by Studs Terkel
“I viewed all girls as being threats. That’s what we were all taught. You can’t be friends with another woman, she might take your man. If you tell her anything about how you really feel, she’ll use it against you. You smile at other girls and you spend time with them when there’s nothing better to do, but you’d leave any girl sitting anywhere if you had an opportunity to go somewhere with a man. Because the most important thing in life is the way men feel about you.”
How could you forget your first trick? (Laughs.) We took a cab to midtown Manhattan, we went to a penthouse. The guy up there was quite well known. What he really wanted to do was watch two women make love, and then he wanted to have sex with me. It was barely sex. He was almost finished by the time we started. He barely touched me and we were finished.
Of course, we faked it, the woman and me. The ethic was: You don’t participate in a sexual act with another woman if a trick is watching. You always fake it. You’re putting something over on him and he’s paying for something he didn’t really get. That’s the only way you can keep any sense of self-respect.
The call girl ethic is very strong. You were the lowest of the low if you allowed yourself to feel anything with a trick. The bed puts you on their level. The way you maintain your integrity is by acting all the way through. It’s not too far removed from what most American women do—which is to put on a big smile and act.
It was a tremendous kick. Here I was doing absolutely nothing, feeling nothing, and in twenty minutes I was going to walk out with fifty dollars in my pocket. That just made me feel absolutely marvelous. I came downtown. I can’t believe this! I’m not changed, I’m the same as I was twenty minutes ago, except that now I have fifty dollars in my pocket. It really was tremendous status. How many people could make fifty dollars for twenty minutes’ work? Folks work for eighty dollars take-home pay. I worked twenty minutes for fifty dollars clear, no taxes, nothing! I was still in school, I was smoking grass, I was shooting heroin, I wasn’t hooked yet, and I had money. It was terrific.
After that, I made it my business to let my friend know that I was available for more of these situations. (Laughs.) She had good connections. Very shortly I linked up with a couple of others who had a good call book.
Books of phone numbers are passed around from call girl to call girl. They’re numbers of folks who are quite respectable and with whom there is little risk. They’re not liable to pull a knife on you, they’re not going to cheat you out of money. Businessmen and society figures. There’s three or four groups. The wealthy executive, who makes periodic trips into the city and is known to several girls. There’s the social figure, whose name appear quite regularly in the society pages and who’s a regular once-a-week John. Or there’s the quiet, independently wealthy type. Nobody knows how they got their money. I know one of them made his money off munitions in World War II. Then there’s the entertainer. There’s another crowd that runs around the night spots, the 21 Club . . .
These were the people whose names you saw in the paper almost every day. But I knew what they were really like. Any John who was obnoxious or aggressive was just crossed out of your book. You passed the word around that this person was not somebody other people should call.
We used to share numbers—standard procedure. The book I had I got from a guy who got it from a very good call girl. We kept a copy of that book in a safe deposit box. The standard procedure was that somebody new gave half of what they got the first time for each number. You’d tell them: “Call so-and-so, that’s a fifty-dollar trick.” They would give you twenty-five dollars. Then the number was theirs. My first book, I paid half of each trick to the person who gave it to me. After that, it was my book.
The book had the name and phone number coded, the price, what the person wants, and the contact name. For four years I didn’t turn a trick for less than fifty dollars. They were all fifty to one hundred dollars and up for twenty minutes, an hour. The understanding is: it doesn’t get conducted as a business transaction. The myth is that it’s a social occasion.
You’re expected to be well dressed, well made up, appear glad to see the man. I would get a book from somebody and I would call and say, “I’m a friend of so-and-so’s, and she thought it would be nice if we got together.” The next move was his. Invariably he’d say, “Why don’t we do that? Tonight or tomorrow night. Why don’t you come over for a drink?” I would get very carefully dressed and made up . . .
There’s a given way of dressing in that league—that’s to dress well but not ostentatiously. You have to pass doormen, cabdrivers. You have to look as if you belong in those buildings on Park Avenue or Central Park West. You’re expected not to look cheap, not to look hard. Youth is the premium. I was quite young, but I looked older, so I had to work very hard at looking my age. Most men want girls who are eighteen. They really want girls who are younger, but they’re afraid of trouble.
Preparations are very elaborate. It has to do with beauty parlors and shopping for clothes and taking long baths and spending money on preserving the kind of front that gives you a respectable address and telephone and being seen at the right clubs and drinking at the right bars. And being able to read the newspapers faithfully, so that not only can you talk about current events, you can talk about the society columns as well.
It’s a social ritual. Being able to talk about what is happening and learn from this great master, and be properly respectful and know the names that he mentions. They always drop names of their friends, their contacts, and their clients. You should recognize these. Playing a role . . .
At the beginning I was very excited. But in order to continue I had to turn myself off. I had to disassociate who I was from what I was doing.
It’s a process of numbing yourself. I couldn’t associate with people who were not in the life—either the drug life or the hustling life. I found I couldn’t turn myself back on when I finished working. When I turned myself off, I was numb—emotionally, sexually numb.
At first I felt like I was putting one over on all the other poor slobs that would go to work at eight-thirty in the morning and come home at five. I was coming home at four in the morning and I could sleep all day. I really thought a lot of people would change places with me because of the romantic image: being able to spend two hours out, riding cabs, and coming home with a hundred dollars. I could spend my mornings doing my nails, going to the beauty parlor, taking long baths, going shopping . . .
It was usually two tricks a night. That was easily a hundred, a hundred and a quarter. I always had money in my pocket. I didn’t know what the inside of a subway smelled like. Nobody traveled any other way except by cab. I ate in all the best restaurants and I drank in all the best clubs. A lot of people wanted you to go out to dinner with them. All you had to do was be an ornament.
Almost all the call girls I knew were involved in drugs. The fast life, the night hours. At after-hours clubs, if you’re not a big drinker, you usually find somebody who has cocaine, ’cause that’s the big drug in those places. You wake up at noon, there’s not very much to do till nine or ten that night. Everybody else is at work, so you shoot heroin. After a while the work became a means of supplying drugs, rather than drugs being something we took when we were bored.
The work becomes boring because you’re not part of the life. You’re the part that’s always hidden. The doormen smirk when you come in, ‘cause they know what’s going on. The cabdriver, when you give him a certain address—he knows exactly where you’re going when you’re riding up Park Avenue at ten o’clock at night, for Christ sake. You leave there and go back—to what? Really, to what? To an emptiness. You’ve got all this money in your pocket and nobody you care about.
When I was a call girl I looked down on streetwalkers. I couldn’t understand why anybody would put themselves in that position. It seemed to me to be hard work and very dangerous. What I was doing was basically riskless. You never had to worry about disease. These were folks who you know took care of them
selves and saw the doctor regularly. Their apartments were always immaculate and the liquor was always good. They were always polite. You didn’t have to ask them for money first. It was always implicit: when you were ready to leave, there would be an envelope under the lamp or there’d be something in your pocketbook. It never had to be discussed.
I had to work an awful lot harder for the same money when I was a streetwalker. I remember having knives pulled on me, broken bottles held over my head, being raped, having my money stolen back from me, having to jump out of a second-story window, having a gun pointed at me.
As a call girl, I had lunch at the same places society women had lunch. There was no way of telling me apart from anybody else in the upper tax bracket. I made my own hours, no more than three or so hours of work an evening. I didn’t have to accept calls. All I had to do was play a role.
As a streetwalker, I didn’t have to act. I let myself show the contempt I felt for the tricks. They weren’t paying enough to make it worth performing for them. As a call girl, I pretended I enjoyed it sexually. You have to act as if you had an orgasm. As a streetwalker, I didn’t. I used to lie there with my hands behind my head and do mathematics equations in my head or memorize the keyboard typewriter.
It was strictly a transaction. No conversation, no acting, no myth around it, no romanticism. It was purely a business transaction. You always asked for your money in front. If you could get away without undressing totally, you did that.
It’s not too different than the distinction between an executive secretary and somebody in the typing pool. As an executive secretary you really identify with your boss. When you’re part of the typing pool, you’re a body, you’re hired labor, a set of hands on the typewriter. You have nothing to do with whoever is passing the work down to you. You do it as quickly as you can.
What led you to the streets?
My drug habit. It got a lot larger. I started looking bad. All my money was going for drugs. I didn’t have any money to spend on keeping myself up and going to beauty parlors and having a decent address and telephone.
If you can’t keep yourself up, you can’t call on your old tricks. You drop out of circulation. As a call girl, you have to maintain a whole image. The trick wants to know he can call you at a certain number and you have to have a stable address. You must look presentable, not like death on a soda cracker.
I looked terrible. When I hit the streets, I tried to stick to at least twenty dollars and folks would laugh. I needed a hundred dollars a night to maintain a drug habit and keep a room somewhere. It meant turning seven or eight tricks a night. I was out on the streets from nine o’clock at night till four in the morning. I was taking subways and eating in hamburger stands.
For the first time I ran the risk of being busted. I was never arrested as a call girl. Every once in a while a cop would get hold of somebody’s book. They would call one of the girls and say, “I’m a friend of so-and-so’s.” They would try to trap them. I never took calls from people I didn’t know. But on the streets, how do you know who you’re gonna pick up?
As a call girl, some of my tricks were upper echelon cops, not patrolmen. Priests, financiers, garment industry folks, bigtimers. On the street, they ranged from junior executive types, blue-collar workers, upwardly striving postal workers, college kids, suburban white collars who were in the city for their big night, restaurant workers . . .
You walk a certain area, usually five or six blocks. It has a couple of restaurants, a couple of bars. There’s the step in-between: hanging out in a given bar, where people come to you. I did that briefly.
You’d walk very slowly, you’d stop and look in the window. Somebody would come up to you. There was a ritual here too. The law says in order to arrest a woman for prostitution, she has to mention money and she has to tell you what she’ll do for the money. We would keep within the letter of the law, even though the cops never did.
Somebody would come up and say, “It’s a nice night, isn’t it?” “Yes.” They’d say, “Are you busy?” I’d say, “Not particularly.” “Would you like to come with me and have a drink?” You start walking and they say, “I have fifteen dollars or twelve dollars and I’m very lonely.” Something to preserve the myth. Then they want you to spell out exactly what you’re willing to do for the money.
I never approached anybody on the street. That was the ultimate risk. Even if he weren’t a cop, he could be some kind of supersquare, who would call a cop. I was trapped by cops several times.
The first one didn’t even trap me as a trick. It was three in the morning. I was in Chinatown. I ran into a trick I knew. We made contact in a restaurant. He went home and I followed him a few minutes later. I knew the address. I remember passing a banana truck. It didn’t dawn on me that it was strange for somebody to be selling bananas at three in the morning. I spent about twenty minutes with my friend. He paid me. I put the money in my shoe. I opened the door and got thrown back against the wall. The banana salesman was a vice squad cop. He’d stood on the garbage can to peer in the window. I got three years for that one.
I was under age. I was four months short of twenty-one. They sent me to what was then called Girls’ Term Court. They wouldn’t allow me a lawyer because I wasn’t an adult, so it wasn’t really a criminal charge. The judge said I was rehabilitable. Instead of giving me thirty days, he gave me three years in the reformatory. It was very friendly of him. I was out on parole a couple of times before I’d get caught and sent back.
I once really got trapped. It was about midnight and a guy came down the street. He said he was a postal worker who just got off the shift. He told me how much money he had and what he wanted. I took him to my room. The cop isn’t supposed to undress. If you can describe the color of his shorts, it’s an invalid arrest. Not only did he show me the color of his shorts, he went to bed with me. Then he pulled a badge and a gun and he busted me.
He lied to me. He told me he was a narc and he didn’t want to bust me for hustling. If I would tell him who was dealing in the neighborhood, he’d cut me loose. I lied to him, but he won. He got me to walk out of the building past all my friends and when we got to the car, he threw me in. (Laughs.) It was great fun. I did time for that—close to four years.
What’s the status. of the streetwalker in prison?
It’s fine. Everybody there had been hustling. It’s status in reverse. Anybody who comes in saying things like they could never hustle is looked down on as being somewhat crazy.
She speaks of a profound love she had for a woman whom she’d met in prison; of her nursing her lover after the woman had become blind.
“I was out of the country for a couple of years. I worked. a house in Mexico. It had heavy velour curtains—a Mexican version of a French whorehouse. There was a reception area, where the men would come and we’d parade in front of them.
“The Mexicans wanted American girls. The Americans wanted Mexican girls. So I didn’t get any American tricks. I had to give a certain amount to the house for each trick I turned and anything I negotiated over that amount was mine. It was far less than anything I had taken in the States.
“I was in great demand even though I wasn’t a blonde. A girl friend of mine worked there two nights. She was Norwegian and very blonde. Every trick who came in wanted her. Her head couldn’t handle it all. She quit after two nights. So I was the only American.
“That was really hard work. The Mexicans would play macho. American tricks will come as quickly as they can. Mexicans will hold back and make me work for my money. I swear to God they were doing multiplication tables in their heads to keep from having an orgasm. I would use every trick I knew to get them to finish. It was crazy!
“I was teaching school at the same time. I used Alice in Wonderland as the text in my English class. During the day I tutored English for fifth-and sixth-grade kids. In the evening, I worked in the call house.
“The junk down there was quite cheap and quite good. My habit was quite large. I love
d dope more than anything else around. After a while I couldn’t differentiate between working and not working. All men were tricks, all relationships were acting. I was completely turned off.”
She quit shooting dope the moment she was slugged, brutally beaten by a dealer who wanted her. This was her revelatory experience. “It was the final indignity. I’d had tricks pulling broken bottles on me, I’d been in razor fights, but nobody had ever hit me.” It was a threat to her status. “I was strong. I could handle myself. A tough broad. This was threatened, so . . . ”
I can’t talk for women who were involved with pimps. That was where I always drew the line. I always thought pimps were lower than pregnant cockroaches. I didn’t want anything to do with them. I was involved from time to time with some men. They were either selling dope or stealing, but they were not depending on my income. Nor were they telling me to get my ass out on the street. I never supported a man.
As a call girl I got satisfaction, an unbelievable joy—perhaps perverted —in knowing what these reputable folks were really like. Being able to open a newspaper every morning, read about this pillar of society, and know what a pig he really was. The tremendous kick in knowing that I didn’t feel anything, that I was acting and they weren’t. It’s sick, but no sicker than what every woman is taught, all right?
I was in control with every one of those relationships. You’re vulnerable if you allow yourself to be involved sexually. I wasn’t. They were. I called it. Being able to manipulate somebody sexually, I could determine when I wanted that particular transaction to end. ’Cause I could make the guy come. I could play all kinds of games. See? It was a tremendous sense of power.
