Erotic American Classics,
Volume 6
Dry Hu$tle
By Sarah Kernochan
Copyright Sarah Kernochan 1977
First published by William Morrow 1977
Berkeley paper edition 1978
Revised edition published by Professional Rabbit, Inc. 2010
Smashwords Edition
The stupid man went into the mountain
The stupid man was amazed
I beg you, oh womb,
Be not angry!
(Ancient Incantation to Promote Bleeding
(From the Latin)
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
In 1975 I got a call from an editor at Cosmopolitan. Her boss, Helen Gurley Brown, was curious to know what went on in the few dance halls remaining in Times Square. She assumed things had changed since the World War II era, when lonely servicemen paid a dime a dance to mix with pretty hostesses, who listened to their woes and maybe let them cop a feel. What was the deal now, in the sex-charged 70’s? She wanted me to go undercover and get the story.
In the dead of winter, I put on some hot pants, an angora top and a look of hopeless naivete that was genuine, and I got myself hired into a basement ballroom off 42nd Street. The manager explained my duties in a few words so euphemistic I missed their meaning entirely, and then he dispatched me to “the pen” where the hostesses hung out and waited for the occasional customer to walk in.
Sure enough, dance halls had changed. A lot. Men still paid for tickets that entitled them to a half-hour’s worth of dancing and conversation but that’s not what they came for – duh. The place smelled of stale emissions. I was in a quandary, wanting to get the hell out of there but wanting even more to get the story I came for.
A young hostess with impressive cleavage approached me in the dressing room. I’ll call her K. She’d been working in the pen alongside her little friend N and they’d noticed my discomfort. Something made me trust her with my secret. I told her about the magazine assignment and asked to interview her so I wouldn’t have to endure another minute in the pen.
I must have been convincing because something made her trust me with her secrets, which were endless, fascinating, and scummy.
But first she told me what I had suspected, that the covert favors practised at the dance hall were the same as in any massage parlor except without the privacy. After she detailed who did what, I asked, “And what is it you and N do?”
“Nothing,” she grinned. “We’re dry hustlers.”
I had my story.
Those two little words set in motion a heady year of adventures I’m glad I’ll never have to repeat. I accepted a kill fee from Cosmo, then I whipped up eighty pages and an outline for a book, got a deal, and took off on the road with K to experience the itinerant life of a bunco artist. N stayed at home while I took her place on the team, gonzo-style, to learn all the ways of hustling men.
Some basics:
The mark must make the first move. His opening line and his body language reveal everything you need to select a strategy for shaking him down. Dry hustling requires laser-like insight into a male’s psychology: his type of woman, his income, his fantasies. Or: what he wants, even if he himself doesn’t know. Then she makes him believe she is that kind of woman, that she will provide that fantasy, enthusiastically and for free. Just…not right away.
A background in cockteasing is desirable. A love of money is essential.
The rules are pretty simple; however, the con may get very elaborate, even byzantine. After all, that’s how Sheherezade hung onto her neck. Because every man is different, each hustle is improvised on the spot. And the more intricate the story, the less attention the mark pays to the cash he’s doling out for “incidentals.” Generally this is a subtle art, and law enforcers would find it difficult to prove the charge of bunco. It’s not like the jails are full of dry hustlers. Yet it is dangerous. It’s mad scary to be pursued by an angry man whom you’ve read wrong.
The book contains a faithful portrait of K, called Kristal in the novel. I conflated N and myself to create the fictional character of Randy. It is most definitely a novel, and yet much of it is based on our true exploits and the contents of the tapes I made: I carried a purse that was bugged when we went out hustling. Sometimes playing them back was the only way I found out what I’d done the night before.
My relationship with K and N came to an abrupt end when I got an American Express bill for a trip for two to Puerto Rico that I never took. In the beginning I had warned K that, tempting as it might be, messing with my credit cards was a deal-breaker. I had no choice but to cut off contact. I never spoke to the duo again. I was more than ready to get out anyway.
Re-reading the novel has proved somewhat painful. While I love my miscreant child, this is not a fun part of my past to revisit. I did get my story, but at a steep price. It took me years to stop thinking like a hustler, and many more to atone. Even now, though I am a respectable married woman, once in a while that lens, dusty and smudged, suddenly clicks into place and I’m seeing the world through felonious intent.
Published in 1977, Dry Hustle was written at a white heat to meet the publisher’s deadline.I have made some changes for the ebook edition, mostly cleaning up style and syntax. I certainly haven’t cleaned up anything else.
Here is my book: still dirty after all these years.
Sarah Kernochan, 2010
PART ONE
GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS
DANCING DANCING DANCING
NEED A FRIEND?
HAVE A DANCE
START A ROMANCE
GIRLS WANTED INQUIRE WITHIN
NO EXPERIENCE
Kristal nabbed me in the dressing room. “Hey…Randy, is that your name? You want a laugh?”
I nodded, not looking up. Yes, she got my name right. No, a laugh might go down the wrong pipe.
“I have to tell you,” she yattered, “Olive is spreading around how you’re a sex change, because you don’t shave your legs, so she says you’re a man.” Laughing, she nicked a chip of black eyeliner from the corner of her eye and hiked her frosted wig to the left, then noticed my stricken face. “Don’t worry,” she said gently. “I know who you are. You’re just a hippie…”
I had already scanned the dressing room for a back door or a trapdoor or a storm drain. Or, if I tried to make a break for it back through the ballroom, I’d have trample seven dance-hall hostesses, one elderly gangster who ran the place, and a bartender, a cashier, and an Argentinian queen who sold admission; and then once up the stairs and onto the street I’d have to face the rest of an army of zombies who could not die because Times Square had better places for them to hang out at night besides the grave.
I just didn’t want to go back in and face Olive and the other six girls. It was my first night, and already I’d lost my first customer. They knew I’d blow it. It was easy to see I wasn’t slick. I didn’t even know how to entertain men. This secret belonged to them. It was highly classified and probably horrible.
Then there was my figure. Olive had told me, “With your shape you ought to be a high-fashion model!” She said it without a trace of envy. After all, my shape could never be a source of income for a Times Square dance-hall hostess, unless a man should want his company tall, blond and terrified, and narrow. A narrow means of support, with my frankly long bones, all hooks and eyes, too narrow for a working girl at the Royale Ballroom.
Olive herself could advertise as a fat bonus: a great, gleaming pudding of stuff. Only her ankles and wrists had bones. While the rest of us sweated honest sweat under the red lights, she swabbed peanut oil on her waist-length tits and sweated some kind of eau de farm. Cause she had seniority. She’d worked the Royale for about thirty years.
“Don’t cry.” Kristal sat down beside me.
But the humiliation was already splashing down my cheeks with salt-water mess.
I was dying to know the secret of entertaining a man.
I wanted to stuff those fifty-dollar tips between my tiny knockers. I wanted to have my own regulars. I wanted them to picture me while they were balling their wives. I wanted to demoralize and rape and pillage. Besides, you have to be somewhat mature to be a high-fashion model.
“Olive’s just jealous,” Kristal urged on, “cause you’re young and pretty and she gets bored at night. She has her one or two degenerates, her regulars that come in during the day to get jerked off and then she doesn’t want to go home at night to a lonely bed. That’s the lowest—the day trade. They’re persons the street pukes up. It goes around to the customers when a woman is a pig. Even the pigs don’t want it. They could have pigs for free, you know?...Anyhow, Olive’s a schizo. In and out of mental places. Honest, she thinks she’s the best-looking girl here!”
She whooped. My face was drying off but I still couldn’t look at her.
“Randy. Want to open Olive’s locker? She’s got a big black dildo she always carries around. She locks herself in one of the stalls and fucks herself. I swear she couldn’t work without it.”
I smiled and blushed. I must have looked so dumb.
“You’d better get back out there now,” she said.
“I don’t want them to think I’m really stupid,” I said. Then I flashed on my whole life so far. “I’m tired of always being the one who doesn’t get the point.”
“What do you wanna be, super-fotch femme fatale overnight? You’re only eighteen, you told me. Well, so what happened with the guy in the white suit that picked you?”
“We went to a table. Then he said that last week he gave…fifteen dollars…to Nita. For helping him. He said.”
“He means jerkin him off.” Kristal started briskly narrating my thoughts. “Look, I know what you’re thinking. It’s your first night and Frank said all you had to do was talk to these guys and dance with them and get them to buy as many tickets as possible and that’s all. And now, you think you’re not gonna make any money unless you do what all the other girls are doin which is pullin their dicks under the table and fuckin’m after work, but—hey Randy. You. Look at me.”
I finally looked at her. She looked like a whore.
She knew, too. “I know I look like a whore, I’ve always looked like a whore ever since I was a baby. But I make more money than anyone else in the joint and Frank knows it, and listen. I don’t touch the guys’ dicks. Never. I don’t even necessarily dance close. I don’t go never mind to first base. Shit, I don’t even know how to give a handjob cause I never have in my whole life, I don’t care if you believe me.”
“But what,” I demanded, “do you give them?”
“Oh…” Her voice drifted off. “I tell’m stories and crap….” She snapped back. “Listen, I don’t give nothing of myself away. What’s myself is mine. They only think they’re gonna get a piece. See, I’m a dry hustler.”
She paused, waiting for my eyes to stop queering.
“You take that clown you were just with. I guess you told him, ‘No my goodness to betsy, I won’t yank your thing for no money.’”
“I told him I had to go to the bathroom,” I said.
“Here’s what you should have done. He says, fifteen bucks. You say: ‘So Nita took fifteen bucks. Then you should know I get twenty-five cause I’m a four-star.’ Let him imagine whatever that means.
“He hands over the twenty-five. Now it’s yours. You don’t need him anymore. He’s bought an hour’s worth of tickets so Frank doesn’t care what you do with him—talk, dance, kiss then customer’s nuts—so long as it’s under the table.
“Anyway, your guy is grinning like the cat that just ate shit and he says, ‘What do I do now?’ and starts for his fly.
“Now. You straighten up, real shocked: ‘You’re going to take out your thing—in a night club!” like you’re a lady, and he’s being very low-class.
“This will get him embarrassed because he’s wearing that expensive white suit and he wants you—a low-life cunt—to think he’s rich and has class. So you sigh. Well, okay, if he wants to be an animal.
“‘Okay, you say, I’ll do you if you want, but inside your pants.’
“Then suddenly you admire his taste in clothes. ‘Wow, isn’t that a beautiful suit!’ and ‘How much did it cost?’…Now he wants you to know he’s strictly high-class top-drawer genuine leather, so he says, ‘Four hundred dollars.’
“‘Four hundred dollars!’ Now you get very concerned on his behalf. You say, ‘Oh, it’s so beautiful and white and you might not be able to get it clean after I get through with you. I mean, that stuff is not easy to get out, and the color white in particular is sometimes never the same.’ Then you excuse yourself to go to the bathroom.
“You go to the can, spend about ten minutes. Meanwhile, his head is full of cleaning bills and never mind what he’s going to look like when he walks out of here. So when you come back to the table, I promise you he would be gone.”
I was suspicious. “What if he comes back tomorrow night in some old jeans?”
She looked amazed. I’d missed the point again. “Think of a new game, of course. I just made that up for the guy you were just with cause he had that white suit on.
“I mean, you can’t repeat yourself exactly. Every man is different. They’re just like any other person, they’re all different. That same guy can come back ten times in ten different disguises and give you a fortune in tips but you’ll never have to jerk him off if you play him. When he finally figures it out he’ll be too prostated with shame to bust you, so either he’ll stop coming around or he’ll start picking one of the other girls with the fifty-cent handjobs. And so happy New Year for them.”
I ached to applaud. Kristal was musing about something else already. “He didn’t have to pay Nita even fifteen bucks to get off,” she said at last. “That chick would have done him if he’d just promised to marry her. Nita still thinks she’s gonna meet her future husband here. For twenty years she’s been believing that. She’s a dance-hall brat.” A girl named Inez opened the door and called in, “Frank is pissed…”
“We got to get back to that disgusting playpen,” Kristal grinned, and leaned closed, and whispered, “I’ll teach you. You won’t have to touch it. You won’t even have to let them feel you…I trust you cause you’re a hippie and you remind me of a cute little mouse standing on its hind legs.”
The Royale Ballroom looked evil on account of the ceiling which stretched dark and low and dirty like a malice…over the bar, over the dance floor lined by tables for two, over “the pen” in the center of the room. We all breathed quietly up and down in the pen like some kind of special organism set apart. The Royale kept the place spitting hot so the girls could wear scanties and the men would order very much beer and get drunk fast.
There was me, and Kristal and Beth and Fernie, Cricket, Olive, Nita, and Inez. It was ten o’clock and no customers were coming in. We got the loose flake off the streets while upstairs the street-walkers worked on the hard-to-get-at grime in the cracks of the sidewalk. Which is not entirely true; we also got a lot of respectable men that would surprise you.
But this was my ignorant first night. “It never catches on til after midnight,” murmured Kristal at my side. Fernie, a gargoyle who had not seen better days, was on the nod again, sitting bolt upright asleep in a black bra and girdle, kept straight by a rod of constipation that run up to her tonsils.
Olive had placed herself under the beam of a white spotlight so she could read her tip sheet for the races tomorrow.
The sturdy Filipino fox named Cricket ate quickly so the brisket sandwiches wouldn’t get cold and the ice cream wouldn’t melt. “Look at her, she doesn’t know she’s pregnant,” Kristal whispered.
There were only four men. Frank had shut himself in his office. At the cashier’s booth, Stan counted tickets and sipped from a paper cup of Scotch lightly tinted with Coke. George, the waiter-bartender, shuffled back and forth changing the positions of ashtrays. He was a demented Quaker. To look at him you’d think that mad scientists would give up disturbing the peaceful sleep of the dead and quit trying to bring corpses back to life where they were not at ease.
The fourth man was Jimmy who always sat at a table in front of the bar facing the pen, drinking beer and snickering at us. Once in a while Olive would yell, “Come over here so I can bite it off!” and pitch a styrofoam cup at him.
On the other side of the pen was the dance floor and beyond that, in thick pitch blackness, were tables where you would take the customers to do what you did. The only light in this area was a nasty fluorescence from the jukebox which seemed to play only “Rock Me Baby” and “The Theme From Moulin Rouge.”
The pen was bounded by walls, about to the top of the thigh in height, built in a strange pattern similar to a rat maze or an obstacle on a miniature golf course. You had to take a few corners before you got out. I think the design was so if a dangerous type wanted to storm the pen he’d be slowed by barking his balls on a wrong turn and by this time Frank would be out of his office and pumping him full of cavities.
The door buzzer went off: a man came in. Fernie jerked awake. We all rose as one: one asp coming up, hauling itself out of the basket, swaying forward to the wall of the pen, the singsong wailing wall: “Come on, sexy, pick a girl, hey handsome…” we joined in weird husky voices. By now I’d learned the opening prayer by heart.
The man walked by us, smiling shyly, and went to the bar. He bought himself a beer and sat at a table. I soared inside myself. This man was going to be mine. He was young, nicely dressed, good-looking, with table manners, lonesome, and sweet. He would be wanting the company of some girl of the same upbringing and hygienically safe.
When a customer passed up on the wailing wall and sat at a table, we were supposed to strut out of the pen, one girl at a time, and try to get him to buy time with us. Sometimes he was too nervous to choose right away and wanted us to make up his mind for him. He’d let this single-file sweetheart parade go by til he saw or heard something that he liked. Then he’d pick that girl and she’d lead him to Stan’s register to buy tickets, at a ten dollar minimum for half an hour. Sometimes the man wouldn’t pick anybody: he just liked being hustled, or he wanted to get stoned before he decided.
Fernie was the first one to descend on him. There was an unspoken courtesy in the pen allowing one of the old-timers—harpies like Beth, Fernie, or Olive—to go first so they wouldn’t feel their existence on earth was pointless. They didn’t hurt anybody’s business anyhow because most men would take one look, get all choked up, and shake their heads energetically.
Fernie was turned down and returned to her warm indentation on the bench, and nodded out again.
Cricket was second up, as usual. The girl really loved making money, hand over fist, and besides, mainly, we knew she was pregnant and always hungry. Most customers bit on Cricket’s line. She was pretty in a sly, exotic way, with gold skin and shiny black hair, and getting plump in her bikini, and when she’d stand over a table she’d deliberately make her thigh muscles romp around her crotch. Also he English was incomprehensible so a man knew he wouldn’t have to talk to her when she got him in a dark corner.
The man refused Cricket.
Now I knew for sure he wanted a nice girl. I jostled with Inez to be third at bat. She stood aside, since I was the newcomer and needed the practice. The young man watched me draw near.
“Hi. Would you like some company?” I asked. I cast down my eyelashes. I was positive I looked demure. All that I lacked was pigtails and a squeaky swing. I began to even wonder what a nice girl like me was doing here, but I’m saving that answer for later.
He shook his head.
Stunned, I retreated to the pen. Inez struck out with him, too. Olive was next, jugs bumbling around her short nightie. Instantly the man got up and followed her to the ticket booth.
Remember, this was my second humiliation of the night.
“Why did he pick her?”
I must have said it out loud.
“He wants a mama,” Kristal explained. “Goin back to the womb.”
“But it doesn’t make sense.”
“So what?”
“Men are funny,” offered Nita.
The bell went off: a customer was coming in. The girls turned their heads, sized him up, and didn’t move. Fernie did not even wake up. I stood to go to the wall.
“Don’t bother with that guy, he don’t have no money,” said Inez. “Hippie scum.”
“It’s my boyfriend,” I said.
At the wailing wall Murphy stood grinning through his big beard and waving his fingers howdy.
“Go away,” I hissed in his ear.
“This place is far out!” His teeth twinkled from smoking grass. “It looks like a foreign movie!”
“I’m not allowed to talk with you unless you buy tickets,” I seethed, “you’re gonna get me in trouble.”
Then Stan planted himself between us. “You going to pick this girl?” he menaced, wobbling on his feet.
Murphy sucked in his cheeks to keep from giggling. I wished him dead of an overdose. “No,” he answered, “I was just rapping with her.”
It was the juicehead staring down the pothead. On either side their eyes were pink and wriggly. I turned my back on them and sat down.
“You can’t stand and talk to the girls unless you buy tickets,” said Stan, “so go over and sit at a table or leave.”
“Okay, man,” I heard Murphy say. “Sort of a depressing point of view you got there, but I’m sure you really believe in what you’re doing—“
“You want trouble?”
“Nice gig,” Murphy added, nodding, and left.
The women were staring at me as if I came from some famous nut farm.
After a long silence, Inez advised me tactfully, “Frank don’t like boyfriends and husbands coming in.”
“Who pays for his reefer, you?” laughed Olive.
“He’s a Ph.D.,” I said.
“Don’t get defensive. Lots of girls support their boyfriends,” Kristal said. “Jesus, do you cry easy.”
It was my third humiliation of the night.
***
Some twenty hours earlier, at about 4 A.M., Murphy and I had been standing in Times Square for the first time in our lives.
We had swallowed our last crumbs of hashish on the bus that rolled us in from Denver. Murphy left me at the Port Authority Terminal.
“You’re dawdling,” he said.
At that, I came to a standstill, fascinated by a pay phone with no dial. Murphy knew it was risky to try to demagnetize someone’s head in a strange bus terminal. He put the phone receiver in my hand and told me to listen to the ocean roar for a while til he could come back and fetch me. I think he considered me less conspicuous standing still and hallucinating peaceably, since I was carrying half a pound of cocaine hidden on my person.
He had to pick up a key from a friend, unlock a loft on Forty-fifth Street, and deposit our luggage there. We were going to sublet the loft for a month, long enough for him to clear thirty thousand on the dope deal. The other half pound was in one of the suitcases.
He got back hours after midnight. By then I was fine, leaning on a wall outside the ladies’ room and calmly reading a candy wrapper. He said he was planning to sell the half pound I was wearing right away tonight. He had already made a call to meet some guy uptown, check out the cash, and then he would dial me at a payphone in a coffee shop to come up in a taxi with the coke. After that, we could spend the rest of the month in the loft while he sold the other half pound off slowly, ounce by ounce, for maximum bucks.
Murphy had a more different slant on things than a lot of people, it was his nature. It excited him that he didn’t know what the hell he was doing. In the past, in San Francisco, Murphy never dealt anything but marijuana and pills to support his hobby, which was to lose on the stock market. He also had a regular job at a university, teaching a course listed for five years in the catalogue as “NEUROPHENOMONOLOGY. Experimental psychology viewed as a religious event produced by psychoactive agents. We will consider arguments for faith and phenomena as a recognizable element of science.” I think it meant: seeing everything as extremely funny. Funny ha-ha or funny weird, depending on what sort of dope you’d softened your brain with.
Anyhow, the college discontinued the course at last and Murphy decided to close his house. He had been running a teen-age runaway convention in his backyard garage, and that was how I met him. He let us sleep there and taught us how to forage for food. At night he could sit in his house and watch the garage skylight glow a faint ultra-violet from the lights we set up over our pot plants which grew while we slept and balled. He said he was studying us but I think he just found us extremely funny. However, he kicked us out when his course at the university was canceled and some kid’s case of crabs made the impossible trek across the driveway and into his short hairs.
Some said I did it. By this time I had made it into the big house and could call myself his “old lady.” When they split, I stayed.
He was impressed by my aptitude for learning. “You’re a wise-ass,” he said. “Now, if I can wise up your head to match your ass, I’ll fall in love with you.” That’s what I wanted, too: to wise up, and to have someone smart fall in love with me. I didn’t see much else action to be interested in.
I smoked weed and read a ton of books and grew two inches taller than him, and I started a diary. On its flyleaf, I tried the many ways of writing my name, which I was not so crazy about since discovering I was adopted.
I liked Murphy. He was full of good cheer and different slants and odd persuasions. Now that he was unemployed, he decided he wanted to see the Third World. “The First and Second you can learn about in any Sears catalog,” he maintained. I didn’t care. The nice thing about fanatics is—like parents, I guess—they make all the plans for you.
Sometimes I could be bitter. He kept hiding my birth control pills because he wanted to see if the baby would be tall. He had some very stupid ideas.
So Murphy cashed in all his stocks and bought a pound of blow to sell in New York City. He told me it would be a major caper in the criminal sense. We would make enough money to travel around underdeveloped countries for a long time. “You mean ride on dromedaries?” I panted. We were fucking standing up and he fell off the telephone book at one point.
But we had never moved cocaine before. Riding across the country to New York, we held ourselves in some kind of dead man’s float on top of a steady tide of adrenalin panic.
We walked to Times Square. According to legend, you could get a close look at a sunken city there. Actually, we wanted to be around other crooks.
Murphy halted on the corner of Broadway, closed his eyes. He sniffed and nibbled at the air. “Let me guess what’s in it,” he said. “It’s a combination of…sulphur…garlic…cat come…greasy sneakers, Negroes, caramel…” He opened his eyes again. “I know! This whole place smells like your underpants!”
Just then, some one of the citizens appeared out of the steam of manholes and tried to sell Murphy a hot pocket calculator. We steered clear and found ourselves a diner.
Murphy had written down the number of the pay phone on the wall to take with him. I was sitting at the counter nearby so I could pick up when he called from uptown.
My cozy doper visions faded an hour later, and now I stared unprotected at the flabby stack of pancakes in front of me. I thought of wadding one up and bouncing it on the floor. My stomach scowled. I tried looking instead into the mirror and daring to glance at the other people on the stools, feeling shy around these fancy street artists, bums, rakes, hookers, junkies, derelicts, all celebrities to me.
Then I felt some inside tubing give a twist and the first blood came down. My period was starting. The nameless wiggy hot women’s dread swole in my belly. Then I flooded all over with the worser terror: I was bleeding onto a sanitary napkin packed with eighteen thousand dollars worth of cocaine.
I don’t remember how long I sat basting this illegal hammock between my legs. I lost all nerve when in the mirror I saw the revolving door whirl, and four cops invading the restaurant.
I picked myself off the stool, lunged into the ladies’ room, and hurled open a stall door. I was shaking so hard my eyelashes jingled. As my hands scrambled to unfasten the sanitary napkin from its belt I wondered which I should do first into the toilet bowl, throw in the coke or vomit.
The bloody pad landed in the bowl first. Then I spun open the plastic bag and dumped the coke. Then I threw up on it. To cover the evidence. I pushed the handle, the water blubbered, and my masterpiece began to wheel around in the eddy.
“Hey moron,” said a voice behind me.
I’d forgotten to shut the stall door.
I turned to see a girl smiling with kitten teeth, tight black eyes, a wig of red curls, and a lavender-dyed rabbit coat. I didn’t know if she was a tasteless narcotics agent or a hooker or both.
“Don’t ever tear off like that if you see cops,” she spoke fast and firm. “Now they’re waiting outside for you because you jumped off your stool and ran like a freak. Those guys are just the pussy posse, out busting whores. They wouldn’t have bothered you if you hadn’t freaked. You don’t look like a whore. Whores don’t wear granny dresses and love beads around here.” She peered past me at the coughing toilet. “And also that stuff is not goin to flush.”
She pulled me out of the stall, went inside and locked it, then crawled back under the door. “Now nobody will find it for a while,” and she stood up. When the janitor comes in he’ll probably snort the whole stinking mess and lick the bowl. That’s a lot of speed you trashed, by the way. Not that I care. I don’t like speed. I prefer diet pills.”
I could hear the pay phone ringing outside. I knew it was Murphy calling. “God damn. God damn...” All I wanted was a fresh clean rock on which to bash my empty head.
The girl put her arm around my waist and stopped me swaying. “Shit, you’re tall. Now keep shaking all over like that when we go out and you’ll make a good impression.” She opened the door.
The restaurant was minus about ten painted ladies who had been there before. Two cops had stayed, impatiently waiting for my comeback.
“Get my sister-in-law a thick milkshake,” my companion called to the counter attendant as she sat me on a stool. “She’s in her third month and the baby just sent back your deadly pancakes. Gimme some extra napkins.” She made a big deal about wiping my face and cooing. “What are you horny sons of bitches staring at?” she snapped at the two patrolmen. “She’s young enough to be your daughter!”
They ducked their heads and vanished out the door.
The girl planted a straw in my mouth: “You must have milk. Come on.”
The sweet vanilla crept into my mouth, and with it a great calm.
The pay phone rang again. I tried to get up but the girl grabbed my elbow.
“Is that for you?” she demanded.
“Yes—“
“What’s your name, I’ll take it.”
“No, I have to—“
“You’re too fucked up. Quick, tell me your name.”
“Randy.”
She walked over and picked up the receiver. “Yeah, you looking for Randy?...Sure she’s here. ..No, you’ll have to come get her, she’s been throwing up again…Yeah, she barfed…Look, quit hollering and just get over here, you bastard, if she’s lost the baby it’s your fault, if you get my meaning, so goodbye.” She hung up.
“What an asshole,” she whispered to me. “He doesn’t know me from Adam and he’s yelling, ‘Where’s the coke, what happened to the shit.’”
I said, “He’s not used to this. He’s a teacher.”
“What kind of creep are you involved with who screams on the telephone at a stranger and uses a baby like you to carry coke? That’s a serious bust if you’re caught.”
“I don’t know but I think he’ll kill me,” I groaned.
“How much money did you just drown in the john?” she persisted. “A couple ounces?”
I shook my head, clamming up.
“You’d better talk to me. I’m trying to get you out of a jam. Look, my name is Kristal and I’m your friend and I know a lot of things you don’t. That dude was mad, he might want to hurt you.”
“He’s my boyfriend.”
“Oh. Does he love you?”
I couldn’t follow the question, it was so funny on the ear. Does? He? Love? Me? “What?”
Kristal rephrased. “Does he love his dope and his money, or does he care more about you?”
I was stuck for an answer.
“How much money did you flush?”
“He paid twelve and was gonna get eighteen,” rushed out of my fool mouth as I sank my face in my palms.
“Oh. Are you in the middle?”
I didn’t understand.
“Are you two just in it for yourselves? Nobody else to pay off?”
“Yeah, just us.”
“Well, everything’s all right then. Whoo. My darling, there are easier and better ways to make a couple ten gee’s without this fuss and bother. Pushing dope is a life sentence in New York, number one. Number two, a sweet baby face like yours is a gold mine in many other safer kinds of businesses. And number three, nobody, but nobody, needs to go crazy, just for some cash.”
She paused, as if expecting a response.
“Do you have any Tampax?” I asked at last.
As she rummaged in her pocketbook, she continued: “You have to decide right now if you’re a stupid person, because if you are then you’re like most people that just keep shittin rope to hang themselves with. But you don’t strike me as the stupid type so I think you should just get rid of your nerves…and think about how you don’t need no pain, you don’t need no extra grief, you don’t need to sell your ass in this life or the life hereafter, and you don’t need to tell your boyfriend because why? Because nobody needs to know the truth half the time because it’s gonna be a pain in the ass for somebody if they do…There’s other ways of…Here. All I have is Super.” She handed me the tampon and followed me into the bathroom.
I sat on the toilet in the stall next to the locked one in which my contraband swam. As I labored to force Kristal’s Super up my Junior-sized nook, I listened to her talk through the stall door, spreading wide open my junior mind.
“You let me do the talking. Here is what we’ll tell your boyfriend,” she began.
It was a normal pussy raid. Randy slipped into the ladies’ room but there was no stopping Officer Dan once he spotted her. Dan is a crooked cop and his nose is out of joint from smelling out dope where dope abides. For his own pleasure Dan prefers the gentle reefer but when he deals shit he deals only the finest coke and scag.
Now, I was taking a pee in one of the stalls when I heard the evil bastard come in after your girl friend.
He was shaking her down. He had her dress over her head and located the cocaine easy. If I hadn’t made my presence known he probably would have made her suck his dreadful dick too.
However the moment I unlocked the door and showed my well-enough-known face, Dan knew we would reach a quick arrangement whereby everybody might come out ahead without much fuss and felony and whatever have you.
Dan, I said. As far as I’m concerned you are raping a young girl at gunpoint and I will start screaming bloody hell in another minute. Then you will have to arrest her and confiscate the coke because your buddy will hear the noise and come in here. However again, you may walk out of here with the coke as a secret between the three of us, if you will agree to cut us in on your future profits. Yours sincerely, singed you know fucking well who I am. Kristal Belle, the Hungarian Tempest.
P.S., 50 percent of your take on the coke belongs to us and may be delivered once a week during our working hours at the Royale Ballroom between 8 P.M. and 4 A.M.
Failure to deliver will result in me sobbing my eyes out to Frank, proprietor of the Royale and favorite son of the mob, and who is like a father to me and all my problems are his problems. Fifty percent is a reasonable figure and my last offer.
Dan says, twenty-five.
A deal, I said.
You cannot split hairs with a serious motherfucker or he might become emotional.
It’s certainly lucky we were all three dishonest people in the same john. Instead of losing the whole stash and going to jail, Randy only has to come work with me every night in the perfectly safe dance hall a few blocks from here, so she can collect from Officer Dan whenever he happens to drop by.
Of course you don’t owe me anything. People have always told me I could be rich beyond belief if I didn’t have such a big heart, but what can you do.
“What about when I don’t come home with this Officer Dan’s money every week?” I asked.
“You will. You’ll make plenty of money at the Royale if you learn to hustle. Your boyfriend doesn’t need to know how you got it.”
She tipped her head—broad, oversize like a child’s head, with a child’s expression, at once idiotic and cunning—and it came to me that there was enough room in that head behind the brain for a crumpled-up piece of paper, no bigger than a fist, a piece of paper containing all the answers. All the answers smuggled under a cap of sleazy red curls.
I’m always on the lookout for someone who has all the answers.
“It’s all real complicated,” I hesitated.
“So is modern art.”
When Murphy arrived we all went out on the street and Kristal ran down the story. She had opened her coat. Murphy was staring down at her chest in a sort of meek fashion, never interrupting except to murmur “oh, wow” now and then.
Now, looking back and remembering his face, I know this look to be the hundredth some-odd level of awareness the self enters when exposed to the sight of tits like that floating into view, over her neckline’s horizon, like alien zeppelins or indecipherable omens.
She finished by berating him: “…if you really loved your baby you’d never put her ass out on the line for no fucking lame-shit deal in the world because she is a lady, and not dirt.”
The dawn had broken, a pink shade. It suited her.
After she sped off in a cab, I walked with Murphy to the loft.
“I think she’s a some kind of neurophenomenon,” I suggested timidly.
He didn’t know. Words failed him.
So here I am, next night around midnight, in a swimsuit and high heels, mad at myself. I grew up in a good neighborhood. I went to good schools. Even after I ran away from home I was good at panhandling. So if I couldn’t score pennies off a man on my first night in a dance hall, I must be a fuck-up beyond my wildest dreams.
A new customer sat down at a table. I shot out of the pen like a sex monsoon.
“Hey there, lover,” I bent down, “you want some fun? We can talk and dance and…” I was running low on ideas. “And get acquainted, if you know what I mean.”
For a moment he said nothing, just stared ahead with coated eyes out of a thin, dark face. Then I heard him say, “I am yours to command,” his voice echoing softly as if we were in a vault. “Do with me what you wish,” he says.
He had a faint Indian accent and was tucked up sort of limply in his chair. He gave me the quakes, so I turned right around and went back to the pen.
Kristal stood ready to go next; none of the other girls had budged. “This guy’s a masochist,” she said under her breath as I passed. “They’re a little hard to handle, but it’s more or less my specialty. Well, here goes.”
I watched her go over, and couldn’t hear exactly what she said, but it had some kind of distinct rat-tat-tat rhythm. I assumed it was abuse. The man accordioned up even more, then followed her in this crouching position to the cashier.
“I’m glad Kristal was around to take care of him,” said Sheba. “Psychos scare me.” Sheba had got into work late that night. Kristal had confided to me that she was “one of the original jerk-off artists. And a lover of dogs.”
“These bones are killing me,” Sheba wrassled her black lace support bra. It was wired like fry baskets and squeezed over the scoop neck of her purple leotard for display purposes. “You have to watch out for these masochists, because they’re also sadists,” she continued sadly. “They’ll flip over to being sadists the minute they get tired of being masochists. Just like that, boomp.”
“Scumbags!” Olive hooted, and threw her paper cup at Jimmy
“We had one in here a lotta years ago,” said Sheba, “that was a German, pink eyes…wanted to pay two hundred dollars to come to a girl’s apartment and clean all her shoes. That’s all he wanted. Kristal was working here then before she went into stripping, and she kept telling and telling the new girls not to do it, but one of them liked the money and he seemed like such a hopeless little toy poodle. So she lets him come over to her place. She gets the money up front. He spends three hours on all her shoes and slippers and mules and what have you, while she lays around on the bed counting her money and ragging him. Which is what you’re supposed to do. But then when he finished the last pair, he comes. Boomp. Now he’s a sadist. He beats her up so she can’t work for a week she’s such a case of black and blue. Pshew, it’s not worth it. Look…that’s Benny! He wants you. Hey, he’s good for a sixty-dollar tip!”
Benny turned out to be a whippersnapper type. At forty he still had the looks of a ballsy kid with plenty of green sprouting out of his wallet. He immediately bought me eighty dollars worth of tickets, four hours’ worth, which meant I was his and his alone til we closed at 4 A.M.
Really, the machinery was very smooth in that place. In a matter of minutes there I was sitting across from my next assignment.
I mentally reviewed Kristal’s first-night pointers she’d given me earlier in the dressing room, in that soft airy chaste voice of hers, the way she sounded most of the time, like some kind of Bo-Peep. “Remember this,” she said, “they all tell you in so many words what they are lookin for. Remember they are like imbeciles because they need this crap. Listen, it was the customers that taught me how to dry hustle. They’d set it up for me to trick’m. That’s why whores call them tricks. Either they’re playin dumb or they really are that dumb—sometimes I can’t tell.”
George trudged up with beers for me and my Benny. While he was paying I tried to size up my quarry. So far, I knew he was in automatic parts, he was divorced with two kids, and he was so full of bounce and squirrely mischief that he regularly scampered around Times Square establishments of all kinds, storing his nuts in his cheeks I guess—
“—my business associates have no conception what I do with my nights,” Benny grinned. “They think I’m off hitting the singles bars. I like to think I lead a double life…”
My attention left him for a minute as I tuned in on the conversation at Kristal’s table nearby.
“How dare you dirty my boots with your filthy tongue!” she lashed at her masochist.
“Yes, mistress,” answered the voice of the tombs.
Benny’s hand closed over mine. My flesh didn’t crawl, so I decided to let him. “Do you have a lot of fantasies?” I asked him. I hoped this topic would make the next four hours race by.
“That’s a good question,” he replied, as if he’d never thought about it. “How about you?”
“I’d like to go to the Third World.”
“Hmm.” He looked blank. “I’ve been to Hawaii many times now.”
“Yeah? This is my second day in New York City.”
We heard a whack and turned to see the masochist on his knees.
“Now get out,” Kristal snarled, “and don’t come back, son of a donkey!”
Her customer disappeared like a crab under a rock.
“Go, Kristal!” Benny cheered. “Hey, how are ya?”
She came over, jaw tensed. “He told me to smack his face, so I had to. One more minute and he was gonna be a hassle. He was having himself a little too much of a good time.” She threw me a smile with her tiny glittering teeth. “This is my baby girl. Benny’s a good person, he’ll take care of you,” she petted my hair and turned to Benny. “This is a very sweet, innocent girl, you hear, you know how beautiful that is? Her sister’s a stripper in the city and she was putting Randy through a college in California cause Randy is just the apple of her eye. It was Randy’s first year, dean’s list and everything, but her sister was just put in the hospital for a radical mastectomy, so Randy had to come here to work for both of them, poor lamb! We’re all trying to chip in so she can bring her sister a nice present and also meet the rent—oopadoop, I gotta scram now. That guy’s here for me. Benny, you treat Randy nice.”
After she left Benny slipped me a twenty towards flowers for my stricken sister with her boob in a sling.
An hour later he’d had enough beer to forget my tragic condition, and I was very sleepy. I thought he was quite nice. It was nice, him stroking my arm, droning on about his fantasies. “…then I have this one which really puzzles me, because I’m definitely a heterosexual. I’m not attracted to men at all. But when I’m having sex with a woman sometimes I pretend I’m the woman, and she’s the man….what’s so funny?”
“I wasn’t laughing.”
“You did this thing with your eyes.” He rolled his eyeballs upward.
“I was just thinking.”
“You’re a very pretty girl.” He was getting restless. “Hey, let’s dance. I’m feeling terrific.”
I stood up with him.
“Wow, you’re a tall one,” he said, stealthily passing me a ten spot. “I couldn’t make up my mind when I first saw you whether you were a sex change. Nita said if she ever caught me dancing with a sex change she’d bite my head off. The only way I can tell is when they have small feet, then I know it’s a girl.”
The jukebox was playing fast numbers, disco beat, with a lot of this thudding and gasping and silky violins on top…I couldn’t believe what we were doing on the dance floor. This is what I watched.
The man’s pelvis goes around and around. It circles, snapping every time it comes forward, like a rubber-band ball on a wood bat.
He hooks his arms around my neck.
My hips chase his hips as if they are snagged together, circling and snapping like that. Our bodies don’t touch.
My hips are getting the edge on his hips. Looks like my hips are going to whip his hips. At this time it’s a dead heat. We are not touching.
My face is the hollow-eyed mask of prostitutes.
Below, all is voodoo. Fantastic tantrum. Hissy-fit.
Inside the mask, my brain and eyes are being sucked down through the funnel of my neck into the mixing motion of the hips. Down go my heart and vital organs. Everything is hooping around my hips.
I was doomed. Nobody was peering over the rim when I went down the drain that night.
Kristal calls this experience “getting the bug for the hustle.” She got it when she was fourteen. She said, the word goes out: get them. “You stir up so much shit inside, it eats you.”
My hips have cornered his hips and are prepared to shoot if necessary.
Then BOOMP—Benny suddenly clamps my right leg between his legs and fastens his boner on my thigh.
He has another voice now, very far off, sweet, and wailing. It curls into my ear: “Oh, oh, oh, fuck me, baby, take off my bra…oh, oh, oh, spread my legs baby, shove it in my cunt now…fuck me, fuck me, oh, oh, please…”
Benny’s first voice returns. “Pant in my ear,” he directs.
I manage a strangled sort of puffing, what might conceivably excite a beagle.
The second voice is back: “That’s right, oh, oh, you’re so big…take me, fuck me now…”
My working hours ended the way a fever breaks. You wonder which parts happened and which parts were just some kind of fever gumbo.
“How much did you get offa Benny?” Kristal asked.
“Tomorrow,” called Sheba, “brings promises of financial reward for work well done.” She finished the horoscope and folded the paper, glancing at the headline. “Whoops, that was for today…I’m all mixed up. I better get the morning edition up on the corner for tomorrow’s. G’night, ladies.” When she left the dressing room, me and Kristal were alone.
I unhooked the top of my bathing suit and my tips fell to my lap. Kristal smoothed each bill out and counted.
“Sixteen dollars?! You had him to yourself for four hours!”
“Wait, I got a twenty in my panties,” I apologized.
“New money he was carrying too.” She handed it back. It didn’t look like any other cash I’d ever earned or begged. Stiff as romaine, loaded with nutrition, moistened with the sweat from between my breasts, but it made a mean scoffing sound when I handled it.
“You should have done better, with all that sister in the hospital horseshit I set you up with. Remember all these men are morons.”
“I’m not even sure if they’re men, now,” I whimpered. “First I’m a sex change, and then Benny thinks he’s a woman—“
“Oh, Benny’s fulla stories, tonight he’s the bearded lady and tomorrow he’s a foreign agent. Your job is not to get confused. She laughed, hooking up her lavender fur coat. “You’re right, they’re not men. I’m glad you fart around with these Ph.D. guys, you really have a way of making me rethink things.”
“I think they’re neurophenomenons,” I muttered.
“Who? Hurry up, let’s get out of here.”
“Those men. I don’t even think they’re mammals.”
“They the ones with no backbones? Ha, see? I took tenth grade too!” She looked at me with interest, then disapproval. “You ain’t been in it long enough to get bitter, candy-face. You were the one letting him rub up against you like that when you didn’t have to, I was watching.”
“Does it matter?”
“Suit yourself. I don’t like to be touched,” she said.
“I don’t have to come back,” I was stuffing money into my jeans.
“You’re not smart enough to stay away.”
When people say things a certain way, I believe them. It’s my big mistake, no one else’s.
As it turned out this time, she was right. That was the voodoo, the heartbeat, the bug of the hustle: larceny. And tonight I discovered I had a little larceny in my heart, stuck there like a tiny burr. “And if you keep playing out there,” my foster mother used to yell after I came in from the woods, “pretty soon you’ve got stickers all over you and nobody will ever touch you ever again!”
I strutted up and down the loft for Murphy’s benefit as he rolled around laughing. He’d made me put the swimsuit and heels back on because he said it turned him on.
“And then what happened?” He paused, gulping for breath.
“Then he told me to take off his bra.”
“WHAAW!” Murphy hurled himself onto the bed, hysterical all over again. “Did—did—he have one on?”
“Of course not,” I dragged on a joint, happy with my saving grass in the 5 A.M. “He was an average businessman. Automotive parts.”
“STOP!” He was going into dry heaves from laughing. “Whaa-haw-haw—then what?”
“He wanted me to pant in his ear…Kristal said I should have just played along and told him he had a tight pussy and a huge tits and how hard he was getting me, and then demand twenty-thirty bucks for saying this garbage.” I kicked off the shoes and seesawed the bathing suit down over my hips. “Catch,” I threw it at my boyfriend, whom I didn’t care for in his current attitude.
Murphy was different. I knew when I came back from the Royale, when he opened the door, that he’d made some kind of decision regarding the importance of greed in his life. His features had some new crass pointy parts like a weasel’s, and the glass face of the handmirror on the bed sported regimental white lines of cocaine.
“My favorite B-girl!” He’d ushered me in, thrust the mirror and a cocktail straw under my nose. “Have a hit, dear.”
“You’re supposed to be selling that coke, not honking it.”
“I’ll cut it with something, these rock starts will snort dandruff as long as it’s overpriced. Have a toot on the naked city.”
“No, I want a joint.”
“Well, par-don.” He blithely flipped the mirror over and I saw my evening’s tips worth of coke settle into the floorboards.
“What’s the matter with you?” I quailed.
And he laughed softly. “I’m a drug dealer in hard drugs now. I get to read a whole new set of lines. Yeah, whole new script. I like this city, fuck the third world, fuck Algeria, fuck all those other places. I want to learn how to be a rotten motherfucker. I’ll just keep you around to turn the pages.”
“I got cramps, let’s go to bed.”
But he wanted to see me in my outfit and tell all about my customers and how much money they gave me.
I tossed my tips at him; they floated down on top of my wilted bathing suit. “It’s just play money,” I said. “Silly money. Funny money from funny men.”
Murphy gazed at my nude self. “Come here.” He beckoned me onto the bed. “Come here, teenager so tall and so tough. Well, you may be tall but you’re not so tough. You can stop the tough stuff now.”
His arms slid around me a like a favorite shirt.
Like my father’s naval uniform in a dark closet in Virginia.
That was the hold Murphy had over me. He knew when I was tired of always having to be older than I am, and every day having to get a little smarter than I wanted to be. He’d just say, “You can stop acting tough now,” and the curse would go away.