Chapter 8
When the taxi deposited them in front of the old brownstone house within blocks of where Elsie had been raised, Flossie led her up the wide front steps. She produced a key and the door swung inward. Elsie stepped across the threshold into a real live whorehouse.
Dolly, to whom Flossie introduced her as though she were bringing home a trophy, was the farthest thing in the world from Elsie's image of a madam. She looked more like everybody's Aunt Bessie. She beamed at Elsie benevolently. "Are you sure you want to make your home here with us, my dear?" she asked, her voice exuding kindness.
"I don't really know," Elsie answered honestly. "Right now I have nowhere else to go. Flossie said that you might use me."
Dolly laughed now. The huge rolls of fat on her vibrated like Jello in an earthquake. When she got her laughter under control, she explained, "Hell, honey, I don't want to use you. I'm no Goddamn lesbian. It's the customers that'll want to use you."
Elsie could feel herself blushing. She was no prude where sex was concerned but hearing the use of her body discussed so blatantly could not help but embarrass her.
"You a good piece of ass?" Dolly asked, as though it was the most natural question in the world.
"I've never gotten any complaints I couldn't handle," Elsie snapped back at the big woman.
"Do you suck cock?" Dolly demanded.
"Doesn't everybody?" Elsie flung back at her.
Her answer amused Dolly and the three other girls in the parlor. Their laughter broke the tension.
"Welcome to our home." Dolly smiled. "I have a hunch you'll make out real good. Now take off those silly clothes and show me what I'm gonna have to sell. I can't promote a deal unless I'm familiar with the merchandise."
Elsie threw a sidelong glance at Flossie who nodded her head. Slowly, she removed her clothes and stood naked before the madam and the other girls.
"Yeah, looks like we got some real prime meat there," Dolly exclaimed, as her eyes examined her like she was a side of beef.
"Does that mean I'm in?" Elsie asked, hoping that Dolly would not realize that she had no alternative in mind.
"Yeah, honey, you're very much in," Dolly grinned at her, exposing a mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth. "Until you grow some hair, we're gonna have to get you a wig. We've got one around here somewhere. It's red but it'll do. Red hair and a blonde cunt might be a welcome novelty to some of our regulars."
"Thank you," Elsie mumbled.
"Here's your whore book," Dolly explained, forcing a small daily diary that businessmen use to keep track of their appointments into her hand. "Our system is simple. You get free room and board. You ain't supposed to do no free-lancing outside of the house. That's how this stupid cunt Flossie got herself into trouble. We're a one-price house. We get ten dollars a trick. I get five for expenses and you get five. Obviously, we can't keep running back and forth with five dollar bills. I keep my records, you keep yours. That's what the diary is for... to keep a record of your box score. Every Sunday we settle up. Okay."
"You make it all sound very simple." Elsie smiled at her fat benefactor.
"Flossie, you show Elsie to room 8 next door to you. Today is payday at the Navy Yard and this should be a busy night. Show her the ropes and have her ready to go by six."
It was a busy night indeed. Many of the regulars were anxious to dunk their dickies in the new girl. Elsie maintained her box score carefully. By the end of the night she had serviced thirteen clients; eight white and five black not that it mattered; a stiff prick was a stiff prick whatever the color of its skin. She had made eighty dollars... more than she would make in a week at Sears. Perhaps being a whore wasn't so bad after all. Besides, there had been one young customer with a lovely prick. Elsie hadn't told Dolly, nor put it on her score card, but she had sucked that beautiful cock for him twice after he had crammed it into her creamy cunt. For a while during the evening, she had been so busy that she hadn't had time to douche between customers. Some of the poor bastards had had to take a wet deck fucking.
As busy as she was with the passing parade of stiff cocks, Elsie still had trouble sleeping and then had constant nightmares about the night of her ordeal on the waterfront. Dolly had a regular house doctor that came in and examined each of her girls every Monday. Elsie mentioned her problems to him. He gave her a prescription for a bottle of big reds... Seconal sleeping pills. They helped for a while, then she seemed to build up an immunity to them. When one wouldn't work, she tried two and then three. As the months turned into a year and more, she discovered that they worked better when washed down with bourbon instead of water.
The combination of the pills and booze began to take their toll and by the end of her second year of tenancy at Madam Dolly's she had lost weight. Her big tits drooped like hound's ears and her once firm ass became flabby. Her skin lost its youthful glow and she was frightened by what she saw in the mirror each morning as she brushed her teeth.
Along with the bodily disintegration, her box score fell off badly. She was thirty-three now, but looked fifty-three. The only way she got customers was to give fancy blow jobs. Even that began to fall off as newer and younger girls came into the house.
One Saturday night she had only one customer. He was a big black boy who wanted a white girl to suck his cock and asshole. He apparently hadn't bathed in a week and Elsie almost gagged at his body odor as she went down on the huge black dong. When she approached his asshole with her tongue, she was sure that he had never learned to use toilet paper. It was all she could do to keep from retching.
After he left and no other customers requested her services, she took a bottle of bourbon to her room and got quite smashed. About two in the morning, Dolly knocked politely and came in to see her. Elsie had feared her visit.
"Look, Elsie, you're a good girl and I love you like a daughter, but I got a business to run. I just got so many rooms and I gotta have merchandise that moves, you know what I mean?"
Elsie nodded drunkenly. She knew only too well what Dolly meant. She was over the hill... all fucked out... all washed up, even as a whore. How far down the drainpipe could they flush her in life?
Dolly was as kind about it as she could be, but the sum and substance of the meeting was that she wanted Elsie out by the following Friday.
Once the big woman had waddled from the room, Elsie checked the bourbon bottle. It was still almost a third full. Then she checked the bottle of Seconals. It was over half full. When she removed the big red pills from the bathroom cabinet, she stared dumbly at the reflection in the mirrored door. "S'long, Elsie. I'll miss you," she mumbled and then staggered back to her combination bed and work table. She washed down the contents of the pill bottle with the contents of the booze bottle.
Dolly showed a lot of class. She called in a priest and then saw to it that Elsie had a real good funeral in a real nice casket. It was the first suicide she had ever encountered among her girls and she felt pangs of conscience. For days, crocodile tears rolled down over the fat cheeks and dripped onto her bulbous breasts.
On the night of the day that Elsie was buried, under a headstone engraved "Elsie Borden," Dolly and her girls sat disconsolately around the parlor. There weren't many customers and they had a real wake for their late friend. Nobody seemed to know what to say. At last Dolly broke the silence. Between her tears and sobs, she said, "Goddammit, we're going to miss Elsie around here. She was the best cocksucker we ever had in this house."
In a corner of the parlor, Flossie cried in her drink and muttered, "That's the trouble with this fucking business... you have to die before they say something nice about you."