My Brother, My Mother, and a Call Girl

by Mara Cohen Marks

My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother.

My mother didn’t bother asking Danny for his permission before engaging Monique’s services. She didn’t ask my father to condone the transaction. Nor was she troubled by social mores or laws against solicitation. She deserves a Mother of the Year Award.

There was a reason for my mother’s taboo-busting parenting. Danny was born with a rare, incurable genetic disease that affects the development and function of the nervous system. The typical lifespan for children born with Familial Dysautonomia was then about five years. My mother rolled up her sleeves, strapped on her stilettos, and ignored the statistic. A parent now myself, I wonder if I have half my mother’s grit and grace.

You might say the call girl was just one of the treatment protocols my mother improvised. Growing up, Danny suffered severe reflux that caused recurrent pneumonias, so my parents learned how to perform at-home pulmonary therapy, suctioning Danny’s nasal passages and gently thumping his back and chest. Danny’s eyes didn’t produce natural tears, so he administered eye drops throughout the day to prevent corneal abrasions. An extreme curvature of the spine and hunched shoulders required Danny to wear a special back brace and eventually to undergo a risky spinal fusion surgery.

Danny’s poor balance and coordination made it impossible for him jump or skip, catch a ball, ride a bicycle, or drive a car. By the time he was an adult, he could barely walk unaided.

All this was bad, but his greatest health peril occurred when his body failed to regulate its responses to physical or emotional stress, turning anything from a minor cold or test-taking jitters into a life-threatening emergency marked by uncontrollable vomiting and wildly oscillating blood pressure and heart rate. These horrifying events landed Danny in the Intensive Care hospital ward scores of times. To attempt to arrest the deadly cycle, Danny practiced relaxation techniques, and doctors taught our parents how to administer Thorazine or Valium injections.

Remarkably, when Danny was 22 surgeons affiliated with the Familial Dysautonomia Foundation performed a breakthrough procedure to tighten his esophagus and prevent the menace of intractable vomiting.

The results were life-altering, and Danny’s anxiety about the sudden onset of a vomiting crisis dissipated. His health improved along with his confidence. With the encouragement of his doctors and our parents, Danny decided he was ready to get his own apartment.

It was the late 1980s, and a building boom in downtown Denver was underway. An Embassy Suites Hotel was going up, and there were a few floors reserved for long-term leases. My parents struck a deal on a swanky one-bedroom with drop-dead views of the Rocky Mountains — the ideal bachelor pad.

That’s when my mother dared to dream the kinds of dreams most mothers take for granted. “I thought someday he’d meet a girl,” she confides.

It wasn’t entirely beyond the realm of possibility. A sociology major at Colorado University in Denver, Danny was frequently in the company of other young adults. He was charming and outgoing, with a mop of chestnut brown hair, long, delicate fingers and a fuzzy moustache he’d grown at our mother’s urging. Danny’s laugh was infectious, and he was a dapper dresser, right down to his argyle socks. But even after puberty Danny remained diminutive in size — 5’1″ and all of 110 pounds on a good day.

There was a piano bar in his building catering to hotel guests and business people who worked downtown. My brother liked to hang out there in the evenings, enjoying the music and nursing a bottle of Perrier. Picture George Clooney rendered as a Sesame Street Muppet. That was our Danny.

My mother envisioned him with a young woman inclined to focus more on the George Clooney part, someone small in stature, maybe with a mild disability. She fantasized about Danny getting married and maybe having children of his own.

And she longed for something very basic for Danny: the experience of physical intimacy. “I understood that he was already growing and developing like any other male. I looked upon Danny as going through different markers. Sex was just another marker that was necessary but delayed.”

But my mother knew Danny’s first sexual encounter entailed more than simply finding the right girl. For all my brother’s charms, he wasn’t what one would call a smooth operator. For example, Danny was blissfully unaware of a tiny drip of urine that often bloomed around the crotch of his pants. “I didn’t want to embarrass him over such a small thing,” my mother shrugs.

She’d become a lay expert on the autonomic nervous system. She knew, for instance, that the parasympathetic branch controls penile erections, whereas ejaculations are functions of the sympathetic branch. Danny could have erections, that much we’d all had occasions to notice at morning time. What my mother didn’t know was whether Danny could ejaculate or have a child of his own. “I was particularly interested in the possibility of procreation. In those days, parents expected to become grandparents.”

My mother’s consultations with neurologists and urologists in Denver and New York shed no light on the question. It was a matter for empirical inquiry. My mother figured a call girl would provide the most expedient solution. So she turned to an acquaintance who struck her as the type who’d “know women.”

Jay was a widower whose 20-year-old daughter had Down syndrome. My mother figured he too had considered the dilemma of his daughter’s sexuality. “We were both parents of disabled young adults. We were in the same club.”

Her instincts about Jay were spot on.

“Oh sure! I know several women and one in particular comes to mind. Yeah, I’ll mention it the next time I see her, and I’ll have her give you a call. She’s the best!”

Thoughtfully, Jay negotiated the fee, and Monique called my mother to arrange the rest of the details. She was to arrive at my brother’s apartment on a Saturday afternoon and leave the next morning. Monique informed my mother she liked to have a bottle of wine in the refrigerator. To help relax, Monique explained. My mother told her to bring a bottle.

Monique asked if my mother wanted to meet her in person.

“No! I didn’t want to meet!” my mother recalls with a shriek. Plus, Jay had already vouched for her.

My mother’s next step was to prepare Danny for his upcoming tryst.

“I told him that this was a normal and healthy thing. I said sex is like breathing and eating. It’s something that is part of life.” My mother says Danny didn’t know how to respond. “It was like, ‘duh . . . ’ no real reaction.”

Danny was embarrassed, but finally relented. “Alright, alright already!”

My mother’s final task was to inform my father about the arrangements she’d made.

“I wanted to get everything squared away first. When I finally brought it up, Daddy went bonkers. Absolutely wild.” A street-tough product of Newark public housing, my mother was undeterred. “I didn’t want anything to do with his irrationality, so I just left the room.”

With nearly three decades of marriage under his belt, my father knew it was futile to oppose my mother, so he fell into line. “Okay, just don’t tell me about it! I don’t want to know any details!”

“It didn’t take him long to come around,” my mother smiles.

Finally my brother’s big day rolled around. He’d tidied up his apartment and splashed on Polo cologne.

When Monique arrived in the lobby downstairs, she stepped into the elevator with three residents from the building. They eyed the attractive woman dressed in a skin-tight skirt carrying a bottle of wine. Monique hesitated at the control panel as the others selected their floors.

“Does anybody know what floor Danny Cohen lives on?” she asked as the elevator doors slid shut.

As a matter of fact, all three passengers knew my brother. One was a judge, Danny’s best friend from the building. He’d moved in around the same time as my brother, he worked at the courthouse downtown, and he occasionally joined Danny for a casual meal in the restaurant downstairs. Suddenly the air was so heavy, it seemed like the elevator had malfunctioned.

Moments after Monique exited on Danny’s floor, my parent’s phone rang. It was the judge on the line.

“A loose lady was going up the elevator looking for ‘Daniel Cohen’! Should I call the police?”

“Maybe she’s just a friend from school.”

“Look,” the judge insisted. “She’s an obvious hooker! What the hell does she want with Danny?”

Finally my mother leveled with the judge. “I hired her,” she said.

Even the lawman could see this was the right thing to do. He and my mother had a good laugh.

Laughter aside, my parents respected my brother’s privacy. The next day, they decided not to call him. Had it been an ordinary Sunday, Danny would have called them around 9 a.m.

“We waited around all frapping day and nothing,” says my mother. “No phone call from Danny.”

“Maybe he hasn’t come up for air,” joked my father.

When the phone finally rang, it was Jay. “How’d it go?”

“I don’t know, we haven’t heard a peep from him all day!”

“Don’t worry,” Jay assured my mother. “She’s a great gal, and she knew exactly what to do.”

By mid-afternoon, my mother was overcome by curiosity. She dialed my brother’s apartment. “So how was it?”

Danny was circumspect. “Everything was fine.”

The call girl provided a more detailed report when she rang my mother a few days later. Danny hadn’t achieved an orgasm.

“That put the question of reproduction to rest,” says my mother. “But he did experience intercourse.”

Within two years, Danny’s balance and walking deteriorated to the point where he’d returned to live with our parents. One evening he and my mother were relaxing in front of the television. They’d watched a Bill Moyers program focusing on death rituals in various cultures, and my mother asked Danny if he ever thought about dying. Danny reflected for a moment.

“Well, no, I mean, maybe if I’d had something serious like Cystic Fibrosis or something.” Was this his characteristic naiveté, or was he considerately shielding my mother from thoughts of his own mortality? We’ll never know.

My mother found Danny the next morning. He was curled on the floor beside his bed like a bird that had fallen from its nest. It was a clear spring morning, less than a week before Mother’s Day. He was 28.

Shortly after Danny’s funeral, a man who occasionally gave Danny rides to school dropped by. He was devastated.

“Did Danny ever, um . . . was he ever with a lady?”

My mother told him about Monique.

“You took care of everything!” he said, smiling with relief. “You’re quite a lady.”

Reflecting on her transaction with Monique, my mother is matter-of-fact. “I’m a realist. This is what needed to be done. For every child, especially one with a disability, a parent wants things to be as normal as possible. Danny experienced all of life. I feel he lived his to the fullest.”

Mara Cohen Marks is a writer and mother who lives in Los Angeles. She celebrates Mother’s Day every day.