The Education of a Very Young Madam (6 page)

Dante is the only pimp I ever knew who had a conscience. He was disgusted by what Julio was trying to do to us, so as soon as Julio took off running, Dante jumped in the car to come get us. He slowed down just long enough for us to hop in the backseat and then drove away, leaving Julio and all the other pimps behind. He drove us straight out of town and didn't stop until we were back in Massachusetts. Our big trip to New York, and we didn't even get to spend the night.

I am not a pimp.

I mention this now because I don't want people thinking that these early experiences turned me into what I am today. I did learn from the pimps and hos I met along the way, but, mostly, I learned how
not
to be.

I have seen firsthand how pimps operate and why girls follow their lead. Why would any girl want to be some pimp's ho? Because she gets to live her life by a different set of rules, and a pimp knows how to make a girl feel special, when he wants to. A pimp will tell you you're gorgeous, you're sexy, you're like no one else in the world. Once he's got your attention, he'll say something like "Why wouldn't you want to use what you have to make some money? It's a gift, after all, and it's something people want. It's what makes you somebody." Then he'll take you to fancy places, dress you up in fancy clothes, introduce you to fancy people, and make you feel like you belong somewhere in this world. If you don't look too closely or for too long, the world that pimps offer their girls looks pretty glamorous. And what other choice do these girls really have? Young girls, poor girls, stupid girls, runaways like Natasha and me—there aren't many glamorous options for girls like that. There aren't a lot of not-so-glamorous options either.

There were some famous pimps around then that everyone in that world knew about. Like Diggy, a West Coast pimp who was always ten to twelve girls deep. He kept that many girls by making them believe it was a privilege to work lor him. He made girls fill out an application to be with him, and if he accepted their company, they had to make appointments to see him once a month (guess what they did during those appointments). He also enforced a strict dress code and a diet-and-exercise regimen so that his girls would always look amazing, which they did. But they were locked down tight, with almost no leeway to do anything without his permission. And their quota was $1,000 a day.

There was also Candy Mac, an NYC pimp who was also always ten to twelve deep and who called his girls the "Mac Attitudes." He would marry his girls after ten years of commitment, and he actually
loved
them. Of course, he didn't divorce the old ones before he married a new one, so his "family" just kept getting bigger and bigger. And strangely, they did seem like one big, happy family. I think it helped that he chose girls who were bisexual so they were into each other as much as they were into him. And he did take care of them. His girls drove nice cars and wore nice clothes, furs, and jewelry. When they were working, he'd drive a big pimped-out van that had a place in the back where the girls could change, rest up, or chill out in between customers. He was a natural-born player, and I liked that about him.

There were all kinds of pimps around then, and different pimps played different games. Some would say sweet things to lure in girls; others were blatant dogs. Either way, most pimps were losers. The whole deal with pimps is that they really only protect you from other pimps. The work of finding customers and keeping safe during appointments is mostly done by the girls themselves, so if they were just smart about it, they didn't really need a pimp at all. That's why a pimp has to be smooth talker, to make a girl believe the lie that she can't live without him. That's what makes me hate pimps. They prey on the weak because their shit wouldn't work on anyone else. They're nothing without their girls, but they never let the girls know it. I mean, really, a pimp without hos is no pimp at all. A pimp will charm a girl just long enough to convince her that she belongs to him, then he convinces her that she's worthless without him. She's not much more than property after that. And the worst part is, I easily could have become one of those girls or maybe even like one of those pimps, which would have been even worse.

The title of "pimp" is a joke in my world. My friends tease me about it, and the boys who work for me laughingly call themselves my "pimp assistants." It's funny only because it's the opposite of what I am. A pimp takes all a girl's money. He thinks he owns her. The pimps I've met never take me seriously, even now—no matter how much more money I make than them—because they don't take any women seriously. I don't have time for such people, and back then I had time for them only because I didn't know any better and I needed them to survive.

Even the title of "madam" is tongue-in-cheek. The old definition of a madam was something like a girl's wrangler and den mother. She took care of her girls, kept them working and in line, often living with them in a house where they all did their business. But I think, if a girl needs to be taken care of like that, then she shouldn't be working at all and she definitely shouldn't be working for me.

I'm a businesswoman. An entrepreneur. I offer a service and give women an opportunity to profit from my name and reputation and from my clientele, who trust me. My job is to keep both the clients and the ladies safe, to manage the business so that it benefits everyone involved, and to market our services to the right people. Women choose for themselves if they want to work for me.
They
come to
me.

When I'm trying to explain my work to people in the outside world who have no context for understanding it, I tell them it's like being an agent. I know the ins and outs of this business. I know what girls need to do to make money. I know what the terms should be. I know good clients who want these services, and I do my best to connect the right girls with the right clients. The one big difference between me and most talent agents is that I never represent a girl exclusively, which means that a girl who works for me can also work for other services, or even for herself if she can pull it off. I don't own the rights to anyone, and why would I want to? I need to constantly bring in new blood in order to keep my clients happy, so I don't want to be responsible for any girl and her entire livelihood.

I never pick up anyone off the street and con her into working for me like Julio tried to do. I never sweet-talk anyone (and talk is one of the pimps' best weapons—they pride themselves on their verbal stylings, otherwise known as bullshit). And I
never
use underage girls. Dante was the same way. Underage girls were not his thing, but, like I said, Dante was not like other pimps.

After we left New York, Dante drove us straight back to Boston, where he lived. Natasha and I actually complained. We were so stupid back then. We had spent all that time trying to get to New York, and we couldn't believe he was taking us back to where we'd come from already. We had no idea how lucky we were.

Dante had a girl working for him named Kayla, and he took us to her house to stay. Kayla was probably no more than eighteen or nineteen years old, but she loved to mother us. She used to tell us when to brush our teeth and clean up after ourselves. She'd make us breakfast and find us outfits to wear. It was kind of like we were playing house.

Julio left us alone after that, even though it was no secret where we were. "He just doesn't want to look bad," Kayla explained. Julio knew that, if he came to get us, Dante would probably just steal us back. It was one thing to get stolen from in New York, where no one knew him, but a pimp never wants to get stolen from on his own turf and he definitely doesn't want to get stolen from twice. That would just make him appear weak, and for a pimp, it's all about reputation. Julio looked like a real loser already, having gone to New York with us in his possession and returned empty-handed.

If Kayla was like our mother, then Dante was definitely our daddy. I thought he was the coolest guy I'd ever met, and I developed a mad crush on him. He was way into music and got me into groups like 2 Live Crew, which were totally different from the Phil Collins songs Natasha and I used to listen to. I wrote him silly little love letters and even offered to work for him. I would have done anything to please him. Thank god he didn't take me up on any of my offers. He knew I was a virgin, and even though I'm sure he didn't have any illusions about how long my innocence was going to last given the company I kept, he just couldn't stomach being the one to corrupt me. In fact, I think he was a little bit afraid of me. Whenever I tried to flirt with him, he'd say something like, "If you keep talking to me like that, you're going to get me arrested," and then he'd walk away.

Natasha was a different story. She was older, only by a year, but to everyone around us it seemed like the age difference was much bigger. At five feet six, she was a few inches taller than me, and she had developed early; she had the body of a woman, while I looked more like a flat-chested little girl. Besides which, she was more experienced than me, and it showed. She was no virgin, and she made it clear that she really wanted to work. She told Dante, "I'm going to do it eventually no matter what you say, so why don't you just let me do it for you?" She just kept bugging him about it. Finally, he gave in. I guess he figured she'd be safer working for him than for anyone else.

Natasha was like that. She was fascinated by the lives of pimps and hos, and she was also very stubborn. Once she got an idea in her head, there was no one who could talk her out of it. And she took to the job like she had been doing it forever. You might even say she was a natural. At least that was the impression that Kayla, Dante, and Natasha gave me. It was about the time Natasha started working that they began to leave me out of things. I remember a lot of dinners in the apartment by myself, and since I couldn't cook, that meant eating lots and lots and lots of Ramen noodles.

Soon Dante was sending Natasha on appointments out of town. I remember feeling really left out when she and Kayla flew to California for a convention while I stayed home by myself. It was mostly boredom that I had been trying to escape when I ran away from the youth center, but there I was, stuck in a place with absolutely nothing to do once again. And even worse, now I had no one to talk to.

It was at that convention that they met Wesley, a computer nerd who had gone to MIT and made a fortune by the time he was thirty. When they met him, he was no longer a whiz kid, just a really smart, rich guy in his early thirties who was already bored with his life. Naturally, he fell in love with Natasha instantly.

I don't know what Wesley said to Natasha and Kayla exactly— probably something about what a great place he had and how much money he would throw around to entertain them—but when they got home, they couldn't wait to tell me the news.

"We're moving," Kayla said, as if that was clearly an exciting thing. I didn't know why we wanted or needed to go anywhere else, but Wesley had agreed to take all three of us in. I didn't ask how that negotiation took place. I assume that it was one of Natasha's conditions that we come along, and, from the beginning, Wesley let Natasha do whatever she wanted. The whole thing just seemed like a new adventure to me. Even Dante didn't question the arrangement. In fact, he seemed happy that we were going to be someone else's responsibility from now on.

Wesley had a huge apartment in Kendall Square, so big that we each had our own room. He had us living in style, which Natasha loved. He rented cars for us—Natasha even got a red Ferrari for a little while—and got us rooms at the Four Seasons just for a change of scenery. A couple of times Natasha and I went to the mall with one of his credit cards and just shopped and shopped until we were so tired we could barely walk. That's probably where my designer-label habit started. But life was different at Wesley's. Even though we had one more person living with us, we seemed less like a family than ever before. Natasha was going off on her own more and more. Except for the occasional shopping trip, she and I hardly ever hung out by ourselves.

Despite the fact that Natasha liked the way Wesley took care of her, she didn't really care about him. One day, out of the blue, she came home and started to gather up her stuff. "I've met someone," she told me matter-of-factly, "and I'm going to live with him."

"Can I come?" I asked her. She hardly looked at me when she said no.

Kayla was the one who told Wesley that Natasha had left. She knew the guy Natasha had run off with too. He was a drug dealer who lived in Buffalo, and I got the feeling, though she didn't say it directly, that he was not a nice guy. There was something else that Kayla wasn't saying, which was that this dealer hung out with a lot of junkies and that Natasha was becoming one herself. She hadn't just run off with a drug dealer, she'd gotten into drugs, and hard drugs too. She had probably gone off with the guy because he promised her a steady supply, which, in her eyes, beat Wesley's apartment and cars. I knew she used, but I didn't know how bad it was. Looking back, I realize that Kayla and Wesley must have understood that part of the story perfectly, though they didn't talk about it in front of me.

Wesley was so heartbroken that he sent me to go find Natasha and bring her back. Up until that point, the cars had been for Kayla and Natasha only. I knew how to drive a little, but I didn't have a license. Even though what he gave me to drive was just a beat-up old Buick, I was psyched to get my own car.

Wesley said that he would go himself except he thought Natasha would be more likely to listen to me because she loved me. He was right about that, but I think there was another reason. Despite the fact that he had three girls living in his apartment, two of them prostitutes and two of them underage runaways, he was still running his own business, and I doubt he could have afforded to get caught in the kinds of places I had to go to look for Natasha.