Forty years ago this month, I accepted money for sex for the first time. It was Friday of the first full week of January; according to a perpetual calendar that would’ve been January 11th, 1985. When my blog was only a few weeks old, I shared the story in these words:
An engineer who was a friend of one of my professors had to go out of town on business; his wife, also an engineer, was away as well, but they had been waiting for some time for a contractor to do some work on their house and he had offered to squeeze them in between two long jobs. The gentleman was willing to trust the contractor in his house but not with his keys, but I came highly recommended so I was offered a house-sitting gig. All I had to do was open the house at 8 AM, supervise the contractors until they left and close up by 6 PM. For this I was to be paid $5/hour, 10 hours a day for seven days, or $350 total; not bad for a broke coed in those days. The contractors got done ahead of schedule, by Friday morning, and the engineer also came home early and arrived about 4 that afternoon. While I was showing him a few things the contractor had asked me to point out, he kept finding excuses to rub up against me and eventually came right out and propositioned me.
I honestly don’t know what got into me, because without hesitation I said, “Can I stay on the clock?” He raised an eyebrow and I elaborated, “I was counting on being paid through the weekend.”
“OK, if that’s what you want,” he said, and he was as good as his word. It took less than an hour, and when he forked over the whole $350 I felt rather proud of myself.
For the next couple of years, I expected guys who wanted to date me to provide a monetary gift in addition to the cost of dinner or whatever; though I was never very specific about amounts, they learned fast that cheapskates would not long remain in my good graces. As one might expect, that meant most of my gentlemen were at least a decade older than I was, but that never bothered me; undergrad boys were generally far too immature to hold my interest. I never advertised or otherwise put myself out in public; my business was all word of mouth. But unlike many of today’s sugar babies, I had no illusions about what I was doing and what prudes (or cops) would call it. Alas, I was too young to recognize that no one man I was likely to attract would give me as good a deal as I could give myself, and so it was that (almost) exactly ten years later my poor decisions blew up in my face, and I returned to making my way in the world by the same means I had first learned barely two months after turning 18. The rest, as the saying goes, is history. But I can’t help wondering how the course of my life might’ve been different (and almost certainly worse) had I not been offered that house-sitting gig four decades ago.
