and even murdering “suspects”, so the National Guard had taken over many of the duties normally performed by police.  And though the population was so low that violent crime was still quite rare, one would think that patrolling the disaster areas would take up most of the remaining cops’ time; perhaps it would have if they considered duty more important than a chance to play sadistic games at a woman’s expense.

It was late October and I got a call about 6 PM from the Royal Sonesta, one of the large hotels in the French Quarter.  The caller said he wanted a massage, and as usual I described myself and told him my fee.  He agreed, and that was about the extent of the conversation; some men are like that.  So I went down there alone because my husband was spending the night at our country place on the way back from a business trip.  I parked in one of my usual places (I refuse to pay to park, so I knew all the safe unmetered spots in the whole Quarter) and went in, greeting the man and collecting my fee as usual.  He was clad only in a towel and said he wanted a massage, so I got undressed and proceeded to give him one while talking about the weather (literally).  Now, I’m quite an experienced masseuse, and I immediately noticed something odd about his back muscles.  Men tend to have hard spots or knots in different places depending on their professions; for instance, professional golfers have knotty shoulders on their dominant side.  But this guy had a strange knot I had never before encountered toward one side of his lower back; it was something like the one many men get in the spot where they habitually carry a wallet, but much harder and too high for a wallet-bruise.  I asked him what it was, and he claimed not to know; I then asked what he did for a living and he claimed to be in sales.  At that moment I knew he was lying, but it was too late because immediately after my realization there was a knock at the door.  He jumped up to get it and I of course protested, but he mumbled some nonsense about his friend coming to bring him a hat and rushed to the door.

The next thing I saw was four big, burly black men dressed like hoodlums coming into the room, and I immediately came to the conclusion that I was going to be gang-raped, so I started to mentally prepare for the ordeal.  But after them came two middle-aged white men in suits, followed by a collection of other men in various types of clothes.  I knew then what this had to be, but I asked anyway:  “What the hell is going on here?”  I was very angry and no longer afraid; I knew what they were up to and so rather than give them what they wanted by running demurely for my clothes, I sat defiantly naked on the edge of the bed. Nobody answered me, so I asked again:  “Excuse me, but what do y’all want?”

Finally, a little twerp with one of those creepy mustaches spoke up; “You’re under arrest.”

“On what charge?”

“Prostitution and Crime Against Nature.”

“Crime Against Nature” is the ludicrous Victorian term used in Louisiana and a number of other states for oral or anal sex, whether for pay or even between a husband and wife; it can be punished by 20 years at hard labor.  If they thought a felony charge would scare me, however, they were very much mistaken; I knew that cops habitually charge hookers with it in order to frighten them into pleading guilty to the lesser charge of simple prostitution, a misdemeanor.  So I spoke up.  “Crime Against Nature means oral or anal sex; does it look to you like I was having any kind of sex?”

“That’s for the judge to decide,” said Mr. Big.  Most of the 14 others were milling about the room, trying not to look at me; it was clear that my defiance and refusal to stick to the expected script was disturbing them.  One of them ceremoniously dumped my condom case out on the bed as though it were some great revelation; most cops seem to have weird emotional issues with condoms, as I’ll discuss in a future column.

Another was going through my purse, and I snapped at him, “Put that down, it doesn’t belong to you!”  He was going through my business card holder (looking for the cards of Mafiosi or drug dealers, no doubt) and suddenly stopped at one particular card.

“You’re a minister?” he asked with strong confusion in his voice.

“That’s right,” I said drily.

“Oh, boy,” he sighed nervously.  There were a number of unusual religious groups in town, ranging from Buddhists to Scientologists to Wiccans to Baha’i, all engaged in charitable work (including stress counseling).  I mentally filed his reaction and decided to press my momentary advantage.

“If you’ll just let me make my phone call, this will be over in five minutes and we can all go about our business.”  Silence.  I repeated it.

“You’ll get your call after you get to the jail,” huffed Mr. Big.  “Now put your clothes on.”  One naked woman, hands on hips, had embarrassed fifteen fully-dressed bullies so badly they wouldn’t even look at her.  They then handcuffed me (obviously I was too dangerous to simply be escorted) and walked me to the nearby French Quarter police station, where every one of them except one quiet cop in his late fifties promptly vanished.  I hadn’t said anything to this guy yet, so I repeated what I had said about one phone call clearing it up.  Why was I so confident?  Because I kept an influential lawyer (whom I’ll call Perry) on retainer is why, and several years earlier he had been able to free Cynthia within four hours of her arrest despite a drug record.

“You have to wait until you get to the jail,” he said quietly.  I could see he was uncomfortable.

“What was all this about anyway?” I asked him.

“We’ve had some reports of streetwalkers stealing guys’ watches and such.”

“Do I look like a streetwalker to you?” I asked indignantly.

“No,” he admitted; “I think you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“And what genius of a detective decided the best way to catch streetwalkers was to call an escort service?”  I asked.  Silence.  “I’ll tell you what I think happened; somebody wanted to bully a defenseless woman, so he organized this so a bunch of y’all could watch a naked girl cry and squirm and try to cover herself, but you didn’t get what you expected.”

“We certainly did not,” he admitted.

He soon handed me over to a uniformed cop who took me to Orleans Parish Prison a few miles away; once there I was photographed but not fingerprinted and tossed in a holding cell with a bunch of streetwalkers and drug addicts, and a middle-aged black lady who obviously did not belong there any more than I did.  She explained that she was a licensed practical nurse who had been arrested for “looting” her own house, and held for several weeks; her daughter had just that hour been finally able to get in touch with the lady’s employers in the place they had evacuated to, and they were even now arranging bail.  After a short while I was finally allowed to call my husband; I wasn’t sure I could find Perry in one call.  Once he answered the phone I reached into that place where all my stress is kept and turned on the tap; I started crying and sobbing on the phone, not to upset my husband but to make an impression on the female clerk.  My husband was understandably upset , though relieved that I was all right (Doug had called him when I failed to check out or answer my phone); he said he would head for New Orleans as soon as he had called Perry and Doug.

I was then forced to take off my clothes and change into one of those disgusting orange jumpsuits; I told the female guard that there was no point because I would be out in less than an hour, but she insisted it was the rule.  She wasn’t rude or nasty, though; in fact she had to argue with the chief guard, who insisted that it was against the rules for her to let me change in a bathroom.  He wanted me to change in the open, in full view of several dozen male prisoners, but she adamantly refused.  But within minutes of returning me to the holding cell the surprised guard was back to tell me I was being released; I couldn’t resist saying, “I did tell you it wouldn’t take long.”

After I changed back to my clothes I signed for my possessions, and the clerk whispered to me, “You’ve got some important friends.”  She explained that one of the judges had called and demanded I be released on my own recognizance at once; obviously Perry had done his job.  As soon as I had my cell phone back I called my husband, who was already on the road; I told him that since I was out it was foolish for him to exhaust himself driving all night, and convinced him to return home and leave in the morning.

As I left the prison the cops couldn’t resist taunting me with “You had better be able to walk home before curfew or else you’ll be arrested again.”  I of course ignored them, and once outside I saw the nurse on her cell phone, trying to line up a ride; I told her she was welcome to come with me if she thought she could keep up with me on a fast walk back several miles to the French Quarter where my car was parked.  She said she could, and was as good as her word; we got back to the car with an hour to spare.  I then took her home, and she hugged me in thanks; I in turn wished her luck with her own case.

As soon as I left her house I called Doug, who was rather surprised when I told him I was signing back on; he asked “Are you sure?” and when I told him I was, he whistled and said “Maggie, you are truly hardcore.”  Stubborn would have been a better word; the cops had succeeded in ruining the first four hours of my evening, but I wasn’t going to let them ruin the whole thing.  It was a quiet evening and I only did one call, but going right back out in spite of their efforts to control and frighten me gave me immense satisfaction.  In the long run I won, but not before having my eyes fully opened to the true corruption of the Injustice System and being forced to do something I found morally repugnant in the extreme, as you will see tomorrow.

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The Only Working Girl in New Orleans (Part One)

Posted in Call types, History, tagged , , , , on August 3, 2010| 2 Comments »

The river rose all day
The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline
Louisiana, Louisiana
They’re tryin’ to wash us away
They’re tryin’ to wash us away  –  Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927”

Like most kids in South Louisiana, I was raised on hurricanes; we never worried much about them.  Oh, we prepared for them, but we didn’t actually worry.  And for me that even remained true after a civil engineering major boyfriend explained (around 1985) what would happen if the “perfect hurricane” ever hit the city; he showed me where the water level would reach on my rented house.  Certainly the authorities knew everything he knew, which is why sometime in the late ‘90s they started to cry “wolf” with monotonous regularity.  Every time a tropical storm looked as though it was headed toward New Orleans, they would start screaming “Evacuate, evacuate!” and the interstates would turn into nightmare parking lots which would’ve become vast cemeteries had any of those storms ever amounted to anything.  So whenever I’m asked why so many stayed when Katrina hit, I explain that most people had grown tired of over a decade of wolf-crying and “evacuations” organized roughly as well as ten cans of Tinkertoys dumped on a floor.

I had never in my life evacuated and had no intention of doing so for Katrina, but the Saturday before it hit I found myself unaccountably nervous and anxious.  I barely slept at all, and on Sunday morning I awoke about 5 AM to find my cat running around the house like a mad thing.  I knew that something was very wrong; my intuition was telling me that we needed to go.  My husband was quickly convinced by my pointing out that if the power went out we’d be sitting around doing nothing for a week or more anyhow, so why not just go up to our country place far from the coast and take a short holiday?   Besides, he is a wise man; he doesn’t understand premonitions, but neither does he discount them.  So we packed up the few valuables and perishables we had (most of our stuff was at our country place anyway) and left.  Though the roads were packed solid, I know every short-cut and back way in South Louisiana so we only had to sit through three traffic jams at various bottleneck points, adding perhaps 50% to the duration of our entire trip.

Well, I don’t need to tell you about the mess that storm caused; at first we weren’t sure if we were ever going back.  But within weeks my operator Gilda was telling me that the phone was ringing off of the hook; there were plenty of rescue workers, government officials, doctors and survivors of the wealthier sort looking for working girls, and not one in town to answer the demand.  So my husband used his connections to find out if the house we were renting had survived intact, and when we found it had (the water had come up to the top step, but not inside) we decided to return.  There was no electricity for the first week and no gas for two months (in fact, we got it back the Monday before Thanksgiving) and since my husband’s work wanted him at their temporary office in Dallas for a while that meant I would be alone for the first few weeks (when his boss asked if I wouldn’t be afraid to be alone he replied, “Sir, I married Lara Croft”).  Needless to say I carried a loaded automatic with me everywhere, and I don’t mind telling you that I felt a lot more comfortable every night after I had locked up tight and checked the house from end to end with my kerosene lamp.  Every morning I went to the emergency center to stock up on MREs and other supplies they were giving away; the volunteers were so happy to see a pretty face (the city was at that time roughly 95% male) that they always gave me extra and carried it to my car for me.  I worked all afternoon and evening, dodging curfew where possible and sweet-talking my way through when not, and because I was the only girl working for the only three agencies open I was kept quite busy as you might imagine.

Mine was the first to reopen, but I had kept in touch with Doug and he followed me down within a week; the third owner, whom I’ll call “Luke”, was a friend of Doug’s and came down immediately after.  Luke had been a gay escort himself until he was forced to retire by major legal difficulties, and I had never worked for him before because I was pretty skittish about working for men; the only reason I had ever called Doug was that he came highly recommended.  But Luke called and literally begged me to work for him after Katrina; he did it in such a cute, funny and sincere way that I really couldn’t say no.  So though there were three agencies, there was only one escort between then, namely yours truly, and this created some amusing situations when the customers were picky.

Let’s say a man called my agency first, looking for a blonde (or an 18-year-old, or something else I’m not); I tell him that we don’t have such a girl right now, and that I’m the only call girl in town.  So he might then ring off and call Doug, who immediately called me and I had to tell him that I had already spoken to the guy.  Often they went through all three, and sometimes just for laughs I would call this hard-to-please person three times to tell him “I did tell you I was the only girl in town; don’t you believe me?”  Obviously, many men don’t expect honesty from whores, but at least Doug and Luke knew better; they had faith that I would honestly give the fee to the first agency which gave me the call, even if I eventually got it from all three.  It became a running joke with us; Luke, Doug or my operator Gilda would greet me with “Have you talked to Mr. So-and-so yet?” rather than the usual “I have a call for you.”

Another change necessitated by Katrina was in my criteria for accepting hotels.  In normal times I was very wary of cheap motels, and there were certain areas to which I would not go under any circumstances.  But after Katrina, the federal government had lodged many hundreds of survivors in what had formerly been very good hotels; I quickly learned that some three-star properties in the Canal Street zone had degenerated into projects whose lobbies and halls were packed at all hours of the day and night with dirty, low-class people who dropped garbage and even human waste on the floors.  I can’t even imagine what it cost to restore those facilities to normal afterward. Fortunately, other corporations had more wisdom than to make a devil’s bargain just to fill rooms, and they stayed as clean and safe as before; most of these were occupied by FEMA officials, consultants and the like.  But what this meant was that hotel rooms were at a premium, so many good clients who would formerly never have dreamed of staying in some dump on Airline Highway (a strip running from the airport to downtown which is famous for nasty, cheap hotels) were forced to do so because there was nothing else, and I in turn was forced to adapt if I wanted their business.  Most of these men were embarrassed even to ask me to these places, and said so when calling; more than once when I told a client I didn’t know where his hotel was he replied with “I’m not surprised.”

Going to residences wasn’t much better; I might travel to a house in an expensive neighborhood only to find the interior gutted and the bed sitting on bare concrete, or else I might have to entertain my client in a government-issued trailer parked in his yard.  I got rather used to working in such trailers; most of the engineers and contractors lived in them, often parked in vast labyrinthine camps.  None of these gentlemen were cheap or low-class; they were of my usual level of customer, but conditions had forced them to adapt and me with them.  And oh, were they grateful; as I mentioned earlier the population was at that time so overwhelmingly male that many of these men hadn’t as much as seen a pretty face in weeks, much less enjoyed the company of a beautiful woman.  By mid-October a large number of streetwalkers had appeared (I’m sure some of them never left), and while these answered the needs of the huge number of laborers involved in damage control they were not what businessmen, professional men, government officials and most homeowners were looking for.

What most of these men needed most was stress relief, and I don’t just mean that as a euphemism for sex.  No one who was not there can have any idea what it was like; the closest comparison I can think of would be pictures and film I’ve seen of bombed-out cities in war zones.  Even large streets had mountains of debris at first, and though these were mostly removed by mid-October the side streets were often hazardous or impassable for many months; I had to have tires repaired at least once a week.  The stench in some places was unimaginable, and the infrastructure in the city proper nonexistent (though one could find a few grocery stores and restaurants open in the suburbs).  Many of my clients could only be called shell-shocked; they had seen corpses of people and carcasses of innumerable animals, been forced to wade through filth in Wellington boots and gas masks (or even in hazardous material suits), and spent every day looking at the wreckage of a formerly great city.  Homeowners were forced to clean up debris which had been treasured memories, and contractors had to deal with the formidable task of navigating the maze of government paperwork required to get paid for the work they were doing.

I honestly think I gave more back rubs in the autumn of 2005 than in any normal year; many men only wanted that, and I was the only masseuse available.  Some wanted to talk about what they had seen, others had fallen so deeply into despair or existential crisis that they required spiritual advice, and still others just wanted a woman to hold them while they cried, or to see something lovely as an antidote to all the ugliness they were forced to endure daily.  One man hired me for his brother, who was a young lawyer whose firm had him working on its share of the mountain of litigation Katrina left beside the mountains of garbage; this poor soul was so upset by all the horrors he had been forced to read about that he had gotten himself blind drunk and started wailing for his wife, who was still evacuated in another state.  There was no way he could function sexually, nor did he want to; his brother had hired me to play the part of his wife so he could hold “her” and incoherently unburden himself to “her” and tell “her” how much he loved her.

In short, I was truly a sacred prostitute during that time, as much priestess as whore, but I’m afraid the distinction was lost on certain busybody control freaks whom one would have thought would have more important things to do during that period.  That story, however, will have to wait until tomorrow.

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Whores and Wives

Posted in Call types, Perception, tagged , , , , , , on August 2, 2010| 17 Comments »

Every man wants a woman to appeal to his better side, his nobler instincts and his higher nature-and another woman to help him forget them.  –  Helen Rowland

Cynthia was probably the best girl I ever had; she was a nurse who had developed a morphine addiction after a serious auto accident, and after kicking the habit had enrolled in a special program to reinstate her nursing credentials.  While in that program she obviously needed income, and as for so many of us (especially medical professionals, as I’ve mentioned before) whoring came easily to her.   She was pretty, busty, friendly, dependable and very intelligent, and often said witty things (such as the time she described a customer’s penis as being “of truly mythical proportions”).  We sometimes socialized with each other, going to dinner or clothes-shopping, and I really liked her and wanted her to be happy.

Well, Cynthia had a very dedicated regular; he was in town a great deal and always asked for her, taking her for multiple hours, to dinner or concerts or overnight stays, and even bought her nice presents.  She always enjoyed their dates and was excited when he called for her, and since a similar customer of mine had eventually turned into my boyfriend (now my husband) I thought perhaps this gentleman might do the same for her.  So I asked her if he was married, and she replied with a rueful sigh, “They’re all married!”  And while that is a bit of an exaggeration, it’s certainly true that an extremely large percentage of our customers are; one day I’ll do a column (for the benefit of my female readers) about why your men come to us, but for today I would like to talk instead about the way wives react to the knowledge that their husbands have been doing exactly that.  You might think it’s universally negative, but you would be wrong; it actually runs the gamut from divorce to enthusiastic acceptance.

Since the negative reaction is the one most people expect, I’ll start with it.  I have heard from customers that such reactions can be very ugly indeed, and generally involve a great deal of crying, screaming, accusations and the like.  I have even heard of divorces resulting from such discoveries, as in the recent highly-publicized Tiger Woods case.  Usually, however, all we ever see is pretty much what everyone else sees; it’s rare that one of us actually witnesses such a blowup, though there are exceptions as I’ll discuss below.  For the most part, our contact with wifely discovery takes one of two forms; either a suspicious wife calls to question a credit card charge, or else the credit card company informs us that the customer has reported the transaction as fraudulent.

Customers would sometimes ask me what I would say if a woman called to ask what sort of business we were, and I always told them that I would have to be as truthful with her as I had been with him.  This is not generally the response he wanted to hear, but really I had no other choice; there is no way for me to know positively that a woman calling is a suspicious wife.  She could be looking for work, or trying to set up a couple call, and I would lose those calls if I lied (in addition to being forced to do something I hate).  But that really didn’t happen very often; most women lack the self-control to call the number first, and instead confront their husbands with the evidence.  This of course results in denial on his part, followed by an angry call to the credit card company to demand the offending charge be removed.  There was only one problem with this strategy; escort services take precautions against just such an eventuality.  I instructed my girls in the science of taking a clear card-impression, and in addition we had a separate disclaimer form on which the client’s name, address, telephone number and identification number (driver’s license or passport) was recorded; this form clearly stated that the customer had received an entertainment service and was completely satisfied and agreed not to attempt cancellation of the charge.  Until he signed it there was no service provided, and all forms were kept for a year in the office.  On those rare instances when a skunk tried to turn a business transaction into a rape by stealing his money back, all I had to do was present the credit card company with clear scans of both documents and the issue was instantly decided in my favor.

I only had such a chargeback stick once, and that was due to American Express’ bizarre “customer is always right” policy.  Have you ever wondered why so few businesses accept the American Express card?  It’s partly because though they don’t advertise it, Amex has a policy (or at least had; it may have changed in recent years) that basically made it impossible for a merchant to foil a chargeback if the customer was persistent enough.  With Visa, Mastercard or Discover the process goes like this:  The customer complains; the company informs the merchant of the complaint; the merchant provides proof of the transaction; the customer is informed that the charge was not fraudulent.  But with American Express it went like this:  The customer complains; Amex withdraws the money from the merchant’s bank account without telling him; Amex sends a letter letting the merchant know what was done and asking him to prove the transaction; the merchant provides proof; Amex shows the customer the proof.  At that point most customers know they’re caught red-handed and give in, and the money is returned to the merchant.  But if a customer still maintains fraud, the merchant has no recourse but a lawsuit (which of course small merchants cannot afford), and the cardholder gets away with whatever goods he stole.

This may sound unbelievable, but I saw it happen.  The owner of a gas station and garage was a regular of one of the other girls at Doug’s agency, but when he called once for her she was on vacation and so I saw him instead.  It was a horrible experience; because his wife was at home he saw girls in his office after hours, and he didn’t even have an inside bathroom!  Then weeks later, Doug informed me that Amex had charged back the calls, one for me and four or five for the other girl.  His wife had discovered the charges and demanded Amex reverse them; she refused to even look at the evidence provided and continued to insist until Amex closed the case and we were out of luck.  I only lost $200 on the fiasco, but the other girl lost over $1000, and all because a wife refused to see reality.  You may be glad to know that this weasel was henceforth blackballed from every reputable agency in New Orleans; his name and address were on a list everyone had copies of.  By the time Hurricane Katrina had come and gone his wife had left him, and he kept trying to call every agency in the book for company, only to find that I was literally the only escort in town.  I repeatedly refused his trade until he demanded to know why (I suppose he thought I had a short memory), and when I reminded him he offered cash and an extra $300 to repay the old debt.  At that point I shrugged and said “what the hell?” and made quite a bit of money from him over the next few months, though it was never easy since A) he was a cokehead (see my column of July 14th) and therefore wanted to see me in weird places like a band’s tour bus he was customizing; and B) I considered him loathsome.

This freak’s wife obviously preferred to blame the whores than to believe her husband had called us, but I remember one case which was the exact opposite.  I’ve previously mentioned Paula, the girl who started working for me on her 18th birthday; well, she went on a call to a wealthy neighborhood one day, and less than half an hour after checking in she called me and asked in a trembling voice if she could come over.  I immediately asked if he had hurt her, and she replied in the negative and said she wanted to talk in person.  When she walked in my door she asked for a drink, and once she had taken a few sips she told me that his wife had come home unexpectedly and caught them in flagrante delicto.  According to Paula it happened like this:  The woman started to scream at her husband, who had instantly gotten off of Paula when she entered.  She was like a Fury, and Paula was terrified the woman would attack her, but instead she suddenly turned to Paula and in a gentle voice said, “Oh, honey, don’t be scared!  It’s not your fault, it’s his; you were just doing your job.”  Paula was dumbfounded, so the woman added, “Why don’t you get dressed and go, baby, this is between me and him.”  Needless to say Paula got dressed as quickly as possible while the woman resumed her attack against her husband.  Then just as she was putting on her shoes the woman suddenly turned to her, her voice again gentle, and asked “He did pay you already, didn’t he?”  When Paula nodded, the woman added “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t go through this for nothing.”

Obviously, this was a woman who understood; though Paula was more concerned with getting out of there as soon as was humanly possible than with listening to the tongue-lashing, she thought the gist of it was that they couldn’t afford his hiring call girls.  She clearly had nothing against our profession; perhaps her reaction might’ve been just as vehement if he had purchased a new television set.  But whatever the reason for her anger, it was directed at the customer rather than the service provider.  This attitude isn’t unusual; though I never told casual acquaintances what I did for a living because it wasn’t their business, I made it a policy to tell my gynecologist, dentist and other medical professionals because I felt they should know.  And not once did any of them, male or female, ever react negatively; in fact many of the women were fascinated and asked me questions.  Some even told me they had fantasized about doing it themselves.  Now, these were medical professionals and I’ve mentioned before that a significant percentage of escorts and call girls have such a background; also, we were in New Orleans, which is much more laid-back about sex than most of this country.  But not all of the women who arranged couple calls for their husbands (see my columns of July 16th and 17th) were locals, and clearly they had no problem with their husbands seeing whores, at least not as long as they were present.

The most understanding ones of all were, as one might expect, whores themselves (either active or retired).  On more than one occasion I got a call from a professional in another city who wanted to arrange a treat for her husband while he was in New Orleans (and made the call herself to ensure quality).  Other times I went to couple calls in which the wife was such a woman, and often in these cases she would insist her husband finish up with me because “he can have his wife anytime.”  I myself made such arrangements for my husband a number of times, but our most memorable experience was shared with the lovely Cynthia; he still talks about that day!  And though the ladies who become hysterical over whores could never understand it, I’m happy when he does because that afternoon was my love-gift to him.

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