Holy Hustling

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Enough about me. A bit about you. You're fascinated by whores. You see us along the streets at night, wide awake, authoritative, lithe. You imagine we know everything there is to know about dark and the city. You've been to the movies so you know our lives are a little empty, a little sad, a little loveless. We have hearts of gold sometimes -- you know that, too.

Perhaps you don't know that your marriages depend on us. Or that the proper business of any prostitute is to become a saint.

I sold my body for the first time at 5 o'clock in the afternoon on August 29, 1987. I did it for that most mundane of reasons -- I was out of work and broke. The decision did not strike me as the first step in a spiral of degradation. It seemed not much different from selling my editorial skills. I had just never thought that anyone would pay good money to have sex with me. I thought hustlers had to be young, hung, and full of come -- or at least one of the three. But the one real live whore I actually knew explained that, in the skin trade as anywhere else, there is such a thing as niche marketing. 'Sell your muscles,'he told me. 'Sell the fact that you're hairy. Sell your age -- not everybody's attracted to young guys.'

I put an ad in Toronto's NOW magazine. I put an ad in Xtra, the city's gay and lesbian biweekly. 'Massage Plus,'it read. 'Trust your body to this muscular, hairy guy. Relaxation and sensual pleasure.'I've even flirted with humor: 'Massage Plus,'my next ad read, 'I work my fingers to your bone.'That works well, though not, I think, because men are amused by the sophomoric joke. Sex is not a laughing matter for most people, and this ad seems to attract novices, who find exactly the right degree of titillation in it. Anything more explicit would make them too vividly aware of what they're getting into. A year from now they may be wandering the demimonde in a harness and tit clamps but, for the moment, the vocabulary of the schoolyard is exciting enough.

I became a whore.

The phone rings. Six times out of ten the caller will turn out to be a married man. If he is very nervous, or new to this, he will book a massage and tell me how he strained his back/neck/legs/whatever and exactly where it's sore. I make sympathetic noises, and we settle on a time. The charge is $50 for an in-call, $60 if I have to go out.

If he's not so new, he'll ask for a description. I'm reasonably accurate, though I usually subtract 10 years from my age and add 10 pounds to my weight. If he's going to hang up on me (and many do), this is when it happens. If he's interested and the price is right, we book a time. (I will negotiate. I also have a $30 student/senior rate. Many have asked for -- and paid -- the student rate. No one has ever asked for the senior.) I don't, except with regulars, book more than an hour or two in advance. The no-show rate increases dramatically for each hour of advance booking.

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