A western Texas fracker starring in a podcast about how his attempted moonlighting as a handyman turned into lucrative sex work largely solicited by distracted oil industry professionals’ housewives says he believes his region’s repressive sexual attitudes gave his side gig an opening to flourish.
“There’s an inherent kind of self-denial,” the subject of The Handyman of West Texas, identified only as Mickey, said in a recent interview. “We all have these thoughts. But we lie to ourselves and try to conform to … how you’re supposed to be repressing your own pleasure.”
Mickey said he arrived at that observation in part from the post-coital talks he has held with many of the adult women in his sliver of the Permian Basin’s Midland area, who collectively compensated him in the mid-six figures during his five-year run escorting amid communities depicted on television shows such as Landman and Friday Night Lights.
As Mickey put it on the documentary podcast and separately to the Guardian, his path to escorting was circuitous. He had just gotten divorced from a woman to whom he had been married to for two decades. He wanted to keep himself occupied as well as earn a little money during his resting periods between his fracking work, which typically involve 15-hour daily shifts, two weeks at a time.
So he posted an online advertisement offering his services hanging shutters, repairing leaky faucets or completing other such odd jobs. The rugged, visually appealing Mickey included a picture of himself, thinking it might make potential clients feel safer about hiring a stranger off the internet.
Mickey recalled that his first respondent was a woman who was a deacon at her church. She said she would like him to fix shutters at her mansion while her husband was away on an oil rig.
Shortly after he arrived, she successfully leaned in for a kiss and they had sex. She paid Mickey $200 despite his not touching a single shutter at her home and sent him on his way.
He said his second client ostensibly summoned him for a similar small household repair, gathering that her husband likewise was away at work. She and Mickey had sex almost immediately after she answered the door in a negligee, and – without prompting – she handed him exactly $200 for, he assumed, his performance.
Mickey said he has never forgotten how he surmised the first woman recommended him to the second, given they both handed him the exact same amount of money. “I had no freaking clue that this subculture kind of lifestyle existed, you know?” he said.
“And apparently it’s pretty damn prevalent.”
As he revisits in detail on The Handyman of West Texas, hosted by Johnathan Walton of Queen of the Con fame, the myriad ensuing experiences have afforded him a financial cushion not many can presume in today’s US economy.
They have also intermittently thrust him into absurd situations, such as the time a married client’s housekeeper walked in on her and Mickey. “Don’t worry – Maria won’t say anything,” the client assured a panicked Mickey, as he recalled.
And they have taught him about himself as much as others.
He gained some insight into his own conservative upbringing, which – to summarize it briefly – largely kept him from being exposed to other bodies. Then, for much of his adult life, he was intimate exclusively with his wife of about 20 years.
Therefore, Mickey said it was not until he stumbled into escorting at about age 45 that his clients’ enthusiastic remarks made him realize he was substantially longer and girthier than average.
Mickey furthermore learned the concept of consensual non-monogamy, explaining that a sizable minority of his clientele weren’t neglected women married to inattentive men. They were couples who hired Mickey for him to have sex with the wife with the husband’s approval.
Of those husbands, he admitted that if he were ever to marry, “I couldn’t put myself in their shoes.”
He also said those encounters bestowed him with the main lesson he hopes to offer people interested in keeping their relationships lively. And that is to seek out things together, not necessarily sexually, that are “out of the norm – that … give a sense of excitement being heightened and a feeling of, ‘What’s happening right now is crazy.’”
Mickey took a moment to consider if he was proverbially flying a little too close to the sun telling his story on a podcast that began airing on 20 January and was being planned for a run of about 10 episodes until May. He said he was confident the fact that there were 30,000 or so frackers in his neck of the woods, provided him enough cover.
And he also said there were so many people with lives like those of the clients he describes on The Handyman of West Texas that he was “not too concerned”.
He nonetheless said he timed his retirement to coincide with the show’s release on platforms such as Apple Podcasts.
“Obviously,” he said, “I couldn’t keep doing it once this thing became public. I thought to myself, ‘Maybe this is a perfect segue into kind of getting out.’”
