Whore Stories

A
R
EVEALING
H
ISTORY
of the
W
ORLD’S
O
LDEST PROFESSION

WHORE
STORIES

T
YLER
S
TODDARD
S
MITH

DEDICATION

To Mom and Dad, for everything

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter I.
BORN TO WHORE

Chapter II.
PROMINENT PIMPS AND MANDARIN MADAMS

Chapter III.
HUSTLING FOR A HIGHER CAUSE

Chapter IV.
SURPRISE STREETWALKERS

Chapter V.
WHORES BEHAVING BADLY

Chapter VI.
THE MAGICAL MYSTERY WHORES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“Morals are too often diagnostic of prostatitis and stomach ulcers.”
—John Steinbeck,
The Log from the Sea of Cortez
INTRODUCTION

When I was a small child, I was prone to insomnia and fits of the night terrors. To get me to fall asleep, my mother and father would fasten me into our family’s 1971 Toyota Carina, throw in an eight-track cassette of Anne Murray’s
Greatest Hits
and drive up and down South Main Street in Houston, Texas, to look at the prostitutes. The blinking neon signs of the no-tell motels, the bling of streetwalkers working their finery, and the day-glo hues of their billowing lingerie were too much stimulation even for a toddler; I would finally shut my eyes and stop struggling against the seat belt while “Shadows in the Moonlight” and the South Main ho stroll played on. I nodded off to sleep not only with visions of sugar plum fairies, but also of leather-clad fairies, common harlots, desperate dope fiends, glamorous go-girls, and rowdy rent-boys all gyrating in my little head.

It wasn’t
my
idea to expose me to a life on the street like that, but back in the 1980s, you had to get out of your house to experience life and love and also to look at prostitutes. Today you can just go to some live-stream dung dungeon and e-jaculate along with the rest of the blundering online nymphos to stuff you’re not even creative enough to imagine, or ask for.

Since then, I’ve visited prostitutes from Nuevo Laredo to Amsterdam, Hamburg to Tokyo, and Las Vegas to Havana, and one thing never changes: People are too quick to make assumptions about what “visiting” means. Where I’m from, “visiting” can mean anything from “talking and catching up with folk” to “setting fire to a miniature pony,” although I haven’t heard it used that way in ages. The point is, I miss the calming effect provided by those idealized streetwalkers of my youth.

What? You’re not buying the nostalgic “visiting whores put me to sleep as a child” excuse for writing a hooker book? The lecherous lullaby ride not convincing enough? That was a 100 percent true story, but here’s a more recent and possibly more accurate illustration of why I came to write
Whore Stories
, documented in an IM exchange last year between me and my agent, Jon Sternfeld. At the time, I was working on some leading-edge inventions, which is something I do when I am lonely and unemployed.

TSS
: what’s the worst thing about europe?

JS
: I don’t know. France?

TSS
: making love in small cars.

JS
: so?

TSS
: kids keep having sex in those little “Smart” cars—I’ve seen it myself—and I think it spells future spinal trouble.

TSS
: you there?

JS
: yes.

TSS
: So i’ve invented a car wash where you rent a limo with your manfriend or ladyfriend and it’s in a big limo—plenty of room. and palliative oils. it’ll be cheap. good tunes, too.

JS
: A car-wash whorehouse?

TSS
: a drive-thru love station with rain.

JS
: hey, that’s something—you should write something about whores.

And so I did.

If you are offended that the politically correct term “sex worker” is not used to describe the characters in this book, I apologize. But then
you
try to write a book called
Sex Worker Stories!
See, even with the exclamation point,
Sex Worker Stories!
sounds more like a serialized bodice-ripper involving one nurse tech’s search for true love in a haunted sperm bank. Aside from the common term used in the title, the words slut, harlot, trick, chickenhawk, rent-boy, trollop, prossy, hooker, gigolo,
etc.
are used liberally within. What can I say? The lexicon of love is a bountiful trove.

Selective word choice aside, the biographical material in
Whore Stories
is essentially accurate, providing you, dear reader, with an informative, entertaining, and revealing look at the men and women who have blazed the bawdy trail of prostitution since the dawn of time. Some of these people have become legends for turning tricks, like Xaviera “The Happy Hooker” Hollander, La Belle Otero, and the self-proclaimed “Rosa Parks” of male prostitution, Markus Bestin. Others have traded sex for money at some point in their lives, and then became famous for other reasons, like Al Pacino, Malcolm X, Former First Lady Nancy Reagan, and Valerie Solanas (she shot Andy Warhol). Still others have turned into man-eating spiders, like the Japanese whore-deity Jorogumo. And finally there are people who have no real claim to Fame: They are just intriguing individuals who happen to have been hookers.

The aim of this book, then, is a simple one: to look into some of the shadier corners of human history, and to shed a little light on an eternally compelling figure: the prostitute. And if you’re thinking of asking me any more questions about my “field research,” then making the international sign for “doing it,” I’ll tell you the same thing I told my agent: Cut it out, pervert. This is a historical document.

TSS

Chapter I
BORN TO WHORE

Do you believe in destiny? I don’t, especially when good things happen to people I hate. Then again, when good things happen to people I love, I usually end up hating them for their success in the long run anyway. So maybe
that’s
destiny.

It is perhaps a stretch to say that someone or another was truly “born to whore.” And while I believe that my neighbor Sarah was born to be wild (you can tell by the way she throws knives at the mailman), it’s probably selling many of these born whores short to say all they have to offer is their bodies. In fact, Madame de Pompadour, one of the most renowned prostitutes of all time, was known more for the brilliance that came out of her mouth than the unmentionables that went into it. The men and women that follow probably did (or will do) some other interesting things with their lives. But in the end, we’re going to remember these naturals for how they played on the field of prostitution. Either way, these prominent prossies deserve a chapter of their own, and here it is.

LAO AI

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Fraudulent eunuch

CLAIM TO FAME:
Personal ho-go stick to the Empress Dowager

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
China in the Third Century
B.C.

In imperial China’s most famous history book,
Records of the Grand Historian
(or
Shiji
), we’re told of a man named Lao Ai who had an enormous penis. The Grand Historian, an academic named Sima Qian, has the following story on good authority. As the
Shiji
tells it, Lü Buwei, a chancellor and regent for the Qin government (and illegitimate father to the boy who would become China’s notorious First Emperor), needs to find an impressive set of sex organs that he can keep on retainer and offer up to the Empress Dowager to keep her happy in his absence. He finds this “prodigious penis” in the person of Lao Ai, whom Lü presumably ran into at a hot springs or a truck stop. The
Shiji
goes on to explain:

At times [Lü Buwei] would indulge in song and music, making Lao Ai dance around with his penis stuck through a wheel of tong wood. He arranged for the Empress Dowager to hear about this, in order to entice her. When the Empress Dowager heard, as expected, she . . . covertly gave a generous bribe to the officer charged with castrations to falsely sentence him and to pluck out his eyebrows and beard to make him appear a eunuch. As a result, he was made a servant of the queen dowager.

We’re not sure how Lao Ai felt about this career change, but he was most likely a member of the peasantry, so almost anything was better than rice farming and slaving around with a slop bucket while festooned in manure. He was also “rewarded with very rich gifts” and eventually, “all the affairs [in the royal house] were decided by Lao Ai.” Unfortunately, all this attention and fame went to Lao Ai’s head and his lack of humility angered the emperor.

Once the emperor-to-be heard that Lao Ai was an obnoxious talking penis and not really a eunuch, and that he was banging his own mom, he lost patience with Lao and the Dowager, exiling the Empress, executing Lao by having him torn apart with horse-drawn carriages, throwing Lao’s two children into sacks and beating them to gore, and exterminating three generations of Lao’s relatives. But, the name “Lao Ai” has lived on for centuries, synonymous in China for anything to do with fornication and penises—and the actual Lao Ai, I suppose, whenever his name comes up in bar trivia.

VALERIA MESSALINA

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Roman empress

CLAIM TO FAME:
Threw some of Rome’s most off-the-hook orgies; insatiable sex-hen

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
First-century Rome

The problem with royal inbreeding is that, with a long enough timeline, you’re going to have an increase in poor decision making and a decrease in your regal comeliness. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still party your jugs off. And that’s exactly what Valeria Messalina, third wife and second cousin of the Roman Emperor Claudius (of
I, Claudius
fame) did.

The year was 38
B.C.
There was lots going on in the world, but a girl gets bored just farting around the building site for a new “Colosseum,” where, according to the press releases, nude dudes will be chased around and around by tigers. Yawn. If you’re Valeria Messalina, however, you hook up with Caligula and enjoy his legendary orgies until the civil engineers can get their act together. Time passes and life is good.

But then, by some labyrinthine turn of events that included political posturing, elaborate bloodline calculations, and arcane Roman protocols, Messalina and Claudius were married. They were a budding power couple, even though Claudius was kind of gimpy and given to drooling. Messalina quickly produced two children, both of whom bore an uncanny resemblance to Caligula. Claudius remained clueless, but after Caligula’s murder, the historically well-lubricated gears of the Roman orgy scene ground to a halt. Claudius was a new and different kind of emperor.

But this is not some PBS special, so let’s get back to the orgies and the toga parties. Have a look at Juvenal’s poem about Valeria’s clandestine easy riding while her spazzed-out husband snores and slobbers in his sleep:

Having concealed her raven locks under a light-colored peruke, she took her place in a brothel … under the feigned name of Lycisca, her nipples bare and gilded … she graciously received all comers, asking from each his fee… Then … she took back to the imperial pillow all the odors of the stews.

This kind of thing would be tantamount to ex-Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi’s wife, actress Veronica Lario, creeping out of the Palazzo Grazioli master bedroom in a blonde wig with Goldschläger bottle caps affixed to her nipples, and hitting the street using the provocative moniker, “She-Wolf.” Back in Claudius’s time, you didn’t have the
politirazzi
snapping photos of your night moves, so Valeria did all she could to make her sexcapades common knowledge. At one point she even engaged in a public sex battle (like a rap battle, but with less rhyming and more pubic hair) with a prostitute to see who could service the most men in one day. Winner: Valeria.