“I was no stranger to the concealed habits and survival tactics of the depraved, but was finding myself sinking deeper into a pit that was growing darker by the minute. I was broke, hungry, and desperate for a job—any real paying job that would sustain me one more day. As it turned out, help was just a compromise away. The first of many tough trade-offs I would have to make in order to raise myself out of the dreadful abyss.”
Felicia flipped the page in her notebook and nodded. Her short-cropped silver hair, coal-rimmed eyes, and chic, body-slimming trousers belied her true age, which La Costa guessed at being sixty or sixty-one. The woman could have been an actress or older model with her glamorous, striking looks and willowy frame. “Go on,” Felicia said, pausing from her writing pad and offering La Costa her full attention.
“It was in a window of an establishment called the Hen House, a dive on Highway Ten, that I saw a handwritten sign saying, GIRLS NEEDED. It was a simple, no-frills strip club with theater-style bench seating, severely watered-down drinks and cheap jug wine. That was the extent of it. Five shows nightly, ‘All Nude . . . All the Time.’ I had intended to work solely as a waitress, but was forced into performing once the owner, Günter, a burly, chain-smoking Swede, cut my hours down to two nights a week without warning. I was on the verge of getting a cashier position at the Quick Stop near the shelter during the day and was certain that between the two jobs, I could soon save enough to afford a cheap studio apartment in town.”
Stripping seemed easy enough, once you got past the fact that it was demoralizing and dirty, La Costa would later write in her memoir—the unabashed account of her less-than-humble beginnings. And, of course, it was every bit—all that.
Felicia would later expound that Mayella Jackson knew this like she knew her own name, which was why she promptly changed it. From that point on, she was known as La Costa, a name taken from a story she had once read about a rich and noble Spanish princess. A far cry from being a poor black girl from the tough dirt lots of West Memphis.
“At the time, I felt a hundred years old, yet I was barely eighteen,” La Costa said, staring out at the afternoon sun high over the Pacific.
Felicia paused and offered a gentle, non-judgmental smile.
The exposé would later reveal that La Costa soon learned to adopt the same blank stare that the other girls had while they danced. One by one, they would parade topless along a wood plank runway, pungent with fresh red acrylic paint, lined with inexpensive chase light runners around the perimeters, under the hot stage fill lights. A yank of a bikini string would reveal the rest, and each would gyrate for a full two to three minutes to a deafening stream of rock or heavy metal music blaring from large stereo speakers suspended from the ceiling by crude chains, wearing nothing but high heels, with vacant expressions that begged for so much more than life had served up.
The job paid more than schlepping cheap beer and watered-down cocktails, but the concept simply changed in the form of a trade-off. Now, what she was selling was sex—her body was on display for one dollar at a time. The first time she removed her garments completely in the smoky bar light in front of nameless strangers, she knew she had lost an irredeemable part of her very soul, or what was left of it.
Eventually, as time passed and the money came in, La Costa would later write in her memoir, it became easier to view the Hen House as nothing more than a means to an end. Night after night, the patrons trickled in, and the girls danced whether there was an entire club filled with paying customers, or merely one pathetic soul looming in the dark, nursing a scotch and soda in the dark, and fantasy fucking the Honey Dejour tantalizing him from the stage.
On a good night, she would explain, she could make up to seventy-five dollars in tips just from what the patrons would sometimes tuck in the garter she wore high and tight around her thigh. Mostly, she went out on stage in the same outfit—four-inch heels, a strand of fake pearl beads dangling between her voluptuous breasts, and tiny G-string panties purchased from the lingerie shop with her first twenty-five dollars earned.
It was important to have the right tools of the trade, La Costa would go on to explain in her book. I wore an old pair of high-heeled cloth pumps that a previous stripper had left behind. Günter said that I could have them. They were badly scuffed, and the heels were wobbly, but they had to do. He also fronted me forty-five extra dollars for a can of shoe polish, glitter, and some glue. With the change, I purchased some dime-store makeup and a cheap wig. And that was it. I was ready to go to work.
“Can you describe the workspace that you had?” Felicia asked.
“There were some inexpensive toiletries provided—mouthwash, razors, and feminine products, kept in a back dressing room, which was really a storage closet converted for the girls to use. It featured a few nude posters and a single stand-up mirror. There were no lockers or hooks, just empty shelf space here and there between the canned olives and pearl onions.
“The girls came, and they went. I never allowed myself to get close to anyone. Most of them were teen runaways like me, who lied about their age to get the job, although looking nothing like fourteen- or sixteen-year-olds. Instead, they looked every bit their fraudulent ages. Tired, worn faces from too much partying or too much heartache and neglect, either self-inflicted or from jaded childhoods or some such abuse at the hand of husbands, boyfriends, or johns. It did not matter much what brought them there. It was a secret sorority of silence that each one maintained. Friendships were not a part of the deal. Rivalry reigned in a competition for hours, prime stage time, and ‘preferred’ patrons, who tipped lavishly for special attentions. The girls knew who the high tippers were, and the customers knew the girls who were willing to give them more than an eyeful for a dollar.”
Felicia shifted, unwinding her crossed legs, now letting the leather binder lay squarely across her lap, and referenced her notes. “Long before losing your cashier job that you also had at the Quick Stop, you write in your account that you were: ‘forced to resort to turning tricks to make the rent.’ Is that correct?”
“Yes, it was a relentless cycle of use or be used in order to survive. Eviction was constantly looming, and the struggle to make my own way in the world—that world—was a challenge that far outweighed the shame and personal cost of what it took to do it. I was convinced of simply this: If I could make it through one more day, and then one more night, there in that place, then I could do anything.”
La Costa’s memoir would poignantly explain, I did not think of my job as anything more than performing. I had told myself time and time again as I knelt in the darkness of doorways and parked cars with my head bent over a stranger’s lap, that it was better than any atrocity done unto me against my will.
Felicia raised a perfectly arched gray eyebrow. “Would you care to elaborate on what you mean by that? Against your will?”
La Costa shook her head and reached for her glass of iced tea.
A long, slow sip was enough of a cue for Felicia to understand. Some topics would be off limits, and this was one of them.
La Costa waited a beat, and then continued. “When I missed my period for the third month in a row and feared that I was pregnant, I freaked out. Günter got wind of it and subsequently fired me.”
“Desperate and shaken,” Felicia confirmed, checking her notepad, “you attempted to end the pregnancy with an overdose of diet pills and gin, correct? A thwarted stunt that landed you in Los Angeles County Hospital, when your landlord discovered you passed out on your bed after you did not report to work at the Quick Stop for three days straight.”
“That’s correct. He called an ambulance, and then promptly evicted me. Not one of my better days!” La Costa recalled solemnly. “Although there was little chance at that point that things could have gotten any worse. I had nowhere to come home to when I was released from the hospital. And I was still with child.”
“So, now desolate and scared,” Felicia said, “you faced yet another impossible hurdle and was once agai
n back on the streets.”
La Costa nodded. “The situation was either to be a death sentence, or a steppingstone for me. I chose to make it the latter.”
“That’s remarkable,” the pensive reporter said. “What did you do? Where did you go next?”
La Costa refreshed both tea glasses and then continued. “To another shelter. St. Augustine’s provided a folding cot in an open room with scores of filthy, diseased bodies hacking and moaning and babbling incoherently. All forms of humanity—men, women, children, teens, gays, straights, freaks and felons, druggies, indigents, the insane, and the walking dead—you name it, I saw it. One hot meal a day was served from the good mercies of the sisters of the church in a basement soup kitchen.”
La Costa explained how she quickly learned from some savvy street residents where the daily handouts and best garbage scraps could be found. “The day I ate a half-eaten Chinese take-out from a dumpster, where a harried legal secretary-type had deposited it, was the lowest moment of my life. Ironically, somehow seeming to be lower even than prostituting myself for the price of a full course meal.”
“And then, as if that were not enough, something else happened,” Felicia prompted, again referencing her notes.
“The weeks passed, and my stomach began to swell. I started smoking cigarette butts wherever I could scavenge one, picking them out of public ashtrays or off the pavement to curb the constant hunger pangs and the incessant nausea. No one wanted sex from a pregnant black girl who was street-weary and dirty, who lived among the degenerate drifters beneath the freeway, in gangways and service tunnels. I figured that the baby had died when the stirring in my belly stopped and my feet went numb from the swelling.”
At nearly twenty-one weeks, the reporter would later write, she delivered the stillborn fetus in an abandoned building, alone.
The words of La Costa’s heart-wrenching memoir said all that was left to relay, and Felicia would use it verbatim: I wrapped it in newspapers like a shank of meat and carried the blood-soaked bundle to the beach, where I set it adrift along the rocky ravine. Then I erected a makeshift cross in the sand, carving out a recess with my bare hands, not fifty yards from the shore. I was emotionless the entire time, attending only to the task and thinking nothing more. I had taught myself by then to detach from all that was far too fantastic to bear; to numb myself sufficiently from the unthinkable. Then I drained the contents of a discarded bottle of bourbon I had found. One full swallow was all it delivered. The liquid stung like fire as it ripped down my throat. I’ll never forget the taste.
I just sat there for a long while, sitting with my feet in the wet sand, watching the waves take my baby boy away.
Chapter Six
Los Angeles – December 1988
“Why don’t you tell me why it is that you want to work for us here at Sophisticate?”
“I could be useful in many ways. I am a fast learner. I have good ideas, and I have a knack for writing. I could maybe proofread ad copy, or such,” La Costa said, averting her eyes. “I could even model maybe a little myself. I see there are a lot of black girls with your agency who are, well, light-skinned. I think that I am more representative of the ancestral heritage.”
La Costa’s heart was pounding. How stupid! What on earth was she saying? The Caucasian woman seated behind the gigantic desk stopped scribbling on the yellow legal pad in front of her.
“I assume that you have a headshot, dear?”
“No, ma’am.”
“I see. You will be getting one soon, I trust?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She plucked her glasses off of her nose and looked squarely at La Costa, who was barely seventeen and had obviously lied on the application on more than one account. “You know, Miss Jackson, our girls must be at least eighteen to model for the agency in any capacity. Without any valid identification, I am afraid . . . ”
La Costa nodded. She only wanted out. A way to earn a respectable living that didn’t involve being ogled and groped for the bargain price of a dollar a dance.
The harried-looking woman sighed. She was a bundle of nerves herself, trapped behind a desk of contracts, composites, and unreturned phone messages. Stacks of magazines towered on shelves too weak to hold them, threatening to collapse at any moment. More loomed on windowsills and were piled on the floor. She had been without a receptionist for four weeks, and things were not getting any easier. She was short-staffed as it was, and backlogged with clients clamoring for models for their fall campaigns. There just were not enough hours in the day. Her former girl, Carla, was on maternity leave, and Lord knows, she needed the help, right now. She had certainly been pleased when the women’s shelter called with the referral. The possibility of finding someone mid-summer was close to impossible, and she would have to take what she could get. But could the girl be trusted? That was the question.
“I have a receptionist position open. I’m in need of someone temporarily.” She eyed La Costa hopefully. “Can you type?”
La Costa shook her head.
“I see . . . how about filing, then?”
La Costa fidgeted.
“Can you answer phones, dear? Can you do that?”
La Costa nodded.
“Bingo!” the woman brightened. “I’ll try you out, and we’ll go from there.”
La Costa surveyed the office. It was beautiful. Messy, but beautiful. She knew that she could clean it up and make it more functional. A glint flickered in her eye. She had been managing chaos of her own for years. “Thank you, ma’am,” La Costa said, smiling. It would be a real job!
“Call me Constance, dear,” the woman said, sealing the deal with a handshake. Then she began rifling through a file drawer for a blank application.
* * *
One week later, La Costa met one of the agency’s most striking models, Panther St. James. Everything about her was the real deal, except for her name. Panther was a nickname that she traded in place of her given name, Phyllis Jean St. James, which she had inherited from her dear Southern memaw from Independence, Missouri. The first time La Costa laid eyes on her, she thought that Panther was the most beautiful creature she had ever seen.
Two years her senior, Panther was nineteen, but looked as alluring and sophisticated as any twenty-something model. She had exotic good looks, delicate bone structure, a pert nose, and dazzling white teeth that positively sparkled against her light brown skin. It was her remarkable feline eyes that seemed to radiate with golden light that labeled her from childhood with the nickname, Panther. “Cat’s eyes!” her grandfather would say prophetically about his granddaughter’s remarkable feline features. “Along with the temper of a lion!” he would add unapologetically. Eventually, the moniker just stuck, planting in the then-six-year-old girl’s soul the notion that she was indeed, something of a novelty.
It was a great advantage, especially in the business, to possess the benefit of a youthful body and grownup looks. But Panther only moonlighted for Constance’s modeling agency to support her lavish shopping and cocaine habits. Panther primarily made money working as a stripper at an elite gentlemen’s club downtown. She was a “Kitten,” as the girls were called at Lucy DuMont’s famed Mink Kitty nightclub. There certainly was no place at The Mink Kitty for crow’s feet or wrinkled skin. All of Lucy’s girls had to have the bona fide goods, and Panther delivered. The Kittens were Lucy DuMont’s biggest draw, and the former West Harlem Madame knew a thing or two about drawing bees to honey. Nobody knew the skin business better than Lucy DuMont.
The first time La Costa met Panther, she was like most all the other models, dressed down in a faded T-shirt and well-worn designer jeans, sporting a long, silken ponytail wrapped like a sable mane into a twist on top of her head. Her killer thoroughbred legs made her something to be reckoned with. They appeared to go on for miles up to her neck, cinching her runway-model status with the blessing of a towering height of five feet, eleven inches. She weighed in at a sinewy one hundred twenty pounds. Her flawle
ss mocha skin glowed radiantly, and her signature amber eyes were rimmed in charcoal points around the edges—proof positive that she lived up to her name.
Panther had been with Sophisticate Models for the past year and a half and was one of their most requested for product shoots and convention appearances. She mostly turned them down, however, preferring instead to dance two to three nights a week at the Mink Kitty, where she made more money in one weekend than in two whole months of passing out flyers at car shows and boat expositions.
At Lucy’s club, Panther was a headline draw. One of only a few Showcase Kittens who stripped twice nightly at designated showtimes. She worked a total of forty minutes a night and went home four to five hundred dollars richer. Panther had a million-dollar body that just wouldn’t quit, and she loved to strut and shimmy in G-strings and teddies on the main stage dance pole.
She was the sleekest and sexiest stripper I had ever seen, La Costa would later relay in her memoir. The first time that I had ever seen her perform, I was mesmerized.
The two had become fast friends during Panther’s many visits to the agency. They quickly bonded when Panther revealed details about her “night job,” and came to learn about La Costa’s stint as a dancer at the Hen House off Highway Ten on the amateur circuit. She was the only soul La Costa had told about her past. “It was far from glamorous,” La Costa confided.
“You should come on by and see one of our shows,” Panther offered, tossing a pink business card onto La Costa’s desk on her way to a go-see. “I can even arrange for you to meet Lucy, if you’d like. Pays a lot better than this temp gig, and you GOT the goods, gurl!”
The offer stood for two months before La Costa took her up on it. The stint with Sophisticate was good, but it was temporary, and the pay was only minimum wage. Rumor had it that Carla was returning and wanted her position back at the reception desk. La Costa knew that it was only a matter of time before she would be let go. She was also desperate to get out of her crappy skid-row-esque apartment. Working at the Mink Kitty sounded like her ticket to much better days, for certain.
Sexy Ink! Page 3