“S... s... sure. Have you?”
“No, I haven’t. Are you in trouble, kid?”
“No. The vice squad arrests prostitutes, right?”
“Right.”
“And call girls? You know, like really good-looking prostitutes? Not the cheap hooker type, but, you know, beautiful girls, girls who have their own apartments to take guys to so it’s not cheesy, like in a motel?”
Borchard laughed so hard that an anchovy popped out of his mouth and landed on the coffee table in front of him. He popped it back in, rechewed it and said, “Marty, are you looking to get laid?”
I lowered my eyes. “Yes.”
“Kid, it’s 1968. Girls are giving it away like never before.”
“I know, but—”
“Have you tried Patty downstairs? She’s spread her legs so many times they’ll have to bury her in a Y-shaped coffin.”
“She’s ugly, and she’s got pimples.”
“Then put a paper bag over her head and buy her a tube of Clearasil.”
I forced out a trickle of crocodile tears, and Uncle Walt said, “Aw shit, kid, I’m sorry. You’re cherry, right? You’re a late starter, and you want a nice-looking cooze for your premiere fuck?”
I wiped my nose and said, “Yes.”
Uncle Walt got up and ruffled my hair, then went into his bedroom. He returned a moment later and handed me a hundred-dollar bill. “Don’t say I never gave you anything, and don’t say I never bent the rules for a buddy.”
I put the money in my shirt pocket. “Gee, thanks, Uncle Walt.”
“My pleasure. Now listen real close, and in an hour or so you will be de-virginized. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Here’s some astonishing information: the LA.P.D., of which I am a member, does allow a certain amount of high-line prostitution to go on in the Hollywood area. Isn’t that shocking? Well, there’s a part of the Boulevard, just West of La Brea, loaded with call-girl cribs. The girls hang out at the better hotel bars — like the Cine-Grill at the Roosevelt, the Yamashiro Skyroom, the Gin Mill at Knickerbocker and so forth. The girls sit at the bar and sip cocktails and eye the single men, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what they do for a living. The standard operating procedure is that they mention a figure and suggest that you adjourn to their pad. The standard pop for an all-nighter is a C-note, which I just happened to press into your horny paw. Now, you’re under the drinking age, so act frosty when the bartender asks what you’re having. Act gentlemanly with the lady of your choice, tell her a C-note is tops, and pour her the pork till the hogs holler for hell.”
I stood up. Uncle Walt chucked me under the chin and laughed. “Some young lady’s gonna burn more rubber than the San Berdoo Freeway. Now get out of here, my pizza’s getting cold.”
An hour later I was not getting “de-virginized.” I was sitting at the bar of the Hollywood Roosevelt Cine-Grill, watching a woman in a tight black sequined dress make small talk with a bluff-hearty man wearing a summer suit dotted with conventioner’s buttons. The woman was a bleached redhead, but pretty; the man had a solid, muscular look. I sipped a Scotch and soda and kept my nervousness at bay by imagining them as Shroud Shifter and Lucretia, unwinding from a long day of stalking victims. I could almost feel the two together in bed.
They left the bar abruptly. As they got up to leave, I realized I was screening brain-movies, and that I had lost sight of them in physical reality. I counted to ten and pursued.
I saw them get into a cab in front of the hotel, and I ran for my car. The cab was easy to follow; traffic on the Boulevard was heavy, and they got stuck at the back of a line of cars at La Brea. I was right behind, reaching under the seat for my gloves and gouger. When the light turned green, I smiled: the cab was already pulling to the curb; Uncle Walt’s “call-girl block” had been gospel.
The couple got out of the cab. I parked hastily two car-lengths in back and watched them enter a large pink apartment building shaped like a southern plantation house. The woman did not use a key to open the front door, so I had my initial access. I waited ten seconds, then sprinted full-out, slowing as I opened the door on a long, pink-carpeted hallway. The two were just entering an apartment at the far left end of the hall.
I scanned mailboxes and willed the aura of a cool young man who belonged in an outré pink plantation on Hollywood Boulevard. It was easy, and affecting such supreme nonchalance made me feel brazen. There were no people in the hallway, but a variety of T.V. and stereo noise was booming from inside individual apartments, so that there was a general high noise level. I walked toward my target, checking out the doors on my way. The opener knobs were not reinforced, and there was at least a sixteenth of an inch’s play at the door-doorjamb junctures. If the hooker hadn’t set an inside chain, I could enter.
At my target door I listened for the sound of pre-sex amenities; all I could hear and sense on the other side was silence. Giving the hall a quick eye circuit, I slipped on my gloves, inserted the pick side of my tool and jiggled at the lock. I could feel individual spring-slides give one at a time, and when the third one clicked softly, I pushed the door open a fraction of an inch — just enough to glimpse a dark living room-dinette. Shaking my head to keep brain-movies away, I entered, twisting the doorknob out and then closing the door soundlessly.
Voices, not sounds of passion, drew me in the direction of the bedroom, and glimpses of flawed bodies were what I saw through the crack in the door. My heart crashed as I held an eye up to my inch-wide viewfinder. He was flabby; she had tattoos on her shoulders and thighs. Her pubic hair was obviously dyed to match the shade of her head; he kept his socks on. I tried to make them into Shroud Shifter and Lucretia, but my brain camera wouldn’t focus, and their voices were so grating that I knew their lovemaking would be hideous — and I could never join them.
“... I been in this building before,” the man was saying. “When I was in L.A. with the Moose convention in ’64.”
“Lots of working girls work out of here,” the hooker answered. “Some of them I run myself. You wanta get started?”
“Not so fast. You’re a madam?”
The hooker Sighed. “More like a big-sister confidante, like a therapist, really. I do fix up dates and take a cut, but I like to be a pal, like a big sister who knows the ropes.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Well, once a week I get together with the working girls I know, and we shmooze and talk tricks, and you know.”
The man giggled. “You ever make it with another chick?”
The woman groaned. “Oh, Jesus. Look, I think I’m gonna need a drink for this. You want one too? Maybe it’ll quiet—”
I saw what was about to happen, and padded for the door. When my hand was on the knob, I saw a purse lying on a chair a few feet away. I grabbed it, and managed to extricate myself from the apartment just as the bedroom door started to open. Then I ran.
The purse yielded $9.43 and sexual information that kept me watching, hoping, stalking and sometimes stealing for over a year. The money, of course, was negligible. It was the hooker’s notebook that kept me busy.
It was a makeshift ledger of customers, their phone numbers and the dates of their prescheduled assignations, and a list of the other girls that Carol Ginzburg, the “Therapist-Confidante” “ran,” along with the names and phone numbers of the “tricks,” and notations as to whether the “date” would be held at a motel, the “trick pad” or the girl’s apartment itself. It boiled down to a wealth of possible watching-stealing sites, and in the case of the preset “dates,” it allowed me the time to perform reconnaissance forays before the assignation.