The three of them were having a fine old time goofing on Jim. Jim remained quiet and his eyes seemed sad. For a while, I almost liked him, but then he joined the party, as did the fifth man. Chuck went over to the window beside the front door and remained there, looking out, standing guard.
“Let’s make a sandwich,” one of the men said.
My first thought was that we were going to stop and get something to eat. By this time I had lost all appetite. But that’s not what they had in mind. The man who had been calling for the sandwich lay on his back and the others put me on top of him. Then I felt another man climbing on my backside. I understood then that they were talking about a human sandwich. I had never experienced anal sex before and it really ripped me up. I began to whimper.
“Oh, lookie here,” one of the men said. “We must have a new baby here.”
The only one who seemed to realize that I wasn’t doing this by choice, that this was just something happening to me, was the man who had been talking to Chuck. But it didn’t matter to him. He was the top half of the sandwich.
The three animals who had come on first cared about nothing but getting their jollies. I can no longer remember their faces. They never talked to me directly. They talked to each other over and around me, as though I was a piece of meat.
Most of the time my eyes were tightly closed. They didn’t mind. They were so into getting their rocks off that they wouldn’t have cared if I was an inflatable plastic doll, a puppet. They picked me up and moved me here and there; they spread my legs this way and that; they shoved their things at me and into me.
Three of the animals were constant and persistent, always coming at me, not even resting between times. The other two would back off from time to time. Two of the men got their biggest thrill by working themselves up to the point of coming and then shooting their sperm all over my body and rubbing it in.
I had never been so frightened in my life. Every time I looked over at Chuck, his look scared me all over again. I was scared by what was happening to me at that moment and what might happen to me next. Even though it was all too clearly happening to me, I couldn’t understand why it was happening. I couldn’t believe that five human beings would do this to another human being.
“Hey, let’s try to get in two at once,” one said.
“Nah, that’s impossible,” another said.
“Crowded, but not impossible.”
And that’s what they tried next. I had no idea what they were talking about. But two of the men tried to pry their way ino me at the same time. I can’t tell you whether they succeeded.
That’s when I went numb. A lot was still happening to my body but it stopped meaning anything to me. My breasts were being mauled and I stopped feeling that. It was as if my body belonged to someone else. A voice from a great distance was saying, “Stick this in your mouth, darling,” but that no longer concerned me—it seemed as though it was someone else’s mouth opening, someone else sucking, someone else swallowing.
Finally they began to tire and to take occasional breaks. Maybe they were getting bored. After all, I had only so many hands and only so many openings and before too long, all possibilities were exhausted. Then Chuck came over to the bed and looked down at me.
“You’re a fucking mess,” he said. “Go take a shower.”
I picked myself up from the bed and went to the bathroom. I had never wanted a shower so much, and I had never scrubbed myself so hard. I scrubbed at my skin where they had come all over me. Then I scrubbed at the rest of me. I wished I could melt into the shower drain and disappear. At that moment I wouldn’t have minded dying.
I was filled with hurt. And I kept turning to God. As far as I was concerned, it was His fault. He had put me here.
All the time I was in the shower, I was talking to God. “Why, God, why? Please tell me why.” I had asked God to help me and He hadn’t helped at all. Well, maybe I shouldn’t say that. He did help me get through it. He did help me survive. So I guess He was helping me out after all. But it took me a long time to come to that belief.
When I went into the room to dress, the men were gone and Chuck was counting out the money on the bed. Each of the men had been charged $40.00, but Chuck had only $180. The one who had been complaining about my attitude had demanded a refund and Chuck had given him back half his money.
I was still speechless and in shock. I had no idea that human beings did such things. I knew that a prostitute offered sex for money, but somehow I figured they would make
love
—that there would be kissing and caressing and some gentleness.
I didn’t say a word to Chuck. I followed him out of the room and to the car. The minute we were in the car, with the doors closed, he turned to me and started yelling.
“Sit up! Sit up straight when I’m talking to you!”
I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t you know how to do anything right?” he went on. “You were lying there like some vegetable, like some fucking turnip. You’re no good and you never will be. You don’t know what to do and you don’t know how to do it. What the fuck is it with you anyway? You better start getting your shit together, Linda.”
I didn’t say a word, couldn’t say a word, had forgotten all words. I could still feel those hands all over me, pressing me, squeezing me, milking me.
“Sit straight when I’m talking to you! Any common hooker off the street somewhere would’ve done better. You know the difference between you and a pro? A pro would’ve taken control. She would’ve been coming up with the weird ideas, the positions. The way you were, they hadda do all the fucking work.”
No words. I went over exactly what had happened. The man I was living with had pulled a gun on me, had forced me to undress, had thrown me into a room with five strange males, had watched them rape me over and over, and now he was angry because I hadn’t been exciting enough for them.
Good God!
“Those guys’ll never come back to me again,” Chuck was saying. “Not after today. We can write them off. You know what I was trying to do today? I was trying to get a business started.
Our
business. That’s all. Just trying to get a business started. You know how you fucking get a business started? You show five guys a good time, that’s what you do. Then each of them goes out and tells two more people. Then you got ten, fifteen, guys. And they talk it up and then you got a little business going there. You know what these guys are going to tell their friends after today? Nothing, that’s what. You’re ruining my fucking business.”
Still I said nothing.
“You’re supposed to be freaky!” he said. “You’re supposed to enjoy it. You’re not supposed to be laying there like some kind of dead log. Shape up, cunt, I’m warning you. Next time better be different. Next time better be better.”
Next
time? Oh, God, what next time?
five
I didn’t have to wait long for the next time. The following day, Chuck introduced me to a visitor, an old friend who managed a truck-rental business, and my name became Tracy at this point.
“This is Harry,” Chuck said. “I told Harry that you’d make him happy, that you’d do anything he wants to do. So I’m going to split for a while and leave you two kids alone.”
Chuck walked out of the living room and an instant later I heard the front door slam. I was alone with my first paying customer, my first trick. Harry thumbed through his wallet and fished out two twenty-dollar bills.
“Chuck said it was forty,” Harry said. “Is forty all right with you.”
“I guess so.”
“Your name is Tracy, right?” I nodded. “Yeah, well, I was sure glad to hear that Chuck was back in the business. Just like old times.”
If I was seeing Harry under any other circumstances, he would’ve seemed nice enough. He was soft-spoken and that has always been an important quality with me. But at this moment he was not even on my mind that much; I was hardly thinking about him. I could think of only one thing— Chuck had finally left me alone. Well, not
entirely
alone. There was one matter to take care of first.
I took off my jeans and blouse and laid them over a chair. Was I supposed to take off the rest or was he? I had no idea. I went over to the bed and sat down on the edge of it and waited for him to come over and do whatever he was going to do to me.
“Tracy, would you mind a little friendly advice,” Harry said to me. “Chuck tells me you’re just starting out so you probably don’t know what you’re supposed to do yet. But the thing is, you should at least be friendly. In fact, you should fake like you really want it.”
“Please don’t talk,” I said. “Just do what you want to.”
“Suit yourself.”
The way he said that, I knew that my attitude wasn’t right and that would undoubtedly get back to Chuck. I was scared and I was dry but Harry went right into me. It hurt at first and it didn’t get better. The expression on his face told me that he wasn’t enjoying it much more than I was. But he went on anyway, pumping away. I lay there lifeless, letting him do all the work. Before too much longer, I would learn to fake it, even to be aggressive, just like the other hookers, but right then I just wanted him to finish and get off me. The moment he was done, I rolled out from under him and went to get my clothes.
“What’s this, a race?”
He seemed to find everything I did very funny. But finally he stopped laughing, got up, got himself dressed and got himself out the front door. I counted to ten, then followed him. As I opened the door, I heard a small noise behind me. A hand on my shoulder. Chuck hadn’t left. He had been standing there in the hallway the whole time.
“Going out?” he said. “Going out for a little walk?”
“
Chuck!
” That was a small scream. “I was just going out to look for you.”
“Well, cunt, you found me.”
He grabbed my arm and yanked me back into the living room. Then he started punching my body over and over again until I collapsed on the floor. It was hurting so much that I couldn’t cry. That’s when he went into the kitchen to get a butcher knife.
“You know something, cunt? I’ve decided not to waste a bullet on you. I’ve decided to cut up your fucking face instead. If you get out of line just one more time—one more time—I’m going to fuck up your face so bad that no one’ll ever look at you again.”
“Don’t do that, Chuck.”
“Oh, tell me why the fuck not,” he said, mocking me. “You’re useless. You’re no fucking good.
No fucking good!
You can’t even fuck good. You’re so ugly that all my customers will want their money back. You got scars all over your belly, your tits are pancakes, you’re no fucking good at all. I’d be doing the world a favor, just putting you out of your fucking misery.”
“Please, please, Chuck.”
From this point on, not a day went by that I didn’t hear more of that. Every day I either got raped, beaten, kicked, punched, smacked, choked, degraded, or yelled at. Sometimes, I got all of the above. Strangely enough, what bothered me most was the endless verbal abuse. He never let up: I was so dumb; I was so ugly; I was so fat; I was
so
thin; I was so flat-chested, and I was
so
lucky to have him taking care of me. The constant yelling took everything out of me.
To buy a share of my nightmare the tricks paid from $25.00 to $150.00—depending. Depending on what the customer requested, depending on whether he was a regular or not, depending on Chuck’s mood. I had as much to do with the money as a teller at a bank; I got it from one man and passed it along to another man. That was the end of my contact with any money. These financial transactions would occur three times on an average day.
Before long, as his business grew, Chuck was able to add to his staff. The first arrival was a young girl named Moonshine. Moonshine was strictly a volunteer. She had been making love with a married man who had been paying her rent. A second boyfriend started taking care of her telephone bill. There was someone else to pay the electric bill and a fourth man who gave her a rented car to use. Before long, Moonshine had many steady visitors and no bills to pay. She came to Chuck with the idea of expanding her horizons and perhaps even getting some take-home pay. There was nothing Moonshine wouldn’t do to further her career.
At any rate, Moonshine was there to share the work load. Then came Debbie. And Melody. Now you might think that this would take some of the pressure off me. But there was more to it than that. You see, Chuck had his own system of distributing the tricks. If a customer was handsome or clean-cut or just young, Chuck would send him off with one of the other working girls. But if he was an eighty-year-old man on crutches, or a 350-pound mama’s boy, or a customer asking whether we supplied whips, then he’d turn to me: “This one’s for you, Linda.”
There are so many things about Chuck Traynor that I’ll never understand. He would fix me up with creeps and degenerates; he would watch them rape me through a hole in the mirror; but he would bristle with jealousy if a young or good-looking man paid any attention to me.
“You know something,” I told him once. “You’re jealous.”
“Bullshit!”
“No, I mean it. You are jealous. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear you had some normal human feelings.”
“Better not count on that, cunt.”
I didn’t. And, in truth, I began to forget what normal people with normal feelings were like. One trick came in every week and asked for his “eleven-year-old friend.” And every week he would hand me a script that he had written and I would have to say the lines to him.
Lines like: “Please don’t hurt me, sir, I’m only eleven years old.” Lines like: “Oooh, you’re so big and strong—please, sir, don’t take away my cherry.” Lines like—well, you get the idea.
And then there was Greg. Greg was thirty-eight years old, a successful architect, and he hired two of us. Greg had a slightly different script. One of the girls—usually Melody—waited outside in the living room while I went into the bed with Greg. Melody would then come to the door and I would have to say, “Ooooh, golly, Greg—your mommy’s here.” And Melody would come storming over to the bed and strip the sheet away from us and say, “Gregory! What are you doing with this cheap girl? I think I’m going to have to spank you!” The following week Melody and I might switch roles with my playing the mother and her playing the cheap girl.
I guess this is where I got my early dramatic training. However, I didn’t always understand the other characters’ motivations. One of the least demanding customers owned a huge resort hotel and paid $150.00 a week. Every week Chuck would take me to a penthouse suite in the man’s hotel and wait for me outside the door. All I had to do was take off my clothes and take a bubble bath in one of those circular sunken tubs. The trick sat and watched me soap myself for a full hour and that was the extent of our involvement.
There was another customer who shared Chuck’s sickness; he got off on pain. He paid $75.00 for the pleasure of making anal love to me while hitting me. I had no idea how I was supposed to react to this sort of thing. I didn’t yet know I was supposed to scream in pain one minute and scream with joy the next; beg for mercy and beg for more at the same time. Before he left, the trick complained to Chuck about my amateurishness.
“Lemme make it right for you,” Chuck said. “Come back tomorrow and you can have her for nothing.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” the trick said. “When you get someone new in, give me a call.”
Customer complaints led to more severe beatings than usual. Also to a brand new line of verbal abuse: “You useless cunt, I can’t even give you away for free!”
My inexperience did cost us several customers, a fact that didn’t disturb me in the least. Much of the time I couldn’t begin to imagine what possible pleasure they would get out of the strange things they wanted me to do. One trick who lived alone on a houseboat asked me to sit on his face and urinate in his mouth. I couldn’t do that. I tried but just couldn’t do it. The trick got angrier and angrier, and, finally, he screamed at me to go into the bathroom and put it in a glass. I returned with a glassful of urine and he drank it down. Then he told me to get off his boat and never come back. I was happy to oblige.
Since Chuck would never beat me up when we were away from his house, I was always pleased when the trick wanted to meet his “date” at a motel or an apartment. Just knowing that Chuck wasn’t staring at me through his little peephole helped some. And there was always the possibility of escape, the thought that he might slip up and leave me unguarded for a few minutes. Still and all, the trips from home were never what you might call pleasure trips. For one thing, I never knew what might be waiting for me on the other side of a door.
Early in August, Chuck drove me to a private home in South Miami. The door was answered by a fat man with oiled black hair, maybe fifty-five years old. The fat man—his name was Leonard Campagno, also known as Lenny Camp—lived in incredible squalor. His living room was filled with boxes and crates. Newspapers were a carpet over the floor and cats were everywhere. Dishes with food still on them were spread over the table and piled in the sink. I could see cat hairs in the sugar bowl.
Lenny led us through this litter to a bedroom in the back. It was not quite as sleazy as the rest of the house. At least there were clean sheets on the bed. Floodlights had been set up around the bed and were pointing down at it.
“Get her undressed now,” Lenny said to Chuck. “Tell her to take off all her things.”
People seemed to be doing that more and more often, speaking around me as if I weren’t in the room. Sometimes I felt almost invisible.
“Okay, Useless,” Chuck said. “Get undressed. We’re going to do some pictures here.”
“What kind of pictures?”
“Picture-pictures,” he said. “You’ll see.”
“Chuck, what kind of pictures?”
“The kind of pictures where you got to take your clothes off first, okay? Now move it.”
“You told me never to let anyone take my picture.”
“Yeah, that’s anyone
else
.”
At least a dozen times Chuck had told me there were two things I should never do. I should never let anyone take my picture, and I should never sign my name to anything. He said those were two things that would always come back and haunt you later on.
“This here is different,” he explained. “Take your clothes off and go into the bathroom and try to put your face on straight.”
And that was that. There never was a way to argue with Chuck, no way to even discuss anything. I had no notion of what was going to happen here, only that I was going to take my clothes off and be photographed. In all our time together, Chuck never bothered to explain anything. Mine was no longer one of those lives where you could tell what was going to happen next.
I was in the bathroom, naked, putting on some lipstick, when the door opened behind me. My visitor was a tiny girl, five feet tall and very slim, brown-haired, about eighteen years old and also naked.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Chicklet.”
“I’m Linda.”
Chicklet was full of energy, a non-stop talker. All the time she put on her makeup, she was telling her life story. She considered herself a “model.” She said the day before, while she was being photographed, she had ripped off a bracelet from the photographer and he had never even noticed. She said the day before that she had a “session” with six guys at the same time.
Finally she seemed to notice that I wasn’t returning any of the conversation. She glanced at me in the mirror and stopped putting on her lipstick.
“Hey, what’s the matter, honey?”
“I don’t even know what they’re going to do to me out there.”
“Take your picture is all,” Chicklet said. “Me and you are having our pictures taken.”
I was no longer as naive as I had been a few months earlier. I knew we were not talking about high school yearbook pictures, and I knew that I wasn’t there to play patty-cake. I had already figured out that I was going to be photographed in compromising positions—but
which
compromising positions? So many strangers had been using my body in so many different ways that I didn’t think anything would ever shock me again. Wrong.