The story of a young prostitute

A teenage call girl gets her "parenting" wherever she can find it. Part 1 of three parts.
By Virginia Vitzthum

June 27, 2000 He's 55 and she's 19. On their first date, more than two years ago, he took her out to dinner and asked her all about her life and her aspirations. "I told him how dysfunctional my family was," she remembers. "And he said, 'OK, let's go back to my place and I'll just play with you. I'll give you $250 if you just let me play with you.'"
Mary Lou is a tiny redhead with huge brown eyes, clear pale skin and a few freckles on her upturned nose. She looks about 16; her face flits from cute to beautiful when she smiles. As she talks about her life as a call girl, she pushes her food around the plate and nervously taps her tongue ring against her teeth.
She said yes to the play date because she needed money for crack cocaine. "We went back to his house and ... he just wanted to look at me naked and touch me and kiss me and say dirty things to me ... I didn't know how to pretend I liked it, so I was tense and rigid. I think he liked that; he knew I'd never done it and it was like breaking my cherry or something."
The 55-year-old kept calling, and the next time she saw him, Mary Lou went all the way. As he screwed her, she "thought about movies where girls are being raped or being prostitutes and they put themselves in another place, like on an island or some other happy place ... I got through it by thinking about crack. It was disgusting, but I kept saying, 'I can go get some rock right after this.'"
From the heights -- or depths -- of dissociation, she also marveled at her new job title: "I lay there thinking, 'Now I'm a crack whore.'"
In the two years since, she has continued to see the 55-year-old once a week. He has taken her to the Caribbean, helped her get off drugs, protected her and managed her career. When Mary Lou sees a new john, she calls her benefactor immediately before and after. Though he has expanded her business by introducing her to new clients, he has never taken a cut of her earnings.
This man, whom Mary Lou refers to as the "first guy" throughout our three-hour lunch, is also the only man she enjoys sex with. "He's the only one who can get me off sexually, the only one who helps me when I need it," she explains. "He asks me, 'How you doing?' and now after we have sex, we'll talk for hours.'"
Theirs is not the "Pretty Woman" scenario of rescue and happily ever after -- First Guy is about to marry his girlfriend, who's around his own age. But he has looked out for Mary Lou more than any other adult has.
Between the play date and the second, crack-whore date, Mary Lou called her mother and said, "Mom, a man will pay me $250 to have sex with him. What should I do?" Her mother said, "Do it -- that's a lot of money. I wish I'd had an opportunity like that when I was your age."
Mary Lou is the product of a one-night stand somewhere in rural Virginia. She lived with her father until she was 12. Her mother didn't want her, she says, "until I was old enough to take care of myself, which she thought was 12 ... She's only 39 now and I think she thinks her childhood was stolen by having me so young."
Mary Lou's father was an alcoholic, and her stepbrother, five years older, sexually abused her from the time she was 6 until she moved to her mother's. "He would make me give him blow jobs and hand jobs and make me do that to the babysitter's kid, who was about my age. He completely controlled me my whole young life."
She escaped to her mother's and was on her own. "Nobody was telling me, 'Do your homework'; there were no boundaries, so I went crazy, so I started doing drugs and doing bad things." She lost her virginity when she was 13 to three guys at a party who, she says, "took advantage of me after I'd gotten too messed up to think clearly." The story got spread around school, with Mary Lou as the aggressor, and she became, in rumor, then in fact, "the slut."
She got kicked out before she could graduate from high school, but she studies her own experience like a natural-born scholar. "I'm into psychology and sociology and I've read books," she says. Her self-analysis is generally astute, even when it bleeds into justification and fatalism. "I know that people who grow up in functional families don't think, 'I want to grow up to be a prostitute.' Growing up with the abuse, never really having the care and love I needed as a growing child, I thought that the way to get a guy to like me was to sleep with him."