Interview with the Prostitute
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Note: Reader discretion is advised. Some mild swearing and sexual content is quoted in this article.
One of the reasons so many people are unhappy in their jobs today is that they picked their occupation without knowing all the other options there are out there. Or, they didn’t know all the pros and cons of the occupations they did pick.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could hear all the good, the bad, and the ugly details of what many different jobs are like straight from the people who worked in them for years? If you had that kind of information, you could decide whether you really want to stay in your current job or try an entirely different line of work.
Also, it’s interesting to learn what our fellow workers are doing all day long and what they really think about their work, their bosses, their coworkers, and their customers. In Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), he interviewed people from many different occupations. Straight from the mouths of professional baseball players to prostitutes, you will learn there are no glamorous, easy, or stress-free jobs.
Terkel found that most people don’t like their jobs. But, he also found that the ones that do love their work are a special breed of people who probably would have taken pride in any kind of work they found themselves doing. And, there are philosophers among all occupations, even prostitutes. By learning about other people’s jobs and their daily troubles and triumphs, I believe we can all have more sympathy for our fellow workers, if not admiration.
In this next series of articles, called “Interviews With,” I will summarize some of Terkel’s most fascinating interviews and share the most interesting parts with you.
THE PROSTITUTE
Roberta Victor began selling sex when she was fifteen years old. For the first five or six years that she was in the business, she worked as a high-priced call girl in Manhattan, New York. Later, she was reduced to walking the streets to continue in her line of work. She calls prostitutes “hustlers” and selling sex “hustling.”
She said: “You never used your own name in hustling. I used a different name practically every week. If you got busted, it was more difficult for them to find out who you really were. The role one plays when hustling has nothing to do with who you are. It’s only fitting and proper you take another name. [¶] There were certain names that were in great demand. Every second hustler had the name Kim or Tracy or Stacy and a couple others that were in vogue. These were all young women from seventeen to twenty-five, and we picked these very non-ethnic-oriented WASP names, rich names.”
Then, she got philosophical: “A hustler is any woman in American society. I was the kind of hustler who received money for favors granted rather than the type of hustler who signs a lifetime contract for her trick. Or the kind of hustler who carefully reads women’s magazines and learns what is proper to give for each date, depending on how much money her date or trick spends on her. [¶] The favors I granted were not always sexual. When I was a call girl, men were not paying for sex. They were paying for something else. They were either paying to act out a fantasy or they were paying for companionship or they were paying to be seen with a well-dressed young woman. Or they were paying for someone to listen to them. They were paying for a LOT of things. Some men were paying for sex that THEY felt was deviant. They were paying so that nobody would accuse them of being perverted or dirty or nasty. A large proportion of these guys asked things that were not at all deviant. Many of them wanted oral sex. They felt that they couldn’t ask their wives or girlfriends because they’d be repulsed. Many of them wanted somebody to talk dirty to them. Every good call girl in New York used to share her book and we all knew the same tricks.”
She also had a few strange customers: “We know a guy who used to lie in a coffin in the middle of his bedroom and he would see the girl only once. He got his kicks when the door would be open, the lights would be out, and there would be candles in the living room, and all you could see was his coffin on wheels. As you walked into the living room, he’d suddenly sit up. Of course, you screamed. He got his kicks when you screamed. Or the guy who set a table like the Last Supper and sat in a robe and sandals and wanted you to play Mary Magdalene.”
Again, she got philosophical: “I was about fifteen, going on sixteen, I was sitting in a coffee shop in the Village, and a friend of mine came by. She said: ‘I’ve got a cab waiting. Hurry up. You can make fifty dollars in twenty minutes.’ Looking back, I wonder why I was so wiling to run out of the coffee shop, get in a cab, and turn a trick. It wasn’t traumatic because my training had been in how to be a hustler anyway. [¶] I learned it from the society around me, just as a woman. We’re taught how to attract, how to hustle, how to attract, hold a man, and give sexual favors in return. The language that you hear all the time, ‘Don’t sell yourself cheap.’ ‘Hold out for the highest bidder.’ ‘Is it proper to kiss a man on the first date?’ The implication is it might not be proper on the first date, but if he takes you out to dinner on the second date, it’s proper. If he brings you a bottle of perfume on the third date, you should let him touch you above the waist. And go on from there. It’s a marketplace transaction. [¶] Somehow I managed to absorb that when I was quite young. So it wasn’t even a moment of truth when this woman came into the coffee shop and said, ‘Come on.’ I was back in twenty-five minutes and I felt no guilt.”
She was a virgin until she fell in love with a jazz musician who ignored her. “So I went out to have sex with someone to present him with an accomplished fact.” She was fourteen years old. “I found it nonpleasurable. I did a lot of sleeping around before I ever took money for it.” She was going to a good high school with high academic standards. “I was very lonely. I didn’t experience myself as being attractive. I had always felt I was too big, too fat, too awkward, didn’t look like a Pepsi-Cola ad, was not anywhere near the American Dream. Guys were mostly scared of me. I was athletic, I was bright, and I didn’t know how to keep my mouth shut. I didn’t know how to play the games right. [¶] I understood clearly that they were not attracted to me for what I was. But, as a sexual object, I was attractive. The year before I started hustling, there were a lot of guys that wanted to go to bed with me. They didn’t want to involved get emotionally, but they did want to ball. For a while, I was willing to accept that. It was feeling intimacy, feeling close, feeling warm. [¶] The time spent in bed wasn’t unpleasant. It just wasn’t terribly pleasant. It was a way of feeling somebody cared about me, at least for a moment. And it mattered that I was there, that I was important. I discovered that in bed it was possible. It was one skill that I had, and I was proud of my reputation as an amateur.”
And friends? “I viewed all girls as being threats. That’s what we were all taught. You can’t be friends with another woman, she might take your man. If you tell her anything about how you really feel, she’ll use it against you. You smile at other girls and you spend time with them when there’s nothing better to do, but you’d leave any girl sitting anywhere if you had an opportunity to go somewhere with a man. Because the most important thing in life is the way men feel about you.”
She explained the ins and outs of the business: “After that [first trick], I made it my business to let my friend know that I was available for more of these situations. She had good connections. Very shortly, I linked up with a couple of others who had a good call book. [¶] Books of phone numbers are passed around from call girl to call girl. They’re numbers of folks who are quite respectable and with whom there is little risk. They’re not liable to pull a knife on you. They’re not going to cheat you out of money. Businessmen and society figures. There’s the social figure, whose name appears quite regularly in the society pages and who’s a regular once-a-week John. Or, there’s the quiet, independently wealthy type. Nobody knows how they got their money. I know one of them made his money off munitions in World War II. Then, there’s the entertainer. There’s another crowd that runs around the night spots, the 21 Club. … [¶] These were the people whose names you saw in the paper almost every day. But I knew what they were really like. Any John who was obnoxious or aggressive was just crossed out of your book. You passed the word around that this person was not somebody other people should call. [¶] We used to share numbers—standard procedure. The book I had I got from a guy who got it from a very good call girl. We kept a copy of that book in a safe deposit box. The standard procedure was that somebody new gave half of what they got the first time for each number. You’d tell them: ‘Call so-and-so. That’s a fifty dollar trick.’ They would give you twenty-five dollars. Then the number was theirs. My first book, I paid half of each to the person who gave it to me. After that, it was my book.
The book had the name and phone number coded, the price, what the person wants, and the contact name. For four years, I didn’t do a trick for less than fifty dollars. They were all fifty to one-hundred dollars and up, for twenty minutes, an hour. The understanding is: it doesn’t get conducted as a business transaction. They myth is that it’s a social occasion. [¶] You’re expected to be well dressed, well made up, appear glad to see the man. I would get a book from somebody, and I would call and say, ‘I’m a friend of so-and-so’s, and she thought it would be nice if we got together.’ The next move was his. Invariably, he’d say, ‘Why don’t we do that? Tonight or tomorrow night. Why don’t you come over for a drink?’ I would get very carefully dressed and made up …”
Even a call girl’s work requires painstaking preparation and research: “There’s a given way of dressing in that league—that’s to dress well but not ostentatiously. You have to pass doormen, cabdrivers. You have to look as if you belong in those buildings on Park Avenue or Central Park West. You’re expected not to look cheap, not to look hard. Youth is the premium. I was quite young, but I looked older, so I had to work very hard at looking my age. Most men want girls who are eighteen. They really want girls who are younger, but they are afraid of trouble. [¶] Preparations are very elaborate. It has to do with beauty parlors and shopping for clothes and taking long baths and spending money on preserving the kind of front that gives you a respectable address and telephone and being seen at the right clubs and drinking at the right bars. And being able to read the newspaper faithfully, so that not only can you talk about current events, you can talk about the society columns as well. [¶] It’s a social ritual. Being able to talk about what is happening and learn from this great master, and be properly respectful and know the names that he mentions. They always drop names of their friends, their contacts, and their clients. You should recognize these. Playing a role …”
Then, she went from a big city call girl to a street hustler: “At the beginning I was very excited. But in order to continue I had to turn myself off. I had to disassociate who I was from what I was doing. [¶] It’s a process of numbing yourself. I couldn’t associate with people who were not in the life—either the drug life or the hustling life. I found I couldn’t turn myself back on when I finished working. When I turned myself off, I was numb—emotionally, sexually numb. [¶] At first, I felt like I was putting one over on all the other poor slobs that would go to work at eight-thirty in the morning and come home at five. I was coming home at four in the morning, and I could sleep all day. I really thought a lot of people would change places with me because of the romantic image: being able to spend two hours out, riding cabs, and coming home with a hundred dollars. I could spend my mornings doing my nails, going to the beauty parlor, taking long baths, going shopping … [¶] It was usually two tricks a night. That was easily a hundred, a hundred and a quarter. I always had money in my pocket. I didn’t know what the inside of a subway smelled like. Nobody traveled any other way except by cab. I ate in all the best restaurants and I drank in all the best clubs. A lot of people wanted you to go out to dinner with them. All you had to do was be an ornament.”
Ms. Victor experienced boredom, shame, emptiness, and loneliness: “Almost all the call girls I knew were involved in drugs. The fast life, the night hours. At after-hours clubs, if you’re not a big drinker, you usually find somebody who has cocaine, ‘cause that’s the big drug in those places. You wake up at noon, there’s not very much to do till nine or ten that night. Everybody else is at work, so you shoot heroin. After a while, the work became a means of supplying drugs, rather than drugs being something we took when we were bored. [¶] The work becomes boring because you’re not part of the life. You’re the part that’s always hidden. The doormen smirk when you come in, ‘cause they know what’s going on. The cabdriver, when you give him a certain address—he knows exactly where you’re going when you’re riding up Park Avenue at ten o’clock at night, for Christ sake. You leave there and go back—to what? Really, to what? To an emptiness. You’ve got all this money in your pocket and nobody you care about.”
Her drug use led her to the streets: “My drug habit. It got a lot larger. I started looking bad. All my money was going for drugs. I didn’t have any money to spend on keeping myself up and going to beauty parlors and having a decent address and telephone. [¶] If you can’t keep yourself up, you can’t call on your old tricks. You drop out of circulation. As a call girl, you have to maintain a whole image. The trick wants to know he can call you at a certain number and you have to have a stable address. You must look presentable, not like death on a soda cracker.
“I looked terrible. When I hit the streets, I tried to stick to at least twenty dollars and folks would laugh. I needed a hundred dollars a night to maintain a drug habit and keep a room somewhere. It meant turning seven or eight tricks a night. I was out on the street from nine o’clock at night till four in the morning. I was taking subways and eating in hamburger stands. [¶] For the first time, I ran the risk of being busted. I was never arrested as a call girl. Every once in a while, a cop would get hold of somebody’s book. They would call one of the girls and say, ‘I’m a friend of so-and-so’s.’ They would try to trap them. I never took calls from people I didn’t know. But, on the streets, how do you know who you’re gonna pick up?
She let customers solicit her on the streets: “You walk a certain area, usually five or six blocks. It has a couple of restaurants, a couple of bars. There’s the step in-between: hanging out in a given bar, where people come to you. I did that briefly. [¶] You walk very slowly, you’d stop and look in the window. Somebody would come up to you. There was a ritual here, too. The law says in order to arrest a woman for prostitution, she has to mention money and she has to tell you what she’ll do for the money. WE would keep within the letter of the law, even though the cops never did. [¶] Somebody would come up and say, ‘It’s a nice night, isn’t it?’ ‘Yes.’ They’d say, ‘Are you busy?’ I’d say, ‘Not particularly.’ ‘Would you like to come with me and have a drink?’ You start walking and they say, ‘I have fifteen dollars or twelve dollars and I’m very lonely.’ Something to preserve the myth. Then they want you to spell out exactly what you’re willing to do for the money.”
She contrasted her life as a streetwalker to her days as a call girl: “When I was a call girl, I looked down on streetwalkers. I couldn’t understand why anybody would put themselves in that position. It seemed to me to be hard work and very dangerous. What I was doing was basically risk-less. You never had to worry about disease. These were folks who you know took care of themselves and saw the doctor regularly. Their apartments were always immaculate and the liquor was always good. They were always polite. You didn’t have to ask them for money first. It was always implicit: when you were ready to leave, there would be an envelope under the lamp or there’d be something in your pocketbook. It never had to be discussed. [¶] I had to work an awful lot harder for the same money when I was a streetwalker. I remember having knives pulled on me, broken bottles held over my head, being raped, having my money stolen back from me, having to jump out of a second-story window, having a gun pointed at me. [¶] As a call girl, I had lunch at the same places society women had lunch. There was no way of telling me apart from anybody else in the upper tax bracket. I made my own hours, no more than three or so hours of work an evening. I didn’t have to accept calls. All I had to do was play a role. As a streetwalker, I didn’t have to act. I let myself show the contempt I felt for the tricks. They weren’t paying enough to make it worth performing for them. As a call girl, I pretended I enjoyed it sexually. You have to act as if you had an orgasm. As a streetwalker, I didn’t. I used to lie there with my hands behind my head and do mathematics equations in my head or memorize the keyboard typewriter. [¶] It was strictly a transaction. No conversation, no acting, no myth around it, no romanticism. It was purely a business transaction. You always asked for your money up front. If you could get away without undressing totally, you did that. [¶] It’s not too different than the distinction between an executive secretary and somebody in the typing pool. As an executive secretary, you really identify with your boss. When you’re part of the typing pool, you’re a body, you’re hired labor, a set of hands on the typewriter. You have nothing to do with whoever is passing the work down to you. You do it as quickly as you can.”
Ms. Victor spent three years in a reformatory and four years in prison when she got busted two different times. She even spent two years in a Mexican whorehouse where she finally hit rock-bottom: “The Mexicans wanted American girls. The Americans wanted Mexican girls. So I didn’t get any American tricks. I had to give a certain amount to the house for each trick I turned, and anything I negotiated over that amount was mine. It was far less than anything I had taken in the States. [¶] I was in great demand even though I wasn’t a blonde. A girl friend of mine worked there two nights. She was Norwegian and very blonde. Every trick who came in wanted her. Her head couldn’t handle it all. She quit after two nights. So I was the only American. [¶] That was really hard work. The Mexicans would play macho. American tricks will come as quickly as they can. Mexicans will hold back and make me work for my money. I swear to God they were doing multiplication tables in their heads to keep from having an orgasm. I would use every trick I knew to get them to finish. It was crazy! … The junk down there was quite cheap and quite good. My habit was quite large. I loved dope more than anything else around. After a while I couldn’t differentiate between working and not working. All men were tricks, all relationships were acting. I was completely turned off.” Then, she was slugged and brutally beaten by a dealer who wanted to have sex with her. “It was the final indignity. I’d had tricks pulling broken bottles on me, I’d been in razor fights, but nobody had ever HIT ME.”
Her final philosophical musings on work and society: “You become your job. I became what I did. I became a hustler. I became cold, I became hard, I became turned off, I became numb. Even when I wasn’t hustling, I was a hustler. I don’t think it’s terribly different from somebody who works on the assembly line forty hours a week and comes home cut off, numb, dehumanized. People aren’t built to switch on and off like water faucets. [¶] What was horrifying about jail is that it really isn’t horrifying. You adjust very easily. The same thing with hustling. It became my life. It was too much of an effort to try to make contact with another human being, to force myself to care, to feel. [¶] I didn’t care about me. It didn’t matter whether I got up or didn’t get up. I got high as soon as I awoke. The first thing I’d reach for, with my eyes half closed, was my dope. I didn’t like my work. It was messy. That was the biggest feeling about it. Here’s all these guys slobbering over you all night long. I’m lying there, doing math or conjugations or Spanish poetry in my head. And they’re slobbering. God! God! What enabled me to do it was being high—high and numb. [¶] The overt hustling society is the microcosm of the rest of the society. The power relationships are the same and the games are the same. Only this one I was in control of. The greater one I wasn’t. In the outside society, if I tried to be me, I wasn’t in control of anything. As a bright, assertive woman, I had no power. As a cold, manipulative hustler, I had a lot. I knew I was playing a role. Most women are taught to BECOME what they act. All I did was act out the reality of American womanhood.”
CONCLUSION
Whether you agree or not with Ms. Victor’s views, her story is as hypnotically compelling as it is brutally honest. Now you have at least one insider’s perspective on what it’s really like to be a call girl or a streetwalker.
If you want to learn intimate facts about other interesting occupations in the U.S., see the other articles in the “Interviews With” series.
If you would like a copy of Mr. Terkel’s book: click here
[For more “Interviews With” articles, click here.]
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