Xaviera Hollander - The Happy Hooker - My Own Story

Most of my customers come to me as a result of word-of-mouth publicity. If somebody arrives at my place and he looks like a wealthy man and can spend large sums of money, I’ll first of all ease the price up above my fifty-dollar minimum. If I think he can go for more money, I give him two or three girls and, bending my rule, let him pay up front. For a trip around the world, if indeed the girl is willing to perform this intimate service with her tongue around the john’s behind, we usually charge double. If he hasn’t enough cash with him, I accept a check, even if he’s new to my place. You can tell if a man is wealthy.

When a man leaves my place and he’s from a city like Washington, Chicago, or Philadelphia, and not New York, I give him a few of my interior-decorator cards and ask him to give them out to his groovy friends and tell them to just call me anytime.

When a Texan walks into my place, the price is immediately a C-note, a hundred dollars. They generally are the best-spending customers I get. For his money a customer is entitled to one half-hour with a girl – and no money back if not delighted.

We squeeze in the little brokers for a quick fifty dollars. They’re not demanding because they’re always horny. They come up often, and they’re not the type to hang around for three hours drinking up my booze. Basically they’re very easygoing.

Sometimes I get men who are impotent and want to eat up two or three girls while still not being able to come. They waste a lot of time and are usually the ones who give me a hard time when it’s time to pay. But most of my customers reach their rocks off in much less time than the half-hour due them. Then if they want another go, even with the same girl, and even within the half-hour, they must pay again.

I split fifty-fifty with my girls, and every night is pay day. The girls I send over to hotel rooms usually come back to me each night after they’ve finished work to give me my fifty-percent madam’s fee. Sometimes, however, they are so tired that it is not until the next day they bring my money to me. Almost always my outside girls are honest and split fairly with me. Since both they and their customers need me, they would not lie. For instance, if I send a girl to a hotel room and instead of only one fuck, she makes the customer climax three times, she could collect $150, and tell me he came only once. But this almost never happens, especially since the customer likes to remind me how much he’s paying me. Maybe he hopes I will give him a discount someday.

A lot of men seem to wake up horny in the morning and would like to see me, but can’t get to my place. For them I have a special service. I let them telephone me, and I talk them into an orgasm while they jerk off. For this I usually don’t get paid, but I know they’ll be back as paying customers some night.

Quite a few of these, what I call dial-a-jerk calls, come from masochists and slaves who jerk off while I describe how I am going to tie down their balls and put pins through them, then I’m going to beat their behinds with my steel-bristle brush and handcuff them and whip them with my cat-o’-nine-tails. But to tell the truth, I am trying to stop this service now, because I am usually up until five in the morning carrying out the administrative duties of a madam, and just getting my beauty sleep when these horny guys or sickies wake me up.

Some of the girls live in my apartment for a week or a month at a time. For this they pay me $125 a week, and, of course, they get the first choice of the johns who come in, especially the nooners who want a quick fuck or a blow-job at lunchtime. So the girls don’t object to this rent arrangement, and it helps me, because my apartments always run five hundred to $1,000 a month.

In order to keep my business lively and growing, I have had to adopt that very American system of credit. For instance, one of the biggest stock-brokerage houses on Wall Street has a credit rating with me of up to two thousand dollars. They send their best out-of-town executives and customers up to me, and once a week the vice-president puts the cash owed me in an envelope and sends it to me with a messenger from the firm.

I take a lot of my payments in personal checks, but this, of course, can be risky. As in any other business, it is impossible to completely escape bad checks and bad accounts.

I keep a little red book in which I record my operating accounts. On the left side of the page I list the customers by name and how much they pay. On the right side of the page are the names of the girl or girls each john saw. This way I can be sure each girl gets paid correctly. I also know how much came in each day. In the back of the book I keep a list of my charge customers and how much they owe me. I also keep a list of the checks that bounce, so I can have Larry, my boyfriend, try to collect for me.

Also in the red book I keep a record of the money I invest. The money I send to my mother in Holland is circled in red. I have told my mother to invest this money so that if anything ever happens to me she will be protected.

Until my name and picture hit the press of the world in connection with the New York police payoff scandals, my mother thought I was an interior decorator. I was able to conceal the fact of my frequent moves by having her write to me in care of Larry. She was able to accept that I lived – as I told her – with Larry, who was hoping to marry me someday.

Whenever I find I have more than a thousand dollars in cash lying around, I telephone Larry and say, “I just saw George,” or “George was here.” That means I have a G, a thousand dollars, to go into the box. I have to be careful on the phones, because frequently I find they are tapped.

But now, let me show you the other side of the ledger. My huge outlay.

In the back of my red book I see that I am owed $8,000 in credit accounts and checks that have bounced. I will be lucky if I collect $3,500 of that money. My yearly loss because of maltreatment in business is more than twenty percent of my total earnings.

Actually, if my business was legitimate, I would deduct a substantial percentage for depreciation of my body. I look into the mirror these days and see how tired I look. I am only twenty-eight, but prostitutes age fast from the late nights worrying about arrests, and only a few hours of sleep. Fortunately, I don’t drink, smoke, or take drugs, or else I would look even older.

To give you some idea of how same people think they can beat a prostitute out of money, a man in Long Island who entertained his friends at my place finally owed me almost $2,000, and I sent him a nicely typed bill for interior-design consultation. When he didn’t pay, Larry telephoned him and the customer said he had sent me a check and it had been cashed out in California. I said this wasn’t true, since I cash all my checks in New York, and he then let Larry see the canceled check. It was made out to me, and someone had forged my name. I have seen this trick before. This john had indeed made the check out to me and then had somebody forge my name and cash the check in California and give the money back to him. Then he not only kept the money, but took a tax deduction for business expenses.

So, as I say, to begin with I have a twenty-percent. loss off the top, and that represents a ten-percent cash outlay, because every night I pay my girls in cash their half of what they earn, even if I accept a check or let the customer charge.

My biggest outlay is when the police raid my apartment and arrest me and my girls. So far this year I have had three disastrous busts. One was in March, a second one in April, and a third in late July. Each time I am busted I have to bail myself and all my girls out, pay the fines against us, and most of all pay the lawyers. This is not counting what I pay off to the police. These payoffs averaged over one thousand dollars per month and were spread all over the precinct. Once or twice police officers told me they quashed complaints, but the fact is I have just been forced to move for the fourth time in less than a year.