Whore Stories (27 page)

Can a girl really be guilty if she was born with a short fuse? The answer is yes, especially if after that fuse burns down, she traipses around town, carving up passersby on the street. Court transcripts from the period examine the issue:

We have seen her several times before the Recorder, and always wondered at the wildness and good-humor expressed by her face, and the politeness of her demeanor in Court. Though so smooth and smiling outside, it appears that she is in reality another Lucretia Borgia; that is a fiend incarnate when insulted.

So the message here is don’t judge a trick by his or her cover. And watch your back, especially in Louisiana.

Chapter VI
THE MAGICAL MYSTERY WHORES

Like any storied tradition, prostitution is fraught with its share of hearsay, fables, false Gods, magical beasts, and bogeymen. Most Western religious texts are rife with whore stories; ancient Asian lore abounds with tales of mystical courtesans and debauched deities; and in some cultures they just invent harlots to serve as foci for annoying ditties. Were any of these elusive sexpots real? Depending on your level of gullibility, you might find the following stories of this randy gang useful for understanding where many of our most debased notions about sex have their genesis. To understand the phenomenon better, it helps to take a closer look at our myths, where the imagination runs rampant and truth and booty are often not what they seem.

THE WHORE OF BABYLON

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Reigning over the kings of the Earth

CLAIM TO FAME:
Satan’s main squeeze

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Babylon

The Whore of Babylon (
neé
Mystery) had it rough. Hell, she
still
has it rough. For over two millennia this poor creature has put a real fright into unsuspecting Sunday school students and sundry other readers of Revelation. Sometimes thought of as Satan’s “Pretty Woman,” this whore pops up in the Bible wearing an outrageous purple ensemble with gold accoutrements, and she is holding up a cocktail featuring the “abominations and filthiness of her fornication.” If that means what I think it means, the Whore of Babylon should feel lucky she ever got a date at all. It’s amazing, really, how disorganized and (to be quite honest) unattractive many of these early/mythological prostitutes were. Thank goodness for progress in both fashion and prostitution, because the Whore of Babylon sounds a lot like a garden-variety monster, as opposed to a sultry, swinging lady of the night.

“Being a hooker does not mean being evil. The same with a pick-pocket, or even a thief. You do what you do out of necessity.”

—Samuel Fuller, American director, screenwriter

With a large tattoo on her forehead that reads, “
MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH
” one is left marveling at (A) what lengths some people will go to for attention, and (B) how big her forehead must have been.

A close reading of the text suggests that not only was “Mystery” a tattooed ghoul, she was also as big as a house. Actually, she’s even bigger than a house: “And the woman which thou sawest is [a] great city, which reigns over the kings of the earth.” That’s
thick
. The Whore of Babylon might be just a metaphor, but in any case, if you’re the devil, you’ve got to take pretty much any piece of ass that comes your way.

Fat, faithless, freaky streetwalking fiends drunk “with the blood of saints” aren’t for everybody, but the Bible tells us: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.” Does this admonition apply to the Antichrist, one wonders? Even a fiend needs a friend once in a while.

SHAMHAT

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Resident skeezer; temple harlot

CLAIM TO FAME:
Civilizing mankind

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Mesopotamia

It’s 2500
B.C
. in Mesopotamia, and Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, is sitting pretty in Sumer. He’s two parts God and one part man, and he’s running around acting like a damned fool. Meathead that he is, Gilgamesh challenges every man he sees to a heavy-lifting competition, which he knows he will inevitably win, as do the men he challenges. It is nowhere near sporting, and the men of Uruk are getting fed up. Aggravating the situation further, after Gilgamesh exhausts the men of Uruk, he moves from house to house having sex with their wives.

Luckily for the male population of Uruk, the goddess Aruru, who created mankind, took note of Gilgamesh’s habit of taking unfair advantage, and she sought to create a foil, a rival of sorts, for Gilgamesh. The ancient poem
The Epic of Gilgamesh
explains what followed:

Aruru washed her hands, she pinched off some clay, and threw it into the wilderness.

In the wild she created valiant Enkidu,

born of Silence, endowed with strength by Ninurta.

His whole body was shaggy with hair,

he had a full head of hair like a woman,

his locks billowed in profusion like Ashnan.

He knew neither people nor settled living,

but wore a garment like Sumukan.

He ate grasses with the gazelles,

and jostled at the watering hole with the animals;

as with animals, his thirst was slaked with water.

Aruru must have been a little disappointed in her creation, because a dude who eats grass and jostles animals is probably no improvement over Gilgamesh. Where is his wit, his tact, and his ability to engage in airy persiflage? Is he even a grown ass man?

This is where Shamhat, the Mesopotamian streetwalker, steps into the jam:

Shamhat unclutched her bosom, exposed her sex, and he took in her voluptuousness.

She was not restrained, but took his energy.

She spread out her robe and he lay upon her,

she performed for the primitive the task of womankind.

His lust groaned over her;

for six days and seven nights Enkidu stayed aroused,

and had intercourse with the harlot

until he was sated with her charms.

Having taken all the starch out of Enkidu, Shamhat convinces him to go into town and give Gilgamesh a run for his money; man up a little, you know? A bunch of shepherds clean him up, give him a nice haircut and send him off to the city of Uruk, where folks think he looks a lot like Gilgamesh, the guy he is supposed to stop from cock-blocking every man in town.

Shamhat encourages Enkidu to relax, try to fit in with the locals. She urges him, “Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives. / Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land.” Enkidu gets a little carried away. He “ate the food until he was sated, he drank the beer—seven jugs!” Uh-oh.

Drinking seven jugs of beer in one sitting is a pretty solid showing, but do you ever wonder who among us has been the
most
hooched-up, like, ever? Though you won’t find it in any reputable book of records, in 2004, Pyotr Petrov, a sixty-seven-year-old Bulgarian national’s blood alcohol content (BAC) was measured at an astonishing .91 percent, the highest BAC on record. The
lethal
limit usually kicks in around .40 percent. According to doctors, Mr. Petrov was not only not dead, but he chatted amicably with his doctors. Petrov’s curriculum vitae is presumably under review by the League of Extraordinary Alcoholics and the Blind Drunk Avengers.

Enkidu heads out to ambush Gilgamesh, but Gilgamesh puts the over-served new guy on his prat. Alas, after the first two tablets of
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, Shamhat doesn’t figure, and so like some shitty Sumerian buddy movie, Gilgamesh and his foil, the now calm, relatively collected, and sober Enkidu, take off on a juvenile camping trip around Mesopotamia playing grab-ass and “slaying monsters.” So in spite of Shamhat’s best efforts,
The Epic of Gilgamesh
, a seminal work from one of the world’s most formidable empires, ends up reading a lot like
Tango & Cash
.

MOLLY MALONE

PRO
FILE

DAY JOB:
Food cart proprietor

CLAIM TO FAME:
Ireland’s favorite moll

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Dublin

Molly Malone is not just the name of a seedy Irish bar; it’s also the name of an iconic figure in the annals of whoredom. The eponymous Molly may or may not have been an actual streetwalker in Ireland during the closing years of the seventeenth century. Legend and lyrics, however, have it that one Molly Malone, a down-on-her-luck fishmonger-cum-part-time hussy was found dead on the corner of what are now Grafton and Suffolk streets in Dublin. A woman of unsurpassed beauty and infected with any number of venereal diseases, Molly was said to have plied her trade from Grafton Street and St. Stephen’s Green to the ivory tower at Trinity College. University environments are notorious havens for cockles, mussels, and assorted deviants.

How and why did sweet Molly die? Some claim VD; the more naive presume food poisoning (cockles and mussels can go bad before you know it). But more importantly, how did Molly live? What was she like? The truth is, nobody is really certain. Some historians claim that she was the mistress of King Charles II, while others stick closer to the script, arguing that she was just an omnipresent nuisance to most of Dublin who went up and down the streets screaming about crustaceans. Still others aver that she was simply the personification of your every-day Irish harlot.

Whatever your gullibility quotient, you can travel to Dublin today and behold the statue of Molly Malone erected at Grafton and Suffolk. In what is assuredly a warped interpretation of how a destitute seventeenth-century Irish prostitute might actually look, the Molly in the statue appears vigorous and free of cooties, though she is pushing a wheelbarrow full of dead fish and wearing a revealing dress out of which her breasts are jockeying for egress.

In many ways, the Irish are much like us, creating their own peculiar religions, mythologies, superheroes, and saints to explain away another society gone maniac. Take the story of St. Brigid, Ireland’s unofficial patron saint of the open bar. As one legend goes, Brigid was doing community service in a leper colony when the lepers ran out of beer, so Brigid stepped up and changed the lepers’ bath water into brew.

And if you’re looking to say the official Irish prayer in honor of St. Brigid, here it is:

“
I’d like a great lake of beer for the King of Kings.
I would like to be watching Heaven’s family drinking it through
all eternity.”

Amen.

Nobody can say for sure if Molly was indeed real, although the Dublin Millennium Commission proclaimed June 13, the alleged date of her death, as “Molly Malone Day,” which the Irish celebrate by getting trashed and having messy sex. This is pretty much like all other days in the land of Erin, but at least on Molly Malone Day they have a somewhat legitimate excuse.

TIRESIAS

PRO
FILE

DAY JOBS:
Largely ignored advice columnist/prophet

CLAIM TO FAME:
Lived as both a man and a woman

THEATER OF OPERATIONS:
Ancient Greece

Zeus and Hera, as you know from
Clash of the Titans
(the old, good, bad version, not the new, bad, bad version) or maybe from school, were always fussing at each other. One argument they couldn’t settle was the one about whether men or women get more enjoyment out of sex. You could make the argument that it only makes sense to discuss this issue on a case-by-case basis. However, if you are one of the gods living high on Mount Olympus, you can manipulate mortals any old way you want. You can even set up an experiment in which the control variable is also the dependent variable, and thereby get a definitive answer about who gets more pleasure out of a roll in the hay.

Tiresias, the blind prophet of Thebes, was the subject of just such an experiment. You may recognize Tiresias from
The Odyssey
,
Antigone
, or Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, stories in which he gives people excellent advice that they rarely take. Indeed, Tiresias was the Rodney Dangerfield of the Aegean: He got no respect.

As if he didn’t have enough to worry about, Hera punished Tiresias severely when he killed two snakes with a stick while the snakes were making sweet, serpentine love. Outraged, the goddess sentenced Tiresias to spend a period of seven years as a woman. If you’re wrestling with the question of whether this punishment fits the crime, just give it up—the Greeks had a dizzying system of torts.

As a woman, Lady Tiresias totally thrived, finding that (s)he really cottoned to the idea of prostitution. (S)he, accumulated all sorts of wealth and valuable experiences from the other side of the gender fence, too. One has a finite amount of energy of course, sexual or otherwise, and toward the end of his tenure as a woman, Tiresias ran out of steam and had to eventually settle down, marry a nice man, and give birth to a son. One wonders how family reunions, locker room hijinks, and bachelor/bachelorette parties were handled during—and after—Tiresias’s “transformation.”