Chapter 7

Tears fell openly from Lennie’s eyes. The story from her past was difficult to listen to.

Cindy realized she was staring off into space as she related her story, then looked as if her mind had returned from somewhere else. She made eye contact with Lennie, returning mentally to the present from that horrible place so long ago.

“And then I had my first client. It was one of Dwayne’s regular customers, and he wanted it to be a gentle beginning. The guy actually treated me kindly. It was some white guy, about 50, who was bald and fat. I just gave him a blowjob and then got on top of him and rode him for a few minutes until he came in his condom. Then another guy, and another. I did eight guys on my first day. At first, Taylor was in the room while I performed, but after a while, men would come to Dwayne’s condo when she wasn’t there. I had to make sure they gave me the correct amount of money that Taylor told me to charge. One time I didn’t count correctly, and when Dwayne found out the next day, he beat me again.”

Hearing about the abuse was difficult for Lennie to fathom. Imagine how hard it was to take it, actually, he thought.

“I’m so sorry, baby. I’m so sorry you went through that.” He paused for a while and said, “Nobody should be abused as he did you. I’m so, so sorry for you,” he repeated.

She looked at the gray-haired man, appreciating the sympathy he was affording her, and took a deep breath to regain her composure. She returned to the story of how she became who she is today.

“Maybe a quarter of them were only blow jobs, and maybe another quarter of them had my ass as well as my pussy. I made over $6,000 in the first week. Of course, it wasn’t mine, and I did some quick math. If I could continue to make 6 grand a week, that means I would pay him back in seven months, not a year and a half.”

“I was still 21 years old for a few more months. It was a lot of money to me. And the sex with clients wasn’t that much different than what my uncle had done to me, mostly.” The look on her face noticeably darkened as she said the last sentence. She glanced at Lennie, then looked down at the floor, closing her eyes and remembering more than she wanted.

After a long pause, Cindy opened her eyes again.

“So that’s how I became a whore. Dwayne spent three days teaching me how to be a prostitute. Jerome violently raped me. Taylor was Dwayne’s top girl; Taylor was known as Dwayne’s bottom bitch. A bottom bitch is the woman who is in charge of the other women when he isn’t around. She was with or near me any time men were around, making sure I did what Dwayne or the men wanted. He chose my birth control to be an implant, which lessened the number of days I was on my period. More days to sell me, you know. I learned how to strip the way men want it to get them hot for my body, lap dances, how to give a good blowjob, how to have intercourse in different positions, and the worst was taking a cock in my ass. He set everything up.”

“At first, it was mostly businessmen visiting Seattle for a night or two, looking for a whore to entertain them or, later on, an escort to accompany them to dinner or an event. But that didn’t last too long.” There was no smile on her face.

“After a while, it got more graphic and nasty. Dwayne started setting me up with two guys simultaneously. Then three guys. Many were black. So many of them simply hated white people. They would call me cracker bitch, and yell stuff like “I’m taking my reparations up your ass, whore!” I’d never experienced that before, being hated because of my race. It was so degrading, and sometimes they hurt me pretty badly. Later, I was able to disconnect emotionally when I was working. Then, maybe two months in, I started doing bachelor parties. I would do one nearly every Friday night or every Saturday night. Sometimes back-to-back nights. There were usually at least six, or up to a dozen guys, sometimes a lot more. If there were, say, twenty guys or so, Taylor or Amber or another girl of Dwayne’s would be there too.” She paused for a moment, remembering what had happened long ago.

As she told her story, the normally positive look on her face was gone. Instead, she kept looking at the floor, back at Lennie with a disturbingly hollow look for a few seconds, and then, when Lennie looked into her eyes, would turn away to stare at the floor again. These memories were painful. She continued.

“I was completely ashamed of myself. I had no friends, the only women I even talked with were other whores that Dwayne owned. I had dropped out of school, and it really hurt not to be in class anymore. Dwayne owned me and used me to provide sex to men. We would do anything he told us to do. I had no free will. And it hurt, it was painful, at least until I got used to it. During the sex, I just remembered my dad’s face and his operation being successful.”

“By now, I was making on average over ten thousand a week, so I mentioned to Dwayne that I was making such good money that I would be paying him back in a lot less time than a year and a half. I was working 70 to 80 hours a week, and the rest of the time was for sleeping. I had no life. I went to Dwayne and said, I had already made over $60,000 for him, and at this rate, he would be paid back in another nine or ten weeks, because I had included my expenses in that. He just stared at me and laughed.”

“He yelled, ‘You stupid whore. I don’t give a shit about you breaking even. Do you think I run a charity ward? Fuck you’re dumb. Eighteen months and not a day less, you stupid cunt.’”

She paused for a moment to control her emotions and gather her thoughts. She hadn’t actually spoken to anyone about her starting days in many years, except to Lori or her therapist, and found it harder to talk than she thought she would.

“The bachelor parties continued, getting cruder by the week. I would commonly have sex with three guys at once. It’s called being airtight.” She still couldn’t look at him directly, instead staring at the floor. After a long pause, she let out a deep sigh. Lennie felt horrible listening to her story, but she was proffering it, like a confession. He wasn’t going to stop her.

“And then, believe it or not, it even got worse. Months later, Dwayne flew me to Los Angeles, and I was forced to start making porn movies. I made about 40 scenes, maybe more. It was usually two scenes a day, with different guys each time. I didn’t know anybody except for one man, whom Dwayne said I had to do whatever he told me to. It was about three weeks of work. After the shooting finished for the day, I also had to have sex with the cameraman and the sound man. A few times, I would also have sex with the makeup lady. Dwayne got paid for me making those movies.”

She took a long breath, paused, and continued her story.

“A couple of weeks after I returned, Taylor told me that I’m a ‘star’. I watched those movies as they were posted on the internet a few weeks later. They weren’t really movies but rather just sex scenes that lasted about half an hour or a bit more. Dwayne would send links to those movies to customers so he could sell me to them for more money. I was a ‘porn star,’ and he sold me that way so he could get more for me.”

She paused for a moment and then stood up. “I’ll be back in a minute, I have something to show you.” She walked down the hall and into her bedroom. Lennie stared at her naked, gorgeous body. Her ass and legs were breathtaking, the soft curves of her back and shoulders the definition of femininity.

After hearing drawers being opened and closed from her office, she returned and sat back down next to Lennie. She held a small, spiral-bound notebook and handed it to him. He opened it.

Each line contained a string of coded characters separated by commas. Lennie started deciphering it. The first was g or c. Hmm, girl or customer? After the comma, the next letter was w, b, l, a, or o. Lennie guessed that was their race: White, Black, Latino, Asian, or other. The next was o, v, a. Oral? Vaginal? Anal? The next characters were two numbers. The first was a random two-digit number, anything from 18 to 73. The next was a larger number, at least 100, but most were at least 300, some 1,000 or more. The first one must have been their age, and the next must have been how much they were charged.

“When I started, I had kept track of how many times men had sex with me. I recorded their race, age, the sex acts I performed, and the amount they paid. This is the spiral-bound notebook that I hid from Dwayne.”

Lennie looked at it, thinking that for each line, the gorgeous woman next to him performed a degrading sex act. He turned to the back of the notebook and saw a large number at the end, which was underlined twice: 1,540.

“There were 1,540 transactions. I serviced 1,540 men with my body. Five or six Johns a day, six or seven days a week. And at least one dozen-or-so-man gangbangs every weekend. In a single year. That’s the original spiral notebook.”

She stopped and shuddered at her memories coming back, as it was the first time she had looked at it in years.

Cindy started repeating herself and got emotional, but carried on with the story.

“In the last four months of my commitment after the porn shoots, Dwayne got two new girls. I had to help him turn them out and force them to do what I was doing. I had to watch and help Dwayne break them in as Taylor did to me. Jerome showed up and did to them what he did to me. Both of them, one at a time. The other one was in a back room and had to listen to the slapping and screaming happening to the first girl, so it was still a surprise what he did to her.”

The look on her face was one of sadness as she recalled her horrible memories.

“I had to watch the entire thing, even participate once in a while. They were both barely eighteen, Lennie, one still in high school, and one who had dropped out. I had to take them on dates with me and make them do all the sex acts. If they refused anything, I had to tell Dwayne, and he beat them with his belt. Then he would beat me in front of the girls, blaming them that he had to beat me. That happened at least four or five times, until the girls figured out the beatings were guaranteed if they didn’t follow orders. I used a lot of makeup to cover my bruises. And those poor girls.” Cindy paused, closed her eyes in remembrance, and slowly shook her head.

“They were so innocent until Dwayne got his hooks into them. A few weeks later, one of the girls killed herself. I found her in his apartment when I got back from a trick. She was naked in the bathtub, her wrists slashed, and an empty bottle of sleeping pills on the floor. The pills had her mom’s name on the bottle; she stole them from her. The bath water was beet red and at room temperature. Her body was ghost-white and cold. She was just lying there, her skin was this ominous pale white, the look on her face was in complete peace.”

She started sniffling, and her body shuddered as she took a deep breath. She paused for a long while before talking again.

“I called Dwayne, and he showed up maybe a half-hour later. He made a phone call, and in an hour, some men showed up, and her body and every bit of evidence about her was gone, like she never existed.”

Lennie just stared at her. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. His mouth gaped open, not knowing what to say.

“But the worst was yet to come. Dwayne had a new scam. He would force me to pick up married men and businessmen whom he had already identified somehow as marks that could be blackmailed with sex. I’d come on to them at a bar, lie to them, and get them to take me back to my hotel room and get them to fuck me. Sometimes we would go to their room, Dwayne always told us girls where we needed to go to perform. I was supposed to get as nasty as a whore could, making it as salacious as possible. We would get them to say stupid stuff like ‘my boss is a dumb shit’, or ‘my wife is a stupid frigid cunt’, stuff they would be particularly ashamed of when they saw it on video.”

“What they didn’t know was that there were hidden cameras already set up. Dwayne had this guy who set up all kinds of electronic recording devices, and they were blackmailed.” She paused as if she couldn’t speak the words, but finally continued.

“Dwayne made more money off of his blackmail scheme than his girls getting turned out for whoring. The unsuspecting marks all had a lot to lose if they got turned into their wives or the companies they worked for. And that was when my world was completely upended.”

Lennie saw she was beginning to shake as tears continued rolling down her face. How could this get any worse? She finally took a deep breath and continued.

“This scheme was making Dwayne a lot of money, as I said. Taylor was in on it too, getting four or five guys a week sometimes, even better than me. Amber refused to do it because she said she couldn’t live with herself, blackmailing innocent married men like that who were alone, horny, and just wanted a little company. She got away with not doing it because she had a different arrangement with Dwayne.” Lennie absentmindedly nodded.

“He had someone, I think, in the hotel business, who identified these men. The slimy guy would set up the cameras beforehand and take them away after. All of this sex happened in two different hotels, which is why I think that was a partner from the hotel business. They were two of the most expensive hotels in Seattle, so the men had money. And no, it wasn’t the Four Seasons where we first met.”

She looked up and gave Lennie a weak but honest smile for a few moments as her thick eyelashes fluttered at him, then resumed.

“He would easily make $20,000 or more off each mark, some of them, I think it was as much as $50,000. Somehow, Dwayne could run a credit check on each one and figure out how deep their pockets were. Five to ten men a week, each paying 20 to 50 thousand in hush money. It averaged at least a couple of hundred grand a week, or more. One week, he cleared almost half a million. If they didn’t pay in cash, their wives or employers would see the tape. They all paid up. But one day, shit hit the fan for Dwayne and me.”

She paused and looked in Lennie’s eyes. Pain showed in each of their faces for different reasons. One reason was hearing the story for the first time. The other was because it was so difficult to recall it once again.

“One of the guys I had set up and blackmailed had found me a couple of months later after conning another guy. After I was done with the most recent guy, I had a couple of drinks in the bar downstairs, mainly to try to forget what I had done. He waited for me to leave the hotel bar and snuck up behind me, sticking a pistol in my back while grabbing me. He told me I would bring him Dwayne, or he would kill me. It was way past midnight, and I was all alone on the street. I didn’t have a choice.”