Call Girl Confidential Page 3

  “Yes, I have it.”

  “Good,” Kristin said. “You wanna work tomorrow night?”

  FOUR

  one of the girls

  When I finally got home, I couldn’t get the keys in the lock quickly enough. I stripped down completely. I put everything in the washer and jumped into the shower. I was numb. I slid down onto the shower floor, hugging my knees, and cried.

  I prayed, Please, dear God, forgive me. I cried all night, and I was afraid of God all night. In the morning I snapped out of it when I looked over at my daughter’s empty room. Anything, I thought. I will do anything to get her back.

  If the worst thing I do is let others take my body to pay these impossible bills, I will answer to God for that. But she will not suffer because her father wants to go to war with me. I will give everything I have, even my body, myself.

  I ran out of funds just a few months after the custody battle began in 2005. Soon I would go to work at my regular day job and then afterward I would work for Kristin. I was working days and working nights, because Isabella was not in my home. She was with him.

  I don’t think I ever felt comfortable or got used to the idea of working during my time as a call girl with Kristin. Maybe it was the clients, or maybe it was seeing the other girls and how they reacted to the job. Sometimes I couldn’t tell if I was crying because I missed Isabella, I was disgusted at myself, I was sad because I felt I was losing in court, or because no matter how hard I worked, it was never enough money. I could feel myself falling apart. There were days when I thought I was truly losing my mind; I would have panic attacks and breathe into a paper bag to try and get myself to calm down. I realized more than ever that I had to separate myself, the girl I truly was, from the girl these men wanted and needed me to be and that I was getting paid to be. The effort it takes to achieve that is nearly impossible but absolutely necessary. It never got easier to do the job. The only thing that got easier was pretending that it didn’t bother me and that I loved each and every one of my clients. There is no time for a real life. You go into survival mode. And that is what I did and have done for years.

  I would pull all-nighters for Kristin, sometimes working until four or five in the morning, then get a couple of hours of sleep and get to work by 8:30 a.m. Then I’d do it all over again. It was exhausting, but I had to pay the attorneys and the rent on my apartment and buy Isabella things. And I had to look good for my night job, and that cost money. A lot of money.

  A regular girl running around New York may think about her manicure and pedicure, her highlights and waxing and even a few extras along the way, but an escort for whom men pay thousands of dollars is at another level of maintenance entirely. The clients expected it. No, they demanded it. I had to make sure my highlights were touched up frequently and had my hair blown out several times a week. I had to be immaculately manicured, pedicured, and waxed. Frequent facials. Eyelashes put on every two weeks, spray tanning every three to four days, so you have that perfect glow and look as though you just returned from St. Barts.

  But just as important was my wardrobe. A high-priced escort has to look sexy but elegant as soon as she walks in the hotel-room door or accompanies a client to a party or restaurant. Eventually I collected racks of pretty dresses, several hundred pairs of sexy shoes, and expensive lingerie. Building a beautiful wardrobe takes time and work. And, yes, my regular clients let me buy whatever I wanted on their dime all along Fifth or Madison. But it takes a lot of effort to look expensive.

  I know what you are thinking: Oh, poor little you. But I actually had to view myself as a business in which I was the major investor. Sure, I was pretty, but lots of girls are pretty. I had to be a full-fledged fantasy.

  I took some of those initial profits and bought things that would transform me into a woman that the richest men in the world desired, again and again. My outfits could each cost thousands of dollars. I learned quickly that this was a game, and decided I was going to be the queen of it. I had to be if I wanted to make the big bucks.

  The work was incredibly risky. Kristin had a knack for getting us a lot of work. But generally a man could call and give a credit card number and he was in. That’s all it took to get a booking. He could have been a serial killer for all she knew. And I never knew who I was about to see.

  I did some incall work at the apartment Kristin had rented at the Corinthian. She also had a couple of other apartments that she would use as incall locations, and they would always be able to serve two customers at a time. Kristin wouldn’t be there most of the time. We girls would come to protect one another and keep each other company in the living room even if we weren’t scheduled to work. We stuck together.

  There were beautiful girls from all over the country and from all over the world, fate having brought them into this line of work for any number of reasons.

  There was a beautiful Ukrainian girl whom I’ll call Ekaterina—Kit Kat. I really, really liked her a lot. She was extremely intelligent and we could talk for hours. I always respected her because she knew this job served a purpose, unlike some of the others. Her family was from Chernobyl, and although she hadn’t yet been born when the nuclear power plant disaster happened there, her sisters had, and they were very sick. One of them had thyroid cancer. Kit Kat sent money back to her mother and sisters every month. They thought it was pay from the job she also had at a well-known public relations firm. She was like me, working days and nights. She made good money, but it was nothing compared to what she got at night, even after Kristin took half. Her public relations coworkers had no idea. She, too, hated the work at the Corinthian, but it was a means to an end, and she would do whatever it took to help her family. She was perhaps one of the strongest women I have ever met in my entire life. After I stopped working for Kristin, Kit Kat and I would meet for dinner or lunch just to make sure the other was OK. She was one of the few who knew my true story. She is also the one who sent me the text to read the article in the paper about Kristin’s arrest. I never heard from her again. I hope she is well.

  Some of the girls didn’t have a serious purpose like Kit Kat. In fact, a lot of the girls spent all their money on clothes, bags, and vacations. They would pay their rent and then blow the rest on the next Louis Vuitton bag. It was refreshing to be around them every once in a while because of their airhead mentality and total ignorance of the seriousness of our life-altering stress. But it also made us feel sorry for them, because they fell for the clients who would say, “Hey, let’s go out to dinner” and “I really want to take you shopping.” Translation: Let me get sex for free, and you will never see it coming—and then you will get fired for seeing a client outside of the business and be out of a job. We always warned them, but they never wanted to listen. And it always happened.

  There was Allie. She was always falling in love. She was really good at her job. She was a little wild, but she had amazing natural breasts that made her a favorite of some of the clients. So, even though she was a little plain, those breasts were enough to keep her employed. We weren’t allowed to smoke or drink if we were at the Corinthian, but Allie did all the time, like it was a party. She was a student but she’d drop out all the time, then go back and then quit again.

  Then there was Lizzie, a very young girl from Minnesota who was a bit of a pathological liar. Actually, let me correct that: she was an outrageous pathological liar. If she wanted to see her boyfriend one night and didn’t want to work, she’d just say her grandmother died, forgetting that she’d told Kristin her grandmother had died the month before. Kristin wasn’t stupid and always knew what she was up to. One day Lizzie said her sister died. Truly horrible. I am not sure it gets worse than that. I felt really sorry for her, but before I knew how much of a liar she really was (because all of the girls wanted to get out of schedules), we were actually pretty decent social friends. Notice I said “social friends.” Not close, but social. I always keep people at just the right distance to be safe. Oh, and to be clear: her sister did not pa
ss away.

  One night Lizzie asked me if I would do her a favor and come along on a job at the Waldorf Astoria. She had been working for many different madams. I didn’t know her other madam this time, but the job seemed very simple: she needed another girl to come along to socialize at a party, and we would be paid to mingle. Easy enough. She said it was an easy job, so I had no problem doing that.

  A well-known media executive and his friends were throwing the party; that was all she knew at the time. We were told to wait downstairs in the lobby, where we would be greeted and then taken up to the apartment. We went up, and the apartment had a beautiful ornate door. When it opened, we walked in, and Lizzie and I were escorted over to the enormous dining area. I introduced myself and my friend to the others in the room. It was a bit confusing, because we had been told we were going to a big party, and there were only about four or five people in the room. We shrugged it off, as champagne was flowing and servers were bringing out hors d’oeuvres of oysters and shrimp.

  One of the guests poured me a drink and asked me my name, and I replied, “Why, my name is Ashley,” and smiled with my usual wink and giggle. It always puts someone at ease when I amp up my Southern accent. His eyes immediately brightened, and he said, “You are a Southern girl!” He said he was Dr. Benjamin Chavis and that he was also from North Carolina. He had been the head of the NAACP and now directed the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. We had a lot to talk about.

  Our client was the host of the party. There were framed photos of his family all around the apartment. Lizzie and I just mingled among the guests. Dr. Chavis and I talked all night. I never got the sense he wanted to “avail himself of the services,” though he did give me his cell number. He explained that a number of them were being inducted as ambassadors to the UN for something the next day and this was a mini celebration, without their wives and girlfriends. Ambassadors for what, I didn’t ask, but I acted as if I was impressed. That was my job.

  By the end of the night, nothing sexual had happened. We were prepared for it, but it just ended up being a straight party. But the client did not want to pay. He said, “I am not paying for you to hang out and talk and eat hors d’oeuvres.”

  “Oh, no, no, no, no,” I insisted. “No one’s leaving this apartment till you pay. Not any of your friends, not Dr. Chavis, no one is leaving until you pay.”

  “I don’t have any cash on me,” he said.

  “So send your bodyguard now,” I snapped.

  “Jay-Z’s waiting for us,” he pleaded. “We have to go to the 40/40 Club. I don’t carry cash.”

  “Too bad,” I said. “You’d better go get some. You know full well why I’m here. This is a business transaction. You have to pay us whether you have partaken or not. You see this girl? She has to answer to somebody. She is going to get into a lot of trouble. Do you really want her to possibly get hurt?” I looked over to Lizzie. She wasn’t doing anything to try to get this money; I didn’t know who had set this job up, but what I did know was Lizzie had better get their cut. I didn’t want to see Lizzie get hurt. I had no idea who she had gotten herself mixed up with, if these were the types of clients being sent her way.

  They all said, “We’re leaving.”

  I said, “Really? Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re all going to go downstairs. If that money is not there at the concierge desk by eight a.m., I have taken pictures of all of you in this apartment without you knowing, and I am going to put every single one of you online as having been with us. Welcome to New York.”

  The money was there in full and on time.

  Oh, a postscript on Lizzie: I did her that favor, and later she stole $3,000 from me. I never heard from her again.

  Many of the girls had boyfriends; some were even married. They were usually pretty open about it among the other girls. But most of their boyfriends or husbands didn’t know what they did. They’d have to conceal their lingerie and condoms. Their boyfriends were definitely not seeing that when they got home. I never talked about Mike, and I was terrified somebody would find out who he was. Or had been.

  There were some very famous models that worked for Kristin. Girls who’d been on the cover of Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan. They usually did outcalls. But occasionally they would pop in to meet a client at Kristin’s place and their attitudes were above and beyond atrocious. They behaved as if they were better than we were, even though they were putting their stilettos up in the air just the same.

  We girls would talk about clients too. We would say this guy likes this and that guy likes that. Or we might say, “Watch out for that guy.” We would share tips. And if we didn’t like somebody, there were always tricks to get him to finish quickly. We made sure the new girls never let a guy talk them into “bare backing.” Bare backing is sex without a condom. Any type of sex, including oral.

  Some girls wanted to see how many clients they could have in a day. I don’t understand why they would ever want to do that. I guess they got competitive with each other. You know, as if they were trying to say that they were the most popular girl in school.

  I was making a lot of money with Kristin, but ultimately I just couldn’t put up with her surprises anymore. Her vetting process was atrocious; no, it was nonexistent. Whether it was New York, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., it didn’t matter: you never knew who was walking in the door or who you were going to see. Unless it was one of your regular clients.

  Aside from the obvious risk factors, I liked to know who it was I was going to see, because I needed to know who I was going to be. I had different personalities with different people, and I went by several names. My psyche had to change because of who each man was and what his needs were. If I went into something blind, I didn’t know who I needed to be for that person.

  And, of course, with no bodyguards, no security, and no bookers present, not even Kristin there, you were meeting complete strangers and having sex with them. Physically, they were bigger and stronger. Anything could have happened. It was very dangerous work. There was always a feeling of risk.

  It was time to move on. But as I would eventually learn, I was in deeper than I had realized.

  FIVE

  rock star daddy

  Are you wondering how I could have sex with strangers for money? No matter how desperately I needed cash to get my daughter back? Are you still judging me? Calling me all the lowest names a woman in our society can be called? Thinking you could never do it?

  Perhaps if you knew that the man I was fighting against for custody of my daughter was a rock star with unlimited funds—or so I thought—then maybe you would understand. When he kidnapped our daughter, I vowed I would do anything I could to get her back.

  I met Mike at a party for a childhood friend of mine. Bob Guccione had just made her his Penthouse Pet of the Year.

  Quite buxom and a natural blonde, my pal was known to Guccione and to her fans as Paige Summers. But back in the tiny Bible Belt town where we grew up, I knew her as Nancy Ann Coursey. Nancy was my dearest friend before I left my hometown. She understood the harsh way my sister and I were being raised.

  We grew up in Morganton, North Carolina, which few people know is the site of the first European settlement in the U.S. interior, built forty years before Jamestown. But it was also a hotbed of the Ku Klux Klan. My father was a very stern and scary man to me growing up, and he ruled our house with an iron fist.

  He worked at the state psychiatric hospital, and every day when he came home, he would go into the yard and shoot his BB gun at squirrels. He beat my sister and me for the tiniest infractions with switches that we would have to pick out ourselves. I called it “pick a switch.” I hated it; I knew I had to be careful because you didn’t want to pick a big one that would be too harmful, but you also didn’t want to pick one that was too small. Coming back with a small one would result in him becoming angrier and going to get his own or getting out the belt.

  In the house, even at dinner, he forced us to be absolutely silent
. He didn’t want anyone talking about much of anything, really. My sister and I hid in our room and whispered and kept to ourselves a lot. We would spend our time before he came home from work building pine-needle forts in our backyard. But once he was home, we had to come inside as well—only to go about our homework and chores in silence.

  Our parents got together with other like-minded parents and collectively taught us at The Children’s School. We didn’t go to school with all the other kids in town. This isolated us even more. We were not allowed to watch television—not that we had one, anyway—and our little school didn’t have a gym. I yearned to take gymnastics or dance lessons. My only extracurricular activities were attending the Baptist church three nights a week and all day Sunday—whether it was for choir or hand bell rehearsal or Bible study—and music. My father played the dulcimer and some brass instruments and insisted my sister and I practice classical music on ours—she on the trumpet and me on the trombone and violin—for hours.

  At the time, I would pray while walking to church that I would be kidnapped and go live with a family that was different from ours. But one day, after years of torment, it all suddenly ceased.

  When I was thirteen my father was diagnosed with a brain tumor that had gone undiscovered for years. Perhaps that is why all his behavior towards us was so harsh when we were children. He had surgery to remove it, but there was good and bad news at the same time. The tumor was successfully removed, but he would have severe memory loss and lose some other abilities as well, and he was shipped off to a rehabilitation center, hours away, where he would live for the next couple of years. My mother simply up and left us for what felt like most of the time. She moved to the apartment offered to family members where my father had been sent for rehabilitation, claiming that she needed to oversee his care.