The Education of a Very Young Madam (13 page)

Unfortunately, Charles wasn't so easy to leave. He followed me places and threatened me and whoever I was with. One time he even tried to strangle me outside of a gambling bar. I got away from him and ran to Audrey's place. Audrey was the only friend I'd made in Montreal, and we'd spent a lot of time together even though Charles hated her.

Audrey was a total drug addict, but I thought she was cool anyway. She was a renegade ho who worked entirely on her own. She used to have a pimp, but he had turned into a junkie and couldn't look out for her anymore. It was a good thing that he had loved her enough to let her go, because most pimps would have dragged her down with them. She was the perfect person to come to my rescue, because not only was she independent but she was out of control, so much so that even Charles was a bit scared of her.

Still, the harassment continued until one day I picked up a copy of
Allo Police,
which is a local magazine with stories about the most notorious crimes and criminals in Quebec. It's not the type of thing that I usually like to read, but I picked it up this time because Charles's picture was on the cover. He'd gotten busted in our old apartment, and they were charging him with possession of lots and lots of weed and cocaine.

I thought it was kind of funny, until the cops came searching for me. They were having problems making their charges stick and they wanted me to testify. Luckily, Charles had a good lawyer (a crooked Jewish guy who I had used once before and who had so many criminal clients, he could get you practically any illegal goods or services that you could possibly want), and I wouldn't have dreamed of testifying against him. It's not that I was afraid of what Charles would have done if I did, it was more that it was against my code. Instead, I made up a story that completely muddled their case, and then I ran so they could never call me into court. I bought a ticket to Ontario, where I knew a couple of girls who danced in clubs and could get me a job doing the same to tide myself over for a while.

I spent an entire year in hiding in a place called Thunder Bay. I don't know if you've ever been to Thunder Bay, but if you haven't, don't go. It's one of the most boring places I've ever been in my life. Near the top of Lake Superior, it has maybe 100,000 people living there, nearly all of them white, spread across this semi-suburban, semi-wilderness area where there is almost nothing to do. In fact, the area boasts a big park and a marina as its main tourist attractions, but since it snows there like half the year and it's cold even when it's not snowing, who'd want to hang out outside in places like that? I played bingo every evening before work just for thrills. In fact, practically everyone there plays bingo. It's one of the region's highlights. I made a few friends, who got me into ecstasy, which I loved, but that's basically all I did for fun for an entire year—play bingo and take ecstasy. When I finally got the news that they'd dropped the charges and Charles was off the hook, I couldn't wait to get back to civilization.

I took the bus back to Montreal since I hardly had any money left by then. Thanks to the facts that it was tough to make money in the backwoods of Ontario and that there was hardly anything to do but gamble, I hadn't been able to save much. Still, I didn't care. In fact, I was so happy to be back that I wasn't worried about anything. One of the first things I did was contact Charles. I didn't know how he was going to feel about hearing from me, so I left him a message saying, "I lost an entire year of my life to keep you safe, and if you still want to kill me, just do it, because I am not running away anymore." Then I told him where I'd be that night and to "come and get me" if he really wanted to.

Charles showed up that night all right. And he gave me the biggest hug of my life. Turned out he was grateful for what I'd done to keep him out of jail. "I love you no matter what," he said. He hardly had any money either, thanks to all his legal expenses, but he'd just started hustling again and he gave me a couple hundred bucks toward getting my life back together. I was so relieved to be back and not to have to worry about him trying to hurt me anymore that I started to cry. I was on my own again and it felt good.

Soon after I came back to Montreal, I met Philippe. He was the kind of guy who could make a guy like Charles just fade into the background. Philippe was a beautiful little dancer who worked at several strip clubs for men around the city. He was totally gorgeous, and he knocked me off my feet the first time I saw him. I knew right away that I wanted to go home with him, but what I didn't know was that I'd end up falling for him.

The night we met I was at girls' night at one of the gay clubs where Philippe worked. The gay clubs would open their doors to women one or two nights a week because they always had the hottest-looking guys working there, and ladies would line up around the block to get in. I saw Philippe dancing for some girl and thought he was adorable. I wanted him to dance for me too, so I gave twenty dollars to another dancer and asked him to get Philippe for me. I waited for him, but to my surprise, Philippe never came over. I watched as he danced for two more girls and then said, "Fuck him," and decided to leave with my friends. As I was heading toward the door, Philippe finally came over and asked me what I was doing later. "Coming to get you," I said, trying not to blush. My friends were all giggling behind me.

I really just wanted a little affection. At 3:00
A.M.,
when Philippe was due to get offwork, I drove up to the club, and there he was standing outside. He smiled at me with these big dimples as he got into the car.

We ended up taking some ecstasy together late and then couldn't keep our hands off each other. We were both instantly in love and checked into one of those cheesy motels with heart-shaped water beds and Jacuzzis in every room. To this day I remember that as one of the most passionate nights of my life. Philippe and I spent every night together for the next six months after that.

During the course of that first night, I was flirting with Philippe and told him that I ran an escort agency. It sounded better than being a part-time dancer and a dealer's ex-girlfriend, and I wanted to impress him. It worked. I definitely had his attention after that, but the truth was I hadn't run girls since I was in Baltimore. After what happened there, I hadn't been in too much of a hurry to get back into business for myself and deal with that kind of responsibility. At the time, the fact that I was kind of lying didn't matter to me because my plan was to have a one-night stand—my first ever, since I'd been a serial monogamist up until then—and never see the guy again.

The thing that bothers me the most about love is how hard it is to control. The next morning I realized how much I actually liked Philippe. I didn't want him to think I was a liar, so I decided the only thing I could do was make my lie true by starting up a new business. I figured I could use some more money anyway. Ignoring the fact that I had no clients and no employees, I threw up a quarter-page ad in one of the local skin magazines advertising my new agency. Twenty-four hours later I was in business.

The ad for what I was calling my University Escorts service not only attracted customers, it attracted girls looking for work, just like when I opened my New York brothel. I started out by offering better-than-average rates so that I could lure some of the best girls away from other employers. It totally worked. After the first week I had ten girls ready to work for me.

Starting up may have been easy, but staying in business was hard. At the time the going rate in Montreal was $140 Canadian for an hour-long appointment. Of that, $70 to $80 typically went to the girl (or her pimp, as was often the case there), and $20 went to the driver who brought her to her appointment, leaving only $50 or less for the agency. And with the better rates I was offering girls, I often got even less than that. It was chump change.

The problem was $140 was all most of the locals could afford to pay. On top of that, competition was fierce. In a pretty small city, there were over three hundred agencies to choose from, many of which were run by biker gangs, who had the local French-speaking market pretty much sewn up. So ifyou tried to charge more, guys would just go somewhere else. A lot of agencies even offered discounts to survive, advertising girls at as low as $120 an hour. At those rates, with my gambling habit (sometimes I lost as much as $5,000 a week), I'd have had to work myself silly to make a decent living.

Everyone else around me just accepted these standards, but I decided I needed to figure out something better. Experience had shown me that Americans were willing to pay a lot more, so I figured the only real money would be in marketing to tourists. I started taking out ads in American newspapers and tourist magazines.

Unfortunately, I soon discovered that there weren't enough tourists to sustain the business, and I knew that if I didn't keep my girls working, they'd leave me just as they'd left their last agencies in search of something better. So in order to keep things going, I had to appeal to both the wealthier tourists and the cheap locals at the same time. That's when I came up with the idea of having different categories ofgirls at different prices.

I called my service University Escorts because I planned to market my girls as if they were all young coeds just discovering their sexuality, the kind who went to school during the day and partied hard at night. I kept that $140 price point that everyone else around me was charging, labeling those girls "Sexy Classmates." That was the low-end category. In the middle I had "The Honor Roll," a smaller group of higher-class girls who were more experienced and gave better service for a rate of $200 an hour. Then we had our "Teachers' Pets," who went for $250 to $300; we usually rolled out this category when there was a big event or convention in town that attracted lots of tourists. And every month I'd feature a different "Student of the Month," a luxurious treat for $500.

The secret was that there really was no difference among the categories. I used the same girls to fill all levels, depending on who was available when a call came in. Still, it worked. The marketing gimmick attracted customers of all types. There was something for everyone. Most important, it made those willing to pay more feel like they were getting something extra special for their money, which made them more inclined to use my service instead of another one. I still had to hustle, but during a good week I made $5,000 for myself. That was much better than the $1,000 per week I had been making when I first started out dancing in Montreal.

I wasn't very fair to my girls back then. I figured that their job was pretty much the same regardless of what the client was paying, so when I got a higher-paying client, I pocketed the extra myself. After all, if the girls were willing to take $80 or less per customer before, then they would still take it now. Don't forget, I started out paying them more than the other agencies did. But since the girls were the ones who collected the money, they knew what was happening, and I began to get complaints from some of them. Sometimes, to make a girl happy, I would pay her a small bonus over what she was used to getting when she was working as a "Teachers' Pet" or "Student of the Month," but it was really just a token amount.

If I had to do it all over again, I would pay the girls more. The truth is they deserved it. I used only local girls then, and Montreal girls are very hardworking. Because they have a more European sensibility, they also tend to be more uninhibited and very sexy. There are so many adorable little French girls there, it's no wonder that there's so much prostitution. I had one very finicky client who liked only girls who weighed under one hundred pounds. He would even bring a scale with him to the hotel and make the girl stand on it before he paid her. I can think of maybe one or two American girls I've worked with over the years who would be able to satisfy his fetish, but there, I could almost always find someone he'd be happy with every time he called. I bring in girls from Montreal to work for me to this day because they tend to be so good at their jobs.

The saddest part of it all was that I could get away with paying girls less in Montreal no matter how good they were because the trade there was mostly run by pimps, who barely paid them anything. I came to realize that if I had paid them better, they probably would have given better service and that could have meant more repeat business, which would have made my job a lot easier because I wouldn't have to be reaching out to new tourists all the time. But even more than that, as I've said, I believe in karma, and I think the way I treated the girls back then lost me some points in that area. Now I give my girls a standard percentage of the price of each appointment no matter what it is, so that if I make more, they do too. I wasn't doing business the right way in Montreal, but at least I learned from my mistakes, and now I believe in always sharing the wealth.

That wasn't the only thing I learned during that time. It was while I was in Montreal that I took the first step toward the future of my business: I learned how to use a computer. This was the mid- to late-1990s, when the Internet was starting to really take hold. Some agencies were beginning to advertise on the Web, so, to get a leg up in such a competitive market, I decided I should too. I like to learn new things, so I taught myself how to use a computer and started my very first Web site for my University Escorts.

The sex industry has obviously taken full advantage of the Internet revolution practically since the day it started. In fact, it's probably more technologically advanced than a lot of industries, so it I wanted my business to stay competitive, I had to keep up. Besides that, I don't know if I would still be in the business today if I hadn't been able to go completely high-tech. I think back to my days in New York and I can't believe I ever survived those times. My very first experience there with Julio and Natasha in Times Square or those first brothels that Suzie and I opened on West Twenty-first Street...we were like sitting ducks then, easily picked up by any policeman who cared to make the effort. At that time, the police just didn't care enough to go out of their way to shut businesses like mine down for good. Today things are different. I'd never put myself out there like that. Fortunately, technology has made it so I don't have to ever again.