The Education of a Very Young Madam (10 page)

The ads for the rip-off agencies were full of innuendo but no promises. They offered "Foxy Playmates for All Occasions," "Party Girls in Half an Hour," and sometimes even "Full Body Massage!!!" Some kept it simple, saying something like "Serving the Baltimore Area" next to a picture of a sultry young girl. But the clients knew what they meant, or at least they thought they did. A guy would call up to make an appointment expecting full service, but then a girl would show up at his hotel room or wherever, collect her money, and ask, just like Maya did, "So, what do you want to do now?"

That question would cause most guys to stammer, because you don't usually have to tell a real working girl what to do next. Some would think it was a sting operation and wonder if they were being recorded. If they actually got around to asking for sex, the girl would say something like "I'm sorry, but that's illegal and I can't do anything illegal." Then she would say, "I could give you a body rub for an additional hundred-dollar tip but not a real massage. I'm not licensed to give massages." There was never any actual sex involved.

You'd think that it would be a dangerous game, that guys would get really pissed off about being scammed and girls would get hurt as a result, but the girls were really good at getting in and out quickly, at keeping calm and being matter-of-fact about the whole situation, at putting the guys on the defensive for assuming they were prostitutes. Most of the guys, who were usually just your average businessmen, were embarrassed by the whole thing and would either take the "body rub" or just send the girl home. A few would try to negotiate for a "happy ending," but it rarely happened. If a guy did get angry, which they obviously did sometimes, the girl would just call the cops. After all, she hadn't technically done anything wrong.

Of course that kind of setup only works on a guy once, so the majority ofcustomers had to be out-of-towners. Still, there always seemed to be people coming and going through Baltimore on business, so I found out that it worked again and again and again. There were even some customers who didn't want anything more than company. They were the best ones. Those were often the drug users, who just wanted someone to be with them while they did what they did. Maya had one repeat customer, an importer from down south, who hired her for forty-eight straight hours one time at her hourly rate of $200. He didn't even try to make a deal, so obviously she banked off him. He was a wealthy man who just wanted someone to lie next to him and hold his hand while he tried to fall asleep after having drunk himself into oblivion. She thought he probably had nightmares based on the way he tossed and turned and the noises he made while he slept. Hut during the day he'd take her shopping and out to eat. She thought he was a pretty cool guy who just wanted a drinking partner until he got really fucked up one night and started ranting about how the aliens were coming.

When it came time for me to open up my own shop, I did as those around me did ("When in Rome" and all that) and opened a "rip-off agency." I didn't need as much start-up cash as I had needed in New York because there was no space to rent, no construction costs, no security guys to hire, which was perfect since I was on my own. I just needed enough money to place a few ads and a couple of girls (most of whom I stole from the agencies that had been so open with me) to visit clients. Just like that, I was open for business.

Naturally, I had a lot of unhappy customers calling me, but they were no trouble at all when they heard my routine response: "What you are asking for is illegal, sir. We are an upscale escort agency that offers companionship only. The young lady is there to keep you company, and frankly, all this discussion is cutting into your quality time with her, which you've already paid for. Unfortunately, we can't offer you a refund or a discount because she has done her best to provide you with exceptional service. If you are going to turn this into a situation, sir, we will have no choice but to call the police."

As long as I was polite and kept my voice level, that speech usually put an end to a difficult situation, but not always. Maya, who was one of the first girls to come to work for me, once had a congressman for a customer who freaked out so much that she had to call the cops. Even after they arrived, this guy continued to rant about how he had "paid for S-E-X!" and hadn't gotten what he'd been promised. That kind of talk quickly landed him in jail. He was such an idiot. This was around the time of the scandal with Dick Morris, the political consultant for Bill Clinton who had to resign after he got caught—pictures and all—with a hooker. The media were focusing on that type of story back then, and after the congressman incident, Maya and I got a call from the
Sally Jessy Raphael
show. We thought it might be fun to go on TV and spill the beans about our industry, so we told the producer that we'd do it.

It always seems to come as a shock to the public when famous men get caught with hookers, which makes me laugh. I knew one girl who was hired several times by a very well-known, very gorgeous movie star. (He was so good-looking that she even began stalking him after he stopped calling her.) Someone like that can obviously get a girl without paying her. Besides, he has so much to lose, why would he risk it? People outside the industry ask me questions like that all the time—why do guys take such stupid risks?—especially if the famous guys in question are married. The truth is, if these guys wanted to fuck the same girl time and time again, they'd just get mistresses. But that's not what they want. There are a lot reasons why guys do what they do, but the point for many of them is that they just want to be around someone who isn't going to judge them for a little while. They have high-stress jobs and they lead complicated lives. Sometimes they just want something uncomplicated, where the outcome is practically assured. Some guys aren't getting it at home, or they're too preoccupied with their work to form real relationships, or they're sex addicts, but many of them actually have pretty good marriages and pretty happy lives. It often isn't about their wives at all; it's about them, about taking a break from their commitments, releasing some stress, and doing exactly what they want to with no consequences, even if it's just for an hour.

I don't really have many well-known clients today, mostly because my service is in New Jersey, where there are plenty of rich but not so many famous men. And that's probably a good thing, since actors, politicians, and other high-profile types can bring with them too much unwanted attention. Maya and I were at the airport with tickets in hand when we changed our minds about the
Sally Jessy Raphael
show. The amount of money we'd been promised just didn't seem worth the effort and potential loss of future business, so we turned around and went home.

I definitely honed my customer-service skills during my Baltimore days. Today, I feel like I can smooth-talk practically any client, no matter what his problem might be, as long as I stay calm. I know exactly what to say in any given situation, but the staying calm part is what I sometimes have trouble with, and it's getting harder. The longer I do this, the shorter my temper. I hear the same damn excuses again and again, from both clients and girls, and I get tired of pretending to care. Patience is a lot more work than it sounds like.

Back then all I really cared about was making money, so I didn't mind all the bullshit as much. It would still be several years before I would learn how to run a business that has all the elements-safety, stability, good money—at once
and
one that provides a great service that clients actually value. The business I have now is rewarding both financially and personally. Who knew you could have that in this industry?

At the time, I was happy with my rip-off agency. As Maya and I spent more time together, we became even better friends. She was a beautiful girl and such a moneymaker. She was also dating a guy who was a top dog in one of the local gangs, and they were the ones who introduced me to my next boyfriend.

Andre had been a powerful guy, but he was nothing compared to Maya's boyfriend, Tito. Tito was tall and lean like a basketball player, but, even if he didn't exactly look like one, he was a real gangster. He asserted his dominance over people every chance he got. He was always arguing with some guy or flirting with some girl just because. His business was drugs too, but if they worked the same area, Tito probably would have been the guy who provided Andre with the product he sold. Not only was he a bigger fish, he was one of the top guys in one of the largest drug rings in the area. He had a whole gang of dealers and runners working for him. Of course, I found all of this irresistible.

Tito's buddy Allen was a dope boy too, but he worked independently. He liked to run his own ship; he respected the gangs that controlled most of the city's trade, but he kept himself separate from them. He believed it was safer and cleaner that way, and I liked that about him. Plus, he was a fly-looking boy, which was fine by me. He may have existed under the radar when it came to business, but in his personal life he was hard to miss. He was nearly six feet tall, with a muscled, 220-pound frame, and he wore the full-on gear of a race-car driver during the day. In fact, he was obsessed with anything on wheels. He owned a whole fleet of cars—his most prized ones being a limited-edition RX-7 and a showroom model Toyota Supra with a twin turbo engine—many of which he had souped up just the way he liked them, as lowrides with purple backup lights and that kind of thing. He even had one of the very first voice-activated computers installed in his Supra. At night he practically always wore Versace from head to toe. He was much trendier than Andre, whose style I'd describe as "old school," but they were both hard to miss when they went out on the town.

Allen also liked to be in control of everything. Not just business, but
everything.
He would even tell me that I was not allowed to go to any of the black clubs in Baltimore, which was ridiculous since he was black himself. Actually, he was only a quarter black, mixed with a quarter white and half Hispanic, and it showed in his light skin, but he called himself "black." Still, he thought the black clubs were too "ghetto," and no girlfriend of his was going to be seen in any ghetto places. "You're too good for that," he'd say. For me it was white-people places or stay home.

But my friend Maya would go
only
to the black clubs because she hated white people and because all the white-people clubs in Baltimore totally sucked. "White people are the ones who are responsible for every dirty, wrong thing in this world," she'd say. "They're the ones who start wars, who oppress people. And it's always the white guys who call up looking to pay some poor girl to do something disgusting. Like golden showers. White men invented those. No self-respecting black man would ever get off on being peed on."

I loved that girl. She was a trip. The funny thing is, Maya also barely looked black, even though she was. Because her skin was a very light brown, she looked Arabic or like a really light-skinned Puerto Rican. Still, she had her rules and Allen had his and I was caught in the middle because I wanted to be around both of them.

Once I tried to sneak into one of Maya's favorite clubs so she and I could hang out. We'd just gotten there when this famous basketball player saw her across the room and came straight over to try to pick her up. She always had that effect on guys everywhere she went. I had no idea who he was, but he had a pick in his nappy hair and was so ballsy about the way he talked to her that I thought he was a whack job. So did Maya. After she turned him down, a friend of ours came over and said, "Do you know who that is?" As soon as she heard who he was, Maya saw dollar signs. She immediately went back over and started sweet-talking him. She really knew how to work people. We were having a great time until Allen showed up. Someone he knew must have seen me and called him to tell him I was there. He knew people everywhere we went.

Allen didn't say a word. He just walked right over to me, picked me up, threw me over his shoulder, and walked out the door. I was screaming for him to put me down and banging on his back with my fists. He barely even noticed. He walked me right past a cop who knew who he was. The cop asked if
he
needed any help, not if I did. Allen said no, threw me in the passenger seat of his car, and drove me home.

It pissed me off when Allen did things like that to me, but at the same time, I understood why he had to keep a firm grip on things all the time. A lot of people in his line of work were like that. Besides, he came from a big working-class family, and the money he made helped take care of all of them. He took his responsibilities seriously, and he completely understood the fact that getting busted and getting killed are risks that go hand in hand with dealing drugs. Maya's boyfriend, Tito, in particular, was playing at a dangerously high level, and a lot of merchandise passed through his hands. He was always talking about balancing risk and reward. He laid it out for me this way one day: "One point five kilos of cocaine can earn you anywhere from $30,000 to more than $250,000, depending on how you work it and on how many chances you're willing to take."

How is it possible for one quantity of product to translate into such different dollar amounts? "It all depends on how you divide that product up for sale," he explained.

If you sell the product all at once to a single buyer, then you're not going to get much more than $30,000 for it. But if you take that 1.5 kilos and sell it to, say, four different distributors, you might get $20,000 from each, for a total of $80,000. If you divide it even further and dole it out to street dealers, well, you can make quite a bit more. And finally, if you wanted to sell all that coke on the street yourself, it would take you a long time, but that much product has a street value of $250,000 or more.