Working Sex (4 page)

Jenna comes all over herself, all over her cotton candy- pink tutu. Ellen and I are delighted and disgusted. I am still
chuckling and commenting on the ridiculousness of Jim’s appearance. “Wow, Jim.” I say suddenly, shaking my head. “Seeing you in women’s clothing was quite possibly one of the most shocking and hilarious things I have ever seen in my whole life.” Jim smiles. “I don’t think I’ll ever forget it. Don’t worry, your little secret is safe with me.” I kiss him on the cheek, and laugh all the way up the stairs.

It isn’t until I am completely out the front door of the house that I fall silent. I run into the street and flag down a cab. My vision feels blurry from the pain in my temples. I throw myself into the backseat and begin digging around in my bag. I find a bottle of water and a giant bottle of ibuprofen. I swallow three and try to direct the driver to my house. I have partially lost my voice and can barely speak.

As the driver pulls over in front of my house, my phone begins to beep and flash. I have a text message from Ellen. The message says, “He loved you. He wants to see us again. You got $300 for that, by the way. You can pick it up tomorrow.” I flip my phone shut and jump out of the cab.

 

a
s I sat on my couch clutching the beat-up throw pillow and the phone, I noticed that ten minutes had gone by. Ellen was saying something to me, but I was barely listening. She was telling me that Jim was in town, and
wanted to see us again. She asked me when I would have some free time to rehearse before Sunday.

“And this time,” she told me sternly, “he wants there to be more laughing. And wants you to accuse him of sleeping with your lesbian sister at her bachelorette party. Three-hundred bucks for one hour. Are you there?”

I wasn’t. I was somewhere else. I was standing on the street. I was thinking about how I left my gold earring at Darren’s house. From the pair I got for my birthday when I turned thirteen. I was so proud of myself for keeping them so long. Why did I wear them to his house? Why was I still wearing them at all? I should have had them locked up in a box or something. I was so upset when I lost it. Darren promised he would search for it every day, but he never found it. I’m sure it was in his bed somewhere.

Maybe I would look for his bracelet tomorrow, and mail it back. Probably not.

I
worked in the hustle bars owned by the Jewish Mafia in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s. The clubs thrived for a while, then closed at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic, when the New York City Department of Health shut down most of the bars, and all the gay baths.

I can’t really separate my sense of the clubs from my sense of that time in my life or the city’s. There was a feeling that it would always be there and go on, but then it ended abruptly. What stopped it for me wasn’t AIDS—I got out before that—but the installation of a large restaurant exhaust system outside one
of the two windows in my small East Village tenement flat. Prior to that, my apartment—backing onto an airshaft—had been kind of a refuge for me. Through the tiny crack between buildings, I observed the changing of weather and seasons. How quickly we adapt to our prisons. A slab of vertical sky, one or two trees, nesting sparrows.

I liked coming home from the bar in a cab around four in the morning. I’d get into bed, sometimes still in my clothes, and read myself to sleep. Cabs lined up outside the club when our shift ended—there were still a few old-fashioned Checkers—and I rode downtown in the deep quiet. Once, a cab driver told me to give him a blow job and pulled out a knife, but that was only one time. In bed, I read James Joyce, Merleau-Ponty, Djuna Barnes, all the Greek plays, and Colette. If I could fall asleep just before dawn, I could wake up at ten or eleven, not as “Sally West” but as myself, with the mysterious addition of two or three hundred dollars cash in my room.

In retrospect, it was like resting between sessions of torture. Within this pile of cash, there were usually thirty or forty dollar bills creased in a vertical fold. These were the tips that customers inserted into my G-string (or, more often, panties—the dress code in the clubs at that time was not very exacting) while I was “dancing” (or rather, moving erratically in some modern dance Devo-esque fashion to jukebox
songs). It was an era of humanist generalism, before specialization ruled. No one had silicone implants; any tits—so long as they were attached to a mouth that cajoled men to buy outrageously priced bottles of ersatz champagne—would do. Likewise, the definition of “dancing” stayed loose. “Dancing” consisted of jiggling around on the stage to let the men know you were available for a date in the back room.

Still, these folded-up bills were a mysterious link between my life during the day, and my life three nights a week as “Sally West.” I remember using these bills at delis and drugstores and restaurants in the East Village, wondering each time if the (usually female) cashier knew by the vertical fold how I’d acquired the bill. The folded-up dollar bills were Everywhore’s signifier. Any girl who’d ever danced knew.

It was 1978, and then it was 1981, ‘82. My life could have gone on like that for a very long time, but when the exhaust fan was installed outside the window, three feet from my bed, I could no longer come home so late and sleep undisturbed into the morning. The exhaust fan started roaring as soon as the prep cooks came in at eight. The sound scared the sparrows, and they stopped eating seeds on my fire escape. The apartment was no longer my cell. The fast movement of capital was putting an end to this dream time all over lower Manhattan. The hardware store turned into a restaurant, and Karpaty Shoes, the Eastern
European shoe store downstairs, was replaced by Bandito’s, the first in a rapid succession of high-concept pig troughs that did business there.

Within months, the street was alive with ambition. The Bandito’s waitresses, with their short ‘80s skirts and high heels, looked more convincing as sluts than I’d ever looked in the clubs. Everyone was going somewhere. This extreme movement forced you to look at yourself, where you were. Time was no longer so aboriginal. In this new atmosphere, those who just wanted to sleep no longer looked good.

Though I started out working at Adam & Eve on the Upper East Side, I soon settled into working three nights a week at the Wild West Topless Bar on West 33rd Street. Located on a seedy block near Penn Station across from a church and two doors from a trade union office, it seemed less competitive. There was an old neon sign with a pair of average-sized tits and a lasso. The Wild West was one of four or five places owned by Sy, Hy, and three other Jewish Mafia guys. Old, bald, with bellies hanging down over their belts in cheap white button-down shirts, the owners looked almost identical. Rotating between clubs to collect cash and check over the books, they otherwise kept a low profile. At the Wild West, Ray Mazzione was in charge of us girls. Ray spent about fourteen hours a day at the club. He was about thirty-two, lived in Queens, and said he was married. Ray hired and fired,
figured our pay at the end of the night, and made it his business to know who was strung out, who was just chipping, whose boyfriend was beating her up, and who was giving out “action.” He kept a list ranking our champagne bottle sales by the night, week, and month. Ray was everybody’s best friend. The girls told him everything.

 

a
t that time in New York, there were still actual strip clubs featuring big-name professional strippers with managers. There were “bottomless” bars that offered “hot lunch”—customers put $50 on the table to get a face full of pussy. But the Wild West didn’t offer these things. The Wild West was all about hustle. While dancers were paid $12 an hour to show up and dance alternate sets, the real money was made selling bottles of ersatz champagne. For $35, a guy could buy us a split, and we’d sit next to him on a banquette for fifteen minutes. For $150, he could buy us a magnum, served in a curtained “back room.” These dates lasted about half an hour. Given this framework, giving out “action”—any sexual contact that would result in a customer having an orgasm—was discouraged and obliquely punished. Because once a guy
spent,
he’d stop spending. Patiently, night after night, Ray taught us the ground rules of romance and dating.
Don’t put out. Don’t act like a hooker.
Because once you do, the hustle is over. And Ray was right. Because while a
guy might offer you a big tip in the back room for a blow job, he might not deliver. And then who would you go to? Better to keep him back there buying champagne.

Girls who gave action were whores. They were not in control of the game. A “good” girl could keep a customer entranced out on the floor over three or four splits, and then get him to celebrate their new romance in the back room with a magnum. An even better girl could keep him back there ordering magnums until—whichever came first—the club closed at four or the line on his American Express card was exhausted. “You’re artists,” Ray told us. “You’re showgirls.”

A thin vestige of glamour surrounded the hustle—faint echoes of silvery black-and-white films, good girls gone astray in the big city, the Great Depression. “Would you buy me a drink? Then I won’t have to dance the next set.” Waitresses in fishnet stockings and cigarette trays uncorked bottles of ersatz champagne with a flourish while Ray ran the guy’s credit card number. “Would you care to order another round for the lady?” Then Ray got on the phone to some primitive gray-market hacker to find out how much the guy had on his line. Sometimes he got the good news that the customer had an open, unlimited line on the card. This news was transmitted from Ray to the girl via the waitress, and so long as the customer stayed, that girl was Ray’s special princess. Ray, at these times, was like Daddy. The system worked well,
because it was so close to real heterosexual life. The toxicity of the club was not its demeaning of our “femininity” but in the putrid, despicable sense of all human nature it revealed, or engendered.

A typical night at the Wild West found Maritza onstage, doing her floor work. At forty-five, this Dominican grandmother was well past her prime as a dancer, but that didn’t stop her from grinding her cunt near a customer’s face with a smile, two rhinestone pasties, and a small feather boa. Maritza was the only girl in the club with real costumes. As a professional, she was stiff competition for the rest of us junkies, aspiring writers and artists, and rock ‘n’ roll whores. “Look at Maritza!” Ray would say, when one of us stepped out of line or was suspected of giving out action.

Maritza knew how to turn on the charm. She was often the night’s top-ranked bottle seller. No one knew much else about her. She confided in no one. While the rest of us bitched and complained and swapped the most intimate confidences, Maritza dealt only with Ray. (Though no matter how close to each other we were in the club, these friendships stopped as soon as we walked out the door. In real life, us art girls crossed rooms to avoid saying hello at parties or openings.)

Gabrielle, waitressing on her working holiday from Australia, walked briskly around pushing drinks. Tall, athletic, with long chestnut hair, she wore her fishnets and leotard
like a school uniform. No one could figure out why she was here. She had no drug habit, abusive boyfriend, or illusions about being an artist. For reasons we never knew, she had chosen to share our place in hell.

Brandy was a stupid slut from the boroughs who liked to walk over and jiggle her tits just as you were closing the deal on a split with a customer. This often worked. Despite her poor conversational skills, Brandy sold lots of bottles. Mary, a pretty blonde woman from Allentown, Pennsylvania, had two kids and an unemployed husband. She caught the bus in to dance two nights a week and slept on a girlfriend’s couch. Lorraine was everyone’s negative role model, the girl in the ratty pink slip you didn’t want to end up as. She had track marks all over her arms and cigarette burns on her legs. Susan S. (now a lawyer in Silicon Valley) had her own band.

The night shift began around 7 PM. The day girls—mostly bridge-and-tunnel types who saw this as a regular job—changed into their clothes and went home. Costumes were more or less optional. Girls danced alternate sets (six jukebox songs) and the rule was that whatever you wore over your underwear had to come off by the end of the first song. Your tits had to be bare by the end of the third, you used songs four through six to hustle some splits and do floor work.

Selling splits didn’t excuse you from dancing, but you were let off the next set if you were in the back room on a
magnum. Until eight or nine, the clients were straggling Long Island commuters. At the most, they’d be good for a split. Not that they didn’t already know you’d use the next fifteen minutes to try and sell them a bottle. This rarely worked. Often you’d just give up and let them tell you their problems.
Listening
was a lower-grade failure than giving out action, but they were in the same class. In both cases, you’d lost control of the hustle.

The real hustle began later on in the evening. By nine or ten, we had our real customers: professional gamblers just back from Vegas, solitary furtive stockbrokers in three-piece blue suits, advertising executives, foreign businessmen, frat boys, and lawyers. Literal sex was not what these men came to the clubs for. As Ray liked to point out, they could get blown in Times Square for less than the price of a split. These men were legitimate hustlers in their own right, and I guess they got off seeing the hustle reduced to a girl’s desperate bid to protect her own piece of pussy. Keeping a customer ordering magnums was vastly more difficult than giving a hand job. For a hand job, you just closed your eyes and took out a Kleenex, but you had to dig deep into yourself to keep the con going, keep the guy ordering magnums. My worst moment of shame came in the back room one night when I’d run out of banter. I didn’t know how to talk to the guy. Unlike most of the others, he was not intelligent. Exhausted, I let him put
his cock in my pussy. He left without tipping. Two nights later I had to pay Ray back my share of the bottle because he’d called AmEx and disputed the charge.