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Posts Tagged ‘virginity’

The First Time

Posted in Call types, Perception, Philosophy, Q & A, tagged , , , , , , , on March 20, 2011| 25 Comments »

Minor things can become moments of great revelation when encountered for the first time. –  Margot Fonteyn

A week ago Friday (March 11th), I received the following email from a young man who asked to be called “Joseph”:

First, allow me to say that I greatly admire your blog.  I stumbled across it while trying to find out more about that recent CNN special about ‘selling the girl next door’ and found it very enlightening, intriguing and engrossing.  And a bit frustrating, since I am in my mid-20’s, still a virgin, never even had a girlfriend (one high school crush notwithstanding) and can’t envision getting laid unless I found someone like yourself (in your previous job of course).  That’s impossible because of my job (military stationed overseas).

Since I can’t ask you to help me break regulations and find a professional in my area, I have another question.  You’ve mentioned that occasionally parents would hire you to take their son’s virginity.  Would you ever talk more about that?  I’m not looking for lurid details, mind you, but what were those jobs like?  Did the parents tell you why they went to such lengths?  Did the son know about what the parents were going to do?

Anyway, thank you for your time and keep up the fine work.  I read your blog every day.

As I’ve written before I’m especially fond of military men, so I told Joseph that I would be happy to oblige.  Joseph, if I don’t answer your questions adequately please let me know and I’ll try to elaborate in a response!

At the time I received my first such request, my personal policy was not to see men under 21; any younger than that just didn’t feel right.  Not that we exactly had a large volume of requests from men that young, mind you; it’s pretty rare that any man below about 25 has the money to hire an escort.  Once in a while there’s the frat boy type, but that’s about it.  Well one night, I went on what I expected to be a normal call; the gentleman sounded middle-aged, was polite, from another state, staying in a nice hotel, that sort of thing.  And when I got there he was much as I had expected, but before he paid me he told me that he had actually called me for his son, who had just turned 18.  Now, I knew that at one time it was not at all uncommon for fathers to hire prostitutes to take their sons’ virginity, but it’s not exactly usual nowadays and in any event I had never done it.  Still, I’ve never been one to turn down new experiences so I agreed.

The young man was, understandably, very nervous; it didn’t seem to bother him that I was 10 years older than he was (actually 15, but I claimed 28 in those days), but he had never been alone with a naked woman in a well-lit room before.  I asked him what sort of experience he had and it was the usual fumbling through clothes in dark cars with high-school girls, so I invited him to look me over and touch me as he pleased. Like many virgins he was almost too gentle for fear of hurting me, but I assured him he needn’t be so tentative and that if he accidentally hurt me I would let him know.  We didn’t do anything really unusual; I gave him the typical activities most men like, and even though I didn’t usually kiss clients I was happy to show him how most girls like to be kissed.  I kept the pace relaxed and interspersed with bits of casual conversation so he could see I wasn’t all that different from any other women he had known.  Inexperienced men often find experienced women quite intimidating, so I was careful to make everything seem as natural and comfortable as I could.

From my high school and university days I knew that virgins and near-virgins tend either to climax very quickly or to take an extremely long time due to nerves and performance anxiety; he was one of the latter sort, so I kissed and verbally encouraged him until nature took its course.  We then lay together for a long time while I caressed his chest and reassured him; like many young men he was very concerned that he had performed adequately.  I said he had done just great and that if he always strove to pay attention in bed, to give his partners more of whatever they seemed to like and to avoid whatever they seemed not to like, I was pretty sure most of his future girlfriends would be very happy with him.  All in all, I really made an effort to make the experience as special and memorable to him as possible; after all, to me he was only one customer, but to him I was and always would be his first.  And I must have succeeded, because later that evening I got a call from the father thanking me for making his son so happy; apparently the young man was singing my praises after I left!

He was the first young man whom I initiated, but he wasn’t the last; sometimes they paid for themselves, one was paid for by his friends (they took up a collection!) and another was actually arranged by his mother.  The latter was a very cool lady; we talked on the phone for quite a while so she could feel me out, and when she was satisfied that I was the right woman for the job she tasked me to show her son how to make love because she wanted him to know the right way before he inflicted himself on coeds.  What made the date even more interesting, however, was that the boy wasn’t a virgin after all; he just didn’t want to hurt his mother’s feelings by telling her after she had gone through all the trouble to carefully select and interview an escort!  It turned out Mama had nothing to worry about; he did at least as well as the average man, which was really my experience with most virgins.  It was certainly the case with a young Indian man in his late twenties who had come to America to make his fortune and was about to send for his bride; he wanted to be sure he knew what he was doing so he could make her happy in bed.  And though he asked me to critique his performance, I could find nothing to complain about.

Indeed, this sort of thing happened so consistently with virgins I sometimes wondered if most men don’t start out with good instincts and then tend to lose them over time.  Perhaps as some men gain experience and confidence they start taking for granted that they know what they’re doing, or perhaps they fall into bad habits that none of their lovers bother to correct.  Some men may just be so selfish that once the initial novelty wears off, they just don’t care about what women (especially not paid women) might like, and others may be so mired in the masculine “never ask for directions” thing that they try to teach themselves (by reading books or watching porn or whatever) and end up firmly convinced of their own expertise no matter how wrong they are.  I’ll bet a lot of them even learn from other virgins, and when the blind lead the blind the outcome is not likely to be a good one.  Maybe the parents who hired me for their sons understood that; in the absence of an older girlfriend to learn from, perhaps for a young man to enjoy his first time with a caring and patient harlot isn’t at all a bad idea.

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Josie Arlington

Posted in Biography, Harlotography, History, tagged , , , , , , , , on February 8, 2011| 12 Comments »

Nowhere in this country will you find a more complete and thorough sporting house than the Arlington…Miss Arlington, after suffering a loss of many thousand dollars through a fire, has refurbished and remodeled the entire place at an enormous expense, and the mansion is now a palace fit for kings. –  Blue Book (Third Edition)

Mary Deubler was born in New Orleans to German immigrant parents on February 8th, 1864, and began working as a prostitute in 1881 under the name Josie Alton.  It is likely that the idea first came from her boyfriend Philip Lobrano, a useless man with whom she stayed until 1890 though they never actually married.  Josie was very attractive, intelligent and industrious and therefore had no trouble supporting Lobrano and several members of her family as well.  She was also, however, notoriously hot-tempered and never shied away from a fight with either customers or other whores, and when she opened her own brothel at 172 Customhouse Street in 1888 (under the name Josie Lobrano), the place soon became notorious for the feistiness of both its madam and the employees she attracted.

Since Josie was a shrewd businesswoman the brothel prospered, but the situation was too unstable to continue for long and on November 2, 1890 a free-for-all broke out which involved nearly everyone in the building.  In the ensuing melee Philip Lobrano shot Josie’s brother Peter, and though he was eventually acquitted she would have nothing more to do with him nor with anyone else who had a reputation for fighting.  Changing her name once again to that by which she is remembered, Josie Arlington, she fired her entire staff and vowed that from then on fighting would not be tolerated in her house; she further decided that only “refined gentlemen” who preferred “amiable foreign girls” would be welcome as customers.  She had apparently decided to operate the highest-class brothel in the entire country, and in the minds of many she eventually succeeded.

The Chateau Lobrano d’Arlington soon developed into the one of the most profitable and highly-respected brothels in the city, and though it is highly doubtful that as many of her girls were imported as she claimed, it is unquestionable that they were amiable; Josie had learned her lesson and immediately ejected anyone who caused trouble, whether employee or customer.  So when Storyville was established in 1898, she had plenty of money to build an opulent four-story, sixteen-bedroom mansion with an onion-domed cupola at 225 North Basin Street.  In keeping with her “foreign” theme this brothel, now called simply The Arlington, had a number of parlors decorated in various national styles including the Turkish Parlor, the Japanese Parlor, the Vienna Parlor and the American Parlor; it also had a Hall of Mirrors and several large dens, all lavishly decorated with paintings, hangings, statuary and furniture.  It was, as the Blue Book expressed it, “absolutely and unquestionably the most decorative and costly fitted-out sporting palace ever placed before the American public.”

Josie lived on the premises with her lover John T. Brady (whom she “took up with” soon after dumping Lobrano) and about a dozen girls at a time, although the number could be as high as twenty during Carnival season.  It was one of the most expensive houses, charging $5.00/hour at a time when the average American workman made 22¢/hour.  The Arlington also offered a live pornographic show called The Circus (I shall leave the details to your imaginations) and various specialties, but there was one common request of that time to which its madam refused to cater: defloration of virgins.  Brothels of the day charged $200 or more for a credible virgin, but Josie absolutely refused to participate in this disreputable trade and insisted that no girl ever had or ever would lose her virginity at The Arlington.  But despite this refusal (or perhaps, in part, because of it) the business was incredibly lucrative and within a few years she bought herself a $35,000 mansion on Esplanade Avenue and a country house and farm in Covington (north of Lake Pontchartrain).

Alas, nothing lasts forever; the Arlington was badly damaged in a fire in 1905 and the business temporarily moved to a set of rooms above a saloon owned by Josie’s friend Tom Anderson.  The building soon acquired the nickname “The Arlington Annex” as a result, and Anderson was so pleased by this he actually had the name painted on the front of the building.  Extensive renovations costing about $5000 were carried out and soon the Arlington was even more elegant than before, but Josie’s mind could not be so easily repaired; she had almost died in the fire, and in the years which followed she became increasingly reclusive and morbid.  She retired in 1909 to her mansion, leased the Arlington to Anna Casey and sold many of her other assets to Tom Anderson, then bought a large plot in the exclusive Metairie Cemetery and built an ornate tomb of red marble with elaborately engraved copper doors.  In front of the tomb stands a beautiful bronze statue of a young girl knocking at the door; she is said to represent a virgin being denied access to the interior of the Arlington.  The project was designed by the noted Albert Weiblen and cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $10,000.

For the next five years, Josie Arlington continued to decline mentally and physically; she became moody and quarrelsome, sinking into dementia in 1913 and dying on February 14th, 1914 – less than a week after her 50th birthday.  She was buried the next day, and though most of the madams in the District sent flowers the actual turnout at her funeral was very poor:  Tom Anderson, Josie’s common-law husband John Brady, her niece (and chief heir) Anna Deubler, regular client Judge Richard Otero and several representatives of the Sisters of Charity, a convent to which Josie had been generous.  A week later Brady and Anna Deubler were married, and though Josie’s father tried to contest her will the couple retained control of the entire estate.

But that isn’t quite the end of the story.  Soon after Josie’s funeral people began to report that sometimes after dark the tomb seemed to burst into flame, with tongues of ghostly, cold fire flickering across the red marble (some claimed it was due to reflection from a nearby traffic light but this could never be proven).  The site soon became a tourist attraction, and before long these visitors began to report an even more terrifying phenomenon:  the statue of the girl at the door sometimes vanished from her post and was said to walk about the cemetery.  Two gravediggers even claimed to have seen her in the act of leaving the tomb!  Naturally, the family was deeply upset and so they eventually had Josie’s remains moved to a different grave and sold the “haunted” tomb to the Morales family.  Though caretakers of the cemetery have been ordered not to point out the tomb to the curious any longer, it is not difficult to find and though no one has seen the phantom fire for at least seven decades there are still occasional claims that the bronze virgin continues her nocturnal wanderings to this day.

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Storyville

Posted in History, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on September 3, 2010| 7 Comments »

All you old-time queens, from New Orleans, who lived in Storyville
You sang the blues, try to amuse, here’s how they pay the bill
The law step in and call it sin to have a little fun
The police car has made a stop and Storyville is done.  –  Clarence Williams, “Farewell To Storyville”

Storyville postcard, circa 1910

The story “Painted Devil” (which appeared in my column of August 23rd) took place in New Orleans of the early 1880s, as most of you probably surmised; in it I alluded to a few historical details which would be familiar to educated New Orleanians but may have left others scratching their heads, especially my mention of Storyville in a reply at the end.  I therefore decided to give you a quick history of prostitution in the Crescent City, culminating in the history of Storyville.

New Orleans was founded on May 7, 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville and named for Philippe, Duke of Orléans, who was Regent of France at the time.  Besides being terribly primitive like all new colonies, New Orleans was hot, mosquito-infested and disease-ridden and therefore had nothing to recommend it to women, so Bienville petitioned King Louis XV for help in 1721.  The monarch responded by releasing all the prostitutes in La Salpêtrière prison and deporting them to New Orleans, where they of course resumed their trade.  So many of the early female inhabitants of the city were whores that when a priest suggested to one of the first governors of Louisiana that he banish all “disreputable women”, the governor replied, “If I send away all the loose females, there will be no women left here at all.”  In 1728, the Ursuline nuns started to import convent-raised middle-class French girls as wives for the middle and upper-class male colonists and continued to do so until 1751; these were called “casket girls” (filles à la cassette) because the French government issued them small chests of clothing.

Most of the female population were still either whores or former whores, but this concerned few people other than the priests; prostitution in New Orleans was neither regulated nor suppressed at any time during the 18th century.  The colony was ceded to Spain by the Treaty of Paris (1763) and remained Spanish territory until 1801, when Napoleon reclaimed it, then sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803.  Obviously, the puritanical Americans could not allow things to stand as they were, so though prostitution was still legal a series of regulations were imposed to allow the police to arrest streetwalkers for “vagrancy” or harass madams for “brothel keeping”.  Most of these cases were dropped long before trial because the men who owned brothels or rented rooms to streetwalkers wanted their tenants back at work, and paid bribes or hired lawyers to ensure that outcome.  New Orleans’ first actual anti-prostitution law was the 1857 Lorette ordinance which prohibited prostitution on the first floor of buildings; it was soon declared unconstitutional, but the advent of the American Civil War gave the city fathers more important things to worry about.

New Orleans was captured by the Union Navy in May of 1862 and placed under martial law with General Benjamin Butler in command; he was known as “Beast Butler” for his tyrannical orders and “Spoons Butler” for his habit of stealing the silverware of every Southern house he stayed in during the war.  Butler seized $800,000 from the Dutch consulate, imprisoned French and English citizens (including diplomats), arrested clergymen for refusing to pray for President Lincoln, and within days of occupying the city issued his infamous General Order #28, which stated that if any woman should “…show contempt for any officer or soldier of the United States, she shall be regarded and shall be held liable to be treated as a woman of the town plying her avocation”, in other words a prostitute.  This order provoked widespread outcry even in the North and was officially protested by both England and France; it was almost certainly the cause of Butler’s dismissal from the post only seven months later.

Mansions housing expensive brothels on Basin Street, circa 1900

After Butler’s removal the lower-class whores of New Orleans thrived on the business generated by lonely soldiers far from home, and by the end of the war a whole string of brothels had opened along the old Basin Canal; the road which connected them was named Basin Street after the canal, and the brothels there and all over the city continued to thrive during the Reconstruction on the money brought in by the Carpetbaggers, unscrupulous Northern businessmen who flocked to the South to take advantage of its weakened economic condition.  Most of these merchants built their mansions along Nyades Road to the nearby town of Carrolton; the road was renamed St. Charles Avenue and the railway which ran along it was eventually converted to a streetcar line which is still used today.

By 1897 there were brothels all over the city, so Alderman Sidney Story proposed to limit the trade to one district specifically zoned for the purpose.  The district chosen was the Basin Street area where most of the larger and better bordellos had grown up during the Occupation and Reconstruction; specifically, it was the zone bounded by Iberville, Basin, St. Louis, and N. Robertson streets.  Residents simply referred to the area as “The District”; only contemporary newspapers and later historians called it “Storyville” after the official who had proposed it.  The brothels ranged from 50¢ “cribs” (originally a San Francisco term) to mid-range houses charging $1-$5, up to a row of elegant mansions along Basin Street where the girls charged $10, a great deal of money in a day when the average workman earned 22¢/hour.  The most expensive fee was probably that charged by Madame Kate Townsend, who though she had long retired from active whoring would still agree to see an important client if he was willing to pay her exorbitant fee of $50/hour!

A catalog named The Blue Book was published periodically by the wealthier brothels; its title page was inscribed with the motto of the Order of the Garter (honi soit qui mal y pense, “shame to him who evil thinks”) and its interior contained descriptions of each house and its featured girls, a price list and a description of any special services offered.  The most lavish of the mansions was probably the Arlington (named for its owner, Josie Arlington) at 225 Basin Street, described in The Blue Book as “absolutely and unquestionably the most decorative and costly fitted-out sporting palace ever placed before the American public.”  The Arlington was a four-story edifice with a distinctive onion-domed cupola, crammed with expensive paintings and statuary and featuring various parlors decorated in the styles of foreign countries.  Josie Arlington herself was a remarkably ethical woman; in a day when verifiable virgin whores brought a whopping $200 or more and previously-wealthy Creole families who had fallen on hard times often sent their beautiful, cultured daughters to the best brothels, she absolutely refused to allow virgins to be “defiled or exploited” by her business.  In fact, the tomb in which she was originally buried (though her body was later moved to foil curiosity-seekers and the structure was sold to the Morales family) features a bronze figure of a young girl who is thought to symbolize a virgin being turned away from the door of the Arlington.

Black, white and Creole brothels (the latter staffed by beautiful “quadroon” or “octoroon” girls, 1/4 or 1/8 black respectively) coexisted in Storyville, but these were all for white clients; black men were legally barred from hiring any girl in the District.  However, brothels where black girls accepted black clients were tolerated in a separate district nearby; they were technically illegal but neither the police nor the regulators ever harassed them.  And though Jazz did not originate in Storyville as is commonly believed, it was played by musicians in the more expensive houses and was therefore first heard in Storyville by many out-of-town clients, becoming inextricably associated with it in those gentlemen’s minds.  “Jelly Roll” Morton and “Pops” Foster started out as musicians in Storyville brothels, and Louis Armstrong’s mother worked in one of the houses after she was abandoned by his father.

Considering its success and the amount of revenue it brought to the city, Storyville might still exist today if not for the prudery of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, a teetotaler who considered the district as a “bad influence” on the sailors at the nearby Naval base during World War I.  The District was therefore closed by federal order in 1917 over the strong objections of the New Orleans city government and Mayor Martin Behrman, who said “You can make prostitution illegal, but you can’t make it unpopular.”  The closing of the District is dramatized in this scene from the movie New Orleans (1947), in which Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong perform the haunting “Farewell to Storyville”; though most of the working girls were forcibly evicted, new brothels opened in secret both there and in other parts of the city, streetwalkers proliferated and some of the earliest call girls appeared.  Many of the old houses were converted into dance halls, cabarets and restaurants, and after the beginning of Prohibition many speakeasies and gambling dens joined the clandestine brothels.  Frequent police and federal raids failed to hinder operations, so in the early 1930s the city government (at federal urging) bought or seized most of the area and leveled every building (even the beautiful mansions on Basin Street) to make room for the squalid Iberville Housing Project, which remains a blight on the city to this day.  Basin Street was even renamed “North Saratoga”, though the original name was restored by popular demand in the 1950s.

Sadly, the current political establishment in New Orleans prefers to pretend that Storyville never existed; even an historical marker at the site mentions several jazz musicians who were “on the scene here”, but glosses over the industry which employed them with the vague and inaccurate phrase “legalized red light district” (as we have seen, prostitution was not illegal there before so it could not be “legalized”).  Though New Orleans cannot contravene state law, city government is allowed to determine police department policy and could certainly order that prostitution is to be tolerated; instead they play the kind of sleazy games I described in my columns of August 4th, 5th and 6th, and thereby dishonor the memory of thousands of women who helped build the city.

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Genesis of a Harlot (Part Two)

Posted in Biography, Perception, tagged , , , , on July 29, 2010| 8 Comments »

You must be a lost angel
Dressed in your silk lace
Born somewhere between heaven
And hell, I don’t know what place
Yes, I can tell that you’ve cast your spell
The way you hold me, somehow
If this is sin, baby, count me in
I can’t turn back now. – Don Felder, “All of You”

Moralists, male “experts” and neofeminists love to regale anyone who will listen with their “explanations” for the reasons a woman becomes a prostitute, and the hopelessly gullible accept their opinions despite the fact that none of these people have ever practiced prostitution or even bothered to talk to any of us objectively and without prejudice; it’s a little as though every anthropologist who was considered an authority on some African tribe derived his conclusions from seeing a few members of the tribe at a distance and interviewing some of their enemies while completely discounting the testimony of a large number of them who were educated in England.  Some of these ignoramuses state that all prostitutes are poor and/or uneducated and have few if any other options; moralists claim that we are lazy or lacking in proper moral upbringing; neofeminists insist that we are all victims of childhood sexual abuse (whether we remember it or not), and all of these “authorities” agree that the vast majority of us are drug addicts.  The fact that many educated whores have spoken or written about our lives at great length over the past few decades seems to completely elude these twits, who maintain that they know more about us than we do.  I therefore have absolutely no hope that anything I say will be taken seriously by any of these ostriches, but that’s all right because it isn’t for them I’m writing this but rather for the intelligent and open-minded reader who actually bases his opinions on facts rather than on his cherished beliefs.

Undoubtedly, many prostitutes have one or more of the aforementioned problems, but then so do many non-prostitutes (including many members of the groups who pontificate against us).  But a large number of others have none of these problems, and that includes me; I came from a conservative, middle-class Catholic family and am both well-educated and unusually intelligent.  I don’t drink or smoke, have never as much as tried any illegal drug (not even marijuana), and was never touched sexually by anybody until I started voluntarily experimenting with boys when I was 14.  In yesterday’s column I talked about my sexual history up to the end of 8th grade, so if you haven’t read it yet I suggest you do so before continuing with today’s.

In the mid-‘60s my home town was beginning to expand, and several members of my father’s family purchased lots together on a new street; I therefore grew up next door to first cousins on one side, third cousins on the other and a number of cousins by marriage across the street.  My favorite of these cousins (whom I’ll call Jeff after his hero, Thomas Jefferson) was three years older than me and very protective; he taught me to read when I was four and suggested the majority of my reading matter for the next ten years, and it was his pet name for me that I adopted as my stage name when I started dancing and kept throughout my professional career.  I thought he could walk on water and told everyone who could listen that I was going to marry him when we grew up.  I never stopped loving him, but though third-cousin marriage is completely legal in Louisiana our families would never have accepted it because they thought of him as like a brother to me.  And indeed he was; my overprotective mother trusted him and so I got to go places and do things I would not otherwise have been able to do because she did not allow me to date until I was 16, and even then only in groups to chaperoned events.  As I’m sure you have already surmised, however, this didn’t stop me for one minute.  I was a clever, sneaky and fiercely independent little minx who chafed at arbitrary restrictions (come to think of it, I still am) and Jeff encouraged me to think for myself, disdain arguments from authority and accept responsibility for the possible consequences of my actions.  The latter is very important because though he never stopped me from doing what I wanted to do, he insisted that I make only informed decisions and warned me that if I chose foolishly or disregarded his advice he would let me fall flat on my face.  And though he was always there to pick me up afterwards, he never refrained from saying “I told you so” if I deserved it.  I owe him a great deal, and never would have made it through my teens without him.

Jeff started introducing me to his friends soon after I turned 14, and I’m sure that my lifelong preference for older men has something to do with the fact that most of these guys were not only older than me, but mature for their ages.  I reckon they viewed me as a sort of mascot at first, but soon came to like and respect me in my own right.  They all treated me with perfect  chivalry (either by inclination or because of respect for Jeff), and I tagged along on every group outing and therefore got to see lots of movies my mother would never have allowed me to see.  I of course enjoyed all the male attention, and before long was discovering the power of my sexuality.  It certainly wasn’t because of my looks; I was actually quite plain at the time, not blossoming until 16.  But I was one of those girls with a pronounced sexual aura, and coquettishness came naturally to me.  Jeff answered every question about men I could come up with, and I was as eager to learn as he was to teach me; he understood what my mother did not, which was that if I were kept sexually ignorant I would quickly get myself into serious trouble.  He extracted a promise from me that I would not give my virginity away until I was at least 15, and I kept my word to the letter:  My first time was with an 18-year-old university freshman of my own choosing at my 15th birthday party (the parents of the party’s host were out of town, and we went off to a bedroom while Jeff was out picking up some guests who needed transportation).

The guys I knew through Jeff were really the only ones I socialized with, because as I mentioned in my July 22nd column I attended an all-girl Catholic high school in New Orleans; it was a long bus ride back and forth, but worth it since there were no quality schools in our area and I wanted to be out from under my mother’s gaze as much as possible anyhow.  One might think that the nuns would be worse but this was not the case; I felt so much freer in a school where nobody knew my family and I could simply be myself.  My new friends came from all over the area and few of their minds were mired in small-town provincialism, so they accepted my sensuality and tendency to speak my mind; thus encouraged I grew ever bolder except around teachers and other adults, in whose presence I behaved like a perfect, virginal little angel.  After I started socializing with Jeff’s friends in my sophomore year my budding whorishness become more difficult to hide, however; one girlfriend used to tease me by singing “Hot Child in the City” and “Bette Davis Eyes”, and I’ve already told you what my favorite teacher said about Mary Magdalene being my patron saint.  After I became sexually active in my junior year with boys, and in my senior year with one of my girlfriends, I worked harder at hiding it and generally succeeded, though people still perceived my precociousness; as a friend of the family once said, “Maggie was born adult.”

I will still never know how I managed to talk my mother into letting me stay with Jeff the summer after my senior year; I used the excuse that I wanted to learn the area around the University of New Orleans and get a summer job at the neighboring amusement park (alas, in its last year of existence then) in order to make a little pocket money. But convince her I did, and because I had matured into a beauty my sex life took off in earnest once I turned 17 and Jeff replaced his final objections with “just don’t do anything stupid.”  I only stayed in the dorm for two semesters because I had discovered that roommates are an impediment to promiscuity, but by the end of 1984 I was beginning to realize just how difficult it could be for an 18-year-old university student to make ends meet.  Since I had no shortage of suitors I soon hit upon the idea of getting money from them; after all, I reasoned, was there really a difference between a guy spending money to take me someplace nice and his directly giving me the money instead?  I’ve already described the method I used in my column of July 12th so there’s no need to describe it again; suffice to say it worked well but not quite well enough, so I was forced to supplement it with odd jobs.

One of these was near the beginning of 1985, and is important to my story for reasons which shall soon become clear.  An engineer who was a friend of one of my professors had to go out of town on business; his wife, also an engineer, was away as well, but they had been waiting for some time for a contractor to do some work on their house and he had offered to squeeze them in between two long jobs.  The gentleman was willing to trust the contractor in his house but not with his keys, but I came highly recommended so I was offered a house-sitting gig.  All I had to do was open the house at 8 AM, supervise the contractors until they left and close up by 6 PM.  For this I was to be paid $5/hour, 10 hours a day for seven days, or $350 total; not bad for a broke coed in those days.  The contractors got done ahead of schedule, by Friday morning, and the engineer also came home early and arrived about 4 that afternoon.  While I was showing him a few things the contractor had asked me to point out, he kept finding excuses to rub up against me and eventually came right out and propositioned me.

I honestly don’t know what got into me, because without hesitation I said, “Can I stay on the clock?”  He raised an eyebrow and I elaborated, “I was counting on being paid through the weekend.”

“OK, if that’s what you want,” he said, and he was as good as his word.  It took less than an hour, and when he forked over the whole $350 I felt rather proud of myself.  Yes, I had earned most of it by house-sitting, but I had made the last hundred merely by doing what came naturally to me.  I had crossed another invisible line, and though the final step into whoredom was still more than a decade in the future, I was two-thirds of the way there.

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