There will always be assholes. Baristas will tell you, restaurant servers will tell you, retail workers will tell you, sometimes customers are assholes and that’s just a truth of client-facing work. Working the streets, most everyone was an asshole. Most every guy I met tried to screw me when it came to payment, and I got hit more times than I can count. One guy trashed my room and pissed on my carpet and another beat me so bloody the grout between the bathroom tiles was stained pink forever.
Don’t get me wrong; there are good guys picking up girls on the streets, too. Before Daddy hired me, I was dealing and stripping in LA, doing some house calls on the side here and there. I met a guy at my club. A nice guy. A neurosurgeon. They don’t have much time to date. He asked me to come back to his place, and I tucked my switchblade into my bra and took his hand. I didn’t need the knife. He was kind. He made me a martini, and we made out on his couch. It was three in the morning but when he heard my stomach growl, he put on a Frank Sinatra record and cooked spaghetti from scratch and twirled me under his arm in the kitchen. We ate on his balcony, looking out over the city, and then we sat in his hot tub and he massaged my shoulders. I fell asleep in the water and woke up in his bed. This could’ve so easily been the start of one of the bad stories, the worst ones, roofies, rape, but no, this guy was good; I found him asleep on the floor beside the bed, fully clothed, using my purse as a pillow. I whispered him awake and told him to join me. We didn’t leave that bed for twenty-four hours after that. He ordered delivery and I called into work and he brushed my teeth with his toothbrush. It took twenty-four hours for him to learn everything about me and he seemed to like all of it. He seemed to like me. Then he said, “You know, I just realized, I don’t know what you want from life. What do you want to be when you grow up? Are you studying?”
“Studying?”
“I mean, why are you stripping? Student loans?”
I wanted to lie. I usually did. I usually told people I was studying to be an accountant because no one ever asks follow-up questions of accountants and I had that boring, boring word ready to go, but then I looked at this guy, this kind, sweet, smokin’ hot guy, like Jamie Foxx in Law Abiding Citizen hot, and I liked him. I liked how he asked questions with his eyebrows instead of his words, I liked how he touched me while he talked, unconsciously, accidental, and I liked how he used his hands while he explained his work, as if he were sewing the stitches right there in front of me. I liked him. I didn’t want to lie to him. I said, “I’m not studying,” and I said, “I like my work. This is what I want from life. I am grown up.”
He stopped touching me then. He said, “This is what you want from life?” He sat for a long time. Eventually, he said, “I like you, Ashley,” and then he said, “But I don’t think we’re . . . compatible.”
I said, “Compatible.”
And he said, “I’m a surgeon.”
I dressed myself for the first time in two days and went to leave, and before I did, he tapped me on the shoulder, like maybe he’d had a change of heart, but instead he gave me money. A whole wad of cash. And he said, “Sorry we got our wires crossed.”
I kept the $500 and used it to buy myself a new pair of shoes. Daddy called me a couple days later. He had a vacancy, a Haitian girl had just been let go, and he thought I’d make a perfect replacement.