Was the Sex All That? What NYS Governor Eliot Spitzer Could Have Spent His $80,000 On Instead of High-Class Whores

The Alfa Romeo Brera: Sex on wheels, not for real

The old cliché says that middle-aged men buy expensive sports cars in order to get sex. So, in a way, perhaps Spitzer was just cutting out the middleman.

Of course, everything about the Spitzer sex scandal boggles the mind: The original chastity of his reputation; the salaciousness of the details connected to his disgrace; the height of his fall; the magnitude of the humiliation and embarrassment invoked when being the highest elected official in one’s state means having to tell your wife of twenty years—the mother of your three teenage daughters—that you’ve cheated on her with prostitutes—most recently the day before Valentine’s Day—and that, in mere hours, this fact is going to be on every newspaper cover and TV news program she’s ever seen and known by every living person she’s ever met.

The price of the hookers floors me: Up to $5,500 an hour? I don’t know about you, but I gotta work fairly long for 55 C-notes. Sex that expensive should come complete with Grucci fireworks. If I ever somehow slipped on a banana peel and found myself in an eighth-floor hotel room with a $5500-an-hour prostitute, I think I’d just wanna look at her. Like, I’d wanna just shine a bright light on her, so I could study her details.

Was this a smart move, on the governor’s part? I mean, even beyond the monkey wren…er, monkey skycrane it’s thrown into his life, marriage, and career, was this fiscally responsible? Even before the fiasco, Spitzer’s proposed new budget, still unratified and in limbo, was getting a lot of criticism. Will fellow lawmakers, especially Republicans, now see a man who pays $5500 for an hour of sex as a credible fiduciary?

Or, will fellow Democrats come to his rescue and say, “No, the price was $5500. He only paid $4300. In other words, he got more than 20% knocked off. That’s the kind of leadership the state wants when it comes to dealing with vendors.”

Republicans: “What do you mean? Emperor’s Club VIP is based in New Jersey. He didn’t even use a New York State pimp!”

We’ll have to wait and see. Somehow, though, I think this could have all turned out better if Spitzer had thought about other uses for the 80 grand he’s allegedly spent on flaxen-headed hoes.

For example, he could have:

• Paid to hear Karl Rove give a speech ($40,000)—twice

• Filled up over 925 mid-size car owners’ gas tanks (16 gal average.) with premium fuel from Amerigo Gas Station, in Gorda CA, which, at $5.40/gallon, is reportedly the most costly in the nation

• Paid for one years’ tuition (and quite a few books) for two New Yorkers at George Washington University, the nation’s most expensive ($37,820). Or he could have or covered all four years for nine New Yorkers at Northern New Mexico College, the nation’s cheapest ($2,206 for out-of-staters)

• Covered one year’s day care ($9,000) for nearly nine children in New York State

• Sheltered ($36,000) two homeless families for a year

• Taken care of annual health care premiums ($10,728) for over seven families

• Paid for sixteen seconds of the Iraq war ($12.5 billion/month)

Any one of these outcomes would have been vastly superior to Spitzer getting his penis watered on an out-of-town business trip by prostitutes. Like, if your going to dishonor your wife so thoroughly, at least give the setup a bit more imagination.

But say Spitzer didn’t want to go the charity route with his cash, or hear Karl Rove. A 2009 Alfa Romeo Brera (that’s a 2006 Brera at the top of this piece) runs about $42,000. For a little more than $80K, Eliot could have bought himself one, and surprised Silda with one.

That also would have created a far better end result than the one we now have: An infuriated state government, a betrayed constituency, confused and scared children, and a scorned wife, no doubt, this very minute, coldly eyeing her, ironically, neutered mate from across the growing expanse of their well-appointed Fifth Avenue apartment.