It Happened To Me: I Worked At An Escort Service. But That's Not The 'It Happened To Me' Part! I Also Stole Two Cats From Them With My Mom's Help

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Hello again, cutiepies!

[By the way: What is your favorite term of endearment? And least favorite? My best friend loves being called Darlin, especially with an Irish accent, and I hate it. Probably because of what I grew up with, I like all the Southernisms (when pronounced with the right accents) like Sweetheart, Dumplin, Sugar, Punkin and the one I use the most, Swee(t) Pea - though my southern accent has worn off to where I enunciate the T, which isn’t quite the same. In any case, tell me your favorites and least favorites in the comments so I can stop calling you things you hate here. That would be nicer.]

I love the writing in today’s It Happened To Me. The story is kind of caper-y which is not my usual thing (Corynne loooooves a caper though), but this includes so many universal relatable underlying issues that I absolutely love it and got sucked right in. Let me and Jennifer know what you think in the comments. And then don’t forget to send me your It Happened To Me Stories to jane@anotherjaneprattthing.com, so we can publish them, pay you, and talk about them with you in the comments as well. There are so many pluses to that offer that I don’t know why anyone would not take it.

And just before I let you go read today’s highlighted AJPT story below, get revved up and ready for a big announcement TOMORROW HERE of a brand new advice columnist you are going to love. You probably know them but are about to see a side you’ve never seen before (one of my favorite things to do - anyone who remembers Pam Anderson’s monthly column and her original makeunders in Jane magazine all those decades ago, as well as the other unexpected celebrity revelations in Sassy, Jane and xoJane, can attest to that).

So subscribe sometime between now and tomorrow if you want to see what I’m talking about. I’ve even opened up the option for you to take out a free 7-day trial if you want to go that route. In any case, meet you back here for that further excitement tomorrow, sweeties. I can’t wait!!

Jane

By Jennifer Byrne

We all remember the first pet we had as an adult. It’s a major rite of passage, if not the stuff of particularly strong passwords. Gone are the days of unrealistic, barely enforced pet care promises that parents demand as part of the childhood puppy manipulation process. As an adult pet owner, you are the parent, and shit gets real. If you forget to feed your puppy for a week when you’re a kid, you can expect a stern lecture from your mom. Try that as an adult, and you can expect a dead puppy.

It’s almost fitting, then, that my first pet in adulthood came from a so-called “adult establishment.” (Yes, it was an escort service.)

And the cat didn’t just “come from” there. I stole her. Along with another cat.

And my mom helped me.

OK, so I was barely an adult.

It was the summer of 1996 or so, and I was a twenty-something living in suburban New Jersey with my parents in a post-college limbo. I had managed a shaky ‘recovery’ from anorexia …or, to my anorexic way of thinking, I had failed. To get better from anorexia, you have to get worse at your most cherished, all-encompassing goal of starvation. I had been a resounding success at failure (I was hungry), and I’d be lying if I said I was unequivocally proud of this accomplishment.

Me in my 20s, recovering from my anorexia.

In retrospect, the optimal next move for me might not have been to hurl myself into a world where women’s bodies are leveraged for profit, but that’s what I did. I got myself a job at an escort service. (At least I had the risk-averse good sense to only seek employment answering the phones!)

The newspaper ad for the job had been an ambiguously worded posting seeking a receptionist. But I’m not going to pretend I didn’t suspect what was up. The ad specifically made the homophonically incorrect request that applicants be “discrete.”

Honestly, I think discrete was what I really longed to be: Apart from others; separate; distinct, according to my pocket dictionary. I wanted to stand out, I wanted to be unique. As a person who came of age at the height of ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ everything, I shared my generation’s desire for a sort of scrappy, DIY individuality, and I had run out of locations on myself to pierce.

I wanted to be weird, which is a good thing, because I genuinely was, whether I liked it or not.

Yet I redundantly sought out the tourist version of weird, even though it was legitimately my home. I diligently pursued weirdness through a series of weird jobs: puppeteer for kids’ assemblies, birthday party Barney (I got kicked a lot), amusement park clown. The stranger, the better.

To my surprise, the escort service delivered less weirdness than I was accustomed to – no wearing sneakers with crude wooden platforms glued to them so I could reach the same height level as my puppeteer scene partner. No almost puking inside a Barney head on a 90-degree day with a hangover. No getting asked out while wearing a rainbow wig and a honkable nose. Aside from the dinginess and the requests for hogtie bondage, this was, more or less, a standard office job.

Going in, I envisioned a fascinating, mildly terrifying subculture of tough-as-nails women who had learned to subvert the patriarchy for their own gain. Instead, I entered a warp-ceilinged, dully lit, mostly empty building that was so awash in gray, it looked like the illegitimate offspring of a cubicle and some week-old snow.