The Education of a Very Young Madam (14 page)

It used to be that the trade in any major city was generally contained in one or several neighborhoods. That meant that people like me were tied to a physical location. When I moved to Montreal, the city still had its unofficially designated neighborhood where you knew you could find a girl on a street corner or in a bar, but thanks to my Web site, I didn't need to spend any time in those places unless I wanted to.

In Baltimore, I hadn't needed a physical space, like a brothel, to work out of either, but I also wasn't doing anything illegal, not to mention the fact that I wasn't making all that much money compared to what I make now. Montreal was midway in my evolution into a virtual business. I no longer needed to rent a space for my girls to work out of because customers could find us through my Web site and then I could send the girls out to meet them wherever they were. But still, because technology wasn't so advanced in those days, I had to be there. I had to be in the city to find girls to work for me. I had to meet with them to make sure they looked the part. I had a clunky computer, a landline, and a fax machine that I used to do business, all of which meant I needed a space to plug in and work somewhere in or near the city itself.

Back then I also split my efforts between print and online ads, but today I don't even bother with anything that I can't do on my own with my laptop. I run my business using two cell phones, one with an 800 number, a Web site on an offshore server that shows pictures of the girls who are available each week, and an e-mail address that customers can use to request appointments twenty-four hours a day (and I probably don't even need that much to be successful). If a new girl wants to work for me, she can e-mail me pictures and I can check reviews of her past work online. No one ever needs to know what I look like or even where I am in order to do business with me. I have even run my agency in New Jersey from the beach in Florida or Mexico for weeks at a time without anyone knowing the difference.

All this means that today I can work from just about anywhere. In fact, moving around a lot is part of how I keep myself safe. It used to be that, if I moved to a new town, I also had to shut down my business and start over in the new location. Not anymore. When I move, my business travels with me. I could be living and working right next door to you and you wouldn't even know it. I used to know of this agency that ran out of a big office building in midtown Manhattan. It was one of those places with lots of office suites in the heart of the city's business district. There were probably hundreds of companies in the same building, and not a single one had a clue what was going on right next to them until one day the cops showed up and busted the place. And the cops probably only found the place because they stayed there for too long. Not me. I work from wherever I'm living at the time—whether it's a hotel room, an apartment, a boyfriend's house, or wherever—and live off the grid as much as possible. That means that I pay for practically everything in cash instead of using credit cards, I get friends to lease apartments or cars for me in their own names (I usually have to pay them for the favor, but it's worth it), and I even have a fake ID with a made-up name that I use when checking into hotels and things like that. All of it, the mobility and the anonymity, keeps me safer than ever before.

I stuck with University Escorts for two and a half years before closing it down. That was a good run for me back then, especially considering the conditions I was working under. Competition was always fierce in Montreal, and the agency I was running was more straight sex, not the GFE-style (girlfriend experience) service I run today, so I was never able to build up much of a regular clientele. Still, it wasn't business considerations that caused me to hang it up, it was my boyfriend Philippe.

Although he was impressed with the idea of me being a madam when we first met, he didn't actually like the reality of what I did. Trying to make a business like mine work can be all-consuming. Once the business started to take off, I'd be on the phone or the computer for hours at a time and until all hours of the night. Philippe had nothing against the nature of my business, and he didn't mind that I worked hard—well, maybe he felt a bit neglected sometimes—but mostly, he was just worried about me. In case you haven't figured it out already, I have a pretty obsessive personality, and when I get an idea in my head—like when I wanted to learn how to build my own Web site so I didn't have to pay someone else to do it, or when I came up with a new marketing strategy that I was dying to try—I couldn't stop myself from working until I saw results. I'm still that way, as are, I think, most good business owners.

I had also developed a big speed addiction by then. The speed I got in Canada was nothing like what you get in the United States. It was a dream drug. I would take one pill, then another half every three to four hours and feel like I had woken up from a perfect night's sleep even though I had never gone to bed. It was almost euphoric. Unfortunately, I did this for years, which eventually fucked up my system. I wouldn't be able to sleep for five days straight until, all of a sudden, I'd crash. Then Philippe wouldn't be able to wake me up for two days, no matter what he did. And even worse from Philippe's perspective was the fact that, when I was on a binge, I'd just keep on working all night long. He wasn't as into drugs as I was then. In fact, our first night together, when we took ecstasy, it was the first time he'd ever done it.

Finally, Philippe asked me to quit the business. We'd been together so long—more than two years, which was a long time for me, anyway—that I took him seriously and made a deal. "I'll quit my job if you quit yours," I said. He was still dancing, and I didn't love the idea of other men and women fantasizing about him on a regular basis. I told you he was gorgeous, and I didn't have to actually see people hit on him to know that they were, all the time.

Philippe agreed, and we became quite the little domestic couple after that. We had enough money to get by on for a while, so we just played house together. Pretty soon I found out that I was pregnant, and Philippe was thrilled. His excitement was short-lived, however, because I had a miscarriage early in the pregnancy.

Things degenerated between us after that for a lot of reasons. In the end I think we were just too different. I decided I really needed to build my business back up again to make some money. Thanks to a number of unpaid traffic tickets for moving violations, I ended up getting arrested and owing the government around $4,000. I also had to fork over a bunch in bail money to get myself out of jail. I was dead broke, and still Philippe didn't want me to go back to work.

We argued about it all the time, and I finally had to admit to myself that the reasons why I was so set on getting back to work had to do with more than just money. I actually
wanted
to get back into business. I was only in my mid-twenties, so I couldn't imagine being retired for the rest of my life. Besides, I felt lost and a little bit worthless without work to do. That made me realize that I had some demon thoughts in my head I needed to confront. I had always had this feeling that, if Philippe really knew me, he would hate me. If he truly understood that I was part of this world because I wanted to be and not just because I didn't have many other choices, I knew he would think a lot less of me. Whenever I thought like this, I'd decide that our love was a lie. I loved him, but he couldn't possibly love me, not the real me. We ended up breaking up because there just wasn't any way that it could possibly work.

I still consider Philippe to be my one true love and soul mate. I loved Andre and Allen, but with Philippe things were different. He was truly a sweet soul and he cared about what was best for
me
first, not for himself, not for business, not for anything else. I trusted him more than I've ever trusted anyone. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if things had turned out differently between us, but it was probably never meant to be. I just don't think a stable relationship is in the cards for someone like me. I've never believed that I was the type to get married or have kids. But still, Philippe was special.

Philippe took our breakup really hard. He stalked me for a while and would show up at my apartment at random hours of the day and night. Once I even found him passed out on my doorstep when I woke up in the morning. His friend Rick, who worked as a bartender at one of the strip clubs where Philippe used to dance, had always been into me, so I decided that the best way to put permanent distance between Philippe and me was to hook up with his friend. Rick and I started dating, and Philippe was furious, but he also finally got it through his head that things between us were over for good.

Staying in Montreal after things with Philippe died out was probably a mistake, but I had lost my ID, so I didn't have any way to cross the border back into the United States. I'm sure I could have found a way, but I didn't. The world seemed to be telling me it was time to move on, and I just wasn't listening.

104

CHAPTER 8

My Canadian Escape, Part 2

L
ife in Canada after Philippe consisted mostly of working, gambling, and dating. Those were the three basics in my life. I was making decent money, still about $5,000 a week, which could go a long way in Canada, except that I lost about that much each week in my favorite local casino. It didn't help that I started dating the city's best card counter, who loved going to the casino almost as much as I did. He was a mathematician and a teacher, a real nerd and not like the guys I usually dated, but I liked him and we had some fun together.

I also made some friends and contacts that I still have to this day. As I've said, I bring in a lot of girls from Montreal to work for my current agency because they are experienced and really good at their jobs. My friend Nicky, for example, who worked for me then and still does sometimes, is barely five feet tall, looks about fifteen even though she's much older than that, and has natural DD breasts. You'd think she'd be hunching over all the time from carrying so much weight up top, but she's a firecracker. Back then she had pink hair and a pierced tongue and went everywhere with a tiny
Powerpuff Girls
backpack on her back. Guys loved her then, and they love her now. She's white, but she has the sultry voice of a big black woman and has always had dreams of becoming a singer. She could probably make it too, if she just got off the fucking mescaline.

I also got to know sonic other agency owners in the area. After September 11, 2001, tourism really slowed down in Montreal. Only the strong survived that downturn, and with my gambling habit, I just couldn't hold out. So I shut down my agency. I started working for one of the top five agencies in the city (I was only in the top twenty when I closed shop), which had enough local clients to sustain itselfuntil things picked up again. I had become amazing at working the phones and booking appointments, so when I shut down my own business, Doug, the owner of that agency, offered me a job.

I got a commission on each booking I made. I would usually just work from home, but on busy nights I'd ride along with the drivers who brought girls to and from their appointments to make sure everything went smoothly. It was a lot less pressure than having my own business, so I kind of liked it for a while. It was like taking a semi-vacation.

A booking girl's salary, however, wasn't what I'd been used to. Pretty soon I couldn't pay rent on my luxury apartment. Doug had a girlfriend named Sandy, who had been trying to befriend me ever since I started working for him. I didn't really trust her, but when she offered to let me stay with her for a while, I figured it was a good temporary solution. I think the real reason she wanted me to move in was because she wanted a full-time babysitter for her kids. In any case, that's exactly what I became.

Sandy had four kids, two by her previous husband, who lived with her, and two by the husband before that, who she saw every other weekend and on holidays. She was a real bitch. Before I got there, the kids ate cereal for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Once in a while, on special occasions, she'd make them mac and cheese out of a box, which was the only thing she knew how to cook. When she wanted them to do something for her, she'd bribe them with candy, which almost always worked since they were always hungry. And that was when she was around. She was always running off with different guys to go shopping, leaving the kids home to fend for themselves.

It's not like she ever asked me to babysit, but I couldn't stand to see her treat her kids like that, so I started taking care of them. Besides, I was there and she wasn't. I cooked dinner for them and packed them lunches for school. The two who lived with us fulltime were real problem kids. When they were upset, I'd ask them to draw pictures of something that would make them happy. One of the boys once drew his ideal living situation. It was a house with him, his brother, and his dad together on one side of the house and his mother all by herself way on the other side. He hated his mother. As hard as I tried not to, I couldn't help myself, and I fell in love with those kids.

Meanwhile, Sandy's kids weren't the only ones she was being a bitch to. She had taken over a lot of the daily work of running the agency (with my help, of course), so Doug hardly knew what was going on anymore. Every chance she got she robbed him blind. She'd make excuses, like they'd had a lean week, and then pocket the cash for herself. She was robbing me too, and the problem was, I knew it. She gave me only about one-tenth of what she owed me in booking commissions, most of which I would spend on decent food for her kids.

I didn't respect Sandy, but I did learn something from her: always keep an eye on your business. During my most successful periods, I'm often tempted to hire someone to do some of the grunt work for me, particularly answering the phones. But when I remember Sandy, I know it's better not to trust anyone with too much information about my business. Doug was a good enough guy. I didn't know him that well, but he did help me out when I needed work and I liked him. But he should have known better. Particularly when Colonel Ed showed up. Ed was an ex-military guy who introduced himself as an expert in targeted Internet mailing lists. He did this kind of work for a whole range of industries actually, not just escort agencies, so most of the time Colonel Ed ran a legitimate business. He was the one who found us, called us up, and asked if we were interested in expanding.