“An able-bodied man must put in his forty hours a week minimum. It’s called working, also known as making a living. Doesn’t matter what your chosen profession is, every day you go out there and perform to the best. And remember, there’s no such thing as a humiliating job, only humiliating salary. You’re a young guy, healthy and strong. Can’t just walk away from your responsibilities for hitting an occasional hurdle here and there. It happens to all of us, and more frequently than you think. Ups and downs is the way of the world. But a guy who gives up and refuses to carry his own weight is a skiver who invariably becomes a dreg of society, a boozehound, a junkie. I understand if you want to skirt the issue and don’t want to talk about it, but as a friend I beg you, don’t go down that road. Idleness is the devil’s workshop.”

It pained me to be so rough on Marcelino. A handsome athletic guy, we had put him out on Pigalle earlier that year on a dry run, so to speak. He was an instant success. But being a gigolo – that is, male hooker or he-whore – is not nearly as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be. Elderly Parisian housewives and big-boned German and American tourists made up the bulk of his clientele, the kind that you look at for a fraction of a second and think, boy, am I happy she was fully dressed when she walked into my field of vision.

We were six guys renting a small apartment on Rue de Vaugirard. Early mornings with Marcelino getting home, always extremely exhausted and sometimes bewildered, I would be there waiting for him with his favorite breakfast drink, a chunk of dark chocolate melted into a cup of black coffee. The other four generally stayed asleep till ten or eleven, but I took it up on myself to carry out the mentoring part, to keep Marcelino’s spirits up. He would announce, with alarming frequency, he could not go on man-whoring. To make his point he would try to bring up some of the more gruesome details from the previous night. I felt for the poor guy but always refused to listen to his stories. It was for a good and compassionate reason: Reliving them would have hurt him all over again. Still, a couple of times I almost lost my patience and wanted to tell him to stop bitching but fortunately I stopped myself in the last moment. Instead, I mentioned Protestant work ethic and that we were put on this earth to make our impact, to contribute to the greater good.

Greater good—we needed the money. The five of us seldom if ever worked; there was no need for it. An average night Marcelino earned more than a skilled factory worker in a week. We had to pay the rent and, just like the next guy, enjoyed Camembert cheese and Calvados while watching TV from bed, and each of us had a girlfriend who wanted to be pampered.

We also had to give Marcelino his ten percent cut.

– J.S. O’Keefe