Chapter 8: Nora Explains Herself

One evening in late September 1977 Nora and I got into some semi-serious drinking at a bar called Googies, on Sullivan Street in the Village. We had a table in the back. She liked vodka and tonics, so we both had a couple of those and we also had some beer to wash it down. She called the combination a “Queens Plaza Boilermaker,” though it wasn’t clear what the connection was to that piece of geography.

On that night she was sitting there wearing her steel-rimmed glasses and she had her hair up. Her clothes were unexceptional. She was projecting an image of being an ordinary young woman, one who could be attending almost any college in the Tri-State area. Of course, I knew she was anything but ordinary.

Nora said, “Now that I’m leaving it, you are probably wondering how I got into hooking in the first place.”

I wasn’t sure that was the topic I wanted to get into, but I knew that it was important to her. “What makes you think I would be wondering about that?”

“Because most guys would be curious. They think that hookers do it because they are really into sex, but of course, it’s actually the money they want.”

I didn’t know if most men really had that view of hookers, but I wasn’t going to challenge her on it. “I think I understood that already.”

“Maybe not on a basic emotional level. Anyway, I got to CCNY in September 1973, and I’m too naïve to know what’s going on. All of these guys on campus are swarming around, and they all seemed to want to get into my pants.”

Perhaps that was more her perception of it rather than reality. Also, I wasn’t sure I liked her sharing all of this with me, but it wasn’t really for my benefit. She needed to vent her feelings about it. At that time I knew nothing about her earlier romantic experiences in high school, and in fact I never would find out.

“There was one guy who was really pestering me; I think was a junior. So, as a joke probably, I said to him, ‘For twenty-five bucks, I’ll give you a blowjob.’ And he takes me up on the offer.” That would be about $145 in today’s money; it didn’t seem like a joke.

“Is that really the going rate? It sounds pretty high.”

“I had no idea; I just made it up.”

“You blew me for a mere term paper.”

That was a sore point with her because of the C grade she had gotten on it. She mentioned the topic. “Yes, George Orwell and his fucking Catalonia.”

I ignored her dissatisfaction, “A lot of foreigners went over there to fight with the leftists.” (This referred to the Spanish Civil War.)

“I did read that paper you wrote for me. The Abraham Lincoln brigade and all that.” I had been going with her for almost three months by then, and she often surprised me with her knack for details.

She went on, “Okay, so it’s the middle of the day, and he’s ready to go with his blowjob. Fortunately, he had his car parked on St. Nicholas terrace.”

“That still seems to be pretty risky.”

“There was one guy later who had a van, but this one only had a sedan. He did have a blanket or something that he put over us. That was also when I realized I didn’t want to swallow if I could help it. I pulled him out at the last moment and he came all over his own dashboard. Not that it was my problem, of course.”

“Nora, you’re a bit cold at times.” She laughed at that.

“I will get guys who go, ‘oh, it really isn’t a blowjob unless you swallow.’ If they are that insistent, I charge them more.”

“Business is business.”

“So this first guy, he fingered my pussy through my panties, but after he came he forgot all about finishing me off too. That was an important lesson to learn about all of this. They didn’t care a whit about my needs or feelings or even me in general.”

Then she said, “After that, I realized that maybe I could make a steady income out of this. There seemed to be so many guys up there starving for sex. This whole Sexual Revolution thing has been overblown, I think. They believe that the world is full of pliable girls ready to drop their panties for them. There are, but only if they are willing to pay for it.”

I had heard this opinion from her before, but I wasn’t sure I accepted it. In any case, I couldn’t verify it one way or the other. I did remember being bereft of any female companionship during my own freshman year.

“It was difficult at times to pull off these tricks in the daytime. They usually didn’t want to wait for the evening, and neither did I. There was one who had the keys to this little room in Cohen Library. All he could afford was a peep show kind of thing.”

“How did that go?”

“What I did was lift up my skirt, pull down my panties, and bend over a desk so that I presented my underside to him. He sat in a chair and jerked off while looking at me. Meanwhile, I had my Sociology 101 textbook open on the table and I was reading it while he whacked away at himself.”

I thought, six months ago I might have been that guy, and Nora might have been the girl I was looking at. I was struck by a certain – call in hardness or toughness – in her. I had seen it myself, but I figured she had to close off her feelings to survive that work.

“I never glanced back at him, no matter how much moaning he did. When he came, I did hear his semen pattering down on the floor.”

That struck me as a bit cold and peculiar, but it went along with my hypothesis about emotional detachment.

“Another place to go was that tunnel between Shepard and Baskerville under Convent. That was a good place for a handjob or an occasional blowjob.” She smiled, “Once we got caught by a Wackenhut guard, but he just smiled and kept going.”

“Those guys didn’t get paid enough to do any real security work.”

“Well, eventually, I decided to have many of the customers just come out to my house in Maspeth when my uncle wasn’t there. That’s a whole story in itself, but let me get to something else first.”

She paused for a moment to think about something. “As I mentioned before, I would never let these guys take me vaginally. It didn’t matter if they were willing to use a rubber or not. Like how most hookers won’t kiss you, that was the line I set. No price would do it.”

“How about, say, $100,000?”

“Hah, no woman could ever get that much for a single fuck. Not even Cleopatra.”

“Everybody is a whore for the right price.” That sounded like something Oscar Wilde had said, but I wasn’t sure.

She had more to share, “I did do it anally a few times; I really charged them through the nose for that.” Through the nose? I let that drop. “I’d ask them to rub my clit so I’d feel something, and they would do it for me.”

“How thoughtful of them.”

“I told them that if they didn’t do it, they weren’t getting any, even with them paying for it. So about those coming to Maspeth for me – I mean, Maspeth is not exactly the crossroads of New York, although there certainly are more remote places. I wasn’t flattered that they were going out there for me; as I said, they would do anything for some poon-tang.”

“What about the ones who didn’t have cars?” That probably included the majority of students at CCNY.

She said, “Some of them had cars, although others would take transit, including the bus for the last leg. I had one guy travel all the way down from Riverdale in The Bronx that way.”

“My trip out there is probably longer.” At that time I was living in Williamsbridge on the other side of the North Bronx.

“Yeah, but you’re going to be spending more than twenty or thirty minutes in Maspeth with me.”

“Nora, for you it’s worth the trip.”

She snickered at me because she knew I was joshing with her, “Oh, that’s so sweet of you.”

Then she went on, “I still used the campus at times. Like you know that little building that’s attached to Finley, Stieglitz Hall I think? There was a two-stall men’s room in there. I would kneel on the toilet to give a blowjob. That way, if somebody came in to use a urinal, they would only see the guy’s legs.”

“What would happen if somebody came in to use the adjacent stall?”

“Then it would have been time to make a hasty retreat.”

I said, “I remember that room. I would go into the stall to whack off in the afternoon.”

“Sounds like what a horny little bastard like you would do. Anyway, we were both using the same stall at different times and didn’t know it. We hadn’t met at that point, however.”

I mused, “Ah, the romance of it all.”

“You should know by now that there is nothing romantic about prostitution. It’s purely about a physical release; in effect, it’s masturbating using a girl’s body. Any guys who think otherwise are deluding themselves.”

I thought I was used to her bluntness, but I was still taken aback by what she had said. I replied, “What about us? We fell in love, didn’t we?”

She was reluctant to reveal her vulnerabilities, perhaps, so she discounted what I had said. She commented, “It was just a fluke, I guess.”

I didn’t believe that was true, but I didn’t want to challenge her. She immediately changed the topic. “There were a few guys with their own apartments. Sometimes they had to ask their roommates to get lost for a half-hour or so.”

“Only a half-hour?”

“It usually didn’t take that long.” In a couple of years, I’d see Taxi Driver, in which Travis Bickle is given a mere fifteen minutes with Iris. It was a harsh business, indeed.

Nora had another story I already knew, “There was that time when my uncle came home early and caught me on my knees blowing a customer. I had gotten sloppy, or lazy because I could have taken him up to my room instead of just doing it in the living room.”

“You told me about the drama that caused.”

“Yeah, my uncle got really pissed. First, he took me over his knees and spanked me on my bare ass. He’s a carpenter, as you know, and he has big, strong hands. Then he bent me over the couch and whipped me with his belt. He didn’t stop until I collapsed and fell to my knees. But I didn’t cry; he couldn’t break me. I’m too tough to be broken.”