My trick wants to go to Plato's.
We go to the old Ansonia Baths where a thousand gay men fucked a thousand times a night for years. Now it is Plato's Retreat; no single men are allowed without a date. I sign a document attesting that I am not a prostitute; my whore name is Nora, after Ibsen; I add Nader, going green for Ralph, and strip. I scarf down a bagel, hard and cold, at the buffet, look in the angled light at the rich naked people some still shyly wearing their towels and dive: I go into the mattress room.
A daisy chain has formed, a length of copulating people, each one on the left servicing the right, up and down. The trick is suddenly timid and urges me to start: He will watch. There is cunnilingus to the middle-aged blonde then a line of men; they find me and move in, one by one, young, old, some good looking, most average at best. We fuck. And fuck. And fuck again. Suddenly comes a man hirsute, pressing, he disgusts me. I push him away and he pushes back hardbut on the chain beside me, a languid man, turns to him and says,
Sir, the lady said no, and miraculously, the ape disappears. I feel a moment of gratitude, extinguished by the semen of the next man.
I work every day. After three tricks, I wait for my pimp at midnight at the door of Studio 54; he falls out of a cab in sneakers and tie, carrying his poetry notebooks and a book by Roland Barthes. Steve Rubell himself lets us in. I follow the pimp to the floor and we dance; he dances well. He is like the bottles of cheap amyl nitrate he carries for sex, dizzying, sickening, my freebase, my cocaine.
The manager for my house,
Friends with Style, is a small misshapened man with an ugly face; He tells me he went to Yale.I work the phones and the tricks come in. First the Hassid, and this
shiksa was his practice. Harry Abram's son brings me a book of Magritte.Sarah and I do a three way with a red-haired man who says he knows Reggie Jackson; of course we are impressed.
Later in the day, when it is quiet and I am alone, a cop comes in; I freeze; I know he is insane. He says are you going to be nice to me, girl? He puts my hand on his crotch and I feel the metal of his gun and he grins and says,
Baby, if you are going to flirt with death you are going to get a date.
A man rescues me from the life. In Cuernavaca I climb the volcanoes every day and heal. Unable to understand human kindness I leave him and go back to New York.
Two years pass, I am in trouble again. I need 200 bucks, the house where I worked is a sex club now. Drunk off my ass, I do a man and his wife in the bathtub then a pair of rutting men . Standing by the fireplace, I see a a girl there, blond pale underage; I see she has cut herself up and down her slender arms and I, the fucking role model, beg her to go home and she only laughs bitterly. A thug from the Ray's Pizza next door sees us talking and tells me,
mix it up, get back to work and I become angry, enraged, I go beserk: I turn on him: I am going to tear this punk's balls off with my hands if he touches this little girl. And I get into his flat punk face and say: WHAT THE FUCK MORE DO YOU WANT? and then I black out.
When I come to a big Irishman is throwing me down two flights of stairs. I land on the concrete on 76th and Third, stone cold sober now; I feel no pain.I call the police and they come; the old one is coarse; the young one tells me that he has gone to college and read books. They will not bust the house. I curse them for ball-less wimps. They say
Go home, miss, go home, and I end up in Bellevue, old Bellevue, locked ward where four orderlies, four, have to hold me down to shoot Thorazine up my butt, and I am put in four-point restraint.
My new shrink, hired by my sister, comes in on a Sunday from Connecticut. He brings me a carton of Benson and Hedges cigarettes and says, “These are like gold in here." They are.
Bellevue, Bellevue, where the nurses' crazy laughter rings high through the night, where
boriquenas pequenas cry
mamí, mamí da me un peso. I think they say
beso. Soon, the DTs start and I shake uncontrollably. A homeless man, thin, dirty, tall, puts his veteran's jacket round my shoulders, and disappears, a Quixote to my Aldonza in this wretched place.
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