In This Town

Chapter One:  Why?

How discreet would you have to be, to be a high-class call girl in a small town, where you were born and raised? Where everyone knows everyone's business and has seen you in each year of your life, since you ran around in pampers—a town where they witnessed your first baptism, communion, and confirmation—where you were marched down main-street as home-coming queen in the annual 4th of July parade---

And so to, knowing how difficult it is, why would anyone choose to live such a life?

The answer: need. It always begins with need. For me, it turned out there were many.

Need for money. Freedom. Excitement.

I was 22 years old, fresh out of college, the first in my family to attend and graduate from a four-year university, with massive debt from school loans covering a proving to be useless English Lit. degree with creative writing minor, having just moved back in with the parents a week, and realizing need to move out immediately but with no money for rent or anything--

I needed money fast, and none of the jobs in the area were big career moves for this college grad, nor did they want to hire me as the locals I grew up with saw me as a high-faluting snob.

Plus, the chaos of the childhood home was not a place I wanted to relive, having escaped to the big city of Portland for four years, my parents smiling faces on Sunday morning comes at a cost of several empty liquor bottles in the garbage can underneath the kitchen sink, the Sunday morning mirage is just that, a mirage--In reality, the chaos involves yelling, smashing the bottles against the walls in fits of rage, violence of all sorts.

So, maybe I was looking, or needing, love but I think it was more than I needed a way out. I think it was freedom, to be who I wanted to be, and yet to create and re-create a new identity over and over again, to have power, to choose my destiny for myself, not based on others constructs of shoulds and should-nots, to forge my own path with my own hand, in a word, to write my own story.

I've always been the creative type.  In high school, I was in all the school plays, usually with a large part to boot.  I was popular but also infamous.  I guess I was beautiful enough to win the home-coming queen title.  

I didn't even know this could happen here, my city isn't exactly a thriving metropolis—but I guess as the Holy-Rollers alert us from every street corner, sin is everywhere---

But so there it is, my story of all my Johns and some Janes, how I became the lady of the night, or more to the point, how the Duchess, so discreetly, rose to power and reigned.

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