Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
After her expulsion from school, she moved into an apartment in Washington, D.C., enrolled in secretarial classes and got a job at a diner. One of her fellow waitresses was Crystal, also 17. The girls discovered a shared love for LSD, ecstasy and ketamine. They began hanging out and Crystal turned Mary Lou onto crack. After smoking it about 10 times, Mary Lou "thought about it constantly," she says. "It drives everything else out of your head."
She told Crystal she needed more money. Crystal suggested prostitution and introduced her to First Guy, a former trick of hers. Once she began seeing First Guy, Mary Lou started budgeting waitress money for her bills and prostitution money for drugs. Surprisingly, she didn't get high before visiting First Guy, always saving it for afterward. "As soon as I was done with him, I'd get Crystal, and we'd go score some crack. I felt so ashamed and dirty, I had to get my brain to stop thinking now." Once the girls got high, "we would make fun of him, imitate the look on his face when he was coming and the noises he made. It was so funny -- we just cracked up."
Mary Lou says, "I hated him; I thought he was disgusting, a jerk, a pedophile." For the first few months, she says, "I connected sex with him, with my stepbrother's abuse and the boys at the party. I knew I was doing this because it happened to me at such a young age."
Mary Lou found First Guy's pillow talk especially hard to get used to. "When I would blow him, he'd say, 'Take that dick in your mouth, take it all, take it all,' and he'd keep saying it. It pissed me off! I'd yell at him, 'Fuck you, I am.' And he'd say, 'I'm sorry, I just have to say it to get off.' And when I realized he wasn't saying it just to demean me, it wasn't bad. But till then, it really bothered me."
Over time, his regard for her grew, which needled her even more than the smutty talk. "He liked that I had ambition and that I was smart. So one time, about three months after I met him, we're having sex and he says, 'What's in between your ears is as good as what's in between your legs.' And that hurt me so bad, I started crying. It was just a dirty thing to say. I'm proud of being an intelligent person and that he would compare between my ears to between my legs just seemed so mean."
But she began to stick around after his 45 minutes was up, talking for a while before leaving to score crack. After 10 months of once a week at $250 a pop, First Guy took her to his time share in the Bahamas. It was her first trip farther away than North Carolina, and Mary Lou calls it "wonderful, the most beautiful place I'd ever been. We had sex three times a day, and that's when I started to like it, maybe because of the whole romantic atmosphere, there by the ocean."
When they weren't enjoying her first-ever orgasms, she kept her jeans on, and First Guy asked if she had any shorts. She admitted she always covered her legs because they were bruised from shooting ketamine into them, bruises she'd hidden from him before in the dark. "It was the first he knew I shot up K. He started asking me about using drugs, asked if I was trying to escape reality or my lifestyle. I told him, 'I have a lot of anxiety issues and family problems that I try to escape. Plus it feels good to alter my reality.'"
As they talked, she looked around his condo and out the window at the beach. "I thought about how much money he has and how hard he works for it -- he's got five time shares in the Caribbean. And I thought, 'Do I want to be a drug addict the rest of my life, or do I want to have all this -- the money and the cars and the time shares?'"
So she quit drugs, vowing like Scarlett O'Hara to earn financial independence. She asked First Guy to introduce her to more rich old tricks and decided to up her price to $400. Back in D.C., he hooked her up with Guy 2, "who looked at my I.D. like three times," Mary Lou says, laughing. "He couldn't believe I was over 18. He was like 57 and he couldn't even get it up; he needs Viagra or something. I was only with him 20 minutes and I made $400 and he didn't even put it in me. I was like, 'This is all mine!' and I didn't spend any on drugs; I put it straight in the bank."
Guy 2 introduced her to Guy 3, her first trick in an expensive downtown hotel. "I got $450 for a blow job!" she crows. "He's in his 30s and nice-looking; it's better when they look nice. And it was so fun, I got room service; I'd never been in a nice hotel before."
She has added a few new clients, and she says, "The first guy kind of oversees everything; I never give him money, but he's kind of like a father figure. He helps if I'm in trouble or need a bit of money." But she feels entitled to more: "I want him to cosign on an apartment for me, but he won't ... That shows me where we're at: At any point, he could dump me."
She shows First Guy her gratitude by charging him less and by "letting him go where nobody else can go," she says, blushing. "You know, the butt. Which I don't see how any woman could like ... There were times when he was doing that and I would tell him to stop and he wouldn't, so I would start crying. But I would never let him see that I was upset. I want to seem like a strong individual."
Gloria Steinem said of her second-wave sisters: "We're becoming the men we wanted to marry." Mary Lou is similarly inspired to be as wealthy and powerful as her johns, but she never got much of a blueprint for success growing up. The closest she can get to independence for now is mutual exploitation.
Part 3: Stepping out, slipping back -- Mary Lou volunteers to counsel streetwalkers as she takes on more johns.
Part 4: Mary Lou finds a new protector.
