Chapter 7
It was our thought at the start of this project to get an interview with a working procurer or pimp, but we found it difficult. The women talked easily and at length, the men almost not at all. Also, much of what the men told us was untrue, as we found when we checked it. They seemed to hide behind a mass of semi-truths and lies.
But we persisted and at length found one ex-pimp-panderer who offered, for money, to tell us something of his 'profession.' He was a user and his habit cost him more than he was able to provide. He almost always needed a fix.
He alone, and the police files, know his real name. He said he was called Chazz, and that's what we called him.
CHAZZ:
"I was born in Portland, Oregon and left there when I was five. I never knew my old man, and my mother was a hustler. I didn't know that for a lot of years, but when I began to be old enough to put two and two together, I realize that she must have been.
There were always guys around. Different guys. For years I thought that was the way everyone lived, with a half dozen guys around every night.
When we left Portland, we went to Chicago. And I was put into a home-school. I still remember the name: The Luther Everette School for Boys.
It was the most dreary goddam place I was ever in. I've seen a lot of creepy joints in .my time, but that lousy school was the worst. I guess because it was supposed to be so upright and religious. They made a big show of taking care of us boys, for the parents or whatever, but after visiting day was over the place went back to normal. Normal was a stinking mess.
I got screwed the first night I was there. I mean reamed out!
One of the sales points, I learned later, of the school was the fact that there were no dorms. The boys slept in rooms, four boys to a room-just like a cheap whorehouse. They put me in a room with three other guys: Taffy, Dingbat and Toad. Those are all the names I can remember ... their names.
I was five, going on six when I hit the school. The other guys in the room were all older. Taffy was seven, Dingbat was eight or nine, and so was Toad. Toad was the leader. He was a fattish, pimply kid with bad teeth. He'd been in the school for years.
As soon as the lights went out that first night, Taffy and Dingbat held me, Toad yanked my pants down and got it up my rear end. I tried to scream but they whacked me till I stopped. Then Toad went on with it. He was a horny little bastard. It hurt like hell.
He slapped the back of my head while he was ramming me, "It feels good, don't it? Don't it?"
He kept that up till I said it did.
And after Toad got his load off in me, then Taffy and Ding took their turns. They were just as hot for it as Toad.
I don't remember how many turns they took on my poor little ass that night, but in the morning I was sore as a boil. Rubbed raw.
We had to take showers every morning. There was a line of shower heads, five or six of them, divided by concrete wings, you know, it made stalls. They sent us in there by rooms, three rooms at a time. Ten or twelve boys in the shower at a time. Naked.
The shower room was presided over by the Athletics teacher, a guy named Mr. Lyon. He was a skinny blonde faggot, about twenty-five, I guess, who stood around simpering at us. He usually wore black trunks and had a whistle around his neck. And as long as we didn't make too much noise, he didn't give a shit what we did.
I was astonished to see most of the guys with hard-ons in the showers. And I found out in a hellova hurry that the showers were nothing more than one big buggering fest. So I got it again in the showers, from I don't know how many guys. With soap this time. That made it easier anyway. And Mr. Lyon walked past on the duckboards and watched, with that crooked simper-smile on his puss that I got to know real well.
Well, that was my first experience with sex. I grew up in a hurry. Nobody talked about anything else. They were ass-fucking constantly-and talking about girls at the same time. I guess because girls were practically an unknown quantity. A few of the older kids had had a dame here and there, and they told us about it over and over again-and we never got tired of listening.
"I got her down," they'd say, "and stuck it in, and she wanted me to do it all day long-" That sort of thing. I knew now they made it up just to stay in the limelight. But then, man, it was hot stuff!
Some of our teachers were women, but they were big and tough, most of them, and distant. Not like our ideas of girls. They probably weren't very good teachers. I'm sure they didn't get much dough, and maybe working for the School was the end of the road for them. Anyhow, I didn't learn a hell of a lot. Not enough to get by on the outside. They didn't teach us a damn thing I could use by the time I got out of there. Some arithmetic, but no shop.
About all a guy from the Luther Everette School was good for was buggering or blowing. The older guys called it the faggot factory. And they were right. Even a kid who had no idea of being a homo, had to turn out to be a gobbling fool. He had to, to stay alive.
Taffy and Ding turned out to be OK guys mostly. They helped me along, and protected me some from the older wolves-it was like a prison in some respects-guys had regular steady boys. They were both orphans and didn't have a damn thing to look forward to. I was rare because my mother turned up about once a month to see me.
But if Taffy and Ding were not too bad, Toad was a bastard. He was fat, but strong as hell and none of us cared to cross him. He was vicious and would get back in some underhanded way. You couldn't trust him out of your sight. And for a time, I was his boy.
I hated him something fierce. I still hate him, wherever he is. For years, I dreamed of meeting him on the outside and cutting his fat heart out. But I never did.
Every night, regular as clockwork, he was in my bed, reaming me. Before lights out we were all supposed to get in bed, and Mr. Blackburn would walk down the halls and look in all the rooms. We were all scared of him. He was a huge guy and tough as nails. He didn't take any crap off any of us and we toed the mark with him.
I often thought of him later. Maybe that's the way to raise kids. Make them toe the goddam mark or else. I mean make them. No fooling around. We sure gave him a lot of respect.
We'd get in bed, like I said, and Toad would lay there and say: "I'm gonna come over in a minute and stick you, Chazz. You got it ready for me, huh?"
If I had raised a stink I'd have had a shiv in me. There was one kid found dead while I was there in the room with Toad. Nobody knew what happened. There was an investigation, and the school came off smelling like a rose, of course. They said the kid had fallen on his head.
We all knew better. I don't mean to say Toad did it. The kid was in another room, and one of them konked him. He probably put up a fight about bending over or something. That was the whisper. We believed it.
After the first blush was off the vine, Taffy and Ding went back to buggering each other, and I became Toad's boy. When lights-out darkened the room, then we all got to work. It was the only fun anybody had in that damn joint. And it was fun for me too, after I got used to it. I'm not trying to get out of the fact that I became one of them. That would be impossible. I was there too long.
Toad liked to get off in me, and he also liked blowing me. He was a homo all the way. Everybody knew I was his, so they laid off me. Even in the showers. Unless Toad let them. Sometimes he and some other guy changed off-swapped boys. Then I got it from the other reamer.
It took me a lot longer time to get used to blowing him. I wasn't a natural born cocksucker. But I had to do it or get lumps.
There was a lot of talk, among us boys, about Mr. Lyon. They all said he was the best sucker around. Whenever a guy went to his office, we all figured he was getting a blow. If the guy Was somebody's steady he denied it. Taffy told me, however, that Mr. Lyon had blown him several times. I believed him.
Once Toad went to the hospital with scarlet fever. That was a holiday for me. I was learning to hate him more and more. The school didn't seem half so bad with Toad missing.
Mr. Lyon called me into his office then, but very secretly. "I don't want Toad to beat you when he gets back," he said to me.
Mr. Lyon knew the score. He also knew I was an old hand by now, so he got my pants off in a hurry. I just sat on a bench by his desk and watched him going down on me. He was real good. I liked it.
"That was the way I grew up. I was in the Luther Everette School till I was almost sixteen. My mother had died when I was eleven. They told me she had died, but someone else, years later, told me she had been killed. In a brawl.
They didn't let me go to her funeral. One day they just took me out of a class and told me, and sent me right back. It didn't mean a lot to me, because we weren't very close. I didn't feel much for her, but I sure felt alone in the world. She had been some tie.
Toad had left years before I did. I never could trace him. Taffy stayed the longest, and we became steadies after Toad left. Dingbat went over the wall one night and we never did hear from him again.
At sixteen The State moved me to another school. I stayed there only a week. It was almost as bad a joint as the first one. But I was tough by then, and I walked out the front door one day and no one stopped me. I got on a street car and rode a couple miles and got off in the middle of town wondering what the hell to do.
I had enough dough to eat a hamburger, then I hung out at the park for a few hours, waiting for night. My plan was to break into something and get some bucks.
I went into the men's pisser at the park though, several times, and the last time I did it was empty. But while I was standing at the urinal a guy came in a stood beside me. He gave me a big smile. Then he reached over and took hold of my dong. "Hi, baby," he said. I let him handle it. "Hi," I said back. He jerked on it real good for a minute.
"Christ, I want that thing." He leaned down and kissed it.
I knew about guys paying for it, so I said, "OK, how much?"
"C'mon to my joint." He shoved it back in my pants and I zipped up. He was kind of flustered. He beckoned to me and I followed him out. Hell, I might get a meal out of him.
I got more than that. He lived in a flat near the park and had a good job, he said. He looked like he did. He was a fairy-looking type, dreamy-eyed, you know. Arty as hell, and swished. His name was Bobby, and as soon as we got inside the door he was all over me. He practically ripped my pants off and stuffed it down his throat.
I was an old-timer at this by now, so I sat back and let him eat it. He went crazy for it. In those days I wasn't handsome, but I wasn't ugly. I didn't swish, anyway.
He made a meal on me, and then he gave me a drink and cleaned me up and we went out to dinner. He treated me like his. We went to a gay joint and he swished all over the damn place, and gay birds fluttered around, lisping at me and batting their eyes. I was right at home, but I was smart enough not to let him know that. He thought he had broken me in.
At least I got dinner. That night he blew me like a trumpet. Even after it went limp he blew tunes on it. He said he loved me.
He gave me dough and bought me clothes. I had found a lover. He made violent love to me for about a week before I gradually came around to doing the same for him. I didn't want to scare off a meal ticket. I was afraid that if he thought I was an agfay he might turn me out. And brother, I was sitting pretty, after that school. I had never had it so good.
Bobby was a pretty nice guy really. He had a good heart under all the frilly clothes he wore when we were alone. He loved to prance around in girl's clothes. He liked me to be naked. It made him horny to feel that I was naked, close by. My dingus drew him like a magnet. He homed in on it and nursed it for hours.
That love affair lasted about a month. Then he got tired of me.
But by then, I had discovered how to get along in the big city. While Bobby had been at work. I had prowled about, looking. I made friends with Speedball, a bookie, and became a runner for him. Through Speedie I got into all the Speakeasys on the north side, and met Tex Smith. Tex was a hard guy with one of the mobs.
Tex needed somebody just like me to drive for him.
I couldn't drive a car at all. Hell, I had hardly been in one in my life. Tex showed me how, and gave me a chance to practise. He wasn't a bad guy, sober. But drunk-look out! He had a bad habit of coming up with a knife when he got drunk mean. Then anybody could get cut.
He had a girl, a blonde (dyed) named Sandy.
She was a hustler with big brown eyes and a pair of hips that could rock a statue to sleep. She stayed with Tex when she didn't have an all-night john. One morning Tex got up and scrammed early. I was sleeping in the next room. I woke up to find her in bed with me, kittenish as hell, wanting to play.
I was scared silly, knowing Tex. "He ain't here," she said. "S'matter, baby, ain't you got one?"
She found it.
I found out she was naked, just by reaching out. She scissored me in a second and yanked on me. I rolled her on her back and beat it into her like I was killing snakes. She laughed like hell.
"For crissake, baby, what the hell you doing?"
"Screwin' you," I said.
"Jesus, you don't know how." Her legs went around me and she lifted my face and looked at me very serious. "You never had a girl before, huh?"
I admitted it. But I didn't tell her I had been a faggot for most of my life. She felt great.
So she showed me how to do it. "Get it in deep, then just writhe it-easy, dammit. I like it nice and slow, but deep. Push it more, yeh, hard. Now, keep it coming-"
I got my gun off in her God knows how many times before Tex showed up again. And when she blew me it was a lot different than I was used to. Girls were a hell of a lot different from guys. I liked it.
She did too. "Hey, you rile me up, baby," she would say. "An old hooker like me, too."
It went that way for quite a while. I drove the car for Tex, and other guys too. We guarded shipments and ran interference for trucks-ordinary muscle. It was an easy job and I got pretty good with a car.
Off duty, I hunted up Sandy lots of times. She hung out in the bars along Pitt Street. She was easy to find. I knew what hotels she used too, and all I had to do was hang around the lobby and she'd show sooner or later. Then I'd take her up to a room and get in the saddle.
I think she liked it some because she was putting something over on Tex. But I know she liked me, otherwise she wouldn't have come looking for me in the first place. She said she was crazy about me. Of course, women are hard to figure. I was just a punk kid and Tex was making big dough. Money didn't mean much to Sandy though.
"It's crap," she would say. "Look how I make it-just crap. Easy come, easy go. What the hell's money for but to spend?"
"It's nice to have."
She would look at me with the big eyes and open her legs. "Hell, baby, I can make all I want."
I had been driving for Tex about four months, and boffing Sandy on the sly, when she sat up in bed one day and stared at me. We were laying naked on a hotel bed, and she had just blown my head off.
"Let's get out," she said.
"What?"
"You an' me," she said. "Let's get out. Go someplace else."
"You mean leave Tex?"
She sniffed. "Hell yes, I mean leave Tex. What the hell is he? A guy, that's all. I'm sick of Tex."
"Whad he do to you?"
"Nothin'," she said. "Nothin'. I'm just tired of him, and that goddam knife of his."
I remembered that Tex had been a little tipsy the night before. Maybe he had shown the shiv. It would be like him. Sandy didn't like knives too much.
"He might come after us."
"Lissen, you for Tex or me? How the fuck he gonna know where we are? We blow town and that's that."
I looked at her, and for the first time I thought about being on my own. With a dame. Sandy was a hell of a lot of dame. Big tits and a lot of urge. When she got it in her head to screw she was wicked.
"Yeh," I said. "It might work-"
"Hell yes it'll work. We get on a train. How's he gonna find out? There's lots of dames. He'll find one."
So we did it. And it was damn easy. I threw my stuff in a bag, slid out and met her at the station and we were off. We went to the Big Town and put up in a hotel. Sandy got a John right off the bat and we were eating good.
That was my golden period.
She kept me like a goddam king. I never did a stick of work for a hell of a long time. Sandy worked her little tail off and I loved her up a few times a week and it was gravy. Gravy all the fuckin' way.
I shoulda saved some of that dough.
Sandy had a guy who got her Johns. I had a fancy apartment, ten suits, a car and golf sticks. I had it crazy. All I had to do was keep her happy. She got sore about this and that, the other dames were getting better scores than she did-that kind of thing, but mostly it was sheer gravy.
She got to be a fifty-buck-a-night girl. Sometimes she made as high as a grand a week.
The only trouble was, she got hooked. Some bastard got her high on H a few times. She got a kick out of it. When she went out on some of them parties on boats, they were mainlining and smoking blue sage.
She would come home sometimes, limping and tired out. "Baby, I'm all wrung out, dry as a fish-"
I had to pet her and give her baths.
She'd look so goddam pitiful. "Baby, they're fuckin' me too hard. I got to ease up-you know they gang up on you out there."
I told her I wouldn't let her go on the boat dates, but she went anyway. Benny, the hustler, he got her good dough and she couldn't turn it down. But they were rearnin' and screwin' her at the same time. He knew it, but Benny didn't care.
Then when I bathed her, I found the needle marks.
She had been at it longer than I knew about. She was hooked.
"I gotta have it, baby," she said. "Don't scold me-I gotta have it."
So I knew it was a matter of time. It took more and more of what she made to support the habit. She tried to keep me up too, but she was beginning to slip.
Benny said, "Hell, Chazz, figure it out. She got competition, you know that. A dame loses her shape, the tits sag, what the hell, guys go somewheres else. They's lots of young broads."
Then he gave her up. So I got her Johns. I had to give up the apartment, and the car. But she couldn't get enough. The habit was driving her nuts. It took a while, but she just couldn't make it. She was down to blowing guys in cars and haunting the bars, doing anything they wanted. She even did dog acts and lezzie shows.
But it got to her. Sandy had been a fifty-buck broad. She had pride.
One night she turned on the gas. And that was that.
She left me a note, saying she was sorry. I never had another broad like Sandy.