Working Sex (11 page)

She was so arrogant and could never stop talking. It was so annoying. Maybe her diarrhea mouth is part of the reason she can’t get a real date, I thought to myself. I was fake listening, sometimes wandering with my eyes by accident, watching my hand on her knee, seeing my own legs, my heels hooked on the bottom wrung of my barstool. There was something so strange that always happened the minute Chris arrived. I’d feel fine all day and then we’d meet up and I’d die a little. Not die exactly. Float in and out of myself like I was on mushrooms when I wasn’t.

When we got to her loft I just let her have it. She said “Tiiimmm-berrrrrr!” and laughed like she was so funny, as she pushed me from standing, face down onto the bed. It was rude and not funny but I didn’t care. It would be easy this way. My chest against the bed instead of her. The radio was on quietly, and she’d lit a few candles while I was in the bathroom as if it would mean something. But the radio and the flames blurred and then floated away. I was sinking now, like a submarine, right into the mattress. It didn’t matter what she was doing, what she was whispering to me, what I was whispering back. I was so far under water now. The blankets and pillows pulling me down like a net. My eyes closed and webs of light, like drops of paint hitting a window, would
flash across my eyelids. But if I tried to focus on one, it would disappear and a spot out of clear view, to the right or left, would break open with light. And then further back from my eyes I could see the front of an aluminum boat moving gently backwards on top of the water, moving in a rocking motion. And the light was bouncing off the water and the boat so that everything would go white for a moment and then return into view. I pushed my hands down, felt the hot-ridged metal of the bench I was on. I felt my bare feet in a little puddle at the bottom of the boat, warm from the sun, and then I turned around, looking behind me. There sat my grandmother. My grandmother with a firm grasp of the oars, lifting them dripping out of the water, leaning forward and then dipping them down, again and again. This motion over and over and the light bouncing. I looked at her arms, how strong she was, and then down to her legs, free from the braces and brand new. Her legs and feet uncurled, sturdy and muscular. Then I saw her face. Her soft face, and her eyes, big and shiny, and her eyebrows smooth, not wanting anything from me. I worried for a moment that she might be angry, that somehow she must have known what I was doing with Chris, but if she did, she didn’t show it. She just looked at me with all this soft love, like she was trying to row towards me even though I was there in the boat with her. The oars lifting, dripping from the water, then dipping down to pull again.

B
orn to working class parents in 1960, I was taught the value of a dollar early on. I never had an allowance and considered children who did to be strange creatures from another world. In my family, everyone did their share and worked hard with their hands. One never expected to get paid for doing one’s chores. My father had little use for formal education. He only went as far as the eighth grade and even seemed to possess a certain amount of contempt for book learning. On more than one occasion, he slammed my textbook shut with the following proclamation: “Put that away, I have some
real
work
for you to do!” “Real work” was without fail something that would put sweat upon my brow: raking, hoeing, hammering, hauling heavy objects, etc. My childhood was this constant struggle between my simple roots and the more educated future I dreamed of. On the day I was moving out of my parent’s home and into a college dormitory, my father took me aside for a father-daughter talk. He implored me to forget this silly notion of getting a college diploma and stay at home with him and my mother. He promised me that the education would be a waste of time and Uncle Sam’s money (I was the recipient of government grants due to our family’s low-income status). Since I was destined to marry and have children by the time I was twenty-one, I certainly didn’t need an education in order to be a proper wife and mother.

My father’s speech was ill-timed. The year was 1978 and the feminist movement was in full swing. I knew I did not want to be a wife or a mother. I wanted a career. I wasn’t sure what I wanted a career in, but I felt certain a college education would help me get there. I majored in psychology with a minor in business administration. Much to my chagrin, there were many female students in the liberal arts school who joked that they were getting their “MRS degree.” I bristled at the thought. I took my education and eventual career seriously. Maybe I would get a master’s and become a
counselor. Maybe I would take my bachelor of science degree into the business world and climb my way to the top of some corporate ladder. What mattered most to me was making it in a “man’s world.”

Upon graduation, I set about doing just that. I secured a desk job at a small telecommunications firm with the intention of working my way up. I took a myriad of on-the-job classes in everything from customer service to the installation and repair of small electronic-key phone systems. When my supervisor was fired, his phones, paperwork, and technicians were rerouted to my desk. I was in charge of everything except signing the technicians’ checks. Department revenue went up considerably while I was running the department. I was elated. Surely a promotion would be forthcoming. But my reward for doing two jobs at once without a pay increase was getting to train my new supervisor. I had to tell him everything. He spent more time at my desk asking me silly questions than he did at his desk doing his job. After this humiliating experience, I surmised that my climb to the top was going to have one major obstacle: my gender.

Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t give up that easily. I struggled for another six years. When that job didn’t lead to success, I tried another company, another position, more classes. . . . My last straight job was in 1988 as a marketing representative for a radio station. My boss would assign me
accounts with the following admonition: “You take this account, Veronica, he likes a good-looking pair of legs.” I hoped my sheepish smile would not give away my mixed emotions of being complimented and insulted simultaneously. My efforts to land these accounts usually ended with the potential client admitting he never intended to buy advertising time with my station; he just hoped he could talk me into going out with him. And then I remembered a rule of business from college: Never define the product for the market—let the market define the product. Maybe I was selling the wrong product. If my clients wanted me, why not give it to them? And instead of only making 10 percent commission, I could take 100 percent.

This brainstorm hit me at the same time I was dating a male stripper and a female prostitute. I doubt I would have ever made that leap in judgment had it not been for the fact that I knew real people in the sex industry, and they were people that I liked. I asked my girlfriend to teach me her profession. There was a lot to learn despite popular jokes to the contrary, and I employed almost everything I learned in college to become a successful prostitute. My mentor taught me to do things the way she had. I got a business license and began paying quarterly taxes right from the start. I learned to screen calls so I only did business with suitable clients and I learned to use latex barriers properly to protect my health.

My new career was so much more honest than the corporate world I left behind. At first I thought I was trading in sexual harassment and gender discrimination for sexual objectification that paid extremely well. The men I saw as a prostitute were no better and no worse than the men I worked for and with as a senior customer service coordinator or marketing representative. Now instead of enduring on-the-job sexual innuendo for a meager paycheck, I was paid more in one day than I used to make in a week. The sex was honest and straightforward. The money was cash up front. My pragmatism made prostitution an attractive choice.

What I did not know in 1989 when I began my career in prostitution is that it would blossom in a way that would eclipse my expectations for any career, let alone one in the sex industry. Eventually, I worked my way up from prostitution by the hour to high-end escorting and finally to being a courtesan. My clients would be some of the world’s most gifted, accomplished, intelligent, and wealthy men in the world. Their generosity of spirit would touch my life in ways far more meaningful than their money. And my initial animosity toward men would be transformed to a healthy capacity for empathy and understanding that all genders are struggling against a system that demands conformity to proscribed gender roles.

I also discovered that my clients, for whatever reason, were more prone to worship women than objectify them. In the beginning, I attracted plenty of men who objectified me but as my career progressed, those superficial souls disappeared and I only shared time with substantial individuals who longed to service the goddess incarnate. They probably would not choose those words, but nevertheless their actions expressed this sentiment. I have been showered with love and gifts and money. But what has touched me the most has been the degree of vulnerability my clients have shown me. Whether grieving the death of a family member, dealing with a physical disablement or disfigurement, struggling with major life decisions or facing their own mortality, I have been honored to share the most private of thoughts and emotions. And that has lent a depth of fulfillment to my career in the sex industry that I never ever hoped for as I charted my corporate career.

I am often asked if there was ever a negative side to my life as a sex worker. Of course there was. The most difficult part of being a sex worker is dealing with society’s stigma and legal sanctions. I was arrested once. That was a degrading experience, which is ironic since law enforcement claims to be attempting to “save” women like me from degradation. My arrest led to my eviction from my apartment because the laws are written so that landlords are implicated as felons
unless they evict a woman accused (not convicted) of prostitution. Some so-called friends dropped me from their list of people to invite to their dinner parties. I have been accused of being the daughter of Satan by religious fanatics. Et cetera. In other words, the work is better than other work I have been paid for. But the hatred of society is hard to deal with and so most people don’t.

Early in 2004, I announced my retirement from prostitution. I have a benefactor or two who will no doubt remain my friends forever. But my career aspirations are now turning to that of being an author. I can only hope that writing will be as fulfilling and fun as my fourteen years in the sex industry.

It was a regular office in an early-20th-century house in a Midwest college town, with block glass on the windows so neighbors couldn’t see in, where the copier creaked out slow copies and ran low on toner and where we had smoke breaks out in the back and listened to the traffic on the main road.

“He had me going for an hour,” Lola would say, and drag on her menthol cigarette while inside Tyler was explaining a particular foot fetish to the New Girl while keeping the customer on hold.

“Only tennis socks, only tennis socks or he’ll get upset!” she said and pressed the button. Lola and I walked back in through the corridors and back to our respective cubes.

It was 3 AM, I pressed the button on my phone and Alexis roared back to life from inside me as my phone rang and I answered with a high-pitched, “Hello, honey, thanks for calling the Campus Sluts!” trying to mask Melanie shouting, “Take it, bitch!” to her client from the next cube. I had a credit card to run and a cheerleader call to do. It was another night at the office, another night at the Campus Sluts. We had our traditions and like sorority songs or pep rallies, they stay and stay.

“So, we all have a gym.”

“What?” I said.

This was the story that we were supposed to feed prospective clients at the phone sex office, the ones who asked us how a bunch of horny college girls at the Large Midwestern University (all 18-23 with measurements that would make Playboy swoon and we all said the girl in the college issue worked with us anyway) got into the phone-sex business, if they even bothered to ask at all. Management never remembered to tell all of the girls so we’d adapt when we heard it. Apparently, in a story of secret, sexy origins, it started with a health club that some seniors at Large Midwestern started (we never said the name
of the school, but let them wonder and draw conclusions even though most of our relations to the school were just hearing the roars from the stadium on game day). According to the story, the rent couldn’t be paid on the gym so the phone-sex business started in the back. This meant that in between laps on the StairMaster and trips to the shower, we could take calls and in a hybrid of wanking and philanthropy, the client would save our gym, relieve our sexual tension, and in doing so contribute to our education at Large Midwestern. It also explained our predilection for hanging out together, presumably when we weren’t all attending the same orgies.

So, we worked out together and if they “guessed” the name of Large Midwestern, we’d just giggle. It made them feel smart. Some used the gym story in addition to the college, some didn’t; Lexus always liked to say she’d just gotten out of the shower, the water dripping down her long, lithe body, off her 5′9″ frame and B-cup tits. She’d smile at us over the phone mouthpiece, her grey hair glinting yellowy in the overhead fluorescent lighting. It came in handy if I had been running for the phone from getting my bag meal at the fridge, breath heaving and heavy.

“Ooooh, it’s the StairMaster!” I’d say, settling into the office chair with the broken wheel. “I was just getting warmed up, baby. . . . I hooked up with the cutest girl here one day . . . did I mention she was one of those wild art major girls?”