Life in the recession is hard. Two years ago when I started wondering if I would ever get called in as a substitute teacher, despite the flu and cold epidemics ripping through the local rural school like A.A. members through pots of coffee and cigarettes, I began looking to the Internet for income. Trolling through sites for writers that had little to offer, something occurred to me. Did they still have phone sex operators like I used to see advertised on late night television, glowing through the dark of my living room as I imagined rather large women with babies crawling all over them as they faked orgasms for men lurking in the darkness of their living rooms?
It turns out they did.
Thus began my two-year stint as a phone sex operator or “Phone Actress.” The latter is a more appropriate term for this line of work because you have to create characters for the various types of calls you receive.
For instance, I had a main character named Ophelia, a moniker that was both ironic and a pun. Only one person ever understood the reference and it wasn’t the type of caller I thought it would be. Ophelia was the typical girlfriend fantasy and my go-to gal. Very vanilla. Unless she wasn’t. Her big thing was hanging around in heels and stockings. In my head she was very sultry with curly red hair, right out of a pulp novel or a stag movie. There was a lot of garter snapping in her life. If this was wrong, she didn’t want to be right. My secondary character, Jessica, was a blonde 19 year old who enjoyed frolicking at the beach despite the fact that she was constantly accidentally ripping the crotch to her bikini bottoms. She must have gone through at least a hundred bathing suits, ripping each one every time! Jessica also spent a lot of time hanging out in a tank top and her panties, having just been to a bachelorette party the night before. Her innocence was a big draw and so was her age. Usually at the bachelorette parties she attended, they gave her free vouchers to call in to the phone sex line and she was always very surprised and a little embarrassed to talk to a guy who had called in. Of course, after a very short while she became a little more comfortable. There were other characters I had at the ready, depending on the fetish: domination, humiliation, Asian girl, mature woman (translation: older than 22), BBW, transvestite and the occasional fetish that had to be explained ahead of time and acted out: “What I like is women with unshaven legs…when was the last time you shaved your legs? Also I like women who get into car trouble.” This fetish was combined and I ended up having my brakes go out while driving around with my unshaven legs. As soon as he shouted, “Scream!” I did and the line went dead.
I made between ten and thirty dollars an hour, depending on how long I kept them on the phone. It was closer to thirty after awhile. The only equipment I needed for my new job was what I affectionately called the “sexy phone,” a two-line pushbutton telephone with a headset attached. I was required to have a landline and I spent calls sitting at my desk in my office chair playing with my plastic animal collection and putting together Playmobil sets while moaning and faking earth-shattering orgasms that I could turn off and on like switches if the call ended for various reasons. I started figuring out tricks to make the calls longer like making Jessica’s social life revolve around bachelorette parties. The more intricate the fetish, the longer it took to act out. I rather liked these calls because they were interesting and they called on my background in theatre. These guys were also very upfront and usually began the call by saying, “This is what I want” and usually gave me a bit of info to go off of. I liked that in contrast to having five seconds or so to catch a caller’s attention and keep him on the line. The “silent” calls were the creepiest. Not just due to the fact that I knew there was someone on the other end of the line and they wouldn’t respond except for the occasional heavy breathing but the bigger thing was that these people were so desensitized that I could imagine them calling me, watching pornography on television and surfing the web for imagery to augment everything else. I’m sure at one point they may have been able to have a healthy interaction with a woman but those days were long gone for these guys.
On occasion, I would get a caller who was just plain curious enough about the women on the other end of the line to spend money to question me endlessly. Was I educated? Yes. Was I single? Yes. Did I have a normal life, as in did I get out and not scare people with say, a grisly disfigurement or was I trapped in an attic with daily deliveries through the roof of my food crate and did Richard Simmons come and cry with me once a week? No, I was normal. And so on and so forth it went until the person got bored and could not figure out why on Earth I would be doing this, despite my simple answer: It’s good money and frankly, rather interesting. No Richard Simmons candidate crawling with babies here.
I also always respected every caller, treating them with dignity. This was a service for all types of people to utilize. It didn’t matter the reason. That wasn’t my business. The important part was that I was allowing them to express themselves in a safe way when possibly they had no other way to do so. I would much rather have them tell me they like me getting into car accidents than repressing what they feel and having it come out in another negative way. I was also a way for people who had no one else to lean on to, for a few brief moments, have a female in their life. As one man put it, who in one week, lost his girlfriend and had several thousands of dollars of farm equipment break on him, “I don’t really know how this works but I just wanted a pretty girl to talk to.”
Wendy York | Contributor
Wendy York has written for such prestigious publications as the American Drivel Review and the virtual zine ICON Lifestyle Magazine under the pen name, Vespa Runner. She aspires to someday punch Weezer’s lead singer, Rivers Cuomo, in the face and go on to write about it because he really deserves to be taken down a notch. Other than that, she whistles a lot, hula hoops and fights the good fight. Feel free to contact her at yorktot@gmail.com. Especially with delicious sandwich ideas.
