Last call for sin

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Henry Singer* is hunting.

* Names and other identifying details throughout the article have been changed.

It’s past dawn and he knows that Carina will be waking with a crack attack—a hit to start the morning as others pour that first mug of caffeine. She’ll need his $20 to buy a rock. It won’t get her through the day, but she’ll be able to face the sun. He’s early for work after tripping out the door in Barrington with a stale kiss for his wife and a mouthful of lies about a breakfast meeting. He cruises Elmwood Avenue, hoping Carina will be propped by a bus stop, an alibi for the cops. He prefers the twenty-somethings, and Carina is forty, but even after two kids her body should be illegal.

A year ago, he was infatuated. But you can’t get attached to someone faithful to a pipe. He crawls past Burger King, then Empire Loan, and slows by McDonald’s. Across from a graveyard cluttered with Coke cans and gauzy dime-store flags, he parks at AutoZone.

It’s not yet eight o’clock; she might be sleeping. If he can’t find her, there was one by the 7-Eleven near Lockwood and Broad who looked better than some of the other sea hags. Five foot, two inches maybe, with dark hair to her ass. Her pimp idled in the parking lot, his Explorer’s smoke-tinted window unrolled a few inches to broadcast his presence.

Carina is nowhere to be found. He circles back to the 7-Eleven, parks and flashes his high beams in the woman’s direction. As she strides closer, he sees her age — over his limit, but she’ll do since he’s late for work. She has a gap-toothed smile and a pinched, rat-like face, but at least she’s built. “Can you give me a ride to my daughter’s house?” she asks. Her eyes inventory the Oldsmobile. Singer scans the lot — no sign of the Donut Patrol. “Get in,” he says, unlocking the passenger door. Her pimp shoots him a hard stare as he drives to a ghost alley. She wants $40 for a b.j.; he haggles her down to $20 — the going rate — for a mic check.

When it’s over, he thinks of Carina. She would have done a better job.
During his lunch break, Singer unwraps a roast beef on rye and shuts his office door. He fires up his personal laptop, checks his Yahoo! account and digests The New York Times headlines. Then he clicks over to another site and logs in as “Streethunter.” Like an Amazon.com customer reviewing a book, he wants to offer his opinion of a recent purchase. Got a mic check from Ratgirl this morning. Pretty mechanical. Face could use a paper bag but decent rear assembly. Looks, 3, Effort, 5.

The Web is where the oldest profession meets the new millennium. The local forum of a national site — usasexguide.info — is Singer’s locker room. It’s where “mongers,” as the Johns call themselves, rate sex workers on looks and performance. They swap notes: Cathy needs to be knocked off her perch. Tiffany is so far gone these days she’s not worth picking up. Watch your wallet with Anna; she’d pickpocket her own mother.

The site includes a photo gallery, location maps and strip club reviews. It’s a venue for Johns to grumble about the price of gas and the dearth of parking near downtown spas. The men reveal which dancers provide takeout service (meaning they can be bought outside the club). They name women whose looks and talent make them most desirable and out the ones who need coaching. They tell who will do what for how much and offer negotiating tips.

Members describe how to discern a police decoy from the real deal and which streets are being hit by “Uncle Leo” (law enforcement of-ficers); posters have even raced to their computers to broadcast a warning minutes after a decoy sighting. Users know the best time to cruise the West End’s Armory district or the Dunkin’ Donuts on Broad. The forum is both community and confessional booth. Singer, a fifty-two-year-old businessman, only discusses his “hobby” with other posters. Anyone else would be too risky in this incestuous state. 

The hunt is often strategic for these serial mongers, some of whom procure two or three prostitutes a day. There is proper hygiene before and after a “date”; a John might stash a change of clothes in his car trunk and shower at a gym
before heading home to a wife or girlfriend. There’s the ruse of switching to a beater car that won’t advertise “mug me” in the ghetto or be recognized by someone who knows his daily driver. Some men bring props. Should Uncle Leo inquire about their business on these derelict streets, a real estate section is folded on the passenger seat. “I’m scouting apartment buildings,” Singer will say, “thinking about investing in property around here.” The cover only works at certain times — one reason he
doesn’t monger after midnight. And if he weren’t snoring in his Barrington bed at 2 a.m., he’d have some explaining to do to Mrs. Monger.

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I ran into the famous Carrie. She is retired from this game and is getting her life together, so she says. But all it takes is one hit on the glass pipe to get her working again.  — RImonger

The Rising Sun Mills sign glows gold on Valley Street in Olneyville, blinking of condos that fetch up to $1,500 a month. Beneath a bruised sky, a junkie-eyed woman shivers. She stomps her Timberland boots, fidgeting for a fix. As a black Camaro creeps near, she glances over her shoulder and gives the driver a deep stare. He offers her a ride, and the twenty-four-year-old slides in.

The patina of many Providence streetwalkers — who have ranged in age from thirteen to sixty — can be shocking. According to experts, at least 90 percent of them are addicts; the drugs have aged them by at least a decade. Most are missing teeth because methamphetamine, crack and other stimulants trigger excessive teeth grinding. The drugs also ratchet body temperature and cause dry mouth, so users crave soda. Heroin junkies grow a fierce sweet tooth from the drug; all addicts gravitate to sugar products because they’re cheap, stocked at the nearest convenience mart and require no cooking.

Ninety percent of the city’s streetwalkers also have hepatitis C, a viral disease that destroys liver cells. Chronic hepatitis C often leads to cirrhosis of the liver and is the leading cause of liver cancer in the United States. Drug users contract it by sharing needles contaminated with an infected person’s blood (it can also be transmitted if blood is exchanged during sex). Most carriers exhibit mild or no symptoms, so a John can’t detect whether a prostitute has the virus. And women are frequently offered more money to not use protection.

If a customer goes bareback, he may be swimming in a Petri dish of sexually transmitted diseases. According to one social worker, a streetwalker who got HIV from a John vowed vengeance, declaring, “I’m going to sleep with everyone out here who will pay me and give it to them!”

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I’d be willing to pay to have sex with the same woman I’d turn down for free in a bar. —Nightrider

Undercover detectives Liz Wajda and Keith LaFazia watch the dead-eyed woman at Rising Sun Mills climb into the Camaro. They tail it for several blocks until the driver parks and they can’t see the woman upright. Then they flash their blue “busted” lights. When they confront the baby-faced driver, the man sputters, “I’m not the kind of guy who needs to pay for that!” But Johns can’t be typecast any more than prostitutes.

Michael Sullivan is a fifty-something John who works in the science and health research field. A regular poster at usasexguide.info, Sullivan says he goes to prostitutes for sex, plain and simple, when not in a relationship. Singer and Sullivan are both upper middle-class professionals who possess doctoral degrees. They are fathers. They do not consider themselves risk-takers and say they are generally law-abiding.

Johns see the prostitutes more than naked. Some have met their kids, their dealers and even watched them shoot up. Occasionally, the men fall in love. “They call it the oldest profession for a reason,” Singer says. “It’s in the genes: men want as much sex as they can get to spread their seed. Women want one man who will take care of them and support their child.” He welcomes the helplessness of streetwalkers and massage parlor workers as an antidote to ‘Feminazis.’ “Men fall all over Carina because of their natural inclination to take care of this fallen angel,” he says.

Singer has indulged his vice every week to ten days for the past six years. In 2005, he spent $6,160 on sixty-eight dates with thirty different women. If he were single, Singer would be a regular at the local massage parlors. But, he laments, the women are liberal with massage oil, and “it’s hard to hide your activities when you left home smelling like Irish Spring and you come back smelling like eucalyptus oil.”

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Feminists say prostitution is degrading to women because it puts men in control. But if you’re looking for sex with a twenty-two-year-old, you’re going to have to pay for it, which puts the power in her hands. — Streethunter