The Real Girlfriend Experience

"What are you supposed to do? I was like, 'I don't want to go to Vegas. Why are you doing this?' Then he'd be really nice to me for a while. He wouldn't let me go, but we'd eat and talk, and he wouldn't hit me. Then out of nowhere, he would start screaming again. He told me if I was thinking about running that he knew where I lived."

He beat her on and off from Friday afternoon to Monday morning. "It was like that scene in Silence of the Lambs," she says, raising the pitch of her voice to match the kidnapping victim from the movie. "I was like, 'Don't make me hurt your dog, mister.' "

Sophia's driver told the man he'd called the cops — which of course he hadn't. But the ruse worked.

"Probably the weirdest part of the whole thing," she says, "as he was letting me go, like right at his door, he went to hand me his gun, like he was telling me, 'It's a hard world out there — watch out for yourself.' But right as he was handing it to me, he like remembered that he had been beating me for a couple of days and he shouldn't exactly be handing me a gun right then."

Because she was so traumatized, she says, she didn't see any clients for a week. Except one. "I had a regular, a psychiatrist, who said he had to see me." When she told him what happened, he insisted she recount the event in exhaustive detail. He even wanted to know what floor they were on. "That's the kind of thing he likes. He's really crazy."

She's seen this psychiatrist on and off for more than a year. He's married.

She estimates that about 75 percent of the guys she sees are married. She explains that sometimes the men come to her, an "incall," and sometimes she goes to them, an "outcall." She gets at least five outcalls a week to go to a client's place of work, often an office or garage. "There are a lot of, like, auto mechanics who are working on a hard job and call me up for an outcall. When I get there, he takes a break and we go into a back room or something. Then he goes right back to work. That's a few times a week." An outcall will cost $100 to $200.

I ask what her weirdest call was, aside from the kidnapping. And the reporter who wanted to go bowling.

"This one guy had a balloon fetish," she says, the long, thin kind clowns use to make balloon animals. He wanted to watch as she had sex with a balloon; then he wanted to have sex with her in a room full of balloons. "Different strokes for different folks," she says, shaking her head. She tells me she's willing to do just about anything if the money is right. "I'd rather pee on somebody or something for $300 than have to have three regular calls over an entire day."

I can't bring myself to ask if she's ever turned anyone down.

Halfway through the second game, Sophia is, for the most part, in a chipper mood. She's laughing at my silly jokes. She's pretending to be bothered when she misses all the pins. She flashes her silver smile every time she has a good roll. I keep noticing, though, that every so often, she sees a family or a happy couple on another lane and disappears briefly from our conversation. She stares distantly at nothing.

Then, as quickly as it comes, the moment is gone and she's playful again, telling me a few things she thinks most people don't know about prostitutes.

One occupational hazard, she says, is cheap men — guys who want to haggle over the "donation" all night. One particularly odd phenomenon she's noticed: The men who ask her to use a strap-on on them — guys who want to be pegged — are the cheapest clients. "They always want to negotiate the price or tell me they only have so much," she says. She shrugs and shakes her head. "I don't know what it is, but it's like every time."

In the second game, she bowls a 67 and I bowl a 99. "Almost 100," she says with a laugh. The dice on her grill sparkle as she smiles. "That's always the hardest one to get."

I buy two Cokes with straws at the bar, and we walk to the other end of the bowling alley to the arcade. Over a game of air hockey, she tells me about leaving her pimp. "I really only got with him because he could teach me how to post on Craigslist," she says, her eyes following the ricocheting puck. "So I got with him, I got that knowledge for myself — something I can take with me — and I moved on."

He showed her the ins and outs of Craigslist her first night on the job. She learned that you can use multiple email accounts to put up more than the five allotted posts a day. And that the successful girls are the ones who keep the posts going all day. He also showed her other sites where men cruise for call girls; some allow men to review and rate women. "It's important to work the internet constantly."