“Xaviera, get dressed, put your clothes on,” one of the boys said. So I grabbed my bikini underpants and tied them around my neck, which was my way of covering up in front of the kids and the Negroes.
We tried to gather up our belongings from the sand, but for some reason our fingers were insensitive, and we could not hold them, and combs, lipsticks, wallets, and suntan oil dropped from our hands. We left them in the sand and ran to the VW.
Nobody was really capable of driving, but Ricky took the wheel, and we zigzagged back to San Juan, almost hitting a tree and a boy on a bicycle, and came to a stop inside the garden of the El San Juan Hotel.
It was the cocktail hour, nearly dusk, and as we jumped from the car all the Jewish American Princesses started moving away from us with the look of, “Oh, boy, look at those animals.” I took one look at myself in a car mirror, with my eyes like red frisbees, made a dash to the water, and paddled out to sea on David’s raft.
By around nine that night the pill had almost worn off, but we hadn’t been home to change, so I went to work just as I was, wearing pigtails and my bikini bottoms and a little beachdress, slightly high, and giggling.
I looked more like a crazy little beach virgin than a hooker, and I turned on quite a few older men, who paid a fortune, and it was my biggest night apart from the Mafia blow-jobs.
As Easter approached, three months after I arrived for three days in Puerto Rico, I started getting bored. Among other things, all the boys had gone home, except David, who was down on his luck and depended on me for ten- and twenty-dollar handouts every now and again. I even let him live in my room, as I had more or less moved into a gorgeous penthouse with a gambler named Norris, who wasn’t a john and would not pay me, but let me have anything 1 needed in the way of clothes or food.
Two days before Easter David said he was going to Miami on a dope deal to make a lot of money and would be away for a week, leaving at six o’clock that evening.
After the other boys left David and I had an intense kind of platonic friendship, so I wanted to get back from the beach early and say good-bye and perhaps go with him to the airport. But as I returned from the beach around four o’clock I could sense something was wrong. All was quiet in my room, and as I walked in the door I was horrified to find it looked like a tornado had hit it.
Drawers and dressers were inside out, clothes were all over the place, my luggage was lying open in the room, and the lining had been ripped open and the money stolen.
I ran to my closet and plunged my hand into every pocket on every dress I had, and they, were all empty. Even my pocketbook had been cleaned out, and the notes stuffed into my passport were also missing.
Whoever did it really cleaned me out. There was enough to make one phone call, two nickels.
I had to find David. He was due to leave in a couple of hours, but if I could get to him first, he might be able to help me out, because he knew every thief in Puerto Rico.
I ran down to the beach where Beegee, his little hippie girl friend, hung around pushing grass. “Have you seen David around?” I asked her.
“I sure did,” she said. “About an hour ago, on his way to the airport.”
“On his way to the airport?” I said. “Are you sure? He’s not leaving for two hours.”
“That’s not what he told me,” Beegee said. “He was dashing to the airport carrying his bag, and he asked me to mind it and his suede coat while he went into the hotel to make a phone call.
“Come to think of it, he was very nervous about the coat and said don’t let anybody get their hands on it, and the pockets and lining seemed to be stuffed with paper.”
I got the message loud and clear. My friend David, whom I had almost supported for the last few weeks, had done the robbery. So much for honor among thieves.
1 ran to the roadway and flagged down a cruising police car and in my European Spanish managed to talk them into taking me to San Juan airport to try to catch him.
I knew he had hot tickets under the name of L. Lieberman, and as far as I knew, takeoff time was an hour away.
At the airport I went straight to the departure counter to check out the flight. There was no Lieberman on the six-P.M. flight, the clerk told me, but Mr. L. Lieberman was on board the plane just taking off. There was no way of stopping him, so I was wiped out, ripped off, $2,000 gone. I could only take a philosophical look at the situation and say easy come, easy go, and just as well. I still had my round-trip ticket.
9. CALL ME MADAM
For two months after returning from Puerto Rico I operated as an independent call girl, or loner, as they are known, until it struck me that this was an unsatisfactory way to earn a living.
Loners make a maximum of $200 from an average of four customers a night, and their income depends on pleasing a loyal but limited clientele which does not demand too much in the way of variety.
However, in order to give a client an occasional change of face, they form into tight little groups and exchange dates among themselves. For example, Gloria will send a customer to Sandy, who will send one back to her. But if Sandy cannot reciprocate, she must pay Gloria a madam’s fee of usually 40 percent of what the client paid her.
Working this way, the girls protect themselves to a certain extent from the competition, but it’s only a matter of time before some pretty young newcomer squeezes in to the circle and seduces away their business.
I recognized this john-swapping activity as bringing in a lot of new faces but no extra money, and that in the end, loners could only be losers. More to the point, I believed I had the qualities it takes to be a successful madam: aggressive leadership, a head for figures, and a matchless stamina. I can get by on four or five hours’ sleep a night for an entire year if necessary.
But above all I had what I call the “madam instinct”: the ability to know when to be bitchy or soft, the diplomacy to handle difficult clients, good hostess skills, and a sense of humor.
And ever since I left the straight life behind, I’d wanted to become a star in this business. So in the summer of 1970 I decided to become not just a madam – but the biggest in New York.
The first thing I had to do was to find a good location to open up shop. Working as a loner is one thing, and it’s a rare Manhattan building that does not have at least one discreet house hooker, but finding a place to open a lively brothel was a different story.
The ideal building, first of all, has to have the proper climate: cool. This means that the management and staff will tolerate, cooperate, and even protect you as long as you cross their palms with silver.
However, this can go too far, and there is one luxury high-rise in the East Fifties with such an army of cooperative doormen and lobby staff that it was costing Georgette Harcourte almost $500 each month, before rent, when she operated there.
There are several buildings in Manhattan’s smart East Side which are known to tolerate active brothels, one of which harbors so many it is called the “vertical whorehouse.” This building, located on York Avenue in the Seventies, advertises in the real-estate columns of The New York Times as having “the ultimate in services and conveniences.” Another building riddled with brothels is on Sutton Place, but as far as I could see, these addresses were no longer cool – they were red hot, with the police watching them like hawks.
It took some searching, but eventually I found the perfect place, a one-bedroom apartment in the East Fifties on a commercial floor of a semicommercial building – which meant there would be no neighbors to worry about after office hours. Initially I wanted a modest apartment which would keep my overhead down. I knew that I could utilize the living room as well as the bedroom for entertaining my customers.
The next step was to recruit staff, and believe it or not, honest, hard-working hookers are hard to find. There were girls around who worked the cheap houses, but they were mostly hardened creatures, and I would not then, nor will I now, ever use a girl who has no class. I don’t want street hookers, because their mentality is too cheap. I have a classy clientele who pay high prices for class. If a man would never pick up a girl in the street, why should I expect him to go with a street hooker?