Nearing sixteen, Marcia nonetheless decided to sample forbidden fruits. She experimented one night with heroin and fell violently ill, missing several performances. When her innards calmed enough for her to resume her act, she swore never to try the drug again. Marijuana was softer, and, in her crowd, among the characters who came to the club and sat at the table of her benefactor, Cousin Morris, smoking pot was as ordinary as drinking Pearl Beer. “I grew up with these people,” Marcia would one day remember. “They were my aunts and uncles and kinfolk. In my family, I thought all fifteen-year-old girls smoked grass. It was a part of growing up.” Occasionally Marcia heard or saw items of interest in her patron’s home that whetted her curiosity. Once a man knocked on the door and asked to borrow a box of bullets and a rope, which Cousin Morris immediately provided. On another day, she discovered two men sitting on a bed dividing up more money than she had ever seen. And she knew that the guns resting casually on the mantel or the kitchen drainboard were not the kind that squirted water. For a time she was not exactly sure just what Cousin Morris did for a living. Then she asked. “Let’s put it this way,” he responded carefully. “I’m forty-six years old and I never got a Social Security card. ’Nuff said?” Marcia nodded. Her education in the character world was blunt. One: don’t ask questions. Two: keep silent. “A loose mouth,” Cousin Morris liked to say, “causes teeth to fall out.” He emphasized this point by making a mock fist and directing it toward the child stripper’s jaw.
A girl friend who, at eighteen, was sophisticated in all areas of the furry side of life suggested to Marcia that she could earn extra money with an occasional sexual appointment. The stripper refused, repeating what she had been told about the perils of pregnancy. It would destroy her burgeoning career. Already her name was moving up on the poster out front. The friend laughed and explained that a quick screw was lucrative, usually enjoyable, and not dangerous if precautions were taken. She knew of a car dealer in Fort Worth who liked young girls and would pay handsomely.
In the motel, confronted with her first customer, Marcia did not know how to conduct negotiations. She elected to set a high price on her services, realizing they were fresh and probably valuable. “How long you got in mind, mister?” asked Marcia, noting on her new watch set with tiny diamond chips that it was 8 P.M. on a spring night in 1966.
“Until maybe midnight,” said the trick.
“Then that’ll be four hundred dollars.”
“Four hundred bucks! You must think your pussy’s made of platinum.”
“It is what it is, mister,” snapped Marcia. “And it’s one hundred dollars an hour.”
Much to her surprise, the man reached into his wallet and handed over four crisp hundred-dollar bills. The rest was, as her girl friend had predicted, lucrative, enjoyable, and not productive of stretch marks. As would often happen in her career, Marcia became friends with the customer and saw him through three wives and four changes of city—though they never went to bed together again. “I have this strange power over men,” she told a sister stripper. “They fuck me, then they want to adopt me.”
Presently the diamond chips became whole stones, and they adorned her wrist and her fingers. She wore daytime dresses that cost five hundred dollars, smart afternoon suits from Neiman-Marcus with French labels. Once she borrowed Cousin Morris’ gleaming silver Cadillac and drove to her old neighborhood, wearing dark glasses, prowling aristocratically around the yards and playgrounds where the girls she had once known—a thousand years ago!—were still clustered on front steps wearing blue jeans and prating of football heroes.
Occasionally she dropped into her mother’s tiny country house, settling in for a few hours on clouds of perfume and jewels and money, explaining that her life was rich and ripe with promise. In her wake, a handful of twenty-dollar bills drifted onto the scarred sofa, an offering almost in scorn to the family she had so eagerly abandoned. But there were also nights when she missed them, missed even her sister’s screaming tantrums, and when she closed her eyes the motel bed beneath her would turn into the sagging daybed with the chenille spread of her childhood. “Sometimes it was like I was living somebody else’s life,” she would say years later. “It was like I could step outside my body and watch myself. Sometimes I liked this person. And sometimes I didn’t. None of it was really real. It wasn’t me, you see. It was somebody else.”
The first undoing was, of course, a man. An ordinary man. A fellow with a Social Security card named Lee, and he was nothing more than a punch-clock laborer for the telephone company. But he was strong and slim and cowboy-looking and kind, and absolutely worshipful of Marcia. Somehow his resolute squareness appealed to her as much as her expensive mysteries to him.
Hardly had their relationship begun before Marcia informed Lee that she would never marry him, nor would she bear his children. These conditions were satisfactory. All Lee wanted was her. That out of the way, Marcia presently fell ill from recurring stomach pains and went to see a doctor. He diagnosed a stomach malady, perhaps the beginnings of an ulcer. She was also missing her menstrual periods, but these had often been irregular. Not until her stomach began to swell, and not until the customers at the club began making pointed remarks about her poochy belly, did Marcia, not yet eighteen, discover that she was six months’ pregnant. When she gave difficult birth to a son named Mikey, she fell into depression. Dejectedly, she studied her still lumpy body and knew that it would not fit into the green-sequined sheath, and even if it did, once she took it off in the spotlight, the ripples on her stomach would turn away customers. She cried for days, holding her baby as if he were a deportation order, banishing Lee from her side. But the hard economic realities of diapers and baby food summoned him back in quick time, and for a year they managed life together as a family. Rarely did Lee bring home more than eighty-five dollars a week, scant offering to a common-law wife who knew neither how to cook nor how to read the right-hand side of a menu.
Cousin Morris professed that he was still her patron and friend, but Marcia sensed his loss of interest when she visited with the smell of sour baby on her shoulder. The other characters who had teased and flirted with her for years now saved their attention for girls who had no responsibilities save painting their toenails purple. For a few months Marcia threw Lee out of their cheap apartment at least twice a week, only to realize she needed him. He was a pier to which she could tie her fast-sinking rowboat. Then Marcia discovered barbiturates, pouring pills into herself, not caring about much of anything once the downs had sedated her. Then it did not hurt so much if the phone failed to ring or doorbells went unanswered after someone peeked out at her through drawn venetian blinds.
She deserted Lee, dropping Mikey with her mother, mumbling something about a job in Florida. Turning a few tricks to renew her union card, shaking off her dependence on reds, and firming up her body to its pre-baby condition, Marcia found work as an exotic dancer in Tampa. Successful there, she moved south to Miami where at Gaiety Theater the reborn Sindy Shane created a sensation as a Tahitian princess being readied for sacrifice, with flaming torches and an oiled, muscled attendant. She commissioned another gown to be made entirely of tiny mirrors. “I want it to be like a thousand prisms,” she instructed the seamstress. “It should absolutely hypnotize the audience … and me.” On opening night, as per her direction, three slender beams of light broke the darkness of the stage, and as the wailing horn behind her began “St. James Infirmary,” Marcia began to spin, throwing off infinite sparks of tiny light. She heard first a woman gasp and then a rain of applause for the power and beauty of the act. The only trouble was she did not want to take off the dress. She wanted to stay in the center of the stage and spin slowly, forever, if there would always be someone in the darkness to watch.
But Miami was a city of the old, and when her admirers all seemed to keep their teeth in a glass beside the bed, Marcia bolted. Once again she ran, this time to the North, to Rochester, where a sister stripper named Morgana promised a city o
f gold. En route, the two girls heard of a rock music festival and detoured. It was August 1969, the time of Woodstock, and for an incredible week Marcia wandered across the rolling cornfields of the Catskills, immersed in the culture of her peers. She was only nineteen, and it was the first time since she had left home so long ago that she was among people who were really her own age. And there were others who seemed just as discontent and restless as she. When one hand offered LSD she took it. When another held out mescaline she took that too. She swallowed whatever was offered her, fascinated by membership in a tribe of half a million youths who sought nothing but to hear the music and dance in fields of wild lilac. Only when the others began stripping off their clothes and bathing nude in cold spring lakes did she refuse. “Honey, I get paid for that,” she told one boy who beseeched her to join him naked. “Once I made $1,500 in one week.”
“Shit, I wouldn’t give you a quarter,” the boy said, diving in, laughing.
Marcia never got to Rochester. Running out of funds, somehow losing the trunk that contained her gown of a thousand mirrors, she turned back south, to Texas, where she picked up her son, now a toddler. Woodstock had given her a taste for the simple life, and she found her way to the Florida Keys, living in a tumble-down shack, wearing blue jeans, letting the child run naked on the dunes. She built furniture out of driftwood and told herself that this was the way she would spend her years.
But within six months, before 1970 was half done, Marcia was back in Dallas, the child parked again at his grandmother’s house. She made a halfhearted attempt at gainful employment, working briefly as a credit investigator, soon realizing that her best possibility for success in the labor force was not in typing. She became a full-time prostitute. “Why not?” she told a retired stripper friend. “Men buy pussy, I sell pussy. I can’t think of a more sensible arrangement.” Marcia was a successful whore who found opportunity everywhere. One night she drove home from an engagement and saw a motorist cursing his flat tire on a quiet residential street. She stopped and with nothing on her mind but good will—she was in fact weary—asked if the poor man needed a ride to the nearest service station. It was at that point around 4 A.M. At 9 A.M., Marcia rose from the motorist’s bed, thanked him for the $1,100 he had bestowed on her, and left, noting as she went that his tire was once again leaking air.
Her colleagues in the business wondered at Marcia’s prowess. All they cattily beheld was a slightly chubby girl of twenty with a roundish baby face and hard brown eyes, teeth still uneven despite thousands spent in denistry, and even a few pockmarks on her cheeks. These Marcia alternately explained as either resulting from a severe onset of German measles or as souvenirs of a gang rape in Washington, D.C., by a group of zestful black motorcycle riders who tied her behind their wheels and dragged her across a gravel parking lot, followed by torture with lighted cigarettes. The way she told it, the tale sounded not only convincing but somehow adventurous and romantic. Perhaps, one competitor reasoned, Marcia was successful because she was so full of bullshit. “That girl!” remarked a sister whore. “She’s always going off to Tibet and climb mountains or to Africa and become an empress.” One thing Marcia did which no one could dispute was travel to Las Vegas and in her first week there strike up conversation with the proprietor of a small casino. She told him she sought legitimate work. Well, what could she do? “I can deal blackjack,” she promised, glancing over at one of the tables where cards fluttered so easily. With no prior experience whatsoever, she thus became one of the club’s best-liked dealers, so favored by the customers that when she grew bored in a few months the boss pleaded in vain for her to stay. “Can’t do it,” she answered. “I appreciate it, but it’s time to split. I’ve dealt myself a bust.” She traveled across town to the Strip, positioning herself on a prominent bar stool at the Cleopatra’s Barge bar in Caesar’s Palace, where in one remembered week she earned $10,000 for services rendered. Promptly she went out and bought the most astonishing ensemble that the city’s most ostentatious store had for sale—a brown velvet pants suit, almost naked from the waist up save for two brief cross strips of cloth, accompanied by an enormous cape with partridge feathers. If the cape displeased her, she could always wear the chinchilla coat and hood purchased by a grateful admirer who felt that Marcia had been largely responsible for his winning $67,000 at craps. She had, after all, stood at his side for sixteen hours as he flung the dice, and her yells had exhorted the winning combinations.
A year later, in triumph, eight pieces of luggage containing the riches of Las Vegas, Marcia returned to Dallas, bearing lavish gifts for her son and her family. She had tales of standing next to Dean Martin at a dice table, of meeting Raquel Welch at a hotel groundbreaking. “That sure is nice,” said her mother, wondering what Marcia did to merit her position, but not wanting to ask.
Within a handful of months, Marcia was hooked on barbiturates again, needing so many of the tiny red pills that her closet began losing the partridge feathers and chinchilla; her jewelry box was soon bare of the diamond ring and emerald earbobs. “I’m broke,” she told Lee, the father of her child. “And I’m scared.” Of course he took her back, but his resources remained helpless to support her needs. On March 25, 1971, both of them were arrested by Dallas police on a charge of passing worthless checks. The checks were not forgeries; the trouble was their account was overdrawn $1,500 at the bank, and they were unable to make restitution. None of Marcia’s allies in the character world were available to make bond, Cousin Morris having been unfortunately blasted to death in a high-stakes poker game. There was no one to help but Marcia’s mother. So the aging, heavy, tired woman dragged all over Dallas, buying back rubber checks from grocers and five-and-dimes. Even then the police were not content, and the mother was forced to engage a lawyer to represent her daughter. She hired a former assistant district attorney named Charles Caperton, a blond and boyish-looking lawyer with a puppy dog personality and two sets of suits—one from the mail-order catalogue to wear into court and impress folksy, down-home juries, the other of continental cut and modish cloth, better to go with the substantial diamond rings he wore and the image he was most proud to offer. Attorney Caperton persuaded the district attorney’s office to put the worthless check charges on the back shelf, knowing that years could go by before someone noticed they were still alive. In the meantime, Marcia and Lee would build a new life together.
For more than two years, from the first week they met, Lee had been urging Marcia to marry him legally. But always she refused. “I just can’t get tied down,” she told him. “You’d be miserable every time I ran off.”
Marcia’s mother suspected otherwise. She deduced that Marcia feared the loss of her son to Dallas County probation workers, who would seize the child of a mother with a penchant for criminal activities and award custody to the legal father. But in a common-law marriage, Marcia knew, the social workers were more inclined to leave the child with the mother, particularly if there was a willing grandmother at the back of the picture always able to house and feed a child. And thus it was, Marcia refusing to marry Lee, Marcia continuing to run on indulgent bursts to Denver or Las Vegas or even to Greece as company for a wealthy trick who bought her sea bass and retsina wine at a café in Piraeus and taught her to break glasses on the red tile floor. And always she would return just as suddenly, swooping her little boy into her arms and covering him with kisses and gifts, then hurrying away into the night—alone.
Marcia knew most of the characters in Dallas, they having been her off and on family since she first began stripping at the age of fifteen. One of them, the dashing pimp and burglar named Clete, counseled Marcia one night in an East Dallas lounge. The facts of life in her case were clear, he said. She was twenty-two years old, with three busts on her record—one for shoplifting, one for pot smoking, one for passing worthless checks—nothing major, but the Dallas police were cold, hard, and unforgetful. Best that she not work at home. Better that she fulfill her need for travel by working “spots,”
these being random two-week stays at hotels in Southwestern cities that allowed discreet prostitution. Clete would set things up, give her a copy of his “spot book,” a valuable index of whorehouses in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Arkansas, and New Mexico. The arithmetic in these matters was well established; if a girl earned a hundred dollars from a customer, she gave forty dollars to the night clerk or bellman. Of the remaining sixty dollars, half went to the pimp, who came around regularly to collect from his girls. The system thus awarded but thirty per cent of the proceeds to the person who did one hundred per cent of the work. But Marcia understood that it was always such and would always be. The alternative, Clete suggested, was settling into one of the few remaining permanent brothels in Texas. One was near Texarkana, another outside the central state farm community of La Grange. But these houses enforced rigid discipline on their employees, the girls rarely allowed a single day off in a six-month tour of duty.
Marcia shook her head vigorously. “No way,” she said. “I’ve heard about the one near Texarkana. The old lady that runs it makes the girls get up at dawn and practically blows reveille. I wouldn’t last a day until I told her what to do with her bugle.”
Then, Clete gestured by making a wide circle with his right index finger, the remaining option is to work the circuit.
She would give the circuit a try. One factor in her decision was a belief that Clete was a singular man who spoke the truth. She had known him since her debut as a stripper. Clete had come into the club one night in the company of Cousin Morris, and Marcia had spent the evening in silent worship of the powerfully built, wide-shouldered, Gary Cooperish sort of man who spoke in wry rumbles. Later, they had a brief affair, she far more enamored than he. Marcia even harbored the secret notion that Clete was perhaps the father of her son. But this she kept to herself. During one of her flush periods, when the diamonds glinted from her fingers and furs swaddled her body, she suggested a more enduring relationship. Clete had laughed at the idea, but it was kind and appreciative, not derisive. “Look at you,” he said. “You’ve got rocks on your fingers, you drive a Cadillac, you own the world. Whatta you wanna get mixed up with me for? The only thing I have a patent on is trouble.”
Blood and Money Page 38