Don’s secretary had finally gone out to lunch, and he stretched out in his leather armchair, took out a charge card, and dialed the number. In rapid-fire but distinct bursts, he read out each digit of his MasterCard, but when he asked for Carol — Carol of the long, soft hair and a voice that would round his mind like lazy satin bed-sheets — he sounded milky and warm.
Aural Sex … Don’t Phone Home
Long-distance “operators” are using the latest in telephone technology to give men a lot more than old-fashioned pillow talk … In fact, their slogan could well be “Reach out and touch yourself.”
Don had never met Carol. He never would. But as she said, “Hello, darling, I’ve been waiting for you,” his hand slid obediently down to his groin. He fumbled with his zip as he felt her voice, her very being, willing him away from himself, away from the office, into some secret place of sex. Now, as the voice caressed him in its husky sensuality, described their lovemaking in lovely detail, he was suffused with a passion objectively pure yet full of the lusty earthiness he’d known only in his dreams. The voice carried him deeper and deeper, into the very entrails of desire. His eyes glistened, the muscles round his lips twitched involuntarily as he released a flood of inchoate love words to the impassive telephone. If only the world could see him now! But the world couldn’t. There was only Don and Carol, tied together with telephone line.
Now she was cuddling him, teasing him, pressing him up and up … then, suddenly, it was over, bar panting. Don smiled, lit a cigarette automatically. Just as automatically he said, “I love you, Carol,” even as her voice brought him gently back to earth. And for that moment in the cold office, he meant it … until the humor of the situation returned to him. It always did. He grinned into the phone and at himself in the mirror, chuckled, and said, “You know something, kid? You sure give good phone.”
Good phone. It is to sex what dial-a-prayer is to church: brief, a bit thin, perhaps, but better than nothing. Sometimes, much better. Like when Carol’s on the other end of the line.
In scruffy yellow flip-flops and a shortie bathrobe, she pads around the blue velvet cocoon of her Gramercy Park apartment, shielded from all but the softest of light. Big, cushy satin and velvet pillows have been tossed around the room with bounteous abandon, and, together with the tufted headboard on her round, king-sized bed, give it the look of an upscale bordello.
“People come in here and tell me they’d love to take a nap,” she says, curling up in a love seat. Her flesh moulds into the cushions sensuously. She’s a big woman — not fat, but zoftig.
“I like body comforts. I’m comfortable with hedonism,” she says with pride as she surveys this room that reeks of sex, throbs in the certainty of its purpose. Carol spends a great deal of time in it.
Growing up in the Kings Highway section of Brooklyn, she says she began calling up men she wanted to date at the tender age of sixteen or seventeen. Nothing really explicit; just some sexy talk and heavy breathing, enough to pique their interest. “It was really effective,” says Carol. “It always got them extremely turned-on.” Carol’s forty now, and claims: “I have yet to find a man who does not become extremely aroused by it.”
Somewhere pretty early along the line, she married someone at the other end, a rich man — she doesn’t have to work now, even though they’re divorced — and handsome, too. But, unfortunately, he was alcoholic. To this day she can’t stand making love to a drunk — even over the phone. “If a man tells me, ‘I’ve had a lot to drink, babe, bear with me,’ it means he’s going to be a long time coming. It’s not going to be a long hot time, though, because I’m gonna have to compete with the booze for his attention.”
‘One girl has a customer with a turkey fantasy. “He likes to be roasted and toasted,” she giggles. “I put him on a spit over a fire. He comes while I’m basting him.”’
After her marriage was over, Carol picked up the phone again — but not for fun and profit until recently, after seeing an ad in the Village Voice that read, “Call Laurie. Me and my sexy friends want to fulfill your every desire, explore all your fantasies…” Emblazoned above it was a picture of a leggy lady lying spread out on a bed, one hand curled coyly over the inside of her thigh, the other on a telephone. “I said, ‘Hey, I’ve been doing this for years for free!’” Carol laughed. “Do you mean people get money for this?” She dialed the number and found they did — lots. She took the job post-haste.
“I was surprised to find out I had a lot to learn. I was making sexy phone calls, sure — but not elaborate fantasies. The other girls were doing things I’d never heard of before. Well, not often at least,” she giggled. “Bestiality, domination, infantilism — all of this was new to me. It’s changed my life. I’ve discovered I’m a creative person.”
Both those assertions are true. Before Carol began phone fantasies, she was in advertising. “I’d like to say I was responsible for those ‘Wet Your Whistle’ lipstick ads or something sexy, but I was in the administrative end — organization, management. It’s only since I started this that I’ve discovered how absolutely creative I am. I can meet any fantasy and run with it. It flows out of me — it’s almost like getting a part in a play. If I’m starting to grope and I listen, I find the man always takes me where he wants to go. I get lots of requests. It’s like a reward. They’re roses to me, every one of them.”
Carol pops a white chocolate into her mouth, and gobbles it hurriedly. Her face opens into a wide, pumpkin smile. Give her a bun, put some slipcovers on the satin settees, and she might be somebody’s mother.
“Oh, gosh, I guess some of my own mother probably has rubbed off on me,” she gushes. “You know, she’s the original Mrs. Portnoy. I can’t tell her what I’m doing — but not because she’d disapprove. She’d be worried I wasn’t getting enough fresh air.”
One can imagine a daughter like Carol might because for concern. Most of her interests do lie indoors — she’s a telescope finely tuned to a single perspective. Flowers, fabrics, perfume, lighting — you name it and Carol can apply it to sex. Chairs are “shaped to please a man,” chocolates “make love to her tummy,” clothes are worn to arouse — and to be gotten out of quickly.
Even her frequent real-life companion, a slave, is devoted to her pleasure. He bought her those black, mariboued mules lying by the bed. At first she got him to teach her how to handle mistress calls, but he made her feel so good.
“You know, sometimes I get the feeling — I really do — that Carol enjoys the calls as much as I do. I guess I’m being silly.” Don blushes. He’s a little embarrassed, a little uncomfortable, after all, about “whacking off while someone listens, as he puts it. After all, he bristles, he doesn’t really have to do it.”
“I’m no breather gone legit,” he says defensively. “I never made an obscene phone call in my life until I saw those ads.” Probably not. A good-looking, high-powered man making his kind of salary? Even with a wife and two kids at home, he could probably do okay for himself. So why, then?
Well, as Don explains it, they’re different. They’re for when you want to reach out and touch someone without actually reaching out and touching someone. “I know when I’m talking to Carol I’m not really having sex. I know she might be fat and bowlegged, even.” He looks down at his fingernails. The possibility makes him so dejected it’s a temptation to set him straight.
“My wife doesn’t know I do it. She probably wouldn’t go for it much,” he continues. “It’s not that I can’t tell her about my fantasies. It’s just that with Carol, it lacks the responsibilities that exist in my marriage. Sure, I could tell my wife I’d like to have a threesome. But I’m not sure I’d really like to have one in real life. I’m not sure what kind of stuff that would open up. What if she wanted to do it again — with a man the next time?” He scoffs, and squares his shoulders. “No. That probably wouldn’t happen…. It satisfies me, talking to Carol. I guess I’ve become sort of attached to her. If I have a bad day in business, she’ll listen. If I’m keyed up, she’ll make me come without draining me emotionally. It’s safe. And for $35 a pop — if I have to give up a few packs of cigarettes or an extra beer to do it, it’s worth it.”
Snap, crackle, and pop. So that’s what it’s all about. All those sociological predictions about the age of the new celibacy — when the Me Generation, beset with fear of V.D., herpes, and sexual cancer, would turn to itself — have nearly come true. It’s turned to an audience.
Viva, the proprietress of New York’s Sexy Phone Fantasies (and not to be confused with the actress of the same name), was one of the first to catch on. After three years in the business, she takes the “build a better bagel” approach to dirty phone calls.
“I knew it had been tried first in California on a very, very low level,” she says, picking over dinner. “I listened to the calls, and they were working on a sort of hooker-john mentality: ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six … it’s time to come. Please come.’ Let me tell you, these girls were geared up for the finale. I said to myself: ‘Hey, these guys are paying a lot of money.’ I knew that I could make it work here, but it would have to be sensual rather than strictly sexual. I wanted to get feelings involved, psychodrama. I knew if I could get women who would be creative in the sense of making a scenario, painting a picture, it would go.”
It went like hotcakes. With a small amount of capital — mostly for advertising in such magazines as Screw — Viva got an office and a few phones and established a business that employs dozens of women, including her mother. “As bookkeeper, of course,” Viva laughs. “No matter what you tell her, the bottom line is men are jerking off to your voice on the phone. But Mom’s adjusting. The money helps.” Viva has made a lot of it. Her cashmere sweater, duplex apartment, and the Audi she tools around town in testifies to that. What she lacks is a boyfriend. “I’d love it. I just haven’t met anybody who could spin my head around. They can’t seem to handle the money, plus me as a person. I think they find me too strong.”
The word is apt. Viva has had a string of businesses around the world in professions as various as interior decorator and dominatrice. She finally put down her whip because “it made me too nervous. I was always afraid one of them might have gotten wise down in my dungeon, and I might get hurt. I’m not invulnerable.”
That’s hard to say. Physically, Viva is a contradiction in terms: spiky, closely cropped black hair frames her liquid brown eyes, and her Boticelli body is locked up in tight jeans and high-heeled black boots. The word striking fits her like a glove. Despite her expensive looks, her voice still smacks a bit of Flushing.
“In the beginning, we worked round the clock. The hardest thing was staying awake in between phone calls. Now we’re so busy I don’t get to take them anymore, I just handle management and publicity. Except for the times when I listen in,” says Viva.
She’s proud of her employees. “A change in breathing pattern, or a pause, and they know just how to zoom in or pull back. It’s almost choreographed,” she boasts. Good casting undeniably plays a large role in this. Viva knows how to recognize a sensual bent-and how to exploit it. Carol works for her. So does Noni. She calls them “naturals.”
You can hear it for yourself. Noni’s voice makes Brenda Vaccaro sound like Attila the Hun: all soft and scratchy little noises that flirt up and down the lower registers, clinging to each honeyed word until it’s not a word at all but the most beautifully musical note. She could make a fortune lip-syncing, she knows, but she doesn’t need the money and it wouldn’t be the same.
‘There’s supposed to be some kind of sexual revolution going on. But you’d never know it from the guys who call here wanting what their wives won’t give them.’
“This is so much more immediate,” she remarks. At thirty-five, Noni’s got a background in computers and motherhood, in that order, and she felt she wanted something more exciting. Just as Carol would make an ideal courtesan, Noni would be a great shrink. instinctually, she’s always right on target, and it’s a gift that leaves her extremely vulnerable to the men who call. She’s the sounding board for their neuroses, a kind of buffer zone between their desire and their soul. She puts her psyche on the line. Particularly for one caller, an embittered polio victim.
Noni puts herself in the wheelchair. She plays a sort of role-reversal game that begins with a cup of coffee and ends in total humiliation. “I’m the helpless one. He puts a little too much sugar in and I have to drink the coffee that way. He wants to know details of what it feels like to wear braces and be crippled and to have to depend on others for everything. Only he means depend on him. I need him desperately; I’m totally at his mercy, and can’t budge an inch for my own pleasure.” The caller is not a kindly lover. He’s cruel to Noni, and berates her for a full forty-five minutes. “I can put up with it,” she maintains. “He has to, every day.”
There’s something sympathetic in Noni that seems to attract the disabled, be it morally or physically. Most of them are better adjusted, however, and she finds her experiences with them satisfying. A number of her regulars are paraplegics and quadriplegics from the Vietnam War, for whom it is a fantasy just to be whole again. Others won’t even ride with their dreams that far; they just need to pretend she’s lying in their arms. “I’m not saying it doesn’t upset me, but it makes me feel really good to be able to do something for them,” she says. She tries to do something for all of them. If they’re fat, Noni puts them on a diet. If they’re in some sort of sexual closet, she tries to drag them out.
Noni’s not the only one doing her job who does more than her job — lots of phone fantasy people tell similar, if less dramatic stories. Maybe the old cliche about the soft-hearted hooker is alive and well via Ma Bell.
Gina from Las Vegas frequently talks with a man named Dwayne. At first they’d just shoot the bull about his wife, her family, where they’d like to take their vacations. But after a while he told her of a painful experience that occurred when he was only seventeen.
“He was young and cocky and thought he was a real little hotshot hitchhiking cross-country,” says Gina. “But he took a ride from a couple of older southern chicks who took him home for drinks and slipped him a mickey.” When Dwayne woke up, there was a shotgun at his head. All the hair on his body had been shaved off, and he was wearing women’s clothing. “They chained him and whipped him, and made him eat out of a dish on the floor. They shat and pissed all over him,” Gina said mournfully.
The first time Dwayne tried to escape, he got caught and had his head bashed in with a shotgun butt. The second time he got away, but was too ashamed to press charges. Gina says the first time he told her that story he cried. The second time he came. “He wasn’t putting me on; it really happened,” she insisted. “He hated the whole experience, but he’s fixated on it and it’s the only thing that gets him off. It wipes me out every time we run through it.”
A “call girl” job consists of more than just pillow talk — it’s a cathartic experience, or, as Viva puts it, “it brings up a lot of shit.” She says she gets a lot of burnout cases — women who find it simply takes too much out of them and take a breather, or quit altogether. “I believe in prevention, not that kind of garbage,” says Gypsy, manager of Candy’s Phone Fantasies in Maryland. “I won’t hire girls who want to play therapist, or girls who are lonely. We’re not here to fuel a desperate need.”
Gypsy is a salty-tongued, hippieish forty-five-year-old who looks much younger and sculpts erotic art pieces “incorporating vegetables.” Before she got into Candy’s last year, she sold antiques and waterbeds. Now, she’s making a lot more money — “and we’re going to keep making it, because we’re the most organized service in the country,” she boasts.
Organized? Compared with Candy’s, the Ladies Garment Workers Union runs a sweatshop. They’ve got medical, dental, and auto insurance, and even a company psychologist. Pay is up to approximately $750 a week for full-time workers, and whatever they can hustle over that in mail-order panty sales. There’s an incentive program to woo repeat customers, two different manuals (one for fantasies and one for sales), and a free help hotline to connect “anybody who sounds uptight” to the appropriate social agency. Candy’s also provides each girl with her own “special effects” arsenal: a bowl of water and some rocks for toilet fantasies, a vibrator, and a spatula to simulate whip-cracking.
Hearts of gold abound here, too. Among their favorite customers is a sixty-five-year-old on Social Security (he gets a special rate) who likes to make believe he’s making love to his eighty-seven-year-old mother. Another is a mascot of sorts: “He says, ‘Hard dick, hard dick, hard dick…’ and jerks off while we put him on hold. He doesn’t have a credit card, but at least he pays for the call. We try to be nice,” says Gypsy.
While Gypsy runs the fantasy division, Vanessa runs sales. “Everything is kosher here,” Vanessa says jauntily. “We’re one of the few places that takes Amex. We do market research, and we’ve got a default department to keep people from ripping us off.”
Rip-offs are rampant, according to most fantasy folk. An insider at Laurie’s Vegas Hotline reveals she gets “maybe one out of ten calls that are good.” Jocko, who handles the business end at New York’s Sexy Phone Fantasies, says he’s trying to tailor his service to attract classier customers. “We only want the better people out there. We don’t need troublemakers.” Some services are beginning to fight back by doing credit checks while the customer is on the line, and taking rip-off artists to court when possible. Others just write it off as overhead.
As far as market research is concerned, it’s mostly just calling around to the competition to see what they’re doing, and the services appear to have more in common than they like to believe. “We give more time, more concern, better rates, better phone,” is an oft-heard refrain, but the similarities among phone fantasy operations are striking.
You pay for the phone call, and the fantasy costs about $35 above that. Conference calls for threesomes, foursomes, and moresomes are extra. Although most places will say, “Take as long as you want,” it’s the rare caller who stays on for more than forty-five minutes; the average is just under fifteen. And the level of courtesy overall seems remarkably high.
Right now, these are primarily women’s businesses, although it’s probably only a matter of time before men begin providing similar services for women. And in many ways it’s a good business for women — the danger quotient for a “call girl” is almost nil. Calls come in on an unlisted phone she’s installed on a separate jack in her home, after they’ve been cleared by a central office. When she doesn’t feel like working, she’s the one who pulls out. There are no phone pimps, although some places have a male receptionist to discourage youngsters. In fact, there’s nothing at all illegal about fantasy phone calls. “Just talking dirty in and of itself is no crime,” says Inspector William Fortune at the New York Police Department’s Public Morals division. So far, he has not received any complaints from the several local companies. “Who’s going to complain?” he queried. “The fact these services exist means there’s a demand for them.”
The phone company minds its own business; all this long-distance reaching out is a cash bonanza. There are no complaints from Uncle Sam either; when people use charge cards, it gets taxed.
Surprisingly, certain difficulties have arisen from the banks who process the charge accounts. “The small ones can’t handle you, and the big ones don’t need your business. If you want to make it in this business, you need enough cash to stick it out for a long haul,” says Jocko. He and others talked of “this gal who started a service in New Jersey and thought she was doing terrific, only to find out after six months her bank rejected every single one of her credit card receipts because she forgot to write down each customer’s zip code.”
Asked for their view of the situation, Manufacturer’s Hanover didn’t have one. “We don’t really talk about our clients at all in public. It is a bank policy,” said a spokesman.
The Chase Manhattan Bank was more vocal, if less articulate. “Chase does not accept as a merchant people involved in that kind of business,” said the Chase rep.
“What kind of business?”
“Chase in general has a reluctance to choose customers who are involved in that kind of business.”
“Could you be more specific?”
“Not just on the merchant’s side, but throughout the bank. We do not have customers in that kind of business. Whether it’s legal or not does not affect our general policy on the matter.”
The banks are not the only people making moral judgments, however. A number of mental health experts had heard surprisingly little of phone fantasies, and what they did hear, they didn’t like.
Said radio and TV personality Dr. Ruth Westheimer: “My goodness, is that what they’re doing? Well, you know, I always have a prejudice against anything that lets people put off finding a partner. But perhaps it’s useful in special situations. I look forward to hearing more about it.”
Psychoanalyst Dr. Ruth Douglas-Mann, who has a call-in show on cable TV called “Solutions and Singles,” seemed almost to resent the competition: “I’m a telephone person and I love it. These people should be telling these fantasies to a psychotherapist who knows how to respond. These fantasy people have never been analyzed, so how can they help anybody else?” She agreed with Dr. Westheimer, and said that even in special situations, using a service for physical or emotional companionship might cause a person to postpone finding a “real woman.” “This way they’ll reach for the telephone instead,” said Douglas-Mann.
She also expressed concern the phone itself would become the focus for sexuality, and her reservations about fantasies in general, saying most of them are born out of “desperation, incest, or perversion.” “If a person has a fantasy, let him write a dirty book,” she said. “All these paraphilias people have are disabling. Suppose he likes thigh-high black boots. Does that mean if the woman loses her shoes he can’t make love?”
Dr. Douglas-Mann isn’t alone in her opinion — even among people in the phone fantasy business. An astrologist who works for a midwestern service, who for obvious reasons can’t be named, says, “Honey, some of these guys are sickies. They’re so stupid they hold their dicks and shake the phone.” She told of one man who would appear to have made the rounds and been rejected by all the services, a surgeon who “only gets off by doing gross things to little girls. Vomiting on them, mutilation — our women just couldn’t handle it.”
But most of the so-called sickie calls are more humorous than they are disturbing. Like Gypsy’s trucker who hates fat-bellied women. “He wants to watch me sock them in the belly with my fist. He screams, ‘Hit her harder, hit her harder!’ — then he comes.” Another regular at Candy’s is a Washington lobbyist who dreams of “fucking a pony at the racetrack in Kentucky, while prim ladies dressed in Victorian clothes watch him through opera glasses from the Turf Club.”
Lucy, a cheerleader type who lives on Long Island and works for a Manhattan, outfit, has a customer with a turkey fantasy. “He likes to be roasted and toasted,” she giggles. “I put him on a spit over a fire. He comes while I’m basting him.” For variety, sometimes he likes to be a pig, and she “stuffs an apple in his mouth and cloves in his behind.” Another client is a shampoo nut, “whose whole body is like a giant cock, and his head is the head of the cock.” Then there’s the rich man who comes while she yodels — that’s what his lascivious Swiss nurse used to do when she bathed him as a child.
“One thing I’ve learned since I started this,” says Lucy. “We’re all complicated. If you think other people aren’t, you’re just flattering yourself.”
By most accounts, men are using fantasy phones as a private arena to try on new and not quite broken-in sexual attitudes. “You get a lot of boys from Des Moines who’d have to go out hunting for months before they’d find someone who’ll go down on them,” says Alice from L.A. “They think California girls are hot. There’s supposed to be some kind of sexual revolution going on, but you’d never know it from the guys who call here wanting what their wives won’t give them.”
The services reported a surprising number of men — many married to weeping violets who couldn’t kill a roach — wanting to be dominated, as well as intelligent young bachelors requesting the “unhip” and “antifeminist” fantasy of “being with a woman with big tits.” “They would never admit it turns them on in real life,” Jocko assures us.
There also appears to be a large pool of heterosexual transvestites hiding in their wives’ closets, who “put on stockings the way some men smoke a joint,” says Alice. But, Jocko warns, the kinkier they are, the more careful he has to be. “You’ve got to make sure they’re the right age,” he says worriedly. “The last thing I want is for some sixteen-year-old kid to come down to breakfast wearing a garter belt because he spoke with one of our women.”
Many straight men seem to need a female witness to feel comfortable about a gay fantasy. Gypsy says she’s done so many calls where transvestites were requested, she’s turned herself on. “I’m trying to find one to date,” she confesses.
lnfantilism is what does it for Carol. “It’s definitely fulfilling a need in me — the mother instinct. I like to diaper them and powder the tush. And I like sucking their toes. The contrast of that macho voice becoming a tiny, tiny baby is incredible,” she says, especially since most of the men who have this fantasy are “heavy-duty, aggressive, power-conscious people.”
Whether fantasies solve real-life problems or merely put off real-life solutions remains to be seen. According to Dr. Douglas-Mann, executives with too much pressure on them ought to seek out ways to lessen their loads — not return to the womb.
“This is just another example of nonrelating. Sex by telephone, by Western Union, by computer — it’s all the same. Some of these people are shy and guilt-ridden, who, if they got help, would be perfectly capable of functioning,” she says. “As far as I’m concerned, sex a la Ma Bell is settling for crumbs instead of cake.”
Maybe. Or maybe, as Noni believes, one man’s crumbs are another man’s gateau. “What does all this mean to Joe next door?” she asks. “He washes the car. He’s also the head of a corporation. He wants to have his ass smacked, and his wife doesn’t understand it. But we do — and now Joe’s all right.”
As you might expect, we tend to be fans of what will always be the ultimate safe sex, that being sex with yourself. And getting freaky on the phone falls firmly — as it were — into that category. A quick look around gave us a United States estimate for salary potential in the “aural sex” industry as just under $3,000/month in your very first year. ZipRecruiter claims an amount almost twice that hight. … A good imagination, lots of empathy, and a soft voice might be handy for that sort of work, but we found it heartening to learn that we still value the art of communication. There seems to be a lot of that missing today. People should simply communicate more, right?
