The Education of a Very Young Madam (8 page)

Later I found out that Rifkin preyed on ethnic women who worked in the sex industry and that he scouted for his victims at strip clubs in and around big cities like Boston and New York. That was why I knew several people who had had contact with him. It was freaky. I don't know why he targeted that type, but he obviously had some serious issues. A friend told me that he killed another girl I knew, a beautiful Spanish hooker named Venus. She was five months pregnant when he got her, and he cut out her baby and left the two bodies in two different Dumpsters in Central Park. I don't go to Central Park anymore either.

What happened to Jackson's girlfriend was the kind of thing that people just never get over. Eventually, I started to understand that and realized that if Jackson couldn't get over it, then he probably wasn't going to change. The idea that he might always be the way he was frightened me more than the beatings themselves. One night, for no reason at all, he lost it on me so bad that I had to run into the bathroom and lock the door to protect myself.

All I had on that night was my pajamas, with eleven dollars in the pocket for some reason, and a pair of socks. Still, I decided it would be better to crawl out the window than to face Jackson. There I was, all by myself with barely anything on, and the only thing I could think to do was call Andre. I had memorized his number, so I went to find a pay phone and called him. Luckily he answered and didn't hang up when I started crying hysterically. He just asked me what was wrong. When I told him, he said, "Stay there. I'm sending someone to pick you up."

Andre brought me to the apartment of one of his "girls," at least that's who he told me she was. Later I found out she was his wife. She instantly saw me as competition and wasn't very nice to me when she found out I'd be staying for a while. Andre told her to find me some clothes to wear, and she returned with the most hideous outfits, which made me look awful. Andre bought her a diamond ring to smooth things over, but it didn't really work. She hated having me there, and it showed. Pretty soon Andre came to get me and took me to a new place. It was a two-bedroom condo in a gated community outside of Boston. It was big and beautiful, and I felt safe there. It was our new home.

Andre became my whole world after that. When I moved in with him, I realized I didn't know anything. I mean, really nothing. I'd been on my own, off and on, for a couple of years at that point, but still, I was pathetic. Andre took me in, but more important, he taught me how to live. He started with the basics, showing me how to make myself breakfast and, as long as I was at it, how to make some for him too. He showed me how to clean up after myself, how to take care of myself, and eventually, he showed me how to cook more complicated things than toast and cereal. Every man needs a strong woman behind him, and every player needs a wife. I fulfilled that role for him. I knew instinctively that he was going to mold me into the perfect girl, and I was the perfect age for him to do so.

Andre knew how to do a lot of things. He was an all-around businessman. He ran a few girls, and he owned a few aboveboard businesses, like a barbershop in Boston, but the way he made most of his cash was by dealing drugs. He was real good with money, so after I had mastered the art of a clean kitchen, he started to teach me basic economics.

The other thing that Andre taught me about was respect. I didn't have any at the time, but if I was going to survive, he told me I needed to learn how to get some. If it hadn't been for Andre showing me how, who knows where I'd be today.

In the world we lived in, there were really only two ways to gain respect. The first was money: people respect you if you have cash to spend. When we'd go out, Andre always made a show of spending lots of money. The clothes he wore, the cars he drove, the liquor he drank—it was always intentionally expensive and everyone noticed. And it was the same for me. I became his prize, so I had to look good. I got leather and suede pants, gator boots, and after thirty days of being together, a gorgeous full-length mink coat with a fox lining; after sixty days together, I got a rock for my finger worth thousands.

The second way to gain respect was through violence: people respect you if they fear you. Andre most often chose to gain respect by spending money, but violence—or the threat of violence—was really a more effective way, and he knew just when and how to use that method too. Andre wasn't afraid of using violence to get what he wanted; people knew not to mess with him, and pretty soon, they learned that he wouldn't tolerate them messing with me either. One night when we were out with his friends, I was complaining about something and one of his acquaintances called me a bitch. Andre gave the guy an icy stare.

"You got that backwards," he said calmly and quietly. "You're the bitch."

Andre then whispered something to the guy next to him, who nodded and immediately left us. Meanwhile, the guy who'd called me a bitch tried to explain himself, giving reasons for saying what he said. As if that made any difference.

Pretty soon Andre's partner (back then he called all his sidekicks "partners") came back with a can of dog food and handed it to him.

"Now who's the bitch?" Andre asked, pulling back the tab on the can and holding it out toward the guy who had disrespected me.

It was obvious to all of us that Andre wouldn't hesitate to hurt this guy if he didn't do what Andre was asking. The guy knew if he didn't take that can of dog food, he probably wouldn't make it home in one piece that night. He looked at me for just a moment before he took the can. Andre made him get down on his hands and knees and eat out of the can right in front of us. After that, Andre just ignored him, like he never even existed. That guy never spoke to me again. I knew then just how powerful it can really be to let everyone know you're not afraid of a little violence.

In fact, Andre earned respect in a third, unusual way, which was just by being a straight-up guy. He never talked about it, but I know people respected him because he wasn't a bullshitter. If he told you the drugs he was selling you were going to be a certain price, then that was the price they would be. He didn't change the deal on you at the last minute or take advantage of you just because he could if he wanted to. He was no petty thief. He was too big for that, and as a result people respected him even more. What's more, they wanted to deal with him.

Andre was the one who set me up in my very first business. My partner was Suzie, a Thai woman who was the cutest little thing you've ever seen. She was older than me but looked really young. She must have been about twenty-one, because she always got served at the bars and clubs we went to. But then again, maybe not. She didn't look a day over eighteen, and no bartender would ever card a girl that adorable.

Andre and I used travel back and forth between Boston and New York City all the time back then. Andre would say it was "for Business," but I didn't really know what his business was in the beginning. All I knew was that every time we went to New York, we had the best time. We'd eat in great restaurants all over the city and hang out with cool people who dressed just like Andre. He hung out with a group of rappers, and we'd go to their concerts and video shoots and drink bottles of Dom P that were always on ice in the backs of their big cars. Andre would dress me in furs and drape me in diamonds to take me to clubs where we'd sit at private tables like superstars. I was tiny compared with him—a full ten inches shorter and still rail thin—but we dressed to match and made quite an impression whenever we walked into a room together.

The first time I met Suzie she tried to pick me up. She just walked up to me in one of the New York clubs, this tiny girl with spiky black hair who was totally butch yet feminine and sweet-looking at the same time. She had all the confidence in the world, so naturally I liked her right away. Hooking up wasn't going to happen—I was very attached to Andre, and besides, I'm not gay— so instead we decided to become business partners. I was about seventeen.

Suzie was from Thailand, but she had married a powerful businessman, a founder and owner of a major Japanese corporation, when she was thirteen. The marriage had been arranged by her parents, and she was his fifth wife. Naturally she hated him and got away from him as soon as she could. I always thought one of the reasons she became a lesbian was that she hated him so much. I never knew exactly how she got away or why he didn't come after her. Maybe he did, but she never seemed to be afraid that he'd catch up to her.

Andre was always looking for new business opportunities, and he wanted to find something for me to do with myself. I was so young and thought he was the- best thing in the whole world. I doted on him, followed him around, and generally annoyed the hell out of him. He was a decent guy, so he would never throw me out or tell me to just get lost—he cared about me, and besides, where would I go? But he was feeling crowded and thought I needed a project, something to keep me busy and out of his hair. So when Suzie came up with the idea, he gave me the money to start up a brothel with her.

By that time we were living in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and I had worked my way up to being Andre's personal money manager. I had also learned a lot about the drug business he was involved in and how it worked. I stacked his bills, and once a month, I gathered up those stacks and took them to a bank thirty miles away for deposit in his safety deposit box. Andre was the one who taught me that $10,000 worth of $100 bills fit perfectly into a small Ziploc sandwich bag, which is a trick I still use to this day to keep track of the cash I have on hand. He also showed me that people like us could store money safely in the bank as long as it was in a safety deposit box and not an account. He even bought me a Cadillac Coupe when I was seventeen so that I could do my errands. I also danced at a strip club called The Body Shop on 123rd and Lexington in Harlem, but Andre was right, even with the dancing and the job I did for him, I still had too much time on my hands.

Suzie and I rented an entire floor of a commercial building on West Twenty-first Street in Manhattan to use as our brothel. It was just this large, open warehouse space when we got it, so we had contractors come in to transform it into something workable. We had walls put up to form six booths with doors, each of which was just big enough for a twin mattress set on an elevated platform, a chair in the corner for clothes, and a narrow walkway. It was just the basics—white walls, no decoration, no frills. There was also a big wash area with showers on one side for the girls and wash beds on the other for the customers.

When a client walked into our place, he'd pay an entrance fee of $40 to $60, which bought him a massage on one of those wash beds. The girls would sit on benches that lined the perimeter of the entry room and cop their most seductive or demure poses when a customer walked in. He'd pick out the girl he wanted, and then they'd head for the wash area. If he wanted to continue on to one of the booths after that, he'd have to negotiate with the girl directly. Generally speaking, a $120 "tip" would get a guy a hand job, and an extra $200 would get him sex. Those girls knew how to negotiate too, even with the businessmen who were our most frequent type of customer, though we really attracted all types of men.

We placed ads in the backs of magazines like
Girls and Screw and newspapers like The Village Voice
to draw customers. Those ads, which featured pictures of young Asian girls, also attracted women looking for work. We weren't all that picky about who we hired, and we would try out just about any decent-looking woman who came by. All kinds ended up working for us; it wasn't just the young, poor, and helpless. Most of them were either Thai or Korean, and one of our biggest moneymakers was actually a sixty-year-old Korean woman. She wasn't ashamed to tell us her age because she looked like she was about thirty and had no trouble attracting men. She had had work done on just about every part of her body.

One of my favorite ladies was a woman who became a really good girlfriend of mine. She was Chinese and in her twenties, but she looked nineteen at most. Her name was Carole, and she had grown up in Chinatown with nine older brothers, all of them gang members. Her brothers looked out for her by controlling almost every aspect of her life. She was never allowed to date when she was growing up, so she got married really young, to escape her brothers' care, I guess, although we never talked about why. Why just wasn't a question that any of us asked about anything. "Why are we here?" "Why are we doing this?" If anyone wondered about these things, they never brought them up. Things just were the way they were and that was that.

Carole hated her husband. She would say things like "Ugh. It's Tuesday. I've got to go home and fuck my husband," like it was laundry day or something. She was hysterical like that. She was very innocent looking, almost like a little girl, but you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth. Carole worked only once in a while, and when she did, she would do maybe one or two customers and then go home. She didn't actually like sex very much. She was so small, she said it hurt her.

Carole never said why she came to us. Maybe it was her way of getting back at her husband or her brothers or all the men in her life. She didn't seem like she needed the money. Maybe she just wanted somewhere to go where people would accept her. Separate from the work area was a private area with a kitchen and a girls-only lounge. When they weren't working, the women would play cards and other games, eat meals together, or just sit around drinking tea and gossiping. From the beginning, the house was a place where ladies would gather and just hang out.

When I noticed how people liked to hang out at the brothel, I came up with another way to make money. As I said, I think I am kind of a born entrepreneur because I was always thinking about things like that. When I had nothing better to do, I often found myself at underground bars playing the gambling machines (the beginning of a little problem that would get me into some big trouble later on). I knew how much money I had lost to those machines, so I had a couple brought in for the girls to play while they waited for clients or for the clients to play while they waited for girls. They were a hit and eventually even became a bad habit for some of the girls, who never wanted to stop playing them.