Some Girls: My Life in a Harem by Jillian Lauren Read Free Book Online

I was catapulted into the job within a couple of hours. Taylor informed me that I was lucky to get a call on my first night of work. I was going to do well, she assured me, if for no other reason than my age. I was the youngest girl there and have always had the advantage of an innocent appearance. My most drastic attempts to be punk and hard never fooled anyone—I am a nice girl to the bone. It has served me well in my not-so-nice endeavors.
    So that first night I got a call to go to the apartment of a well-known talk radio host. Ellie, who was basically a plump, cookie-baking, Laura Ashley-wearing assistant pimp, taught me how to use my own little credit-card machine and gave me specific instructions about how and when the transaction was to take place (immediately upon arrival), as well as the rules for reporting in. Before I left for my first “date,” Taylor took me into the bedroom, sat me down on the bed, and gave me a few pointers. She had taken me under her wing.
    “The whole trick is, how much can you get for how little you give, get it? You want to turn one hour into two into three and to make a blowjob seem better than sex.”
    Like Scheherazade, we looked for the story that was so irresistible they had to keep us around for another hour to hear the end.
    “Some nights suck,” she said. “Some nights we hang out here with no calls at all, but some nights are eight-hour limousine windfalls with coked-up, limp-dicked, out-of-town businessmen. It evens out. Always, always use a condom. Put it on with your mouth and he won’t even notice.”
    For my escort name, I picked Elizabeth because it sounded real and because it had been, along with Janice and Eduardo among others, one of the aliases I had used when playing make-believe games as a kid. I had been Elizabeth the Queen of France, Elizabeth and the Three Bears, Elizabeth the seventh Brady kid, Elizabeth the French Resistance fighter.
    Add to that résumé Elizabeth the call girl, Elizabeth the cheater. Sean and I didn’t have the kind of relationship in which we checked in with each other every five minutes, so I hadn’t exactly lied to him; I had just neglected to mention my whereabouts that evening. But if I stuck with the job some hard-core lying would definitely be called for. Taylor said that the girls sometimes told their boyfriends they had jobs as night temps. Waitressing was a risky lie, because your boyfriend could show up to surprise you at work and then you’d be screwed. I supposed that I could let Sean assume I was still dancing at the club. But though I had been a stripper, until that point I hadn’t been much of a liar. To my parents, yes, but not to my friends. Not to my boyfriend, my kind boyfriend with the elegant hands.
    Sean had introduced me to Elvis Costello. As I left that night for my first trick, the lyrics to “Almost Blue” played in my head. There’s a part of me that’s always true. Always. The rest of me—Elizabeth, eighteen-year-old curvaceous theater student with a face like Winona Ryder’s, will do whatever—stepped into the street alone and hailed a cab to an uptown high-rise.
     
    It felt like a movie with a good jazz soundtrack. Like a Woody Allen New York love song. One of the characters is a young, lost actress who finds herself in a cab headed uptown to turn a trick with a radio personality. Starring Mariel Hemingway. Starring me. The film was already rolling. I couldn’t stop to reconsider.
    I stepped out of the cab, my breath visible in the cold night, and plunged my hands into my pockets before walking past a doorman, who nodded politely. I rode the elevator to the almost-top floor and knocked on a door. Instantaneously, the radio host appeared in the doorway. I recognized his face from ads for his show that I had seen plastered on the insides of subway cars. He was holding a sweating, half-empty drink in his hand and his paisley robe hung open, the belt coming undone and revealing a pair of silk boxers