There was a silence. Matt thought he hadn't heard correctly. "Huh?"

"It's $200 for an hour," she said, all business. "I prefer cash. I'll come to your house."

"Oh," Matt said, dumbfounded. "Well, I -- I think Larry may have had the wrong idea when he gave me your number," he stuttered. "I mean, I just wanted to talk to you or maybe ask you out."

"Oh," Katie said. There was a pause from her end. Then she said irritably, "So you're just calling me to ask me for a date?" The pitch of her voice had dropped considerably. "Well, I have a boyfriend. So I'm not really interested."

"She became very matter-of-fact after that," Matt told me. "We talked a little bit more -- but she definitely dropped the sales pitch mode and went into now-I-have-to-make-polite-conversation mode. She said she was putting herself through school and that she'd had a big IRS problem."

"That's why?" I asked. "Hmmm."

"Well, as she put it, 'I really like sex. And I can do it part-time.'"

Now I understood why I was told to call Matt.

"I have a theory," I began. "I speculate that just about every woman in the world considers doing this, for exactly those reasons, at some point in her life. But then she shelves the idea, because logistically she can't figure it out, or maybe because of some moral hangup. Though I think that it's probably the former. But hey, if you have your brother pimping for you --"

"Well, that's the part I can't figure out," said Matt. He seemed truly puzzled, and I suddenly realized that his shyness had more to do with looking foolish than looking prurient.

"It seems pretty clear that he's getting a cut," I said.

"I always thought the guy was slippery," Matt said.

How do you end a failed cold call with a hooker? "Well, earlier she'd mentioned that she had a boyfriend and that he didn't know that she was doing this," Matt said. "And that he would freak if he knew. And that they'd been having some problems lately.

"So, I just said lamely, 'Well, I hope you work things out with your boyfriend.' She said thank you." I think I said finally, 'Tell Larry I said hi,' and she said she would. She wasn't embarrassed in the slightest -- I got the feeling she'd been doing this for a while." He laughed. "Really, she just seemed irritated, like I'd wasted her time. Which I guess I did."

I considered for a moment. "Weren't you curious? I mean, I would be, if I were a guy --" or even a girl, I thought, "-- and if I had $200 to blow. So to speak."

"I don't have $200," said Matt -- disingenuously, I thought. Come on, the guy was a lawyer. "But yeah, I have to say, yeah I guess I was ... I mean, I am ... curious. I mean, now I've had a conversation with her. It wouldn't be like -- you know ..."

"A real prostitute experience."

"Exactly! It's funny, I always did think Larry was a slippery kind of guy." Matt paused again. "Hey," he said at last, his voice suddenly springing to life. "What kind of cut do you think he gets?"
SALON | April 1, 1998

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