Thirty

by Lawrence Block

  I suppose I’ll get drunk, which isn’t the same thing at all. And if I do, it’ll have to be on wine. I can’t afford anything classier. Not now.

  July 11

  I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.

  I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)

  There’s nothing to it.

  Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution—what a windy clinical word for the actual process—but I wouldn’t have believed it could be so, oh, what’s the word? Noninvolving?

  That’s not exactly it. That was part of it, the feeling of this-person-he’s-fucking-is-not-the-real-me, and I suppose every girl has to feel that in order to keep from despising herself. And there is a certain amount of tripping out involved. I have always been good, perhaps too good, at being able to carry on a conversation, nodding in the right places, grunting uh-huh and mmmm and uh-uh, even contributing a phrase or a sentence now and then, without paying a dime’s worth of attention to what’s going on.

  And you know, you can do this physically as well as verbally. It’s much the same thing, except it’s the body instead of the mind that is just going through the motions of participating.

  I made forty-five dollars today. That’s at least twice as much as I could have made in any job I could have gotten, and in half the hours.

  The sex part—

  A flash. It was almost exactly the same as when I hit the hay with what’s-his-name, Edgar. The same thing! The same I’m-not-really-here, the same faint sense of contempt for the man I was with, the same general disinterest in what we were doing in bed, the same experience of getting a certain amount of pleasure from it but being too detached to really enjoy it, or even to really hate it, for that matter.

  I don’t see why I can’t go on this way. It shouldn’t be too terribly hard to put away a hundred dollars a week. A hundred dollars is four or five tricks. (The New Math.) Four or five men a week and the rent is paid.

  Went to the gay bar last night and got drunk. A little foggy on what happened, but I think I went home with a girl and I think we made it. I drank some wine before I went there, then had a bottle of cough syrup—terpin hydrate and codeine—you have to sign the book when you buy it and the druggist gives you an I-know-what-you-want-this-for-you-junkie-bitch look, but how else can you get high for seventy-nine cents?

  Then all the drinks at the gay bar, which she bought for me, and whatever we had at her place. For all I know we had cocaine at her place. I really don’t remember. I have vague sex memories but they parallel a couple of freaky dreams I’ve been having lately, so who knows which was which?

  The other thing, which I haven’t written about in here, and which I’m still not writing about because it scares me that much, hasn’t happened yet.

  If it doesn’t happen soon I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, well, I guess I can always kill myself.

  The girl is not entirely kidding.

  July 15

  Still nothing.

  What will I do? If Eric were around he would know what to do. I suppose he would help, but who knows? Who knows anything any more?

  Maybe it will work out.

  Except I know it won’t. I’ve never even worried about it before and this time I just knew.

  It’s impossible. Everybody says it’s impossible. What do you do? Sue the manufacturer?

  Except I probably forgot. I know I forget a lot of the time, I always have extras left over.

  (Write it, you idiot! Go on!)

  No, I can’t. I don’t want to. I guess I’ll go out and fuck somebody and make some money.

  Yesterday I turned five tricks and all five of them wanted to be blown. All five. That was the only contact they wanted to have with me.

  Why don’t they turn queer?

  If I did nothing but that all the time I wouldn’t have this problem.

  July 17

  I was reading through this.

  I’m really sick. Most of the time I don’t realize it. Or maybe I do deep down inside. All of that shit early on about making progress. Some kind of progress. The girl is going noisily out of her skull.

  I have a feeling, too, that it’s not a good idea to drink cough syrup every day.

  Fuck it. Maybe it’ll hurt the baby.

  July 18

  It really looked as though I would never write that last line. It’s funny because I’ve been able to put down almost everything else I’ve done, but now what I seem to be is pregnant—I’m never late, and God am I late now. And even now I can’t sit back and let myself gush about it. I’m really uptight about this. I’ve never been quite like this before.

  Then again, I’ve never been pregnant before.

  This isn’t supposed to happen to girls on the pill. Everybody said the pill would put abortionists out of business. What is it, some sort of mad suicidal or self-destructive streak in me? How can you run around the city fucking absolutely everybody and forget to take your pill first thing in the morning? And it isn’t as if I have such a full schedule that I can’t find time to take a birth control pill. It isn’t as though I have so many other vital things to remember that little trivial things like not getting pregnant are too much to remember.

  As a matter of fact, there have been days when taking my pill was just about the only thing I did do. There were also days when it was one of many things I didn’t do. Which is why I am presently knocked up.

  When Howie and I were trying to have a baby, nothing happened. The river flowed red like a clock. Red like a clock? What is the matter with me today? And what’s with cutesy little euphemisms for menstruating?

  What do I do now?

  Who do I know who would know where to go for an abortion? The funny thing is probably just about anybody. Of the old gang in Eastchester I’m sure there were a lot who went under the knife. If this had happened before I left Howard, I would just have asked Marcie. Nothing simpler. If she hadn’t had an abortion herself she would certainly know somebody who had, and it would all be very intelligently arranged, and it would cost whatever it is that they cost, which I guess is a thousand dollars (which means I could have afforded it if I hadn’t had the robbery, and of course people become paranoid, why shouldn’t people become paranoid, because it’s pretty obvious that the world is conspiring against me. I mean, how else would everything happen this way, as if on schedule? It can’t all be luck. Somebody up there hates me.)

  The same question, over and over and over. What do I do now? I wish I knew the answer.

  There’s not even any point in looking for an abortionist now because I don’t have any money to pay him with. The way things stand now I’ll have the rent when it’s due and probably a couple of hundred dollars beyond that, but I don’t know how long I can go before it’s too late to have the abortion.

  Maybe I should have the baby.

  Oh, that’s just what I need. And if worst comes to worst I can take it back to Howie. Here’s somebody’s baby to bring us back together again.

  Solid.

  July 24

  Liz says she knows someone who will do it for three hundred dollars. She insists he’s reliable and that he operates under sanitary conditions. I hope so. I really don’t want to die. I’d rather have the baby than die.

  I wasn’t so sure about this the other night. I sat in the bathroom making lists of the different ways to kill yourself. Myself, to be specific. One was worse than the next. There was a Dorothy Parker poem about that, wasn’t there? All the different ways to check out and what’s wrong with each of them, and it winds up You might as well live. That was the conclusion I came to, and for about that reason.

  Maybe I should write something about Liz. I just got to know her the past
couple days, although I’ve seen her around ever since I started to work the bars off Lexington.

  (How professional that phrase sounds!)

  She is a Lady Clairol blond, and her hairdresser is only one of many who know this. I think you could say (at least I can) that she looks like a whore. I say this not to put her down but realistically. The bleached blond hair, the hardness around the eyes and mouth, the way she struts when she walks, the slight and excusable tendency to overdress. Maybe, for all I know, it pays to look as much like a whore as possible, so that men will know what you are. Why confuse potential customers? Where’s the percentage?

  We had taken to nodding to each other, and then one afternoon I was watching a daiquiri evaporate when she came over and asked if the other seat at my table was taken. It wasn’t, and she sat in it and studied me intently.

  “We’ve seen each other around,” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “What I’m going to say, I don’t want you to be offended.”

  “All right.” I had, at this point, the feeling that she might want to recruit me for her pimp. I had had such suggestions before from girls. I had invented a pimp of my own, a West Indian spade named Mickey with a huge knife scar on his cheek, but very gentle deep down inside. After I spoke of him once or twice I almost came to believe in him.

  But what she said was, “I have this John, don’t stare but he’s the third stool from the left end, the one with God-help-us-all a straw hat. You see him?”

  I did. An inoffensive little man with wire-rimmed glasses and a quizzical smile. He looked like somebody’s uncle, a bank vice-president or a retired druggist or something.

  “He likes two girls at once. You know the scene?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “There are two girls I can ask to split a trick like this with me, and they’re neither of them around. I thought it wouldn’t hurt me to ask. It’s fifty each. He wants a real party, but it’s fifty each.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I don’t know if you ever made a scene like this—”

  “I did. But never as, you know, as a trick.”

  “You mean for kicks?”

  “More or less.”

  “Like you dig it both ways?”

  “Well—”

  “That makes it easier. Me, too, matter of fact. But a lot of girls don’t. Matter of taste.”

  “Literally.”

  “Huh? Oh, right, I dig. You’re a funny girl, you know that? You say one word to my thirty, but you’re funny. You’ve just been around recent. New in town?”

  “In a way.”

  “New in business, then. Well, that’s cool. You want to make half a bill? I’ve tricked him before, his name is Claude, he’s really a lamb. He’s no trouble at all.”

  We gave the lamb his money’s worth. He was a sly old bastard, all right. He had a whole script worked out. It went this way—first he would hide in the closet, then Liz and I would neck and pet and one of us would go down on the other while he watched. Then he would come out and surprise us, and we would beg him to keep our secret, and finally we would bribe him with our bodies. The phrase, believe it, was his.

  So we did. It was kind of fun, in the way that agreeable tricks are fun. It wasn’t real because those things never can be. And working from a script that way. The beginning was nothing but stagey, the kissing and petting and undressing. I felt foolish, and didn’t even get any enjoyment out of the fact that it was a kinky scene. Sometimes I can dig kinkiness in and of itself, but this time nothing.

  Liz gave me a good tonguing. She could have faked it easily enough and the lamb would not have known the difference. Unless he asked to smell her breath afterward or something. She could have just come close and he would have had the same trip, but either she felt it was easier to do it than to fake it or else she was enough in the mood to want to, because she really gave me the treatment.

  A funny bit—I remember lying there giving a real Oscar-winning performance of a girl torn with passion, and what was going through my mind was the thought that this was really a great muffing I was getting, and wasn’t it a shame I couldn’t turn on to it and enjoy it? But I couldn’t. It just wasn’t sex, it was a performance, and I was too busy playing a part to feel anything. I think she could have done it forever without really getting to me in any substantial way.

  Of course after enough time had gone by I managed to have a nice theatrical orgasm for Lamb’s benefit, and he came storming out of the closet, and we all played our parts the way we were supposed to. He made us lie down side by side on the bed while he inspected us in turn, holding our labia apart and looking inside, even sniffing inside, rolling us over, looking between the checks of our asses.

  Liz said later it was like being searched for a heroin stash by a police matron.

  Finally, after he had done all of his little things, and after we each gave him a little hand-and-mouth action, he screwed me while Liz gave him a rim job.

  He had a surprisingly large cock. I have to get out of the habit of expecting that large men will have large ones and vice versa, or that sexy men will be well hung while nebbishy shrimps will be small and shriveled. There doesn’t seem to be any correlation at all as far as I can see. Anyway, the Lamb had a whang on him that the Lion would have been proud of, long and thick as a walking stick. He didn’t last too long, but with all that preparation, how could he?

  He finished, and then he huffed and puffed a little—I still can’t help always expecting these old farts to drop dead at the crucial moment, and I know sooner or later it has to happen—and then he chatted embarrassingly with us about what sweet girls we were and how much he enjoyed being able to talk with us, and then he got dressed and handed us each an envelope. Fifty bucks for each of us, as she had said. And then he went away.

  We were in Liz’s apartment, on East Fifty-fourth. Small but very comfortable, and a building with a doorman and an elevator and such things to keep burglars from taking a poor girl’s life savings. Two small rooms, a living room and a bedroom, and a sort of kitchen. We were in the bedroom, logically enough, and about half-dressed.

  “He’s a character,” Liz said.

  “You know something. They all are. Every one I meet is at least a little bit nuts.”

  “That’s for sure. You going out again?”

  “I don’t know. What time is it?”

  “Almost six.”

  “I made a hundred dollars already. A couple of quarter tricks earlier, and now this. I suppose I should make a few more dollars. I really should, I could hustle and make another hundred but I just don’t feel like it.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “But I really should.”

  “You got a money problem, Jan?”

  “That says it, all right.”

  “An emergency or something? Or have you got a man who expects a lot?”

  I considered and rejected the West Indian pimp. “No man,” I said.

  “Thank God for that. I didn’t think you were the type. Some of these girls are crazy. I mean they’re really crazy. What they go through to earn money, and then they give it all to some son of a bitch who what does he give them but abuse. I’m sorry but I don’t see the point.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “You take a girl like Barbara Jo, she’s the little red-haired kid who sometimes calls herself Barbara Jo and sometimes BJ?” I nodded, knowing who she meant. “She gives me a lot of shit about how I don’t know what love is. Now nobody should have to listen to lines like that, right? I don’t know what love is. But she, she’s the authority. She ever talk to you about her man?”

  “She wanted me to meet him. I told her I had a man of my own.”

  “Very intelligent, Jan. Very smart. I happen to know a little about this man of hers. His name is Maurice. He’s a shriveled-up little spade about the height of a fireplug with this comical wrinkled-up face. I swear what he looks like is a monkey. It’s comical to see him with Barbara Jo, who’s lit
tle herself, but when you see him walking down the street with a pair of six-foot blonds it’s too much. He looks as though he’s walking a pair of Great Danes on leashes.

  “I’ll tell you something about her Maurice. He has I think it’s eight girls now, all of them hustling like mad and dealing back every time to Maurice. And in return for this Maurice doesn’t even throw them a friendly fuck from time to time, pardon the language.” Pardon the language! “Because he can’t, the little brown jerk. He can’t get hard, this top stud. He can come if you suck him for a month or so, but without getting hard. That’s what BJ gets for her money. That’s how come she knows all about love, and I don’t.”

  “Well, girls like that are crazy.”

  “Yeah. But you’ve got a money hangup where you don’t know if you should quit after you make a hundred dollars in a day. What’s the problem?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Right, and I’m too nosy.”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Why keep it a secret? For what? I put out one cigarette and lit another and started talking about it. It all came out in a flood. Diarrhea of the mouth, once I started. I couldn’t stop. She was the right kind of listener, not getting in the way or anything.

  When I was done she said, “Well, the important thing is to get you an abortion. I know this doctor, he’s really a doctor, not a butcher. Believe me I know about some of those. I’ve had what, four abortions. You would think I would learn what’s causing it, wouldn’t you?”

  “Why don’t you take the pill?”

  “And get cancer?”

  “Jesus, everything gives you cancer. Smoking, soda pop, the stuff they put to keep the bread from getting moldy. Everything in the world gives you cancer.”

  “I’ll tell you something, I think the world itself is getting cancer.”

  “Maybe. But I’ll take the pill.”

  “If you’re going to take it, Jan, take it all the time.”