The Education of a Very Young Madam (2 page)

Price points are always a balancing act, and it's certainly possible to charge too much as well. Right across the water from us in New York City, there are a number of agencies that regularly charge $1,500 an hour or more. I've done my homework on the subject and have basically come to the realization that, as alluring as they may be for both the entertainer and the agency, prices like that are just a mistake.

Let's face it, despite what men would like to believe (and what
I
would like them to believe), for the most part pussy is just pussy. Trust me, I've dealt with enough of it to know. At $300 to $350 an hour, most of my entertainers—who get two-thirds of that fee plus any tips they earn, and at this level, most guys tip—are going to feel well paid for their work, and most of my clients are going to feel like it was money well spent. But at $1,500 an hour, it's difficult for the client to be anything but disappointed, unless he's the kind of guy who can throw $1,500 around without flinching. And there just aren't enough of those guys around to really make a business.

Getting caught is always a concern in my line of work, but the business is not as risky as some people might think, as long as you're smart about it. In order for me to get caught, someone who has witnessed illegal activity, usually a client or a girl, has to turn me in. Since I'm never there when the illegal activity takes place, finding a witness can be very difficult. And since both the clients and the girls have participated in some illegal doings themselves, they aren't, generally speaking, so anxious to talk to the authorities. On top of that, I'm extremely careful about who I do business with on both sides of the transaction.

Usually, if a girl has worked before, if she has already established a reputation in the business—and these days every girl who has been around the block has her "reputation" posted on special peer review sites on the World Wide Web—you know it's safe to hire her. After all, no undercover cop would actually do the deed just to bust someone.

Besides, let's face it, the cops know we're out there. Everyone knows were out there. Prostitution is the oldest business in the world, and it's no secret that it exists all around us—in every state, in every city, in every country around the globe. When the cops arrest a girl for working, they usually just fill out a report, hold her for a bit, and then let her go. They have better things to do with their time than worry about who is screwing who.

Generally, as long as business stays low-key—and I've mastered the art of low-key business—people leave us alone, unless the cops are motivated to make a point. It happens every once in a while ... they decide to make a show of how tough they are on crime, how they're working to clean up the streets and protect the children and all that. It happened to me several times in New York, where I used to run a brothel, and that's why I got out of the city. Giuliani had just become mayor, and he had promised during his campaign to clean up New York. Curbing all the conspicuous prostitution going on all over town became a top priority for the police department when he took office.

Of course, in the long run the effect was mostly cosmetic. The cops would make regular sweeps of businesses like my brothel, which was out in the open and easy to find, forcing them to shut down. Business calmed down for a while, but then it came back as strong as ever, just in a different way—on the Internet instead of the street corner. Giuliani only succeeded in driving it underground so that the taxpayers could pretend it wasn't happening all around them. (I heard he did the same thing with the homeless.)

I don't do business like that anymore. I don't have a physical location that cops can bust whenever they feel like it. I'm mobile, which makes me harder to find, and much more careful and discreet. Having to go underground was actually better for me and for a lot of people in this business. It forced us to become smarter. Now I'm making more money
and
I feel safer.

Still, I know that I'm never entirely safe. When that cop answered Zoe's phone, I didn't know how much danger I was in, but I knew I couldn't take the risk. I shut down my business. I took down my Web site and Internet ads, which is something I would do only in extreme situations, because it means my clients don't know how to find me. I thought the police might be able to trace me through the SIMM card in my cell phone, so I threw it out, which meant I lost all of my phone numbers. Thank god I have a good memory, especially when it comes to client info. Then I put what was left of my things in storage so I could travel light and so I wouldn't have anything on me to be used as evidence if it came to that.

Without two very important things—my cell, which was now in storage, and my computer, which I could only assume was in police custody—I can't work. My business is built around the idea that my identity must be protected at all times, so almost nothing is done in person. My clients, most of my girls even, know me only as a voice on the phone or a message in their in-boxes. I use a pseudonym and I try never to show my face. When something does need to be done in person, like exchanging money, I have assistants who act as go-betweens, which is another reason why it would be hard for the cops to pin something on me.

If I couldn't work, then there would be no cash coming in. I didn't want to go to my safety deposit box, because I was afraid someone could be waiting there for me. Call me paranoid, but you just never know. So I had to live off what I had on me. I found a quiet hotel room back in New Jersey and stayed put, just me and my dog, Max. I didn't go out or talk to a soul.

It's times like these when I usually decide to pick up and start my life over. Drop me down in the middle of any large to midsize city, and within days, I will be self-supporting. Within weeks, I will be on my way to setting up a profitable business.

But this time, even though I was risking getting caught, I didn't leave town. I don't know why I decided to do things differently. It went against everything I had ever learned about this business. For better or worse, I found a place to hide and waited to see what would happen.

10

CHAPTER 2

What $100,000 Can Buy You

I
t's no accident that I'm so good at picking up and starting over. I've had lots of practice at it, starting when I was very young, before I had any choice in the matter.

My earliest memory is from Korea, where I was born in the mid-1970s. My grandmother was beating me with a baseball bat. At least I think she was my grandmother. I was so young when I saw her last I don't really know for sure who she was.

My grandmother, my big sister—or at least someone I called
"Uhn-nee,"
which means "big sister" in Korean—and I all lived together in the back of a restaurant that sold hot dogs. We had only one room for the three of us to share, so we must have been poor. Grandmother was senile, so she couldn't really care for me. In fact, the only time I remember her paying attention to me at all was when she was beating me or telling me what to do. Big Sister was the one who looked after me, when she had the time. She was usually very busy cleaning, working in the restaurant, and taking care of Grandmother. I remember sometimes leaving the restaurant out of boredom and wandering the streets by myself for who knows how long.

Other memories from that time are still vivid in my mind. I remember eating one bowl of soup a day and cleaning, always cleaning. I'm a clean freak to this day, and I think that must be why. I especially remember one of my recurring childhood nightmares because I still have it sometimes: A normal-looking man is talking to me when, suddenly, he does a kind of somersault and turns into a vicious vampire wolf. Whenever I dream this, I wake up screaming, covered in sweat, and shaking with fear.

Eventually I ended up in an orphanage. I don't know if someone took me away because Grandmother was too sick or too old, or if she put me up for adoption herself, or if she sold me. It was the people at the orphanage who explained what had happened to my real parents. My mother, they said, had died in childbirth, and my father was in the military, always traveling, so I couldn't live with him. That was what they told me, but they offered no proof. Many years later, as an adult, I sat next to a Korean woman on a train and we started talking. It turned out that she had worked in an orphanage in Korea, so she knew how these things typically were handled. Back then there was no formal adoption process in the country, so everything was done on the black market. It wasn't considered normal for Korean people to give up their children, so stories were often made up to explain away the situation. You can't blame a mother for dying and leaving her child behind, so that was a popular excuse. Of course, some mothers do actually die in childbirth, so I've never really known whether to believe the story I was told or not.

I also remember being on an airplane with one or two other Korean kids. They must have been orphans too. We were on our way to America, although at the time I had no idea what was happening to me. I don't remember feeling scared exactly, just confused and out of place. When we landed, my new family was waiting for me at the airport gate—Mom, Dad, and my new big sister, Michelle, my new parents' natural daughter. That's when I got Teddy, my very first teddy bear, who meant so much to me that I've kept him to this day. I couldn't remember having ever been given anything before, so I was very excited by the concept of toys.

I was six years old, and my new home was in a very upscale town in suburban Connecticut We lived in a huge house next to a large apple orchard near a pond. There was a guesthouse on our property, where a sweet couple lived with their baby. The husband was our groundskeeper, and he maintained all the land, which included a well-kept front yard, a huge backyard with trees, a swing set, and a sandbox, and, behind the guesthouse, the main stretch of orchards, which just went on and on. It was about as picturesque as you can get.

I don't remember arriving at my new home, but I do remember a dinner party we had a few days later in celebration of my arrival. Everyone was so big and so white. While sitting in the dining room, I wondered if there was going to be enough food for all of us or if we were going to have to eat our dog, Figi, who looked like a big hairy hot dog with little legs. It's funny what stays with you. People kept coming over to me and hugging and kissing me. I think they were family members; some may have been neighbors. Our neighborhood was a very friendly place.

Across the street from us lived the Addamses. I liked them so much I named the father in my new dollhouse after Mr. Addams. They had a pool in their backyard and threw great pool parties. Since I'd never really had friends before, I spent a lot of time at their house playing with their two kids, who were about my age. That is, until one day when we were playing doctor and one of them cut my nipple with a plastic knife while trying to perform "surgery" on me. That's the last time I remember being at their house, although the scar from where the real doctor stitched me up still reminds me of them.

I used to hear my mother gossiping about the Addams family. Mr. Addams, she said, was having an affair with his secretary. Later he divorced his wife and moved to some state that didn't enforce child support, or at least that's what the neighbors were saying.

A little farther down the road were the Millers. The husband sold fancy cars all over the Fast Coast. I remember their house being creepy, but I think that's because it was the first place I ever babysat and someone had told me that story about the babysitter who gets spooked by a crank caller and when the police trace the call, they tell her, "It's coming from inside the house!" That story still sends chills down my spine.

Down near the pond, where we would go ice skating in the winter, was a newer development with just three houses. The one at the end of the road was a huge, modern house where the Yis lived. They were a Korean family, the only one around.

Mrs. Yi helped my mother a lot when I first arrived, since I spoke only Korean and my new family didn't have any other way to communicate with me. I continued to have nightmares, which caused me to cry and yell in my sleep. My mother grew so concerned that they began tape-recording me at night. Mrs. Yi would listen to the tapes and translate. Each night it was the same thing. I would scream about the monster, the vampire wolf. Years later I heard the tapes again, and they still frightened me.

Just like your typical American family, my parents divorced several years after my adoption. I was about nine then. I think my adoption had been a misguided attempt by my parents to save their marriage. Of course, it didn't work, and pretty soon Dad was on his third marriage (before my mom there had been the Brazilian wife), to a woman fifteen years younger than him.

My parents sold the house and the orchard and moved to separate parts of town at first, then to separate countries (Dad eventually settled in Europe with his new family). Michelle, who I was never very close to, chose to live with our dad. I ended up with Mom. And just like that, our not-so-happy family split down the middle; we all had to start over.

A few years later, when I was visiting my dad—who by that time had managed to create a perfect little life for himselfwith his perfect, young wife and their perfect new daughter—he told me what a disappointment I had been to all of them. When they had decided to adopt a child from Korea, they had been promised a baby. Then I showed up, already walking and talking and crying in my sleep. I caused them even more trouble after he and Mom split. By the time he told me this, I had run away a few times and Mom was having problems coping with me, all ofwhich was getting expensive for him, since he still supported us. "I already paid $100,000 for you and I'm still paying," he told me.