“Sir, I think you need to calm down.”
He started laughing.
“You need to calm down,” I repeated.
“I don’t think you get it.”
“No, that’s not something I take care of.”
He said, “No, you really don’t get it, do you? This is a massage parlor. The least you can do is give me a local.”
“A local what?”
“A local is a hand job.”
“A what?”
“I give you extra money to jerk me off.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“No. Why do you think this place is so busy all the time?’”
Naively, I replied, “I figured they just needed a massage.”
It started to dawn on me that they needed their tension relieved, but not in the shoulders. “Oh my God,” I thought to myself. And then it hit me that my husband was pimping me out. I recognized this client as one of the guys in the waiting room when I walked in the first day. Frank and Bob had set me up; they had planned all of this.
I was beyond angry. “You can jerk yourself off. I’m not doing that to you.”
Finishing out my shift, I told Bob and his wife, “I understand the whole deal with this place now. And if you want me to stay here I will. But all I’ll be doing is giving massages.”
They said, “Well, we’ll see how it goes. That’s fine.”
They probably figured I was shell-shocked and I’d come around and give hand jobs and blow jobs or do it “all” like the other girls. But I did give a good massage and had regular clients who just wanted that, so I figured I could continue there.
When I got home I was really hurt and just looked at Frank and said, “What in God’s name did you get me into? Do you know what kind of place that is?”
“Yeah, I know what it is.”
“Why would you want your wife to work in a place like that?”
“I didn’t figure you would mind. It’s just a hand job.”
“You think I wouldn’t mind?! Most men don’t even want their wives looking at another man, much less touching their private parts.”
He looked at me blankly and repeated, “I didn’t think you would mind.”
“Well I do. You must not think very much of me if you’re willing to peddle me out like that.”
I went and slept on the couch. I didn’t know which way to turn or what to do. I had no family; I had no friends. All I had was a husband, and he was trying to pimp me out for a quick buck.
That was the beginning of the end between me and Frank. He never really apologized. Hell, he never said a whole lot about anything. I was pretty hurt, but was also pissed off. We didn’t speak a lot after that. I didn’t want to even look at him. I just went to work on the day shift and did my job. I wasn’t about to work the night shift there, because God only knows what went on then. Guys would ask for me, but the owners told them, “No, you don’t want her.” But I didn’t have many office skills per se and sure didn’t want to go back to a factory job. It wasn’t like I had a lot of employment opportunities to choose from.
I tried to save some money because I knew in the back of my head I was going to make an exit. I was trying to figure how to run away from home again. I didn’t want Frank to know my finances before I had all my ducks in a row. If I was going to move I was going to need one month’s rent, one month’s security, furniture, and I still had to find a place. Even worse, I’d never really been on my own before. It was all pretty depressing. I felt like I’d been abandoned once more. I didn’t trust anyone to begin with, and now I’d put 100 percent of my trust in someone to make my life okay and I was just wrong.
Meanwhile Ken, one of my customers who came in quite often, owned two adult bookstores on the strip where the massage parlor was. I let him know I was looking for a different job. He offered me a position as a clerk. It didn’t take much for me to walk into Bob’s office and say, “I quit.”
I started to work behind the counter in Ken’s bookstore the next day. At least at the bookstore customers were going in to watch other people having sex and I didn’t feel like I was being pressured to prostitute myself. They weren’t asking me for it or trying to fondle me or grope me.
I was there a week before my husband found out. Bob asked Frank how I was doing and that’s when my husband discovered I wasn’t working there anymore. It really took him by surprise as it was my first independent act. He demanded to know what was going on and was not happy I was employed at an adult bookstore. I didn’t understand how he could be against me working at a bookstore, but it was okay to work in a whorehouse and be encouraged to give guys hand jobs.
My responsibilities included working the cash register, stocking the shelves, and splicing the 8mm movies together for the peep shows. I couldn’t help watching them and I had never seen anything like it before. I thought they were pretty interesting. My initial reaction, though, was that the women looked really bad. It seemed like they hadn’t bathed. Their hair looked dirty. The soles of their feet were dirty. They had pimples on their butts. It was appalling to me that women would allow themselves to look that way or have others present them that way.
The whole thing was strange and yet not so strange. Basically, I was working as a clerk in a store, period. It could have been 7-11 or Piggly Wiggly. It just so happened that it sold dirty magazines instead of hotdog buns and Mountain Dew.
Besides Frank’s, I hadn’t seen any other penises before. But when I saw the size of some of these guys in the movies, I said to myself, “Holy crap.” It didn’t scare me, though. In fact, it all interested me. Even though I was sheltered, none of it offended me at all. I figured they were consenting adults, whereas I wasn’t given a choice when it came to working at the massage parlor. I guess you could say it was arousing to me, the same way it is when guys see big boobs for the first time. Ask them what’s so great about them, they probably can’t give you a really intelligent answer. It’s just something hormonal, I suppose. At the time, I wouldn’t have had any idea what to do with some big huge porn cock — what it would feel like or whether I’d even like it. But hanging around the store was making me feel more comfortable with my own sexuality.
The people who walked in the store were amusing. There were a lot of soldiers, but also a lot of dirty old men. They were the lecherous kind you saw in Playboy and Hustler cartoons. My counter was the farthest away from the door and it sat up about three to four feet higher than the rest of the store so the customers couldn’t grab at me or reach into the register. I could see down the aisle in the back and notice if any of the films broke in the twenty-five cent booths. We changed the movies once a week and everybody knew what day the movies changed. On that day the customers were always primed. “Did you change them yet? Did you change them yet?” Surprisingly, a lot of them were good-looking guys who, nonetheless, came into the store to beat off.
None of this action bothered me because it had nothing to do with me; I was merely the clerk — a voyeur. Also, I was making good money, I didn’t work particularly hard, and it wasn’t boring. I heard everybody else talking about how dull their jobs were, but I never knew from one minute to the next who would walk in the door and what stupid crap they would do.
There was a guy around ninety who came in one day with a raincoat on. He suddenly opened the coat and flashed me. I said, “Oh, you ridiculous jackass!” He immediately got a boner — exactly the reaction he wanted. He came in the same exact time the next week and exposed himself again. Ditto week three. By the fourth time, I was ready for him.
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