Night bait, page 8
Soon, her period of observation turned to procrastination. Vickie was stalling. She had her work cut out for her, but she continued to stand around, unable to bring herself to do what she had to do. An hour had passed since Nora had left her on her own, and she knew that by the time her friend came back around the corner, she had better have at least turned one trick.
Wide-eyed, Vickie began walking down 14th Street. She thought of the importance of her first night out in the eyes of Dutch. She knew that if she came home with only a few dollars, Dutch would go on the rampage. That's what she used to compel herself, and with that in mind, she continued. Her confidence magnified with each step. I've got to do it! she shouted at herself. Go on, coward! Do it! Do it! Do it!
Her fearful shuffle then changed into the all-familiar hungry strut. Everything, her past, her principles, her morals, her nature, she banished from her mind, for she knew that they did not apply here. This was a totally different world, and if she wanted to survive, she would have to conform to it; she would have to do things that normal girls would never do.
Because she was no longer a normal girl.
Now, she went on the prowl. It was time for some action, time for her to make her move. She would be cautious about her first selection, and would remember all the rules Nora had given her.
Her first trick didn't turn out to be bad at all. He was short, young, built like a fire hydrant. His hair had been cut so close to his scalp that from a distance he looked bald. He had a big, green tattoo burned onto his forearm, a picture of a skull with a dagger in it, and the letters: DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. The second she had seen him, she knew he was safe. Obviously a serviceman, she thought. Fresh out of basic training, the most common of Johns.
The entire transaction went ideally. She stopped when he gave her the eye, and then he propositioned her. Without delay, she had hailed a cab which had taken them across town to one of the notorious one-nighters, the tourist motels where the rooms were rented by the half hour rather than by the day. Inside, they had to wait for a room; when they had arrived, all the rooms were in use. But a few minutes later, the door at the end of the hall opened, and an Oriental hooker with too much makeup on stepped out, followed by a fat, middle-aged businessman. Vickie grabbed her John by the arm and hustled him into the room. He pulled out some bills from his jeans pocket and handed her forty-five dollars right on the nose. She slipped the money in her purse and told him to take off his clothes. It only took her a second to strip; she plopped down on the bed and opened her legs. By the time he had gotten out of his boxer shorts, he was ready. Vickie closed her eyes and kept her mind blank as he climbed on top of her and went to it. After what seemed a minute later, it was over. Like mechanical mannequins, they both got dressed and left. Fifteen minutes later, they were both stepping out of another cab, back onto 14th Street. He walked away, neither of them saying anything. After that first one, Vickie stood in front of one of the bottomless bars in disbelief. The entire escapade had been sad and funny at the same time. Sad, because for all her life, she had always felt sexually inept. Her experiences with sex had been few; she had never really liked it. She thought back to when she had lost her virginity. When she was a junior in high school, one of the guys on the baseball team—she couldn't remember his name—had asked her out one Friday night. She agreed, and he took her to some sleazy drive-in showing a couple of C-grade horror movies. She had every intention of letting him do it to her, from the very start. Curiosity itched at her; most of her friends had already done it, so Vickie thought it was time to find out what the big deal was. And as she might have suspected, it wasn't a big deal—it was a joke. The boy proved to be a clumsy turd. He had tried so hard to be gentle with her, but still he had managed to pop a button off her shirt and to cut her arm with his wristwatch. The guy had practically twisted her into a pretzel when he took her clothes off, and by then she was ready to call it quits. But finally, the kid got his shit together, and it happened. One of the girls in her algebra class had told her that it didn't hurt that much the first time. But it sure as hell had hurt Vickie. She could feel something inside of her tearing, as if the boy had poked her with a fish scaler. And as soon as she had gotten over the pain, he was finished. Just a couple of humps and that was that. All that foolishness for absolutely nothing. As it had turned out, she had enjoyed the horror movies more than the sex.
During her senior year, she went out with a boy for several months. His name was Glen Halford, one of the quiet, intellectual types. She noticed a distinct difference between Glen and most of the other boys in her school.
He didn't seem so bent on sex. She thought perhaps that was the reason she continued to go out with him. Many times, he told her that he loved her. She knew that he did; she could see all that heartfelt sincerity flowing from his big, sad eyes whenever he looked at her, and she supposed that she loved him too. One night, he said that she was the most important part of his life, that he would do anything for her, and that he wanted to make her feel good. Vickie had been touched by the things he said; it had really gotten to her, and before she knew it she had taken off her pants, and she held the back of his head between her legs. It felt so good. She wished that he would do it forever. The intensity of her climax almost made her faint. The next day, she broke up with Glen. It was the strangest impulse; as much as she liked him, she felt that she could never face him again. She believed that it had something to do with the fact that he had been that close to her, that he had actually had his mouth there. The entire episode was so embarrassing that she never went out with Glen again.
That was the sad part. Her new world all revolved around sex, an act that she didn't really know anything about, something she had only experimented with a few times. There had never been a time in her adult life when she hadn't felt inhibited about sexual contact. And now, there she was, doing it for money, posing as a professional. It was almost as if she had no right to be on the street.
But the details of Vickie's first trick were also funny, in a jaded way. It had been so superficial that it dumbfounded her. The interchange seemed mechanical and lifeless. What was that old proverb? Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am? Now she knew the truth behind that one.
She saw that prostitution was no different from any other simple business. He gives you the cash, and you give him the goods. Nothing more. A colossal farce. The ultimate joke. All this fuss and bother about something no more intricate than selling hotdogs from a vending cart.
That night, Vickie turned five more tricks, some good, some bad. But she had prepared herself for that. She knew they wouldn't all be as easy as the first. One of them had been drunk, and it had taken him forever to get it up. Another one had wanted oral sex. "I want you to suck me," he had said. That what's she hated most of all, especially when the guys weren't clean. And this particular John smelled like he didn't know what soap and water was.
Time had gotten away from her. After the sixth one, she noticed that it was getting light out. The whole evening had passed, and she had been too busy to notice. She looked into her purse and counted her night's earnings. Two hundred and fifty-five dollars. It looked like a lot of money sitting there all together, but that's when it occured to her that she had no idea what the usual take was for a hooker in one night. She hoped it would be enough.
As Vickie started around the block, Nora turned the corner up ahead.
"How'd you do?" Nora asked.
"I have about two hundred and fifty," Vickie returned, her head tilted down for fear that it wasn't an adequate sum.
"Jesus! You really hustled, didn't you? Your first night out even. That's fantastic, Vickie. Shit, I only made a hundred and twenty. Dutch'll be pleased."
Nora was right; Dutch had been very pleased with Vickie's extraordinary take. That was a relief. It didn't take her long to get motivated to do a good job and bring in a lot of cash, because when she didn't, Dutch would get mad at her. And to her, the wrath of Dutch was worse than the wrath of God. Constantly, he would threaten to put her on the needle. Sometimes, when he was in one of his more scurrilous moods, he would punish her by raping her in an array of ways. And once, he even beat her up. So, as much as she hated it, it proved to be to her best advantage to turn as many tricks as she could every night.
Vickie learned the ins and outs of hustling in short order. After a month, she knew the streets as well as any of the other girls. She was even arrested once. During her first summer, she propositioned a guy who turned out to be a vice cop. At first, she had been terrified. But what Nora had said about the low regard the judges held toward prostitution as a crime turned out to be quite true. Vickie spent about ten hours in jail, was bailed out by Dutch in the morning, and received a suspended sentence. She saw the episode as the end of a kind of a probation period, the final initiation to an entirely different existence. She grew used to a prostitute's life, and she assumed her depraved role with ease. What was once unthinkable was now a way of life. Day in, day out, Vickie sold herself to anyone who wanted her. Sex had been reduced to just another thing she had to do in order to survive, like breathing and blinking her eyes. She became a nocturnal fixture of the treacherous 14th Street, a ghostly outline in the neon overspill. Like a vampire, she would stalk the streets during the night, lurking, forever on the hunt, and when dawn came, she would disappear and retreat to her lair where she would lay down and die until the darkness returned.
A few months later, Dutch was murdered.
One morning, Vickie and Nora returned to the beggarly apartment, expecting as usual to turn over their money to Dutch and then to go to sleep. But Dutch wasn't there. Instead, a black man neither of them had seen before was waiting for them. He was an awesome-looking man, six and a half feet tall, with hands as big as footballs. His face struck Vickie as monstrous, lacking some undefinable quality which makes human faces appear human. She guessed that it was the sick, yellow eyes and the hideous nests of shiny pockmarks embedded on his cheeks. That morning, he wore a pair of black jeans, a black high-gloss garrison belt with a gold buckle, and a glistening black shirt.
"Who are you?" Nora demanded.
"I'm Cadillac," the stranger said, "your new man."
"Like hell. Where's Dutch?"
His smile made mockery of innocence. "Oh, well you see Dutch had an accident last night, a terrible, terrible accident. See, Dutch was rippin' some people off with stepped-on smack, and somebody accidentally beat his fuckin' head in with a hunk of pipe. So now everything that was Dutch's is mine, including you two cunts."
"Go fuck yourself, nigger," Nora barked at him.
Without hesitation, Cadillac smacked his giant fist into the side of Nora's head. Vickie shrieked and jumped back, after Nora flew back over the arm of the couch and landed upside-down on the floor, unconscious.
Vickie's lips quivered.
"How 'bout you?" Cadillac asked with a sardonic grin. "You got anything to say? Any objections?"
"N-no," she whispered.
"Now that's a good little white bitch. Me and some of my girls, see, we'll be movin' over here, just one big happy family. You can tell your friend there, when she wakes up. I don't take no shit from my girls, see? Just get that into your head, and everything'll be just dandy." He took several steps closer to Vickie. "Say, you're one foxy lady. You can start off makin' me happy right now."
Vickie started moving backward. "No, please don't. Just leave me alone."
"Hey, baby, that's no way to talk to your new man. You don't want to be uncooperative," he said, pronouncing the last word in slow syllables. Both of his hands reached out, the open palms covering her chest entirely, and he mashed her small breasts flat. "Yeah, baby, we're gonna get it on real good."
She kept stepping backwards until there was no more room—the knob on the front door jammed into the small of her back. Still grinning, Cadillac took hold of her wrist and pushed her tiny hand into his crotch, forcing her to stroke him through his jeans. With a grimace, she saw something swell to huge proportions beneath the seam of his zipper.
"Come on," she pleaded. "Give me a break. Not now. I'm exhausted. I've been hustling all night."
"Then you can hustle a little more. I wanna try your little ass out for size."
A hand still cupping one of her breasts, he turned her around and pushed her toward the couch. She felt as though she was walking to a firing squad. From behind, she could hear the sound of his belt buckle unsnapping and the quick rasp of his zipper.
"First, we'll have some head," he said, and sat spread-legged on the sofa, grabbing her hips and forcing her to her knees.
Vickie knew the uselessness of resisting him. She only had the choice of doing as he said or getting her lights punched out like Nora.
He seized her head in his hands and guided her up and down.
"Mmm, baby, that's good, real good."
He began pushing harder, choking her. The pressure of his guiding hands increased painfully, such that she thought he could crush her skull at will.
Without warning he pulled her mouth off, stood up, and yanked her to her feet. He shoved her on the couch, flat on her belly. Then he pulled off her high heels and roughly yanked off her pants. Oh, no, no, no, she thought in silent terror. Not that way.
"Now my baby's gonna take it in the ass."
The tremendous weight of him straddling her squeezed all of the air out of her lungs. She had to struggle to breathe. Her teeth clacked shut in agony when he entered her. Each hammering thrust sent a bolt of pain up her spine. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, and she had to arch her neck to get air into her chest. It felt like she was getting punked with the fat end of a softball bat. She knew she was bleeding.
"That's what I like, a nice tight bitch."
The strokes of his pelvis increased to vicious, pounding blows, like a jackhammer out of control. She could feel the couch jolt with each one.
When he was done, he got up and walked away, leaving Vickie heaped and disarranged over the cushions of the sofa. Once she got her wind back, she pulled on her pants. Then she stopped over Nora, who was just coming to, and she helped her into the bedroom, where they both fell to the mattress, dead-asleep.
Vickie didn't know the true meaning of the word hell until Anthony "Cadillac" Pervis established himself as Dutch's successor and moved some of his hookers into Dutch's old apartment. Most of Cadillac's girls were junkies, desperate and groveling. There were six new girls all told, one Oriental, and the rest black. Suddenly, ten hookers lived in the cramped, broken-down apartment, and they had to crowd together in two bedrooms. That's what made the environment there so hellish. At all hours of the day, girls would be moaning, vomiting in need of a fix, fighting like banshees, yelling, stealing, and hating. And since Vickie was the smallest of them all, she would usually have to sleep on the couch or on the floor with the roaches.
True, Vickie had hated Dutch's guts with a passion, but compared to Cadillac, she loved Dutch like a brother. Whenever Cadillac suspected that one of his hookers might be holding back some cash, he would beat her. If any one of the girls got too far out of line, Cadillac would hold back on their junk till they went cold turkey. And he wasn't just brutal to excess; Vickie could easily see that he was half crazy. She didn't care about the other girls, but Cadillac was doing it to Nora too, and she knew perfectly well that Nora wasn't keeping any of her earnings for herself.
But the very worst thing about this new order was that Cadillac took a distinct liking to Vickie over the others. Against her will, she became Cadillac's personal sex receptacle. Whenever he wanted it, he would take her, often several times a day.
Cadillac was a proverbial pimp. He would hang around the streets to keep a close eye on his women. He always wore a ridiculous cheetah-skin hat with a feather in it. He smoked 120mm cigarettes and had a ring on each finger. And, of course, he drove a shiny new Cadillac sedan with whitewall tires and a gold lacquer finish. He was also a doper to the max, and a heavy drinker. Whenever he was drunk or doped up, hell ensued. He would barge into the apartment in a fitful uproar, beating and raping whomever he pleased. Many times, he would bring friends over, and the result was a drug-fest which inevitably led to a forced orgy. Every night, the girls would have to hustle their butts off, and when they came home, expecting to sleep, they'd find Cadillac and a bunch of his screwed up friends waiting to release their sexual whims.
Another month went by before things got really bad. Vickie knew that Cadillac was nuts, and that he had murdered Dutch. And when people around town started dying from hot shots, Vickie knew full well that Cadillac was responsible. There was nothing gradual about it at all. One night, Cadillac must have gone totally off his rocker and just started killing junkies he didn't like. According to the newspaper, all of the victims had injected poisoned heroin. Vickie wasn't absolutely sure Cadillac was behind it until hookers started dying too. Cadillac had several stables of girls around town, and the girls who died were only from these. Two of the dead hookers came from the apartment Vickie lived in—two who were constantly being accused by Cadillac of holding out.
Now, Vickie was in fear for her life. She would do anything for extra money. Kinks, groups, bondage, golden showers—anything to produce more cash, anything so Cadillac wouldn't suspect her of holding out also. Though she still had managed to keep from getting hooked on junk, she knew that Cadillac wouldn't think twice about killing her in some other fashion if he thought she was cheating him.
One morning, Vickie came in from a night of whoring, flatout exhausted. She looked into the bedroom and saw Cadillac giving Nora a packet of smack. Cadillac hadn't heard Vickie come into the apartment, nor had he seen her. Fearing the possibility that her pimp might want to pull her into the bedroom and rape her, Vickie backed slowly out of the apartment without being noticed. She was too tired to put up with another confrontation with Cadillac, so she went back outside and hid around the corner of the building, hoping that her pimp would leave without knowing she had returned. And sure enough, just five minutes later, Cadillac's mammoth form strode out of the building, climbed into his pimp mobile, and drove away, unaware that Vickie was peeping around the corner watching him. When his car was long gone and out of sight, Vickie smiled with relief and went back up to the apartment. Her feet dragged; fatigue inhibited her entire body, and all she could think about was curling up and going to sleep.
