George Martin - Rogues

My mom and I would dress the part. She had a pretty, faded cotton dress, threadbare but screaming of decency. She put me in whatever I’d grown out of. We’d sit on a bench and target the right people to beg off. It’s a fairly simple scheme. First choice is an out-of-town church bus. In-town church people, they’ll just send you to the church. Out of town, they usually have to help, especially a one-eyed lady with a sad-faced kid. Second choice is women in sets of two. (Solo women can dart away too quickly; a pack of women is too hard to wrangle.) Third choice is a single woman who has that open look. You know it: The same woman you stop to ask for directions or the time of day, that’s the woman we ask for money. Also youngish men with beards or guitars. Don’t stop men in suits: That cliché is right, they’re all assholes. Also skip the thumb rings. I don’t know what it is, but men with thumb rings never help.

The ones we picked? We didn’t call them marks, or prey or victims. We called them Tonys, because my dad was named Tony and he could never say no to anyone (although I assume he said no to my mom at least once, when she asked him to stay).

Once you stop a Tony, you can figure out in two seconds which way to beg. Some want it over with fast, like a mugging. You blurt. “Weneedmoneyforfoodyouhaveanychange?” Some want to luxuriate in your misfortune. They’ll only give you money if you give them something to feel better about, and the sadder your story, the better they feel about helping you, and the more money you get. I’m not blaming them. You go to the theater, you want to be entertained.

My mom had grown up on a farm downstate. Her own mother died in childbirth; her daddy grew soy and raised her when he wasn’t too exhausted. She came up here for college, but her daddy got cancer, and the farm got sold, and ends stopped meeting, and she had to drop out. She worked as a waitress for three years, but then her little girl came along, and her little girl’s daddy left, and before you knew it … she was one of them. The needy. She was not proud …

You get the idea. That was just the starter story. You can go from there. You can tell real quick if the person wants a scrappy, up-by-the-bootstraps tale: Then I was suddenly an honor-roll student at a distant charter school (I was, but the truth isn’t the point here) and mom just needed gas money to get me there (I actually took three buses on my own). Or if the person wants a damn-the-system story: Then I was immediately afflicted by some rare disease (named after whatever asshole my mom was dating—Todd-Tychon Syndrome, Gregory-Fisher Disease), and my health-care woes had left us broke.

My mom was sly but lazy. I was much more ambitious. I had lots of stamina and no pride. By the time I was thirteen, I was outbegging her by hundreds of dollars a day, and by the time I was sixteen, I’d left her and the stains and the TV—and, yes, high school—and struck out on my own. I’d go out each morning and beg for six hours. I knew who to approach and for how long and exactly what to say. I was never ashamed. What I did was purely transactional: You made someone feel good and they gave you money.

So you can see why the whole hand-job thing felt like a natural career progression.

Spiritual Palms (I didn’t name the place, don’t blame me) was in a tony neighborhood to the west of downtown. Tarot cards and crystal balls up front, illegal soft-core sex work in back. I’d answered an ad for a receptionist. It turned out “receptionist” meant “hooker.” My boss Viveca is a former receptionist and current bona fide palm reader. (Although Viveca isn’t her bona fide name, her bona fide name is Jennifer, but people don’t believe Jennifers can tell the future; Jennifers can tell you which cute shoe to buy or what farmer’s market to visit, but they should keep their hands off other people’s futures.) Viveca employs a few fortune-tellers up front and runs a tidy little room in back. The room in back looks like a doctor’s office: It has paper towels and disinfectant and an exam table. The girls froofed it up with scarves draped over lamps and potpourri and sequined pillows—all this stuff only girly-girls would possibly care about. I mean, if I were a guy, looking to pay a girl to wank me off, I wouldn’t walk in the room, and say, “My God, I smell hints of fresh strudel and nutmeg … quick, grab my dick!” I’d walk in a room and say very little, which is what most of them do.

He’s unique, the man who comes in for a hand job. (And we only do hand jobs here, or at least I only do hand jobs—I have an arrest record for a few petty thefts, dumb stuff I did at eighteen, nineteen, twenty, that will ensure I never ever ever get a decent job, and so I don’t need to pile a serious prosty bust on top of it.) A hand-job guy is a very different creature from a guy who wants a blow job or a guy who wants sex. For some guys a hand job is just a gateway sex act. But I had a lot of repeat customers: They will never want more than a hand job. They don’t consider a hand job cheating. Or else they worry about disease, or else they never have the courage to ask for more. They tend to be tense, nervous married men, men with midlevel, mostly powerless jobs. I’m not judging, I’m just giving my assessment. They want you attractive but not slutty. For instance, in my real life I wear glasses, but I don’t when I’m in back because it’s distracting—they think you’re going to pull a Sexy Librarian act on them, and it makes them tense while they wait for the first chords of a ZZ Top song and then they don’t hear it and they get embarrassed for thinking that you were going to do Sexy Librarian and then they’re distracted and the whole thing takes longer than anyone wants.

They want you friendly and pleasant but not weak. They don’t want to feel like predators. They want this transactional. Service-oriented. So you exchange some polite conversation about the weather and a sports team they like. I usually try to find some sort of inside joke we can repeat each visit—an inside joke is like a symbol of friendship without having to do the work required of an actual friendship. So you say, I see the strawberries are in season! or We need a bigger boat (these are actual inside jokes I’m giving you) and then the ice is broken and they don’t feel like they’re scumbags because you’re friends, and then the mood is set and you can get to it.

When people ask me that question that everyone asks: “What do you do?” I’d say, “I’m in customer service,” which was true. To me, it’s a nice day’s work when you make a lot of people smile. I know that sounds too earnest, but it’s true. I mean, I would rather be a librarian, but I worry about the job security. Books may be temporary; dicks are forever.

The problem was, my wrist was killing me. Barely thirty and I had the wrist of an octogenarian and an unsexy athletic brace to match. I took it off before jobs but that Velcro-rip sound made men a little edgy. One day, Viveca visited me in back. She’s a heavy woman, like an octopus—lots of beads and ruffles and scarves floating around her, along with a big scent of cologne. She has hair dyed the color of fruit punch and insists it’s real. ( Viveca: Grew up the youngest child in a working-class family; indulgent of people she likes; cries at commercials; multiple failed attempts to be a vegetarian. Just my guess.)

“Are you clairvoyant, Nerdy?” she asked. She called me Nerdy because I wore glasses and read books and ate yogurt on my lunch break. I’m not really a nerd; I only aspire to be one. Because of the high-school-dropout thing, I’m a self-didact. (Not a dirty word, look it up). I read constantly. I think. But I lack formal education. So I’m left with the feeling that I’m smarter than everyone around me but that if I ever got around really smart people—people who went to universities and drank wine and spoke Latin—that they’d be bored as hell by me. It’s a lonely way to go through life. So I wear the name as a badge of honor. That someday I may not totally bore some really smart people. The question is: How do you find smart people?