As Needed for Pain by Dan Peres

Author:Dan Peres
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-02-10T16:00:00+00:00

Journey was playing on the stereo the first night Chickpea came over. I had considered putting on something moodier, like Al Green or Marvin Gaye, but that seemed cheesy and somewhat cliché. I was sure that call girls had heard enough “Sexual Healing” to last a lifetime. I figured I’d give her a break. Plus, I’d recently seen an episode of Behind the Music on Journey and was reminded that Raised on Radio was the first cassette I ever bought with my own money. It may not have been a career-defining album, but it did have a couple of hits. I was an unabashed Journey fan, something the editors of Details took great delight in. It seemed that making fun of my taste in music was a growing obsession for many.

It had been over a month since Caroline and I broke up. I had just returned from the 2001–2002 fall/winter European men’s fashion shows, with stops in Milan and Paris. I was really starting to love these trips—and not for the fashion forecasting. It was hard to get excited about shearling-lined bombers and gray flannel double-breasted suits. No, for me these trips were all about lodging. I loved the hotels. The room service. The terry cloth robes. The fact that I could luxuriate in an opiate fog in 900-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets at the Four Seasons in Milan and the Ritz in Paris. The highs always seemed just a little bit higher in a five-star hotel.

Spending $1,000 on a call girl was the furthest thing from my mind when I walked back into the Details’s 34th Street offices the first Monday after my semiannual European fashion adventure. We had just shipped the all-important March issue and I needed to make sure that things were moving smoothly with April and May. I may have been something of an absentee editor—even, on occasion, when I was in the office—but I managed to focus long enough to make sure we were building a strong magazine. It mattered to me that the mix of content was right, that the images were beautiful, that the design was forward thinking, that the stories and headlines were great. This had become something of a shaky high-wire act every month. I would make it across and then look back in amazement and wonder at how I had done it—at how I was still alive.

I was on my way to lunch when Steven, an eager junior editor with a slight lisp who sat directly outside of my fourth-floor office, grabbed me and pitched a story about wealthy men ordering ultra-expensive escorts over the internet.

“These women aren’t like the hooker Hugh Grant got busted with,” he said, going for an older but still useful reference. “They’re not streetwalkers. These are tens. Total beauties. Check it out.”

I leaned over the back of his chair as he brought up the Elegant Affairs website. There was a tuna sandwich on his desk. The smell made my stomach turn. There was a grid of

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