The Education of a Very Young Madam (24 page)

"Okay," she agreed. "But I can't work until Thursday. I'm already working for Sherry Monday through Wednesday."

"Okay, then. I'll book you for Thursday and Friday. I think I'll put you in Princeton or maybe the Meadowlands. How early can you be there on Thursday?"

"I can be in the Meadowlands any time you want. I can even be there Wednesday night late."

"Are you that close by? Where does Sherry have you on Wednesday?"

"I'm working there, in the Meadowlands. Monday through Wednesday."

"The Meadowlands?"

My territory in New Jersey is a very big deal to me, and I'm very protective of it. It's one of the reasons I set up shop in New Jersey instead of New York, because I knew that I had the best access to clients and that no one could match my service. When I came to New Jersey, the market was wide open, and I basically created the upscale market here from scratch.

I had met Sherry at a club in New York. We knew a lot of the same people and had partied together many times. I considered her a casual friend, so when she and her sister had decided to open up their own agency the year before, I was fine with it. She came to me for advice and I gave it to her, but I also said very specifically that I would help her out as long as she stayed out of my territory. She could have South Jersey because I didn't want to be that spread out, but Princeton, Edison, New Brunswick, Newark, the Meadow-lands, these places belonged to me. And I'd been sending tons of clients her way. Any time one of my guys was heading down to Atlantic City, I hooked him up with her. Not anymore.

"I didn't know that," Angelita said nervously after I explained why I was so upset. "But that's between you guys. I mean, she just told me where to go. I didn't ask to go there. You need to talk to her."

"You understand what I'm saying, though, right?" I said.

"Yeah, I understand, but... "

"Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to book you for the Meadowlands all this week. Do you already have a hotel?"

"Yeah. I'm staying at the Sheraton."

"Okay. When you get there tomorrow, call me. I'm going to put you on my site and send out an e-mail advertising that you'll be there all week. So that way, when Sherry has you just sitting around waiting for your next appointment, I can send you some real work. And I guarantee you'll make more money with me. Way more. Okay?"

"Okay, I guess."

"So you'll call me tomorrow morning?"

"Yeah, okay. But what do I tell Sherry?"

"You don't have to tell her anything. That's between her and me."

"Yeah. It's between the two of you. Okay. I'll call you tomorrow."

The rest of the way home I was pissed. For a minute, I thought I might call Sherry and confront her—I wanted to tell her what I thought of the really stupid thing she'd been doing behind my back—but I knew it was better to just swallow it and not say a thing. I didn't want her to know what I knew. Not yet. When I got home, Justin heard the car pull up and came outside to help me with the groceries.

"You'll never guess what just happened," I said to him.

I told him about Sherry as he looked through the bags to see what I had brought home. "Did you talk to Sherry?" he asked when I'd finished my story.

"No. I don't have to talk to her. She knows better than that. Now not only am I going to take away her girls, starting with Angelita, I'm going to take over her territory—Atlantic City, South Jersey, even Philly, because she goes there sometimes. Remember this morning when I said I wasn't ready to go back to work yet? Well, now I'm motivated. I need to go inside and make a few calls. I've got this girl coming in tonight and another guy I'm juggling who wants to see her now too, and he's willing to wait until whenever, and I need to start booking Angelita for first thing tomorrow because she'll go where the money is. They all go where the money is. Money is the only real loyalty around here. Can you finish taking in the groceries, sweetie?"

"Yeah. I'm hungry. Did you get anything good?"

"Yeah, I got lots of good stuff, but just wait a little bit and I'll make you dinner. I just need a little while to sort some things out first, but I want to make you dinner."

"Okay."

A lot of things changed in my life after that day. That was one of the last good days I remember between Justin and me. It was not long after that that I caught him taking drugs and we broke up. After that day I became super-focused on work for a while too, which is probably why I didn't notice right away that he was acting strangely. He'd been taking pills at the same time that he'd been helping me get off them.

It was also not long after that day that I dismantled my business and went into hiding. During that time I'm sure my clients thought I'd abandoned them or had been arrested. A lot of my girls went on to work for other agencies, and I can't really blame them. That's just the nature of the business.

CHAPTER 14

Girls I Have Known and Loved... or Hated...or Girls Who Have Really Pissed Me Off

Y
ou may be surprised to learn that I'm pretty much against prostitution as a concept. I was brought up to know right from wrong. My adoptive parents may have had their problems, but they believed in your basic middle-class values (or, in their case, upper-middle-class values), and they taught them to me before our family fell apart. It's partially because of them that I believe it's important to be straight with people, to treat them how you want to be treated, to approach life's issues rationally instead of flying off the handle and letting your emotions rule you. These qualities, which may seem common enough to most regular people, make me so different from most of the people who work in this business.

You may also be surprised to hear that I do believe marriage is sacred, maybe even more so because of what happened to my parents' relationship. Since almost all my clients are married, I think that what they are doing is completely and totally morally wrong. But I think lots of things we do are wrong, like smoking, for example, and there are lots of people making money off that habit. I try not to judge people because, obviously, who am I to judge?

But truthfully, I can't stand most of the guys who use the service that pays my rent.

Once in a while I'll get a call from somebody's wife, and that's the worst. It usually happens because the wife suspects her husband is cheating on her, so she looks through his phone records or at the numbers she doesn't recognize stored in his cell phone. Sometimes they track me down through credit card statements. Because I have to keep my guard up, stay calm, protect myself and my client, I usually tell a wife: "I'm sorry, honey, but I don't know anyone by that name. I think you must have the wrong number." Although that's what I tell her, what I really want to say is "Yes, your husband's an asshole, and it's worse than you thought. You're probably thinking I'm his girlfriend, but I'm not. I set your husband up with hookers on a regular basis, sometimes as many as one or two a week. Remember when you thought he had to run to the office last Thanksgiving because of an emergency? Well, he lied. He called me. You should really dump him right now. Pack up your stuff and your kids and leave him today. There's no way you need a dog like that in your life."

Of course, I think the clients are worse than the entertainers— they are the ones who have taken marriage vows after all—but the girls are not totally free from blame. They still shouldn't be sleeping with married men. Obviously, they don't always know who is married and who isn't, and that's definitely not a question they should be asking their clients if they're doing their job right. But still, I think they share some ofthe responsibility. And I do too, for setting it all up.

Now if the guy is single and the girl is single and the girl is doing what she does for the right reasons, then I don't have an issue with taking money for sex. The only problem with that is it usually doesn't happen that way. It usually happens that a girl gets into this business because she's got a nasty drug habit and is desperate for money, or because she's broke (and often a runaway, like Natasha and I were) and desperate for money, or because she hooks up with the wrong guy, who knows how to control her and uses her to make money.

I'd never do what my girls do. It's not so much because I think it's so immoral but more because I just think a person should do more with her life than that. There may not be much wrong with prostitution when it's two consenting adults without risk of collateral damage to wives or kids or whoever, but there's not much to respect about it either. It's like becoming a father: any asshole with a dick can do it, but that doesn't mean they all should.

A lot of my girls accuse me of not having much respect for the women who work for me, and I tell them they're right. That's another reason why I'm not a pimp. I don't bullshit my girls. I tell them in a heartbeat what I really think. In fact, I have more respect for a girl working the street corner than for a girl who works for me, because with a girl on the street, it's just 1—2—3—do your business, give me my money, and get out. And unless she's a junkie or out of her mind, it's done safely, with a condom. In those instances, it's just about sex, but being a GFE escort is about more than that. It's about intimacy or, at least, the illusion of it. The girlfriend experience means the girls kiss, they do oral without. They do use condoms for sex—or, at least, I tell them they're supposed to—but you can still spread things through that level of intimacy. And, obviously, the more intimate you are, the less safe it is for both parties. Honestly, I promote what I think is the worst part of this business because it's the least safe.

I've lost so much respect for women doing this. The truth is, what I do isn't that hard; it just takes some time and discipline to figure it out. If any of the girls who work for me had even half a brain, they'd learn how to market themselves and find their own clients, and then they'd be making a lot more money. But these girls can barely get themselves to work. At least half of them don't even know how to use a computer. It's the nature of the business.

If a girl could do anything else, she probably would. Practically all of them have got something seriously wrong with them—drug habits, shopping habits, boyfriends who treat them like shit. A lot of them are unstable or fucked up in the head. You have to be to do what they do.

Zoe, for example, once went to a salon and got a massage from this really hot guy. The two of them ended up having sex before her appointment was over, and she left him a huge tip for his "services." Then she recommended the guy to a friend who had recently broken up with her boyfriend and needed some action. When the girl approached the masseur about getting more than just a back rub, he was totally offended. "I don't do that," he told her. Zoe's view of the world is so screwed up that she hadn't even realized the guy just liked her and wanted to fuck her. No payment required.

I've truly respected only three girls who've worked for me during the whole time I've been doing this. That's three out of probably hundreds. The first was Angie, who was a college student who worked as an escort to pay her tuition. Unlike most girls, she saved every penny she made, and, boy, was she cheap. She'd wait an hour for my driver to come get her and take her to her hotel rather than take a fifteen-dollar cab. She paid for school that way, and she did other things too, like travel to Europe. She stopped working after a while, and I can only assume she graduated from college and got a better job. She was an entrepreneur at heart, so I'm sure she found something worthwhile to do with herself.

Then there was this girl named Antonia, who still works for me from time to time. She just really enjoys the business and takes it seriously. When clients create their fantasies about the girls they pay for, she's exactly what they think of: some nice, pretty girl who just really loves sex and is uninhibited enough not to feel bad about getting paid for it. Until I met Antonia, I didn't think such a woman existed. (Of course I never tell my clients that. When a guy asks, I just look at him with all the fake sincerity I can manage, and say, "Yeah, baby, they're all nymphomaniacs who just can't get enough.. .every one of them.") Antonia's one in a million, in a billion. She doesn't do it for the wrong reasons. For her this is a life choice. I kind of respect that. Maybe she's hiding some inner demons, but if she is, she has them in check. She's really reliable, and she's a great person.

The third girl was Monique. She had been married, but her husband killed himself. From what she said, he really loved her, he just had problems. He was on medication and had forgotten to take it when he did it. She worked for a while and saved all her money so she could do other things. She was a photographer who came in from Florida to work, but whenever she had spare time she'd go to New York to visit the museums. She also spent half the year in Asia, traveling and taking pictures. She was incredible and really humble too. She showed me some of her work once, and it was really good. She took classes on the side as well. She just did all sorts of things with herself.

Of course, all three of these girls were wildly popular with clients—Angie was the number one earner when she was working—which tells me that they were doing everything and anything. Clients don't rave that much about any girl unless she goes all out, which can obviously be dangerous. I don't know why they were like that. All three of them worked only part-time, so maybe they just wanted to make as much money as they could when they were working. I was always able to book all three of them up with as many appointments as they could handle, and I'm sure they earned some nice tips as well.