Jenny Angell - Madam

In the kitchen, Sam was voicing his displeasure with the menu choices. I sighed and marched in to head him off before he decided to throw the offending food around. Now all I had to do was figure out who the hell I had that I could pass off as this April, who was, unfortunately, a total figment of my imagination.

* * * * * *

Sometimes I think I’m in the wrong profession altogether.

Mornings, in particular, are tough. I’m not supposed to be working then – we do most of our work in the late afternoons and at night – but I still answer the calls: it would be suicidal not to. Talking with Gary this morning hadn’t precisely made my day, but yesterday was worse. It was raining for the third day in a row, my husband was away, and Sam was adamantly refusing to eat the exact same breakfast he had loved only the day before.

And I had a new girl on the phone, asking for advice.

“Peach, should I get the wax done just before I go? Sometimes my skin is a little irritated right after I have a wax. And – there’s this other thing: what do you think – should I have all the hair removed, or leave a strip of it on?”

Wonderful. I haven’t had my first cup of coffee yet, and here I’m talking to this girl about her pubic hair. Ask me if I care .

Well, actually, the reality is that I do. I do care about these girls and I care about making things as comfortable for them as I can and I care about their confidence (if not, precisely, about their wax jobs); but sometimes it just gets a little … overwhelming. Like I’m a nanny with a particularly difficult and demanding set of charges.

The only difference between us is that my charges are all drop-dead gorgeous and in their twenties. The rest? I’d say it pretty much stays the same.

* * * * * *

Despite what you may be thinking after reading all of this, most of the time, I love what I do. I love owning my own business. I love having my days free. For a long time, I loved the cachet that went along with being a successful madam in a relatively small city where everyone who is anyone knows everybody else. I loved the entrée it gave me to events and parties and inner circles; I loved being seen as someone who people wanted to be seen with.

And then there’s the issue of power. After all, my profession involves providing something that men want, and I’m the gatekeeper. I’m the one who gives or doesn’t give what they are asking for. There are days when that feels pretty good.

This book is partly about that, partly about what it was like to be flashy and successful in a glittering world where it was always night, where the real world was somewhere else. Because that was a big part of my life. But it’s also about how that gets old, finally; about how the other side to the nightlife can be devastating and even deadly; about how, in a sense, I grew out of it and into something that is just as satisfying in a completely different way.

And, through it all, I ran – and continue to run – a very successful escort business.

I didn’t start out wanting to be a madam.

I mean, it’s not the kind of career choice that little girls consider when they talk together about what they’re going to be when they grow up. Let’s see: teacher, nurse, lawyer, bordello owner … nope, just doesn’t work. There are some careers that you choose, and some careers that choose you. This one definitely falls into the latter category.

So, how does a nice girl like me end up running an escort service?

I’m not sure exactly where to start. I could use all the excuses that people generally use when they’re trying to justify what others may see as questionable behavior. I could talk about boyfriends and about wanting to do well at Boston’s Emerson College; about my parents’ expectations that I would marry and buy a mock Tudor house somewhere in the suburbs. I could list my various jobs, give you a resumé or a list of recommendations; I could self-righteously mention exactly how few positions are available to people when they first leave a school like Emerson, which is so specialized in communications and acting and related fields. I could even say that I had put a lot of thought into it and decided that running an escort service would make me Businesswoman of the Year.

But the reality is different. The reality is that I was tired of coming home to the guy I was living with (for no reason other than that we had started living together and inertia had taken over) who did nothing but smoke pot and watch television. I was tired of looking for jobs in communications with a degree in Communications that meant absolutely nothing at the end of the day. I was tired, tired, tired …

I did try to follow one of the roads that lead to what others see as respectable careers. I tried sales first. I’ve always been pretty good at talking people into things, so I went to work in the sales area of some low-income housing developments on the edge of North Cambridge, Massachusetts, and moonlighted answering the telephone for the maintenance department. The first clue I had that I was in the wrong place was when a couple of the guys refused to fix the toilet in a certain tenant’s apartment. The tenant in question didn’t speak English, so I started giving the maintenance guys holy hell about discriminating against him.

When one of them could finally get a word in, it was to say, “You know, lady, no one’s gonna go there. Two other maintenance guys almost got killed fixing stuff for that creep.”

Oh.

The second clue came when the news trucks all started coming around and people began shoving microphones in my face, asking me questions about the guy on the eighteenth floor who had just gotten arrested for running a prostitution ring out of his apartment.

And all of that – those events, those situations that I can single out and point to – didn’t even touch the sheer bleakness of working there, in that world, with people who had lost every shred of hope they had ever had for a better life. Poverty is a grinding, daily, hurtful thing, and after a generation of it, most people cannot imagine a world that doesn’t involve welfare, or dealing drugs, or stints in prison, or wanting something with the only part of you that hasn’t accepted that you’ll never be able to have it. I know I’m a hypocrite to feel that way and not become a social worker, or something – anything to help ease people’s pain. Instead, I decided one thing: I wasn’t going to make a career out of being part of anybody’s misery. I wanted a modicum of happiness in my work.

So I made some New Year’s resolutions in the middle of the summer and kicked the boyfriend out and thought for a while about my assets – what is fashionable, these days, to call a skills set. And I realized right away that what I’m good at – what I’m brilliant at – is talking . I can talk anybody into anything. I can sweet-talk operators into giving me information they never planned to give out. I’ve always had this big double bed and I sit there with my telephone and my Yellow Pages and man, I’m all set. I can get just about anything I need with my phone and my Yellow Pages.

On the other hand, what do people do who are good on the telephone? I certainly didn’t want to do telemarketing. Yuck. Interrupting people having dinner to try and sell them subscriptions to some magazine they’d never read anyway. It just didn’t work for me.

So I sat and called everyone I knew and didn’t get any closer to figuring out what to do with my so- called career. I took a couple of temp jobs working as a receptionist for high-tech companies and resigned myself to doing something like that in the foreseeable future.

When I finally happened on the ad in the newspaper – almost accidentally, on a day I had not set aside for job-hunting – I had no idea that it was going to change my life forever.