I Didn’t Know What an Escort Was — A Story About a Naive, Numbnut from New Hampshire
Love can make us do some crazy stuff, but destiny has a way of working it all out
- Janice Miller Jones, 1985, our first car together, a red Subaru, by the author
In the summer of 1983, I was twenty-two years old, dead broke, and completely convinced I was going to marry a woman who thought of me as a spring fling. My self-view was not terribly good: skinny, insecure, naive, and didn’t know the difference between infatuation and true love.
Her name was Janice Miller. She lived in Philadelphia with college roommates. I lived on a farm three hours north, digging fence post holes for $3.50 an hour in the Pennsylvania heat. I did not own a car. I did not have money in the bank. What I had was a borrowed 1966 Dodge Dart, a grandmother who felt sorry for me, and a plan held together entirely by hope.
Every weekend I could manage, I drove to see her. And every Sunday night, I drove back, alone, rehearsing the same question in my head: How do you make a woman stay when you have nothing to offer but yourself?
I didn’t have an answer. But one weekend, scanning the Philadelphia classifieds, I found what I thought was one.
Wanted: Male Escort. $8.50 an hour.
I showed Janice the ad. She leaned over, read it, and said, “Wow. That’s pretty good money. What’s an escort?”
Neither of us knew.
I called the number. A man answered, gruff and quick. “Come in for an interview, kid. You know how to find us?”
I did not. But I found a gas station map, talked Janice into coming along as co-pilot, and off we went across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey. We got lost twice. We eventually found the address — a squat industrial building in a part of Jersey that looked like a movie set for a mob story.
That’s when I saw the guard tower.
It sat in the center of the parking lot, rising like something that had no business being there on a Saturday afternoon. There were maybe four other cars because it was mid-morning on a Saturday. The lot was quiet in a way that made noise feel dangerous. I parked the Dart and opened my door, and before my second foot hit the pavement, a voice crackled over a loudspeaker from the tower.
“You can’t leave the woman in the car.”
Not a suggestion. A command. Stopped me dead in my tracks.
I looked at Janice. She looked at me. I told her to take the car, drive around, and come back in thirty minutes. She pulled away, and I stood there alone in that parking lot, in my one interview suit, holding a cheap briefcase my dad had given me, walking toward a door I had no business walking toward.
Every step, my stomach tightened. Looking down at my dress shoes, I saw the one my dog had chewed. I thought about turning around, but there was nowhere to go. By the time I reached the door, I felt the way I had felt watching The Exorcist as a twelve-year-old — that specific dread of knowing something is wrong and not being able to stop yourself from finding out how wrong.
Inside, a man waved me over from the dark. The floor stuck to my shoes. The air smelled like cigarettes and something I couldn’t name—a dark, human stench.
“Do you even know what an escort does?” he said.
“No,” I said. “But if it pays $8.50 an hour, I’d like to find out.”
He handed me a few tokens and told me to look around.
I lasted about ninety seconds. I had landed in a parallel universe.
I walked back out into the daylight, blinked hard, and started moving toward the parking lot exit at a pace that I hoped looked like confidence and felt like pure escape. I was certain the tower guard had a rifle. Too many bang-bang movies, perhaps. I have always had an active imagination.
Waiting for Janice felt like an eternity. She finally picked me up twenty minutes later, having gotten lost herself. “What happened?” she asked. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t think I’m going to get the job,” I said. I hopped into the driver's seat as Janice slid over. “Let’s get the fuck outta here.”
That night, at the party Janice’s roommates threw — their weekend ritual — I made the mistake of telling one of the older guys what had happened. He laughed so hard he nearly lost his beer. Then he turned and announced it to the entire room. Might have been something to do with the pile of cocaine.
My shame was immediate and total. An Irish Catholic dork drowning in guilt, now soaking in it publicly. I drank more than I should have to get through the rest of the night. Passing out often seemed better than trying to process feelings.
The next morning, Janice and I hiked in the local park. I don’t remember what we talked about. I remember the way it felt to be next to her — that pull, like gravity had a preference. And I remember dreading the drive back.
I left at three in the morning to make it to the farm by six. The highway was empty. I had no radio station decent enough to fill the void. Just me, the Dart, and the slow understanding that I was twenty-two, clueless, and apparently incapable of knowing what an escort was.
But I was still going back. Every week. For Janice. I was a boy on a mission, having vowed to myself, my parents, and the universe, “I’m going to marry Janice Miller.” Mom and Dad thought I was nuts, but I was madly in love.
Forty-plus years later, Janice Miller Jones is my wife and my best friend. She has loved me when I forgot how. Honestly, I think my curious, naive, inner child is one of the reasons she kept me around.
A man willing to walk into a New Jersey strip club in his only suit, carrying a briefcase, looking for honest work — that’s either deeply foolish or deeply devoted.
Looking back, I think it was both. And now I know the difference between infatuation and true, lasting, unconditional love. The former fades while the latter grows.