Lightning Rods - By Helen DeWitt Page 0,84

the thing that kicked Lightning Rods into a whole different ball park was that Joe suddenly started facing competition.

In the early days Joe had gone out of his way to underline the difference between a lightning rod installation and prostitution. Because the concept was so new prostitution was the first thing people thought of, and a lot of groundwork had to be done to enable people to understand the distinction between the two categories.

In fact, of course, as it turned out, some of the most effective lightning rods had had careers in the more traditional branches of commercial sex. For some reason it was easier for someone with that kind of background to pick up a few office skills and move over to lightning rod work, than for someone with an office background to expand her repertoire the other way.

In retrospect, maybe that wasn’t so surprising. Women who made the move across from, say, secretarial work were making a lot more money than they were used to, but they also had to get used to working conditions that presented a whole new range of challenges. Women who came the other way tended to see things differently. In some cases, they might actually see their take-home pay go down. Others might find they’d only achieved parity. And they might well find they were working longer hours to achieve that parity. What they were looking for, in other words, was not primarily a big financial pay-off. What they were looking for tended to be closer to all the things Joe had initially outlined as the main attractions of the job.

As one woman later explained, she had originally started out with an escort agency because the money was good; then she had built up her own clientele and the money was even better. But there’s something about that whole lifestyle that gets you into the habit of spending everything as soon as it comes in, or even before—at one point she had owed something like $30,000 on her credit cards. You keep meaning to save, but you never do, and every once in a while you wake up and look in the mirror and you look like shit and you realize the money is going to keep going out but sooner or later it’s going to stop coming in. Trouble is, it can be quite hard to find some other line of work that pays enough to make it even conceivable.

So from her point of view, lightning rods was ideal as a second career. At 17 she had hated the idea of a nine-to-five job, but at 27 she was able to see the attraction of a job that came with a healthcare plan and a pension plan and a reasonable guarantee of employment when she was 37 or even 47 or 57. There would obviously come a point when the lightning rod element of the job would be removed on grounds of seniority, but by that stage she would be qualified for a responsible mainstream position. Besides, the high earnings of the lightning rod segment of her working life would be reflected in her pension.

And besides. Quite apart from the long-term financial implications, in many ways lightning rod work was a lot less stressful than what she was used to. One of the things that gets on your nerves after a while is having to interact socially with people you wouldn’t choose to mix with if you had a choice. Not to mention having to watch physically unattractive people get undressed—that gets old real soon. Lightning Rods removed that whole factor of the equation. It was really only after it was gone that you realized how much of your life you’d spent with a big fake smile plastered across your face.

In the early stages, when nobody had heard of Lightning Rods, women who might have been interested in this kind of career move didn’t know it existed. Recruitment, as a result, was hugely labor-intensive, and even after the recruits had signed on they required a level of through-care which was not really in the spirit in which they had been invited to join in. Later, as word started to get around, things improved considerably. Lighting Rods started to attract a type of applicant who had already resolved whatever conflicts she might experience relating to providing a service with a sexual component. The numbers on the register continued to grow steadily but counseling costs leveled off. The ratio of recruitment time to successful