Chapter 2

Yvette returned a few minutes later bringing with her an older woman who appeared to Jennlynn to be in her late thirties. She was not exactly dressed in what were considered to be work clothes, at least not for working at the Redlite Ranch; she had on sweat pants and a flannel shirt that bulged out from the pressure of a large chest. Her honey-blonde hair needed some work, and it was pretty clear that she hadn’t been up long. She seemed familiar to Jennlynn, but she had worked with a lot of different women over the years.

“Didn’t you used to be called Frenchy?” Jennlynn asked.

“I did,” Justine yawned as she sat down in one of the lounge chairs while Yvette stood by listening. “I got bored with it and changed it. Besides there was a Francine working here as a regular at the time and we kept being confused.”

Jennlynn’s memory snapped into focus. Yes, she remembered this woman, although she didn’t know her real name or where she was from. She had worked with the prostitute now known as Justine from time to time over the years. It hadn’t been often; while Jennlynn was a weekend girl Justine worked full three-week shifts, but only three or four times a year. Still, there had been slow periods when they’d had some very good conversations, and Jennlynn remembered the impression that she was a very smart and understanding woman. After thinking about it for a second Jennlynn seemed to remember that Justine had a husband and two high school-aged kids, and preferred working occasional intense shifts rather than a regular job so she could spend more time with her family.

“I’m sorry we got you up,” Jennlynn said.

“Oh, I was up,” Justine replied. “I don’t go on duty till noon, so I thought I’d spend some time at the books. I’ve got a major paper due in a little over a couple months and I’m behind schedule.”

“A paper?” Yvette frowned.

“I’m working on my doctorate in psychology,” Justine smiled. “A class here, a paper there, and I’ve still got to research, write, and defend a dissertation. That’ll probably take another year unless I get lazy again. I’ve been diddling with it for four years now.”

“You’re working on a doctorate?” the younger woman said, clearly amazed at the thought. “I, uh, I never expected to find that here, of all places.”

“It’s not as strange as you might think,” Shirley laughed. “Jennlynn here has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, and there are a few other girls working on advanced degrees. We have a weekend girl who comes in pretty often to get money to pay down her student loans. She’s an emergency room doctor on her day job. If her plans don’t change there’s another girl who will be here all summer to build up her cash for when she starts med school next fall.”

“Not every girl here does it like that,” Jennlynn explained. “But there are a few. I paid for the second half of my undergraduate degree working on my back up out of Carson City and at Bettye’s Ranch years ago. That’s where I met Shirley. A hard-working girl here can make some serious money, and then have plenty of free time to do something useful with it if they don’t throw it away on booze and drugs and having fun.”

“You’re young enough that you probably haven’t thought about it,” Justine said seriously. “But if you decide you want to make a career out of this, it usually ends early. There are not many women who stay with it when they get to be as old as I am. There’s too much competition from girls your age. At least there are some guys who are a little more comfortable with a more mature woman.”

“Besides, a more mature woman has had time enough to learn all the tricks to pleasing a guy,” Jennlynn laughed, then sobered. “But Justine is right. At your age you need to be thinking about developing an exit strategy, because if you stay with it the time will come all too quickly when you’ll need one. It’s not something you need to be deciding right away, but you ought to be thinking about it.”

“You should be taking advantage of what you have now,” Justine agreed. “Unless you want to spend thirty years at a drive-up window asking, ‘Would you like fries with that?’”

“If you’re lucky,” Jennlynn sighed. “Justine, that sort of ties in with what I wanted to talk to you about. Can you take time enough from your studying that I can bend your ear for a while?”

“Yeah, sure. If I don’t do it now I can always do it later. What do you have in mind?”

“It’s not simple. Yvette, why don’t you get a cup of coffee for Justine, and maybe bring a carafe so the rest of us can have some more?”

“Would you like fries with that?” Yvette snickered as she turned to head toward the kitchen.

“Actually, that sounds good but it’s a little early for me,” Jennlynn shot back.

When Yvette returned with the coffee Jennlynn was just getting to the point in her story where she was telling about her young friend-of-a-friend who had managed to escape from her horrendous situation. “What I’m concerned about is that perhaps I’ve made this life sound too good, and that there are other girls who will wind up in the same boat because of it,” Jennlynn explained.

“It’s a valid concern,” Justine told her. “I saw that story you did for WNN, and you’re right, it’s bound to be appealing to some young women.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” Shirley agreed. “I know we’re getting more inquiries from girls who think they want to try it out than we used to get. Not a lot more, but more, but I have to wonder how many girls who haven’t gotten in touch with us here think it’s an easy life and want to do it.”

“There are undoubtedly some,” Justine agreed. “I wouldn’t want to say how many, because the number is probably smaller than you think, but my saying that is just a guess based on one of the ideas I have for a dissertation topic. There are bound to be some girls who never thought of a career as a house girl before and think it’s a good idea. But even as easy as things are here in comparison to the other ways a girl can be a hooker, not all of them can hack the reality, and even fewer can be a real success at it. We all know it seems easy, but it often isn’t.”

“No fooling,” Shirley smiled. “I’ve seen a lot of girls over the years who think it’s a good deal and act like they’re eager and ready to go, but when it comes down to having to do it, they just can’t make themselves.”

“I know it wasn’t easy for me when I first turned out,” Jennlynn agreed. “It wasn’t like I was forced into it, but I didn’t have a hell of a lot of other options, either. And that was after I’d been one of the more round-heeled girls at Caltech for a couple of years. There’s a stigma about doing it for money and knowing that you’re a prostitute that’s hard to overcome. As much as I’ve done it over the years maybe I haven’t overcome it all the way yet.”

“Right,” Yvette put in. “There’s a hell of a big difference between being an easy lay for free and taking money for it. It wasn’t easy for me, either.”

“Maybe it’s because the girls who come here have thought about it,” Justine said thoughtfully. “I think a lot of girls who wind up in other parts of the business don’t think about it. It’s something they’re forced into, or something that they drift into little by little until they’re up to their necks in it. That’s how it first happened with me, and I was lucky to get out of it.”

“How was that?” Jennlynn asked.

“I got started early,” Justine shrugged. “I was fifteen when I did it for pay the first time and I wasn’t a virgin then. I was just a high school girl, and another guy from a different high school wanted to get laid and offered me twenty bucks. It sounded like a good deal since if he’d asked nicely I probably would have done him for free anyway. I guess I wasn’t old enough to see that there was any difference between a freebie and getting paid for it. Anyway, I thought the money was nice so I did it again every now and then. I was a nice little suburban high school girl and could usually get money from my folks, but this was money I’d made by myself and they didn’t have to know where I got it.”

“It was pretty much the same way for me, except that I was seventeen,” Yvette nodded. “I only did it a few times like that until I was in college. I needed money, and found out about this escort service, and I still didn’t do dates an awful lot.”

“I wish it had worked that way for me,” Justine shook her head. “Let’s just say the money looked awful good to me, and I realized pretty soon that adults had more money than high school kids although it was harder to make the connection with them. I managed to get the word around, and pretty soon I was doing it for a hundred dollars a pop, two or three nights a week, and I thought I was doing real well, you know? But I wanted more, and one day I ran into a guy who said he could get me more business if he could have a cut of it.”

“A pimp,” Shirley snorted.

“Yeah, but I didn’t realize it at the time. Even though I’d been doing it for a while by that time, I was still pretty naïve about things. You probably have a pretty good idea of what happened next. Yeah, I was doing more guys, sometimes two or three a night, but the guys were rougher and I wasn’t keeping as much money. Bob, my pimp, actually was fair for a while about the cut with me, but it always seemed like he needed more money. I mean, his car was broke down or something, or his mom needed to go to the doctor or whatever, and well, shit, I was soft hearted and stupid. Well, it just got worse and worse to the point where he wasn’t asking for more money, he was demanding it. The next damn thing I knew I was out on the street corners in fishnets and a miniskirt that barely covered my crotch offering guys driving by in cars a blow job for fifty bucks. I didn’t like doing it, but Bob got me to snorting coke to build up my willingness for it.”

“I’ve heard that story before,” Shirley replied, “and not just from you. It’s the standard way a lot of girls get sucked into it. So how did you get out of it?”

“Sheer goddamn luck. Bob started slapping me around in front of a guy I’d just done, trying to bitch me out for not getting enough money out of the guy, and the guy didn’t like that and beat the living shit out of Bob. I got him in the nuts a few times myself. Then the guy put me in his car and we drove around while I pulled myself together, and then he took me home. We cooked up a cock and bull story about me getting separated from the friends that I was supposedly out with, running into some gang guys, and him rescuing me. I don’t know what happened to Bob, but he was hurting bad when we left him. Well, that taught me a lesson. I was a good little girl after that. I mostly stayed home in the evenings and gave up the business, at least for a while.”

“Since you’re sitting here, I know that’s not the end of the story,” Jennlynn smiled.

“Oh, hell no. I stayed clean and out of it until after I went to college though. I didn’t have a lot of money, and there were a bunch of horny guys running around, and I sort of drifted back into it a little, you know, doing a guy here and there for fifty or a hundred just for spending money. It wasn’t quite the same thing. I’d do a guy, and then tell him I was short on cash and could he lend me a few bucks but the end result was the same. That would only go so far, so after a while I signed up with an escort service like you did, Yvette. That worked pretty well until the service got caught up in a sting, and I got busted for soliciting.”

“That’s one of the risks you take,” Yvette nodded. “I just missed getting caught like that once.”

“It turned out to not be as big a deal as I thought it was at the time. I only got charged with a misdemeanor and getting fined five hundred, but I decided that was enough of that so I was out of the business again. About six months later I was in a burger shack and I ran into Charlie, who was a guy I’d been with a couple of times. We got talking, and he said he was interested in doing me again, but I told him I didn’t play for pay any longer. One thing led to another and I wound up spending the night with him, and after I got back to the dorm I found a couple hundred in my purse that hadn’t been there the night before. I called him up and told him I couldn’t take his money, and after a lot of back and forth we wound up going on a dinner-and-a-movie date that evening, and I wound up in his bed, of course. A couple months later I moved in with him.”

“So how did you wind up back in the business?”

“It took a while,” Justine went on. “Look, right from the beginning I realized that Charlie liked to sleep around, and I knew that I did, too. Let’s face it, most of the guys we meet here are like that, and so are most of the girls. So Charlie and I worked out a deal where we wouldn’t be exclusive and we’d try to be fair with each other. It worked pretty well, and we had some good times, almost always with other couples. That went on for years and still does some.

“Anyway, I got pregnant with Stephanie not long after I graduated from college, and we got married pretty soon afterwards. I piddled around with my master’s until after Jeff was born. For years after I got my undergrad degree I was busy with little kids, but I did the occasional pay date, always with Charlie’s permission, and then just for the fun of it. We hit a bad patch financially for a while, and I resented the fact that Charlie was getting more extracurricular ass than I was. One day he suggested that I do a tour at one of the places near Carson City just to bring in some extra cash and even things up a little bit. It sounded like a good idea to me, so I gave it a try. It was all right, but not real all right if you know what I mean, but for the next two or three years I occasionally did a tour in some of the other Nevada houses.”

“You must have been there about the time I turned out there,” Jennlynn commented.

“It had to have been later since I heard talk about the girl who flew her own plane in to the place. It was a long haul up to Carson City and I didn’t like the atmosphere of the house all that much, so I did a few tours at Sheri’s after that before I came here. Now I’m getting old enough that I don’t think I’ll be coming here much more, but I don’t know what I’m going to do after that.”

“There’ll be room for you,” Shirley smiled. “Like you said earlier, there are always guys who like more mature women.”

“Well, maybe,” Justine sighed. “I don’t know yet, but it looks like I’m headed out of the business again whether I want to or not.”

“Maybe you’d be interested in a tour as a fill-in floor manager,” Shirley suggested.

“Could be. We’ll have to talk about it sometime. At least it’s a better way out of the business than a lot of girls can do, which is to say feet first. Jennlynn, you are right to be concerned about girls who get into the business the way I did and get sucked down into the traps that are sitting all around. You may have made some girl somewhere think about it, but don’t try to take too much guilt about it on your shoulders. I learned back in Econ 101 that if there is a demand for a service, a supply will develop to fill that demand. There has always been prostitution and there always will be as long as there is something between a woman’s legs that a man wants to get into. As long as there are women who are willing to supply that need, there will be men who will take advantage of them. That’s not feminism, that’s just the way things are. We’ve been lucky to avoid the worst of the traps, or at least not get caught in them badly enough that we couldn’t escape.”

“Yes,” Jennlynn said slowly. “I guess I always realized most of that. But you take my young friend I was telling you about earlier. She only managed to escape because she got lucky.”

“She got lucky and she managed to work up enough determination to do it when the opportunity opened for her,” Justine said. “A lot of girls who get that low lose all sense of that determination. It’s partly fear of the unknown. She may not like what she’s doing but the alternative of not doing it appears worse, and often is. A lot of girls in that situation would like to escape, but they have nowhere to run to. If a girl wants out badly enough, and she can get away from the life and the drugs and the pimps and the subjugation and get some support along the way, she can often manage it. That sounds like what happened to your young friend.”

“Once she made it out she had a lot of support,” Jennlynn agreed. “Family and friends, especially. What’s more, she had the idea that God was helping her, and it was strong enough that it gave her the strength she needed to keep from backsliding.”

“One of the things that’s really needed is for a girl who’s recovering to realize that she has other ways to make a living rather than spreading her legs for some guy,” Justine continued. “The hell of it is that it’s not always easy for a girl to be able to put all of that together on her own. Let’s face it, to some girls it’s more appealing than running a grill at a burger shack someplace. But nothing is the same from one girl to the next.”

“Aren’t there organizations that can help girls like that?” Yvette asked.

“Yes, there are, but they often don’t have the resources to be able to do the job effectively. My feeling is that you have to get the girl away from the destructive environment and give her time to reorder her life, but there aren’t many organizations that can do that. It often doesn’t do the girl a damn bit of good to give her a little of the support she needs while she’s still living in the neighborhood where she’s been trapped with all of the old temptations still around her. Going back to the old life seems like it’s easier than trying to build a new one, even if she doesn’t have a pimp beating on her to keep her under control. Even if she doesn’t, drugs are often a problem.”

“I know some girls who make a pretty good success of being call girls, or even working the street,” Yvette said. “And they don’t have those kinds of problems.”

“Like I said, every girl is different, and there are those of us who can make a fairly good life for a while. It doesn’t have to be a bad life. I mean, look at us, but the Nevada houses only have a tiny fraction of the girls in the business, and even then they sometimes may have trouble making it out. I mean, hell, look at me. I like doing this, I want to do it, I’ve been pretty successful at it and I don’t want to give it up. It’s just that the calendar is saying I’m going to have to do it sooner than I want.”

“You seem to be pretty sure about yourself,” Jennlynn said. “Not that I don’t agree with you on most of it. I’ve never had any real contact with the down-and-out type of street girl, but you seem to know more about it than I would have thought.”

“Well, I am pretty sure about it, if only for the reason that somewhere in that area is where my dissertation topic is going to be,” Justine replied. “It needs to be a lot narrower than what we’ve been talking about, and I haven’t worked out the answer to that yet, but it’s something I’m going to have to do in the next few months.”

“Then I guess you do know more about it than I thought,” Jennlynn sighed. “I still wish now I hadn’t done Fast World, but I guess what’s done is done. It still eats at my gut to think about what may have happened to some poor girl as a result.”

“You are not alone in creating the motives, because they were already there,” Justine told her, glancing at the clock on the wall. “I’m going to have to cut this short since I have to go on shift in a little while. I need to change into work clothes, buff up a little, and get my hair under control before things perk up out front. But I’d like to talk to you about it some more if you want to.”

“I’d like to do that,” Jennlynn said. “But first things first around here, I know how it is. I’m probably going to have to be heading back before you get off shift, though.”

“Another time, then,” Justine smiled as she got out of the lounge chair. “I’ll catch you around. It’s been good to talk to you again, Jennlynn.”

“It’s been good to talk to you, too,” the tall, raven-haired woman replied. “You’ve eased my mind on a couple of things, but I still wish there was something I could do.”

“Who knows? Maybe there is.”

Jennlynn sat back in the lounge chair, rerunning part of the conversation after Justine left to change clothes and get ready to go on duty. She had made some interesting points, and Jennlynn could see that she had both the knowledge and the first-hand experience to know what she was talking about.

Jennlynn wound up eating lunch in the lounge with Shirley, but they mostly reminisced about the old days. They were just finishing up when Yvette came back into the room, and handed Jennlynn a note. “Justine said you ought to think about this,” she said as Jennlynn stuffed the note unread in her shoulder bag. “It was good to meet you, Jennlynn. There are so many stories about you and it’s nice to know that there’s a real, caring person behind them.”

“You take it easy, and don’t forget to think about the future,” Jennlynn told her. “The first key to it is to be all you can be. Shirley can help you with a lot of that.”

“I think I’ve learned that already,” she replied. “You take care, Jennlynn.”

Not long afterward Jennlynn went outside, locked the gate, and untied Songbird. She was in the air heading for Phoenix before she thought about the note. Since the plane was on autopilot, she pulled the note out of her shoulder bag and read it: Give me a call sometime and we can talk about this some more. I’ll be home most of the time after the end of next week. It was signed, Norma Franceour, and gave a phone number with a Phoenix area code.

It was more or less against both the written and unwritten code of conduct for girls at the Redlite to reveal much of their personal lives, even to the other girls, so Jennlynn realized that Justine – well, Norma – really wanted to talk to her.

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