I was fired from a brothel for alcoholism.
May 3, 2015 9:50 AM   Subscribe

 
Chip off the shoulder, the new P.O.V.
posted by clavdivs at 9:53 AM on May 3, 2015


Fifteen hundred dollars was a baseline for us, for overnights. Some people went higher. Janet charged $3,500 for an overnight.

I'm always startled by how much price variation there seems to be in the market for sex, and how much some people are apparently willing to pay for it.
posted by Dip Flash at 10:07 AM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


This was totally engrossing. Its so well written, I can't actually tell if this is fiction, part fiction, or a real autobiographical piece. The only line that feels false (as in not very authentic) is that last sentence.
posted by gt2 at 10:08 AM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


TPM has jumped the pocket shark.
posted by spitbull at 10:09 AM on May 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I also found myself debating if this was real. It felt fictional, but that might be due to the writer's style.
posted by elwoodwiles at 10:20 AM on May 3, 2015


On one hand I read it as if it was fiction on the other hand DC is the only town I've been straight up propositioned in public and when denied, the guy offered to pay soooo
posted by The Whelk at 10:22 AM on May 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


No seriously what the hell does is have to do with TPM's mission? It's utterly unbelievable, and awfully sophomoric writing.

Click bait, plain and simple. Sex sells , and TPM is visibly dying on the vine. Their editorial standards have reached a widely noted nadir, they rarely do any original reportage like they used to, and the site is covered in right wing click bait ads.
posted by spitbull at 10:25 AM on May 3, 2015 [9 favorites]


Do people actually have ATM limits that allow them to withdraw $1,500? Mine tops out at $400 per day.
posted by porpoise at 10:34 AM on May 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


I've seen them in casinos?
posted by The Whelk at 10:39 AM on May 3, 2015


This same piece appeared several years ago in n+1 magazine. I could have sworn I read it here, but it might have been through Longform.org
posted by cyphill at 10:44 AM on May 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


Amex will give you plenty at the ATM.
posted by colie at 10:46 AM on May 3, 2015


Is this a complicated metaphor about Washington politics? Who is the Commander? Who is the squeaky clean new guy who knows all the tricks of the trade?
posted by Oyéah at 10:51 AM on May 3, 2015


What's happening with the weird hyphenation?

“We’re putting you on the roster as ‘Eu-ro-pean’ instead of -‘Hispanic.’ ”
“We just say Eu-ro-pean.”
One evening, an escort named Ahmed and I -were talking while Leon prepared for an out--call at a hotel.
One day the phone rang; it was one of our most pop-u-lar escorts ...

Are those just artefacts from it originally being published elsewhere? That doesn't even really make any sense (especially with pop-u-lar), but who knows.
posted by minsies at 10:51 AM on May 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


What's happening with the weird hyphenation?

Southern accent?
posted by davros42 at 11:09 AM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


> No seriously what the hell does is have to do with TPM's mission?

Seems to me you answered your own question, there.
posted by ardgedee at 11:12 AM on May 3, 2015


He shrugged. “Once in a while. I usually just tell ’em, ‘Hey, a blow job’s a blow job.’ ”

Just another day for the average DC lobbyist.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 11:33 AM on May 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


Click bait, plain and simple. Sex sells , and TPM is visibly dying on the vine. Their editorial standards have reached a widely noted nadir, they rarely do any original reportage like they used to, and the site is covered in right wing click bait ads.

Yeah, I've been watching TPM since the early days when it was a tiny blog in the tiny liberal blogosphere. And even its early clumsy moments were more honest and authentic were more compelling than anything on the current blog. And now it is trying to be something else: a news corporation. Or more precisely: Josh Marshall's retirement fund. The writing was on the wall about the time they added The Slice clickbait. But for a while it TPM was still readable via their RSS feed. Now even that is useless. About half the RSS feed is an article, followed by a second post "hey we just wrote this article."
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:35 AM on May 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Well yes, it was a rhetorical question.
I give TPM one more year. They can go for days without a new original feature and Marshall will just post four "Editor's Blog" posts linking to the same feature they've been pushing all week, which is then rarely near the kind of quality investigative reporting they were once known for. The website itself is all kinds of broken. They had to disable reading comments on mobile after their last shot at a paid subscription model (for what? There's almost nothing there for the money!) meant yet another CMS that doesn't really work right - the comments can't display readably except on a full sized laptop or desktop browser screen. And no one there seems to be able to edit English prose. Long time readers complain in the comments all the time about the dead sloppy handling of facts and basic sentence structure. But the worst is all the in your face ads from Newsmax and similar right wing slop, which undermines any pretense to quality or integrity.

So yeah this is par for the TPM course, but taken up a notch. One thing they haven't yet tried is foregrounding sex. What's next, Kardashians?
posted by spitbull at 11:36 AM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


davros42 - that works for the pop-u-lar and the Eu-ro-pean (I think one of those was Madam Mike's and one was [Name Withheld]), but there's also the weird stuff happening with Ahmad and I -were talking and out--call.

It is a lot more interesting to pretend that this is an anecdote in Frank Underwood's early career, though.
posted by minsies at 11:40 AM on May 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Yes, it does read like fiction, but I've had a similar experience as The Whelk.

I was out of college for maybe 6 months, and somehow ended up on this business trip to Washington DC. I wandered around in the evening, checking out the sites, and came across a number of well dressed but nevertheless scantily clad women who wanted to know if I wanted their services. I politely declined and walked on. About a block and a half later, I ran into a number of very drunk men in nice suits who asked me if I knew where they could find women for hire. To my surprise I realized I knew exactly where they could find them and told them what direction to walk. They thanked me profusely and stumbled off down the road.

I was proud of myself. One day in Washington DC, and I was already accomplishing things.
posted by eye of newt at 11:42 AM on May 3, 2015 [67 favorites]


Oh and the weird hyphenation is just another fine example of TPM having no shits to give about editorial quality. I'm not at all surprised it's a (well disguised, no?) rerun from another site. I doubt Marshall and Co. even gave it a quick pass with a red pencil.

I wouldn't care if it wasn't such a great site in its early years. Now it's like seeing an old friend with a drinking problem.
posted by spitbull at 11:43 AM on May 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


I really haven't paid much attention to TPM in a while so I'm surprised that this is there; it seems more like something that Salon or Huffington would publish.
posted by octothorpe at 11:48 AM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I'm always startled by how much price variation there seems to be in the market for sex, and how much some people are apparently willing to pay for it.

As I've been given to understand, in places like Washington and London, people aren't paying those quantities for the sex so much as for the discretion. Though it does also get access to the peak of current standards of physical beauty.
posted by Grangousier at 1:28 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I Was An Administrator At A Fading DC Brothel

... by Dennis Hastert.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 1:34 PM on May 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


On one hand I read it as if it was fiction on the other hand DC is the only town I've been straight up propositioned in public and when denied, the guy offered to pay soooo

I walked long distances to an overnight shift downtown Chicago at a Borders where I worked for a few months. I learned a few new words for sex my favorite of which will always be "Wanna ding?"

Elegant.

You learn a lot traveling from little Puerto Rico (Humboldt Park) through the Gold Coast and downtown to a place directly across the street from where Oprah films.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 2:43 PM on May 3, 2015


I've been propositioned while walking to an all-night fast food place in the college town where I did my undergrad. Not sure if it was for money or not.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:42 PM on May 3, 2015


20-1 This place is now either a gastropub or the new event space of Big Bear Cafe (no pun intended).
posted by Potomac Avenue at 5:29 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


I was intrigued, and like many things that begin with intrigue, it ended in an administrative job.

You can't tell me this isn't real.
posted by pulposus at 5:35 PM on May 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Just another day for the average DC lobbyist.

This is really offensive to sex workers. People usually say that and they're being ironic but I'm not: sex workers provide a service that is negotiated ahead of time and comes directly out of an individual's pocket in the form of an actual exchange with some taken off the top by a middleman. Lobbying is either working within a broken system that requires lobbyists to exist (for a few decent lobbyists for decent organizations), or it's exploitation of a corrupt, broken, awful shitty system.
posted by NoraReed at 6:12 PM on May 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Who is the Commander?

I like to think it's Cobra Commander. One of the Dreadnaughts is his boyfriend.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 8:31 PM on May 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


It seems like the brothel was having trouble keeping up with demand, which makes it all the more surprising that they gave a criminally abusive client three chances. The author of this essay comes across as a real piece of work, though, so who knows whether his account is reliable?

On one hand I read it as if it was fiction on the other hand DC is the only town I've been straight up propositioned in public and when denied, the guy offered to pay soooo

Not sure I would draw any conclusions about the local culture of sex work, based on that - my experience with street harassment is that the next step in the sequence is threats and recrimination rather than good-faith negotiation. (Not that I've tried to enter negotiation.) Maybe it's different for guy-on-guy harassers, though.
posted by gingerest at 10:00 PM on May 3, 2015


I think this is bullshit in the same way that recent drug addict teacher story was. But sort of inverted.

Instead of "look at how cool i am, isn't everyone else an idiot" oppa-holden-caulfield-style, it's aren't all these other people around me such weirdos?

Interestingly, the author of that other piece also used this weird hyphenated phonetic stuff to convey an accent in his also-probably-bullshit in jail in mexico story.

It also, like those stories, doesn't go anywhere. There's no thesis. It's like a bus route, if you take the full loop get on and off at the same stop. You passed by some places and saw some things, but didn't really make it anywhere. Time elapsed, i guess.

Dunno, i'm just really tired of this weird style of internet bullshit writing that seems to be getting pushed by more than one person.
posted by emptythought at 12:21 AM on May 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


hate to see a grown-ass man bragging about being drunk at work
posted by thelonius at 1:34 AM on May 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a believably interesting group portrait. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd met "Leon" or "Ahmed" in a bar (or on the gay rowing team or whatever) in DC a few years after all this happened; Lord knows the city has a plethora of young attractive men with probably more than one means of support.
posted by psoas at 5:20 PM on May 4, 2015


emptythought weird style of internet bullshit writing

There's no thesis.

Ah, that was what was bugging me.
posted by porpoise at 6:46 PM on May 4, 2015


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