Fiction from The Literary Review

An Escort

Douglas A. Martin

In the city, I start to lose my taste for everything. I wander around in this state of feeling I need, constantly. I'm going to an office building to meet a man. Sign in once I get there. Do I know what his agency does?
          Yes.
          Are you gay?
          Yes.
          But not enough said. What follows is a series of questions. I don't know how tall I am and lie, say what I think I remember from my driver's license. Something like 5'9”.           Oh, so you're tall, he thinks, then asks me how much I weigh.
          Again, I take a guess since I don't measure myself like this. Something like 135 I think is almost right.
          Tall, skinny, I wonder if I'll be rejected, try to see myself in his eyes. He asks me if I'm a ribcage or abdomen.
          Abdomen, I say.
          Then he's not so sure, asks me if I know the difference. I laugh a little, sure I know the difference.
          His clients go to the best hotels. I'll often have to be able to walk across a lobby and sign in without calling too much attention to myself. Do I think I can handle that?
          I wonder how much work I'll get with short blond hair and blue eyes.
          Those are the preliminaries.

He says I don't get a second chance, that first impressions are everything, tells me not to be late.
          I go for a coffee beforehand, look at myself in the mirror in the restroom. I really only see my face, though. I know he's going to think I look like a little boy.
          The coffee house starts closing, and it's almost time.
          I circle the block, window shop until then.

He tells me that business is slow right now, that I'm more attractive when I smile. Maybe after Labor Day he might have something for me.
          He wishes I had a little more of a body, but he encourages me to try other agencies. He'll keep my number, just in case.
          The second agency I call is open twenty-four hours. I call around midnight. I get basically the same questions, except the one about whether or not I think I'd be able to sign in at nice hotels. They'll give me an interview. I should bring a picture for the file, and a phone bill to establish residency. I'll actually be filling out an application. The man on the phone gives me an address for a phone booth I should call him from for further directions.

I go to the wrong street, think the place is an apartment complex with wood paneling where a group of small boys are helping an older man do midnight janitorial work, taking out full black garbage bags to a curb. I call again from the pay phone. It's hard to hear what the guy who answers is saying.
          He says someone came out to get me. I wasn't there. Where was I?
          The guy is mad, claims he didn't say anything about 76th Street. I heard him wrong. Someone else is being interviewed now. I'll have to wait. He'll send someone out again. Later. I wait on the steps in front of a shiny silver building, eye every stranger with possibility, suspicion.
          Someone should have been out to get me in twenty minutes.

The agency is located in the basement of a building next door. When the man finally comes out, he leads me past washing machines and dryers, partitions of dry-wall. Then I have to sit and wait in a black rubber chair next to another empty chair. The interview is going to start in a second. First, can I run an errand for him and his partners? Three people will be interviewing me. Go up to the store and buy drinks. Gatorade for everyone, he lisps.
          There are two young, beautiful and thin, light skinned black women waiting in the room with the chairs and phone. The man keeps coming out of a bedroom door he closes behind him. One of the women has a carton of food and eats at a steel desk painted to look like dark varnished wood, in front of a small, fuzzy television that breaks up occasionally, sparks of green dots popping.

One of the women from before has had to leave before making any money, to go home and check on her kids. She explains to the man who seems to be running everything that it's a family emergency. The other woman is still there, wrapped up in a white wool blanket, sleeping on her side on a couch in the room with the desk, television, phone.
          The final question of my interview is get hard so they can measure my dick. On my way to the bathroom, I'm scolded for turning on too many wrong lights.
          It's different here than with the man I saw earlier in the office building with the elevator, glass doors, interior with nice carpet, what looked like leather couches. He wore a suit. There were magazines spread on a glass and silver table gleaming with a silver tray of miniature cologne samples.
          I dropped my pants and took off my shirt, left on my shoes and socks, twirled. He had said something approving before no.
          He said if he ever called me back, we'd talk more, about pagers, other fine points.

For the second interview, they are going to eat first, the man whose words I can barely make out and his partners. They offer me food I decline. What's wrong? They joke. Do I think it's poison?
          It's past two in the morning. There are four dogs. The partners are another man and one white, older woman. One of the dogs is a pudge with a wrinkled face, silver brown in front of me. Then I'm working myself through my hands, coming back from the bathroom, trying to keep the erection so they can measure, and the dog turns around and puts its ass in my face. I know I could get harder if one of the men would just kiss me.
          I should go back to the bathroom, they tell me, because my erection is all but gone now.
          The woman asks me where I'm from, and when I say Georgia, she says she loves Atlanta. They ask if I brought a picture like they asked, to attach to my application, so when they are flipping through later they'll remember who I am. I offer them my student I.D. from college. It's the only picture I have with me. No, they'll take a polaroid.
          It's snapped of me with no shirt.
          My white skin is too pale for the white wall that's the background.
          They don't want me standing like that, with my shoulders and arms like that. I don't know how to show myself to my best advantage yet.
          I've got a nice swimmer's build, one of them says.
          I glow weird in the photo.
          Do you kiss? Do you French? Do you know what that means? They ask and tell me it means oral.
          Do I do S&M;? Domination, submission?
          It depends, I say. Then ask how involved it gets.
          Sometimes it gets pretty. Would I be all right with some guy peeing on me in the shower? Can I be a top or a bottom, both?
          Do I know what that means?
          The guy who is interviewing me, the one back in the room behind the door while the other was looking for me on the street, his name is Chase. I don't want to find him handsome, like I do. He eats take-out lying on the mattress back in the room in sweat pants. Do I do couples? I assume they're a couple. Of course.
          They'll call me, and that's it.
          Oh, but first we have to think up four or five names for me. This part takes forever. Who do people say I look like? Who do I look like on TV? We finally arrive at Woody, Arthur, Katch. Those sound like $200 and $300 names, but we really need a $500 one before I go. Think of the names they've been using, they prompt each other, searching for me, helping me look. Think of the boys who I went to school with, the preppy boys, they tell me. Think of something foreign, rich, something Scandinavian, Icelandic, Irish.
          I just moved here, but Chase asks me finally if I have any references.
          I’m supposed to call back tomorrow, come back tomorrow night.
          Turn out the lights on your way out, Chase tells me.
          There will be no one on the train this late at night but drunks and homeless people. Someone will be pissing on the platform, and I will start thinking about how it’s romanticizing, really, to call the subway the train.