* * *
Jesse was reading in the library the next afternoon when he looked at his cell phone and noticed the time. It was nearly three-thirty. Son of a bitch, he thought. He had better get over to the athletic center to see about that job.
He was feeling dehydrated from last night’s drinking so found a vending machine in the large, windowed foyer of the athletic center and dug out his wallet to buy a drink. He wore the same jeans from the previous night, and when he pulled out his wallet, the slip of paper Farhad had given him slid out and fell to the floor. He had been pretty drunk, had forgotten about Farhad’s call, but now the memory floated to the surface. He picked up the paper and looked at the address, then looked into the workout room. Sweaty bodies rode stationary bikes, lifted weights. Some guy cleared his throat and hocked a loogey into a water fountain. Behind the front desk an athletic-looking girl with blond hair and a ponytail spoke to an in-shape, thirty-something-year-old man with a buzz cut. Was that Ray? He imagined Ray barking orders at him like a drill sergeant: “You call that latrine clean! What are you, some kind of hillbilly? Get on your knees and clean it again! And what kind of name is Jessie, anyway?! Isn’t that a girl’s name?”
Okay, he thought, that’s probably not realistic, but Ray still didn’t look like a guy he’d want to chat with all afternoon while checking student IDs. And what would have Hemingway done, sat like a statue behind a counter and mopped bathrooms or gone the more adventurous route?
Jesse stuffed the paper into his pocket and darted out of the athletic center. He found a computer kiosk and looked up the address, walked to the student parking lot to get his car and, in 20 minutes, was walking up the front steps of a modern-day brothel.
It was really just a plain, 4-story brick apartment building, but as Jesse rode the elevator to the third floor, he imagined he was entering a 19th century den of iniquity, and wondered how one acts in such a place? Should he be more Doc Holiday or Billy the Kid? And what else goes on here? Drugs, illegal gambling? He would have to be on guard and keep his cool.
He got off the elevator at the third floor and walked down the brightly lit hall to room 32. An older woman answered his knock.
“Howdy, ma’am,” he said, almost reaching to tip a make-believe Stetson. “I’m here about the driver position.”
“Ma’am? My God, I know I’m old but you don’t hafta rub it in,” the woman said while letting him in. “Helen. For God’s sake, call me Helen.”
Helen smoked a cigarette. Her skin had a tanned complexion not from the sun, but as if years of cigarette smoke was embedded in her pores. She said things like “How are ya’, Honey” and “Right this way, Darling,” and led Jesse into the apartment. She moved her plump body in lurches, and lurched for the ringing phone as they reached the living room.
The apartment was dimly lit and Jesse’s eyes had to adjust from the brightness of the hallway. What he could make out wasn’t much, decoratively speaking. The walls were bare and white; the counter, which separated the living room from a small kitchen, held only a phone and a bag of Doritos; and a cell phone and a purse sat on a coffee table in the living room. Otherwise, the apartment was immaculately clean and empty. Except, of course, for its most salient features.
A large man, probably in his mid twenties, in a green tee shirt and jeans sat wedged in the corner of a plush, white wraparound couch. His forehead jutted out farther than any other part of his face, though his teeth were fighting for a close second place. He must have been some type of bouncer, Jesse reasoned. A few feet away on both sides of him two girls wearing mostly skin sprawled out on the couch. They all stared languorously at a massive large screen television showing of some Adam Sandler movie, their short bursts of staccato laughter intermittently puncturing the heavy torpor that hung in the room.
Jesse stood on the opposite side of the room where Helen had left him. He tried to make eye contact but their eyes remained fixed on the TV. He, too, looked at the TV until the next burst of laughter, when he looked back at the trio and tried again to smile ingratiatingly at them. With still no reception he turned back to see Helen, who hung up the phone and staggered towards him.
“Sorry to make you wait, dear, but someone was supposed to go to Park Plaza and then said they didn’t have a ride and we couldn’t get a driver. You see why we need new people. Come with me this way.” Helen led Jesse into a small room with a desk and file cabinet. “I only work here part time answering phones,” she said, digging through desks and drawers. “I don’t know where Chrissy keeps anything.”
She eventually dug out an index card and wrote down Jesse’s cell phone number and availability. She explained his general duties, which amounted to picking up the escort—the girls on the couch, she said, were there doing in-calls—driving her to the client, waiting, and driving her home when she was done, for which he would receive about thirty dollars, depending on the rate charged and the distance driven. She said that they liked to have drivers come in to meet them so they could get an idea of whether they would be reliable, and that he indeed seemed like a reliable young man, though she asked him nothing and he said almost nothing while there. She said they’d call when they needed him, though it didn’t hurt to check in to tell them if he was available. He left the apartment not fifteen minutes after he’d entered it.
As he walked to the elevator a man passed him going the opposite direction. He looked respectable in an average sort of way, like a banker or mid-level manager. Maybe he lived next door to the escort service. Jesse wondered if the guy suspected people were having sex for money not thirty feet from where he slept. Or maybe he was going there. Jesse turned around to see if the man entered the door he had come out of, but the hallway was empty.
That Monday in chemistry Jesse sat a few seats closer to the black-haired girl than usual. That was his plan. Sit a few seats closer each day, to make it seem natural, inconspicuous, until finally he was in the seat next to her. Of course, his plan had as much to do with the fact that he was too nervous to just plop down next to her, but he preferred to think that it was to appear inconspicuous.
That week he got his first call to drive an escort to a client. The girl went by the name of Alexis. It wasn’t her real name, but Jesse soon learned that even when talking to and about each other, at least while at work, they used their pseudonyms. Alexis wore a tight black skirt, black sleeveless top, lit a cigarette in his car without asking and tossed back a nip of Scotch before going to see the client. He had been nervous before picking her up. Most people are nervous before their first day on the job, but this was undeniably different from any job he’d had before. Not to mention, girls and sex weren’t his forte, and here he was thrust into close quarters with a girl in a situation that revolved around sex. At first he wasn’t sure how he should act or what he should say. What do you say to an escort? How’d the job go? Everything run smoothly, everything operational in there?
Jesse felt awkward at first but was soon put at ease. Since he was just there to work there was no pressure to hit on them. He would talk to them about the logistics—where the guy lived, the best way to get there—but otherwise he let them take the reigns conversationally. If they felt like talking about work or a client, he was intrigued to listen. If not, he would do his best to talk about whatever else was on their minds. And if nothing was, he was content to turn up the radio and just drive.
There was, he soon learned, no one particular type of girl that worked as an escort. Sasha was a red-headed graduate student who had a certain amount of disdain for her clients, and would treat them as mere cash machines to be manipulated for as much money as possible. Cocoa was a large-breasted black woman with a bubbly personality who seemed to really enjoy her job. She would touch his shoulder as she laughed and good-naturedly made fun of a client—“He was so embarrassed, he couldn’t get it up. And I’m like, whatever honey, I make the same amount either way. But these guys are so funny, they all wanna please me even though they’re paying for it. I
t’s like their manhood’s at stake or something.”—and shook her head and laughed some more. He had driven four different girls his first three weeks, some of them two or three times each, and none of them seemed to have much in common with each other except for their profession.
At first, though he was intrigued by their illicit line of work, he was also somewhat skeptical of the girls he was driving. What kind of people sell their bodies like that? But as he got to know the escorts, he not only got used to what they did, he actually began to enjoy their company and look forward to driving them. A few of them even requested Jesse as a driver.
After only a few weeks of driving different girls around, Jesse began to feel, if only slightly, more confident about talking to girls in general. Though they didn’t provide the intimate connection he ultimately desired, there was still a connection, and though it was work related, it inevitably spilled over into more suggestive areas as well.
Jesse liked the idea of attending school by day, a mainstream and wholesome activity, and then entering a seedier and more secretive world at night. He got a certain vicarious thrill out of driving girls to have sex with people. He