Working Sex (12 page)

No one questioned why we were there late at night. It was finals or Greek Week or something and anyway, in my case, all my sorority sisters went there too. But they didn’t know my naughty phone-sex secret since they were too busy violating pledges with Push-Up ice cream pops or, in a story that led me down a road that never ended for one client, taking them to the Large Midwestern University Medical School so they could volunteer to be examined by the young gynecology interns. It was all sorority speculums after that and he never wanted to hear about my arm curls. Others just wanted to hear about school.

“I’m worried,” a client once said.

“About what?” I asked.

“That your submission to me may affect your grades.”

I asked him about applying to grad school and the next time he called with advice for forty-five minutes and I was able to tell him all about my 4.0 and my goals. After that, it was time to play slave girl and blow job, and he assured me I’d be fine, just fine in grad school.

We had traditions and we had game days. We were in a college town, after all. Late nights when we spun on our creaky chairs, made slurping noises on the phone, and read and reread the same tattered issue of
Foxy Boxing,
we had a game.

There was an envelope full of words written on slips of paper. We crammed them into the envelope until it was full to bursting—and we played it like this, fast and furious. The minute one of the girls got on a call, she’d open the envelope and draw out words that had to be used in the call. We were very creative, since we had time on our hands. The player wrestled with words like gravy boat, Mrs. Beasley doll, corncob, and a variety of Ozzy Osbourne lyrics we threw in for good measure.

“Oooh baby,” I’d say when it was my turn, “you’re gonna make me bark at the moon.” We’d all huddle around the speaker in the manager’s office and howl with laughter as the player would purr, “Oh honey, I’m gonna swallow up that corncob!” followed with “I bet you wanna touch my squirrel, don’t you?” and “That’s right, play with Mrs. Beasley!”

Laughter would vibrate through the thin walls. Sometimes the player would have to press the mute button on our big, heavy office phones so she wouldn’t laugh, wouldn’t break her throaty whisper or high-pitched-giggle girl voice. The men, if they were confused, didn’t show it; they just kept stroking their corncobs (or sporks, or pencils) until the end result. We wondered often if they were so drunk they didn’t care or if we’d somehow reprogrammed their erotic responses.

She pulls a slip of paper and covers her mouth with her hand and in the office we take a deep breath. “You know
what I hear in my head when I’m fucking?” she says to the two men on the line, each of them sharing an extension, jerking off to her voice, as close as they have ever come to touching. “War Pigs,” she says, and hums it in a porno moan as we in the office giggle and applaud.

“Oh baby,” one of the guys says, “that’s so fuckin’ hot!” and it’s all over for him, it’s all heavy breathing and exhaustion and we’re all collapsed on the floor, trying to breathe from laughing so hard. She was the queen from then on.

It got us through the long nights, through the cavalcade of drunk calls when the bars closed on the West Coast, through the callers who just wanted to hear how much you were a no-good dirty whore, through the ones who just wanted to hear you come. Until the morning, when the sun rose and the day shift and more managers came on.

We had a high turnover at Campus Sluts. People graduated from the actual Large Midwestern, moved, got tired of the coprophiliac calls or had a fight with the manager, anything, and I was one of them after a year and a half. My last shift I came out as the sun came up. I’d be moving to Boston that morning and as I walked to the car, I wish I had a tassel to turn or a hat to throw. I’ve since worked as a model and I still work as a home-based phone-sex operator now and then
and when I do, I think of the Campus Sluts and look back on those false years at Large Midwestern with a sort of pride. I did a lot: I won the English department essay contest, gangbanged the whole Sigma Chi house, applied to grad school, did my first
bukkake
film, ravaged innumerable pledges with vegetables, fingers, and frozen desserts, was intimate with balloons—all while working out every night and getting a well-deserved 4.0. If that isn’t dedication, I don’t know what is.

G
loria Lockett is the former codirector of the prostitutes rights organization COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) and Executive Director of the California Prostitute Education Project (CAL-PEP), an Oakland-based, nonprofit AIDS and HIV prevention organization that works with street prostitutes. Lockett served on San Francisco District Attorney Terence Hallinan’s Task Force on Prostitution and as a member of former Governor George Deukmejian’s California AIDS Leadership Task Force. She has been published in several anthologies, including
The Black Women’s Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves
, edited by Evelyn C.
White (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1990),
Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry
, edited by Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander (San Francisco, CA: Cleis Press, 1984), and
Lessons from the Damned: Queers, Whores and Junkies Respond to AIDS
, by Nancy Stoller (New York: Routledge, 1998). She was also, for eighteen years, a prostitute.

 

SIOBHAN: What led you into the sex industry?

GLORIA: Money. I was young, twenty-one when I first got into the sex industry. I had two jobs, one as a clerk at a Lucky’s store and the other as a clerk at City Hall. I was also waitressing at the Hyatt House Restaurant and various hotels in Oakland, trying to support myself and my two kids, and it was very, very hard.

 

SIOBHAN: How did you begin working in the sex industry? Did you have any connections with people who were already working in it?

GLORIA: During that time women in San Francisco worked in their fur coats. They were nicely dressed, and their hair would look good. One day, I said to this guy I was seeing, jokingly, “I could do that.” Next thing I know he was bringing me a black dress and telling me to put it on. Basically, he and I were going out to work. That was in 1967, and it just went on from there.

 

SIOBAHN: How long were you in the sex industry?

GLORIA: I still consider myself to be in the sex industry, but as far as dating and working for myself, I was in it for eighteen years. I worked on the streets for about ten years, and then I worked in clubs in Burlingame and different hotels. In the latter years I went to working ads in newspapers.

 

SIOBAHN: How were issues around safety and clients dealt with?

GLORIA: I was working in a stable with lots of other women for about eighteen years straight. For ten of the eighteen years, there was an average of ten of us, me being the eldest. We were always around each other and worked in pairs on the streets and in hotels. We had procedures where if you got out of a car and no one was around, you took down the guy’s license plate number, or someone driving behind you took down his license number. As soon as you got into a hotel room you would pick up the phone and tell someone where you were and what time you were expected back. For the most part, I felt pretty safe; the streets are a little more dangerous than being inside, but a lot funnier. When you worked inside you had to play girlfriend and boyfriend, but on the streets the guys knew what you were down there for. They knew why they were picking you up—there were very few games that were played.

 

SIOBAHN: How was race an issue in terms of how much money you made?

GLORIA: The money varied. It went up and down depending upon what city and what town. Over the eighteen years I worked in a lot of different states. In order to be black and work the sex industry you had to move around a lot. In each state the money was different, anywhere from $10 to $600. I’ve worked Vegas, Hawaii, Alaska, Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco, and other small cities, so money depended on where you worked and what kind of date you were going to turn. If you were in Vegas in those days, the average date was $100. Most of the time the guys would offer you as little as possible. If you were on the streets they would offer you $10 or $20, but the art is to talk the men out of however much you could get instead of taking what they offered you.

There was a time when I was on the streets that I could turn as many as ten or eleven tricks a night. But if you were in a hotel it was more like three or four, and if you worked out of ads in papers then it was five or six. If you worked in Alaska prices were up in those days because of the pipeline, so men had lots of money, plus it was very cold. Guys would work three months at a time before they would be ready to spend their money.

Race played a very big part in how much money you
made. Fortunately or unfortunately, I hung around a bunch of sisters who were white. We all helped each other out. If one of the girls would catch a date, we had an apartment or checked out the pad that we were working out of. The two or three black women would wait until they got to the apartment and we would double-date. So, if you were standing out on the corner, they would definitely pick up the white girl first. No matter how big, ugly, or old she looked—it didn’t matter: The white girl went first, then the black girls.

When I worked the hotel scene there were very few blacks, so you had to be very careful. You had the chance to rip guys off, not that I did, though it was tempting at times. But you couldn’t rip guys off because there were only two of you, and people in the hotel would know who you were, even if the guy didn’t.

You couldn’t hang around with other black girls. You had to hang by yourself or with other white girls, because if you were hanging in the Fairmont or the Hyatt, the people working there were more apt to bother you if you were with another black girl. I might have hung with one black girl from time to time, but for the most part I hung with white girls or by myself. It’s a very racist thing, for different reasons. Some people have never seen a black woman; they’re raised in areas where they don’t see black women until they’re grown. Actually, I remember one time I was standing on the corner
of MacArthur in San Pablo and this guy kept passing by looking at me. Finally, a stable sister of mine came out—a big white girl—and he picked her up. I waited until he got to the house; waited until she got her money. Then I went in and said to the guy, “You’ve got to tell me why you picked her up because I know that you were more interested in me than her. What is it?” He was shaking and he said, “Well, I didn’t see a black person until I was twenty. I was too scared.” [laughs] Racism plays a part in anything that you do.

 

SIOBAHN: Was the money more equal when you were with other black women?

GLORIA: Well, it’s hard to say because the skill was not how much a person would offer you, but how much money you could talk them out of. I think it was probably about equal; of course they would give a white girl more money than they would give you. So black girls knew that they had to talk. I always figured if you had the money on you, then you should be prepared to spend it. Unfortunately, this was before ATM cards. [laughs]

 

SIOBAHN: How many times have you been arrested and what were the circumstances of your arrests?

GLORIA: I’ve been arrested about forty times. The first time I got arrested it was horrible; I was in San Francisco and
a sweep happened. They arrested me and about thirty other prostitutes. I had never been to jail. I was twenty-one. I didn’t know anything about jail and I didn’t know anyone who had ever been to jail. I remember I was in jail crying and one of the girls whispered to me, “You can’t cry because if you cry the other girls are going to talk about you.”

I was like, “I don’t care! I’m never going to do this again.” The girl said, “Aw, baby. You’ll be back out there tomorrow.” She was right. [laughs]

They had you sleep on cement floors with wool blankets, which I’m allergic to. The toilets were in front of the bed, so there was no privacy. In the first year I pled guilty, so I was on probation for a year—it was horrible. After that, I fought all my cases and I have to say that I’m a little bit different from the average person because I refused to think I was a criminal. I got up every morning and went to court, and used a public defender, sometimes private lawyers. I spent a lot of time in court and—knock on wood—I never served more than three days. But it was very difficult because if you’re on the streets you get arrested, you’re an easy pickup.

Police always want easy marks, and prostitutes are a lot less dangerous than a domestic violence call. If you’re not on the streets, for the most part, you won’t get arrested. Police constantly harass prostitutes; police have arrested me and said things like, “What if we put sand in this Vaseline? That
would really be something.” They used to take our condoms and punch holes in them. So, the police were really bad, and that’s another reason why you had to move around. I really hated it that we had to move around so much. Trying to raise kids and moving from one city to another city was hard. But my kids’ lives were a little more stable. Either my mother kept them or the housekeeper did, so they weren’t jumping all over the place like I was. I moved around a lot to keep from going to jail. Jail back then is the same as now, most people in jail are black. White people who go to jail don’t stay and they don’t get the same amount of time.

 

SIOBAHN: Were murders of prostitutes a big concern for you when you were working the streets?

GLORIA: It’s always a concern, but my situation was a little bit different because I hung around so many people. Misery does not like company, so most of the time the women that were getting murdered hung by themselves. There was a time when pimps, if you will, would not let their women work with other women for fear that their women would become more educated and organized and leave them.