“Trust me. It’s always the ones who look away or start staring at the floor like they’re looking for change. The ones who look like they’ve never been given a compliment in their sad, sorry lives. Those are the little fishes you want to scoop out of the pond.
The others. The ones that are fine looking. The ones that look straight back at you and smile and walk off, or tell you to get lost, or look like they hear that shit all day, every day. Those ones are no good.
Always remember, Andre, a ho is born, not made. Although they sometimes need a little shaping.”
He had Hanger’s speech down pat. He’d heard it enough times.
Like a lot of things that Hanger said, it never varied. Not even by a word. Hanger had speeches for young bucks like him, he had speeches for bottom girls like Soothe, and he had more than a few speeches for his hoes.
He had speeches for the police. Speeches for Johns who damaged the goods. Speeches, if it came to it, for a judge, although that had only happened once as far as Andre was aware.
Hanger had introduced him to the game. Or rather, for Hanger and men like him, to the world of pimping, which was the game within the game. Sometimes it got called the life, although that was more what the women called it.
The life had its own rules, and it had its own language. Ducks. Swans. The track. Track hos. Carpet hos. An entire world within a world, what a bullshit sociology college professor would call a subculture.
Andre didn’t go out looking to recruit girls for Hanger. He’d found that hunting rarely, if ever, worked. Instead, he just lived his life and kept his eyes open.
He’d even come up with a name for what he did. He called it Pokémon Ho. Not Pokémon Go. An h instead of a g. Ho for, well, he assumed it was short for a whore, not that he ever used that word around the girls.
Pokémon Go was this game you played on your phone, only you played it outside. You’d point the screen at things outside and these little Pokémon characters appeared, and you could capture them. Just like a treasure hunt.
And, thought Andre, so was this. Only the little Pokémon hoes he captured were real, and he could exchange them for actual money.
A lot of guys tried to find them over the internet, but Hanger had turned him on to the real-life hunt early on. Hanger was the last of the old school, and he’d told Andre he wanted to pass on his knowledge to one last generation.
For a start, Hanger had explained, real life recruitment saved time. You might talk to a girl online for weeks and get nowhere. But out here you could tell pretty much immediately who a suitable target was and who wasn’t.
Andre thought of it as part science and part art. And for every girl he handed off, he got five hundred bucks. Two hundred came up front and the other three came after Hanger put her to work. If she was white, a swan, it got bumped up by another five hundred.
Hanger also showed Andre how the pimping game worked. Andre had already seen the money that could be made from pimping. It was crazy, off the charts, loot.
A single girl might be worth a couple of hundred grand a year to Hanger. It was almost all profit too. The girls didn’t keep any of it. Not a single cent. Everything got handed over. Hanger clothed and fed them, bought them drugs and booze, but that was it. The rest was pure profit.
At home, in his mom’s basement, Andre fired up a blunt. He spent the next few hours poring over the girl’s social media accounts. With each scroll down a page, more and more dollar signs appeared in his eyes.
Kristin was young and white, two qualities that made her worth a lot more out on the track. For a moment he actually considered keeping her for himself, putting her out there to earn for him. But he knew he didn’t have the game required, not yet anyway.
From what he could tell, his instincts had been right. She was ripe for someone like Hanger. She only had her mom and a grandpa. No father that he could see.
Hanger had told him that girls without a father were easier to turn out. Plus, they were less risky, easier to deal with if their family came looking for them.
As he kept swiping and scrolling, moving back into Kristin’s past, he felt a twinge of guilt pull at him as she got younger. He quickly brushed it off, reminding himself that this was business. There was no room for sentiment in the game.
When he followed her on Instagram, she messaged him almost immediately. He didn’t reply. He would, but not right away. He needed her to do her own scrolling, to look at his pictures, to start to develop those feelings that girls who’d been ignored their entire life always had.
He pulled up the latest picture she’d posted. It showed her standing in front of a Christmas tree, smiling shyly at the camera. He copied the picture and sent it on to Hanger.
“I want two for this one,” was the message he sent with the picture.
Hanger messaged him back. “Two? You must be tripping.”
Andre didn’t respond.
A half hour later, Hanger came back.
“She is fine, though. I’ll go to two, but only if she works out for me.”
Andre smiled and tapped out his reply.
“Deal.”