When Worlds Collide

The man behind the counter at the St. Marks Hotel definitely knows my secret. I often wonder what he thinks when he sees me show up there with different men more than once a week. As the proprietor of a notorious hooker hotel, he obviously knows what I’m up to. But my vanity and his discretion are so potent as to combine into a heady cocktail of suspension of disbelief. Me – young, pretty, white; perhaps he thinks I am just an amicable single girl with roommates and an active dating life. His eyes never flicker. He never offers any sign of recognition.

The real threat is that someone I know from my real life will see me dart inside. I would be at a loss to come up with any non-carnal reason why a dormitory resident would need to visit a seedy short-stay motel in downtown Manhattan. I generally make house-calls, but the callgirl who only sees single men who live alone is subsisting on a pretty paltry diet, so I occassionally have to meet a married guy who can’t “host.” Rather than give out my address, I meet them at the St. Marks.

When waiting for a customer, I stand off to the side near Kim’s video, thus limiting the time when I can actually be associated with the hotel to the split-second it takes to hurry inside. Once through the doorway, I’m safe to blend with the Swedish tourist families who are willing to forgive some thin-walled moaning for the low nightly rates.

I was waiting to meet the kind of nondescript customer who would become one of those floaters you see once and never hear from again. Unlike the clients you hope call again, these types generally make such little impact on you that you never even think to wonder what became of them. Either you weren’t what they were expecting, the awkwardness and staging of the encounter overcome the eroticism for them, or they were just type of guy that wanted to try being with a hooker once and never again. These guys are usually pretty simple to take care of and would make great regular customers. On the other hand, it’s the guys you can’t stand that take forever that never stop calling.

So I was standing outside the hotel waiting for the client to appear when all of a sudden I heard someone say my name. Standing in front of me was a guy I had gone on a blind date with a few months ago. He had spent the evening regaling me with stories of his pinball prowess and counted out change so we could take the bus back to his place where we’d had some surprisingly athletic recreational sex. Neither of us had either called the other again.

“Oh, hey...” I greeted him, nervously looking around for the guy I was supposed to be meeting.

“How are you?” he seemed to be settling in for a cozy catch-up chat.

“Pretty good.” I racked my brain trying to even remember the name of my client. If he appeared now, I decided, I would just introduce him as the first name that popped into my head and hope he was smart enough to play along.

Since I had never met this guy before, I couldn’t be sure if he looked like someone who could conceivably be my friend or if his clothes and appearance would evoke suspicion. I had seen a picture, but it’s hard to get a read on demeanor from a headshot. If he seemed too old, if he was wearing a suit...these were the things that would be harder to explain.

“Hey, I think I lost your number,” the pinball wizard mused. I was momentarily distracted from my panic by surprise – I thought it had been a pretty clear-cut case of us both preferring the one-night stand to the callback, but I wrote my number out for him again anyway (he never used it.)

Finally, after what seemed like an agonizing eternity, he walked away without running into my john.

A few minutes later, a relatively cute husky guy showed up in Dockers and a blue button-up with a conservative haircut and a nice smile. “I’ve been waiting across the street for about 10 minutes,” he said. “It looked like you ran into someone you knew.” If I wasn't being paid to fuck him I could have kissed him.