No one knows how many prostitutes there are, infesting and infecting our cities-and citizens. No one could know because the number is ever-changing and the profession is not as black is to white. There is a huge gray area. Thousands of prostitutes are only part time workers, but very real professionals for all of that.
Most books on prostitution that we have read describe it as a casual or even a numbing business. Undoubtedly to many of the women in it, that is so. However, we have had conversations with many who describe it as quite the opposite. These have been the more successful operators, and a minority. Whores do not possess a lasting glamor. In fact, almost everything they possess is fleeting, including their money.
Archive Note: There was no section in the original hardcopy pocketbook labeled "CHAPTER ONE."
LUIS SCALICI:
"I grew up on the west side. My father was a stone mason. I was the third of eight children, three boys and five girls.
Both my older sisters became whores. That's how I learned about the racket young. My older sister, Veda, was the wildest of all; Rosina, the next oldest, was very placid. They didn't even look like sisters.
Veda was what they called a tomboy then. She was always getting into trouble, and getting me into it too. I liked running and playing with her because she got so many wild ideas. I think she would do anything-if it was exciting.
There was a lot of Commie talk then, it was sort of a fad-spouting Red ideas. Somewhere Veda heard them, how the rich were oppressing the poor and how all the wealth should be split up, and that kind of thing.
Veda and I were all for that. We liked the idea of splitting up all the dough in the world. We used to talk about it, in a hideout we had. How we'd buy this and that, and what a pocketful of jingling coins would feel like. We never had any dough.
She was three and a half years older than me, and when she got it into her head that having dough was a good thing, I just wanted the same. Veda was a kick in the head.
On Saturdays we'd go out and do a little shoplifting. We'd steal lipsticks, toys, candy, anything that wasn't nailed down. Then we'd trade for other stuff. Me and Veda did all this, not Rosina. She was too lazy.
We kept stuff in the hideout, things that we couldn't get rid of. They would come in handy on later trades. This hideout was in a half torn down building. There were a lot of such buildings then, not now. Now the taxes won't let that happen. Anyway, we had a sort of room that we found in what was once the top basement. We fixed it up a little and made it strong enough and tight enough to keep out wind and snow. We had a half dozen ways to get to the place, so we never did have adults poking around. Which was good, because sometimes Veda wanted to experiment.
Like I say, she was pretty wild. Living in a big family, we both saw all our brothers and sisters all the time, but Veda heard things. She wanted to know what it felt like to put one thing into another. You know what I mean? We heard about screwing, and she wanted to find out. She experimented with me because we were always together.
I never felt funny doing it to Veda, somehow. I think I would have with Rosina, but Veda was different. Anyhow, Rosina never wanted to.
Veda would sit on a box or something and I would stand in front of her with the thing hanging out and she just stuck it in and I would pump at her. We were pretty damn crude at first.
"Do me," Veda would say. And I knew what she meant. We always called it 'it.' Like: "I wanna do it," or "Do it to me," and so on. We did a lot of crazy things in those days, but the things we did that stand out are the times that Veda wanted me to 'do it."
Naturally we could hear the old man and Ma doing it at home. The old man got into her once a week, regular as clockwork, on Friday night. They didn't particularly wait for us to go to sleep, either. Sometimes I thought it was their casual attitude about screwing that made me and Veda kind of casual about it too. We aped them, you know?
Another funny thing. Me and Veda never played around before we did it the first time. Other guys have told me they fooled around the girl a long time when they were at it the first time. You know what I mean? Scared to do it.
"Let's do what Ma and Pop do," Veda said to me one afternoon when we're sitting in the hideout. I knew what she meant right off. She didn't have to explain.
"OK," I said, but I didn't know how to begin.
She laid down on the floor and I got on her, but that was a bust because the floor hurt her fanny and my knees. It took us a while to realize it would work with her sitting and me standing in front. She was the one who took it out of my pants, and she guided it in and told me to push.
It went in easy though, because she was wet. "It feels good," she said, "push harder."
It felt great to me too, the first time. Maybe it wouldn't have with somebody else, but with Veda, she was fun. I was nine then, and she was almost thirteen. We knocked off two cherries that day. Hers and mine.
"Don't tell anybody," Veda warned me when we finally stopped. "And for crissake don't tell the priest."
By the time I was twelve I knew about a lot of things, you know, what goes on. We'd play hookey, go to the movies or hustle bets, and if nothing else was happening we'd go up and toss bottles into an alley somewhere.
I even knew a couple of the big guys by their first names. You know, guys in the mob. One of them got Veda her first job. A guy named Reddy. He was thin as a hacksaw with arms like a gorilla, you know, long.
Reddy got a big hump for Veda. She was a good looking shicksa, almost sixteen and tits like a movie star. She had been screwing for dough for two, three years. She took guys to our hideout where we had stole a mattress for her to work on.
Anyway, Reddy got it in lumps for Veda, so he took her uptown and him and her split the profits. She would let guys boot her in his car. He went in the clubs and got her Johns. She made ten, fifteen bucks a night that way.
I know goddam well that Reddy kept the most of the foldin' stuff, but she thought she was doing great. I mean I know it now. I didn't know it then.
The year I was twelve was the year the old man got his on the job. A block of concrete slipped and pinned him under it, and that was curtains. What they took to Skinner's Mortuary they could of smeared on the slab. That was a big thing to us. It broke the family all to hell.
Mama wasn't strong enough to cope with us. She just sort of gave up and let us run. My younger brothers and sisters mostly did what me and Veda told them. Veda ran the house, because she had the dough. Mama used to scream and rant about taking dirty money from Veda, but the rest of us didn't mind. Veda handed it out all right. Easy come, easy go. There was lots more where that came from.
She told me once, "Baby, my snatch holds out, we'll be rich."
She didn't know the percentages.
She worked the trick with Reddy for about a year as I remember. She pulled out of school and went uptown with him on weeknights too.
I sat with her in a drugstore one Saturday, I remember, and I was real surprised to see, in the daylight, how tired she looked.
"They're beatin' me," she said. She was dark and sparkle-eyed, but the sparkle was going fast, and she looked older than seventeen. "Man, they're beatin' me down."
She was beginning to wonder about the gravy train she was riding.
"Eight Johns las' night," she said. "Seven of 'em in that goddam car and one in a hotel. Man, that's workin'."
"You said it was fun."
"Listen, it ain't fun. Sure, it was fun for a while. But man, they're beatin' me. I mean really beatin' me."
She pulled down her blouse and I could see the marks on her shoulders. Somebody had been taking a strap to her. That astonished me. "What for?"
"They pay more for that," she said with a funny look.
It took me a long time to figure guys who wanted to beat dames. And to get whipped. I had to believe it because Veda told me and showed me the marks. But I couldn't figure it. Maybe I still can't. I just know about it, I don't try to figure guys no more. There's a lot of sick guys around.
One of them was Reddy.
I never did like him much. He was in the mob, but he was makin' Veda hustle on the side. Of course they found out about it later and put the screws on, but he got away with it for a while. That's the kind of dumb he was. All muscle, no bright.
He used to come for Veda, showing up in a fancy boiler with chrome horns on the outside, acted like he was the Ace and we was deuces. Mama was scared to death of him. I think Veda was too, a little. The rest of us got the hell out of his way because he was mean and we never knew what kind of a mood he was in.
One night he come for her, and I saw him go right in her bedroom. She shared it with Rosina and a younger sister, Aurelia. Veda was there alone and he just pushed her onto the bed and jumped on her. With the door open and all. He didn't give a shit. Everyone in the house knew what he was doing to her. It was silent as a goddam grave, except for the bed bouncing.
I looked in the kitchen and Mama was crying. I could have killed Reddy, but I was scared of him too.
Veda just shrugged it off. She looked at me and made a face like: "What you gonna do?" when they went out.
Of course we all knew what Veda was doing. She couldn't keep it a secret She had been screwing too many guys at school before she dropped out So, about the time that she began showing up with fists full of green stuff, Rosina got the idea that the primrose path had its points.
Rosina went out and set up in an apartment with a guy. She was sixteen when she left. It like to killed Mama. But we couldn't talk her out of it. She wouldn't even listen to Veda.
"You're doin' it"
"Yeah," Veda said, "but maybe I wouldn't Christ, you oughta see the guys you gotta take on."
Rosina only shrugged her ample shoulders. Rosina was bigger and a lot less shapely than Veda. She moved in with a pimp named Veral. He was a seedy little guy who looked about fourteen till you got up close to him and saw the lines in his face. Then he looked like a year old apricot.
We didn't see Rosina much after that. And Veda moved out too. She took a joint uptown and I saw her about once a week. I went up and she gave me money to give to Mama.
We weren't making out very good and we needed the dough, but Mama hated to take it. I guess if it hadn't been for the little kids she wouldn't have. "It's dirty money," she would say, and shake her head.
But it was dough. That's all that counts, when you're poor. It spends.
And Veda looked terrible. I sat around with her maybe an hour a week, because we had been pretty close once. But we weren't anymore. We tried to pretend that nothing much had changed, but it had. She looked about ten years older than her age.
"I'm stayin' up late," she would say. And she always had a drink or two while I was there. I could see her going to pot.
I never did ask her for anything, and she never offered it, you know what I mean. Screwing. She got enough during working hours. We had only done it because we were exploring, that kind of thing. Oh, maybe we had booted it a little sometimes when we had the hots, but it always seemed OK with Veda.
She was working out of the hotel now, and working for the mob.
"They got my contract," she said. "I'm doin' all the work and they give me a cut. Some deal." A lot of the old fire had gone out of her. But she didn't like me getting into the mob. Veda started to turn. I think she found out what the hell it was all about too late. She had lived so hard when she was a kid that she hadn't thought about anything else. When she got the years she was already past them without thinking where she was headed. The old path of least resistance. You know? Now she was getting the ideas she should have had ten years before. But me too. I was the same way. I thought the mob was the most. I hated cops and authority and school and everything but dough and muscle. God was I dumb!
I was on the fringes of the mob, doing all kinds of errands and odd jobs. I knew about the dames who worked the hotels and in houses. I knew about dope and what it did, and I never suspected that Veda was on junk. I didn't know about it for a couple of years. Then I found out that Reddy had put her on it.
I couldn't get my hands on Reddy then, because the mob had already disposed of him. Some shiv man had cut him into little slivers and slices and spread him over as wamp in the next county. It was too good for him.
Home wasn't big enough to hold me. I was making dough, had dames, and needed a place to bed them. I was making it steady with a waitress named Elinor who had a gash that wasn't easy to satisfy.
She was my first real girl, and I was nuts about her, in a way. I was buddying with a guy a year older than me, Kipper, and he kept saying: "Don't let 'em get to ya, pal. Keep 'em on the end of that long string."
Elinor hated it on a string. She liked it up close. As close as possible. So close it was inside her. We played that game every night I could get at her.
In between, me and Kipper laid quite a few in the Pickering Hotel which was a run-down rat trap that the street whores used. Nobody asked questions, you dig?
Elinor knew I was running with the mob. Looking back on it, I think all she cared about was the excitement. She liked to be taken places, dancing, dinner, a movie, you know.
Then she wanted to get in bed and screw.
She had long legs and a box with muscles in it, and when you buried your dong she squeezed it like a lemon rind. She was pretty. She had a big chin and she had to wear glasses to see a foot in front of her, but she was built like a brick shithouse, and she said she loved me. I was a wise kid, but pumping away on her, I was ready to believe it.
I met Otto Sunderland about that time too. Otto was a cop. He had a square face on a kind of skinny body, and he chewed gum all the time and looked at you like you were some sort of bug.
"He's poison," Kipper said. "Stay away from him."
Otto tried to get me to quit the mob, but hell, I wasn't going to listen to a cop. He should have known that. Maybe he did, and was just going through the motions. He knew all about me though, and Elinor. He was about six, seven years older than me and hardly ever raised his voice. He knew the neighborhood as good as anybody, and everyone in it. He knew who was collecting for the numbers and he was wise to most of the pushers and broads-I guess all the broads.
Now and then he bust somebody. And he always had the goods. I doubt if he ever made a bum pinch. The guys respected him, I tell you.
He had partners, but I'm talking about Otto. He was the one who counted. His partners just did what he told them. When Otto looked at you kind of sideways and chewed his damn gum, it made you sweat, man. You know what I mean?
He never looked at me but what I toted up what I had done that week. I was always guilty of something. He knew it too. But Otto wouldn't bust you without the evidence. Then look out.
He busted me when I was about twenty.
CHAPTER TWO
There were cops and there were cops in the big cities. Once upon a time it wasn't as tough to become a policeman. If you had a hard head and good feet for walking, you were in. And there weren't too many annoying rules to memorize. A beat cop made many of his own rules.
Most policemen were just ordinary men doing a job. They tried not to take it home with them at night, but that was difficult, perhaps more then than now. It was a hard job and not overpaid.
Always there are a few who get publicity. Bad cops always draw publicity when they are discovered. The public remembers the lurid newspaper stories and tends to forget the honest day to day service of most.
In the day of the mobs, one of the honest cops was Otto Sunderland. The mob gave up trying to buy or frame him. He was pounding a beat when he met Luis Scalici for the first time:
OTTO SUNDERLAND:
"I guess I had seen Boodle Scalici around for weeks before I learned his name. I had just got the beat. They didn't call him Boodle then, just Kid. He was a skinny, undernourished punk living in a smelly brownstone-like a thousand others.
Frankly, I wouldn't have bet a dime that he'd get far in the mob. He didn't seem to have the moxie. But you never can tell how a guy will turn out.
It was a pretty tough neighborhood. I learned the beat over the years. Most of my problems were small ones, fights, robberies, an occasional rape, family quarrels, and various troubles with the youth gangs. We didn't call them juvenile delinquents then, just no-good tough kids.
Boodles Scalici wasn't tough. He never pretended to be a hard guy. He was slick. As a matter-of-fact, even though we knew what he was doing, he stayed out of our hands for quite a while.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
You asked me about prostitutes. I had 'em on my beat, of course, but nothing big. Only one house, with five girls, but nothing like the district. I didn't bust the girls unless they asked for it, you know, got rambunctious. I knew all of them, they'd tell me their troubles, and I straightened out a few boyfriends here and there. But I found out that the whores sometimes kept the fights down. Not always, but sometimes.
I'd look the other way when one of my partners wanted to chop out a piece. You had to look the other way for lots of things. Some of them whores were good looking girls. Like Veda Scalici, for instance. She could have made it good if she hadn't taken up the whore trade.
"G'wan, cop," she'd say when I suggested it.
"Listen, Veda," I'd say, "you get a job in an office and you'll be marryin' the boss in a year."
She wouldn't believe me.
I remember only about a half dozen young girls who were selling it. Veda was one, of course. They hung out at Bunker's store, a candy emporium that sold everything Dunker thought would move. More like a dime store, with stuff piled in counters and on shelves. In the back he had a couple of counters where the kids hung out and drank sodas and whatever.
Old Dunker was a shit. You couldn't get a thing on him, but he was a real son of a bitch. A slimy little guy. His wife was a fat frau who knew what was going on and it never fazed her. Dunker was putting them kids up to it, I know.
The girls met guys there, and Dunker made it easy for them to use the storeroom. He even had a couch in there. When I asked him about it one day:
"Holy God, Otto, I got to lay down once in a while, ain't I?"
You couldn't pin anything on him. It was his joint and he could have a couch in there if he wanted to. I never caught anybody using it. It was too easy for them to signal, and the back door was right there. But it was one of the things you KNOW, and can't prove legal.
I would take an oath that Dunker got a cut of what the girls made in that storeroom. If not in cash, then in trade. Over a period of time I talked to a lot of girls who said Dunker had screwed them on that couch. But they wouldn't say it in court.
So I rolled with the punch. No use molesting the set-up when it wouldn't pan out in court. I just hoped I'd get the goods on Dunker one day. I was sure he was encouraging the younger boys to shoplift too.
The other broads walked the streets or hung out in bars. I knew them all. There were plenty of part time hustlers too, but generally I didn't bother them. Who can prove what goes on in a locked room? And that just led to more trouble, family trouble. The part time workers, I looked the other way.
I bet I knew more than most husbands what went on in my neighborhood-after they went to work. I had a partner one time who was laying five or six housewives on the beat. I had to get rid of him-and that wasn't easy.
It's a hell of a bad thing when a cop owes favors.
Now and then a citizen got rolled and we had to investigate. But generally I knew all about it damn soon after it happened. A beat cop gets a lot of info because HE does a lot of favors.
I would probably surprise you what info came to me. I knew every time Murphy beat his wife, and practically every time he put her on the bed. I knew who was conning who, or packing up to leave, or failing school, or who had bought a new dress.
I also knew all the husbands who were patronizing the whores and which ones, and how much they paid. And all the other Johns too. They paid from fifty cents to five dollars each pop. Five dollars was a lot of dough for it then; there were only a few, like Veda Scalici, who could dig it out of a john. Veda could dig it out of a statue in the park.
I knew a lot of the young kids who were giving it away, because the boys talked too much. I knew they would drift into it full time-or some of them would. I was sorry as hell to see Veda drifting into it.
I met her about the time she was beginning to give it away, and sell it for peanuts. I knew all the family. When old Joe Scalici was killed at the stone yard I tried to keep a special eye on the family, because I had a special interest in Veda. There was a difference in our ages, but I could have let go for her. Naturally I never said so. I never really got the chance.
You can't lecture a girl and ask to take her to the movies at the same time.
I went overboard talking to Veda, I know, but I couldn't help myself. About all I did was annoy her. My uniform repelled her. I was concerned too because I'd heard rumors that she and Luis, her brother, were selling stuff they'd lifted in the big stores. I didn't want her to get sent up for it. She wouldn't listen to a thing I said.
Veda was a hell of a good looking girl. She was meeting guys at Dunker's store and taking them into the storeroom, and I knew it and couldn't do a thing about it. I tried especially hard to get something on old man Dunker, but he was a real wriggle worm. More about that later.
Again, I had to look the other way. I couldn't get solid evidence, and I didn't really want to. Veda's old lady was having it hard enough, and I certainly didn't want to pile trouble on her-or seem to by arresting Veda.
The newspapers called me a tough cop, later on, but I doubt if I was. A good cop only fights human nature so far. You got to know where to draw the line and look the other way. Otherwise you kick the respect for law in the ass. When you do that, you're in real trouble.
After I realized that Veda was not for me, I began to hope that she'd meet someone and get married. She had looks and personality. It was a vain hope.
I guess that one of the most average types was Katy. Average whores, I mean. Katy had looks too, but not Veda's personality. Katy was dark, and when you met her in a dimly lighted saloon you'd swear she was meant for the choir in a church. She had that madonna look. That's right, lots of looks-and no conscience at all.
Katy was a street whore, a few years older than Veda, and she had a pimp. A slimy little guy named Miff.
"Lemme fix you up," Miff said to me one night. "It's all on the house, pal. I'll send Katy out back, huh?"
"No thanks," I said.
"Get smart," he said, shuffling up close and blowing cigarette smoke in my face. "Katy fucks like a goddam mink."
I wanted to plant my fist in his face. I don't know how I kept from it.
"Listen, you scratch my back," he said, "I scratch yours. Katy wants t'do it. She likes you."
"Beat it."
"No sense getting riled up, Otto-"
"Don't call me Otto."
"Lissen, pal, you're turning down the best goddam screw this side of-"
I turned away. Otherwise I would have hit him. Maybe I should have. I've always regretted I didn't.
I don't know how many times I've seen Katy in a doorway with a John. It wasn't our policy right then to call the wagon for hustling. Policies change, you know. Katy knew the policy as well as I did. She'd have her legs wide open with this guy pumping her when I come along. She'd just smile at me, over his shoulder.
But Katy and Miff were the kinds who rolled guys. Robbed them. When they got a drunk, he went home to the missis minus his dough.
Even after Miff had talked to me, Katy still batted her eyes at me. I guess they figured it didn't hurt to give her a chance at me.
"Hi, Otto," she said one night. My partner was half a block away, and I met her-maybe by chance, but I doubt it. We paused in the shadows of a wood fence.
"I dunno why you don't like me," she said with the voice she probably saved for the best Johns.
"I got nothing against you," I told her. "Except your trade."
"A girl's got to eat."
"Yeh, but she can work. Working girls eat."
She gave me that tinkly laugh. She had enough perfume on to smell up a ball park. "Oh come on, Otto, we ought to be friends-"
She came very close and I had to pull her hands off me. It wasn't easy.
"I've got something you'd like," she said.
"What?" I knew what, but I was curious.
She giggled. She bumped it up against my leg, and rubbed it. "This, honey. We could be real friendly, y'know. You can have it for free-"
"How come you want to give it to me?"
"Honey, I'll give you all you want." She was rubbing it on my leg and not subtle. "You give me somethin', and I'll give you something, is it a deal?"
I was very curious. "What do you want?"
"The park, honey." She came very close and bumped her snatch on me. She had me against the fence. I knew she was an expert at screwing in a standing position. It made me nervous.
I got the strength to hold her off. "What about the park?" I usually walked through the park a few times every night. It wasn't a big park, only a little triangle of shrubbery and a couple of trees.
"Stay out of it tonight, honey," she whispered. "And I'll fuck your socks off."
That's the kind of thing I had to put up with.
CHAPTER THREE
The girls who took up the whore trade have told us various reasons: Romance, adventure, they thought they would find glamour and excitement-and money. Some of them were victims of curious rationalizations.
Some were lazy, like Rosina Scalici. It was easy to get paid for opening your legs. What the hell, that was a cash register down there. Every time a guy pops, it's money in the bank.
Katy Feaster was a money hustler. Katy had everything going for her: nice figure, looks and a come-on smile. She thought that hustling was easy street. She'd clean up and get out. She'd heard about how some dames never got out of the racket, but that wouldn't happen to her. She was smart. Get the dough and get out. Yes sir.
KATY:
"My real mother died when I was about six. I was an only child, and me and Pop were pretty close, I guess. We got along great for about six years, then he got married again.
Jesus, boy, I hated that.
Her name was Sylvia, a yellow haired dame with a flat face and tits to match. I knew she and Pop were running around together, but it floored me when they announced they were getting married. I sure didn't expect a thing like that.
Pop hunted up a cousin to take care of me while he and that woman went on their honeymoon. It was a million years long, the honeymoon.
I had to stay at this cousin's house. They had a boy named Solly, two years older than me. All he had was hands. He had his goddam hands all over me all the time. He was a skinny kid, I remember, with a wart on his hand. He had a long nose and a squint. He used to get me out in the yard and get his finger up in me.
I let him stick his goddam finger in me for a dime, or whatever I could get. Then I'd pretend to come for him while he diddled me. I never did come.
He would drag his cock out and make me hang onto it too. So I held it for him while he jerked it in my hand. A couple times I let him stick it in me. Once for a quarter, that was the most I could get. I think he swiped it from his mom. I didn't like him much.
When they sent me back it was worse. Sylvia acted like I was dirt. Pop didn't hardly notice me any more. I had to work all the time-do this, do that. Jesus Christ I hated her! If it hadn't been for her I wouldn't have had to go to that damn cousin's place. I could have stayed with Pop.
Sylvia was always trying to make fun of me in front of Pop, too. "Isn't she a pretty thing?" she would say, meaning me. Sarcastic as hell.
Pop didn't know what she was doing.
But the thing that really make me scream was listening to them in the bedroom. Our house wasn't so big I couldn't hear them if I wanted to. Sylvia would moan and groan while Pop was doing it to her-Jesus Christ, I thought I'd throw up. Why he could stand to screw her was something I couldn't understand.
Hell, I knew all about screwing. I was twelve. Guys had been fingering me in the crotch for a long time. They did it at school, down where they kept the bicycles, and behind the handball courts, and plenty of times after school. A lot of the girls did it. Some of them went all the way. Once in a while I did too, for dough. Hell, if they wanted it that bad, they could pay for it. That's what old man Dunker said.
Old man Dunker got me in his storeroom the first time and he gave me candy. I was about ten, I guess. I knew about him, because the other girls whispered it. I heard about Dunker's cock a long time before I ever saw it. The first time he gave me candy, then he felt me up. I was used to that.
The second time he felt me, and had me feel him. He had a big long one. "Suck on it," he told me, but I wouldn't do it. "Elinor does," he said.
He gave me stuff, not only candy or ice cream, but jewelry sometimes, lipstick and like that. I let him play with it all he wanted. He got it in me too, not too much, but he did. I was pretty small then. And he finally got me to blow him.
I talked to Elinor about it. She was a kind of a silly one, all she cared about was seeing movies and stuff. Anyway, she was sucking old Dunker all right. She sure didn't mind admitting it. He gave her dough for the movies.
Sylvia and I used to scream at each other. We were always fighting. I don't think Pop realized how much we fought all the time. She was always complaining to him about me. I could hear them in the bedroom, and sometimes she'd cry. She just did it to make him feel sorry for her.
I knew that he loved her more than me. He would come out and get stern with me and lecture me. Jesus Christ if he only knew, really knew, how she was. But the more I told him the less he believed me.
Then he would yell at me for cutting school. He didn't care about me.
But I got even with them. I would cover my ears so I couldn't hear them screwing in the bedroom. And I let old man Dunker stick it in me more often. And then he got a guy to go into the storeroom with me and the guy gave me fifty cents-I dunno who the guy was. But Dunker only took fifteen cents of it.
After that it got easy. I wanted to make a lot of dough so I could get away from them. I did it every time old Dunker wanted me to. I even cut school so I could screw guys. Dunker got me three and four of them an afternoon. I got fifty cents to a dollar. Mostly I got a dollar for blowing them. They called it 'Half and half.' Half screw, half blow job.
A lot of the guys wanted to know if it was fun. I always told them I loved it, but I didn't. It was just a way to get dough. Some of the kids, like Elinor, said they got a big boot out of screwing. But I didn't. I don't know why, I just didn't feel much.
I didn't like to do it much either, to tell the truth, but Jesus Christ, it was the easiest way to make dough. Every guy wanted to stick it in me. So what the hell, let 'em stick.
Blowing them was fastest. Before I dropped out of school, I used to take guys downstairs and blow them for a quarter or whatever I could get, because it was faster than booting it. Besides, it was safer. The guy only had to take it out of his pants. I didn't have to spread, and get in an awkward position that I couldn't get out of quick.
And they shot it real fast when I sucked on them. At first I used to swallow it down; I didn't know any better, because old man Dunker told me to do it that way. He always wanted to come in my mouth, so, not knowing any different, I figured that was the way it was done.
I learned better after a while.
But anyway, I used to blow them by the bike racks mostly. And I usually had three or four waiting. All the guys knew I was the one who would 'do anything,' and I collected pretty good every day. I'd go back to class smelling of jism sometimes. It's a wonder they didn't run me out of class. The guys would giggle and make jokes about me. I didn't like that at first, but old man Dunker said, "Hell, Katy, every time they tell somebody, that's a customer."
So screw it, I let 'em make jokes.
Veda Scalici had a boyfriend, Reddy, and he used to pick me up now and then. He was always after a blow job. He said I did it better than Veda. She and I were about the same age, a couple of months difference maybe. Reddy wanted me to go uptown with him and boot guys in his car, but I was doing all right alone.
I wasn't crazy about Reddy anyway. He was in the mobs and thought he was something. He always carried a gun and I was scared of that. He made me get down in front of him in the car and eat it; and a few times he just pushed me around and wouldn't give me any dough. Sucking on that thing is hard work, for no dough. The son of a bitch. I sure didn't cry when he got his.
Pop found out I was letting guys boot me.
Jesus Christ! He raised the goddam roof. He yelled at me and beat me. And Sylvia said "I told you she was no good-" and like that. That fuckin' Sylvia, I could have killed her.
"You're too goddamned hostile," Pop yelled at me. "She's your mother now, show her a little respect."
"She's not my mother."
"I try to be," Sylvia said in her damn sticky voice. "You just won't let me."
Oh, Jesus, I could have slit her up the middle, k the bitch.
"She hates me," I told them, but Pop never could understand that.
"You don't hafta go laying all over town," he screamed at me. "What kind of girl do you want to be anyhow?"
"I want dough," I shrieked at them, "so I can get outa here."
"But this is your home-" Pop really didn't understand a damn thing. "If you want money, you come to me."
I could have said something to him then, but I held my tongue for once. I wouldn't take his goddam money. Sylvia tried to pet me but I shook her off. I didn't want her damn icky sermons.
And I had trouble at school too. Because I was cutting classes so much, I got called into the office. Miss Giannini was the girl's principal and she gave me hell. She was a sharp nosed old dame, and I got to give her credit, she knew what goes on.
"Katy, you're coming to a bad end-"
"Tell me what I got comin'," I said to her. "I don't need a sermon, I get them at home."
"This isn't a sermon, it's the truth. I know what you're doing-everyone in school knows it. Do you know what happens to girls who do as you're doing?"
"Yeah, they get rich."
"They get disease. You've been lucky, Katy. For God's sake straighten up before you get diseased and your life wrecked."
Jesus, I didn't want to hear all that. She made me sore. Everyone was against me, Pop and the damn school, and everyone. "Lemme alone!" I screamed at her. "I don't want your fuckin' advice-lemme alone?"
It shocked her pretty good. She turned white, and then she sent for the big shot, the principal. He sat me down and gave me a good lecture. I just stared at him. I knew I couldn't do anything. He could make me do anything he wanted, so I just waited and tried not to listen to all that junk he was saying.
Then he sent me home with a note. I tore the note up. Pop gave me hell again.
And Sylvia sat there and smirked at me. Jesus, I hated her.
So I ran away from home."
CHAPTER FOUR
LUIS SCALICI:
"Kipper and I made a pretty good team. The mob paid me fifty dollars a week and that was enough salary to do anything on. I could take Elinor to the best spots. And I got little extras too, because they knew I was in the mob.
I was a bag man. For the houses. The mob had a string of houses up and down the town. Kipper and I collected the loot and brought it in. I held the bag and he was the muscle. We hardly ever had any trouble. The mob had the cops paid off, so no one bothered us.
Of course I met a lot of broads that way. And I got a lot of free stuff. I never told Elinor about it, because she was playing it straight with me. She never did put out to other guys.
I was wise that a lot of dames were putting out to punks like old man Dunker, but not Elinor.
"I can't stand him, honey," she told me. "Jeez, I'm not a dame to go cheating on you, you oughta know that."
Then we'd roll in the hay and I'd stab her. She loved getting it in the old pusseroo. The only trouble with Elinor was, I got the feeling sometimes that she didn't give a shit. She'd just lay there and let me make it. She didn't push back much, like some of the other broads. She might have been eating peanuts while I'm killing myself on her.
But otherwise she was a lot of fun. A lot of laughs.
The mob was always looking for broads. There was a big turn-over. They sent the dames around, a regular schedule, two weeks here, on to the next spot. So the Johns didn't get tired of the same old slit.
Kipper was always looking for broads too. He always could spot 'em. "There's one," he'd say, "Lookit that dish in the green dress-she'll fuck." He was always right-whenever we followed it up.
"It's a knack," he would say. "I can tell, and I dunno how exactly. Some broads will do it and some won't-not right off the bat anyway."
I never did get that knack, not like Kipper. But the mob heard about it, and put it to work. Kipper went around looking at dames. Then it was my job to pick them up and get them into the life.
One of the first broads he pointed out really jolted me. Kipper and I were sitting in a bar and he looked over my shoulder and says to me, "See that broad in the booth, the one with the fur piece? She'll do it like a hot fox."
I looked at the dizzy. She was a dame with a face like Mrs. Astor's sainted aunt. I knew this dame wouldn't even screw her husband on their wedding night. She just didn't look the type. She had like a smooth kiss-me-Jesus look. I doubted if she knew what her pussy was for.
"Forget it," I told him. "Not that one."
"Forget nothing," he said, "That dame is so hot she's sizzling. I can smell her gash from here." He pushed me. "Go on over and ask her. I bet she falls over and yanks up her skirt."
"Come on," I said. "You make a fool outa me. Not that one."
"Shit," he snuffed out his cigarette. "I gotta do everything for you, Boodle?" He got up and went over to the booth.
There was a guy with this dame. But Kipper didn't bat an eye. He went over and in a second he was talking to them, and pretty soon he hands the dame out and they go over to the postage stamp dance floor. It is pretty gloomy in that club, but I can see that she is the best looking broad this side of Miss America. She is wearing a silky gown that shows off her round ass and I have to gulp down a Scotch because it makes me horny just to look at it.
At the same time, I know that Kipper is lucky to get this far. The guy in the booth isn't happy at all. He's looking at his watch and staring around at them. He sure looks like a husband.
Then Kipper and the dame disappear.
I had another drink and watched the guy. Finally, when the dance ended, he got up and wondered around looking for them. But they weren't in the club at all. He came over to me.
"That man," he said, "the one who was with you-"
"He wasn't with me," I said. "I never saw 'im before I came in here."
He frowned at me. "That's funny, he told my wife and me that the two of you were partners in a taxicab firm-"
I shook my head wonderingly. "Boy, he sure told you a whopper, mister. I work in a bank."
He stood there for a full minute, staring at me. He didn't want to believe that. I said I sure was sorry, but the guy was just plain lying. He was a puffy-faced type and he was puzzled. He left, finally, and wandered around the room, still looking for them.
I slid out. Because I knew where they'd be. In the car which was parked in an alley a half block away.
They were there all right. And Kipper was ramming her like it was Bride's Week. She had both naked legs up in the air and he was driving his pole up the old gulch. I could hear her giggle forty feet away.
Kipper was never wrong. Never.
But I still couldn't believe it. And yet it was true. It was the doll with the silky dress and the saintly look. Only now she was grinning and bucking and wriggling under him like the wildest floozie in town. She saw me leaning on the car and it didn't faze her for a second.
She cooed in his ear. Kipper didn't spare the horses. He was booting her with all he had, his pants off his ass and his mouth around one silky breast.
I got in the car and leaned over the front seat and watched them convulsing. She was a wildcat. And she didn't mince words, like a hooker from over on the docks. "Gimme that thing, gimme that pecker-Jesus, I'm gonna come-!"
She made me hard as iron. Old Kipper really slapped it to her. He must have had that one-eyed snake a yard up her gash. The two of them fornicated like a couple of mad monkeys for a few minutes, then her eyes opened and she looked at me. Kipper was still thrusting into her when she reached out her hand and pulled me.
She wanted me to boot her too. I slid over the back seat and told Kip to move aside.
His eyes were glazed. He was panting like a miler at the ribbon. He rolled off her and I could smell the perfume of their lechery. She said: "Hurry up."
I was into her like a spear into jelly. Nice, warm jelly. Only when I skewered her she grabbed with her throbbing vagina and squeezed. She was great! Kip could pick 'em. I never questioned him after that.
She pulled me close and I battered her velvet gorge. The silky dress was all dark and wet where Kipper had mouthed her titty. She slid her hands about me and we were kissing, and she almost pulled me off with that amazing undulation.
"You do it great, honey," she breathed in my ear.
No kidding, I was sure astonished. I thought I knew a lot about broads, but I didn't know hardly anything. She said her name was Stephanie Warwick, and Kipper told me later that he had seen her picture in the papers in the society section. And it was true. She was one of them society dolls. The guy in the bar was her husband, alright, only he was ten or fifteen years older than she, and she told me he couldn't get it up but about twice a week.
"I like you," she said, kissing me. "Let's go someplace and have a drink to celebrate."
We took her to the Pickering Hotel. And you know, she loved it. She thought it was great, the shitty old run-down hotel with rats and bugs and whores from the Civil War. You should hear her giggle.
We got a room, the best room in the joint, and a couple bottles. Kipper borrowed a radio and we danced around, hugging and kissing.
Kipper could pick the broads alright, but this one sure homed in on me. She kept grabbing my cock all night. Lucky for me, Kipper didn't mind. "She likes you, pal. Live it up."
But he got his chunks too. He got her down on the couch when I went to the bathroom. I could hear her giggling, and when I went back she was spread wide and taking it like a bimbo in the back seat.
I thought me and him, Kipper, were just making a lucky boot. I figured this dame was high on something and we just got our cocks in the way and she climbed on. What I didn't realize was that she knew we were in the mob and she was getting her kicks letting low-lifes screw her. The best thing we could have done was to bring her to the Pickering Hotel. The more low-down the joint the better she would have liked it. She would probably have got real crazy wild if we had brought in a couple of the knocked-out whores to play with in front of her.
But we didn't think of that.
The more we danced, the drunker we all got. Pretty soon we were shedding clothes, and dancing half naked. She had the nicest tits I had seen since Veda's. And the more we hung on them the better she liked it. It was sure a kick to see that saintly face giving one of us a blow.
She liked to sing too. While we danced, she would sing. I finally got her all naked. Then she sang and danced for us, and she was the screwiest, bawdiest dizzy I ever saw. None of them whores in the houses could hold a candle to her. Maybe because she was doing it for kicks and not dough.
We got her between us, me and Kipper, both of us stripped, and she sang and wriggled and we rammed her. We had a hellova wild party.
We wrecked the room too. Jesus, it was a mess in the morning. And when I woke up she was gone.
But there was a note in my pocket. "Call me," it said, and she had written her phone number. I didn't find the note till me and Kipper had got dressed and had some coffee and breakfast. My mouth felt like a moose had been tracking in a swamp.
I was still a kid. Like I said, Kipper was a lot older, a few years, but that was a big party to me. Elinor gave me hell because I had stayed out all night. We weren't living together, but she knew I had been out. I tried to tell her I had been on business, but she took one look at my red-rimmed eyes and she knew I had been holding corks with a bottle somewhere. And probably a broad.
We had a good fight. After that it got easier to spat with her.
Kipper was acting funny too. I told him about my trouble with Elinor and he wasn't much help. Usually he gave me a lot of advice, whether I took it or not. Not this time.
"What the hell's the matter with you?"
"Nothin', kid."
I prodded him all day long before he would open up at all. We got along pretty good, me and Kipper. I could see finally that he had something he didn't want me to get sore about. I egged him to tell me.
"Elinor," he said. "It's about her."
At that second I knew what he was going to say. But I let him say it. Kip was never wrong.
"She's layin' guys," he said. "I'm sorry kid."
"How d'you know? You seen her at it?"
He shook his head. "Hell no. I just looked at her. She can't help it."
What he meant was that Elinor was a round-heels. I said, "Why didn't you tell me a long time ago?"
"I figured you knew about her. Hell, I didn't know you'd get serious. You going to marry her?"
"
I said no. I was curious as hell about who she was taking on. So I hung around a few nights and watched one certain citizen slide in. I didn't know this guy. He was a chunky clown with a battered Ford; he looked like a stevedore, and I was a little disappointed in Elinor.
I fingered the guy for Kipper and he had a couple of the boys push him around. It didn't help. I didn't feel no better about it. And it didn't cure Elinor. I didn't think it would have.
In the meantime, I called Stephanie. She purred over the phone at me for about a week before she let me up to her castle. She lived in a house about the size of Maryland, with another house in the back for servants. And another house for cars. She had five cars. Who the hell needs five cars?
The butler looked at me like I was a pot of kreplach, and guided me to a den room where there was a bar and a hell of a lot of cut glass. And Stephanie.
When the butler eased out she came into my arms. She pushed her dingus at me and kissed me and wrapped herself around me like a python. Her motor was running. "God! you excite me," she whispered.
She excited me too. I had never been in such a layout, or even dreamed of it-outside the movies. But the movies were lagging along behind that house. A guy could get lost Especially with her. She sort of attacked me, like a hungry animal. We were down on the couch with her on top, and she was a wild goddam dame.
I would come up for air every now and then and she would drag me under again. She was all ready for me too; she had hardly anything on under the dress, and she wriggled out of it very fast. I had a crazy naked female on my hands, and I was still kid enough to have it shock me a little. Despite what I had seen in the whorehouses. I guess I just wasn't ready for Stephanie. But that didn't stop me from screwing her.
Nothing could have stopped her. She demanded it. She scissored me and impaled herself on it, sticking out of my pants. With me still underneath, she bounced me damn near silly. What a woman!
When I finally rolled her over and got on top, I asked her why I hadn't been able to see her for a week.
She giggled up at me. "Because I've been in Europe, darling."
I wasn't used to broads who flew back and forth to Europe like it was between towns. "Why Europe?"
"We had a party," she said. "It just happened to go that way." She wound herself around me. "Don't talk, just frolic."
I frolicked her, alright. Then we had a drink, with her stark naked, sitting on my lap.
"Do you shoot a lot of people, dear?" she asked me.
"Well, not a lot," I said, "only once in a while." I had never shot anybody. I didn't even own a gun. But I wasn't going to tell her that. She thought I was a big tough gangster.
"When was the last time?"
I thought very fast, remembering what one of the guys had told me about a rub-out a few months past. "Oh, we took a guy for a ride," I said, trying to sound like the newspapers. "It wasn't much."
She wanted to know all about it. "Did you shoot him?"
"Sure."
"What did you feel-I mean when you fired the shot? Did it bother you?"
I said I was used to it. I didn't dare say anything else. She expected it. And she kept rubbing her naked breasts across my face while I told her. She wanted to know what the bullet-hole looked like and if he bled much, and how he looked afterward-and she got pretty goddam hot over it.
I laid her on the couch again and gave her another working over. She was crazy mad with lust. And while I pronged her I looked at the damn saintly face on her, wondering how come.
I also wondered about her husband. Did he know what a crazy package he had? Maybe not.
"Damn," she said, "don't hold back-make me come-pound me-"
I pumped her like a machine and she screamed when she let go. I hoped the damn butler wouldn't show up. He didn't, so I guessed he was used to her. She was one wicked little donkey. She couldn't get enough.
She got all she could though-all I was capable of putting out. And then, when I went permanently limp for the day, she threw me out.
"My husband will be home soon, dear," she kissed me and helped me on with my pants. When I left her she was still stark naked.
The butler showed me out, and never cracked an expression. He was wooden as a barrel stave. There were a lot of questions I'd like to have asked him, but I saved my breath.
I was pooped.
CHAPTER FIVE
Police reporters copied, the blotters. The public wanted to hear about gangsters and their molls. There seemed to be a mixed reaction. Some wanted justice to overtake them, the mobsters, and some regarded the Capones as movie stars. The further away from mobsters, the more glamour they took on. Up close they were vicious.
Too often the newspaper accounts of gangsters were fictionalized and made to seem romantic. A crook with a tommy gun was Robin Hood. They forgot that the reason he had that tommy gun was because he wanted the public's money. That was the easiest way to get it in large hunks. Mobsters were not romantic. They were selfish and venomous.
Oleg Orchard was a police reporter and knew many mobsters personally. He was not one of the big names but his by-line was seen daily. He had his share of problems because he occasionally spoke his mind. He now says he wonders how he came out of those days alive. But the mob did not like to take on the press if it could find a way around. Sometimes the press was more trouble than the police.
Orchard did not have a high opinion of mobsters as human beings.
Unfortunately for him, they knew it. He was beaten a few times, and warned others. They were obviously careful not to kill him. It wasn't that he said anything wrong-he was absolutely honest about what he wrote. They didn't want it said. Mobsters often pictured themselves as benefactors.
If you find that strange, go back and read the pronouncements of some of the gang lords. Shirley Temple would melt in their mouths.
OLEG ORCHARD:
"I have to say, on looking back, that it was a hell of a period. There was violence and corruption galore. Money buys almost anything it needs. For a time.
Few newspapers, for a variety of reasons, printed things as they actually were. Some didn't know the truth and some avoided it rather than distort it. Some carried news stories without question or check-up. The one thing that was certain was: the bastards were in control.
Some newspapers were bombed, and other agencies blamed-not the mob. Personnel were threatened, acid thrown. It was safer to say nothing. Truth took a holiday in some large cities of our nation.
Not all the heat came from the mob. City Hall also put the screws on newsmen. Publicity was a weapon and politicians are notoriously shy when the white light is turned on them. The news guys knew who was taking and who was not-from their actions if nothing else. The politicians hated to have this information become public property. It affected votes.
Not that votes weren't bought. It might be better to say, the ballot boxes were bought. Why take a chance? Win the election at the source. One guy votes for everybody. That way it's nice and sure.
No mob can exist and do business without the knowledge and consent of police and civil authority.
"It was hard not to fall into the mob's clutches. They were velvet clutches and sticky with sugar. The mobsters knew how to wine and dine a prospect. The politicians learned from them. The hell with mouldy chicken and peas. The mob put out the best, with champagne and all the trimmings. Including broads.
The mob did the press favors, everything from a timely loan (that needn't be paid back) to girls. A lot of good men fell for the treatment.
Reporters are human, after all, despite what some people believe.
Like cops, they're not overpaid either. Certain guys were patted on the head and told what to write. In return they lived it up with fancy roadsters, trips to Florida and all the broads they could toast on a stick. A few of them got so big they had to be knocked down. With bullets.
Sometimes it was almost more than a stomach could stand, reading sob-stories in the press about the good deeds and public worries of mobsters. Capone said he worried about what the kiddies thought of him. Bullshit.
As I indicated, when the mob did the press favors, they wanted something in return. Good writeups. And suppression of certain news, not to mention slanting of news. The mob was also generous with donations. But with strings attached.
It is a fact that mobsters were often as stingy as they were greedy-and that's saying a lot.
I've been to a lot of stags, where naked girls popped out of cakes and such. Sometimes a reporter was 'honored' by a phony, mob-backed organization. He got dough and a plaque to put on his wall. Sometimes he had the decency to blush when he received it.
But when you're young, it's hard, as I saw, to turn down the food and the fun. Many times I was laid and relaid in some dingy hotel by mob-picked and paid-for broads. This is not a confession. Most of us had it happen at one time or another. You get suddenly taken drunk and when the girl shows up to help relieve the pains or the images, you don't have the strength to get up and toss her out the door. Besides, she is round and fully packed not to mention firm. Also, she has been told what to do and she goes right about doing it and pretty soon you don't struggle. Not if you're human.
I knew Luis Scalici, yes. He was a bag man, so they called him Boodles. He was a pleasant guy, as I remember. Not tough or pushy. He was soft-spoken and had hard brittle eyes.
The mob tagged him as a brain, and they gave him problems to solve. A guy named Kipper hung out at his elbow and did the dirty work if any needed doing. I doubt if Boodles could handle a rod. But then he didn't need to.
If I remember right, Boodles served a stretch for possession of narcotics. I met him about the time he came out. But I'm getting ahead. You asked about girls.
There was the tenderloin. It was a district where some of the high-priced houses were. A jumping spot. In those days the girls hung out in houses, not like they do today, relying on the telephone.
The madams were a colorful lot, most of them. You could get a drink and some good talk and a broad, all for a decent price. I' mnot a PTA expert so I don't pretend to know the ins and outs of legalized sin versus the free-form kind. Maybe permanent call houses is not the way.
We know that something is, whatever it may be. Because sin is here to stay, if the reports can be believed. Sin via whores has been around a hell of a long time and it'll be around for a time to come. I'm basing my argument on history, of course.
At any rate, with whorehouses, the take was easy to figure. The girls were in one place and lems except fixing the right people, the money went over the counter and no problems except fixing the right people.
I've seen a lot of cops in whorehouses. Sampling the wares. Politicians too.
I didn't mind that, but I knew all the madams. They told me the cops and the big shots got in free. Paid for by the mob. Naturally that was a few years ago. That doesn't happen anymore. Of course.
CHAPTER SIX
LUIS SCALICI:
"Like I said before, we were always looking for girls. They didn't last long. You put a pretty young one in a house and in a few years she is beginning to turn brown at the edges. Then you can't get a good price for her.
We had a hell of a lot of trouble with girls too, because a lot of them wouldn't take care of themselves. They got fat or sloppy or dirty. They let their hair go and they tried to hide it when they got the clap.
For a while, me and Kipper turned up a lot of broads. One of the places we went for them was the bus station. Kip would walk through the joint, usually in the evening, and spot a broad.
"That one," he would say, "the one in the white sweater"-or whatever. Then I would slide over and sit beside her. I had a sort of innocent puss or something, and they seemed to trust me.
Anyway, I'd sit down, give them a cigarette or gum, and we'd be talking pretty soon. That's the way, for instance, I recruited Marge. She was pretty, about twenty, and was sitting in the station with one worn suitcase when I sat beside her.
"I'm going back to upstate," she said when I asked her. I've forgotten the little town she came from. She was out of dough and had no friends in town. She had met a few people, but wouldn't go to them for help. Her job hadn't panned out-waitress.
"Come on," I said, "I'll buy you a hamburger.
She hesitated, but she went with me. And as if by chance we ran into Kipper.
"I got a car outside," he said, taking her arm as though it was the most natural thing in the world. "Why walk if you can ride?"
So we got in the car. After that it was easy.
We drove to any one of a number of places, this time to a garage. Marge protested, but she was easy to hold till the boys opened the door. Then the garage door was closed. Two guys took her into a room and talked to her. She had one asset. Her pussy. They talked her into using it to make a living.
The two guys were experts. One was Tony, the other a little squirt named Boozer. Boozer had a cock that would fill a horse. He was the break-in guy.
The way they talked Marge into the Life was for Tony to hold her down, hands and nails. Kip held her legs open and Boozer gave her the benefit of years of booting broads. I just stood there and watched him fuck her. Sure, it sounds cruel, but you get used to a lot of things. It was all in the day's work.
Marge had a damn good figure. Her thighs were nice and shapely and round. We let her scream. No one could hear. She only yelled for a short time, because he didn't hurt her. She wasn't a virgin.
Boozer took his time screwing her, Kipper opened a bottle and we all had a drink. Except her. She wasn't in the mood.
I never did see a cock like Boozer's. "I can tell when it touches bottom," he said.
He showed us how he didn't ram it in all the way. Marge couldn't take the whole length of it or he'd ruin her. Boozer was a pro. He had a good time and he didn't ruin the dame. Tony didn't have to hold her hands after she got the idea she was going to have to take it. We just sat around and watched that prick slide in and out.
Actually that was part of the ceremony, getting her to accept the act. Boozer made it last, because the longer it lasted the better it was.
"It gentles 'em," he said. "You fuck a dame quick and she don't get the idea. You got to diddle 'em with it. Make 'em like it. Some of 'em like it right off the bat. And sometimes I got to boot 'em over and over before they get it through their thick heads. Once they get the right idea, that's it."
Marge took a while. At first she begged us to let her go. Then she turned sullen-wouldn't talk. Boozer just grinned and kept feeding it to her. He greased it now and then, but just kept up a steady screwing.
It got to her.
Despite us sitting there looking at her, drinking and making cracks, she got hot. He made her come. She grabbed him and fucked back; she couldn't help herself. Kipper winked at me. She was going to be a good little whore!
"Oh my God!" she groaned. She held on and Boozer fed her that prick, watching her face We sat there, glasses halfway to mouths and pricks hard, and watched her jerk and twitch when it hit her. It made her squirm.
Then she was a little easier to get along with. Boozer kept feeding it to her and it took a lot shorter time to get her horny again. She lay back with her eyes closed and received it-and then when she began to hump, he let go and squirted his load. The two of them shook the hell out of that couch.
And as soon as Boozer slid off her, Tony got on.
She hardly noticed. She was all weak and trembly from the second boot and didn't even try to get her legs together. Tony got it in her and began ramming her right off. She took all of his dong and he punched her with it. And he undressed her the rest of the way as he did it. She didn't protest at all.
She was a great looking piece naked. Nice tits.
Kipper wanted a piece too, so I hung around. I had a date with a broad and didn't want to lose a pop with her, so I didn't take a turn.
They gentled her good. In a couple hours she was eating it and giving nobody any trouble.
I met her a few months later in one of the houses, and she was relaxed and looking fine. We had a little talk, and I booted her then. She was making dough and they treated her OK. Her folks thought she was working in an office, and she even sent a little dough home. She was a pretty good lay too. I've had better blow jobs, but what the hell, you can't find paradise in a bus station.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened to her if she'd gone on home. She'd probably wound up having a flock of snotty-nosed kids and grinding her life away for some slob. I did her a favor.
The rap they hung on me was sure a bum one. That fuckin' cop, Otto Sunderland, framed me with a tissue of horse. He knew damn well I'm not a user.
Technically the H wasn't on my person. I was hauled in with a dozen others, and the Big Guy got us lawyers. I didn't know the heroin was in the place at all, but who would believe it? The jury gave me a fast shuffle. The judge gave me a three year stretch even though my lawyer protested they were jugging me for my record and not the immediate crime.
Otto sat out there in the courtroom and grinned at me. The son of a bitch.
I got out in a year, but that was one hell of a long year.
OTTO SUNDERLAND
"I wasn't happy to see Luis get jugged for possession of heroin. We were trying to work up a white slave charge against him which would have put him away a lot longer.
Those are the breaks. Sometimes the law works when you don't want it to. I knew that Boodle would be a harder fish to catch next time. And it didn't hurt the organization one damn bit. They put another guy in his spot and went right on with the action.
It wasn't my job to make pinches connected with dope anyway. If I stumbled across it, well OK. But my job was to keep the peace in my neighborhood. I had a suspicion that old man Dunker was peddling dope, for instance, but I'd play hell trying to prove it. I could probably get a few kids to say so in court but that's not enough. I thought I could rely on him to ditch it pretty good, so a raid wouldn't turn it up. I didn't want to raid him for a search till I was certain I'd find something.
A few whores told me that Dunker sold snow or marijuana to them. But you can't trust a whore. A dame like Katy might say anything just to get even.
Katy caused a lot of trouble in the neighborhood. Somewhere along the line she got connected with Miff, a very slimy specimen. Miff had several girls on his string. He wasn't the usual pimp, he was more than that. He took care of the girls and got Johns for them. Maybe I ought to say here that most pimps didn't work, I mean didn't get Johns for the girls. They were just kept by the girls. Procurers were different.
But Miff was a combination. He was a hustler. He had been lots of things and had spent time for them, like burglary and robbery. He was a real nasty little shit. I often wondered if there was a connection between him and Dunker. He went to Dunker's place every day.
But, like I said, Katy caused a lot of trouble. She enjoyed it. She was a natural born rebel. And when she raised too much hell she'd run to Miff for protection.
I don't think she cared much for Miff, but he was handy and he was protection. She needed that.
The mobs were growing in power and influence. There were a lot of different gangs at first, but over the years they tended to merge. By the time I'd been on the force a few years there were only a half dozen gangs in town, and in another few years those were whittled down to three.
They got tough with the hookers. You worked for the mob or you didn't work. To the girls, that was one more cut out of their total take.
The entire thing got more and more vicious.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was our thought at the start of this project to get an interview with a working procurer or pimp, but we found it difficult. The women talked easily and at length, the men almost not at all. Also, much of what the men told us was untrue, as we found when we checked it. They seemed to hide behind a mass of semi-truths and lies.
But we persisted and at length found one ex-pimp-panderer who offered, for money, to tell us something of his 'profession.' He was a user and his habit cost him more than he was able to provide. He almost always needed a fix.
He alone, and the police files, know his real name. He said he was called Chazz, and that's what we called him.
CHAZZ:
"I was born in Portland, Oregon and left there when I was five. I never knew my old man, and my mother was a hustler. I didn't know that for a lot of years, but when I began to be old enough to put two and two together, I realize that she must have been.
There were always guys around. Different guys. For years I thought that was the way everyone lived, with a half dozen guys around every night.
When we left Portland, we went to Chicago. And I was put into a home-school. I still remember the name: The Luther Everette School for Boys.
It was the most dreary goddam place I was ever in. I've seen a lot of creepy joints in .my time, but that lousy school was the worst. I guess because it was supposed to be so upright and religious. They made a big show of taking care of us boys, for the parents or whatever, but after visiting day was over the place went back to normal. Normal was a stinking mess.
I got screwed the first night I was there. I mean reamed out!
One of the sales points, I learned later, of the school was the fact that there were no dorms. The boys slept in rooms, four boys to a room-just like a cheap whorehouse. They put me in a room with three other guys: Taffy, Dingbat and Toad. Those are all the names I can remember ... their names.
I was five, going on six when I hit the school. The other guys in the room were all older. Taffy was seven, Dingbat was eight or nine, and so was Toad. Toad was the leader. He was a fattish, pimply kid with bad teeth. He'd been in the school for years.
As soon as the lights went out that first night, Taffy and Dingbat held me, Toad yanked my pants down and got it up my rear end. I tried to scream but they whacked me till I stopped. Then Toad went on with it. He was a horny little bastard. It hurt like hell.
He slapped the back of my head while he was ramming me, "It feels good, don't it? Don't it?"
He kept that up till I said it did.
And after Toad got his load off in me, then Taffy and Ding took their turns. They were just as hot for it as Toad.
I don't remember how many turns they took on my poor little ass that night, but in the morning I was sore as a boil. Rubbed raw.
We had to take showers every morning. There was a line of shower heads, five or six of them, divided by concrete wings, you know, it made stalls. They sent us in there by rooms, three rooms at a time. Ten or twelve boys in the shower at a time. Naked.
The shower room was presided over by the Athletics teacher, a guy named Mr. Lyon. He was a skinny blonde faggot, about twenty-five, I guess, who stood around simpering at us. He usually wore black trunks and had a whistle around his neck. And as long as we didn't make too much noise, he didn't give a shit what we did.
I was astonished to see most of the guys with hard-ons in the showers. And I found out in a hellova hurry that the showers were nothing more than one big buggering fest. So I got it again in the showers, from I don't know how many guys. With soap this time. That made it easier anyway. And Mr. Lyon walked past on the duckboards and watched, with that crooked simper-smile on his puss that I got to know real well.
Well, that was my first experience with sex. I grew up in a hurry. Nobody talked about anything else. They were ass-fucking constantly-and talking about girls at the same time. I guess because girls were practically an unknown quantity. A few of the older kids had had a dame here and there, and they told us about it over and over again-and we never got tired of listening.
"I got her down," they'd say, "and stuck it in, and she wanted me to do it all day long-" That sort of thing. I knew now they made it up just to stay in the limelight. But then, man, it was hot stuff!
Some of our teachers were women, but they were big and tough, most of them, and distant. Not like our ideas of girls. They probably weren't very good teachers. I'm sure they didn't get much dough, and maybe working for the School was the end of the road for them. Anyhow, I didn't learn a hell of a lot. Not enough to get by on the outside. They didn't teach us a damn thing I could use by the time I got out of there. Some arithmetic, but no shop.
About all a guy from the Luther Everette School was good for was buggering or blowing. The older guys called it the faggot factory. And they were right. Even a kid who had no idea of being a homo, had to turn out to be a gobbling fool. He had to, to stay alive.
Taffy and Ding turned out to be OK guys mostly. They helped me along, and protected me some from the older wolves-it was like a prison in some respects-guys had regular steady boys. They were both orphans and didn't have a damn thing to look forward to. I was rare because my mother turned up about once a month to see me.
But if Taffy and Ding were not too bad, Toad was a bastard. He was fat, but strong as hell and none of us cared to cross him. He was vicious and would get back in some underhanded way. You couldn't trust him out of your sight. And for a time, I was his boy.
I hated him something fierce. I still hate him, wherever he is. For years, I dreamed of meeting him on the outside and cutting his fat heart out. But I never did.
Every night, regular as clockwork, he was in my bed, reaming me. Before lights out we were all supposed to get in bed, and Mr. Blackburn would walk down the halls and look in all the rooms. We were all scared of him. He was a huge guy and tough as nails. He didn't take any crap off any of us and we toed the mark with him.
I often thought of him later. Maybe that's the way to raise kids. Make them toe the goddam mark or else. I mean make them. No fooling around. We sure gave him a lot of respect.
We'd get in bed, like I said, and Toad would lay there and say: "I'm gonna come over in a minute and stick you, Chazz. You got it ready for me, huh?"
If I had raised a stink I'd have had a shiv in me. There was one kid found dead while I was there in the room with Toad. Nobody knew what happened. There was an investigation, and the school came off smelling like a rose, of course. They said the kid had fallen on his head.
We all knew better. I don't mean to say Toad did it. The kid was in another room, and one of them konked him. He probably put up a fight about bending over or something. That was the whisper. We believed it.
After the first blush was off the vine, Taffy and Ding went back to buggering each other, and I became Toad's boy. When lights-out darkened the room, then we all got to work. It was the only fun anybody had in that damn joint. And it was fun for me too, after I got used to it. I'm not trying to get out of the fact that I became one of them. That would be impossible. I was there too long.
Toad liked to get off in me, and he also liked blowing me. He was a homo all the way. Everybody knew I was his, so they laid off me. Even in the showers. Unless Toad let them. Sometimes he and some other guy changed off-swapped boys. Then I got it from the other reamer.
It took me a lot longer time to get used to blowing him. I wasn't a natural born cocksucker. But I had to do it or get lumps.
There was a lot of talk, among us boys, about Mr. Lyon. They all said he was the best sucker around. Whenever a guy went to his office, we all figured he was getting a blow. If the guy Was somebody's steady he denied it. Taffy told me, however, that Mr. Lyon had blown him several times. I believed him.
Once Toad went to the hospital with scarlet fever. That was a holiday for me. I was learning to hate him more and more. The school didn't seem half so bad with Toad missing.
Mr. Lyon called me into his office then, but very secretly. "I don't want Toad to beat you when he gets back," he said to me.
Mr. Lyon knew the score. He also knew I was an old hand by now, so he got my pants off in a hurry. I just sat on a bench by his desk and watched him going down on me. He was real good. I liked it.
"That was the way I grew up. I was in the Luther Everette School till I was almost sixteen. My mother had died when I was eleven. They told me she had died, but someone else, years later, told me she had been killed. In a brawl.
They didn't let me go to her funeral. One day they just took me out of a class and told me, and sent me right back. It didn't mean a lot to me, because we weren't very close. I didn't feel much for her, but I sure felt alone in the world. She had been some tie.
Toad had left years before I did. I never could trace him. Taffy stayed the longest, and we became steadies after Toad left. Dingbat went over the wall one night and we never did hear from him again.
At sixteen The State moved me to another school. I stayed there only a week. It was almost as bad a joint as the first one. But I was tough by then, and I walked out the front door one day and no one stopped me. I got on a street car and rode a couple miles and got off in the middle of town wondering what the hell to do.
I had enough dough to eat a hamburger, then I hung out at the park for a few hours, waiting for night. My plan was to break into something and get some bucks.
I went into the men's pisser at the park though, several times, and the last time I did it was empty. But while I was standing at the urinal a guy came in a stood beside me. He gave me a big smile. Then he reached over and took hold of my dong. "Hi, baby," he said. I let him handle it. "Hi," I said back. He jerked on it real good for a minute.
"Christ, I want that thing." He leaned down and kissed it.
I knew about guys paying for it, so I said, "OK, how much?"
"C'mon to my joint." He shoved it back in my pants and I zipped up. He was kind of flustered. He beckoned to me and I followed him out. Hell, I might get a meal out of him.
I got more than that. He lived in a flat near the park and had a good job, he said. He looked like he did. He was a fairy-looking type, dreamy-eyed, you know. Arty as hell, and swished. His name was Bobby, and as soon as we got inside the door he was all over me. He practically ripped my pants off and stuffed it down his throat.
I was an old-timer at this by now, so I sat back and let him eat it. He went crazy for it. In those days I wasn't handsome, but I wasn't ugly. I didn't swish, anyway.
He made a meal on me, and then he gave me a drink and cleaned me up and we went out to dinner. He treated me like his. We went to a gay joint and he swished all over the damn place, and gay birds fluttered around, lisping at me and batting their eyes. I was right at home, but I was smart enough not to let him know that. He thought he had broken me in.
At least I got dinner. That night he blew me like a trumpet. Even after it went limp he blew tunes on it. He said he loved me.
He gave me dough and bought me clothes. I had found a lover. He made violent love to me for about a week before I gradually came around to doing the same for him. I didn't want to scare off a meal ticket. I was afraid that if he thought I was an agfay he might turn me out. And brother, I was sitting pretty, after that school. I had never had it so good.
Bobby was a pretty nice guy really. He had a good heart under all the frilly clothes he wore when we were alone. He loved to prance around in girl's clothes. He liked me to be naked. It made him horny to feel that I was naked, close by. My dingus drew him like a magnet. He homed in on it and nursed it for hours.
That love affair lasted about a month. Then he got tired of me.
But by then, I had discovered how to get along in the big city. While Bobby had been at work. I had prowled about, looking. I made friends with Speedball, a bookie, and became a runner for him. Through Speedie I got into all the Speakeasys on the north side, and met Tex Smith. Tex was a hard guy with one of the mobs.
Tex needed somebody just like me to drive for him.
I couldn't drive a car at all. Hell, I had hardly been in one in my life. Tex showed me how, and gave me a chance to practise. He wasn't a bad guy, sober. But drunk-look out! He had a bad habit of coming up with a knife when he got drunk mean. Then anybody could get cut.
He had a girl, a blonde (dyed) named Sandy.
She was a hustler with big brown eyes and a pair of hips that could rock a statue to sleep. She stayed with Tex when she didn't have an all-night john. One morning Tex got up and scrammed early. I was sleeping in the next room. I woke up to find her in bed with me, kittenish as hell, wanting to play.
I was scared silly, knowing Tex. "He ain't here," she said. "S'matter, baby, ain't you got one?"
She found it.
I found out she was naked, just by reaching out. She scissored me in a second and yanked on me. I rolled her on her back and beat it into her like I was killing snakes. She laughed like hell.
"For crissake, baby, what the hell you doing?"
"Screwin' you," I said.
"Jesus, you don't know how." Her legs went around me and she lifted my face and looked at me very serious. "You never had a girl before, huh?"
I admitted it. But I didn't tell her I had been a faggot for most of my life. She felt great.
So she showed me how to do it. "Get it in deep, then just writhe it-easy, dammit. I like it nice and slow, but deep. Push it more, yeh, hard. Now, keep it coming-"
I got my gun off in her God knows how many times before Tex showed up again. And when she blew me it was a lot different than I was used to. Girls were a hell of a lot different from guys. I liked it.
She did too. "Hey, you rile me up, baby," she would say. "An old hooker like me, too."
It went that way for quite a while. I drove the car for Tex, and other guys too. We guarded shipments and ran interference for trucks-ordinary muscle. It was an easy job and I got pretty good with a car.
Off duty, I hunted up Sandy lots of times. She hung out in the bars along Pitt Street. She was easy to find. I knew what hotels she used too, and all I had to do was hang around the lobby and she'd show sooner or later. Then I'd take her up to a room and get in the saddle.
I think she liked it some because she was putting something over on Tex. But I know she liked me, otherwise she wouldn't have come looking for me in the first place. She said she was crazy about me. Of course, women are hard to figure. I was just a punk kid and Tex was making big dough. Money didn't mean much to Sandy though.
"It's crap," she would say. "Look how I make it-just crap. Easy come, easy go. What the hell's money for but to spend?"
"It's nice to have."
She would look at me with the big eyes and open her legs. "Hell, baby, I can make all I want."
I had been driving for Tex about four months, and boffing Sandy on the sly, when she sat up in bed one day and stared at me. We were laying naked on a hotel bed, and she had just blown my head off.
"Let's get out," she said.
"What?"
"You an' me," she said. "Let's get out. Go someplace else."
"You mean leave Tex?"
She sniffed. "Hell yes, I mean leave Tex. What the hell is he? A guy, that's all. I'm sick of Tex."
"Whad he do to you?"
"Nothin'," she said. "Nothin'. I'm just tired of him, and that goddam knife of his."
I remembered that Tex had been a little tipsy the night before. Maybe he had shown the shiv. It would be like him. Sandy didn't like knives too much.
"He might come after us."
"Lissen, you for Tex or me? How the fuck he gonna know where we are? We blow town and that's that."
I looked at her, and for the first time I thought about being on my own. With a dame. Sandy was a hell of a lot of dame. Big tits and a lot of urge. When she got it in her head to screw she was wicked.
"Yeh," I said. "It might work-"
"Hell yes it'll work. We get on a train. How's he gonna find out? There's lots of dames. He'll find one."
So we did it. And it was damn easy. I threw my stuff in a bag, slid out and met her at the station and we were off. We went to the Big Town and put up in a hotel. Sandy got a John right off the bat and we were eating good.
That was my golden period.
She kept me like a goddam king. I never did a stick of work for a hell of a long time. Sandy worked her little tail off and I loved her up a few times a week and it was gravy. Gravy all the fuckin' way.
I shoulda saved some of that dough.
Sandy had a guy who got her Johns. I had a fancy apartment, ten suits, a car and golf sticks. I had it crazy. All I had to do was keep her happy. She got sore about this and that, the other dames were getting better scores than she did-that kind of thing, but mostly it was sheer gravy.
She got to be a fifty-buck-a-night girl. Sometimes she made as high as a grand a week.
The only trouble was, she got hooked. Some bastard got her high on H a few times. She got a kick out of it. When she went out on some of them parties on boats, they were mainlining and smoking blue sage.
She would come home sometimes, limping and tired out. "Baby, I'm all wrung out, dry as a fish-"
I had to pet her and give her baths.
She'd look so goddam pitiful. "Baby, they're fuckin' me too hard. I got to ease up-you know they gang up on you out there."
I told her I wouldn't let her go on the boat dates, but she went anyway. Benny, the hustler, he got her good dough and she couldn't turn it down. But they were rearnin' and screwin' her at the same time. He knew it, but Benny didn't care.
Then when I bathed her, I found the needle marks.
She had been at it longer than I knew about. She was hooked.
"I gotta have it, baby," she said. "Don't scold me-I gotta have it."
So I knew it was a matter of time. It took more and more of what she made to support the habit. She tried to keep me up too, but she was beginning to slip.
Benny said, "Hell, Chazz, figure it out. She got competition, you know that. A dame loses her shape, the tits sag, what the hell, guys go somewheres else. They's lots of young broads."
Then he gave her up. So I got her Johns. I had to give up the apartment, and the car. But she couldn't get enough. The habit was driving her nuts. It took a while, but she just couldn't make it. She was down to blowing guys in cars and haunting the bars, doing anything they wanted. She even did dog acts and lezzie shows.
But it got to her. Sandy had been a fifty-buck broad. She had pride.
One night she turned on the gas. And that was that.
She left me a note, saying she was sorry. I never had another broad like Sandy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Lilli de Witt had been a successful madam, and we were lucky that she was willing to talk to us. Her real name was something like Lily Barnes, it wasn't Barnes, but she won't permit us to disclose it. She had come from Indiana, straight out of high school) and had gone right to the top in her chosen profession. She told us that she had decided upon whoring because she liked money and the things it would buy.
She hadn't known the pitfalls, and had been lucky. She had been one of the few who had looks and seduction ability combined. Most girls didn't know how to really entice a man, she said. Lilli had saved her money, stayed out of the hands of pimps, and become a madam.
She was rather exceptional in many ways:
LILLI DE WITT:
"You said to start at the begininning. Well, I had an uneventful beginning, I guess. My parents were normally well off, dad was a druggist and had his own store-still does. Mother was always understanding and still is. I had very few childhood problems.
I went through school, got good grades and got into very little tourble. I was practically a model student.
How then did I become a whore? Romance, probably. I had never known a whore, had only read about them. The things I read were only the good side. I really had no idea of what the life was like. Actually.
It sounded easy. You know, go to bed with men and they give you money for it. Simple.
I read a lot when I was in high school, all the best sellers, and in fact everything I could get my hands on. Lurid and whatnot. I heard a lot about what people faced when they got out of school, perhaps I was a more serious sort, I don't know. But I thought about getting a job, factory or office, or getting married. It didn't seem to be the best thing. My reading had given me a taste of wanting. I wanted to see the Riviera or the moonlight on the Ganges. I had never been far from my hometown, but I had the urge to travel. I saved up my money and went to Chicago one summer.
I was a virgin when I hit town and that was one of the things I wanted to correct. I had to do it out of the familiar surroundings. The trip was an experiment.
I went there to see what a big city looked and felt like, and to lose my cherry.
The boy I picked to do that chore turned out to be just as shaky as me. I was, of course, picking from my limited experience. Not knowing any better, I automatically selected a companion who looked like the kids I was used to. I invited him to my room at the hotel and he was more scared than I, I think.
Naturally I didn't tell him I wanted him to deflower me, I thought in my innocence that nature would take its course. It did. He got all shook up and pooped out on me.
After he ran out, I went downstairs to the bar, frustrated and worried that I was a social failure. I was actually too young to drink, but the bartenders were rushed and hardly looked at me. I sat on a stool and sipped a pink lady and thought I was one hell of a sophisticated girl-barring my recent bust.
"And what have we here?"
I still remember his opening line. The oldest, corniest opening remark in the known world. Only I didn't know that.
I smiled and so he wedged in beside me and ordered us another drink. He was short and dark, with a pencil moustache and a pinstripe suit that I thought looked expensive. "I'm Gene," he said.
I never did learn his last name. I told him mine, and we had the drink, and another. Then he wanted to go to another bar, "Where there's a show."
I went along. What the hell, I was on an experiment. So far, I liked it. Gene was a good spender. I was on a very limited budget, but I didn't skimp on the pink ladies with him paying. They had hardly any alcohol in them anyway.
That's what I thought.
I remember waking up a little, groggily, in a strange, darkened room, hearing voices. Somebody was pressing on me, intimately. The bed seemed to be moving far more than beds usually did. They were men's voices, two perhaps. It was all too fuzzy. I couldn't make out faces. After a moment I realized what they were doing, but I was in no condition to protest. I couldn't speak, only make sounds.
Before I passed out again, I was sure there were two of them-taking turns on me.
I wasn't a virgin anymore.
The next day was awful. I woke about noon with a huge head and a miserable taste in my mouth. Whether I had been drugged, I don't know. Perhaps I had just been drunk. I wasn't used to liquor, of course.
But the bed was a mess, bloody and smelly. My clothes hadn't been torn, they had undressed me. I had a bath and dressed and got out of there. It was a small dingy hotel and the clerk looked at me oddly when I hurried through the lobby.
I was prepared to scream if he spoke to me, but he didn't.
I went back to my own hotel, getting a lifted eyebrow from the clerk. I didn't care about him. In my room, I sat and considered. I had got what I had come for. But I hadn't enjoyed it. That was my own fault. I had drunk too much. I made up my mind right then not to drink. The only other thing that worried me was pregnancy.
I was lucky there too. I stayed in Chicago two more days, and I really looked for a man to give myself to, to really experience sex, but did not find one. After the bad time, I was probably much too careful and scared them off by droves.
But I went home deflowered. And it hadn't been an impossible thing. I began to wonder what the life of a scarlet sister was like.
In my senior year of school, I went to dances and out on dates, like all the other girls. I also had a steady. I let him do everything he wanted. And we often had sex. I enjoyed it. I managed to get a diaphragm, used it diligently, and had no problems.
So how could going to bed with men be bad? It was fun. I thought about it and thought about it, and came to the conclusion that my female organs would provide me with bread and board. All I had to do was be careful.
My steady didn't realize how I experimented with him. Looking back, I realize he must have thought he had a very hot little girlfriend. I got him to try everything either of us could think up.
I wanted to become an expert in all forms of pleasing men.
But we didn't think of all of the possibilities.
Anyway, I went to Miami the summer I got out of school. I convinced my parents I was a big girl, and they didn't protest too long. After all, I had gone to Chicago and returned intact. For all they knew.
I registered in a small hotel. The bellhop went up to the room with me, carrying my two bags-and propositioned me.
"Look, I send guys up here, I get ten percent, OK?"
I stood and blinked at him. That wasn't what I thought the whore business would be like. "Well," he said, "how 'bout it?" I stammered.
He pulled me to the bed and was almost on me before I fought him off. He didn't like that at all.
"I got to try you out, dammit! You think I'm gonna recommend you blind?"
I told him to get the hell out. Slamming the door on him, I almost cried, I was so angry. Then I thought about turning around and going home. Suddenly being a whore didn't sound so good.
Then I talked myself out of that mood. I hadn't given it a try. I had natural talents, I was sure. That night I dressed in my best frock and diaphragm and went into the nicest bar I could find. The most high class.
I attracted a man immediately. He bought me a drink and wanted to go upstairs. I set my little jaw and discussed it in a very lady-like manner.
He gave me twenty-five dollars for an hour's work.
That, I thought, was better.
I moved out of the cheap hotel into a much fancier one. My theory was right. A girl could make it with men if she really wanted to do it right.
I was wrong, but I didn't know that. Then.
I was several thousand dollars richer before I discovered how wrong I had been. I was both right and wrong. But mostly I had been lucky.
"In some ways being a whore is a good bet. Depending. There's never a slack season, I mean guys want sex all year round. You just have to be in the right spot to catch a John's eye.
You have to consider it a business. You let yourself start enjoying it and you're through. That's my opinion anyhow. If you want to enjoy, do it outside of working hours.By now I've met and employed and talked to a hell of a lot of whores. They differ naturally, in every possible way. They don't agree and they have likes and dislikes like anyone else. But most of them seem to agree on some things. Like you have to keep yourself desirable if you want to get the good money. You have to stay off H and the other drugs. If you're keeping up a habit, you're stupid.
In my opinion, if you keep up a pimp you're stupid too. But try to tell that to a lot of broads.
Men want sex all year round, as I just said. They also want it when they're high, feeling good about something. So when I ran a house I tried to keep it a cheerful place. That helps too, when you separate the suckers from the dough.
But the guys want it when they're down on their luck also. If a guy is feeling bad, maybe a dame will bring him out of it. A whore has to be able to figure guys. Read their moods. She has to be sweetheart and even a mother. A hell of a lot of Johns want a mother to comfort them. And they pay well for it. If the girl doesn't understand, she loses the fee.
A good whore ought to know some psychology. Of course that has been said before, but true, real true.
I've met a lot of girls who don't have any idea of what they're selling. They think it's between their legs. That's only part of it. I had no end of trouble getting girls who were seducers and not just lays.
In my opinion, the girls who accost a man and rub it on his leg are always going to be cheap whores, and will probably get saddled with a pimp and a habit and never come out of the life with a dime.
Of course, that's just my opinion. But I don't remember one who didn't.
A prostitute, to get anywhere, must be a pretty good conversationalist, smart, sophisticated, and not rough or coarse. She must look good enough for a man to take her anywhere, and know enough to talk about general subjects in good English.
Maybe my English isn't the best, but when I was hustling I was careful about what I said. And I was interested in what the man said to me. I showed it. Man, they pay for tact.
Money is the name of the game.
I've just said that a girl must look good enough so a man feels he can take her anywhere. Men are vain as hell, more so than women, I think. Anyway, what I was about to say is: looks aren't everything. A girl must look good, yes. But if she's got a pleasing or interesting personality, that's a lot better than looks any day. Any day.
Whorehouses are full of beautiful girls. Beauty isn't enough. In fact, to my way of thinking, beauty may be a handicap. I have talked to men who steer clear of the beauties. They say the beautiful girls expect to get by on that commodity alone and do not make an effort.
Give me a girl who can charm a man and you can have the beauty. When I was hiring girls, I could never find enough girls with personality.
A girl has to fake it. She can't enjoy every client, not like they enjoy her. Otherwise, naturally, she'd burn out. She mustn't make her John feel that she's rushing him either. If she puts a watch on the bedside table and gives him twenty mintues to work, then she is telling him exactly what she is, and he'll treat her accordingly. She should beguile him instead. Most men don't want to feel they're buying sex. Sure, they know they are, but they'd like to kid themselves.
A good hustler would help out the illusion. And maybe get a little extra dough for it. I found that guys were generous-if you didn't ask for anything.
I know you can't teach personality, but it is possible for some of the tricks of the trade to soak in. It's all an illusion of love. The closer to the real thing you can make a John feel, the more dough he is likely to give you; and he'll want to become a steady customer.
Baby, it's an illusion. But it pays."
CHAPTER NINE
LUIS SCALICI:
"I was in the can for a year. One whole lousy year. (I didn't know then that I would spend sixteen more.) It was a rough time for an ambitious guy. I was afraid the mob would forget about me and I'd have to start all over when I got out.
My cellmate was a guy named Belcher Gein. They called him Belcher, his real name was Horace-I saw it on his tag. But anyway, he taught me a few things. Belcher was a strong-arm guy.
"I done that 'cause I wasn't smart enough t'con," he said to me a thousand times. "Lissen, armed robbery is for the birds. You tell 'em I said so."
Belcher wanted to be a con man. It was a laugh. He was built like a tractor. His body was his constant sorrow.
"I coulda been a whiz if I was skinny," he moaned.
But he taught me about banks and guns and about how cops think, and a lot of good stuff. I liked Belcher. Except for one thing. He was a little stir-crazy and would get moody and touchy now and then. You had to use kid gloves with him then. He could flare up and wipe the cell with me if I wasn't real diplomatic. Even the screws were careful with him.
He had one other stir-gotten vice. All the old residents, and some of the new, acquire it. He was one of the brown boys. Come lights out, he wanted to bugger. I had to put up with that for the year.
"Relax an' enjoy it," he would tell me. There wasn't anything else I could do. He outweighed me two hundred pounds, at least. He greased it and took his time.
It was easy to tell, from the comments, that other guys were practising the same diversion. There was one bird, down the block, who would yell: "I got it up, I got it up-"
Other boys always yelled back, with suggestions, some asking for appointments, some timing him.
The bastile was in a bad way just then, overcrowded and having problems with the screws. Belcher and I were in one of the tiny cells, meant for one guy. There were no prisoner uprising while I was there, but soon after they had a prisoner strike. I wasn't surprised.
The food was terrible. The yard was over crowded too, and a lot of guys got hurt. Old scores were settled in the yard-guys would group around and two gees would work over a creep and leave him laying there. If he got dead nobody knew a thing about it.
Some guys made dough or cigarettes, by selling mouth in the yard. The screws knew it, but they didn't try to interfere. Like I say, they were having problems with the State, and didn't take risks. A group of gay guys would stand around and if you wanted a blow they'd do it right there in the yard.
I saw some awful fights when a new guy came into the can. If he was a young, good-looking kid, the old wolves would really go after him. I was lucky in a sense being with Belcher. Nobody bothered me. They didn't fool with him.
Kipper met me when I got out.
He looked exactly the same, and I was sure glad to see him. We went right to the train and back to town. It was good to throw away the duds they gave me and get into some clothes again. I couldn't get enough of the town.
Kip had to laugh the way I wanted to ride around and look at things. But I was only twenty-one. A year was forever. The town had changed too, even in that time.
Kip knew what I wanted. He called for a girl and gave me his apartment. She was a hooker named Betta, and she looked very good to me. I guess I made a pig of myself, but she seemed to have a good time. I kept her for a day and a half.
She was one of Lilli's girls and they were the best.
Then the Big Gee sent for me and I was nervous as a hillbilly in a tux. But I got a nice surprise. The Big Guy was pleasant as hell. He was about my size, smooth as ice and gray-haired. Pleasant but ice underneath. He knew all about me. That I had been given a bum rap even.
"You were a victim of circumstances," he said. "It shouldn't have happened, but it did. We got you out in a year, though. Now we want to see that you stay out."
I got a nice bonus too. I thught I'd get my old job back, but I did other things instead. I was sent to work with Kipper and a guy named Yoine. I was glad they didn't split up me and Kip.
Yoine was a little guy, gray straggly hair and glasses. He looked like a bum. No matter how expensive his suits were, they draped on him like he got them out of a can in the alley. Yoine was an expert on legal larceny. He figured out grifts that were big on the payoff and almost legal.
I spent a year with him, then I went back to working on the tenderloin. Yoine didn't mess with the dames much, most of his business was financial, so I'll skip it. He was a very smart apple and highly respected in mob circles. What he could do with a set of books was pure art, they told me. He was one of the guys who started the Swiss switch-putting dough in Swiss banks with numbered accounts instead of names.
Unfortunately, Yoine liked young girls. I heard later that he had been gunned to death in a brownstone somewhere while calling on a young broad who happened to be the sole property of another hood who didn't recognize Yoine in his birthday suit. The mob took vengeance on the hood. Yoine had been more valuable. They gave him a swell funeral.
One night I met Stephanie Warwick in a nite club. She looked exactly the same too, and it made little shivers go up and down my spine when I saw her. She was with a party, and I had a blonde. The blonde looked like a crumpled gum wrapper beside Stephanie. And she was a hellova slick blonde.
Stephanie saw me too. She didn't make a sign. When she passed my table she slipped and I gave her a hand. When she went on, I had a note which I put in my pocket and read later. It said: 'Call me."
She was all giggly on the phone the next day. "Darling, I'm crazy to see you!"
We made a date for that afternoon at a club, and I was waiting for her. She showed up in a long coat that hid everything but her nose. I had a drink waiting. She sipped it and ogled me.
"How was it in jail?"
It must have been in the papers, but I didn't expect her to know. I told her it had been lousy. She giggled.
"Did you miss me?"
"Of course."
"Then let's get out of here."
We went in my car which was a Packard and not bad. She wasn't used to sitting in the front seat, but somebody had to drive. I headed out of town fast. She insisted on it.
"I want fresh air." She curled up and put her head on my shoulder. "Tell me who you've shot lately, darling."
I made up a story for her and dragged it out as long and grisly as I could. She loved to hear about blood. Then I turned off the road and found a spot under some trees.
She didn't have a damn thing on under the coat. Naked. A suit of satin skin. She giggled when she opened it to show me. She wriggled over the back and pulled me into the back seat with her. I had forgotten how crazy wild and exciting she was. She had been wound up at birth and would never completely unwind.
"Men wear so many clothes," she protested, as I did my best to shed them. She was all over me with hands and mouth. She knew how to erect my nerve-endings and keep them in a frothy state of delirium till nothing could stop the dam bursting.
She smothered me in titties and went berserk when I blowed madly up her gash. She screamed naughty things in my ear in French, Italian and even a little German. I had to guess what they were, but every now and then I recognized the word for 'fuck.' In French. She was becoming an international broad.
When she let me up for a coffin nail, she told me her husband was in England but was flying home in another day or so. She also had a boyfriend.
"He's young, darling, you know I need youth. Lots of it-"
"Baby, all you need is a prong."
She giggled. "Don't be vulgar. Anyone would think you know what you're talking about. Anyway, his name is Brent and he's a darling. Loaded with trashy boats, but a darling." She twined herself about my neck like a pink necklace and stuck one tit in my eye. "I don't think I love him though. I need a man for love-"
"What about your husbnad?"
"What about him, dear? He's an old fogie and I hate him." She made a face. "He smells. Darling, he smells."
"So do you."
"You're so sweet." She kissed me passionately. "Let's fuck again, darling."
She sat on it and bounced. The blonde had taken a lot out of me the riight before, so I did my best for her, but I think she was disappointed. But she didn't say so. I managed to make her scream with surging spasms, and she literally wore herself out. She was crazily impulsive in her never-ending search for gratification. I couldn't help remember the first night I had met her, and got a piece of her in the back seat of a car in an alley.
She was probably worth millions. And she foiled around with common hoods in a dingy corner just for the thrill of it.
I called on Veda, my sister, too, soon after I got out of the stone John. It took me a day to find her, and then I was sort of sorry. She looked terribly thin and worn.
She had none of the old fire and sparkle. Her skin was gray and her hair was like dull straw. The dope was making her nothing more than a skeleton. I hoped my feelings didn't show on my face.
She cried to see me. She hugged me and petted me. Naturally she knew I had been in the pen, I had written to her. I tried to get her to go to a hospital.
"You can kick the habit-"
"I'm scared," she said, looking at me with her sad eyes. "I'm scared to try."
"They'll taper you off," I told her, "it'll be tough, but they'll do it over a period of time." I wanted to get her into a hospital, talk her into it somehow. I knew they couldn't taper her off, but maybe she didn't.
She wouldn't go.
I made sure that she got her junk, so she didn't have to hustle for it. But I hated the slimy bastards who pushed the stuff. Because of Veda.
I saw Rosina too. She looked slightly older, but just as plump and settled. She was hustling out of a hotel and seemed to be doing fine. She didn't have the habit; she had a pimp, but few problems. Nothing bothered Rosina much. She even saw mom now and then.
But I kept after Veda, and finally she agreed to go to a hospital.
Old man Duunker wasn't the guy who had got her hooked, but he was just as bad. I knew he was pushing junk, grass mostly. I dropped by his store. It hadn't changed much.
"Jesus God! It's Luis!" Dunker put on a show of being glad to see me.
I let him press a cigar into my hand and give me a drink from a bottle. He didn't have a license to sell hard stuff. I was sweet to him. The old lady wasn't around, so I asked about her.
"She's upstairs," Dunker said, fluttering around to light the cigar for me. "She don't come down much no more. We're gettin' on, Luis. You know I'm not as old as I used to be." He laughed at his joke.
He was a slimy little son of a bitch. There were some young kids in the back, same as usual. Probaby some chick in the storeroom getting worked on too. I told Dunker he looked good. I lied.
He was nervous, thinking maybe the mob had sent me down to talk to him. I let him think so. If he only knew, the mob wouldn't have liked for me to monkey in junk. It could be Dunker was getting his greefo from them. I hadn't bothered to check. I was sore about Veda, and I never had liked Dunker.
We talked about nothing for a while. Dunker fussed around, always coming nervously to me. Finally he offered me a girl.
"Oh, she's a nice young one, Luis. You allis liked the girls, Luis, I remember. I give her free, for old time's sake, huh? You like that?"
"Sure," I said. Maybe I could learn something from the broad.
He fluttered away and came back in a bit with a girl. "This is Rita," he said. "Rita, you treat Luis real nice, hear? He's a big man now. Very big."
She nodded. She was nice. Young and round. She had smart eyes, but her face was young and smooth, framed by black hair tied in a pony tail. Her shape had lots of baby fat, big tits and round hips. She let me look. "Hi, Luis."
I took her out to the car. "How much do you get?"
"This is for free," she said. "Mr. Dunker said I wasn't to charge."
"How much do you get for an hour?"
"Sometimes a couple dollars."
I went uptown and drove aimlessly for a bit without speaking, trying to make up my mind. If I made trouble for Dunker I might have to answer to the mob. The mood I was in, I could have rubbed him out and never noticed.
Finally I went to the Pickering Hotel and got us a room. I could find out what he was doing anyway. The information might come in handy. Rita thought I was going to screw her. She took off the dress in a hurry and hung it up in the closet. "What're you doing?"
"I don't want to get it all wrinkly." She came back in her bra and panties. She had a very nice shape. "Can I have a cigarette?"
I gave her one. "Is Dunker getting you Johns?"
"Yesh," she nodded and blew smoke. We sat on the crummy couch and I put my feet on the coffee table.
"How old are you?"
"Eighteen."
I looked at her and she hung her head. "All right, I'm sixteen."
"You were sixteen when?"
"Two months ago."
"Are you in school?"
"Yes. He wants me to quit."
I nodded. "Dunker says you can make more dough if you work all day, that right?"
"Yeh. I can too."
"And more for him. What does he take out?"
"We split half and half if I use his back room."
"Do you like it-the work?"
She shrugged. "It's the dough. Yeh, I like it." She smiled at me to show she did. She even waggled her tits a little and I put out my hand and bounced them.
"Bunker's a shit," I said. "You know that, don't you? Fifty; fifty's too much. Is he booting you too?"
"Yeh." She looked at the cigarette. "I don't like him, but he gets me Johns. I gotta have the dough."
"What for, home?"
"Yeh."
I took her bra off and admired her tits. She had a lovely pair. She was a cute mouse. I asked her: "Is he selling grass?"
She hesitated. Then she nodded. "Yeh. Somebody makes the reefers for him and he peddles them one at a time."
"A buck each?"
"Yeh. He can get you horse too, though."
"Are you smart enough to stay off it?"
She smiled and shrugged. "I guess so. Are you gonna do it now?"
She was getting to me with that keen baby fat. I jiggled the titties and she grinned. Her nipples were stiff as dimes. "What's your specialty?"
"Any old thing. I do anything you want."
I wished there had been some music and a bottle. You can't have everything. I got up and took off the duds. She removed the panties. Then she came over and grabbed the old jock.
She was an all-round broad all right. She didn't have much seductive knowledge, but her touch was right. After all most of her trade was kids and bums. You only shell out a couple bucks, you don't expect the dance of the seven veils. Nobody had taught her the fine points. Old shit Dunker had probably just told her to lay down and spread 'em. She didn't know about the mystical side of whoring.
But her suction was young and powerful, and eager. She wanted to do me good. I let her blow a couple of intricate tunes on it, then I turned her over and laid her. She did the sinuous twitch, and I know she put out more than she should. She got pretty impulsive. I made her yell and twist and frolic. I think she meant it for real.
I thumped her hard and steady and she got wilder by the minute. Not like Stephanie, but then who was like that doll-only screamers.
We gushed and fountained, and kept it up. We got sated on it and the more I jabbed her the more she seemed to like it. It was dark in the room before we came up for air.
"God, that was great," she said. "I oughta pay you."
I liked her. "Do you have to go home?"
She hesitated again. "I could get out, I guess."
"Don't you do overnight tricks?"
She shook her head. "I haven't, but I could." She swarmed over me. "I want to-"
"Me too," I said. "You're a lovely lay, baby. I wanna wake up in the morning with you on top."
She giggled.
I gave her a Jackson and took her home. Then I picked her up later and we went out to dinner. I popped her eyes, and took her to the best joint, the Cafe Royale. We had a couple martinis and she was round-eyed at the luxury of it. "Jeez, that's what I want."
"You probably won't get it screwing."
She looked at me. "Some girls do."
"Most don't. Not in this town right now. It's stacked the other way."
I let her feel my leg during dinner. She wanted to get into my pants, but no telling who might come by; I might have to stand. But I liked it.
I took her to my apartment and put her to bed. It was fun. She had a ball, bouncing naked all over the place. It wasn't as tempestuous as a session with Stephanie, but a hell of a voluptuous time. She choked me pushing her titties down my throat. And I lapped her and drove her up the wall.
In the morning I woke with her on top. She was cute as hell.
After that I took her to see Lilli de Witt. If she wanted to be a whore, she might as well do it right. Lilli ran the best bookshop in town. Lilli seemed to like her.
We had a couple words in Lilli's office. "Is she willing?"
"Maybe too much," I said. "She fucks like it's goin' out of style. But you get the rough edges off and you'll have a great little money-maker."
"Thanks, baby," Lilli said, "I think you're right."
Lilli is a great doll. I could go for her myself. Everybody says that.
CHAPTER TEN
OTTO SUNDERLAND:
"I made sergeant, after some hard studying, and lost the intimate contact I had once had with the old neighborhood. The problems of the big city were increasing-they always increase, never the other way. Population accounts for a lot of it, I guess, just that alone. Over-crowding and poverty lay hell in keeping the peace.
To be specific, about the whores, well, they were on the increase too. The mob increased the number of houses. It was real big business. The more we protested, the more trouble we got from some of the big shots at city hall.
"Leave the girls alone," the word came down.
So when you leave the girls alone, you don't monkey with guys like Boodles Scalici. He was rising slowly in the ranks. We knew he was involved in obtaining girls and in keeping the houses in order, in paying condition. I tried to figure, after a couple of stake-outs, how much the houses were pulling down. It ran into millions, figured over a year. That is a hellova lot of screwing.
But it was a period of medium hard times, so cops don't risk their jobs. We got paid less than cab drivers took in anyway-and took a lot of crap along with the salary.
We got docked for sickness, and never got extra pay for overtime. We were lucky to get straight time. I never knew a cop in those days who wasn't in hock for house, furniture, car or something. We were paid peanuts and we were arresting hoods every day who peeled big numbers off rolls that were the size of cabbages. Plenty of cop's fingers got tangled in that green stuff. Lettuce-poisoning, we called it. It affected the eyesight something fierce, and the will to proceed against certain suspicious characters.
I went on, collecting information and filing it, hoping that some day it would come in useful-like on a witness stand.
We had a suspicion that old man Dunker, for instance, was selling marijuana and girls. I think I mentioned that before. So I worked on the captain for about a month, and finally got him to agree to an undercover man. I had a guy in mind.
The guy was Irish Yates. He looked Irish, but he was mostly Roumanian or something. Anyway, the name. He had been a cop for a lot of years, eleven, I think, mostly in the middlewest.
He was smart-not smart enough to quit the cops and get a decent job, but wise to the rackets. He hated mobsters; he had a private reason which I didn't ask about, but he told me much later. His old man had been gunned down by a couple of greasy little hoods one day. Innocent bystander.
Irish was slim and not particularly handsome, and not even rugged looking. He was wiry though and was a good boxer. His hobby was collecting toy soldiers. How do you figure that?
Anyway we talked about how to get hoods like Scalici in court. And make a rap stick.
"You got to have the evidence so goddam strong that the judge can't let 'im go," Irish said. "Half the judges are bought, you know that."
"Sure. But how are you going to get that kind of evidence?"
"Undercover," he said. "That's the only way."
So I nagged the captain.
Irish Yates is not available for comment. He was killed in line of duty about a year after he began his undercover operation against the mob.
With the help of Sergeant Sunderland and several others of the force, we have compiled a brief history of that investigation. Yates' buddy on that operation was Karl Newell. Newell was Yates' contact man and worked with him when-t ever possible and prudent. He knows as much of the inside as anyone, since he also knew Irish very well.
We have reconstructed as much as we could with his help, supplying conversations as Yates' reports described them.
KARL NEWELL:
"Irish was a hellova good cop. He wanted to be a cop, it wasn't just a job to him. He did things that other cops might not have done. I think that was what finally killed him. He just took too many long chances. The mob isn't that dumb. By that I mean that Irish had too much contempt for them, I think. That's my own opinion.
Irish started his investigation by taking a bus out of town, and bumming his way back in. He wanted everything to look real-even the dirt under his fingernails.
He and I had agreed on a mail drop and on signals and a simple code. I met him every week in one of three spots, picked him up and took him to an apartment where he made his reports to Otto.
"I give you one month," Otto told him. "That's all the captain will pay for. You gotta bring me stuff that I can wave under his fat nose, so's I can get another month."
Otto wanted the mob as bad as Irish did, for different reasons, I think. Otto was OK. That goddam gum chewing got on yours nerves, but he was OK.
Irish hung out in one of five or six saloons where the mob went. He got pally with bartenders, pimps, girls, and whoever would talk. He did odd jobs, you know, dirty jobs, anything to get a meal and a place to sleep.
"You wouldn't believe the screwin' goes on," he told me once. "Hell, there's eight girls at the Ninety Seven Club (supposedly a bar and grill) and they are knocking off twenty or thirty Johns a night, each. You figure how much that is in dough."
It had to be more than six grand a week. And that was just one cheap little bar. He didn't care about the girls though, what we wanted was evidence connecting guys like Scalici with the take.
That was a horse of a different color.
Scalici didn't even show at the little joints.
Irish had a lot of evidence of H and other dope. We turned it all over to the DA's office. We weren't after narcotics then even though it was tied in with the flesh peddling. There was plenty of official jealousy over jurisdiction and we didn't want to jeopardise what we were after. In those days you had to settle for crumbs; get at the mob by scratching away little by little. The big arrests came later. But the damage was being done every day.
Irish got another month, and another. We made some arrests when we thought it would hurt the mob and not hurt Irish or make them suspicious.
But for awhile we didn't get any big fish."
CHAPTER ELEVEN
There were all kinds of whorehouses, and all kinds of madams. Lilli deWitt was one of the better madams, so we looked for an average or below-average woman. In order to show all sides of the question, we felt it incumbent on us to show the seamy side, if only to deter young girls from entering the 'life."
The following conversations with Maggie Smith have been edited considerably. Her language has been brought to an acceptable level, for instance, more than with any of the others interviewed. Maggie Smith is not her name; in fact little of what she told us seemed the truth at first. She was a congenital liar. By constant checking and questioning we think we have come somewhere near the truth, and we present her story in that light.
Maggie is far gone on drink at the present time. We believe the only reason she consented to an interview was for the money, to buy booze. We have also edited out the hiccups:
MAGGIE SMITH:
"I was born in Buffalo, upstate. I think I'se born in a cat house. I never knew my old man, if I had one, and my old lady died when I was three. That's some beginning, huh?
I had a few years of school, not much. I lived with an Aunt and Uncle. He worked in a box factory and was a preacher o-the side. A hellsfire and damnation preacher. He had a rickity little joint for a church and on Sundays he would go in there and preach his damn head off and you could hear them hunkeys yelling for a mile.
He worked them up something fierce, and after the collection he got a bottle and come home and pawed me. Little as I was. He tried to get into my pants before I was five years old. Drunk and quoting the bible at me. And my Aunt would sit there and watch and laugh her fool head off because he was so clumsy.
By the time I was about six, I was giving him hand jobs. I was strong enough to fight him off-I hated the damn smell of him-but I wasn't strong enough to get out of his clutches. So I squeezed it and milked it for him and that quieted him down some.
We lived in a tough neighborhood. At six years old I was a target for plenty of guys on the street
... like every girl. The big game was jazzing. They got a finger in you and they made you hop. The worst thing was to fight them. Then they'd lay for you and a bunch of them would gang up. Then it was free meat. I got so I'd let them jazz me and I'd give them hand jobs. I could calm a guy in no time-or two at a time.
Sex and drinking was about the only fun people got in my neighborhood. Sex was free, at home, and the bottles were cheap if you stayed on wine.
So I don't even remember the first guy who spread me. I was giving it away before I could read and write good. Hell, it was no big deal. My uncle did it to me, and he was a preacher.
By the time I was eight he was screwing me every week. I got to expect it. Every time he was drunk, 'Hey Maggie, c'mere.'
Yeh, I got some school. I went through the sixth grade, but I didn't learn much. I never cracked a book. When they sent for my Aunt, she went to the school and listened to what they said and nodded her head, and I never heard no more about it.
I got lousy grades, and they kept puttin' me through the same grade, but I didn't care. I skipped school a lot because Tony Peaker wanted me to work waitress at his joint. That was class, working at Tony's.
I got a buck a day at least. That was as much as my preacher Uncle got. And I was eight, going on nine.
Tony called it waitress, no matter what he wanted me to do, it was waitress. He had a cafe with back rooms and rooms upstairs. He had three or four hookers working for him, mostly old bags with flat tits and calloused snatches. They got a buck a throw from the good Johns, and anything else from the rest.
I used to play out back of Tony's place with the guys, and one day he hollered at me and I went inside with him. "Hey," he said, "you a good-lookin' kid."
He talked like he had wire for vocal chords, real rough and throaty, but he was a pretty good joe. Fat though. With a stringy moustache and always sweaty.
He wanted to feel me right off. So I let him. Then he gimme a piece of pie and took me in a little room with a cot and sat on the cot and got me on his lap. Well I knew what he wanted without him telling me. He pulled his dick out and stuck it in and I just bounced on it. He didn't have a hell of a big one, so it didn't give me no trouble. He liked it.
But I didn't go for that pie deal too long. For about a week he was giving me like pie or ice cream and taking me into the room and grabbing a piece of ass. I got to talking to one of the chippies, Lena, and she wised me up.
"Get dough for it, kid," she said. "Screw the pie. He'll give you dough."
He did too. He didn't like it, but then he give me fifty cents a throw. So did the cook. He was a skinny little squirt with a cast in one eye and fingers like steel. Jesus, he was strong. Right after I come out of the room with Tony, he wants me to go back in, and he don't care about a slippery deck.
I was a little scared when I seen his dick though. He had a big one. For a little guy. And none of the lap stuff, sitting, I mean. He laid me down and got it in and gimme a ride. It only hurt when he rammed it too hard, and he jerked like crazy when he shot it. Tony never did.
So for a while I made fifty cents each from them two, and once in a while two-bits from the dishwasher.
Then Tony wanted me to go to work for him after school or anytime. My tits were getting big and I looked older than I was. He give me the room for myself, and he sent guys in, fifty cents each. But I sure didn't like most of them. Some were drunks and some were old bastards who couldn't get it hard or keep it hard. They wanted me to blow 'em, and I wouldn't. So they com-pained to Tony.
Tony sent me up to talk to Lena.
I remember the day. Lena was half drunk and naked. She sat around naked a lot. "Shit," she'd say, "I just get dressed then some Joe comes in an' I got to strip-what the hell."
She was the first one who explained the whore trade to me. Tony didn't, he just grabbed what he could get.
"Lissen, Kid," she said, "Don't be a jerk, you gotta blow guys. It ain't so bad. You don't swallow it, you spit it out-see?"
"Yeh." I didn't see. What the hell a guy wanted to shoot in a girl's mouth for, I couldn't see.
"It's bad for you teeth," Lean said, "the gism, so you spit it out."
"Why they wanna do that?"
"Get sucked? Hell, baby, Johns love it. Besides, it's faster. You can blow a guy and get his buck in half the time if you're good at it."
I considered that, you know, that made sense. I was all for getting the dough.
"Dames like it too," Lean said. She got a half shirt on and looked less naked.
"Like what?"
"Jesus," she said. "Don't you know anything at all? Like gettin' licked."
That was the first time I heard about Frenching. She explained, and while she was telling me she crawled over close and I could see she had a funny look in her eye.
"You're a cute kid," she told me. "You wanna lay down?"
I ought to have known what she wanted, but I didn't catch on right off. She was being nice to me, so I laid on the bed.
"Take off the panties, honey."
I took them off and she was on me in a hurry. It doubled me all up. I had no idea what a crazy feeling it was-and Lena went for it like a house afire. My God, she got her tongue in me and I yelled so you could hear me a block away. She said to shut up. Of course it was new to me, and I tried to push her off for a minute, but she just kept licking and pretty soon I let her do it.
I have run into a lot of whores since who like to do it that way. They take so many dicks that they have to switch, I guess. Lena wasn't no lesbian, but she liked it for a change.
"I get a kick outa doin' it," she would say to me. "You wanna do me, honey?"
She had a big, flappy snatch, and I didn't get much kick from chewing it, but I did it because she did me. She got pretty wild doing me. She glued her mouth on it and made me rear up alright. Christ, she bore down with all six cylinders.
After that I did it to Tony, let him shoot it in my mouth. But he said I didn't do it right. I had to go back to Lena for more advice.
"You gotta hold it," she told me, sucking her finger to show me how. "Squeeze it with your lips, just like you're jackin' him. You get it?"
"Yeh. He wants me t'swallow it."
"Fuck 'im. Don't do it." She lit a cigarette and looked at her watch. "I'll show you, honey. G'wan down and tell Tony t'get me a John and you can watch."
There was a blacked-over window in her room, that went to a hall. The hallway had been added and the window wasn't needed. Anyway, I got behind it and made some scratches so I could see in, and it was a real education.
The John was a barfly that Tony sent up, but he could get it up alright. He looked like hell in his underpants, but Lena didn't care. She went down on it and made him twitch.
I had to laugh too, because she kept looking over at me behind the window. The guy didn't notice. He just laid on his back and jerked. She really give him a good working over and when he shot it she caught most of it in a handkerchief which she used so she could show me easier.
For a long time I had a picture of Lena blowing that guy. His big red dick in her mouth stayed with me for years. She showed me good.
After the guy went out, she said to me, "You can tell afterwhile about when he's goin' to blow. That's experience, honey. Then you let him squirt, an' you catch it in a towel and that's all they is to it."
"It tastes funny-Tony does anyway."
"You get used to that."
Then she laid me on the bed again: "To get the taste of him outa my mouth." She made me squirm!
The next time I did Tony he said it was better. The cook said I was pretty good if I practiced. So I did him a couple times a day for a while. My jaws hurt. He tasted bitter and salty, and so did the dishwasher.
By the time I was ten I was doing guys regular and French, and getting as much as Lena. She told me, when she was sober, that I oughta get more.
"Tony's holdin' out on you, honey. Guys like young pussy. I bet he's gettin' a couple bucks for you. So I asked a John one day.
"I paid three bucks," he said. Tony told me he paid one.
So I saved my dough and slid out. I just up and took a bus. In Cincinnati I got a hotel room. The bellhop took my suitcase up to the room and gave me a real wise eye. I was awful young, so he wasn't positive about me. But I could see the look.
"Whassmatter," I said, "you want some fun?"
He came over and ran his hand up my leg. "You fooled me, baby. How old're you?"
"Sixteen." He got two joints of finger in me and diddled.
"Like hell you're sixteen."
"So I'm older'n that."
He grinned at me and laid me on the bed. I reached down and grabbed it just as it was about to plug me.
"Hey, I get paid for that-"
"Not me, baby. I'll send you Johns." He yanked my hand away and got it in deep. "But I gotta try you-first."
I found out that was a standard line: I gotta try you first. Crap.
He booted me good, then he told me his name, Muley.
"I can get five bucks for you, baby. Two for me, three for you. I'm generous, and I get my share of nooky, right?"
"OK," I said. I found out later he got more for me. He got whatever the traffic would bear. I bore a lot of traffic the first month. I found out why Lena didn't like to keep getting dressed. And Muley got his wick dipped about once a day.
That was hard work. I didn't get out, hardly to eat; I was really too young to be such a working whore. Muley got bossy as hell and didn't like it when I went to the movies and stayed too long. The only real fun I got was going to the movies.
"Shit, you missed a ten buck score," he'd say, or "you missed a couple of quick ones-we coulda made some fast dough-"
I got tired of him. One day I eased out and never went back. I had a couple hundred saved and the clothes on my back. For about a week I just went to the movies and took it easy. Then some smart sonofabitch wanted to know why I wasn't in school. I told him I was just getting over chicken pox. It was the first thing that popped into my head. He went, but it made me think.
They could grab me and send me back. I needed protection. That's when I met Louie. Boy, I fell for him hard. He was my first pimp.
I met him through some guy I took to my room, I don't even remember who. But Louie came up to see me and 'try me out.' I blew his hat off.
He was just right for me. He got me a room over a cafe, bought me some swell clothes, and got me all the Johns I could handle. Boy, I was making it great. And giving it all to him.
In those days I wasn't too bad looking. I had nice tits and nice legs. I was always a little wide in the ass, but guys liked that. They sure liked it that I was so young. Sometimes Louie got twenty bucks for me. For all night I got as high as forty. Once in a while we got sixty or seventy bucks, but I had to take two guys all night ... at the same time.
We were saving dough to go to California or Hawaii. Louie said I could make a mint out on the coast if I could get my legs around some of them movie guys.
The cafe was run by a gun named Joe Zwill, they called him 'Swill.' He was another Tony, fat and greasy with hands all over you all the time. He said he was crazy for me. Louie said I had to be nice to him because he had influence. So Swill got free rides. He was the first guy who ever got it up the dirt road. A few other guys had wanted to, but I wouldn't let them.
Louie made me put out to him. Swill greased it up and after a few times it wasn't so bad. "That's the way the fairies do it," he said. "Zingo, in the butt."
Swill knew some politicians. He was one of those guys who made an In downtown. Cops and flunkies from city hall were in his joint all the time. A lot of them were in me too. I asked Louie if I was giving it away and he put me off.
"Don't worry, baby, the bankroll is growin'-" It ought to, I was getting flat on the ass side. There were other floozies working the cafe too, and we used to get together now and then and talk shop. A couple of them were pretty cute broads, and all were older than me, of course. They all hated Swill because none of them liked it in the butt. They were scared to cross him though, but among ourselves he didn't come off so hot.
One of the chippies was a doll named Vera who made no bones about it, she liked other dames. She was always after me. Louie didn't like that, because he never liked me to put out free stuff-unless he said to. But I let Vera have it anyway and didn't tell him.
Louie got me into my first circuses too. We put on some shows for visiting firemen in the rooms. Boy, it got wild. Mostly there was me and another broad and a guy. Sometimes two guys. But the guys were harder to find. One was a nigger boy with a nice big dick. Swill liked to have him in the line-up. But I didn't like him much, not because he was a nigger, but because he rammed too hard. He got so goddamed excited.
Mostly by the time we had one of the circus shows everybody was half drunk anyway. Sometimes there was a big audience, including other broads, not in the life. Wives sometimes, Louie told me.
But they got out of hand, the shows did. One of the first ones I was in was with Vera and a guy. Vera usually did the shows because they could get her to lick the other girl. The guys always liked that. Always.
Anyway, this show was in a small room, smoky as hell. They put a couple mattresses on the floor and turned the lights on it. The squares were sitting in chairs and around the room on pillows and things. I guess there was about a dozen, guys and dames. You could smell the excitement in the joint.
Us girls stayed out in the hall, because there wasn't any stage. Me and Vera were naked, and there was another girl to break the ice, she was mostly naked, Kitty, she sang dirty songs. The MC was a guy from the cafe, a waiter, Wally, and he sort of ran the show. So Wally went in and told a few dirty jokes and then Kitty went in and wriggled her ass and sang the songs. Jesus, the audience ate it up.
I was scared as hell, it being my first show, but Vera and the guy, I forget his name, but he had a deep tan all over except around his fanny, and his dick was real white. It was like a stripe. Vera and the guy kept telling me to take it easy, and they fed me some drinks till I didn't feel any pain.
Then all of a sudden the door opens and the guy runs me into the room. All I can see are the eyes looking at me. Then I'm flat on my back and he gets on me and bam bam bam I'm getting it and the crowd is yelling.
The guy doesn't shoot it. He boots me for a while, then he gets off and sticks it down my throat. Everybody gets real quiet. All I can hear is myself sucking on that pole. The lights are on me and I sure feel funny, doing it in front of them. It seems like I blow him for a year. Pretty soon I can hear the heavy breathing.
Then Vera comes running in and grabs the dick away from me, and Wally shoves me out the door. I almost collapse in the hall.
Then Wally comes out. "You did great, Maggie, just swell."
The whole thing is making him hard. He pushes me up against the wall and takes it out. He makes me lean over and take it up the gash from behind. "It makes me so goddam hot," he says over my shoulder. And he boots me while Vera is eating the guy inside.
When I go back inside I am full of his goo. Vera swears at me when she starts to muff dive, because she don't like gism much.
For the finale Vera does me and I blow the guy with the stripe. By that time I can look at the audience, and I see that they are squirmy too. Every show, some broad blows a guy-sometimes three or four of them get loaded and let go like that-in the audience.
There was a dog act too. I never did take the dog on, but the singer, Kitty, did. She would grin at the audience with that damn big dog poking it up her, going a mile a minute. She had a big snatch on her. Man, that Kitty!
My worst time was when I found out that Louie had spent all our dough. He liked to roll the ivory marbles on a blanket. A couple times I had to pay his I.O.U.'s on my back.
"Listen," he said to me, "so I lost it, we'll get it back-"
"I'll get it back!" I screamed at him. "I'm doin' the goddam work. I'm the one gettin' knocked up-" (I had had two abortions that year.)
He tried to soothe me, but for some reason I didn't want to be soothed. Most of the time Louie could wrap me around his finger and get anything he wanted. This time I was finished. I really didn't know why myself. But I packed up and took the bus.
I had about fifteen bucks, an orange dress and an extra pair of stockings. After a big year. Some payoff.
When I hit the big town I started hustling from a hotel and inside a week a guy came to see me. "You workin' for us, baby," he tells me.
So that's how I met Boodles. This guy takes me to see him and he put me in a house. "We'll treat you right, Maggie," Boodle says. "We're looking out for you now."
I couldn't buck the mob. Some dames tried it and had their snatches cut out. What hooker is worth a damn with only half her equipment? I went along witht he mob. It wasn't so bad. A big old dame, Fay, was the boss; and in about a year I was top girl. That meant I was making the best prices. So it wasn't the best house in town, but I was the top in that joint.
I got twenty bucks a throw when the other broads got ten. I didn't have to work all the circuses, only part, and no dogs. We had lots of circus call, three or four girls at a time and a guy or two. The hoods liked them. They got a big charge outa seeing two or three girls eating it ... each other, I mean. Our lezzie was a cute brunette named Myra. She liked it both ways, licking and getting licked.
Me and Myra put on private shows for guys, usually just one guy at a time. We'd lap each other and Myra always took it big. She's shudder and her eyes would roll up till only the whites were showing. She really jerked when it hit her, and she wasn't faking. Her clit got hard like a piece of rubber, and I could make her vibrate. The Johns loved it. They would come back over and over to see us work on each other.
The reason I know Myra wasn't faking is that she would come to my room in off hours and want to make it with me.
"Jesus, gimme a mouthful, Maggie," she would beg me. "I'm all trembly."
That was her favorite expression: Trembly. When she got trembly she was hot in the britches. So I went down on her and pretty soon she was gone. Man! she was gone!
Fay didn't like it too much. "She'll burn out," she said, meaning Myra. Fay had to show a profit and Myra was a moneymaker.
"Fuck 'er," Myra said, and we'd do it anyhow. I got pretty goddam 'trembly' too when Myra ate me. Myra ate me constantly for a couple years.
Then one night there was a fight and she got cut very bad in the gut. The doc tried to save her I know, but she had lost too much blood and was very bad cut inside. She died and man, I was heartbroken. It was like I lost a sweetheart. I didn't know I was so gone on her.
I got drunk that night. And every night for a week.
Boodle came to see me then. Fay had complained.
"You got to snap out of it, baby," he said. I just looked at him.
"You're top girl here," he said. "I don't wanna have to change that-"
"I am top girl," I told him. I was kind of proud of that.
"Alright, but you got to get back to work. Look, I know you was friends with Myra, but I got another pal for you. A dame you're gonna like. Linda."
I wasn't interested. Until I saw her. Linda was just like Myra had been. I guess Boodle made an effort to please me. He was a swell guy.
Linda was a brunette and she went for the pussy meat just like Myra. The first time we got together it was a hot little session. I just laid back and made believe it was Myra's mouth on me-and in no time at all I didn't have to make-believe. Linda was a crazy lover and I settled down again.
So I went on like that for quite a few years.
I didn't start hitting the bottle until Linda left me for another broad. But even that didn't make a drunk out of me. I got another girl and stuck to the straight and narrow.
Boodle came to see me then. He said he liked it that I didn't keep a guy, and wanted me to take over a house. I said sure.
That's how I became a madam. I didn't have to screw anymore unless I wanted to. Maggie Smith's house was a big success. We had hardly any fights and some of the best circus acts in town.
I know because I was in 'em."
CHAPTER TWELVE
LUIS SCALICI:
"I couldn't figure a fool-proof way to get old man Dunker without the mob finding out. He was kicking back to them, and every source was protected. I'd have a hellova lot of explaining to do if I knocked him off.
You couldn't trust the cops to keep their mouths shut, not even Otto. If I gave him information he'd have a hand over me. I didn't dare.
So I didn't like Dunker. But I stopped thinking about him. I had plenty to do otherwise. Keeping all the madams and girls happy was a bit job. You asked me about Maggie Smith:
I had a lot of trouble with her. She was an average whore, not bad looking but no beauty. She didn't have much pride and no taste at all; that's why she never got out of the life. She wasn't smart enough.
Maggie was good enough to be top girl in a house full of bums. Mostly because she was still young and would do anything. She'd take it anywhere a John wanted to stick it.
I think she liked the shows too. She liked to show off. Some dolls got a taste for that. It made 'em feel like they were kin to Hollywood, you know what I mean? Sort of in the same business. Sure, it's stupid, but what the hell, whores are stupid. Right?
Maggie had a couple years of school, that's all. I couldn't break her of the habit of using obscene language most of the time, just like a whore down at the docks. (Most of those words edited out). She might have made it to a better house but for that. She knew that some guys like to hear them words, but she didn't have sense enough to know that not all of them did.
She drank too much too. She liked her booze. One good thing about her was that she didn't keep a pimp. I think it was because she liked dames. She got a boot out of eating pussy, so we let her do it. We gave her a dame named Myra, and one named Linda, and Maggie kept them both happy for a long time. She hit the booze about the time she split with Linda, but it didn't get serious for quite a while.
We gave her a house to run, one of the cheapest houses, and she did OK. I thought she would. All you had to do with Maggie was pat her on the ass and tell her what a great little hustler she was and she purred.
Even after she became a rumdum she ran the house pretty good. She lost her looks and couldn't keep a girl and that made her hard to get along with. None of the young broads wanted to chew on that old rum-soaked pussy. So, when she got to hitting the bottle too hard, we tossed her out on her ass.
There ain't anything as worthless as a no good used-up whore. She was through and still in her thirties.
One of the hot little hustlers from the old neighborhood ended up with Maggie too. Katy. It was the same old story with Katy. Her pimp took her for all her bucks and when she was beginning to have trouble getting clients she suddenly couldn't find him one day.
We talked her into going into a house instead of pounding the sidewalks. I figured she had six or seven years in her yet. It was better for a broad like Katy to be in a house anyway. She got beat up too much on the streets. We could protect her better in a house.
Katy sure didn't look like she used to. She had lost most of her looks in the ten or fifteen years she had been a soiled dove. She didn't have a habit but I heard she hit the grass a lot.
She and Miff, her pimp, had a good racket going and made dough at it-we took a cut of everything, of course-till the cops finally got wise. They were working a taxi routine. Miff drove the cab and picked up hot-pants Johns with Katy in the back seat. Then she got 'em all fizzed up and Miff drove to a quiet spot and they rolled the mark.
Sometimes it was a lot faster than working the bed. Katy would do any goddam thing for a buck. Funny thing too, she wound up with noth-in'.
Nothin'."
KATY FEASTER:
"Like I said, I ran away from home. Not too far though, because I didn't have no fare. I went over to the Pickering, where I knew I could find a room. All I had to do for it was spread. That was easy.
I started making dough. I got a buck a throw, sometimes two bucks. Overnight I got ten and it all went into the mattress. I was saving it. I had plans. Big plans. All I had to do was get some dough together and then I could go to all them places I seen in the magazines. And if I run out; of dough someplace, well open the old knees and more dough comes rolling in.
But it took a lot of screwin' to make it. Charlie, the shit at the Pickering, took half, and the mob came in for a slice. I was working for hardly nothing.
My old man heard I was putting out, so I had to scram. I went to three or four of them little hotels along the westside, but everywhere I went it was shell out, baby. The first year I was hooking I found out that a whore pays everybody and hardly anybody pays her.
Then I met Miff and he changed things. For a while. He showed me how to make more dough, and he got me Johns so I didn't have to waste time going out looking. We got on great for a few years.
Naturally they was set-backs. I got the clap now and then, but Miff took me to a doc and cured it every time. I had some abortions, but all the girls had them.
The best thing Miff ever did for me was to keep me off H. He didn't want no part of it and wouldn't let me try it even when I got loaded and wanted to. I knew better, but I thought it wouldn't get me. Sometimes I went on parties that lasted days. The Johns would take us, me and another broad, or two, up to a house somewhere and we'd party till we all ran out of gas. Or until they ran out.
I made good at them parties. I liked them. Hell, we got fed and there was booze coming out of our ears. On most of the parties I could depend on Miff taking care of me. But one time we got crossed up. I don't know how it happened yet, but I went with these guys and he didn't know where.
The party lasted four or five days, and it got rough at the end. I went with a dame named Audrey who was a dumb little redhead with a face like Little Red Riding Hood. How she ever got to be a hustler with a face like that I'll never know.
Anyhow, these two guys picked me up at the hotel and I left a note for Miff which he never got. They took us to a house across the river and locked all the doors and windows. Both these guys were young, one was dark and one was almost blonde and not bad. You know, for Johns, they were OK. Maybe thirty and not too puffy.
We all had a drink and they undressed me and Audrey right off the bat and screwed both of us. Right now, zingo. Then swapped. Audrey giggled the whole time.
Then I found out the phone didn't work.
They hide our clothes too, so me and her ran around naked the whole time. They had a lot of food in the kitchen, cans and stuff. But about all we did was drink. They'd drink and grab us, bang, bang, bang, and have another drink. They were having a great old time. The blonde guy, Bill, said he was crazy about me. He actually got a little sore when the other guy boffed me.
"Hey, this one's mine," he would say.
The first night they had a little fight over it. Not much, just a couple words, but I could see Bill meant it. He had been bending the elbow real good.
When we went into the can together, I told Audrey we oughta wear 'em both out so's we could get some sleep. She said OK, so we went out and started blowing them. Audrey was a good little whore. She had this dumb little-girl face, but she could suck a cock like a machine. We blew both of 'em silly. They couldn't get 'em up.
But they bounced back the next day.
For a while there wasn't any talk about me being Bill's girl. They chased us around the house, a big joint, and had a lot of fun pronging us whenever they caught us. They were a couple of pretty good joes and a lot of laughs.
Then they started drinking and in the middle of the afternoon the first fight started. The dark guy, Joe, was on top of me and working it in like tomorrow is the end of the world. Bill comes staggering in with Audrey under his arm. When he sees Joe nailing me he gets sore as hell.
"Get the hell offen her!" he yelled.
Joe looks around surprised, then Bill jumped on him and they start trading punches. Holy Christ! Me and little Audrey had a hell of a tough time getting them apart. Then Bill ran me into the next bedroom and gave me hell.
"I don't want you screwin' nobody but me," he yelled, and it didn't help to tell him I am a whore.
But he was drunk then.
The next day he forgot about it for a while. It seemed to come over him once in a while that I was his. "He thinks you're somebody else," Joe said.
I think he must have been right.
But both of them got pretty drunk, and Audrey too. Ordinary stuff wasn't good enough for them. They had to do everything they could trunk of. Like watching Audrey take a crap on a newspaper in the middle of the floor. She giggled like a fool the whole time. They wanted me to do it too, and Joe laid down and I did it on his belly. I guess I was drunk too.
Me and Joe went into the bathroom and stumbled into the shower to wash off-and while we're doing that we hear a scream. When we staggered into the living room, Bill has got Audrey's head in both hands, holding her tight so she can't move, and is pissing in her mouth.
That goddam Bill was a crazy man. He made her gulp it down. Joe knocked him down, but it didn't hurt him any. I took Audrey into the bathroom, but she is giggling again. I don't think she knew what happened.
"He hurt my ears," she said.
Of course the next day the joint is beginning to smell. But they are drunk and don't notice. What they want to do now is ram stuff in her and me. They get a hell of a big charge out of diddling us with handles and whatever is handy. Audrey is glassy-eyed and she thinks it is fun. It made me sober up because they scared me. Both of them held me down and masturbated me with a ketchup bottle. I pretended it really got me worked up. So Bill got on me and finished it.
They got crazy, both of them. They were staggering around, pissing on the walls and on us if they could, and doing any damn thing they could think of. I remember because they scared me so much I stayed sober. Audrey didn't. She was too dumb. Both of them worked her over time after time. They couldn't catch me after while. They threw stuff at me. The house was a wreck.
Now and then they'd cave in. I got food out of the kitchen and spent all my time looking for the clothes they hid. Sometimes I dragged Audrey away from them. They were ramming her from both ends and she didn't know what the hell was happening.
I finally found our clothes in a box. They had stuck it in the attic through a trapdoor in a closet. I pulled Audrey away as soon as they laid off her, and dressed her. She was feeling no pain.
We got out a window and went staggering down to a road and got a ride. That was some damn party. It took me a week to get over it. Jeez, what some guys want to do-I dunno what makes them do it.
While I had Miff, he wouldn't let guys beat me. Plenty of them wanted to. I remember Veda went for that stuff. Veda Scalici. She got the habit, according to Miff. But she liked guys to strap her and beat the fanny off her. That's a tough way to make a buck. Sure, I know I fell down a cesspool, but you don't have to eat shit.
I met Audrey a couple times later. "Hey, we had a lot of fun, huh?" she said. She forgot all about them sad bastards, and what they done to her.
Miff told me Audrey got herself a pimp who taught her to keep her mouth shut-so she wouldn't say dumb things. About the time I went to work for Maggie, Audrey got married to this big shot auto dealer. Now she's wearing mink. Man, don't that turn your stomach?
After Miff ran out on me, I kind of gave up. I couldn't save anything. Boodles talked me into going over with Maggie. I knew her, seen her around. She was a flab-ass hooker, young but puffy around the eyes with alky. How come hookers always lose?
Maggie had a real bum trade. Jesus, all the two buck sports in town. I had got twenty or thirty bucks a throw, and now I was down to peanuts.
"You're lucky," Maggie says to me. "Stand up an' stick your tits out, dearie, I got a classy John for you-"
To her a classy John was a guy with more than two clams to rub together. If it hadn't been for the son-of-a-bitch Miff, I could have got somewhere. Now my looks are shot. I got to powder up good in a poor light and all I do is blow. The older you get the more you got to blow 'em.
And Maggie put on shows all the time. I don't mind fucking in public, but Maggie is a lapper and I never went that route. She is a gash hound.
Some of her shows got wild. They smoked a lot of grass, so did I, and I took on a whole roomful of guys more'n once. You talk about gang-fucks, man, we had 'em. Fifteen or twenty guys taking turns on two of us, and blowing 'em too. While you're high it don't seem like much. The next day, brother!
Sometimes I think back to when I was yelling at Sylvia, my stepmother. Maybe I had it better than I figured. The primrose path has got thorns. But you can't tell that to no kid.
There was a young kid, seventeen or eighteen, trying to boost Maggie for a job. I went in and we laid it on her. You know-get the hell back home and forget it. But it didn't do no good, I know it. She thinks she's got it by the tail and all she's got to do is swing. Brother, swinging is the hardest work there is.
And the poorest pay."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Police investigation went on. Irish Yates and Newell made progress, enough to pry more time and confidence from the higher-ups. Sergeant Otto Sunderland was promoted to Lieutenant in the middle of the investigation:
OTTO SUNDERLAND:
"My promotion made things easier. Also, we were getting more money, not as much as we wanted or needed, but more. The department was expanding slowly.
The investigation had gone for four months and it was paying off. A great deal of information was being compiled. Names, dates and coincidences were collected. By coincidence I mean that we found it interesting that Kipper or Boodle Scalici occasionally met us at the door of a vacant house. The mob had accurate advance information of raids.
We knew that the mob must realize that someone was investigating from underneath. It caused us no end of concern for Irish. If he was cornered, they would finish him long before we knew it.
It was definite that old man Dunker was paying off to the mob. We even knew the amounts. We could guess why ... not counting the girls. He was selling reefers. He wasn't the head of a ring or syndicate, so we let him operate. His was small potatoes. But he led us to all sorts of people. We compiled a list of everyone who ever visited the store.
"He's still breaking in girls," Irish told us. "The old fart is still humping them in his storeroom. High school kids. Why don't we run him in?"
God knows, I wanted to. But we had hopes of uncovering something much bigger. You can knock over little guys any day. I wanted Boodle. Or guys like him.
I told Irish to get back and swallow his disgust."
KURT NEWELL:
"Irish hated old man Dunker. He saw him nearly every day and he would swear something awful when I saw him in one of our secret meetings.
"That old shit is worse than any crook I ever came up against," he said. "He's leading kids into crime every day."
I think that Irish had a thing about Dunker.
Some of those kids would go that way Dunker or no Dunker. Plenty of the girls were giving it away and it was easy to slip into the paying trade. First it was for a buck or a favor, and pretty soon it was steady diet. Of course I'm sure Dunker make it easy to slip. I remember one conversation I had with Irish:
"This cute little chick comes in," Irish said, speaking of Dunker's store. "She's about fifteen and don't look like she knows what makes the birds and bees tick."
(By then Irish was sweeping out the store every day as well as doing odd jobs around the neighborhood.)
"I had seen her before, but I didn't know her name. I found out later it's Angelina. Anyway, she sits at the counter in the rear and Dunker talks to her a minute. I keep watching, and she slides back to the storeroom. He goes in too in a minute and they're there for about twenty minutes. Mrs. Dunker tends the joint as smooth as glass. She knew damn well what was going on."
"You mean Dunder was boffing her?"
"Sure. What else? When they come out he looks like he's just had injections. I kidded him about her later on and he just grinned and patted his pants."
Irish shook his head in disgust. "I wish I could bat him one-"
Irish wanted to get photographic evidence of the storeroom goings-on. He was able to make a peep hole easily enough, but although he took pictures the light was never good enough to bring out anything. He knew that if he increased the light, Dunker would get suspicious.
"It turns your stomach to see them little fifteen year olds blowing that old bastard," he said.
The storeroom was also used as a meeting place between the girls and any number of men with a dollar bill. Irish watched dozens of copulations and a few whippings.
There were other private clubs about the neighborhood too. Meeting places for sin and sex. Irish gradually infiltrated his way into many. One time he was put into a very bad spot for a cop. By accident he happened to be in the right place at the wrong time. A reefer party was going on when he showed up. They gave him one and made him light up, no way out.
"It was in a cellar," Irish said, "under one of them big warehouses on Keel Street. They had widened the furnace rooms. I knew about five of the guys and one or two of the girls, most of them were pretty young. When I got there they were high, that's about all that saved me because they didn't watch me close."
"School kids?" I asked.
"Yeah, most of 'em. You gotta remember, this is the tough ones. Anyhow, they're smoking gree-fo and a couple of 'em are dancing damn near naked."
"A wild party, huh?"
"You know it," he said. "I'm sitting there in a corner, blowing on the reefer so's it'll glow. Thank God they forget me. They got really floating. The room is fixed up with pillows and mats and a few chairs, lots of places to lie down. Well in a little while a lot of 'em are dancing, and the others are screwing. I mean they're screwing right there in the middle of the floor. They're so high they go after it and they don't care."
I'm thinking about the report and wondering how that will look.
Irish says, "That kind of stuff shakes your socks. They've got a radio playing and the room is smelly with grass smoke and the kids are crazy. They're not making any noise but Jesus, you never seen any broads go after it like those brats. It seems like you blink your eyes and they're naked. The ones that're dancing change places with the others and it's all mixed up. Everybody is screwing everybody. I had a couple of them in my lap. The guy is pronging her and she's hanging onto me and smiling at me glassy-eyed. Man, it shakes you."
"How'd you get ut of there?"
"In about an hour they popped out, most of them. I had a headache like sledgehammers. But I skinned out without any trouble. That Angelina girl I told you about was one of the broads." He shook his head. "She's something to see naked."
Irish also got connected with Lilli de Witt's whorehouse as a swamper. He liked her. "She's a good gal," he said. "Takes care of the chippies alright. Some of them broads are dumb as hell."
But he found no real evidence of Boodle's connection. Scalici went ther often, but getting evidence that would stand in court against the mob's attorney's was not simple. Lillie kept few records where a swamper could get at them. I suggested to Lieutenant Sunderland that we get a cop-burglar to break in after hours and burgle the safe. He just looked at me.
I let it drop, but it seems to me the mob protects itself by our rules."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LUIS SCALICI:
"It was a real shock to me when Veda cashed in. I had put her in the hospital and she was getting along OK they told me. Then one night she got a window open and just stepped out. Five floors up.
I don't drink, but that night I had a few. Poor Veda, I hated to see it happen. I hadn't been home for a long time, but I went down and cried with Mom. For once she didn't scream at me.
Rosina came over too. She was still hustling, but she didn't look it. She was fat and placid and making the bucks. She had a pimp who kept her in Johns and she just ate and screwed and slept and didn't worry about anything. She was a cow. But the funny thing was, she was better off than Veda.
Rosina was the best kind of whore. I bet she never even looked at her Johns. They got on and did their stuff and beat it and she hardly knew it. That's what you gotta do, be a screwin' machine.
We were getting broads from out of town and Kipper would put 'em through a session. He looked them over an talked to them. He was never wrong. But once. I'll tell you about that in a minute. But Kip talked to them when they come in, and sent them in to Boozer. Boozer gentled them, if they needed that.
The girls came in usually a few at a time, so it wasn't a full time job. They went to some rooms in back of a club, soundproof rooms. Sometimes they screamed and yelled a lot. Boozer liked to work alone, but he couldn't alwayr, handle them, so we had to send in a guy to hold their legs or something. Boozer got a kick out of scrounging dames. You know, rape.
But this dame that Eipper was wrong about. Well she waa a real doll, redhead and stacked. She had a nice face, sort of pretty and nothing-some dolls don't seem to have much character. Pretty is all. She was pretty enough, and Kip said, "Man, she'll do it."
But she wouldn't. Boozer and two guys got her down and he rammed it up her alright, but she struggled the whole time and when he got through she still fought.
He couldn't gentle her. So we took her away and brought her back later. He did it again, but still no dice. So when we had about five guys take her on-holding her down of course. Nothing worked. She swore at us and screamed at us and nothing. I said to get rid of her.
"Wait a sec," Kip said. "This dame is a hot one. I know it."
"You're wrong, pal," I told him. "For once, you're barkin' up the wrong hustler."
"Bullshit," Kip says. "Lemme have her."
I told the guys to give her to Kip and he took her somehweres. We could trust him, but I sent Tony along to help. We couldn't turn the broad loose. She had seen us and knew the operation. She could testify. Tony knew the score.
At the same time, I had a lot of faith in Kipper's know-how. He never had been wrong. He had this instinct. I had the dame traced, to find out where she had come from. It took a couple days, but I learned that some guy had grabbed her in a suburb of Cleveland. She was a married dame, so we figured she was crazy about her husband and didn't want no other guys.
I give them hell, because grabbing a diz off the street is a lousy way. Somebody had slipped up. We shut down getting out of town broads for a while.
Kipper spent about a week with this redhead broad. I went by now and then to see how he was making out.
"Sure, I got her taking it nice and easy," he said, "but she'd powder if I turned my back. She's taking it so I won't kick her teeth in."
"So you were wrong."
"Hell no, I ain't wrong. This dame will screw like a mink. I tell you I know.'"
"But not you, pal." He shrugged at me.
It was a challenge to him. He had to prove himself right, and I wanted him to. But I sure couldn't see how he was gonna do it. If a mouse won't screw, she won't screw. Of course she had been married; but maybe that had been a cover-up. I knew Kip would check to ree if she was a leirzie. He told me he didn't think she was. He put a real lesbian in with her and she didn't perk up at all.
Finally, he told me later, he just let her alone for a week, locked in. Tony was taking her meals, and once Tony was out somewhere and Kip sent Calvin in with the tray. Cal didn't come back right away, so Kip went looking for him.
He found Calvin on top of the redhead, pounding her ass into the mattress. She was screaming and yelling at him: "Gimme it, gimme all of it-!"
Kipper stood in the doorway and watched them, he said, and he knew he had been right all the time. She was one hell of a cockhound. He just had the wrong color. She liked them black. Calvin was black as the ace of spades.
You never know."
LILLI de WITT:
"I never did like the mob sending me girls who I had to watch all the time. If you have to lock them up like in a cage what good are they?
I complained bitterly to Boodle and some of the bigger shots. I didn't have any trouble convincing Boodle, he could see my point easy. So after while I didn't get those girls anymore. He sent them somewhere else. I wanted to run a high class joint. I wanted to select my girls myself. It took about a year for me to get my own way.
The shots in the mob said, "Lilli, a broad is a broad, what the hell's the difference? All a guy wants is a place to stick it. If she's got a slot, so what else?"
That is lousy psychology. And lousy business too.
A whore can be more than just a receptacle. Enough more so's a guy will pay for it. You know, a John can always jack-off.
Finally I put it up to Boodle and Rico and some of the guys, the big shots, I said, look-lemme run the house my way and see if it pays off. If it pays off, then I proved my point, right?
They said, "Right." They could always understand if you put it into dough. Dough they wanted.
I figured that if I had the right girls and a nice looking joint I could double the tab. If you ask a John for double the price and talk to him a little, you can make him believe he's getting something special. What the hell, they're all the same at the bottom, as the joke goes, but you got to make the difference in a John's mind. And the way the girl slips it to him.
Boodle was on my side right away, and he talked the others into giving me a chance to prove it. That's one thing I got to say about Scalici. He was always willing to spend a buck to make three.
I had three girls who were high class. And I wanted about ten more. Finding a high class whore those days was like combing city hall for an honest man. Honey, they were scarce.
So I set out to train some. The first one I tried was a cute little blonde doll named Jennifer. She was about twenty, creamy skin and blue eyes, and looked a little too wise. I had to smooth that out of her. She had come up fast, too fast. That's one trouble with whores, they start too soon. But there's the story Jennie told me:"
JENNIFER:
"I come from a little town in Pennsylvania an my old man worked in a mill. We were poor as hell so we had a boarder. This guy was a hardware salesman and he was out two days a week and home five. I had a kid crush on him right away. He was handsome and real polite. His name was Ford and he couldn't see me at all. I was just a skinny kid.By thirteen I had filled out a little and I got in Ford's way whenever I could. Still nothing. He was seeing some dame, and whenever he was in town he spent all his time with her. I spent all my time trying to figure out how to make him look at me.
I was pretty shameless about it. I went to all the movies so I knew how to attract a guy. You know, show him legs and tits. I didn't have much in the way of tits, but I showed him all the leg he could take. I guess I was pretty skinny beside his other girl.
Then one night my chance came. My folks were playing cards and Ford was sitting in the parlor. I went in there with only a robe on and I rubbed myself all over him. Man, I was hot for him.
I got him breathing hard. The robe came open and his hands rubbed me, little naked me. And then he pushed me away and ran out.
Jesus! I was sore.
He didn't go up to his room, he went outside for air, I guess. So I went out to the porch and waited for him. He really did a double-take when he saw me sitting there. It was dark. He came up and sat facing me, and said I was growing up. I admitted it, and I went over to him. I put my arms around him.
Well, he tried hard, but he couldn't make it. The robe came open again. This time I got my legs around him. I was sitting on the rail and he was standing in front of me. Then it went in. Man! I grabbed him and hung on. It felt as big as a log. He got too excited and rammed it in me. I wanted to scream, but I didn't. I was afraid he would stop.
He just let go and booted me like a piledriver. I was sure surprised. I didn't know it would feel like that. But I liked it ok. I think mostly I liked him to feel it. It wasn't all that big to me.
He shot his wad and told me I was quite a gal. "I didn't realize you were so big-"
Well, it was easy after that. At first he was coy about getting into me, but I made it easy for him. Then he began to hunt me down and stick it in. He came upstairs to my room at night when my folks were alseep after while. We'd fuck like pigs.
Then I got a job after school, and when school was over I did it full time. I was running a mimeograph for a department store, and doing odd jobs. The manager of my department was a guy named Mr. Simcoe. He sure had the eyes. And the hands. He'd come in the mimeo room and have his hands all over my fanny. I let him do it. One day he said, "You like it here, Jennie?"
I said sure.
"You want it permanent, the job?" I said sure.
"Come on into my office at closing time."
I went. He locked the door and sat me on the desk and gave me the old whangeroo. I knew I was gonna get it. I didn't mind. After that I got it almost every day. Simcoe had a long one with eyes. Man, it could find it's way up your leg in a storm.
He gave me a raise in a month, but I wasn't to tell anyone. There were other dames ahead of me in seniority. But the news got out. You can't keep that kind of thing secret with an accounting office. So old Simco caught hell. They put two and two together, seeing me go in his office all the time.
Simco and I got lots of publicity, and the firm fired him. I packed my stuff and hit the road.
Well, I didn't want to work too hard. I guess I'm a born whore. I got a guy to take care of me. Ke was boffing me for my keep. And then I met a guy who talked me into making part time dough with my ass. Then I drifted into full time hustling.
That's the way it went."
LILLI de WITT:
"Jennifer made a good girl. She had wit and enough natural charm to work on. I taught her how to speak and how to walk without swinging her ass all the time. Cheap hookers think they have to advertise every time they take a step.
Jennie was like a lot of girls, they just didn't care about having sex. They didn't feel anything. So they had to learn to pretend it. Johns like to think they're making a girl squirm.
She had terrible taste. I had to throw away all her dresses. What gives whores such terrble taste? They dress like gypsies if you let them. Fur boas and clashing colors and too many of them. Cheap jewelry and shiny shoes, the ones with taste are so rare I hardly believe it when I meet one.
Also, I had complaints about their bed performances. Some girls had to be taught how to please a man in bed. They came to me thinking that all they had to do was spread and let the guy do it all. No guy will repeat with a doll like that. I wanted repeat business. Jennie was cute, but she thought her puss was all they wanted.
It isn't. Not to the guys who are willing to put out real dough for a girl. It is to a cluck off the street with two bucks in his hot hand. Not for my trade.
I think I said before, a whore with personality can make good dough. All she needs then is to put it in the bank. The dough, I mean. If you could put personality in the bank you'd be a millionaire. I'd lend money on it"
Chazz, mentioned previously, was a pimp. His girl worked at Lilli's house. Her name was Beatrice.
CHAZZ:
"Bea was a good girl. She had looks, legs and nice knockers. She could squeal when a John was humping her, and make him feel he was getting his money's worth. That was a good asset for a hooker.
Since I lost Sandy I had had lots of dames. A guy has to live. You got to understand that a mouse is a funny deal. Some of them are swell and some are a pain in the ass. Most of 'em try to hide dough. A whore don't trust banks. If they don't trust me I haven't broke 'em in right. They do after while.
I had a dame once who went to church every damn Sunday and pray for her soul. She'd sit there in the pew with gism running down her leg and pray. It made me sick. , Bea was on the dawn patrol when I met her. She was too good for walking the street. I could see right off that she would make a top girl. But she was dressed like a Indian on the fucking warpath. I got rd of the satin dresses and crappy rings and put her in a plain dress and got twenty bucks for her in the first good speak.
Just on looks. But the guy complained that she didn't wiggle. "I can screw a board at home," he said.
Bea said, "Baby, the Johns don't make my skillet sizzle."
"You got to act," I told her. "Make with the bumps, you know how."
"Yeh, with you, baby." She came over and put her arms around my neck. Then she slid onto my lap and rubbed it over my whoozit. She can wriggle when she wants to. She is a fun broad to screw. When you get it in her she gives with a wicked bounce on the old pole. She can squeeze it out of you and giggle like a fool and make you think you are getting a royal roll in the hay.
But I had a hellova time getting her to do that with the scores. She didn't feel it. She was lazy. Too many dames are lazy.
But after I convinced her, and showed her how she could double her take, then she made the effort. We got plenty of repeat trade. I hung out at the Park Hotel, and guys would slide in: "I want Bea for Friday-or Monday"-or whatever day. Hell, it was a cinch.
I also had a couple other broads, not as cute as Bea, but they done all right. Not for as much moolah, but then sometimes a lot of fast tricks make up for short dough.
Bea didn't know it, but I also had a guy on the string. He was a transvestite-I looked up the word-and flounced around in dresses all the time. He was cute, named Fran. I took Fran the guys who wanted a good blow. No screw, justa blow. I never told them the truth, of course. But we had a hellova lot of repeats because he could make a broomstick shoot.
I met Fran in a downtown hotel. I had the two broads down there at a small convention. When I went into a men's room he was in the can. I opened the door to this stall toilet and he was sitting on the seat. So he opens his mouth when he sees me and beckons me in. I take it out and let him eat it.
The crazy bastard was sitting there blowing every guy who came in. I took him home and fixed him up at the Park. Besides, I like a good fag blow.
Then Lilli came around looking for dolls. She gave Bea the once over and we talked, so I put her in the house. We had to kick in to the mob anyway, so I figured we might as well have the protection. Lilli wouldn't take my other hustlers though.
"No class," she said.
Lilli could tell how a dizzy would do as soon as she looked her over. She knew her stuff. She didn't like me much though. I don't know why she shouldn't. Hell, I took Bea off the street and showed her how to hustle. To really make it. I deserved a cut. Lilli always acted like I was a leech or something.
I got another broad to take Bea's place. Bren-da, who looked like a dream. Dumb as a post. Christ was she dumb. She was a sucker for a hard-luck story. Half the guys in town were getting into her pants because she felt sorry for them.
She even gave it away to cops. How low can you get?
I had a terrible time drumming it into her head that she was the one to tell the hard-luck story. She hadn't had no hard time.
"I been getting all I want," she said.
"Lissen, for Chrissake," I said to her. "You're an orphan. You're fuckin' life has been nothin' but dregs. You got a pain in your chest, you need dough-"
"Jeez, honey," she looks up at me with them big dumb eyes, "that's beautiful. The way you say it, that's just beautiful."
Man. What do you do with a pussy like that? I had to rehearse her for days. Even then it sounded like she was reading it off the walk She couldn't act her way out of a toilet booth. But she could screw.
Brenda's big trouble was that she liked it and when a John got her in the sack she gave him all she had. She got me in bed, wrapped her slinky legs around me and I damn near yelled 'uncle.' Me, I been around. But I never met many like her. She was a natural born cock squeezer. Marvelous.
But lousy for business. I was scared she'd burn the candle till it flickered out. She got wild.
I couldn't get her to tone it down. She would listen and agree. But when she got her legs spread she forgot. Dumb. Just plain dumb. All that energy burning up. I hated to see it.
But I got an idea how to make it pay two ways.
I scouted around and found a joint where I could fix it up for a two-way rnirror deal. It cost bucks, but I got a room built so's there was two-way mirrors around three sides, and so they couldn't be spotted from inside.
Then I sold seats to the show. Brenda didn't know about the mirrors. It sure wouldn't have mattered if she did. She would have forgotten about them anyway as soon as the action started.
It worked great. I cashed in on her two ways. The mark with her didn't know he was in the spotlight either. But he got such a good ride that maybe he wouldn't have cared. Then I got a guy who would take movies of the action. I cashed in three ways.
Brenda was a crazy lay. She was photogenic too. She had a pretty ass with a forty jewel movement.
There was hell to pay when she got the clap. I had seats sold for the performances, and no broad. Brenda had to get to the doc, so I sent in a kid, a girl ramed Grace. I didn't know her very good. I had laid her once and she was pestering me for Johns. I put her in the room and told her to make it look good with this guy. She didn't know about the mirrors either.
Grace was about sixteen, straggly blonde, but a good shape. I was afraid the guys who were behind the mirrors would object because it wasn't Brenda. They didn't complain.
She started out with a little naked dance, shoving her twat in this guv's face and he loved it. She got her tits around his dong and he blew his load all over her chin. She did great. After that I used her and Brenda both in the room. And I used her in bed myself.
This was a good period. Except the mob took too big a cut. They took the dough, and once in a while a couple hoods would come around and 'try out the broads."
Shit, what a lousy excuse."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The story of old man Dunker's slimy trail has been told, in part, by various of the people who knew him. When we learned about his operations we though they would make a good example of the type of small time pusher. He wasn't typical, perhaps, but his connection with other forms of vice made him interesting, to us.
It was impossible to find those who participated in these events, or, when we did, they would not talk. However, we have been able to piece together a very likely chronological sequence of events.
Lieutenant Otto Sunderland and Irish were of some help, but the undercover man was elsewhere during much of the following:
Dunker, over a period of years, had built up a clientele. Men who wanted young girls. Dunker was a small man, greasy and ingratiating in manner. He was very careful in his choice of girls. He usually let the girl come to him, according to those whom we knew to have been in this 'stable."
All the girls of the neighborhood were aware that Dunker could get them work, if they wanted to assume the proper position. This fact was Dunker's constant advertisement. Word of mouth.
His store was off an alley. Men could easily slip into the back without being seen from the street.
The traffic went on till late hours. Dunker was smart enough to limit his business to a one-at-a-time basis which made it as inconspicuous as possible. But the Johns paid well.
Dunker paid the girls a dollar a throw as an average.
"I got fifty cents," a young girl told us, "for one trick."
Irish found that some got as high as two dollars. "You gotta lay and suck both," A girl told him, "and the guy can have an hour on you."
Dunker's stable contained perhaps a dozen girls who were on call to him at one time. They changed sometimes monthly as girls drifted away or went into business for themselves or whatever. Some of these girls were all-round. They would do practically anything, and for them, Dunker got very good prices.
He gave these girls two to five dollars a trick.
"I had two guys work over me for five bucks," a girl told Irish. "They did everything but put their whangs up my nose," she said. "Not only that, but Dunker laid me on the couch too."
Another girl said, "Once his wife came in and watched us do it."
Irish never obtained any evidence that Mrs. Dunker knew of his operations. Not court evidence. He was positive that she did, however.
"Old lady Dunker gave me grass," a girl said. "She knew me and a guy were smoking it in the storeroom. She told me to be careful of matches."
None of these girls would testify in. court. A few were afraid of Dunker and of the mob, but most didn't care or didn't want to help cops. It never occurred to them they were helping themselves in the long run by cleaning up such slimy operations as Dunker's. They all said: "Sure, I wanna get outa the life-" But none made any real effort. The life was too easy.
Dunker curtailed some of his dealings too. He apparently was cutting down on petty stuff such as the pilfering racket-acting as fence. Irish reported that almost no stolen goods were routed through the store. Dunker was confining himself to selling H to selected customers, and running his young flesh trade.
He liked young girls. Naturally he tried out all of them. He gave them as little as possible for their efforts, when they serviced customers. If he gave them fifty cents, he probably got two dollars. If he gave them two dollars, he probably got ten. Dunker was no philanthropist. And he kept no records.
He did keep a book, however. A book of names.
Later on, the newspapers called it a little black book.' And they were right. It was black.
We reconstructed the crime as follows:
The girls came into the store. No one remembers seeing her. Mrs. Dunker was upstairs, as she was most of the time. Dunker had a counter man, Tom, who ran the food and drink part of the store. Tom saw no one, he said.
"I was working at the sink, washing dishes. I didn't see Dunker around, but then that wasn't unusual. He was in and out all the time. There was some dames in, and a few guys. Gee, I don't write down their names."
A girl came in and went into the storeroom. Dunker followed her and shut the door. He laid the girl on the couch; there were no signs of a struggle, so she went willingly. He had intercourse with the girl.
Then she stabbed him.
The police found Dunker half on the couch; he had lived long enough to try to reach the door. An ordinary kitchen knife, brand new, was still between his ribs. The knife was four and one half inches long, with a wooden handle. She must have had it in her purse.
Dunker's body was half clothed, pants about his knees. There was a good deal of blood. The wound had been enlarged by his frantic scrambling-which might have lasted a minute.
"I made a special trip just to see Dunker," Otto Sunderland said. "It was worth it-off the record. I'd rather have had him on a witness stand, but if we couldn't do that, then this way was fine by me."
Irish said: "Somebody saved the taxpayers a lot of dough."
The police theorized that the killer had blood on her, but there were no threads to follow. She could have been young, or old. Dunker knew both kinds of whores, of course. A number of people were questioned, but no one was arrested. The case is still unsolved.
But the police did find the little black book.
Undoubtedly a number of men slept nervously if at all for a while. It was a book of Johns-customers. It contained likes and dislikes of each, prices and bits of information that the police found useful and informative. They subsequently questioned a large number of the men whose names they found in the book.
Mrs. Dunker sold the store and moved into an apartment. No charges were brought against her. Her bank account was fat, she lived very comfortably. For her, at least, crime paid well.
LUIS SCALICI: "We wanted that black book. Dunker, the sonofabitch, had been warned about keeping them kind of records.
The mob tried to pay off a couple of weak cops, but no dice. For a while the heat was on. The papers made a big deal out of it. Dunker's connections with young stuff gave 'em a chance to run them sexy pictures of young broads. The public ate it up.
But it wasn't a diary. That's about all that saved us. Guys who keep diarys are poison. We went through every house looking for that kind of thing. We found stuff that shook us a little. You know a guy can get to thinking he's plugged all the holes, then you get a shit like Dunker.
I was glad to see him go. There wasn't hardly anybody at his funeral. Old lady Dunker bought him a cheap casket and a few flowers. It was more than he deserved.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUIS SCALICI:
"I had it pretty good. Business was great and we didn't have too much crap that we couldn't take care of. City Hall was in the hip pocket.
It got so I could play golf and go on vacations and even had a personal valet. Big time. I was a hell of a long way from the old neighborhood.
But I still wasn't in Stephanie Warwick's crowd.
I met her at a theatre party one night. This time she came over and cooed over me and the dame I was with. She was like syrup. So I figured she wanted something. I got one minute alone with her and she wanted my phone number.
She called me the next day and we met in a hotel room she rented for the occasion. She was slinky as ever and gave me a drink and made it easy for me to get my hand up her leg. She wanted to get booted.
"You big strong darling," she said.
She never called me that before. Dames don't usually give me that line. I'm not the strong type. Anyway, it got me thinking.
But I took her into the bedroom just the same. I hadn't had a broad like Stephanie for a long time. I wanted to see if she was just as wild. She was. She made a dive at me and hung on my joint before I could get my pants off. "You taste good," she purred.
I couldn't get it in her. "That's old fashioned, darling," she said, and slung a string of some foreign phrases at me, giggling like crazy.
We messed up the bed something awful, but she never lost a drop. She blew tunes on me that I hadn't heard before. But her snatch was getting a little loose. Poor Stephanie was putting mileage on it.
"What d'you expect," she said when I was boor enough to mention it. "I have to have a man every night, sweetheart. It's good for my complexion."
She had something on her mind.
We screwed finally, and were laying there side by side with nothing but my connection rod between us, when she asked me.
"I wanna go see Lilli."
"Lilli who?" I knew who she meant.
"Darling, don't be evasive. I wanna go see Lilli."
"Why?"
She giggled and wriggled and got under me and bumped me around a bit, but I got it out of her.
"Darling, some of my best friends go to Lilli's place, that's how I know about it. I want to-well, I want to-be one of her girls."
I was startled. No kidding. Here was a society broad with all the dough in the world, wanting to be a whore in Lilli's house.
"Why, for God's sake?"
She giggled. "Just for kicks, baby."
She meant it too. We spent the rest of the night chasing each other around the apartment and nibbling and chewing and sucking. In the morning I couldn't have got it up unless she'd tied a string around it.
I had promised, so I went to see Lilli that afternoon. She was shook too, when I laid it on her.
"She wants to what?!!"
I explained it again. "This is a very unusual cookie," I said. "She is a dizzy with everything and needs kicks to keep her from going blase."
"Maybe it isn't a good idea-"
"I dunno how it could hurt anything. She wants to pretend she is a hooker-which she is, by the way-and she'll probably pay us for the privilege."
So Lilli said OK, and I called Stephanie and told her where to show up.
"Leave your furs at home," I said.
She giggled at me. "I'll just take my pussy," she said, and she did.
LILLI de WITT:
"That was one for the books. This Stephanie was a very nice looking doll. She came in, wearing a smart two piece suit that had set her back a flock of bucks, with real pearls around her neck. She was cool and smart and dripped poise.
Luis had said she was a crazy mad thing in bed. It was hard to believe, looking at her. But here she was, and she wanted action.
She didn't mince words either. "I just want to be one of your girls for a night or two."
I asked her why and she shrugged and didn't say anything.
I said, "It'll cost you."
"Everything costs me, Lilli. How much?"
"A grand."
"That's too much. I'll give you two hundred dollars for the use of one of your rooms for two days."
I shrugged at her, and smiled. "Deal."
"What do I do now?"
I told her. Calling Mazie, the maid, I set her up to the best room with Stephanie. Then I got on the phone and told anybody I could find to send Boozer over.
Boozer is a little guy, maybe five feet seven, with moist eyes and a belly. But the mob has been using him as a break-in guy for years. He can gentle a girl and diddle her into the idea better than anyone. He is hung like a horse, and some of my girls have talked about him with a far-away look in their eyes. Every time I saw him I wondered about-well, enough of that.
He came in, and he looked terrible. That's why he got the tag. He had been oozing. Mazie and one of the swampers got him cleaned up and shaved him. We got him some decent clothes, then I sent for Stephanie.
Our system is to let a John pick from three or four girls. If he's a big spender, he can pick from all of them. Anyway, we put Stephanie in with a couple other girls, and I could see she was a little nervous. The other girls stared at her, wondering where the hell she came from. I went in and cooled them off.
Girls are so damn jealous. "This is Stephanie," I told them. "She's just here for a few days-" and that seemed to do it. They didn't mind the competition if it wasn't permanent.
Then I fixed it with Boozer to choose Stephanie.
This was my idea. I wanted to see how this society big shot could stand up to real professional work. I told Boozer to take his time.
He liked her. His boozy little eyes lit up when he saw her. I didn't tell him anything about her at all, merely that she was paying for a good time. I wanted him to do her good, but I warned him that she was supposed to think he was a customer-she wanted it that way.
He went upstairs with her and shut the door.
That night, Mazie went up with a tray of food for them. She told me that it all seemed peaceful enough to her.
"He's layin' in bed, Miss Lilli" she said. "Smokin' a cigar."
So far, so good. They rang down for some drinks later, and Maxie told me that Stephanie grabbed the tray and pushed her out.
"That gal was in a hurry-"
I went up and listened at the door later on. All I could hear was the bed squeaking, and some muffled laughter and voices.
Mazie took them breakfast. "They're both sleepin', Miss Lilli," she said. It was almost noon.
I went up and knocked. Stephanie asked: "Who is it?"
"Are you two alright?"
"Go away," she said.
I shrugged and went back downstairs. They sent for drinks, and in the evening Maxie took them more food.
"They looks a little pale," she said.
During the evening she took them more drinks and came to me with an envelope. "Miss Stephanie, she says this is for you."
I opened it. There was a short note and a hundred dollar bill. The note said: "One more day-please?"
I sent up a bottle of champagne.
The next day, about two in the afternoon, Boozer staggered downstairs. He was dressed and he was glassy-eyed.
"You put me through a meat-grinder," he accused. He had a drink and tottered out. I grabbed my skirts and ran upstairs. I expected to see Stephanie half dead.
She was lying on the bed, naked, staring at the ceiling, a smile on her face. She turned around lazily when I burst into the room.
"I think I'm gonna like this job-"
I gaped at her.
"Who's next?" she said.
LUIS SCALICI:
"I was sure surprised at Stephanie. She stayed four days with Lilli. I heard about Boozer, so I looked him up.
"That dame had a goddam rubber cunt," he said. "She's a one-gal cathouse. Where the hell she come from?"
"Society," I told him.
He shook his head. "One guy ain't enough for her. She threw me out 'cause I only got one dong."
I believed it.
Lilli told me that Stephanie had serviced eighteen guys, different guys, and that four of them hand gone back for seconds.
"I was thinking of sending for a doc," she said. "Some of them looked peaked when they got out of there."
"She's a tiger."
"I wish I had her permanent," Lilli said. "There were no complaints." She sighed. "Except from her."
I saw Stephanie later. About the last time I saw her, as a matter-of-fact. It was a week after her fun at Lilli's house. She invited me to a cocktail party at her apartment. Her husband was there too.
It was a plush layout, one whole floor at the Carleson Hotel, with catered help. The wine flowed like over Niagra Falls. I was the only member of the hoi polloi in the place.
"Darling," Stephanie said, kissing me lightly on the cheek. "I'm so glad you could come."
She was cool and smooth as a windy glacier. Every hair in place, as unruffled as a sidewalk. I tried to break the calm, no one was close to us. "Wanna screw?"
She only smiled distantly. "Darling, come meet my husband." She took my arm.
I had already met this bird, long time ago in a bar. The night I had first met her. But he didn't remember me. He was a thousand years older than her, and a little doddering, but still sharp.
We said a few words and then I got away. He didn't impress me. We were worlds apart; there was nothing much for us to talk about, except maybe how Stephanie wriggled in bed. He wouldn't appreciate me mentioning that. Anyhow, I doubted if he knew anymore. She'd kill him.
There were other good looking broads around. A few gave me the old eye and I headed toward one who had lots of cleavage and nice round ass. I was thinking that if more of these society dolls were like Stephanie, I might just wind up screwed tight.
But Stephanie intercepted me. She guided me into a small den room, and shut the door.
"Are we gonna screw?"
"Later, darling," she smiled at me. "Business first."
"You want to go back to Lillie's? You'd better ask her."
"Forget Lilli. I want you to do something for me-" She poured us drinks and handed me the glass. "For pay, of course."
"Baby, I'll lay you for free."
"I know you will, darling." She came close and ran her hand up my pants front. "Forget this little thing for a minute."
"Little?"
She sighed. "Males." She sipped and moved away. "Darling, you're a gangster, after all-" I grunted.
"-I just want to hire you, in your porfessional capacity."
"To do what?"
"To kill someone." She smiled at me as though she had said nothing at all. I blinked at her.
"Who?"
"My husband, darling."
There was a dead silence between us for a long time. This broad was a better gangster than me. I had never killed anyone. I almost asked her why she didn't do it herself. She was capable.
"Well?" she said. I asked her why.
"For various reasons, darling. Mostly, I need the money. His money."
"Yours is all gone?"
She smiled wiimingly. "Long gone, sweetheart. I adore gambling."
"IOU's?"
She nodded. "Very pressing. I must have the money. And I can't ask him for more. Or my friends. I already owe-more than I care to think about."
That was a familiar story to me. "Lemme think about it," I said. "What's your time-table?"
"I have to have money in two weeks. I must."
She looked different when she said that. There was a hardness about her that I hadn't noticed before, and I would have noticed it. I had seen every part of her.
"Alright, let's meet and you tell me all about him. Habits, where he goes, that stuff."
"Alright."
"And bring your pussy."
She looked at me under the lashes. "You want it now, darling?"
I took a small helping of it, then we went back to the party. I stood around for an hour and stared at the husband. It seemed a shame to rub him, he was going downhill fast. He'd do it himself. But Stephanie was in a hurry. She had to hurry up nature. Too bad.
I contacted one of the hard boys, a guy named Gillie. He was a slim, pasty-faced goniff who looked as harmless as a one-legged Scoutmaster, but who liked shivs and rods. Gillie was quick and accurate. All he needed was a finger.
Gillie was free. The mob wanted five grand for the rub-out. I knew Stephanie would pay it.
We met at the Pickering Hotel. She came, wearing a long coat and a scarf. I already had a room that we could get to without passing the desk. No one saw her.
I had brought along a bottle and she gulped down a snort of Scotch. "I brought my pussy," she said.
So I laid her on the bed without even taking off her skirt. She giggled the whole time. It was like a couple of kids in the back seat. I got the old snake in her and rode it in as far as it could go and we both shook it and thumped it and undulated it and shook the bed. I made her squeal and buck when the first spasm hit her.
"Oh darling," she whispered, "let's fuck all night-"
I got off her, with my dingus still brick hard, and stripped down. She captured it with her lips and I had an awful struggle trying to reach the bottle on the dresser with her working it like a piston and taking my mind off the booze.
Then we had another drink and I stripped her bare. I splashed Scotch on her and went after it, licking it up while she yelled. We ended up head to tail on the bed and worked that way for a sinuous gorging time. She tasted lush. She made me jet and pulsate, flat on my back, and milked me limp.
I almost forgot what we had come for, but she didn't. We were lying side by side, taking a breather and just easing it in and out, when she told me his schedule.
"He'll be at the Henley Trust Building every day this week. They're working out a contract. You've seen him, and I've got the license number of his car in my purse."
"Do you know when he leaves the building?"
"In the afternoon. That's your job, darling." She squeezed me with her vaginal muscles. "Were you thinking of an ambush?"
"Yeah."
"I'd rather have it look like robbery-"
"Ambush is easier, precious."
"Is it? Maybe, but not for me. I don't want any investigation-or as little as possible."
I pumped her nice and steady, looking at her and feeling her big bare tits pressing my chest. I wondered if she wanted to be along so she could see him bleed.
"How about night, does he go out?"
"I could arrange it."
"Somewhere out of town? Guns are noisy in town."
She smiled. "Alright. We'll go visit someone. You can hold us up on the road."
"Good enough. Where?" She eased closer and hitched her hips up. I was able to get another millionth of an inch into her. Then I rolled her onto her back and thrust hard. She giggled and purred. "You hit the spot, darling-"
I kept hitting it, hard and fast, and she squirmed like a snake with stomach cramps. She shrilled in my ear and exploded. I remembered what Boozer had said about her rubber cunt. It was electrified. I rammed her head into the pillow and tried to hold her down. She bucked up in the middle and we rolled around till she finally began to subside.
She was panting and cooing like a gallon of turtle doves on a slow fire. She couldn't keep her pussy from throbbing and convulsing; she didn't want to.
"We'll make it look like robbery," I said, still pronging her.
She sighed and nodded.
"Will you have a chauffer?"
"Oh darling, stop talking shop-" She writhed under me and tried to slip her tongue into my mouth.
"We gotta settle it, don't we?"
"I wanna fuck."
So I gave up and went on feeding it to her.
In an hour I was worn to a frazzle and begged off. We had another drink and a cigarette, and discussed the problem.
"You'll have to get rid of the driver," I told her. "That's one too many witnesses."
She nodded and thought about it. "Maybe I can get him to take one of the sports cars. Then he'll be driving."
"Maybe nothing, you've got to be positive. No driver or no deal."
"I didn't know gangsters were so particular."
I let that one go. "About the price. Ten grand."
She yelled out loud. "Ten!?"
"He's a big shot. If you wanna knock off a newsboy I can get it cheap."
That cooled her off. She flounced out of bed and walked around the room glaring at me. "You're taking advantage of me, goddammit. I can get any crumbbum to do it for less."
"Go ahead." I got up and put on my pants.
"We're not bums."
"We? I'm hiring you, not an army."
"No," I corrected her. "You're hiring a professional gunman. Not me. I won't even be there."
That stopped her. She had a good sized drink, staring at me. I think she realized all at once that it was different from what she'd expected.
"Five grand," she said at last.
I shook my head. "Ten is the price."
It took her another hour to agreee. By that time she did she was all business and hard as nails. I hadn't seen this side of her. We didn't screw anymore.
But she laid out the route. We got a map and pored over it. We agreed on the place, the end of a bridge on Smollett Road-I knew it pretty well. It was twenty miles past the town of Smollett. Well out in the sticks. I told her Gillie would put up a roadblock. When her husband stopped to see what was going on, Gillie would rub him.
"Then you scream for awhile," I said to her. "And figure out what next."
"What is next?"
"Either you stay there to get found, or you push him aside and drive to town. It's up to you."
She stared at me for along time. The next day I took Gillie out to look at the place. It was what they call a secondary road. Paved, one lane each way. The bridge was wooden, over a dry creek bed. There was plenty of junk around for a roadblock. Gillie got out and prowled around, making little noises in his throat. He was careful. He looked at everything. But he seemed satisfied.
"I'll use my heap for the block," he said. "I'll get a red lantern, he'll stop alright."
"Take his wallet, and anything else you want. But don't screw around with the girl." He squinted at me. "Yours?"
"Anybody's. But she'll get too wild. I don't want you in Sing Sing."
She called me the next evening and we met on a side street. I got in her car and we talked. She had it arranged for a Thursday night which was two nights away. She was all business. She gave me five grand; I was to collect the remainder when the job was completed. We set the time and she even gave me a snapshot of the car, a sleek foreign job.
"It was taken a few months ago," she said. "There won't be another car like it on the road."
I showed the snapshot to Gillie. He studied it carefully and gave it back. That snapshot became a very damaging hunk of evidence against me. I put is in my pocket and forgot about it, I never got the other five grand.
Gillie did the job and it went off like clockwork. She delivered him on time. Gillie did his usual professional job and lifted a wallet with five hundred clams in it, and a ring. He left the watch because of the inscription. Stephanie was smart enough to wear a few jewels which Gillie took.
"She didn't say a word," he reported. "She just looked the other way while I plugged him. Cool broad."
She drove the car to the next town with him beside her. There was a hellova roar went up. Warwick had been a bigger shot than I thought. I should have asked for twenty grand.
They didn't hold Stephanie at all. She took a boat after they got her statements. There was a picture in the paper of her going up the gangplank in black. That's the last I saw of her.
Otto came looking for me, the sonofabitch.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
OTTO SUNDERLAND:
"Cops get lucky, like everybody else. I had been chasing Luis Scalici for a lot of years. All the way from the old neighborhood to easy street.
He wasn't Mister Big in the mob, but he was riding good and high. He was an organizer. The more widespread the mob operations, the more they needed organization. It was 'way out of his line to set up a pigeon and knock him over, I didn't believe that Boodle had had anything to do with the death of Mr. Warwick, but you never can tell. I had heard he knew Stephanie Warwick. That kind of thing had been in the columns. I just gave it a try.
He was surprised to see me. He was living in a joint that reeked with plush and fur. He had a fancy blonde and expensive liquors. They told me he changed the blonde daily. I mentioned the Warwick hit and he played dumb.
He played a little too dumb. It made me wonder.
I got the boys to check up on Stephanie, the wife. She had taken a boat to Europe, but the Warwick enterprises were too well known. It only took about a week to run down some interesting facts. She was broke and owed money. He had been tight with dough, according to some of his friends and associates, and was wiser to her than she knew.
He didn't shell out easily. We figured she might have had him killed. According to everyone who would talk to us, she had a heart like a ball bearing. A small one.
Luis Scalici was the only one of the mob that she had known well. The more we examined it, the place and circumstance, the more it looked like a very smooth professional job. The kind of job the mob might do. Stephanie's description of the gunman would fit a million guys. She had said she was hysterical.
It didn't add up.
So we searched Scalici's apartment. And we found a snapshot of a foreign car. Warwick's car.
We had evidence that a hood named Gillie had been in town and was now vanished. The job fitted Gillie's MO, and marksmanship.
We pulled Scalici in and made the rap stick. We didn't get him for murder one, but we sent him up for manslaughter-better than nothing.
By the time he got out his kind of mob was passe. We got him again for hustling and white slave. He made the circle, from poverty to poverty. Some whores do better. Not many, but one here and there."
LILLI de WITT:
"I never did encourage a girl to get into the life. You didn't have to, of course, there were always enough girls banging on the door to get in.
It was easy. That's what hooks 'em, I think. I've heard so many girls say: "I got into it too young. I was only fourteen-I was only just out of school-."
Most of them admitted to me that they didn't know what they were getting into. It seemed easy, and then the longer they worked at it the worse it got. Some grew to hate men; some grew to hate themselves. The easy money didn't stick. Pimps got it or they gave it away. Many whores considered it 'dirty' money, even without consciously thinking about it. They showed what they thought by throwing it away: easy come, easy go.
Whores are almost always associated with the lower or criminal classes too. That's the way it is. You buy 'Hot' goods from them, clothes and merchandise, and you learn to hate cops.
I've seen some girls who wouldn't believe anything you said to them, not if you told them the time of day. They've heard so many lies and been involved in so many shady deals that they can't adjust to honesty. That's a terrible way to live.
So, many of them take narcotics or drown in liquor. Damn few save anything for old age. I don't know how many reach old age. They damn sure haven't paid taxes on their earnings; I wonder how many are on social security. It's a great life if you can stand it. For a while. Every whore wants to get out, and the ones who marry and live minus sin are the lucky ones to my mind.
The odds are against anyone sinning six days a week and praying one.
I'm not dumb enough to think that there won't always be whores around. If there's a demand, there'll be some cute little hustler to fill it.
My advice is, don't let it be you. It is not a heaven on earth. It may be for a while, but honey, you'll get old. The Johns want 'em young and you're not going to win where Ponce de Leon failed. It's the worst ride there is with nothing but parasites to keep you company.
