The Education Ministry in Rome vetoed it.
Confessions of a Priestesstute
Donna Marie Niles
When I was nineteen years old, I made what seemed like a conscious decision to become a prostitute. Having experienced sexual harassment on the job, in the streets, and in virtually every area of life, it was not a particularly fantastic leap to take. It was a very easy transition, raised as I was to be a female. I’m always surprised to find that more women don’t choose to enter the life, especially those with extensive “dating” herstories. Any woman who has ever been on a date, who knows what it is to exchange affections or sex for dinner, or kindness, or survival, is quite prepared to be a hooker. Learning to serve, please and appease men is something that binds all women together. It’s why secretaries, nurses, waitresses, wives, sales clerks, etc are on the low paying end of the very same stick. To separate our experiences too much, or to believe that the ways we get by in this woman-hating world are so different, is a mistake. Women as either virgin or whore is one of the greatest lies that men ever created about us.
I took up working as profitably as I could within a structure that basically offered me either one man in marriage or many men for cash. As a white, educated, feminist hooker, I made more money than I ever expected to see again in life. Because I was an independent contractor, I had a lot of time left over to live my life in. These were two of the reasons why it was quite difficult to leave.
I’ll never forget the depression I experienced in my first straight job out of the business. I was a secretary. As a prostitute, I had to keep moving, life was rarely predictable, and many people were interested in who and where I was: police, hotel security, tricks, cab drivers.
As a secretary, I was invisible, treated with either disregard or patronizing contempt. My credibility (i.e., getting heard or listened to) took a skydive as I changed from hooker to radical lesbian feminist. On top of this, I worked a regimented forty hour work week for ridiculously low pay. I was literally earning in two weeks what I had previously made in an evening, and paying taxes! It was a shocking welcome back to respectability.
But I have endured, and have not returned for many reasons. One of them is the exhaustion of the constant threat of arrest. It wears you out worrying about going to jail all the time. However, the major reason I left was I simply could no longer could justify working in an industry that profited from the sexual objectification of women. Since I felt I could no longer be in collusion with the men who make billions from our suffering, I had a lot of good-byes to work on. I said good-bye to the diet, fashion and the industries, and other institutions that tell me I am ugly and smelly and in need of alteration because I was born a woman.
When men sell women’s bodies, or images of women’s bodies, it is called pornography and it is legal, its right to exist vehemently defended with the first amendment. But when women sell their own bodies, it is called prostitution, and we can see what an imperative it’s been to protect the rights of prostitutes in our society.
I began to get a glimmer of the magnitude, the enormity, behind the expression, “It’s a man’s world.” I saw who was profiting from our blood, our loving, our bodies, and for whose profit and convenience every institution on planet earth was set up.
Ironically, I still expected them to give it all up. I can truly grasp the reformist feminist notion that by simply explaining, repeating the litany over and over, by holding enough demonstrations and writing enough letters, men will finally get it and abdicate. I spent years talking to men, trying to educate them as to the injustice of it all, explaining how feminism would save them, too. It was the only angle on feminism I was able to sustain their attention with.
Ultimately, I have come to realize that it is women who deserve that kind of loving, devoted patience, that passion and tenderness. We can’t go around begging for their time, or attention, or power any longer. Men have no reason to surrender and no intention of handing over a system designed to nurture only themselves. We need to take back not just the night, but our lives if we are to have them.
When Colleen Needed a Job
Tracy Lea Landis
When Colleen needed a job, Alicia talked us into letting her work with us. One of our full-time girls had just left town, we had four shifts open and Alicia knew her friend would want the work.
We girls pretty much ran the parlor. The owner didn’t know much about the business. He’d stop by in the morning to pick up his take, before any of us came to work. We rarely saw him. Most of the decisions were made on a seniority basis by the girls who operated the place.
Although last hired, Colleen immediately took the role of elder in our little work group. She’d grown up in the business and had worked the parlors before the rest of us. Jacque was at least seven years older, but was new to the business. She’d started working as a prostitute after her divorce because she couldn’t raise a child on the salary of a department store clerk.
Alicia had also grown up in the business. She was the youngest in the group. After working in the streets for a couple of years, she was old enough to get a massage license and had gone to work in a parlor. That’s where she met Colleen.
When you work in the business, you’re lucky if you can find a man at all, and you adore his ass if he can manage to be at home when you need him. If he don’t call you names when he gets pissed or drunk, well, that’s nice, too. If he’s never gonna be good for a steady job. .. well, that’s a hassle, but it’s pretty much what you can expect.
Something strange happens to most of the men who stay with a prostitute. They lose respect for themselves, somehow. They lose their ambition, if they ever had any, and they start letting their old lady take care of everything. If they have any trouble getting a job, pretty soon they just give up. Sure, they don’t like it that their old lady’s a hooker, but somehow they can never do anything about it.
A lot of times, they’ll get into running around while their woman is at work, playing games on her and with her money. Acting like a big shot, the man of leisure. Maybe they’re just feeling guilty.
Colleen’s man was never going to do much, but he was reliable. “He’s always been there for me.” Colleen once said. Jacque and I were in a bar with her after work and she started saying how all us girls had men who didn’t do nothin’. “Hey, Will cooks, cleans, takes care of my kids; all the things I’d be doing if he worked. But he doesn’t like me doing this, he hates that I’m doing this.”
With all the other hassles Colleen had to deal with, having a man who was reliable was a great deal of comfort to her. She loved him very much for it. She said there was a time when Will had stepped out on her, but he had regretted it and never let it happen again.
She had two sons. The eldest came from her husband’s previous marriage, but she always referred to him as her son. Colleen had provided her family with a big suburban home in one of the outlying districts of the city. It had all the nice things, a big freezer and a double garage, and a big boat on a trailer and a couple of cars in front. The living room was a huge family gathering spot, with a great big fish tank by the door and a nice color television next to the fireplace.
Like most of the girls we worked with, Colleen didn’t have much to do with the neighbors. There were too many things that she wouldn’t want to talk about with casual visitors. So Colleen and her husband raised the two boys quietly, amongst the comings and goings of a few relatives and friends in their average suburban home.
In that home was the sum of all Colleen had worked for, except, of course, what had been spent on drugs. Her man kept a good grade of drugs traveling through their house and they partied a bit. Whenever she and I worked together, she would always have a joint to share or have Will deliver one. There we’d sit, smoking, watching television, brushing our hair, fussing with make-up or nail polish, and talking.
Since Colleen had been in the business longer than any of us, and had worked at almost every parlor in town, she had plenty of
stories to tell. Once, after she’d gotten to know us well enough to talk freely, we got on the subject of runaways who work in the business. Colleen told me the story of a young runaway she’d met at the last joint she worked. Colleen had been working for a dyke who owned, and also worked in, her own parlor. This dyke, Rita, had found a runaway girl who was as lost as they come, and had turned her on to the pleasures of lesbian love. She had also turned the little girl out and was successfully exploiting her confused little ass off.
Rita’s parlor was a major competitor of ours because it was on the same well-traveled street, just six blocks away. Customers would often say that they had been to Rita’s and girls who knew Rita could find out whether one of her customers was okay by giving her a call.
The girls at Rita’s, and Rita herself, did a lot of drugs at work. Colleen used to get aggravated, and nervous as hell, when she’d find people’s needles and shit hidden away in the bathroom cabinets. “If I can find ’em, damn it, so can the cops,” she had warned.
Rita, in displays of lavish affection, provided drugs to the little runaway. It was very easy for the chick to get all strung out, with her very own never-ending stash; the bottomless baggie, the limitless gram.
Sometimes Rita would even go out shopping and bring new clothes for her little runaway lover. “Rita would bring her all these frilly little working clothes from discount places. Just trashy stuff.” Colleen shook her head, “And this little girl was just thrilled like it was Christmas time or something.”
Of course, Colleen tried to help the kid. “I shouldn’ta gotten involved,” she said, “But I did.”
Colleen had seen enough of this type of thing going on that she was very careful about how she tried to help. Stepping into Rita’s crazy shit, she knew, could be dangerous for everybody, let alone possibly costing Colleen a job she felt she needed at the time.
This little runaway chick didn’t know how to take care of her female stuff at all. She didn’t know how to protect herself at work and she didn’t know how to keep herself clean. Colleen tried to help her pull all that together.
“You know,” Colleen said, “the basics.”
She also tried to convince the kid that she shouldn’t let Rita bank her money, that she oughta be holding her own money, not letting somebody else take care of it.
“I tried to get her to start thinking about how much money she had made for Rita,” Colleen told me. “I tried to get her to see that the little presents from K-Mart were nothin’ compared to the money she’d brought in.”
The kid just kept insisting that Rita was taking care of her. She had been so messed up before she found her way to Rita and into prostitution that she felt taken care of, she felt loved. Colleen was able to find out a little about the home the kid had run away from, and it really would have been hard to tell which situation was worse.
The little girl kept insisting that she was being taken care of, until a couple months went by and her dyke momma accused her of stealing and pulled a gun on her.
Then the little runaway ran away again.
All the biker chicks who worked at Rita’s were constantly doing heavy drugs. When Colleen was around that for very long, it reactivated a bad habit that she’d acquired along the way, an addition to crank. When it got out of control, her taste for uppers could turn her into an anemic scarecrow in a few short weeks.
When Colleen saw that working at Rita’s was leading her down that self-destructive path, she came to work with us. As soon as she changed parlors, her regular customers quit going up to Rita’s and came looking for her at our place.
Because Colleen was a genuinely friendly and caring person, she had a lot of regulars. The loss of Colleen’s regular business pissed Rita off. She made excuses instead of telling us which customers were cool when we called.
Colleen’s family knew what she did for a living. Even her eldest son, Colleen told me, knew where his momma got the bacon to put on the table. She didn’t tell me any details about how he knew, how much he knew, or how he handled it. She only said that he knew.
Colleen’s openness was a far cry from what Jacque and her friend, Laura, who also worked with us, enjoyed. Jacque and Laura would still, occasionally, after many years in the business, dust themselves with bathtub cleanser and perfume their bodies with ammonia cleaner before going home. They maintained an elaborate lie to their children, Jacques live-in and long-time jobless lover, and their few neighborhood friends. As far as anyone who knew them was aware, the two made a living cleaning houses for people.
Jacque’s daughter, Jenny, was in her early teens and once, during the summer, we had a series of crank phone calls at the work place from a couple of young girls. The girls who were working that day insisted the two voices sounded like those of Jenny and her best girlfriend, and that they had asked a bunch of curious questions, seemingly trying to find out what the place was about.
Jacque was terrified when she was told and refused to answer the phone on the job for weeks. We encouraged her to be honest with Jenny, to tell her the awful truth so that Jenny wouldn’t get the mistaken impression that her mother thought it was all right to be a hooker as long as you could hide it, which of course was not how Jacque felt about it. But Jacque couldn’t bring herself to face Jenny. She couldn’t tell her.
Laura, who was very tight with Jacque and lived in the house right next door to her, had been left by the father of her son just before the baby was born. Shortly after Jacque had started working the parlors, Laura got work at the same parlor. Though Laura was fearful by nature and terrified of the idea, she allowed Jacque to get her the job, managed to survive her introduction to the world of prostitution and, eventually, got used to the standard of living the money provided.
For four years Laura kept up the lie that she and Jacque worked on a contract basis, cleaning houses for a living. She raised, and spoiled, her son on her own. The only family she had, all the while, was her best friend, Jacque, though they fought all the time.
Then, all out of the blue, the son’s father, now a truck driver with a house of his own in another state, started coming to visit his son every couple of months and on holidays. Pretty soon he asked Laura to marry him and she, overjoyed and barely able to believe what was happening to her, accepted.
No one ever heard from Laura much after she left. She sent a couple of letters to Jacque. But we figure she just couldn’t risk it. She would have to spend the rest of her life carefully pretending that the whole thing hadn’t happened.
Laura would find a way, we all hoped, to fit into the suburban community she had married into. We hoped she would be able to make friends, learn new things and talk about everything that was happening in her present, never mentioning what had happened in her past. Most of all, we hoped that it would work for her, that she would be happy. We even envied her a bit — marrying out of the life.
It’s been three years since I saw Colleen. I heard she had a parlor of her own for a while, but then it was an election year and the heat got bad, so she sold the place and moved her family to another town, intending to go straight.
I called Alicia the other day. She said Colleen had a straight job for a while, doing some kind of repair work on machines. But it hadn’t worked out and she’d gone back to the parlors.
“You remember Harvey, don’t you?” Alicia asked. “That trick friend of mine, the little Oriental guy? He said he’d been up to see Colleen the other day and when I asked him how she looked he told me, ‘Don’t ask. You don’t want to know.’
“She’s living with Rita, man. Do you remember how she used to hate Rita? I’ve got a little postcard here that she sent me and it sounds just like Colleen always did — warm, caring. But I just can’t call her up. I’ve been kinda bummed out myself and I’m just afraid that if I talked to her right now. . .” Alicia, who came into the parlors to find a wise and caring Colleen to look after her, who was unable now to do anything to help, left the sentence unfinished.
Alicia s
aid that Will had taken legal custody away from Colleen. He took both her boys.
The Madame
Phyllis Luman Metal
Oh God, girl, am I ever glad to see you. You’re late, and I was afraid you wouldn’t show up. Hurry and get your glamour on. Old what’s his name from the Islands is in town. He’ll be here in about fifteen minutes. You know who I mean, Old Pineapple. That old fart is loaded. I took his old lady for a massage this morning — she’d shit a bucket if she knew her old man came in for you-know-what. Ugly old bag, but she had the money. She got him started. Her folks had all that land in the islands. Hurry up now. . . No, not that wig, put on the red one, and, here, use some of this eye shadow I just bought. Yeah, that dress looks good. They’d sure never guess what you do the way you look when you come in here. Just as well, makin’ those pots of yours all day. Here, lift up your skirt and let me give you a squirt of perfume where it counts. Here he comes. Now hide and go up and surprise him.. . and remember, everything you do is extra. Start with a hundred, and if he wants to take you in the shower and piss on you, that’s fifty extra. I have to clean up the mess. And tell him how great his dick is; he loves to hear about it.
* * *
Well, Mr. Phillips, if you aren’t a sight for sore eyes. I’ve missed you. You get younger looking every time I see you. Wish I could take you myself. But I’ve got a surprise for you today. She’ll see that you have a good time... I try to make all the boys happy, but you’re my special. God, we go back a long ways. I got nobody scheduled for over an hour, so take your time... go on up now, and she’ll be right there...
* * *
Okay, now listen: the old fart is loaded, and he wants to spend it, so take your time with him. He’s hungry. And be sure not to comment on that funny nick out of his dick. He says it happened during the war, but I think somebody took a bite out of it. He likes his asshole tickled with a feather; I just pulled one out of a bird’s tail for you. . .
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