The funny thing about life, which is epitomised in my industry, is it’s not what you know but who. If I needed an accountant, a client would always offer his services in return for an hour of my time. There was never a shortage of bank managers to help me prepare my bank loan application, not to mention approve it. Car mechanics were always at the ready if I ever needed a tune up. The fact that I charged $300 an hour and my car needed $580 worth of work seemed to escape these men. Gardeners, builders, lawyers, carpenters, painters, plumbers, painters, picture framers, computer repairs—the list goes on. I will never understand the whys but I was always grateful. I would joke about the Aussie dollar being 63 cents to the US dollar, but the * dollar was always four times as good as the US dollar.
In Western Australia the law is funny in relation to the sex industry. The sale of sexual favours was not illegal but not necessarily legal either. By law, if I was to work I had to work from my own home, even though I had a child residing there. For some unknown reason it was illegal to rent an apartment to work from.
Inviting a stranger to your home is an incredibly daunting experience. So for safety reasons most girls employ a receptionist or a phone girl. This is illegal because it’s illegal for another person to live off the earnings of a prostitute, but you would be insane not to. Of course, the government doesn’t mind living off my $25,000 tax instalments. Nor does the newspaper mind taking my advertising dollar, in fact they love it. Personal ads run at twice the rate of positions vacant or for sale ads.
It is for reasons of safety that every private girl with an ounce of intelligence hires a phone girl to sit with them every working hour, and so that while I was attending to a client she can be answering the phone and booking in the next client, or entertaining a client with beverages, if I was running late.
As well as being illegal the job was mundane. Over a hundred times a day the phone girl had to go through the spiel: ‘Good morning, my name is Cleo, I work from West Perth until about six pm. I offer a full service that includes French, mutual French, sex and Spanish. I am twenty-two years old, five foot seven, I have long blonde hair, green eyes, a slender build with a DD bust and am freshly waxed. Prices start from $150.’ She had to pretend to be me because we were all supposed to be working alone.
Her job was half phone girl, half bulldog. It was her job to sniff out the crazy clients, just by the tone of their voice or the questions they ask. Mind you caller ID certainly brought an element of safety to the job as well. We never took jobs from gentlemen calling from private/silent numbers, no matter what their excuse. This also limited the number of no shows that wasted your time during the day. No shows were clients who phone and make an appointment and neglect to turn up. God knows why, perhaps it’s that they had second thoughts, perhaps they just wanted your address, perhaps they were the tax man, perhaps they were psychos or perhaps they worked for the agencies who booked out the private girls with fictitious clients so that we would turn away genuine clients.
School holidays were the worst for the time-waster phone calls. In any given day we would receive up to ten calls from pesky, bored, latch-key teens thinking it was a big laugh to make prank calls to numbers from ads in the paper. Apart from the voices or the giggles in the background we could always tell by their stupid questions that they were teenagers: ‘Do you like take, um, like, really big cocks?’ We’d just hang up, only to see the same number show up again moments later, this time a different voice and a different stupid question: ‘Do you have, like, a really nice cunt?’
If my phone girl was on the toilet or running an errand for me, I was forced to answer calls, so when these kids were wasting my time, I decided to have a little fun with them. ‘Listen, you are wasting my time and being very rude, I can see you are calling from Subiaco from your area code that comes up on my caller ID.’ That shut them up pretty quick-smart. ‘I am going to give you five minutes to call me back and apologise for wasting my time and money and for the way you spoke to me, or I shall be calling you back at six thirty tonight when Mummy and Daddy are home, and see how they feel about you racking up phone bills to prostitutes in the paper.’ I’d hang up and wait. A few times I phoned their number at six thirty and told whichever parent answered what their son had been up to.
Finding a girl to employ was easy. Finding a girl who was trustworthy was not always so easy. I found a nice lady, Marie, who also happened to be a single mother. She worked for me for about eight months without a hitch. Then just before Christmas, she found herself in financial need. I had just bought my apartment and was doing my best to pay off more than just the interest on it. I was also trying to pay for a holiday for Poppy and myself for Christmas, as I felt that it was going to be a very isolated time of the year with all my family on the other side of the country.