Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl

by Tracy Quan

  When other women reminisce about fucking because they got carried away with adolescent desire, I feel more than a hint of envy. Passion, swelling, throbbing, coming—with a guy! At eleven, twelve, thirteen. All this is mind-boggling to me.

  My one romantic experiment with a high school boy was Derek. I had a huge crush on him—and every crush I had made me feel like a victim of fate. He was constantly occupying my thoughts; I felt nerdlike, insignificant, and powerless to attract him. A continuing battle with blackheads, pimples, and oily skin had taken a huge toll on my ego.

  Then I read an article in Sixteen that proved to be quite useful: “How to Make Him Like You Too.”

  I still remember it! Practice the Mona Lisa Smile—smile with your mouth but not with your eyes. I tried this in the mirror. When you normally smile, your eyes will smile with you, but the Mona Lisa Smile is a Serious Smile. (I recently checked—in my mirror—and found the Mona Lisa Smile supercilious, so it must be one of those things that looks good only on an adolescent.) Having mastered the Mona Lisa Smile, hang out wherever he hangs out. Be around. Do not make a point of talking to him, just be there. When you see him, look straight into his eyes and…deliver the Mona Lisa Smile. But don’t try to talk to him! This combination projects an air of mystery. He will start smiling back at you. Keep this up for two weeks and he will start to like you too.

  And he did. His return smiles became sweeter, more personal, and more liquid-eyed. He was tall and soulful, with dark hair to his neck, and he was mine. For about a week.

  Derek came over to the Hersch household, where I was babysitting their toddler, and we rolled around on a bedspread in a darkened bedroom. When he asked if he could “stick it in,” I realized he had never read a sex manual.

  What? I’d read a hundred times that the man was supposed to make sure the woman was lubricated! I didn’t understand how this worked in real life. I expected him to ask me point-blank, “Are you lubricated?” And since he didn’t do that—and I wasn’t even aroused—I felt inadequately handled. I had also read about pills, condoms, and pregnancies. He hadn’t asked me about that either.

  So I just said no.

  “We probably shouldn’t,” he agreed.

  “I don’t have any birth control,” I pointed out.

  The next time we got together, at another baby-sitting location, he gently nudged my head toward his cock—and I cautiously kissed it. But I didn’t put it in my mouth. (I didn’t understand until years later that this was a social overture—his way of asking for oral sex.) I still remember wrapping my hand around his cock and feeling rather thrilled about finally touching my first hard penis; but it was a sense of accomplishment, not a feeling of arousal, that I remember.

  Put another way, I didn’t know that he wanted me to suck his cock, and he didn’t know that I wanted him to get me wet. It was a simple case of mechanical failure, perhaps. I had this huge crush on Derek, but I never felt anything close to the arousal I’d felt when I’d read that dirty novel at the age of eleven.

  I wanted to win him and have him and I loved looking at him, but my body didn’t need him.

  We were sitting in the living room, listening to Neil Young, when he broke up with me.

  “I don’t think you really like me. I think you just like having a guy, knowing that you’re going out with a guy.”

  “No, no, I like you—I’ve liked you for a long time!”

  I started crying. Neil Young started singing a breakup dirge, in that god-awful nasal voice that I found so romantic at the time. I wept more intensely, thinking this would change things between us.

  “The song always seems to fit the situation,” Derek said.

  I cried some more, he was gentle and kind, and then he got the hell out of there. In a way he was right. I was finding that the wanting and waiting and scheming to get him had been more exciting. The time we spent together was weird, quiet; we weren’t really connecting, and we hardly ever talked. And I couldn’t bring myself to admit it. My first loosely defined junior high courtship—and I was ready to behave like some sort of established partner who is just going through the motions! When I think about it, my attitude seems almost like a caricature of middle age. Scary.

  But I guess I didn’t know quite what to do with him. Why didn’t I just chatter, the way I could with an older man? I noticed constantly that guys in their twenties and thirties—guys who were no longer in high school—were so easy to talk to.

  In May, Professor Andrews offered to initiate me sexually. I liked the attention I was getting from him because he was a local celebrity, but I was not, like the women in his orbit, a fan. Because I was still a girl, I was immune to his romantic appeal.

  I told him, “No—I’m not attracted to you” I didn’t want this portly old geezer to be my first lover. I knew it was preposterous; he was somebody’s dad, for god’s sake. Impossibly old!

  Professor Andrews asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. “I’m going to be a hooker,” I told him.

  “You can start now, you know. I’d pay you,” was his reply.

  “I’m going to wait until I’ve gone to university,” I said.

  “Call me if you change your mind,” he said—but I was skeptical.

  A month later, there was no special guy to please or be seduced by when I decided to start having sex. But, oddly enough, a special guy appeared on the horizon as soon as I had made up my mind to start fucking. Peter was a nineteen-year-old history major who had taken a few of Professor Andrews’s courses. (In our small town, that was not surprising. Many people had.) I was thirteen and a half, and the decision to lose my virginity was made on the day after I took my last exam for the school year, in June.

  A week or so later, I met Peter while I was cruising the aisles of a trendy bookstore, trying to decide whether to spend some of my baby-sitting bonus on a copy of The Bell Jar. He was carrying around a stack of books, Survival, by Margaret Atwood, being the most prominent.

  As a small child, I had never been a tomboy; I’d preferred dolls and books to sports, English to science, even enjoyed home ec. I’d never really liked competing with boys when I was small. But when I started having sex, my tomboy streak emerged. I began to see my sex partners as notches on a belt, scalps hanging from my waist—conquests. Though I was extremely charmed by Peter, that didn’t stop me from thinking about who I could sleep with next. And not for reasons of passion; I had a Sexual Plan. I didn’t know yet that there could be more pleasure in being the conquest, letting a man plan your seduction.

  Once I had begun having sex, I felt emboldened. I called Professor Andrews and reminded him of his offer. No oral sex (an act I still regarded with suspicion) and no kissing, I told him. “And we have to use a condom.”

  He had no quarrel with my terms. “But there’s something else we should discuss. What are you going to wear?”

  “Wear?” I said blankly. I didn’t know that people sometimes wore clothes for the purpose of making sex more interesting. Peter and I had an affectionate, ordinary sex life—nothing kinky.

  “Well, you’re always dressed in these long baggy things and loose shirts. Don’t you have a short skirt? Or a pair of high-heeled boots?”

  “Boots?” I gasped. “It’s August!”

  “Do you have a garter belt?”

  “People my age don’t wear garter belts!” I scoffed. “Are you crazy?”

  This irked him. “That is such an arrogant crock of shit! It’s one thing for you to express a preference! But don’t try to present yourself as a spokesperson for your generation!” he railed.

  I knew he was nuts. Nobody I went to school with owned a garter belt. I showed up for my first trick wearing Dr. Scholl’s sandals and a denim skirt hemmed with the wrong color thread, carrying a wicker basket.

  “I suppose you want your money first,” he said. I tucked it into the small lozenge tin that I kept in my wicker basket and used as a wallet.

  As he put the condom on, it came naturally to me t
o say “I like watching you do that.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “It’s the anticipation.”

  But I was more interested in getting my first trick over with, collecting what I knew to be an amusing scalp. I knew about erotic anticipation from books. I had never lusted for a man’s cock. Today, I might get into bed with a client and make him hard with a hungry look; but I didn’t know, at thirteen, how to mimic that kind of desire. I had no standard of excellence to maintain or achieve—the way I do today—and I made zero effort to please him, turn him on, or entertain him.

  And yet he came as soon as he was inside me—a fact I just took for granted because, after all, adolescence is wasted on the young.

  I didn’t appreciate how ridiculously easy Professor Andrews was until a decade later, when I was hooking for real and starting to make myself “younger.” Most of my clients aren’t as quick as Professor Andrews—or as easy—but I suppose most would be if they were fucking their thirteen-year-old neighbor. I’m sure my clients today—Milt, Etienne, guys like that—are turned on by pubescent girls. But these guys are big-city players, not small-town pedophiles, and they’re less likely to act on those fantasies. They have too much to lose.

  I had no idea what an enormous turn-on my age had been for Professor Andrews until I entered my twenties. There was much I didn’t know, but I understood that Professor Andrews was being foolish—taking a giant risk to satisfy a curiosity he couldn’t control. I should have felt a little bit sorry for the man, and I do today. But when I knew him I thought about him only in very selfish terms.

  He was different from my boyfriend, whose attention and admiration lit me up from inside. Despite my deliberate approach to sex, I had fallen in love with my first sex partner. I couldn’t wait to tell Peter about this adventure; he had more sexual experience than I did, but I was catching up with him. Maybe I could even surpass him. Peter was my sexual confidant—the only person I talked to about the realities and discoveries of sex—so I boasted to him about what I had done. Despite my physical maturity (I had the body, the face, and some of the mannerisms of a seventeen-year-old), this was a child’s boast. Bragging to my lover about another sexual conquest—I was like one of those people with new money who can’t help flashing their winnings around!

  Peter wasn’t angry; he didn’t insult me or judge me in any way. He looked bemused and thoughtful, and he continued to be quite affectionate—but an older girl closer to his age or a young woman in her twenties would have kept this escapade to herself. And when the summer ended, when the school year began again, our age difference began to matter more.

  Ignorance is bliss—sort of. I didn’t know a tenth of what I know today, but I had some basic instincts down that puzzle me to this day. How is it that some people are born knowing how to feel about a trick while others (at any age—thirteen or thirty-three) can’t figure this out? A misfit hooker feels put upon and put down, or she falls for a john and wants his approval. But I felt that fucking Professor Andrews for money made me his equal. I wasn’t some student seeking a good mark, or a lonely lover wishing he would leave his wife. Or an adoring groupie flattered by his conversation. And while he seemed hopelessly old-fashioned—garter belts!—and just plain old, he didn’t strike me as much of an authority figure. Fucking a local celebrity was a feather in my cap because of other people’s infatuations—and I liked knowing that I had seen the mental underbelly of a town icon. I didn’t know how to say this at the time, but that’s what I felt.

  If I could say I regretted fucking him for money, it would have made—would make—a lot of things simpler. I do regret, or wonder about, some other things, though. Three days after turning my first trick, at thirteen, I’d spent the entire sum. Later, when I was fifteen passing for twenty, and picking up clients at the London Hilton on Park Lane, I knew I was making per trick what some real adults earned in a week. But I ignored the older girls who advised me to save money, and I blew it on restaurants and clothes, indulging my whims. They seemed…so dour, like my mother. I much preferred the company of frothy types—also older—who enjoyed talking about their boyfriend problems, who bonded with me over food rather than advice, who enjoyed hanging out for hours in cafés and bistros. And I wasn’t getting a very good grounding in reality; Ned, the boyfriend I lived with at that point, provided me with a home, and there were no household bills to pay.

  New York was different. Where London was glamorous yet somehow familiar (especially to someone from a small Canadian town), New York felt foreign, untidy and incomplete. I was startled to discover that I now had to pay for my V.D. tests; there was nothing remotely like the Praed Street clinic in New York. The greatest city in the world didn’t have casinos or free V.D. clinics! Well, not the kind of clinic where you felt comfortable. There was a public clinic in the West Twenties that looked like an abandoned public school—before you even got inside. So I found a private gynecologist who specialized in working girls and their needs—and got used to paying cash for my medical care.

  But the American way was also seductive. When I joined the ranks of Jeannie’s Dream Dates (a midtown escort service with ads in the Yellow Pages), I was faced with a surplus of johns. I had never been so busy in London—not even at the Kontinental nightclub. Hustling champagne all evening—“punters” had to buy two bottles of Taittinger in order to sit with a girl—I would usually pick up one client and invest a lot of my evening in him. Things moved at a slower pace, and if it didn’t pan out, it was a waste of time—too bad.

  New York was different not just because you had to pay for everything but also because I suddenly felt that I was in the aisle of a giant sexual supermarket. Why was I so busy? At first I thought it was my exotic loveliness and my good breeding. “You’re so well-spoken!” Jeannie would croon at me. Actually, I was too naive to give out my number and skirt the 50 percent cut that went to Jeannie.

  I felt an allegiance to the agency for keeping me so busy—but not to the clients for liking me. I still thought of clients as a breed apart from other guys (like Professor Andrews), and I didn’t respect them. In my sixteen-year-old’s half-invented inner universe, the agency and I were as one, united in the fleecing of the johns.

  But all that changed one night when the agency sent me to see Arnie, a Garment Center hippie and the son of a buttons-and-trimmings magnate, with a triplex in Gramercy Park. For the first time ever, I had multiple orgasms. Due to Arnie’s abundant cocaine and my extreme youth, I became somewhat paranoid after my fourth climax. Was he trying to get out of paying for the final hour? But no, it was business as usual, and Arnie asked for my number as I was leaving, a request I warily brushed off. When I woke the next afternoon, I literally pinched myself. Why hadn’t I given Arnie my number? I realized I liked him in a way that I had never liked a john before.

  Arnie made me look at men differently. Before, clients were mere tools, a breed apart from boyfriends, and I didn’t care if I saw them again. But now I discovered that you could care about seeing a john again—because you simply hit it off or he did something to your body that nobody else did. For the same reasons that you might want to see your boyfriend.

  Basically, I’d snubbed the first repeat customer I’d ever wanted. When other girls at the agency went to see him, I was secretly jealous. And I wondered about those multiple orgasms. Did the other girls have them, too? Or was it our special chemistry? Why did I assume this was just a job until now, a crude exchange involving a man’s pleasure and his money?

  Before Arnie, I resented any client who had the ability to make my body feel things. I had strange ideas. I believed, for example, that a client who lost his erection was prolonging the session to make me work harder. Though I never saw Arnie again, my attitude began to change.

  I started finding out what my body liked, what it could or couldn’t accomplish for itself while making love for money. I finally began to outgrow Professor Andrews. I was still a pro, still working, and as concerned about money as ever. But
I wasn’t a sexual tomboy anymore. A customer had surprised me—he had changed me. I wanted to see him again. But I never did.

  13 The Bad Seed

  MONDAY. 5/8/00

  Two dates this morning, back-to-back. First, Milt, by appointment. Then, Steven, impromptu: “I’m ten minutes away. Can I come over?” I knew he would be the easiest $350 I’d made in weeks. These sudden opportunities—which you must be prepared for (but can’t plan for) if you’re serious about being a call girl—really get the adrenaline going. The true test of a girl’s sexiness and couth is her ability to turn it on when pressed for time. Anyone can be sexy if she has a whole day to prepare! But I still—after how many years in this business?—get flustered, feel the pressure to perform at the last minute. And I thrive on it.

  The pressure to find those special stockings that he likes. Where did I put them??

  I washed up in record time, changed the sheets, put on my garter belt—and was still adjusting my sheer stockings when Steven buzzed. I stood behind the apartment door, listening; I could hear a neighbor and her Yorkie. The woman who lives three doors down from me. With my ankle straps still unbuckled, I stayed out of sight so Steven could slip into the foyer without letting the dog owner catch sight of me—nearly naked in my heels!

  While Steven was undressing, I was still dressing, discreetly buckling my shoes and fastening my garters. He came while I was perched on the edge of my bed, rubbing the head of his cock against the lacy edge of my bra. After he left, I washed the residual Astroglide off my chest, soaked my bra in Palmolive and Shout—it was covered with his come—and decided to spring-clean the closets.

  The sun is suspiciously powerful these days: time to excavate the hall closet and find my good French sunblock, my protective summer hats. Yesterday, I picked up a fresh tube of Self Tanning Milk (for my legs only—I never tan elsewhere) and booked an appointment with Claudia for my presummer power peel. Soon it will be mosquito season—time to make the switch from Allure to Off! But I’m not just molting for the summer. It’s a bit more serious than that. I guess this is the spring-cleaning of my life.