Take This Man (9 page)

5

“I
t was your idea, Brando,” my mother said, “for me to become a phone sex operator.”

My mother, grandmother, and I were together watching television in the living room. This was before my mother and I had separate TVs in our own rooms: three televisions for three people who couldn't share.

On that day's
Donahue
: “Phone sex operators!” Women who have explicit sexual conversations with men for money. A black silhouette with crescent rolls of vertiginous hair spoke in a digitally graveled voice about the virtues of the job: working from home, lots of tax-free income, power over men.

I turned to my mother and said, “You could do that.”

• • •

How had I, at ten years old, become my mother's pimp? She leapt from what she called “straight jobs” to sex worker because she felt victimized by a series of menial office jobs, the last of which was at a recruiting office: the ironically named Manpower, where she worked as a headhunter. She “quit” when she was cheated out of a large commission (or, to translate into what she'd call “white man's words,” fired for insubordination). There were few work options left to a two-year community college graduate, an amateur unemployed paralegal (via a mail-order diploma course), and a Marinello Schools of Beauty dropout (too many fights with her customers).

She replied to a tiny box ad soliciting “adult phone actresses” for a company called Inside Moves in Pacific Palisades. It operated like a taxi service. A client called asking for a woman with particular ­attributes—tall, voluptuous, redhead—and gave his credit card and callback number to a dispatcher or screener. She'd then contact one of the operators, or girls “on call,” and give her the client's requests. The girl then called the client collect at the number he (almost always a “he”) had provided. When the call was over, the screener would charge the client's credit card based on how many minutes the call had lasted. The girl earned a percentage based on how many minutes were billed; the longer she kept the client on the phone, the more money both she and her company made.

My mother gave an alias for her payroll check. Over the more than ten years that she'd work in the business, she'd cycle through new billing names for a host of reasons: marriage, switching companies, remarriage, eluding obsessive clients, re-remarriage. She accumulated a deck of bad fake IDs to cash checks with no payroll taxes deducted that erased any trace of her Mexican ancestry and spliced together her two fake Indian names: Running Deer Skyhorse, Maria Running Skyhorse, Maria Running Deer, Mia Skyhorse. (“Mia” was a favorite alias.) She fanned them out like a deck of cards.

“I can be anyone I want,” she said.

It wasn't easy at first. My mother vomited after her first several phone calls. Then she got the hang of it. After several calls experimenting with various names, ethnicities, and gradations in voice, a clear winner emerged. My mother became “Cara Lee,” a twenty-three-year-old Irish grad student from Chicago.

“Straight” sex calls (missionary, no kink) were simple; rape/incest/molestation calls, the toughest, though she could do a convincing mimic of an eight-year-old girl. “Gimme a wowwy-pop,” she'd say at the kitchen table to make me laugh, though I knew without understanding that she was never this chaste on the phone. “Golden” and “brown” shower calls (her explanations were useful verbal ammunition for the coming leap to junior high) made her laugh; domination calls were her favorite because they didn't involve graphic sex.

On an ever-expanding Rolodex, she kept a card for every man she spoke to, noting the date and length of each call, where he lived, when his birthday was, his children's names, and whether he liked to imagine Cara Lee—that is, my mother—in black stockings or red lace panties or crotchless. She listened to their insecurities, celebrated their triumphs, commiserated with them over life's disappointments, and acknowledged with handwritten thank-you notes their gifts of flowers, chocolates, and classical music sent to her call center. Her calls could last anywhere from ten minutes (“Get them
off
, then get them
of
f
”) to marathon six-hour therapy sessions, but her therapeutic duties were always second to arousing her clients. My mother scoured pornographic magazines for sexual scenario ideas but was too embarrassed and too tethered to her telephone to buy them. So she sent my grandmother to the neighborhood stand on the corner of Sunset and Echo Park Avenue.

“
Hola,
how are you, Julio?” my grandmother would say.

“
Como estas,
abuelita
? Everything good?”

“
Bien, bien
, busy, busy. What you got today?” she'd ask.

“Got the new
Penthouse Forum
you wanted,” Julio said, all business. (My mother got her best ideas from
Forums
.)

“How about . . .” my grandmother said, putting on her bifocal reading glasses and looking at a list, “
Juggs
and
High Society
?”

“Next week.”

“Then give me the
Forum
, a
Reader's Digest
, and an
Ellery Queen
. I need my mysteries,” my grandmother said. “Oh, don't forget the new
Hustler
.”

• • •

The money my mother earned was good for the early 1980s; up to six hundred tax-free dollars a week, not including her welfare checks and food stamps. With our new fortunes came a cornucopia of ­constipating middle-class “American” comforts: Hamburger Helper, Spam, Hormel chili, Shake 'N Bake chicken, Hungry-Man frozen dinners. We bought a microwave the size of an air conditioner and a popcorn popper that roared like a military hair dryer. Out with the Kool-Aid, in with Capri Sun and Sunny Delight. Cans, seared foil, and poked-through cellophane replaced fruit rinds and empty flour sacks in our garbage. We graduated from government cheese to Velveeta. I drank whole milk by the gallon and ate so much bacon I broke out in hives.

My mother had packed up my stuffed animals long ago, but now our playacting games moved to the telephone. She read reviews in
Los Angeles
magazine of expensive restaurants in Beverly Hills and West Hollywood where it was impossible to get reservations.

“Do you think you can get us a table?” my mother asked. “Here's the phone. Call them and let's see!”

Maître d's that scoffed at my mother's name softened when they heard mine. We celebrated a nine-thirty table at Spago, party of two, by ordering a pepperoni pizza from the local joint down the block.

My mother had a strict policy at first that I never enter her locked room while she was “on call,” but with her home all day, I gravitated toward her like a satellite. Over time the membrane of my mother's closed door became porous, and I could gauge when to leave a tray of food by her closed door or whether I could creep into her bedroom to lay out dinner on her bed. Ever the improviser, she'd wink and smile over how boring a call was or would pantomime a funny second performance for me. One time I brought a salad in a large stainless-steel bowl, and she told her client that she was going to “make a salad in his asshole.” (“Tossing salads,” anyone?) Then she had me stir the leafy contents for her, making sure the fork scraped hard against the metallic rim. Other times she asked me to slap my palms together to lend flesh-slapping effects to a character she'd created called “the Pampers man,” a grown man she kept in her house on a chain who liked to be spanked and diapered.

None of this felt inappropriate to me. We were like two children playing a practical joke on an unsuspecting adult. Perhaps on his end of the phone, he was looking at one of the special advertisement cards Inside Moves had printed up to promote my mother's popular fictional creation. On the card, “Cara Lee” had pouty, deep sea-green eyes, helium lips, ice-pick-sharp cheekbones, 36-24-36 measurements, and curly shoulder-length brunette hair, and wore striped V-cut panties with a tight T-shirt clasped into a sexy knot around her taut belly. In red letters on the shirt: “I am the woman your mother warned you about.”

But what if this woman
was
your mother?

• • •

Her cushy “working from home” job soon exacted a physical toll from long periods of sedentary activity. Hours were spent on the phone lying in bed or roaming around her eight-by-eight room like a shark in a cramped tank. She had major headaches and in several months added sixty pounds onto her five-foot-three frame. Her voice grew hoarse, her neck and shoulder muscles developed curlicue kinks, her ears chapped until they flaked. She never left the house, not even to collect the mail. For years my mother and I had traveled the country together, as partners, as friends, as adoring son and adventurous, carefree mother. Our backdrops had been stolen glances of pulsing deep-hued skies, open green pastures, and distant craggy mountains. Now I had a maid's-eye view of her bedroom, clearing her food trays while she made two-minute sprints to the bathroom.

I negotiated stacks of glossy office supply catalogues and phone company brochures searching for the right combination of materials for her work space, including padded-ear handsets to ease strain and a pager for her to report back to her house on the rare days she actually went anywhere. One time my mother was attending a friend's AA testimonial at a regional chapter meeting when her pager went off. We made our exit through a sea of murmurs and speculation: “She must be a doctor.”

We added a separate phone line when a homework call with my friend cost her a client.

“Call up my boss and fucking apologize to her now!” my mother screamed.

Her boss, hearing me cry, said, “School always comes first, okay? Hey, do you like roller coasters? I belong to a roller-coaster-enthusiast society. Would you like to go to Magic Mountain?”

The boss's phone voice conjured a picture of a giant, statuesque blonde in a tailored business suit; television supplied the only template I had for white women. When she honked her horn, I found at the bottom of our stairs a sweet, frumpy middle-aged woman with stringy, overcooked spaghetti hair named Janet. My mother refused to meet her, insisting you never meet anyone “face-to-face in the business,” so I rode off to spend the entire day at an amusement park with a complete stranger who ran a phone sex business.

Janet and I rode coasters and ate corn dogs. I told her my favorite musician was Phil Collins and bragged about the most outlaw thing on my resume: copying friends' computer games onto five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies. I liked Janet but imagined her—my mother's boss—less as a replacement mom and more of an adult whose conversational world I could now navigate with ease. Wasn't that what my mother was doing, anyway, having “adult” conversations?

My mother was growing bored with just talking for money. “Mistress Cara” had become her most popular creation, so she briefly entertained the idea of becoming an actual spanking flesh-and-blood dominatrix. She placed a newspaper ad in the
LA Weekly
but was disgusted by most of the responses.

In a strange coincidence (which in my family is saying
a lot
), a former high school acquaintance named Jerry was one of the men who answered her ad. She set up her only dominatrix meeting with him at our house and had me write out a list of “slave” instructions because my handwriting was more legible than hers. It was a shopping wish list with capital letters, exclamation points, and four-letter words.

“You Are to Buy Me a Bra and Pantie Set You Fucking Worthless Piece of Shit!” I wrote, and then added, “And a Book for My Son of His Choice!”

To insure that he followed her directions, she made Jerry take me shopping with him. She envisioned cachets of money folded into scented envelopes and fancy silk lingerie from Beverly Hills. Instead, Jerry drove his ten-year-old slave chaperone to the garment district downtown and bought bustiers wrapped tight in plastic like kites for seven dollars each. Whenever he checked his side mirror, I thought he was looking at me and smiled.

Jerry's “slave day” consisted of nothing more than buying my mother secondhand lingerie and stealing a passionate kiss from her by the front door before he disappeared. I didn't know he'd vanish, so that afternoon I pretended what kind of dad Jerry would be. With a little work, I could imagine any man—even my mother's dominatrix slave for a day—as my father.

• • •

“I hate what she says on that phone,” my grandmother said. “You shouldn't be standing around here listening to her. Get dressed. We're going out.”

In an Echo Park where drugs or gangs were a routine milestone for children in sixth grade, my grandmother inoculated me with a third option: stories. Musicals, plays, movies, books—whatever could take me away from the neighborhood for a couple hours. What other indulgence was there for a curious boy in a dicey part of town? Gangs? They didn't notice me. Drugs? They never came my way. Booze? It didn't interest me. Girls? See: gangs and drugs.

My grandmother and I saw eight to ten movies a month.
Everywhere
. We toured the glorious movie palaces downtown that my grandmother had gone to as a girl. On Hollywood Boulevard, a reliable stream of druggies, hookers, pimps, and johns flowed both outside and inside the theaters, staying out of our way. We went to Glendale, a suburban haven home to the Glendale Galleria mall and a bucolic main drag of shops, restaurants, and movie theaters called Brand Boulevard.

“So many white people here,” she said. “Behave.”

I watched as many R-rated movies as G-rated ones, back when ticket sellers actually said things like, “Ma'am, are you
sure
you want your grandchild to see this movie?” We saw the T&A-drenched animated movie
Heavy Metal
and then held court in the lobby after the show with a group of prototypical comic-book geeks who wanted to know how I'd ended up with such a cool grandmother. I knew they were right; she
was
cool, for a grandmother. She just wasn't a father.