by Seka
He wanted to teach me how to drive. He had a Volkswagen van with a stick shift. He took me to a huge mall parking lot where I wouldn’t crash into anything. It took a weekend until I could drive the thing. I studied the Driver’s Ed book and right out of the box I got my driver’s license. Talk about freedom. Getting married and getting a driver’s license — it was like the biggest jailbreak of all time.
June was approaching very quickly, which meant graduation. Frank said, “We need to talk about a couple of things.”
I thought, “Uh-oh.” The red flag went up.
“You need to think about getting a job. A real job, to contribute to the household.”
It used to be I’d get out of school and have the summer off and get to play, but this wasn’t going to happen anymore. I graduated, got my diploma, and I was suddenly an adult.
I called my Uncle John, who worked for the Virginia Department of Highways. I figured he might know somebody who could get me a job. I went to this office and got a mail clerk position, distributing all the mail and running all the reports. This was before computers. We had steno machines and I’d have to ink up these big drums and put the reports in there. We used masters to print out hundreds of copies. I even had my own office. I thought, “Wow, this is really cool.”
I liked the people and was finally treated like an adult. They judged me on my own merits, which was really a cool feeling. They were all very helpful and got me oriented to the position.
As time went on, I got to know Frank’s mom and dad, as we ate over their house frequently. They were really nice people. His mother couldn’t hear very well at all and his father pretty much sat in his La-Z-Boy recliner and watched sports and drank beer. She reminded me of Edith Bunker and even looked a bit like her. The whole scene was all very Archie Bunker-ish. His dad was racist, but didn’t know it. It was because of where he was born and raised. But I got along with them okay.
Meanwhile, Frank kept smoking his pot. He was on swing shift — eight to three one week, four to twelve the next, and then twelve to eight. I had never been alone except when my mom had left me. Now I was quite frequently. When he worked the graveyard shift, it was really scary for me. I was just afraid to be in the house alone. I don’t know why. I stayed awake and watched a lot of TV. Somehow, I functioned at work. There were so many new things happening in my life I guess I was just on overload. But as the months went by, I kind of got used to that, too. We would have our weekends together and we’d even go back to the lake to go fishing.
One day while driving to the lake Frank said, “Try this,” and he handed me a joint.
I said, “No,” but eventually relented. The first time I tried it I didn’t feel anything. No sensation. No hunger. No giggles. Nothing.
The speed limit was seventy-five. He started laughing and asked, “How fast are you going?”
“Seventy-five.”
He laughed even harder. I looked down at the speedometer and it said thirty-five. Then I started laughing. I felt like I was going seventy-five, but I was stoned. It felt calm and peaceful. But I knew it would be best to pull over.
Frank introduced me to sex and alcohol, and now drugs. The party was just beginning.
9. Massage Girl
As much as I enjoyed the idea of being an adult and working, I realized I wasn’t going to go any further where I was. My salary and benefits weren’t very good so I decided to look for another job.
I put in an application with Reynolds Aluminum Company and ended up working on their production line. I sort of felt like the character in the movie Norma Rae. It was hot and sweaty factory work — a huge building with a metal roof. There was no air conditioning and their gigantic fans did little to cool off our massive production line.
After their Prell Shampoo boxes were labeled, fifteen or so would come at you. There would be one little box that would stick out, which they called the “kicker.” You’d pick that box and stack the last group in it while waiting for the next bunch. That’s all I did for eight straight hours. Pull and stack. Pull and stack. It made me hate Prell Shampoo.
It was the dog days of summer in Virginia. It was hot, humid, miserable, extremely noisy, and I was doing swing shifts. Right in the middle of the section I worked was this little room where the foremen would sit and watch everyone doing their jobs. They had a nice air-conditioned set-up. They were assholes who didn’t particularly treat the women well. We did most of the hard stuff while the men did all the other work that wasn’t as physical. And the guys got more money. After all, it was the seventies.
I took home economics class, so I knew how to sew. I made a pair of shorts and a top to go over the shorts. It was a jumper. The shorts were down to maybe an inch above my knee. I made it because it was something to wear to work that was cool, comfortable, and that I could stand to wear in this sauna.
One day, I was busy on the line when one of the other ladies tapped me on the shoulder and told me they wanted to see me in the office. The foreman said. “You’re going to have to go home and change your clothes.
And we’re going to dock you. Your pants are too short.”
I angrily said, “No, they’re not.”
He informed me he was going to measure my shorts and actually went to get a ruler.
“You’re not going to touch me,” I announced.
“If you don’t change your clothes, you’re not coming back.”
Grabbing my time card, I threw it in the air. I watched the foreman’s mouth grow wide in surprise as the card seemed to hover in the sky. “I quit!”
Storming out of the building, I got in my old Volkswagen Beetle and headed towards home when I spotted Frank driving the other way. He turned around, got behind me, and we pulled over.
“What are you doing?”
When I told him, he asked “What do you mean, you quit?!”
“I quit. I’m not working in that sweatbox. And I won’t be talked to like that.”
We needed both incomes, but he finally said, “Well, okay.”
About a week later, he asked, “Are you going to look for another job?”
“After I get some rest.” Hell, I was exhausted. That job had beaten me down.
One afternoon he got home from work and told me Bob, a guy he worked with, had a side business I might be interested in. He said it wasn’t difficult work and if anybody could do it, I could. That was very intriguing considering I didn’t have a formal education besides a high school diploma. I wasn’t really trained in anything.
“What is it?” I asked excitedly.
The guy owned a massage parlor. I figured I could learn a trade and have a job for life.
The office was in Petersburg, Virginia, which is the next town over and is famous for being the home of Moses Malone. Right next to an Army base was a strip that had a few restaurants, quite a few adult bookstores, and two or three massage parlors.
When I entered the office for my interview I heard a little bell go off. There was a waiting room with maybe eight or ten chairs and some magazines on a coffee table. It reminded me of a doctor’s office — very neat and clean, nicely done. It was actually kind of upscale. There were a couple of guys sitting there looking at me in a way that I hadn’t been looked at before. I didn’t understand why. It made me feel very uncomfortable.
The other door opened into a hallway of small rooms like when you go into a doctor’s office. There was a slender, older lady in her forties with a nice build. She wore white go-go boots and a one-piece body suit that snapped in the front. I thought, “That’s odd. Why would a receptionist not be wearing a skirt or a pair of pants?”
“You must be the new girl. Come on in.”
Still, nothing was hitting me as odd.
I went into a regular-looking office that had a desk and lots of papers and some sort of machine sitting there. The room smelled heavily of cigarettes. Bob was heavyset and sort of disheveled looking. He chained cigarette after cigarette, lighting a new one with the last spark of
the old. There were a couple of other girls in the room dressed just like the lady who answered the door. I wondered, “Why do all the girls dress like this?” I figured when you gave a massage you get warm, so maybe they just wanted to be comfortable until they got ready for the next client.
He asked the two girls to leave and he introduced the older woman as his wife. “So, you’re Frank’s wife. He was telling me about you. I understand you’re looking for a job.”
“What does this entail? Does someone here teach me how to give a massage?”
He got this quirky grin on his face. “Oh yeah. We’ll teach you.”
He asked me what my size was for the boots and the little jump suit. His wife went to the closet and pulled a set out. I tried them and he said, “That looks really good on you. You can start today. To begin with, you’ll stick with my wife and she’ll show you where everything is. If you have any questions, you’ll ask her.” I called Frank to tell him the good news.
It was much like any health spa with shelves, towels, creams, a small sink with soap, and a little radio for soft music. There was a men’s shower room and four stalls. She walked me through the routine. I was told that when a client comes in I should tell him to put his clothes on the hook on the back of the door and shower. When he was done he’d come back to the room and leave the door cracked just a little bit so you’d know he’d returned.
Although I had never had a massage myself, I saw them being done on TV and figured, “I can handle this. No big deal.”
We greeted the first guy sitting in the waiting room. After he showered, he was lying on his stomach with his butt covered by one of the towels. She proceeded to show me how to give a massage. They could buy a half hour or an hour massage. A half was $25 and an hour $50. There was a menu in the lobby. It said tips were accepted.
Everything was going along smoothly. “Not bad,” I thought. I didn’t have to sit in a sauna with those macho foremen telling me my clothes were too short. It was nice, cool, and clean. And the boss was friendly, as were the other girls those first four or five days.
After that, Bob said, “Today you’re going to start working one-onone with the clients. You don’t need to have someone supervise you anymore.”
Already confident in what I was doing, I said, “Well, okay.”
The first two or three guys came in and it went just fine. It was just like all the massages I had done with the other lady. No big deal. Business as usual. The first guy gave me a twenty-dollar tip, which was excellent. But after I massaged the fourth client’s back, he turned over with the hugest boner I’d ever seen in my life, and I’m thinking, “Whoa… hold on Skippy.”
“Sir, I think you need to calm down.”
He started laughing.
“You need to calm down,” I repeated.
“I don’t think you get it.”
“No, that’s not something I take care of.”
He said, “No, you really don’t get it, do you? This is a massage parlor. The least you can do is give me a local.”
“A local what?”
“A local is a hand job.”
“A what?”
“I give you extra money to jerk me off.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No. Why do you think this place is so busy all the time?’”
Naively, I replied, “I figured they just needed a massage.”
It started to dawn on me that they needed their tension relieved, but not in the shoulders. “Oh my God,” I thought to myself. And then it hit me that my husband was pimping me out. I recognized this client as one of the guys in the waiting room when I walked in the first day. Frank and Bob had set me up; they had planned all of this.
I was beyond angry. “You can jerk yourself off. I’m not doing that to you.”
Finishing out my shift, I told Bob and his wife, “I understand the whole deal with this place now. And if you want me to stay here I will. But all I’ll be doing is giving massages.”
They said, “Well, we’ll see how it goes. That’s fine.”
They probably figured I was shell-shocked and I’d come around and give hand jobs and blow jobs or do it “all” like the other girls. But I did give a good massage and had regular clients who just wanted that, so I figured I could continue there.
When I got home I was really hurt and just looked at Frank and said, “What in God’s name did you get me into? Do you know what kind of place that is?”
“Yeah, I know what it is.”
“Why would you want your wife to work in a place like that?”
“I didn’t figure you would mind. It’s just a hand job.”
“You think I wouldn’t mind?! Most men don’t even want their wives looking at another man, much less touching their private parts.”
He looked at me blankly and repeated, “I didn’t think you would mind.”
“Well I do. You must not think very much of me if you’re willing to peddle me out like that.”
I went and slept on the couch. I didn’t know which way to turn or what to do. I had no family; I had no friends. All I had was a husband, and he was trying to pimp me out for a quick buck.
10. Alone Again
That was the beginning of the end between me and Frank. He never really apologized. Hell, he never said a whole lot about anything. I was pretty hurt, but was also pissed off. We didn’t speak a lot after that. I didn’t want to even look at him. I just went to work on the day shift and did my job. I wasn’t about to work the night shift there, because God only knows what went on then. Guys would ask for me, but the owners told them, “No, you don’t want her.” But I didn’t have many office skills per se and sure didn’t want to go back to a factory job. It wasn’t like I had a lot of employment opportunities to choose from.
I tried to save some money because I knew in the back of my head I was going to make an exit. I was trying to figure how to run away from home again. I didn’t want Frank to know my finances before I had all my ducks in a row. If I was going to move I was going to need one month’s rent, one month’s security, furniture, and I still had to find a place. Even worse, I’d never really been on my own before. It was all pretty depressing. I felt like I’d been abandoned once more. I didn’t trust anyone to begin with, and now I’d put 100 percent of my trust in someone to make my life okay and I was just wrong.
Meanwhile Ken, one of my customers who came in quite often, owned two adult bookstores on the strip where the massage parlor was. I let him know I was looking for a different job. He offered me a position as a clerk. It didn’t take much for me to walk into Bob’s office and say, “I quit.”
I started to work behind the counter in Ken’s bookstore the next day. At least at the bookstore customers were going in to watch other people having sex and I didn’t feel like I was being pressured to prostitute myself. They weren’t asking me for it or trying to fondle me or grope me.
I was there a week before my husband found out. Bob asked Frank how I was doing and that’s when my husband discovered I wasn’t working there anymore. It really took him by surprise as it was my first independent act. He demanded to know what was going on and was not happy I was employed at an adult bookstore. I didn’t understand how he could be against me working at a bookstore, but it was okay to work in a whorehouse and be encouraged to give guys hand jobs.
My responsibilities included working the cash register, stocking the shelves, and splicing the 8mm movies together for the peep shows. I couldn’t help watching them and I had never seen anything like it before. I thought they were pretty interesting. My initial reaction, though, was that the women looked really bad. It seemed like they hadn’t bathed. Their hair looked dirty. The soles of their feet were dirty. They had pimples on their butts. It was appalling to me that women would allow themselves to look that way or have others present them that way.
The whole thing was strange and yet not so strange. Basically, I was working as a clerk in a store, period. It could have been 7-1
1 or Piggly Wiggly. It just so happened that it sold dirty magazines instead of hotdog buns and Mountain Dew.
Besides Frank’s, I hadn’t seen any other penises before. But when I saw the size of some of these guys in the movies, I said to myself, “Holy crap.” It didn’t scare me, though. In fact, it all interested me. Even though I was sheltered, none of it offended me at all. I figured they were consenting adults, whereas I wasn’t given a choice when it came to working at the massage parlor. I guess you could say it was arousing to me, the same way it is when guys see big boobs for the first time. Ask them what’s so great about them, they probably can’t give you a really intelligent answer. It’s just something hormonal, I suppose. At the time, I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do with some big huge porn cock — what it would feel like or whether I’d even like it. But hanging around the store was making me feel more comfortable with my own sexuality.
The people who walked in the store were amusing. There were a lot of soldiers, but also a lot of dirty old men. They were the lecherous kind you saw in Playboy and Hustler cartoons. My counter was the farthest away from the door and it sat up about three to four feet higher than the rest of the store so the customers couldn’t grab at me or reach into the register. I could see down the aisle in the back and notice if any of the films broke in the twenty-five cent booths. We changed the movies once a week and everybody knew what day the movies changed. On that day the customers were always primed. “Did you change them yet? Did you change them yet?” Surprisingly, a lot of them were good-looking guys who, nonetheless, came into the store to beat off.
None of this action bothered me because it had nothing to do with me; I was merely the clerk — a voyeur. Also, I was making good money, I didn’t work particularly hard, and it wasn’t boring. I heard everybody else talking about how dull their jobs were, but I never knew from one minute to the next who would walk in the door and what stupid crap they would do.