I played jobs three or four nights per week; during the summer vacation before my senior year I got a job playing five nights a week with the relief group at the Jazz House. My love life prospered. For a while I had so much cunt I didn't know what to do with it all. I picked up girls at dances or around the club. Chicks seemed to be all over the place and ranged in age from twenty-one to fifty. They stayed with me overnight, or at the most for a few days, until I tired of them. None of them really had anything in common with me outside of the fact that I wanted their bodies, the experiences, the varieties, and differences of them. My problem was created mostly by Mora. After the first night, because they were used to jack-rabbit husbands and thoughtless lovers, they wanted more, wanted to come back. I got to the point where I would be in bed with one girl and two more would phone to ask if I was free, so I had to keep the receiver off the hook. Then the doorbell started ringing, while my bed partner and I tried to ignore it.
I finally realized that the only thing that works when you want to get rid of a woman is to be callous and abusive. So when I tired of a cunt, which was always in a few days, I would throw her out almost bodily. And even then, some would phone me back, and they would apologize for whatever it was they thought they had done to offend me. I was no sexual -superman. Unlike the heroes of the porno novels, I couldn't come twenty times a night, or ten, or even five. Many evenings I was lucky to make it twice, but I did know how to please, and how to treat a woman as if I appreciated her.
During the summer the guys from our combo, plus some other friends decided to have a smoker. They arranged to have stag movies and two call girls. The fee was twenty-five dollars apiece for eight guys, twenty for the girls and five for the films, with everybody bringing his own booze. I would never have dreamed of paying for a woman, but I agreed to go five for the movies. So they got another guy to make a ninth because the girls needed eighty each.
The smoker was held at the apartment of an alto man, Bud, who didn't play with our group. It was on Sacramento Street, way up on Nob Hill, and, while it was old, it had a lot of rooms.
I arrived late with my five bucks and no bottle, never having been a great (or even a poor) drinker. There were only seven guys there, including myself, and the two girls, to whom I was immediately introduced. Rita was a tall blonde of about twenty-five who looked like she had been pretty well used. I gave her a year before she would be sitting in bars, waiting to pick up Johns. She was just about through as a call girl, and I had seen enough of them to know when they got "the look."
The other girl was Terry. She was short, with smooth, olive skin and black hair. She was a doll, cute and pixyish, with dark, lustrous eyes. The same glance that told me Rita was an old call girl told me that Terry was a new one. Her eyes were fresh, her complexion clear, but most important, she didn't have that hard look about her.
Both girls were wearing lacy bras and panties. Rita had on heels and Terry was barefoot. They smiled and waved as I said hello. There was something about Terry that I liked at once, and when she looked at me I could tell that she liked me, too. Everyone around the room was talking, all trying to monopolize the girls. I stood off to the side, not wishing to compete. But Terry's eyes and mine we're catching, even when she was conversing with somebody else. Bud, our host, was swacked out of his mind already. Lew, who was Bud's friend, was getting antsy about the other two guys showing up. He disappeared for a few minutes to phone but was unable to reach either of them, although he talked to the wife of one.
Meanwhile, Bud had Terry pinned against the wall and was trying to lift her breast out of her bra, slobbering drunkenly all over her chest. A couple of other guys came over and started feeling her legs and crotch. I caught the look on her face, panic; she couldn't cope with it. I walked over and held out my hand over Bud's bobbing head. Terry grabbed it and I gave her a yank, pulling her bodily from the horny group, and yelled that I wanted to talk to her for a minute. We crossed the room. "I just wanted to get you away from all that," I said.
"Thanks," she said, "I didn't want to run away, but I didn't know what else to do."
Then we heard Lew and Rita arguing about money. Lew wanted the girls to come across for just the group we had, sixty bucks each. Rita was adamant, eighty or nothing. They decided to cool it for another ten minutes and started the movies, old silents which kept breaking where the film had been respliced a thousand times. The guys all were getting pretty loaded. The bar, full of liquor bottles and mix, spilled liquid and crumpled dishtowels, was a mess.
After more frantic calls it became apparent that the other two guys weren't going to show. When Rita motioned Terry that she should start to get dressed, Lew just about nipped. He reached into his pocket, came up with another twenty, and I suddenly found seven threatening sets of eyes staring at me. It was a simple decision; if I didn't kick in twenty for a screw I didn't want, the girls would split and nobody would get laid. I sighed and dug out my wallet, to the accompaniment of cheers, a hero and hating myself for it. I didn't have many principles, but this was definitely against one of them.
Bud was too drunk to write, so Lew put the numbers one through seven on separate pieces of paper and mixed them in an empty ice bucket. Bud, being our host, was accorded the courtesy of first choice, leaving the rest of us to pick for position. I was the last to pick, and because number one hadn't been taken yet I knew that I had it even before I stuck my hand into the bucket.
Bud was very short, so he chose tall Rita to take to the back bedroom and I chose Terry for the center bedroom, with a plan beginning to form somewhere in the back of my head.
Terry looked almost grateful as she took my hand and led me through the bedroom door, which I closed and then discovered that I couldn't lock. She put her eighty dollars into a small purse and stripped off her bra and panties. Her breasts were small and high, with dark brown nipples that jutted straight out. I sat on the bed with my clothes on. As much as I instinctively liked her, I was beginning to feel that I really couldn't do it like this, not this way, like a John.
She looked at me, sitting on the bed. "Are you bashful?" she asked.
I ignored the question. "You haven't been hustling very long, have you, baby?"
"How do you know?" she asked defensively.
"By the way you panicked out there and because you still look fresh and pretty, and not all beat out, like Rita."
She liked that and smiled. "About two weeks, now."
"What did you do before?"
"I was a hostess in a restaurant on O'Farrell Street."
I stretched out on the bed. "I like you," I said. She sat next to me but didn't answer. "Do you think I'm just another trick?" I asked.
She hesitated.
"Yes."
"Bullshit."
"What?"
"You heard me. I said bullshit. You kept looking at me the whole fucking time we were in the other room."
"Do you want your twenty dollars back?" she asked sarcastically. Then, switching moods, she asked my name-having-forgotten it. I told her.
"Did Rita tell you about talkers, guys that pay just to talk, and get their jollies that way?"
"Yes," she said, surprise evident on her face. She hadn't figured me for a "timid John."
"Well, I'm not a talker, or a weirdo, or a special trick. As a matter of fact, I'm not a trick at all."
Now she really looked puzzled. She had an air of quality about her, and in spite of her puzzlement at my behavior her eyes reflected intelligence.
I took her hand, "Do you like being a call girl, after a whole two weeks in The Life?"
"Oh, sure, it's great. I get to meet a lot of interesting men and go places and make a lot of money." Only her eyes, hurt at the audacity of the question, told me that she was lying.