For Flip, hustling was a fairly steady occupation and one which could support him adequately without taking very much of his time. He gravitated in short order to the East Village and began to conform to the general pattern of life there. He let his hair grow, drifted into the drug culture, and gradually became a part of the society in which he was now living.
Almost immediately he began having casual sexual relations with girls.
“At the start I was completely out of it as far as girls were concerned. Remember, there were two big years there when I never saw anything female. And before then it wasn’t just a matter of never having sex with a girl but that I never really talked to a girl. In the sense of rapping at any length.
“I was a little uptight about this. I suppose it would have been very easy at this point to become gay. To just avoid the whole hassle of trying to make out with girls and just turn completely gay. I had this one dude who wanted me to live with him. He had this nice apartment and the bit was that I could live there and he would give me money for clothes and like that. I stayed there a couple of days but I couldn’t quite see it as a steady thing. I didn’t like the feeling that, you know, that he owned me.
“Fortunately for me, the girls around here are more open and easy about sex than other girls. I didn’t have to come on. I could just more or less hang around and be cool, and one afternoon I was rapping this one particular girl, and I was hardly even thinking of her as a girl because to me she was just somebody I knew that I had rapped with now and then. We were smoking and she said it was the kind of high where she really could dig to ball somebody, and would I like to ball her. And I said sure, why not, and we did it. I guess she was about twenty-five. I haven’t seen her in years. I don’t think she had any idea that she was the first girl I ever made it with. I hadn’t said anything to anybody and didn’t say anything to her.
“It was night and day. I had this fear in the back of my mind that I wouldn’t be any good with a girl or that I wouldn’t enjoy it as much as with guys. Even that I wouldn’t enjoy it at all. Oh, wow, like worrying about nothing at all, man! I really dug it to a much greater length than I thought I ever could. Really got completely into it. It made everything else I ever did like black and white, and this was in color. All the difference in the world.
“Ever since that first time I never worried about being queer. And that made me much easier in my mind about hustling, not that I had been uptight previously, but that this took away the only thing that had been bothering me at all.
“Then there was a period of time when I balled what must have been a tremendous number of girls. I would hustle when I needed money but there was usually no sex in it from my point of view. What I mean is that I would prefer not to get excited and particularly not to come, because I wanted to save it for a girl.
“From what I’ve heard, this led to something pretty weird. Put it this way. When I was having sex with a man for money, it didn’t used to matter to me what he wanted to do. Whether he wanted to blow me or the other way around. In the sense of not objecting to either thing that he might want to do, because all of this came naturally to me after two years in slam, so in that sense it didn’t matter. But in another sense, in the sense of what I got out of it, then it would be that I would prefer to be the one who got blown, or the one who did the cornholing, because I got no sexual thrill out of the other side of it while by having a guy blow me or whatever we did, by that I would come, I would have an orgasm, which was pleasurable.
“But once I discovered girls, to put it that way, I preferred to be the one who did the blowing, to put it that way, for the simple reason that I could do it because it wouldn’t get me excited. It was just something you turned your mind off and went and did. Now the usual thing is that a hustler prefers the role that he enjoys, if you can dig it, and I prefer a role that does nothing for me. When I lay it out to people around here like that they can dig what I’m rapping about, but everybody says it’s weird in that for most hustlers it’s the other way around.
“Now my old lady has done a certain amount of hustling. Glory, this is. I didn’t turn her onto it, by the way. Some other dude did. In fact how it started is he more or less told her to go out and come back with ten dollars or he would punch her out. A very hostile cat. She did it and she found out she didn’t mind it, and she’ll do it now and then when we start to run low on bread.
“What she does is she works cars. Say she’ll work the corner of Second Avenue and Eleventh Street, and square cats will pull up to the curb and she’ll get in the car and park around the corner, and she’ll go down on them right there in the car. And she says that’s cool as far as she’s concerned, but she doesn’t like them touching her! Feeling her breasts or her cunt, that she doesn’t care for. Because that sort of thing turns her on and she can’t get turned on when it’s just a matter of turning a trick, so she would rather not be touched like that when it’s doing nothing for her.
“This is off the subject, but it might fit into the book you’re writing. I know a couple of queens, drag queens, that work those same corners. And what they do is give head, which is all anybody ever asks for in the cars, because if you were to get into any actual fucking in a parked car you could have troubles with the cops. And if anybody wants to take them to a room or anything they refuse, so it’s just a case of giving head, and it’s over and done with in a matter of minutes, so the Johns go home thinking they got blown by a girl, when actually they had it from another guy. I bet it would really be like a major mind fuck for a lot of these dudes to realize it. I bet it would really do some heavy things to their heads. And when you think how many times this must happen, and without any of them ever finding out what happened. All these uptight types who think they never had a homosexual experience in their lives, and here they’re treasuring memories of this absolutely out of sight blow job, and they never know they got it off another guy. Really weird, totally unreal.”
I asked Flip how his friends felt generally about his activities as a hustler.
“How people feel in general is that they don’t hassle other people. ‘You do your thing and I’ll do mine.’ That’s a very big thing here. That you don’t criticize somebody else’s thing. You may not dig it but that’s something that is only important in terms of your own head, so you don’t go and lay your trip on somebody else just because his thing is something you can’t relate to.”
“That’s as far as their attitudes are concerned.”
“Right.”
“But how do you think they feel about it?”
“In their own heads? Right. I think for the most part it’s the same as how they feel about a girl who is tricking. That it’s cool. That the money is easy and you aren’t giving anything, and sex in general is a good trip, and if you can get with it and not get negative vibes out of it and make easy bread at it, why not?”
“And you would say that’s the general feeling?”
“I would say it’s a general feeling. I don’t think there’s any one general feeling about most things. It’s like one person will be on a strict macrobiotic diet, nothing but brown rice, and another person will be on a high protein thing, and each one will be completely into his own approach but each one at the same time will respect what the other one is doing as something worthwhile.