I’ve been with so many wonderful lovers. It astounds me to think of them all. Most guys do their homework, and they do it very well. They’re determined to learn how to satisfy a woman, and some of them truly succeed; they must send their women to heaven. They have the right touch, just the right presence, just the right combo of technique and tenderness.

     Some of the others are all thumbs. Their natural touch is an irritating jitter. Or maybe they drink, they feel that they have to. The alcohol makes them insensible, clumsy.

     Whatever. No matter how well or how badly they perform, I give most of them A’s for effort. Most of them defer to the clitoris as though it were a five-carat diamond. Most of them search for the G-spot as though it were a sunken treasure.

     The guy who’s in bed just to get his own jollies is a relic, a throwback. He’s almost extinct. Men, for the most part, have discovered something big. A way to proud manhood is to make women come. And boy, do they ever try to. Getting us off is a major-league issue. If a guy doesn’t do it, he feels like a loser. And a guy will do all that’s required to win.

     And some of them are just being fine human beings. They understand that to make a girl come is nobler than just feeling manly. To be good to a woman is the right thing to do. 

     Imagine the pressure that puts on an escort. Especially one billed as the Girl Friend Experience! Three-quarters of my clients want me to come, they shell out big bucks just to make me. Of course, there are plenty of times when I can’t! But I do make sure to tell them what good lovers they are. They need to know they are, they try so hard to be, and most of them deserve a big pat on the back.

     Okay, that’s a fanfare, a tribute, that I’m making here and now, to men. That’s my heartfelt acknowledgement, my sincere declaration, my knighting of the gallantry that men show in bed. Innumerable clients have earned it.

     And now, with that said, with good mentions all made, I’ll get on to the winners, the champions. For me, the winners aren’t men. It’s been couples….

     First and foremost, I want to make one thing clear: I sell myself for nobody’s profit but my own.

     I only work when I want to. I only see who I want to. I make all the rules. I keep all the money. And that makes all the difference.

     I think that puts an iron cork in the anti-prostitution agenda. Isn’t the exploitation of women the biggest issue there?

     No one exploits me.

     I don’t have a pimp. I don’t work in somebody’s brothel. It’s true I’m an escort, but I’m not an agency escort. No madam or manager lords over me, sending me out, taking big cuts, or telling me who to see.

     I’m completely and literally self-employed.

     Actually, nothing exploits me. Not even Corporate America. When I wake up in the morning, it’s not because an obnoxious alarm clock has startled my brain from its nest. I don’t have to “report” or “go in” or “show up”….

 I pull up at the hotel. It’s a sweeping, three-star affair. When I go to a cheap motel, I feel a little cheap, even though I make the same money. I won’t feel that way here.

     I park and walk into the lobby. I approach the front desk people with a bright, friendly smile, and plenty of eye contact.

     Don’t act nervous. Don’t ever act guilty. Walk proud; walk tall; you belong here.

     Damn right I do.

     But just to get me lost, just to lead me astray, just to get me gaping, impressed, at the vast banquet halls and theme lounges (so some day I’ll book an event here, and make the hotel big bucks), the guest rooms are located remotely, in areas not apparent. These large hotels are strange mazes. Somewhere deep in this complex, tunnels of rooms spread out from the center in maddeningly different directions.

     Which way should I go?

     My new client tried hard to be helpful on the phone; he described where I should turn once I got here. But the design of the place, and its hugeness and attractions, have all done their numbers on me; I’ve arrived, and my memory wavers; I’m a little bit overwhelmed. I’m probably going to go the wrong way, probably five minutes-worth of wrong way, and I don’t want to be late. So I head to the desk for directions.

     Somebody hands me a map of the hotel….

     When I get to his floor, and I’m close now, scoping room numbers to his, my heart is a pounding hammer, and my stomach is knotted to the point of feeling sick.

     Housekeepers are all over the corridor. Their huge carts are parked just like trucks. Their invasions of rooms and their aggressive strip-downs make them look like they own the place. They also tend to look foreign.

     For some reason, they always smile at me.

     Why?

     They smile at me, an attractive woman, more carefully groomed than the average female traveler, who’s walking down this hallway all alone; I don’t have any luggage, and I don’t look at all wound-down; I’m clearly not a woman who’s come here to rest. 

     They can see I’m not holding a key card. They can see I’m all peering and seeking, yet somehow bold just the same; I’m purposefully hunting for a room not my own.

     So, why are they grinning at me?

     Do they know? Are they cool? 

     Maybe they’re beaming for the simple reason that their cultures made them randomly friendly. Or maybe they’ve been trained by their employer to welcome every face with a smile.

     But there’s something too real in their eyes.

     Is it because they know what I’m up to, and they know I’m the highest paid female service worker this place will ever contain, and their culture has taught them to respect me for it?

     Or are they grinning because they know there’s a sting operation going on here, and they know I’m a whore walking into her doom, and their culture has taught them I deserve it?

     Easy girl, easy. Stop it.

     I return every one of their smiles.

     I walk a bit further, and okay, here’s his room….

He wants what clients call the GFE: The Girlfriend Experience. He wants a full hour of romance and passion. He wants me to flower for him. He calls me a lot because he knows I’ll deliver.

     Intimacy with strangers is easy for me. I can’t begin to say why. Before I became an escort, I was intensely monogamous. I was no doubt a “good girl.” I remain so, in the realm of committed relationships. But I’ve found that it’s also incredibly easy for me to be a sex worker. I can walk into a place, face a strange man and, even if he’s initially defensive, have him relaxed and content in just moments, and warmly reciprocating.

     I don’t know how I can do this. It just comes to me, like mothering or writing.

    And guys like this one make it so sweet. Good karma comes off him like a fragrance. It’s great to immerse myself in it. We make out on his couch with much care for each other’s comfort. Then we retire to his solid-oak furnished, pillow-top mattressed bedroom. We make love just like a chance meeting. There’s erotic intrigue, even though it’s been planned.

     And whenever my soul isn’t tethered to a lover, this luminous guy makes me come. I don’t know how we do this. But we do, even though it’s not love, even though I would never begin to imagine that he’d ever let me clutter his self-absorbed life, and I’m going to be glad to leave him, just like when I leave all the others, and I’m not going to miss him and cry for him, as I would if he were my man; and I’d never do it with him for free.

     But while we’re together, it’s lovely. He’s imparting a ray of his destiny to me, and I’m happy to let it in.

     As I’m getting back into my clothes, he puts three hundred dollars next to my purse. I only charge two-fifty, but he always gives me more.

     We say our good-byes, with warmth but dismissal. He wants me to go now, as much as he previously wanted me to come. Those are my feelings exactly.

     I head home….

     Now that I was an escort, I always felt well off. I felt beautiful, and free, and in control of my life. For the first time in a long time, I felt like a good mother.

     It made sense to me, immediately, to defend the profession that was saving my family.

     I had a driving need to share what I was feeling. It was instinctive to write about it. I wrote mounds of journal-style thoughts about it. I relentlessly sought books on prostitution. I read twenty books either by or about other prostitutes. I had a ravenous hunger to learn more about this secret, this forbidden way of life that had lifted my life out of hell. 

     When I delved into the published writings of American activist prostitutes, I got amazed and excited all over again. In most of the accounts that I read—those of the eighties and nineties heavies, like Norma Jean Almodovar, Dolores French, Cosi Fabian, and others—each was reporting that as soon as she learned the callgirl lifestyle, elation was her dominant emotion. Each was expressing a sense of liberation. Each was describing her discovery of sex work in glowing, exultant terms. Each was insisting that once she’d gone down that prohibited, stigmatized path, her circumstances dramatically changed—for the better. And what’s more, they changed right away.

     The same thing had happened to me, with the same sense of lightning-bolt truth.

     Money abruptly came into my life, but without the destructive emotional price that I’d been led to believe that a prostitute must pay. At first, of course, I had a few qualms; social conditioning is a vice grip on the mind. But social conditioning is only a spin, and a spin can be brought to a clattering stop on the ground of concrete truth. For me, that truth was threefold. It was the new look of peace on my well-attended sons. It was the health of my bank account and credit rating. And it was the major eye-opener, the thing that clinched it all: the sincere appreciation of my clients.         

     As I’ve mentioned before, all of my customers acted grateful and sweet. No one I saw when I started, and no one I’ve ever seen since, was abusive. It’s been quite the contrary.

     My customers all act respectful. They often act downright adoring. I enjoy an outpouring of gratitude. They’re usually happy to pay my fee, and some tip me. Most make appointments to see me again.

     Clients are always expressing their thanks. I think I’ve come around to a fairly good understanding of why most of them are so pleased. Each client sings at least one of these praises:

      Thank you for being so friendly and sensual, without any hesitation. Thank you for being all mine, my dream come true for one perfect hour. Thank you for taking charge of my need. And thank you for the honor of allowing me to try to take charge of yours. Thank you for letting me have this fun. Thank you for helping me through this transition. Thank you for accepting my polygamous nature. Thank you for letting me relieve my stress, exactly the way I need to, through my cock. Thank you for committing me to only your fee. Thank you for providing these wonderful “sins” with respect and a sense of humor—with the attitude that what I badly need isn’t wrong.

     All of the escorts that I’ve read about describe that appreciation. And most of those women’s conclusions are a perfect mirror of mine. We recognize the stupidity of making prostitution illegal. We consider all the meanings of “criminal,” and we know that our happy transaction simply doesn’t add up to a crime….

     All types of men call prostitutes. The business is an absolute leveler, a truer democracy. A working girl sees clients in just about every profession.

     And sooner or later, she and a few of them are going to barter. They’re going to trade off their services, whichever of them she needs.

     The word “barter” might sound kind of negative to some. It might conjure wretched images of female desperation. A sexually bartering woman could be one who’s miserably married. Or she could be a single woman, intolerably poor, who’s bedding a man she doesn’t love in order to get his help. Or she could be coerced into sex work. Whatever her bad situation, she’s fallen into pure desolation, maybe in a scene of outrageous exploitation, with that wrecking ball of the soul slamming at her, that thing called “survival sex.”

     But the feeling is radically different for the independent escort. To barter, for her, is simply a choice, and never the result of despair or coercion. It’s just another good option. “Trading” is just an additional way she can get her life nicely wrapped up.

     …. one of my favorite trade-off guys is a local nurseryman. For a bunch of straight springs in a row, he’s provided me with zillions of flowers. He’s enabled me to have fabulous gardens for free, everywhere I’ve lived.

     One of those years I got married, and he was my free wedding florist!

     All I have to do for this guy is join him for a few minutes, off to the side of his acreage, in a comfy little room that he uses for his breaks.

     This guy was in his late thirties when I met him. Every spring since, it’s been the same: I drive to his nursery and park my car discreetly, way out there by the break shack, where huge greenhouses surround me, and seasonal Mexican workers. The place is a gardener’s paradise. I see thousands and thousands of six-packs of ready-to-plant baby flowers, and hundreds of baskets of gushing mature ones, every variety and hybrid of annuals, acres of them hanging and tabled all around me. It’s a sweeping panorama of the proof of spring’s power, a glorious cornucopia of the birthing of summer, an enormous concentration of blooming and promise, and I get a little bit giddy.

     This is stuff you pay a fortune for retail, and I can grab all that I want of it, for free.

     He lets me take all I can fit in my car—front seat, back seat, floors and trunk, and dangling from hooks by the ceiling. This is the one time I wish I owned a pickup. What I do get in there is amazing—enough to make a beautiful season, enough to make my gardener’s soul surge high with fulfillment and joy.

     In dollars and cents, market value, what he gives me has got to be at least five hundred dollars, every single May. Sometimes I go back a second time, and visit his shack again, and load up my car again, for a son or a friend with a yard that needs a facelift.

     And all I have to do is spend twenty minutes or so, back there with him in that shack. That’s less time than choosing my flowers.

     He’s married. He likes to point out that every single night, he goes straight home to his wife. He talks about his friends with their disastrous affairs and divorces.

     “Why don’t they just do this?” he laments. His eyes get puppy-dog sad when he says that. I’m touched by his regret for his peers and their families.

     I’m the way he gets just a tad of forbidden fruit, without the catastrophe.

     We merge our particular strains of spring fever. We exchange some delightful fruits of nature. Flowers and sex: they’re not very different. Ask any botanist.

     Ask any poet.

     Ask any feminist herstorian.

     “We’re helping each other out,” he says, with his warm and simple smile. I can tell that’s his regular attitude, his everyday philosophy of familial give-and-take.

     How I envy his wife.

     Well, I don’t have a good husband like that one, but I sure have a wonderful garden every year. I leave his place so damn happy. Oh, if you could only see me with my carloads of beautiful flowers! I vacuum out scads of petals! Oh, if you could only witness all my gorgeous summer marvels! They grow and spread all around me, they trumpet their rainbow colors, they inspire my gardener’s passionate care, and obtaining them all cost me nothing!

     Talk about awesome job perks….

     Since the earliest years of my life, black pain has threatened to waste me. I’ve always been aware of its terrible power, and I’ve learned to aggressively fight it. Over and over and over again, I’ve jumped up and fiercely grabbed hold of my mind, sorted and rummaged inside it, and carefully, purposefully shaped it. I’ve scoured and polished and painted in there until it’s positively shone.

     Because I knew that if I didn’t do that, if I never reached in and rearranged things, and plugged in a really good attitude, and accepted that it’s all about being self-made—-I’d probably die very young.

     I guess that’s the mission of a motherless child.

     In some ways, however, the conditions of my childhood were fine. They were even enviable. No one ever physically or sexually abused me. No poverty stole my dreams. No disease harmed my development, and neither did classic calamities, like a hurricane or a fire. On the face of things, I was fortunate. I was a white child, and pretty, the offspring of cultured people. I was heir to every social advantage. When I was very little, however, a whole lot of bad things happened. My developmental years were catastrophic. I was surrounded by grownups whose eyes betrayed pity. My little-kid world was so damaged that people grew silent around me; their heads would sadly shake. They could see I was a child whose birthright to security had been torn away and permanently trashed.  

     Severe instability wrecked me. Dreadful tragedy, unbearable loss, devastating rejection, and nonstop uprooting: those were the demons of my childhood. If I could make that horror an entity, if I could give it a face, I’d create a grand master of cliffhanging yo-yo, endlessly flinging me away on a string, dangling me over the edge of the world, with a sociopathic sneer.

     In the beginning, my pain was sympathetic. It clawed me from the depths of my mother. As a preschooler, I was perceptive. I was acutely aware of her despair. From my toddlerhood until the day of her death, her demise repeatedly crushed me. She was always in agony.

     There was her first, permanently disabling stroke, the one that toppled her suddenly and mercilessly from her prime. Then came her heartbreaking divorce from my father, who had decided he preferred a fully functional woman to his limping gimp of a wife. What followed was her ruin from paralysis and depression.

     I can only remember her pain. I remember my panic and guilt-ridden anguish, all in response to her downfall, which I endured when the loss of a teddy bear should have been my most terrible trauma.

     In the end she was felled by her worst cranial bleed, the one that killed her when I was six.

     What followed were frequent separations from my father, and a permanent separation from my only full-blooded sibling. Compound rejections by fickle caregivers were additional shocks to my mangled little life.

     To everyone who took care of me, I was dispensable. I was the commitment they could rid themselves of when life got a little tough. One of them wanted to keep my brother, but didn’t want to keep me. That’s how I ended up losing my sibling, on top of everything else. 

      Between kindergarten and my senior year of high school, I got moved around so often that I attended fifteen schools. Really. I was always the scapegoated “new kid.” Other kids sensed my aloneness, my smashed and broken defenses, my desperado groping for the fragments of my self. They often closed in and attacked.

     As a young adult, I deepened that painful-life pattern, inflicting it on myself. Many years prior to becoming an escort, I bonded with undependable men. I tolerated horrible marriages.

     I finally broke free and faced the outcome, single motherhood.

     I was poverty-stricken, bereft of child support, and as usual, much too alone.

     My father had been gone for a long time. He had made himself scarce, financially broken, when I was just nineteen. He’d dropped dead soon after I turned twenty-one. He never saw any of the grandchildren I gave him, starting at age twenty-three.

     He had once been a successful and responsible dad. In spite of his desertion of my mother, and his absences caused by his work-related travels, he had always been loving and attentive to me.

     While I was growing up motherless, and my vacillating guardians were bouncing me around, my father always wrote to me and called me. And whenever he materialized, he took me on special excursions. He enchanted me with presents….    

     My traveling father provided my guardians with more-than-adequate child support payments. Unlike my mother, who was absolutely gone, somehow my father seemed there for me, even when he physically wasn’t. He was alive. He was in touch. He never failed to think of me, even when thousands of miles away. He would always remember to find me great gifts. 

     He made me feel important to him. I remember the thrill of his loving attention, whenever we were together. I remember the annual Easter Parade, on Fifth Avenue, in New York. I was dressed to the nines in some fancy, flouncy, little-girl Easter dress. I remember the billowing layers of yellow, and pinafore, petticoat white. I felt lost in the promenade of thousands, and yet people noticed me. Strangers were snapping my picture. My father was beaming with pride.

     When I was a child in grade school, he’d return from his travels and stay for a while at home, in his Manhattan apartment. During those times, he’d have me visit. My father would take me to diners’ clubs where he schmoozed around with his friends. I remember the bartenders saying, “It’s okay for a kid to be here, but you’ll have to keep her six feet from the bar. That’s the New York State law.” So Daddy would cheerfully sit with me, that far from the bar.

     By the time I had turned fifteen, his business trips had dwindled, so now he could have me move in. I had stayed with him on all my school vacations when he wasn’t on the road, but I hadn’t actually lived with my father—not since before he left my mother, back when I was four. Finally getting to cohabitate with my only living parent was the best thing that could have happened to me.

     Eventually, however, my father’s business floundered, and so did his cardiovascular system. When I had barely reached young adulthood, suddenly he was dead. So were all of his assets. Emotionally, he left me in shock. Financially, he left me with nothing.

     After all that I’d been through growing up as a tragedy-stricken, motherless, tossed-about kid, my emotional health was quite tenuous. The loss of my father at such a young age seemed to be the last straw. It was as though I just snapped apart. I became self-destructive. I wasn’t attracted to alcohol, drugs, or any kind of dangerous activity, yet I found a sure way to wreck my life; my ruinous path was bad men. I seemed to hurl myself at abusers and losers. Even after I rid myself of them, their negligence poisoned my life. The two fathers of my three children were both of no help to me. One was a totally deadbeat dad, and the other one only involved himself sometimes, only when our child lived with him.

     I ended up subsisting as a dismal statistic. I barely eked my family by. I grappled and bargained with the never-ending pressure of attempting an impossible mission. I was trying to raise a family with no support at all. My status was common, yet subtly scorned:  I was poor, divorced, and female, with “brats.”

     I endured the triple impact of no child support payments, no parents to help out, and total estrangement from my sibling. To top it all off, I lacked earning power. With those multiple disadvantages, my single-mother status was exceptionally bleak. I was trapped in the desolation of a failed, yet inescapable, survival operation. Emotionally and physically drained in a dangerously chronic dejection, I hopelessly acknowledged, and hopelessly tried to negotiate, the nonstop onslaught of living expense, on my own with three mouths to feed.

      Having not been raised in poverty had ironically proved a disadvantage. I had always lacked the cold pragmatism of a money-hungry, working-class kid. The assortment of people who raised me had all been fairly well off, and they had all been very well-educated. They were highbrow intellectuals who despised single-minded materialism. In the wake of their lofty influence, I learned a bit late that such thinking works only for those who have a trust fund….

     In those wretched years before I learned escorting, I worked as a substitute high school teacher, and as a waitress, and as a home health aid. I subjected myself to a depressing assortment of additional low-paying jobs. I held those jobs not consecutively, but collectively. At night I came home late, exhausted, to the festering wounds of my absence and my poverty. To a chaotic and shabby apartment, ruled by my neglected boys and their friends, and visited by police and truancy officers. 

     My relentless strife with the unbearable had grown to be a real threat. I feared for my mental and physical health. In response to the stress my body became like a water-bloated balloon. My emotional outlook was increasingly grim.

     I was terrified of becoming so overwhelmed that I could no longer properly function. What would happen to my kids? Would they end up without their mother, as I had?

     Eventually, I managed to pull myself up. I created one liberating light in my life. In the mid-nineteen-eighties I forced myself into the health and fitness movement.

     That call to healthy living redeemed me. It was instinctive. It was the mastery of flight in the moment before the crash.

     I couldn’t afford the cost of a health club, but I joined one anyway. I couldn’t spare a minute of time for such things, but I made time, just the same.

     My involvement in fitness saved my life. I’ve always declared that, and now, as I actually type out those words, I can see that my claim looks exaggerated. It’s not. When I started working out, I was a desperate girl in her thirties, nearing some kind of breakdown. Exercise turned me completely around.

     I had never been in sports or in any activity that causes prime physical fitness. Now I had joined that fraternity, and I was learning the most beneficial lesson of my life. All that I needed for a sense of well being had always been within me, right there inside; it had simply never been tapped. In order to feel good, really deep down strong and good, I didn’t need a bottle of pills, or a drink, or a cigarette, or an illegal drug, or a fattening snack, or a sitcom, or any other kind of escapist “help” that exists outside of me. In order to feel deep down strong and good, all I needed to do was learn how to properly stimulate my heart, my lungs and my muscles. And to keep that good thing going, all that I needed externally was pure water and the right kinds of foods. That was all! 

     But in order to perpetuate that good thing, I had to lay on the willpower thick. I had to continuously work out and eat right.

     When I realized how great I was feeling—and looking—that wasn’t such a hard thing to do. For a long time, I never pigged out. I can’t say that working out stopped me forever from compulsive eating behaviors, but it sure cut them down a lot.

     Eventually I experienced another great truth, the one behind anyone successful: self-discipline is the only true path to fulfillment. I had already learned something about that through my labors in college, and sometimes in parenting. But seeing that truism working in fitness—in the immediate, glowing rewards from my body—that was the most uplifting!….

     Years before I became an escort, and I was learning devotion to exercise, I experienced, for the first time ever, a profoundly upward spiral. I had always been terribly aware of downward spirals, or vicious circles. I knew too well how one bad thing leads right to another, and another. Exercise took me completely the other way.

     Having a vitalized body vitalized everything else. Improved circulation made everything in me work and feel a lot better. My newly toned muscles worked miracles: because of my muscular fitness, my organs were now much more supported and aligned, so my headaches and bowel irritations diminished. My posture improved so much that, even though I was a grownup, I actually grew half an inch.     

     In the punishing midst of my poverty, aloneness, and uncontrollable children, my spirits would sometimes improbably soar, and I became somewhat calmer. Exercise, and the addition of therapeutic stretching that I had learned to make time for, were profoundly soothing to my mind. I was virtually living the mind-body connection. In one long stretch, I could feel my anxieties loosen. After ten long stretches, my stress would feel malleable and easy to subdue.

     After a couple of years of this regimen, I attempted to glean a living from my newfound healthy lifestyle. I found work as an exercise instructor. That was a bright addition to my spirit-killing roster of jobs. I interspersed my drearier employments with shifts at various health clubs. I studied hard, and passed the difficult multiple-choice exam, to become certified by the American Council on Exercise.

     With that credential under my belt, now I could legitimately present myself as a professional fitness instructor. 

     I enjoyed myself in that work. I designed new club members’ workout programs and taught them to effectively use them. People looked up to me. People wanted to be me. They admired my disciplined leanness, my well-tended muscular tone, and my buoyancy honed from daily cardio workouts. Doctors, lawyers, professors, CEO’s…everyone, including the prestigious, persistently approached me with eyes that beseeched. To me they turned over their tired, flabby, lackluster selves. I showed them how to put the bloom back into their smiles, and the lilt back into their gaits. It was deeply fulfilling work.

     It paid five dollars an hour.

     I attempted to establish myself as a personal trainer. When enough clients sign up for that coaching, a fitness instructor’s low income can greatly, though gradually, improve. I had very little success. People generally take years to get around to joining a health club. After that expenditure, few are willing to pay out even more for much-needed, yet much-resisted, pricey one-on-one training. The building of a lucrative clientele from a crowd that reluctant requires “marriage to the job” and high cash reserves.

     These days, I think I could pull it off; I now have the resources to enable me to. I just might go back to work in the gyms, and promote myself as a trainer.

     When I was a poor single mother, however, I had neither the savings nor the time to succeed.    

     Along with my devotion to exercise, I eventually developed a passionate interest in supplemental nutrition. I learned that intensely augmented nutrition would help to keep me strong. I began to consume, and I tried to distribute, some nutrient-dense “super foods.”

     The first of those marvels that I tried to promote is a naturally growing type of blue-green algae, a primal food rich in amino nutrition. One’s mood and one’s energy level perceptively improves after swallowing a few freeze-dried capsules. Its internal cleansing properties and its bolstering of the immune system have all been clinically evidenced.

     I continue to take algae capsules often, and I plan to for life. I make sure that my loved ones are getting theirs, too.

     My repertoire of “super foods” spontaneously grew. I learned of natural antibiotics extracted from foods and herbs, and natural energizers and antioxidants, and many more nutrient sources that strengthen the immune system and prevent or heal illness. I took each of those remedies when I felt that I needed them, and I could sense, with a growing satisfaction, my mind and my body respond. I became less susceptible to colds and flu. If I did come down with something, I got over it remarkably fast. I successfully treated my urinary tract infections without ever turning to a doctor or a drug store. I aided and eased my intestinal tract with cheap and simple, old-fashioned remedies that too few people know about. I supplemented with natural aids that are native to the gut: intestinal flora, called probiotics, and “pearls” of digestive enzymes. After adding that stuff to my system, my symptoms of Irritable Bowel Syndrome vanished. 

     I was approaching forty. I had much more energy than most people that old. I childishly bounded up stairways, while other mature adults trudged. Despite my travails as a desperately poor single mother, I looked young, acted young and felt young, and people refused to believe me when I told them my actual age.

     People insisted that I had to be in my late twenties. They demanded to see the birth date on my license. When I showed it to them, they were bowled over. Some of them seemed pissed off.

     Well, I had thought that I could never afford the health-food-store well being-enhancers, but I saved my spare change, sacrificed things, and found that after all, I could buy them. I had noticed that low-income people could always find money for their poisons, their cigarettes and their beer; I could find bucks for my health.

     Some of the brands of nutritional supplements can be sold by individuals. I tried to become a distributor, but it never got profitable. Just as it went with the personal training, I was continually frustrated to find that, in distributorships which offer self-improvement through nutrition—where people are invited to buy supplements, and invest in their well being—most resist, and close up their wallets. This is true even when they perpetually gripe for relief from their various ailments. Most continue to take whatever their doctors prescribe, even though their trust in doctors is becoming quite shaky, too—even though they’ve grown sensibly weary of scalpels and toxic pharmaceuticals.

     I observe American medicine with an increasingly angry eye….

     ….Every time I watch commercial TV, I find myself wanting to scream. Every other ad I see is a ploy to get me “on” something, a ploy to get me dependent on yet another drug. 

     To my great relief, however, I’ve discovered a handful of rebel physicians who defy that dismal status quo….

      I, too, have defied convention. When I became a prostitute, I found an alternative way to be.

     My prior quest to master self-healing profoundly impacted my beginnings as a whore. Becoming a whore was perfectly in keeping with my attraction to alternative medicine. Becoming a whore was perfectly in keeping with my devotion to physical fitness. People don’t associate whores with health, but the blending of sex work with a healthy lifestyle is precisely the path I discovered.   

     Immediately, escorting healed me financially. But then I saw that being in sex work could heal me in other ways, also.

     As I strengthened myself through the identity of whore, I began to intuit the power of the primordial sexual priestess. At first, I merely sensed her. Eventually, I actually read about her. With the aid of the writings of feminists who had freed up the hidden archives of our prepatriarchal past, I learned of her ancient glory. I learned that thousands of years ago, before the global takeover of patriarchal religions, before the catastrophic oppression of Goddess and nature and women, priestess-whores were the official and highly exalted healers.

     I joyfully internalized that beautiful truth.

     I had begun to examine the writings of several enlightened sex workers. One such is Nina Hartley. She exemplifies and clarifies the priestess-identified sex worker. Hartley states: “I believe that sensual pleasure (self-generated or shared) is a meditation, opening a direct path to the life force, i.e., ‘God.’”³ 

         Hartley has been a registered nurse. She’s also a world-renowned porn star. She recently published a book entitled Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex.

     Another lady of singular radiance stands out among activist sex workers. While most of the activists mundanely campaign for the basic right to work, Cosi Fabian stirs me with the ancient and the hallowed. Regardless of whatever any law may disallow, she perceives her whore status as holy. She has identified with the Qadeshet, or angelic erotic priestesses, of our prepatriarchal ancestors’ temples. She has recognized whoring as sacred.

     As a courtesan, Fabian has utilized her American right to practice her religion. Her astounding, groundbreaking, and loving creed of faith, written in the nineteen-nineties, is showcased at the front of this book.

    Back in my early days as an escort, Fabian and Hartley and others were making me aware that I was far from alone with my perceptions. With the aid of those “outed” whore thinkers, I understood that when practiced correctly, sex work is a healthy rebellion. I began to see a parallel between the rebellion of self-empowered escorts, and the rebellion of people who attempt to self-heal. I began to see a parallel between those who better themselves through escorting, and those who get in much better health by defying conventional medicine.

     Indeed, that marriage between healthiness and sex work has been noted by the doctor of a whore. Fabian remarks: “Even my doctor, who was initially horrified by my career move, has been impressed by the extraordinary improvement in my…health.”⁴

I’m sharing this account of my love life—my love life as an escort—because it occurred to me that some readers might wonder about that part of me….

     Standing as I am in my own shoes, it seems to me that after writing on the relationships between escorts and their clients, and on man/woman relationships in general, I’d have to be pretty remiss if I left out my own affairs of the heart—particularly my affairs as a sex worker.

     So here goes.

     Those relationships—there have been two of them—have been a rough ride for me. The reader’s going to discover what an understatement that is. My love life has severely impacted my work life, and considering what my work life has been, that should come as no surprise.

     And yet, I sense that my love trials have been karmic. I mean karmic as opposed to circumstantial. I feel that no matter what career path I’d have taken, my love life would have been hard.

     Indeed, it’s always been hard. Some people seem to just breeze through their marriages, and I’m even talking about some escorts. It’s never been that way for me. Not before, and not during, and not after, my life as a prostitute. No romance has ever been breezy for me.

     Any relationship therapist who reads this will point to all of the childhood traumas, revealed in both of my books, that have influenced my dire relationship choices. Well, for sure I’ve got all my baggage. It’s been slamming me and tripping me and making me dumb, for all of my adult life. I’ll be fighting that stuff until the day I die! And it may even nail me again! But I like to think I’ve made progress.

     The one thing I take a lot of comfort from is that I haven’t lost the will to love. And I believe that’s the biggest thing that matters. I believe that defines success.

     So okay now, with that said, I’m going to sprawl on my back now. I’m going to expose my underbelly. I’m going to show you a weakness that the sex work-abolitionist feminists may immediately jump onto, in order to try to gut me.

     The abolitionist feminists may read through the following chapters, and conclude with a whooping war cry: AHA! See? We’re right! Prostitution does damage women! She’s proving it here, right here in this section where she describes her horrendous suffering! See? See how the work violates her! See how it’s made her life HELL!

     Well, before you start skewering me, ladies, allow me to remind you of the truth. The truth is that YOU, and NOT the work, are exactly what make my life hell. Your part in the oppression, stigmatization, and isolation of escorts has been the driving force behind my descent into a bad, abusive relationship that never should have begun. Your part in the oppression, stigmatization, and isolation of escorts was the driving force behind my travails in another relationship with another man who turned out to be a sociopath liar. Those treacherous paths that I’ve slipped on, as a flawed human being in love, might have been completely avoided if I’D HAD YOUR SUPPORT OF WHO I AM.

     I’ll repeat and repeat and repeat this, along with my activist peers, until finally some day you begin to understand that it’s not prostitution that causes the damage, it’s not prostitution that’s wrong. It’s the way the world treats it, that’s wrong. And that’s what makes our lives hell.

     So with that said, now I’ll begin. I’ll take you for a ride down the convoluted trail of my love life as a sex worker.

     I met Mitch, who became my next husband, sometime after I ran from that motel. I’ve told you how that episode hurt me, how it filled me with sick desolation, that feeling of got to escape now, that all-alone fugitive angst.

     Right then I should have realized, at the same time I was running, how wounded I was becoming. I should have realized that the pain of the outlaw was going to make me do something stupid.        

     Something very, very stupid. I should have shut myself down and shut myself off and avoided romance like the plague; I should have known I was becoming too vulnerable, that my loneliness was going to blind me…. 

    Well, after Mitch I made damn sure to take total charge of myself. I wanted to be completely invincible. I thought: To hell with the forces against me. Loneliness, Isolation, and Stigma: I’m not letting those bitches ever weaken me again.

     I had rid myself of my weakness for Mitch. Now I was on the upswing. Now I was all vim-and-vigor. Nothing was going to enfeeble me again. Not having to live as an outlaw, and not my own romantic delusions.

     I was going to stand strong, all alone. And if I ever found myself falling, again, for some low-achieving, miserable loser, I’d understand why, and I’d back right off. I’d put up with the Three Ugly Sisters, I’d steel myself against their cruel shunning, before I’d ever jump into the world of a jerk like Mitch again.         

     And my life was smooth sailing, for a while.   

     I had charge of a very sweet option. I could make the whole world my lover! I could belong to the world! There’s no finer way to heal. Every single client I saw was a reaffirmation of my worthiness. Every single client I saw was a comfort, a way to forget. Talk about getting into your work! Sex work can be more self-mending than any other labor on earth.

     I could actually live off the praises.   

     You’re so beautiful. You’re so sexy. You’re so sweet. You’re so bright.

     You’re such a beautiful soul.

     I feel so good when I’m with you. You’re so worth all the money. I’m so happy to give you so much….here, have some more, you deserve it.

     Oh, the power, the beautiful power, of being so highly rewarded! Just for being a woman! And few of them asked me for even a smidgeon of the things the invincible won’t give.

     The feminists firmly against prostitution have often made the point that occasionally women get into the work right after they’ve been hurt by a man.

     Well, yes! And don’t knock it till you’ve tried it!….

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