Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  For the first few years of his life, Johnny clung unceasingly to my mother’s leg, while I slept in the T-shirts from my father’s company softball team. We had chosen sides. I loved Johnny, but I loved being my father’s favorite even more.

  Now Johnny is Hasidic and lives in Jerusalem. He spends his days davening at the shul and occasionally works as a migrant olive picker or a seller of organic herbal tonics. He dreams of a small plot of land, a herd of goats, and some olive trees of his own. In his world, men and women eat in separate rooms. It is a world with its own logic, but it’s not a world with much of a place for me. We still talk on the phone once in a while. When I can remember, I send his son birthday presents.

  I like to blame Johnny for the distance between us. He’s the one with the wide-brimmed black hat and the archaic belief system, not I. But the truth is that when things took a bad turn, I ran from our house and I left him. I promised him I would come back for him and I never did. That Thanksgiving, I went downstairs and sat by myself on the couch and didn’t listen when he tried to tell me that my father had hit him over the head with the telephone the night before.

  My mother bustled between the dining room and the kitchen, engaged in the mysterious arts of table setting and perfectly timed food preparation. In the living room, my father played his prized Steinway baby grand. He tirelessly progressed through a medley of show tunes played halfway through at three times their intended speed. He always played as if there were a more important song somewhere on a constantly receding horizon, which he never quite reached. It was to that same off-tempo music that I first started belting out the songs from South Pacific and twirling around the living room.

  As I had twirled, my father had called me Katrinka, but I’d never heard of the Powerful Katrinka. I kept dancing. I was the Graceful Katrinka, the Talented Katrinka, born of a woman so ethereal she’d simply floated away.

  After escaping to New York, crossing back over the border to New Jersey was like putting a plastic bag over my head. The longer I spent there, the less oxygen I had. I was running out of air, suffocated by the house itself and the music and the family portraits and the family in person and the boyfriend upstairs who had seen it all. Maybe that was why I made the decision to pull the card Taylor had given me out of my wallet. I was trying to poke a hole in the bag, trying to breathe. The Crown Club seemed like a pretty sharp tool and it was the best I could think of right then. The music was loud enough upstairs so that no one would hear me. I didn’t think anyone would really answer the Crown Club phone on the afternoon of Thanksgiving, but, of course, someone did.

  chapter 4

  When I arrived for my interview at the Midtown brownstone, a petite, short-haired brunette in a sweat suit and bare feet answered the door with a smile.

  “Diane’s on the phone in the office. Come on in and wait a minute. I’m Julie.”

  I shook her hand and introduced myself. I assumed we were using real names for purposes of introductions. I’m not sure what made me think that. In strip clubs, I would use my stage name from the minute I walked in the door. Maybe it was the fact that the name Julie was so prosaic. Although you never know the logic behind another girl’s working persona. Maybe Julie was working a small-town-girl angle but her real name was Jezebel.

  I followed her down a short hallway to where Taylor and another girl sat in a living room decorated with a monochrome vanilla-ice-cream color scheme. The walls, carpets, couches, cushions, and Formica wall unit were all vanilla. The only splash of color was an orange Georgia O’Keeffe poppy poster that hung on the wall over the couch. My grandmother used to have a small, framed picture of the identical poppy in her hallway. Underneath the picture had been a quote from O’Keeffe: “Nobody sees a flower, really . . . to see takes time. Like to have a friend takes time.” Georgia’s poor poppies—rendered invisible yet again, mass-produced and hung on the walls of Midwestern doctor’s offices and Midtown escort agencies.

  Julie plopped down next to a lank-haired, model-thin girl with a vague Eastern European accent. The model introduced herself and then immediately returned to watching The Golden Girls. The room smelled like Chinese food, though none was in evidence. Taylor popped up from the chair she was sitting on, trotted over and embraced me.

  “I’m so glad you came,” she said, turning to the girls on the couch. “This is that girl I met on that movie I did.”

  They looked at her blankly. All three of the girls wore sweats, but their hair was coiffed and they wore makeup and jewelry. They reminded me of ice skaters waiting backstage.

  Beyond the living room was a formal dining room that was set up as an office. A long table lined with multiple Rolodexes and phones was pushed against one wall. Along the other stood four off-white filing cabinets. At the far end was a window overlooking the city, a square of twinkling black velvet in a sea of otherwise relentless cream. Two rolling desk chairs faced the table. In one sat a pink-cheeked, round-faced woman wearing a plaid headband with a bow. A stuffed Christmas reindeer already decorated her workstation. She looked over at Taylor and me and waved, giving us the five-minutes sign. Next to her, facing the window and talking on the phone in a loud, irritated voice was what looked like a beige pantsuit crowned with a mushroom cap of brassy hair. The pantsuit sounded like it was from Queens. Diane, I presumed.

  Taylor used the next few minutes to begin my initiation. She gathered me into a corner and chatted conspiratorially.

  “Where are your clothes?”

  I had worn a green crushed-velvet cap-sleeved minidress, which I estimated to be the classiest thing I owned, along with fishnets and a pair of two-inch pumps my parents had bought me years before to wear to temple. They were the only heels I owned that didn’t have a platform the height of the OED. I still carried my black overcoat over my arm.

  “I’m wearing them.”

  “Really? That’s all you have?”

  Taylor marched me to the closet and pulled out three neatly pressed suits, the skirts short but tasteful, the jackets tailored. I guessed it was the business attire of the ice skaters.

  “You never want to look like a hooker when you’re walking through a hotel lobby. Suit or dress, sexy but conservative, three-inch heels, thigh-high stockings, expensive underwear.”

  I owned none of these things.

  “But you’re not horrible,” she said. “I’ve seen worse.”

  At this point Diane had ended her call and beckoned to me from the office. Diane’s first glance at me contained a whole conversation. She was no Candice Bergen. Pugnacious and brusque, she baldly assessed me like the merchandise I was destined to become. After asking me a few initial questions, she fired off a description of me to the phone girl with the plaid headband, whom she introduced as Ellie. Ellie wrote down Diane’s dictation on an index card.

  “Hair: auburn. Eyes: hazel. Thirty-six, twenty-four, thirty . . . nine. Might as well play up the big ass. Eighteen-year-old, curvaceous theater student with a face like . . . Winona Ryder. What will you do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will you do nurse fantasy?”

  “Um, yeah.”

  With each answer, Ellie checked a box on her card.

  “Dominatrix?”

  “Sure.”

  “Girl on girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maid?”

  “I don’t have to actually clean, right?”

  To Ellie, she said, “That’s a yes.”

  “Private dance?”

  Diane turned to Ellie and talked over my final answer, saying, “Will do whatever.”

  Ellie nodded and checked a final box. Was there a box for whatever?

  “Will do whatever” was pretty much accurate. In the peep shows and strip clubs I’d worked at, I had done more unseemly deeds for money before I turned eighteen than most women would ever contemplate in their whole lives. What was one more? But escort work was different, wasn’t it? A tiny misgiving fluttered somewhere under my occipital bone. Cal
l it whatever euphemism you chose; this was fucking for money we were talking about, right? I had been the embodiment of confidence until I stood in the middle of that room in my trashy dress while Ellie checked the “whatever” box. I was flooded by a cascade of anxieties. What if I got a disease? What if it was disgusting? What if I got raped? Got killed? What if this next step would create a fissure in the landscape of my heart that could never be repaired?

  “You bring your ID and passport?”

  I had been told that my interview would require two forms of ID. I handed them over.

  Luckily, I had obtained a passport as a gift to myself for my eighteenth birthday a few months earlier. I had been ensnared by tales of Paris in the twenties and it was my dearest hope to get my ass there at all costs. I knew the Paris of seventy years before was long gone. Nevertheless, the call of that city resonated in my bones. The name alone could send me into hours of happy daydreams. I wanted to drop down right in the center of Paris, where I would drink wine and write poetry and let Paris infuse my soul with continental urbanity and sophistication. I had hoped to hand my passport to a customs official at Charles De Gaulle International Airport. Instead I was handing it to Diane at the Crown Club, but it was a mere stopover, I told myself, a brief detour.

  Diane gave me the same shtick about my clothing that Taylor had and I vowed to go get myself some class as soon as I could afford to. I was catapulted into the job within a couple of hours. Taylor informed me that I was lucky to get a call on my first night of work. I was going to do well, she assured me, if for no other reason than my age. I was the youngest girl there and have always had the advantage of an innocent appearance. My most drastic attempts to be punk and hard never fooled anyone—I am a nice girl to the bone. It has served me well in my not-so-nice endeavors.

  So that first night I got a call to go to the apartment of a well-known talk radio host. Ellie, who was basically a plump, cookie-baking, Laura Ashley-wearing assistant pimp, taught me how to use my own little credit-card machine and gave me specific instructions about how and when the transaction was to take place (immediately upon arrival), as well as the rules for reporting in. Before I left for my first “date,” Taylor took me into the bedroom, sat me down on the bed, and gave me a few pointers. She had taken me under her wing.

  “The whole trick is, how much can you get for how little you give, get it? You want to turn one hour into two into three and to make a blowjob seem better than sex.”

  Like Scheherazade, we looked for the story that was so irresistible they had to keep us around for another hour to hear the end.

  “Some nights suck,” she said. “Some nights we hang out here with no calls at all, but some nights are eight-hour limousine windfalls with coked-up, limp-dicked, out-of-town businessmen. It evens out. Always, always use a condom. Put it on with your mouth and he won’t even notice.”

  For my escort name, I picked Elizabeth because it sounded real and because it had been, along with Janice and Eduardo among others, one of the aliases I had used when playing make-believe games as a kid. I had been Elizabeth the Queen of France, Elizabeth and the Three Bears, Elizabeth the seventh Brady kid, Elizabeth the French Resistance fighter.

  Add to that résumé Elizabeth the call girl, Elizabeth the cheater. Sean and I didn’t have the kind of relationship in which we checked in with each other every five minutes, so I hadn’t exactly lied to him; I had just neglected to mention my whereabouts that evening. But if I stuck with the job some hard-core lying would definitely be called for. Taylor said that the girls sometimes told their boyfriends they had jobs as night temps. Waitressing was a risky lie, because your boyfriend could show up to surprise you at work and then you’d be screwed. I supposed that I could let Sean assume I was still dancing at the club. But though I had been a stripper, until that point I hadn’t been much of a liar. To my parents, yes, but not to my friends. Not to my boyfriend, my kind boyfriend with the elegant hands.

  Sean had introduced me to Elvis Costello. As I left that night for my first trick, the lyrics to “Almost Blue” played in my head. There’s a part of me that’s always true. Always. The rest of me—Elizabeth, eighteen-year-old curvaceous theater student with a face like Winona Ryder’s, will do whatever—stepped into the street alone and hailed a cab to an uptown high-rise.

  It felt like a movie with a good jazz soundtrack. Like a Woody Allen New York love song. One of the characters is a young, lost actress who finds herself in a cab headed uptown to turn a trick with a radio personality. Starring Mariel Hemingway. Starring me. The film was already rolling. I couldn’t stop to reconsider.

  I stepped out of the cab, my breath visible in the cold night, and plunged my hands into my pockets before walking past a doorman, who nodded politely. I rode the elevator to the almost-top floor and knocked on a door. Instantaneously, the radio host appeared in the doorway. I recognized his face from ads for his show that I had seen plastered on the insides of subway cars. He was holding a sweating, half-empty drink in his hand and his paisley robe hung open, the belt coming undone and revealing a pair of silk boxers underneath.

  “You must be Elizabeth. Can I get you a drink, sweetheart?”

  I readily accepted his offer for a drink, totally ignoring Taylor’s suggestion to stay sober. I wanted to be classy and in control like her, but I’d have to work up to it. Nothing sounded better than the comforting burn of a drink. I followed him into his apartment, where he took my coat, threw it over the back of a chair, and indicated a black leather sofa. I sat while he freshened his vodka tonic and poured mine.

  The apartment was a classic bachelor pad with an elaborate entertainment center, five tall CD towers, and a panoramic view of the city. His back still turned, the radio host fired questions at me. Habit, I guess. He asked me how old I was and what I did when I wasn’t doing “this.” I told him I was an eighteen-year-old theater student at NYU.

  “You’re older than eighteen, sweetheart. I can tell. It’s my job to read people.” His eyes sparkled with self-satisfaction as he sat down next to me and handed me my drink, his hand resting on my thigh. “You don’t have to lie to me. Now, how old are you really?”

  He seemed so pleased with his intuitive gifts that I thought it best not to argue.

  “You’re right. I’m twenty. I’m graduating next year.”

  It occurred to me as we chatted more that I was going to be good at this. I was discovering a new talent. I had spent all this time in my acting training trying to uncover the authenticity in every moment, trying to lay myself bare. Here, I was going for pure artifice, the exact opposite result, but I was using the same skills of listening and improvisation.

  I had been a good stripper—a natural, everyone always told me. I was never the prettiest or the girl with the best body, but I had that something that made people want to look at me. More important, I had that something that makes people feel seen themselves. Lonely guys couldn’t get enough of it. It was easy for me; it was acting, which was my thing, after all. And I suspected that I was going to be the same way as a call girl. A natural.

  The radio host was very impressed that I was a theater student, which I had actually ceased to be six months before.

  “I went to Yale drama,” he told me. “You should consider it.”

  “Good idea. I’ll definitely consider it.”

  “You like Sam Shepard?”

  “I love Sam Shepard.”

  “I’m a close personal friend of Sam Shepard. I could get you an audition one day.”

  He gave me the tour of his hallway gallery, which consisted of black-and-white pictures of a younger him in Off-Broadway productions. All of them hung slightly crooked, as if someone had banged into the wall hard enough to shake it—maybe he himself, staggering from the bedroom to the bar.

  He grabbed my hand and led me toward the bedroom.

  “There’s something really cool I want to show you in here.”

  Please don’t let it be a bottle of chloroform and a set o
f antique surgical instruments, I thought. I started to ask for another drink, but he didn’t give me a chance. With a flourish, he opened the door of one of his bedroom closets and yanked me inside. It was a walk-in, lined floor to ceiling with cowboy boots of all kinds.

  “Wow. Cool.”

  “I’m famous for wearing cowboy boots,” he said. “It’s my trademark. Would you like to undress?”

  I reached behind me for my zipper and a chill shot up the back of my legs, the kind you get when you’re caught doing something wrong.

  “No, in here,” he said, and indicated the bedroom. The bedroom had gray walls and gray berber carpeting. A garnet-red bed was the only furnishing, and it faced a set of mirrored closet doors. He sat on the edge of it and watched as I took off my dress and stockings and folded them, dropping them in a pile in the corner. The fishnets had embossed a pink honeycomb pattern in the flesh of my thighs. I put my heels back on and left my thong in place, planning to hold on to it until the last possible moment.

  I stood awkwardly in front of him while he looked at me for a brief moment with no notable reaction and then began fiddling in the drawer of his nightstand. It was one thing to be naked and half drunk on stage with music and rosy lights and a rowdy audience. It was another entirely to stand under track lighting in silence in a stranger’s bedroom. My arms felt long and awkward. I didn’t know where to put my hands. I opted for my hips, with my feet in beauty-contest position. It seemed a bit stagy, but it was the best I could come up with.

  “Have you ever done Rush?” he asked. He found what he was looking for. It was a bottle of poppers.

  “I’m not in the mood, but you go ahead.”

  I would have juggled chain saws for another drink right then, but I didn’t want to be passing out on the job. It was the first time I had seen amyl nitrate outside the dance floor of a gay club. Maybe this guy was gay? I had learned enough from fantasies revealed to me by customers at the club to know that there are many shades of gay.