The Devil's Stocking

by Nelson Algren

  “Had a bad day, Flash?” Spanish Nan asked him.

  He nodded to assure her that it had been a bad day at the fight. “Turn up the sound, Ben,” he instructed Big Benjamin.

  The voice of the mayor came on, high-pitched and plaintive: “We’re going to call it the John Hour,” the mayor announced over WNYC, “because ‘John’ has become the slang phrase for a prostitute’s customer. We will announce the names of all men against whom convictions have been obtained for patronage of prostitutes. The threat of public scorn will be a severe deterrent to patronage of prostitutes. Not only will men now fear to patronize them, but the present imbalance, in the law, of punishing the prostitute but not her customer will be corrected.”

  Flash cocked his head toward the radio. “No wonder that guy looks so much like a chicken,” he commented, “he is a chicken.”

  “Some people,” the mayor assured the parlor full of whores, “just don’t seem to know what the real world is like. I have been in office twenty months and what I am advocating has the overwhelming support of the ordinary folk who live in this city.”

  “What this dude thinks the real world is like,” Flash commented sadly, “is nothing like it is. He thinks that a man who goes to a whorehouse puts on tinted shades and wears a false beard, for God’s sake. He takes it for granted that, when the man comes out, he is so filled with guilt that he’s ready to kill himself if his name is broadcast on the radio, for God’s sake. Who does he think comes up here but the ordinary folk who live in this city?”

  “Don’t you feel guilty, Flash?” Dovie-Jean asked just to try him out.

  “Guilty? About what? I come here the same way I go to the track. I lay my money down at the mutuel window and hope I picked a winner. If I felt guilty about laying a woman I’d be dead for forty years, for God’s sake.”

  “Although the state legislature has seen the unfairness of the present approach,” the mayor’s voice went on, “some judges have not been carrying out the law in this area. Many of them set their own standards about what the law should be. Judges have no right to nullify statutes.”

  “Mayors have no right to tell me who I can screw, either,” Flash muttered.

  “The New York Times editorializes, this morning, that ‘The police and the courts have more important things to worry about than either prostitutes or busted johns.’ Yet this is the same newspaper which has repeatedly condemned vice and lewdness in the Times Square area, and has demanded that the area be cleaned up. Now the paper takes a new direction: let Forty-third Street between Broadway and Eighth be a combat zone where prostitutes, pimps and johns can frolic freely without let or hindrance by the police.”

  “How can prostitutes, pimps and johns frolic freely when the street is already so overcrowded with businessmen from the suburbs,” Flash wanted to know, “and with middle-class kids from Yorkville and Queens? Does he think that hookers make their living off single men, for God’s sake?”

  Uriah Yipkind attempted, that same evening, to resolve the conflict of opinions about the mayor’s views on prostitution.

  Yipkind had already run a program featuring three male patrons of prostitutes and many prostitutes had taken exception to comments made upon that show. They had demanded equal time and Uriah had given it to them.

  The three hookers were shadowed. Yipkind named them Jane, Joan and Jenny. They were all three—by their voices—in their early twenties, and all three were hundred-dollar-an-hour women.

  “One thing I resented on your program, Mr. Yipkind,” Jane led off, “was your use of the phrase ‘pimped off.’ You used it three times. I’ve never seen a pimp in my life. If I’ve ever talked to one I didn’t know what his business was. No woman is forced, physically, into prostitution, from what I’ve observed. We are in it because it pays ten times as much as other trades, it is much more interesting than most positions open to women, and you are your own boss. I enjoy the life I lead and the money I make is not taxable.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “On Park Avenue near a first-class hotel.”

  “Do you have a steady boy friend—not a pimp, just a friend?”

  “No boy friend.”

  “And you, Joan?”

  “I’m married.”

  “How does your husband feel, about your making it with other men?”

  “He approves.”

  “Approves?”

  “He could hardly object. He’s a male prostitute.”

  That was the first of several shocks Uriah was to sustain in the course of the program.

  “We have two bedrooms,” the girl explained further. “He works one, I work the other, then we compare notes.”

  “But don’t you feel this is degrading?”

  “What’s degrading?” Jenny came in, “to me it’s more degrading to be an average housewife, cleaning house, shopping, taking care of her husband’s needs, and getting nothing for herself. Except respectability—another name for a dog’s life.”

  “I’m a college graduate,” Jane came in, “and I wanted to work with people. I went into social welfare but I never reached anybody. All paper work and the male social workers assuming you’ll be flattered to sleep with any one of them, for the honor of the thing.

  “Now when I sleep with men I make them feel they are being honored. I reach them because they come to me with problems. I’m of help to them. They need a woman to talk to and, as often as not, to let them indulge in fantasies. I wish that, just once, somebody would have the nerve to write ‘therapist’ instead of ‘whore.’ Because that’s closer to what I do. This town is full of men who lead secret fantasy lives and who have the money to support it. I have a hundred-dollar-an-hour psychiatrist—and that’s exactly what I charge him. He needs me more than I need him.”

  “In what way does he need you?”

  “I help him get born. He gets into a warm bath which he fantasizes as a womb. When he comes out I put him on the bed and diaper him, exactly as though he were a newborn infant. Then he puts on his clothes and keeps appointments with patients in one of the classiest offices on Park Avenue.”

  “It depends upon the value you put on yourself,” Jenny added. “You can go to a massage parlor in the Village for twelve dollars, of which the girl gets five. If that’s all the value she puts on herself, that’s all she’s worth. I put a higher value on myself, that’s all.”

  “Five bucks?” Yipkind asked incredulously. “It sounds like Pakistan. But do you feel yourself to be superior to the Village hooker? Basically, you do the same joyless thing—you take money for the use of your body. The trick hands you cash so you take off your clothes and lie down. What can be more degrading than that?”

  “I don’t get it,” Jenny protested. “What does your nice little housewife do except take off her clothes and lie down in exchange for room and board? What can be more degrading than that?”

  “It doesn’t work the way you think, Mr. Yipkind. For one thing, he doesn’t hand you money. He comes in, you make him feel at ease, he puts the money under an ashtray. You don’t even talk about it. You deal with every man differently, but most of mine like a story. I tell him, ‘I was born in Bimini last week—just went for a week of sun you know—and I still can’t believe what happened to me. I’m lying on the beach, suntanning myself, when this gorgeous man comes along, sits near me and smiles. At first I pay no attention but I do notice his gorgeous body.’ It’s all cock-and-bull, of course, the sort of story school-girls read, but all the while I’m telling it I’m loosening my clothes as if I don’t know what I’m doing. By the time I get to the hotel-bedroom scene, I have everything off but my panties and the trick is so hot it takes him very little while in bed. Sometimes I get myself so hot I come with him.”

  “You come with your tricks?” Uriah asked all three. Joan answered, “No, not usually, but now and then, when a trick has become a friend, I do.”

  “Who are your tricks, your johns?” Uriah asked. “Where do they come from?”

&n
bsp; “Businessmen,” Jenny answered, “politicians, clergymen, cops, lawyers, judges …”

  “ … and TV celebrities,” Joan added laughingly.

  “Your best customer is your past-middle-aged successful businessman,” Jane puts in.

  “Especially if he’s Jewish,” Jenny added.

  “Jewish?” Uriah asked as though he had never heard of such a thing as a Jew who patronized prostitutes.

  “Half my clients are Jews,” Joan put in.

  “At least,” Jane supported her.

  Jane put her head down to stifle her laughter, then explained, “I’m from the Deep South. Small town. I never saw a Jew my whole life until I got into hustling. One day a john shows up dressed like no john I’d ever seen. He’s wearing a tiny skullcap, he’s got long curly sideburns and he’s wearing a long black topcoat. He must be some sort of priest, I figure. I’d never seen anything like it.

  “I’m a Chasidic Jew,” he explains while taking off his clothes. He takes off everything except the skullcap and a black-and-white scarf he’s wearing under his underwear.”

  “Talith,” Uriah, being a Jew himself, was able to help.

  “Talis-shmalis,” the girl agreed, “so all right, we got along, I didn’t try to hustle him, he was ready with the money. Next week here comes another dressed just like him, a beard just like the first one had. Next week I get two-three! Where the hell are all the rabbis coming from, I wonder.”

  “Where were they coming from?” Uriah asked.

  “From their homes, Mr. Yipkind, from their homes. These are men in their fifties and sixties, they have grandchildren, the old lady is fat and has lost her looks …”

  “It isn’t entirely a matter of losing her looks,” Jenny explained, “because when she was a young beauty she was still a dead mackerel in bed. All she knew was that for a woman to share sexual pleasure was a sin. And she’s never learned anything since.”

  “They do sleep separately in orthodox homes,” Uriah was helpful again. “Sex is only for purposes of procreation.”

  “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” Jane put in.

  “There you have it,” Jenny picked him right up, “sex is evil to her. She was brought up to think so. Oral sex? She never heard of it. If you told her she wouldn’t believe you. If she believed you it would disgust her.”

  “I think it’s lovely,” Jane put in.

  “But where does that leave her old man?” Jenny continued. “I’ll tell you where it leaves him: he becomes a successful businessman and he has no love life at all. All he has is a fantasy of a young blond shiksa, naked, with a marvelous figure, going down on him! He keeps this fantasy going for years until he discovers that, for money, he can realize it. What a discovery! It’s like he’s born again! He runs and tells his friends in the synagogue—what a bargain!”

  Uriah appeared to be talking to himself. The idea of a Jewish businessman pimping his colleagues was something he didn’t seem able to grasp immediately. “What were you laughing at a moment ago?” he suddenly turned on Jean accusingly.

  “I was thinking of one of my Jewish johns,” Joan answered. “He takes off his clothes but keeps his yarmulke on. He gets into a pair of black satin panties. I bought them for him because my own wouldn’t fit because he’s short and fat. Then he puts on black hose and stands looking at himself in the mirror. That’s my cue to put the record on: ‘Sleepy Time Down South.’”

  Joan paused to see that she had Uriah’s interest.

  “Yes? Yes?”

  She had his interest for certain.

  “Why, he begins to dance to it. He can’t get enough of that record. He chants it. He chants it all around the room, dancing to it and you can’t tell whether he’s in a whorehouse or a synagogue, the way it sounds. His eyes are closed, he’s smiling to himself, I’m on the bed, ready. Four times around the bed and he’s ready too.”

  “A hundred an hour to dance to ‘Sleepy Time Down South,’” Uriah said aloud, yet as if talking to himself, “in women’s panties.”

  “The hundred an hour is only a part of it,” Jenny explained, “the Jewish trick is usually in jewelry or women’s clothing, something like that. I have one who has brought me at least five thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry. All he asks is that I wear it when he visits. If I don’t he is offended.”

  “The Jewish johns are what makes the trade so expensive,” Joan told Uriah. “They have money and expect to spend it. I’d much rather deal with an old Jewish businessman than with a young trick—say Irish or Italian. The old Jewish guy is a businessman. He knows you don’t get anything for nothing. He knows you get what you pay for. He’s appreciative. He’s polite, he’s respectful, he tells his friends about you. The young guy is likely to give you a kick in the head and take his money back.”

  “The Jewish trick is also good for tips on the stock market and in real estate too,” Jane added. “One of them invested money for a friend of mine, so now she has an income whether she works or not.”

  “And where is the harm,” Jenny asked, “what is all this stuff you put about being degrading? You give a love-starved man a taste of good old-fashioned belly-to-belly raunchy sex and he feels better than when he came in. You squares act as if having an orgasm does big social damage. Maybe if men had more orgasms they wouldn’t run around firing bullets at everybody who don’t act like they think he should act.”

  “Do you have orgasms?” Uriah wanted to know, asking all three women.

  “Not every time,” Joan replied, “but if you like a guy, and he keeps coming back and always enjoys himself, you begin coming with him. I’ve got half a dozen tricks I come with.”

  “You haven’t hit on half of the story, Mr. Yipkind,” Jane advised him, “such as, what else can a woman do if she’s not a specialist in some line? She can work as a secretary, as a receptionist, as a cloakroom attendant for a hundred dollars a week and tips. That doesn’t mean she isn’t sleeping with men. She sleeps with any male higher than herself, whether it’s in advertising or in television. She does that just to keep her job. She is dependent upon every male above her in the pecking order.

  “I’m dependent upon nobody. I run my own business and what I make is untaxable. And I take satisfaction in taking care of men. When I see a big man in politics on the TV screen, and know that, in a couple of hours, he’ll be in bed with me, I have a sense of power.”

  “How big?” Uriah wanted to know. “Municipal? State? Federal?”

  “State.”

  Uriah shook his head. There was something else he wanted to ask: “Is this big man in state politics Jewish?” He wanted to ask, “Is the Park Avenue psychiatrist whom you diaper Jewish?”

  Uriah stopped himself from asking. He wanted to know, yet he didn’t want to know.

  The wall is thirty feet high, fourteen feet into the earth and is two feet thick; it encloses forty-eight acres, houses two thousand men, and had twelve gun emplacements.

  Three years after his sentencing to three lifetimes for triple murder, Calhoun appeared, to Barney Kerrigan, to resemble a brown barn owl.

  Kerrigan, of Calhoun’s own age, was a state investigator.

  Calhoun was sitting with a book spread on a table and with a magazine article below his hand. The book was The Idiot by Feodor Dostoevsky.

  “How can a man,” Calhoun asked Kerrigan, “whose life has been spent inside a campus fortress, have the faintest flash notion of what it’s really like to live in a cell, a few feet from the electric chair, and the death sentence upon him?” Then answered himself. “No way. No way.” He swung the magazine around.

  “In Favor of the Death Penalty,” by one Professor Barzoom, was the title and author of the piece he’d been reading.

  “He tells us here,” Calhoun informed Kerrigan, “about a man who spent a year in prison due to a miscarriage of justice. When the man got out his wife was dead and his children were in the workhouse. This man, the professor tells us, was not so lucky as Tim Evans, who was hange
d in another miscarriage of justice. ‘Rather be Tim Evans dead,’” Calhoun read the professor’s decision, “?‘than to emerge, after twelve months in prison, to find all reason for living gone.”’

  “‘Ask Tim Evans,’” Calhoun answered the professor’s question.

  “A sailor,” Calhoun explained, “might travel around the world nineteen times and remain the same man he’d been when he’d first gone on the ship. He’s seen everything and seen nothing. He can’t judge because he is not capable of experiencing. I’m sure the professor has attended funerals; yet nothing about death has ever touched him. He is wrapped in cellophane. Listen to this, Kerrigan:

  “‘The propagandists for abolition speak in hushed tones of the sanctity of human life—but most of the abolitionists belong to nations that spend half their annual incomes on weapons of war and research for more efficient means of killing. These good people vote without a qualm for political parties that arm their country to the teeth.’

  “What he’s saying,” Calhoun interpreted, “is that, if you live in a Western nation which uses military means to assault a country, say of Southeast Asia, you yourself are doing the killing. Even though you may be sitting in jail for protesting the assault, the responsibility for it is still yours, he says. You are therefore a hypocrite for demanding abolition of the death penalty if your state reserves the right to impose capital punishment. You voted for the governor, didn’t you?

  “All the professor is doing is putting the old tribal belief of an eye for an eye, into academic language. Thank God, Kerrigan, for people who don’t believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Were it not for them the world would have gone toothless and blind long ago. Here,” Calhoun picked up the novel, “is a man who knew:

  “‘But the chief and worst pain,’ Calhoun read from Dostoevsky, “?‘may not be in the bodily suffering but in one’s knowing for certain that in an hour and then in ten minutes and then in half a minute, and then now, at the very moment, the soul will leave the body and that one will cease to be a man and that that is bound to happen; the worst part of it is that it’s certain … to kill for murder is a punishment incomparably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by a brigand, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute … but in an execution, that last hope that makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more horrible.’”