Fiona Helmsley is a writer of creative non-fiction and poetry. Her writing can be found in various anthologies like How Dirty Girls Get Clean and Air in the Paragraph Line and online at websites like Jezebel, Junk Lit and The Rumpus. She can be reached through her blog Flee Flee This Sad Hotel at http://ilikemymeattender.blogspot.com. This story can be found in David Henry Sterry and R.J. Martin Jr.’s new anthology Johns, Marks, Tricks and Chickenhawks: Professionals & Their Clients Writing about Each Other from Soft Skull Press.
I’d been down that road a million times before and had learned the hard way that unless you had some kind of special line just for them, it never paid to give a client your phone number.