Call types | The Honest Courtesan

Archive for the ‘Call types’ Category

Regulars (Part One)

Posted in Call types, tagged anecdote, ethics, fantasy 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.

Read Full Post »

Nothing in the Dark

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged bad customers, condoms, dehumanization, dirty, disease, drivers, ethics 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 6^th 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 18^th 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 6^th 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.

Read Full Post »

Cops and Condoms

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, bad customers, condoms, cops, Cops and Condoms, dirty, disease, ethics, evidence, law, streetwalkers 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 4^th, 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.

Read Full Post »

The Only Working Girl in New Orleans (Part Three)

Posted in The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, carnival, cops, ethics, law, New Orleans 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.

Read Full Post »

The Only Working Girl in New Orleans (Part Two)

Posted in The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged anecdote, bad customers, carnival, condoms, cops, law, massage, New Orleans, rape, streetwalkers 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.

Read Full Post »

The Only Working Girl in New Orleans (Part One)

Posted in Call types, History, tagged anecdote, ethics, New Orleans, sacred prostitutes, streetwalkers 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.

Read Full Post »

Whores and Wives

Posted in Call types, Perception, tagged anecdote, bad customers, drugs, escort services, ethics, marriage, Whores and Wives 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 14^th) 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 18^th 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 16^th and 17^th) 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.

Read Full Post »

Rough Trade (Part Two)

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged anal sex, anecdote, bad customers, condoms, dehumanization, drugs, Madonna/whore, psychology, rape, Rough Trade, sisterhood, sporting events, stereotypes, violence vs. sex workers on July 26, 2010| 19 Comments »

Women are called womanly only when they regard themselves as existing solely for the use of men. – George Bernard Shaw

One major professional hazard for whores is the possibility of rape, and though it is much less likely for call girls than for streetwalkers it does still happen sometimes. In yesterday’s column I defined rape as I use the word and discussed the appalling ignorance which causes many people (including some women) to conclude that whores cannot be raped; I then described the first time I was raped on the job. In today’s column I will describe the second time and another incident in which I only barely avoided being raped; strangely enough it was the latter incident which was the most frightening of the three, for reasons which will soon be made clear. For those who missed yesterday’s column I will repeat this warning: Though I will do my best to describe these events as neutrally and without lurid detail as possible, it may still be a bit difficult for those of delicate disposition or women who have themselves been raped. If you belong to one of those two groups, you may wish to skip both this column and yesterday’s because I really have no desire to cause anyone distress. As I said yesterday I would rather not have to talk about it at all, but the only way to combat ignorance is with complete honesty, and that means discussing the ugly aspects of harlotry as honestly as the beautiful ones.

It was perhaps a year after the first incident that a regular customer of mine who was a wrestling promoter called me for one of his professional wrestlers, a champion from Honduras. The man spoke almost no English and I only half-forgotten high-school Castilian Spanish, so the details were arranged by my regular. The hotel wasn’t nearly as fancy as the Windsor Court but it was by no means cheap, and my regular was going to be in the next room, so even though I had a slight sense of foreboding I went ahead with the deal. As in the other call the first part went as usual, but soon after the client was inside me my true predicament became apparent.

The first sign of trouble was that he wouldn’t stop trying to kiss me. As I mentioned in my column of July 24^th most whores never kiss our clients because of the desire to maintain emotional distance, and though I sometimes broke that rule if I felt some chemistry with a friendly, clean client, I certainly never did with men who seemed unable to kiss without being disgusting (which I will discuss in a future column). This guy I most definitely did NOT want to kiss; he had a huge, wet mouth and was a heavy smoker in addition to just generally being gross. But despite my protests and fighting he continued to kiss me roughly, biting my lip and sucking on it so hard it throbbed. When I finally succeeded in getting him to let go by biting him back, he started laughing like an idiot and sucking on my neck. Again I fought, pushing him off, and he moved to one of my tits, then the other, laughing and keeping me down in a wrestling hold so I could not escape.

Finally, I got my opportunity; he withdrew from me, reared up on his knees and announced, “No like condom!” and proceeded to pull it off. My legs slammed shut like a steel trap and I rolled off of the bed and dropped to the floor so quickly it almost made me dizzy. This seemed to take him off guard, so I quickly got up and started pointing at my watch, trying to make him understand that his time was up. It wasn’t, of course, but I managed to confuse him enough to cause him to hesitate while I started to get dressed. The next five minutes or so were like some grotesque comedy; he kept trying to hug and kiss me while I was trying to get dressed, then actually lifted me off of the floor several times and turned me around in his hands, talking to me in thickly-accented Spanish I couldn’t quite make out. If I hadn’t been so concerned for my safety it might’ve been funny. At last, though, I managed to get out the door, only to find my regular coming up the hall from the bar where he had been for the last twenty minutes, oblivious to my noisy struggles next door. It was the last time I ever saw him, needless to say!

I raced straight home and took a hot shower, then examined myself in the mirror; my lips were swollen and purple, and I had ugly bruises on my neck, chest and nipples. I was utterly furious and frightened at the same time, and I cried for some time before I could explain to Grace what had happened. I did not go out again that night, and the next day the bruises were even uglier so I had to take the night off; not even makeup would have covered them. By the second day following, however, I had figured out a makeup combination which would hide the marks until they got pale enough to ignore. I think the reason I was affected so much more strongly by this abortive rape than by the completed one was that, while the Frenchman had been very quick and nonchalant and even seemed to think he had done nothing wrong, the wrestler clearly recognized that he was hurting me and obviously took sadistic pleasure in it. In addition, the Frenchman did not remove his condom; I shudder to think what disease I might have contracted from the wrestler had he succeeded in penetrating me again after removing his.

The one factor these two calls had in common was obviously the language barrier; I do not believe that the problem with these men was their ignorance of English, but rather my ignorance of their languages. Many people have a tendency to perceive people who don’t speak their language as stupid; think of the stereotypical “ugly American” shouting at non-English-speaking people as if increasing the volume will somehow help them to understand. Perhaps it is easier for some people to dehumanize those with whom they cannot communicate, to think of them as somehow lacking human feelings and rights. I believe that is what happened in both of these cases; because I could not speak the language of either man it was easy for him to dismiss me as stupid, even subhuman, like some kind of animated sex doll.

The third (and last) client who violated me to that degree didn’t have the excuse of a language barrier; he was just completely fucked up on some drug I could not identify. It was at a big Super Bowl party; a group of eight men had hired eight girls (four strippers and four escorts from two different agencies) for three hours, but the negotiated fee just covered our being there (dancing, socializing, and the like). As is usual in this sort of arrangement, the escorts were picking up “side bets” and entertaining them in the bedrooms off of the main room. These rooms weren’t locked or anything, so while I was engaged in one such deal there was actually another girl (whom I did not know) in the room changing clothes or something. The client was taking me from behind, then without warning it was like the Frenchman all over again; he bore down on me with his full weight and switched holes too quickly for me to stop him. I of course protested and tried to move away, but he was far too heavy for me to move and far too stoned to care about my protests (I’m not sure what he was on but it wasn’t pretty); I therefore went into my usual rape-defense mode, relaxing as best I could with this moron resting his full weight on my arched back. As with the Frenchman, I was perfectly calm and my thinking was absolutely crystal-clear; though I could easily have attracted attention by shouting, I realized that to do so would probably blow a multi-hour deal not just for myself, but also for seven other girls. So I kept quiet and resolved to endure it, but I think the other girl realized what was going on because she left the room immediately and apparently summoned one of my girls, a fiery redhead called Karla, who came into the room and asked if I was OK. Now, picture this bizarre situation; there was a big party going on in the next room, and here was this guy holding me down and raping me, completely oblivious to the fact that another girl was there talking to me. He was high, all right. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I gasped.

“Is he doing what I think he’s doing?” she asked, visibly bristling.

“Yeah, he is, but I’ll be all right,” I replied. She seemed to be getting angrier, so I added, “really.” And bless her heart, she stayed right there until he was done (which wasn’t much longer) and collapsed on the bed, at which point she took me into the bathroom and cleaned me up with a warm washcloth, cursing him all the while. I was really touched by her solicitude and told her so, explaining that I didn’t want to mess things up for everyone (including her, who was saving up to buy a car). She said she understood, but stared daggers at the stupid ape when he stumbled out of the bedroom an hour or so later. As with the Frenchman, things worked out for the best because I collected several more “side bets” and when the guys decided to keep four of the girls for another two hours, I was one of them; altogether I went home with over $3000 cash in my purse for five hours of work. As before, my “pushing past” the ordeal rather than dwelling on it got me through, though I still remember the episode with complete clarity down to the smallest detail.

These three incidents, the only ones of the kind I ever experienced while working, demonstrate the value of establishing oneself as a real person in the eyes of the customer. Whenever I had the opportunity to talk to the client, to let him see me as a normal woman like his sister or daughter or mother, I automatically invoked the protection of the social conditioning which encourages a man to treat a woman with respect and to refrain from harming her. But in these three cases I was prevented from doing so, twice by the language barrier and once by a drug-induced neurological haze, and so the old Madonna/whore duality came into play; unlike the vast majority of my customers these three men saw me only as a degraded and even subhuman creature out of the age-old propaganda of the false moralists, and therefore merely a thing to be used rather than a businesswoman who had come to perform a service for him. If I could believe that these men were just freaks, part of the small criminal element which has no compunction against harming others for their own gratification, it wouldn’t be so bad. But when I look at society as a whole and see cops violating our rights and persons, the media presenting us as pathetic addicts, legislators treating us as legal incompetents, neofeminists portraying us as damaged psychotics and judges ruling that we don’t even deserve protection from violent assault, I realize that the attitude which allowed those men to violate me is still that of the majority.

Read Full Post »

Rough Trade (Part One)

Posted in Perception, The Dark Side, tagged anal sex, anecdote, bad customers, cops, dehumanization, law, rape, Rough Trade, streetwalkers, violence vs. sex workers on July 25, 2010| 22 Comments »

That which does not kill us makes us stronger. – Friedrich Nietzsche

Every profession has its dangers, and an omnipresent one for whores of every level is the possibility of rape, though obviously it is much more likely for streetwalkers (especially at the hands of cops, but we’ll talk about that another day). Because call girls deal with a much higher class of clientele in much more controlled settings, our chances of being raped are far lower than those of our sisters in the street, but those chances still exist and if a girl works for long enough the possibility of rape becomes a virtual certainty. I was raped twice in my career, and one other time I barely avoided it; strangely enough it was the latter incident which was the most frightening of the three, for reasons which will become clear when I talk about it tomorrow. In any case, I feel compelled to issue this warning to my readers: Though I will do my best to describe these events as neutrally and without lurid detail as possible, it may still be a bit difficult for those of delicate disposition or women who have themselves been raped. If you belong to one of those two groups, you may wish to stop reading now (or at least when you get to the paragraph starting with “the first time I was raped on a call”) and skip tomorrow’s column altogether because I really have no desire to cause anyone distress. I would rather not have to talk about it at all, but the only way to combat ignorance is with complete honesty, and that means discussing the ugly aspects of harlotry as honestly as the beautiful ones.

First of all, what is rape? There are probably a dozen ways to define it, but there are things that are legally called “rape” which are not, in my mind, rape; chief among these is statutory rape. I lost my virginity on my fifteenth birthday to an eighteen-year-old, and I’m sure that at least a few of the guys I had in the next few years were over the imaginary line which separates “child” from “adult”. By law, all of those experiences were rape, to which I reply “Bullshit”; I was completely in control of every one of those encounters, even the first one. What’s more, few of the men I slept with had any idea how young I was; though I look much younger than my real age now, as a teenager I was the opposite. Throughout my late teens people consistently estimated my age as 25, and I was “carded” for the first time in my life in 1996 (at the age of 29). But despite all these facts, any of the men who enjoyed me when I was 15 or 16 could have been prosecuted for “rape”, which IMHO only dilutes the strength of the word.

Conversely, there are people who would claim a hooker cannot be raped because she has already consented, and many of these ignoramuses are actually in positions of power. In 2007 a municipal judge in Philadelphia, Teresa Carr Deni, dismissed the case against a group of men who raped an escort at gunpoint, charging them instead with “theft of services” (read story here). What makes this even more reprehensible is that though local feminist organizations reacted to the story, the response of national feminism was lackluster at best; I’m sure if the judge had been male or the victim a teacher they would’ve had a field day. Note that the girl was rescued by a fifth man who was invited by the rapists to participate, but realized what was going on and instead rescued her; note also the first response to the linked story, in which a neofeminist uses the incident to argue for the abolition of sex work. A man recognized rape when he saw it while a “career woman” and “feminists” used the victim to further their agendas, and that is nothing short of disgusting.

I would define rape as “the taking by force of that which a woman cannot be persuaded by other means to give.” So yes, we can be raped. Consent to one act does not equal consent to ALL acts, and once force is used all bets are off. I must also point out that deception is a form of force, since the fraud tricks a woman into giving something she would not otherwise have given; if any of you men out there have ever paid an escort with your credit card and then charged it back when your wife discovered the bill, YOU ARE A RAPIST. You took her favors after agreeing on a price, then stole the money back. That is rape, no less than drugging a girl with Rohypnol and fucking her while she is unconscious. In fact, it’s probably the sleaziest and most cowardly form of rape. It is, however, not violent; the very few times I’ve had a credit card chargeback that actually stood up (they can usually be successfully challenged) I felt angry rather than violated. This column is not about such collection-plate thieves, but rather about bona fide, hands-on violence.

The first time I was raped on a call was not the first time I had been raped in my life; that was five years earlier, long before I became a professional, and was both more brutal and far more frightening. I don’t really care to discuss the incident right now, and I may never do so in this column; suffice it to say that there were three men in positions of power, and that both guns and a massive violation of trust were involved. But I was a tough little bird even then, and by the time of the incident I am about to describe I had largely dealt with it. I was enjoying the freedom and money that goes with being a call girl, and sometimes I was even enjoying the sex. The nightmares and flashbacks had become fairly rare; my experiences with boyfriends in my youth and customers in the preceding months had been so overwhelmingly positive that the trauma was largely drowned in a sea of good experiences with men, both before and after the rape.

There was no way I could have guessed what awaited me that night; I had already done five calls and was high on the knowledge that I had already made a large profit, with another fee on the way! The customer was at the Windsor Court, New Orleans’ only five-star hotel, which I always enjoyed visiting because it is so beautiful and the staff so friendly and respectful. The only oddity about the call (though it sent up no red flags at the time) was that I had not spoken to the customer myself; the arrangements had been made by Doug, the best agent of the several I worked with. This was necessary because the client was from Paris and spoke no English, nor do I speak French. Doug does, and so was able to set up the call for me. I trusted Doug’s instincts (and still do; this incident could not be blamed on him as you will see), the customer was in a very expensive hotel, and just before I arrived Doug gave me ANOTHER call to set up for afterward at the hotel next door, which would bring my total to seven if it went through! The client seemed very nice, smiled at me and paid as soon as I came in; I had absolutely no sign of possible danger, no indication that this was not going to go smoothly and quickly. Things went as they usually do on a call of this type (except for there being absolutely zero talking) and after a bit of foreplay he indicated he wanted to enter me. After a few minutes of that, however, he suddenly pulled out and attempted to change orifices.

I was not remotely an anal virgin; I had experienced and enjoyed such sex many times with boyfriends and with my ex. But I never did it with customers for the simple reason that it can be excruciating if done incorrectly, and a stranger simply cannot be trusted to take his time and follow instructions so as to make the experience pleasant for the woman. So when he started probing there, I said “No” firmly and squirmed backward to get away from him. Since that word sounds the same in French as in English and my body language was unmistakable, what happened next can only be called rape; he grabbed my shoulders, dropped his whole weight down on me, and rammed into me in one rapid motion. I started to scream but he put his hand over my mouth, also getting my nostrils in the process so that I couldn’t breathe. At that moment my brain focused instantly; I felt utterly calm and realized that if I stopped struggling he would probably let go of my face, or at least relax his hand so I could get my nose free. The pain was at that point secondary to survival, so I went completely limp. As predicted, he loosened his grip enough for me to twist my nose clear of his hand, and then I was able to concentrate on willing myself to relax so the rest of the experience would be something less than agony.

Fortunately, it didn’t take him long after that, and when he withdrew the pain subsided fairly quickly, though of course the soreness persisted and would for some time. He went to the bathroom to clean up and though it took me a minute or so to compose myself I soon followed him, silently going over to the toilet; a warm washcloth removed the blood, and when I was fairly sure I wouldn’t stain my underwear I got dressed in silence. He didn’t seem to think he had done anything wrong, and he smiled and said something in French; when I slung my purse over my shoulder to go, he even spoke a cheery “Au revoir!”

“Adieu,” I replied, and went on to my next call. I was not exactly in the mood to continue working, but since I had already made the appointment professional ethics and greed combined to get me over there. As it turned out, it was the best thing I could’ve done; both the next customer and the one after him (I did eight calls in all that night, a record which stood until December of 2005) were very nice, very gentle, and were looking for nothing out of the ordinary. I have often thought how lucky I was that it happened that way; it’s like the folk wisdom that if one is thrown by a horse one must immediately get back on if one wishes to avoid being afraid of horses forever afterward. I did indeed get right back on, and as a result suffered no lasting ill effects other than a sore anus for a few days.

I didn’t understand then why it was apparently so easy for him to do what he did; men had tried unwelcome things with me many times before, but had always stopped when I asked them to. The body language of “no” is impossible to misread, and I didn’t believe there could be such a cultural gulf between France and the U.S. that he would ignore my wishes. Besides, I had seen plenty of European men before, including Frenchmen, and nothing like that had ever happened. So I put it down to his simply being a complete asshole and went on with my life, and it wasn’t until the second incident many months later that I figured it out, as I’ll discuss tomorrow. For that second incident bore a striking similarity to the first, and thereby demonstrated in no uncertain terms the value of forming a rapport with clients.

Read Full Post »

A Fictional Interlude

Posted in Fiction, The Dark Side, tagged bad customers, drivers, imaginative fiction on July 19, 2010| 8 Comments »

I said in my introduction that I’m not a fiction writer, and though that’s generally true I’d be lying if I told you I don’t make the odd attempt from time to time. So, when Sailor Barsoom made the comment (on my July 11^th column) that he would like to see a prostitute as adventure heroine, I couldn’t stop thinking about it; the idea was so compulsively interesting that I eventually decided that I had to try my hand at it. So, here’s my humble effort at a short story about a heroic harlot; I hope you like it, and I promise that tomorrow I’ll be back to the nonfiction.

The Trick

“Almost ready?” asked Van, sticking his head into the bathroom where Bella was checking her makeup.

“Just about,” she replied, “I had to make sure I had enough supplies in my purse.”

“So, what do you think?” he asked.

“Not sure. He sounded promising.”

Van nodded. “Well, the car’s ready when you are. Where are we going?”

“The Downtown Hilton,” she said, picking up her purse and gesturing him to move back from the doorway. “Let’s go.”

She relaxed and collected herself while Van drove her to the hotel; it made her job so much easier to know that she had a partner in whom she could completely rely. His mere presence was reassuring, and he had never failed to be exactly where she needed him to be exactly when she needed it; having him as a partner made an impossible job merely difficult. As if he could hear her thoughts, he reached over and gently patted her leg, giving her thigh a reassuring squeeze.

They soon arrived at the hotel, and she gave him a quick peck on the cheek before getting out. The autumn night had turned unexpectedly chilly, and she clutched her filmy shawl a little more tightly about her shoulders as she hastened into the big revolving door. In a few moments she was through, and with practiced nonchalance walked over to the bank of elevators and chose an empty car in which to ascend to the 23^rd floor. She consulted her notebook to be sure of the room number, checked her face and hair in the elevator’s mirror and stepped out into the quiet hall as soon as the doors opened. The numbering system in this hotel was pretty straightforward, and before long she found the room and knocked on the door.

When she had first started this job three months ago, the interval between her knocking and the answer seemed interminable; she had always felt exposed and obvious in the hall for an impossible length of time before the door was opened and she could begin the process of feeling the individual customer out. But within a week her confidence had increased, and now it always seemed as though the client was literally waiting at the door; this time was no exception.

“Byron,” as he had called himself on the phone, was a striking man, proverbially tall, dark and handsome and endowed with a magnetism Bella could almost feel. She remembered how she used to believe that all of a hooker’s clients were fat, old, ugly or otherwise unable to pick up women, but it had not taken her long to discover how mistaken that notion was; in her experience there were just as many attractive men among her clientele as in the general population. In any case, it was neither here nor there; she had a job to do, and had schooled herself to be immune to the charms of those with whom she did it. So she smiled her prettiest smile, introduced herself, and stepped into the room.

While he closed the hall door, she walked down the narrow little hall past the closed bathroom door and made a quick appraisal of the room; she was struck by its sheer messiness. Not filth, mind; there were no pizza boxes or beer cans or overflowing garbage or any of the other typical rubbish one sometimes encountered in clients’ rooms. No, this was just clutter, a sheer volume of luggage and clothes which told her that Byron could not have come by air unless he owned the plane. Several large suitcases stood in the space between the bed and the curtained window, while garment bags and loose clothing draped every available hook and fixture. “Goodness, what a mess!” Bella exclaimed; she had discovered that plain honest conversation usually made a better impression than pretense or flattery.

Byron laughed. “Sorry about this,” he said; “I’m going to be in town for a while and I like to be comfortable. Please don’t be put off by it.”

“Not at all,” said Bella with a smile, but inside she was keyed up; she had noticed a telling detail, and knew that she must be on her guard at all costs. But he hadn’t done anything really unusual yet, and she had to be absolutely sure. So she continued with, “I like to get the formalities out of the way first, so I can check in with the agency and then we can relax.” As he pulled out his wallet, he reminded her that she had agreed to stay the full hour, and she nodded and assured him that she always took as much time with her customers as was needed.

He handed over the cash, and she thanked him sweetly and put it into her purse, then picked up the phone to call the agency. After noting the time and checking in, she turned again to Byron and said “So, what did you have in mind tonight?”

“Oh, I just thought we’d chat for a few minutes first; there’s no need to rush things.” He said. “How long have you been doing this?”

“I’m pretty new at it,” she said, “only three months now.” She had discovered that an honest response to that question generally got a good reaction, and this time was no exception.

“Three months! Why, that practically makes you a virgin!” This was said with a sort of condescending undertone that Bella did not at all like, but she was here to do her job and so pretended to laugh at his “joke”. He continued, “Aren’t you ever scared?”

This wasn’t an unusual question, but the mockery in his voice drove her to a higher state of alarm which she nevertheless kept from her face. “Sure, sometimes,” she said. “But the agency knows exactly where I am, so if I don’t call out on time they can call my driver downstairs.”

As she expected, he was unfazed. “That didn’t help those other girls, though. How many now, eight in the past few months?”

“Nine,” she answered, unable to keep the choke out of her voice. The sick bastard was enjoying this; he wanted to terrify her before having his way with her, but she fought down the fear and continued to watch him with poorly-feigned nonchalance.

“Haven’t the police any leads?” he continued, attempting to meet her gaze.

She turned the slightly to the right and squeaked, “No, none of the bodies have been found, and he keeps changing hotels. And besides, the cops never try very hard when it’s whores who are vanishing.” Then, abruptly, “Look, do we really need to talk about this? Wouldn’t you prefer to do what you hired me for?”

Then he laughed, and in an instant Bella erupted into action. In one smooth motion she drew the pistol from her purse and swept the obscuring clothing from the bureau mirror, ascertaining in an instant that she was the only person reflected in it before turning to fire three perfect shots straight into the rapidly-approaching Byron’s heart. He clutched his chest with a look of complete astonishment, then collapsed onto the floor at her feet.

She did not hesitate for a moment, but put three more shots into his back, confident that the sharp “Thwip! Thwip! Thwip!” of the silenced weapon would not be audible in the next room above the sound of the television set. Her hands shaking, she dropped again into the chair and called Van. “It’s done,” she sighed.

“So it was him! I’ll be right up!” While she waited, she opened the largest of the suitcases; as she expected, it was empty but for bloodstains. She showed Van when he arrived, and with carefully-controlled anger he said “This time it’s his turn to be carried out in it.” Then he unshouldered his bag and she turned away; no matter how many times they did this, she would never be able to watch Van decapitate them. She knew that Byron had been dead for a long time, decades maybe, and that he was no longer human but a hellish monster who preyed on unsuspecting women. But try as she might she just couldn’t handle the sight or sound of the head coming off, and Van understood; as usual, he waited until she left the room.

She felt stronger as she walked out into the cold night air and went to the car to wait for Van to arrive with the loaded suitcase; as usual, they would torch its contents on their way out of town. As she waited, looking up at the moon, she felt her face creep into a smile; she was going to miss being a call girl. Her cover for this mission had been a lot more interesting than posing as a coed, a barfly or any of the other kinds of women their quarries usually preyed on, and it had been even more lucrative than the time she had played the part of a stripper. One thing was for certain; the money she had made in the past few months would not only support them for quite a while between hunts, but also purchase quite a number of silver bullets.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts - Older Posts »

Visit my bookstore
This Month
April 2026

S M T W T F S

1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30

« Mar
Old Posts
Old Posts
Call me

Enter your email address to follow "The Honest Courtesan"; you'll be notified by email whenever Maggie posts something new.

Email Address
Become a Blog Patron

If you want to donate but don't want a recurring charge, you can send any amount you like via PayPal to my email address (see below). Be sure to include a note so I can thank you!
Contact Maggie

If you’d like to ask me a question, click here.

If you made a comment and it doesn’t appear within a few hours, click on this one.

If you’d like to alert me to an interesting item, use this one.

And if you have a request, bouquet or brickbat or just want to introduce yourself, this is the one for you.
A Few References
Boring but necessary legal stuff

All original content on this website (i.e. all of my columns, pages and anything else which I write myself) is protected under international copyright law as of the time it is posted; though you may link to it as you please or quote passages (as long as you attribute the quote to me), please do not reproduce whole columns without my express written permission. In other words, you have to say “pretty please with sugar on top” first, and then wait for me to say “okey-dokey”.

Frank commentary from a semi-retired call girl

Archive for the ‘Call types’ Category

Visit my bookstore

This Month

Old Posts

Call me

Become a Blog Patron

Contact Maggie

A Few References

Boring but necessary legal stuff