Hotel Honolulu

28 Naked Strangers

One morning at first light, quite by chance, she entered the hotel's coffee shop in a tight tube dress that rode up her thighs from the heel- and-toe motion of her wicked shoes. But you did not see a dress, you saw a body. Like a lot of Honolulu newcomers, she made it a habit to stop in after the night, superstitiously feeling safe with a routine in this strange place. She could not have known about Puamana, or else she was defiant. She was unusual in another way. At this time of day they always had a pimp with them, and they never handled money. She carried cash, and there was no sign of a pimp except perhaps the tattooed name Cobrah set off by flowers between her breasts — her dress was that skimpy. The pimpish name could have been a hammerstroke to end a story. It was her three-year-old son.

"You a cop?" she asked when I first spoke to her.

It was my intrusive questions, my unconvincing smile, my noticing details, my impartiality and confidence. She was in the keeping-secrets business, and I was a collector of secrets.

She ate alone, picking at scrambled eggs bloodied with hot sauce, and then smoked, drank coffee, and around six went somewhere to bed. She got up for work as soon as darkness fell. She was black and always wore white and in this dazzling place hardly saw any daylight.

A full week passed before I had approached her, and I did so only because she seemed relaxed. As soon as I began speaking she got impatient, as though I were wasting her time and she had important things to do, like the lawyer in whose eyes you see thoughts of billable hours, and who, even at his idlest, becomes a clock watcher in conversation, talking in quarter-hour increments.

"Would a cop tell you the truth?"

She didn't smile. She saw the logic in it, but was impatient again, that fake-weary hurry-up sigh of a bad actress.

Her name was Jasmine, and she had come here from Las Vegas. "That's a real tourist town. I don't care what they say here." She was disappointed by Honolulu and said she probably wouldn't stay much longer. There was another tattoo on her thumb, a small stark symbol.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said.

She tapped her feet and fingers and gave me that sigh again that said, Look, I'm busy.

But she wasn't busy. She was pausing over breakfast, smoking a cigarette.

"You want to talk to me?"

I smiled in a helpless friendly way instead of answering.

"Then it costs money."

As a hooker, she was paid for everything she said or did. All contact with a man had a price. And so I signed for her breakfast, buying time, and said, "I'm the manager here."

That meant something to her; I could see it in the way she kept from showing that she was impressed. I had authority over this whole establishment — bedrooms, drinks, food, the guests themselves.

And strangely, as I signed her bill and looked at the total, I instinctively looked at her body, as though comparing what I had paid with how she looked. She was big, soft, loose-fleshed, not exercised. Her skin was coarse. She had nicks and small scars on her legs, and tiny scratches on her arms, and I felt that each mark represented a separate and much larger incident. She had shadows on her body that you see on overripe supermarket fruit. And was I imagining the thumbprints?

She was unlike Puamana, whom I never thought of without seeing her welcoming posture and her big made-for-men smile, as though saying, Come to Mummy.

"Get me another cup of coffee and a pack of More Lights," Jasmine

said.

"More Lights," I said, in a croaky voice, for the absurd name, but she didn't smile or thank me for them. Any attempt at humor only made her suspicious for the way it seemed a time waster. She sneered, she challenged me, she gave little away, and when I tried to compliment her, she said, "Why shouldn't I be confident?"

I said, "How many men did you have last night?"

"I'm going," she said, and left, like that, not offended, just out of time. But the next morning she was back at five, as dawn broke, looking for breakfast and willing to talk again.

Her instinct was to find the man's weakness, whatever need he had, and to exploit it and make him pay. Her line on the street was "Want to spend a little time together?" If the man did not react, she moved on fast, no "Excuse me." If the man nodded, she offered a few seconds of friendliness, even sweet talk to him before the taxi pulled up. After that she went cold. It was just a matter of getting to the room, finishing the business, and hurrying back to the street. She was uninterested in anything else. "I'm not looking for a friend." She was indifferent about the men, hardly noticed what they were wearing. They were all the same to her; they hardly had faces; anyone with money would do. And yet I suspected that each man saw her in his own dramatic way.

The price quoted on the street was a hundred dollars, double that if you were Japanese. Once in the room, when the man was naked, as he had to be to show he wasn't a cop, more money was demanded.

"A guy yesterday made me walk three blocks to his car. I told him, 'Get a taxi!' but he wouldn't. So I made him give me an extra forty for all the walking."

The person who says "You are asking me to walk another hundred yards and therefore you will have to give me forty dollars" — that person

has the hair-splitting, get-the-boss-over-a-barrel, union mentality, in which every detail of a job is a matter for negotiation.

"That's fair," I said.

"But you don't really think so," she said.

"In my janitors' contract there's a clause that says they can't be asked to climb higher than nine feet."

"They go higher, you pay them more. That's righteous."

She understood at once. She went on to say that when the man was in the room, she'd say, "If you want more, that's going to cost you more."

And of course a naked Japanese man with his dick in his hand fished out the money and handed it over.

"Don't touch me," she said when that same man reached for her breasts. And when he touched her tattoo she stiffened and said, "Ouch! That hurt! I just got that tattoo!" — although her tattoos were several years old — and the man backed off. Then she scolded him for going soft.

Time was everything to her. At just the moment when I was most eager for her to answer, she said she had to go. A whole day passed before I could resume.

She sat smoking in her ridiculous dress, in stiletto heels, her stiff, dry, dull-colored bunches of hair askew and sometimes spiked like a sea urchin. People sized her up as a hooker instantly — well, that was the whole point of the dress, subtlety being another time waster in this business. And she was impolite, not to say rude, but the fact was that every minute counted, for she was rude the way an air-traffic controller might be rude. Even the way she walked in long strides was tick-tock, tick-tock, marking time.

"What if they want to touch you?" I was thinking of the other day, the Japanese man reaching for her breasts.

"I don't care what they want. I'm in charge."

A local man had been arrested for using a stun gun on hookers, and soldiers beat them up, and now and then they were murdered — invariably knifed. Jasmine was too professional to talk about any of this; she knew it, so there was nothing to discuss. Two months after arriving in Honolulu she spoke enough Japanese, a dozen words perhaps, to spend half an hour alone in a room with a naked businessman from Osaka. A dozen words were plenty, and the men were relieved to go.

Hurry hurry was the opposite of erotic, impatience and fuss confounded desire, but it seemed that Jasmine did not even know this, or if she did, she ignored it in the interest of a quick buck.

On a really good night she had six or seven men, and though I had to pay her almost as much as any one of them had, she gave me the details for the previous night, the five men.

The evening had begun with one of those irritating ones who made her walk to his car. She could not remember whether he was a white guy or where he came from, only that he was worried about the police, losing

his car, being seen. He kept going soft. She finally gave up, could not demand more money while he was soft, and he left, still soft.

A Japanese tourist, also nervous, was the second. When she said, "No, don't touch," he was startled, like a boy. She slipped the top of her dress down, exposing her breasts, sat beside him on the bed, and kept warning him to keep his hands off her. She manipulated him, and when he was finished he went out, trotting to the elevator his shirt untucked.

It was midnight. She stood before a mirror fixing her makeup, then headed to the street again, very tall in her stylish heels.

Something about the way the third man answered her told her that he was drunk. Within seconds she knew he was uselessly so — loud and boastful when she selected him from his group of friends, but quiet in the taxi. He was so subdued and dozy in the room that he fumbled with his money and she got almost two hundred in the beginning. There was no end. He could not finish. She was only afraid of his falling asleep, this big unmovable man, so she pushed him and talked sharply. She hated him for trying to kiss her.

An experienced man who knew what he wanted was helpful, though first-timers were more easily intimidated. The fourth customer knew the moves but was too explicit. He said, "I want your ass." She said, "No one gets my ass." And when he sighed, seeing her tearing open the condom wrapper, she said, "I do nothing without a condom."

He paid the extra. She lay and parted her legs and looked away, and winced when he entered her, as if she were being vaccinated.

The man had spit strings in his mouth and his eyes were glazed. Jasmine shoved hard at his groping hands. A moment later, when he seemed to be enjoying himself and taking his time, she said, "Okay, that's all," and he had to hurry to finish. "Bitch," he said as he turned to go. She was so vicious in reply, the man stepped quickly through the door.

After that, two soldiers approached her in the street. They weren't in uniform, but she knew they were military from their haircuts and the position of their tattoos — they could be concealed by a T-shirt — and their shoes, which were too heavy, too shiny. They were insistent.

"One at a time," she said.

But they both wanted to go. One yanked up his shirt and pushed his belt down. She read on his lower belly, Ball Till I Fall.

They wouldn't go separately, so she turned them down. Two men were dangerous, needing each other more than they needed her. Anyway, it was weird and they were soldiers and she was wary of watchers.

The last john of the night, this one at around four A.M., was a man of about fifty who never said a word. Probably foreign, but he made a fuss about the money by sighing and grunting. He, too, tried to kiss her. She said, "I don't kiss," and "Don't touch me there," and "That hurts."

"This is a waste of time."

She was talking to me, trying to be tough again, the way fearful people pretend. She wanted more money to go on talking. I thought: People call what she did sex, but what she did was whatever was the opposite of sex, and beyond nakedness, something skeletal, just money in a hand so bony it looks like a claw.

No one knew who she was or where she was from, nor would she tell me, except to say it was on the mainland. No name, utterly anonymous, probably not more than twenty-something, yet she stood for whatever particular fantasy was in the grateful man's mind.

Jasmine wanted nothing more than money. When she asked for more from me she became unconvincingly flirtatious. But she had already told me too much. I said, "I've never paid for sex."

"Men don't pay me for sex," she said. "They pay me to go away."