My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can\u2019t have the address.<\/p>\n
An escort doesn\u2019t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the clich\u00e9 \u201ctime is money.\u201d One hour, $500. You\u2019ve got to get in touch with her through her website or from a referral. You can\u2019t call an agency or drive real slow by her on the right street. She\u2019s an entrepreneur, complete with an appointment book and a client list. Her price is non-negotiable, you pay for perfection. She\u2019s not on drugs, and she doesn\u2019t have to meet you. She\u2019s not a classless call girl or a filthy prostitute. See the difference? It\u2019s there, most of the time.<\/p>\n
Perfect moms don\u2019t exist. Now that I\u2019m thinking about motherhood, I realize that it\u2019s not \u201cI hope I don\u2019t screw up my kids,\u201d but \u201cI wonder what my kids will have to go to therapy for?\u201d<\/p>\n
Being fat and an adolescent girl at the same time was hard until I found out that my mom was an escort. My friends and I would sit on my bed after school and read magazines. We\u2019d read about the ways to pleasure a man and how to dress for your body type. I had to look at the \u201capple shape\u201d section. We all knew the hourglass shape was the best to have. The best way to dress for your shape was to trick men into thinking that you had an hourglass shape by directing attention to your boobs and butt while distracting from your waist. By the time you were undressed, he\u2019d be so excited by the ice cubes you put in your mouth before blowing him that he wouldn\u2019t care what you looked like, at least for the next twenty minutes.<\/p>\n
But my mother was an apple, and men wanted her. They called her begging to see her for just an hour. They could afford anything, even hourglasses. I threw away the magazines and used ice to cool drinks. I was the crispiest apple.<\/p>\n
I remember the guy who told me that I looked just like my mother, staring at me but never making eye contact. I came home too early. I wanted to cut open his scrotum, but I smiled and walked away as he turned to watch. He paid for my new school supplies and clothes.<\/p>\n
Jake, the one that pays her rent and my college tuition, quietly leaves envelopes fat with cash on my Mother\u2019s dresser for the privilege of being her boyfriend. He\u2019s nice enough; he waited until I was twenty-one to ask if he could rent me. It could be very profitable, being the child of an escort and adult actress. One of her photographers offered me $600 to take my shirt off and ride a mechanical bull for a crowd on camera. I almost said yes but wrote a bucket list instead: 1) Ride a mechanical bull.\u00a0 Saying no to people offering to pay me $500 an hour has become a reflex. \u201cNo\u201d has to be reflexive. \u201cRent is due\u201d, \u201cI need health insurance\u201d, \u201cIt might be interesting.\u201d These responses are slower, less practiced than \u201cNo thank you Sir.\u201d<\/p>\n
Max was the first person I met who had a poor, black daddy and a rich, white mommy. He lived on a farm down the road and was the only person who wasn\u2019t black or white but black and white. I thought he was sent from heaven or made up in a lab, he had a divine destiny to teach us all that we were just people. We were both defined by who our parents were. Bastard. Oreo. Slut. I hoped that as racism became a four-letter word maybe people would see that I wasn\u2019t just an escorts\u2019 daughter; I was a women, a unique apple, alive.<\/p>\n
My mom hates her job. Maybe that\u2019s why we\u2019re both rich and poor, not in between but both. She always works just enough but not more. She loses friends when they find out; she lies to protect my grandma. Grandma knows, she knows we know she knows, we don\u2019t talk about it. When pressed, my mother says she is in \u201cadvertising\u201d and changes the subject. A good escort knows how to manipulate any situation. She would make a good politician.<\/p>\n
The neighbors notice the expensive cars parked outside our cozy two-bedroom attic apartment. They watch the men come out alone, negotiate the cracked sidewalk and stay in sixty-minute increments. A fog of sex hangs outside the door; you can smell it for miles. The neighbors grow pot and trade it for the essentials. They don\u2019t talk about what they see to my mother because she is too proud, but they ask me questions when they think my guard is down. My lies are impenetrable, but I wish they wouldn\u2019t ask me things they already know. They accept it because we\u2019re good neighbors but I have to come over to their house to play, their children aren\u2019t allowed in mine.<\/p>\n
At nineteen I tried to be gay, but I wasn\u2019t. Then I tried to be asexual. Men were giving, and I took. I loved what they gave me, the attention, the privilege, the things. I loved feeling the unique shape of their cocks for the first time. I felt richer with each new fuck.<\/p>\n
My mother says she\u2019s an international model and a sex therapist. She\u2019s kept marriages alive. She always says, \u201cMen need to cheat, they\u2019re hunters. They need to marry Mother Mary and fuck Mary Magdalene.\u201d She says they do things to her that they would never do to their wives. My boyfriend can\u2019t understand why I want an open relationship. I don\u2019t want him to have to cheat. He squeezes me tight to his chest and tells me that not all men cheat, that I\u2019m all he needs. I\u2019m trying to be both the virgin and the slut. I\u2019m starting to realize that we\u2019re different, my partner and I. He says we\u2019re not our gender, we\u2019re all just people. Maybe in Vermont, but where I come from even heaven-sent-black-and-white-people have gender. It\u2019s inescapable.<\/p>\n
Sometimes when the rent is due and there aren\u2019t any groceries in the house, I can feel my resources rotting. This $8.50\/ hour job isn\u2019t worth it. I am my mothers\u2019 secretary. When someone asks, \u201cDo you speak Russian?\u201d I know it has nothing to do with Russia. The cops she gives discounts to tell her where and when. It\u2019s more of a struggle to not become an escort than to become one.<\/p>\n
I want. I want individually packaged yogurt with fruity flavors and meat that isn\u2019t the Manager\u2019s Special. I want silky, black underthings with triple digit price tags. I want to separate twenties into piles of five like my mother and I used to.<\/p>\n
But my mother said she\u2019d kill me. She wouldn\u2019t, she would tell my dad, and he would beat me into applesauce. My future degree will be their proudest achievement. I want it too, now that it might be too late. They sent me to college where it\u2019s always winter, so I\u2019ll never want to take my clothing off. I have to become a doctor, so I can save her from her choices. I have to build a big house with an addition. She sleeps with strangers so I can go to college, so she can stop sleeping with strangers. When I told her I was getting a degree in literature, she started a second job selling used books.<\/p>\n
I wonder where Max is now.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My mother is an escort and an adult-actress, not a prostitute, call girl, hooker, whore, porn star, or streetwalker. Yes, she has a website and no, you can\u2019t have the address. An escort doesn\u2019t trade money for sex. She makes her living exercising the clich\u00e9 \u201ctime is money.\u201d One hour, $500. You\u2019ve got to get … Continue reading The Crispiest Apple<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3604,"featured_media":959,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6855],"tags":[],"issue":[6874],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-fiction","issue-6874"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-25 10:08:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3604"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/959"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.gcc.mass.edu\/plum\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issue?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}