Nice Girls Finish Last

by Sparkle Hayter

  There was a voice in my head that said that as well. But that voice had been famously wrong before and, fortunately, there was another voice too. You know, the voice of reason. Impossible, my brain finally said, when my cognitive cells had regrouped. You can’t possibly be in love with a man you don’t even know, even if you think you recognize him on some level.

  Then I suddenly remembered where I had seen this man before, and that I had seen him many times, in fact. Oh, he looks a little different every time—he’s very clever—but I’d know him anywhere. To paraphrase John O’Hara in Butterfield-8, I’d know him at the bottom of a coal shaft during a total eclipse. He was the sinuous and smoky Hungarian writer with the beautiful Oxford accent who had locked his dark eyes on me as we chugged out of Budapest on the Orient Express to Paris, many moons ago. He was the aqua-eyed rich Swiss-Italian guy backpacking around America in 1986, and the blond Teutonic god with the “Correspondent’s Squint” whom I married.

  He is the Devil.

  I am only half-joking about this.

  “A musician, Claire? At my age? Jeez. This isn’t true love. This is a Margaret Trudeau Midlife Moment. This is me thinking with my genitalia again.”

  “I keep forgetting how elderly you are.”

  “Let’s be realistic . . .”

  “Bock bock bock bock bock,” she clucked like a chicken. It was the second “cowardice” reference of the day.

  “Give me a break.”

  “Listen, I have to go to a matinee of a play this friend of mine is in. Why don’t you come?” she said.

  “Naw, I’m broke and anyway, I have an errand I want to run, but thanks for asking,” I said.

  Until Claire, made that remark about how the less I knew the safer I was, I had planned on going home after seeing her. Maybe she didn’t mean it the way I took it, which was as a dig about my courage. Maybe I was just being oversensitive. Whatever. It was enough to make me detour to the Hotel Bastable.

  At one time, the Hotel Bastable, which was just eight or nine blocks from my place, had been a respectable lodging house catering to young immigrant men. Later it became a haven for poor, struggling artists and writers, like O. Henry, who lived there for a while before his fortunes took a healthy uptick and he was able to move into much finer lodgings at the Hotel Chelsea. Since then, the Bastable had steadily degenerated into one of the worst single room occupancy hotels in the city. Even Charles Bukowski wouldn’t stay in this place now, and he’s been dead for a couple of years.

  The Bastable charged ten dollars and fifty cents a night or two hundred and fifty dollars a month, according to the stained rate card next to the desk in the “lobby.” The smells of urine, disinfectant, and frying meat mingled in the dingy beige foyer where a guest was asleep, akimbo, in a chair. At least, I thought he was asleep. He might have been dead.

  “I wanna know about a guy who stayed here, Joey Pinks,” I said to the sneering man behind the small bulletproof window at the front desk.

  “He’s gone,” he said, without emotion.

  “I know. Can you tell me anything about him? When did he move in—”

  “Can’t tell you anything,” he said. He was rubbing the palm of his hand suggestively. He’d talk for money. Well, I had two problems with this. First, I don’t practice checkbook journalism, although because of my curiosity I would have compromised my strong moral convictions on this one. But the second problem made it irrelevant—I only had $3.47 on me, and I had a hunch Mr. Information would be insulted if I offered him three crumpled dollar bills and a handful of linty change.

  I went back out on the stoop, stood for a moment, looking down the street, first one way and then the other. There were two men hanging out on the sidewalk, a black man wearing dark glasses and an elfish-looking white man who couldn’t stop scratching himself, which he did as though he wasn’t aware he was doing it. When he walked over to me, I leaned away slightly so that whatever was making him itch wouldn’t jump on me.

  “Smoke, smoke,” he said, the traditional whispered come-on of the street pot seller.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Ecstasy, cocaine.”

  “No thanks.”

  “You look lost,” he said.

  That struck me as a very existential statement.

  “You live here?” I asked him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “You?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “Actually, I’m wondering about a guy named Joey Pinks.”

  “Yeah yeah, I know him,” he said, scratching inside his ear with one hand and scratching his neck with the same hand that held his cigarette. The ember just missed his earlobe.

  “Skinny guy, got here a couple of days ago. He was killed. Cops were by earlier.”

  The man did not stop scratching. It was amazing he had any skin left.

  “Did you ever talk to him?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “He bought some pot off me when he first got here. We talked a little then. He’d had some hard times, came back to New York looking for a pal, hooked up with some woman. Guess that didn’t work out.”

  “Did he ever have visitors?”

  “No. But I heard him on the pay phone in the lobby a couple of times.”

  “Did you hear what he said on the phone?”

  “Something about a diary.”

  “A diary?”

  “That’s all I know.”

  A diary, I wondered, or a little black book?

  While we were standing on the street talking, a dark blue sedan that had been parked at the far corner pulled out and drove slowly by. It stopped, hovering in the middle of the street in front of the Bastable. It was a chauffeur-driven car, but I couldn’t see if there was a passenger, as the back windows were tinted.

  I noticed it because of its suspicious creep. But I didn’t take much more notice of it, figuring it to be some rich Yuppie looking for drugs, as this part of the Lower East Side was a pretty big drug marketplace. The scratching man thought so, too, and walked toward the car to make a pitch to the driver, who promptly rolled his window back up and took off like a shot.

  “Damn tourists,” he said when he came back.

  “A lot of tourists come down here?” I said.

  “Oh sure. In buses sometimes. Driving all the customers away.”

  “So about Joey Pinks . . .”

  “Whaddya need him for, when you’ve got me?”

  He was starting to flirt with me, winking (and scratching) to punctuate his remarks. Evidently, he went by the five-minute rule, i.e., if a woman spends more than five minutes with me she’s attracted to me.

  “You wanna go get a slice?” he asked.

  Shooting the shit with street guys is a great skill to have, even if it doesn’t look so great on a resume, and I’m pretty good at it. If they flirt, I have two approaches, depending on the vibe I pick up. I humor them, but in a very tough and burlesquy “you couldn’t handle me if you had me” sort of way. Or I act like I’m incredibly flattered. Not to be a snob or anything, but how very, very flattering it is to be asked out by a street dealer with no prospects who suffers from some sort of skin disease, probably contagious, that he picked up in his fleabag hotel. What a catch.

  “No, but thanks for asking. Gosh, that’s nice of you. But I have to run. Thanks for your help.”

  I started walking away. About halfway down the block, I heard the scratching man calling after me. He was following me. I sped up, he sped up. Jesus. He wouldn’t give up.

  Why am I so irresistible?

  When he got a little closer he called out, “You know, you have gum on your ass! I thought you’d want to know.”

  I looked behind me. Indeed, I did have gum on my ass. Not only that, but it had been there for some time, judging by the flotsam and jetsam it had picked up—black lint, a piece of toothpick, an orange Tic Tac.

  Oh God, I thought. Did I have gum on my ass when the ins
anely handsome man walked by?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Dress to blend in,” Jerry had instructed us about the Anya’s shoot Saturday night.

  Now, what does one wear to a public flogging? My wardrobe just wasn’t suitable, and I put together several feeble outfits before settling on my oldest pair of jeans, a ratty black sweatshirt, and a pair of ratty black boots, the boots to “blend in.” I chose this ensemble after remembering what sexual adventurer Dillon Flinder had said. When going to a sex club, he had advised, wear clothes that won’t stain.

  Eeuw.

  Dressing to blend in was somewhat easier for Tamayo because she had the wardrobe for it—lots of leather and a couple of cute black rubber numbers—right down to the accessories, the studded dog collar, the chain belt, the black streak of temporary dye that ran down the center of her bleached blond hair reverse Susan Sontag-style.

  “What do you think?” she asked when she picked me up. “Too matronly?”

  “No, you look great,” I said. I looked up and saw Mrs. Ramirez peeking out from behind her lace curtains. God only knew what she’d make of Tamayo.

  “Well Robin, you look . . .” Tamayo didn’t finish.

  The cab was waiting. “Meter’s running,” said the cabbie.

  We got in. As we were turning onto Fourteenth Street a big green tanker truck with the words D&L CESSPOOL on the side drove by. The guy in the D&L Cesspool truck beeped and waved at us.

  “There goes a tragicomic accident waiting to happen,” Tamayo said, as the cabbie pulled in behind the D&L Cesspool truck, following it, a little too closely for my taste, for several blocks.

  “He’s cute. Too bad he’s a cesspool cleaner,” I said.

  “I didn’t even know there still were cesspools. What would it be like to date a cesspool cleaner?”

  “I dunno. If we went on a date, would he borrow the truck and pick me up in it? That alone would almost make it worth it. Anyway, we probably have more in common professionally than I want to admit.”

  “Cheer up. Maybe you’ll meet Mr. Right tonight at Anya’s,” Tamayo said, as the cab pulled up around the corner from the club.

  Anya’s was located off Gansevoort and Little West Twelfth Street in the heart of New York’s meatpacking district. The Meat Rack, as it is sometimes known, is a warren of cobblestone streets and squat buildings with iron awnings, a marketplace for dead animal carcasses by day and live animal carcasses by night. In addition to the meatpackers and the covert sex clubs, there are also apartments, bars, and restaurants like Hogs & Heifers, Kafka’s, and Florent, and a number of abandoned warehouses. Regular folk mix here with the avant-garde and all manner of streetwalking prostitutes. It is a very visceral neighborhood, and spooky after dark. It’s the kind of neighborhood where the streetlights do little but accentuate the shadows.

  Jim and Mike were set up around the corner in the undercover van. They calibrated Tamayo’s purse-cam hidden camera for white balance and wired her for sound. Most of what she shot wouldn’t be seen anyway—she had been instructed not to shoot faces, and the effects department would blur what Aunt Maureen would call the “naughty bits.”

  Outside Anya’s, a couple of guys were negotiating some transaction with a woman on the sidewalk in front of a line of cabs and hired limos, waiting to whisk customers home.

  “Well,” Tamayo said. “It’s time to paint the snake.”

  She and I went down the stairs to the door. Under a sign that said, CHECK ALL YOUR WEAPONS—EXCEPT THE ONE GOD GAVE YOU, we paid the $15 ladies’ admission ($100 for men) and went through black curtains into a dungeon-like room with a no-alcohol bar. This was the public lounge part of the establishment, a creepy gray stone room with low ceilings and very low lighting.

  Despite the sign outside, there was quite a lot of weaponry on display, paddles and small whips, racks, cages, spanking horses.

  After checking our coats with the husky, whiskered, tartan-clad transvestite in the coat check, I went to the juice bar to wait for Anya, and Tamayo went her own way, undercover. Mike and Jim were going in a back entrance, so their camera gear wouldn’t alarm the customers. Little did the customers know Tamayo was walking around filming them.

  Gee, I hate undercover stuff.

  Anya’s is pretty middle-class sleaze. Although I hadn’t been to an S&M club before, I knew from interviewing domina-trices for a previous series on S&M that there are darker, more wicked clubs where truly horrible things go on. At Anya’s, the activities were basically role-playing, exhibitionism, and voyeurism. In the middle of the dungeon room, a man bent over a spanking horse was having his bare bottom paddled by a woman who, despite her black leather outfit, gave off a strong schoolteacher vibe. Others, mainly men, some wearing clothes, some naked, many wearing masks, watched.

  Whatever turns your crank, Frank, but sex clubs just didn’t do it for me. During our honeymoon, my ex-husband Burke and I, on a lark, went to an upscale, touristy live sex show in Amsterdam. We sat next to a lovely uptight couple from Essex, England, and watched one pair of bums after another bouncing in time to disco music. It struck me as joyless, mechanical, less a naughty erotic bacchanal than an aerobics routine. In and out, in and out, six more, in and out, in and out, four more.

  A masked man had come up to me at the juice bar very casually, as if he wasn’t completely naked except for the mask, scuffed black shoes, sport socks (you don’t want to go barefoot in a place like this), and watch.

  “May I lick your boots?” he asked.

  “No, but thanks for asking,” I said, ever polite, inching away. The cesspool cleaner was looking awfully good in my mind right about now. This guy next to me was probably a successful Wall Street analyst or something, I thought, a good catch. Anya had boasted that this was where Wall Street came to be whipped.

  I consider myself a freethinker, but then, be a freethinker, and the next thing you know, you’re making small talk with a naked investment banker from Massapequa. I dared not meet anyone’s eyes, lest I burst out laughing. I have to really know someone well before I can do anything kinky with them, otherwise I just can’t keep a straight face.

  Take, for example, the time I almost had sex with Howard Gollis, which was also the last time I had vodka. Things were progressing smoothly. We were hot and heavy, panting, groping, about to tear our clothes off, when Howard stood back and smiled a wicked smile at me.

  And he pulled out a blindfold.

  “Is that for you or for me?” I asked.

  “For you,” he said.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said. I couldn’t stop laughing for a half hour.

  For a comedian, Howard didn’t have a very good sense of humor about it and accused me of rank prudery, but jeez, what kind of guy wants to blindfold you the first time you have sex? Either a control freak or a man who is horribly disfigured, in my opinion. Or both.

  So Anya’s was a challenge. It was important not to laugh. As Dillon had informed me, “If you laugh at them, the masochists like you even more. If you tell them to get away, they adore you. If you call them bad names and try to kick them away, they’ll worship you for life. It’s like quicksand.”

  Anyway, I got the feeling after talking to Dillon that the biggest risk a woman faced at Anya’s was being worshipped to death by a pack of slavering dog-men.

  “Ah, you’re here,” Anya said. “I’ll show you the place on our way up to the Sacher-Masoch Room. Your crew is up there, yes?”

  “They should be.”

  “Come with Charles and me,” she said, tugging on Charles’s leather leash.

  Above the public lounge was a couples-only room, which featured a free buffet, of which Anya was quite proud. “The baked ziti is excellent,” she said. “Help yourself.” I demurred.

  I heard a mechanical grinding and gnashing through the wall.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The hamburger factory next door,” Anya said, casually, seeing no irony in it. “Night shift.”

&nb
sp; Anya’s seemed very banal for a den of iniquity. Maybe it was the ubiquitous naked, masked men in tennies and sport socks standing around eating white and yellow cheese cubes off floral paper picnicware.

  On the third floor was the Justine Room, for male dominants and female submissives—closed tonight because of a burst pipe’—and the Sacher-Masoch Room for female dominants and male submissives. Anya’s offices were on the top floor.

  “My late husband, Gus, he built this place. The spanking horses, the racks, everything. Made it with his own hands,” she said.

  “Quite a guy, Gus.”

  “He was, yes.”

  “Does Charles go with you everywhere?” I asked.

  “More or less,” she said, punching a code into the keypad outside a large blue door, which then opened into the Sacher-Masoch Room.

  Inside, several women paraded their slaves around on leashes for Mike and Jim, who were set up in a corner.

  “If Hell had a kennel club . . . ,” Mike whispered to me as the slave-men went through their paces.

  There were others in the room, a very large man in a harness with two dominatrices attending him and a lone woman with a whip, who was introduced as Carlotta, Anya’s “lieutenant.”

  “These are our players,” Anya said, introducing me to the others, who gave their first names only. Some were masked, some were not. All had signed releases, which are good things to have when you’re shooting sensitive material like this.

  “Ms. Hudson has a few questions,” Anya said, and gave me the floor.

  I passed a photocopied photo of Kanengiser around.

  “Have you seen this man before, in this club or elsewhere?” I asked. “His name is Herman Kanengiser.”

  “I’ve seen him before,” one of the slaves said. I noticed his mistress tightened his leash slightly when he did.

  “Where did you see him?” his mistress asked, mockingly.

  “Uh . . .”

  “On television,” said another slave. “He was on television this past week, right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “That’s probably where I saw him,” the first slave said.