The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

by Xaviera Hollander

  At eight A.M. after the morning news, we were told we would be taken to the Tombs and warned that there were reporters waiting outside. We all wanted to disguise ourselves somehow. Flavia painted a big black moustache under her nose with an eyebrow pencil, put her hair up with a rubber band, and put on her head a civilian porkpie hat she had managed to lift from one of the policemen.

  I put glasses on, my hair up, and wore another man’s hat we took. Calvin had the best disguise. I gave him my light summer dress I had stuffed in my bag before the cops took me away. He wrapped the dress around his head, making a turban of it, and pulled the end into a veil around his nose and mouth like an Arab yashmak.

  We walked down the steps of the station house holding newspapers in front of us and stepped into the van which would take us downtown to the Tombs, New York City’s jail. There can be no atmosphere in any jail in the country as depressing and sordid as at the Tombs.

  As we were rudely pushed along the narrow gray hall of the prison toward our cellblock, we passed a cell full of transvestites, mostly grotesque gargoyles making pathetic attempts to be what they were not, although a few brilliantly succeeded. Mundus vult decipi decipiatur ergo. The world wants to be cheated, so cheat.

  Now after the pleasant stay at the Tombs I am at Bikers Island. Two years ago jail was as foreign to me as the far side of the moon. Now one more trip here and I’ll know the graffiti on the slime-covered walls by heart.

  Two years ago my house was a pleasure retreat you went home to. Now it is a place you drag around, the way a tortoise tarries its shell, from precinct to new precinct after each bust. Yes, I am happy in my business and love it. Indeed some of the happiest moments of my life have happened in the two years I have been rising in the ranks of New York City prostitution to become the biggest and most important madam in town. But why the harassment from police, the heavy bail and fines, the high lawyers’ fees, the payoffs? Whom are we bothering? And, as I think about it, I realize that a safe little secretary can save almost as much as I did this last year.

  Finally Larry comes with the money. My lawyer, I find, has been outside for three hours, waiting for the money, to bail me out. Now my savings add up to much less than a Secretary could save. But I am out again. Riding with Larry back to the city. Now I will have to start again.

  I smile sort of hopelessly as Larry parks in front of my apartment building. But I’ll get a new place, let my customers know where to find me, get my girls together again, and keep giving pleasure to men and women. I can’t help myself. To tell you the truth, I am very happy in the business.

  2. A FAMILY AFFAIR

  Don’t think of me as a poor little girl gone astray because of a misguided or underprivileged childhood. The contrary is true. I come from a very good background and grew up in a loving family atmosphere.

  I was born in Indonesia and later received a fine European education. Between my parents and myself we speak a total of twelve languages – I personally speak seven fluently.

  Mother, a stately blond of German and French extraction, was serious-minded but warm and utterly devoted to her family. She was my doctor-father’s second wife. His first wife, a White Russian ballerina, had left Indonesia with their only daughter immediately after their divorce. His marriage with my mother was a happy one, even though they were opposites in personality and temperament. There was never any question that he loved only my mother, despite a twinkling eye for a pretty girl.

  My father, whom I idolized, was a rare human being – an intellectual, raconteur, lover of the arts, bon vivant, and a truly generous-spirited man. At the height of his highly successful medical career, he owned a large hospital in the then Dutch East Indies, and I later learned that we had two palatial homes, one in Soerabaja and the other in the hill resort area of Bandung, both run by many servants.

  But we lost all that when the Japanese invaded the islands and threw my parents and their newborn baby – that is, me – into a concentration camp.

  For the three years of the Japanese occupation, my father suffered extreme hardship and torture at the hands of our captors. His crime was not only that he was Dutch, but that he was Jewish as well. And this is something few people realize, that the Japanese in Southeast Asia were as anti-Semitic as the Germans in Europe.

  The compound we were incarcerated in had a big sign nailed up with the lettering “Banksa Jehudi,” which was Malaysian for “Jewish Folks.”

  My mother suffered torture as well, even though she was not Jewish, but became the committed the crime of being married to a Jew. She was once thrown into a little wooden hut full of corpses, where the temperature was like that of an oven, for about five days, because she had become hysterical and demanded extra rations of rice and water because I was very sick with lever and dysentery.

  My father was sometimes hung by his wrists from a tree with his feet. An inch off the ground in the scorching tropical sun. Probably the only reason they didn’t let him die was because they needed his medical skills. They finally dragged him away from us to a separate compound, where he was appointed camp doctor for over a thousand women and children. In wartime this can be a kind of living torture, too, especially for a man who hates to see human suffering.

  He later told us that he almost went insane during this period worrying about the well-being of his wife and child. And, ironically enough, the first time he did see me again was not as a father but as a doctor. This was two-and-a-half years after he’d been taken away.

  By that time my mother and I had been released and were living in nearby Soerabaja with some White Russian friends. One day I fell from a tree, badly gashing my leg. In my mother’s absence, a frightened servant rushed me to the concentration camp doctor.

  After he operated on my leg – to this day I still have the scar – I was taken home, and only then did someone tell him he had just performed surgery on his own daughter.

  “That little blond, green-eyed angel was my daughter? I cant believe it,” he responded with joy. “The last time I saw her, she was a tiny baby with blue eyes and black hair.” At least he was reassured we were still alive and in reasonable health.

  When the war ended our family was finally reunited, although stripped of ail our money and possessions by the new government, and we went back to Amsterdam to start all over again. My father was already in his forties, but he was not only a man of great moral strength and courage, but also gifted with a capacity for hard work, and with the help of some financial aid from the Dutch government he soon built up a fine new practice.

  In time he acquired such a widespread reputation as a physician that patients came to him from all over Europe. But he never again achieved his former financial status, and I don’t think he really much cared about it. He was not the sort of man who was meant to be a millionaire. He was dedicated to medicine and was infinitely more interested in his patients than money. His patients were also more important to him than his own family. I even knew him to postpone our vacation if a patient needed him. Whatever the hour, he tended to his patients’ needs, and sometimes to my mothers distress. Especially if the patient was an attractive woman with nothing more wrong with her than an imaginary stomachache. And a yen for my father.

  One of my father’s patients was a voluptuous sexpot of a woman, about twenty-four, whom my mother and I called “the mustard girl” simply because she worked in a mustard factory.

  He was treating her primarily for asthma but also – as my mother later found out – for hyperactive sexual urges. Evidently my father’s small affair with the mustard girl came to my mother’s attention when she saw a mink coat listed in his office amounts. Not very smart of him.

  From then on, each time the mustard girl came for her visit, which was always after work in the evenings, my mother found some kind of excuse to walk into my father’s office – which was attached to our home.

  One evening Mother and I were in the kitchen putting away the dishes at a time when the mustard girl was having her �
�treatments,” and Mother quietly said, “I think I will take a cup of coffee in to your father.” She poured it into his favorite Delft blue mug and went to his office. Suddenly there was such a commotion I thought the Zuider Zee had burst through the dyke. There was yelling and screaming, doors opening and slamming, and china breaking. And with some reason. My mother had walked in unannounced and found the mustard girl, her mink root open and nothing on underneath, down on her knees lustily sucking my father’s penis.

  She grabbed my father’s patient by the hair and threw her out into the snow, minus shoes and stockings or anything but that precious mink coat. En route, my mother forbade the mustard girl ever to walk through our door again.

  Father had retreated into the house, and so Mother then picked up most of our good Delft china and hurled it at Father’s head. By this time I had retreated to the top of the staircase where I stood, ready to try to intervene if there was going to be a bloodbath. But instead Mother ordered Father out of the house and threatened him with divorce.

  My father, as I have stated, was a man of unusual courage. Throughout all the savage things which happened to him during the war, I doubt he shed a tear. But this night he wept openly, because he did love my mother very much and realized how much he had hurt her over a harmless bit of nonsense with an easy piece like the mustard girl.

  I was only eleven at the time, but despite my age I could understand that the whole event was not to be taken really seriously. I already recognized that sex and love could mean two different things to two different people. For Father, the mustard girl had been sex – or satisfying a passing appetite. For my mother, his was deep, undying love.

  Despite my youth, I also had a good idea of what went on between adults, and I knew their fight, over something sexual, could be forgotten and forgiven when they made love. I have not stated this before, but sex in our house was regarded as natural and beautiful, and I would often see my parents walking around seminaked or undressed and unashamed. Several times, I had even seen my father, in this naked state, get an erection as he caressed my mother.

  On those occasions they would retire to the bedroom and close the door, no matter what time of the day. I had a strong curiosity as a child, and even though I thought I knew what they were doing, I had a strong urge to see them.

  If I heard their bed squeaking at night, I would knock on their door and make a pretense of wanting to get a glass of water from their bathroom, even though I had my own bathroom. Once in their room, I would ask could I sleep with them. My request was usually granted, but not without a few grumbles from my father.

  The older I grew, the more I became attached to my father and wished I could be as intelligent and respected as he was. In a completely Freudian way I was in love with my father, and even today I am not ashamed to say that if I met a man exactly like him, I’d fall in love and want to marry him.

  Being the only child, I was spoiled by him not only in a material sense but with all his – and my mother’s – devotion. My father guided my mental development like the professor Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady and saw to it that my talent for foreign languages was fully cultivated. He encouraged me to study Greek, Latin, French, and German in high school and made it a rule that on weekends, in the summer at the beach or in the winter in the country house, we all conversed in nothing other than a foreign tongue.

  On Saturday it would be, say, French or German, and the next day perhaps English. Each year as well we would spend at least one month’s vacation in a foreign country so I could improve my accent or else begin to learn still another language, say, Spanish or Italian. It was an extraordinary education.

  On the other hand, until I was twenty-one I always went on vacation with my parents, unlike most of my friends, who went in unchaperoned groups, because my mother treated me like her little chicken and did not want me exposed to moral danger.

  “Keep your virginity until you’re married, Xaviera,” I remember her saying. “I was a virgin when I got married, and that is how every girl should be. Then your husband will never be able to throw your past up in your face or tall you a whore. You will be able to walk with your head high, and nobody can ever say bad things about you.” Which all seemed pretty old-fashioned, considering the education in relaxed nudity I was getting at home.

  These days you would have to walk around like a Diogenes – armed with a lantern and looking for an honest man – to find a virgin over sixteen.

  Anyway, for the time being she did not have to worry about me, because the person I was in love with could never take my virginity. Her name was Helga.

  Helga was my closest friend at high school, and for the past year I had nursed a flaming desire for her and did not know why. I vaguely knew about lesbians, but I did not connect myself with those half-man, half-woman types with short hair, long pants, and fat asses that my older schoolmates, giggling, pointed out in the streets.

  Helga never returned my feelings, and indeed she did not know lesbians existed, except that she may have wondered why I was always accidentally bumping into her beautiful boobs.

  Helga was sixteen, one year older than me, and we were like sisters sharing all our girlhood secrets. But as sexually precocious as I instinctively was, she was just as sweet and innocent.

  By fifteen I had already kissed my boyfriend with my tongue, explored his body all over, and had even sucked his cock. Helga never knew about this, but she was aware that I was a little more educated in this direction than she was.

  One day my beloved Helga turned to me for the benefit of my advanced knowledge about such things.

  “Xaviera, I have something quite embarrassing to ask you,” she began shyly as we sat in the recreation room during lunch hour. “And I need your help… Tonight Peter Korver has asked me to a party, and I am afraid he is going to want a good-night kiss.”

  Weirdly enough, when she told me her date that night was with a boy who was one of the most sought-after catches in high school, I was jealous, not of her, but of him.

  “You’ll never believe this,” she went on, “but I have never ever kissed a boy in my life, and I don’t know how to react.”

  I was surprised at her absolute virtue, because she was definitely one of the best-looking girls in the school. She was tall, slim, big-boobed, and had a mass of silky dark hair cascading around her beautiful face.

  “Could you explain what I should do?” she asked.

  “Of course, Helga,” I said. “Let’s go over to your place after school, and I’ll teach you.”

  It was wintertime and thus dark at four o’clock when school let out, and we doubled up on my bicycle and rode over to her house.

  I chained the bicycle to a rail, and we entered the darkened hallway, which I decided would be a perfect setting for the scene, because Helga was from a religious, conservative, snooty family who would hardly take kindly to their daughter exchanging romantic gropes with a girl friend in her bedroom.

  I suggested we creep into the cavernlike area under the stairs from the foyer to the second floor of the apartment building, because “this is probably where you and Peter will be when he wants to kiss you.”

  I coaxed her gently against the hallway wall, and there, under the heavy oak staircase, started making love to my girl.

  Helga was submissive at first, although I believe she expected something a little less realistic than I had in mind.

  “Let me hold you the way a man usually holds a girl,” I began, and slipped one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulder. Then I took her chin softly in my hand and planted a light kiss on her lips. She stood there stiffly with her eyes and her mouth closed.

  “Open your lips, Helga,” I urged. “Nobody kisses with them closed.” She obediently parted her lovely mouth, and I eased my tongue inside. At first she tightened and drew away. “Relax,” I whispered; “this is what everybody does, and it is the only way you will learn.” My pink serpent of a tongue was exploring her mouth, and I lingered for a passio
nate eternity until she became restless.

  “Now give me yours,” I said, and as her sweet-tasting tongue entered my mouth, I thought I would go insane with excitement. I wished the moment could proceed in slow motion, but if I took too much time, she might become impatient or suspicious and walk away.

  “No kiss is complete without some attention to the neck and shoulders,” I said next, and I started kissing her ears and her neck and pulling back her sweater to get to her breast.

  Not really knowing what was happening to her pent-up adolescent sexuality, she was getting carried away. She threw her head back to reveal a pale, slender neck, and goosebumps came out on her flesh.

  At that moment the front door opened, and a tenant, accompanied by an icy wind, walked past us and vanished along the hall. I pressed Helga to the wall in a protective gesture. She relaxed and responded.

  “After kissing, you have to know how to caress and be caressed,” my instruction continued, and I unbuttoned the coat she wore over a sweater and skirt. Then I slid one hand under her sweater, into her bra, and cupped one of her breasts. My other hand went under my own skirt, and I started stroking myself.

  I got so frantically excited that I would have loved to have been a man with a big penis and put it inside her. But all I had was a hardened little clitoris.

  While she was in her slightly dazed state I moved my mouth down under the sweater and started sucking those glorious breasts with the erect nipples. As I did so, I also took one of her long legs and pulled it up underneath my skirt between my legs; then I rubbed faster and faster till stars exploded in my head and I fell off the earth

  I was breathless – and Helga was shocked. She had asked how to respond like a lady to an innocent first kiss and had just been seduced in the hallway by a love-crazed schoolgirl. She mumbled something or other and hastily ran up the stairs.