I Hire a Gig Economy Sex Worker!

Confessions of an unrecognizable former rock dreamboat

I promised myself in my early 20s that I would never pay for sex, and for over 50 years I wasn’t a liar. But this past weekend, with Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) at her big sales conference in Glasgow, I was overcome by loneliness, longing, and a feeling of purposelessness, and spent an enjoyable couple of hours comparing “escort” agencies that serve London’s southwestern tip, eventually concluding that my money would be most sagely spent on Embassy Escorts’ 29-year-old Chantelle, who enjoyed movies and music, and who was, according to her three photos, reasonably attractive. I liked her blue eyes, false eyelashes, and bewitching smile, and will not deny that I also found her name — which I’d heretofore believed the exclusive province of chavvy young women on Big Brother — quite sexy.

Before she arrived, I showered and shaved and put on and then removed my male girdle (designed to create the illusion that I don’t have saggy pecs and a saggy belly) four times before thinking to myself, “Yo, numbnuts, you’re paying her to pretend to find you sexy in spite of how mercilessly the decades have vandalized your beauty.“ I ingested 150 milligrams of Cialis®, and tingled with anticipation.

She was thicker in the wrong places than in her photographs, and probably 10 years older. I was on the verge of asking her about Embassy’s refund policy when I intuited that, beneath her brashness, she might be vulnerable. Ordinarily, my malignant narcissism would have precluded such a perception, but the thought of getting laid had sharpened all my senses. I asked if she might enjoy a cup of herbal tea. She snickered, “You sound like my bloody psychotherapist. And the metre’s running, ducky.” I had paid for only an hour of her attention. She pronounced her th’s like f’s. Psychoferapist. Such so-called th-fronting is regarded as a 'boundary marker' between Cockney and Estuary (that is, educated, middle class English.

Keef Richards, innit.

I felt it necessary to establish that I hadn’t always been the saggy-chested, dilapidated old embarrassment with a splotch on his left cheek exactly the shape of Uruguay now sitting nervously opposite her. I told her that once upon a time I’d been rather a rock dreamboat. In restaurants, women beautiful or fastidiously groomed enough to star on one of those nauseating television series about selling very expensive real estate had routinely come over, even when I was unmistakably enjoing Date Nite with a blonde starlet, to hand me a matchbook on which they’d written their phone numbers. (There was no such thing as an email address at the time.)

“Right, gov,” Chantelle said, rolling her eyes beneath her wonderful false lashes. “And I was the head of the quantum physics department at bloody Cambridge.”

Stung, I showed her photographs of the young rock dreamboat me on my laptop. “Mmm,” she murmured humidly. “Well tasty. But what happened?”

“Life happened,” I said, and had to struggle to keep tears of embarrassment and regret from spilling from my own very dark brown eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said, in a gentler tone than she’d said anything else to that point. “Misread you, innit. Some blokes quite enjoy being ridiculed. It gets them angry, and then they shag me vengefully. Vengeful sex is well popular among a certain demographic.”

I told her that I’m not a vengeful person, which was of course a lie, and changed the subject. I asked about her own erotic disposition. She said that she fantasized about going to Botswana — because she loved its name — and being kidnapped and ravaged by a trio of Bushmen.

I felt complimented by her confiding in me. “My experience,” I said “is that many women have fantasies of being ravaged by black men.”

“41,289 of us, in fact,” she said, winking. I was reminded of Bob Dylan replying, “41,” in response to a pompous press conference question about how many genuine protest singers were left in 1965, and chuckled. She seemed to take my amusement as an affirmation, and at that moment we began to relax around each other.