Kindle Notes & Highlights
I’m not sure my parents would have entrusted me with these personal treasures had they known I was turning tricks. They would fear for my safety, for the security of my possessions and my body.
But I looked a little better than they did— more professionally coiffed
I took more vitamins than my parents, exercised a lot, and sent them art postcards whenever I went to a lecture at the Frick. With details of the lecture in my note.
“Oh, I got it on sale,” I assured her.
Louis Vuitton never goes on sale
The average tongue is easier to take than the average man’s undisciplined fingers.
He’s young enough and important enough to get free sex from nonprofessionals—and cute enough to inspire nonprofessional enthusiasm in some hookers. But good-natured enough if you don’t fall for it.
Because death isn’t fair. The customers who die are never the ones you merely tolerate to make up your weekly quota.
Pushy clients never die. They keep trying to kiss you (or worse!) long after more sensitive johns have been cremated and committed to urns.
Wendy smiled. I can tell that she understands pleasure—food, sex, beauty—and that’s why I feel okay telling her that I hook.
God, I hope not. Nobody wants a client who’s going through a divorce.
Jasmine would also make a terrible madam if she actually had to make her living that way, because she barely gets along with other women—and a madam has to.
Jasmine and I, in our simpler garb, felt a bit conspicuous. As, I think, did Allie.
Roxana interrupted, unable to completely give up her customary role as chair.
Every time Cozy rhapsodized about “being a whore,” I cringed. The antiglobalization lipstick lesbians seemed to love it, though.
exploded. “Lisa says? Since when is some airhead porn actress an expert on what happens to hookers in real life or in the movies? Are you telling me a porn star’s going to decide whether a Hollywood movie’s acceptable or unacceptable to me? That’s unacceptable right there.”
“There are divisions between sex workers,” Allie intoned. “We are here to overcome these differences.”
“I’m not,” Jasmine said firmly.
“Porn stars might be,” Jasmine said. “But that’s because they haven’t got the discipline to make it as call girls.
“We have to listen to this insulting, divisive tirade from one call girl and then we have to kill the topic because of another call girl,”
I don’t think you understand anal sex, and when it comes to human sexuality, people are afraid of what they don’t understand.”
A small coterie encircled Jasmine, and I could hear snatches of her invective: “This business of being dictated to by San Francisco—I don’t think you should stand for that!” The Cozy Von Booty wannabes, wearing leather dresses and U-shaped nose rings, clustered together at the other end of Roxana’s living room.
I was standing against a bookshelf, recovering from the sheer embarrassment of it all,
“Isolation will disempower us!”
People think it’s the repressed types who go for kink. Actually, the happier and healthier a client’s marriage is, the harder you have to work at keeping things sleazy.
it’s important to do something different every time you see a regular. Make sure you don’t get into a rut.
A professional could just ask him to go and wash his hands, but as a supposed amateur, I didn’t want to come off too clinical.
Because I’d waxed so recently, every inch of my skin was tingling. Sometimes, though your head is thinking that the man you’re in bed with is a bit of a fool, your pussy seems to smile back at him with a mind and will of its own.
it’s ladylike, after all, to let guys worship you.
Clients know you make money with your pussy, but a freshly waxed, beautifully maintained pussy sends a message: You spend money on your pussy. The word pussy is ladylike; cunt is not. Muff is somewhere in between.
As for drugs, cocaine is more ladylike than heroin; snorting coke is more ladylike than smoking crack. Ladies only do small amounts, anyway.
There were lots of books at home but not enough magazines.
If my monthly allowance ran out, I got an extra baby-sitting job to avoid having to ask my mother for bus fare. When I discovered that I could circumvent her scoldings—simply by working—it must have been one of the happiest days of my life.
And since adults did not discuss their money openly, I knew that keeping my money problems and issues private would give me some adult freedoms.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about!” she yelped. “Neither do you,” I said.
the source of my independence,
Nobody over the age of nine dressed like that! As one who was no longer a “little” girl, I had a stake in these issues.
If the little girls were really for sale, where were the passages describing all the things they bought with their forbidden loot?
again. I was the kind of thirteen-year-old who stubbornly refused to do anything that wasn’t easy.
I would have gone to school on those days if skipping school had been harder to do.
I planned my defloration down to the last detail, read up on every method of birth control for an entire year before deciding to have sex. I read about the different phases of the female orgasm and wondered when I would actually have one.
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.
but it was a sense of accomplishment, not a feeling of arousal, that I remember.
Because I was still a girl, I was immune to his romantic appeal.
As a small child, I had never been a tomboy;
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.
I knew about erotic anticipation from books.
I had no idea what an enormous turn-on my age had been for Professor Andrews until I entered my twenties.
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!
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.
