After four years in the Air Force, Hawk moved to southern California years ago to pursue a career in the entertainment business. He started by dancing in clubs and bars around the Los Angeles area, and eventually, he became an escort. Now, he's one of the best-known gigolos in the world thanks to his role on Showtime's reality TV series Gigolos, which follows the lives of Hawk and several other male escorts in Las Vegas, Nevada. He recently sat down with Men’s Health to discuss his life, his livelihood, and upcoming book, Nick Hawk’s 100 Kicks in the Ass: A Guide To Gaining Confidence & Reaching Your Full-Potential.
When I moved to California, things didn't work out well in the beginning, and I was very lost. I drank a lot. I did a lot of drugs. I struggled with severe anxiety and confidence issues when I was a child, and it was drinking that got me out of my skin. I thought I could get all the hard work done in the Air Force, get my schooling done, and then pursue entertainment.
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I traveled from girlfriend to girlfriend to girlfriend, trying to find out what I was missing from life and love. I'm very competitive, and that pushed me to be good with women. But I hit this wall, where I realised that if I wanted to be special or successful in life, then I really have to fucking work for it. I decided that I don't want to be an angry person anymore. I don’t want to be a scared person anymore, and I'm going to do everything I can to be the best version of myself. I was stripping at the time, and I started taking care of myself. I started doing a little fitness training. And then I got into gigoloing, and that's what really motivated me and pushed me even farther to put even more pieces of the puzzle together in my own life. I started to put so many pieces of the puzzle together.
When I started gigoloing, I really got thrown to the wolves. I thought it was just going to be fun and entertainment. I didn’t think it was going to be something that I was going to embrace and be proud of and give any fulfillment in my life. At the time, I thought I was just going to be meat....I mean, I am meat every once in a while, and I don’t hate doing that — I like to satisfy in as many ways as possible. But it transformed into more than that.
Now, I like building relationships. I sleep with less women since becoming a gigolo than I did before. My sex and sexuality is more sacred to me than it once was. I once wanted to beat Wilt Chamberlain's record [Chamberlain famously claimed that he slept with 20,000 women in his life], and I was probably on my way for a little while — that's that's what drove me and motivated me.
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I prefer to see a handful of regulars, as opposed to many different clients multiple times a week. I only take a few bookings a month, and they're typically an overnight or longer [rates can range from $3,000 to $25,000 for a full week]. Sex is never guaranteed, of course. I’ll see anybody once, though. I do a meet and greet, a four-hour booking to test the waters a little bit [Hawk's four-hour rate is $1,550]. I don't like to be a bucket list item, but I am for a lot of women, and I don't mind it.
A lot of my clients, they just got divorced or they were in a relationship for a long time, or they worked their ass off their whole lives, or they went to college or worked to build a brand or business or whatever and they're like, "OK, now I want to have some fun. Time to date. Shit, what do I do?" You come to me.
When women come to me, I want to leave them with a complete feeling of satisfaction — not just sexually, not just mentally. I’m a lot of fucking money and I want to give them their money's worth. I want them satisfied on every level, and I want to leave them with you know such a great feeling. I want it to be one of their best fucking nights when they're with me. I do everything I make it that way.
I've had some severely lost people come to me for help and advice. I wasn’t fucking ready for it. Believe me, I'm ready now. There was a time when I wasn't. The first time, I really got thrown to the wolves. I had a lady who told me that she’d cleared out her bank accounts, we were gonna have a fun weekend or two, and then she was going to kill herself. I was like "Oh, shit. She told me this. Now what?" Luckily, I was at the stage in my life where I took [helping her] as a challenge. I talked to her, and found out that she needed to be outside more, and she [mentioned] she missed jogging in a park. I talked her into moving into a new apartment that was right by a running path, and it's something simple like that really changed her life.
My clients come to me for an amazing time, but also for advice. About half my clients struggle with severe social anxiety and confidence issues, and almost all of them come to me for some kind of health or fitness advice [Hawk's website advertises confidence and life coaching]. The biggest piece of advice that I can give anybody about working out is to just do anything for a minimum of 30 minutes that will get your heart rate up and get you sweating every other day. If you miss a day, you do the next no matter what, and you do that forever.
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I gave sex advice for a long time, too. The best way to improve your sex life is to improve yourself. [My fitness] plan — do something every other day, if you miss a day, do the next — is something that you should apply to sex as well. Explore your sexual energy or have sex or get off or whatever every other day as well. Be more flirty! Send more pictures to your friends, send more sexts! Be more creative in your life! You have to be consistently creative in some way shape or form — writing, drawing, painting, developing your website. That's what I do, and I’m 36, and I’m the fastest, strongest, and quickest I’ve ever felt in my life.
This article originally appeared on Men's Health