It could only have been a bullet hole smack in the middle of the plate glass oval in the front door of Sigrid’s apartment house. This was right before gentrification, when the West Eighties still looked like the working-class neighborhood it once was, only worse, dilapidated. No buzzer system, so, as we had arranged over the phone, I banged on the ground-floor window, which was where Sigrid lived. The face of a princess, of a blond Rose White, peered at me through the venetian blinds.
“It’s plenty big enough for two,” she said once we were inside.
The apartment was one room, with a homemade plywood partition about five feet high that ran down the middle. Sigrid had decorated her home with beds. Beds were everywhere. One queen-sized number was made up with sheets, the others, three or four single beds, were draped with tie-dyed cotton coverlets in various hues of green and purple, big pillows in psychedelic primary colors thrown around on top of them. Besides the extensive bed collection, there was a card table with some metal chairs over by the kitchenette.
“This looks great,” I said.
“Supremely functional. Beds are all-around practical, the only kind of furniture worth having. You can do anything on them: sit, eat, read, sleep, fuck, anything. What else do you need?” Sigrid said. “Want some tea?”
I was quietly speeding. My pupils were crowding out my irises, otherwise you couldn’t tell. But, as always, the drug made me romanticize. What was really getting to me was the china-blue, angel-blond, porcelain look of my hostess as she elegantly poured the boiling water into a potful of bancha leaves. Even though she was wearing jeans and a faded-blue man’s shirt with a hole in the shoulder and padding around in bare feet, there was a quality she had that I was sure inspired men to throw their coats over mud puddles in her path, send her flowers. She was a lady, a very white, delicate lady.
“The thing is, I’d like to move in immediately if I could, except I don’t have a lot of cash right now,” I said.
“Oh, that’s easy, no problem. I know how to get money any time,” she said.
Sigrid made it sound like getting money was a hobby, something to do when you had nothing better to do.
“Tell me,” I said.
“OK, but I don’t know what you’d be up for. Maybe it would bother you,” she said.
“I doubt it.”
“Good. Then I’ll let you in on it,” she said, pouring the tea into two mugs and sitting down across from me, where she proceeded to tuck one foot over her opposite thigh, then the other one, lotus style. She took a dainty joint out of her pocket, lit it, and passed it to me. It was very good dope.
“I’ve got these friends, Vincent and Candy,” she said, sucking the smoke into her lungs and holding it. “You never met anyone like them, a trip, really. They run this, well, how should I put it, ‘emporium,’ I guess you’d call it, off Times Square. There’s a big theater in the back, where Vincent stages these live sex shows, only they’re actually morality plays that he wrote himself, allegories, you know? They’re really beautiful, except I don’t go in for that, that’s not my bag.
“But in the front, he’s got this mini–massage parlor going. It’s just a roomful of massage tables with screens to simulate privacy, you know? Here’s the best part: each customer gets a timer. Fifteen minutes. Hand jobs, that’s all. It’s a piece of cake. Twenty-five dollars for a hand job. We keep fifteen of it. Do ten of those and you got the rent plus mad money. And you can do it for as long as you want. The guys are lined up in the hallway. It’s so easy, it’s like having a trust fund. Any time I’m feeling broke, I just call Vincent. We could pop down there on Monday if you like.”
I shivered. Hand jobs—that is cold. I didn’t mind going to bed with someone for money. That had turned out to be a cinch, but mainly because it mimicked ordinary life and normal relations between a man and a woman. I could fantasize anything during the act; I could pretend, if it helped things along, that the john was my lover. But hand jobs? They were mechanical acts that exposed the whole enterprise for what it was: orgasm for money. Everybody likes to come, but men could and would pay for it. Even the poor ones would pay to come. The only sentimental note is that they preferred a delicate female hand to their own for a change. Meanwhile, I would be stuck with the reality of what I was doing. Hand jobs. But I looked at the fair Sigrid, the lovely lady who would inspire gallantry in the worst of heels, and I had to admit my attitude was silly and impractical.
“I’ll definitely think about it,” I said.
I went home and packed the few clothes I hadn’t lost or ruined somehow and generally got ready to move in with my new friend, Rose White. Before I left, I kissed and hugged Maggie good-bye, as if I were a kid on my way to Europe for the first time. She kissed and hugged me back, always willing to jump into the charade of a loving, uncomplicated parent-child relationship. We were the same size, so whenever we embraced, our bosoms collided. We were standing there in the hallway, pap to pap. It made me nervous. I had told her that my roommate did a term at Swarthmore, which was true, and that now she was studying to be an actress, which was also true.
Maggie seemed relieved. She would go to bed that night telling herself I was just a child of the sixties after all, rebelling in a harmless and probably short-lived way, and all was right with the world. It made me sad. I didn’t enjoy in the least deceiving her and disappointing her over and over again. This was because despite years of the best adolescent therapists money could buy, despite one eerily removed professional after another telling me to get away from that destructive bitch who actually unconsciously loathed me (one guy did say exactly that), in spite of all this, a part of me had to admit, as I stood there in the middle of the warm hug, that I wanted desperately to please my mother. Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to love her, because in enlightened psychiatric circles you had to hate your mother first before you could finally love her, I was never able to bring myself to go through the required healthy hating part. OK, so she neglected me when I was a kid. OK, so what. We also had a lot of laughs then. Right after I started third grade, my governess, Josephine, quit because, she said, she only took care of young children, and, at the age of eight, I was no longer one. From that time on, my mother hired a series of live-in maids who did their best to keep their distance. After Josephine left, there had never been anyone else. It was Maggie then or nothing.
The taxi sailed downtown along the East River, on its way to deliver me to my first whorehouse. Corinne had referred me to her colleague Evelyn for a week’s work. She said it was part of my initiation into the Life. The late-morning, late-August sun poured its benign light over the dirty water, and the oily rivulets seemed to dance as if fish were chasing each other just below the surface. A compact little tug scooted under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, reminding me of lives lived in the open. Mick Jagger’s taunting alto blasted over the car radio. I was preening again in the large hand mirror I had brought with me and singing along, occasionally catching the young, long-haired driver’s eyes in the car mirror staring at my shiny black hot pants that twitched to the rock ’n’ roll beat.
In an hour’s time I would be sequestering myself with the first of an endless trail of strangers, all of whom would be sticking their strange penises into me, from eleven A.M. to seven P.M. for the next five days straight. And the truth is, rather than gritting my teeth, I was jumping with excitement, behaving more like a bobby-soxer on the way to her first hop than a prostitute booked for a week’s work. Appealing visions of iniquity danced in my head: satin sheets the color of wine, heavy drapes blotting out the street, and foreign men who looked vaguely like Marcello Mastroianni drawing