Whore Stories (16 page)

—Benjamin Franklin, American statesman, Founding Father

Hustling on Gorky Street
provides a rogues gallery of floozies, but Regina Savitskaya stands out from all the rest. She was a Bolshoi-trained ballerina who earned a master’s degree from Moscow State University and a fat roll of rubles from her real calling,
interdevochka
, or “international girl,” a fancy term for a prostitute who can demand the high hard currency. Regina got around, but she always came back to her old haunt at the ballet. She tells Brokhin:

In the evenings, I worked the Bolshoi Theatre. My favourite ballet was
Swan Lake
: four intermissions to spend time working the crowd in the lobby…. I’ve been screwed by such famous pricks as John Steinbeck, Yevgeny Yevtushenko . . .[and] clergy from the Vatican.

One must obviously ponder which (if not all) definitions of the noun “prick” Ms. Savitskaya intends to convey here, but Regina goes on to explain how the rigid Soviet-bloc training she received on the way to earning her master’s degree gave her an advantage over the ogling johns and Steinbecks lurking under the ominous shadows of Moscow’s onion domes:

Later in the day, I’d stand on Kutuzov Prospekt, where the foreign residents live, and pretend to hail cabs, keeping an eye open for Mercedes Benzes or Cadillacs, wearing my best Simone-de-Beauvoir expression. (My study of existential philosophy came in handy for hooking foreign suckers that starved for an intellectual cunt.)

That the Soviets possessed an arsenal of nuclear weapons aimed at our armpit,
and
they had a hot-to-trot
devotchka
with her existential ass aimed at some of our most important novelists failed to result in a global apocalypse, and for that we’re lucky. It would have been a twentieth-century Trojan War, with Regina of Moscow replacing Helen of Troy in the role of beautiful woman whose charms threaten to tear the world asunder. And instead of a Trojan horse, it’s a big Soviet bear stuffed with hookers, nuclear bombs, and Yakov Smirnov. The Americans are aware of the caveat, “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” although the slightly lesser known adage, “Beware of Soviets gifting bears” hasn’t made the rounds. Just like that, the Bolshoi bombshell could have become a destroyer of worlds.

These days, Regina Savitskaya manages an international road transportation and shipping company out of the Czech Republic. I’m not sure if that’s the same Regina Savitskaya we’ve been discussing here, so if it is, nice work. Hell, even if it’s not, nice work—not everybody can perpetrate upper management.

NATALIE “NATALIA” MCLENNAN

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Tap dance champion

CLAIM TO FAME:
Once known as NYC’s “#1 Escort”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
New York

When you’re on the cover of
New York
magazine and printed over your picture is the headline “N.Y.’s #1 Escort,” well now, that’s just making momma proud. Although, according to her tell-some memoir,
The Price: My Rise and Fall as Natalia, New York’s #1 Escort
, winning the 1996 Canadian Junior National Tap Dancing Championships may have been a greater source of pride for Natalie’s mother. After her daughter’s terpsichorean triumph, Natalie’s mother beamed, “Honey, I am so proud of you,” to which Natalie later responded, “I wish I could have bottled up that moment and put it under my pillow.”

Natalia, at her swankiest charged $2,000 per hour. Wait a sec, you say. $2,000 per
hour
?! Well, according to
TheEroticReview.com
, Natalia achieved a level of prostitutional perfection bordering on apotheosis. The website encourages clients to “rate,” on a scale of 1–10, his or her experiences with various sex workers about town. To receive a rating of “10” is rare, something akin to a “10” on the uneven bars at the Olympics. During one incandescent streak in 2004, however, consummately satisfied clients awarded Natalia seventeen straight 10s, a “once-in-a-lifetime” distinction. It defies logic that one girl could be so preternaturally gifted in her tap shoes and out of her knickers, but that’s Natalia.

Before she fell under the spell of “The King of All Pimps,” Jason Itzler, and his torrid team at NY Confidential, she found work bartending, acting off-Broadway, and “crawling across the floor like a horny hyena” while posing for photographs taken by legendary
bon vivant
, Peter Beard. It was Beard who introduced Natalie to Itzler, and the next thing she knew, she had transformed into “Natalia” and even better, Jason’s “bottom-bitch,” which, in escort jargon, counterintuitively refers to the “top draw.”

It was all fun and games and money and Manolos until somebody—Itzler mostly—fell victim to harem hubris and the whole house of cads came tumbling down. Among the throngs of hedge-fund managers, NFL quarterbacks, rock stars, and politicos turnstiling in and out of Natalia’s lair, there were also large, conspicuous Con Edison vans outside NY Confidential headquarters in Tribeca, the place she and Itzler called home. The heat was on. Cops began to show up daily to root around, gawk, and pass judgment before eventually taking their leave. Any reasonably alert working girl would have taken this action as a sign to put the brakes on. But by this time, egad, Natalia was so coke-addled, paranoid, and devoid of hope, she “slumped down on the floor of Macy’s and burst into tears.” Sure enough, NY Confidential headquarters was raided, with cops taking computers, credit card receipts—even the goddamned fog machine! Naturally, Natalia and many other members of the old Tribeca gang were arrested for prostitution, money laundering, and a host of other no-nos. Natalia pleaded guilty to attempted money laundering in 2010 and now lives in Montreal, where she was offered a much more lurid and disturbing role than any she had played before either on stage or in the bedroom: the lead in a play by Ayn Rand.

ASHLEY DUPRÉ

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Rapper/singer

CLAIM TO FAME:
“Brought down” former New York governor Eliot Spitzer

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
NYC

What must it be like when you’re an aspiring pop singer from Jersey; Dad is mad ’cause you so wrecked the Porsche and you’ve got to get out of town; you’ve been abandoned by your boyfriend and you’re all alone on 5th Avenue with nothing but your wits and a line of credit? It’s like being Ashley Dupré, except that you probably don’t have a job servicing a man resembling the love child of Frankenstein’s monster and Yoda who just happens to be Eliot Spitzer, governor of the great state of New York. Clearly, Ms. Dupré worked hard for the money, too. Her court testimony reveals Governor Spitzer was almost as much of a pain in the ass in the bedroom as he was in his job at CNN: refusing to wear condoms and refusing to shut up, respectively.

Just when Dupré was building up a nice little grub-stake, making some strong sales and emerging on New York’s “scene,” along comes Spitzer, or Client #9, and the ensuing scandal/media frenzy. Was all that notoriety a good thing or a bad thing for Ashley’s career? If you’re familiar with Ms. Dupré’s musical oeuvre, you know why even the hype surrounding the little
ménage
with Governor Spitzer didn’t move her Pussycat Dolls–influenced jams up the download charts more than a trifle. Her beats are hackneyed and Ms. Dupré’s lyrics, if not an overt nod to Ezra Pound’s fascist-era doggerel, seem inspired by a similar brand of delusion.

So, what has all the fuss come to? There’s Spitzer droning on CNN, and there’s Ashley making the rounds of the reality TV show circuit, most recently on VH1’s
Famous Food
. Also, trading the upscale ho stroll for a quill and scroll, Ashley now serves as the dating and sex columnist for the
New York Post.
Her advice column, “Ask Ashley,” offers solutions to probing existential questions:

Q: My boyfriend insists on showering immediately after sex. What’s a girl gotta do to get some cuddle action?

Ashley: I get the whole needing-to-shower-off-all-the-gooeyness factor (especially if you use lube), but physical touch plays a huge part in any relationship—most importantly after intercourse. . . . What about hopping in before him? If he’s so particular about being clean, I bet he’d want you to be, too. Then, let him rinse off after you. This way, you can jump back into bed naked and prepare to lure him back into your clean arms.

Nuh-uh. The boyfriend insists on showering after sex because he’s got to get back to the office, and he doesn’t want to reek of Dream Angels, that
eau de by-the-hour
Victoria Secret fragrance so popular among call girls, and a veritable smoking gun of poor decision making and adultery. This is just the kind of advice column grandstanding that brought Dear Abby down. That’s not entirely true. Alzheimer’s, then death, brought Dear Abby down, but the sentiment remains.

MIKE JONES

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Masseur

CLAIM TO FAME:
Blowing the whistle (among other things) on evangelical bowel movement, Ted Haggard

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Denver

On Ted Haggard’s website the disgraced minister invokes the words of Genesis 50:20 where Joseph speaks to his brothers after they sell him into slavery saying, “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.” The passage, claims Haggard, has “become a source of life to us,” “us” being Haggard and his long-suffering wife. Welcome to the world of people who are plum out of their goddamned minds!

Lucky for us, through all the meth, masturbation, and mendacity, one person emerges from the Ted Haggard sex scandal as a voice of quasisanity: Mike Jones, masseur, muckraker, and drug-dealing prostitute.

In 2006, Mike went on a Denver radio show and “outed” reverend Haggard, a vocal opponent of homosexuality who vigorously supported Colorado Amendment 43, which bans same-sex marriage in the state. Hey, Mike! You can’t go around outing people for being meth-snorting, closeted homosexuals with a thing for Stars and Stripes–patterned he-thongs! I understand your impulse, but Ted Haggard wasn’t just anybody: He had a standing meeting with George W. Bush on Monday mornings to talk about the evangelical movement and what to do about evil gay devils.

Haggard’s church, the 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs, was thriving, and Ted held sway over legions as president of the 30 million–strong National Association of Evangelicals. Well, if you’re determined to spread hate, bigotry, and intolerance under the guise of, well, anything, I think we can all agree you’ve got a little media scrutiny coming to you.

“Men will pay large sums to whores for telling them they are not bores.”

—W. H. Auden, American poet

Jones outed Haggard at a time of great political importance. “I took the vibrator and greased it up while he put some lube inside his rectum,” reveals Jones in his tell-all,
I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard’s Fall
. How is that grotesque image of Haggard even remotely related to political importance, you ask? Well, while Haggard was dispatching Astroglide into his party portal, Colorado was primed to vote on Amendment 43, with Haggard serving as one of the most influential and fervent supporters of the same-sex marriage ban.

Jones saw through the lube and he felt it was his civic duty to expose Haggard, whose annoying habit of leaving globs of meth under his own nose while roaring, “Jack me off, now!” had become intolerable. Jones elaborates on why he chose to reveal the unctuous underbelly of one of America’s most influential men:

People forget why I exposed him. . . . Not because he was ranting about gays, but because he was a hypocrite . . . and still enjoy[s] the benefits of marriage. What a lucky man. Should gays be so lucky to marry the one they love and be totally devoted.

When the scandal broke, columnist and sex-advice sage Dan Savage hailed Mike Jones as a “Gay American Hero” and Mike was instantly revered throughout the community. No, not just the “gay” community, but also the community of people who are not stark raving mad, right-wing “fundamentalist charismatics.” The ultimate irony, and perhaps the best argument there is that God really doesn’t exist, is that Haggard has established another wildly successful church and made tons of money appearing on
Celebrity Wife Swap
, while our hero Mike Jones has been reduced to putting on eBay the massage table he used to pleasure Haggard.

Also, Amendment 43 passed with 53 percent of the vote. Now there’s something truly scandalous.

NINON DE L’ENCLOS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Philosopher; writer

CLAIM TO FAME:
Epicurean hardbody;
Mademoiselle Libertine

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Paris

Like so many of the French, Ann “Ninon” de L’Enclos’s main occupation was to be artsy. Well, unless you were Marcel Marceau or Cardinal Richelieu or were lucky enough to have been born wealthy, you needed a second line of work so you could eat
fromage
and buy unfiltered cigarettes. For some the option was taking to the bimbo banks of the Seine in Paris, vying for spots near the Pont Neuf with the other hookers until you found Prince Charming, or if you were not lucky, until the riled-up Reformation gestapo threw you in a gutter. Anne de L’Enclos was one of the fortunate few who had relatively smooth sailing in her ascent to the heady heights of harlotry.