Madam. Jenny Angell

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       THE MAKING OF A MADAM

      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.

      So I finally had a job. I was the receptionist; I greeted clients and took all the telephone calls. And listened to the bickering.

      “The sheets have to be clean,” Laura kept saying to the girls. That was her constant mantra. You wouldn’t think that clean sheets could ever become such an issue. Whose turn it was to change the sheets, who had last used the front room, who had done the laundry yesterday. That was all that the girls talked about: those damned sheets.

      The sheets weren’t my department. I got to talk to the guys.

      The clients came in all shapes and sizes, both figuratively and literally. Guys who knew exactly what they wanted, and guys who could be talked into seeing the girl who hadn’t had a call for two days. Young guys that you couldn’t figure out, for the life of you, why they couldn’t get a date on their own; and older men who clearly had СКАЧАТЬ