The Whore on Christmas

That’s sadder than a whore on Christmas.”

The first time I had sex for money on Christmas, I was 21 and I’d
been a call girl for a little over two years. I don’t care a whole lot
about Christmas. I have no objection to a one-day holiday, but I hate
being beaten over the head with stockings and carols and Santa Claus
for eight weeks, and I hate being told when I should feel jolly or
giving.

However, contrary to the sad-and-lonely whore stereotype, I have a
large extended family. I may be the black sheep, but my family is
determined to gather me into the fold—whether I like it or not.
It’s not that my relatives aren’t nice people. It’s just that when we
all get together to have a Christmas celebration, it’s as if the punch
bowl was spiked with 151-proof banality and tedium.

Granted, at 21 I was still baiting my Southern-conservative family
with my spiked hair, goth clothing, and sweeping pronouncements about
the virtues of nationalized health care and gun control. I was used to
being the target of some teasing. But attempting to be patient
throughout a day of speculation about why I was the only female
grandchild not married and pregnant left me deeply envious of
orphans.

I was sitting in a plaid recliner in my grandmother’s living room,
hoping the rum in my Coke would deafen me to the screams of my cousins
and the roar of the football game my uncles were watching on TV, when
my mother said, “Honey, something in your purse is beeping.”

My pager? The only person who had that number was the owner of the
escort service I worked for.

“Must be the alarm on that sports watch I got,” I offered. “I’ll go
turn it off.”

I took the phone from my grandmother’s bedside table, dragged the
long cord into her closet, closed the door, and dialed my service.

“Hi, sweetie,” said my boss. “Thanks for calling back. Listen, I’m
sorry to bother you on Christmas, I know I said we’d be closed. But
this guy I know called, he’s really nice, and he’s stuck here on
business. He wanted to know if we had anybody who’d come down to the
Hyatt to see him. Any chance you’d do it? He’ll tip you big time.”

An automatic, “No, I can’t” rose to my lips, but before I said it, a
piercing wail penetrated the closet door, as the effects of too much
sugar and too little sleep took their toll on the Fisher-Price set. I
heard my Aunt Alice calling me to come to the kitchen and whip the
cream for the pies. I thought about my options for a moment: kitchens,
football, and screaming children—or go fuck a strange man for
money.

“What’s his room number?” I said. “I’ll be there in half an
hour.”

I told my family that my neighbor thought she’d smelled smoke by my
apartment door, and it was probably nothing, but I just had to run home
and check. The client was pleasant and uncomplicated, and the sterile
beige serenity of the hotel, with its silent hallways and clean white
sheets, was a balm. I returned to my grandmother’s house to have some
pie—someone else had whipped the cream—and then it was time
for everyone to go home.

It was the best family Christmas party ever.

The expression “sadder than a whore on Christmas” is based on
the notion that whores, presumably ostracized by loved ones (not always
the case), are also deserted by their customers on December 25. While I
am a pro domme now, I spent the first 10 years of my sex-work career
straight-up fucking for money. And my experience says that while other
people’s Christmases may be white, Christmas can be nicely green for
whores.

That’s because I’m not the only one who needs relief from the
pressure of enforced family togetherness. Whenever I’ve worked on
Christmas, most of my clients have also been ducking out of family
gatherings and they’ve fallen through my door like men pursued by
wolves. And most of them have said something like: “I gave presents to
everybody else, this is my present to myself!”

“Oh yeah, they say the same kind of thing to me,” said my friend Jae
as we stood surveying the buffet at a holiday party. Jae works as a
call girl, and she’s had similar experiences working on Christmas. “So
I started putting long ribbons and bows around myself—if I’m a
present, unwrap me.”

And, yes, she really does that.

“Some years I get the sexy-Santa outfit request a lot,” Jae added.
“Especially if there’s some kind of TV special with chicks in
sexy-Santa outfits. Guys get triggered by the visuals. Guys will bring
over those big, fat candy canes and want you to put it up your
ass—or his ass, for that matter. Particularly if they’ve been
drinking. You do have to watch out for that on Christmas—guys
who’ve been hitting the eggnog all day.” She shrugs. “But the tips are
usually good.”

When my friend Natalie was an escort we had weekly vent-about-work
sessions over dinner. She’s since left the business, but we still do
weekly dinners, and she still has plenty of opinions about sex
work.

“I may be a Jew,” Natalie said when I asked about her experiences on
the holidays, “but I didn’t work on Christmas. The way I see it, if
you’ve got nothing else to do on Christmas, then you’re nobody I want
to deal with. All the good clients have other places to be.”

Even the Jewish ones?

“Christmas is a secular holiday, too, now,” said Natalie, “not just
a religious one. Only weirdos and losers call on Christmas.”

Natalie has a point. I’ve been to Christmas gigs where it was clear
that the guy wasn’t escaping from a family gathering—because he
didn’t have a family. Some of them were contented loners, just looking
to be entertained. But some of them—well, Jae pretty much nails
it:

“Sometimes you show up at the guy’s house on Christmas and you feel
sorry for him, you know? Like there’s this sort of Charlie Brown-ish
Christmas tree with one present under it, and it’s for you.”

Now that’s sad.

I remember one particular Christmas client.

It was midafternoon on Christmas Eve. The client and I had never met
before, but I showed up at his house at the appointed time, and he
quickly ushered me inside. The man of the house was thin and pale, with
faded blond hair, and he looked nervous. I could understand why:
There’s a reason married guys rarely have whores come to their
homes.

How could I tell he was married? Well, the fact that the house was
decorated in a nauseatingly cutesy-country-crafty style was a big
tip-off. Not just decorated—the place was stuffed full of ruffled
chintz and gingham, designer teddy bears and American primitive wooden
plaques with bunnies and angels and hearts burned on them. There was a
flowered platter of homemade iced cookies sitting on the hall table.
And there were a lot of family portraits on the foyer wall, with Mom,
Dad, and three little rug rats.

“So you can be gone by six, right?” he asked.

“Sweetie, I’ll leave whenever you want,” I replied.

I paused before asking the obvious question.

“Is your wife coming home?”

He nodded jerkily. “She and the kids are at church.”

I couldn’t believe it. This guy had a hooker come to his
house on Christmas Eve while his wife and kids were at
church? He is so going to hell for this, I thought, and I’ll
undoubtedly see him there.

“Well, let’s not waste playtime,” I said, moving toward the stairs.
“Where would you like to…?”

“No, not upstairs!” he said, practically panicking. “I don’t want to
mess up the bed. Let’s just—do it in the living room.”

Easier said than done. We edged around the eight-foot Christmas tree
that dominated the room and sat down on the powder-blue couch. He
handed me an envelope with the cash in it. I tucked it into my purse
and then looked at him, waiting for him to give me some sign of how he
wanted to proceed. But he just stared at me like a trapped rabbit. The
room was dim, and the lights from the tree threw alternating red and
green splotches on his face. The effect made him look like he had some
kind of facial tic, and I doubted that it was enhancing my complexion,
either.

“Okay,” I thought to myself, “if I have to be gone soon, I am going
to have to take control of this fuck.”

I stripped down to my tarty black lace lingerie and stockings, got
his pants around his knees, and started unrolling a condom onto his
dick with my mouth. He moaned and leaned back on the couch—and
then we both gasped and jumped as the tinkling strains of “White
Christmas” suddenly rose into the air. He looked wildly around the room
for a moment, then relaxed and said, “Oh, wait, it’s this pillow. It’s
got a music box in it, when you lean on it, it plays…” He fished a
red-and-green throw pillow from behind his back and tossed it away. It
played on for a minute, before ceasing abruptly with a mechanical
click.

He lay back again, but it seemed that our musical interruption had
made his little Saint Nick unhappy. Or maybe it’s this house, I
thought, as I sucked him. It’s completely antisexual. Interior decor as
visual saltpeter.

I stood up, pulled off my panties, and bent over the couch. I knew I
should give him some dirty verbal encouragement, but my vast repertoire
of porn talk had deserted me, and the best I could manage was a
come-hither expression that felt as painted-on as the faces of the
knee-high nutcrackers flanking the fireplace. I watched him maneuver
into position behind me in the gilt-framed, holly-draped mirror over
the mantel. In my black bra and stockings, I was jarringly out of place
in the room, an affront to the relentless, smothering cozy cuteness. It
was hard to even breathe. As he fumbled around behind me, the bowls of
cloyingly sweet potpourri that sat on both end tables began to make my
eyes water and my nose itch. I was going to start sneezing
uncontrollably in a minute, I thought, and my mascara was going to run
down my face in black streaks. It was like a Stephen King Christmas
house, where it looks all sweet, but if you don’t behave, it kills
you.

It certainly killed our date. After 45 minutes of unsuccessful
fumbling, he looked at the clock and announced that I should leave.

“Thanks anyway,” he said, holding the door open for me. “And,
uh—Merry Christmas. Would you like a cookie? They’re
gingerbread.”

Like any customer-service job, sometimes whoring is a breeze,
sometimes it’s a grind. But there’s one thing that always makes the
season bright: the money. Because Christmas—secular and
otherwise—means presents, preferably expensive presents. Every
sex worker I know drops a lot of cash at Christmas. Especially when
she’s new enough to still be astonished by how much money she’s
suddenly making. The urge to share the wealth with your loved ones at
Christmas is strong.

I was 19 the very first year I was working. My mom had separated
from my dad a few months before, and she was down about her first
Christmas alone. So I bought her a ton of presents—a VCR,
obscenely expensive bed linens, and blue topaz earrings that matched
her eyes. After we opened them and she stopped crying, I took her to
one of those ridiculously extravagant buffets with ice sculptures and
hand-carved roast beef. She cried a little more, and then we laughed at
how silly it was and ate too much.

The Christmas I was 23, my lover had just won custody of her two
daughters, aged 4 and 6, after a lengthy battle with their father. She
weighed her staggering legal bills against her low-paying job, and said
to me, “I want to do what you do.” The tricky thing was that Martina
was a butch dyke, not exactly a sought-after look in the sex industry.
But under her auto-shop jumpsuit, she had long legs, a narrow waist and
D-cup breasts, and with a little makeup, we figured we could femme her
up enough to get by.

She grudgingly agreed to practice walking in high heels, but she
flat-out refused to wear dresses. We bleached her crew-cut hair
platinum blond and told my agency to describe her as a Brigitte Nielsen
type. Martina didn’t have much of a knack for the prefucking chitchat,
but as she put it, “Once I can take those stupid girly clothes off, I’m
fine.” A surprising number of guys found her unstudied tomboy manner
quite attractive.

Martina took the cash and bought her two little girls so much stuff
at Toys R Us that she had to make two trips with the car to get it all
home. We could hardly see the tree on Christmas morning, with all the
boxes stacked around it. I have never seen two children so shiny-eyed
with gratified toy lust.

“I would even wear a dress if I had to,” Martina told me later that
morning, “just to see them happy.”

What do people mean when they speak disparagingly of “a
whore”? Someone who sells her or his body? I have news for you: Unless
you’re a ghost who still draws a paycheck, you use your body to make a
living, too. Ever been nice to a customer you really didn’t like, or
acted enthusiastic about something you really didn’t care about, just
because you were getting paid? Congratulations, you’re a whore, too.
You’re just not getting paid as much as I am.

I got into sex work thinking, as everyone does, that it would be
something I’d do for a little while before I went on to a real career.
The culture of sex work was different then. This was preinternet, and
most sex workers were isolated from one another. The popular media
presented sex work as a one-way ticket to hell. Clients and workers
were both much warier, each fearing violence, disease, or exposure at
the hands of the other. I dealt with a lot of disapproval from friends
and lovers who I came out to. In spite of all that, somewhere along the
way, I realized I wanted sex work to be my real career. I liked the
money, I liked the independence, and I liked using my sexual
skills.

There’s still a lot of stigma. Even now, my mother would be
distressed if I gave her exact details of what I did to get the money I
used to buy her all those gifts. Martina’s daughters might be disgusted
to find out their mother was once a call girl. But the world of sex
work looks very different now. The lonely-whore stereotype has been
replaced by the hooker who snags a book deal by blogging about her
exploits. Buyers and sellers talk to each other and among themselves
online; escort-review websites allow clients and whores to hold each
other accountable. Since everyone is a bit less fearful, we’re all a
bit more relaxed and kind and human with each other. When I first began
working, I usually saw a client only once, maybe twice. Now I have guys
who I’ve been seeing frequently for years. The relationships have their
boundaries, but I am my real self when I am with them, and they are my
friends as well as my clients.

The vast increase in the visibility and dialogue of real sex workers
has changed my nonworking life as well. The misconceptions that I have
to overcome on a daily basis have gone from massive to manageable. I
have sex-worker pals who I can talk to when things get stressful. I
have two committed partners who love me and understand and support my
career. And I have a wide circle of friends who think I’m a good
person. My family? Well, I’m still the black sheep, but they love me
anyway. I am about as far as you can get from lonely, at Christmas or
any other time of the year.

I’m not on the run from any big holiday parties this year, so I’ll
be spending a mellow Christmas at home with my lovers. If you’re a sex
worker doing dates on December 25, I wish you happy clients, heavy
tips, and an equally sweet Christmas of your own to go home to.

Ho, ho, ho.