CHAPTER 1
Before some trick asks what's a nice girl like me doing
hustling my body, and they all really ask this, he wants to
know where I'm from. In New York City everybody wants to
know what you do, where you're from. Since what I do is no
mystery, I get right down to telling I'm from a forsaken place
called Pottsdam.
Of course he's never heard of it.
Then, as I'm getting ready to make love I tell him that God
himself damned the whole place including everyone who lived
there and wanted happiness. But it didn't matter how hard
you worked your ass off or juggled welfare to make things
nice. In Pottsdam there was this real low sneaky kind of devil
force you could not ignore. There was this sickroom fever that
made you bitter, a virus in our town air that got you dizzy,
made you hate yourself even if you just hung out all day with
other kids with nothing to talk about.
Some of these Pottsdam kids believed tomorrow would be a
better day, the town sickness would blow away Iike a cold
spell. But it didn't. All the faith in the world couldn't heal
those sores. If you had any natural born smarts pretty soon
you started to figure out your escape. You kept your eyes
open, your mouth shut. You guarded your secret. I t was the
one you never told nobody. And the more !.ou thought about
i t , this was every minute of the day and it could keep you from
falling asleep, your secret grew like sorne shiny treasure you
knew someone was about to steal. You kept re-hiding it again
and again, moving it around from place to place, burying it
deeper and deeper inside as you tried to find a clever place no
burglar would ever look. 1 still do this when a john gives me
fresh money and 1 search around the house for a place
nobody'd think of guessing.
This can get on your nerves like nothing else counting my
mother. Mom was dumping on me, sucking my blood from
when 1 can remember. I t wasn't all her fault neither. Like as I
say, bad vibes in that God damned Pottsdam ruined
everything. What they couldn't destroy they turned sour.
There was an awful lot of drinking, closet and on front porches.
Mom took her medicine (gin) but in a nice churchy way.
She kept a china saucer in the refrigerator. On this was a pretty
linen doily crochetted on its edges. She had a couple dozen of
these she bargained out of a door-to-door peddler. Resting
on the doily was a fancy glass she loved to polish until it gleamed.
If she let me hold it up to the sunlight I could daydream into
next week riding the colors of the rainbow that used to dazzle
me and I'd hum and be happy.
Next to her glass was her special teaspoon. This was pure
sterling silver stolen from the Hotel Plaza in New York City.
She'd polish this as fondly as her glass and already the Plaza
was fading. Next was her medicine, a prescription bottle from
Mr. Nutter's drugstore with the label faded like the Plaza except
you could still make out: take one tsp when needed.
Mom refilled this little bottle from the Bombay gin bottle
she kept hidden in her hatbox in the closet. When Mom took
her medicine it was like a religious ceremony at our kitchen
table after she'd wipe off the plastic tablecloth. She'd sit
herself down, take a long sigh and a tiny smile would make her
dark eyes light up. Mom could sit there alone for hours taking
one tsp when needed.
This was Mom's treasure, her only escape. I hate to say it
but my Mom didn't have too much imagination and her
dreams never came true. Since I'm older I notice lots of people
like her.
About my Daddy I have a few details. They wrote that song
The Impossible Dream for him. The inside of his life always
reminds me of penny arcade gambling take-a-chance games
with the odds so high against you, you just got to be out of
your mind to waste your money. If you've ever been to any
seashore resort you know the arcades I mean.
When I first started turning tricks on West 42nd Street in
New York City for Tony, there used to be one of these shabby
places in the middle of the block between Broadway and
Seventh Avenue. They had a freak show downstairs
This contraption consisted of a box-sized glass cage inside
of which was a toy-size steam shovel-like claw digger you
worked with two levers to make it move back and forth, lower
it down, then ever so slowly squeeze the claws together so
they'd clinch hold of a special trinket with their teeth, maybe a
gold watch or an expensive ring or bracelet. All these more
valuable items were buried deep into the pirate island sand. I
always suspected they were bolted under the sand out of sight.
So no matter how many quarters you dropped inching that
bobbing claw around nibbling at the bait, seldom did you
catch anything. When you did, it was disgustingly cheap. The
prize usually dropped off the claw before you could swivel it to
the side where, if you were lucky, it dropped with a clank into
a slot you had to twist your fingers into to grab.
In a nutshell that's the story of my Daddy's life.
His other game is the one you usually see at those concession
stands at Roman Catholic street festivals usually run by
the priests. You insert pennies, dimes or quarters that roll merrily
down a little shute to flip rightside up-when along comes
a slowly moving bar that nudges the new coin with excruciating
slowness to maybe bump another on its edge.
Should your coin miraculously push others off the edge they
tumble into a chute and maybe you win a little. This game
fascinated Daddy. He could play it with the patience of a
surgeon making a heart transplant.
Life for us in Pottsdam was without any joy. When the sun
would come out to interrupt gloomy weather now and then,
people would get giddy. As I grew up there life was so dull and
unexciting someone should have invented a game called
Monotony you played with blank dice. I had a younger sister
and some girlfriends. The only constructive thing we did except
primp was swipe and swap movie fan magazines. I learned
how to read from True Confessions and Crime Detective
magazines.1 loved the bleak gory pictures of desolate towns
and city limits and rural farm communities like my sick town
where all sorts of bloody brutal murders and violent poisonings
used to turn me on in a way I didn't understand and
would scare me a little bit.
As for the girls bleeding their poor hearts out in True Story
and Romances, they were always getting fucked by stepfathers
or distant cousins, knocked up on car seats pulled into
the woods at highway rest stops or getting their cherries busted
in clammy sandblock motel rooms or cottages. Lots of them
ran away from home with married truck drivers who also had
a girlfriend at every neon diner on Route 66.
We had no movies in Pottsdam because the pipes froze one
winter and the Jew went out of business. One summer it turned
into a feed store, then the next some drunken Hell's Angels
bikers who chained their old ladies nude to oak trees burned it
down at an orgy.
1 don't remember most of the movies I saw there but 1'11
never forget the wonderful smell of that place and how free
from town evil it made me feel. Once I walked onto that carpet
down the aisle in the funky darkness, the bitterness, the hate
and anger behind my eyes, would vanish as if I'd had myself a
good cry. Then the movie would end and no matter what it
was, I'd melt like a chocolate bar with happiness and it would
take me hours later to get myself back together so that I could
handle the miseries that always seemed to be waiting.
I know for sure now and I've thought about it a whole lot
that the early ideas I had to make my escape from Pottsdam
complete was to learn how to become a movie star, a gun moll
or to meet one of those guys in Crime Magazine who would kill
his unfaithful wife over me. He'd get caught and be put away.
I'd have all the money he salted away from her insurance
policy before he buried her in a lime pit behind his old chicken
house.
The first thing I'd do would travel Greyhound as far from
Pottsdam as it was possible. I'd stop off at a health clinic in
New York City where I'd read some kind of shrink quack, if
you took his course and paid in full up front, would give your
brain a face lift so you would never again remember Pottsdam
or Mom's medicine, or my Daddy's being birthmarked by bad
luck or no hot water or any one of a thousand different
miseries that had Pottsdam tattooed on them like Made in
Japan.
A small town keeps you small. Mine was like a jail. It wasn't
that everybody knew your business or couldn't get through the
day without gossiping about you and what you did or did not
do, it was how it trapped you with its monotony. Being bored
is one thing but coating it with chocolate is a crime. My world
was one where promises or dreams never came true. Nobody
ever really laughed. All told themselves outrageous lies and
believed them as if they were gospel truth. If you were young
and tender and pretty and had a build like mine and you were
hot-blooded at the same time, it was pretty sticky.
It embarrasses me because deep down I am really a shy person,
although you'd never know this now because I learned
how to master this. I put myself into neutral with the motor
idling and 1 can shift gears with the best of them and my
reflexes are like a cat's but sex as you think of it when you say
sex, really means a lot to me even when I learned how sinful it
was to admit it made you feel good.
You know, by now I've had a lot of experience. As they
say, nothing, no matter how kinky or perverted it is really
turns me on or gets me off. But back in Pottsdam, believe you
me there were days I thought of nothing else. When I found
out and believed it that nobody but nobody but me alone
could read my mind, know my thoughts, really know the lovely
sexy thing I was honestly getting off on thinking about, I felt
like I was covered with some kind of invisible gown like the
sheet that hides you from head to toe when you play Ghosts.
Listen, when I discovered the source of my pleasure, namely
my nipples and my pussy and the sensitive button I read about
in a sex hygiene book written by a city doctor, my clitoris, a
word I'd say over and over and over to myself like those Hare
Krishna books, I knew I had it made. I had life by the tail. To
tell you the truth, I simply could not believe my own good
luck. It was like some miracle struck me from heaven!
At first it scared me half to death because it was like having
some terrible power, like some wrath of God but a good
wrath. Now I know better but in those early days, say when I
was thirteen years of age and my titties were getting all
swollen, it was like something very personally sacred and
magical. I would often look up at the stars and wonder if in
some crazy way they had some special influence on my sex
hunger that would get so bad at times I was wetting my panties,
even making puddles on my sheet without even thinking
about sex much less using my fingers.
0 yes this was very embarrassing. Sometimes when I'd be
walking and my young titties would be bouncing and my pink
nipples rubbing rough against my sweater doing their own
thing, I'd wonder if the stars hadn't sent me down some
monster.
I'd suddenly be so full of shame and want to hide from the
world. When some town boy but usually a grown man, like
one of those thin murderers in the crime detective stories or the
lonely sailor who meets this girl at the baggage room in the bus
station, would give me the eye or make some cunty remark, all
the lovely magic of my true inner feelings would turn to shit if
you know what I mean?
So as a kid growing up I really had a hard life, a lot of trouble
no kid should have these days. Mostly it was me and my
sex and trying to figure it out. My brain would want to go one
way and my pussy would chase after it. The other way around
was even worse. My pussy would be happy, sobbing and suddenly
my brain would try to interrupt. So my pussy would
glance up shocked and say hey go fuck yourself; so it wasn't
long before I became my own pussy's prisoner.
It wasn't until I was fourteen when I got my first period.
Because of the evil vibes in Pottsdam I was later than every
other girl in town. I know that's the reason. I was really a sensitive
young girl, shy, sinfully modest but open-hearted and
outgoing. What I mean to say is I wasn't scared of things other
girls shied from. I didn't belive in ghosts or astrology. I didn't
believe in God neither because I know if God had any gump
tion at all like people say he's supposed to, if he honestly gave
a shit, he surely would have done a little something about
Pottsdam. It was a crying shaqe he never did. Maybe Pottsdam
just wasn't on His list, but when I started to realize this
was when I got my first period and I couldn't find a single
thing in our bible to explain it.