“Welcome to my house, Xaviera,” she said, and I was in for another surprise. That foreign accent. New York’s reigning madam was from a country where I had lived for two years, South Africa.
By way of introduction Madeleine gave me a guided tour up the staircase from the entrance hall to the first floor which had simply, but tastefully, furnished bedrooms to the left and right. The second floor was identical, differing only in colors.
The third floor was where the men would relax in between their activities. It was a beautiful big baronial room, very masculine, with beamed ceilings and heavy wooden benches. On one side there was a fully equipped bar, and on the other there was a cinema-sized movie projector set up.
The butler, Felipe, saw to it that the men were helped in and out of their coats and shown to the bar or the other public rooms.
Overseeing the bedroom activity was Madeleine’s red-haired young lesbian secretary, Cynthia, who wore a little black-and-white uniform and walked around keeping score of who went with whom and how many times. It is one of the hazards of this business that girls can claim they did more work than they did if there is not some kind of surveillance on them. On the other hand, a customer could claim he did less than he did. Either way you would be cheated out of money. So Cynthia, who has since come to work for me as a call girl, kept score, and Madeleine arranged the pairings and acted charmingly to her clients.
This was my first contact with working girls as a group, and frankly I was apprehensive about mixing at first. I always imagined hookers as a breed were tough street types or brainless little runaway girls. Not so with Madeleine’s girls. They were well groomed, attractive, and reasonably well educated.
As we waited for our customers, I wondered what does one sit around and talk about with a bunch of prostitutes. What kind of small talk can you make? Something like: What do you think of the Pentagon Papers? Or: Will the wage-and-price freeze affect prostitution? Or even: How’s tricks? I didn’t feel that it was in good taste to talk shop about money, johns, and so on, but being always curious about what makes people tick, I decided to conduct a little Harris poll of my own. Where are you from, how long have you been doing this, do you enjoy sex in general, do you enjoy professional sex? In other words, I was asking them the eternal question: “What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?”
Carmen, the fiery Brazilian, said, “I hate this business, but my guy beats hell out of me when I don’t bring money home.”
Crista, the German, cooed, “I am married, and my husband knows what I’m doing, and we like the extra income.”
Sunny, the American, hissed, “I hate men, I am a lesbian, this is just a living to me.”
Nobody admitted liking what they were doing except myself and one other girl, the Negro, Laura.
“Yes, I like sex, I like men. I like every bit of it as long as they don’t give me a hard time.” She laughed. Her voice was without the trace of hardness or bitterness in the other girls.
Laura and I immediately became friends, and to this day, as the only two from that gathering who have prospered on our own, we still meet on jobs and keep in touch. She became a high-class courtesan working on her own, and my own success you already know.
Finally the group of about ten or twelve slightly polluted young men, all dressed in black tie, showed up after their formal dinner, and were received by Felipe, the butler, who helped them out of their coats. Cynthia showed them to the bar, where they were given drinks and mingled with the girls until they made their choice or Madeleine made it for them.
Each man selected two girls, either separately or together, and everything went off smoothly. It was a night when business was an unmitigated pleasure.
They were all accommodated while Cynthia walked around the house dressed in her little uniform, keeping score of who went in the green room, who went in the blue room, and who went in the red room, and with whom.
Around three in the morning, when everyone was content, dressed, and sitting around the downstairs dining room drinking coffee, Madeleine decided the evening had gone so well that she would put on a special late-late show as a bonus.
She had noticed that Laura and I hit it off very well together and were enthusiastic about our work, so she felt we should do a naked swing together on the big oak dining table.
I ought to have jumped at the chance to make it with Laura. However, there were reservations – I had never been with a Negro before, and my South African background made me slightly uptight.
Laura, however, had no such inhibitions, and when she peeled the clothes off that dynamite body with those big brown breasts with nipples like ebony thimbles, I decided she would be my first black lover.
We climbed onto the table, and I started kissing her slowly, softly, on her face, her shoulders, down to the little protruding navel in her flat belly, and all the way to the springy hair on her purple pussy.
The watching girls and guests came back to life, and pretty soon everyone was tearing off his clothes. Ties, pants, and shirts were flying around the room, and men were jerking off, and jumping on or under the table with girls. Even the madam herself became too excited to keep her clothes on and did a quick peel. I must say for almost forty she looked very attractive naked, with her big boobs sticking out like rocks because of a silicone job, as she climbed on the table and helped herself to a good-looking man.
One thing I learned about Madeleine was that if she wanted a particular man, which is the privilege of the madam, and he rejected her, she would become furious and take her anger out on everyone around her. But happily that night there was no such drama, and we all ended up in a big profitable gang-bang with a harassed Cynthia running around trying to keep score of who came and who caused it.
That spontaneous swing made the house and the girls a lot of extra money, and Madeleine was justifiably happy with me the first night, because I started it all.
Before I went home she invited me to be one of her regular girls. Around the same time I also met Georgette Harcourte, who had an establishment in a multistoried apartment building on York Avenue. But I learned early that you don’t jump around from madam to madam. If you are getting good work with one, you stay with her.
I preferred Madeleine’s because she had a more sophisticated, longer-established house with a better class of clients.
Both Georgette and her reasonably large operation were less reliable than Madeleine’s. She was always moving from one place to another. Her living room was usually packed with cartons, and looked a mess. And, what’s more, she was not half the lady, nor did she have the savoir faire of Madeleine.
On being taken into Madeleine’s stable, I severed all professional relationship with Pearl, although I kept in touch with her as a friend, because I liked the girl.
Also, at the time my professional life was accelerating, my straight life was falling apart at the seams. Things were getting hot at the office. My co-workers and employer were wondering why I was always tired, always getting masses of phone calls, and dressed generally far better than some little secretary on a lower-echelon income.
It was only a matter of time before the pennies dropped and they got an open line on my activity. As would be appropriate at a consulate, my superior suggested diplomatically I would be better off working somewhere else, and even advised me of an available position at a United Nations mission, and gave me a good reference.
I took the suggestion, knowing that there was little alternative, and went through a series of multilingual typing and translating tests at the foreign mission. I was hired and started work on November 1, 1969. The job was administrative, but almost as dull as the one I had left, and it was just as well, because I wasn’t up to concentrating much effort or energy taking dictation from my boss, the horny little ambassador, after a hard night’s work.