Prostitute
by Patrick Timony
Illustration by Mark Reusch
I just found out my friend Gloria is a prostitute.
The other day I took her to an ice cream festival at Boston Common and grilled her about why she was always busy at night. She told me about her second job.
She’s not a street prostitute, with needles hanging out of her arms and violent emptiness in her eyes. She’s an energetic, beautiful 21-year-old with a quick wit and bubbling laugh. And a night job.
She works for one of those escort services you find in the yellow pages. You know, “Large Selection, Discretion Assured.” Before she became a prostitute, she thought they really were just escort services, more like expensive dating agencies than delivery brothels.
During the school year, Gloria goes to Harvard University. She gets good grades, plays classical piano, and involves herself in a long list of clubs and sports. She has no reason to be angry at the world, or desperate for money. Her parents pay her full tuition and provide her with an allowance. But somehow she got involved in exchanging sex for money.
She didn’t slip slowly into a life of prostitution through a whirlpool of drugs and promiscuous sex. “I’ve never even smoked marijuana,” she said when I asked her. “I’ve only had about 10 boyfriends, which made my first week with the escort service pretty educational, sexually… It just sounded like something I wanted to try.”
She sleeps with three or four men a night and gets paid $300. The men aren’t all old and sleazy like you’d expect, she says. Some are young and insatiable. Some are just lonely. They live in all kinds of different neighborhoods and have all kinds of different jobs. “Some of my clients are nine-to-fivers and some are rich and famous. I have some pretty famous clients, some you wouldn’t believe.” Famous or not, they’re all at least rich enough to afford her $160/hour price tag.
The $160 is split three ways: $80 for her, $40 for her driver/bodyguard, and $40 for the agency. For a weekend away with a client, Gloria can make $2000. For a few hours of having sex with another woman, she draws $300. The pay is pretty good for a summer job during college – even if the college is Harvard – but I’m not sure I can bring myself to congratulate her on her earning power.
I heard about the big prostitution sting in Boston last summer, the one where the Emerson student got busted for doing the books. I’m sure the papers would do anything to get their hands on a story like Gloria’s, but she doesn’t seem concerned with her own novelty. She has an innocence about her situation that doesn’t seem to suit her occupation.
The first thing I asked her after she told me about her job was, “Why?” which was a pretty stupid and obvious thing to ask, but she answered me anyway.
“I do it for the money,” she smiled, looking at the ground, and then after a moment added, “And to get back at my father for being over-protective.” She sounded as if she’d gotten the idea from a big psychology textbook, which she probably had.
“And to give me something to write about,” she added again, pausing to think. “My professors tell me writing comes from experience, so I’m getting experience.” She gave me a demure look over her ice cream cone. Her face was smeared with the chocolate fudge of experience.
“I’m tired of living a sheltered campus life and trying to write about the real world. You have to experience things to write passionately about them, so I guess I’m making an experience stockpile.”
“Do you think it’s safe?” I asked, ignoring all the arguments popping into my head.
She said her driver waits outside each house she goes to, in case something goes wrong. As soon as she gets in, she calls her driver on the car phone to let him know she’s in. If she doesn’t call again at the end of the hour, he comes to the door ready to break it down.
“I meant safe because of AIDS,” I said.
“I always use a condom,” she stated with freshly-graduated-from-sex-education class confidence.
She went on to tell me about all the condoms and jellies and paraphernalia she had to buy for her first night on the job. She has a kind of excited-but-disgusted little kid way of talking about sex that makes you want to cry.
She works five nights a week in the summer and interns at a prestigious downtown business during the day. Her co-workers and friends have no idea she leads a double life.
When she complains about work, it’s usually about the intern job, not having sex with four men a night.
“Don’t you get sore?” I asked.
“In the escort service, we swab our wounds with federal reserve notes,” she said, patting her purse as she paid for the ice cream.
Gloria is from an upper middle-class section of northern New Jersey. She was the superstar of her high school graduating class, and the only one to get accepted to Harvard. What happened? The question draws a look of disdain from Gloria. It’s not like she’s a fallen angel she says. She studied some economics in school and the escort service is a business like any other. The people who are involved are filling a demand that has been around since the beginning of time. They’re not monsters or shady criminals. Skid row prostitutes and heroin-pushing pimps are the extreme, she says. As long as the small services keep it discrete and safe, they can operate indefinitely without fear.
“And, for the money, I’m happy to be a part of that little niche in society,” she said as we passed Copley Square. “It’s not a question of good and bad. It’s a question of supply and demand.”
When I asked Gloria how she got started in the business, she said she looked in the yellow pages and called the first escort service she came to. “There’s no such thing as a legitimate escort service,” she said. “All the escort services in the yellow pages are for sex.”
“It’s just a part of society that has to stay hidden,” she said as we neared my workplace. “It’s a victimless crime, but it’s one that people would scream fire and brimstone about if it ever came out of the closet.”
A whole bunch of male, philosophical arguments grew in my head. “If money is so important, then why have the Jesuses and Mother Theresas in history always been poor? The point of life is to spend as much time as possible with the most inspirational people you can find. Prostitution will only put you in contact with the eager, business-like, furtive, skulking, scrambling, squirming portion of the human race that you want to avoid.” If I’d given her any of this abstract bullshit, I would’ve sounded like a filibustering politician, and she’d have fallen asleep on me before she got a chance to run away. But I guess I wasn’t so worried about her running away anymore, now that I knew how she spends her nights. The innocence and promise had gone out of her eyes. It’s not the kind of lifestyle decision you can argue someone out of anyway. So I turned and left her standing by the subway with chocolate still smeared on her face.
