Hella Nation - Evan Wright [123]
But in all his myriad past experiences and encounters, Greg credited one man with teaching him the most important lesson of his life. He met his teacher in the early seventies on the tennis courts at Stanford. During certain hours of the week, the courts were open to the public. According to Greg, a man showed up one morning driving a garishly painted Cadillac. He wore a peacock-feather hat and an ankle-length fur coat, which he slipped off to reveal standard tennis whites. The man was a street pimp from Oakland. Greg and the pimp became friends on and off the court. In Greg’s personal lore, the pimp taught him the essentials of the “whore con”:
a. Men are powerless before the lure of female sexuality.
b. The whore lures men by promising unlimited sexual fulfillment.
c. As soon as she has lured a man and has begun to extract payment, the whore withholds as much sex as she can get away with.
d. The whore understands that the more she withholds, the greater her value.
e. All women are whores.
After dropping out of therapy, I increasingly turned to Greg for personal guidance. According to him, the object of being a man was to outsmart the whore con. Outwardly, he seemed to be a master of the game. There were weeks when he bragged of bedding a new beautiful woman every night—dancers, porn girls and young, college-educated women working entry-level Hollywood jobs.
But the more time I spent with Greg, the more he seemed to be a woefully inept player. Inevitably, he developed infatuations with women who moved into his apartment and began treating him with the cold, disinterested contempt they thought he deserved.
For several months it was Treatie, a peep-show dancer more than twenty years Greg’s junior. Greg would pick me up in his red Corvette, we would have dinner at the Daily Grill or Louise’s Trattoria, then we would drive up and down Sunset and Hollywood discussing his problems with her, occasionally pulling over to chat with a streetwalker.
“Treatie and I have nothing in common,” Greg lamented. “She doesn’t even want to fuck anymore. You give the girl a joint and a goth comic book, and that’s all she needs to be happy. She doesn’t care about anything else, except my car. She hates my car. She says it’s ‘cheesy.’ I tell her, ‘Treatie, my choice of vehicle is severely limited. I’m a pornographer. I’m supposed to drive a cheesy car.’”
Then there was the heroin-addict prostitute he met on Hollywood Boulevard. Greg portrayed his first encounter with her as a conquest in which he had beaten the whore con. “She was on the street in a baby-doll T-shirt and velvet hip-huggers. I pulled over, and she gets in the car. She asks, ‘Do you want to date me?’ I say, ‘Yeah, show me your pussy.’ She says, ‘That’ll cost you sixty bucks.’ I say, ‘I ain’t paying for it, sweetheart. Get out of the car.’ ” He laughed. “She pulled down her pants and showed me anyway. We went to a motel, and she fucked me for free.”
The most appealing aspect of this relationship to Greg was that the girl was a hooker. “As long as she stays a prostitute,” he reasoned, “there’s not a big danger of getting committed.” But one night, when we were supposed to be planning a five-day video shoot, Greg was unable to work. His mind was on his hooker girlfriend. “There are things about her I don’t understand,