Saving the Hooker

By Michael Adelberg

Matthew Hristahalois is a not-so-scholarly scholar. He's obsessed with the "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" character that keeps turning up in movies like Pretty Woman and The Hangover - the beautiful and kind fallen woman who can only be saved by Prince Charming. Matthew wins a post-doc to see if real fallen women can be saved by a good man. He casts himself as Prince Charming and sets out to study and rehabilitate real New York City prostitutes, at least until he meets a fiery auburn-haired prostitute who calls herself Julia Roberts.

Saving the Hooker is a fast-paced assault on male hubris and the recycled fairy tales at the core of so many of our favorite books and movies. It is also a bawdy tour of lower Manhattan's escort service prostitution scene, a poke in the eye of academic orthodoxy, and a not-so-subtle send up of cable television talk-news. Centered on the combustible relationship between Matthew and Julia, Saving the Hooker makes comic hash out of modern America's show horse institutions and sacred cow issues: academia, high and low media, political correctness, misogyny and sexual assault.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Permanent Press
• Release date: Mar 21, 2014
• ISBN: 9781579623685

Michael Adelberg

Michael Adelberg was born forty-something years ago into a perfectly decent New York City family that deserved better. He underachieved through high school, then overachieved through college and grad school. For the last two decades, Adelberg's earned a living as a pale and studious health policy wonk, while moonlighting as an even paler and more studious historian of the American Revolution. About five years ago, he started writing fiction in the middle of the night, resulting in two novels: A Thinking Man's Bully (2012) and The Razing of Tinton Falls (2012). Adelberg lives in Vienna, Virginia with his very tolerant wife and two remarkably well-adjusted sons.

Book preview

Hooker.

CHAPTER 1

Saving the Hooker

I was seven when Dad brought home a videocassette of the movie Pretty Woman for Mom. She insisted that we watch it as a family. The three of us settled onto the couch. I don’t remember much about the movie, but I do remember my parents arguing after Richard Gere vanquished scheming Jason Alexander and swept up Julia Roberts.

As the credits rolled and Roy Orbison sang, Mom leaned over me and kissed Dad on the cheek. She told him she loved the movie.

Dad, who had served 20 years in the army in southern Italy and Vietnam, said, Hon, glad you liked it, but this is one of the dumbest movies ever made. I spent time with some hookers while in the service. He chuckled, They aren’t even a little bit like Julia Roberts. This movie’s just a Prince Charming fairy tale for little girls.

And then things got hot. They said terrible things about each other, using code words that I now understand were references to each other’s unfulfilled ambitions and sexual fantasies. I squished down in the couch cushions between them—hoping they would stop.

Finally, Mom ended the discussion. She picked up the VCR remote control and froze the screen on the closing movie credits: Well, Al, read the credits. Director – Garry Marshall; Producers – Arnon Milchan, Gary W. Goldstein, and Steven Reuther; Writer – Jon Frederick Lawton; Cinematographer – Charles Minsky: All are men. This movie might be a fairy tale, but it’s a fairy tale by horny men—high-paid losers. I bet they all beat off to Julia Roberts during the casting. It’s why she got the role. They still think about her in that short skirt when they have to get it up for their wives. I can’t believe you don’t love this movie, Al. Maybe I’ll get lucky tonight. It’s been two weeks.

Mom won that argument. She won every argument with Dad. She was always the sharp-tongued parent—the one willing to escalate a disagreement to a meaner level. But her comments about Pretty Woman were more than a trump card in a domestic squabble. Mom offered brilliant film criticism.

If Mom hadn’t grown up in a trailer park, married a man she never loved, and had a kid at 19, she might have been an amazing critic. Mom could have been so many things had she not been assigned to live in Morris, Illinois, the dullest place on Earth—had she not died before her son could help her.

MOM’S LINE about Pretty Woman lodged in some dusty corner of my brain, and reappeared three years ago when I was watching The Hangover, the defining guys’ movie of this century. There she was again—the Julia Roberts character from Pretty Woman reincarnated as Heather Graham’s character in The Hangover: Hot, fun, street smart, and a really sweet person. The only thing keeping Heather Graham from being perfect was that she needed that nice dentist, Ed Helms, to rescue her from hooking. A man had to make an honest woman of her. Graham’s hooker, like Julia Roberts’s hooker a generation earlier, was the most virtuous and competent character in the movie. But still only a man could save her.

This started me on a little quest to examine hookers in other American stories. I spent the spring of 2012 doing only two things: 1. writing my postdoc application to the Manhattan University Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, and 2. watching movies with hooker characters. From my little apartment in Brooklyn Heights, I waited every day for the mailman to bring me more Netflix DVDs with more hookers to examine. I invented a second identity and opened a second Netflix account just so I could order more movies with prostitutes.

When not watching hooker movies, I read about them. I read maybe ten books about prostitutes and found dozens of American stories built around the heroic man saving the fallen woman—not just dime-store novels, but classics like Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.

Even the producers of the HBO pseudodocumentary Cat House bought into the myth, including (faux?) confessions from prostitutes speaking wistfully about the special man who might one day bring them out of hooking. Across the decades, the plot kept recycling: The attractive street woman saved by a good man.

I made myself an expert on the hooker with a heart of gold in the American Western. Five times I watched Stagecoach, and five times I watched John Wayne ride off into the sunset at the end of the movie with Marlene Dietrich, the saved hooker. I watched a dozen Westerns costarring Marie Windsor and Ann Dvorak, buxom women always cast as prostitutes or dance hall girls. The character they played was always the same: The sexy, smart talkin’, streetwise woman awaiting redemption through a heroic man.

I found the same hooker in modern cinema: Jamie Lee Curtis’s Ophelia in Trading Places, Rebecca De Mornay’s Lana in Risky Business. And then I watched Pretty Woman again and understood why, despite its chick-flick reputation, so many men secretly love it. I masturbated to Julia Roberts that night—and dozens of nights since.

IT WAS June 28, 2012. My application to the center was due on June 30. It was half-completed and not very good. I was writing about how suburbanization, with its long commuting lifestyle, changed the American book. But I had no provable thesis or research approach. I was past desperate; self-loathing was setting in for having wasted the entire spring on my hooker obsession.

With no other choice, I scrapped my half-baked postdoc proposal and rewrote a new one from scratch:

Saving the Hooker:

Juxtaposing the Hooker with a Heart of Gold in American Media

with the Actual Women of the Sex Trade

The research would be divided into two parts: First, I would conduct an extensive literature review to document the archetypical hooker depicted in American books and visual media (this was already largely done, but they didn’t need to know that). Second, I would interview a cross section of real hookers, examine their pathologies, and determine the degree to which they can be saved by a caring man and the frayed social safety net of modern America. I would examine the dissonance between the mythic hooker of Pretty Woman, et al, and the real thing.

In ten powerfully argued pages, I proposed to discuss the virtuous hooker archetype in American storytelling, and contrast it against prostitution as a deep-seated societal problem. I proposed to introduce these women to healthier behaviors and provide caring, platonic companionship. I would be Richard Gere to Julia Roberts, John Wayne to Marlene Dietrich, but without heroes, villains, or movie climaxes. I would work from protocols ground in established qualitative research methodologies and make the best possible use of existing social services to help these women. My efforts would be rigorously documented for scholarly purposes.

Competition was fierce for postdocs at the center. Thirty applicants were vying for two slots, but my Saving the Hooker proposal was the best paper I’d ever written.

August 7, 2012, was the happiest day of my life. I was selected for the postdoc. It meant so many things all at once: Recognition as a promising scholar, two more years with a life-sustaining stipend, and two more years to pursue my hooker obsession—now legitimized by real scholarship. I celebrated by indulging myself with a little companionship. I bought a cute little parrot whom I named Harpo. I vowed to teach him a funny line or two that would crack up visitors from home—because every hayseed from rural Illinois wants to visit the Big Apple.

I e-mailed the news of the fellowship to the half-dozen professors who’d been helpful to me during my six years of grad work at New York University. I also e-mailed the good news to a few friendly grad school colleagues who’d moved on to faculty positions at small colleges in the middle of the country.

Then I stopped. There was no one else I wanted to tell; my social circle was pitifully small and shrinking. Sure, I still had my two old high school buddies from Illinois—Will and Tim—but they’d have no idea what I was talking about. They’d kid me about studying hookers to get free blow jobs.

I was out of people I wanted to tell, but there still was someone I had to tell. There was still Dad: Dad who gets his information from right-wing talk-news programs and spends his evenings promoting hair-brained petitions on the Internet. Without any joy, I forwarded him the e-mail announcement. Then I dialed the phone.

Conversation with Dad: August 9, 2012

What dumb-ass is paying you to study that? Dad asked with typical sensitivity. Nobody plays the part of the blunt-speaking everyman as well as Dad.

"A committee of past fellows from the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies annually peer select two projects that they believe will advance scholarship in the construction of identities in American culture. They select two new fellows each year. I know this isn’t your thing, Dad. I’m not studying the NFL’s most bone-jarring hits or the raunchiest lines from Family Guy. But still it’s important and interesting."

Hey look, Matty, I know you’re a bright guy. I’m just trying to understand what you’ll be doing. You’re 28 and still never worked a real job. According to this e-mail from your center, you’re now going to spend two years watching movies and reading books to learn about hookers. I haven’t been near a hooker in thirty years, but I know that you don’t read books to find out about them.

"That’s not quite right, Dad. I’m going to look at the hooker as a cultural archetype. Think about the prostitutes of the 1940s Westerns, then think about Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and Heather Graham in The Hangover. American men continue to portray hookers as something quite unreal. The hooker is sexy, wise, and invariably virtuous. I will interview actual prostitutes and provide them opportunities to improve their lives—or at least to bridge into safer and healthier lifestyles. I will show the incoherence between the mythic hooker of the male storyteller and the real women who ply the sex trade."

There was a pause. Jeez, Matty, you can even make hookers boring.

Dad’s good for a few put-downs before his conscience kicks in and reminds him that a good parent must be supportive of his child. So I was not surprised by his next line: Well your, uh, project sounds interesting. So these people at this center will pay your freight for two more years to do this studying of story-time and real hookers. Then you’ll write about it.

Yes, Dad, two years. It’s a postdoc—an extended period of time pursuing a single research topic beyond my dissertation. The center received thirty applications and made only two selections. It’s a real affirmation of my work. It says that I’m a promising scholar. It lines me up for publishing my research into a book, tenure-track faculty positions, and National Endowment for the Humanities grants.

Well, if you were building something like your old man, I could see the worth of what you’re doing a lot better. But, Matty, you know that I’m proud of you. I’m sure your mother’s smiling too—even if you believe she’s just a piece of meat in the ground being eaten by worms. He paused, his voice tight for a moment.

He continued, Before your mother died, it was her job to worry about you. Now I worry. Getting involved with New York City hookers is going to take you to places you don’t yet understand—ugly places. Maybe you’ll write the best book ever about hookers, but it will come at a price. These hookers won’t be like the girls you grew up with. Matty, you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into.

Thanks for your concerns, Dad, but I’ll be fine. It’s just research. I’ll call you in a couple of weeks.

The conversation went better than I had expected.

CHAPTER 2

Two Smart Fellows, They Felt Smart

So now I was a fellow. In the three weeks between being notified of my selection and the welcome reception, I didn’t do very much. Mostly, I kept watching movies about hookers, beating off to the sexy ones, and sleeping through New York’s miserable August weather. I justified the indolence by telling myself that I’d soon be working incredibly hard and needed to bank some sleep and down time.

My first official responsibility as a fellow was attending the annual reception with the center’s faculty and past fellows. At this reception, my selection and the selection of the other 2013 fellow would be officially announced.

The morning of the reception, I rolled out of bed and performed my morning rituals: Two sets of push-ups to keep my arms toned and ten minutes with Harpo repeating the statement birds can’t talk for his eventual memorization. I showered and looked in the mirror. There was some good news: Despite six years of geekdom, I was still okay-looking. I had a full head of wavy dark hair on a broad-shouldered six-foot frame. The acne that dogged me into my twenties was finally gone. My upper body still showed the effects of three years of high school football and wrestling. I still could do four chin-ups in a row on a good day. But the good news ended there.

I opened my closet and confirmed what I already knew. I had nothing appropriate to wear. The uniform for an academic dinner is well known: Tweed jacket or navy blazer over a white button shirt and well-pressed khaki pants. I had plenty of pants, none well pressed, and most too tight to button. Reluctantly, I unzipped the suit bag at the far right corner of the closet and pulled it out. It contained the black pinstriped business suit Dad bought for me two years ago when I mistakenly told him I was thinking about leaving academia to get a real job.

The suit pants were tight in the butt, and the jacket didn’t button easily, but it was good enough. At least I had black dress socks and matching black business shoes. Sure I looked more Wall Street than Ivy League, but it was a coherent ensemble. Some old-school faculty might even appreciate that I was overdressed. There really was no alternative. After a shower and a shave, I was out the door and on the subway into Manhattan.

The New York City subways have come a long way from the grime and graffiti of the 1980s, but the cars still are abused by a ridership that is disinterested in their upkeep. I boarded a car that was randomly dotted with some kind of paint. A large mass of spilled Slurpee inched backward as the train rolled, and then crashed forward into the car’s front wall at each stop. The light blue frozen goop slathered halfway up the car’s front wall. The car was near empty. It was four on Thursday afternoon and I was riding against traffic. The other five riders were black—two young mothers with three ill-governed children.

The train jostled and lurched through a half-dozen downtown Manhattan stops, including Union Square, my long-time stop for NYU. After this stop, the train took on passengers. It was close and steamy by the time it trudged into midtown. I was hemmed in on both sides by jostling sweaty riders. Finally, I reached my stop at Forty-Second Street.

Times Square in August at five thirty is a collision of smells. People from all over the world are released from service jobs. They carry into the street the lingering effects of curry lunches and deodorant-deprived armpits. These smells mix with the city street’s own two pervasive odors, car exhaust and urine. Thirty feet above ground level, Times Square is Disneyfied and perfectly packaged for whitebread America—the great triumph of Rudy Giuliani’s urban renewal. But at street level, at the start of rush hour, Times Square still combines the worst elements of Sodom and the Tower of Babel.

I passed the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the tens of thousands it releases to New Jersey each evening. After that, the masses thinned and the last two blocks to the center were quite pleasant. This neighborhood, the mid-Forties on the west side, was once called Hell’s Kitchen. It was known for its gangs of tough Polish and Puerto Rican kids—the neighborhood inspired West Side Story. Now, like all of Manhattan’s once troubled residential areas, it’s traded up. At five forty-five P.M., the sidewalks are dotted with young professional women, harried but still attractive

Reviews for Saving the Hooker

[cynthia357 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I don't remember requesting this one. Read the synopsis and decided to push on through...It turned out to be exactly what I expected; something a 16 year old boy might like to read.An immature 28 yr old gets a fellowship. He wants to "save hookers". He gets involved with one who calls herself Julia Roberts. He loses his virginity to her (at age 28?!) She is a lunatic. He is your stereotypical perpetual student.

[acornell_13 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

So I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes good fiction. I read a lot of books and it boils down to two things for me is the story good and is it well written? Also, true confession, I had just finished two exemplary fabulous best selling 500 page novels that I was immersed in head over heels for days so my perspective on this particular book comes at the end of great literature. Is it fair to compare this work with great literature? So my first though was that as a story it was mildly funny--I work in academia so I understand a bit about the plights and perils of the scholar. It had a compelling plot line enough so that it made me remember the character and wonder what was going to happen to him. The character was not at all likable. I wanted him to end up in prison by the end. It felt like a very male story full of drugs and erections and wounded parental relationships.But sadly, the language and writing were terrible. The dialogue seemed contrived and fake--even in satire people do not talk this way. Ever. Sometimes I just had to skip pages because the words made me cringe. So, if you are interested in a clever story about a man who is studying prostitution as a post doc, and then gets in a whole lot of trouble on national TV and end up in jail, it is a good read and it is probably readable in one sitting. Don't look to it for fine writing or pretty passages to read aloud to your partner. It just isn't there.

[alanab_26 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I just finished reading Saving The Hooker. I enjoyed it. I liked how it started with Matthew's writing sabbatical and the rest of the story focused on how he arrived there. I also liked his conversations with his father throughout the book. It had the right amount of suspense, and overall had a satisfying end to the book.

[botkin05 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Just finished this book as an early reviewer for LibraryThing. I can say that I couldn't put this book down. I didn't love the main character Matthew but I don't think that I was supposed to. I did thoroughly enjoy the stabs taken at the media and academia in general. This author has sharp wit and nobody is safe when he starts slicing and dicing. I will definitely be reading his other books!

[leaseylease · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Hated this book. The main character was obnoxious, the entire premise was just stupid and I had no interest in reading about academia. Glad I received this for free from Early Reviewers because it would have been a complete waste of money, instead of just a waste of time.

[zmagic69 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A funny book that skewers talk show TV, academia, and pop culture. I it is the story of Mathew Hristhalois a smart guy who has stayed in school too long and needs to write a book to continue in academia. He decides a a research into prostitution and why the women got into it, and would they leave it if the right man came Alina a la Pretty Woman. Unfortunately for Mathew he meets a prostitute/escort who actually goes by the name Julia Roberts, and Julia is insanely crazy, but also much smarter than Mathew is. This is a short but vey fun book to read.

[dketelsen_2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I received a free copy of this book for review from Library Thing.The protagonist of this book, Matthew Hristahalios, is a former HS football player who's gotten chubby and lazy during his college and grad school days. Now he's a post-doc struggling to find funding--but find it he did, in the form of a 2-year grant to study and help prostitutes in Brooklyn.This book is supposed to be an amusing book poking fun at academia and media fame. I didn't think the author, Michael Adelberg, went far enough with lampooning academia. I can easily see everything written here as being real, not exaggerated. The content regarding Fox News was funny but it's such an easy target and came so late in the book that not much credit is earned there. A substantial portion of this short book was dedicated to how Matthew related to his father and that struck me as filler. I can't recommend this book and it's a shame because Adelberg strikes me as a good writer.Bottom line: Adelberg is a good author but he seemed unwilling here to hurt feelings by taking a real swing at academia.

[joycebl · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Michael Adelberg's book Saving the Hooker, is advertised as being a satire on academia and male hubris. I found the premise to be stupid, and the writing mediocre. The main character, Michael Hristahaliosis (really??) wins a prestigious post-doc research grant to study NYC prostitutes and see if they can be "saved" by a good man. He practices faulty research methods, is lazy, and unethical in about 10 ways ,including faking his research results, lying about how he spent the research money, and engaging in illegal actions in the course of his study. This makes the book unbelievable from the beginning. How did he win such a grant with such poor academic habits and such moral turpitude? In the end, predictably, instead of demonstrating how a good man can save a fallen woman, he winds up in jail, a victim of his own arrogance and weakness. I have been told that satire and irony are sometimes lost on me and perhaps this is the case with this book but it is not a book I would recommend.

[sheiladeeth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Matthew Hristahalios wanted an easy academic life; studying the difference between movie deptictions and real-life hookers looked like a happy option, especially when his proposal won its funding. Of course, Matthew wasn’t planning on working too hard for these studies, but watching movies is always fun, and what could be so difficult about finding and interviewing a few hookers?Matthew’s academic advisors want results. Matthew’s friends want to enjoy a visit to the big city. And Matthew’s dad just wishes his son would get a real job. Still, he’ll do his best to be a supportive parent, as long as Matthew doesn’t squander too much money.Money seems to disappear rather rapidly in this tale, as Matthew struggles to please everyone (and especially himself), while a hooker tries to please herself (and maybe Matthew too). Both story and hookers lack the proverbial hearts of gold, as do academia and the media. Meanwhile serious concern and frivolity keep an uneasy balance, making this a book that invites both laughter and frowns. Do all hookers want to be saved? Are media portrayals of hero or hooker ever real? And is it true that crimes against whites get more coverage than any other?For me, the story takes off when the media get involved in Matthew’s dreams. Now it’s not just a question of who’s cheating whom. A pound of flesh waits somewhere offstage, and maybe society’s the one who needs to be saved. Cynical, bawdy, plausibly (and sadly) absurd, Saving the Hooker is a tale of our (American) times told with sharp humor, stark parody, and dark intelligence. Disclosure: I received a free preview edition from the publisher and I offer my honest review.

[carolo_77 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I did not find out until the next to the last page that I was meant to vilify the main character – and possibly the book – in a women’s studies class. If I had read the end of the book first, as I am led to believe some do, it would have saved a lot of time.The idea of the book held some promise – a satirical story of a post doc comparing New York prostitutes to the Hollywood Pretty Woman view of prostitution. It did have some humorous moments and it did have some brief social commentary but overall it just left me slightly sad. Perhaps I would have had a stronger reaction if I had liked the main character. Matthew, the not so scholarly scholar, is too hapless to be even remotely believable. He has lived in New York while getting his undergraduate degree and Phd and has no friends, no social life, no hobbies other than watching the movie Pretty Woman. His best relationship seems to be with his pet bird. He has unprotected sex with a prostitute and never appears to consider getting tested for HIV or other STDs. At the end he does start dating a woman but in the final wrap up she is not mentioned. His dad calls him every Sunday and Matthew does his best to avoid the calls or keep them short but at the end he feels slighted that his dad is no longer calling him. Perhaps the 19-45 male demographic that this book is targeting would understand and give Matthew more slack then I am able to.