Madam

The telephone was ringing.

That’s not unusual: in my world, the telephone is always ringing. It’s an occupational hazard. I don’t suppose that I should complain; I’m the one, after all, who has the advertisements in the local alternative newspaper asking people to call me. I’m the one who persuades guys to use my number, to see my girls, to become, in an odd, indescribable way, my friend. It’s my lifeline, the telephone.

But sometimes – once in a while – I do find myself wishing that it would just stop.

It was ringing this morning while I was trying to get Sam ready for his day. Yes: I am a madam, and I also have a child. It’s not an oxymoron; it’s my life. I checked the caller ID and saw that it was a new client, someone I’d sent a couple of girls to in the last few days. That kind of regularity translates as Very Good Client. “Hi, Gary.”

“Peach?” He sounded surprised that I knew who he was. As though he hadn’t heard about the latest in telephone technology. Although, to be fair, I’ve always been very good with numbers, and I’d matched the cell phone display to his name almost instantaneously. “Hi, Peach. Um – I was just, you know, thinking about what you said last night, and you’re right, I need to get out of my rut.”

Great. And now you want to talk about it. “That’s probably a good idea, Gary.” I was hunting for one of Sam’s missing shoes as I waited for the rest. I already knew what it was going to be about. When one of my clients says he wants to get out of a rut, he’s not talking about changing jobs, going on vacation, or taking up a new hobby.

My clients are much more specific than that.

“Well, you know what you said, about trying something new, and I guess that I just had this kind of fixation with blondes, you know, but I think …” He paused and took a deep breath, as though entering into an important pact, making a difficult commitment. “I think I’m ready for a change.”

I was watching the clock. The school bus waits for no madam. “Gary, that’s terrific. But can you call me back later? I’ve got a new girl working tonight. I think you’ll really like her. We can connect you once she checks in.”

“What’s she like, Peach?”

I sighed. I should have known I wasn’t going to get him off the phone that easily. “She’s got dark hair, five- seven, 122 pounds, 36-26-32. She’s gorgeous, Gary, and she’s really sweet.”

“What’s her name?”

Thinking fast, I said, “April. I’ll have her call you as soon as she checks in, does that work for you? She’s a college student. She’s in class right now.”

“Oh. Okay, Peach.”

No “Thank you, Peach,” or anything like that. Silly me, to expect courtesies from someone who calls an escort service at breakfast time just to chat. I frowned at the phone as I pressed the off button. April. I’d have to remember that.

Most of the girls who work for me use fictional names. I can’t blame them – after all, I do the same thing – but sometimes it’s a little tough keeping them straight. Especially when I assign one on the spur of the moment, as I just had.

In the kitchen, Sam was voicing his displeasure with the menu choices. I sighed and marched in to head him off before he decided to throw the offending food around. Now all I had to do was figure out who the hell I had that I could pass off as this April, who was, unfortunately, a total figment of my imagination.

* * * * * *

Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong profession altogether.

Mornings, in particular, are tough. I’m not supposed to be working then – we do most of our work in the late afternoons and at night – but I still answer the calls: it would be suicidal not to. Talking with Gary this morning hadn’t precisely made my day, but yesterday was worse. It was raining for the third day in a row, my husband was away, and Sam was adamantly refusing to eat the exact same breakfast he had loved only the day before.

And I had a new girl on the phone, asking for advice.

“Peach, should I get the wax done just before I go? Sometimes my skin is a little irritated right after I have a wax. And – there’s this other thing: what do you think – should I have all the hair removed, or leave a strip of it on?”

Wonderful. I haven’t had my first cup of coffee yet, and here I’m talking to this girl about her pubic hair. Ask me if I care.

Well, actually, the reality is that I do. I do care about these girls and I care about making things as comfortable for them as I can and I care about their confidence (if not, precisely, about their wax jobs); but sometimes it just gets a little … overwhelming. Like I’m a nanny with a particularly difficult and demanding set of charges.

The only difference between us is that my charges are all drop-dead gorgeous and in their twenties. The rest? I’d say it pretty much stays the same.

* * * * * *

Despite what you may be thinking after reading all of this, most of the time, I love what I do. I love owning my own business. I love having my days free. For a long time, I loved the cachet that went along with being a successful madam in a relatively small city where everyone who is anyone knows everybody else. I loved the entrée it gave me to events and parties and inner circles; I loved being seen as someone who people wanted to be seen with.

And then there’s the issue of power. After all, my profession involves providing something that men want, and I’m the gatekeeper. I’m the one who gives or doesn’t give what they are asking for. There are days when that feels pretty good.

This book is partly about that, partly about what it was like to be flashy and successful in a glittering world where it was always night, where the real world was somewhere else. Because that was a big part of my life. But it’s also about how that gets old, finally; about how the other side to the nightlife can be devastating and even deadly; about how, in a sense, I grew out of it and into something that is just as satisfying in a completely different way.

And, through it all, I ran – and continue to run – a very successful escort business.

THE MAKING OF A MADAM (#u33f14c4f-9104-531b-aac0-8d6d4d795a7a)

I didn’t start out wanting to be a madam.

I mean, it’s not the kind of career choice that little girls consider when they talk together about what they’re going to be when they grow up. Let’s see: teacher, nurse, lawyer, bordello owner … nope, just doesn’t work. There are some careers that you choose, and some careers that choose you. This one definitely falls into the latter category.

So, how does a nice girl like me end up running an escort service?

I’m not sure exactly where to start. I could use all the excuses that people generally use when they’re trying to justify what others may see as questionable behavior. I could talk about boyfriends and about wanting to do well at Boston’s Emerson College; about my parents’ expectations that I would marry and buy a mock Tudor house somewhere in the suburbs. I could list my various jobs, give you a resumé or a list of recommendations; I could self-righteously mention exactly how few positions are available to people when they first leave a school like Emerson, which is so specialized in communications and acting and related fields. I could even say that I had put a lot of thought into it and decided that running an escort service would make me Businesswoman of the Year.

But the reality is different. The reality is that I was tired of coming home to the guy I was living with (for no reason other than that we had started living together and inertia had taken over) who did nothing but smoke pot and watch television. I was tired of looking for jobs in communications with a degree in Communications that meant absolutely nothing at the end of the day. I was tired, tired, tired …

I did try to follow one of the roads that lead to what others see as respectable careers. I tried sales first. I’ve always been pretty good at talking people into things, so I went to work in the sales area of some low-income housing developments on the edge of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moonlighted answering the telephone for the maintenance department. The first clue I had that I was in the wrong place was when a couple of the guys refused to fix the toilet in a certain tenant’s apartment. The tenant in question didn’t speak English, so I started giving the maintenance guys holy hell about discriminating against him.

When one of them could finally get a word in, it was to say, “You know, lady, no one’s gonna go there. Two other maintenance guys almost got killed fixing stuff for that creep.”

Oh.

The second clue came when the news trucks all started coming around and people began shoving microphones in my face, asking me questions about the guy on the eighteenth floor who had just gotten arrested for running a prostitution ring out of his apartment.

And all of that – those events, those situations that I can single out and point to – didn’t even touch the sheer bleakness of working there, in that world, with people who had lost every shred of hope they had ever had for a better life. Poverty is a grinding, daily, hurtful thing, and after a generation of it, most people cannot imagine a world that doesn’t involve welfare, or dealing drugs, or stints in prison, or wanting something with the only part of you that hasn’t accepted that you’ll never be able to have it. I know I’m a hypocrite to feel that way and not become a social worker, or something – anything to help ease people’s pain. Instead, I decided one thing: I wasn’t going to make a career out of being part of anybody’s misery. I wanted a modicum of happiness in my work.

So I made some New Year’s resolutions in the middle of the summer and kicked the boyfriend out and thought for a while about my assets – what is fashionable, these days, to call a skills set. And I realized right away that what I’m good at – what I’m brilliant at – is talking. I can talk anybody into anything. I can sweet-talk operators into giving me information they never planned to give out. I’ve always had this big double bed and I sit there with my telephone and my Yellow Pages and man, I’m all set. I can get just about anything I need with my phone and my Yellow Pages.

On the other hand, what do people do who are good on the telephone? I certainly didn’t want to do telemarketing. Yuck. Interrupting people having dinner to try and sell them subscriptions to some magazine they’d never read anyway. It just didn’t work for me.

So I sat and called everyone I knew and didn’t get any closer to figuring out what to do with my so- called career. I took a couple of temp jobs working as a receptionist for high-tech companies and resigned myself to doing something like that in the foreseeable future.

When I finally happened on the ad in the newspaper – almost accidentally, on a day I had not set aside for job-hunting – I had no idea that it was going to change my life forever.

* * * * * *

Laura lived out in one of Boston’s suburbs – Wilmington, was it? Or maybe Lynnfield? – someplace like that, that’s what I remember. And even though my departed boyfriend hadn’t been good for much, he had managed to pay half the rent. Now I was struggling to manage it by myself. Come work for me, Laura said, and you can stay in my basement.

It sounded pretty good to me. Work and a place to stay, just when I needed both. I said yes. I didn’t consider what people would think when they learned I was working for an escort service, even in the minor role of receptionist. I didn’t consider much of anything. This is probably typical of many of the women who work in the profession: it seems like an answer to a prayer, a way to make ends meet, a way to make a living, for heaven’s sake. And when the reactions trickle in, we’re always surprised by them.

I didn’t think about people’s reactions. I just went to work for Laura.

My first impression was how clean it was: everything was impeccable. Laura ran an escort service that was both in-call and out-call: some girls went out to clients’ homes; others saw the guys there, at Laura’s place. It was never called a bordello. In fact, in all my years in the business, I’ve never heard an in-call place called a bordello. We just called it Laura’s. Maybe it’s just a Boston thing.