The shrink tried to relate this to the whores.
Sexual success or something. Balanced off against fear of failure. Can’t make it with a regular woman out of fear of failing. Have to make it with whores to prove the fear of failing is unjustified.
This is ridiculous, because I’ve made it with non-whores plenty of times. Not much before marriage. How many hundreds and hundreds of times with my wife? And how many times since then? I am not impotent that often. Once in a while, but not that often. And not that much more often than I am impotent with whores, which also happens. Once in a while.
It would happen more often with whores, except a competent prostitute can usually manage to do you some good one way or another.
• • •
As a matter of fact, I have never had oral sex from a non-whore that was nearly as good as three whores out of four are capable of even on an off night.
• • •
Sometimes an experience comes along and surprises you.
A night about a year after the divorce. Out all night with friends, and pretty tired. Not drunk, not close, but plenty to drink. Walking home because no cabs, and for once honestly not thinking about getting laid.
Believe I had had a girl that afternoon, anyway.
Walking along, and this girl comes up to me. Very young. Black girl. Some of the black girls working the streets are fifteen, sixteen. This one wasn’t much more than that.
Generally I’ll only pick up a black girl if I want something very quick and physical. Not a prejudice. Just the vibrations. Can tell they hate their white johns.
Maybe a little projection—if I were a spade hooker I would hate white johns. Why shouldn’t they? Thus hard to talk to them, hard to relate to them. Okay for the times when you don’t want to talk or relate. Otherwise no.
Very appealing girl, this one. Sort of chubby. Puppy fat. Her name was Dolores. Did I want to go out with her?
Said I didn’t think I was in the mood. Said she’d make sure I had a good time. Spoke nicely. A lot of the black girls on the street talk dirty, think it excites men. Used to excite me when I first started hanging around Times Square. Turns me off nowadays.
Wound up taking her to a hotel on Twenty-third Street. Not to my apartment. Call girls, yes, that I knew, but nothing off the street to my apartment. Fear of getting robbed. Also a limit to what the neighbors will stand.
Kept thinking about the time I was rolled. Thinking about it now—amazing I went through with it at all, an out-of-the-way hotel, the scene that went on after we got there.
Pleasant girl. Dolores. Must have been new to tricking. Asked twenty, agreed right away when I offered fifteen. And kissed me on the mouth right away. Some do and some don’t, but none of them initiate it, in case the john doesn’t want to.
Don’t really remember what kind of fuck she was the first time. Or exactly what we did.
Afterward, lay there for a few minutes, then started to get up.
“Where you going?”
Tell her I’m getting dressed. Oh, do I have to go home to my wife? I say I’m divorced. Do I have somebody I have to go home to? No, nobody at all.
“Then why don’t we stay here? Paid for the room, might as well use it.”
Right away I’m wary. Some kind of hustle. Has to be, no other way it can play.
Tell her I don’t have any more money. Oh, that doesn’t matter. She earned enough tonight, she wants to sleep and have somebody nice to sleep next to. If I go she’ll stay there herself, but why don’t I stay next to her?
Right. And I fall asleep, and she’s gone with the money. Just one time I was drugged, but how many times did it happen when drunk and fell asleep? No way to blame a whore for that. You fall asleep yourself, and of course she’ll steal. If she can fuck for it, why can’t she steal for it?
Decide, oh, shit, who wants to get dressed and go out in the cold now anyway? And what’s in the wallet? Fifty bucks? Figure it’s costing fifty bucks to get her to stay. Cheap enough that way, and figure on it in advance and you don’t feel like a sucker the next day.
I say I’ll stay and stretch out, figuring we’ll go to sleep. She starts playing with me. Don’t really want to screw anymore but start to harden.
Puts her finger in my anus, asks do I like that. I can take it or leave it. Tell her sure, I like it. Gets up, very animated, gets a washcloth, washes me there. Says there’s something men really like.
Eats me there for about twenty minutes.
Feels good, but nothing spectacular. Remember kissing her, then wonder how many asses her tongue had been up earlier in the evening. Kind of thought that is usually a turn-off, but not this time. Wonder why.
Finally tell her let’s do something else. She’s disappointed. Ultimately realize she was really enjoying the act. Enjoying her part in it and disappointed it wasn’t doing all that much for me.
Frenches me for a while. Then I fuck her. Really tired now, put her on top. She comes with a dreamy look in her eyes. I’m still hard. She starts in again and brings herself off, and I’m still hard and almost asleep. She gets off of me and blows me until I come, then curls up next to me and goes to sleep.
I’m exhausted but light sleep. Now I don’t want to get robbed because it was beautiful with her, it got really good, and that would make it rotten. Can’t fight sleep too long, and slip under.
Wake up in her mouth. Sun streaming through the window. Hard as a rock in her mouth. Longtime fantasy never before achieved, to be sucked gently out of sleep.
Beautiful experience.
I keep my eyes closed. After a while she rolls me over onto my stomach, does the anilingus thing again. I wake up in the course of this and turn over. Disappointed: “Nothing for you, huh?”
Tell her it’s not my thing. Then ask if she would like me to do her. Wouldn’t she just. I wash her with the washcloth and do her.
Have done this before. As an experiment. Never before with someone enormously turned on by it. Very unusual experience. Wants me to bugger her, but too tight. Finally screw her dog style.
We get dressed, leave the hotel together. I offer to buy her breakfast. All she wants is coffee. Never asks for money, never even looks like waiting for me to offer. I want to, I should, but stubbornly refuse to be hustled, even soft-sell hustle. We are easy enough across the breakfast table, but have nothing to say to each other.
After I’ve left her I regret not giving her money. Regret not taking her home to my place, living with her. Know it’s ridiculous, but start to romanticize her.
Looked for her that night, couldn’t find her; after hours of walking, went home without picking up a girl. Looked for her for weeks. Asked girls if they knew her, gave her name and description. Nothing. Didn’t have the sense to get a phone number from her at the time.
You have an experience now and then like that one, and it’s hard to stop chasing whores, because you know there’s always the chance one like that will come around again.
• • •
What the shrink said—need to succeed, plus fear of letting others down, thus unable to make it with someone other than whore.
Take the girl I couldn’t make it with at all, and maybe it fits. The one girl I wanted to make it with. The one girl I did not want to disappoint, and nothing.
Maybe it does fit.
All right, but so what?
• • •
When I was young, years before I first got laid, I had a fantasy of meeting a beautiful young prostitute and taking her away from all that. She would think I was too good for her, but I would be very noble, and her background would mean nothing to me. I would have saved her from a life of shame and degradation, and we would make each other very happy for the rest of our lives.
This is a common fantasy. There are some men who never get over it. The average call girl gets a surprising number of proposals, if half the ones they talk about are true. And some of them marry johns. I know at least three who married johns and retired, then went b
ack to the game when the marriages fell in the shit.
When they propose, they always insist that they want to marry the girl in spite of her background.
Bullshit.
They want to marry her because of it.
• • •
The most difficult time was when I first started again after I was married.
Furtive sneaking around. Nothing but streetwalkers, because I didn’t know any call girls and wouldn’t ask friends. Didn’t want anyone to know what I was doing. Afternoon pickups on Forty-seventh Street. Nervous that someone from the office would see me. Quick coupling and spurting in filthy hotel rooms. Late nights at the office, the excuse elaborately prepared early in the day, then staying around late to make it true, then a half-hour with a whore before catching the subway.
Enormous fear of bringing a disease home. The terror when urination is occasionally painful, the certainty that it’s a symptom of gonorrhea. Careful examination of the penis and scrotum looking for a syphilitic chancre, worrying over every occasional pimple or enlarged lymph node.
“You married? Guess there’s things your wife won’t do huh?”
She did everything I ever asked her. Would have done other things had I suggested them.
• • •
It is easier to pick up whores now. It was hardest in my bachelor days in New York.
They’re afraid of young men, the whores are. They think there must be something wrong with a young man, a man in his twenties, if he has to seek them out. That he’ll want to do something odd. That he’ll lose his temper or turn out to be murderous.
And they often thought I was a cop. I was young and tall and heavily built and clean-cut, and it is men of that description who most often turn out to be cops.
Once I sat on the bed afterward and was tying my shoes. The girl had a hand on the doorknob. Asked her to wait a minute and reached into my pocket. I can’t remember why. Not to give her a tip, because I never give them anything extra. Perhaps to find out if she had a phone number. Some girls on the street also work off the phone, and when one pleased me, I sometimes took her number.
Spun around toward me with her face white as a sheet. Whiter than the sheets in those squalid hotels. Absolute terror in her eyes. Probably the first human expression she showed all day.
Told her whatever it was, her phone number, whatever.
“Don’t ever scare me like that. Calling me to wait, and your hand in your pocket, and I think, oh, shit, here I am busted again.”
But I had just finished fucking her. How could I be a cop?
“Oh, they fuck you first if they like your looks. Anything they want. Your word against theirs, so who are you going to tell that’ll listen. Usually I try to keep at least a hundred bucks on me, but I just started, and I’m stony.”
I had significantly less trouble after I was married. And no trouble at all nowadays. Either because I’m older or because I just look like a john.
• • •
“This is ridiculous. I have a perfectly good wife at home.”
This used to run through my head during the years of my marriage. Not when I first resumed running after whores. Then the compulsion was too urgent to be approached rationally, the guilt too great to look at with logic.
Later on, whoring out of habit, drinking coffee in a call girl’s apartment, or signing a false name on a hotel register, the line would come to mind.
A perfectly good wife.
No point working out why she wasn’t enough. Question: could she have been different in some way that would have made a difference to me?
Answer. Cummings’ line: “always the beautiful answer that asks the more beautiful question.”
She enjoyed sex and was good at it, but lacked my obsession with it. Had she been comparably driven, I cannot be sure things would have been better or worse. Would have been different, though.
Thousands of reasons why I go whoring, but one is a need for something new. Different. Other. Some extension of the limits of sex.
I think of an athlete extending himself beyond the limits of his own capacity for endurance, forcing his body beyond its own limits. Howard the sexual athlete.
Once I fucked three whores in two hours of an afternoon. Hardly out of physical need. Happened this way. Called this girl I had seen couple times. Her roommate picks up. Carol has a trick that’ll keep her busy, so I can call back in an hour or so or come over and see her. Very sexy, breathless, Marilyn Monroe voice, gets me half hard over the phone, so I go over there and fuck her. Afterward she’s not busy, so we have a couple of drinks, Carol finishes her trick, and comes out and sits with us. Nice sexy, pleasant conversation. Fun to talk sex with whores. The stories they tell. Nice beforehand to get hot, but better afterward, intimate that way.
Start necking with Carol. “This might lead to bigger things, Howie.” Tell her I’m feeling like a millionaire, so she knows I’m not after a freebie. Marilyn Monroe gets up to leave the room. Tell her no, stick around, turns me on to have her there. Carol and I fuck on the couch. Marilyn—call her that because who remembers her name—gets into spirit of the thing and while I’m fucking Carol comes over so I can eat her pussy.
Not my first time with two at once. Usually prefer one at time. Nice this time because she and Carol touch each other, get involved. You remember Carol, put her in Tricks with a different name.
On the way home a girl solicits me on the street. No desire at all, but appreciate the irony of it, so what the hell, here’s my shot at the Sex Olympics. Take her to a hotel, not expecting I’ll get it up, but just to see what happens. I’m hard before she’s out of her clothes. Takes a long time to come, and nothing really left to shoot.
Screwed my wife that night. Couldn’t come, but faked it.
• • •
I’d get married tomorrow if I met the right girl.
Scares me, because not sure there is a right girl, and I don’t want to make another mistake. Can’t afford it. Huge salary, but not too much left after alimony and child support. I’m out of alimony now because she remarried, but child support a total bitch, goes on till they’re twenty-one. Youngest one won’t be twenty-one for eleven years.
The right girl. Not a whore. I like some of them, and I could even love some of them. But they have pieces missing. Need someone so hung up on sex she couldn’t turn herself off the way they do.
Someone who would want to swing with other couples, try everything once, like most of what she tried. Kind of woman who’s what whores pretend to be, what you really look for when you go to one.
Read your books about swingers and wonder if it would really do it for me or if I just think so because I know I’ll never try it. Can’t do it without a partner. Single girls, sure, but no single men.
Keep thinking about hiring a call girl to swing with another couple, not telling them she was a whore. I know a few who would go for it. Cost a mint, and need a girl right for the part. Right one would get a kick out of the idea. Be surprised how many of them wanted to be actresses when first came to the city.
Unfair to the other couple? I don’t know. Be getting professional talent.
Probably do it sooner or later, see what it’s like. Think about it so much, sure to try it out sooner or later just to see.
• • •
Not really bad as it sounds. All of it.
At least I do it when I want to. Guys I know, sitting around dying to get into somebody besides their wives. Talk with the secretaries, stare bug-eyed every time a pair of tits walk by. Probably jerk off in the toilet.
Run around with girls, presents all the time, keeping these girls on the side, scared the wife’ll find out, scared the girl will want them to get a divorce. No good that way, either.
Know a guy who has a girl who doesn’t know he’s married. Damned fool. Wearing himself out cheating on each woman with the other one.
Probably had more women than ninety-nine percent of the men in New York. Probably screwed more times, to
o. Married man who doesn’t cheat, how much does he get after ten years married? Once, twice a week. Me, maybe five times a week. Who do I know my age gets it five times a week?
• • •
Wonder what it cost over the years. Jesus, wouldn’t want to try to figure it out. Cheapest ever was five bucks. No, wrong. Driving down Third Avenue below Fourteenth Street once years ago. Lived out in the Island then. Girl comes over when I’m stopped for a light. She’ll blow me for five. I look, and I’m down to two bucks besides what I need for the bridge. She takes the two, and I park on a side street. Only took her about two minutes, head bobbing in my lap. Not bad, dollar a minute.
Never spent more than fifty. Fifty dollars, spend that much on dinner and a show and not even get laid.
Could be worse.
Odds And Ends
The letters from Grant and Roger, and Howard’s extended exercise in verbal self-analysis, are not really typical of my professional correspondence. Far more commonly I will receive a letter, reply to it, and receive no reply in return. While one grows to expect as much, nevertheless it is often somewhat frustrating. Often the initial letters are intriguing—one is interested and wants to know more.
This book is already at least as long as it ought to be, and this final chapter was not part of my original plan. But while sorting through my correspondence I kept finding myself digging out letters that somehow begged to be included. A sampling of them follows.
One obvious motive for including them stems from the natural desire to emulate meat packers and use “all of the pig but the squeal.” Because this book is in a sense a grab-bag, it lends itself to the utilization of these odds and ends. But in another sense, I cannot help feeling that these fragments of correspondence help to suggest the considerable variation in sexual life styles and the ways in which different people have succeeded or failed in accommodating themselves to their desires.
Thus these odds and ends.
John Warren Wells,
I am eighteen years old, and I have went to bed with boys ever since I can remember. I’ve got most boys I pretty well wanted. I can’t get enough of their bodies. I usually pick the one I want, and then see if I’m smart enough to get them to make love to me. It isn’t that hard, you know. To be honest, for years I had my own pick of the litter; and now I don’t have anyone.
Beyond Group Sex: Doing Their Own Thing (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 16