The Male Hustler

Flip

“A year or so ago I had this old lady who would get very uptight if I was going to hustle my ass. I couldn’t dig this because I’ve never been able to get into this whole jealousy routine. We had quite a few hassles over this, as a matter of fact. I would say, ‘Look, if you see some guy you want to ball, be my guest.’ She couldn’t relate to my attitude. Like she thought if I really dug her I should want to own her. I wasn’t telling her she had to ball anybody. I know a lot of cats who like make their old ladies go out and turn tricks. I never told her to do this, or that she should ball people for free, or anything. Just that she should do her thing and I would do mine.

“But what bugged her wasn’t so much if I didn’t come home and she knew I was with some other chick. Which is it bugged her, but she wouldn’t come on strong about it because she knew better. Knew it wouldn’t be cool, and she was this middle-class girl on the outs with her family and so it was very important to her to be cool, to be hip. Like living near Tompkins Square Park and getting into drugs and living with me and no talk about marriage, all of that was important to her so she would know she was a rebel and she was staying away from the suburb trip that her parents were on, and being cool if I was with another chick was a part of this for her.

“But she couldn’t be completely cool. Like she wanted to be a hundred percent cool but she didn’t know the rules. ‘How can you go with men for money? You’re not queer, how can you go with other men?’ Except that she didn’t say queer, she knew better than to use the word. Gay, she would say. I’ll say words like queer and wop and nigger some of the time, partly because I grew up talking that way, thinking that way, and when it comes natural, I don’t know, I can say nigger in front of black friends of mine and they know how to take it, that it’s just the way I talk, that it’s not a matter of George Wallace or somebody saying nigger...

“‘How can you go with gay fellows?’ She didn’t understand hustling, the changes you go through in your mind so you can be cool about it. That I was able to be completely cool about it and not uptight at all. ‘How can you do it if you hate it, Flip?’ Well, who said I hated it? ‘But if you’re not gay, how can you help hating it?’

“She just didn’t understand. You know, in her mind. Either you’re gay or you’re not. Like I tried to explain that I wouldn’t do it without any money involved, that I had been into that scene once and it wasn’t where I lived, but that I had no objection to it. I said, ‘Look, take a guy who steals. Now in the building we were in there must of been five, six dudes who stole for a living. Certain things weren’t said, but if you lived there you knew what was happening. And there was a friend of ours who did a lot of boosting, stealing from department stores. ‘Take Marty,’ I said. ‘He steals to get money. You can accept that, right?’

“‘I think he’s very foolish,’ she said. ‘One of these days he’ll get caught and he’ll wind up in jail.’

“This is easy for her to say, but Marty at the time is into scag. Heroin. He’s just snorting, but it’s twenty dollars a day, and he’s too freaked to have any kind of a job, so what else is he gonna do but steal? But forget that. What I said was, ‘You think he’s foolish but you can dig why he steals, right?’ She agreed. ‘He steals for the money. Now if Marty did the same boosting from stores for the hell of it, and then threw the shit away afterward instead of selling it, what would you think then? You would think he was crazy, right?’

“She got the point, that certain things make a different kind of sense if you’re doing them for the bread. Marty stole and I hustled, but we both did it for the bread. But getting the point didn’t help, didn’t make things go down right for her. She still had her own hang-ups about the entire scene and they kept on getting in the way. I suppose that was the ultimate reason that we split up, although there are never reasons, there are just ways people gradually work out of each other. But it is difficult to live with a person who is bothered by the way another person lives, by what he does. Because you start questioning yourself. No matter how together your head is, there are times when you start worrying about yourself, and then later on you tend to resent the other person for doing these bad things to your head. Like anytime I felt bad about hustling, or felt confused about hustling, later on I would blame my old lady for making me feel that way.

“You met my current old lady. We been together, I don’t know, couple of months. And the thing with Glory is that you would expect the same kind of shit from her if not more so. I mean a Jewish girl from Long Island, her father’s a very successful radiologist, that whole middle-class Jewish scene. You would think it would be the same thing over again with this heavy rebellion with a thick layer of Great Neck underneath. But night and day, man. Like Glory is absolutely super-cool. I’ll hustle, she’ll hustle, either of us is free to ball other people, the whole thing. We can even talk about it without either of us feeling hassled. The other chick, the best we ever got it to was that we would neither of us bring it up in conversation. Glory and me rap about all of this and nobody gets brought down. Night and day.

“I’m just beginning to get used to it. For the longest time I was always on guard. Like waiting for the other shoe to drop. I couldn’t get rid of the thought that a lot of her cool was a pose and it would eventually come out that she was putting on a lot of this hipness, because I had known girls like her before but not with her background and not without other hang-ups of their own. And then I came to see that there was no pose to it, that she had turned her head around completely. It wasn’t what she was rebelling against. Maybe that was it in the first place but she was past that now, she had worked it out. She was just being real.

“So right now she’s important to me like no other chick ever was, because there’s nothing about her that threatens me. And in it’s own way, that’s a kind of a threat, if you can dig it. Everything is cool right now, we’re just going with things the way they are, but I can already see how out of caring about Glory in a certain way and relating to her in a certain way I could find my own head changing. And I’ll get flashes of the two of us getting out of the city and away from all this garbage. Not only the hustling but the whole way people live here. Garbage and cockroaches and heavy drugs and everybody’s apartment constantly getting ripped off. More and more of our friends tend to talk in terms of getting out of the city and going up to Vermont or out to New Mexico. Getting a place way out in the country and trying to grow your own food and getting it all together that way. I mean like just Glory and myself all by ourselves. Having kids, you know. That whole trip, which is something I would occasionally think about but never seriously.

“The beautiful thing is that we have been able to rap about this and we both are thinking our way along the same lines, but there’s no pressure to do it now. We’re grooving on what we have at the present time, and when something is perfect you want to be careful not to make any sudden changes. Future tripping scares me. Time is just a whole series of nows and you take them one at a time and you stay straight. But one of these nows I think we’ll be ready. Unless things turn around, which they could do, but I don’t think they will, not unless something unreal happens.

“I think about the past sometimes. Glory and I will sit around and get stoned and one of us will talk about the past, just going on and on, and the other one listens. Sometimes I tell her about things that happened to me that I haven’t even thought about in years. And it seems unreal, the whole person I was and the things I was into. Reform school, for example. Not just what went down there but the reason I was there in the first place. I was like totally freaked over cars. I would see a car and I would have to drive it. The reformatory where I was at, I think four out of five of the kids there were for GTA which is grand theft auto, which means stealing a car for the kick of riding around in it. Joy-riding. I can remember the way I used to get. Like you would see a car with the keys in the ignition and something happened inside you, like you got high on it. I remember how it felt but I can’t dig how I could be in that bag. It’s so unreal.

“And I think, suppose Glory and me get out of the city, suppose we go off to the country or to a small town or something. And have a kid or two. And really get into it, and the whole thing is dynamite and it works for us, and like imagine us in say ten years from now. I mean it’s impossible, you can’t really imagine ten years in front. But just supposing. The two of us sitting around and talking about how we used to live on East Fifth Street and stay stoned constantly and peddle our asses on the street. This is what we’re doing now, dig it, but if you look into the future you can see how a time will come when our now is going to look unreal. It really freaks me out, thinking that way.”

At twenty, Flip’s appearance is very much consistent with the image of the New Masculinity. He is tall, about six two or three, with perfectly straight dark brown hair that hangs down a few inches below his shoulders. He wears a full beard which he keeps neatly trimmed. His eyes are a light blue, his gaze penetrating. At certain times his face has a biblical cast to it; he would not seem at all out of place playing an early follower of Christ in a movie, and when he spoke of moving with his girl to the country, one could easily picture him in the role of one of today’s hip homesteaders.

His habitual attire consists of bell-bottom dungarees and an army field jacket. There is little spare flesh on his large frame, but he insists he is fat compared to a year ago.

“I was doing a lot of speed for a while there. I shot crystal a few times but mostly it was a pill thing, dex or meth or bennies — whatever was around. That really takes the weight off you. You don’t sleep and you tend to forget about eating. It doesn’t kill your appetite as much as it puts it out of your mind. I like speed in a lot of ways but it is a very bad drug to stay with for a long period of time. I still do speed once in a while but more as an occasional thing so that it doesn’t move in and take over. And I’ve gained some weight back and am in much better physical shape.”

For several years, drugs have been very much a part of Flip’s life-style. He is less apt to talk of the drug experience as a vehicle for self-realization than are many other members of the youthful drug scene.

“Drugs are to get high. I’ve been getting high for like ten years with one thing or another. Airplane glue. This was the first big thing I remember. Squirting a tube of glue into a bag and sniffing it. We used to do this all the time when I was like ten and eleven and twelve years old. What’s weird is that this is thought of as kid stuff, which it is in that it’s really young kids who are into it, but it’s one of the most dangerous drugs around. It can really fuck up your liver. Nobody knew this at the time. It was just a way to get high. Fifteen cents for a tube of glue and you were beautifully spaced.

“I would try everything at one time or another. Liquor, wine, beer. I don’t dig hard booze much but I still like to get off on beer or wine now and then. Codeine cough syrup. Different kinds of ups and downs, reds and greenies and tranquilizers. Mescaline. Acid. STP. I don’t know how long it’s been since I tripped. I guess it must be close to a year. What happens, all the trips are good at first, and then you’ll have a bummer and no matter how well prepared you are, it’s a freak scene. Really bad. And then there was a point like where every other trip was a bummer, and it wasn’t worth it.

“Cocaine is very nice but you can’t always get it, and too much of the coke nowadays is cut with methedrine which is a dangerous combination. In fact too much of everything is cut with meth. I’ve seen too many people get too hostile and paranoid on that.

“Heroin scared me. I snorted, and the sensation was too much. It was too good. I know people who are into scag in a careful way. Like they use it once a month because nobody gets hooked on anything using it once a month. That’s nice if you can keep your head in that compartment, but not everybody can. And I have just known too many junkies. It is an absolute death trip. You have to get off just to stay even. I’m too much into life to want that kind of scene. I don’t want to turn myself off, turn the world off.

“I told Glory, don’t. The only thing I ever told her don’t. I told her she ought to trip once and I would be with her even though I didn’t want to trip myself any more. I thought that would be worth it for her as an experience, and it was. But heroin, I told her not even once. I told her I made it once, and it was unbelievable, and nobody should fuck with anything that dangerous when there’s that much chance you could love it too much. And she agreed, but she said it was a minor bitch having something like that that you can’t know what it’s like. Which I could relate to. So what we did, we smoked some grass, which makes it easy to get back into a past experience, what it feels like, not just how you remember it. And I went completely into the one heroin experience I had and I described it for her. I couldn’t have done this completely straight but I was back into it myself. And she said afterward that hearing about it the way I described it was enough, that it handled her curiosity and now she could live without it.

“Another reason I didn’t want her to fuck with it was there’s this very close line between what it takes to get you off and what it takes to kill you. So many people have OD’d on the shit. And there was this thing in the paper, a girl who died of an overdose from snorting. This was something you never used to hear of, but there’s all this weird smack coming in from South America that nobody knows how much it’s cut or what with, and you can die from it. As a matter of fact I knew someone pretty well who they found dead with a needle in his arm, and I was really shook.

“Drugs in general I use a lot less than I did a year, two years ago. But I can’t see ever getting to the point where I won’t want to get high a certain amount of the time. I couldn’t see myself not smoking every day, for example. It’s something I do.”

Flip’s introduction to homosexuality took place while he was in a reformatory for stealing a car.

“Before that there were a few of us who used to fool around. It was nothing much. The same kids who would get off together sniffing glue. We would be at somebody’s house and we would jerk off together in front of each other. Or we would have these contests as to who could come first or who could shoot the farthest. It’s funny to think back that the object was to come first, where when you get into sex it’s more the object to be able to go a long time without coming, so that your chick can get off.

“Another thing we did that was a definite gay thing, although we didn’t see it that way, was to jerk each other off, and the object was seeing who could make the other come first. More than that I never did at the time. There was a kid who I knew vaguely who supposedly blew another kid but I never knew for sure if it was true. It was just something that was talked about. And two other kids that I know for a fact one of them tried to get into the other one’s ass, but they couldn’t manage to do it, and they would joke about how they had tried and it never went beyond that.

“Reform school was something completely different. If you were a new kid and a young kid you had absolutely no choice in the matter. It was open your mouth or spread your cheeks, whichever somebody had in mind, and if you didn’t cooperate in a hurry you could get the shit beaten out of you. Some of the guards were into this, too, they would fool around with some of the kids, but for the most part it was the kids themselves. Some of the kids were definitely queer. With others, I guess it was the same as what I’ve heard about a lot of adult prisons, that a con will get completely into the scene while he’s in slam but be completely straight on the outside. The general feeling was if there’s no meat then you eat potatoes and it’s better than starving. There were no girls for sex so you used boys for sex.

“I guess I was fourteen at the time. My fucking mother, with the age I was I could have gotten probation with no trouble. I got probation once before on the same charge and could of got it again, the judge as much as said so, but my mother did this number about how she couldn’t do a thing with me and maybe it would do me good to get sent away. In all the world there is only one person that I hate. There are people I have no use for but only one that I hate, and it’s my mother. I usually won’t talk about her, but Glory sees it that I should get into this more, or else one day I’ll find out that she’s dead and it might shake me on account of not working it out in my head first. Maybe she’s right, but I can’t even handle thinking about that stupid drunken cunt with the drunk bastards she would bring home to live off her, and then letting them send me down, fourteen years old and she lets them put me away...

“As far as being uptight about the queer stuff at the reformatory, I had no trouble getting used to it. All I could see was that I was stuck in that place and these were kids with the same hassles that I had, and the way to make it there was to be cool and fit in. And don’t make waves and don’t piss anybody off.

“The first time I got cornholed I cried like a baby. The second time it hurt like hell but I made up my mind I wasn’t going to cry and I didn’t. The third or fourth time I didn’t particularly enjoy it but I didn’t mind it either, and to my surprise I came. There’s a gland there and pressure on it will make you come even if you’re not excited. Not always but some of the time. It’s a physical thing.

“And by the end of the first week I was getting it both ways, doing one thing or another to kids and having the same things done to me. With a very few exceptions everybody was into this. There were older kids who didn’t want either end of it, and they were tough enough to make it stand up. But the thing is that with all of the sex that was going down, there were only a few kids who were into it for its own sake, who were getting more than sex kicks out of it. These two would be in love with each other, or one young kid would have a big crush on the jock who was punking him, but those were few and far between. The rest of us, we would talk about girls before doing things to each other, and sometimes think about girls while we were doing them.

“So I never worried about being queer or anything.

“The main thing about reformatory is that you learn things there. I consider myself very lucky being that I learned the one thing you’re supposed to learn and which not many kids did, and that was to stay out of jail. I really learned this. Don’t do things that they’ll put you away for. Don’t get caught.

“Now this doesn’t mean it became my religion, because obviously I’ve broken a lot of laws since then. There’s hardly ever a day that I don’t smoke grass, for example, and according to the law they can put you away for that. For that matter, hustling is also illegal. And I’ve boosted things occasionally. Let’s face it, I’ve done a lot of things.

“But I’m cool about it. When I walked out of that reformatory I was not about to hotwire a car and take it for a spin. No way. And I don’t smoke on the steps of the police station, and I never deal any kind of drugs to anybody I haven’t known a long long time. When I see trouble I walk across the street. That’s what they taught me inside.

“The other things I learned are the real education of reform school. It’s really out of sight. They take a kid who has this crazy kid thing for cars that he can’t control and they put him in a place where he learns how to be a criminal. Just from rapping I had a real education. How to rip off stores. How to get into an apartment. How to hustle queers. How to find a fence when you wanted to sell something you stole. How to get stoned on a hundred different things you never heard of before you went to the slam.

“There’s a crazy way that the whole reformatory system makes a kind of weird sense. Like there are these guys who run everything, and they look down and say, ‘Here’s a kid who’s going bad. Here’s a kid who is committing these little crimes, which means he’s going to grow up to be a criminal. Now this kid doesn’t know his ass from his elbow and if we just let him go on trying to be a criminal the poor bastard is going to starve to death. So we’ll send him to reform school, so that he can really learn how to be a criminal. I mean, if the punk’s going to be a crook, the least we can do is teach him how to be a good one.’

“I was inside for two years. Two miserable years, but when I came out it was like I had gone to college. Not that I was all set to be Dillinger and Al Capone rolled into one, because that was never my ambition, I was too set on never being inside again. But that I had all this store of criminal knowledge.”

At sixteen, Flip was released from the reformatory (or escaped — it’s hard to be certain). He came directly to New York and drifted automatically to Times Square.

“I had a crew cut then. And no beard. I only had to shave like once a week at the time so I couldn’t have grown a beard if I wanted to. And at the time I thought hippies were weird. I would see some on the street and I thought they were, I don’t know, crazy.”

He had already decided to make money by hustling homosexuals. His original plan, developed from information gleaned at the reformatory, was to let himself be picked up by homosexuals and demand money at knife point.

“This was supposed to be very easy because the word was that queers were sissies who would just about faint if you waved a fist at them, let alone a blade. And that they couldn’t go to the cops because they were queers. And especially if you were underage.

“I scored within maybe two hours of hitting Times Square. I had a knife on me at the time but I never even took it out of my pocket. The guy who picked me up, Jesus Christ, I can still remember what he looked like. Built like a house. Really a huge dude, he must have weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. As a matter of fact when he came on to me my first thought was that he was a really tough cop and I was in for a bust two hours after I was off the bus. And when he got to talking and offered to take me to his place for dinner I wasn’t really sure if he was queer or not. I figured he had to be, but I also figured there was a chance that he was just a nice guy who was feeling sorry for me because I was on the street without any bread.

“Of course when we got to his place and he gave me a friendly little pat on the ass I gave up that thought.

“We had some drinks and then went to bed. I was a little uptight about him corning me because of the size of him, but it turned out that his dick was the one thing small about him. Really small, as a matter of fact. He commented on this and said for this reason he couldn’t get any satisfaction with a woman. I don’t know if this was true or if it was an excuse he used because he happened to like it with boys. Maybe he was embarrassed with women, or he thought he couldn’t satisfy a woman with anything that small. I don’t know what he was really all about.

“Anyway, he got his kicks, and I was standing around trying to figure out what in hell I was going to do now. I mean, I didn’t feature going up against the cat with a gun, let alone a knife. I figured he would take the knife away from me and feed it to me through my ass. It wasn’t just the size of him but that he seemed like the kind of person who could take care of himself. The type who wouldn’t faint at the sight of a knife.

“So I thought, shit, some dynamite hustler I am. Like I made it with him and I got nothing. And while I’m still thinking this he says it looks as though we never did get around to having dinner, and he doesn’t feel up to going out, he just wants to go to sleep, so here’s a couple of bucks and I should get myself something to eat. And hands me a ten-dollar bill.

“I never wound up pulling the knife on anybody. I carried it for maybe a month after that until one day I lost it somewhere and never bothered getting another one. Because why have all that hassle if you could make money without it? Why take the chance of getting beat up yourself, or maybe hurting somebody badly or even killing them and having all that heat?

“What it is, at least according to what I’ve picked up here and there, is that cats will get into this set that it’s a manly thing to beat up a queer or force him to give you money. Or that you can get out of having sex with them that way. But I didn’t really mind the sex and I didn’t have to prove anything with a knife. And I’m not really into stealing, to taking something off another person. From a big store is different, because it’s not from a person, it’s from some fucking company that is ripping off the public in the first place, so all you’re doing is getting a little of your own back. I’m hip that either way it’s a case of stealing but how it goes down inside your head is a different thing.”

For Flip, hustling was a fairly steady occupation and one which could support him adequately without taking very much of his time. He gravitated in short order to the East Village and began to conform to the general pattern of life there. He let his hair grow, drifted into the drug culture, and gradually became a part of the society in which he was now living.

Almost immediately he began having casual sexual relations with girls.

“At the start I was completely out of it as far as girls were concerned. Remember, there were two big years there when I never saw anything female. And before then it wasn’t just a matter of never having sex with a girl but that I never really talked to a girl. In the sense of rapping at any length.

“I was a little uptight about this. I suppose it would have been very easy at this point to become gay. To just avoid the whole hassle of trying to make out with girls and just turn completely gay. I had this one dude who wanted me to live with him. He had this nice apartment and the bit was that I could live there and he would give me money for clothes and like that. I stayed there a couple of days but I couldn’t quite see it as a steady thing. I didn’t like the feeling that, you know, that he owned me.

“Fortunately for me, the girls around here are more open and easy about sex than other girls. I didn’t have to come on. I could just more or less hang around and be cool, and one afternoon I was rapping this one particular girl, and I was hardly even thinking of her as a girl because to me she was just somebody I knew that I had rapped with now and then. We were smoking and she said it was the kind of high where she really could dig to ball somebody, and would I like to ball her. And I said sure, why not, and we did it. I guess she was about twenty-five. I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t think she had any idea that she was the first girl I ever made it with. I hadn’t said anything to anybody and didn’t say anything to her.

“It was night and day. I had this fear in the back of my mind that I wouldn’t be any good with a girl or that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as with guys. Even that I wouldn’t enjoy it at all. Oh, wow, like worrying about nothing at all, man! I really dug it to a much greater length than I thought I ever could. Really got completely into it. It made everything else I ever did like black and white, and this was in color. All the difference in the world.

“Ever since that first time I never worried about being queer. And that made me much easier in my mind about hustling, not that I had been uptight previously, but that this took away the only thing that had been bothering me at all.

“Then there was a period of time when I balled what must have been a tremendous number of girls. I would hustle when I needed money but there was usually no sex in it from my point of view. What I mean is that I would prefer not to get excited and particularly not to come, because I wanted to save it for a girl.

“From what I’ve heard, this led to something pretty weird. Put it this way. When I was having sex with a man for money, it didn’t used to matter to me what he wanted to do. Whether he wanted to blow me or the other way around. In the sense of not objecting to either thing that he might want to do, because all of this came naturally to me after two years in slam, so in that sense it didn’t matter. But in another sense, in the sense of what I got out of it, then it would be that I would prefer to be the one who got blown, or the one who did the cornholing, because I got no sexual thrill out of the other side of it while by having a guy blow me or whatever we did, by that I would come, I would have an orgasm, which was pleasurable.

“But once I discovered girls, to put it that way, I preferred to be the one who did the blowing, to put it that way, for the simple reason that I could do it because it wouldn’t get me excited. It was just something you turned your mind off and went and did. Now the usual thing is that a hustler prefers the role that he enjoys, if you can dig it, and I prefer a role that does nothing for me. When I lay it out to people around here like that they can dig what I’m rapping about, but everybody says it’s weird in that for most hustlers it’s the other way around.

“Now my old lady has done a certain amount of hustling. Glory, this is. I didn’t turn her onto it, by the way. Some other dude did. In fact how it started is he more or less told her to go out and come back with ten dollars or he would punch her out. A very hostile cat. She did it and she found out she didn’t mind it, and she’ll do it now and then when we start to run low on bread.

“What she does is she works cars. Say she’ll work the corner of Second Avenue and Eleventh Street, and square cats will pull up to the curb and she’ll get in the car and park around the corner, and she’ll go down on them right there in the car. And she says that’s cool as far as she’s concerned, but she doesn’t like them touching her! Feeling her breasts or her cunt, that she doesn’t care for. Because that sort of thing turns her on and she can’t get turned on when it’s just a matter of turning a trick, so she would rather not be touched like that when it’s doing nothing for her.

“This is off the subject, but it might fit into the book you’re writing. I know a couple of queens, drag queens, that work those same corners. And what they do is give head, which is all anybody ever asks for in the cars, because if you were to get into any actual fucking in a parked car you could have troubles with the cops. And if anybody wants to take them to a room or anything they refuse, so it’s just a case of giving head, and it’s over and done with in a matter of minutes, so the Johns go home thinking they got blown by a girl, when actually they had it from another guy. I bet it would really be like a major mind fuck for a lot of these dudes to realize it. I bet it would really do some heavy things to their heads. And when you think how many times this must happen, and without any of them ever finding out what happened. All these uptight types who think they never had a homosexual experience in their lives, and here they’re treasuring memories of this absolutely out of sight blow job, and they never know they got it off another guy. Really weird, totally unreal.”

I asked Flip how his friends felt generally about his activities as a hustler.

“How people feel in general is that they don’t hassle other people. ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine.’ That’s a very big thing here. That you don’t criticize somebody else’s thing. You may not dig it but that’s something that is only important in terms of your own head, so you don’t go and lay your trip on somebody else just because his thing is something you can’t relate to.”

“That’s as far as their attitudes are concerned.”

“Right.”

“But how do you think they feel about it?”

“In their own heads? Right. I think for the most part it’s the same as how they feel about a girl who is tricking. That it’s cool. That the money is easy and you aren’t giving anything, and sex in general is a good trip, and if you can get with it and not get negative vibes out of it and make easy bread at it, why not?”

“And you would say that’s the general feeling?”

“I would say it’s a general feeling. I don’t think there’s any one general feeling about most things. It’s like one person will be on a strict macrobiotic diet, nothing but brown rice, and another person will be on a high protein thing, and each one will be completely into his own approach but each one at the same time will respect what the other one is doing as something worthwhile.

“Now in terms of sex, there are a lot of different personal feelings. There are girls I know who are completely into women’s lib to the extent that they think it is morally wrong for a woman to ball a man because of politics, sexual politics. Now how do I relate to that? I think they’re out of their fucking heads, to tell you the truth, but at the same time I can dig that they’re going through some certain kinds of necessary changes. Like what they’re into is insane, but it’s very sane for them to be into this particular insanity at this particular time in terms of what it will do for their heads to be there. I don’t know if you can dig that, if I’m finding the right words to put it into, but maybe you can see what I mean.”

“Yes, I think so.”

“There are a lot of people who feel for themselves that sex has to be part of a love trip. That you can’t just fuck a cunt but that you have to fuck the whole person, and if you don’t have the proper feeling for the person it’s immoral to ball them. I’m not into that but I can dig it, and people who are into it will not necessarily condemn people who aren’t. Almost everybody has the feeling that other people’s scenes may be right for them as long as nobody gets wrecked by it. You would condemn a person who was violent, for example. You will now and then hear some asshole rapping that if violence is somebody’s thing they’re entitled to it, that if some dude is into rape then it’s good for his head to go around raping chicks, but this is bullshit and the person saying it generally knows it’s bullshit. Anything that doesn’t hurt anybody, that doesn’t fuck anybody up, is cool. But after that there’s a line drawn.”

Does it bother him that Glory occasionally turns tricks?

“That she’s balling somebody? No. I honestly don’t care who she balls. If she wants to ball for money, fine. As long as it doesn’t bother her why should it bother me? I’m not into jealousy. And if she wants to ball somebody because he turns her on, also fine. The typical married person, I can’t understand him. He worries that his wife wants to ball someone and that she might actually do something about it. What in hell does he want? He’s supposed to love this woman. Does he want her to take this desire and put a lid on it? To not do something that she wants to do? And is this shit supposed to be love?

“No way.

“Like a few nights ago this cat from next door was over, and the three of us were sitting around smoking and drinking wine, and you could pick up heavy vibrations between this cat and Glory. Neither of us knew him very well but we dug him as a person. I wanted to give them a chance to work it out but I didn’t know him well enough to say it right out front, so I said I had to see a guy over on St. Mark’s Place and I would be back in a couple of hours. And they made it while I was gone, which I would of been disappointed if they didn’t since I didn’t have to meet anybody and what I did was spend an hour and a half walking around doing nothing. But they made it, and he had split by the time I got back, and Glory and I rapped about it and she said how she dug it, and maybe she would ball him again sometime but she was in no big rush, and then as it happened we smoked some more and went to bed, and she said all he really did was make her want me more than ever.

“Sometimes Glory likes to make it with girls. I dig watching that. It’s something I happen to dig. A couple of girls eating each other, playing with each other. It’s pretty to watch. Sometimes it’s exciting but sometimes all it is is pretty and tender and I don’t want to do anything but watch and groove on it.

“When Glory goes out and works cars over on Second Avenue, the only thing that bothers me is worrying about her safety. That she could get busted, which has never happened yet but it’s possible. But mostly that somebody could be violent toward her. That worries me, because she’s small and couldn’t protect herself. But if you think about it, considering the neighborhood, she’s probably safer in some square’s car than walking down the street.

“That’s the one thing that bothers me and the one thing that will make us split from this scene sooner or later. There are so many beautiful people around here but there are also so many people who are out of their fucking heads. We’ve been lucky so far. The place gets ripped off by junkies looking for something to steal. That happens regularly but never when anybody’s home, and since there’s nothing that we own that anybody could possibly sell, all it really is is a nuisance. Oh, maybe somebody steals a few dollars’ worth of grass but what else do we have? That’s the thing, you can’t live in this neighborhood and figure on owning anything, because sooner or later it gets stolen.

“And once some speed freak tried to start up with me, but I punched him out. I got into the habit of carrying this flashlight battery in my pocket. When I lose one I spend thirty-nine cents and get another one. Put it in your fist and when you hit somebody it’s the same as if you were wearing brass knuckles, and it’s perfectly legal, no cop ever arrested anybody for having a flashlight battery in his pocket. I’ve been carrying one around for a couple of years and only once did I ever take a punch at anybody, and that includes all the queers I’ve been with. As violent as this neighborhood can get, that’s as close as the violence ever came to either of us.”

About four months later, I ran into Flip on Third Avenue in the Sixties. He looked just as he had when I had seen him last. We talked briefly on the street, and I suggested we stop somewhere for a cup of coffee.

“Come up to my place, man.”

I said I had an appointment in the area and didn’t want to go all the way down to the East Village.

“No East Village. You didn’t know I moved? I got a place a couple blocks from here. Come on.”

We walked a few blocks, then turned into a new apartment building with canopy, doorman, and plush lobby. He grinned at the expression on my face. “It’s no hype, Jack. This is where I’m at.”

“And Glory?”

“We’re still an entry. She’s upstairs, she’ll be surprised to see you.”

“Did you come into money or something?”

“Just a new hustle.”

The apartment was small but comfortable. It was nicely furnished. Glory was sitting on a convertible sofa listening to soft rock on an elaborate stereo rig. The apartment rental, I learned, was just over three hundred dollars a month.

“We got so we had had it with the neighborhood,” Flip explained. “Quite a change, isn’t it? What happened was we found we were spending more and more of our time just being alone with each other. That we were more and more often getting bugged when other people dropped by. And that we weren’t spending any time hanging around the street. To hustle, but not to hang around and rap with people. So we thought, shit, if we’re going to spend a lot of time in a place, why not make it comfortable? And you couldn’t make the other place comfortable. You couldn’t even have a comfortable place in that neighborhood.”

“But the East Sixties?”

“We figured, do something, why not do it all the way? We were talking about getting out of the city but we realized we’re not ready for that yet. Maybe someday but not yet. So we found this place, and the rent’s a bitch, no question, all this money for what amounts to one room, where we had three rooms before for $62.50 a month.”

“But bread isn’t a problem,” Glory said.

“Yeah, we found a new hustle.”

“Show him the ad, baby.”

Flip handed me a copy of Screw with one of the personal ads circled in magic marker.

I read:

“That’s all there is to it,” he explained. “Easiest thing in the world. The first ad said that we were available separately or together. We got so many calls after that that I took that line out because we had enough business without it. So we only hustle as a couple.”

“Which we really dig,” Glory said.

“Which we really dig. Also it got rid of my one worry, which was that somebody could turn violent to Glory and I wouldn’t be able to help her, but this way we’re always together. And it’s not walking streets and working cars for ten dollars at a time. The price is a bill and that’s for all night if they want because we won’t take more than one gig a night. I don’t think there’s been a week we haven’t made five bills. And with no taxes to pay. So you see what I mean when I say bread is no problem.”

I asked what kind of clients they were getting.

“About sixty percent single men. I mean single in that they come alone. Sometimes they want to get involved with both of us. Sometimes they want to watch me with Glory and then ball her.”

“They all have different things,” Glory said.

“Maybe twenty, twenty-five percent couples. Married couples, I suppose. Some of them not too much older than we are but most of them a lot older. In their forties and fifties. One time it was an older couple who had been swinging, oh, for years. With other couples who were more or less their own age. And they had been trying to swing with a really young couple but couldn’t find one willing, and a hundred dollars to them was like a dollar to us. Other times it’s couples who want to get into swinging but are nervous about it, and if they’re paying they can back out at anytime.”

“We also get some single women,” Glory said.

“Right, and that surprised me. I didn’t think it would happen. Not that often. I wouldn’t know if they’re married or single.”

“One of them said she was married.”

“Yeah, but you never know. The thing is, Jack, we’re into a very good thing. And it’s not just that it really pays but that we are really getting into it. With the two of us together, it really doesn’t feel like hustling. It’s a thing we do together and really get involved in and then have it to share afterward. I suppose eventually there will be a lot of other couples getting into the same hustle, but for the time being we have so much action we can’t even start to handle it all. The phone’s turned off right now, for example. Otherwise it would be like ringing constantly. Of course everybody who calls is ready to come up with a hundred bucks, but enough of them are so that we have the phone turned off most of the time.”

“And we’re saving money,” Glory said.

“Saving a lot of money. Isn’t that unreal? But we want to have some money set aside in case we need it. In case we decide to take time off and have a kid, or something.

Glory beamed.