Ordeal

by Linda Lovelace

  By late afternoon I still hadn’t come up with a specific plan of action. All I knew was that I would have to get away from Florida. Just before dinner my mother said she wanted to talk to me.

  “Chuck has been calling all day,” she said. “I’ve talked to him a few times now and all I know for sure is that he really loves you.”

  “Mother, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, you never think that I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’ve been married a good long time, longer than you’ve been alive, and after all this time I guess I know a thing or two about husbands and wives. You don’t want to forget that he’s your husband and you’re his wife. No matter what little difficulties you’ve been having, you should be able to work them out.”

  “Little difficulties? Little difficulties!”

  “Chuck told me everything,” my mother said. “He told me enough so that I know this is just a lovers’ quarrel.”

  All day I had been thinking about how I could tell my parents what was going on in my life. I felt that I should break it to them gently. Well, all those plans just flew out the window. I laid the situation flat-out, using the bluntest words that I knew.

  “Mom, Chuck has beaten me bloody,” I began. “He has held a gun to my head and made me do awful things. He has forced me to have sex with women and other men. And now he is talking about making me have sex with animals. He has made me pose for dirty pictures and he is turning me into a prostitute. He is always threatening to kill me. He has even threatened to kill you and Daddy.”

  “But, Linda, he’s your husband.”

  “Mother, you’re not hearing me. You’re not hearing a word that I’m saying.”

  “Well, let me tell you something else,” she said. “Chuck happens to be on his way over here right this minute. He should be here any time now, and I want you to remember one thing. He’s your husband and you’re his wife.”

  “I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to go.”

  “Linda, he’ll be here in just a second.”

  “Mom!”

  “He promised me! He promised me that he would never make you do anything wrong again.”

  I got up to go.

  “Mom, you just don’t understand a thing.”

  “Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “Chuck told me everything. He also told me that he was sorry for anything bad that happened, and he doesn’t know what came over him.”

  The doorbell was ringing. My mother opened the door and Chuck was there, all dressed up the way he had dressed for his trial. He smiled as my mother led the two of us into a room.

  “I’m leaving the two of you alone to talk things out,” she said.

  Chuck and I were alone then. Well, not quite alone. My sister’s little boy came into the room and starting playing with his toy trucks. Chuck showed me the bulge in his trouser pocket.

  “I’m going to shoot this little boy in his fucking head,” he said, still smiling. “If you don’t get up and come along with me, this little boy will die first.”

  “My father will—”

  “Your father will die next,” he said. “When he comes through that door, he will get a bullet between his eyes. Then your mother and your cunt-sister, I’ll blow them all away. Maybe then, when they’re all fucking dead, you’ll decide to come along with me. Maybe not.”

  I followed him then through the rest of the house and out the front door. My mother was beaming.

  “See, Linda,” she said, “I knew you two kids could work things out.”

  People always ask me why I never called the police. It seemed to me that the system would never work for me, only against me. Then, too, I believed Chuck’s totally absurd story that a wife could not charge a husband with a crime. The one time I did bring in the police—this was much later on—I discovered that that totally absurd story could also be true.

  Now I was Chuck Traynor’s prisoner and Phil Mandina’s meal ticket. Since he would be handling my case up in New York, Mandina suddenly decided that I was socially acceptable. When he took his girlfriend Barbara up to North Carolina to look over a piece of investment property, we were invited along for the ride.

  We flew up in the lawyer’s private plane, a twin-engined Cessna. Barbara was a beautician, a little on the plump side, with dirty blonde hair. Apparently beauticians didn’t spend much time working on their own hair. But at least she was a nice dresser. Barbara wore matching outfits or cocktail dresses while I was wearing jeans and insulated thermal shirts. Mandina favored vested suits, and Chuck looked like a refugee from an army-navy store window.

  Although Chuck and I were never well dressed, it only became a problem when we were out of our element. And this weekend we were in a fancy resort hotel filled with potential investors from all over the country. I felt self-conscious from the beginning, and Chuck didn’t help matters at all when he gave me my standard public-appearance briefing.

  “Listen, there’s going to be a lot of people down there for dinner,” he said, “and I don’t want to see you drifting away. Don’t go to the john without me; don’t even fucking ask. If you’ve got to go, we’ll come back up to the room here. I don’t want to see you talking to no strangers. Don’t say nothing to no one. Some clown asks you a question, you don’t know shit.”

  This speech, with minor variations, was given to me whenever we were to be in the company of strangers. I must’ve come off like the world’s dumbest human being. I was allowed to say, “This food tastes nice” or “The weather is nice today” but that was about the extent of my social conversation. I’ve got to wonder what other people thought. And what on earth did they think when they saw me asking Chuck’s permission to go to the bathroom?

  After the dinner that first night, the four of us—Chuck, myself, Mandina and Barbara—got together in one of the bedrooms. The two men were drinking Scotch and passing around joints. Then they got into a bragging contest; they each claimed to be the world’s greatest hypnotist. Mandina said he could hypnotize Barbara into doing anything he wanted. Chuck told them how he had hypnotized me into the deep-throat techniques.

  “She can take the whole thing in her mouth,” he said. “She can swallow the whole thing.”

  “Oh, Phil tried to get me to do that,” Barbara giggled. “But I could never manage it. I think Phil’s just too much man for me.”

  This was the level of conversation that night. And before we were through, the two men decided to demonstrate their prowess as hypnotists. Mandina put Barbara under and gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion: “When you wake up, you are going to be very thirsty. You’re going to feel like you’re in the middle of the desert, and you’re going to run into the bathroom for a drink of water.”

  After awakening, Barbara fluttered her eyes, a couple of times and then made a dash for the bathroom. She immediately realized what had happened and she said, “Oh, Phil, you did it to me again.”

  Then Chuck hypnotized me. Chuck had a sure-fire way of telling when I was really hypnotized and when I was faking it so there was nothing to do but allow myself to be hypnotized. Chuck’s post-hypnotic suggestion took a somewhat different course, one more in keeping with his personality.

  “When you come to, you are going to take off all your clothes,” he said. “You will get undressed and you will get turned on when you look at Barbara. Then you are going over to Barbara and you are going to undress her. And then you’ll make love to Barbara. All she’ll have to do is touch you and you’ll come.”

  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.”