I do not intend to claim great expertise in the field of escorts or in the field of plain old prostitution. What brings all of this to mind is an incident earlier in April of this year wherein some Secret Service agents had a soiree in Cartagena, Colombia and then invited the women to their hotel rooms, where I suppose some sort of sexual activity took place. There was a messy altercation when one Secret Service agent offered his prostitute the sum of about $47. She was highly insulted and claimed that this was the rate for plain old prostitutes and that the Secret Service agent must have known that she was an escort.
She was quite emotional but as best as I can discover through the translation of her Spanish remarks (this incident happened in Colombia), she was enraged because the going rate for an escort was approximately ten times that of a plain old prostitute.
As you will recall, the Director of the Secret Service has gotten into the act and a large number of the agents have been disciplined. I was vaguely familiar with the difference in price for an escort vs. a plain old prostitute. It now appears that several Secret Service men will find the end of their career looming, whether the women were escorts or prostitutes.
The Secret Service agents should have talked to me. I would have told them that a night with a plain old prostitute was not worth jeopardizing their careers. Now as for escorts, I have no record of intimacy with what they do or what their charges may be.
If you go back to the era around 1940, I do have some experience with three prostitutes. Those who have followed my career may remember that before I went to work for AT&T, I had an illustrious career as a filling station attendant. There was an occasion when I was on duty early in the afternoon at the Schroth Mobil gas station in Clayton, Missouri. Two comely women drove into the filling station with a tire that had been punctured. I changed the tire and put on the spare and told them at the same time that I would return their patched up tire to them the next day.
They seemed to have a significant amount of interest as I changed their tire. Very soon I deduced from their conversation that they were prostitutes on their way to work at a location in the theater district of St. Louis. The following day when they returned to reclaim their tire, the women made it reasonably clear to me that if I imposed no charge on them, they would “take care of” me. I do not mean this in a sinister way at all. In short, they were trading sex for my fixing their tire.
I was a young man then of perhaps 18 years. I explained that my boss, Carl Schroth, would not think well of this proposition. So in the end I fixed the flat tire and was told by the two prostitutes that if I wanted to be taken care of, they would be on duty at a place of prostitution, a whorehouse, slightly east of Grand Avenue in St. Louis. I never took the women up on their proposition but instead I went to work for AT&T and then joined the American Army.
The second incident was recorded in an essay written a good many years ago. On that occasion at the end of the Second World War, I was riding on an ancient bus filled to the gills. The bus was old and it leaked exhaust fumes. That three-hundred-mile trip from Memphis to St. Louis was an enjoyable experience because it meant the end of my military career.
As I said, the bus was filled to the gills with passengers and their luggage. When the passengers were seated, I discovered that there was a woman sitting next to me. She was anxious to tell me the story of her life. As I recall it, she came from a farm in Arkansas and had decided that the best way to make “real money” was in prostitution.
It took that bus about six hours to make the trip from Memphis to St. Louis. This included a stop for rest at a town called Blytheville, Arkansas. As the young woman was spilling out her story, she said that she could provide sexual favors to me. She explained that the bus would stop for about 30 minutes in Blytheville, and that she could take care of the sexual business. My guess is that she had been on the Memphis to St. Louis bus before because she knew of the Blytheville stop. In any case, I turned her down as politely as possible, explaining that my wife was waiting for me once we reached St. Louis.
That is basically my experience with POP or plain old prostitution. In St. Louis or on the trip between Memphis and St. Louis, there were no such thing as escorts. If I had told this then-young woman from the farm in Arkansas about the going rate for escorts, I suppose that she would have established the first escort service in the Mississippi Valley. But, alas, I knew nothing about escorts at that time. I suspect that there are a few Secret Service agents who wish that they had been as naïve as old Ezra when it came to escorts and plain old prostitutes.
But now the secret is out. Escorts can command ten times the rate of a regular prostitute. I have no idea what escorts do that would make their services so valuable. It may well be that escorts attempt to get their clients inebriated, which would make them more willing to pay for the escort services. But as you can see, I am clearly out of the escort vs. plain old prostitute business.
If however a trip came along for me to go to Cartagena, Colombia, I might establish what escorts do to make their services so valuable. And if I could go back in time and locate the three women with whom I was temporarily associated, I would tell them that the escort services are the way to build a vast fortune. Ah, but I cannot go back in time. Those women, like myself, are approaching their 90th year. All of which brings to mind the lyrics from the opera “Porgy and Bess.” One song about old age said:
Methuselah lived 900 years.
Methuselah lived 900 years.
But what use is livin’
If no gal will give in
To no man of 900 years?
And so I leave you with my experiences with mid-western prostitutes. This will probably not give you a full-fledged briefing on the subject of prostitution and escorts. But, boys and girls, it is all I’ve got. And if you can find a theater company producing “Porgy and Bess,” please go to see that wonderful opera.
E. E. CARR
May 3, 2012
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Please don’t confuse the acronym for Plain Old Prostitution by the nickname by which I call my grandfather. I could see how this may have been slightly unclear. Anyway, this is the last one I’ll post tonight; I hope it starts to give some idea of the breath of subjects that these essays will touch on.