The Education of a Very Young Madam (25 page)

Angie, Antonia, and Monique were definitely exceptions to the rule. I also have a good friend who is one of the top porn stars in the country, and she takes home about $10,000 a week working for anywhere from $1,000 to $1,500 an appointment. She doesn't have a lot of repeat business, but she does have a lot of fans who know her from her movies. She has done over a hundred movies to earn that status, however, and she travels about nine months out of the year marketing herself. She's definitely an exception to the rule-too, but she's never worked for me because she doesn't need someone like me. Not only does she make tons more money per appointment than my girls but she also pockets all the money herself because she knows how to handle her own business.

Most of the girls in this business are total messes. I even have trouble respecting the ones I've become friends with. For example, my friend Nicole, the one who has kids and is supported well enough by her ex, basically works for party money. That alone isn't so bad, I guess, but not long ago I ended up staying at her house so that I could keep her asshole boyfriend from beating the crap out of her. He was at
her
house, destroying all
her
stuff, and she didn't even throw him out. And it's not like she needs him for anything.

While he went off, Nicole got the hell out of there and hung out at the drugstore for a couple of hours, wandering the aisles looking at toothpaste until her boyfriend calmed down. I went and picked her up there and told her I was on her side. Then I brought her home and told him, "Listen, you can't be doing this to her. She's smaller than you and I'm going to defend her. You know I'll shoot you if I have to." He's a friend of mine too, so he knew that I would.

But then, a couple of days later, it happened all over again. He started beating on her and ran her out of her own house. Again, I went to get her, but this time I told her, "If you keep going back to him, then this is your fault too."

She just looked at me and said, "But if I don't go back, he'll take all my G!" Apparently she had left her stash behind, and that was all she really cared about. I told her how sad and pathetic that was. Then I drove her back home like she asked me to.

Zoe too had a pimp for years before she finally got away from him and came here. He not only took all her money and lived off her (she was his only "employee"), he couldn't even take care of himself. She did all the cooking, all the cleaning, even washed all his clothes. If this guy couldn't even manage a clean shirt by himself, what did she need him for? She told me that since she'd been in New Jersey, one of her friends back home had run into the guy and said he was living on the streets. Without her, he was nothing, and she could never see it.

Zoe has had a self-esteem problem for as long as I've known her. She even worries about what the clients think of her, even the ones who are one-time customers that she'll never see again. She had this one client not long ago who was unbelievable. Even I could barely stand to listen to her tell the story after all I've seen and heard over the years.

We had been traveling as part of the circuit we had set up for ourselves, so we were out of the area where most of our clients live. To see what we could get, I had put up an ad for her on some of the local sites, including Craigslist, which was probably a mistake. Anyone can find you on Craigslist, including the cops, but we figured it was a one-time thing and we could probably get away with it. We got some responses right away and booked a few appointments for her in a different hotel than the one we were staying at so we could at least be somewhat safe. The clients would all be first-timers she didn't know, but she didn't seem to mind. She did that kind of thing all the time when she worked for her pimp in Montreal.

Everything was fine until she got to her last appointment of the day. As soon as she saw the guy, she knew she was going to have a problem. The guy was old—she figured he was at least seventy by the look of him—but he wasn't just old, he was sick. He said he had Parkinson's disease, and she believed him because his hands shook the whole time. And he wasn't just sick, he had hurt himself. He said it was a golfing accident, whatever that is, and he had bandages all along the right side of his body, on his hip and on his ribs. She said you could see the pus and blood oozing through them. When she was telling me about it, I had to stop her right there. That was all the detail I could stand.

When Zoe first opened the door, she wasn't sure what to do with him, so she asked if he'd mind taking a shower. He kind of smelled, and that was
before
he had gotten all his clothes off. But he said he couldn't. He wasn't supposed to get his wounds wet. Doctor's orders. That's when she should have said, "Sorry, I just can't help you."

Just because you're a working girl doesn't mean you don't have the right to set some standards. But Zoe, she's always had a people-pleasing problem. When she told me she had never sent a guy away before for any reason, my jaw nearly hit the floor.
"Why not?"
I asked her. "Because I just don't like doing that to people," she said. Is she afraid she's going to hurt their feelings? I just don't get why she cares.

But that's not my problem. My problem was that when I called Zoe to tell her the hour was up, the guy got upset. He said he needed more time. He hadn't managed to cum yet, which Zoe was thanking her lucky stars about. She said later that if she had seen him cum, she would have lost her lunch right then and there. He threatened to get on the review boards as soon as he got home and write scathing reviews of both Zoe and our agency. He said he was going to let everyone know that we ripped people off and took advantage of a poor old guy.

Since I wasn't there, Zoe had to handle the situation, but I talked her through it. She told the guy that if he was a regular hobbyist who posted often on the review boards, then he should know that if there is one hard-and-fast rule in this business, it's that an hour is an hour, no exceptions. "Most girls would have helped me," he complained. "They would have helped me get out of my clothes and get cleaned up so that it wouldn't take so long."

Zoe wasn't taking that, and I was proud of her for sticking up for herself. "Did it ever occur to you that some people are uncomfortable with all this?" she shot back. "I've been nothing but nice to you and I've tried my best, but I can only do so much!"

You'd think someone like him with all the problems he had would have learned to be a lot nicer to people to get what he wants. I mean, he was in no position to be demanding. He finally did leave, unsatisfied, and I don't think he ever posted a bad review. I never saw one anyway. But even if he had, it wouldn't have been the end of the world. If he had gone through with it, we would have offered a few deals to regular clients in exchange for rave reviews to counter his complaint. If a customer sees one low rating among a whole bunch of perfect tens, he's going to know that that one was a fluke. That guy was definitely not the kind of customer we'd ever want coming back, so fuck him.

It all worked out in the end, but I couldn't believe Zoe had so little self-respect. She should have sent the guy home in the beginning, before things had gotten that far. But she's an equal opportunity ho and proud of it. I just don't think that anyone needs a few hundred bucks that badly. No one needs some G that badly either, but that didn't stop Nicole. She and I were friends until I had to fire her because she had done so much GHB and meth that she defecated in the bathtub of her hotel room and then passed out on the floor, where her next client found her. She left me no choice. All I know is that I don't need anything that badly. And I'm proud of that.

These girls make sick money, disgusting amounts of money, so that's not their problem. The problem with most of them is that they just throw it away so they're never building anything, never working toward anything, never doing anything at all to better themselves or their situations. It's just day-to-day with them. They think they're going to be young forever, but they're not. They can't all be like Nicole and a couple other girls I know who were still working for good money in their forties. Even Nicole probably won't last much longer, not the way she's going anyway. If the girls are lucky enough to live past their prime, then what are their options? End up with some asshole husband who pushes them around? Or maybe work some shitty minimum-wage job at a diner or something? They don't have many options, but they also don't think about alternatives as much as they should.

So do I respect them? Definitely not. Why would I?

Do I feel sorry for them? Sometimes, but not for long. At least I try not to. We all make our own choices, and we are all responsible for our own lives and for what we become.

Epilogue

Sometimes I think that the universe has its own rules and that it has ways of making you follow them whether you want to or not. Things were going pretty well for me until recently. Zoe and I had grown closer and closer. We actually became really good friends. We took care ofeach other, and I gradually came to trust her enough to make her more than just a supporting player, almost a real partner in my business. We lived together, worked together, traveled together, played together. It was better than any relationship with a guy I've ever had.

But, no matter what I do, life always seems to fall back into the same patterns. It's like the universe doesn't want me to be too happy or too stable for too long. I'm not working at the moment. Will I start up again, maybe somewhere new? I'm not really sure. Things are a bit hot to start working again right away, especially on my old turf, but eventually I'm going to need money. And when that happens, what else am I going to do?

After that call to Zoe's hotel room in Boston, when Officer Dan answered the phone instead of her, I lost track of Zoe. I know she got busted, and I tried to find a lawyer for her, or at least someone who would check on her while she was in jail, but no one wanted to get involved, especially since I had shut down my business and didn't have access to much money. I should have left some stashed somewhere besides our room, like I usually do, but I had gotten sloppy since we were doing so well, and I never got around to it. I know they got her on a weapons charge at the very least. The gun I'd left in the room was unregistered and had been bought illegally. I don't know whether they got her on a prostitution charge too, but I wouldn't be surprised. Either way, she was in the country illegally, so she had to be facing deportation in addition to everything else.

It was just a few months before that we had our own little family going. Then Melissa went back to her mom, Nicole went off the deep end, and now Zoe's gone too. And I'm on my own again.

Sometimes I really want to get out of this business, but as soon as I have that thought, I have another one: What else can I do? I've accomplished plenty in my life, not the least of which is the fact that I'm still alive, which puts me ahead of many of the girls I met and lived with in the various youth hostels, group homes, and state facilities in Maine when I was a teenager. So what's a girl who comes from places like that, a girl with an eighth-grade education, supposed to do? How's a girl who wants to make something of her life and doesn't want to rely on some guy to do it supposed to make it in this world without people walking all over her?

"Get out of the business," you might say. I've had a lot of boyfriends tell me that over the years. But then what? Suppose I swear off the sex business forever. Then what?

My story is obviously not over yet, and I don't know if I will get a happy ending. Or even if I deserve one. Some days I think I have a chance, but others.. .Well, the outlook isn't so good. The one thing I can say is that when I first went out into the world on my own, I was really young. You may think a girl of thirteen doesn't know a thing, but I knew even then that my ultimate goals were going to be respect and success.

I think I have achieved those goals to some degree. Today I am somewhere safe from violence and danger, and that's a long way away from where I started out. That sense of security is something

I created entirely for myself, and even though my life can be difficult and hectic most days, I still seem to find reasons to smile pretty often. I can't ask for more than that, and if there is one thing that I would like girls like me to take from my story, it's this: Be strong and survive. No matter what.

194

Appendix

So You Want to Be a Call Girl?

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE EMPLOYEE HANDBOOK

Girlfriend Experience was founded in New Jersey in June 2002. Since then, our service has grown to become one of the most reputable and sought-out in all of the Northeast. Our rapid success has been accomplished through honesty, reliability, and exceptional customer service. Here at GFE we value our customers and go the extra mile to show our appreciation by offering them the individual care and attention they deserve. We cater only to an upscale clientele that has been screened to ensure the highest level of safety, and our models are individually selected for beauty, class, and tenderness. Our reputation has brought us to new heights of success; maintaining this reputation demands excellence, patience, hard work, and motivation from everyone involved. Girlfriend Experience would like to open our arms and welcome you to our team.

Travel and Accommodations

•    Models are responsible for all their own travel arrangements. Before you book your travel, however, your schedule must be approved by GFE.

•    Accommodations are provided in reputable, upscale hotels.