After years of working in market research in London conducting telephone surveys, I arrived in Melbourne and answered an ad for someone ‘broad-minded with a good phone manner.’ When I rang a woman answered and said “You’ve called here before, haven’t you?” She told me her name was Bev and the next day I traveled deep into suburbia via train, tram and bus to meet with her. I rang the doorbell of an inconspicuous unit in an oblong block of 'blonde' bricks. The door opened then a screen door and there was the middle part of a woman, the widest person I had ever seen, cropped on each side by the door-frame. In order to let me in she had to back into a room off the hall and only then did I get the full measure of her. Not only was Bev monumentally obese but she lacked any physical charm whatsoever. Women have suffered too long from being judged by their looks and without wishing to contribute anything more to the whole horrible business, the kindest thing I can say about Bev is that she didn't look well. Usually you can say that someone has nice eyes or pretty hair, shell-like ears or elegant hands, but not in this case. Bev spoke in a girlish high-pitched Marilyn Monroe ‘Happy Birthday, Mr President’ voice. Her conversation was punctuated with pouty little sighs and outbursts, chirpy exclamations and exhalations: “Oooh! Ahh! Hmmm!Ah-howwww!”
Bev demonstrated a phone sex call. She told her client she was a size eight, green-eyed blonde double D breasts, and showed me how to wet my front teeth and rub my forefinger over them to make the sound of a wet pussy. Squeak. Squelch. (It sounded more like the noise a rat would make if you picked it up by the tail.) Bev told me I’d earn $10.00 per call. This was years before the internet and clients paid via a kind of honour system, posting a check to Bev’s PO Box once they’d had their call. She was running her business illegally while collecting a Disability Pension (she had diabetes) so there was nothing she could do if a client didn’t send in the money. And if they didn't pay up, I didn't get paid. Bev didn't tell me this until after I'd worked an entire shift. At that time I needed even the prospect of earning money, so I went back for a second night. I think she liked me. “I’d like to spank you,” she told me when I turned up for the second shift. “Ah! Wouldn’t you love that? Ooooh!”
My first call was with a man who wanted to be 'forced' to dress in a little Miss Muffet costume, insulted, degraded and referred to as ‘Slut Joan’. Cross-dressing fantasies figured highly in the phone sex scenarios. Slut Joan was a regular, as was another client who wanted me to change his nappy, breast feed and burp him. Sadly, though, most of the conversations were about my 'appearance' (porn star Barbie) and the sort of predictable things clients would like to do to me. It was hard to stay interested. To amuse myself I tried putting on accents but can’t have been convincing. In one nearly climactic moment one client interrupted me to demand accusingly, “You’re faking that, aren’t you?” Faking which bit, exactly, did he mean? Bev also worked occasionally as a bondage mistress. I was curious and she thought I’d make a good apprentice so she took me along to meet Bud who lived in a run-down little ground floor flat in a housing estate. Bud was an older man who employed her to vigorously smack his arse with a thong (the footwear kind; 'jandal' if you’re a New Zealander), much the sort of thing you got on a daily basis for free when I was growing up. The difference lay in the accompanying soundtrack: instead of this’ll teach you to answer back, yer hear or do that again and I’ll bloody well belt you from here to Kingdom Come, Bud wanted me to say things like you’re loving this, aren't you, Big Boy? I ordered him to kneel before me and lick my shoes. "Oh, Jesus," he moaned. "Me knees! Spare me all that rubbish!" That day I was wearing an especially nice pair of black lace undies, the one iota of glamour in the entire brightly-lit, shabby-sad afternoon, and Bud insisted on buying them. When I left he was wearing them pulled over his face, with the rest of him, clad in a grubby singlet and a pair of baggy y-fronts, stretched out on the floor. He didn’t want to see me again. “Yer too young and beautiful,” he complained, in an unexpected but sweet reversal of values. He was more comfortable with Bev. One night Bev asked me to come in and take over the phones. Before she left she had another surprise for me – in her lounge was a man, a man in his forties called Neil, watching porn on a large TV screen with one leg slung over the arm of a comfy chair. Neil was some sort of minder I guess, although neither of them explained his presence. It was summer and he was dressed in only a pair of blue nylon shorts. Tucked into the waistband of those blue nylon shorts was a gun. A real gun– a gun for killing people; not a rifle for shooting rabbits or horses with broken legs. I was raised in New Zealand where not even cops carry guns. I'd never even seen a gun before and now I was alone in the suburbs with a strange man who was watching porn and packing hardware. As Beverly cast off into the night it occurred to me how I wasn't in a terribly sensible situation: no-one on earth knew where I was, and this Neil fellow held the balance of power should there be any disagreement between us, about, say, anything whatsoever. But he hardly spoke to me the entire time; the porn interested him more than me. Bev made a serious business blunder that night: she left me with an unopened bottle of something distantly related to vodka: Polish spirit; pure alcohol, pretty much. I drank it all while I phoned everybody I knew. I called my mum, my brother, my sister and my Aunty Margaret in New Zealand. I called my friends Paul and Liz and Vicky and Anna in London. I called the Lebanese guy who worked the front desk at the hostel I’d stayed at in Athens. I called my friend Ella’s granddad in a town near Amsterdam. I called my friend called Ginny in Ireland, and a man I’d met in Paris called Julien. By the time Bev got back I was incoherent and practising what little Greek I knew with a hapless would-be client. Do you have any fetta? I asked him, and Where do I catch a bus for Delphi? Not the sort of conversation he was expecting and I doubt he sent his ten dollars in to Bev’s PO Box. That night spelt the end of my phone sex career. Some weeks later I received a Christmas card from Bev containing a tenner, my entire earnings. But experience is priceless, no?