The Happy Hooker: My Own Story
Page 13
They didn’t wait to hear any more, they just bowed their heads and hurried straight out of the room.
I was angry in a way, but at the same time grateful that pictures were the only thing they found, because stashed away in my pocketbooks, luggage lining, and even my passport were bundles of fifties, twenties, and tens, which represented most of my three months’ earnings.
I had already sent a substantial sum back to New York with a man named Larry, who has since become my permanent boyfriend. Nevertheless, it was a risky practice leaving so much money around, especially since the people I lived with weren’t what could exactly be called honest, particularly David.
To show you what he was like, in the nighttime we would all get dressed up, and he would take us to the most expensive restaurants in San Juan in a hot VW and pay for the multicourse banquets with stolen credit cards. If he could do something straight, he would reject it, because he got a great deal of genuine pleasure out of being crooked.
As the weeks went on, our behavior became more and more reckless and abandoned, and we would do almost anything that had an air of escapade about it, which is why one day David suggested we all get stoned on mescaline.
As I mentioned, I don’t use stimulants of any sort, not even coffee, so at first I was naturally scared. But David assured me everything would be all right, especially as we would all take a pill each together and the effects would last no longer than eight or nine hours.
David knew all about drugs – as well as turning on to them, he also pushed them on occasional trips to Miami – so we took his word for it.
It was a Friday morning when we went on our “trip.” We took the pills around noon as we left the guest house and in a “temporarily borrowed” Volkswagen drove to a small secluded beach ten minutes from San Juan.
By the time we arrived the pill had already started to work, and we piled out of the car onto the white-sand crescent and tore off all our clothes. Even Hood, the timid one, came out of his shell, and soon we were all rolling around in the sand near the water’s edge making love. Somebody tried to make Polaroid pictures of the scene, but the camera kept falling out of our hands, and after about two exposures it fell gurgling into the sea.
Then I remember wanting to have a pee, which I would normally be embarrassed to do with people around, unless it’s a freak scene and somebody wants to get peed on. But that day I was so abandoned I said, “Okay, baby, I’m going to pee.” I stood there naked doing it in front of the others while they were all stoned out of their heads, digging up the sand.
The whole scene was like standing apart and watching ourselves in a fast-action film, yet being involved at the same time. Colors became very vibrant. The sun was like a golden ball dangling above our heads, and the sea was like blue Jell-O oozing to shore and out again. We ran into the hills and made love with a background of palm trees threaded by a sandy road that we must have come along, which appeared to lead into a small village.
As we were freaking out and jumping around, a maroon car passed on the road, looking as if it were from a different world, but somehow very close, and inside was a Negro who looked out, waved, and drove on.
You don’t entirely lose your head on mescaline, and even though you’re stoned, you still know what’s happening. Pretty soon the same maroon car was back again, this time carrying three Negroes, all waving, and it went away again.
Five minutes later, or an hour – we cannot judge time anymore – the same car came along followed by a sightseeing bus full of Negroes all staring at those nude people jumping around out there.
The bus slowed, stopped, then took off again, but the three Negroes parked the maroon car near the palm trees and started wading through the water to us. As they got closer, I got this obsession that I wanted to see them jerking off. I had never made love with a black man, but I had heard the story that they are all huge. So I started indicating my desire by making the manual gesture, up and down, and indeed one of them took out his cock and started jerking off! Then the others started doing it, too.
Just then a bunch of schoolkids with their satchels on their backs appeared. The Negroes retreated into the bushes, so we began sucking and fucking again, and the children were walking backward looking at us with eyes like saucers.
From beneath the palm trees the Negroes started trying to hit us with coconuts, and this was the point we started to realize we should split. But by now we were so freaked out we could not control anything anymore.
“Xaviera, get dressed, put your clothes on,” one of the boys said. So I grabbed my bikini underpants and tied them around my neck, which was my way of covering up in front of the kids and the Negroes.
We tried to gather up our belongings from the sand, but for some reason our fingers were insensitive, and we could not hold them, and combs, lipsticks, wallets, and suntan oil dropped from our hands. We left them in the sand and ran to the VW.
Nobody was really capable of driving, but Ricky took the wheel, and we zigzagged back to San Juan, almost hitting a tree and a boy on a bicycle, and came to a stop inside the garden of the El San Juan Hotel.
It was the cocktail hour, nearly dusk, and as we jumped from the car all the Jewish American Princesses started moving away from us with the look of, “Oh, boy, look at those animals.” I took one look at myself in a car mirror, with my eyes like red frisbees, made a dash to the water, and paddled out to sea on David’s raft.
By around nine that night the pill had almost worn off, but we hadn’t been home to change, so I went to work just as I was, wearing pigtails and my bikini bottoms and a little beachdress, slightly high, and giggling.
I looked more like a crazy little beach virgin than a hooker, and I turned on quite a few older men, who paid a fortune, and it was my biggest night apart from the Mafia blow-jobs.
As Easter approached, three months after I arrived for three days in Puerto Rico, I started getting bored. Among other things, all the boys had gone home, except David, who was down on his luck and depended on me for ten- and twenty-dollar handouts every now and again. I even let him live in my room, as I had more or less moved into a gorgeous penthouse with a gambler named Norris, who wasn’t a john and would not pay me, but let me have anything 1 needed in the way of clothes or food.
Two days before Easter David said he was going to Miami on a dope deal to make a lot of money and would be away for a week, leaving at six o’clock that evening.
After the other boys left David and I had an intense kind of platonic friendship, so I wanted to get back from the beach early and say good-bye and perhaps go with him to the airport. But as I returned from the beach around four o’clock I could sense something was wrong. All was quiet in my room, and as I walked in the door I was horrified to find it looked like a tornado had hit it.
Drawers and dressers were inside out, clothes were all over the place, my luggage was lying open in the room, and the lining had been ripped open and the money stolen.
I ran to my closet and plunged my hand into every pocket on every dress I had, and they, were all empty. Even my pocketbook had been cleaned out, and the notes stuffed into my passport were also missing.
Whoever did it really cleaned me out. There was enough to make one phone call, two nickels.
I had to find David. He was due to leave in a couple of hours, but if I could get to him first, he might be able to help me out, because he knew every thief in Puerto Rico.
I ran down to the beach where Beegee, his little hippie girl friend, hung around pushing grass. “Have you seen David around?” I asked her.
“I sure did,” she said. “About an hour ago, on his way to the airport.”
“On his way to the airport?” I said. “Are you sure? He’s not leaving for two hours.”
“That’s not what he told me,” Beegee said. “He was dashing to the airport carrying his bag, and he asked me to mind it and his suede coat while he went into the hotel to make a phone call.
“Come to think of it, he was ve
ry nervous about the coat and said don’t let anybody get their hands on it, and the pockets and lining seemed to be stuffed with paper.”
I got the message loud and clear. My friend David, whom I had almost supported for the last few weeks, had done the robbery. So much for honor among thieves.
1 ran to the roadway and flagged down a cruising police car and in my European Spanish managed to talk them into taking me to San Juan airport to try to catch him.
I knew he had hot tickets under the name of L. Lieberman, and as far as I knew, takeoff time was an hour away.
At the airport I went straight to the departure counter to check out the flight. There was no Lieberman on the six-P.M. flight, the clerk told me, but Mr. L. Lieberman was on board the plane just taking off. There was no way of stopping him, so I was wiped out, ripped off, $2,000 gone. I could only take a philosophical look at the situation and say easy come, easy go, and just as well. I still had my round-trip ticket.
9. CALL ME MADAM
For two months after returning from Puerto Rico I operated as an independent call girl, or loner, as they are known, until it struck me that this was an unsatisfactory way to earn a living.
Loners make a maximum of $200 from an average of four customers a night, and their income depends on pleasing a loyal but limited clientele which does not demand too much in the way of variety.
However, in order to give a client an occasional change of face, they form into tight little groups and exchange dates among themselves. For example, Gloria will send a customer to Sandy, who will send one back to her. But if Sandy cannot reciprocate, she must pay Gloria a madam’s fee of usually 40 percent of what the client paid her.
Working this way, the girls protect themselves to a certain extent from the competition, but it’s only a matter of time before some pretty young newcomer squeezes in to the circle and seduces away their business.
I recognized this john-swapping activity as bringing in a lot of new faces but no extra money, and that in the end, loners could only be losers. More to the point, I believed I had the qualities it takes to be a successful madam: aggressive leadership, a head for figures, and a matchless stamina. I can get by on four or five hours’ sleep a night for an entire year if necessary.
But above all I had what I call the “madam instinct”: the ability to know when to be bitchy or soft, the diplomacy to handle difficult clients, good hostess skills, and a sense of humor.
And ever since I left the straight life behind, I’d wanted to become a star in this business. So in the summer of 1970 I decided to become not just a madam – but the biggest in New York.
The first thing I had to do was to find a good location to open up shop. Working as a loner is one thing, and it’s a rare Manhattan building that does not have at least one discreet house hooker, but finding a place to open a lively brothel was a different story.
The ideal building, first of all, has to have the proper climate: cool. This means that the management and staff will tolerate, cooperate, and even protect you as long as you cross their palms with silver.
However, this can go too far, and there is one luxury high-rise in the East Fifties with such an army of cooperative doormen and lobby staff that it was costing Georgette Harcourte almost $500 each month, before rent, when she operated there.
There are several buildings in Manhattan’s smart East Side which are known to tolerate active brothels, one of which harbors so many it is called the “vertical whorehouse.” This building, located on York Avenue in the Seventies, advertises in the real-estate columns of The New York Times as having “the ultimate in services and conveniences.” Another building riddled with brothels is on Sutton Place, but as far as I could see, these addresses were no longer cool – they were red hot, with the police watching them like hawks.
It took some searching, but eventually I found the perfect place, a one-bedroom apartment in the East Fifties on a commercial floor of a semicommercial building – which meant there would be no neighbors to worry about after office hours. Initially I wanted a modest apartment which would keep my overhead down. I knew that I could utilize the living room as well as the bedroom for entertaining my customers.
The next step was to recruit staff, and believe it or not, honest, hard-working hookers are hard to find. There were girls around who worked the cheap houses, but they were mostly hardened creatures, and I would not then, nor will I now, ever use a girl who has no class. I don’t want street hookers, because their mentality is too cheap. I have a classy clientele who pay high prices for class. If a man would never pick up a girl in the street, why should I expect him to go with a street hooker?
At one point I hired a girl who had worked in a cheap house, and as a result, got exactly what I should have expected. Cheap behavior. In this case I relaxed my policy because the girl, Misty, was outwardly attractive. But when she undressed, there were stretch marks all over her body from children she gave birth to when she was fourteen and fifteen. At nineteen, when she came to me, she was already used up. And I soon found out her niceness was a very thin veneer.
As is my practice with new girls, I gave Misty a pleasant, attractive man as her first customer. The man, a stockbroker, was slightly drunk, but the easy-to-handle type.
Misty retired to the bedroom with him, but within five minutes dramatically reappeared, charging stark naked into the living room, cursing and swearing.
So I went inside and walked into a screaming match between the customer and Misty. “Listen,” I cried, taking the customer’s side, “you’re not working in a twenty-five-dollar whorehouse, so don’t behave like a whore.”
“Goddamnit!” she screamed. “I’ve already taken care of that bastard, and now he wants some more.”
It is my philosophy that a man is entitled to more than five minutes of a girl’s time, and even if he climaxes quickly, he can expect to be treated warmly and even babied and washed up, if that’s what he wants.
Misty quieted down and promised to cooperate, but her background was too strong, and twice next day I had complaints that she was a hard, cold bitch. So I had to dismiss her.
The others who were not attached to madams already usually had pimps behind them, and pimps are bad news because sooner or later they try to move in on your business.
In the beginning I did hire some girls who had pimps, and only one of them, a lovely-looking blond named Leonora, worked out well. I met Leonora through an old white pimp named Tony Roland who was known to handle the best-looking “working” girls in New York, and he saw that they were punctual and reliable. However, this particular girl had aspirations higher than hooking, and through a customer of mine, landed herself a television commercial, and her face is now splashed across the home screen.
The exceptional thing about this story is not that a prostitute achieved legitimate fame, because some major celebrities we all know began that way, but that her pimp let her get out of the business. But I suppose she is making more money now as a minor celebrity, arid in his way, Tony is still her pimp.
An unhappy case of one pimp refusing to let go of his bread-and-butter body was Greta, a small-time madam who operated from the York Avenue building and was managed by a “connected” Italian type who took care of payoffs and made sure she never got busted. But the pimp himself got sent away for armed robbery. This did not make him surrender his suffocating hold on the girl, and even from prison he managed her via two of his lieutenants, who kept her under a twenty-four-hour surveillance, even when she went out to visit her mother in Queens.
Different madams have different methods of finding girls to work for them, and on a couple of occasions I tried to follow their examples.
A lesbian madam named Janet cruises the gay-girl bars like Cookies, the Three, and Harry’s Back East to find working girls. She finds some little dyke, seduces her, invites her to live in her apartment for a few days, then persuades her to go into the game. This isn’t too difficult with lesbians, because basically they hate men and e
njoy taking their money in exchange for sex.
I tried Janet’s approach one night in Maxwell’s Plum. I struck up a conversation with a gorgeous little gray-eyed straight girl in the powder room.
“You’re a very lovely-looking girl,” I said. “Are you by any chance a model?”
The girl stopped applying her lipstick. “Oh, no, I’m a legal secretary,” she said.
“How come you dress so beautifully on a secretary’s salary?” I asked. “Do you have a rich fiancé?”
“Heavens, no,” she laughed. “I wish I did, then I wouldn’t have to spend every cent I earn on clothes.”
“A girl like you should not have to work, you should have men spending money on you,” I told her. She was so delicious I would have liked to make love to her myself.
“Where can I find that?” she asked, showing casual but genuine interest.
“I know lots of rich men who would like to spoil you. Are you interested?”
“Oh, sure, I’m interested,” she said earnestly. “As long as there’s no sex involved.”
I met a cute little girl named Jenny at a gay bar, and although my intention was not exactly recruitment, it developed that way.
Jenny was twenty, looked fourteen, with short-gamin hair, and she told me she was a butch.
“It’s impossible to be butch when you are a virgin,” I explained. “You become one gradually after having sex. You might look a little tomboyish with your short hair, but you’re feminine – so let me be the butch.”
Jenny had a beautiful body, with silky pubic hair, and she turned me on tremendously. However, she wasn’t clean and fresh down there, and I had to teach her all about washing up, because she couldn’t douche, being a virgin, with her little hymen still in place.
We’d sit in a tub together, and I would play with her little titties and suck them and go down on her. I adored her so much I became protective, like a lover, toward her.