The Capri Anderson story got me thinking about hookers this week. The following is all true. It happened nearly twenty years ago:

If working girls happen to like you, they pass your name along to their hooker girlfriends. At one time I must have been on the LA Hooker rolodex. I’d get, sometimes, seven, eight calls an evening from girls who got my name from girlfriends, who got that name from girlfriends, that I was hooker-friendly.

With all the bewildering array of aliases I was dealing with, I had to keep a black book full of referrals just to keep names and telephone numbers straight. But here’s one that turned into a tale Stephen King would appreciate.

I get a call from a girl named Joanie. Joanie tells me she’s a friend of a woman who claims to know me. The woman’s name didn’t ring a bell. No matter. Joanie proceeds to tell me that she’s a blond, a fetish model and has great legs and feet. So far she appealed to my weakness on three basic counts.

The hitch with Joanie was that she couldn’t come out to see me because she was having problems with her car. [Virtually every hooker I knew had problems with her car.] I would have to see her. Joanie proceeds to tell me that she lives in a guest house in North Hollywood and that I would like the quiet surroundings, etc., etc.

I didn’t make a “date” with Joanie because I was seeing someone at the time, but as soon as I had a window of opportunity, I called her. The weird thing about it was, Joanie claimed no recollection of our previous conversation and denied ever saying she was a fetish model or had pitched her wares on the basis of her legs, etc.

In other words, she was trying to make it sound like I was crazy and she had never talked to me.

Bells went off in my head not to pursue the issue. I apologized for having bothered her. Then, about six months later, I get another call from Joanie giving me essentially the same sales pitch as she had done when she first contacted me at the office, forgetting, of course, the incident where I had called her back. She even used the same woman’s name as a referral.

Now I’m REALLY curious with this deja vu all over again thing. Priding myself as always having been the Indiana Jones of sex where adventure was paramount, I’ve got to arrange to see Joanie in North Hollywood being compelled as I am by inner voices.

I knock at the door which opens in a way you’d expect in an Addams Family movie. It creaks wide, but there’s no one there. A voice out of the darkness bids me to come in.

The blinds are drawn but some of the early evening summer sun manages to slip through the slits. It takes me a minute or two to adjust my eyes, but, by this time it’s too late. I’ve handed my money to Joanie who I now judge to be a woman in her middle to late 50’s. She’s wearing shorts which reveal good legs, and she’s wearing the kind of platinum wig with braids you’d expect to see on a German beer hall waitress. I figured to make the best of the situation.

Joanie proceeds to tell me that she gives the best blowjobs in Hollywood and that she has many esteemed attorney clients and movie producers who can testify on her behalf. Or so she says.

Who am I to argue with the opinion of attorneys and movie producers on this issue, though I didn’t want to ruin the Hallmark moment by informing Joanie that blowjobs are not my particular thing.

Then, as though she were Lee Ermey greeting a busload of raw recruits in Full Metal Jacket, she proceeds to rattle off a laundry list of rules and regulations I must follow. I can’t touch her breasts, but I can finger her areolas. I’m not permitted to tweak her areolas. I’m not allowed to grab her ass. I’m not allowed to finger her ass. I’m not allowed…I’m not allowed…I’m not allowed.

Then she tells me to take off my pants and lay on my back. She grabs my cock with her right fist and proceeds to yank it into her mouth with the gusto of a baseball fan consuming a bratwurst at a Milwaukee Brewers game.

Joanie’s platinum head bobs down on me like a puppet’s. AAAAGH!! AAAAAGH!! AAAAAAGH!! she grunts. I’m not responding.

AAAAAGH!! AAAAAGH!!!! AAAAAGH!! she continues. This woman was giving blowjobs with her own sound effects.

“Gene, do you take drugs?” she asks me.

“You must take drugs because you’re not responding to me. All of my clients respond to me. Guys on drugs don’t respond to blowjobs!!”

I tell her, teeth gritted, that I’m not on drugs, as if I have to apologize for the lackadaisical reaction of my penis at this particular moment. Joanie works on me some more to no avail. Finally, I tell her, politely, enough’s enough. I get up off the bed and put on my pants.

“You don’t have to talk to me that way!!” she yells. I didn’t talk to her in any which way.

“My father used to talk to me like that!!”

With daddy issues obviously resurrecting, she starts crying and proceeds to lead me into her kitchen and opens an empty refrigerator.

“I’m just a poor college student!! This is my only way of earning a living!!”

I say nothing about the bizarre discrepancy of her being a near 60 year-old college student and pray to get out of there before she starts going all Jessica Walter from Play Misty For Me.

The next morning I get into work and find two messages on my voice mail. One is from a woman who’s trying to alter her voice like a man’s. The second message is from Joanie.

The disguised voice proceeds to tell me that she’s Joanie’s boyfriend and is going to come beat me up for the way I treated her. Joanie’s follow-up message informs me that her boyfriend was hiding in a closet the whole time and I don’t know how lucky I was that he didn’t kill me on the spot.

Joanie tells me never, EVER call her again.

Twenty years later, I’ll bet she’s a little old hooker still giving blowjobs because they never leave the business. Never.