Chapter 2: My Second Fantasy; Criminal Justice

This one took more imagination on my part.

I’m sure I had deep guilt about being a prostitute, even a part-time one, during my freshman year. Sometimes I only turned one or two tricks per week, but I was eighteen, nineteen years old while doing sex work.

By the way, I’ve always thought there was something wrong with term “sex work.” It made me think that I was supposed to be on par with people who worked in auto assembly plants, on railroads, and so forth. But I could set my own hours and avoid paying taxes on my cash earnings. It didn’t require boring hours of installing car parts, or long uncomfortable trips riding freight trains as a brakeman (brakewoman?) or a conductor.

It’s hard for me to analyze exactly why I became a whore in the first place. I must have had some deep misgivings about my sexuality and how I saw myself in relation to men. There was a lot of anger in me that I tried to cover up by being so open, so brazen about what I was doing. There was no love, not even affection, involved in serving my clients.

If they were realistic, these men understood the limitations of whoring. But sometimes they deluded themselves into thinking that I actually cared about them. It was quite a letdown for them when they had to face the truth of my indifference to everything but their money.

To me, on one level, getting paid to have sex seemed like a smart move. Why give myself to those contemptuous males for free when they would give me cash for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes of erotic action?

I even offered blowjobs for term papers if they had no money. That was how I met Paul in 1974. George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; that was the subject of the paper he wrote for me. One jerk, when he heard the title, assumed it was Homage to Catalina. He was only off by several thousand miles.

But on a deeper level – one I didn’t want to think about too much – I was contemptuous of myself. I thought my body and my desires were unspeakably dirty; I had to degrade myself and avoid any pleasure for myself during those sex acts. Making it all into business transactions covered over my shame.

I began to get away from those attitudes by the middle of 1974. Yes, I had met Paul, who truly loved me for who I was. But my arrogance misled me and I dumped him after less than five months for an older guy with a good job, money, and a nice car.

That new relationship ended after a year, and the next guy in the rotation also lasted for a year. When Gilda offered me the dominatrix position in mid-1976, all I could imagine was the amount money I would make merely spanking or whipping naughty guys. I could avoid dealing with their messy splooge as I used to do when sucking their cocks or stroking undergraduates to a climax.

The easy money and my own lack of direction or respect for myself drew me back into the life. Unlike the Corleone family, I had managed to become legitimate but then I threw it all away for a time.

But my subconscious mind knew better, and my fantasies had a grip on me. The following is one of them. It is looking back on 1974 from where my mind was two years later.

In my imagination it was May of 1974, and I finally got arrested in a sting operation at City College. I was standing in front of Wagner Hall when a Latino guy came up to me. He asked about my services, and I gave him prices for a handjob or blowjob, my bread-and-butter offerings. He chose the latter.

He didn’t seem like a cop to me because, well, he wasn’t one. He was actually one of the rather inept Wackenhut Guards the college had hired to patrol the campus. We had just started to walk to that little men’s room at the back of Stieglitz Hall when he made some kind of hand signal. Within seconds two real plainclothes cops came up to us. I was busted; after nearly nine months my luck had run out.

I knew I’d be released by the following day. I also knew the punishment I’d have to endure before that happened.

The system went through the motions it always went through. First, I was taken in a squad car to the 26th Precinct on 126th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. Late in the afternoon, I was put in a Corrections Department van with a number of other luckless ladies and driven downtown to Central Booking on Centre Street. My fellow van riders had been picked up for various offenses. About half of those were drug charges.

Central Booking is a horrible place to be, and I didn’t get any sleep and barely anything to eat. By mid-morning six of us females were in a courtroom upstairs. We had all been charged with a first offense for soliciting for prostitution. I was the only white girl in that group.

New York gets these cases done very quickly and efficiently. I already knew the penalty; every working girl in the city was aware of it and most of them went through it eventually. The sentence for the first offense was a caning: six strokes on the buttocks over the clothing, and ten more on our bare backsides.

It was a warm day, and I was wearing my faded old blue jeans, plus a cute little sleeveless top and sandals. Believe me, jeans offer no protection from a cane. Flesh will be severely marked right through the cloth.

Within thirty minutes all six of us were processed, convicted, and taken away for our punishments. That would be done in a room downstairs on the other side of the building. I had been quite sleepy from my lack of rest the night before, but now I was very awake and feeling a lot of anxiety about how I would be punished. I had been belted before in my life, but I had never experienced what a cane would feel like when applied to my tender little heiny.

We waited in a hallway while the first two chicks got their beatings. I was impressed by the amount of yelling they did, and I could also hear the impact of the implement on their bodies. When they were dragged out, one had tears running down her face, and the other was openly sobbing.

I was called in third. There was a spanking trestle in the middle of the small room, and four corrections officers, one male and three females. The man read a brief statement that was printed on a card. “You, Nora Meara, for the crime of solicitation for the purpose of prostitution, are hereby to receive six strokes of the cane on the seat of your trousers and ten more on your exposed buttocks.”

Something about the word “buttocks” sent me into a panic. There I was, nineteen-years-old, and I was about to get a solid thrashing on my pale, narrow behind. I started to breathe very heavily, and I felt like I was on the verge of crying.

Nora, you’ve got to get ahold of yourself. It’s only a quick little spanky. Then one of the women revealed the wooden cane to me, and I lost my nerve again. My legs felt weak, and I seemed to be on the verge of fainting. The implement looked more like a long stick than true cane, but I knew it was going to hurt when applied to my body.

It was not going to be a little “spanky.” The two other female C.O.s – and they were quite burly, not delicate little things – saw how unsteady I had become. They immediately grabbed my arms and held me down on the trestle. That piece of furniture pushed my behind up so it was the highest point on my body. It was going to be an excellent target.

My nerves were shot, and I started to cry softly and say things like, “Please don’t do this to me, I’ll be a good girl from now on.”

The lady with the cane said, “A good girl? Honey, you may say that but you are really just a piece of street trash.”

She swished the cane through the air so I could hear the noise it made and she said, “Okay, baby, are you ready to take your discipline?”

I protested, “No, please, don’t hit me with that thing.”

She went to another topic. “Take her glasses off so that they don’t go flying from her head.” I wondered if that were obligated to buy new ones if an existing pair broke.

After that she tapped my bottom with the cane and got it lined up for the first stroke. I glanced back at her, and I saw her raise the cane for a fierce blow on my butt.

I heard the impact as it dented both my jeans and my ass, but then the only sound was from me yelling. I had tried to control my voice, but the cane had lashed a painful line across the lower part of my backside.

The second stroke was right above the first one, and it felt even worse. Without thinking about it, I was trying to get up, but the two guards held me tightly. My legs were free, however, and I swung those around and banged my sandals against the trestle.

“Hey, watch those legs, girl, or I’ll give you some whaps on them too.”

One of the guards holding me commented, “She’s a loud one, for sure.”

“As well as being quite a bucking bronco. Should we restrain her with the straps?” I noticed that there were loops of leather attached to the front arms of the trestle, but those were not being used.

The cane lady said, “It’s such a pain in the ass when we have to do that and then undo it.”

In my fevered mind, I managed to note her phrase “pain in the ass.” I was certainly feeling that! She spoke to the male guard. “Mike, do you mind getting down there and holding her feet in place? This is one of those times when we need you to do that.”