“You’ve done this before, right?” Chicklet asked.
“Done what before?”
“You’ve been with another chick before, right?” Chicklet could see that she was drawing a blank. “You’ve balled another chick, am I right?”
I burst into tears. That was my only answer. Chicklet came over to me and put her arm around my shoulder. Suddenly her voice was very soothing.
“Hey, hey, there’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “These are all
stills
. We don’t have to
do
anything. We don’t have to be moving at all. Lenny tells us what he wants and we just go through the motions. You don’t have to be into it at all. All you’ve got to do is relax. So relax, willya? It’s not going to be so terrible. You don’t think I’m like ugly, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“Well, stop it with the crying,” Chicklet said. “We’ll just let things go down the way they’re gonna and if you don’t dig something, we’ll like fake it. I’ll start the old ball rolling and you just do whatever, just like me.”
I followed Chicklet out into the bedroom. The fat man, two different cameras roped around his neck, was waiting for us. Chuck was leaning against a wall, staring right through me. I think his whole pleasure in life was watching me react to things. The floodlights were on, an explosion of light over the double bed.
“Okay, girls,” Lenny said. “Why don’t we start off with a few little kisserinos?”
We did as we were told. Just a few little kisserinos. As that was happening, I made myself go numb. I thought of myself as a metal robot, no human feelings at all, and that worked for a while. I was feeling nothing. A skinny naked girl was kissing me on the mouth and I felt nothing at all. She tried to put her tongue in my mouth but she learned that you can’t pry open a robot’s lips.
“Okay, Linda,” Lenny said.
Click, click, click
. “Put your right hand over there on Chicklet’s breast. No, no,
no!
Wouldja at least try to make it look natural?”
Natural?
Try to make it look natural? How could it look natural, my putting my hand on another woman’s breast? What on earth would make that natural? I couldn’t imagine what to do.
“C’m’on, Linda, get into it,” Lenny said.
Click, click, click
. “Chuck, couldja tell your cunt there to get into this. She could at least look like she’s getting her rocks off.”
“
Linda!
” That was a warning.
“Chicklet, what’s with you two?” Lenny asked.
“Hey, lemme talk to Linda for a minute, she’s just shy.” The lights were turned off then and Chicklet walked with me over to the side of the room. “Look, Linda, lemme give you some advice. The best way—the easiest way—to get through something like this is to like get into it, really get into it, and then it’ll be over and done with. Otherwise, we’re gonna be hanging around here all day and we still have to do the sixty-nine shots.”
The sixty-nine shots? I wasn’t ready for something like that. I could be a robot through the kissing and even through touching her breast. I could go through the motions and erase them from my mind almost as they were happening. But when it came to something like sixty-nine, something that personal with another woman, it really blew my mind. I had never even let a man do that to me.
“I can’t do that.”
“Listen to me.” Chicklet lowered her voice as though we were conspirators. “
Just do it!
We’ll just go through the motions together—you’re gonna have to anyway—and then it’ll be over with and you can forget all about it. Look, when you go down on me, just fake it. You know, you don’t have to actually do nothing. I won’t tell anyone.”
I’m not sure whether Chicklet was conning me or just calming me down, but we both knew there was no choice. I’m not sure why this bothered me more than the things I was doing as a hooker. All I know is that it was far worse. I couldn’t imagine being with another woman. At the same time I was wondering what they were doing with the pictures they were taking. Where would they go? Would my mother and father ever see them? I had an awful feeling that the pictures would someday be used against me. Whether they were or not, they made this part of my life real, part of some record, uneraseable.
Click, click, click.
This was a day of many firsts. The first photographs. The first sex with another woman. And there was still another first to come. When the fat photographer had enough pictures of the two of us together, he went into another room and came back with something that he started to strap onto Chicklet. It was a strap-on, make-believe, male sex organ. My first dildo. The dildo jutted out like a telephone pole when it was fastened to Chicklet’s small frame. Then, assuming the male role, something she did with no difficulty at all, Chicklet got on top of me and put the dildo inside of me. The fat man came in very close with his camera.
Click, click, click
.
So there I was, being photographed by a fat degenerate while a skinny little girl with a make-believe penis was having sex with me, and I looked over at Chuck. He was watching the scene with a very superior expression. At moments like these, the lowest spots in my life, whenever I saw Chuck watching me, I would become aware of just one thing, his missing finger. Under normal circumstances—say we were just driving along in his car—I would never notice it. But whenever Chuck got me into a bad spot, that missing finger loomed large, casting a shadow over my mind. Now all I could see was the deformed hand, the absent finger.
Chicklet was my first female sex partner. Not my last. As soon as Chuck saw how much pain this experience caused me, he made sure that it became a key part of my repertoire. Many men like to rent that particular fantasy—two women making love to each other while the man becomes excited and then joins in. A few weeks earlier I didn’t know what “bisexual” meant and suddenly I was having sex with a half dozen women and several dozen men.
I only liked one of the women I was coupled with—and the sex itself had nothing whatever to do with my liking her.
Melody was the first person to help me in any way. One day she saw Chuck hit me and that was enough for her. From that moment on, she was my friend. Melody was a strange kind of a girl to be a hooker. She was very intelligent and always carried a book to read with her, even on jobs.
Melody was cute rather than sexy looking—about five-two, light brown curly hair, pug nose, non-stop smile. She reminded me of a high school cheerleader. But the main thing about her was that she was smart, way too smart to ever become one of Chuck’s girls. Melody was a madame with a small operation of her own; she lived in and worked out of a tastefully decorated four-room apartment. When her customers were too weird for her, Melody transferred them over to Chuck’s operation. If they were really weird, disgustingly so, Chuck made sure that they eventually found their way to me.
From the beginning, Melody seemed to take a personal interest in me. Whenever she had a job that required more than one hooker, she would call up Chuck and put in a request for me. Chuck would drive me to the meeting and wait nearby. He was never far away, but at least I was out of his sight for a time.
Melody seemed to understand Chuck very well. She knew just what to tell him to get me off on a job with her. She would tell Chuck the most degenerate stuff she could think up and he would leap at the bait. For example, she would tell him that she had a customer who wanted to tie up two girls and urinate on them, and Chuck would say, “Far
out!
Why don’t you take Linda on that one?” Or she would say, “This John is too much—he wants to give some girl an enema.” And Chuck would say, “Yeah? Well, Linda would like to do that trick.”
There was one trick we shared every week. This was an old guy in a wheelchair, barely able to stand up. He would hire six or seven girls and each girl would get a fifty-dollar bill. One girl would stand behind him, holding him upright, while all the other girls except me would be on the carpet, kissing each other and making love. My job was to kneel in front of him and suck him off. Melody would give me that task because she knew that I found that easier than being with another woman.
And sometimes, when we finished a job like that, there’d be a few minutes to talk to Melody without Chuck listening.
“This is all really awful for you,” she said one day. “Isn’t there any way you can get away from Chuck?”
“You know Chuck.”
“I know a dozen Chucks,” she said, “a hundred Chucks, and they’re all monsters.”
Whenever I started talking about my life, I found myself fighting to hold back the tears. But it was no use; there was no holding them back. And then I couldn’t hold back the words. I told Melody everything that had happened: how he kept me prisoner; how he watched me through a peephole; how he beat me constantly; how he threatened to kill me, and how he swore to murder my parents if I ever managed to get away.
“And it’s getting worse,” I said. “He keeps thinking up worse things for me to do. And now he wants
me
to think up weird things—he says if I don’t think up at least one new ‘freaky’ thing every day, he’ll beat me.”
“He’s a real sicko,” Melody said. “Sometimes I get the feeling that the world is full of sicko people.”
“There can’t be anyone else as bad as Chuck.”
“Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “Look, I’ll tell you the kind of thing you tell Chuck. Tell him that today I tied all the other girls together, locking them into strange positions, and then the old guy began beating on everyone with a cane. Tell him that some of the girls were really screaming; one was yelling, ‘No, no more, no more pain!’ And another one was saying, ‘Hit me! Hit me! Harder, harder!’ Tell him that some of the girls got very excited and had orgasms.”
It was a strange way for a friendship to start. Melody told me every unnatural act she had ever heard of, and then she made up some brand new ones just for Chuck. And almost every day she managed to find me a trick in a hotel or an apartment, a job that got me away from Chuck, if only for a little while.
Sometimes, the way things worked out, I’d rather have stayed with Chuck. Melody turned over one of her $150-a-week customers to me, a guy who weighed nearly 400 pounds. Chuck was happy to have me do that one for two reasons: it was so much money, and it was so revolting.
To make up for jobs like that one, Melody would also take me along on her easiest tricks. There was Leo, a retired clothing manufacturer who had a condominium on the beach. When you first arrived, Leo made you go through closets filled with dresses, gowns, and lingerie. You were allowed to select whatever you liked. Then you modeled that for Leo, marching up and down in front of him, turning this way and that, until he said, “All right, girlie, take off all your clothes.”
When Melody and I had removed our clothing, we would pretend to make love while Leo got turned on. Afterwards, he would give us each thirty dollars and the clothes we had modeled; that clothing was the only payment I was ever allowed to keep.
I knew that someday God would get me away from Chuck but until then, until God made His move, my only help came from Melody. She kept thinking up new perversions for me to tell Chuck. She was like that girl in
The Arabian Nights
, the one who had to tell the king a brand new story every day, only the stories Melody told me were not exactly fairy tales.
“Linda,” she said, “you know what a dildo is?”
“Yes.”
“Well, they have these dildoes with two heads on them.”
“Two heads?”
“Yes, try to follow this, Linda. The two-headed dildoes are about this long and this big around. Tell him that the trick had one of those with him and you had to insert both ends of it at once . . .”
Okay, so it wasn’t exactly
The Arabian Nights
. In fact, some of the perversions were so elaborate that I couldn’t believe my ears. I was sure that Chuck would start laughing at me when I told him a story like that. But that wasn’t what happened at all. His eyes would go glassy and then he’d get sexually excited.
Every time Melody and I turned a trick together, we would find time for a little talk. Melody had a book—
The Female Eunuch
by Germaine Greer—that she wanted me to read. The first time Chuck saw me looking at it, he tore it from my hands and threw it away.
There were other times with Melody when I felt very uncomfortable. One day after our regular session with Leo, she reached out and touched my hand.
“You know something?” she said. “I really liked that today. I couldn’t help myself. It’s just that when I’m with you, I really start to get it on.”
“Don’t tell me about that, please, Melody.”
“I can’t help it, I’m starting to really love you. I
do
love you. You’re so beautiful and nice. I’ve been with a lot of girls but when I’m with you, I get a very warm feeling. Do you know what I mean?”
“Please don’t tell me about it, Melody. You’re my only friend, and I don’t want anything to happen to that friendship. I need you as a friend.”
“But I could do so much for you, Linda. You’re going to get away from Chuck someday. As sure as I’m sitting here, you’re going to be free of him. And then you’re going to need a place to stay. You could stay with me and I’d take care of you. You would learn to love me.”