When you’re 23 and getting divorced after 5 years of staying home, the only logical thing to do is to look for a sugar daddy, no? It made perfect sense to me; I wasn’t interested in a serious relationship, but being taken out on nice dates and having help with the bills seemed like a win-win situation. I truly believed there were these handsome 30- and 40-something year old men who were just happily fluttering $100 bills in pretty girl’s faces; that they deemed it their responsibility to financially support young women.  My career in sex work started this naively.

Those illusions clashed with the reality of being a sugar baby as soon as I met “Jim,” who convinced me that he was a generous sponsor after a dinner at Beni Hana and an offer of a winter coat. I spent our dates high out of my mind, so my perception of things was undoubtedly flawed, and my memories of him confuse me to this day. But as I recall, we would go to his house where we had Thai delivered every time I came over. He was in such a rush to get upstairs that he would hurry me through dinner. His “son’s room” was like no child’s room I have ever seen – it looked to be straight out of a Pottery Barn catalogue with not one thing out of place. At the time, I didn’t think he really had a son, and looking back it makes me wonder what else he could have been lying about.

Each time we saw each other he gave me a couple hundred dollars, except for once. The last time we spent together, he slapped me across the face while we were in the middle of sex and began what he believed was dirty talk. “You like that, don’t you?  You like being my dirty little whore?” I was so shocked I didn’t respond at all, and when he dropped me off, he gave me $60 “for gas money this week.” Based on the agreement that he would give my girlfriend $40 each time for babysitting, this meant I ended up with $20 for being smacked around. I could discuss how much my sitter needed to be paid, but talking about my own compensation, for whatever reason, was too uncomfortable. For the first and last time, I had wrongly assumed that a man “just knew” what the magic number was.