Welcome back to Confessions of a Rentboy, real life stories and behind the scenes comments on my life as an escort. It’s cold outside and the world sucks, but I hope you all are still finding ways to enjoy yourselves. If you’ve been forwarded this email or found your way here from Twitter, consider signing up to receive 2-3 new stories a month in your inbox (it’s free). And if you like what you’re reading, please forward, like, leave a comment and share.
Art in this post is by Adam Wellington. Be sure to check out his instagram. You will not regret it. Thanks Adam!
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Behind the scenes (1)
A few weeks ago I was with a very talkative client. I’ll call him Asshat. He was high on chems, and he kept asking me about escorting: how long have I been doing it? Do I like it? What are my clients like? And so on. Some clients are genuinely curious—often because sex work is a turn-on in and of itself for them—and the trick for me is to know if they want answers that indulge their fantasies or if they want the truth. When Asshat asked, “what’s the most fucked up thing that ever happened to you while escorting?” I considered him for a moment before responding plainly, “clients who don’t pay me, or fake pay me. Usually they’re high.” Asshat gave a thoughtful frown and looked around the room without turning his head; “Well…I suppose that isn’t so bad.” Red flag.
Getting cheated by a client fucking sucks. Get two or more male escorts together and complaining about clients and we don’t swap stories of violence and abuse (although of course most of have at least one of those experiences). We rage about guys who waste our time or cheat us out of payment. Now, I say that as a white, cis, masc-presenting escort who finds all of his clients online, has built up a base of semi-regular clients, and charges at the higher end of the scale (thus seeing fewer overall clients). And most of my friends are in the same boat. All of those things generally reduce our exposure to violence and harassment, from clients and the state (but by no means does privilege totally inoculate us from those very same threats).
Disclaimer aside, here I tell a few stories of lying, cheating scheming men who have ripped me off or wasted my time.
Starting with Asshat. Asshat asked very direct personal questions that seemed randomly selected from a list of topics not to ask about on a first date. I would redirect the conversation to our physical situation (him sucking my dick) or give a vague answer before asking, “and you?” Asshat hired me for “an hour at least. Maybe more” during mid-morning on a weekday. He confirmed that he had cash and that my price was OK. But when he commented that being cheated by a client wasn’t such a terrible experience, a little voice in my head said, fuck, this guy is going to cheat me. I stayed for two hours, and sure enough, when it came time to pay me, he didn’t have enough cash.
He gave me the rate of one hour and then made a show of giving me what was left in his wallet (not much) and asked, “is that enough?”
Uhhhh, no Asshat. I was hear for two hours…?
“Oh shit man, you’re right. I’m so sorry. But I don’t have more cash. And you don’t take PayPal, right?”
Nope.
“Can I do a bank transfer?”
Nope. But I’ll walk to the ATM with you.
“OK but the thing is I already maxed out my withdrawal limit today because I had to pay rent.” That’s a lie (and we’ll see that one again from another guy before this post is over). But after refusing to ask to borrow money from his roommates (he definitely didn’t tell me he lived with roommates or that they were home(!!) before I arrived…another red flag), I finally accepted a bank transfer. I insisted on putting my personal bank details into his mobile banking app, but for some fucked up reason I decided to be noble and handed his phone back to him before executing the transfer myself. He did it, then took a screen shot of the confirmation and sent it to me. But…the money never arrived! It wasn’t a total loss though, as I got paid for the first hour. But fuck you, asshat.
Asshat wasn’t the first one to pull that trick on me. Just two months before I was cheated out of a much larger payment by Ramón (or at least that’s the name he gave me). Fuckface. This was a four hour session with a “friend” who turned out to be another escort (who later told me the client also cheated him. And they played all night and all the next morning, so it should have totalled well over a grand). Anyways, Ramón Fuckface also used the bullshit excuse about having exceeded his maximum withdrawal and wanted to pay me via PayPal. (Maybe sometimes this isn’t a total lie if someone has been partying and already blew a lot of cash on drugs and escorts; but I’m willing to bet it’s bullshit nine times out of ten). But at least he told me this before we met. I said, no to PayPal, but negotiated that he pay me with an electronic gift card (this way he doesn’t get to see my legal name and I don’t have to mess with PayPal, which is anti-sex worker).
The other guy he was playing with was in-and-out of consciousness throughout the date. But he was rough-sexy, and I enjoyed sucking his cock and licking his toes while he slept. He woke up with his cock semi-hard in my mouth and smiled boyishly. Then he would make some hard face and try to start fucking my throat. But at that point I pulled away and reminded him that I wasn’t there to be his bitch boy. He would grunt, then say something in broken English before getting up to fuck the client hard in the ass.
Back to how Fuckface ripped me off. He agreed to pay right away, so I signed into Amazon and pulled up the page for him to top up my account with a gift card. I saw him type in his credit card info and confirm before he gave me back the phone and I even saw the ‘thank you for topping up’ message. So I thought, cool. Legit. Until a couple hours into the session I check my e-mail and see a message from Amazon telling me that my account might have been compromised by fraudulent activity. The order was cancelled, and my account would be frozen until I cleared everything up. Fuck. I thought, hey, it was probably just because it was a new credit card on my account and a not a small amount of money. The credit card was either Spanish (where the client lived) or Mexican (where he was from). So I told the client and he said, no problem, we can just do a bank transfer. Again, not ideal; but at this point I had already spent two hours with him and I wanted to get paid, so we did that. I saw the confirmation screen, again. But just like with Asshat… the money never came through. Seriously, how do they doing this?
I tried texting and calling the next day but the whatsAPP messages never turned ‘double checked,’ never turned blue. His profile had been deactivated. I called but no answer. Eventually I found the escort profile of the rough trade with the beautiful dick, which is how I confirmed we was also supposed to be getting paid for his work and that he was also cheated. He said he didn’t have any other way of getting in contact with the guy, couldn’t remember anything about him; but said if he ever saw him again he would get violent. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to imagine some form of vengeful justice on that asshole; but I knew that would probably be the last time I saw Fuckface. Maybe one day in a club I will pass him, but by then I’ll probably have forgotten who he is. I might pause, look at him, something about his face giving me that feeling, don’t I know you? But then I’ll hear the thump, bump, thrash of the beat, or the sweet smell of sweat and heat from the darkroom, and I’ll continue on without ever realizing who he is.
When guys like Fuckface cheat with such boldface shenanigans, you know you are dealing with a base person. No morality. Cheap character. I try to be generous with guys who have drug problems and not judge them too harshly, but this dick wasn’t even smoking T, no lines of coke or any amphetamine. He was taking moderate amounts of G and drinking juice.
So yeah. Fuck him.