When he took me out of hypnosis, I was in a cold sweat. Sometimes I was able to remember everything Chuck said to me when I was under. Some of his suggestions I was powerless to resist, and some I just wouldn’t do. He once told me to make love to a dog and I wouldn’t do that; another time he told me would have an orgasm during oral sex with a man, and that didn’t happen, although it was eventually the entire plot of
Deep Throat
.
To protect myself from a later beating—and Chuck would be furious with me if I didn’t follow his post-hypnotic suggestions—I would always play along at least part of the way. So I began by taking off my clothes. I took off all my clothes and stopped. In a way I was playing along with Chuck, and in a way I wasn’t. All three of them were staring at me, waiting for the rest of it. And then I undressed Barbara. It was a strange sensation. As I was doing it, I became more and more scared. I knew what they were waiting for, and I didn’t know how far I was going to go. If that sounds confused, it should. I
was
confused.
We were both naked then and we were sitting on the carpet together. I knew what was supposed to happen next. I was expected to put my arms around Barbara and start making love to her. But that didn’t happen. I couldn’t go that far.
There’s one thing about all that hypnotism that really scares me. Someday I’m going to sit down with a psychiatrist and get everything out. There are whole days, groups of days, when I don’t remember a thing. Sometimes I’d wake up and have to ask what day of the week it was. The things I can remember are so horrible, I wonder what happened on those days that I can’t remember. The idea of finding out scares me, but the idea of never finding out scares me even more.
Repeated exposures to Phil Mandina didn’t make him any more likable. Still, Chuck continued to bring the four of us together after our return to Miami. Now our meetings took place on Mandina’s houseboat. Chuck kept telling me I had to get something going with Barbara, or else.
I warned Barbara about this: “There’s something crazy about Chuck. He’s always trying to get me to do weird things. Now he’s mad at me because I haven’t been coming on with you at all.”
“Oh, Phil’s just like that, too,” Barbara said. “He’s always after me to do crazy things.The only reason I do them is it makes him so happy.”
On this particular night, the two men were inventing contests. They decided they would go down on the two women and whoever made the woman come first would be the winner . Chuck would go down on Barbara and Mandina would go down on me. I could’ve told Mandina to save his energy, but there would’ve been no discouraging the two of them. It finally ended with Barbara noisily claiming victory.
One game led to another. This time the boys decided on a reversal: Barbara went down on Chuck and I took care of Mandina. Although I despised the lawyer, it had to be done, and done well. Chuck was still upset that I wasn’t coming on with Barbara so I had to make up for that. If I didn’t satisfy Mandina, then I’d be in for a beating. My thinking: if I do this well, then I’ll be covered with Chuck for the evening. This was the minimum I could get away with. I often thought in those terms, the minimum I could get away with.
So although I hated Phil Mandina, I did what I had to do. Often, when I was in a situation like this, I would get some small revenge by “accidentally” biting the man. This time I couldn’t take that chance.
Mandina was satisfied. Months later he called me in Hollywood and told me that I should give Barbara special deep-throat instructions over the telephone—she was trying to do it right then but without success. I could hear her giggling in the background.
Some people don’t understand how you can have sex with someone you hate. I kept looking for ways to make it possible. I was smoking more and more pot. Later, when I discovered a pain-killer called
Percodan
, I’d really load up on it and become totally numb to what was happening to me. But there were some pains that
Percodan
didn’t make go away.
At the end of our first summer together, Chuck announced that he was taking his bride on a little trip. We were off to Aspen, Colorado. I had learned not to press Chuck for details but this time he volunteered a little information. A friend of his had just started a bar in Aspen and he needed a girl to work as a go-go dancer and after-hours hooker.
I no longer even reacted to bulletins like these. Whatever Chuck told me to do, I did. No questions asked. How he had accomplished this, I don’t know. He was constantly belittling me, humiliating me, and degrading me. The beatings were endless. I was being hypnotized several times a week. And the changes in my personality were not subtle ones.
I was no longer experiencing things that made me feel good or bad. I felt as though my self had been taken away from me. I was not a person anymore. I was a robot, a vegetable, a wind-up toy, a fucking-and-sucking doll. I had become someone else’s thing. If I didn’t do . . . whatever—I got beaten. So I simply did it. Whatever.
During the long drive toward Aspen, Chuck kept thinking up new things for me to do. New car games. And I was his biggest toy. If I told you some of the games, you’d have trouble believing them. At least I hope you would. One example: He would buy Red Hots, those tiny cinnamon candies that kids love, and he would stick a handful of them in my vagina and watch me squirm as we drove along. If we happened to run out of his precious Red Hots, he’d yell at me until we found a store that carried them.
Since we were low on funds, Chuck decided that we’d have to earn money on our way to Aspen. How would we do that? Chuck outlined his plan to me in a small town in Arkansas, a town too small to have its own police department but just large enough to support a haberdashery. Chuck pulled our car up in front of the haberdashery and looked in the window. It was empty except for two salesmen.
“Go in there and speak to those two guys,” Chuck told me. “Tell them you’ll give them a blow job for $10.00. No, wait, let’s start off with twenty. If they don’t go for that, tell them you really need the bread bad so you’ll do it for ten.”
I got out of the car and started walking toward the store. Chuck rolled down the window.
“That’s ten
each
,” he said.
As I walked into the store, the two men straightened up behind the counter and smiled a nice, friendly, small-town smile. I took a last look back toward the street. Chuck had gotten out of the car and was now pretending to windowshop while watching me closely. What to do? Suddenly I remembered the trouble my father always had finding the right size shirt.
“I’d like to look at a shirt,” I said, “but it has to have very long arms.”
“How long?” one of the salesman asked. “We carry most sizes up to a seventeen neck and thirty-six-inch sleeves.”
“This is a fifteen neck,” I said, “and a forty-inch sleeve.”
“Forty inches We don’t have anything like that.”
He was shaking his head no, which was just what I wanted. Then the second salesman started to laugh. Evidently I had just given them a shirt size that would have been perfect for an orangutan. And this is what Chuck saw through the window—one salesman shaking his head no, the second salesman laughing at me.
“Well, thanks anyway.”
I turned on my heels and walked out of the store, letting the door slam behind me. I started to tell Chuck how I’d been turned down and he interrupted me.
“Save it,” he said. “I saw it all. These fucking hillbillies probably never saw a real live cunt before.”
I used that same ploy whenever we traveled. No matter what kind of store Chuck sent me into, I asked for something that was both too large and purple, something outlandish enough to get a quick no. Chuck was confused by all the rejections.
“You gotta be doing something wrong,” he said. “You’re no fucking good at all. You can’t even give a hillbilly shopkeeper a fucking hard-on.”
I almost smiled. Almost. This was one of the few times that I got the better of Chuck. It may not seem like such a big deal to you, but to me it was a win. I couldn’t escape but I could maneuver a bit within the system. Anytime I got the better of Chuck—and just conning him was enough—I felt a small flash of pleasure.
During the long drive, Chuck seemed to have just one thing on his mind. He kept talking about a little detour we were going to make, a detour to Mexico. “Wait ’till we get to Juarez,” he’d say. Or, “Only 650 miles to Juarez.” Or “Once we’re in Juarez, we’ll be able to pick up some easy money.”
I didn’t bother asking what was waiting for us in Juarez. From the way he was going on, it was not something I wanted to hear. I also suspected that he’d get to the point before we drove too much farther.
“I hope you like donkeys,” he said.
“Donkeys are fine.”
“There’s no fucking reason you should like donkeys,” he said. “It’s just that it’d be a good thing if you did like donkeys is all. It’d be better for you.”
“What would be better if I liked donkeys?”
“Donkeys’d be better,” he said.
“
Why
would it be better if I liked donkeys?”
“Because you’re going to be fucking them in Juarez,” he came to the point. “That’s what I’ve been telling you, that’s the reason we’re going to Juarez. To fuck donkeys.”
He had to be kidding. Didn’t he? His eyes were off the road and on my face. Evidently I didn’t register sufficient shock because he felt compelled to describe all the wonders waiting for us in Juarez. He talked about an arena similar to the pit used for a cocknght—hundreds of men sitting around a ring, yelling out their wagers. In the middle of the ring, naked women and a donkey. The men would be betting on the various women. Specifically on how many centimeters of donkey penis each woman would be able to contain in her vagina.
“You’re
made
for this contest,” Chuck said. “I’m telling you, you’ll clean up. Shee-yit, the last chick I brought to Juarez made us three thou and she was nothin’.”
This was surely just another story, another of Chuck’s little on-the-road entertainments. However, there were too many details. If it was all make-believe, he had given it a lot of thought.
“The chicks go in one at a time,” he was saying. “And the crowd cheers, just like when prizefighters come into a ring. And then they strap the chick up on this contraption and then they bring out their trained donkey and they lead the donkey right into the fucking cunt.”
“You’re lying!” I said. “How could a donkey do anything with a woman?”
“Oh, he gets a little fucking help,” Chuck said, obviously pleased that I was finally reacting. “They’ve got to point him right, you dig? Sometimes the chick gets ripped up a little—I’m telling you, you haven’t lived ‘till you’ve seen one of those donkey dongs. Those suckers are
huge!
And the guys are all bidding like they’re at some fucking auction—‘I’ll bet a thousand on the redhead,’ like that.”
“That would kill a woman.”
“Nah, they got the medicos right there,” Chuck said. “If the bleeding gets too bad, they unstrap the chicks and give them medical assistance right on the spot. Some of those chicks are really hemorrhaging, too.”
I couldn’t tell when Chuck was telling the truth. But I was
scared
. As the miles piled up, he got more and more graphic. He seemed to like the word “hemorrhage” because he used it a lot. At night I went to sleep dreaming about women bleeding. I also dreamt about animals making love to women—but those images were fuzzy. How could they do it?
Could
they do it?
Maybe all of this was one of Chuck’s inventions but I have never prayed so hard in my life:
Dear God, please don’t let us get to Juarez, Mexico; please stop us from going to Juarez
.
And God answered my prayers one night outside of Little Rock, Arkansas. All of a sudden Chuck’s little Volkswagen just took off. It had been hit from behind by a station wagon driven by a drunk. We swerved to the right, then to the left, then off into a ditch and over onto our side. The next thing I knew, truck drivers were crawling all over the car, looking for a way to lift us out. I heard one of them say, “Well, that little car has had it.”
Thank God! I knew that God had done it. The automobile accident was definitely God answering my prayers. Maybe not verbatim, maybe not giving me everything that I wanted, but at least protecting me.
From what?
From being fucked by a donkey in Juarez, Mexico.
eight
Juarez was now out of the question, and Little Rock definitely
was not
Chuck’s kind of a town. So we got a ride to New York which definitely
was
Chuck’s kind of town.
We couldn’t afford an apartment in the city itself, but Chuck found us a place on the other side of the Hudson—in Jersey City, New Jersey. After putting up a month’s security and a month’s rent, Chuck had less than $50.00 left. He invested some of this in purchasing every sex tabloid published in New York City.
Once he had the newspapers, Chuck went through the classified ads, looking for suitable employment for me. These were not your ordinary
Help Wanted
ads. In fact, I read the same classified ads that Chuck was reading, and I couldn’t understand what they were talking about. They were written in some kind of code. They used phrases like “English Leather Fanciers” and “French Instruction” and “Greek Spoken Here” and “TV Specialists.” Chuck knew exactly what they all meant.
“This is some town!” he said. “They get away with stuff here they haven’t even thought of back in Miami.”
As he went through the newspaper ads, Chuck circled telephone numbers. His first calls were all to S&M—sadism and masochism—numbers, but these calls were for his own general information. When he began looking for employment for me, he called the numbers in the “Models Wanted” columns.
“Well, Babe, we’re back in business,” he said. “Your old man has everything under control.”
It was not all that simple. My career as a topless dancer, for example, lasted less than one night. We were racing from one address to another in the midtown area of New York City, and one of our stops was a small bar off 42nd Street. It was like a little auditorium with thirty or forty seats. There were girls dancing, and, between sets, they hustled drinks from the customers.
After speaking to the club manager for a few minutes, Chuck told me to go upstairs and put on a G-string.
“This could be easy money,” Chuck said. “So you’re up on a stage bare-assed for a couple of hours every night, so what’s the big deal? This way you’ll be able to work with photographers during the day and dance topless at night. Just until we find something more steady.”
That prospect—“something more steady”—sent a small shudder through me. But, in truth, the whole topless bar scene was as embarrassing as anything I’ve ever done. I went into a small room, took off my clothes and put on the G-string while one of the dancers was giving me advice.
“Listen, honey, there’s nothing to this,” she was saying. “Just dance up close to the end of the stage and let your tits hang down so the creeps can almost reach them. Then, when you’re spreading your legs, just lift your G-string a little, you know what I’m saying?”
Waiting to go down the stairs and onto the stage, I could hear the manager introducing me.
“What we got here—for your entertainment and enjoyment—a brand new star, fresh from Florida and points west, about to grace our stage here for the first time . . .”
There had been no chance to watch the other dancers, so I had no idea what was expected of me. Suddenly, in front of dozens of glittering eyes, I was on a stage—wearing a piece of string and feeling as stupid as I’ve ever felt—doing some regular disco dancing. And the customers made no attempt to conceal their feelings. Those who weren’t yawning, were hooting at me. I finished a couple of numbers, then made a dash for the upstairs dressing room. Followed by Chuck. Followed by the manager.
“What’re you two trying to do, put all my customers to sleep?”
The upshot was that the brand new star, fresh from Florida and points west, got no pay at all for her show-business debut. Chuck was quick to assure me that there’d be many other opportunities in the near future, and he was right. New York City was truly the land of opportunity for Chuck.
There were hundreds of people who made their livings by peddling sex in New York. What was amazing to me was how quickly one got to know them all. They were all links on the same chain; you met one person, and he passed you along to the others. The still photographers knew the club owners who knew the madams who knew the eight-millimeter directors who knew the peep-show kingpins who knew the adult book store owners and so on. I swear, before that first week was out, Chuck Traynor managed to meet almost every prominent pervert in New York. My life was a succession of job interviews.
One of those first interviews was with a whore named Xaviera Hollander.
Although Xaviera was not yet famous as “the happy hooker,” hers was no nickel-and-dime operation. The uniformed doorman at her East Side apartment building informed us that Miss Hollander would be detained for a few moments and asked us to be good enough to wait in the lobby.
And this is where I met Xaviera Hollander. My first reaction to her was that New York City must be pretty hard up if someone who looked like her could become a successful madam. She was fat. Her hair was dirty, all caked with grease. She had piled the makeup on a face that needed more than mere makeup. We followed her to the elevator and on up to her apartment.
“Tom sent us over,” Chuck said. “He thought that maybe you could use my old lady here in your operation.”
“No, I don’t think so.” Xaviera looked me over like a butcher inspecting a side of beef. “She’s too skinny. She’s not my type at all.”
“She’s a good hooker . . .”
“I’ve already got enough brown-haired girls,” Xaviera said. “Maybe if she was a redhead . . .”
“She could be a redhead,” Chuck said. “No problem.”
Before responding, Xaviera went to pick up a ringing telephone. The call was from a publisher and they were talking about some book that was about to come out under Xaviera’s name. While she was talking, Chuck whispered to me.
“Come on with her a little.”
“No way.”
“Tell her you’d like to give her a little free sample of what you can do,” he said. “It won’t kill you. And ask her if she’s got any dildoes around. Tell her you can show her some new things with dildoes.”
“No.”
Xaviera returned. She was looking at our clothes and was more amused than impressed. We were in our usual outfits: blue jeans, waterproof boots, and army jackets.
“Those clothes are awful,” Xaviera said. “You know, my clients are astronauts and judges. They take my girls to formal parties. They don’t want girls who look like hippies, they want nice girls.”
I began to wonder what kind of a hooker ever dressed the way I was dressed. Chuck, realizing that this prospect was slipping away from us, went to his hard sell.
“Linda’s not a typical hooker,” he said. “She could show you—why don’t you let her give you a little sample.”
“I’m not talking about what she does,” Xaviera said. “I’m talking about the way she looks. My girls have nice clothes, a lot of class. They’re able to sit down and have dinner with the mayor or the governor.”
“Yeah, but not all your tricks are big shots,” Chuck said. “You must get your share of freaks and guys who go for the far-out stuff. Linda could do them.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
All the way to our next appointment, this one with a Swedish madam named Milka, Chuck yelled at me. He said that Xaviera was right, I was too skinny. He could never make up his mind about that. One day he’d yell at me for being too skinny, the next for being too fat. Then he went back to his favorite theme: I wasn’t freaky enough. If I had been more freaky, I would have come on with Xaviera Hollander and gotten the job that way. I crept into my shell and closed it tightly behind me.
Xaviera’s rejection didn’t bother me in the least. In fact, being turned down by her was a compliment in a way.
The second madam, Milka, was at least nice looking. She was with a friend, Martin, and they both scrutinized me, much the way Xaviera had, but they didn’t come to a quick decision. Chuck decided to help them make up their minds: “Why doesn’t Linda give Martin a free sample, see what he thinks.”
Martin led me over to a double bed in the far corner of the room. Fish netting, draped like curtains over the bed, was all the privacy we had. Something that I can’t explain hit me then. While the act was happening, while his thing was in my mouth, I started crying. It was as if my whole life had come down to this moment and this act—sucking off a stranger—and I couldn’t hold back the sadness. Martin eased away from me.
“You don’t really want to do this?” he whispered.
“No.”
“Then cool it,” he said. “You’re not into this kind of thing; you shouldn’t be doing it. Come on, Linda, calm down now, nothing is going to happen. We’ll wait here a few minutes and then we’ll go back out there.”
There was no more conversation. Martin rubbed my back soothingly while we waited for the proper amount of time to pass, then we went back to Chuck and the madam.
“She’s really fantastic,” Martin said. “She’s the greatest. Chuck was right.”
“What’d I tell you?” Chuck said.
“Yeah,” Martin said, “I never had a blow job like that.”
Somehow, although he was saying just what Chuck wanted to hear, he was also letting Milka know that something was not quite right here. She listened to him and then turned to us.
“Well, Linda, if we can use you, we’ll get in touch with you.”
In other words: Don’t call us, we’ll call you. Which was fine with me, but not so fine with Chuck.
About this same time, one of Chuck’s former hookers in Miami showed up and moved in with us. Brandy, a still fresh-looking eighteen-year-old girl with long brown hair, had only worked as a prostitute for five or six weeks. In fact, she was still involved in a mental debate: Should she become a full-time hooker or should she give it up and marry her high-school sweetheart and start a family? I told her she was crazy to come back to Chuck and the business, but she only laughed at that.
Brandy and I had done several tricks together in Florida, and our first job in New York was for a still photographer. This was in a studio that was used exclusively for sadomasochistic photos: chains hanging from walls, strange medieval torture devices, a full selection of whips, a jumbo-sized bottle of Heinz ketchup.
Brandy and I stripped down, then took turns pretending to whip and torture each other. It was all so absurd. What kind of a man would get turned on by seeing a picture of a naked woman with ketchup smeared across her back?
From still photographs it was a short distance to the world of movies. Just across the street, as a matter of fact, to a studio where they shot eight-millimeter movies for the peep-show trade. The thought of making a movie really bothered me. When they were taking still photographs, you could always stop whatever you were doing and take a breather. You didn’t have to act as through you were enjoying every minute of it. I had no idea how I was going to fake it long enough for them to shoot a movie.
“We’ll just give it a try,” Brandy said. “What’s the big deal? We’ve done plenty of tricks for twenty—why not do a movie for a hundred?”
“It’s no big deal,” Chuck said. “When we get there, you two just do like the man tells you. Tonight, we’ll have a little dress rehearsal.”
Chuck’s idea of a dress rehearsal was for Brandy and myself to have sex together while he watched. He was always trying to push the two of us together. He would get the three of us in bed together, and he’d begin by taking my hand and putting it on Brandy’s breast. Then he would take Brandy’s hand and put it inside of me. Brandy got no more pleasure from any of this than I did. But she was like me in one crucial respect: She went along with it.
While Chuck was brutal to me, he was nice with Brandy. In fact, I never saw him rough up another woman. Maybe because other women would not have taken it. The way I see things now, I was still a baby. He had taken me directly from the cradle to the whorehouse, and brutality was the only thing that kept me there.
Well, I had been involved with Brandy for the benefit of tricks, and I didn’t see anything in the movie that was going to be any different. So I went along with it.
Those first eight-millimeter movies were shot in a loft near 48th Street and Broadway by a man named Tom. The bathroom sink was filthy. The rooms were filled with odd pieces of furniture covered by sheets. The floors had never been mopped and your feet turned black just walking on them. The people who made filthy movies always seemed to live in filth.
Tom introduced us to our co-star for the day, a nice-looking young man named Rob. I wound up making a half-dozen of the eight-millimeter movies with Rob, including some with his wife, Cathy. The first time I met Rob, I wondered how this could be. Here’s this real doll—he was
adorable!
—tall and blond and cute. How could a guy who looked like that do what he did for a living? What problems did he have to get into something like this? I will never understand that.
The director, Tom, told Brandy and me to take off our clothes and lie on the bed. He told us to lie there naked and be laughing and talking together and then to start kissing each other.
All right, I had to kiss her. Instead of moving right along, as the director wanted, I kind of hesitated at this point. I hated to move right along, even though that was the only way to get through these jobs. Then, when Brandy and I were supposedly getting into it, a guy appeared in the scene.