It was November, more than a year since I'd graduated college, and my fourth month in Manhattan. I'd blown through my savings before the first frost. Among other unwise choices, I'd recently traveled to New Jersey to be photographed for feetinyourface.com. I was picked up at the train station, driven to a home decorated with stenciled wallpaper and offered a glass of white zinfandel from a jug. After five cups, I decided that kissing the belly dancer's feet wasn't half as fun as kissing Vanessa, the third foot model, and we ended up providing a free show for the videographers.
A month later, after I spent a day in Queens filing in the nude, my sister requested that if I was going to sell myself, I do it someplace where she wouldn't worry I'd be raped or killed. So I answered a Craigslist ad for "artists" — full-time pay, part-time hours, no sex — and there I was, sitting with Robin in an Upper East Side diner at three in the afternoon, picking at my pancakes and talking about handjobs.
Robin owns a massage parlor with an impressive zero-arrest record. This is mostly due to cautious advertising and her vigilance over the phone. A filmmaker from Kansas who came to New York for college, she started at Annette's Escape as an employee, buying out the French owner ten years later. Now she's remolding the place, bringing in young, educated, English-speaking types like myself, phasing out Annette's remainders. By modest accounts, she personally pulls in about four grand in commissions a week enough to outfit the two Annette's branches with new Macs, fresh paint and Ikea furniture.
promotion
When we met, Robin was not the striking brunette with sexually suggestive tattoos I'd expected. She had bouncy blonde curls and cleavage that climbed from her retro red dress like half a cartoon heart. She looked less like a madam than a trendy student teacher prone to slipping the occasional curse word.
In the middle of our conversation, Robin answered her cell: "Hello? What's your code? . . . What time were you thinking? Tonight we have Lisa, golden skin, long raven hair, warm brown eyes . . . yes, large on top, five-foot-three . . . she's a dancer . . . okay, for how long? . . . Thanks, Mike." She hung up and text-messaged Lisa before turning back to me. I'd later learn that although Robin stopped by AE from time to time to collect money or drop off supplies, she generally ran the business from home.
"That sounds like a lot of money for not a lot of work," I said.
Robin smiled. "Do you have any other questions?"
"Yeah." I ran my fork against the plate. "Does it — has it — like, made you lose faith — like, in men?"
"Actually," she said, pursing her lips as if this was a reassurance she'd given many times," just the opposite. I think it's a really respectful way to get what they need, sexually. Without hurting anyone."
"Yeah, I see that," I said, but I didn't see it, really. Not then.
I start work at Annette's Upper East, a first-floor two-bedroom on a residential street. A narrow hallway connects the front room to a small back room just big enough for a massage table and space to move around it. The large front room is divided by a gauzy curtain. One side holds the massage table, stereo, oils and paper towels; the other has a desk and a chair where we'll sit answering phones, flipping through a Rolodex to verify the existence of our gentlemen callers. Annette's Midtown is a large studio where girls work alone. Newbies never start there.
Two girls work at AUE per shift. The air is damp and musty. Angela says it's suffocating, so she leaves the bathroom window propped open. She's the first girl I meet. When I walk in, she's doing tricep dips off a chair in the corner. Men tell her she looks like Tyra Banks. This signifies nothing other than the fact that they haven't slept with many black women.
Angela also teaches yoga and eats vegan, which is why she looks ten years younger than her actual age, thirty-three. She's so decent she stores her sole set of trashy lingerie in a Whole Foods bag in the closet. She
At first, I had a boyfriend. He didn't ask about the cash. He had his own problems with work.
has a Stanford degree and an environmental government job. I love her. She takes her mental manipulation seriously and follows every tip she dispenses with a huge laugh.
"Give 'em a little squeeze when you hug them goodbye. I take notes to remember our conversations. I was thinking once," she laughs, "If all my clients were in the same room and said Angela is BLANK," she raises her palms, demonstrates the empty place waiting for an adjective. "The other guys would go: 'What? Are we talking about the same Angela?'"
Her boyfriend doesn't know, she says. She calls him her "young lover," and laughs when she tells me this too.
We split the money with Robin. I get $120 for myself for each hour session. On one particularly well-tipped night, I earn $900. For the first few months, AE is my only job. I have no other way to account for my time. At first, I had a boyfriend, who didn't ask about the cash. He had his own problems with work. He was twenty-eight, and I was watching him getting old in front of me. His decision to stop drinking and get promoted didn't exactly jibe with my choices.
My first Monday night shift is with Sadie, and she scares the shit out of me. Her sharp Russian accent shoots at me like raw spit when she tells me I'm doing everything wrong, that I can't even answer the phone properly. I feel eleven, naked in the communal showers at summer camp, boyish and awkward. Sadie is commanding: mid-twenties, tall and blonde, curvy like a Crumb cartoon, with wide blue eyes. She tells me to go to school because "this business could be busted any day and — poof! — then what will you do?"
After a few weeks together, I've learned how to answer the phone, and she begins offering me shards of herself: flashes of sadness when she talks about her family, a dreamy happiness after a profitable day. She flips through InStyle and Us Weekly and clicks her tongue at pictures of Britney Spears: "I don't understand this girl." Sadie is saving for school. In the meantime, she loves her "guy" and helps him study for his citizenship test.
Soon afterward I meet Camille, a twenty-seven-year-old Jersey girl who did stints at Rutgers and massage school. Now she wants to be a writer. "I just need more time," she moans, pulling on a thin strand of thread that I imagine passes for underwear at Scores. "I just got so caught up in the nightlife, you know?" She's supposed to train me in massage, but when I'm half-naked with her hands all over my back and her endless and endearing chatter, I just want to make out. She tells me a story: "So I'm seventeen and I have purple hair and I'm trying to fix my labia piercing, and my Mom walks in on me? I'm splayed on my bed with pliers between my legs and you know what she asks me? Are those your father's pliers?"
Simone is almost forty and already a bodywork legend. All winter, she dances in The Nutcracker, which means she blows off her shifts, coming in two hours or three drinks late. The first time I meet her is one of those days. Camille is in session, and I am waiting, agitated, on the massage table in the front room. Simone apologizes in a syrupy Southern accent. Her hair is in a bun pulled back from her face, which is a tight order of bones, ruddy cheeks and exaggerated eye makeup.
We compare the lies we tell our boyfriends and our families, pursuing the perfect story to fit our hours and income: we hide cash in secret drawers and in our shoes on the train downtown.
She's been in the business for ten years, but her body remains childlike and resistant. One bored Sunday, I look through the closet for a lost shoe and find a Kleenex box filled with love letters to Simone. I want to feel voyeuristic and naughty reading them, but I think about the men who wrote them and instead I want to cry.
Robin punishes Simone periodically. One night, I take Simone's withheld shift, and that's how I meet Hailey. "I never have time to read my mail," she says, dumping a grocery bag of catalogs and letters onto the desk and sorting through it. She extracts a pamphlet and explains that she wants to go to school to be a nutritionist. I know that Hailey is a singer-songwriter, because I've seen her CD, now scratched and oily. On the cover, Hailey's face is imposed over a throbbing red moon, and she wears a crown of sticks. Her long blonde hair sits on her slender shoulders, which are obscured by ostensibly ethereal lettering. I wonder how she got interested in nutrition. I remember her telling me that she was eating more fruits and vegetables, which was making her feel a lot better "like, in general."
We compare the lies we tell our boyfriends and our families, pursuing the perfect story to fit our hours and income: we hide cash in secret drawers and in our shoes on the train downtown. We leave our stilettos in the studio and shower often.
"He doesn't need to know everything about me," Sadie tells me. She sometimes runs to Thirty-Fourth Street at ten-thirty so her "guy" can pick her up from her alleged clerical job.
"Isn't that the point of relationships?" I ask.
She clicks her tongue and flips the page of InStyle. "Girl, you have so much to learn."
