The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

2. A FAMILY AFFAIR

Don’t think of me as a poor little girl gone astray because of a misguided or underprivileged childhood. The contrary is true. I come from a very good background and grew up in a loving family atmosphere.

I was born in Indonesia and later received a fine European education. Between my parents and myself we speak a total of twelve languages – I personally speak seven fluently.

Mother, a stately blond of German and French extraction, was serious-minded but warm and utterly devoted to her family. She was my doctor-father’s second wife. His first wife, a White Russian ballerina, had left Indonesia with their only daughter immediately after their divorce. His marriage with my mother was a happy one, even though they were opposites in personality and temperament. There was never any question that he loved only my mother, despite a twinkling eye for a pretty girl.

My father, whom I idolized, was a rare human being – an intellectual, raconteur, lover of the arts, bon vivant, and a truly generous-spirited man. At the height of his highly successful medical career, he owned a large hospital in the then Dutch East Indies, and I later learned that we had two palatial homes, one in Soerabaja and the other in the hill resort area of Bandung, both run by many servants.

But we lost all that when the Japanese invaded the islands and threw my parents and their newborn baby – that is, me – into a concentration camp.

For the three years of the Japanese occupation, my father suffered extreme hardship and torture at the hands of our captors. His crime was not only that he was Dutch, but that he was Jewish as well. And this is something few people realize, that the Japanese in Southeast Asia were as anti-Semitic as the Germans in Europe.

The compound we were incarcerated in had a big sign nailed up with the lettering “Banksa Jehudi,” which was Malaysian for “Jewish Folks.”

My mother suffered torture as well, even though she was not Jewish, but became the committed the crime of being married to a Jew. She was once thrown into a little wooden hut full of corpses, where the temperature was like that of an oven, for about five days, because she had become hysterical and demanded extra rations of rice and water because I was very sick with lever and dysentery.

My father was sometimes hung by his wrists from a tree with his feet. An inch off the ground in the scorching tropical sun. Probably the only reason they didn’t let him die was because they needed his medical skills. They finally dragged him away from us to a separate compound, where he was appointed camp doctor for over a thousand women and children. In wartime this can be a kind of living torture, too, especially for a man who hates to see human suffering.

He later told us that he almost went insane during this period worrying about the well-being of his wife and child. And, ironically enough, the first time he did see me again was not as a father but as a doctor. This was two-and-a-half years after he’d been taken away.

By that time my mother and I had been released and were living in nearby Soerabaja with some White Russian friends. One day I fell from a tree, badly gashing my leg. In my mother’s absence, a frightened servant rushed me to the concentration camp doctor.

After he operated on my leg – to this day I still have the scar – I was taken home, and only then did someone tell him he had just performed surgery on his own daughter.

“That little blond, green-eyed angel was my daughter? I cant believe it,” he responded with joy. “The last time I saw her, she was a tiny baby with blue eyes and black hair.” At least he was reassured we were still alive and in reasonable health.

When the war ended our family was finally reunited, although stripped of ail our money and possessions by the new government, and we went back to Amsterdam to start all over again. My father was already in his forties, but he was not only a man of great moral strength and courage, but also gifted with a capacity for hard work, and with the help of some financial aid from the Dutch government he soon built up a fine new practice.

In time he acquired such a widespread reputation as a physician that patients came to him from all over Europe. But he never again achieved his former financial status, and I don’t think he really much cared about it. He was not the sort of man who was meant to be a millionaire. He was dedicated to medicine and was infinitely more interested in his patients than money. His patients were also more important to him than his own family. I even knew him to postpone our vacation if a patient needed him. Whatever the hour, he tended to his patients’ needs, and sometimes to my mothers distress. Especially if the patient was an attractive woman with nothing more wrong with her than an imaginary stomachache. And a yen for my father.

One of my father’s patients was a voluptuous sexpot of a woman, about twenty-four, whom my mother and I called “the mustard girl” simply because she worked in a mustard factory.

He was treating her primarily for asthma but also – as my mother later found out – for hyperactive sexual urges. Evidently my father’s small affair with the mustard girl came to my mother’s attention when she saw a mink coat listed in his office amounts. Not very smart of him.

From then on, each time the mustard girl came for her visit, which was always after work in the evenings, my mother found some kind of excuse to walk into my father’s office – which was attached to our home.

One evening Mother and I were in the kitchen putting away the dishes at a time when the mustard girl was having her “treatments,” and Mother quietly said, “I think I will take a cup of coffee in to your father.” She poured it into his favorite Delft blue mug and went to his office. Suddenly there was such a commotion I thought the Zuider Zee had burst through the dyke. There was yelling and screaming, doors opening and slamming, and china breaking. And with some reason. My mother had walked in unannounced and found the mustard girl, her mink root open and nothing on underneath, down on her knees lustily sucking my father’s penis.

She grabbed my father’s patient by the hair and threw her out into the snow, minus shoes and stockings or anything but that precious mink coat. En route, my mother forbade the mustard girl ever to walk through our door again.

Father had retreated into the house, and so Mother then picked up most of our good Delft china and hurled it at Father’s head. By this time I had retreated to the top of the staircase where I stood, ready to try to intervene if there was going to be a bloodbath. But instead Mother ordered Father out of the house and threatened him with divorce.

My father, as I have stated, was a man of unusual courage. Throughout all the savage things which happened to him during the war, I doubt he shed a tear. But this night he wept openly, because he did love my mother very much and realized how much he had hurt her over a harmless bit of nonsense with an easy piece like the mustard girl.

I was only eleven at the time, but despite my age I could understand that the whole event was not to be taken really seriously. I already recognized that sex and love could mean two different things to two different people. For Father, the mustard girl had been sex – or satisfying a passing appetite. For my mother, his was deep, undying love.

Despite my youth, I also had a good idea of what went on between adults, and I knew their fight, over something sexual, could be forgotten and forgiven when they made love. I have not stated this before, but sex in our house was regarded as natural and beautiful, and I would often see my parents walking around seminaked or undressed and unashamed. Several times, I had even seen my father, in this naked state, get an erection as he caressed my mother.

On those occasions they would retire to the bedroom and close the door, no matter what time of the day. I had a strong curiosity as a child, and even though I thought I knew what they were doing, I had a strong urge to see them.

If I heard their bed squeaking at night, I would knock on their door and make a pretense of wanting to get a glass of water from their bathroom, even though I had my own bathroom. Once in their room, I would ask could I sleep with them. My request was usually granted, but not without a few grumbles from my father.

The older I grew, the more I became attached to my father and wished I could be as intelligent and respected as he was. In a completely Freudian way I was in love with my father, and even today I am not ashamed to say that if I met a man exactly like him, I’d fall in love and want to marry him.

Being the only child, I was spoiled by him not only in a material sense but with all his – and my mother’s – devotion. My father guided my mental development like the professor Henry Higgins of My Fair Lady and saw to it that my talent for foreign languages was fully cultivated. He encouraged me to study Greek, Latin, French, and German in high school and made it a rule that on weekends, in the summer at the beach or in the winter in the country house, we all conversed in nothing other than a foreign tongue.

On Saturday it would be, say, French or German, and the next day perhaps English. Each year as well we would spend at least one month’s vacation in a foreign country so I could improve my accent or else begin to learn still another language, say, Spanish or Italian. It was an extraordinary education.

On the other hand, until I was twenty-one I always went on vacation with my parents, unlike most of my friends, who went in unchaperoned groups, because my mother treated me like her little chicken and did not want me exposed to moral danger.

“Keep your virginity until you’re married, Xaviera,” I remember her saying. “I was a virgin when I got married, and that is how every girl should be. Then your husband will never be able to throw your past up in your face or tall you a whore. You will be able to walk with your head high, and nobody can ever say bad things about you.” Which all seemed pretty old-fashioned, considering the education in relaxed nudity I was getting at home.

These days you would have to walk around like a Diogenes – armed with a lantern and looking for an honest man – to find a virgin over sixteen.

Anyway, for the time being she did not have to worry about me, because the person I was in love with could never take my virginity. Her name was Helga.

Helga was my closest friend at high school, and for the past year I had nursed a flaming desire for her and did not know why. I vaguely knew about lesbians, but I did not connect myself with those half-man, half-woman types with short hair, long pants, and fat asses that my older schoolmates, giggling, pointed out in the streets.

Helga never returned my feelings, and indeed she did not know lesbians existed, except that she may have wondered why I was always accidentally bumping into her beautiful boobs.

Helga was sixteen, one year older than me, and we were like sisters sharing all our girlhood secrets. But as sexually precocious as I instinctively was, she was just as sweet and innocent.

By fifteen I had already kissed my boyfriend with my tongue, explored his body all over, and had even sucked his cock. Helga never knew about this, but she was aware that I was a little more educated in this direction than she was.

One day my beloved Helga turned to me for the benefit of my advanced knowledge about such things.

“Xaviera, I have something quite embarrassing to ask you,” she began shyly as we sat in the recreation room during lunch hour. “And I need your help… Tonight Peter Korver has asked me to a party, and I am afraid he is going to want a good-night kiss.”

Weirdly enough, when she told me her date that night was with a boy who was one of the most sought-after catches in high school, I was jealous, not of her, but of him.

“You’ll never believe this,” she went on, “but I have never ever kissed a boy in my life, and I don’t know how to react.”

I was surprised at her absolute virtue, because she was definitely one of the best-looking girls in the school. She was tall, slim, big-boobed, and had a mass of silky dark hair cascading around her beautiful face.

“Could you explain what I should do?” she asked.

“Of course, Helga,” I said. “Let’s go over to your place after school, and I’ll teach you.”

It was wintertime and thus dark at four o’clock when school let out, and we doubled up on my bicycle and rode over to her house.

I chained the bicycle to a rail, and we entered the darkened hallway, which I decided would be a perfect setting for the scene, because Helga was from a religious, conservative, snooty family who would hardly take kindly to their daughter exchanging romantic gropes with a girl friend in her bedroom.

I suggested we creep into the cavernlike area under the stairs from the foyer to the second floor of the apartment building, because “this is probably where you and Peter will be when he wants to kiss you.”

I coaxed her gently against the hallway wall, and there, under the heavy oak staircase, started making love to my girl.

Helga was submissive at first, although I believe she expected something a little less realistic than I had in mind.

“Let me hold you the way a man usually holds a girl,” I began, and slipped one arm around her waist and the other around her shoulder. Then I took her chin softly in my hand and planted a light kiss on her lips. She stood there stiffly with her eyes and her mouth closed.

“Open your lips, Helga,” I urged. “Nobody kisses with them closed.” She obediently parted her lovely mouth, and I eased my tongue inside. At first she tightened and drew away. “Relax,” I whispered; “this is what everybody does, and it is the only way you will learn.” My pink serpent of a tongue was exploring her mouth, and I lingered for a passionate eternity until she became restless.

“Now give me yours,” I said, and as her sweet-tasting tongue entered my mouth, I thought I would go insane with excitement. I wished the moment could proceed in slow motion, but if I took too much time, she might become impatient or suspicious and walk away.

“No kiss is complete without some attention to the neck and shoulders,” I said next, and I started kissing her ears and her neck and pulling back her sweater to get to her breast.

Not really knowing what was happening to her pent-up adolescent sexuality, she was getting carried away. She threw her head back to reveal a pale, slender neck, and goosebumps came out on her flesh.

At that moment the front door opened, and a tenant, accompanied by an icy wind, walked past us and vanished along the hall. I pressed Helga to the wall in a protective gesture. She relaxed and responded.

“After kissing, you have to know how to caress and be caressed,” my instruction continued, and I unbuttoned the coat she wore over a sweater and skirt. Then I slid one hand under her sweater, into her bra, and cupped one of her breasts. My other hand went under my own skirt, and I started stroking myself.

I got so frantically excited that I would have loved to have been a man with a big penis and put it inside her. But all I had was a hardened little clitoris.

While she was in her slightly dazed state I moved my mouth down under the sweater and started sucking those glorious breasts with the erect nipples. As I did so, I also took one of her long legs and pulled it up underneath my skirt between my legs; then I rubbed faster and faster till stars exploded in my head and I fell off the earth

I was breathless – and Helga was shocked. She had asked how to respond like a lady to an innocent first kiss and had just been seduced in the hallway by a love-crazed schoolgirl. She mumbled something or other and hastily ran up the stairs.

For the next few weeks I was lovestruck and unhappy and followed her everywhere like an adoring puppy, praying for a chance once more to get my hands on her gorgeous breasts. If she played tennis, I played tennis; if she went horseback riding, so did I; and when she joined the snooty rowing club, I joined the snooty rowing club, even though it was notoriously anti-Semitic.

I would love to watch her sliding back and forth on the bench of the boat in her shorts, and would follow her to the shower afterward and wish I could rub the soap all over her magnificent body as she stood there wearing nothing else but a bathing cap.

As Helga matured a little she started to recognize my absolute infatuation and began teasing me, which would drive me more and more out of my mind, and for two whole years I walked around adoring and desiring her, even after I lost my virginity to a boy at the age of seventeen.

To most girls the actual deflowering is one of the most significant events of their young lives. To me it was just a technicality. I had been dating my steady boyfriend for two years, and we had experimented with sex and explored each other, but had never made love “all the way.” In Holland young people are strictly supervised, and even though we would fool around behind the windmills and beside the dykes, we had never found the right combination of courage and opportunity.

The way it eventually happened in a friend’s borrowed apartment was very ordinary, and nothing like wild rape – there was no bleeding and no pain. There was just the nice, secure feeling of my boyfriend’s penis going all the way inside me, back and forth with more rhythm until he exploded and left me warm and wet.

Far more significantly, I must confess that from the moment I lost my virginity I became absolutely wild about sex, and even threw over my steady boyfriend in pursuit of it. I couldn’t care less who I did it with, even my relatives. In fact. the idea of sampling forbidden fruit made incest all the more exciting. The only taboo against it was don’t make babies, that’s all.

In my early teens when I first heard the facts of life from older friends, I used to wish I had a big brother so I could fuck him. In my late teens I did gratify my taste for forbidden fruit and actually made it with some members of my family. And not by accident.

My first attempt was my mother’s brother, my favorite uncle, who adored me as a child in a paternal way and was an adolescent in what was definitely a more carnal way.

One weekend when my family took me with them to visit his family in Düsseldorf, Germany, we made an assignation to sneak away to a motel room and make love. But the prospect of the clandestine affair apparently so excited him that his wife was able to guess what he was up to. She did not let him out of her sight until my family and I returned to Amsterdam, so the whole endeavor was abortive.

The second family affair was more successful, and it happened a few years later with the twenty-eight-year-old son of another uncle, who had come to stay with our family and see the sights of Holland. He was a big, strapping young German, and certainly no virgin.

It was my job to take him out and show him the town, and I was even allowed to stay out past my midnight curfew because he was a relative. The first night I showed him the regular tourist sights and sent him home early. The second night I showed him the fun spots like the “girls in the windows” in Amsterdam’s legalized red-light district on the canals, then took him back to his hotel and seduced him. He was not bad, nothing special, a typical strong German, but with an unromantic soul.

By this time 1 had graduated from high school with top marks, studied music for a year, and then gone to work for one of Amsterdam’s leading ad agencies as an assistant account executive.

From the moment I began work I approached my job with the large amount of enthusiasm and dedication with which I have done everything else in my life – and still do today. The work was nice, but it didn’t have what you call in America immediate “upward mobility,” so I decided to try for something else. Even in those early days I had the desire and the drive to be Numero Uno. I’d heard that the Manpower Employment Agency was conducting a contest for the best multilingual secretary in Holland, and being competitive and ambitious, I decided to enter it

The contest was to be judged on best typing. shorthand in four languages, translating skills, poise, and personality. There were several exams leading to the final, which required each entrant to write a two-hundred-word poem as a publicity pamphlet for the employment agency. I was the youngest of the sixty contestants – and, as it happened, the most successful. I won the title of “Number One Secretary in Holland.”

Television interviews, newspaper articles, and a trip to England, as well as $1,000 prize money, followed, and I was appointed a unit head at Manpower – a job that was, coincidentally, not unlike the one I do today. A client would request a service, and I would satisfy his wishes by supplying the right person to do the job. That was when I discovered my best skills were administrative, in an intermediary capacity. I also learned another valuable lesson from that job. That if you have real initiative it is best to work as an independent if you can, because others tend to sit back and reap the profits of your hard efforts.

For relaxation after a hard week, I would go with friends on weekends to a white-sand beach not far from Amsterdam named Zandvoort. This beautiful beach stretched along the entire Dutch coastline and had little terraced cabanas and gaily decorated restaurants where you could sit out front and have meals and refreshments. Each little restaurant had a name and a number, so when you wanted to make a date with someone, you would say, “See you later at Wilhelmina’s number twenty-four.”

One weekend I went to Zandvoort with a drummer friend named Kuuk, and we both had a brand-new personal experience – we discovered Seaview number twenty-two, and the colorful and gay crowd that hung out there.

The men were all beautifully dressed in minuscule bikinis which hardly covered their emphasized assets, designer T-shirts, Pucci or St. Laurent scarves. There were also lots of manicured poodles jumping around that belonged to the gay boys.

The girls, as I soon found out, were all gay as well.

The only really straight person there was my friend Kuuk. Extremely handsome and well built, he had all the gay boys swarming over him.

Left alone, I introduced myself all round until I came upon a girl whore face seemed strangely familiar, although as far as I was aware I didn’t have any dyke friends.

“Hi,” the pretty red-haired girl said to me; “how have you been these last few years?”

“Me? Are you sure you mean me?”

“Yes, you little ‘butch’,” she said, laughing.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked her.

“My name is Hellen Karf, and I was your teacher in high school, and I used to see you lusting after Helga at the same time I was dying to have an affair with you.”

Hellen Karf, who taught us art and designing, was not exactly what you could call a schoolmarm type. She was dressed in a chic way and had told us she was engaged to the country’s top actor. Still, I was informed enough to know her fiancé was definitely gay, but I never imagined that for her part she was a lesbian.

“I could tell you were a little ‘butch’ in those days,” she volunteered. I was surprised to hear that I may have been strong and well built, and I had shortish blond hair, too, but when I look back at pictures taken in those days, I would say I looked like the average attractive, but sporty, schoolgirl.

Hellen now took my arm. Pupil and former teacher went around and talked to all the gay girls. And from this time on I willingly got into the female homosexual scene.

My first affair was with a girl called Liesbeth, who looked very feminine when we started going together but became more and more mannish as our relationship progressed. She cropped her hair, wore jeans, shirts, and sneakers, and started drinking and smoking like a man.

At that time I didn’t smoke or drink because of a truly sincere agreement I had made with my parents while a teen-ager. They had said that if I didn’t drink or smoke until I was eighteen they would buy me a motor scooter, and at eighteen they promised me a car if I could abstain from both these things until I was twenty-one. I got both the scooter and the car and, astonishingly enough, to this day have never taken an alcoholic drink and have smoked only an occasional cigarette without inhaling – at the request of a kinky customer, which I’ll come to later.

Liesbeth, the little dyke, was madly in love with me and considered herself my male partner, but as I got more into the lesbian activity, I discovered I was definitely “butch” and so we had a “supremacy” fight and broke up.

I met many more girl friends through my female hairdresser, who was also Hellen’s lover, and my sex life soon became part heterosexual and part homosexual, and sometimes a happy mixture of both.

It was also around this time that I was taken under the wing of a sophisticated older couple who lived in a magnificent seventeenth-century house in the artists’ colony on Amsterdam’s Prinsen Island. Daedo, the husband, was a man of forty-two, and Silva, his wife, was eight years older. Nights and weekends I would often sleep over and spend a lot of the time gossiping with Silva, an attractive, vivacious woman, while Daedo, who owned an advertising agency, worked in his study.

One evening in her bedroom she asked me would I give her a back-rub. She was fresh out of the shower, and she lay face down on the bed. “Why don’t you take your clothes off, Xaviera?”

I was rather surprised at her approach, and to tell you the truth, the idea of making it with a fifty-year-old woman did not appeal to me. As I rubbed her she started making low moaning noises and was getting sexually stimulated. “Xaviera, take off your clothes and make love with me,” she pleaded. She turned over, and I saw her nice big firm boobs – I have always been intrigued with beautiful breasts, and even as a child I had fantasies about sucking my mother’s breasts- I recognized quite early that I was a natural bisexual and have completely enjoyed both homo- and heterosexual encounters. There is no guilt where I live. So I undressed and started making it with her on the bed.

I was worried in case her husband walked in, but she didn’t seem to be concerned. And as she lay on her left side with me facing her and eating her pussy, I heard Daedo walk in.

He didn’t say a word, and the next thing I knew, his big penis was against my back. And for a while I neglected Silva and freely started sucking Daedo’s penis. Then I went back to her, and he put his penis inside me from the back while I was giving it to her with my vibrating tongue.

Everybody was having a ball, and even the dog joined in and was licking our feet and legs and jumping around all excited. Then the three of us, happily minus the dog, worked ourselves into a frenzy and all climaxed simultaneously, screaming, moaning, and laughing.

Now and again, after that, we would swing together, because basically I had no steady romantic interest happening at this time. And, in my way, I was still in love with Helga, who had in the meantime married the well-to-do owner of a travel agency and was expecting a baby.

I had sex at least once or twice a week with my casual boyfriends, but to be quite honest, Dutchmen more often than not bored me stiff. I have never enjoyed or been part of the dull, serious Dutch mentality. I was more like my father, a bon vivant, and needed something more in my life than unromantic, stingy Dutchmen with their famous “dutch treats” on dates.

Friends of mine who had visited me recently, just arriving from South Africa, had told me about the beauty of this country, and the warm all year round climate. In case I would be interested in immigrating there, the South African government would pay the airfare completely. So… away from cold and misery and rainy summers. Down to the sun and my sister, who lived there as well. In fact, I was getting a bit bored with the Dutch mentality, even though Holland is a very charming country and Amsterdam lately has become one of the swingingest cities in Europe. Maybe it was not so much Holland itself, but my inner hunger for someplace new and exciting. The fact that I had my stepsister (a daughter from my father’s first marriage) living in Johannesburg with her husband and children made it more encouraging for me to go there.

When I decide to do something, I do it quickly and efficiently. I arranged visas, booked my ticket, and organized my private life to leave Holland.

There was only one last thing to do before boarding the plane. I had to say good-bye to my lovely Helga, who was now eight and one half months’ pregnant.

When I went to see her for the last time, she was standing there in a nightie, and nothing was more exciting to me than to see that big belly sticking out, and those beautiful breasts.

“Helga,” I said, “please let me touch your belly and suck your nipples, because they are so beautiful.”

She hesitated at first, now not because of modesty but because her husband, whom I could not stand, might walk in. He didn’t care much for me, and the feeling was mutual. Maybe it was jealousy, but I found him a real bore.

His name was De Boer, which means farmer, and it suited him perfectly. He had already gone into her mail and found the love letters I sent her from all over Europe. Looking back, I guess she thought I was simply foolish, because she never even replied. However, on this last visit she agreed to let me have my wish and touch her, and she lifted up her nightie.

I gently lowered my mouth around the nipples, and a trace of milk escaped, and the loving feeling was still there, except this time I didn’t feel I wanted to screw her. I felt an entirely pure kind of love.

I couldn’t believe that after five years I was finally sucking and caressing those divine breasts and Helga was letting me. In all the experience and sex I have had in the intervening time, this is still the most precious moment I can remember.

I think I was just about to tell her how I loved her when a red-faced and furious De Boer stormed in and ordered me out of his house.

“If I ever catch her here again, I’ll throw you both out,” he screamed at his wife.

A few days later my family and friends bade me a tearful farewell on my flight to South Africa, and everyone was crying, including me.

“Come back to us,” my mother said through her tears, but even then I knew I never would.

The only thing that tied me to Holland besides my parents, believe it or not, was Helga, and that was an impossible dream.