Desperate Measures Ch. 01

I was right.

At 10 minutes to 10, the phone rang. It was a nurse from one of the city's hospitals, telling me Brett had been in a serious automobile accident and was in real bad shape.

He'd been driving home on the expressway when it started sleeting. His car hit a patch of ice, went into a spin and was broadsided on the driver's side by another car that couldn't get out of his way because of the lack of traction.

I frantically called my best friend Betty Sue Montgomery, and managed to get her to let me drop Ashley off to stay with her. I was trying to fight off hysteria and failing when I arrived at their house with a sleepy, cranky three-year-old.

Betty Sue and her husband Terry live down the street, and they have a daughter the same age as Ashley, plus Betty Sue also has an older daughter by a previous relationship, a 13-year-old who was Ashley's regular babysitter.

I was absolutely a basket case, so when I got to Betty Sue's, she insisted on driving, and I didn't argue with her. I did not grow up in a place where icy roads were a regular thing, and Betty Sue had. And besides, as distraught as I was, I'd have been unsafe even on a dry road.

I was glad she was there with me when we got to the hospital. Brett had been pinned in the wreckage of his car and they'd had to get the Jaws of Life to get him out. He had suffered a serious head injury and was undergoing brain surgery when we arrived.

We stayed in the waiting room all night, drinking bad coffee and trying to engage in small talk. At regular intervals, I'd break down and cry, and Betty Sue would comfort me.

It was a little before 6 o'clock in the morning when they wheeled Brett out of the operating room and the surgeon gave us the news. Brett had a broken neck as well as the head injury. But he'd made it through the worst, and there was a 50-50 chance he'd live.

He did, but it wasn't much of a life that he got back.

I'll probably burn in hell for admitting this, but it would have been better for all of us – including Brett – if he'd died that night.

He was left completely paralyzed from the neck down, and his mental capacity was severely diminished. He could speak, with difficulty, but he had trouble forming coherent sentences, and difficult ideas and concepts were beyond him.

Worse, he was unable to breathe or swallow food on his own, so he had to be hooked up permanently to a ventilator and a feeding tube had to be inserted.

They kept him in a coma for six weeks, to let his brain heal, then gradually brought him around. After three months in the hospital, he'd recovered as much as he was going to recover, so I brought him home.

By then, I'd learned some hard truths about health insurance. It was good, but it only went so far.

Brett's health plan through his work took care of his initial hospital bills, after we met the $1,000 deductible. But when he was released from the hospital, their obligation ended.

Under the state's disability plan for paralytics, we could have a home health nurse come in to care for Brett, but it only covered 12 hours of the day. We had to cover the other 12 hours.

We had thought we were prepared for such a situation when we bought an insurance policy a few years earlier that covered long-term disability, never realizing that we'd need it so soon.

It wasn't a bad plan; it just wasn't nearly enough. The plan only paid 80 percent of his medical expenses and it maxed out when those expenses reached $1 million.

And there were some things the plan didn't pay for, such as the wheelchair-converter van that we needed to ferry Brett around to doctor's visits and rehabilitation appointments. The food processor I needed to puree his food so it could go in the feeding tube was one of the little expenses that also wasn't covered.

I had managed to get a contractor out to the house to do some fast remodeling, so that it would be compatible with a wheelchair and for the care of an invalid. I used all of the money we'd had in our savings for that.

Brett's company paid half of his salary for the first year as part of its disability package, and we were able to get some Social Security money and some state money, so we didn't fare too badly that first year. But the second year was when things started going downhill in a hurry.

After Brett came home, it became obvious pretty quickly that taking care of him and Ashley at the same time was a task that was more than I could handle.

Brett required round-the-clock nursing care, and it wasn't possible for me to do that with a three-year-old in the house.

When Brett was in the bed, he had to be turned constantly to keep from getting bedsores. His ventilator had to be monitored at all times, he had to be cleaned whenever he soiled himself and he had to have his meds administered intravenously.

So after a month of fumbling around trying to take care of Brett, I hired a private home health agency to provide a nurse during the day, while the state nurse came at night.

After I hired the private nurse, I went out to find a job, but I wasn't able to find much of anything. The economy wasn't the best at that particular time, I didn't have any marketable skills, and even if I had, employers wouldn't look at me twice when they learned I had an invalid husband I was caring for.

I finally managed to find a job working for a nearby day care center, which allowed me to keep Ashley there for a reduced rate. But that paid less than minimum wage, with no benefits, and I frequently missed work to take Brett to his appointments.

The money I was able to earn, the disability check from the state and the Social Security money was barely a drop in the bucket for our needs.

About 15 months after the accident, I finally broke down and went to the state office and applied for food stamps. That was a humiliating feeling, but I couldn't feed my family without them.

Being on food stamps quickly changed my political thinking in that regard. While I used them carefully, for staples such as sugar, flour, coffee, dry milk and cheap cuts of meat, I saw others who used them on things like beer, cigarettes and candy.

I'd always been a little liberal where the poor were concerned, but I quickly grew to understand why conservatives were so angry about welfare abuse. It pissed me off too.

I scrimped, cut corners, did everything I could think of to keep our household expenses down, but it wasn't enough. As Christmas approached that second year, I was facing a grim situation.

Our medical expenses hit the $1 million mark in October of the second year, maxing out our policy and leaving us with no insurance.

We already had $200,000 that we owed the various clinics, doctors, medical supply companies and the home health agency. I was trying to pay a little bit of what I owed on that, but I wasn't making much headway.

I talked to the insurance company about renewing our policy and extending our benefits. At first, they were reluctant to give us anything, given the enormity of our needs and the financial situation we were in. But the agent seemed sympathetic, so finally she wrote us a policy similar to the one we'd had. The problem was, the premium was three times what it had been before.

In addition, by then I was three months behind on the house note, two months in arrears on the van, the house phone had been disconnected because of my inability to pay the bills and our auto insurance policy had been cancelled because I couldn't keep up with the premiums.

We were getting just barely enough income to keep up with the utilities, occasionally falling a month behind before I could scrape together enough for the bills. We were judicious with the water, taking spit showers, and we kept the heat set low in winter and the air conditioner set high in summer.

I still had a gas credit card that I kept an owed balance of about $1,500 on. Any other credit cards we'd had were long since maxed out; we still owed about $12,000 on those, and they were threatening to take us to a collection agency.

I managed to keep a cell phone, and I tried to stay current with it, and we kept the cable connection pretty much up to date. You might think cable television would be an extravagance we couldn't afford, but Brett had to have something to keep him entertained as he sat there immobile in his wheelchair, or in his bed, and TV was it.

We were up against the wall financially. Our debts were steadily mounting and my ability to pay those debts was feeble at best.

The alternative was to put Brett in a nursing home and have Medicaid and Medicare pay for it. That would have eased the financial burden somewhat, though it still wouldn't have done anything about what we already owed.

But I had a couple of reasons why I didn't want Brett in a nursing home. One was irrational and one was practical.

When I was about 6-years-old, my parents had taken me with them when they to see my great-grandmother. Mom had come from country folks and her grandmother by then was in her 90s and senile.

She was in this God-awful nursing home way out in the country. It was old, rundown and smelled putrid. All I can remember was Granny moaning in abject misery, and that image has stuck with me all of my life.

And even if modern nursing homes aren't like that any more, I was still leery of the quality of care they provided. My husband needed someone with him at all times, and I didn't think that would be possible in a nursing home.

Besides, I wanted Brett at home, in familiar surroundings, where his loving wife and daughter could be with him most of the time, rather than just visiting.

But I wasn't sure if I could continue to manage that. We were in a vicious cycle of debt, and I couldn't see any way out of it.

However, a way soon presented itself.

About 18 months after the accident, I was about to go stir crazy, when Betty Sue insisted that I start getting out of the house. She, Terry and Mallory – her older daughter – would stay with Ashley to allow me some time alone out of the house.

I quickly came to cherish those days and nights when I could get out and forget my troubles. I'd go to a restaurant – nothing fancy, but not McDonald's, either – and maybe I'd go to a movie afterward.

I'd go out about twice a month, sometimes alone, sometimes with Betty Sue and sometimes Terry would go with us.

I have to stress here that Betty Sue and Terry went above and beyond the call of duty for us. We didn't have a real wide social group before Brett's accident, but we did have a circle of friends, neighbors and his co-workers.

And of this group, Betty Sue and Terry were the only ones who stuck around after the accident. The rest just drifted away, uncomfortable, I guess, at Brett's condition.

Not even the church we'd joined stayed with us. Oh, they came around with some help and sympathy for a few months. But out of sight was out of mind, and the longer we went without attending services, the less they came to visit.

I don't know if Brett noticed it, but I sure did, and it gave me a bitter perspective on the value some people placed on friendship.

I hated what this was doing to me. I had always had a bright, cheery nature, but the constant strain of taking care of an invalid husband, a young child and worrying about finances was turning me into a shrew. I needed help, and one night in December, things came to a head.

One thing I noticed whenever I went out, whether alone or with Betty Sue and Terry, was that I always got hit on by men, even though I still wore my wedding and engagement rings.

I didn't think I was all that sexy, at least not in a conventional sense, but obviously the men I encountered thought otherwise, and that was a revelation.

Although I loved my husband, I have to say that the attention I got from men when I went out was flattering. I had no interest in going with any of them, but it was nice to know I still had the ability to turn a man's head.

It was in that frame of mind that I accompanied Betty Sue and Terry to a dance club one Saturday night a couple of weeks before Christmas.

I really didn't want to go, but they insisted. I danced a few numbers with Terry, Betty Sue and I boogied a bit, and I was starting to have a pretty good time.

Eventually, a fellow asked me to dance, and I thought, "why not?" He was a 40ish man, nothing special, but he seemed nice. We shook a tail-feather to a couple of songs, then a slow number came on. I was ready to leave, but he asked me pleasantly if I'd slow-dance with him.

As he pulled me in close, and his arms wrapped around me, I felt myself getting wet between my legs, and it hit me then how long I had gone without the intimate touch of the man I loved. It was a thought that I had tried to suppress over the previous months because I knew how painful it would be.

But when that man pulled me to him, and I started to respond physically, it hit me like a ton of bricks. I managed to mumble an apology before I dashed to the ladies room sobbing.

After 20 minutes, Betty Sue came in looking for me, and she managed to get me pulled back together enough where we could make a hasty getaway.

However, a funny thing happened that night when I crawled in bed. I was restless and horny. I kept replaying the closeness with that man – whose name I never learned – and thought about how it made me feel, and I started to become aroused.

Hesitantly, I slid my hand into my panties, and when my middle finger touched my clit, the feeling swelled to a white-hot fever. For the first time in over 10 years, I masturbated, and the images that tumbled through my mind ran the gamut from Brett to the man I'd danced with to Terry Montgomery.

I quickly pulled my panties off and attacked my pussy with both hands, thumbing my clit with one hand and filling my aching hole with the other. Faster and harder, I worked myself until I arched my back and let an unbelievable orgasm rip through me.

Sex had never been an obsession with me before, but I had grown to like it and accept it as a part of my life with Brett, and I missed it. More than that, I missed the things that accompanied sex, the closeness with another person, the giving and receiving of pleasure.

I had been denied that when Brett was incapacitated, and that night I let out almost two years of sexual frustration with that one act.

The next day, Betty Sue came over for coffee, bringing Rachel – her three-year-old daughter – over to play with Ashley. I apologized for losing it the night before, but she waved it off.

"You needed it," she said. "You keep too much of that bottled up as it is."

She asked me if I wanted to talk about it, and I did. I told her about how I had repressed my sexual feelings for so long, how dancing the night before had triggered my arousal and how I had taken care of myself when I went to bed.

Betty Sue looked at me evenly for several seconds, then we changed the subject. Looking back on it, I believe that what happened on the dance floor that night and my reaction to it afterward planted the seed for me to accept a life of prostitution.

For the next few weeks, I started to masturbate quite regularly. I found that it helped release a lot of tension, took away a lot of my frustration. My fantasies were pretty mundane, memories of sex with Brett or just imaginary encounters with men I met in the course of the day.

It certainly helped me get through a bleak holiday season. The year before, we had gone home for Christmas, the way we had most years before. But it was one of the most depressing times in my life. Everybody seemed to be tiptoeing around Brett and his condition, or they were overly solicitous and annoyingly sympathetic.

This year, I resolved that we were going to spend a quiet holiday at home, and that's what we did, except that Mom and Dad came over to spend it with us, so we weren't totally alone.

At Dad's insistence, we got a tree and got out the decorations, and Mom and I spent Christmas morning in the kitchen the way we always did. It helped, but it was still a pretty hollow holiday.

Once my folks left, and the new year approached, I began to worry again about our desperate financial situation.

The bank had called again right after Christmas, seeking a house payment. The man I talked to was nice, but firm. If we didn't come up with a payment in January, they'd have to see about starting repossession proceedings

Later that day, I was having lunch with Betty Sue when we had the conversation that turned my life around.

I guess the worry showed in my face, because she asked me about it, and I told her I thought we were going to lose the house. I hadn't planned on unburdening myself like I did, but I ended up laying out exactly how bad off we were in dollars and cents.

"Betty Sue, I just don't know what I'm going to do," I said. "If we lose the house, if we can't keep the van, where will we go? What will we do? I don't want to put Brett in a nursing home, but what choice do I have? It'll kill him if we lose the house."

She looked at me with a long look, almost a sad look. Based on what she was about to say, I can understand why.

"Katie, I'm going to suggest something, and please don't get offended by it," she said. "You know I love you like a sister, and I'd never suggest this if I didn't think there was any other way for you to get back on your feet."

"What do you mean?" I asked, as a nervous feeling grew in my stomach.

"Have you thought about sex?" she said.

"Sure, I think about it all the time," I said, a little flippantly.

"No, I mean sex, for hire," she said.

"You don't mean ... p-prostitution?" I said, and I couldn't help the horror in my voice. "I couldn't do ... that."

"I don't mean walking the streets, but you can make a lot of money as an escort," she said. "I mean, a lot of money."

"Me? You've got to be kidding," I said. "I'm a 32-year-old housewife and mother. Men aren't going to want me like that."

"Bullshit," Betty Sue said. "In the first place, every woman has something that men want. Men have paid for pussy since the beginning of time, and they'll especially pay for someone like you. You can command a lot for what you have. You're good-looking, slim and you have a maturity, an innocent elegance that will draw men like flies. I've seen the way men hit on you when we're out. You're gorgeous, and you don't even realize what you've got."

"But ..." I stammered. "It's one thing to be attractive, but to be a whore? God, Betty Sue, I don't know. I mean, I couldn't do that to Brett. He still has his pride, and the thought of me with other men would devastate him."

"Look, let me ask you something," Betty Sue said. "How much did pride pay you this year? Girl, pride doesn't pay the house note, pride doesn't pay the doctor's bills and pride sure as hell doesn't buy groceries. You wouldn't be the first wife who had to spread her legs for money in order to take care of her family, and you won't be the last."

"That's easy for you to say," I said. "You're not the one spreading her legs for other men."

My best friend looked down at her hands for long seconds, then looked up at me with tear-filled eyes.

"Kate, honey, I've been there, done that," she said softly. "I'm going to let you in on a secret that only one other person in this city knows about me. I worked for an escort agency for five years, from the time I was 18 until I was 23. I fucked more men than I can count, and quite a few women, as well."

I'm sure the shocked look on my face spoke volumes. I'd always thought of Betty Sue as a person of such high moral standards, a dedicated wife and mother. She smiled sadly, as she continued.

"I got pregnant with Mallory when I was 17, and my father was so angry he threw me out of the house," she said. "I managed to find a job through my pregnancy, and I was going to give her up for adoption. But about a month before I delivered, I backed out and decided to keep her. I've never once regretted that decision, because, as you know, she's turned out to be a special young lady. But it was hard. I was an 18-year-old single mother, a high school dropout with no future. I was one step away from the street, one step away from losing Mallory to the state, when a social worker took pity on me. I told her I was about ready to start screwing to get by, and that's when she gave me a card for this company that specialized in escorts for businessmen. She told me that if I told anyone where I got the card, she'd deny it and make sure I paid a steep price, but that if I kept my mouth shut and went to work for them, I could make a good living and keep my baby. I made enough to live on and saved enough money to go back to school."