The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

1. RUBBER SOULS

Almost from the moment we were herded into the crowded cattlepen of a prison cell in New York’s infamous Tombs, the jail-toughened black hookers gave us nothing but misery.

“Hey, bigshit madambitch, bet you ain’t got no black cunt turnin’ tricks in your high-class fuckin’ house!”

“Yeah, bet your midget-dick rich white johns can’t buy no licorice from your candy store!”

“This queen bee of the hookers here, she afraid the black stuff gonna rub off all over her beeyootiful white sheets, ain’t ya, honey?”

The hassling began bawdy, became ugly, then menacing.

“You there in the red-white-and-blue Saks fuckin’ Fifth Avenue dress – don’t bend forward so far, otherwise ah’m gonna tear it off and eat you up!” Five minutes more and there could be a bloodbath, with us sure as hell the losers. There were seven of us, twenty of them, and common contempt of these street hookers for us, the expensive call girls, united them. In the hooker hierarchy, we were the aristocrats, they were the serfs, and jail, by God, was the great leveler.

I stood with my girls huddled tightly together against the cell bars, putting as much distance as possible between us and the black streetwalkers. Even if we wanted to sit down among the others, we had no chance. Those that had places on the few uncomfortable benches hung jealously onto them. If anyone got up for a drink of water or a pee, a fast ass would cancel the space. Some girls, exhausted from a night’s sidewalk cruising, lay on the concrete floor, their heads in someone else’s lap. They slept despite the anguished sounds of junkies in neighboring cells coughing, retching, and howling for relief. The stench of vomit, urine, and stale human body odor was suffocating.

The ranks oozed and abated like an oil slick as one group of girls, summoned by the big bull-dyke matron, was led to the courtroom and replaced with another. “Git heeyah, judge gonna see ya now.”

Each new paddywagon full of hookers fell in with the catcalling. “Hey, muthahfuckin’ madam, can you tell us now why you don’t have a little color in your high-class eestablishment?” a vicious-looking hooker in a neon-orange wig said menacingly.

Caution on my part gave way to exasperation, then anger. “Listen,” I said, “I want you to know I do have black girls working for me. Several of them… I even have a black roommate. There she is over there.”

I pointed to Aurora, a willowy light-skinned girl who was sitting apart from us. A prostitute since her teens, and the veteran of many arrests, the same experience that taught her how to grab a seat for herself also taught her to assume a low profile in this kind of a scene. Aurora sat in a corner, wearing a blond wig and dark glasses, her collar pulled high under her chin, trying to blend in with the walls. She squirmed as twenty pairs of raisin eyes riveted on her.

The hookers stopped teasing their wigs and painting their nails with varnish that had mysteriously appeared despite all handbags having been confiscated outside. “Sheeyit, man,” a mean-looking coal-black girl finally rasped, “that mixed rat ain’t black, she half-white.”

“The scumbag dunno what the fuck she is,” a girl with the face of a sepia madonna and the voice of a carnival tout said. Both she and her friend left their seats to walk toward Aurora for a better look and maybe take a swing at her. All of us were watching them. This had to be the moment of detonation.

Just then the cell gate cranked open, and the big black matron escorted in a fat white girl who was hobbling on crutches. The girl was all marked up with ulcers on her arms and legs and seemed to be dope-crazed. As the matron, in a kindly way, tried to ease her into one of the vacant seats, the lame hooker yelled, “Take ya hands off me, ya big black dyke!” and hauled off, her crutch savagely ripping across the matron’s head.

That was all we needed in this charged atmosphere, a racial explosion touched off by the handicapped whore. Girls started screaming and yelling; fists, arms, legs, and the crutches flew all over the place. My girls and I quickly moved for cover behind the urinal wall and waited to see what would happen next.

Three hefty matrons marched into the cell and efficiently subdued the hysterical white girl. What would happen next? Thank God we didn’t have to hang around to find out. “Git heeyah, you girls behind the wall over there. Judge gonna see ya now.” The cattle were led to the courtroom.

Inside the courtroom, full of journalists, quick-sketch artists, and curious onlookers were my house guests of the night before. The nice john from the Midwest I called Calvin was probably going to lose his job and marriage because his name and position had been blasted all over the New York papers. There was my sweet Greek lover, Takis, and beside him the couple whose only concession to convention was their last name. Otherwise they lived a life of free love and had been swinging with Takis and me in my house, for love, not money, only minutes before the cops arrived.

The judge listened with what seemed to me obvious hostility as the charges against us were read. One by one I paid the bail for my girls from the envelope of money I had stuffed into my panties before accompanying the cops to the station house. But the one person I wanted in the courtroom wasn’t there. My boyfriend, Larry. I hadn’t been able to contact him and he had the key to the safe-deposit box where my main cash supply is kept. Now I was left without enough cash to pay the sky-high bail of $3,500 they put on “New York’s most notorious madam” – as I heard myself described. So it was off to Riker’s Island for me.

Riker’s Island is the new women’s prison, cleaner and more modern than the Tombs, but still the nesting place of the dregs of humanity. I was thrown into a big room full of junkies, pushers, five-dollar harlots, the general hustlers of life, and victims of other people’s crimes.

A scrawny white hooker who had been the victim of a “freak trick” – a customer who gets his kicks from brutally beating girls – was nursing her wounds. Three other hookers had been beaten by him on Eighth Avenue over the past two weeks, and this poor girl had bruises and cuts all over her, plus a broken arm and a lip which was cut to her nostril. Her eyes were swollen slits.

A sixteen-year-old Puerto Rican girl was crying for her three-week-old baby left unattended at home. “Mi marido try to kill me,” she wailed in fractured English.

I tried to help the Spanish-speaking girls fill in their forms, but when I did, they would move away from me as though I had leprosy. So did the other prisoners. My expensive clothes and appearance made them suspicious and resentful.

They all stared, but nobody spoke to me except a cute little brown girl with freckles on a face like an acorn. “I have already been picked up eight times in a fortnight,” she said. “So now the judge decided to send me away for a month’s rest.”

She was agitated because her pimp did not know where she was. She wanted me to phone him when I got out.

When I got out? When would that be? It was four P.M. Friday, sixteen hours since my house was busted by three phony johns.

It is now daytime, so where is Larry with my bail money? Where is my lawyer? Why am I, a woman of class, happy in her profession and basically doing a necessary service, in this horrible place? I thought back on the bust, trying to understand where I had made my mistake.

Aurora could smell a cop a city block away. She didn’t trust those three “clients” who had persistently phoned and insisted on coming over even though I tried to discourage them. We had been having a stag party earlier and now just a friendly social gathering. On their third call, around midnight, I finally allowed them to come up.

As soon as they came through the door, Aurora reacted like a gazelle downwind of a jackal. My instincts also signaled caution. The little swarthy man with the moustache sure looked like a john, and he was shaking in his shoes. The second one looked like a crook, and these days cops and crooks often look alike, so I couldn’t be sure. But it was the third one, a tall man, who looked most like a cop.

“As a matter of routine,” I said to them politely, “would you mind showing me some identification.” The one with the moustache shook some more, and he and thugface looked toward the tall one, and he pulled a wallet from his pocket with only four of the dozen plastic compartments occupied. None of them contained credit cards. Cops can’t afford credit cards. I didn’t like it. I looked toward Aurora, who was staring down at the tall man’s feet.

I followed her gaze. Rubber soles! The sure mark of a policeman. The cop followed our eyes, too, and knew that we knew. The bluff was up. “Okay, everybody, this is a raid,” he said, and flashed a badge. “You’re all under arrest for being on premises used for prostitution.”

As if on cue, the front door opened, and in walked the big plainclothes policeman I recognized as the one they call Scarface. “Good evening, Miss Hollander,” he said, leering at me; “I told you we would get you again.”

Eight uniformed cops stormed through the front door and started turning the place over like a pancake. But the scene that followed was more like a Keystone Comedy than an efficient police raid.

Bureaus were turned inside out, and men started loading everything that wasn’t nailed down into a trolley. My childhood love letters, family photo albums, and even my collection of cookbooks were stuffed aboard. “Let me have those back,” I asked the cop standing guard over the trolley, “unless you plan on making some delicious Dutch pea soup down at the station.” What’d he do? He shook his head, and refused to release my cookbooks.

Booze that I had bought from a customer, trading one girl for one case, was taken. Cigarettes bought duty-free in the Dutch islands were also taken. None of this worried me. What was worrying me were my valuable black book of customer listings and cash book standing on an open shelf. The last time the police took these I had to buy them back under the table. This time I decided to steal them back.

The cop guarding the trolley looked like a horny guy (and men are always men), so I pulled out a collection of pornographic pictures from a drawer. “Hey, look at these,” I said, handing him the pictures. In a minute or two this ape gets so juiced up he calls the others over. And they obliged by gathering around the pictures, soon making obscene comments about them. But I certainly didn’t mind because this allowed me to take a few steps behind them and remove my customer book and cash records from the shelf.

I managed to quickly throw the book of names into a hall closet under an empty carton, and from the cash book I tore out all the pages recording my business affairs and then threw it on the trolley to avert suspicion. Since nobody was bothering me, I was able to slip into my bedroom, where I stuffed the pages under the wall-to-wall bedroom rug – which I always leave untacked in one corner. I also slid one thousand dollars in cash under the rug, because if those hyenas find money, they usually say there was none and keep it.

Just then a big cop came out of the bedroom with a folder of bamboo cigarette papers in his hand. “Okay, where do you keep the pot? We know you have some.”

“I don’t have any in the house,” I lied. “I never use drugs.” As he disappeared into the bedroom, I whisked the plastic bag of marijuana out of the hall closet, rushed into the bathroom, and emptied it down the toilet.

Nobody was watching the bathroom, so I went back and forth like a kidney patient getting rid of damning evidence.

Then I saw a uniformed cop who was trying to act as though he were working go to the hall closet with a flashlight. He began going through things and was getting dangerously close to the carton that concealed the big black book.

“Excuse me, sir,” I said, and gently shoved him away from the open door, “my mirror is inside this door, and I have to fix my hair.” The cop walked back into the bedroom, where his colleagues were now congregated, looking for pot.

As nobody was guarding the front door, two of the girls and the maid decided to split.

“Okay, everybody, let’s go,” a big detective said, coming out of the bedroom. He did a head count and found that three girls were missing.

“Where are those cunts?” he asked, with his hand raised, threatening to strike me. “I’ll break their fucking legs when I find them.”

“I have no idea where they could be,” I said evenly. The girls had strolled to freedom via the front door, and had calmly ridden the elevator to safety.

The police arrested everyone, including poor Calvin, and took everyone but me down to the 17th Precinct. I was left alone in my apartment with the three plainclothesmen who first raided my place. The phones kept ringing – customers wanting to come over. The cops answered all the calls and made rough jokes. That would be the last time those johns called me.

My house was a mess, yet they overlooked my goody bag. I was lucky not to have to replace it. Those leg irons and handcuffs so carefully collected, and the rare cat-o’-nine-tails the masochists love to feel bite their flesh. My slaves were saved.

The boys from the precinct had a ball cutting all my telephone wires, four telephones in my bedroom, four in the living room. Finally they took me down to the station house. But not before I went into the bedroom and got the money I’d hidden. It was about three in the morning when I joined the others being fingerprinted. The newspaper reporters were milling around outside the station house.

It would be a fine story for the sensation-hungry press. Seven girls, six men arrested.

At the station house the policemen gave us coffee and doughnuts. They let us lie down on tables and get a little sleep, and even switched off the glaring neon lights in the ceiling. Calvin was lying beside Aurora, who’d been his date, on one table. She used her big pocketbook for a pillow. Calvin was still being a sweet pussycat, not giving anyone trouble, but that bastard lieutenant had to give his name out in the press. Calvin is the president of a big company in the Midwest. I can imagine what he thinks of Fun City now. A family, a career, ruined for half an hour of pleasure.

Takis and I were lying beside each other on another table, my head on his shoulder. And now I was horny, by God, was I ever horny. What is the matter with me?

Takis grew a nice hardon, and I caressed him when I thought nobody was looking. But why give a damn anyway? They couldn’t arrest us again.

In a few hours we woke up stiff and tired. The police had a television set turned on to the morning news. They brought us more coffee and doughnuts. We watched, and there were the girls walking out of my house. Everyone’s name on television. “Madam Xaviera’s house was raided last night. She was considered to be the queen of the call girls and exchanged girls and customers all over Europe.” Wow! At least they made me look good.

At eight A.M. after the morning news, we were told we would be taken to the Tombs and warned that there were reporters waiting outside. We all wanted to disguise ourselves somehow. Flavia painted a big black moustache under her nose with an eyebrow pencil, put her hair up with a rubber band, and put on her head a civilian porkpie hat she had managed to lift from one of the policemen.

I put glasses on, my hair up, and wore another man’s hat we took. Calvin had the best disguise. I gave him my light summer dress I had stuffed in my bag before the cops took me away. He wrapped the dress around his head, making a turban of it, and pulled the end into a veil around his nose and mouth like an Arab yashmak.

We walked down the steps of the station house holding newspapers in front of us and stepped into the van which would take us downtown to the Tombs, New York City’s jail. There can be no atmosphere in any jail in the country as depressing and sordid as at the Tombs.

As we were rudely pushed along the narrow gray hall of the prison toward our cellblock, we passed a cell full of transvestites, mostly grotesque gargoyles making pathetic attempts to be what they were not, although a few brilliantly succeeded. Mundus vult decipi decipiatur ergo. The world wants to be cheated, so cheat.

Now after the pleasant stay at the Tombs I am at Bikers Island. Two years ago jail was as foreign to me as the far side of the moon. Now one more trip here and I’ll know the graffiti on the slime-covered walls by heart.

Two years ago my house was a pleasure retreat you went home to. Now it is a place you drag around, the way a tortoise tarries its shell, from precinct to new precinct after each bust. Yes, I am happy in my business and love it. Indeed some of the happiest moments of my life have happened in the two years I have been rising in the ranks of New York City prostitution to become the biggest and most important madam in town. But why the harassment from police, the heavy bail and fines, the high lawyers’ fees, the payoffs? Whom are we bothering? And, as I think about it, I realize that a safe little secretary can save almost as much as I did this last year.

Finally Larry comes with the money. My lawyer, I find, has been outside for three hours, waiting for the money, to bail me out. Now my savings add up to much less than a Secretary could save. But I am out again. Riding with Larry back to the city. Now I will have to start again.

I smile sort of hopelessly as Larry parks in front of my apartment building. But I’ll get a new place, let my customers know where to find me, get my girls together again, and keep giving pleasure to men and women. I can’t help myself. To tell you the truth, I am very happy in the business.