Free Getting Screwed by Alison Bass Page A

away.”
    For the most part, however, Anna enjoys her job. Like Joi, she sees a lot of older men who are either divorced or have lost their wives, and she says she finds it rewarding to be able to give them pleasure. “They get all emotional and they leave feeling happy. It makes me feel good too,” Anna says.
    Half the men who spend time with her don’t want to have intercourse. Sometimes they just want to talk or have a massage. “Many of them are lonely,” she says. “They just want to snuggle up and have a date. It’s therapeutic on both ends.”
    Indeed, Anna’s experience at Sheri’s Ranch has pointed her toward a new career. She says she is going back to school to get a master’s degree in psychology so she can be a marriage counselor or a sexual surrogate. She has already been accepted into a master’s program at a school in Florida. “Some people view sex surrogates as glorified prostitutes,” she says. “But the ultimate goal is to get people feeling comfortable with being touched.”
    Anna says she will be working at Sheri’s Ranch for only five more months, so she can begin graduate school in January. She says she has made “amazing friendships here” and will leave her stint at the brothel with mixed feelings. “It’s like a big family and it’s my second home,” she says.
    We are now back in the airy main lounge, sitting and talking on one of the velvet couches. Soon Jeremy Lemur reappears to tell me that “things are picking up” in the bar and Anna’s services are needed. Earlier, he had promised that I could talk to another brothel worker, a twenty-something who goes by the name of Tatiana and has worked atthe brothel for several years to pay for her schooling while she was in college. Tatiana now works as a biologist, but she still comes to the brothel for several weeks at a time to supplement her income. A bottle-blonde beauty with a gorgeous body and dark come-hither eyes, Tatiana was the woman picked by the Icelandic couple for their threesome. Jeremy now says she is still occupied and won’t be able to talk to me after all. It is clear that he wants my visit to end, even though I still have many questions to ask Anna and she seems happy to chat. But when Jeremy reappears, she stands and so do I. She shakes my hand, smiles, and then, ever the perfect hostess, she waits for me to leave before resuming what she calls “just a job.”

The Rhode Island Story
    T he morning after Jillian is sprung from jail by “a drug dealer and a ho,” her case is continued without a finding. Jillian is hopeful that the prostitution charges will eventually be dismissed, since it’s her first offense. But then her father writes a letter to the Hampden County District Attorney’s Office, telling prosecutors that his daughter is hooked on heroin and pleading with them to mandate that she receive treatment in exchange for a lighter sentence. Jillian is furious at him, but the die is cast. In February 2005, she pleads guilty to a prostitution misdemeanor and agrees to enter a methadone maintenance program in exchange for the promise of getting the prostitution charge cleared from her record. That evening, Jillian, with characteristic sass, updates friends on her online journal: “If only my estranged father hadn’t fucked me in court by sending a hysterical please-incarcerate-and-forcibly-rehabilitate-my-crazy-junkie-daughter letter to the DA , drugs wouldn’t even have been an issue in this case, but oh well. Anyway, it gives me a few months of freedom to, er, Get it Out of My System, and eventually clean my record. Darlene reminded me that as soon as I get on the program I’ll be earning shitloads of cash once again, which I can spend spoiling my friends, being a self-righteous philanthropist, creating even more self-righteous communes, and saving up for my next habit.”
    In the