A job switch to another company based in another state facilitated their living as man and wife. While they had planned to do so eventually, Rob had heard that the company preferred to hire married men, and thus described himself as married in his résumé.
Interestingly enough, it was this change in the outward appearance of their relationship which created the greatest single difficulty they seem to have faced, a difficulty which ultimately led them to go through a marriage ceremony and which further led to their decision to try swinging, a decision which led to a resolution of the problem.
• • •
The one mistake we made was that we took our vows seriously. That’s just an expression, because when we first began living as husband and wife we didn’t take any vows, not even private ones, but just moved from one house in one city to another house in another city, as if nothing was changed.
What was changed was that we were not dating anymore. The funny thing is that we didn’t even realize in advance that this would happen. But of course here I was wearing a wedding ring and here Rob was at an office where everybody knew he was married, so how were we supposed to date without it just looking like we were cheating?
Rob first really came to see what it was all about when there was a girl in his department that he thought was cute, and he just went and asked her out in a very matter-of-fact way, not even taking the trouble to make sure there was no one else within earshot. Well, she gave him this really astonished look, not that married men never tried to date her, but never so open about it, and told him she didn’t date married men, and fortunately he got the message in time and passed it off as if he was just kidding.
We laughed about that, although it wasn’t a laughing matter in that he could have ruined his future with the company if the wrong person had been around at the time. We decided that being married meant being true to each other, not necessarily because we felt any different than before, but because there was no convenient way to date openly and be married at the same time. And as a result of this we got it into our heads that in order for our marriage to be real we shouldn’t want to date or have sex with anybody but each other.
Now, this was really ridiculous, because all through school we had gotten past all the nonsense of just having sex with one person. All through school we were closer emotionally than most couples ever become in marriage, and what we did with other kids only made our situation that much more exciting, and here we were trying to jam ourselves into a definition of marriage that even straight people find hard to live with for any length of time, even people who don’t know any better, the way we did.
It just didn’t work for us, because there was no denying that something was missing, and this made us think that maybe we were simply perverted people, since we couldn’t be satisfied with only each other, and maybe the idea that we had such a wonderful love for each other was a lot of crap. That’s why we ultimately did go through the nonsense of blood tests and a marriage license and a religious ceremony, because we got it into our heads that taking our vows formally might make it all easier for us. Which it seemed to do for the first month, maybe, but that was about the size of it.
Almost as soon as we heard about swinging, we seemed to know it was for us. About the only question in our minds was whether these people were for real or not, because the first things we read were magazine stories, and then a couple of trashy books, and it was all so obviously made up that we couldn’t be sure if there were really any swingers in the world or not.
Once we got into it, we realized that we had been swingers all along; and whatever hang-ups we had had in being married are long gone now.
I Often Wonder What The Harlots Buy
I remember a girl I picked up on Times Square a few years ago. A white girl. Very thin. Sallow complexion. Deep circles under her eyes. Stringy black hair. All wrapped up in a dark cloth coat and shivering. A warm spring night. I was comfortable in a suit jacket, but she was shivering in a bulky coat.
Junkies are always cold. Heroin junkies. All bundled up in coats in midsummer, but still they shiver.
I started talking to her. She had a flat, empty voice, and up close her skin looked dead, like wax fruit. Not so much dead, but as if she had never been alive. This turned me off. It’s the personality of the girl I respond to, the attitude, even more than the physical appearance, and she turned me off.
Went with her anyway. Try and figure it out. Three, four in the morning. Stayed off the street until then telling myself I didn’t want to look for a girl, wasn’t going to look for one. Stayed up watching late movies. Two, two-thirty I went downstairs to get cigarettes. Still had plenty, but wanted to make sure they were there in the morning. Hate waking up and no cigarettes.
Down the elevator and out the door and over to Broadway to buy cigarettes out of the machine at Riker’s. Have a cup of coffee while I’m there. Loads of empty cabs on Broadway. Sure, why not go down to Times Square and just have a look at what’s available? Telling myself I’m just window-shopping. Always knowing better, but not realizing until later. Sections of the brain fighting with each other.
Saw her on the street and talked with her and she turned me off and went with her anyway. Figure it out.
Well. A pattern that happened before, happened later too. What it amounted to: didn’t want to put her down. Didn’t want to injure her. Didn’t want to walk away, saying in effect that I didn’t like her, that she wasn’t attractive. Also the always there dream of sexual nirvana. The dream persists, however absurd the context. That this one will somehow make some magic. That one will fuck as one has never fucked before, come in a rush before which all prior comings pale.
A thousand rude awakenings won’t stop the dream. You would have to kill the dreamer.
The ritual of bargaining. What can you give me? I’ll give you fifteen. Can you give me twenty-five? No. Then how about twenty? All right, twenty it is.
A cab to a hotel on Thirty-second Street just a few doors east of Fifth. Never there before. Usually went to dumps in the West Forties. Suggested as much, and she shrugged it off. “This place is nicer. There’s a lot of heat around Times Square. This place they know me, and nobody will bother us, we can take our time.”
Five dollars and twenty-five cents for the room. Five for the room, two bits for the city hotel-room tax. The clerk will throw the registration card away and put the money in his pocket, tax and all. Rent the same room ten times a night, five dollars for the owner, twenty-five cents for the city, $47.25 in his pocket. Some of that has to go to the cops, some more under the table to the owner.
Can’t remember what the clerk looked like. Most of them fit the word “Runyonesque.” Bent Broadway features, spaced-out Broadway eyes. All look the same in memory. Surprising I can remember what the whore looked like.
Looked worse with her clothes off. Hit marks on her arms and legs. Tracks. No surprise. Fewer than some I’ve seen, but whatever amount she uses has strung her out. The breasts are shrunken, the ribs showing. No meat on the thighs. Small sagging abdomen, stretch marks on it. A dozen marks on each breast. I recognize them because I’ve seen them before, on other girls. Usually on breasts. Cigarette burns.
“Listen, do you want to have a really special time?”
I’m wary. Always a hustle for a little more dough. I’ve already given her the twenty. Now she’ll promise ten more orgasms for ten more dollars. Learned over the years to say no. Offer her more money if I still feel horny after she earns the twenty.
“I have these pills. You take two of them, and you cut out and wail.”
(Or words to that effect. Who can remember it word for word? I remember the tone of her voice, smoke-roughened, slightly squeaky, tension in it.)
Still wary, I say I can’t pay for the pills. But there’s no charge. She digs sex more when she takes them, likes it if a guy takes them with her. What are they? Ups, something like bennies, might keep you awake, but who wants to go to sleep, right? Right.
; A pair of capsules, a glass of water from the bathroom sink. Don’t recognize the capsules. Look like nothing I’ve seen. Just look like capsules.
She makes a big production of taking two pills, hands two more to me. I take them. Visions of sexual superman, ultimate studhood.
“Get in bed, I want to wash up.”
I get in, waiting. Waiting a long time. She comes back, frowns. I tell her to join me. She says she doesn’t really like to get into sex until her pills take hold. Tells me to lie down and relax, goes to john again.
Beginning to get irritated, want her to come back and get the whole thing over with. Eyes close. Wake up six hours later with a dry throat and a headache. Instant understanding. Get out of bed, dizzy. Find pants. Wallet’s in pocket, money missing. Had about seventy last night, gave her twenty, a deuce for the cab, five for the room. So she clipped me for what? Call it forty-three. There’s a little over a dollar in change in my pants. She left it alone.
Credit cards are all intact. I offer spontaneous thanks to her for leaving the credit cards.
Head still throbbing. Gorge rising, feeling of having been suckered, guilt, shame. Drugged with what? Chloral hydrate, barbiturates, something. And took the pills like an idiot. What if I’d been drinking and the drug combined badly with the alcohol? What if the dose she gave me was lethal in its own right?
And the bitch wouldn’t even fuck for it first. Had to stay in the bathroom until the drug took hold.
I buy a shirt on the way to the office, change in the washroom. Sit at my desk still feeling the drug hangover and swearing never again, never goddamn again. Not street stuff. Twenty numbers in my wallet of twenty-five-dollar girls, safe, clean, decent. Twenty for the girl and five for the room is twenty-five dollars, the same price to feel like a human being instead of an animal. No more of this, no taking chances with getting robbed or drugged or diseased. No more crabs from dirty girls and dirty ten-times-a-night fucked-on bed linen. Never again.
Two months later, back on the street. Saw the same sallow-skinned bitch again. Recognized her right off. She looked at me and looked right on through me. No idea she’s seen me before. Her eyeballs are pinned, she’s junked out of her skull.
Thoughts of picking her up, taking her somewhere, fucking her. Then beating the shit out of her and taking my money back, plus anything else she’s got with her. Take her clothes and leave her naked in the fucking hotel room.
But I can’t summon up the rage. Just walk by her coldly. And, two months after the drugging and robbing, I pick a skinny little black girl off the street and go around the corner with her. She stuffs my fifteen dollars in her bra, blows me with professional technique wedded to professional detachment. Spits it out on the floor.
I remember the spitting better than the blowjob. Why not the sink or the toilet? No, she has to spit it on the floor. So much for you, whitey. On the floor.
“Never again” equals two months. Figure it out.
• • •
Howard, the author of the passage quoted above, is a Madison Avenue copywriter in his early forties. He is tall and heavy-set, with receding brown hair and an animated expression. His conversation is utterly different in tone and content from the written observations which comprise this chapter. In person he is witty, ebullient, cheerful, with a wry sense of humor and a charming manner. One feels that, while he may recognize the absurdity of his particular life style—indeed, he stresses this recognition—nevertheless he is quite comfortable living as he does.
I met Howard in the early stages of research for Tricks of the Trade. While one has little difficulty meeting call girls in New York, one does find it considerably more difficult meeting girls who are not only willing but able to talk perceptively about themselves. I had accordingly told various friends of my project, and let them know that I was interested in getting in touch with girls whom they considered likely prospects.
“You’ve got to talk to Howard,” one such friend told me. “There’s a guy who must know half the hookers in New York. I never heard of a guy who spends that much of his salary on prostitutes, or is that open about it. I’ve been to lunch with him and listened to him go on about one call girl after another. You wouldn’t believe the stories he tells. He’ll have a whole table in stitches.”
I was introduced to Howard and sat over dinner with him for several hours one evening. He gave me numbers and introductions to a number of girls who seemed ideal for my purpose, and several of the interviews which saw print in Tricks were a direct result of our meeting. He also lived up to his publicity—he did virtually all the talking, and the stream of anecdotes he spun was not merely entertaining but enlarged my knowledge of the New York call girl scene immeasurably. Thus Tricks of the Trade was a better book in several respects for his help.
Immediately upon publication I sent him a copy, and he called shortly thereafter to say he had enjoyed the book, and also to try to guess the identities of several of the girls in it. He surprised me by being right on one, a girl who was not one of the ones he had suggested to me. I thought I had disguised circumstances and particulars enough, but there was an unalterable minor detail which turned out to be enough for Howard.
“One thing that occurred to me reading it,” he said. “There ought to be a chapter on the johns. The good fellows like me who keep the sweethearts in business.”
I had considered this at the time, but felt a general chapter on prostitutes’ customers might be out of place in what was a fairly specialized work. I did include observations on johns in discussing the individual girls.
“Maybe not johns in general,” he said. “Maybe a whole book or a part of a book just dealing with a guy like me. A guy who spends half his time chasing commercial cunt and the other half hating himself for it.”
There was a tone in his voice I had not heard before. I arranged to have drinks with him, and went to his East Side apartment a few nights later.
It was a painful hour or so. He would keep steering the conversation along anecdotal paths, talking not about himself but about girls he had known, furnishing essentially a repeat performance of our earlier meeting. When I injected a question dealing specifically with him rather than the girls, he either blocked or replied briefly, then lapsed into silence. I went home with the certain feeling that his story was an important one, but that either he was not the person to tell it or I the wrong person to drag it out of him.
Two days later he called to apologize. “I brought you over here for one thing, and then I couldn’t give it to you. I think I must have hoped you’d turn out to be like talking to a shrink. I’m not sure whether I get anything from my shrink or not. Thirty bucks an hour, three days a week. Often feel I could spend the same fee on a hooker and be sure of a return. My man said something funny when I told him that. Not hysterical, but funny for him. He’s an essentially humorless person. Maybe that comes of listening to people like me all day. Assuming he listens.
“He said when I stopped wanting to spend the money on a whore instead, then I wouldn’t have to spend it on him, either.
“Jack, the point of this is, I can’t talk it out. What I want to do is write it out. I think if all I had to do was talk to the typewriter with my fingers I might put something down that otherwise stays locked in my head. I wanted to ask you if you would be willing to look at it when I’m done, and if you think there’s anything there, you could use it as a source document for writing a chapter about me. Does that sound all right?”
I said it sounded fine, although I must admit I didn’t expect more than a page or two would ever get written. We said good-bye to each other, and I hung up without really expecting to hear from Howard again. Some months went by, and then I received a sheaf of manuscript in the mail. The typing was atrocious, with whole sections xxxxx’d out and innumerable words spelled in a highly unorthodox manner. The grammar was frequently out of whack, and the style inconsistent, with the narration switching unpredictably from past to present tense and back again.
This notwithstanding, the document was one that gripped me all the way through. Rambling, episodic, bitter, it comes across as an extraordinary revelation of a compulsive john.
I called Howard and made properly enthusiastic sounds. “Then use it whatever way you like,” he told me. “I don’t know what you would want to know that I left out. You can make up anything to fit the gaps. Turn it around or put it in the form of a dialogue between us, anything you want.”
I told him what I really wanted to do was print his manuscript verbatim, or at least as much of it as I had room for. He protested that it was an unrevised draft, that he had been so immersed in the writing process he had been unable to waste time on writing style. “I’d like to leave it that way,” I said. “It gets the feeling across. The only thing that bothers me is the feeling that I’m profiting on your work and doing little or none of my own. You could even expand this, make a book out of it if you wanted to.”
He laughed. “I’ll tell you something,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the good it did me to write it. But as far as trying to do anything with it: in the first place, I could never put my name on it; but even more than that, Jack, I was absolutely incapable of looking at a single page after I finished it. I wanted to proofread the thing, and it made me physically ill to look at what I had written. Too personal. I couldn’t hack it. Do anything you want with it, but with one exception—don’t send the thing back to me. I don’t want to look at it.”
So here, then, is the autobiographical statement of a compulsive john. It is choppy, uneven, and the sections are arranged as Howard wrote them, which is to say that they are in no particular order at all. The piece quoted at the beginning of this chapter was the opening of the work, and the rest of it follows below. With the exception of name and place changes here and there, and typographical correction, everything is verbatim. The only omissions consist of two lengthy reminiscences; I might have included them but feared they would make this chapter disproportionately long.
Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 14