The following was written for GALLERY MAGAZINE almost 15 years ago, just after I got my first job selling ads to "bodyworkers." It's a little upbeat as I wasn't quite as jaded then as I am now. But it works as a second introductory piece to give you a good idea of exactly what I do for a living. I might add that the publication switched editors in the middle of this project and it never came to print…nor did I ever get a kill fee from the boss (what a dick)! Regardless, I still like it as much as the day I wrote it. And I don't always feel that way about my efforts viewed in retrospect.
Seventeen years ago, down on my luck, penniless because of a gambling problem, and emotionally as well as spiritually destitute, I took the lowest, most dead-end job any college educated native American could possibly lower himself to: I became a New York City cab driver. Now for most, the occupation leads its indentured servants on a potholed path to an even lower and more depraved mental state.
But for me, driving a taxi proved to be the breakneck roller coaster ride I’d always been searching for. There were freaks, knuckleheads, whores, danger, adventure, unpredictability and virtually anything you could imagine to entertain a mind as malignantly idol as mine. But never in a million years did I think that driving a cab would be the springboard which launched me into my current line of work.
Yes! Thanks to driving a cab, I have become the Fun Time Salesman, a hired, salaried hand who gets paid to write stories about, collect money from, sell ads to, and basically spend my whole life “servicing” the accounts who advertise in my employer’s tabloids.
So what’s the big deal? Any schmuck with a pencil holder, a pot belly, and a pair of jelly jar glasses could get that job. Well, not quite! You see…our accounts are just a few centimeters off the beaten corporate path. They don’t sell shoes, or shipping supplies, or evening gowns. They sell sex and as such, my elite list of clients includes whorehouses, dominatrixes, escort services, transsexual hookers and any other entity related to the sale of anything to satisfy the libidinal urge. And every morning I get up for work, I have a skip in my step and a smile on my face because I know I’m going to be spending the majority of my day conducting business and getting entertained by some of New York’s sexiest and raunchiest babes passing their not-so-hard-earned money into my waiting palm.
Now don’t get me wrong! It’s a job like any other job. And there are a lot of buttheads, morons and prima donnas on the beat. But there are also some surprisingly intelligent people in the business – not to mention outrageous stories the likes of which you could only hear at a taxi garage.
So what’s it really like hanging out with hookers all day? Do I have a constant hard-on? Do I ever take a half hour off to partake of the goodies? Well, to put things into perspective, let’s examine a typical shift on the funtime beat.
Usually, the fun commences about 9:30 or 10 in the morning. My phone rings, my beeper goes off, and I know it’s time to get up, gulp a glass of OJ and prepare myself to deal with the “clients.”
But first, I go over sales leads, collections, and complaints about my erratic paperwork with the boss. Then I get passed to my homeboy and fellow salesman for a little bit of his input – and a lot of gossip about which girl is working where and what the customers have to say about her performance.
Having established the day’s itinerary, I’m out the door and into the street – where the surreality begins.
First stop? Tiffany’s in Midtown. Tiffany is a 41-year old madam who has probably done more tricks in her lifetime than Wilt Chamberlain has chicks. Thus, it would be ridiculous to try and bull shit her. Nobody in his right mind would. Rumor has it she once whacked a detective on the head with her shoe when he came up to her place to extort money from her.
I hop the train, get off at 57th Street and head towards her building, a totally luxurious and upscale high rise right in Midtown Manhattan. In a million years, you’d never think such a fancy edifice would quarter a house of ill repute, but the facts are what they are – and Tiffany’s whorehouse thrives at one of New York”s most exclusive residential locations.
I stroll by the doorman with a wink (he knows what’s up and has been paid off accordingly) and ride to the 20th floor. Tiffany’s place is immaculate. Soft jazz plays on the radio, plush carpeting caresses my shoes and three or four girls greet me with a friendly smile when I enter. Already, the place is busy with lunchtime horn dogs ringing the phone and booking appointments for some afternoon delight. And it’s no wonder she does a landmark business. At $100 for a half hour and $150 for an hour, it’s the best deal in Manhattan.
As is the custom, I prod Tiffany for a good anecdote. She obliges with some story about a john who just couldn’t “get off” within the time he booked. His girl emerged from the room in frustration, explaining the dilemma, whereupon Tiffy barged in and came back five minutes later proclaiming victory.
“How’d you do it?” Tiffy’s hooker sputtered in wonderment.
In her broken English Tiffany responded “I tell him about me…and a dog…and a horse.”
In the meantime, her girls are sitting around arguing about who had the most orgasms the night before. I’d love to stay all day and bask in the absurdity but the phones are ringing like crazy.
“OK, Billy! You can leave now. It’s getting busy,” orders Tiffany as she slips me a few bucks as a reward for a story I wrote about her place in the last paper.
Works for me! I stuff the tip in my pocket, flag a cab, kibitz with the driver, and then adjourn to Gina’s on the East Side. Gina is a big barrel-chested Brazilian mama who ironically, owned and drove her own cab until a next door neighbor turned her on to the financial and spiritual rewards of domination. And clearly, taxi driving’s loss has become the dominance world’s gain. Gina now kicks the crap out of the same freaks she used to drive around at 3 A.M.
Initially, she tells me stories from the old taxi driving days – like the time she whacked a fare beater over the head with a tire iron – but then segues into a tale from her current occupation, specifically, yesterday’s tattooed merchant mariner.
“You know, when I see an old sailor with a lot of tattoos…I know he’s a pervert. I beat the shit out of him until I’m so tired I have to get one of the other girls to help.”
I shake my head in disbelief but know every word she’s saying is true. One of my other dominas (Mistress Natacha) with whom I’ve become very friendly, assures me that she routinely performs electric shock, catheterization and brown and golden showers on her customers, most of whom are Wall Street lawyers answering ads from the classifieds in New York Magazine.
After the storytelling is through, we go over Gina’s ad copy and make a few changes to include “female wrestling” and stuff like that so she can beat and humiliate her clients in new and even more inventive ways. What a gal!
With my mission accomplished, I move on to my next task, one which proves to take me from the frying pan straight into the fire. Iman, one of the city’s many transsexual hookers has called the home office and expressed an interest in running an ad with our paper.
There are three salesmen with the company – but I get all the transsexual calls. Apparently, my cab driving experience has paid off; I don’t have a problem dealing with the chicks with dicks set – I’ve seen and dealt with so many in the back seat of my cab.
Iman buzzes me into her lair. I pass through a narrow hallway and into the living room where I discover that there are three more girls in attendance. My mouth waters at the prospect; I love a transsexual tupperware party. If I can just get the girls heated up with some filthy gossip about which”girl” said what about whom (all the transsexual hookers know each other), I know I’ll walk away with a multiple sale.
By now, it’s 4 in the afternoon and Oprah is coming on with Ru Paul as a guest. The girls go stark raving mad when they see Ru. A chorus of “You better work, girl”(s) rings through the apartment; I feel like a fly on the wall. No matter! Forty minutes later, I’m out the door with two sales under my belt, several stories about which celebrities they’ve “dated,” what the married couple last night wanted one of the girls to do, and a mind-boggling image of one of Iman’s monstrously endowed freaks, who had the audacity to walk around buck naked as I made my sales.
Descending from Trannyville, I steel myself for the dreaded South American run. It’s not that I don’t like South Americans. In fact, I do – and they like me as well. It’s just that the majority of our South American clients are located in Queens, and servicing them involves riding the overcrowded #7 train to several distant stops along the way.
The first destination is the apartment of a girl in Jackson Heights who runs a 1/4 page ad for herself. Alexa confesses she’s been cleaning her place for a whole hour in anticipation of my arrival. (She doesn’t want me to know what an incredible slob she really is.) Alexa’s just a regular chick from the Bronx, with the same old friends from her childhood, none of whom know what she’s actually doing to earn a handsome living.
She’s a fitness freak; her body is as hard as a rock and she’s a black belt in karate. Indeed, her trophies virtually litter the apartment. I’m truly impressed; I feel her bicep and joke that I wish my erection got as hard as her muscle. She laughs in appreciation and then gets serious. Alexa wants her ad copy changed. One of the idiots at the factory mistook her desire to be listed as a girl who likes to be ravaged from behind (vaginally) and instead listed her as a “poop shoot aficionado.” I apologize for the mistake and write her a quick “doggy style specialist for all you hounds” ad copy change. She’s relieved now that the Greek freaks won’t bother her anymore.
And in gratitude, Alexa hands me a fifth of rum for the road. I’ve been singing her praises in my New York News column, and she’s been making money from my features. Hooker or on hooker, she knows how to to the right thing.
It’s getting late so I skip the stop in Corona (which involves a lot of walking in a nasty neighborhood) and head straight out to “Unforgettable” in Flushing. It’s a hell of a schlep out there. I have to ride to the very end of the line and then walk a mile and a half. But I have a crush on the madam. She has puppy dog eyes and long straight black hair. And whenever I go there, she plays with my mustache and tells me “Billy, I missed you so much.”
My industry is rewarded for the trek; she has a new girl who wants to be photographed. Photography is yet another of my jobs for the firm. Our books are basically a “ho shopping network.” And the big selling point is that within its pages, the publication features 200 pictures with phone numbers of the actual girls at the houses. Just dial the number and ask if the girl of your choice is available and believe it or not, most of the time your wet dream is actually on duty.
Thus the firm encourages the salesmen to take pictures. In fact, they give us fancy $1000 cameras to perform the task professionally. Now, I don’t know shit about photography; I’m the first to admit it. But with the wonder of modern technology and the resulting computerized camera, even a schmuck like me can snap a good picture.
Alisha, my subject is one of those “less is more” hot tamales. She’s very thin and lithe and maybe all of 100 pounds. Her hair and skin are dark; she’s a Dominican vixen from heaven. The shoot goes easily; Alisha is more than willing to spread everything for the lens.
Then the moment arrives when I know I have the world’s greatest job. Carolina’s house has been making money from my rogue photography and she wants to show her appreciation.
“Billy! Would you like a free session with Alisha?” Now, this doesn’t happen that often but it DOES occasionally. For a second, I’m taken aback. I’ve been running all day and I’m tired. But experience has taught me that when a madam offers me free sex, there are no rain checks attached. Get it now or lose the opportunity is always the order of the moment. And accordingly…I seize the moment.
Half an hour later when I emerge from the room, the madam asks me “Did you have fun?” I describe the action for a second. Her puppy dog eyes light up; she looks like she wishes she were involved. (Carolina is an ex-hooker turned entrepreneur with a healthy appetite for both men and women.) Secretly, I hope that next time (if there is one) she will.
I bid the girls goodbye and float out the door on a waft of sexual satisfaction with my feet barely touching the ground all the way back to the subway. Wet dreams of Alisha and Carolina preoccupy my mind; I walk right by the subway entrance and continue for several hundred yards forgetting who and where I am.
The work day is officially over – or is it? I shake my head and grit my teeth remembering the last stop – an Asian spa in Midtown.
When I think of the Asians, I wish I were back on my old taxi driving job, stuck in a mountain of traffic with a smelly, cantankerous passenger blaming me for a gridlock that is obviously way out of my control. Indeed, there is nobody or nothing in the world nastier than a disgruntled Asian hooker.
Tammy’s ad has been trimmed from a full page to a half because her payments have been delinquent. And I‘m the guy who has to show her the new paper. For twenty subway stops, my mind travels alternately from the sublime (Carolina’s) to the dreaded (impending doom at “Asian Heaven”). Unfortunately, I don’t have a heart attack and die before I get there.
Up the stairs I trudge and into the pink lit waiting room. Six girls, clad only in tiny bikinis are squatting like baseball catchers around several dozen crabs. Each is eating, screaming in Korean, and spitting shells into the pile. I wince at the spectacle and the specter of what’s about to come.
Tammy’s no charmer to begin with. She’s had a hard life, what with stomping through rice paddies for most of her childhood, and then holing up in steerage – and paying off smugglers – all to run an Asian whorehouse in New York City. And no spoiled American is going to break through – especially when he’s carrying bad news under his arm.
Tammy goes ballistic when she sees her ad. For half an hour I hear about what a mother fucker and a faggot everybody at the company is for shrinking her ad. Her poor payment history is irrelevant. I try to wedge in a word of explanation but to no avail. She simply wants to ventilate and won’t quit until she’s done so.
I sit like a trooper and absorb the punishment. I know that screaming her guts out primally is her best form of release so I let her rage as long as she needs. It’s all part of being the Funtime Salesman.
Finally she stops, almost acts human, coughs up the money for the boss and even throws me an extra fifty for putting up with her bull shit. I smile ambivalently as I leave; I’m not sure the gratuity was worth the abuse.
Having run the gamut in its entirety, I hop a cab for “Hogs” (a local juke joint) to down a few for my mental health, and then return to the comfort and safety of my East Village studio to lay my body down and rest my spirit for the fusillade of salacious activity the next day will surely bring. Just like driving a cab – it’s a tough job – but with this one, everybody wants it.