Goddamnit, girls could come just like boys! They could jack off and everything! Sonofabitch! I had really learned something.
And so had Herb and his date, who had long since finished whatever it was they did, and were leering over the front seat at us.
Aside from my normal excuse to my parents, I did spend a fair amount of time with the guys. Every Friday night when I didn't have a job or wasn't hustling, we went to hear the San Francisco Symphony, with Monteux conducting. Except for a few star musicians, they were really lousy. Yet we all enjoyed the music, especially Beethoven and Mozart's later works, and the French composers that Monteux loved to work into every concert.
Also, I started taking judo at a local judo studio, or do-jo, as it was called. This created no strain because my lessons were right after dinner, so on nights when I had to play I could go from there to work. I loved it, and have continued with the art for most of my life.
But the street was getting to me, working its way into my blood like a disease. I was on my way down.
Chapter 6
I began to hang out at Jack's Bop Town, an after-hours jazz place on Post near Fillmore, in the black section of town. It was a dilapidated old place which has since been torn down, but we loved it. The prices were reasonable and the company, mostly black, was lively and entertaining. Like all after-hours clubs, Jack's was loud and smoky. It was a place that reeked of life, and sometimes death. Characters that would have had our great American authors scrambling for their typewriters were abundant. I learned a lot at Jack's.
It was my first real exposure to the drag world. At that time only musicians smoked marijuana, and only people who lived in the black Fillmore ghetto of San Francisco were on junk. The cops never bothered places like Jack's, so it was known as "safe." The only white people tolerated there were musicians who could blow jazz like the blacks, no Lawrence Welk types. If you had soul in you, it came out the minute you blew your horn or hit a drum skin. If you didn't, you got frozen out with hostile looks and threatening manners. And if that didn't work, somebody simply stuck a knife into your gut, so you'd get the hint that your presence was not appreciated.
There were no honky tourists at Jack's. Knife fights were fairly common, and bleeding people always seemed to make it outside, so that the place wouldn't get a bad name.
The first time I went into the John there was a guy at the.urinal, pissing. Next to him, on the toilet, sat a black chick with a tourniquet around her arm, shooting shit into her veins with an eyedropper needle and a rust-colored spoon. She didn't even look up when I entered. The guy finished, so I took my turn. Her head fell back, her eyes closed, and she was breathing deeply. I could see the darkish needle marks all over her arm.
All of the junkies were black and all of the women were prostitutes, working the white trade in the Fillmore or the Tenderloin. After a while I got to know most of them on a first-name basis, and they looked after me as they might look after a little brother. But it all was superficial. When you're on junk you think about only one thing, your next pop. Junk was all you lived for. People would go into, the John, looking fidgety and nervous, and come out in a calm stupor, eyes dilated and gait temporarily steady. There was so much shit around you could make a buy openly from almost any cat. Nobody was sweating it. It wasn't uncommon to see some pretty perverse sights. This was before the pill, and one thing the local hookers didn't need was to be knocked up. The garbage cans in the alley beside Jack's had seen more than one newborn, smothered to death, wrapped uncaring in newspaper, and dumped unceremoniously along with the eggshells and old potato skins. Once I saw a pretty, young black girl sitting on top of a table at Jack's, nursing a baby obviously fathered by some anonymous white John. To everybody who passed" by she would ask, "Take my baby, mister? Take my baby? Please take my baby?" She didn't want to kill it, as the sisters of her trade had done with theirs, but she couldn't work to support her habit and be a mother at the same time. Knowing what I now know, it's hard to believe that most of those babies didn't die from narcotic-induced respiratory depression at birth.
I got to know them all, those who worked the Tenderloin, the Fillmore, the International Settlement, and the fancy Nob Hill hotels. As time went on we broke a lot of bread together, those broads and I. Aside from the junkies, they all were good friends. Many times when it was very late, when I was tired from playing a gig or hustling too many Johns, I would stay at the apartment of one or another until it was time to go to school. If they weren't living with an "old man" or a lesbian friend, we often slept in the same bed, often naked, but I never tried to touch one of them. We were close in a way that made it kind of like sleeping with your sister. Even though I would have loved to have fucked a few of them, their attitude made it plain that they weren't interested in.me, or any man except maybe their boyfriend or lover.
I never asked my friends how they got into the trade, but through normal conversation I usually found out anyway. They were all adamant about my staying in school and getting good grades, and eating well and sleeping enough. The good grades I did get were more to please them than my parents. A few of the girls even used to buy clothes and small presents for me. They loved to play mother to somebody who they didn't really have to take care of. It made them feel more like real women.
Most people think that all whores are the same, but this is a fallacy. As in any other profession, there is a pecking order. At the top is the call girl. These girls work in several ways and fall into several subcategories, but they have in common the fact that they all are young and beautiful; or, to turn it around, you won't find any old or ugly call girls. Most of them have at least a high-school education and quite a few have been to college. Polly, an old call-girl friend of mine, was working for her master's degree in sociology.
The call girl is the cream of the play-for-pay crop. Some are in it part time, and some full time. I have met office workers, secretaries, stewardesses, nurses, and even schoolteachers who had a setup with a telephone. Some of them go into prostitution for a definite goal, saving enough money to buy a lot of blue-chip stocks, buying a fashionable boutique or even wanting to meet and marry some rich but stupid guy. Others get into it because they can't think of an easier way to make a buck than by lying on their backs. Some do double duty, living part time in a house where they meet a select number of Johns by careful prearrangement, including the use of code phrases, and taking calls from "safe" Johns at local high-class hotels. Others work only the houses, and still others work only the hotels. This is the kind of girl a visiting businessman can take out on the town for an enjoyable evening, knowing in advance that he will be able to fuck her. It usually costs him one hundred to two hundred dollars for the evening, or twenty-five to fifty for just a quick one. Depending on the John's proficiency, that amounts to just about one buck per stroke.