One day I get a more-urgent-than-normal email from my new editor.
“Let’s discuss a nutty adventure story that’s come up,” she writes. While I highly doubt there could be any adventure that’s nuttier than the state of my current personal life, my editor quickly proves me wrong.
It turns out everyone in the media is talking about the an- nouncement of “Markus,” the very first legal male prostitute in America. Markus just gave an interview to Details about his thoughts on his role, an interview in which he, no lie, compared himself to Rosa Parks and Gandhi. They’ve stopped letting him do press because of this, so instead I book an appointment posing as an excited sex tourist.
Within the next seventy-two hours I have made a flight and car ride, eventually arriving at the tiny dusty yellow brothel known as Shady Lady Ranch in the middle of the Nevada desert.
Markus comes out to greet me, wearing a blue satin shirt, and guides me into a humble suite with a little Buddha statue. Then he asks me for $500 and tells me that we will first need to “inspect each other in the shower to make sure there are no discrepancies.”
Holy crap. A shower immediately? I’ve already decided I have no interest in sleeping with this guy. Hookers just don’t really do it for me. I’m all about the ego fuck, too, when it comes right down to it. But who am I kidding? I’m not going to blow this assignment just because I don’t want to stand naked in the shower with the guy.
Dignity? Never met her.
The two of us stand together awkwardly in the water, and I do a barely glancing “inspection” of this twenty-five-year-old Alabama native with an eight-and-a-half-inch dick who looks a bit like Steve-O. I know how the sex worker industry works. They keep tighter standards than most guys you meet online. Markus looks me up and down and shares his assessment.
“Wow,” he says, “you’re like an eight or a nine.”
So good. If I did write a Yelp review of the experience, I would be sure to add: If a lady is paying half a grand for your time, maybe just go for bust and say ten.
I quickly put my clothes back on, and we move to the bed, but his unrelenting pressure for me to touch him is irritating. There’s something bittersweet about the fact that even when you hire a guy to be your companion, it still feels like a shitty second date in New York.
“I love oral,” Markus says, showing me various ribbed prophylactics. “I love eating. I’m telling you, you’re not getting the full experience. You will come your pants. I’m serious.”
As romantic as that sounds, I decline. So he tries a different tactic.
“Or I can put a condom on, and you can give me oral? Or . . . I love to be stroked.”
“Yeah, it’s just . . . I don’t think I’m that good at it,” I say, thinking about how good at it I am. “But I think it’s hot when guys get themselves off. I want to see how you touch yourself, because every time I’ve done it I’ve messed it up.”
“Sweetie,” he says, beginning to jerk himself off, “you’ve paid for this. You just stroke in a slow rhythmic motion.”
I fully embrace the virginal rube character I’m doing now. “Doesn’t that hurt?” I ask.
“No, that doesn’t hurt at all,” he says, laughing. “This is a learning experience for you. It’s soft and hard at the same time.”
As he jerks off, Markus waxes on philosophically about politics and psychology and literature and Buddhism. Then he asks me to “stroke him off”—once again.
I’m starting to get a little worried he’s suspicious about my complete lack of interest in doing anything sexual. So I give him a half-hearted hand job and call it a day.
When I fly back to New York, I am immediately put on deadline for the story. Around 6 p.m. I sign off on the final proof of my pages. But while reporters are shown the mock-up of their story inside the newspaper, if the story ends up on the front page—or “the wood” as it’s called in tabloid parlance (because it used to be set with wooden slabs)—we don’t really see it.
While I never have reason to go up to the tenth floor where the A-1 page is set and designed, Mackenzie does. So, as she’s upstairs doing some important editor stuff, she just happens upon the next day’s cover all mocked up and ready to go. “Would You Pay $500 to Have Sex with This Man? Our Reporter Did!”
Mackenzie does a double take and finds the designer. “You guys, Mandy didn’t sleep with him. You guys know that, right?”
It gets changed last-minute to “Spend the Night.” Better. But it doesn’t really matter. Because the next day, the pickup on the piece translates like an international game of telephone. By the time it reaches Turkey the translation is “US Reporter Sleeps with Male Hooker for News” and leads to a lot of fan mail in broken English saying things like, “Best journalism! Very hard working assignment looking good.” In Asia, one of those creepy yet hilarious animations is done, featuring me and Markus taking a shower, making passionate love, bickering—and making passionate love again. The press requests are insane, and within a span of a couple of hours I’ve had to turn down The View while making appearances on Inside Edition, Joy Behar, and tons of radio from around the world.
At the end of this very long day, I head to Langan’s alone to get a drink. I’ve gotten only a few hours of sleep and am fried. As I sip on a Maker’s, I check my email at the bar and get a Google news alert that Gawker has written a follow-up piece to their morning link to the story.
“Should the New York Post Hire Hookers? Media Types Spend the Day Jeering.”
Meanwhile, Markus, whose real name
