Alphabet of Hookers - "L" is for Liz
Few people would ever assume that Liz was an escort, but she is, and quite a successful one at that.

She has one of those faces that are, at first glance, almost plain. Dark hair, simply cut. Skin not quite perfect, more than a few wrinkles around the eyes, and a nose that's just a bit too wide. Then she smiles, and you wonder how you could have missed the fact that she's gorgeous. A wide open grin, with a hint of dimples. Liz is beautiful when she smiles. She's also almost fifty five years old.

Liz drifted into sexwork like so many other women I've known. A job layoff, no money in the bank, teenagers to feed, and an ex-husband who rarely bothered to send his support checks. She couldn't ever seem to make quite enough money to get caught up, and she knew she was one or two missed payments away from losing her house. An ad in the local weekly paper caught her eye, with it's promises of thousands per week for 'dating' rich business men. Liz isn't stupid, though. She had a friend who was a dancer, and she understood what those 'dates' would mean.

When she told me about the first client she ever met with, Liz laughed about how disappointed she felt. "I thought he'd be Richard Gere, or some kind of suave international banker. Instead, he was a fat old man who looked like my Grandfather, and who lived in a dumpy little apartment over top of a store. It was the end of my Pretty Woman fantasy, that's for sure!"

Her client might not have been dashing, but at least he was kind. When Liz was too afraid to come out of the bathroom, after she'd gone inside to freshen up, he didn't get angry. Instead, he did his best to comfort her.

"Oh, he stood outside the bathroom door and listened to me crying. He kept telling me that it would be fine, and that we could just talk. I told him I'd never done this before, and that I was nervous, so he went to the kitchen and made me a pot of Earl Grey. He told me we could just talk, and that's what we did."

Liz sat at the kitchen table for almost the entire hour, telling her new friend about her life, about how she'd ended up as an escort, and her pride in her house and kids. She smiled her gorgeous smile when he told her she was beautiful, and I know, having seen it myself, how it must have melted him inside. Eventually, Liz began to feel guilty about taking up this nice man's time with her worries, and after he'd paid what seemed like so much money. She offered to give it back, but he declined, giving her an extra twenty dollars from his wallet, and telling her to take her kids out for ice cream. He then shyly told her that, if she ever wanted to come back and see him again, he'd love to have her visit. He was lonely, you see, and the conversation he'd had with her was, according to him, better than the mechanical blow jobs he'd gotten from some of those younger girls. Liz took his number.

Over the next few weeks working with her agency, Liz met a few more older, lonely men, all of whom needed more than just an hour long roll in the hay. Liz started to think about a plan, a niche market fulfillment scheme, if you prefer. She decided that she'd only see older clients, from that point on. Men who were lonely, who wanted a friend as much as the sex. She put a small ad in the same paper she'd found the hiring ad in, and waited for the phone to ring. It did, and with time she developed a small client list, which she maintains to this day.

She's not like a typical escort, not really. She doesn't charge her 'fellows' (that's what she calls them) an hourly rate, and, while there's usually sex involved, that's not really what it's all about. She talks with them, brings them home made cookies, tidies up their kitchens. Sometimes she stays for an hour, but other times for an afternoon. Liz knows the stories of their kids, and their grandkids. She's learned to accept it if, from time to time, she gets called by the wrong name, the name of a spouse who's been gone for several years. She visits them in the hospital, runs errands on her way over. For Liz, it's the only way she can see herself ever working.

"I'm the Florence Nightingale of escorts!" Liz says with a smile. "I give my fellows attention and, yes, I give them sex. They might be old, but they still have needs." Liz laughs, then adds "Hell, I'm old, and I have needs of my own! But it's more than that. I make them feel young for a little while, and most of all, I treat them with kindness. Who doesn't need some of that in their lives?"

Morgan