The price quoted on the street was a hundred dollars, double that if you were Japanese. Once in the room, when the man was naked, as he had to be to show he wasn't a cop, more money was demanded.
"A guy yesterday made me walk three blocks to his car. I told him, 'Get a taxi!' but he wouldn't. So I made him give me an extra forty for all the walking."
The person who says "You are asking me to walk another hundred yards and therefore you will have to give me forty dollars" — that person
has the hair-splitting, get-the-boss-over-a-barrel, union mentality, in which every detail of a job is a matter for negotiation.
"That's fair," I said.
"But you don't really think so," she said.
"In my janitors' contract there's a clause that says they can't be asked to climb higher than nine feet."
"They go higher, you pay them more. That's righteous."
She understood at once. She went on to say that when the man was in the room, she'd say, "If you want more, that's going to cost you more."
And of course a naked Japanese man with his dick in his hand fished out the money and handed it over.
"Don't touch me," she said when that same man reached for her breasts. And when he touched her tattoo she stiffened and said, "Ouch! That hurt! I just got that tattoo!" — although her tattoos were several years old — and the man backed off. Then she scolded him for going soft.
Time was everything to her. At just the moment when I was most eager for her to answer, she said she had to go. A whole day passed before I could resume.
She sat smoking in her ridiculous dress, in stiletto heels, her stiff, dry, dull-colored bunches of hair askew and sometimes spiked like a sea urchin. People sized her up as a hooker instantly — well, that was the whole point of the dress, subtlety being another time waster in this business. And she was impolite, not to say rude, but the fact was that every minute counted, for she was rude the way an air-traffic controller might be rude. Even the way she walked in long strides was tick-tock, tick-tock, marking time.
"What if they want to touch you?" I was thinking of the other day, the Japanese man reaching for her breasts.
"I don't care what they want. I'm in charge."
A local man had been arrested for using a stun gun on hookers, and soldiers beat them up, and now and then they were murdered — invariably knifed. Jasmine was too professional to talk about any of this; she knew it, so there was nothing to discuss. Two months after arriving in Honolulu she spoke enough Japanese, a dozen words perhaps, to spend half an hour alone in a room with a naked businessman from Osaka. A dozen words were plenty, and the men were relieved to go.
Hurry hurry was the opposite of erotic, impatience and fuss confounded desire, but it seemed that Jasmine did not even know this, or if she did, she ignored it in the interest of a quick buck.
On a really good night she had six or seven men, and though I had to pay her almost as much as any one of them had, she gave me the details for the previous night, the five men.
The evening had begun with one of those irritating ones who made her walk to his car. She could not remember whether he was a white guy or where he came from, only that he was worried about the police, losing
his car, being seen. He kept going soft. She finally gave up, could not demand more money while he was soft, and he left, still soft.
A Japanese tourist, also nervous, was the second. When she said, "No, don't touch," he was startled, like a boy. She slipped the top of her dress down, exposing her breasts, sat beside him on the bed, and kept warning him to keep his hands off her. She manipulated him, and when he was finished he went out, trotting to the elevator his shirt untucked.
It was midnight. She stood before a mirror fixing her makeup, then headed to the street again, very tall in her stylish heels.
Something about the way the third man answered her told her that he was drunk. Within seconds she knew he was uselessly so — loud and boastful when she selected him from his group of friends, but quiet in the taxi. He was so subdued and dozy in the room that he fumbled with his money and she got almost two hundred in the beginning. There was no end. He could not finish. She was only afraid of his falling asleep, this big unmovable man, so she pushed him and talked sharply. She hated him for trying to kiss her.
An experienced man who knew what he wanted was helpful, though first-timers were more easily intimidated. The fourth customer knew the moves but was too explicit. He said, "I want your ass." She said, "No one gets my ass." And when he sighed, seeing her tearing open the condom wrapper, she said, "I do nothing without a condom."
He paid the extra. She lay and parted her legs and looked away, and winced when he entered her, as if she were being vaccinated.
The man had spit strings in his mouth and his eyes were glazed. Jasmine shoved hard at his groping hands. A moment later, when he seemed to be enjoying himself and taking his time, she said, "Okay, that's all," and he had to hurry to finish. "Bitch," he said as he turned to go. She was so vicious in reply, the man stepped quickly through the door.
After that, two soldiers approached her in the street. They weren't in uniform, but she knew they were military from their haircuts and the position of their tattoos — they could be concealed by a T-shirt — and their shoes, which were too heavy, too shiny. They were insistent.
"One at a time," she said.
But they both wanted to go. One yanked up his shirt and pushed his belt down. She read on his lower belly, Ball Till I Fall.
They wouldn't go separately, so she turned them down. Two men were dangerous, needing each other more than they needed her. Anyway, it was weird and they were soldiers and she was wary of watchers.
The last john of the night, this one at around four A.M., was a man of about fifty who never said a word. Probably foreign, but he made a fuss about the money by sighing and grunting. He, too, tried to kiss her. She said, "I don't kiss," and "Don't touch me there," and "That hurts."
"This is a waste of time."
She was talking to me, trying to be tough again, the way fearful people pretend. She wanted more money to go on talking. I thought: People call what she did sex, but what she did was whatever was the opposite of sex, and beyond nakedness, something skeletal, just money in a hand so bony it looks like a claw.
No one knew who she was or where she was from, nor would she tell me, except to say it was on the mainland. No name, utterly anonymous, probably not more than twenty-something, yet she stood for whatever particular fantasy was in the grateful man's mind.
Jasmine wanted nothing more than money. When she asked for more from me she became unconvincingly flirtatious. But she had already told me too much. I said, "I've never paid for sex."
"Men don't pay me for sex," she said. "They pay me to go away."
29 The Widow Mrs. Bunny Arkle
On one of the last mornings the hooker Jasmine ate breakfast in the hotel's coffee shop — soon after that, I never saw her again — Buddy Hamstra said to me, "Look at that woman. She's outrageous." I glanced at Jasmine in her white slinky dress, and Buddy said, "No, her," and nodded at a slim, delicate-featured woman, about sixty or so, moving toward a table, looking graceful and patient. The new flower man, Palama, Amo Ferretti's replacement, was doing the lobby arrangement, sorting stalks of heliconia and bird of paradise.
"Mrs. Bunny Arkle." It sounded like one word to me, Bunnyarkle, and from then on I never thought of her without imagining both names. But this woman could have had many more names. She had been married four times.