Dovie-Jean had never eaten in a Chinese restaurant. He took her to a second-floor place, overlooking Mott Street, and ordered martinis for them both. She had never had a martini before. She sipped at it, wrinkled her nose in distaste, then returned to it, surprised to find she liked it after all.
He ordered chicken almond ding for her and a shrimp dish for himself. By the time the meal was half over Dovie-Jean was almost on the nod; it had been a long, exciting day.
Back in their hotel room, when she was half-undressed, Red took her into his arms for the first time. She was too tired to respond; yet was pleased that, after all, he should want her.
Late in the night she wakened to find him making serious love to her. She lay back, first accepting, at last responding. When the first light came across their bed she was lying with her legs crossed passionately behind his back, her arms about him, giving herself completely.
It was the first time Red had made love to her.
A whore who works in a house is less likely to go down the drain than is the woman who cruises the streets. She is protected from muggers as well as from police, from men who may whip her and take back their money, and she has a biweekly physical examination. She always has help, close at hand, in event of a trick getting rough or crazy. She gets every other week off and earns as much as a thousand dollars a day—untaxable. Would you believe that that sad bespectacled cretin lounging in the corner and looking like a titless chipmunk, makes a hundred dollars a day without even trying?
She does. Whom she spends it on, don’t even try to imagine.
Entrance fee to the thousand-a-day house is fifty dollars and the girls call you by your first name—or by whatever first name you choose to give at the desk. Drinks are on the house, there is muted music in the walls, a valet will take your clothes and show you to a shower. Rooms are tastefully appointed, your credit card is good and there’s a jacuzzi.
Red Haloways’s connection wasn’t good enough to get Dovie-Jean into a thousand-a-day house. His connection was one Amanda Dillon, who ran an escort service and conducted interviews for half a dozen houses in midtown Manhattan.
Miss Dillon, an ample, middle-aged party, had never seen the South. But there was very little that had gone on, along the Eastern Seaboard, since she’d been born, of which she was not aware. The sympathy in her voice sounded like a put-on to Dovie-Jean, who wasn’t yet accustomed to that dreadful Barbara Walters nasal sniffle now current. But she possessed a judicious eye for a girl’s possibilities.
Dovie-Jean, outfitted in a gypsyish dirndl and oversized earrings out of a Village shop, didn’t appear overly promising to Miss Dillon. It wasn’t the oversized earrings or the dirndl so much as a feeling the girl gave her of vulnerability.
The freckle-faced high-yellow dude who’d brought her in was confident that he had nothing else to do but to turn his charm upon Miss Dillon and she would be immediately swept away.
She’d met him a thousand times before: these bartenders who kept a deck in one pocket and a pair of engineered dice in another, these pimpified pool hustlers, bag men, three-card monte operators, all experienced street-wise cats: agile, fast-talking, sharp dressers who, often as not, drove Caddies—not one of them, she knew, but was a total fool. Not one who realized that, while he was victimizing everyone within reach, his biggest victim was himself.
She’d asked him to excuse himself while she talked to the girl—not because he constituted any threat to her conversation but in order to establish her dominance. Miss Dillon was very good at establishing dominance. Black women have inherited the pants of the family because, for so long, their men’s pants had been taken off them. The black man, having been weakened by the white, has passed his strength onto his wife. Thus she and the white man remain rivals of equal strength.
“Report to this address,” she decided at last. “Your joint togs will be a hundred dollars. Cash. Payable now,” she added with a smile.
Dovie-Jean stepped out into the hall. “I need a hundred, Tiger,” she informed Red.
When they returned from Miss Dillon’s agency, they had hardly gotten back into their room before Red began undressing her. Again he made love to her, and again she responded to him.
She was half asleep when she heard him telling her, “You hate me now, don’t you, Dovie-Jean?”
She opened one incredulous eye.
“Hate you? What for? I’m glad you made love to me. I wanted you to make love to ever since our first night.”
“It’s not what I meant. I meant you must hate me for making a whore out of you.”
Dovie-Jean sat up and switched on the bed lamp.
“Look, Tiger,” she told him, “you’re not making a whore out of me. I’m making a pimp out of you. Now get to sleep.”
Between Seventh Avenue and the Avenue of the Americas, on Forty-eighth, an upward-pointing arrow is painted in red against a white-washed wall:
PLAYMATES OF PARIS
ONE FLIGHT UP
One flight up the door is locked, but through its window you can see a girl seated at a littered desk under a fluorescent light. She presses a buzzer, you step inside and are confronted by an aging, oversized Jew in a pair of frayed corduroys and a faded plaid shirt, wearing a tiny pink-peaked baseball cap. You raise your arms, he pats you down and then steps to one side.
“You a member, sir?” the girl asks.
You show her a small red card stamped P.P. that brings the entrance down from fifteen to thirteen dollars.
Your next impression is of a dozen lightly gowned women in a spacious parlor, but there are only half a dozen and the parlor isn’t all that spacious. Mirrored walls do the trick.
Somewhere someone in the parlor has a transistor playing music too faintly to be identified. The muted breathing is that of an air conditioner.
“Hi, children!” you may greet them; but you won’t get a “Hi, Daddy!” in return. The women have been disciplined not to compete by smile, voice or laughter. The most you’ll get is a conjectural glance. Smiles cost money and so does laughter here. Credit is not extended. If you want a friendly look or a welcoming glance, pay off, daddy, pay off.
Three of the women are white; one is dusky; one is black; one is yellow. All are good-looking. None is over thirty.
It was a wintry autumn afternoon. There’d been only one trick the entire morning and little prospect, in midweek, of many more before midnight.
“The character trade,” Spanish Nan observed, “is something else. Poor things, they can’t help theirselves. I was working escort service and a dude sent for me by phone.
“I go to his apartment house uptown and get by the doorman, who gives me a look like from the morals squad. The elevator leaves me off inside the apartment.
“Dark. Curtains drawn. Music, sad and low from somewhere. Two tall candles flickering. What century is this trick living in?
“Then I see the coffin.
“I was more puzzled than anything. I go up to that box and there’s a dead dude in it. What do you know. His face is rouged and powdered. He has on gray gloves and they’re folded across his chest. I felt a little sick, a little like laughing; and very much like I better get out.
“Then he sits up smiling and I screamed.
“He climbs out of the box, a short, fat, middle-aged trick in his stocking feet, and holds out his hand with money in it. I took the money without touching the glove.
“‘Thank you, miss,’ I heard him say as I was getting into his elevator.
“I was mad as the devil at him, having such a joke at my expense, until I realized this was his only way of making it with a woman. His only way. Two hundred dollars he handed me in conscience money. Poor man. Poor clown.
“For all my hustling, in and out of jail like a fiddler’s elbow, I’ll still take my life against his any day. The man is walking dead, dead, dead.”
“Weirdos don’t scare me,” Fortune put in. “You have to realize he has no other way to go. Yet he has to go. If the only
way he can make it is by hanging from a chandelier by candlelight while petting a white chicken—so what? Who’s he hurting outside of the chicken?
“What the man is doing is letting the sickness inside him come out. Once he does that he’s all right for a couple of weeks. You don’t have to worry about him. The one you have to worry about is the one who can’t let it out. He’s like a man who can’t dream. If he doesn’t dream, it’ll come out in real life. Then somebody gets hurt. You read about it in the papers.”
Spanish Nan was a slender woman in her early thirties, her dark hair bleached blond but still black at the roots, who’d been brought to the States through Mexico, by a professional “fiancé.” By the time she realized his promises were fraudulent she was knocking doors on Doyers Street and saying “me-me” to Chinese men without women.
“Me-Me” were the only words she knew outside of her own language. She had survived by learning English and wrenching herself free of her “fiancé.” Now, after eleven years in the trade, she had a twenty-three-year-old husband whom she was supporting through courses in media communications at Columbia, and owned a tiny botanica in a Ninth Avenue cranny.
“He never miss a day,” she assured Dovie-Jean about her young husband, “he like going to classes. Every day I give him ten dollar. I handle the money.”
Big Benjamin, the oversized flunky, came in bearing hamburgers, cokes and coffee. His jacket and cap were wet with rain. He shook them while the women divided the food. When everyone had what she had ordered, one super burger remained unclaimed and yet neatly wrapped.
“That one is yours, King,” Spanish Nan assured him, and he took it into his shadowed corner like a well-disciplined mastiff and ate it there in two huge gulps, by himself.
“How do you know it’s kosher, King?” Tracy asked him.
“Kosher, shmosher,” he murmured.
Big Benjamin was not an Orthodox Jew.
“I know that coffin deal,” the girl from Buffalo, who called herself Ginger, recalled, “except my operation was different. I was working escort service and my madam came with me because, like she said, ‘Special handling, honey. You’ve never done anything like this before.’ ‘Ain’t anything I ain’t done before,’ I told her, but all she said was, ‘Wait, you’ll see.’
“The apartment was so full of flowers it smelled like a funeral—and there, in the middle of the flowers was a casket. ‘Take off your clothes, honey,’ madam tells me before I could ask who had died, ‘then climb into the box. Somebody will be coming through that door and he wants to see you daid. Don’t be afraid. I’m standing by. Just lay still with your eyes closed.’
“I kept one eye barely peeled. Sure enough, here comes an old boy, stark naked, past sixty, skinny, gray below and bald above, he’s coming to the coffin, he walks up on tiptoe all around it. He kneels, rises, puts his arms around me, kisses me, very light, on my forehead.
“He never touched me further than that. Just walked around the box once more, then left.
“‘How much does he pay for that, for God’s sake?’ I asked madam.
“‘Come back to the office and you’ll see for yourself,’ she tells me. He comes into her office—this time he has his clothes on—and hands her a five-hundred-dollar bill. Then he hands me a C-note without so much as a smile. And I get a hundred-fifty from my madam just for playing dead.”
“I never heard anything like it,” Dovie-Jean admitted.
“One time,” Tracy added, “one of these no-laugh clowns comes in carrying a briefcase and tells me, ‘I must ask you not to laugh.’ ‘What’s to laugh?’ I ask. ‘Get undressed,’ is all he tells me. And he tells it to me in such a cold tone, like I felt right then he wasn’t going to touch me.
“He opens the briefcase and pulls out a long, colored feather, like off a peacock’s tail. ‘I won’t let you whip me,’ I tell him, still not knowing what he has in mind.
“He sticks the feather between his buttocks and begins taking short, hopping steps like a chicken with its legs tied saying, ‘Caw! Caw! Caw!’ Then he reverse, hopping the opposite way, saying, ‘Beepie! Beepie! Beepie!’ Is he going to fly or lay an egg, I wonder.
“I started to laugh and couldn’t stop. I was helpless. He stopped his crazy hop-hop-hopping then and stood looking at me, his feather now in his hand, just so sad. Then he put the crazy feather away and got dressed. I finally stopped laughing.
“When he was almost dressed he looked at me and I saw he was trying not to cry. Like a little kid. I turned away, it was the only thing I could do. I had to feel sorry for him. But I still have to laugh when I think how foolish that trick looked.
“No, I didn’t get paid. I didn’t expect to. I’d ruined his day.”
A youth of no more than twenty came in, carrying a book under his arm. He glanced about self-consciously, as though he had come in only to browse, and sat down in one of the large armchairs provided for tricks. None of the women looked directly at him: they were accustomed to this type of youth. He hung around the main reading room of the Public Library, on Forty-second, trying for a pickup, but always failed. The Chinese woman, Fortune, remembered him because he’d chosen her once before; and then, as now, he’d been carrying a paper-back copy of Catch-22. She remembered him as a tight trick, a poor spender, and tried to avoid his eyes. But when he handed her the ticket she led him to the room.
“I was living in a twenty-dollar-a-month basement flat on Chicago’s Near Northside,” Ginger recalled, “when I get a knock. A man maybe sixty, dark suit, looked like he’d cabbed down from Lake Forest. Not a word, not a smile just hands me a blank letter.
“It was on business stationery. I kept him standing while I read it: ‘Dear Madam: Bearer has made application for Membership in our fraternal order. In accordance with our constitution he is to receive twenty lashes upon his naked buttocks. We would appreciate your administering them at the current rate of two dollars per lash. Cordially yours,’ I’d never handled this type of trick but I knew I wasn’t supposed to hurt him for real. You’re suppose to fake the hurting, as a rule. I let him step inside.
“‘You got a big whipping coming to you, you four-legged alley fink,’ I began on him as soon as he was inside, ‘and I’m going to give it to you. Get your clothes off.’
“I could see by his expression I’d made the right beginning. ‘Now get on the bed, face down and take your punishment like a man,’ I told him. ‘You’ve been very bad.’
“He’s been a bad boy and he knows it. I took off my own clothes down to my garter belt and slapped him lightly with his belt but not with the buckle. Just kind of slapped him with it but not hard enough to draw blood. But I gave him perfect hell with my tongue: ‘you piece of pigshit, you motherless degenerate.’ By the time I’d given him twenty lashes I’d called him everything in the book and he was crying like a baby. Finally he dries his eyes, gets dressed and hands me a fifty. ‘Keep the change,’ he tells me.
“How did he find me? God knows. A week later he showed up again with another business-type letter. This one says something like, ‘Regret to inform you applicant has failed his recent initiation. We propose your cooperation in giving him fifty lashes, somewhat severer than previously. May we have your assistance in this matter? Payable at current rate.’
“For Gods sake—I’m a psychiatrist! I whipped him till my arm tired, but still not with the rough end of the belt. He paid me a hundred but he never showed up again. Maybe I should have used the buckle end. He might have come back and brought some of his business-lunch friends.” “You didn’t whip him hard enough, Ginger,” Tracy decided, “he was serious about being whipped. All businessmen are serious. If he could laugh he wouldn’t be paying you outrageous prices to whip him. Why is it that all these characters are businessmen? What is it about business? Masochism, sadism—that’s all bullshit. Nobody likes to be hurt. But if the only thing a man can feel is pain, he has to settle for that, else he’s dead. He pays you so he can feel alive, in any way at all.
The kid from the Public Library came out of Fortune’s room still carrying his paperback. When he’d left, Fortune shook her head and sighed, “What a yossarian!”
“What’s that?”
“I just meant he does a lot of evasive flying,” Fortune explained, “a character out of a book.”
“Don’t mess with young dudes if you can help it, that’s my experience,” Ginger expressed a private opinion. “The younger they are, the meaner. One thing I learned in San Diego—they used to come up there in gangs. Nineteen-year-olds trying to prove their manhood to each other. They’d gotten the word on every perversion known to man and wanted to try them all out without ever knowing what they were. Like kids in an amusement park who want to try all the high rides, and knock off all the rabbits in the shooting gallery and eat all the cotton candy at once. Here’s one with egg stain still on his chin asking me, ‘How about up your old keister, sis?’
“‘I’m not accustomed to being addressed in that fashion, young man,’ I told him. ‘I’m a real lady, so fuck the hell out of here,’ and I shoved him out the door. Thank you all the same, sonny. I appreciate the honors, but no, no, no. I’ll take an old man who takes out his dentures every time.”
“There’s no single way of handling men,” Fortune added reflectively, “but he’ll be easier to handle if he’s a little scared inside—and most of them are. Once he has clothes off, he’s always a little scared.
“Myself, I’m scared of a thousand things—dogs, the wind, bridges over water—I have had dreams I’m back at that big black sewing machine in Chinatown and the door is locked.
The Devil's Stocking Page 8
