Cover Story: Booty call

Savannah feels her job has always been good for a laugh. An amateur comedian, she has a routine worked up for open-mic nights around town she titles, "My life as a call girl."

After a few minutes of wisecracks about tightwad johns and tiny johnsons, she usually winds up her set with the line: "Ladies, you shouldn't have a problem with hookers. We should unite against our common enemy: Sluts — they're just giving it away."

Savannah's shtick isn't an act. She really is a call girl — or, to use the preferred terminology, an escort. But she's been doing it long enough not to bristle if you slip and call her a hooker, just as long as you don't mistake her for a streetwalker. They're two different worlds, as any escort will be quick to point out: one sad, sordid and dangerous, and the other ... well, less so, anyway, depending on one's vantage point.

In Atlanta, the old world of the street hustler is dwindling, while that of the high-priced call girl is growing in ways only hazily imagined a few years ago.

While you now can take a midnight cruise down Ponce de Leon on payday and count the hookers on one hand, a Spiegel-sized catalogue of available ladies can be surfed online 24/7. What used to be considered the city's seedy underbelly now comes candy-coated in Flash graphics and studio glamour shots, accessible to any precocious 12-year-old with an iMac.

The openness of women like Savannah, the upfront nature of their online advertising and the fact that they are largely ignored by police and local officials testify to the budding acceptability of escorting, somewhere between telemarketer and Nitro Girl. The industry recently has even become a free-market battleground as discount entrepreneurs have joined in a price war over that most personal of services.

Today, by all educated estimates, more girls than ever are being lured into the high end of the business by crazy money, fewer risks, the promise of greater freedom (real or imagined) and, of course, our culture's shifting moral boundary lines that can vault a young intern onto the Social Register simply for being the president's sex toy.

This boom in the industry also has collided with the Internet revolution to spawn the newest and possibly most decadent form of connoisseurship: the "hobby," in which recreational johns rate their dates and trade recommendations via dedicated websites that are to hired nookie what Consumer Reports is to detergent and minivans.

What remains unchanged, however, is the emotional and social toll that prostitution can exact even from those who enter it willingly. It's a business that tends to age people before their time; it nearly always renders stable relationships currently impossible and future ones problematic. The happy hooker may not be an outright myth, but she's the fortunate oddity.

Charlie, 31, who turned her first trick when she was on welfare and who now lives with her daughter in a pricey Buckhead apartment completely furnished by her clients, certainly can think of vocations she'd rather have entered. She's thankful, though, that she never had to work "the track," down at street level, exposed to beatings, busts and con men.

"I feel like what I'm doing is morally wrong and sometimes I hate not being able to have a normal personal life with a regular boyfriend," says Charlie, who's understandably protective of her real name (as are others quoted in this story), "but it allows me to a earn a lot of money and make a good life for my daughter. To date a guy at this point would feel like giving it up for free."

Try this harmless experiment: Tell any female acquaintance other than your grandmother that a typical Atlanta escort earns $200 to $300 an hour, tax-free. More often than not, the response will be, "I'm in the wrong business!" delivered as a rimshot line. In most cases, of course, she's kidding — but there's always the chance that the wheels have started turning behind that grin.

Certainly, that kind of professional and ethical leap is beyond the imagining of most of us, but let's face it: When women do enter prostitution of their own volition, the money is what carries them across that moral crevasse. That's what happened with Bobbi.

"I'm not an escort," Bobbi says sincerely as she sits down for an interview at a fashionable intown cafe. "I'm a professional personal companion."

To Bobbi, who's been pursuing her euphemistic sideline for the past year- and-a-half, the distinction is quite real, although she's quick to point out that both enterprises are, technically, illegal.

The difference lies in the fact that Bobbi rarely provides "full service" — another euphemism designed to skirt the edges of the law — and then only to familiar or favored clients. Her usual session typically involves dinner, dancing and a peck on the cheek, or perhaps cocktails at an airport lounge with a businessman on a layover.

Either way, casual lunch or the full monty, the going rate is $300 an hour, although, as Bobbi admits, "You almost feel a little guilty taking that kind of money just to sit around and chat, but then I realize that the guys wouldn't call me unless they have it to spend and they want to get together. There are so many people out there who are dying for companionship. What I offer is a convenience; it's almost like professional dating."

Barely 5 feet tall and thirty-ish, Bobbi is undeniably plump but pleasant-looking, with piercing blue eyes, a polished air and a business wardrobe, not someone you'd single out of a crowd as a call girl.

She stumbled into the trade after leaving a corporate job and launching her own Internet consulting firm. When she took on a client in the adult-entertainment industry, she found herself rubbing elbows with a potent combination of rich guys and hookers. Seeing the healthy fees commanded by high-end escorts, Bobbi eventually asked one for a referral, a blind-date-for-hire that netted her $1,200 for a civilized evening on the town with an older executive.

Suffice it to say she was hooked.

But Bobbi plays it safe, scrupulously checking references and never discussing anything so tawdry as sex acts with unfamiliar clients. "When you get to the level I'm at, you're virtually untouchable," she says matter-of-factly.

Last year, she estimates, she earned $70,000 as a part-time escort — mostly in $100 bills — that she funneled through her legitimate business. She even paid taxes on most of it so as not to draw notice from the IRS.

"I can think of seven or eight friends who've gotten into the business when they see the money I make," she says.

And as long as her clients are happy, Bobbi sees little wrong with her form of moonlighting. "I'm a single, young, professional woman with no obligations to anyone, who wants to prepare for her future."

And the job even has some built-in perks. "This job is a big part of my social life," she confides. "I'm a human being and there are days when I'm sitting at home wishing someone would call because I'd like to [[[get laid]."

"Atlanta has been good at regulating vice so it's controlled and you can ignore it if you choose to, but it's there for those who want to find it," says Jacqueline Boles, one of the nation's top academic experts on hookers.

Having studied the business of sex over the past 30 years as a doctoral candidate at UGA, then teaching sociology at Georgia State University, Boles, 69, now follows the profession locally as something of a retirement pastime.

When she began her research, finding vice wasn't the problem; in fact, prostitution seemed a very public thorn in Atlanta's side. The newcomers gentrifying Midtown complained loudly to city leaders that hookers were brazenly accosting potential customers on the street and that slow-cruising cars with suburban plates were clogging local thoroughfares.

Midtown's Cyprus Street was a smorgasbord of rough trade; stretches of Peachtree Street at times resembled parts of Amsterdam. Boles recalls visiting a certain massage parlor where girls who weren't engaged in rubdowns would sit in the large picture windows facing the street to serve as on-site advertising.

"Eventually they shut the place down because it was causing too many traffic accidents." The tiny gnome of a woman cackles heartily.

Boles was recruited by a befuddled Atlanta Police Department to find out why so many hookers were setting up shop in Atlanta; the answer is one we now take for granted.

Says Boles: "Whenever you have a transportation hub like Atlanta, you have a lot of single and mobile men, and with that comes a lot of vice, which in turn can boost a city's economy. Prostitution is good for the convention business, just like the strip clubs."

After her city gig, Boles worked nearly a decade on a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention grant studying behavioral factors in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. In the mid-'80s, Boles was asked by then-Mayor Andrew Young to serve on his Task Force on Prostitution, an initiative she believes he undertook in order to deflect criticism that he was soft on hookers.

(Not that the move worked; the former pastor caught plenty of heat for naming Delores French, Atlanta's celebrity escort and a Boles pal, to the panel and refusing to remove her even after she was busted.)

"It was an interesting experience and a total waste of time," Boles says of her 15 months on the controversial task force. "We made several recommendations, not one of which was ever enacted."

The group, which also included civic leaders, City Council members and clergy, had briefly, but seriously, considered legalization in the form of a red-light district, but realized that such areas in other cities invariably have become unmanageably violent.

In the end, the panel urged cops to enforce the law more fairly by not letting customers off the hook, which in turn would serve to deter streetwalking.

Although Atlanta police don't keep statistics that differentiate between busts of hookers and johns, Boles says her research indicates that "the number of johns arrested is infinitesimal because it's not politically advantageous."

Although the task force's recommendations strongly favored a crackdown on the street trade that had become a public nuisance, it was fairly silent on the subject of high-end call girls. Many observers took this as promoting a live-and-let-live approach to escorts.

The statistics would bear that out. Last year, Atlanta police made more than 5,000 prostitution busts, many involving the same women. But only about 100 of those involved escorts, and often only because of a noisy complaint lodged by an enraged wife.

Which is why it comes as no surprise to realize that hookers have become a rare sight on most of the usual corners in Atlanta, with only some of the credit going to the boom in intown development. By contrast, in other cities, certain areas ("L" Street for you D.C. sightseers), still look like a casting call for Pretty Woman II.

"We've devastated streetwalking city-wide," boasts Lt. Tony Biello, who until last week headed the Atlanta Police Department's vice squad. But when the subject of high-end call girls arises, his tone switches to something resembling admiration.

"It's illegal, but it's the greatest business in the world: It's got low overhead, yet it's very lucrative," Biello says. "The women are worried about being busted, so it's gotten more professional and upscale. There are few complaints because their clients don't get ripped off or beaten up."

It's difficult to make a solid legal case against escorts, who are careful not to speak explicitly about the services they offer and who warn each other about sting operations, he explains. It's even tougher to nail agencies, which insulate themselves with answering services.

"These girls aren't stupid," Biello says. "Bust them once and they get smarter; bust them twice and they get a master's."

And yet, how challenging can it be to catch a hooker who advertises herself online, often with photos that clearly show her face, her hourly rates and a direct phone number? At that point, Biello concedes somewhat uncomfortably, enforcement becomes a question of priorities.

"I've only got 20 officers in vice and I'd rather dedicate my resources to protecting visitors downtown instead of raiding escorts," he says. "The top priority of any police department is to stop violent crime, and the escort agencies are not bashing people's heads in."

The worst penalty a call girl usually can expect for a prostitution rap is a stiff fine — up to $1,000, about the equivalent of a week's hard work — a few visits to a probation officer and a temporarily wary clientele.

He emphatically rejects the suggestion that city policy-makers have quietly discouraged police to shake up the escort industry, but on those rare occasions when his lads do manage to haul in a top-end escort, Biello seems suitably impressed.

"Ninety percent of the girls we bust are knock-outs," he enthuses, the kind of sentiment that might raise the question of whether some local cops aren't simply keeping the peace, but keeping a piece of ass.

"I know several girls who have had sex with cops and have still gotten busted," Charlie says, aware that such claims are unverifiable. "But when it's a cop's word against yours, the judge doesn't listen to you — which is hypocritical, because I've had clients who are judges."

Like its kissin' cousin, the brothel, the escort agency is among the few mainstays of the sex industry that traditionally have been overseen by women, nearly always former hookers who draw upon their connections and knowledge of the trade to give younger girls a start and make a killing for themselves in the process.

Men, typically, have been drawn to aspects of the business that are arguably more purely exploitative: stag films, porno mags, strip clubs and such morally indefensible endeavors as child prostitution rings and the sexual indentureship of immigrant women.

But its high-profit appeal finally has introduced the escort industry to market forces to which it had long seemed immune. In recent months, several enterprising businessmen have launched their own agencies that apply the concept of volume discounts to sex: Sell it cheap, but sell a lot of it — and forget about the mint on the pillow.

After all, why employ a thirtysomething pro who charges $250 an hour when you can hire an 18-year-old fresh from behind the check-out counter at KFC, persuade her to take $80 for a 20-minute session and pocket a hefty agency fee several times a day? This bottom-line thinking has touched off a price war that has made Atlanta the place to come for sin on a budget.

As a result, many veteran escorts are finding it increasingly difficult to command the fees they were getting only a year ago, a fact that leaves Grace Williams appalled.

"I hate to see the industry undercut like this," says Williams, who knows virtually everybody in the local skin trade courtesy of her position as sales manager for the Atlanta adult-entertainment magazine Xcitement.

"The reason we've got this situation is the fact that men have gotten into the business and men usually don't value a woman's work as much as a woman would," she theorizes. "The men are able to go out and get young girls who don't know anything about the business and brainwash them into thinking $135 an hour is a lot of money."

It doesn't help when the Internet boom has helped create a buyer's market. Or, as Charlie helpfully points out: "There are too many whores out there."

"I hate it when guys call and say, 'How much for an hour?' and you can tell they've called lots of girls," she complains. "You say $350 and then they ask, 'How much is half an hour?'"

Atlanta's current price war has prompted Charlie, one of the city's first black escorts to advertise online, to concentrate her efforts on maintaining a local stable of sugar daddies while scheduling lucrative out-of-town engagements on the "circuit."

"I charge $500 for an hour-and-a-half in Chicago and New York; that's who I am," she explains, sounding almost like a character from a Mamet play. "Mentally, I can't do that crap with a guy for less. Atlanta has become too cheap for me and the men here are not as refined; they want to flip you over and do all sorts of positions."

If the trend continues, Williams laments, the heightened competition will only serve to ratchet up the industry's sleaze quotient by pushing women to do more for less. Even Atlanta's current Sam Walton of the escort trade goes by the self-consciously pimp-daddy moniker of D. Money.

"Ford Motor Co. could learn something about business from the vice industry; it's continuously evolving, adapting to new laws and it turns on a dime," observes GSU's Boles. "Right now, it's like shopping at Kmart; there are a lot of bargains out there and I suspect it'll eventually drive out some of the competition.

"One of the things that always amazed me is that guys will comparison-shop for the best price," she adds. "I would imagine if there's any time that 'You get what you pay for' is a good rule of thumb, it's with buying a hooker."

Interviewing hundreds of prostitutes over the years has given Boles the authority to confirm the familiar assumptions that the majority have been physically or sexually abused; many are addicted to drugs or alcohol; and those who earn more money than they know what to do with often find themselves broke in middle age for that very reason.

"When you deal exclusively in cash, you develop a different attitude toward money than if you earn a paycheck," she explains. "Many of these women make good money, but don't end up with any. In the main, I think it's a terribly hard life."

The typical hooker, she says, is 15 to 30 years old, has even odds of being black or white, is only average in appearance (before implants, that is), has at most a high-school education and possesses what Boles terms "fantasy aspirations."

"I can't tell you how many women I've talked to who want to be a veterinarian or run their own beauty parlor, but have no idea how to make it happen," she says. Boles' work has given her genuine affection for sex workers; she refers to the wild and raunchy '70s, when hustlers swarmed the streets of Midtown and local hotels advertised hourly rates, as "the good old days." She even helped Delores French found Hooking is Real Employment, an early-'80s prostitution advocacy group better known as HIRE.

And when it comes to sexually transmitted diseases, Boles says they're to be found only in the scroungiest of street whores. "Escorts use condoms more than the general population; they're tested [[[for diseases] all the time and they can't work for an agency if they test positive, so escorts don't pose a significant public health hazard."

Predictably, call girls CL interviewed insist they never have unprotected sex, but know others who do.

There's a saying among working girls that's taken on the air of one of life's universal truths: A guy doesn't pay a hooker to have sex with him; he pays her to go away (after having sex with him, presumably). This breathtakingly cynical adage may not stand up to the strictest logical scrutiny, but you get the point.

Anyone who's ever been in a frat house at 2 a.m. as the profound questions facing humankind were debated over a pony keg of half-flat PBR has heard some variation of the following theory, typically delivered with impressive earnestness by a fifth-year senior determined to pass on his hard-won wisdom: "I figure if I've got to take a girl out to dinner and the movies and buy her flowers and hold her hand before I can get in her pants, I may as well save some time and spend the money on a hooker and avoid all the bullshit that comes with dating."

That logic makes a certain sense to Seth, 45, a transplanted Brooklynite who's lived in Atlanta a decade and sampled dozens of escorts over the past 15 years.

"I'm not married, I'm straight as an arrow and I love women," he declares. "I'm just lazy."

Not that he's proud that buying sex appeals to him because it's less complicated than dating and more exciting — if only for one high-priced hour at a time. "If you get hooked on this, it's like a drug," he says with the conflicted air of a junkie who wishes he could kick the habit but is jonesing for his next fix.

Intimacy issues? Seth's got 'em. Arrested adolescence? Check. Self-esteem problems? Guilty as charged.

"If most guys in my place would say, 'no,' they are full of shit," he says. "It's not a normal, natural thing to pay for sex."

But, Seth is quick to point out, at least he's not a hobbyist. "A lot of those johns will put seeing a hooker before food, clothes, bills. Some of them really have screwed-up priorities."

Paying the house note isn't a problem of Frank's. A confirmed hobbyist with an upper management job that pulls down about $125,000 a year, the Kennesaw resident sees escorts once a month or so and has little trouble hiding the expenses from his wife. He says he likewise never had any problem getting women. No, Frank's weakness seems to be a compulsion for sexual thrill-seeking, a need to get that something extra he won't get at home.

"The most exciting moment for me is when the girl's knuckles hit the hotel room door," he says. "It takes a little more to get the old motor running, and I see this as a better alternative to having an affair. You see, I can rationalize almost anything."

And he's happy to have found a community of like-minded individuals. Websites such as BigDoggie.net and "The Erotic Review" allow the Franks among us the opportunity to post a detailed review of the last escort they've seen, as well as check out recommendations on the next girl they plan to call. These sites list more than 200 Atlanta-based escorts; police won't hazard a guess as to the total number.

Exhaustively researched escort data-bases offer such vital information as to whether an escort looks like her website photo, if her breasts are real, what services she'll perform, how good she is in bed, etc.

Basically, if she has mild halitosis, 1,100 registered hobbyists will know about it before they meet her.

The hobby even comes with its own lingo, such as GFE (girlfriend experience) — a call girl who makes you forget you're a trick — and PSE (porn star experience) — a call girl who makes you imagine you're Ron Jeremy without the back hair.

Not that all escorts are thrilled about the hobby. They're the worst, Charlie says, and a working girl can always spot them. As soon as they walk in, they're peppering her with questions, talking about other escorts they've seen and scrutinizing their surroundings — everything just short of taking notes.

"I find them to be selfish and unable to connect with other people," she says.

Call it a grudgingly symbiotic relationship.

"Paying for an escort is a waste of money," Seth says. "When she's gone, you're left with a feeling of emptiness — but while she's there, it's a fantasy fulfilled."

The call-girl career path typically leads women through the strip-club circuit or the various spas, massage parlors and lingerie modeling studios you'll find advertised in the sports pages of the AJC or the back of this newspaper (and known, collectively, as "jack shacks"). The savvy women usually sign on with one of the city's escort agencies before striking out on their own as an independent.

A handful of women claim to find the lifestyle liberating, even empowering, but they're the exceptions in a business that has typically been the course of last resort for those who are broke, undereducated and lacking in self-esteem.

A sex worker for more than five years, Savannah — who is round-faced, has long red hair and gives her age as 26 — is happy to defy most of the stereotypes: She wasn't abused as a child or forced into the business. But she admits somewhat sheepishly to having embraced promiscuity as a lifelong interest at the tender age of 14.

"When I was a young girl, I saw movies showing prostitutes and always thought that kind of life looked so glamorous," she says. But her entry into the business sounds anything but. Starting as a stripper, she moved on to a lingerie-modeling studio, eventually graduating to making hotel calls and hasn't looked back.

A protege of Delores French, Savannah shares her mentor's upbeat approach toward escorting as a profession in which a girl can set her own hours; be her own boss; make loads of money; meet interesting people; explore her sexuality and indulge her fantasies (so long as they revolve around sex); and have the kind of enviable, self-actualizing, convention-be-damned anti-career that exists only in Camille Paglia essays.

For what it's worth, her pride seems rooted not in how much money she makes, but in how skilled she is at her job of entertaining strange men in unfamiliar hotel rooms. She travels the city with a bag stocked with massage oil, soothing CDs, sex toys, fetish gear and other items calculated to please.

"Part of me says, 'You're a really smart girl; you could be doing something better with your life,' " Savannah confesses. "But I like escorting so much better than waiting tables."

When she hears her cell phone ringing with an incoming booty call, to Charlie's ears it sounds just like a cash register. And it rings about two dozen times a day. "Ka-ching!" A new skirt and matching jacket. "Ka-ching!" A week's worth of groceries. "Ka-ching!" That covers the babysitter's bill.

"When I'm having sex," she confides with no hint of modesty, "I'm thinking, 'Now I can get my nails done,' or 'Let's see, I have to pick the kid up from soccer practice.'"

She certainly didn't always view her work this blithely. Charlie recalls her start as a $125-an-hour call girl, taking on all comers and seeing between six and 10 men a day. Despite a religious upbringing, prostitution seemed to her the only way to get herself and her daughter off welfare and out of her mother's house.

In her most profitable year, Charlie made $100,000, but now explains, "That's only with having no life; it's hard to keep up that pace."

She's since scaled back her hours and income. But her sugar daddies — all well-off, married white guys, each ignorant of the existence of the others — keep her in furniture, clothes and expensive baubles.

Charlie is tall, slim and naturally busty, with large — some might say sensuous — features. An aspiring writer, she has a regular column about the escort industry in a local adult-entertainment magazine; a recent issue saw her offering hygiene and etiquette tips for prospective tricks.

Worldly, proudly self-educated but decidedly rough-edged, Charlie has seen nearly every side of the industry. The scams in which a girl has her driver bang on the door and yell, "Time's up!" before the client's been served. The scary johns who like to slap girls around. The Asian and Russian girls trapped in massage-parlor servitude by language barriers or visa problems. The convenience store clerk who wanted to get laid so badly he paid her in jars of pennies. The busts where, she says, cops arrest an escort simply for showing up to a call. The pimps who take none of the risks and most of the cash. The girls who burn out on drugs, booze or bad choices.

"I can look at a girl in the mall and tell if she's a ho," boasts Charlie, who says she, on the other hand, dresses much classier, "like a singer or a football player's wife." She describes herself as a "cerebral escort."

Make no mistake: A respectful attitude and witty conversation are not lost on Charlie, but the true measure of a man will always be the depth of his bank account. When it comes to a john's financial portfolio, size does matter.

She wants to get out of the business, but isn't sure when that will happen. She has made up her mind, however, that she'll eventually tell her family how she made ends meet, including her young daughter.

"I don't want her doing what I'm doing, but when she's 19 or 20, I'll tell her how she was supported," Charlie says. "She already knows Mommy doesn't date any broke guys and I want her to know that, rather than scrape by to pay the bills, this is the choice I made."

scott.henry@creativeloafing.com??