The Education of a Very Young Madam (18 page)

As the boss, I can break my own rules if I want to, but I've found that when I do, I often get into trouble. Tracey, stage name Sindy, was one of my most extreme examples of getting too close to a girl. I met her when I was in Montreal, where she worked for a pimp-run agency that I continued to trade girls with after I set up in New Jersey. It's something I do now and then with this and other agencies whenever I need to bring in fresh meat. (I prefer ones that aren't run by pimps, but the business comes first; I do what I need to do to keep my customers happy.) That's how Sindy came to be working for me one week in New Jersey.

Sindy's pimp was a real dick, and I felt sorry for her—my first mistake. She was sweet and pretty, and we had gotten along when I knew her in Montreal, even though I didn't know her well. But I liked her, so one day when she started crying, I made another mistake—I asked her what was wrong.

She told me she was crying because she had recently, finally, paid off her pimp so she could go out on her own, but then he changed the deal on her. When she began working for him, he made her believe she owed him, not just a percentage of her income but also a flat payment of some ridiculous amount for getting her started, if you can believe that. Somehow she managed to pay him the money, but he was still insisting that she give him a cut of whatever she made, whether he booked the appointment for her or not. I told you that pimps think they own their girls, and that's how this guy saw Sindy, as someone he'd own for as long as he felt like it—forever if that's what he wanted.

I hated to see this because I know what it's like to be taken advantage of by pimps. I thought of Julio and the guy Natasha had run off with and others whose paths I had, unfortunately, crossed over the years. Part of my problem was that I love to stick it to guys like that, who think they can take advantage of women just because they're women. Against my better judgment, I told Sindy that if she wanted to get away from her pimp, she shouldn't go home. She should stay in New Jersey and continue working for me. And that's what she did.

A lot of people would say I did the right thing, but business is business, and in most cases there are reasons why a girl is stuck in a situation as bad as hers. Sindy was not the kind of person who knew how to make it on her own, and I quickly realized that what she really wanted was not to get away from pimps altogether but just to get a new one, who would be nicer to her and pay her more money. She needed someone who was going to take control of her life and tell her what to do. Unfortunately for her, "nice" pimps don't really exist, and being a caretaker for my girls is not part of my job description.

Taking Sindy's side cost me a very successful work relationship. Her pimp obviously didn't appreciate that I helped his girl leave him, and we no longer traded talent after that. The worst part of it all was that I sacrificed that relationship just to get stuck with another needy girl.

Sindy was like a child, always late or disappearing for days at a time. When she managed to make it to work, she was amazing and guys loved her, but in order to get her to show up, I had to become her mother, her best friend, her caretaker, and her psychiatrist.

She'd go on drug binges and take off with guys she didn't even know, so I would have to stop whatever I was doing and go find her before she got herself into any serious trouble. She didn't really have any friends around, so I felt responsible for her. When she wasn't on drugs she talked about committing suicide, which made me feel like I needed to keep watch over her. One of my agency's hard-and-fast rules is that girls
must
practice safe sex, no exceptions. Sindy did manage to follow that rule when she was on appointments, probably thanks to her clients rather than her own will, but when she was off the clock, she had unsafe partner after unsafe partner.

That was too much for me. The last thing I wanted was to have to call up my clients to tell them that the girl they saw last week just tested positive for HIV. That happened to me once before, when I was in Montreal. I left too many of those decisions up to the girls and their customers back then, until I found out that one of my former employees had gotten really sick. One of her former clients had been a good friend of mine, and giving him the news was one of the worst moments in my whole life.

Unfortunately, not even I can stop caring about someone just like that. I had to fire Sindy, and the only way I could do it was if I knew she had somewhere to go. When she was with me and on her game, she had been making close to $10,000 a month, but somehow she'd managed to blow all that money. I gave her $2,500, sent her home to her family, and took it all as a lesson. I'm no shrink—I can't help a girl with that many problems, no matter how much I may want to. I need to stick to what I'm good at. I've heard that Sindy is back with the same pimp in Montreal, which doesn't surprise me at all. Sometimes you're just lucky to get a girl like that out of your life before she can cause too much damage.

Sindy never paid that $2,500 back to me, but I'm not even going to bother trying to get the money from her, which is not like me at all. Another one of my rules is that if you owe me money, then you owe me money, and you'd better pay it back one way or another. In Sindy's case, though, I wrote it off as a gift. It was guilt money really. I couldn't help her, so I paid her offto get her off my hands. If there hadn't been those special circumstances, however, it would have been a much bigger problem between us.

Money is the thing my girls and I fight over the most by far: they're late with their payments or they forget how much they owe me or they pay me the wrong amount because they can't count. Sometimes it's an honest mistake—alter all, most of them will never be confused with rocket scientists—but sometimes it's not. The problem is, I often don't know which it is, and I can't completely trust any of the girls who work for me. Most girls in this industry are not the type to think ahead, especially when it comes to money. They get $ 1,000 in their pockets and they act like they're set forever.

Take, for example, Kristi, stage name Ginger, who had worked for me a bunch of times and been nothing but professional. Ginger is a tall blond bombshell with 36DD breasts who looks like a porn star. In fact, she has done some movie work before. She has probably been working for ten years, and why not? She still looks great, and her reviews are always perfect tens. You'd think I'd be able to rely on a girl like that. But even she tried to screw me once.

Ginger had been meeting clients in the hotel room I got for her all week and had paid my assistants faithfully every night when they came around to collect my share. That is, until the end of the week, on her very last day in town. That's when she decided not to wait around for my assistant, taking off instead with all the cash from that day.

I'm not an unreasonable person. Maybe there was a reason why she had to leave early. Maybe there was a reason why she needed some extra cash that day. If she had bothered to call and tell me what was up, I would have worked something out with her. But Ginger just disappeared with $1,000 of my money.

Still, I didn't freak out. I called and left her a message saying we had some settling up to do. She never called me back. I called her once a month after that and left the same message: "You know you owe me some money and we have to figure out a way to settle up." Each time, nothing. That went on for a year and a half before I did anything about it. I always give girls a decent amount of time to make things right. It's the only fair thing to do.

I had heard through the grapevine that Ginger was working for another agency in the area, so one day, after she hadn't returned my call again, I had a guy friend of mine call the other agency to make an appointment with her. The plan was this: He would pretend to be a client looking for the last appointment of the day, but when he showed up at her hotel room, he'd rob her instead. And that's exactly what my friend did. He's a big guy, a former bouncer at a club, and he's licensed to carry a firearm. He also brought along a friend to help. They didn't hurt her, but two big guys with guns will definitely scare a girl.

The guys were very professional. They got to Ginger's room, gathered up all the money she'd made that day, counted it, and then, per my instructions, put one-third of it back on the bedside table. That was the cut for the agency she was working for. My issue was with Ginger alone, and leaving the agency's money behind would make it clear that I wasn't interested in screwing them, just the girl. (I also called the agency to let them know this in case Ginger decided to take off with their money too.) Then, on their way out, the guys made sure Ginger understood why this was happening. "If you had settled your debts, this never would have happened to you," the bouncer told her. I'm sure she got the point.

The guys brought me my $1,000 and kept the rest for themselves as payment for their services. I wasn't looking to make money off of this, just to get what I was owed and settle the score. The guys got about $1,500 to share for a half an hour of work.

It's not like I go straight to that kind of tactic. Like I said, it had been over a year and I had given her all sorts of chances. She could have paid me in installments, she could have worked it off, but one way or another she had to pay. She didn't take me up on any of my offers, so she left me with no choice.

I know $1,000 is not a lot of money, but it's not the amount that matters. Word gets around. If one girl gets away with stealing from you, the others eventually hear about it and you have a nasty trend on your hands. So I can't let those things stand, not for any amount. Especially me. Being a young woman in this business has its advantages, but it has its drawbacks too, one of which is that people are more likely to think they can get away with shit. The girls should know better by now, and they should know that we will see each other again. We live and work in a pretty small world. I want all my girls, if they are considering doing what Ginger did, to think that I have a long memory and I will catch up with them eventually, so what's the point? Do you want to be watching your back for the rest of your life because you owe someone a measly $1,000? Unfortunately, a lot of the girls aren't that smart. If they were, they'd do what I do instead of what they do.

None of my girls could ever accuse me of not being fair. I never try to steal from them. I don't even charge interest when they're late in paying me. I just want what I'm owed. And Ginger learned her lesson. She was back working for me a few months later, and she hasn't misbehaved since.

I wish I could say that, once I made an example out of Ginger, that kind of thing never happened again. But it has happened again, and it will continue to happen. Girls are just like that.

Other tactics I've used to get even with girls and encourage them to settle their debts with me: calling up a husband or boyfriend to tell him what his precious lady really does with her spare time; burning a CD of a girl's promotional pictures to send to her family; and putting a notice on my Web site under a girl's pictures, along with her real name, for all our clients and whoever else visits the site to see, saying: "This girl's services won't be available until she pays back the money she owes us. Until then, her pictures and this notice will remain on our site."

As for my clients, most of them are hardworking professionals like doctors (the most common profession to hire my girls by far), lawyers, executives, and business owners (with one exception: our UPS delivery boy; how he affords to come by as often as he does, I'm not quite sure). They all have cash to spare and things to lose, which is just as important as the money, because it helps keep me and my business safe. And they need me as much as I need them. Even though a lot of the smarter girls market themselves on the Internet these days, most upscale clients don't really have time to troll the Web looking for what they want. And even if they did, they don't like giving out their personal information to a different girl every week. They want to do this safely too, and if they go through me, someone they know, they can choose from a variety of girls while having to trust only one person with their phone and credit card numbers. My girls don't even need to know a client's real name unless he tells it to them himself.

I try to live by the old rule "The customer is always right," except that sometimes he isn't. That's true even for my guys, who are, for the most part, a pretty nice bunch. But just because a guy looks like an upstanding citizen during the day doesn't mean he is one. We get all kinds of personality types calling us. "Different strokes for different folks" is what I say, and as long as they abide by the terms of our deal and behave themselves, I don't judge them (not in front of them anyway).

There was this one guy, for example, who never wanted to have sex. He just wanted someone to treat him like a baby, literally. He'd bring along a bottle, pacifier, and adult-size diapers, and the girl was supposed to feed, burp, and change him. Whatever. He was too out there for a couple of my girls, but most didn't really mind. It was a pretty easy hour for them. Babies, after all, mostly just lie there.

He wasn't the only one who asked for things other than sex. I had another client from New York who also brought along his own props. In his case, they were a long plastic tube and a small rodent. He had the girl stick the lubed-up tube in his ass, put the gerbil, or whatever it was, inside, and then wait for it to crawl upward. Once it had, she pulled out the tube, and the poor thing scratched around in his ass until it eventually suffocated. But that wasn't what excited this guy the most. What he really looked forward to was when the girl took him to the hospital afterward to have the rodent removed. He had specified in advance that she wear her sluttiest stripper wear, so that when they arrived at the emergency room, there was no doubt about her profession. And then he couldn't wait to tell everyone that there was "something stuck up my butt." It was the humiliation that really got him off.