Whore Stories (23 page)

Hey! What about that oral sex I mentioned earlier? Ah, yes. During the 1950–1951 U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, known also as the Kefauver Committee, Hill was hauled in to explain why she was so often seen dating known gangsters. The committee also wanted to know why her dates with men using uncreative though menacing nicknames, seemed to develop amnesia whenever the question of taxes arose, specifically the matter of Virginia’s $161,000 in unpaid back taxes. When grilled by Senator Kefauver over why she drew paychecks from so many dubious sources, Ms. Hill gave it to him. The following is an excerpt from the interview transcript:

• Sen. Kefauver
  : How come that’s the case, Miss Hill?
  

• Virginia Hill
  : Senator, are you
  sure
  you want to know why these men give me money?
  

• Sen. Kefauver
  : Of course I want to know, Miss Hill.
  

• Virginia Hill
  : Senator, they give me money because I’m the best damned cocksucker in the United States!
  

The response so shocked New Hampshire senator Charles W. Tobey, a notoriously pompous old fart, that UPI reporter Harold Conrad said, “Tobey all but swallowed his Bible.”

Sadly, in 1966 at the age of forty-nine Virginia forced a handful of sleeping pills down her throat and dropped dead of an apparent suicide in a remote town in Austria. You will no doubt be happy to learn that she did divorce the Nazi before nodding off for good.

KHIONIYA GUSEVA

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Aging floozy

CLAIM TO FAME:
Would-be assassin of the “Mad Monk,” Rasputin

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Tsaritsyn (today Volgograd), Russia

Losing one’s nose isn’t always the end of the world. In fact, for some people, it’s a new beginning. And for Khioniya Guseva, a middling-to-effective prostitute in Romanov-run Russia, along with the abolishment of her nose came a revelation: She was born to be one of those people who embrace various religious zealots. This surely comes as no surprise and is a common U-turn among the naïve and/or noseless.

Guseva soon fell under the spell of Ilioder, a defrocked monk, radical anti-Semite, and former colleague of “The Mad Monk,” Rasputin. When Ilioder broke all ties to Rasputin, some assume he enlisted the past-her-prime frosty prosty, Khioniya, to stick it to his old colleague. Why? Rasputin’s meteoric rise in influence and power within the Romanov family had many embittered political and religious rivals out to cut the wild-eyed mystic down to size. A kind of Tsarist Squeaky Fromme, Khioniya was convinced by Ilioder that Rasputin was a false prophet and a nun raper, so she set out—on Ilioder’s orders—to send Rasputin back to hell.

One day, Rasputin was hanging around, probably staring at people with those penetrating eyes and making political and sports predictions, when, according to the deputy prosecutor of the Tobolsk district court, Khioniya, a woman “of repulsive ugliness, her nose was crushed and misshapen” approached him, bowed politely, and begged for a ruble. “You shouldn’t bow,” replied Rasputin, at which point “Khioniya Guseva drew a sharp dagger out of her coat and struck Rasputin in the stomach.” Khioniya then ripped the knife up to Rasputin’s navel and his guts fell out, whereupon she screamed, “I have killed the Antichrist!”

After the Mad Monk’s death, his penis turned up in Paris around 1920. In the 1970s the member found its way to a California antique dealer, and it popped up again in London during the ’90s, where an astute observer noticed that the artifact was not a penis at all, but a dried-up cucumber. But wait. In 2004, Dr. Igor Knyazkin opened the Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburg, to showcase the 15,000-plus sex collectibles he acquired over the years, including the Mad Monk’s nearly foot-long dong (11.8 inches) in all its original glory. Tests have yet to be run on the
objet
to determine its authenticity, but let’s hope this time it’s at least someone’s penis and not a gourd.

Typically, this would be the end of things, but Rasputin didn’t go down easy. Entrails in hand, Rasputin picked up a stick and gave Khioniya a wallop to her dome, followed by a near-mortal ass-kicking from incensed townspeople and assorted pro-Rasputin toughs.

Speculation remains that Khioniya may have been a spurned lover of the Mad Monk, or perhaps she was just an unsatisfied patient of the notorious mystic, soothsayer, and faith healer. Who wouldn’t be furious if she went to some alleged “healer” and her nose fell off? However, it seems Khioniya’s nose fell off independent of any quacky, quasi-salubrious mambo-jahambo on Rasputin’s part; the problem was most likely the result of a powerful case of Bolshevik syphilis, or a knife fight.

In the end, it would take a few more stab wounds, a good clubbing, strangulation, a flurry of bullets, the removal of his penis, and an icy dip in the Neva River to kill Rasputin. As for Ms. Guseva, the authorities sent her up to the booby hatch in Tomsk, where she spent her days in what family members referred to as “exalted religiosity.” She was released after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and never heard from again. As for Ilioder, he fled to Finland after hearing of the abortive attempt on Rasputin’s life, then moved to New York City and became a devout Baptist and a janitor at the Met Life building in Madison Square.

SADA ABE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
D-list geisha

CLAIM TO FAME:
Hauling a penis around Shinigawa for a week

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Japan

Geisha are supposed to operate on a separate plane of existence called “The Flower and Willow World,” or
kary
-
kai
. And it is a geisha’s residence in this farcical world of imagined flora and idyllic haiku that seems to make it okay for men to pretty much treat them as slaves or indentured servants. Sada Abe escaped all that. She was a risk taker who scoffed at convention. This was a geisha who would steal your heart
and
your penis.

In the late 1920s, Sada Abe was, by all accounts, a piss-poor geisha, a low-level drone in the Osaka geisha scene, spending most of her time just providing sex for money, which sounded suspiciously like straight-up prostitution. That being the case, Ms. Abe decided to muscle-up and join the ranks of the common streetwalkers. Abe proved to be wildly successful once she ditched the geisha routine and saw fit to hook down here with the rest of us. Abe eventually built up enough of a grubstake to—at the urging of one of her johns—begin an apprenticeship at a local restaurant. The owner of the restaurant was one Kichizo Ishida, who fell hard for Sada, despite his marriage to Mrs. Ishida. Sada fell for Kichizo too, and according to William Johnston’s
Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan
, the pair consummated their relationship in the middle of the restaurant, with a geisha who sang a love ballad as the two writhed around like a plate of
unagi-no-kabayaki
, popping and sweating on the grill. Well, that’s all very romantic, but things were about to take a decidedly peculiar turn.

While prostitution is in no way unique to Japan, the Japanese do bring to the field at least one unique diversion, a culinary curiosity of the first order: the practices of
nyotaimori
and
nantaimori
, or, “eating sushi off of nude people.”
Nyotaimori
(a buffet arrangement on top of a female) and
nantaimori
(male arrangement), consists of shelling out unfathomable amounts of money to pick cold sashimi off of a goose-bumped and presumably miserable model, or “plate.” A relatively new phenomenon, scholars postulate that
nyotaimori
and
nantaimori
may have developed in response to the 1980s economic boom in Japan, when people were searching for new and ever more ridiculous ways to waste their plentiful yen.

Sada became upset because after their lovemaking Kichizo always insisted on returning home to his family, although “upset” doesn’t really do justice to what happened next. During a four-day sex binge ending on May 18, 1936, Sada and Kichizo played out the usual fantasy: They played at strangling each other with Sada’s obi before the ex-geisha brandished a huge knife and placed it on the tip of Kichizo’s penis. Nothing new about that, right? Well, then Sada killed her lover and used her knife to separate him from his penis. She did have an explanation for this move, which she explained to one of her interrogating officers: “Since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him, no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him.” When someone asked, “Okay, but why did you cut off his penis after you strangled him to death with that obi?” her answer was logical, “Because I couldn’t take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.” Pretty touching stuff, but it gets better.

After carving her name on Kichizo’s arm and writing “Sada, Kichi together” on his severed truncheon, Sada lay with the body awhile, then left with Kichi’s dong in her handbag. She claims to have felt a strong sense of attachment “to his penis and thought that, only after taking leave from it quietly, could I then die. I unwrapped it and gazed at it. I put it in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me. In the end, I intended to jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.” Whoa. Luckily, the police finally tracked down Sada before her boner B.A.S.E. jump and she spent six years in prison.

Sada enjoyed a degree of celebrity after her release, writing a bestselling book and becoming a brief media sensation. Some people claim she is still alive, which would make her a whopping 106. As for Kichizo’s penis, it was given to the Tokyo University Medical School, where someone once again absconded with it. And so it goes that Kichizo’s unfortunate cock continues its “journey” today, perhaps as a paperweight or charm dangling helplessly from a keychain.

BARBARA HOFFMAN

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Biochemistry student

CLAIM TO FAME:
Massage parlor murderess

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Madison, Wisconsin

If you think that a happy ending is what happens at the finale of one of Hugh Grant’s crimes against cinema, you’ve been missing out. And you must change your life. But before demanding your $15 back from the cineplex and heading downtown to the massage parlor for a “happy ending” you can get excited about, think twice. You could run into someone like Barbara Hoffman.

If you met Barbara Hoffman in Madison, Wisconsin, during the mid-to-late 1970s, you were probably either (A) looking for sex at Jan’s Health Studio, one of the whorehouses-cum-massage parlors in town, or (B) in the biochemistry department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Barbara maintained a 3.9 GPA, making the dean’s list by day and turning tricks at the massage studio by night. Well, this kind of ambitious routine can lead to exhaustion, frustration, and, occasionally, murder.

Now, nobody here is going to judge anybody for rocking two disparate employment trajectories, especially if one of them is prostitution. I know how the landscape of contemporary biochemistry is changing by the nanosecond—or at least I imagine that it is—so it’s clearly necessary to have a safety net to make sure your golden years are everything you dream they’ll be. However, it’s when you start to burden yourself with added responsibilities like taking out life insurance policies on your soon-to-be-dead client and your boyfriend that you start to get overextended. And that’s exactly what happened to Ms. Hoffman.

In 1977, Barbara’s boyfriend Gerald Davies walked into a police station and informed them that he’d helped Barbara dispose of a body at the nearby Blackhawk Ski Club. Sure enough, the police went out there and found a naked dead man. Police charged Hoffman with the murder of Harold Berge, one of her clients at Jan’s. Davies was set to testify against Hoffman in court until he turned up dead in a bathtub. Unexplained bathtub death can be a game-changing snag for the wheels of justice, especially as Davies left a letter to the
Wisconsin State Journal
and his lawyer before his death, stating, “I was scared. I was jealous, Barb is innocent and I wrecked her life. All those stories I told about Barb were false.” “Well, shit,” thought everybody, “this changes everything.” Our murderous masseuse has been cleared!

In Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, we are treated to a romantic description of poisoning from the character Lucianus,

Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life usurp immediately.

Unfortunately, things aren’t so poetic once the poison kicks in. Cyanide is a choker, halting your body’s oxygen consumption. It goes down with an acrid burn, then you have to barf, and your head feels like it’s been mounted by a jaguar. Your vision will soon blur; you’ll do some “reeling”; and then, like an insouciant fart at the opera, you will collapse, and die, much to everyone’s disgust (unless it’s proven that you were murdered with cyanide, then they’ll feel bad for leaving you dozing through
Tristan and Isolde
again).