If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. – William Blake
In my column of August 15th I pointed out that one of an escort’s greatest assets is the ability to blend into her environment and thereby remain invisible. But as with creatures in nature or military camouflage, no disguise is perfect; even if the escort makes no mistake whatsoever, some people have an infallible instinct which allows them to see the truth about others no matter how well-hidden.
Usually, such instinct derives from experience; I know that I have no trouble spotting most escorts, and they can spot me with equal facility. As Linda used to say in her inimitably déclassé fashion, “A ho knows a ho.” Many a time I met another girl going into a hotel I was leaving or vice versa, and often we exchanged smiles; once another working girl struck up a whole (though disguised) conversation with me when we found ourselves riding down in the same elevator. And on one memorable occasion a streetwalker approached me bold as brass while I was getting into my car and asked for a ride; while en route she began a conversation with, “I wish I had what it takes to be an escort.” I was quite sure on these occasions that I was not dealing with a disguised policewoman; though I’ve never met such a creature, I’m sure her “vibe” would be completely different.
Cops love to imagine that they have the ability to detect “criminals” (including, in their minds, whores) by a finely-honed instinct, but this is in most cases as mythical as the superior driving skill many of them claim to possess. Undoubtedly many cops can detect nervous behavior (big deal, so can most people), and since true criminals tend to behave nervously around uniformed cops it isn’t any great surprise that they notice criminals sometimes. But this common ability has no power to detect one who isn’t worried; I’ve often been chatted up by uniformed cops while on my way to or from a call, with never a hint they thought I was anything other than a businesswoman.
I can only recall one exception, a cop who was working a “detail” (a private security job outside his normal duty hours) for one of the large hotels on Bourbon Street. Because of the large number of drunk tourists that crowd the area on weekends, this hotel always hired uniformed off-duty cops to guard its lobby from inebriated non-guests who might otherwise wander in from the street. I usually avoided these cops by the simple expedient of entering via the hotel’s parking garage, but in this particular instance my cell phone battery had died so I needed to check in and out via the room phone. When I checked out, Doug let me know he had another call for me; since it would be the height of crassness to take such information down in front of the client I had to walk down to the bank of pay phones near the front door, and on the way I passed the cops at their guard positions. I got the info from Doug, called the client and arranged my appointment, then started back toward the parking garage to leave. But when I passed the cops, one of them hailed me with a smile and said, “Girl, in your job you ought to get you a cell phone.”
I replied, “Oh, I’ve got one, but I forgot to charge it.”
He then waved and said, “Have a good night!”
“You, too!” I answered. It was obvious that he knew exactly what I was, and equally obvious that he didn’t care; I of course said nothing incriminating, but even so I was glad he wasn’t a vice cop! Perhaps he had seen me before on other nights; I suspect most men remember pretty faces better than average ones, and he may have worked that same detail many times and therefore had ample opportunity to notice me. Or perhaps he was observant enough to work out the escort pattern, and I fit it closely enough for him to hazard a guess. Or perhaps he really did have the ability to see through facades, in which case I certainly hope the department eventually promoted him into a position where his talent could be better employed!
Another perceptive man in a hotel actually turned into a client. I was riding up in the elevator with him and he struck up a conversation, obviously in the hope of “getting lucky”; he obviously assumed I was a guest in the hotel as he was, and asked if I was turning in for the night. I replied with something like “probably not just yet,” and at that moment the doors opened to my floor and I bid him good night. He had a sort of quizzical look on his face, though, and it was obvious he had clearly understood my comment. But I didn’t realize how well he had understood it until I got out of the call some forty minutes later and found him lurking about in the elevator hallway despite the fact that he had originally gone beyond this floor to a higher one.
“Well, hello again,” I said pointedly.
He looked around to make sure we were alone, then quietly asked me “Did you mean what I think you meant earlier?”
I smiled, saying “That all depends on what you think I meant, doesn’t it?” and handed him my card. I knew he was safe; this hotel was one of the morally-run establishments which refused to allow the NOPD to practice their evil games in its rooms.
Either he had done this before or was just naturally discreet, because he asked, “How much would an hour of your time cost?”
“$300,” I answered, and he agreed. Grace was none too pleased when I called; it just didn’t seem right to her, but as I reminded her it was actually safer than a typical call because I had been able to look the man in the eye before committing myself to anything. It turned out to be a very normal call, though especially nice for me since there was no travel time at all!
The Vieux Carré (French Quarter) is absolutely infested with tour groups; it’s impossible for a native to go six blocks in any direction without running into one. The most popular of these are conducted from horse-drawn buggies whose drivers entertain the tourists with a colorful mixture of common local knowledge, facts learned from other guides, half-remembered history, exaggerated and/or distorted facts, pure hokum and outright lies; I suspect some of it is made up on the spot. That was certainly the case with one such driver who passed me one spring day; I was in no great rush, so instead of my usual brisk walk I was slowly perambulating along in a rather filmy long-skirted dress. I heard the carriage approaching but as usual paid it no mind until I overheard the driver saying to his passengers, “Y’all have heard the song about New Orleans ladies sashayin’ by, and there’s one of ‘em right there.” A quick glance around revealed that I was the only woman on the block, so he clearly meant me; I doubt he intended me to hear him, but I have unusually sharp hearing. It’s certainly possible (though unlikely) that he didn’t realize the song was about whores; perhaps my lazy sashay simply called it to mind. Somehow, I doubt it.
But none of these men was as amazing as the middle-aged American Indian I saw one night in (I think) 2004; he told me he lived on a reservation in New Mexico and was in town to visit a friend, and it was pretty obvious he was stoned. I don’t know if it was peyote or something more mundane, but whatever it was opened the doors of his perception to an astonishing degree. The first sign came when I was demonstrating my oral skills; there’s a particular trick I use which must be very unusual because many clients have either asked where I learned it or told me no girl had ever done it to them before. But my Indian knew exactly where I had learned it; he suddenly said “I think bisexual women are especially beautiful.”
I was a bit surprised and asked, “How did you know I’m bisexual?”
He replied, “Because what you’re doing to me is like what you would do to a woman.” And he was right; I had adapted the technique from one I use in lesbian encounters. The clitoris and penis are analogous structures, after all.
But he didn’t stop there; he proceeded to make similar comments for the next half-hour. He knew I was divorced, childless and remarried; his fingers found nearly-imperceptible scars from old accidents and correctly deduced their causes. It was nothing short of incredible, and when I asked how he could tell so much he simply shrugged and said, “I’m a shaman.” He then held me close and gently caressed me, telling me that he wanted to enjoy the beauty of my spirit more than that of my body.
Eventually he fell asleep, and when I left I said to his friend in the next room, “Your friend is an amazing man.”
He agreed, saying “He’s always been like that; I’ve known him all my life and it still spooks me sometimes.”
For whatever reason, some people are more able than others to penetrate the veils we wear to cloak ourselves from a world in which many deny our right to live and work; fortunately, such individuals are rare and usually uninterested in using their gifts to harm us.
That peyote is something I want to try, though I’d settle for san pedro.
I’ve never tried any drug except alcohol, and that only on rare occasions. Drugs have never interested me; I think all of my experimental impulses are directed toward sex instead. 😉
I figure since I’ve already managed sex and rock n’ roll…
LOL! 😀
“I like your beard.” lol
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVlxiLuaq4
But we’re getting away from the subject matter. Hhhmmmnnn……
Sacred prostitutes… Sacred plants… any traditions which combine the two?
Awareness and perception are the reason camouflage fascinates me so. Excuse the netspeak, but <3
Thank you. 🙂
There are “cops” and then there are big-city detectives, usually homicide or drug guys, and they see a great deal. Some of them know how to suavely dissimulate this seeing, so that the seen may imagine they just slide by.
It’s easy to spot a high-class whore; they have a certain briskness of manner and movement which is not bitchiness, but rather a worker’s ruthless efficiency and economy of motion; in repose, as in an elevator, they have about them a light, resigned melancholy which one never encounters otherwise in an attractive woman.
The total effect is of a woman who is rather too composed. The real miracles of hiding in plain sight are the serial killers — how do they do it?
“Melancholy” is a strange choice of words there; I never met an escort whom I would describe as habitually melancholy. Perhaps you meant something else?
Note the qualifiers. One sees the same light, resigned melancholy in all kinds of workers. It is part of having a job to do; esp. when one is on the job. It belongs as much to a type as to an individual. It is the face of work. This is what the acute eye detects.
In having never met an almost always melancholy escort you are the exception, as you seem to be in many ways.
I think it’s more likely that, as an escort myself, I don’t project a stereotyped sadness into the working girls I meet. Or perhaps you’re merely using the word “melancholy” to mean a much shallower emotion than the one I think of when I hear the word.
Melancholy and sadness are quite different. Perhaps my point is subtle.
Think of it this way: there are certain paintings that one would never describe as “sad” — a melodramatic word for something that merely engages the eye, like a passing whore — but for which “melancholy” is an almost laughably apt term.
Hopper’s overly familiar “Nighthawks” is refreshed by the points made above: we see the intrinsic resignation of work amounting to melancholy, and we recognize the rather too composed figure of the redhead for what she surely is.
Enjoy:
http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/hopper/street/hopper.nighthawks.jpg
I find it amazing that prostitutes have the ability to recognize each other even when they are discreet enough to fool everyone else. Maybe it’s analogous to the way some gays can recognize each other.
Whoredar.
Thought of you while reading one of my favorite poets. Do you read poetry?
http://www.ealasaid.com/fan/rochester/ramble.html
He had such a sweet and easy way with words that always seem so mealy mouthed now, like cunt. And “damned abandoned jade” is a golden phrase.
But Rochester was perhaps a little early.
You belong to the 18th century, Maggie, with your hatred of cant and your elegantly clunky way with a semi-colon; Dr. Johnson would have loved you, and chastised you.–
Hey now, compound-complex sentences are NOT “clunky”; they’re adult sentences for adult readers who know how to cut up their own meat rather than expecting mommy to do it for them. The lamentable preference for short, choppy sentences is the bastard child of the “sound bite” era; it is a sign that the majority are far more comfortable with being read to than with reading.
I can’t deny that I’m a bit of an anachronism, though; I think I would’ve enjoyed corresponding with the Empress or Madame de Pompadour or Mary Wollstonecraft. And you know, there is always room at the top for an 18th-century brain in a 21st-century head.
Oh my Gawd. Adam Ant? Seriously?
[hugs Maggie]
What? What? 🙂
I love Adam Ant.
“Elegantly clunky” ? Surely not. Maggie uses the semicolon with grace and a light touch; which is to say “correctly.” Like the subjunctive, which she also deploys with style, it’s a fashion accessory of language that hardly anyone uses anymore and even fewer use well. Learn from Maggie, young grasshopper.
Hmmph. “Clunky.” 😛
I wish I had whoredar.
Could the Shaman have known you were childless from examining your pussy? I’ve heard that doctors can tell.
Well, the nipples darken in late pregnancy, and in some women the anal sphincter darkens as well, but my pregnancies didn’t last long enough for either to happen. So, that might be it.
“there’s a particular trick I use which must be very unusual”
Tricks, tips, and techniques would make for an interesting read.
LOL, No, I must respectfully disagree with this premise. The men who appear to have an uncanny ability to “spot us no matter how well we blend in” have no perceptive ability whatsoever, quite the opposite. I made the same mistake when I first became a hooker; nothing about me had changed in the way I led my day to day life when I wasn’t working, I still dressed like the same old slob outside of my appointments, yet suddenly everywhere I went men constantly approached me. Walking to the store in sweats, in a nice upscale neighborhood, I’d see dozens of cars pulling over, guys doing doubletakes, etc. I thought OMG, how can everybody tell, I haven’t changed!
It was several years of this before I found the escort-advice websites like USAsexguide, ECCIE, etc. They are full of idiotic men giving other idiotic men idiotic advice on how to “spot a working girl”, and all of the advice generally boils down to the same thing: I”f a woman exists, and can be seen by you in any public place, no matter how unlikely, and no matter how she looks, you should take a shot and approach her, she is probably a prostitute”. They all have their own stupid strategy for how to “be subtle and clever about it, in case she’s a cop.” Finally the lightbulb went on;it wasn’t ME these men were responding to at all, just this idiotic advice they were getting from other idiots.
I realized men had ALWAYS been approaching me my whole life, long long before I became a prostitute, but before I became one, I was taking their attempts to “be subtle” at face-value because I was innocent and it just didn’t occur to me that they were offering me money for sex.
For example, when I still held corporate jobs, dressed like a corporate button-down drone (in fact i dressed like a dude to try to deflect constant advances from guys in my office), men would CONSTANTLY approach me in public, in malls, subways, parks, gas stations, ANYWHERE, and after a few minutes of casual conversation they’d frequently say “so, uh, are you working?” This would be especially awkward if I’d already told them my line of work, I’d be like “wtf, I just told this guy I’m a business analyst and I work downtown in the Bradford building, is he fucking deaf?”
I’d usually answer with something like, “Uh, do you mean am I unemployed? Because I’m employed, I just told you, look here’s my badge to get into my building. Yeah, I work, so…?”
They’d eventually go away and I’d just be left thinking, “what a retard.”
It wasn’t till YEARS later I realized nobody could tell I’m was a hooker when I’m in sweatpants at the grocery store, mongers just try to approach EVERY female they see, and I had just, for most of my life, been too dense to pick up on what they were really trying to ask.
So ladies, have no fear. Nobody can “spot” you when you’re blending in. The guys who approach you are just approaching EVERY woman because they’re idiots, and you just happen to be in the vicinity. That’s all it is. They aren’t “magically perceptive”, they’re just horny and stupid.
Glad I could help you solve the mystery. Another “psychic-myth” debunked.
You’re welcome.
Oh, and one other reason people seem to “know” you’re an escort is because johns are constantly snapping secret pics and video of you in your sessions and uploading it to the web, so even if you’ve tried to protect your info, it’s already been shared with thousands of people who will know you on sight, as well as your name, address, car, license plate, and any known places you might frequent. I used to get stalked and approached at my neighborhood Whole Foods ALL THE TIME, couldn’t figure out for the life of me why, til some helpful guy with “backchannel access” on the local “escort-info website” gave me a clue.
But again, nobody is psychically able to discern your profession; it’s just that all your clients are doing everything they can to announce all your info to the entire fucking world, no matter how hard you try to protect it.
Again, glad I could help you out, ladies. You’re welcome.
How’d he know the other stuff, like how she got the scars which could barely be seen? I personally am skeptical of claims of psychic powers, but some people can seem to have such powers by noticing signs that are there, but most people miss.
In my experience, older people, as in 60+, are usually more perceptive. This is a combination of a very observant nature as well as experience. They say that the women of yore could tell whether a girl was a virgin merely from the way she walked . Then there’s the old ladies who tell pregnant women whether they’ll have a son or a daughter (some of them are accurate but the majority spout hogwash).
I remember one time that I had taken my granny to the temple. I don’t normally like escorting people thus but she had come to town for the first time. While she was buying flowers I was being chatty with the pretty flower girl. This was nothing unusual for me. I was a naturally talkative child and used to chat with any familiar person without even knowing their name. I used to see her on the way home from school everyday, she was nice to me, I was nice to her, this was the simple logic of my 9 year old brain. My granny didn’t like it though. She later told me that it wasn’t a good thing to chat with any damn person I saw; not in those exact words but that was the gist of it. She always said this whenever I talked to strangers but she was particularly aggressive that time. I was pretty angry tbh as I thought that it was just her ‘we don’t talk to such people (read ‘poor people’)’ attitude rearing its ugly head. We had a spat about how she doesn’t even know her, what a nice girl she was to me and then I basically sulked for half a day before forgetting it all and making up. It wasn’t that I particularly liked the flower girl; she looked like the kind of girl who would be made homework monitor & tattle to the teacher that you didn’t do your work even if she wasn’t in charge (idk how else to put it, I still see her from a 9 year old’s perspective ( ^_^;)). But the thing was that I felt that gram judged the book by its cover even when she hadn’t been in town more than a day & knew nothing about her, gossip or otherwise.
A couple of months later the flower girl became a lot more aloof, wasn’t always around as regularly & started having drastic weight gain as well as loss in a few weeks’ time (yes, I was very observant as a child, still am). She disappeared altogether when I was 14. I had originally reasoned that she must’ve become busier with studies & life in general and did not have time to mind her granny’s flower shop while the sourpuss mom (she’s still around, sour as ever) was off doing her day job as a maid, and her later disappearance was attributed to her mother getting her married off to some bloke far away. But I wasn’t satisfied with that. I felt there was something more to the story. Like n/a had mentioned, there was a certain melancholic air growing about her, enveloping her, which hadn’t been there earlier when I had first met her.
When I had remarked to my mother about how the flower girl had disappeared, her first question was, “What girl?” When I described her, complete with her weight thing & her sourpuss mom, my mother’s face changed. She said that she must’ve been married off somewhere and passed a cryptic comment saying that “there are many reasons for a woman’s body to gain or lose weight suddenly.” Upon futher probing and asserting that I wasn’t a child anymore (15) and that I know how the world works and other such tactics, I found out that word on the grapevine had been that her mother had been pimping her out due to financial difficulties. Her father had not been with them since a long time ago. She had been forced to drop out of school and help with the income. The fluctuating weight was attributed as the physical consequences of whoring and general female promiscuity (this I never understood: how does sleeping around make you fat?). When it became medically impossible for her to get an abortion, her mother arranged a shotgun wedding with some family friend (hopefully) or distant cousin (probably) out in the boonies (definitely).
And this had been going on ever since she had crossed puberty. So it was already happening when Granny had visited. There you have it. I doubt Grams would even remember the girl if I could ask her what it was that had set her off that day but I’m pretty sure she’s not very pro-whore. I still don’t know if it’s true, I can’t exactly walk up to sourpuss and ask her if she really was whoring out her only daughter. It still haunts me sometimes that she could’ve had such a bright future if she hadn’t been forced to quit school.
There you have it. The other side of the coin, the kind of things that people not involved with The Life see and hear. Thanks for reading this enormous comment and I’ll be very thankful if you could possibly provide some insights on this.