I Almost Was Caught

For a two or three year period starting in 2002, I saw many different "providers," as they're called here in Seattle. My wife and I had not been married very long when we started to have kids. We were in our mid to late 30s when we were married, and she had never been married before (I had). She had quite a hard adjustment living with just one other person when we started adding kids to the mix, and during this time our intimacy (not just our sex lives) really started to dry up. In my first marriage, I had become used to having sex four or five times a week, even when we were fighting. At times, it would be adventurous sex (in public, with one of her girlfriends, bondage, etc.). I knew sex wasn't as much a priority for my new wife, but she is such a beautiful, wonderful, great person, I thought I could handle it. I did handle it until intimacy became nonexistent.

Since I was in college, I would go to strip clubs every now and then. My first wife would go with me or pick up a wad of $1 bills for when I would go with friends. My new wife had an issue with that, so I stopped going as often, and I wouldn't tell her when I'd go. I liked strip clubs in that you could get a good looking woman to feel you up, but then you get all worked up with no release. Occasionally, you would find a stripper who would jerk you off in a dark corner or the VIP room, but eventually those strippers or clubs would get busted.

One day, I decided to call on an ad I saw in the back of the local weekly. It advertised a New Age "massage" and Tantra experience. It is still to this day one of the most sensual experiences I have ever had. There was no intercourse or oral, it was just a beautiful woman, in a warm candlelit room, with New Age music, rubbing you down, and giving you a hand finish. I had found a new way to wind down from a very stressful job and cold marriage. An hour with this experience was much less expensive than an hour in a strip club, and you were able to get off as well.

Along the way, I also discovered a local resource here in Seattle that rated providers and what they did, what they charged, how good it was, etc. I had to learn a coded language, but it was a good way to not get ripped off. Some of the ads in the back of the weekly were basically streetwalkers trying to scam guys. It happened to me once. With the review website, I was now able to hear from hobbyists who had reviewed girls, and they were safe. As I became a regular with the New Age massage (called FBSM in the code, full body sensual massage), the girls came to know me and more things came on the menu specifically French (code for oral). One girl I regularly saw gave a great massage since she was trained as a legit massage therapist. The more I saw her, the more we became friends, and the more we would do. On my third visit, she had me sit up on the bed, then she would turn around, pour oil down her back and the crack of her ass, and have me hump between her ass cheeks (called Italian in the code). Eventually, we wound up having full on intercourse. Our last couple of times together, she didn't charge me. We stayed in touch after she retired until she moved across the country.

I did try full service escorts (code for escorts that offer intercourse), but the FBSM girls offered more of the intimacy I was craving. One full service escort was very much the girlfriend experience that many guys crave. She was knock down beautiful, and she knew what guys like me were looking for. Every time she saw you, she acted like she was the girlfriend you had been apart from for a long time. She eventually retired.

I don't know how much I spent for that period of time, but it was a lot. Seattle is known for having reasonable prices for escorts compared to other cities, so it was definitely cheaper than hanging in the strip clubs. My wife eventually noticed we weren't catching up on our bills as quick as she thought we should, and I almost was caught. I had to do a big tap dance, but I was able to get around it. That was the incident that made me realize how much I still loved my wife and my kids, and how much I didn't want to lose them. My wife and I finally got into counseling and our relationship is the best it's ever been. As our intimacy has deepened, our sex has become more intense as well. I know now that while I was seeing the escorts, I was distancing myself farther and farther from my family. I was willing to settle for little to no sex to save my family, and luckily it never came to that. My wife still does not know.

I Got What I Wanted

Four months before my 50th birthday, I discovered that my husband of 28 years had been having an affair. I was crushed. For several months afterwards, I was split on whether to reconcile and "save" our marriage or leave. I just couldn't commit one way or the other.

I had a conference I was speaking at in New York. Inspired by the movie "The Wedding Date," I found an escort agency in New York and arranged for an "escort," preferably over 35, for the second night of my stay, after I completed my speaking obligation. My goal was simple. I needed to know that I could be naked in front of a man other than my husband and enjoy the experience. I'm attractive, but I have the stretch marks of four pregnancies, breasts slightly less than perky, and, despite daily workouts, thighs that jiggle. He called beforehand, offering to make dinner reservations, but I offered room service instead. I was nervous when he arrived, but he was very comfortable and relaxed. We agreed to have dinner later, and I started to undress but he stopped me. He undressed me, and then helped me undress him. If my body was anything less than desirable, I never felt it. He coaxed me onto the bed and, starting with my earlobes, kissed and stroked his way down, softly describing each body part as he touched it. He would arrange my hands and fingers and then kiss over and through them. We never did have dinner. Instead, we made love twice, he went down on me twice, and I went down on him once. We spooned and slept in between. In the morning, we showered and shampooed each other's hair. (I mention that only because it was amazing.) Afterwards, we had a somewhat erotic toweling off session, he dressed, and we talked for a couple of minutes. I asked him for an honest appraisal of my body. He was candid, but he closed with this: "What really makes a woman sexy is that she participates and actively enjoys, not just sex, but life. You are going to be just fine." He asked me if I would like him to come back that night. No. I got what I wanted. It wasn't romantic, but I wasn't looking for romance. It turned out to be the best $2,000 I ever spent--that includes a $500 tip.

What followed was unexpected. For the first time in years, I felt truly sexy and desirable. That night, I went out with a group of friends to a series of blues clubs. What followed became a running joke. Drinks were sent to the table for me. Men, primarily in their late 30s, hit on me. Even a member of our own group tried to talk me into a lesson on body shots.

More surprisingly, I went home to my marriage. Knowing that I had other choices and that I wasn't acting out of fear, I was able to commit to a reconciliation. I had to discreetly teach my husband several of the tricks I had learned, but I never told him. It is still tough at times, but I would never have been able, really, to return to my marriage without having taken this step.

I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done

I spent twenty years, eight months, and one day in the US military. The first ten of those years I was happily married to a sexual goddess. We made love, we fucked, we had casual sex with each other almost every day for almost every day of our marriage. The only times we didn't have sex was when I was down-range for three, four, or even seven-month deployments. The best sex in my life would be in the weeks following my return home from those deployments. We would make love and just plain fuck for a whole week. Little did I realize I was married to a sex addict; I asked the question I didn't want the answer to: have you been screwing other men while I'm away? I filed for divorce the next day, and did an ERD (early return of dependents) with my command. In one short week, I went from having mad/crazy love-making/fuck-fests almost every day to celibate guy.

I was stationed in Germany at the time and was only a short four hour drive to Amsterdam. Two months after having no sex and getting very tired of the whole masturbation thing, I made a drive up to Amsterdam with a few single friends. We had a purpose, and it was to get me laid. We arrived about 5PM and started off at the Hard Rock drinking insane amounts of Heineken. None of us had ever done anything like this. (Although I did pay for a virgin co-worker to have sex at a so-called Turkish women's prison in SE Turkey in 1992 during one of my several stints for OP Northern Watch/OP Provide Comfort). We needed to take the integrity-first edge off, so to speak. We started roaming the district a couple hours later. Since we were window shopping, we walked around for about an hour trying to find that "perfect" girl. I found mine first.

She was about 5'6", light brown hair, smallish but perky breasts, and not a day over 22. There was no negotiation: fifty guilder. At the time, the guilder-to-dollar exchange rate was about 2:1, so $25 for a session. I had no idea what a session comprised, but I was quite willing to part with fifty guilder to actually touch a naked woman. I went in, she closed the door, pulled the curtain and switched on a small lamp and turned off the overhead light. The room was tiny. It had a sink, a single bed and a chair. There wasn't much room for anything else. I sat down on the bed, and she took off my shoes and socks, then my shirt, and then she unbuckled my belt, unbuttoned my 501's, and then slid my jeans and underwear off. She neatly placed all of my clothes on the chair, put my socks in the shoes, and placed them under the chair. Very neat, very proper, and very matter-of-fact. Then she examined my now very erect penis, and then she took off her bra and slid out of her panties. Kneeling there on the floor, looking up at me, was a thing of beauty. Not an ounce of fat, perfectly taught belly, spectacularly symmetric breasts, and a completely shaved pubic area. She stood up and laid me on my back on the small bed, my feet hanging over the edge. She placed a condom on my penis, then straddled me, and then slowly lowered herself onto me. She maintained complete control, riding me until I came, about 15 minutes.

She took off the condom, wiped me up and handed me my clothes. We chatted while I dressed, and in doing so, found we were both Czech. When I left, I asked if I could come back again later that evening. She said that would be fine, but she would be vacating the spot at 2200 hours when another girl would be taking over. That would be fine, she said. My friends were waiting for me when I left, asking all the standard questions (how was it? was it worth it?). We walked around trying to find "perfect" for the other guys. When one of them found one, we'd wait outside, until we'd all had our A-dam cherries popped. I found my first experience so exhilarating that I paid for sex three more times that night... once more with my Czech beauty. The next day was a carbon copy of the first: lots of beer and then sex with more girls. I visited my Czech beauty three times that weekend, and over the course of the next six months, I spent every other weekend in A-dam, buying blocks of time with her. Of course we spent a lot of time fucking, but we also spooned for hours, talking about life in America and life in Praha. I'd bring American cigarettes from the base commissary and cosmetics from the BX for her after the second weekend. (I asked her if I could bring something for her once, and then I'd always ask what else she wanted.) Those spring and summer months of 1996 linger in my mind for two reasons: I was single again for the first time in over 12 years, and I had amazing sex and spooning with "my" Czech beauty in A-dam.

I have been a john, off and on, since that crazy year. I've paid for sex with college girls in Seattle while on my way to Japan. I spent an extra two days in Frankfurt, returning from my last tour in Iraq, just to spend some Euros in one of the various Eros Centers. I've picked up streetwalkers for a twenty dollar blow job, and I've spent as much as five hundred bucks (not including a room and dinner afterwards). I've crossed the South Texas border for weekend sex jaunts. When I was stationed in Japan, I even took a week-long trip to Thailand for the single-minded purpose of fucking, fucking, and more fucking.

Here's what I've found out about myself, and life in general, in the process of being a john. I'm not a big fan of Asian women--although the Thai trip was completely otherworldly, in terms of no-holds-barred, freaky, whatever you ever dreamed of, off-the-charts-and-straight-to-hell sex--I prefer the end-of-century eastern European women of Amsterdam and Germany (Czechs, Poles and Russians). American girls charge too fucking much. As much as I love to perform cunnilingus, and I'd rather spend an hour giving before an hour of receiving, I've only done it with one working girl. I still do not have herpes (I'm certainly a very, very, very lucky man). I'd just as soon spend $300 to come right away and then spoon for 45 minutes as I would to have a whiskey-dick hard on and never come for an hour. You can, in fact, buy intimacy by the hour, even if one half of it is feigned. Lesbian crackheads do not give good head. One can try to hang a sign on us, the collective john, as perpetuating the global conspiracy of sex/slave traffic, and I'll grant that my Thailand trip may have/probably did contribute to some sort of thuggery. But in the end, I am ashamed of nothing I have done.

I Was Forever One of the Johns Now

I had sex with a prostitute once, when I was in my mid-twenties.

I came about as close to going crazy that year as I have so far. (Knock on wood). I was single and living alone, being stressed beyond all previous experience by a job. (It amazes me now to think of letting an employer drive me to this state.) Though I wasn't consciously tracking it, I had also been going up a steady ramp of commercial sex trade, from porn to phone sex to strippers.

I grew up in a small town, and I was pretty unworldly. I don't remember how, probably through some movie, I realized that you could actually find escorts in the telephone book. I went to look and sure enough. For a couple weeks, every so often I would look at those listings. But I didn't think I would actually do it.

One day, I went to the movie theater alone--the way I did most things those days. The movie I saw was "Angels and Insects." Throughout that strange, messed-up story of class, repression, and incest, I felt like a bubble of hot blood was swelling in my head and chest. I was also plagued by hypochondria during this period. In the end of the movie, two of the main characters escape their damaged, repressed situation together. I knew that there wasn't any escape in the cards for me.

When I got home, I put myself into the sort of unthinking trance I do when I want to do something I don't think I should and don't want to think about it and dialed a number selected based on an unremembered criteria. I hadn't even thought about money, I was relatively poor, and the amount cited (a couple hundred) surprised me. I said I didn't have it on hand and didn't know if I could get it, thinking that might be the end of it, but she said she would call back in half an hour and see. It must have been a slow day. I walked to a nearby convenience store (I had no car) and took out the money plus an fifty extra because I figured I ought to, as a cash advance on a credit card. I went home and told myself she probably wouldn't call. But she did.

I was very excited, the kind of rush I used to get going into the adult store (or, when I was a kid, shoplifting), but in the time it took for her to arrive the feeling decayed and I felt like I'd made a mistake. But the doorbell rang and I figured: in for a penny, in for a pound.

I think she said her name was Laurie, but I'm not sure. She was pretty, buxom, and slender, though she had her hair gelled to the point of being crunchy, which made touching it sort of unpleasant. I almost forgot what I was about for a minute, until she told me I couldn't kiss her. Oh, right. I fumbled over some stupid line I thought would protect me from a potential police sting (some over-thought variation of "You're not a cop, are you?") that only made her nervous, though she got over it. Foreplay felt like a stupid charade, but I went through the motions, for my own sake, not hers.

When we moved into the bedroom, I was suddenly embarrassed by the fact that I slept on a mattress on the floor--I was just a couple years out of college. I lost my erection while she tried to get a condom on, but she managed to get me back up with oral. The oral was the best part of the experience, even with a condom. She was very skillful.

The sex was really average. When she started to moan. I felt like telling her not to bother, but it seemed like it would be rude to do so. Orgasm was a little flicker, quickly dissipated to nothing. But the pressure in my head went away.

She asked me about what I thought afterwards. I didn't really know what to say. (I said something but I don't remember what.) She asked me if I was expecting her to be prettier, and I said she was very pretty. She said: Some guys expect us to look like models. If I looked like a model would I be doing this? Then she seemed sort of embarrassed, like she'd let the cat out of the bag that she didn't really want to have sex with me. No worries, sister. I knew that going in. She asked if she could have my belt. It was strange. It wasn't really a remarkable belt at all, just black leather with a steel buckle. It was probably worth twelve bucks. I told her it was a gift from my brother (true), otherwise it would have been no problem. I walked her out to her car, and she hugged me before she got in. I wondered about that. Maybe she was trying to leave a good impression for potential repeat business, or maybe she was grateful that I'd showered beforehand and didn't try to stick it up her ass. She said to call her any time.

I sat in the dark listening to records afterwards, smoking and thinking about how I had joined this dirty club, and I couldn't take it back. I was forever one of the Johns now. I felt like I had changed something about who I was--and not in a good way--more so than, say, when I lost my virginity. I worried about the money, too. I really couldn't afford it.

Then again, for months afterwards I would find myself thinking that I would do it again, only this time I wouldn't be such a nice guy. I would really take advantage of the situation. I went through a similar escalation with phone sex, like the first time I asked an operator to role-play anal, which at the time was very exciting. But I never made another call, and I've never slept with another prostitute. I regret it now, though I don't think or worry about it anymore. I don't judge sex workers or in general the people who employ them, but it isn't what I want sex to be in my life. I don't think the experience added anything of value to my existence. I have told very few people about it. My brother, and a couple of friends, and the woman who is now my wife, before we started dating, because I knew I wanted to date her, and I figured it was better off being out there. I got appreciably saner, and I stopped calling phone sex, though I do sometimes look at dirty pictures on the internet.