Skipping Towards Gomorrah (39 page)

“He's probably spending the last of his stock options to take someone like you out on a date.” Then he handed Emily his card. “Give me a call if things don't work out with the Microsofty here.”

He stared at me when he called me a softy, smiling his big gummy smile. I think he wanted me to hit him. His gummy smile said, “I'm picking up on your date right in front of you, and what are you going to do about it?” He was clearly an alpha-male type, and I suppose he expected me to challenge him for alpha position, which I refused to do. I like to think of myself as an alpha male—all men do, don't they?—but I wasn't up for getting into a fistfight over a
woman
. Now, if he had attempted to steal my collection of show tune CDs, well, then I would've laid him flat. But Emily? He could take her off my hands for fifteen hundred bucks.

Jim lingered for a second, looking at me. I grinned at him, playing dumb. If he wanted to have a fistfight, he would have to throw the first punch. He gave me an angry, imploring look. It was as if he thought I was doing something wrong by not holding up my end of the deal. He seemed to think I was obligated to hit him so that he could hit me and win the girl.

“Let's go get something to eat,” Emily said, taking my hand. Turning to Jim, she said, “It was great to meet you.”

“Give me a call sometime,” Jim said to Emily. “See you around, softy.”

 

E
mily had made reservations at a restaurant a block from the hotel.

“It's my favorite restaurant,” she said. “I'm sure you'll love it.”

Emily's favorite restaurant was also one of New York City's more expensive restaurants—and it was on me, of course; high-priced call girls don't go dutch. While we ate, I couldn't help but contemplate the sinfulness of paying someone five hundred dollars an hour to eat incredibly expensive food in her favorite restaurant. What sin is this? I wondered to myself while we ate small rounds of goat cheese that cost more than twenty-five dollars each. Was it greed on Emily's part for making reservations in such a pricey place? Was she getting a kickback from the restaurant? Or was it gluttony, even with tiny portions? Later in the evening, the same thoughts would flit through my head as we sat watching a hit show that's almost impossible to get tickets to—a show I would wind up paying Emily five hundred dollars an hour to watch. What sin is this? Greed on her part? Or stupidity on mine?

During the walk to the restaurant, I confessed everything—writer, doin' research, not interested in “hitting it off”—because my pride wouldn't allow me to let Emily think I was a coward. I didn't want her to think what I'd done in the bar, or hadn't done in the bar, made me somehow less of a man. I wasn't afraid of Jim, I lied. I was taking her to dinner and a show to pick her brain, not her booty, and anyway I wasn't the kind of guy who gets into drunken fistfights over women. Emily nodded. She'd picked up on that the moment we met in the lobby.

“Usually when I meet a man at his hotel the first thing out of his mouth isn't, ‘Wow, I
totally
love your jacket.' ”

While she would normally shoot down any guy who tried to pick her up when she was with a client (“Clients appreciate that”), Emily thought the guy was pretty cute, she liked aggressive men, and she didn't think it would bother me. After all, I liked her jacket.

The restaurant she took me to was one of those hushed places, where the tables are incredibly close together, making it nearly impossible to have a private conversation; it was the kind of restaurant where white, well-off New Yorkers gather to discuss the cartoons in that week's issue of
The New Yorker
. The food was tremendous, and we ordered quite a lot of it; yes, this was definitely gluttony. There were only four other couples in the restaurant the night we went, and we were off in a corner by ourselves, which made it possible for me and Emily to talk shop.

“Business has been way off,” Emily confided. “Not for the twenty-dollar blow-job crowd—their clients are local. But the vast majority of my clients are rich businessmen from out of town or overseas. They haven't been coming to New York City, obviously, so for me business is way, way down. It's been hard.”

While Emily's business may have been down after September 11, PONY's Quan said that wasn't necessarily the case for other New York City prostitutes.

“I don't know very many prostitutes who rely very much on tourists for their income,” said Quan. “Anyone who makes their living as a prostitute is looking to have regular clients, who tend to be local. Tourists are not regular clients. When people are being tourists, they're often traveling with someone, like their family. That doesn't make seeing a prostitute very easy.”

Business travelers, however, do make good clients. “Business travel was way off after September 11,” said Quan, “and prostitutes who do most of their trade with business travelers were losing money. Higher-end, three- and four-hundred-dollar-an-hour prostitutes had the most to lose. I also know some people who had clients that died on September 11.”

Emily's business was gone, she said, because before September 11 she had carved out a niche serving Japanese and Taiwanese businessmen (“They adore—and will pay a lot for—tall blondes!”), and they weren't coming to town. She had an established group of regular clients, and she had stopped advertising her services. A few weeks after September 11, she was forced to put her Web site back up.

“I needed to get some new clients,” she said, “some men who didn't have to fly to the city to see me.”

Emily was everything she claimed to be in her Web site—beautiful, fun, charming, sexy. Emily wasn't a student, however, and this came as a shock to me. I was so invested in the paying-my-way-through-college-escort stereotype that I assumed Emily was doing postgraduate work somewhere or other.

“How long do you plan to keep doing this?” I asked. “If you're not going to school, what do you plan on doing when you get out of this line of work?”

Emily set her spoon down—we were working on desserts by this point—and shot me a disapproving look.

“Why would I get out of this line of work?” she said. “I'm making good money, and I live really well in the greatest city on earth. I work a few hours a night, three or four nights a week, and I have the rest of my time to myself.”

“But you won't always make good money doing this,” I replied.

“Gravity comes for everyone.”

She shrugged, then cracked her lavender crème brûlée with her spoon. In the first two years she was escorting, Emily sank every cent into a two-bedroom condo, which she now owned outright.

“Whatever happens, I'll always have a place to live.”

What will she do for income when she gets older?

“I don't know. Maybe I'll do domination work,” she said. “I'll set up a dungeon in my extra bedroom. There's good money in that, and you can do that until you're fifty.”

“So you're happy doing what you're doing indefinitely?”

“I'm a ho. I like being a ho. Are you happy doing what you're doing indefinitely?”

“Yeah, but I don't have to see people naked or—”

“Or what?”

“I don't have to have sex with people I'm not attracted to.”

“You're beginning to annoy me a little,” Emily said, smiling at me, a singsong lilt in her voice. “I just want to get that on the table. I mean, do you know how many married women have sex with someone they're not attracted to every time they have sex with the husband? And what makes you think I automatically have sex with people?”

“Uh, the naked pictures? The hints on your Web site?”

“I don't have sex with anyone I don't want to have sex with. Men buy my time, that's all, and what—”

“—what happens between two consenting adults is perfectly legal.”

“If I'm with a man I find attractive, something might happen. If I'm not attracted to him, nothing happens.”

“Don't the guys expect it, though? Don't they get angry if you don't put out?”

“I guess you could say I'm attracted to a lot of different kinds of men. I would do you, for instance, even though you're not really my type.”

“Well, if you had a dick,” I said, “I'd definitely be into you.”

“Thanks, I wouldn't be into you in a nonprofessional context,” Emily continued, turning the spoon. She cocked her head to one side and squinted at me, as if she were trying to picture me naked. “No, I'm very much into muscular men, especially men who are at least a few inches taller than I am. That's what I love, and it's hard to find.”

How big? How muscular?

“I like that classic V shape, a lot of muscle, no facial hair. Big, ripped guys, without an ounce of fat, but a little rough around the edges. The guy I moved here with looked like Henry Rollins. He thought he was Henry Rollins, too, but he only looked like him. That's my type. My current boyfriend is six-six and all muscle.”

I asked Emily if her boyfriend minded the line of work she was in. She shrugged as she scooped up the last of her crème brûlée with her spoon.

“Why should he mind?” Emily said. “He's in the business himself.”

 

I
t was almost midnight when the show ended. Emily walked me back to my hotel, and thanked me for dinner and the show. Then she informed me I owed her another fifteen hundred dollars, since we'd been together six hours. We had to leave the hotel to find a cash machine. I had hoped Emily might not charge me for the three hours we spent watching a hit show, but times were tight. (“I promise to put your money into my IRA,” Emily joked, “so that you don't have to worry about me when I'm old.”) By the time I got back up to my room, I had calculated just how much money I'd dropped into New York City's battered economy since arriving in the city eight hours earlier: $500 for the hotel room, $200 for theater tickets, $200 for dinner, $40 for drinks in the bar, $30 for a cab from the airport; and $3,000 for Emily—$3,970 total. I didn't pay any state or local sales taxes on most of the money, since the lion's share of it went to Emily, and Emily is officially part of the underground economy. But the money I gave her had to surface sooner or later. When Emily spent my $3,000 on food, clothes, and her condo's monthly dues, she would be paying taxes.

When I got up to my room after saying good-bye to Emily and three thousand of my publisher's dollars, I opened up my laptop computer and began to search for Emily's boyfriend.

During intermission at the theater, I pumped Emily for info about her boyfriend. I was fascinated by the concept of coming to New York and renting both halves of a straight couple. They had been seeing each other for a little more than a year, Emily told me. He was six feet six, white, with dark black hair and blue eyes, and he competed in “natural” body-building contests (no steroids).

“Are his clients women?” I asked.

Emily looked at me like I was from Mars.

“Brad does gay work,” she said. “I wouldn't want him seeing women. Anyway, there's no money in women.” Her boyfriend wasn't bi, she explained. He was a straight guy and a body builder who made money letting gay men worship his body—but that's all. Just worship, no sex.

“The gay guys he sees usually just beat off while they're with him,” Emily said. “He poses, flexes. He's huge. Two hundred and forty pounds, all muscle,” said Emily. “All he does is muscle worship. Gay guys pay him to let them feel his muscles, kiss his biceps, his calves. That's all he does with them. No sex whatsoever.”

Emily and Brad met through a friend, a gay neighbor of Emily's who was a regular client of Brad's. As a loyal customer over a period of years, Richard had come to know Brad pretty well. Richard paid Brad two hundred dollars a week for the privilege of washing his gym clothes by hand; with Brad dropping by once or twice a week to drop off and pick up his gym clothes, he and Richard had become friendly. When Emily moved into the condo next door, she also got to know Richard. Soon they were friends, and in their conversations about men Richard discovered that he and Emily shared a passion for big, muscular guys. Richard didn't know that Emily was an escort when he threw a small party in his apartment with the sole purpose of introducing Emily and Brad. The couple didn't find out they were both escorts until a few months into the relationship. Another New York City miracle: A boy escort and a girl escort are set up on a blind date by a gay male client of the boy escort—it sounds like Nora Ephron's next movie. Brad eventually moved in with Emily, and as a token of appreciation, Brad no longer charged Richard for the honor of washing his gym clothes.

I wasn't really into muscle guys, but the idea of renting the boyfriend of the escort I'd been with all night, well, it was too delicious to pass up. If Brad was anything like Emily—who was beautiful and, once I stopped trying to be her career counselor, charming and delightful—I wanted to get to know him. And who knows? Maybe I was into muscle guys and I didn't know it. (“It's not until you run your hands over someone supersized that you can appreciate how wonderful all that flesh feels,” the FA at the NAAFA convention told me.) Since I've always been into skinny, bookish guys, I'd never really had cause to run my hands over a guy with a lot of muscles. Maybe an hour with Brad would change my mind.

It took a couple of hours, but I finally found an ad for a guy who fit Brad's description on a male escort Web site: “Live your fantasy. 6'6”, 240 lbs. ripped. I'm the straight guy at the gym you're always staring at. Massive, rock-hard, ripped abs, huge guns. Model looks, great face. $200 IN /$250 OUT. Muscle worship only. No sex.” I called and left a message. Early the next morning I got a call from Brad. He had an hour free late Saturday night. If I wanted the “in” price, I would have to go to his apartment, or he would come “out” to my hotel for $250.