Thirty - Jill Emerson [50]
Fancy talk. What it comes down to is I’m broke, and what do I do now, Mother?
I am honestly damned if I know.
The jobs I checked out, the jobs I looked at but did not touch, were all pretty much the same thing. Nine-to-five crap for a hundred and ten dollars a week. It didn’t seem worth the trouble when I had money and now it just isn’t enough. What am I going to do on a hundred and ten a week? That comes to about eighty-five a week after taxes, and I pay more than that right now for rent alone. I pay three hundred and seventy-five dollars a month rent, and there is no kind of job I can get that will give me that kind of bread.
I suppose I could get out of here. Except that I really like it here, and where am I going to go? I could find some shithole in the East Village for fifty dollars a month, but how long could I live there before I started to go crazy? It wasn’t too bad visiting Arnold and David at their apartments, although it was occasionally depressing, especially Arnold’s, but then I had them with me. I can’t imagine being alone in a place like that, returning to it after a day’s work pounding a typewriter or whatever you have to do to bring home a lousy eighty-five dollars a week.
There are these jobs they advertise in the East Village Other. Modeling, which means nude work of one sort or another. Once in a while I suppose it’s a legitimate job for a photographer who takes dirty pictures, but I gather that mostly it’s working in those modeling clubs where creeps bring cameras and take nude pictures of you, half the time without film in the camera.
(What sort of men actually go to those places? I mean, I can see a man paying a whore, but to pay money to click a camera at some bored, naked girl. I mean, why?)
They pay five or ten dollars an hour. Ten dollars an hour to have some goon snap pictures of you isn’t too bad. But I don’t suppose the work is very steady. Not the sort of thing you can count on. Those places must get shut down from time to time, or else the customers must get tired of the same old faces.
Faces?
Besides, it’s not much different from being a whore, except for being less interesting.
That’s what it all keeps coming to, doesn’t it?
Oh, I don’t want to think about it. I really don’t. I can’t think about anything else and I don’t want to think about this, certainly not for the time being. It was all something I knew I was going to have to face pretty soon. Another three months at the outside and my money would have run out, even if that son of a bitch hadn’t walked off with it. (Maybe I shouldn’t call him names. Maybe he was poor and he really needed the money. Well, he isn’t poor now. Now he has my fifteen hundred dollars, the son of a bitch.)
God, I wish I could get high! I mean really nice and high and just sit around feeling great for a couple of hours. I think I could face anything right now if first I could just get high and have a little time to myself, just high and happy. That mixture of grass and hash that I smoked with the boys. I would love to have a taste of that now and go off on one of those happy bubbly cerebral highs. Or that red crud that Eric keeps around the place, the sweet-and-sour rose petals, whatever the hell it is. Some kind of a sex drug, but you could take it and get high and skip the sex and it would be better than sitting around like this.
I suppose I’ll get drunk, which isn’t the same thing at all. And if I do, it’ll have to be on wine. I can’t afford anything classier. Not now.
July 11
I don’t feel any different, and if I looked in the mirror, which I have been gradually breaking myself of the habit of doing, I don’t suppose I would look any different either. But then neither did Dorian Gray.
I made forty-five dollars. One this afternoon for twenty-five, one this evening for twenty. (If you can’t get five, take two.)
There’s nothing to it.
Literally nothing to it. I never would have believed this. I would have believed almost anything else about prostitution—what a windy clinical word for the actual process—but I wouldn’t have believed it could