Whore Stories (12 page)

At NY Confidential, I told my girls that the pressure is on them because we have to provide the clients with the greatest single experience ever, a Kodak moment to treasure for the rest of their lives. Spreading happiness, positive energy, and love, that’s what being the best means to me. Call me a dreamer, but that’s the NY Confidential credo.

For a while, the dream came true. The ladies in Itzler’s NY Confidential stable spread more positive energy around swanky hotel rooms and the NY Confidential headquarters in Tribeca than one cares to imagine. And in a daring display of chutzpa he took out full-page ads in a number of upscale NYC publications, flying his floozy-flag in full view and almost daring the police and the politicians to shut him down. The thing was, many of them were his customers. Ashley Dupré, former governor Elliot Spitzer’s go-to gal, was once an NY Confidential Escort, as was Natalia, the $2,000/hr sex sorceress (see entry on Natalia McLennan).

In 2005 the cops could not ignore the obvious any longer, and they took down Itzler and NY Confidential. After serving his eighteen months, Itzler bounced around, running lower-key escort services and dealing a little coke, but those enterprises also came crashing down, along with his pants, after the cops found him wandering around W. Fourteenth wearing a jaunty fedora and carrying a trombone he didn’t know how to play, which is not a crime, but prostitution and drug-dealing still are. Hobbling ignominiously out of the courtroom in handcuffs with his pants around his ankles, Itzler had one last flash of inspiration: He wailed in psychosis, “I saved Billy Ray Cyrus’s life, that’s what this is about!”

Oh, come
on
, man. That’s not even
trying
.

Chapter III
HUSTLING FOR A HIGHER CAUSE

Some people just can’t ever be satisfied. You must be familiar with this species of ambitious creature: the medical assistant training to be a doctor, the waitress waiting to be discovered as a model/actress/singer, or the prostitute pounding the pavement, hoping the Fortuna wheel of the street will eventually give him or her that lucky spin toward something loftier. So on that note, let’s meet the overachievers, the busybodies, and the multitalented call girls, rent-boys, and common streetwalkers who came to distinguish themselves not only in the field of floozies, but by other, more newsworthy achievements than just lying down to take it and fake it.

THEODORA

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Politician

CLAIM TO FAME:
A trick with a goose; ruling the
Western world

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Byzantium

Meet Theodora, the whore who once held dominion over the Western world. She was born a Greek Cypriot with a bear trainer for a father and a “scandalized” mother. Her fate, it seemed, was to be stuck in a dead-end gig as a mime/nudie dancer, but in
A.D.
527 Theodora managed to work it all the way to the throne of Byzantium.

The ancient scholar Procopius in his
Historia Arcana
, which lay hidden for centuries in the Vatican archives, recounts one of Theodora’s signature moves:

She would sink down to the stage floor and recline on her back. Slaves to whom the duty was entrusted would then scatter grains of barley from above into the calyx of this passion flower, whence geese, trained for the purpose, would next pick the grains one by one with their bills and eat.

Luckily for Theodora, Justinian, the open-minded emperor of Byzantium, also commonly referred to as “The Emperor who never sleeps,” was smitten with this courtesan’s beauty and her willingness
to get a little freaky. Theodora and Justinian married, and it is Theodora, by most accounts, who is credited with being the brains of the
operation to restore Rome to its former glory. Justinian insisted that his bride share the throne and that she serve as a spearhead in all decision-
making processes. They were well on their way to glory when the
bubonic plague thwarted their grand vision by decimating the population.

An ardent champion of women’s rights, Theodora spent much of her life working to reform Byzantium, starting with a prohibition on forced prostitution. In Rome and abroad she successfully lobbied to expand women’s legal rights in domestic proceedings, property issues, and guardianship, while showing no quarter to criminals convicted of rape (think lions) and other crimes against women.

HERBERT HUNCKE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Junkie; poet

CLAIM TO FAME:
“The Mayor of Forty-Second Street”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Forty-Second Street

If you look closely, you’ll notice prostitution is a theme that emerges in the lives of many figures from the “Beat Generation,” the group of post–World War II writers and artists that includes Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady, among others. However, perhaps the “beatest” of the Beats, was the man who coined the term, the man who operated in the shadows, the man with the perfect name for a back-alley prosty: Herbert Huncke (pronounced “hunky”).

Herbert was born in 1915 in Massachusetts, but his family soon relocated to Chicago. There, Huncke thumbed his nose at the authorities and dropped out of school to hustle wide-eyed Windy City tourists, then hopped trains and lived the hobo life, which was tough, because where the hell are we supposed to deliver your paper, Mr. Caboose? The reality was that Herbert Huncke had no need for, or interest in, reading a newspaper; he was one of those unique life forms who exist purely in the ethereal space between life, time, and the local news.

In 1939 Huncke hitched a ride to the Big Apple and took up residence on Forty-Second Street, where for the next decade he would be a fixture known as “Huncke the Junkie,” and/or “The Mayor of Forty-Second Street.” It was here, in Times Square, that Huncke the prostitute blossomed. Huncke was an open-minded, gender-blind working boy who offered his services to men and women desperate enough to enlist a homeless addict sporting a wilted
boutonnière
, and attracting the kind of attention usually reserved for fistfights and devastating apartment fires.

In the autobiographical
Junky
, William S. Burroughs remembers seeing Huncke (called “Herman” in the book) for the first time:

Waves of hostility and suspicion flowed out from his large brown eyes like some sort of television broadcast. The effect was almost like a physical impact. The man was small and very thin, his neck loose in the collar of his shirt. His complexion faded from brown to a mottled yellow, and pancake make-up had been heavily applied in an attempt to conceal a skin eruption. His mouth was drawn down at the corners in a grimace of petulant annoyance.

Of course Burroughs was trying to sell Huncke some morphine and a submachine gun at the time, a pitch that may have contributed to Herbert’s “waves of hostility and suspicion.” And while the temptation is to talk about how insane it is to name a child “Herbert”, it’s time to get back to the call-boy boogie.

Before Huncke could serve as an inspiration to his Beat contemporaries, live off their charity and regale them with stories of slanging every iteration of the word “junk” in Times Square, he had to live the life. In a 1949 journal entry, Allen Ginsberg wrote of Huncke:

I appreciated [his] activities as touches peculiar to Huncke alone, and therefore valuable, lovely and honorable. They were part of his whole being and “life force.” I also enjoyed mythologizing his character. It is a literary trick which Kerouac, the novelist—who has written much about Herbert Huncke—and I exploited in the past.

As a literary muse, Huncke was unparalleled. To be sure, he was a junkie and thief, but the man was also a Times Square Prometheus who imparted his own brand of fiery wisdom to the poets and then suffered the wrath of the gods while flaunting his opiate-saturated booty along Broadway. As a prostitute, maybe he just needed money for dope, or maybe he was indeed, as Jack Kerouac described him, “martyred. Tortured by sidewalks, starved for sex and companionship.” In his autobiography
Guilty of Everything
we are given Huncke the writer, which if you are interested, offers a certain tedium and explains why he had to have lots of other day jobs.

“Hustlers of the world, there is one Mark you cannot beat: the Mark Inside.”

—William S. Burroughs

Shakespeare poses the question, “What’s in a name?” With a name like Herbert Huncke, you’d better be ready to go knuckles out on the playground, and often, or make your entrance from around the back. For better or worse, Herbert made his choice.

JEAN GENET

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Writer; political activist; scamp

CLAIM TO FAME:
Colossus of French modernism

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
France

Doesn’t the name “Jean Genet” make you yearn for a trans-Atlantic tryst with an artsy Frenchman? Maybe he’s also mysteriously reticent, wearing a beret and a black-and-white striped shirt. Wait, no. Those are mimes. Different fantasy.

Although not a mime, Jean Genet is known as the powerhouse dramatist of French modernism. He was also controversial for his political activism, for his alliance with the Black Panthers, and for the graphic portrayal of homosexual sex in his plays and novels. Born in 1910 and abandoned at seven months by his mother, a destitute prostitute fighting a losing battle on the rancid rues of Paris, Genet was charged with his first crime (theft) when he was only ten. He spent most of his early years in state-run institutions and reformatory “schools,” where he got by on his prodigious intelligence and a certain facility for theft, drug-dealing, and, of course, prostitution.

You may call it the grundle, taint, gooch, choad, nifkin, or durf, but the area bridging the divide from your anus to your genitalia is actually called the
perineum
. Scientists and freaks are wont to measure this fleshspan, called anogenital distance (AGD), with longer AGDs linked to increased fertility in men (the average AGD is around two inches, or 52 mm). For the ladies, studies indicate that massaging the perineum with warm olive oil toward the end of the third trimester can reduce tearing and the need for an episiotomy. And yes, I’m referring to the pregnancy trimester, not the trimester where your proposal to major in “choad measuring” was declined by the biology department, the narrow-minded fools.

Living for a time in Gibraltar during the 1930s, Genet sometimes sold his body for sardines and a loaf of bread (literally) to English seamen. He would often dress as a woman to aid in his petty thievery, and presumably, to make the sailors of the stuffy English armada feel less guilty about dorking a master of modernism on a dirty wharf. Genet recounts many of these buoy-toy experiences in his seminal novel,
Our Lady of the Flowers
, which he wrote while in prison for “vagrancy” and “lewd acts.” In this worthy tome, Genet graphically details all the ins-and-outs of a man-whore subculture, along with one of the best odes to a choad you’ll read this week:

There was in his supple bearing the weighty magnificence of a barbarian. . . . The most impressive thing about it is the vigor, hence the beauty, of that part which goes from the
anus
to the tip of the penis.

Our Lady of the Flowers
had worldwide influence, inspiring participants in the New York Stonewall uprising and the Tokyo Street riots, both turning points in the fight for gay liberation. The legendary philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre praised Genet’s novel as “an epic of masturbation . . . a matchless, unholy trinity of scatology, pornography and the legitimate study of evil.” One would think an author could pen only so many weighty epics on masturbation, but Genet would continue for years to explore themes of sex, politics, prostitution, and society, most notably in
The Balcony
, a masterpiece of modern theater in which a brothel serves as the focal point for a violent revolution in the streets. The prostitutes featured in
The Balcony
are well-developed characters, full of humanity and righteousness, unlike the morally bankrupt characters that represent the status quo. Genet remains often imitated but never duplicated, and his influence transcends time and culture, which only occasionally results in misbegotten mime fantasies. A towering figure in both the art world and the tart world, Jean Genet gave a voice to the dispossessed, and he offers a frustrating reminder of how, if one is dead-set on creating meaningful art, one should probably catch a case and go to prison for a while.

ANNIE SPRINKLE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Sex icon

CLAIM TO FAME:
Prostitute/porn star turned artist/sexologist

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
San Francisco

Camille Paglia calls Annie Sprinkle a “feminist revolutionary”; Sprinkle calls herself a “metamorphosexual”; and I hereby proclaim her “Queen of the Golden Shower Ritual Kits.” But Annie Sprinkle would have merited none of these titles if she hadn’t first distinguished herself as a prostitute.