Well, you can probably imagine where my train of thought was leading me. I was thinking that this man would certainly have given me cab fare if he had been awake, but of course I hadn’t wanted to wake him up and ask for it, and I hadn’t even considered helping myself to money while he was sleeping. And I thought that he never would have missed it if I had taken some money, and I thought, oh, about how little money I had and how I was always broke, and how this man had spent I don’t know, fifty dollars at the very least that night, just to take me to bed, and most of that he spent taking me to a show I hated to sit through. It occurred to me that I would have been much better off taking the money directly and skipping the show, and just balling him in return for the money, since I had gotten nothing but grief from it anyway and couldn’t possibly have felt more like a whore.
I went to my room but I couldn’t sleep. It was still early. I went downstairs to the cocktail lounge and had a couple of drinks, and sure enough this fellow hit on me and started buying drinks for me. This was no surprise. A girl by herself always gets her drinks bought for her.
I wound up at a table with this fellow, and the funny thing is he was a pretty decent and hip guy, and if it hadn’t been for my mood I would probably have gone to bed with him and had a reasonably good time out of the whole thing. But you understand how I felt by now. He was just another man who wanted to use me, and he had recognized me for a tramp the minute I walked in the door, and, oh, the usual things were going through my mind. He asked if I wanted to go somewhere for a late bite. I think he suggested a place where they specialized in steaks and had a jazz quartet for entertainment. The reason I mention it is that this was the sort of thing I liked to do on a date, the ideal way as far as I’m concerned to spend some time with a man before going to bed. That’s the whole point, in a way—that this man who was really my first trick was an ideal date and the complete opposite in every way of the pig I had gone out with earlier that evening.
JWW: If you had met him first—
GILLIAN: It would have been a completely different evening. But let’s not get into the convenient trap of saying that if I’d met Mr. Okay Guy first I wouldn’t be hooking today. It might have taken longer but I would have wound up in the same place.
JWW: But you might have come via a different route.
GILLIAN: Right. But all roads lead to—well, not Rome, but wherever the hell am now . . .
When he asked me out, I started to accept, and then something happened. Now this is funny, because I honestly hadn’t planned my approach. Looking back on it I can see how I was all primed to ask for money, the business with the cab and all the thoughts that had been going through my head, but I had never actually worked up a plan. I was playing things by ear. But I started to accept, you see, and then I got a long face and sort of lowered my eyes, and he wanted to know what was the matter. And I went into my act. Completely unrehearsed, and the words surprised me as I said them, but they couldn’t have worked out better if I had stayed up nights committing them to memory.
I went into this number about how I was really up against it financially, and how I didn’t need drinks and a steak any more than he needed to buy them for me, but that I was really broke. And I went through this bit about, Look, let’s be honest with one another. I said that I knew that he wanted to go to bed with me, and that I wanted it too, and I would just as soon go now instead of going out and listening to music first. But I also told him that I needed to make some money, and I suggested that he might want to match my honesty and straightforwardness by giving me the money he would have spent on food and drinks and all. I said, “You know, you’d spend money on me and not think twice about it, and you would send me home in a cab, and you might even go overboard and decide to send me flowers or even a gift. Well, not to take the romance out of it, but I could really use the cash.” I invented a reason why I needed money. I don’t remember what it was.
He was completely stunned.
JWW: I can imagine.
GILLIAN: And he bought the whole story. He put two and two together and figured out that I needed cash for an abortion. He gave me a hundred dollars and told me there were no strings attached, none whatsoever. He said he liked me and would enjoy making love to me but that wasn’t part of the deal. If I wanted to do that, fine. If not, the hundred was still mine with no hard feelings.
What a tough little whore I was! You would think I would have found a way to give the dough back and say I was kidding, something like that. But I was all caught up in the role I was playing and all excited at the idea of going through with this, of balling a man for money. I made myself refuse to see him as a decent guy. I didn’t know the words at the time, but what I did, really, was make him a John in my mind.
I took him to my room. I guess the circumstances were so unusual that he found them very exciting. He made love to me in a very sincere and loving way, but as I said he was a John to me and I was as completely turned off as I had been with the other man. In fact it was the same thing again, the whole bit of being into it but not feeling anything and having my mind somewhere a thousand miles away. This complete detachment that I have with tricks, to the point where my body is all involved in pleasing them and they think they’re getting the screwing of their lives and actually I don’t even know they’re alive.
We made it a couple of times, and I dropped off to sleep while he was still there, which was pretty unprofessional. It would have served me right if he took his hundred back and my own money along with it. But as I said, this was Mr. Nice himself. When I woke up there was a second hundred weighted down with the ashtray, and a note with it telling me it wasn’t payment, that it was a loan, that I should use it for whatever I wanted and that someday when I was in the chips I should give the hundred to someone else who was up against it.
I cried, John. I broke down and cried. The one thing I wasn’t ready to handle was that kind of human decency. I just wasn’t ready for it.
I didn’t know anything about him, his name or where he lived or anything. We had never gotten past first names the night before. And something—I guess I knew that I shouldn’t try to see him again, or even think about him if I could avoid it. Because all I would do was build up another love situation in my mind and set myself up for another fall.
So I looked at it cold, you know, and I made myself see it for what it really was, with all of the pretty part cut out. I told myself that it made a beautiful story with the right violins in the background, but that instead of violins all I had in the background was the cruddy guy I’d met earlier in the evening and all the other cruddy guys my life consisted of, and that Mr. Nice would have been a cruddy guy himself except that he was hipped that particular night on the idea of helping a damsel in distress. And after all, it was all a con, and by falling for it he was just a fool, and as for me, well, I was nothing but a whore, which in a sense was all I had been all along, but at least this time I was a whore who had made two hundred dollars in one night’s work, and if you were going to be a whore anyway, which it looked as though I was, then it seemed to me that I might as well make it pay off as well as I could.
• • •
During the following several months, Gillian got into the habit of prostituting herself several times a week. She never again used the elaborate story she had used on her first customer, however.
“I thought of it,” she told me, “but it gave me a bad feeling, the whole idea of it. The more I thought about it, the more I had the feeling that he had topped me. That I had set him up for a con, if you know what I mean, and by being such a decent guy about it he had turned the con inside-out so that I was the fool and not him. And I figured, well, if I was going to be a whore I might as well go right out and be one, and none of this crap about being up against it financially and just doing it as an amateur.
“With the general run of men, it was much easier this way. The squares, the puritans. It wasn’t a question of keeping their respect because these were the kind of clods
who divided the world into good girls and bad girls, and if I would sleep with them at all, for money or for free, I was a bad girl and not entitled to their respect. So it was simpler all around with them to be a straight out-and-out whore and the hell with keeping up appearances.
“Also, I found I liked it better that way. My own feelings. There was no need to pretend that I dug them as people, or to put on any kind of an act. I didn’t even have to put on an act with myself. It was as though I had found my own level and I knew who I was. On the plane I would be all bright and cheerful and well-scrubbed, the perfect stewardess, the all-American girl, and every day this was more of an impossible act for me. When I was with a John I could be my real self. A whore, in other words.”
How did she select her customers?
“Mostly I would accept a date with someone on the flight. A dinner date. This always seemed to me to be the easiest way. I never let on at the time that I wanted money. Not on the plane because that would have been too dangerous. I was running a big risk anyway, taking money from men who knew my name and what airline I worked for, because there was always the chance that one of them for spite would report me, and that would mean the end of my job. But I wasn’t worried enough about that possibility to be as careful as I might have been.
“I would take a date, being careful to pick the reverse of the type I would normally have picked. Instead of hip, self-confident guys I preferred the creepy types, the types who most reminded me of that one jerk who had made me feel like a whore in the first place. I figured that they were the type who were least accustomed to getting it for free and who would be most willing to pay for it.
“I usually let them buy me dinner. A girl has to eat, right? Then when they were trying to think of someplace to take me after dinner, I would give them my pitch. I would say that I liked to make a little extra money because I couldn’t live on what the airlines paid me, and if they were willing to spend money on me instead of on drinks and a floorshow, we could have a really good time together.”
“And this approach was successful?”
She laughed. “Are you kidding? It literally never missed. I found out a very interesting thing about the average American male: instead of being turned off by the idea of a girl selling herself, he’s actually turned on by it. Maybe it just appeals to his sense of guilt. Maybe he thinks prostitutes are hotter and more passionate than other women, which is a laugh when you realize that prostitutes ninety-nine times out of a hundred are just going through the motions, while with a girl who’s doing it for love there’s at least a chance that she’s getting some fun out of it. Or maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s just that these men are so insecure, so uptight about themselves and their lives and their sexual ability. When it’s all a matter of cash and carry they don’t have to worry about striking out. Also, if they’re married, it doesn’t seem as much like cheating to them. And they don’t have to worry that I’ll fall in love with them, or call them up at the office, or any of the embarrassing things a girl might do if she actually liked them for their stupid selves and not just for their money.
“Listen to me sounding like a psychologist. All I really know is that during this time, while I was still flying as a stew and tricking on the side, I never struck out. Each of these men was a guy who did not have it in mind to go with a prostitute, but when I brought up the subject I did not get turned down. Which must prove something. A few times guys tried to talk me into doing it for free, but then it was mostly a case of their still thinking of me as a stew and not believing I was really hooking. Once they knew where I stood they stopped trying to build up their egos and paid the price.”
And how much was the price?
“I started out by asking for twenty. Then I found out that it was a mistake to set a price. When I didn’t ask, I always got at least twenty and sometimes got more. I don’t think I ever got more than fifty.
“I would say I probably earned a little over a hundred dollars a week this way, on the average.”
“Was the money important to you?”
“God, yes.”
“How?”
She considered this. “It was a tremendous amount of money at the time,” she said finally. “You have to realize that I was earning less than a hundred dollars a week as a stew at that time, and working my tail off for it, and here I was doubling my income by doing something I had been doing anyway, and for free.”
Had she had trouble living on her salary previously? No, she admitted, she had not. Then why was the extra income so important to her?
“Maybe because it made me realize I was worth something,” she suggested. “I remember something that must have happened over and over, sitting on the edge of a bed in some hotel room after a man had made love to me and gone away into the night. Sitting on the edge of the bed with a couple of bills in my hand. And holding onto that money, just holding onto it. As if it was telling me who I was.”
“You think it gave you a sense of identity?”
“Oh, I don’t know. When you put it in those words it sounds so ridiculous. Like something Joyce Brothers would say. And I’m not sure that’s what it was, anyway.
“Partly, well, it was the feeling that I was getting a little of my own back from these men. That they had been taking advantage of me all my life and now I was taking advantage of them. I didn’t know any prostitutes at the time and I didn’t really know anything about prostitution, the terms and all, but when I learned the word trick later on, either to trick a man meaning to screw him for money, or trick as a word to describe an act of sex, or even calling a John a trick, this was a word that made immediate sense to me. Because although I didn’t use the word I thought of it all in just those terms. I was tricking these men. I was giving them absolutely nothing because my mind and body were completely turned off by them and untouched by them, and they were giving me money and not getting anything in return.
“Now from what I’ve learned since, this is the typical prostitute’s attitude. It’s an absolute cliché. This is every hooker’s life trip, and it’s so much a part of the whore scene that even today I get astonished when I meet a girl in the life who has orgasms with Johns, or who doesn’t feel that the whole act with a John is a case of mutual exploitation, with each person trying to take advantage of the other. Not every girl does feel this way, but so many do that it’s a surprise still to meet one who doesn’t.
“There’s one incident that sticks in my mind—it was one of the last tricks I turned before I got grounded by the airlines. I think it was in Baltimore but I’m not that sure of the city, and I had met this man, not on the plane but in the cocktail lounge at the airport. This was actually much safer than picking them up on the plane because you could keep it a secret who you were. In fact I think a pro hooker nowadays could make a good thing out of picking up men at an airport lounge. Everyone would take it for granted that you were a stewardess and no one would make a fuss about you picking men up because it’s accepted for stews to do this, and there are always plenty of men around looking for pickups, and no one would know that you were a pro because no one knows every stew by sight. I know plenty of girls who work the midtown bars when the phone goes dead, and they take a big chance in a lot of ways, and now that I think about it, they would really do much better at the airport . . .
“I picked this man up, and when he wanted to buy me dinner I suggested we have dinner in my room. I told him we could order everything from room service and have a ball for ourselves. I had never pulled this particular line before but I figured it would get the preliminaries out of the way in a hurry.
“In the room, I gave him the rest of the story. He was tremendously turned on by the whole thing. It seemed he was in town for a convention and this was his one weekend of the year to cut loose and have a good time, and he couldn’t believe how lucky he was.
“We never did order dinner. We went to bed and I earned a fast twenty-five dollars, and the next thing I knew he was on the phone. I thought he was g
oing to call either the airlines or the police, I had no idea which, and I wanted to jump out of bed and run, but how could I do that? It was my room, not his.
“But it turned out he was calling his buddies at the convention hotel downtown. It wasn’t enough for him to go to bed with me—he had to show them how sophisticated he was and what a great operator he was, and he had to set them up with me, too. He told them to pile into a cab and come on up there.
“This scared me. I could picture a whole army of Shriners in the hallway, whooping it up so that every airlines person in the hotel knew that a stew in Room Whatchamacallit was putting out for an army. So I told him I would go to their hotel instead.
“We took a cab, and he sneaked me up to his room, and I was back in high school again. It seemed that way. I felt like the only whore in town. I was there for hours, taking on one man after the other, and I was so exhausted in the morning that I had to call in sick and get someone else to take the flight for me. I suppose that was one of the reasons I got grounded not long after, but it was coming anyway, so it didn’t make any real difference . . .
“That night, though, it did settle things for me. Until then I was a stew during the days and a whore at night, and it was something special, doing it as a sideline, but that one night made me realize that I would have to give up flying because this life was where I belonged.
“Not because I enjoyed it. Not even because of the money itself, although it did add up to a perfect fortune for one night’s work. I think it was just the whole feel of that night and the way it stayed in my mind. One man after the other. Except it got to the point where they weren’t even men anymore. Not men at all. That’s a fact—it wasn’t one man after another, but one cock after another, cock after cock after cock, and they would go either in my cunt or in my mouth, it hardly mattered, and they would move around in there until they finished, and then some other cock would come and take their place. Just cock after cock after cock—
Sex and the Stewardess (John Warren Wells on Sexual Behavior) Page 13