Rat Pack Party Girl: From Prostitute to Women’s Advocate

by McCormick, Jane

  “Yes,” I said, “It’s me, Janie! I was in town from Vegas and was wondering if you’d like to meet me for a cocktail?”

  Sounding eager and laughing he said, “I could never pass that invitation up!”

  So I said, “Let’s meet at the little bar over on Harbor Boulevard at 5:30.”

  When I got to the bar on Harbor Boulevard, I went to the darkest part of the room and sat at a table facing the door. I ordered a drink and for the next half-hour I pictured myself reaching into my bra and pulling out my little gold derringer and shooting him in the forehead. I wanted to kill him so he’d never destroy anyone’s life again. But I didn’t want to go to jail for killing a scumbag like him.

  Minutes later Woody walked through the door and he stopped to look for me in front of the big picture window. From the back of the dark room, I noticed that his silhouetted body had expanded around the waist. I raised my hand and waved at him so he could see where I was sitting. As he approached my table, I could see that his face looked wrinkled and that he’d lost most of his hair.

  He stood across the table lusting at me with the same eyes he had when I was a child. He smiled and said, “Hi Janie,” then all of a sudden he sat down in the chair right next to me and he kissed me on the cheek. “I knew you would be a beautiful woman when you grew up because you were such a pretty little girl!”

  I instantly backed up in my chair while he continued to lean forward, almost in my lap, telling me all about the things he’d been fixing in his garage. Then after the waitress came over to take his order, he put his left hand on the table and I noticed he had a wedding ring on his finger.

  “Oh…you’re remarried?” I sternly asked.

  “Yes, I remarried and she has two sweet little girls.” He openly smiled.

  I candidly smiled back and looked disgustingly into his eyes and said, "Oh, and do you like to crawl into their bedroom to touch them, like you used to touch me?”

  He looked at me innocently confused, “I didn’t hurt you!”

  I growled at him under my breath, “You son-of-a-bitch, you molested me when I was just a little girl.”

  “Oh—that didn’t hurt you. You liked it!” he whispered sarcastically.

  I sat there holding back my temper and softly hitting the table with my closed fist. “You tortured me! You fucked up my whole life! You’re a child molester and you should be in prison for the rest life you sick son-of-a-bitch!”

  “No I didn’t,” he replied inoffensively. “I never hurt you. I just wanted to give you pleasure.” Thinking for a moment, he continued to explain, “Besides, you needed to learn how to keep a man happy.”

  Tears came down my face. As I continued, my voice aggressively rose louder, “You should never have a chance to hurt another child because in my mind I still see you hurting me, forever, and deep inside I felt you knew that’s what you wanted to do to me! Every night before I went to sleep I’d pray that you’d been killed so you couldn’t hurt me again. I was just a baby, and you were a monster that used to creep into my bedroom at night and touch me so you could get your rocks off. And after you finished your business, you’d threaten to kill me, and Mom, and Dick if I ever told anybody. Well I’m a big girl now and I’m going to tell everybody about you.”

  I stood up abruptly, slamming my chair against the wall. I picked up my drink and in a single upward motion, smashed the lip of the glass into Woody’s left cheekbone. Everyone at the bar turned around to see his blood gushing from his cheek. I yelled, “You molested me as a little girl you fucking prick! I’m going to call your wife and tell her what you did to me you son-of-a-bitch! You should be in jail for molesting me and you better-not-be doing that to those little girls!”

  Woody stood up holding his face and yelled, “You bitch!” as I rushed out of the bar praying that the cut would permanently put a scar on his face.

  Mom said, “Oh my god Janie, did you really do that? Weren’t you afraid he was going to call the cops?”

  “No. I didn’t care,” I said as my temper tantrum began to turn towards her.

  “You know Mom, I always felt that if you would have paid more attention to me when I was a little girl that Woody would have never gotten away with hurting me. I was so mad at you because you were always partying and acting like a hot shot. Well goddamn it, you didn’t do a damn thing for me. You were my mother and you never protected me from Woody. And when I did tell the cops about what he was doing to me you called me a liar in front of the police, and instead of believing me you sent me to a psychologist who had to tell you that I was telling the truth. While all that time I had to live with him looking at me as if he was going to kill me. It was a total nightmare for me. For Christ sakes, what was wrong with you? Who wouldn’t protect their own daughter? I can’t believe it!”

  “I knew that you were going to say that,” Mom said coldly.

  “Yeah well sometimes the truth hurts, doesn’t it? You know Mom, I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to kill that son-of-a-bitch for what he’d done to me all those years. When I was six years old, I dreamt that I’d kill him with the heavy iron skillet that you had in the Camp LeJeune kitchen after he’d taped me up and thrown me in the closet for being hungry. I pictured myself standing over him like he’d hovered over me in my bed and I’d smash his skull in after he’d passed out on the couch. And then when I was about nine, when we lived in Hawaii, I planned to stab him in the heart with a big sharp kitchen knife after he crawled into my room and molested me.”

  “Oh my God Jane, that’s terrible!” Mom said with her eyes wide open.

  “I knew I had to do it fast, before he woke up and killed me, because if he was dead, I knew he would never come into my bedroom at night and touch me again.”

  “I’m so sorry honey. I never knew how much he was hurting you.” She said as she got up out of her chair and came over to hug me.

  I pushed her back, refusing her love, and said, “I mean Mom, all my life he molested me and I watched him push your ass around. Why did you let that happen?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was doing that to you, and I didn’t know how to get away from him after he hit me because he always was nice to me after he sobered up,” she said.

  “Well I guess I turned out just like you. I stayed with Johnny just like you stayed with Woody because I thought that he loved me and I thought he would change. Instead of leaving him I learned to take the beatings and learned how to manage his verbal abuse. I saw how you kissed up to Woody and how nice he was to you after he hit you. I thought it was normal to have a relationship like that, but deep down inside of me I hated it.”

  “I know honey, I’m sorry. I didn’t believe you all those years and I never realized how much you were tortured by Woody. I didn’t know how mean Johnny was to you,” she said with tears building in her eyes, “I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me.”

  “Yes, I have forgiven you but I can’t ever forgive Woody,” I said.

  We went around and around for most of that morning talking about that until she left to meet her friends for lunch.

  Once alone I thought about my relationship with Mom. I can’t ever remember her telling me how much she loved me until I got to Las Vegas and had given her a lot of expensive gifts. I always felt I had to buy her love and everyone else’s. That’s why I had to make a lot of money. Now here I was, poor, and my heart was burning for a woman’s love. Now at the time, I couldn’t talk to my mom about it and I certainly didn’t want my kids to know. So I kept it to myself.

  Later that week I called Bob, my ex-husband, and asked him if I could have Cindy and Roberta for the weekend. Bob bought a three-bedroom house with some of the money I used to send him every week. Barb, his new wife, and her two sons who were older than my daughters, moved in with him. They seemed happy together but I used to argue with Bob because I thought the house was too small for six people to live in. However, I was happy to see my two daughters have a home, share a room, have a yard and I kne
w Bob loved them and would take good care of them. And when I wanted my girls he almost always allowed me to send for them or let me have them when I visited Mom.

  I had Bob drop off Cindy and Roberta around ten o’clock in the morning and they were happy to come over to grandma’s to swim. I hadn’t seen them for a month and I could clearly see they both had grown in that time. I loved Cindy and Roberta so much and grandma loved to have them over. The weekend passed so quickly, and Bob was back over to pick them up, taking them away from me again, breaking my heart and theirs too.

  For the rest of the month I tried to look for work, but what could I do after being, let’s say, an independent business owner making a half a million dollars a year? Hell, I’d have to be a crook to even come close to what I was used to making and now I thought I might be gay and wasn’t making a dime because I didn’t want to turn tricks. I couldn’t afford to pay rent or buy a car. And now I couldn’t give Bob the three to five hundred dollars I’d been giving him every other week for the girls.

  After a couple of weeks of trying to find a job I got very restless and wanted to party. After all, I was used to working the casinos seven nights a week, and moving back to Mom’s house was like living on the moon with nothing to do. I had to make a change.

  Chapter 21

  Garden Grove, Suicide and Chicago

  So I called my old friend Curly, who introduced me to Bob Harvey, my ex-husband, when I was in high school. Curly had married my best friend Carol and the four of us used to hang around together when we were teens. But now Curly was living as a gay man and I wanted him to take me out to Garden Grove, where the gay community hung out.

  Curly was a twenty-eight-year-old clean-cut, handsome five-foot-eight blue-eyed redhead with dimples on his cheeks and freckles on his nose. He drove up to the house in his new sky-blue Ford Mustang. After seeing him through the picture window I anxiously ran to the front screen door and screamed, “Curly!” He swiftly walked up to the front steps and I admired his trendy red and white pin striped short-sleeve Polo shirt and tightly fitting jeans.

  “It’s so nice to see you after all these years,” I said as we squeezed each other, him picking me up off of my feet.

  After a few hugs he gently put me down and then he stood back to observe my peach-colored pants suit. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without a dress on. You look great!”

  “Thank you Curly,” I said nervously, secretly concerned with how I looked. “I’ve never owned a pants suit before and thought that this would be a nice change for me.”

  “That’s what most of the fems wear at the bar,” he laughed.

  Then he raised his arm and said, “Let’s go girl,” and he proudly walked me to the car, opening the passenger’s side to let me into the front seat. It was refreshing for me to see that he still had his smile and joking personality. He made me feel alive again and I couldn’t wait to get to the bar and be around the gay community.

  Curly took me to Happy Hour Bar, which was one of the hottest gay bars in Garden Grove. The smoke-filled bar was mostly full of women who were meeting other girlfriends after work. The fems wore eye makeup and generally dressed in pants suits and mini-skirts; the butches were dressed in blue jeans and tee shirts, and the few men that were sitting at the bar were dressed in office suits and ties while others were dressed in blue collar work clothes or casually dressed, like Curly.

  Curly and I took a table so we could talk about all the shit that had been going on in our lives and why I was in California.

  After ordering drinks I rambled on, telling Curly how crazy my life had become after Bob had cheated on me, and how I ended up out in the street after the judge awarded my children to his mother because he thought I was too young, at seventeen, to care for my daughters—which crushed me! Then desperate for money in Hollywood, I met Tyler, a car salesman who persuaded me into tricking his friends and becoming a victim of easy money and drug abuse. I’d let him talk me into the glamorous life of Las Vegas, where I’d become a high-class prostitute. I continued to tell him that after my abortion, I got rid of Tyler. Then I told him as a few years passed, Johnny became really mean. He beat me up all the time and two months ago he tried to kill me after he realized that I didn’t love him and I wanted to be with a woman. So I left Las Vegas to get away from him and to get out of prostitution.

  Curly looked sad after hearing my story.

  Then one of his friends, a drag queen dressed in a low cut summer dress, came over to the table and said, “Honey I think your friend here is a real hot-tottie because she knows how to put on her makeup like I do—the right way!”

  Both of us roared, breaking us out of our serious conversation. For me it was welcome relief and it was nice to be around men who didn’t try to hustle me for sex. The disco music started playing, the lights dimmed and we ventured to the floor for a dance.

  After a few drinks he noticed me checking out a butch woman and said “Wow, look at you checking out a woman for a change! Girl you never did that before!”

  “I know Curly. I’ve changed,” I explained.

  I told him that I was very straight-thinking at the time when Frank Sinatra introduced me to the idea of performing sex with women because he liked to party and watch two or three of us girls staging a love-making scene back in the ’60s. And a few years ago, I never would have thought of being with a woman because I was sure I loved men. Then after telling Johnny about Frank’s sex parties, Johnny and George wanted me and Margo to put on a show for them. Even though I didn’t feel great about being forced into doing things with Margo, I definitely had more fun with her, as a woman, then I’d ever had with any man, and I started to realize that I didn’t need the guys.

  “My God Jane, I had no idea Frank and Johnny were so weird!” Curly said surprisingly.

  “Margo and I both went along with it because we loved our men and we wanted to please them. That’s what happens to you when you start getting brainwashed and you do not even know it. Not to mention that if you wanted to avoid getting abused, the smart thing to do was to just obey orders.

  I then told him about another time when Johnny met me one night after I’d turned about ten tricks and we met a girl at the Tropicana cocktail lounge. Star was a twenty-year-old beautiful brunette wearing long eye lashes, red lipstick, a low cut dress and spiked heels. After a few drinks Johnny asked her if she’d like to come over and smoke some pot with us.

  She said, “Hell yeah. Let’s go!”

  I drove us back to our place and Johnny went into the kitchen right away and made us some strong cocktails. I went into the bedroom and put something sexy on and started rolling some joints. Johnny put on some fun music and we sat on the floor and started smoking pot, drinking and laughing. Then Johnny started kissing on me and began to put his hands on her at the same time. Then he said, “I sure would like to see you go down on this pretty chick!”

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” she said.

  Then Johnny got up and went into the bedroom and returned with a dildo and I said, “Where in the hell did you get that thing?”

  “I picked it up at a head shop,” he said as I looked at him funny. “You know— where they sell porn movies and smut books.”

  “Oh…what the hell are we going to do with this?” I asked.

  “You’re going to strap it on and do her!” he explained, “Now let’s get naked.”

  The six-inch dildo had three straps around it, one around the waist and the other two hanging below with a ring holding the rubber look-a-like pecker. I laughed at the weight of it when Johnny handed it to me and I said, “Holy shit. Do you want me to strap this on and stick it in your ass? I bet you’d like that!”

  “Hell no, you’re supposed to strap it on and stick it in her!” he laughed.

  Without hesitation, Star rolled back, spread her legs and laughed her ass off.

  Johnny took the dildo back and he held the strap for me and said, “Just step into it, first one foot and then the other, and pu
ll it up so it’s tight into your crotch, then tighten the straps around your legs and waist.

  The dildo fit tight around my waist and it felt like a part of my crotch. I ran around the room laughing with the dildo dangling loosely in front of me while I physically experienced what it might feel like, to be a man.

  “Oh… my God… Janie! How fun was that?” Curly laughed.

  I continued, telling him I ran over to Star and got on all fours and stuck it in her. She started laughing so hard, appearing to enjoy it, while Johnny watched; and all I thought was how weird it felt to penetrate this woman with this dumb dildo while he was the one getting a hard-on. Then after I pulled it out of her, he rolled me over, took the strap off of me and screwed me while she watched.

  I looked at Curly seriously and said, “I mean . . . what? What’s with that shit? That’s not love! You don’t do that to someone you love!”

  “Yeah I know what you mean,” Curly leaned back in his chair, “that’s why I had to leave Carol because I couldn’t keep faking my feelings with her. I loved being with men and . . .”

  “Yeah, I remember being over at your house that afternoon Carol and I were in the living room having a drink and you were getting ready to go out and see your so-called ‘buddy.’” Carol felt he was more than a buddy, so after you left we jumped in my car and followed you over to his house. When we saw the house and all the men on the porch holding hands and hugging each other, that’s when we knew you were gay.”

  “I couldn’t help it Jane. I loved Carol and I never wanted to hurt her or my son, but I couldn’t stay away from the guy I was seeing.”

  “Well that about killed Carol!” I said.

  “Yeah well that guy you saw me with is gone, and I’m with another guy who lives in Chicago. I met him here last summer at the gay pride parade and we’ve been seeing each other ever since. I’ve been looking for a job in Chicago and I’m planning to move out there as soon as I find one,” he said.