Some Girls: My Life in a Harem

by Jillian Lauren

  She stormed off in a huff and later did an interview with Playboy, in which she described a date almost identical to ours and said that if she had been a man, she might have stabbed a woman for teasing her like that. Camille used the treatment to which this tease subjected her as an example of how some men are provoked into justifiable violence against women. And I thought it was just a lousy date.

  The performance piece I was writing kept growing and I did actually complete a few video segments of it. But, all told, the experience reminded me of a time I had helped a stripper friend of mine move a futon. As soon as I held up one corner of the futon, the other sagged to the ground. When we thought we had a good grip on it we’d walk a few steps and it would start to unravel. It took us about three hours to drag that thing ten blocks and up a flight of stairs. My theater piece was exactly like that. Every time I supported one end of it the other fell down. I knew it was no good but I had no idea how to fix it.

  Penn Jillette, the taller half of the magician duo Penn & Teller, lived in the loft below Lindsay and me. Long before I ever moved in with Lindsay, Penn and I had been friends. My moving into his building was one of those small-world moments. Penn’s computer-genius friend, Colin, made frequent trips up the stairs to hang out. Colin and I became, and remain, close friends. It was like living in a dorm. I’d ride the elevator down with computer problems or tuna sandwiches and then back up again to push the rug aside and get two-stepping lessons from Lindsay on the living-room floor.

  “Relax that arm, princess,” Lindsay would say. “Don’t make me feel like I’m wrestlin’ a gator.”

  Lindsay was like a surrogate father. He not only taught me to dance; he applied first aid to my garish fashion sense. He called my closet Victoria’s Slut Closet, and routinely pointed out to me that Jackie Kennedy wouldn’t be caught dead in the shoes I was wearing. I reminded him that my clothes had been bought for my career as a hooker and not as a first lady. He said that those kinds of rigid distinctions were only a failure of my imagination. I still occasionally wore trashy shoes, but Lindsay’s tutelage did bring my game up dramatically. He also got me to keep the house tidy, dragged me to the gym, and encouraged me to cook meals once in a while.

  Even a porn performance artist, a feminist sex activist, has to look at the facts eventually. It had been a year since I left Brunei—a year of changing my hair every month and buying sixteen pairs of boots at Barneys and a complete luggage set at Louis Vuitton (maybe not the Patti Smith-est of moves). It had been a year of cycling through designer jeans and picking up lunch tabs all over town, a year of sleeping in Pratesi sheets and cruising the flea markets for antique furniture I didn’t need.

  I wasn’t alone in my excess. That was what all the Brunei girls did. I told myself I was practically Warren Buffet-frugal compared with them. From the occasional phone calls I got from Delia, I knew that the minute the feet of the L.A. girls hit the L.A. soil, to a man they marched to Mercedes-Benz of Beverly Hills and bought the most expensive model on the showroom floor, usually in cream with a tan interior. They all bought L.V. luggage so why shouldn’t I? It was a staple, a loaf of bread, a quart of milk, right? After a year of this stupidity, the well wasn’t dry yet, but I could definitely see the bottom.

  The Foreman show had opened up doors for me and, if I seized my moment, there was a real chance that my acting career could take off. What would Patti Smith do? Patti Smith would step up and take what she deserved and knock everybody on their ass. They would hate her; they would love her. But they would all see her and no one would forget her.

  But every time I sat down to consider my options, I was distracted and fidgety. I wasn’t in the mood for seizing. I got tired and took a nap. Where had my old sense of relentless ambition gone? It had ebbed somewhere along the way. I tried to pinpoint the exact place where it had leaked out, figuring I could patch it and I’d immediately fill back up with the same drive that had kept me taking the bus into New York every Saturday all through high school in order to take acting and dance classes. When I looked, I saw there were so many holes I didn’t know where to start spackling.

  I was failing as an auteur. I watched hours of Amy Fisher on Court TV and took long walks up to Columbus Circle. On one of my less slothful days, I visited the Empire State Building. I could see it from my window and one morning I threw on my vintage leather coat and went to see what it looked like from the inside.

  On my way to the Empire State Building, I passed by Macy’s and took a sharp right turn on impulse. I went to the men’s department and walked to one of the cologne counters, where I sought out a bottle of Egoiste, Robin’s cologne. I picked up the bottle and sprayed it on the pulse point of each wrist, then waited until the alcohol evaporated before holding my wrist up to my nose. I felt a twinge, small but unmistakable.

  At the top of the Empire State Building, I looked down through the netting meant to catch pennies and whatever else people throw. The city looked like a diabolical rat maze, covered in soot and pockmarked with potholes. I put my wrist to my nose again and thought for some reason of Robin’s habit of saying “good girl” to me. It was demeaning that he’d talked to me like a five-year-old or a terrier but I had still kind of liked it. It had still felt like approval, almost like love. It had felt like a victory.

  The girl I was in New York might be closer to the real me, but the girl I’d been in Brunei had been purposeful, at least. I had felt powerful. I hadn’t been confronted with things like the prospect that the show I was writing was a failure. I hadn’t done things like getting an abortion, like hurting someone recklessly. I hadn’t succeeded at getting a good acting job and then still felt aimless. In Brunei, even if the course was hazardous, the rules were so simple, the goal so obvious.

  I had also spent a big chunk of my money in the year I’d been home, and somewhere along the way, I had gotten used to that money. I had built up a world that required it, even. Sex work has many pitfalls, and this is one of them. It’s the reason that the stripper putting herself through school so often turns out to be a myth. Sure, a lot of strippers start out putting themselves through school, but school starts to lose its appeal pretty quickly. Your sociology degree doesn’t qualify you for an entry-level job that can even come close to making you the kind of immediate cash with which you walk out of a club.

  But it’s more than the money. There’s a persona you create to fill in for you on strangers’ laps all day, or to lie forgotten between black silk sheets in a prince’s office bedroom. This persona is sexier, bolder, wilder, and inevitably feels less pain than the real you. If she doesn’t, you haven’t done a very good job inventing her. So maybe you start to visit that persona once in a while when you’re not at work. On weekends, you know, just when you’re being socially awkward at a party, or when a friend hurts your feelings or you’re out on a date and feeling vulnerable. And you find out that she helps you, that brazen stripper, that sophisticated call girl. So maybe you start to bring her out a little more often.

  Sex work is dangerous work. Yes, it’s dangerous for the obvious reasons. It exposes women to all kinds of exploitation by pimps and by glorified pimps dressed in suits and calling themselves club owners. It makes us an easy target for violence. It can put us at risk for contracting sexually transmitted diseases. But the subtler and more ubiquitous danger is that you won’t be able to tell the difference anymore between your work persona and yourself. And that girl who wears the thong so effortlessly in public might not be the one you want making major life decisions for you. But give her an inch and you know how the rest goes. She’s a stripper, after all. She’ll take all she can get. It’s her job.

  I didn’t tell myself that at the time. When I made my decision to go back to Brunei, I told myself I had spent nearly all my money and had forgotten to go to Paris. Just one more time back to Brunei and I’d do it right this time. I’d go to Paris and then I’d return and find a proper agent and in no time I’d be splashed across a marquis; I’d be a name rolling
up the screen, the very top of a list of credits. I told myself, too, that I missed Robin, that I had never said a proper good-bye. In retrospect, I realize that I didn’t miss Robin so much as I missed her, the girl in the penthouse suite, overlooking all of Kuala Lumpur, already a success, with nothing to do all day but dream.

  Colin came upstairs from Penn’s and did some last-minute tinkering on my computer as I packed. Months before, he had convinced me to get this wacky new thing called a laptop. Colin was doing his best to set up my computer so I could send e-mail from Brunei. I figured they’d probably confiscate the whole thing, but it wouldn’t hurt to try.

  “Do you think I’m making a mistake?” I asked Colin.

  Ever the pragmatist, he replied, “No. No way. Plenty of women suffer in the suburbs their whole life for some jerkoff’s money. You’re just taking your punishment up front. Then you can take the money and do whatever you want. This time just figure out what that is exactly and you’ll be golden.”

  In between our exchanges, Colin typed incredibly fast and talked on the phone to various clients at the same time.

  “You know,” he said. “The thing that kills me is that the Prince is purchasing so little of what he could have with you. I mean, he could say, ‘Write a play by Tuesday and stage a performance of it by Friday.’ ”

  “Not everyone wants to see my plays.”

  “But still, it’s all that money. It makes you boring.”

  “That’s true. It’s definitely boring.”

  “Can you write novels in your head while you’re sitting at the parties?”

  I thought about it. It hadn’t even occurred to me to write novels. But something about it appealed to me. It was kind of a good idea.

  “I don’t know. I could try. I could start with a short story.”

  “Try it. Write it in your head while you’re at the party, then write it down and e-mail it to me when you get back to the house at night. Don’t let the bastards make you boring.”

  The plane ascended and I watched the shining towers of my Emerald City turn into spindly toys. I set my watch ahead to Singapore time. It helps you to adjust on long plane rides if you set your watch ahead right at the beginning. All I had ever wanted my whole life was to move to New York and be an actor. And there was New York below me, growing smaller and smaller, along with my family and the friendships I had forged and the offers of real acting jobs. And somehow, I couldn’t wait until it was out of sight and there was nothing but twenty hours of blue.

  chapter 26

  I sleepwalked through the routine: New York to Frankfurt to Singapore to the Westin Stamford and a flight into Bandar Seri Begawan the next day. Ari told me I was to meet three newbies at the Westin and we’d have an extra day to adjust in Singapore before the final leg of the trip. Because Ari couldn’t come until a week later, I was meant to show them the ropes. She asked me to do her the favor of getting everyone through the airport in Bandar Seri Begawan and making sure they were all okay. She still trusted me. That was good.

  Last time, I had passed out as soon as I got to the Westin. This time, I decided to be social as part of my penance for staying away so long. I went to the hotel restaurant to meet the new girls: Gina, someone forgettable, and Sheila. I watched them tally up the value of my outfit as I approached the table. The only obvious high-ticket item I wore was my handbag. I had drawers full of Chanel and Hermes bags by this point. I could have worn a new one every day of the month. But otherwise I traveled in jeans and no makeup. The girls’ faces fell in disappointment when they saw me. All of them wore dresses and had faces pounded with eyeliner and lip gloss.

  When I hugged them hello, I began to get a sense of what Ari had meant about things changing in Brunei. These girls were savvier than the last crop; it hung about them like a perfume cloud. They looked like they had walked out of a Rampage dressing room and they smelled like the cosmetics department at Bloomie’s.

  They asked about the money right away. We had barely introduced ourselves and they were falling all over each other asking how much. How much do you make a week? How much do you get altogether? Do you get jewelry? I told them what people had told me: Don’t worry, you won’t be disappointed.

  Sheila was the most colorful of the bunch. She had a raspy voice and a ratty handbag. When she pulled out pictures of her one-year-old son, part of her purse’s torn lining flapped out over the side.

  “This is my son,” she told us over the omnipresent plates of satay and peanut sauce. As far as I’m concerned peanut sauce is one of Southeast Asia’s great contributions to the world.

  “Are you single?” she asked me, while they served our third round of drinks.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know if they already told you this, but I was a Penthouse Pet of the Year. I lived with the Gucciones. The Gucciones are like my family. So I’m no stranger to this kind of life.”

  “Do the Gucciones own a country?”

  “I get it. You’re funny. You’d love Bob junior. I’m gonna set you up with Bob junior when you get home. He lives in New York. You’re smart like Bob junior. He’d love you.”

  She regaled us with stories of the goings-on at the Guccione indoor pool until we all called it a night.

  The next day we did some bleary-eyed sightseeing. We went to the Singapore Zoo because it’s supposed to be so humane and gorgeous and all that. We dragged around in the steamy heat and petted baby elephants. Singaporeans and doughy Western tourists alike stared at Sheila’s cropped shirt and tight shorts. The other girls enjoyed the zoo, but I couldn’t; I never can. The gorillas make me so sad, with their human hands.

  When the four of us boarded Royal Brunei Airlines the next day, I told myself that the nauseous, sinking feeling I had was the jet lag.

  When we arrived at our guesthouse, I saw that Sheila, Gina, and what’s-her-name comprised only a small fraction of the new bevy of beauties. Of the last crew, only Delia was still there a year later, cheerful as ever and holding tight as she quietly built her bank account and planned for the future.

  Gone were the days of single rooms and unlimited phone time. There were two full houses of American girls, and Sheila and I were assigned to be roommates. In my first hour there, I already sensed the atmosphere was rowdier, more crowded, less tightly managed. I soon learned Sheila wasn’t the only girl with Penthouse bragging rights. Playmates and pageant queens and bathing-suit models abounded. When we crowded around the marble table for lunch, I looked around and thought, Is this it? This is a big bunch of Pets and Bunnies and calendar girls, an adolescent-male fantasy come to life, and this is all there is?

  They were just girls, real and flawed girls whose images had been smeared across the pages of magazines and airbrushed to look impossibly smooth and luscious. Maybe Robin thought the same thing. Maybe that’s why he kept ordering up more and summarily discarding them.

  This surge in the American population of the harem was the first in a series of steps indicating Robin’s progressive greed and decadence. I was witnessing the very first snow flurry of the avalanche that, years later, would roll right over Robin. By the time it did, I would be long gone and reading about it in the papers. I would be sitting on a friend’s couch in Los Angeles with my jaw in my lap as I watched Sheila blab to tabloid news reporters while topless pictures of me flashed across the screen, a digital smudge blurring my eyes and my boobs—an ineffective gesture toward concealing my identity.

  But that day I had only an inkling of the transformation that was happening to the world inside the palace gates. It threw me off. It was a world that had seemed so tightly regimented that I had thought it would never change.

  Some things did remain the same. I had been there for exactly one hour and was lying on the couch looking up at a lizard with his belly flattened against the skylight, when a guard showed up and told Delia and me to put on bikinis and go sunbathe by the upper pool. I slathered sunblock on my New York-pale skin and grabbed a towel. We zoomed up the familiar
hill in the golf cart. I practically glowed purple in the afternoon glare. I looked like I was under black light.

  “Where’s Fiona?”

  “Oh, sister. You’ve been gone a long time.”

  The story of Fiona went like this: After nearly a year of residence there, Fiona owned countless closets full of designer clothing, houses for herself and all her family back in the Philippines, and jewels to rival the Queen of England’s. On Christmas, Prince Jefri gave her a present of a million dollars cash and an engagement ring. This was supposedly the brass ring for which we were all reaching. All of us but Fiona, apparently.

  Fiona refused Robin’s proposal and took the first plane home with her clothes, her money, and her freedom. Her betrayal had beaten Serena’s by a mile. No one knew where Fiona lived or how to get in touch with her. I never saw her again, but I think of her sometimes. I think of her whenever I remember how I learned to really walk.

  I chose an ivory silk minidress to wear to the party that night. Through the silk, you could see the faint outline of my nude Cosabella thong, along with the outline of my tattoo. I studied myself in the mirror and questioned my judgment for the first time since I had gotten it. I had no idea what Robin would think of it. A pussy tattoo, for God’s sake—who gets one of those? What was I thinking? Would he be disgusted?

  In the party room, our little dominion had become so crowded that we were forced to shove our asses together on the ottomans. We balanced on the arms of the chairs. The really petite girls could fit two to an armchair by positioning themselves on the very edge of the cushions. Our section of the room had once looked like the first-class section of a plane compared to everyone else’s coach. Now we were all the same.