When did I first understand that there were women who had sex with men for money, that men paid them for having sex? I know my comprehension that there were men who did the same thing, gigolos, male prostitutes, rent boys, call boys – came years later, many years, maybe when the movie, American Gigolo,with Richard Gere came out. Call girls, bad girls, loose women, ruined women, prostitutes, sex for hire, sluts, courtesans, mistresses, side piece, whore, high class whore, kept woman, streetwalker, and the truly ridiculous ‘Ladies of the Night’ – these were terms I knew even as a teenager, or younger. But – if you were to marry someone for his money – or hers – isn’t that pretty much the same thing? Hm.
There were couples like that, when I was a kid. The dentist whose wife was so much younger, and for whom he wrote prescription after prescription, handing them to my dad while trying to distract me from the reality of what was going on, attempting what is aptly called, I believe, a charm offensive. And the famous photographer with the big house on Rte. 3; he had a new wife – a model, some said – who was the same age as his sons, or almost, just a few years older. Personally, I can’t wait to read Jill Ciment’s re-examination of her – a-hem – love affair and marriage to her former instructor, 30 years her senior, a man she met at seventeen. Yes, dear, he was a groomer, and you were a child. People who claim ‘distorted revisionist history’ don’t seem to accept that other human beings, and their views and understanding of their own lives, can actually change, grow, deepen, be illuminated in retrospect.
I (red) read novels (and yes, I still do reed/read – English is hard). I devoured novels. There were mistresses, kept women, call girls and side pieces openly existing within those pages. There were bad girls, fallen women, and men who would and could ‘ruin you’, but the men seemed to get off scot-free, from the Scandinavian, skat or tax free. Skat as in scat a.k.a. animal shit seems more like. Bears and coyotes like human men dropping their shit wherever they please or can get away with, walking away, unconcerned, triumphant. Men score, hit a home run; women are ruined, damaged, soiled. De-flowered.
I knew a woman – we went to college together but weren’t, ever, friends – who worked at a brothel on the east side near the United Nations; it was very popular with the foreign diplomatic set, and Orthodox Jews who came in from their closed, religious enclaves in Brooklyn and Queens to fuck or, in some cases, simply watch women engaged in sex acts who in any other circumstance they would never acknowledge as an intimate partner. This woman was the phone girl, responsible for buzzing men in and out, collecting cash payments, answering the ever-ringing phone to schedule the girls. The girls. After the second or third time she was held up at gunpoint, having let the wrong man or men inside, or when the door was forced behind an entering customer, she quit that job. The money was insane, but not worth dying for in the ugly 1980s.
She was originally from Pennsylvania, the land of the flat-fish, wherever that is. I remember that from her introduction freshman year drama school. She was blond, had a front tooth gap, loved horses and wearing jodhpurs, which she did regularly at school. Always seemed like a dyke to me, but what do I know? Not much, as it happens, but I do remember weird, specific shit, sometimes.
I met another woman a few years later who had left prostitution. She was trying to break into acting, and had a long scar from open heart surgery she frequently, openly displayed wearing low-cut tees and blouses. Was it something you were born with? Your heart, I mean, the surgery thing. No, she was working as a call-girl in Florida, and had been harassed, stalked, and attacked by one of her johns. He’d become violent, and she described the assault to me, in a condo she’d been living in, where she plied her trade. She was a higher class – more pricey – prostitute, or so I gathered, and this man – it’s a little foggy all these years later – had come in through a window, left open? Anyway, it was a miracle she had survived, as he had stabbed her in the heart, and other places, in an epic sounding battle throughout the apartment, which I envisioned as late 1980s gleaming white, shades of Scarface, full of sun, long translucent curtains blowing with bursts of the grappling couple, and increasing splashes of blood red on white.
Was she with another man, another client, when it happened? I think so. He was stabbed, too, but what the john did to her was far worse. When we met she was newly married to Gerry G., a decent sort, a short, well-muscled ginger who believed in love and prosperity and the power of positive thinking. I wanted to ask, but didn’t dare, was he a client? Was he? Or, ask him, were you, her client? But before I could, or dared, the earth spun and I lost track of them.
I bet I knew more women who had done this, been prostitutes, sold sex to survive. It was going on around me at the street-walker level, on East 1st Street, where, one block away on Houston St. long-haul truckers would stop and pick up women who gave them blow-jobs in those capacious cabs. For months while I lived there, I thought they were getting food from a local deli, taking a cat-nap – and maybe they were, too, also, in addition to getting laid or sucked off. On 45th street between 8th and 9th avenues, a pocket park was the perfect setting for addicts and prostitutes, who – this was in 1989 and ’90, AIDs was running rampant – picked up johns in Mercedes or Range Rovers (I know this because these same johns tried picking me up, too, while I was walking my dog) for the same ‘cat-nap’ on their way back to Jersey, or Westchester, or back to the office downtown.
These women, the ones in mid-town, had open sores on their bodies, which screamed AIDs to me, but – if you’re patronizing a street-walker in 1989 or ’90, you had no judgement to speak of anyway. These men’s wives were, no doubt, waiting at home.
Years later, a neighbor upstate wanted to take me out to dinner, and when I finally agreed he was blunt about it: he wanted to marry a younger woman like me, someone who would ‘change his diapers’, someone who had money of her own. I was not interested. I also did not allow him to pay for dinner; I paid for both of us, because I didn’t want him to think I was interested in any transaction in which I was considered a candidate for any form of his largesse in possible exchange for my youth. Even if he was my type (he was not), his honesty, which should’ve been a plus, was not. He’d been in AA since he was nineteen, and was a tight-ass about it; all of his friends were part of what I called Ahhh mafia; the incestuous nature of their getting up into one another’s business was really off-putting, and I’d only seen it from the distance of a neighbor. That night, over dinner, I thought but didn’t say, you’ll find someone, some younger woman struggling with addiction and self-esteem issues, right there in Ahhhh, just stick with it. And, you know, he did. They’re divorced now, but he made out well, if temporarily. She was younger, and had a lot more money.
As women have money, serious money and careers of their own, the dynamics of relationships change for the better, the betterment and empowerment of women. My mother liked, and often said, the old phrase, ‘they (men) won’t buy the cow if they can get the milk for free’. How odd a way to speak of your own gender as a group, in a world where there are a dozen ways to name women who are being paid – being bought – for sex, for affection, for contact, intimacy, an approximation of love. But of course, that’s not what my mom meant; she meant bought as in married, and how apt, really, because ‘old-fashioned’ women had so few choices, they were the equivalent of a house slave, a brood mare, a dairy cow. The modern mess of what is the GOP certainly seems to see women that way.
And women, nowadays – like the successful and well-off gal my neighbor briefly managed to talk into marriage – are now able to buy men, or something very like, as well as ‘return them’. We need more, and creative, words for gigolo. Or perhaps we do away with the idea of buying and selling other people and the concept of whoring, in its entirety or better yet, perhaps, let’s just call it what it is: negotiated relationship, contractually established connection, fair trade intimacy…the possibilities are endless.