Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Read online

  Callgirl

  Callgirl

  Confessions of Double Life JEANNETTE ANGELL

  Schwartz Publishing

  Level 5, 289 Flinders Lane

  Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia

  [email protected]

  www.schwartzpublishing.com

  © Jeannette Angell 2008

  First Australian edition published 2005

  Originally published in the United States

  by The Permanent Press 2004

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Angell, Jeannette L.

  Callgirl : confessions of a double life.

  2nd ed.

  ISBN 9781863951517 (pbk.).

  1. Angell, Jeannette L. 2. Novelists, American - 20th

  century - Biography. 3. Women college teachers - United

  States - Biography. 4. Prostitutes - United States -

  Biography. 5. Prostitution - Massachusetts - Boston.

  6. Boston (Mass.) - Social conditions. I. Title.

  813.54

  Printed in Australia by Griffin Press

  Contents

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Introduction

  People ask so many questions about it. You did that? You’re kidding, right? How did you start? What’s it really like? What kinds of people use the service? What kind of girls work for it?

  Men, especially, are utterly fascinated by the subject. They want to talk about it, they ask the same questions over and over, they can’t get enough information. It’s like getting a glimpse into some mysterious semi-forbidden world, a world caricatured by pornography and attacked by conservatives and speculated about by just about everybody. Men get a vicarious sexual frisson thinking about it. Women wonder what it would be like to have someone pay – and pay well – for something they routinely give away for another kind of currency.

  And, inescapably, people look at me and get a little scared. I could be – I am – one of them. I am their sister, their neighbor, their girlfriend. I’m nobody’s idea of what a whore looks like. Maybe that’s why I’m scary.

  They want callgirls to be different, identifiable. That keeps them safe.

  But the reality, of course, is that usually we’re not. Oh, the girls on the streets at night, yeah, with them, you know. But to be honest, those girls scare the shit out of me. I was out one night with Peach and we locked the car doors when we drove past them, and we’re supposedly in the same business. The truth is, we have nothing in common.

  But callgirls – women who work for escort services, especially expensive ones, especially those run by other women – we don’t look any different than anyone else. Not even always prettier. So we’re scary: because, you know, we could be you, too.

  Maybe we are.

  *

  I hate using literature to refer to television, but I have to here. These days I regularly watch a program called The West Wing, an intelligent, witty, politically-aware and humanely sensitive weekly drama. I’m impressed with the characters, with their thoughtfulness and their dedication.

  Yet in an early episode, a character articulates to a callgirl the same assumptions that appear to be virtually universal: that she has no ethics to speak of, that she would do anything for money, that she, essentially, is her profession. And that her profession is nothing to be proud of.

  Who else among us would tolerate such an assumption?

  Please hear this. Callgirls have ethics. We make decisions like everybody else does, based on our own religious and/or moral convictions. We are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists, and Libertarians. Some of us are kind to small animals. We are neither sex-obsessed nor nymphomaniacal. We have relationships, we build trust, and we keep secrets. We are daughters, sisters, and mothers; we are wives.

  The reality is that men need us. And they don’t want to need us. So they blame us for it. It’s why Muslim women have to be hidden from men – it’s their fault, apparently, that the men feel tempted by them. It’s why “hookers” are amoral – because their job is to cater to that which is amoral in all of us.

  So – try to put all of that aside. All your assumptions, all your conditioning. For just a little while, free yourself of your guilt, your prejudices, your judgments. Then you can hear my story.

  *

  In 1995 I had just received my doctorate in social anthropology and was anticipating full-time, tenure-track employment at some recognized institution of higher learning. What I got, instead, was a series of lecturer positions, because most universities were no longer offering professorships, or offering very few. It was, after all, the nineties, and grants and other resources weren’t stretching as far as they once had. I was willing to keep at it, however, because it was my chosen profession. It was my vocation.

  When I started working for an escort service I was teaching classes on a semester-by-semester basis, being paid – at the end of the semester – the less-than-princely sum (before taxes) of thirteen hundred dollars per class.

  The woman I have called Peach ran an agency that could be considered a mid-level escort service. Let’s see: how can I explain it? She didn’t get the rock stars when they came to town, but she did get their entourages. She got people who owned companies, but not necessarily companies anyone had ever heard of. She got people with condos at the Four Seasons, but not at the old Custom House. She never got clients who wanted a quick blowjob in the car; but she also rarely got the clients who wanted to take the girl to the Bahamas with them for a week, either.

  Peach ran ads looking for employees, and hers stood out from others in that she required a minimum of some college education. The fact is that she helped pay off a whole lot of graduate student loans. She had a specialty niche: she did well with clients who wanted intelligent conversation along with their sex. She inspired loyalty in both her callgirls and her clients, and she tried to be fair to everyone.

  Her clients were university faculty, stockbrokers, and lawyers. They were underworld characters who offered to “fix” problems for her and computer geeks who couldn’t tell a C-cup from a C-drive. They owned restaurants, nightclubs, and health spas. They were handicapped, busy, socially inept, about to be married. They saw girls in offices, restaurants, boats, and their own marriage beds, in seedy motels in strip malls and at suites in the Park Plaza Hotel. They were the most invisible, unremarkable group of men in Boston, having in common only that they could afford to spend two hundred dollars for an hour of company.

  They used the time for which they paid in a variety of ways, and that is my usual response when someone – and someone will, inevitably, in any conversation about the profession – says something
judgmental about the perceived degradation of exchanging sex for money. Because, in my experience, that doesn’t make sense.

  You think I’m just manipulating semantics here, don’t you? I’m not: hear me out, and you’ll see that it’s not mere spin. Many people in a number of professions are paid by the hour, right? Employers hire consultants, for example, on the basis of certain areas of expertise that the consultant can offer, and that the employer wants to have, use, leverage, whatever. The employer – or client – pays for the consultant’s time by the hour. The consultant performs certain pre-arranged and mutually agreed-upon tasks for the client during that time.

  The consultant is using his expertise and experience to create something for the client; he is not “selling” his expertise. He is a skilled professional possessing an area of knowledge for which there is a demand and for which the client is willing to pay a pre-determined rate per hour. What he is selling, in point of fact, is his time. He keeps the expertise; the client keeps the product; but the hours put into the project are gone.

  A callgirl is a consultant, using her expertise and experience in seduction and giving pleasure to fulfill a verbal contract with a client who is paying her by the hour to complete an agreed-upon project. She is a skilled professional possessing an area of knowledge for which there is a demand, and for which the client is willing to pay her a pre-determined rate per hour. She is using her expertise and experience to create something for the client; she is not “selling” her expertise, or the tools that she uses to implement her work.

  If there’s such a gulf between these two people, if there is more degradation in one than in the other, I’d like to have you explain it to me, because frankly I don’t see it.

  I have women friends who are waitstaff, waitstaff in so-called sophisticated restaurants on Newbury Street and Columbus Avenue and on the waterfront, and I’m sorry, but I would never put up with what they have to endure every night. Not for any amount of money.

  Speaking of the money, it’s a pretty good hourly rate. Remember that what we get, we don’t have to share with anybody – no state or federal tax, no social security. I take that back: it’s a damned good hourly rate.

  Occasionally there is no sex. Lonely men sometimes are just looking for company, for someone to listen to them: that’s worth the fee. I remember an early scene in Frankie and Johnny, when Al Pacino, newly released from prison, hires a woman to “spoon” with him – allow him to fall asleep curled into the curve of her body, her arms around him. I always found that scene incredibly touching.

  Some clients use the time for public appearances at restaurants or concerts, either because they genuinely want company for these activities, or because they want to show off their ability to date a pretty girl. Some clients mistake us for therapists and use the time to talk, to have someone listen to them, to their problems, to their emptiness.

  However, the reality is that most clients do want sex. Some want 8 it quickly and efficiently, after which the girl is free to go; others want it as part of a date-like interlude and argue if they think they’ve received a minute less than they paid for. And there’s every imaginable situation in between.

  *

  I’ve changed all the names in this book, except my own, for a number of reasons that I’m sure you can appreciate. But it’s not-make-believe. These people are real. I am real. This all happened,in Boston, in the mid to late nineties. Promise.

  So… are you one of the curious, the inquiring minds who want to know? Do you want to know what we think, how we feel, who we are?

  Then welcome to my world.

  Chapter One

  “Mind the gap… Mind the gap!” I was standing on a subway platform in London, in the Underground, listening to a disembodied voice telling me in the tones of a not-too-friendly nanny to watch my step. I appreciated the concern, if not its delivery.

  So I stood there dutifully minding the gap, and I thought about the newspaper advertisement folded into the shoulder bag I carried. It felt conspicuous, as though everyone else on the train platform could tell exactly what was in there, and what it said.

  I had picked up the Phoenix just before leaving Boston, on an impulse that wasn’t really an impulse but was disguised as one anyway. My impulses usually are. I was in London for a week, lecturing at the London School of Economics, and my mind wasn’t exactly on my work.

  It should have been, of course. It was an honor and a privilege to be here, and my professional life shouldn’t be impacted just because I was having problems in my personal life. But that’s the way that it always works, isn’t it? You think you can separate it all out, put your life into neat little compartments where nothing over-9 laps with anything else. You think that, and you’re wrong.

  My personal life was screaming for attention. Loudly. I needed money. I needed a lot of money, and I needed it quickly.

  I needed the money because Peter, my most recent boyfriend, had not only decided to fly to San Francisco to meet up with some ex (whom he had been fucking behind my back the whole time we were together, as it turned out), but had also emptied my checking account before leaving. A prince among men.

  Rent was due. The decimated bank account had held all the money I had to live on until the end of the semester. That was when the two community colleges where I taught sociology elective classes would be paying me. I had to live within those parameters, with budgets planned well in advance and no extra or surprise expenses allowed.

  Peter’s desertion decidedly qualified as a surprise expense.

  In any case, the end of the semester was two months off. Which was why I needed a lot of cash.

  I dealt with the crisis in my usual way. I spent one night getting very drunk and feeling very sorry for myself, and I got up the next morning, did what I could to deal with my hangover, and made a list. I love lists, I always have. Lists give me the illusion of being in control. I listed every possible way I could get the money I needed.

  It was a depressingly short list.

  The one thing I was not going to do was ask for assistance in any way. Not from my family and not from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. I had been the one to make the bad judgment call, it made no sense to ask anyone else to pay for my mistakes. So even though I had written down the words “government assistance” on my list, I ignored them and moved on.

  I frowned at the remaining items, crossed off “childcare,” both since I’m really incompetent with children and also the pay was too low to make much of a difference, and frowned again at what was left.

  I was going to have to try one of these options. I didn’t have a lot of choices left. I took a deep breath, and I went to work.

  I called a number I had found in some campus newspaper, BU or Northeastern or something, the ubiquitous one we’ve all seen, the one that is looking for people to sit in cubicles and respond to 900 calls. Talk sex, convince them that you’re hot for them, that sort of thing.

  Well, the rat bastard boyfriend had told me that I had a sexy voice, so I figured it was worth a try. I’d only do it this once, of course.

  I clearly hadn’t given the idea enough thought, because I was totally unprepared for the sleaziness of my interview. I hadn’t imagined ahead of time the really scary visuals: the rows of tiny cubicles, with women sitting in them wearing headsets and talking; they never stopped talking. Lights were flashing on their phones. Mostly they were middle-aged, with sagging flesh and garish makeup and an air of indifference that might have been cruel if it hadn’t felt so hopeless.

  And I hadn’t visualized the way-too-young greasy guy with way too many piercings who never even looked at me as he squeezed words out past a toothpick sticking to his lower lip. His eyes didn’t leave the skin magazine he was thumbing through. “Okay, honey. Eight bucks an hour, two calls minimum.”

  “What does that mean, two calls minimum? Two calls an hour?”

  That earned me a glance. I couldn’t tell if it was amusement or pity. “Two calls minimum a
t a time.”

  I stared at him. “You mean keep two different people on the phone…?”

  “Yeah, that’s right.” He sounded bored beyond belief. “If one of ‘em wants you to be a Ukrainian gymnast and the other wants you to be a tattooed lesbian, you go with it. Time’s money. Want the job?”

  I was still stuck imagining the reactions of the clients when you got them mixed up. It was indescribable. Sure. For eight dollars an hour. This could happen.

  So I gave up, tore up the list, and panicked again for a while about the money thing. The bills kept coming in, as they have a habit of doing: time stops for no bankruptcy. I could read the official-looking print through the rusted gap in my mailbox: computer-generated, thin envelopes. Some had a strip of red around the edges. No need to open them. I knew what they said.

  Suitably enough, one of the classes I was teaching was a sociology elective called On Death and Dying. Suitably, of course, because I was accompanying it with such dark thoughts. I would break the class into discussion groups and stare over their heads out the window and feel that cold claw of fear somewhere in my stomach. One of those weeks we talked about suicide.

  It didn’t sound like such an impossible option.

  And then, slowly at first, my thoughts kept going back to the newspaper. I sometimes looked in the After Dark section of the Phoenix, even after I decided that I couldn’t possibly be both a Ukrainian gymnast and a tattooed lesbian, and I wasn’t stopping anymore at the 900 number ads.

  The next pages, the ones after the telephone lines, were for the escort services.

  I’d look, and then I’d shut the paper and let my cat Scuzzy sleep on it while I pretended that it wasn’t there, and corrected student essays instead. And yet… and yet.

  Why not?

  Was it such an impossible idea? Did I really want to add an extra fifty hours a week to my schedule, working at a Borders bookstore or a Starbucks coffeehouse for just over minimum wage? Those were the next options on the list, after all. I’d even interviewed. Borders said I could start any time.