The ad in the back of the Village Voice said ‘BARMAID – EXPERIENCE PREFERRED’. What I saw was no experience necessary and I was all that and almost eighteen. I’d been in topless bars before, small places out in Long Island, but nothing that prepared me for the Mardi Gras.
The double glass doors opened onto an insanity of mirrored walls, lights, sequins and more mirrors. I’m busy staring, mouth hanging open, trying to take it all in and I feel someone staring — at me. He had a face made from the soft sweat stained leather of an old catcher’s mitt, and I’d swear I’d seen that face in a hundred gangster movies. He says his name is Ralphie. I tell him mine.
“‘S’a boy’s name. Ya mudder wanna boy’n get stuck wit chu?” Snort. “We’ll come up wi’sumpin’. You a dancer or bartender?”
“Uh, bartender?”
“Can ya mix drinks?” I shake my head no. “Can ya open a bottly beer, little girl?” When he talks, only one side of his face moves, one side of his mouth, so’s if I was standing on the other side I wouldn’t know it was him talking at all. I’m mesmerized, by him, by the whole huge glittering place. It’s like being inside of a Christmas ornament. Ralphie bends down to look me in the face, like I’m the town idiot, or a small child. I feel like both, but opening beer bottles, here was something I had plenty of experience with. I shake my head enthusiastically up and down. Yes, I shake, struck speechless
“Good. Now, can ya close ya mout ‘n folly me?”
I close my mouth and folly.
dirtygirl wants to know:
Have you ever stepped through the looking glass? What was the first time you found yourself someplace you had no reference at all for and what the hell were you doing there in the first place? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 29, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, Robbies Mardi Gras, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Everyone turned up & tricked out for the funeral. Cindy and her man BamBam from the Bronx Savage Lords, Geronimo, Candy, Cowboy, Sharon, Fat Phyllis, Terry the Moose and all the pretty boys. It was the first time I’d seen any of them in the daylight. There’s something to be said for the kindness of moonlight and mirrored balls. I’m sure they were thinking the same about me.
One of Candy’s johns, a little Truman Capote looking thing, drove us out to the funeral home. Frankie’s mother and sisters introduced me to two or three other people who were also engaged to him, and another couple he’d already married. I met the jealous ex-girlfriend who was always banging on the apartment door because, she said, it was her apartment and she wasn’t his ex-anything. We’d shared the same lover and the same vaginal infection. Both were over for us now. She introduced me to more people who were engaged to him and others he’d married, some he only lived with. Half of them were younger women, the men were mostly older.
Standing graveside as they lowered the coffin into what would remain an unmarked grave, an aging blonde drag queen named Sunshine in a tasteful black lace dress & veil handed me a plain white envelope and offered me a ride home. She drove a big convertible with soft white leather seats, and a blazing cherry red paint job that matched her lipstick exactly.
I crawled into the back seat, tucked myself into a corner. Horse Faced Linda climbed in next to me and started to cry. Linda was neither engaged nor married to Dead Frankie, but had the dubious horror of being the woman whose bed he chose to kill himself in. She was the only one there I hated & I was the only one she spoke to. She wept and babbled into my ear the entire drive home.
I caught the blonde’s eye in the rear view mirror. Her veil lifted, the wind sent her Nice n’ Easy Honey hair flying around her head, catching in the fine stubble on her chin. She watched as I opened the envelope. I thumbed through the nude Polaroids inside. Two front view and one rear view. With matching wallet sized copies. They’re the only pictures I’ve ever had of Frankie. She smiled into the mirror, lipstick smears on her crooked teeth. I leaned back, opened a small vial of butyl nitrate, amyl’s cheap & easy sister, and watched the sun pulse as it slid out of view. The sounds of the road, of blood rushing through my veins, through my head, to my heart, drowned out Linda’s equine weeping next to me. The wind caught the tangles of my hair now, and beat me into oblivion as I inhaled a little more of the butyl.
He’d been about to turn twenty. I was seventeen. Overwhelmed by lonely, with fears and shames we couldn’t name–we hunted for somewhere safe, dark and distant.
It was a good day to die.
Todays question for my readers: What do you do in your life today to ease stress, how do you deal with sadness or loneliness? Do you have someone to talk to, do you meditate, go running, drink till oblivion? How do you handle that?
This entry was written by , posted on June 25, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, death, dirty boys, hustlers, johns, love, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Wednesday afternoon Frankie called and canceled our Thursday Central Park plans. Thursday morning, the phone on my desk rang again.
“This is the Police Department. Do you know a Frank Stewart, Ma’am?”
Yes. I did. I do. Why are police calling me?
“He overdosed on drugs, Ma’am.”
No. That’s not right, I say into the phone. A thousand tiny feet of hysteria starting to dance inside me. Funny sounds come out of me. I know that only because heads are turning. Ears are perking.
“He overdosed.”
Where is he? I need to know what hospital he’s at. I need to be there, to fix him, we fix each other when we’re broken. That’s the agreement. No one buys damaged goods. We fix each other. Where is he, I scream into the phone.
Everyone in my office has stopped working. They’re staring. I am desperate to find a pen. To be writing down a name of a hospital. To sit by his side. To stop screaming into the phone. To make sense of what the cop voice is saying.
“He overdosed.”
I tear the phone cord out of the wall, hold the dead receiver close and scream: STOP. SAYING. THAT.
I scream again, into the darkness that has swallowed me whole, hurling the phone across the room. We hit the wall at the same time, each shattering into a million sharp pieces.
There’s a thin line between here & hell. Sometimes the pain of living is more than you can stand. Frankie swallowed a bottle of Darvon, one of Triavil and one of Quaaludes, washed it down with two quarts of Budweiser, called me, then lay down to sleep in Brooklyn.
He immediately became known as Dead Frankie.
If he hadn’t killed himself I might never have met his family.
Todays question for my readers: Somedays it hurts too much to be alive, but what about the people you leave behind, the people you lock out? Or tell me about your first heartbreak, what was that all about?? Are you over it yet? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 22, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, dirty boys, drugs, suicide, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Everyone is on the game, everyone is following the money. The hustlers come for the money. The queens come for the hustlers. The whores come to relax. They can drink in peace and the queens fuss up a big production when they’re all dolled up.
Sharon’s a high class whore. An escort, she says. She wears satin pumps and vintage underwear she swears belonged to Greta Garbo. Garbo pussy stains, she says, See? She lifts her skirt and points. She’s a natural blonde, that’s what I see. Candy, a towering glamor-puss in red patent leather platforms works the dark night of the West Side Highway with her dick tucked neatly and discreetly between the cheeks of her perfect apple ass. You’d never know she was a he. Candy is a less than natural blonde, the furthest thing from a natural anything. Cindy’s an Irish bulldog. She’s been turning Delancey Street tricks with her mother since she was eight, on her own since she was eleven. Well, not totally on her own. Candy looks out for her and tries to teach her about makeup and other girlie things. Cindy’s thirteen.
Cowboy follows me home to Levittown like a hungry puppy. He followed my mother around after that. I don’t think he’s ever had a real mother. We have sex between his doses of the clap, so, not that often cause he has the clap most of the time. There’s usually only a few days or a week window before he’s got it again. I tend to the cuts and scrapes he gets when he has his epileptic seizures. We pretend they never happened, the cuts or the clap. Nobody buys damaged goods.
In this dark cavern, I wait nightly for whoever it is will need me to feel he’s a man, whoever I’ll need to make me feel like a woman.
An old queen named Hollywood Al slides up next to me & bets a dollar a drink I can’t finish 25 drinks in 25 minutes. Twenty-five Black Russians later, I win. Hours later, I wake up stuffed into a small alcove full of cleaning supplies–cramped, cold & clutching twenty-five worn singles covered in vomit & Kahlua. The string mop next to me reeks of disinfectant and vomit, probably mine.
Old queens like Al don’t appreciate me fucking the hustlers. I’m a distraction, an annoyance. The best they can do is get me drunk enough to get me out of the game for the night.
I found Frankie in the darkness of Christopher Street and fell in love. I work days at a law firm. He works nights hustling out of the bar. Somehow we find time to be together. He lives in a basement apartment with a toilet bowl in a closet. When we make love there, we’re hit by falling bits of plaster. And cockroaches. Central Park became our sanctuary from the night life, an escape from the darkness, from booze and sex for money. We lay on the rocks, cleansing ourselves in sunlight.
He’s turned my world upside down & suddenly I’m living in a Hallmark card full of cheap poetry.
Todays question for my readers: How ever did the disastrous story of star crossed lovers Romeo & Juliet become a romantic mythology? Tell me about your first love….Post your thoughts below, c’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 18, 2009 at 10:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, dirty boys, drugs, Greenwich Village, hustlers, Levittown, love, The Chalice, whores. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I follow Terry the Moose as he heads uptown to work the Gaiety Burlesque in Times Square; dancing for grimy old men sitting in the dark worn seats of the shabby third floor theater, floors cum-sticky from the grimy old men who jerked off in the dark at the last show. We stop downstairs at HoJo’s for some of their famous tendersweet clams on a bun (he cuts his soft eyes down to my own yearning-to-be-famous tender-sweet clam and smiles as he orders), before he goes upstairs to work.
Strutting out onto the small stage, his glossy mahogany mane catches the light, falling softly in a feathered shag around his thin shoulders. A gold lame g-string sets off his warm olive skin. He winks at me and waves to the three street whores resting in the back row, feet up on the seats in front of them, airing out their own clams before heading back out to work.
His thick moose-boy cock comes out swinging like a cop’s nightstick to a disco beat. He prances across the stage like a thoroughbred teasing and tempting the pedophiles, the perverts & chicken hawks, the straight marrieds in denial, all of them wanting him, wanting his cock in their hands, their ass or their mouth. I wait in the dark after his show, watching the next beautiful boy dance, while backstage Terry lets old men grope him, worship him, lick his ass, suck him off for money, more if he cums in their mouth. It’s a blessing to be young he tells me, stuffing himself back into his jeans, his full lips smile, revealing teeth so perfect and white I think of toothpaste whenever he smiles, a blessing, he says, to be able to cum again so quickly.
We tumble down the stairs, bouncing and rushing out into the noise and stench of Times Square, pockets stuffed with cash, ready for the night. I’d spent an hour earlier, panhandling Penn Station, Please Mister, I lost my train ticket, my parents will be real worried. He’s gotten his the old fashioned way, and the two of us are ready for anything.
We hit the streets, arm in arm, off in search of the tough boy whores that make us forget who we are.
Todays question for my readers: What is it about girls and their gay boyfriends? Post your thought below, c’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 15, 2009 at 12:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1974, dirty boys, dirty money, Gaiety Burlesque, hustlers, The Chalice, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
photo credit: I.C. Rapoport
The hustlers in The Chalice think sucking cock for money doesn’t make them queer, that the money changes everything.
It’s something to think about.
Chino brought me here last week. I’ve been here every night since. It’s a fag bar, so no one is buying me drinks, no one asks for ID or cares that I’m underage. No one cares if I get all drunk. I panhandle Penn Station after work for an hour or so and I have enough to hang out and drink all night.
The young boys are pretty. Prettier than me. The stand on the tiny dance floor, swaying to the music on the juke, touching themselves and rubbing their crotches against the old chicken hawks. Waiters in tight leather pants and no shirts carry trays of cocktails and vials of amyl nitrate.
The bar reeks of dirty socks. Poppers.
In the corners, in the shadows, the rough trade boys. Cruel, muscular boys with hard stomachs and hard hearts in tight jeans and cut-off denim vests. They wait, making the old men come to them. Wait, until an offer is made, until money changes hands. The old men come and I can hear them: Let me suck your cock just watch me while I jerk off let me watch while you jerk off I just want to touch it I know you’re not a fag I can get you a place to stay some coke a leather coat a car how much money do you want?
As long as there’s money, as long as they still fuck girls,
fuck me,
they’re not queer,
they say.
Yeah. Okay.
Today’s question to my readers: What defines sexuality? Actions? Intention? Fantasy? If I just think about the forbidden, have I crossed a line? If I write about it? If I read about it? When is the line crossed and who decides where that line is? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on June 6, 2009 at 12:40 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1974, dirty boys, dirty money, Greenwich Village, hustlers, The Chalice. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
