Authors: Lawrence Block
I suppose I could get out of here. Except that I really like it here, and where am I going to go? I could find some shithole in the East Village for fifty dollars a month, but how long could I live there before I started to go crazy? It wasn’t too bad visiting Arnold and David at their apartments, although it was occasionally depressing, especially Arnold’s, but then I had them with me. I can’t imagine being alone in a place like that, returning to it after a day’s work pounding a typewriter or whatever you have to do to bring home a lousy eighty-five dollars a week.
There are these jobs they advertise in the
East Village Other.
Modeling, which means nude work of one sort or another. Once in a while I suppose it’s a legitimate job for a photographer who takes dirty pictures, but I gather that mostly it’s working in those modeling clubs where creeps bring cameras and take nude pictures of you, half the time without film in the camera.
(What sort of men actually
go
to those places? I mean, I can see a man paying a whore, but to pay money to click a camera at some bored, naked girl. I mean, why?)
They pay five or ten dollars an hour. Ten dollars an hour to have some goon snap pictures of you isn’t too bad. But I don’t suppose the work is very steady. Not the sort of thing you can count on. Those places must get shut down from time to time, or else the customers must get tired of the same old faces.
Faces?
Besides, it’s not much different from being a whore, except for being less interesting.
That’s what it all keeps coming to, doesn’t it?
Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t. I can’t think about anything else and I don’t want to think about this, certainly not for the time being. It was all something I knew I was going to have to face pretty soon. Another three months at the outside and my money would have run out, even if that son of a bitch hadn’t walked off with it. (Maybe I shouldn’t call him names. Maybe he was poor and he really needed the money. Well, he isn’t poor now. Now he has my fifteen hundred dollars, the son of a bitch.)
God, I wish I could get high! I mean really nice and high and just sit around feeling great for a couple of hours. I think I could face anything right now if first I could just get high and have a little time to myself, just high and happy. That mixture of grass and hash that I smoked with the boys. I would love to have a taste of that now and go off on one of those happy bubbly cerebral highs. Or that red crud that Eric keeps around the place, the sweet-and-sour rose petals, whatever the hell it is. Some kind of a sex drug, but you could take it and get high and skip the sex and it would be better than sitting around like this.
I suppose I’ll get drunk, which isn’t the same thing at all. And if I do, it’ll have to be on wine. I can’t afford anything classier. Not now.
I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.
I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)
There’s nothing to it.
Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution—what a windy clinical word for the actual process—but I wouldn’t have believed it could be so, oh, what’s the word? Noninvolving?
That’s not exactly it. That was part of it, the feeling of this-person-he’s-fucking-is-not-the-real-me, and I suppose every girl has to feel that in order to keep from despising herself. And there is a certain amount of tripping out involved. I have always been good, perhaps too good, at being able to carry on a conversation, nodding in the right places, grunting uh-huh and mmmm and uh-uh, even contributing a phrase or a sentence now and then, without paying a dime’s worth of attention to what’s going on.
And you know, you can do this physically as well as verbally. It’s much the same thing, except it’s the body instead of the mind that is just going through the motions of participating.
I made forty-five dollars today. That’s at least twice as much as I could have made in any job I could have gotten, and in half the hours.
The sex part—
A flash. It was almost exactly the same as when I hit the hay with what’s-his-name, Edgar. The same thing! The same I’m-not-really-here, the same faint sense of contempt for the man I was with, the same general disinterest in what we were doing in bed, the same experience of getting a certain amount of pleasure from it but being too detached to really enjoy it, or even to really hate it, for that matter.
I don’t see why I can’t go on this way. It shouldn’t be too terribly hard to put away a hundred dollars a week. A hundred dollars is four or five tricks. (The New Math.) Four or five men a week and the rent is paid.
Went to the gay bar last night and got drunk. A little foggy on what happened, but I think I went home with a girl and I think we made it. I drank some wine before I went there, then had a bottle of cough syrup—terpin hydrate and codeine—you have to sign the book when you buy it and the druggist gives you an I-know-what-you-want-this-for-you-junkie-bitch look, but how else can you get high for seventy-nine cents?
Then all the drinks at the gay bar, which she bought for me, and whatever we had at her place. For all I know we had cocaine at her place. I really don’t remember. I have vague sex memories but they parallel a couple of freaky dreams I’ve been having lately, so who knows which was which?
The other thing, which I haven’t written about in here, and which I’m still not writing about because it scares me that much, hasn’t happened yet.
If it doesn’t happen soon I don’t know what I’ll do. Oh, well, I guess I can always kill myself.
The girl is not entirely kidding.
Still nothing.
What will I do? If Eric were around he would know what to do. I suppose he would help, but who knows? Who knows anything any more?
Maybe it will work out.
Except I know it won’t. I’ve never even worried about it before and this time I just knew.
It’s impossible. Everybody says it’s impossible. What do you do? Sue the manufacturer?
Except I probably forgot. I know I forget a lot of the time, I always have extras left over.
(Write it, you idiot! Go on!)
No, I can’t. I don’t want to. I guess I’ll go out and fuck somebody and make some money.
Yesterday I turned five tricks and all five of them wanted to be blown. All five. That was the only contact they wanted to have with me.
Why don’t they turn queer?
If I did nothing but that all the time I wouldn’t have this problem.
I was reading through this.
I’m really sick. Most of the time I don’t realize it. Or maybe I do deep down inside. All of that shit early on about making progress. Some kind of progress. The girl is going noisily out of her skull.
I have a feeling, too, that it’s not a good idea to drink cough syrup every day.
Fuck it. Maybe it’ll hurt the baby.
It really looked as though I would never write that last line. It’s funny because I’ve been able to put down almost everything else I’ve done, but now what I seem to be is pregnant—I’m never late, and God am I late now. And even now I can’t sit back and let myself gush about it. I’m really uptight about this. I’ve never been quite like this before.
Then again, I’ve never been pregnant before.
This isn’t supposed to happen to girls on the pill. Everybody said the pill would put abortionists out of business. What is it, some sort of mad suicidal or self-destructive streak in me? How can you run around the city fucking absolutely everybody and forget to take your pill first thing in the morning? And it isn’t as if I have such a full schedule that I can’t find time to take a birth control pill. It isn’t as though I have so many other vital things to remember that little trivial things like not getting pregnant are too much to remember.
As a matter of fact, there have been days when taking my pill was just about the only thing I
did
do. There were also days when it was one of many things I didn’t do. Which is why I am presently knocked up.
When Howie and I were trying to have a baby, nothing happened. The river flowed red like a clock. Red like a clock? What is the matter with me today? And what’s with cutesy little euphemisms for menstruating?
What do I do now?
Who do I know who would know where to go for an abortion? The funny thing is probably just about anybody. Of the old gang in Eastchester I’m sure there were a lot who went under the knife. If this had happened before I left Howard, I would just have asked Marcie. Nothing simpler. If she hadn’t had an abortion herself she would certainly know somebody who had, and it would all be very intelligently arranged, and it would cost whatever it is that they cost, which I guess is a thousand dollars (which means I could have afforded it if I hadn’t had the robbery, and of course people become paranoid, why shouldn’t people become paranoid, because it’s pretty obvious that the world is conspiring against me. I mean, how else would everything happen this way, as if on schedule? It can’t all be luck. Somebody up there hates me.)
The same question, over and over and over. What do I do now? I wish I knew the answer.
There’s not even any point in looking for an abortionist now because I don’t have any money to pay him with. The way things stand now I’ll have the rent when it’s due and probably a couple of hundred dollars beyond that, but I don’t know how long I can go before it’s too late to have the abortion.
Maybe I should have the baby.
Oh, that’s just what I need. And if worst comes to worst I can take it back to Howie.
Here’s somebody’s baby to bring us back together again.
Solid.
Liz says she knows someone who will do it for three hundred dollars. She insists he’s reliable and that he operates under sanitary conditions. I hope so. I really don’t want to die. I’d rather have the baby than die.
I wasn’t so sure about this the other night. I sat in the bathroom making lists of the different ways to kill yourself. Myself, to be specific. One was worse than the next. There was a Dorothy Parker poem about that, wasn’t there? All the different ways to check out and what’s wrong with each of them, and it winds up
You might as well live.
That was the conclusion I came to, and for about that reason.
Maybe I should write something about Liz. I just got to know her the past couple days, although I’ve seen her around ever since I started to work the bars off Lexington.
(How professional that phrase sounds!)
She is a Lady Clairol blond, and her hairdresser is only one of many who know this. I think you could say (at least I can) that she looks like a whore. I say this not to put her down but realistically. The bleached blond hair, the hardness around the eyes and mouth, the way she struts when she walks, the slight and excusable tendency to overdress. Maybe, for all I know, it pays to look as much like a whore as possible, so that men will know what you are. Why confuse potential customers? Where’s the percentage?
We had taken to nodding to each other, and then one afternoon I was watching a daiquiri evaporate when she came over and asked if the other seat at my table was taken. It wasn’t, and she sat in it and studied me intently.
“We’ve seen each other around,” she said.
“Sure.”
“What I’m going to say, I don’t want you to be offended.”
“All right.” I had, at this point, the feeling that she might want to recruit me for her pimp. I had had such suggestions before from girls. I had invented a pimp of my own, a West Indian spade named Mickey with a huge knife scar on his cheek, but very gentle deep down inside. After I spoke of him once or twice I almost came to believe in him.
But what she said was, “I have this John, don’t stare but he’s the third stool from the left end, the one with God-help-us-all a straw hat. You see him?”
I did. An inoffensive little man with wire-rimmed glasses and a quizzical smile. He looked like somebody’s uncle, a bank vice-president or a retired druggist or something.
“He likes two girls at once. You know the scene?”
“Uh-huh.”
“There are two girls I can ask to split a trick like this with me, and they’re neither of them around. I thought it wouldn’t hurt me to ask. It’s fifty each. He wants a real party, but it’s fifty each.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don’t know if you ever made a scene like this—”
“I did. But never as, you know, as a trick.”
“You mean for kicks?”
“More or less.”
“Like you dig it both ways?”
“Well—”
“That makes it easier. Me, too, matter of fact. But a lot of girls don’t. Matter of taste.”
“Literally.”
“Huh? Oh, right, I dig. You’re a funny girl, you know that? You say one word to my thirty, but you’re funny. You’ve just been around recent. New in town?”
“In a way.”
“New in business, then. Well, that’s cool. You want to make half a bill? I’ve tricked him before, his name is Claude, he’s really a lamb. He’s no trouble at all.”
We gave the lamb his money’s worth. He was a sly old bastard, all right. He had a whole script worked out. It went this way—first he would hide in the closet, then Liz and I would neck and pet and one of us would go down on the other while he watched. Then he would come out and surprise us, and we would beg him to keep our secret, and finally we would bribe him with our bodies. The phrase, believe it, was his.
So we did. It was kind of fun, in the way that agreeable tricks are fun. It wasn’t real because those things never can be. And working from a script that way. The beginning was nothing but stagey, the kissing and petting and undressing. I felt foolish, and didn’t even get any enjoyment out of the fact that it was a kinky scene. Sometimes I can dig kinkiness in and of itself, but this time nothing.