I put glasses on, my hair up, and wore another man’s hat we took. Calvin had the best disguise. I gave him my light summer dress I had stuffed in my bag before the cops took me away. He wrapped the dress around his head, making a turban of it, and pulled the end into a veil around his nose and mouth like an Arab yashmak.
We walked down the steps of the station house holding newspapers in front of us and stepped into the van which would take us downtown to the Tombs, New York City’s jail. There can be no atmosphere in any jail in the country as depressing and sordid as at the Tombs.
As we were rudely pushed along the narrow gray hall of the prison toward our cellblock, we passed a cell full of transvestites, mostly grotesque gargoyles making pathetic attempts to be what they were not, although a few brilliantly succeeded. Mundus vult decipi decipiatur ergo. The world wants to be cheated, so cheat.
Now after the pleasant stay at the Tombs I am at Bikers Island. Two years ago jail was as foreign to me as the far side of the moon. Now one more trip here and I’ll know the graffiti on the slime-covered walls by heart.
Two years ago my house was a pleasure retreat you went home to. Now it is a place you drag around, the way a tortoise tarries its shell, from precinct to new precinct after each bust. Yes, I am happy in my business and love it. Indeed some of the happiest moments of my life have happened in the two years I have been rising in the ranks of New York City prostitution to become the biggest and most important madam in town. But why the harassment from police, the heavy bail and fines, the high lawyers’ fees, the payoffs? Whom are we bothering? And, as I think about it, I realize that a safe little secretary can save almost as much as I did this last year.
Finally Larry comes with the money. My lawyer, I find, has been outside for three hours, waiting for the money, to bail me out. Now my savings add up to much less than a Secretary could save. But I am out again. Riding with Larry back to the city. Now I will have to start again.
I smile sort of hopelessly as Larry parks in front of my apartment building. But I’ll get a new place, let my customers know where to find me, get my girls together again, and keep giving pleasure to men and women. I can’t help myself. To tell you the truth, I am very happy in the business.
2. A FAMILY AFFAIR
Don’t think of me as a poor little girl gone astray because of a misguided or underprivileged childhood. The contrary is true. I come from a very good background and grew up in a loving family atmosphere.
I was born in Indonesia and later received a fine European education. Between my parents and myself we speak a total of twelve languages – I personally speak seven fluently.
Mother, a stately blond of German and French extraction, was serious-minded but warm and utterly devoted to her family. She was my doctor-father’s second wife. His first wife, a White Russian ballerina, had left Indonesia with their only daughter immediately after their divorce. His marriage with my mother was a happy one, even though they were opposites in personality and temperament. There was never any question that he loved only my mother, despite a twinkling eye for a pretty girl.
My father, whom I idolized, was a rare human being – an intellectual, raconteur, lover of the arts, bon vivant, and a truly generous-spirited man. At the height of his highly successful medical career, he owned a large hospital in the then Dutch East Indies, and I later learned that we had two palatial homes, one in Soerabaja and the other in the hill resort area of Bandung, both run by many servants.
But we lost all that when the Japanese invaded the islands and threw my parents and their newborn baby – that is, me – into a concentration camp.
For the three years of the Japanese occupation, my father suffered extreme hardship and torture at the hands of our captors. His crime was not only that he was Dutch, but that he was Jewish as well. And this is something few people realize, that the Japanese in Southeast Asia were as anti-Semitic as the Germans in Europe.
The compound we were incarcerated in had a big sign nailed up with the lettering “Banksa Jehudi,” which was Malaysian for “Jewish Folks.”
My mother suffered torture as well, even though she was not Jewish, but became the committed the crime of being married to a Jew. She was once thrown into a little wooden hut full of corpses, where the temperature was like that of an oven, for about five days, because she had become hysterical and demanded extra rations of rice and water because I was very sick with lever and dysentery.
My father was sometimes hung by his wrists from a tree with his feet. An inch off the ground in the scorching tropical sun. Probably the only reason they didn’t let him die was because they needed his medical skills. They finally dragged him away from us to a separate compound, where he was appointed camp doctor for over a thousand women and children. In wartime this can be a kind of living torture, too, especially for a man who hates to see human suffering.
He later told us that he almost went insane during this period worrying about the well-being of his wife and child. And, ironically enough, the first time he did see me again was not as a father but as a doctor. This was two-and-a-half years after he’d been taken away.
By that time my mother and I had been released and were living in nearby Soerabaja with some White Russian friends. One day I fell from a tree, badly gashing my leg. In my mother’s absence, a frightened servant rushed me to the concentration camp doctor.
After he operated on my leg – to this day I still have the scar – I was taken home, and only then did someone tell him he had just performed surgery on his own daughter.
“That little blond, green-eyed angel was my daughter? I cant believe it,” he responded with joy. “The last time I saw her, she was a tiny baby with blue eyes and black hair.” At least he was reassured we were still alive and in reasonable health.
When the war ended our family was finally reunited, although stripped of ail our money and possessions by the new government, and we went back to Amsterdam to start all over again. My father was already in his forties, but he was not only a man of great moral strength and courage, but also gifted with a capacity for hard work, and with the help of some financial aid from the Dutch government he soon built up a fine new practice.
In time he acquired such a widespread reputation as a physician that patients came to him from all over Europe. But he never again achieved his former financial status, and I don’t think he really much cared about it. He was not the sort of man who was meant to be a millionaire. He was dedicated to medicine and was infinitely more interested in his patients than money. His patients were also more important to him than his own family. I even knew him to postpone our vacation if a patient needed him. Whatever the hour, he tended to his patients’ needs, and sometimes to my mothers distress. Especially if the patient was an attractive woman with nothing more wrong with her than an imaginary stomachache. And a yen for my father.
One of my father’s patients was a voluptuous sexpot of a woman, about twenty-four, whom my mother and I called “the mustard girl” simply because she worked in a mustard factory.
He was treating her primarily for asthma but also – as my mother later found out – for hyperactive sexual urges. Evidently my father’s small affair with the mustard girl came to my mother’s attention when she saw a mink coat listed in his office amounts. Not very smart of him.
From then on, each time the mustard girl came for her visit, which was always after work in the evenings, my mother found some kind of excuse to walk into my father’s office – which was attached to our home.
One evening Mother and I were in the kitchen putting away the dishes at a time when the mustard girl was having her “treatments,” and Mother quietly said, “I think I will take a cup of coffee in to your father.” She poured it into his favorite Delft blue mug and went to his office. Suddenly there was such a commotion I thought the Zuider Zee had burst through the dyke. There was yelling and screaming, doors opening and slamming, and china breaking. And with some reason. My mother had walked in unannounced and found the mustard girl, her mink root open and nothing on underneath, down on her knees lustily sucking my father’s penis.