Richard Sharon - Diary of a Lover

She got her purse, put sixty dollars on the bed, and gave me back my twenty.

The pounding on the door started again and a jumble of drunken voices began shouting. I could hear Rita over all of them, demanding that Terry come out. But as drunk and as mad as they were, nobody opened the unlocked door until, holding Terry's arm, I threw it open from the inside.

"What the hell were you two doing all that time?" Jack yelled. You couldn't have been screwing that long."

"Fer Chrissake, we'll be stuck here all day if you don't hurry with them." Rita whined.

"Rita old girl, Terry just turned in her trick towel and quit, she's going home with me," I said.

This brought pandemonium. The guys who were waiting for Terry started moaning about their money, and Rita screamed obscenities at me. I told the fellas they'd find their dough on the bed, and if they wanted to give it to Rita instead, that was their business. I told Rita to go fuck herself, grabbed Terry by the hand, and left them all standing there in shock.

We drove right to the flat on outer Washington Street that Terry rented with Rita and two other girls, got her stuff while nobody was home, and went to my place.

She loved it. Dropping an armful of clothes and a cosmetics case, she danced about, laughing and touching everything, like a puppy in a new garden. She swore she had never seen such a super apartment and asked if she could cook me dinner now. Was I hungry? Did I want anything? Could she do anything for me? For the first time she felt free, and I felt it with her because I had been there once myself.

I put on music and made drinks and she fixed spaghetti, a huge salad, and garlic French bread for dinner. And we talked. Her parents lived in Belmont, on the peninsula, and were divorced. Her father used to beat her regularly, accusing her in his heavy Greek accent of whoring with boys, when she really wasn't. But then she started to, just as a means of getting back at him, figuring that if she was going to be damned as a sinner, she might just as well sin. There was never any enjoyment out of it, except thinking to herself that she wished her father could see her with Charlie's prick in her hand, or Joe fucking her, or jacking Bill off all over the seat of his car. However, her father never did see her, so her revenge was only symbolic, and she would come home and try to soak off her guilt in the bathtub.

By the time her parents were divorced she was seventeen. She lived with her mother, who spent every evening out cruising the bars looking for a new husband. Many nights her mother never came home. After Terry was graduated from high school and turned eighteen she left home and went to San Mateo Junior College for two years, and also to secretarial school, where she learned to type eighty words a minute and take dictation. But when she came up to the city to find work there was nothing available, so, rather than return home, she took a job as hostess in a restaurant, making barely enough to pay the rent on a dumpy basement apartment in North Beach.

Rita came in for late-night snacks when she had dates along Motel Row on O'Farrell Street or nearby Van Ness Avenue, and Terry got to know her pretty well. Early mornings were slow, so Terry would pour herself a cup of coffee and sit with Rita, and the two of them would talk.

Finally, a few weeks later, Rita had made her the offer, using the chance to make big money as a come-on and painting mental pictures of the beautiful dress shop the two of them would one day buy. Terry, who spent her days looking fruitlessly for work as a secretary, spent another week thinking about job hunting and about Rita's offer. At the end of the week she decided that she would try being a call girl, at least for a while.

She moved into the flat with the other girls and took her first trick, or client, as the high-class girls call them, on the second night. The girls had a referral-only system, which isn't the best, but if the heat's on it's usually safe. One of the girls would service Henry S. If Henry was pleased, he would tell a visiting executive friend about it, and the friend would phone and say that Henry had referred him. The girls would get the friend's phone number, then tell the friend to have Henry phone to verify. When Henry phoned, they would ask him a question that only he could answer, and check it in the little black book that all call girls keep on their Johns, just to be sure it wasn't a setup by the cops. Then they would phone back the friend to arrange the date. If he just wanted to get laid, the rate was fifty dollars if he came to the flat or fifty plus cab fare both ways if he wanted the girl at his hotel. More often than not the trick wanted a real date for dinner, a show, and the whole evening, in which case the fee was a flat hundred, plus whatever he wanted to spend on her.

In fourteen days of whoring Terry had screwed twenty-two Johns, none of whom satisfied her sexually, although they all were good guys. She had a couple of local politicians, a famous baseball player, some big-wheel corporate people, and a smattering of local and out-of-town businessmen, all married. She took her first two tricks at the flat, and was scared to death. But, being first-rate clients, they were awfully nice and tried to put her at ease. The other girls gave her tips on how to get the client off in a hurry. However, she said it wasn't necessary to use special motions with most, they popped pretty fast, anyway.

The one thing Terry hated was having to suck cock. Call girls, unlike street whores, do not charge for each separate service; the price includes anything the customer wants, within reason. And also unlike street whores, it is not considered good etiquette to ask a client to wash himself before hand, it's assumed that he will be clean. Most weren't, especially uncircumcised men. Terry even tried to hold her breath while sticking but it didn't work very well. Often she had to fight back retching. She enjoyed being taken out for dinner, going first class on the town, and resigned herself to the rest.

I've known enough whores to know the business fairly well, and also the people. Any hooker or ex-hooker who writes books telling about the great life she had and how fantastic the sex was is just simply full of shit, there's no plainer way to put it. Glorious tales of wild orgies may sell enough books to make those broads a lot of bread, but truth they ain't.

Financially it wasn't such a great deal for Terry, either. She had taken twenty-two tricks, five for one hundred dollars, and seventeen for fifty. She made a total of thirteen hundred and fifty dollars, out of which she had to give half to the house for rent, bail, and jail fund, lawyers, doctors, and payoffs, including that unknown portion that the other girls stole from.her because she was new and square. This left her with six hundred seventy-five dollars for two weeks' fucking, or three hundred thirty-five per week, which isn't bad. But wait a minute. She's out of action one week a month with her period, and whatever other days she wants to take off. The three hundred thirty-five is for a seven-day week, so this means she actually made only a thousand a month, or two-fifty a week, about the same as a good private secretary. And because she was new and fresh she was in great demand. After a while those figures would have dropped considerably. Still, it was better than working in a hash house and living in a cellar.

We had a nice dinner and talked far into the night. I liked her very much, and I knew that she liked me, but I wanted to play it very cool, to be sure that she still didn't confuse me with a John. I got out spare blankets to make up the couch, but Terry insisted that I sleep in my own bed, and that she should take the couch. She threatened to leave if I gave her any trouble about it, so I acquiesced. As she was making up the couch I stripped naked as normally as one might take off a jacket, and went into the bathroom to shower and shave. Normally I don't shave before retiring, but I figured I had better play it safe, because I wasn't sure what, if anything, was going to happen.