Whore Stories (11 page)

FILLMORE SLIM

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Blues musician

CLAIM TO FAME:
“The Pope of Pimping”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
San Francisco

Clarence “Fillmore” Slim just wanted to play the blues. And he did that, but he also became a legendary pimp on the streets of San Francisco, where he seems to have had no choice. “Pimps are born, not made,” he asserts. You hear that people are born to play the blues, too, so maybe you can be born to do more than one thing. If you were fortunate enough to catch him in the documentary
American Pimp
, however, it is hard to imagine Clarence as anything but a “fancy man.”

Born in New Orleans in 1934, young Clarence came from humble beginnings, picking cotton and plowing fields with a mule, eking out some facsimile of a life by day, but entranced in the evening with the blues lore and legend his grandmother provided. By 1955 Clarence had taken his leave of Louisiana and moved to Los Angeles, where he made a small dent in the music scene, but one night on tour in Midland, Texas, everything changed. In an interview with
SF Weekly
, Slim explains, “We played a smoky blues dive in Midland. I noticed this little girl who kept coming in, then going out. Finally, she came up to me and said, “I like you. I want you to have this money.’” Slim, quite naturally, was confounded. “I asked her how she got all that money. She finally told me she was a hooker. I asked her what a hooker did, and she broke it on down for me.” Not one to miss an opportunity, Slim took off for San Francisco where the future for a blues singin’ booty slanger was decidedly rosier.

In San Francisco, Slim opened for BB King, Dinah Washington, and other blues icons. He even released a successful single of his own called “You Got the Nerve of a Brass Monkey.” Slim waxed a flurry of somewhat less well-received 45s in the ensuing years, while somehow finding the time to cultivate a reputation as the premiere pimp of San Fran’s Fillmore district. Eventually the intricate financials associated with a dual career playing the blues and pimping got to him, and “Fillmore Slim” had to hang up the guitar, embrace supply-side economics, and hit the streets in earnest.

Slim claims that at the high point of his career he had twenty-two “bitches” working for him. It’s one thing to manage, like, four imbeciles at a Kinko’s, but twenty-two bitches running around lawless on the streets of San Francisco? That’s a job to inspire a blues ballad if there ever was one. But then again, as Fillmore so elegantly puts it, “pussy gon’ sell when cotton and corn don’t.”

Today, Mr. Slim has allegedly reformed himself. He’s playing the blues again and coming up on eighty years old. Gone are the days of schlepping around the streets of San Francisco, looking for “bitches” to turn out, and trying to keep his hos off “dog food.” Today, Fillmore has left the life of the loins behind, but he has his nostalgic moments:

I still do miss the game sometimes, but I’m also glad I’m still here to talk about it. These days the game is dangerous. I’m glad I’m still OG—paid my dues and lived through the days. But now I’m doing something that society accepts me for.

Like writing some of our most cherished floozy anthems, including: “Street Walker,” “Hooker’s Game,” and the timeless ode to pimp frustration, “The Girl Can’t Cook.”

POLLY ADLER

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Bestselling author

CLAIM TO FAME:
Classy cathouses drew everyone from Joe DiMaggio to Dorothy Parker

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
New York

Talk about pulling yourself up by the bra-straps, Polly Adler’s life in many ways represents everything the American dream has to offer: sex, wealth, power, and just enough drugs to be fun but not go completely outer limits. Of course, as the movies and to a lesser degree, history, have taught us, you have to go through a whole bunch of horse shit first, before you can realize the American dream. Polly had to make compromises in her quest for the dream, and those compromises led to more than a dozen collars for running houses of ill repute and other lesser indiscretions all over New York City.

Pearl “Polly” Adler was born in Russia at the turn of the twentieth century and immigrated to the United States just before the outbreak of World War I. Having alienated her traditional family by getting pregnant without the benefit of marriage and then having an abortion, Ms. Adler found herself lost in a sea of immigrants living in the squalid tenements of 1920s New York City. Luckily, Polly understood a thing or two about the universally spoken language of harlotry. She tried eking out a living at a shirt factory in Brooklyn, but soon turned to renting (then renting-out to concupiscent clients) individual apartments throughout New York City, where discretion and anonymity ruled the day and ass ruled the night. Eventually Adler had enough clients to open up a full-fledged bordello.

Ms. Adler ran a different kind of place, a classy joint where the rich and famous could frolic on a first-class passion playground. According to Polly, in her autobiography
A House Is Not a Home
, when men would take one of her girls for a date on the town, “I insisted that on such occasions they dress quietly and use a minimum of makeup. The days of the flagrantly dressed, flagrantly ‘refined’ tarts who tossed down their snorts of rotgut with the little finger well out were long past.”

These days, the Internet is making it easier for prostitutes to ply their trade and keep one step ahead of the police. But that’s not to say the fuzz doesn’t try to limit prostitution in certain areas by using certain legal loopholes. In Washington, D.C. (and
especially
during inauguration ceremonies and other diplomatic fêtes
)
, lawmakers have instituted “Prostitution Free Zones,” (PFZs) where prostitutes can’t hang out unless they’re offering sex for free or if they ply their thighs outside of the ten-day PFZ enforcement periods, a bit of seedy political wrangling that make the PFZs quasi-constitutional. Cyndee Clay, the executive director of Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS), a nonprofit group in Washington, D.C., argues that “A Prostitution Free Zone allows the loitering standard to be so low that anyone who doesn’t look like they belong in a particular neighborhood [is] rounded up.” And the battle of the sexers continues.

Adler’s bordellos often had to change locations abruptly in order to elude police, but the big-name New York personalities always seemed to know exactly where to find her. Members of the Algonquin Round Table, including Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker, frequented Adler’s classy cathouse, and so did mob boss Dutch Schultz, Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, and even the famously depraved and corrupt mayor of New York City, Jimmy Walker.

Prohibition was the law of the land, but Adler served up bootleg liquor and good times until a bunch of buzz kills including the Feds, the vice squad, and the temperance movement ruined everything. Ceaseless raids and constant fear that she might be “taken out” by some gangster eventually proved too much for Polly, who gave up on the life of an iconic New York City madam for a relatively chaste life in California, where she eventually went to college and wrote the bestselling
A House Is Not a Home.
Polly Adler was one hell of a woman; intelligent, insightful, pragmatic, financially successful, and brutally realistic to the very end. In her autobiography, she gives an eloquent argument in defense of her “tainted” past:

If I was to make my living as a madam, I could not be concerned either with the rightness or wrongness of prostitution, considered either from a moral or criminological standpoint. I had to look at it simply as a part of life, which exists today as it existed yesterday. . . . The operation of any business is contingent on the law of supply and demand, and if there were no customers, there certainly would be no whorehouses. Prostitution exists because [people] are willing to pay for sexual gratification, and whatever [people] are willing to pay for, someone will provide.

Ms. Adler died in 1962 in Hollywood, California.

ROSEBUDD BITTERDOSE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Memoirist; pool hustler

CLAIM TO FAME:
Scene-stealing turn in Hughes Brothers’ documentary
American Pimp

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Los Angeles

Don’t let his paradoxical and bewildering
nom de pimp
fool you—Rosebudd Bitterdose (“with two ‘Ds’ for a double-dose of this pimpin’”) is a bewildering paradox. This wily whoremonger can appear to be an old sage of the streets who gets all misty-eyed talking about the tragic death of the first bitch he pimped. Rosebudd claims a bunch of bank-robbing LAPD cops killed her so she wouldn’t talk. In an instant, however, he can morph seamlessly into a stone-cold moron reinforcing all the worst stereotypes. For instance, just try picking up what Rosebudd’s putting down on the illusive concept of “game” in this interview with
Suck.com
:

You don’t see real game…. That’s the part of it that’s still a secret, and you cannot imagine how motherfuckers get a hold of girls, besides tricking them with drugs. And let me tell you, a pimp thinks like this: “I don’t want no motherfucking drug addict counting my money before I do.” A pimp is selfish. . . . A real pimp isn’t thinking, “I got to stand over here to keep an eye on her.” There are pimps who think like that. But those be little pimps. Those be pimps that are not willing to risk losing a broad over their principles. I’m willing to risk it for my principles.

What in the Sam shit does that even
mean
?

You may be thinking to yourself, “Why, I don’t want no motherfucking drug addict counting my money before I do either!” but don’t flatter yourself that you are a legitimate pimp. If you are a quasi-rational person, and even moderately aware of the hazards associated with drug use, such as jail time and death, you are suffering from delusions of grandeur, and you most assuredly do not have what it takes to be a pimp. Even if you are so morally steadfast you would be willing to risk losing a broad over your principles, I have to ask, “Do you even have a broad to risk, man?”

Well, pimps have to start somewhere, and young Mr. Bitterdose (born John Dickson) started by hustling pool in Hollywood. Hustling pool turned into hustling women, and by the 1970s, Rosebudd was
the
pimp of Sunset Strip. He was, in fact, the star and the most compelling and preposterous pimp of the bunch in the Hughes Brothers’ documentary,
American Pimp
, as Mr. Bitterdose proclaims to care about his “hos” and “bitches,” even though he feels that sometimes he’s forced to beat the stank out of them.

In his memoir,
Rosebudd: The American Pimp
, the author writes about how he “has to” slap a bitch who has stepped out of line. The young ho wants an off day, so he smacks her “four or five times” while thinking to himself, “An off day, hummmmmm, what a concept.” But then, he comes to his senses, remarking “Bitch, if you wanted a designated off day, you should have been a secretary or something!” Rosebudd attempts to justify himself saying, “Now to a hustler, being a motherfucker is what you strive for. So when someone say, ‘Rosebudd’s a motherfucker,’ that’s the highest compliment you can get because they’ve run out of adjectives.”

It looks like we’re all run out of adjectives up in here, Rosebudd.

JASON ITZLER

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Page Six
magazine favorite; prison bitch

CLAIM TO FAME:
Self-proclaimed “King of All Pimps”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
New York

If you’ve ever heard of Jason Itzler, it’s probably because he was the founder of a notorious prostitution ring called NY Confidential. The last time most people heard anything about this lecherous miscreant was in September of 2011 when the authorities charged him with promoting prostitution and selling drugs through an escort service called Rockstar Models & Partygirls. Pleading not guilty, Itzler stood before the court, and, in one of the more satisfying turns of events in recent memory, his pants fell down. The bailiffs snatched him up, and he scampered awkwardly back to jail.

French writer André Gide was spot-on when he said that, “Nothing is so silly as the expression of a man who is being complimented.” Well, Itzler was a man who, for a time, spent all of his waking hours being toadied to and basking in compliments inspired by stark terror, so imagine the guy Gide is talking about, scoff at him, and then picture his pants around his ankles. That vision will make everything right with the world; this is why we need Jason Itzler. We need the fall. We need justice, even if it’s only the poetic kind.

Itzler was born Jason Sylk in 1967, and he was raised in a cosmopolitan atmosphere. His family was hooked up with everyone from notorious Mob accountant Meyer Lansky to the then prime minister of Israel, Golda Meir, who stayed with Jason’s family on trips to the United States. However, Jason early on developed much more of an affinity for the Lansky lifestyle.

While enrolled at George Washington University, Jason had little time for class; he was busy, busy, busy making his first fortune as “the 22-year-old phonesex king of South Beach.” Tax issues and bankruptcy soon laid waste to the phonesex operation, and he suffered some serious blowback from getting caught on his return from Amsterdam with 4,000 tabs of ecstasy, a purchase Itzler admits correctly was a “totally retarded idea.” The judge gave him seventeen months in the hoosegow to reflect on his crimes and to ponder how to become a better citizen. Inspiration did not arrive, however, until he was on parole in Hoboken, a long-standing setting for the hatching of bad ideas. He would start an escort service—the best. It would be called NY Confidential, a lazy branding campaign if there ever was one, but Itzler had a dream, not unlike MLK, except for Itzler’s dream was so rapturously stupid: