Ania*                                                                             by Lisa Falour                                                                       *Excerpt from I Was For Sale, as in SlushPile 4. Buy it! New York may be the world’s largest small town. A year or so after I’d become friendly with Ania I mentioned her to my friend Rowan. “Oh, I know her,” Rowan said immediately. “We went to the same high school.” “I think she’s a junkie,” I continued, a propos to nothing. “Always has been,” Rowan replied. Not an unusual little conversation for a warm Spring afternoon on Park Avenue, but I couldn’t help but be amazed. “There are eight million faces in the Naked City…” (or is it “…eight million stories?”…) and Rowan, my coworker in a semi-reputable investment banking house where we both worked, happened to know the same young woman I did—Ania. (“Only in New York.”) I held my breath as we walked, for two reasons. One, we were smoking a joint. Rowan’s brother Patrick was a part-time drug dealer, and she almost always had a joint for our lunch breaks. Two, I was afraid Rowan would ask how I knew Ania. I hadn’t yet revealed to Rowan that I was a part-time prostitute specializing in the kinky stuff. Rowan, however, didn’t ask. Either she was too stoned to care by this point, or she figured I knew Ania form the East Village, my hangout. Rowan’s favorite topic is her personal life, so the subject soon switched to her current boyfriend. One of the reasons I liked Rowan was that was like a TV set always turned to a soap opera—a TV you kept running on low volume, to keep yourself company—to distract yourself from yourself. Most of my friends found her horrifically superficial, but I value superficiality greatly. Superficial people make great colleagues, friends—even lovers—in my book. They spout platitudes and accept platitudes in return. Nothing heavy, thank you. No philosophy today, thank you. Keep the conversation light; or better still, LITE. America! God knows, living and working in New York City is sensory overload enough. If you can make it there you’ll make it anywhere; but chances are, also, that you’re mentally ill, or at the very least, maladjusted. Each day can be quite literally a very struggle for life itself, so you often find New Yorkers with lots of “lite” social contacts, like my bubble-headed Rowan, who’d toss away $200 on a haircut and dye job, spend a few nights drinking midtown, and then cry to me that she was broke. And two days later, she’d be wearing a smashing new designer suit her mother had found for some incredible price—and given it to her out of twisted, angst-laden, Irish-Catholic guilt I never understood and certainly didn’t want to know from—which was a good reason, Rowan rationalized, to go shopping for new shoes: because her mother had spent so little, given it for nothing, and didn’t it make Rowan look slimmer? Of course it did, and sure, Rowan deserved those new shoes. That’s what credit cards are for, right? Understanding Rowan helped me to understand Ania a little because both are from the same area in Queens—Middle Village. Ania’s from Ridgewood actually, but Middle Village is the next neighborhood adjacent, and both are in the middle of nowhere. Queens, New York, is something that has to be seen to be believed, and if you believed your eyes, you probably still could not grasp the spirit of this suburban, sprawling piece o’ hell. Queens is horrible, when you consider it as a whole, but when you’re in places like Rowan’s mother’s house there, you begin to find yourself profoundly in doubt of your own value judgments. In many ways, Queens is as bland and pedestrian as any boring, bleak section of any blue collar, middle-class enclave you’ll find anywhere in the U.S.A., but there’s a sort of tension in Queens that’s completely unique. Look to the West and you’ll see, on a clear day, the famous New York City skyline. Look to the East and there lies Long Island, over a hundred miles long, tract houses, mansions, beaches, toxic waste sites…look up, and you’ll see, very often, the bluest sky ever, making you even more aware of the greyness around you. Look down, and it isn’t had to imagine that just below the pavement lies hell. Queens can be such a super mind fuck. All around you are concrete reminders (literally) of middle class aspirations—private homes, little gardens, cars in driveways, and Bar-B-Que pits. You find yourself enjoying these shallow things, and perhaps, even coveting them. And yet, just on the horizon is the grotesque reminder of how difficult it is to earn these bourgeois trappings. The skyscrapers are like teeth, tearing at the unhealthy (yet often so blue!) atmosphere, and you find yourself thinking, “It is truly a jungle out there.” And the anxieties mount, and you worry about next month’s bills, so you can have a drink or something else to relax a little, and ultimately, you go too far, thus blowing your budget, thus making yourself more worried about money, and so on. It’s mental traps and money traps like this that lead people to lives of part-time prostitution. The extra money is needed to pay for your bad judgments, and the work is part-time because you want to keep one foot as solidly as possible in Real Life. But you don’t like Real Life, especially when Real Life is Life in Queens. I met Ania in January, 1982. That’s the month I started working in the Grand Central of Sleaze—Jack’s Cheap S/M whorehouse on 23rd Street. I started working there because I’d managed to stop working as a call girl the year before, having found work as a receptionist in a Madison Avenue public relations firm; but I’d fallen in love with a writer and he wanted me to get my own apartment and cook him nice dinners, so I needed more money. He often showed up late for dinner, and always promised to share the rent, but didn’t for nearly two years. I ended up marrying the guy. Yes, I’m an asshole. But I’m a resourceful asshole, thank you. The city never sleeps and neither does my neurotic Pennsylvania Dutch brain. When all else fails—sell yourself. And if your looks aren’t quite good enough to work for a Mayflower madam, and you happen to own a lot of black leather attire and a pair of shoes with 6-inch spike heels, you go into kinky prostitution. Doesn’t much matter, the year. S/M is kind of timeless. Certainly the older a woman gets, the more she can charge. This is one profession where you can certainly demand more money based on your level of expertise. The greatest mistakes are made by people whose hearts are too soft, too good. There’s true sort of Darwinism to all this: only the tough survive. The soft are consumed by their own slaves, or worse, by their own slavery to their own weaknesses. Ania isn’t really tall, but she seems somehow a little larger-than-life. “Statuesque” might be a good description of this Nordic Ice Goddess from deepest Ridgewood. Ania has been to me like one of those puzzles with 5000 tiny interlocking pieces. There it sits, on your card table. You find yourself horrified that you’re actually sitting there, trying to assemble it. Years go by, and you blow off the dust and the pieces fit, slowly, and the total picture emerges. And what, you wonder, will you do with it when it’s finished? The image you’re struggling to put together (you realize from the outset) is tacky. It’s banal. Yeah, it’s in the worst taste. Yet you find it compelling. You somehow believe, almost, that once you’ve mastered the joining of those maddening little pieces, you’re going to possess something more. You’ll have some sense of achievement. Because there’s a kind of…beauty to it all. A horrid, superficial beauty— a high gloss over sleazy cardboard. It may be horrid, but dammit, it’s gonna take effort, and once you’ve done it, it’s yours. Ania seemed like such a thing when I first saw her answering the phones for Jack, arranging “appointments” for Jack’s sleazy whores. Ania seemed easy to judge, but fifteen years later I still find myself looking for her. You could certainly call her one of my obsessions. To rank her among my bad habits would be to diminish her, however, and this I won’t stand for. I worship Ania. Because I’m a former ‘Mistress’ (dominatrix), I’m used to pointing a finger and having my slaves admire the crazy things I do. Who cares about their opinions, huh? They’ re paying me. Turn, then, your thoughts to Manhattan. In 1982. In Gramercy Park. On the second floor of a crummy two-story building, in a neighborhood which houses an art school of extremely questionable standing and two or three dozen brothels, where you can choose from a thoroughly depressing selection of messed-up females, there for you to deal with in cubicles with dusty wall-to-wall carpeting, cheap plywood walls and damp platform beds with dirty linen so threadbare you could make out the bloodstains on the foam padding beneath it. $60 for an hour with a woman who will “dominate” you. No tipping required, and very little forthcoming. Look behind the pressboard furniture and discover a treasure trove of rusty needles hidden by junkies long gone, or long dead, and always forgotten. What counts is only today, and your craving for pizza, and that stack of bills somewhere in your kitchen. What counts is Ania, with her sweet blue eyes, passing you a joint of exotic smoke; Ania who’s got three guys booked for you at ten, and she thinks one of them’s “for real.” A good phone girl earns every penny of her 10% of the gross. She tirelessly delivers her spiel to the phone freaks, the curious, the tourists, and the few cheap demented hard cases who actually frequent the premises: these weirdos often deriving obvious pleasure from seeing the “Mistress” and the “slave girls” paraded before them in the corridor, having probably sampled the wares of each previously and knowing each sleazy life story, and just how much, and why, those dollars are needed. Each woman will keep only $30 from each dominant session, after she’s paid $10 to the “Hawkeye” (a sort of mini-pimp, employed by the management), and paid for her new stockings, and her cab rides to and from work, and the vices of her lover, and the substances she has to abuse to deal with showing up at work. In short, a job, like most others, but this one being tax-free. And there I’d dwell, two or three times a week, often after work at my “straight” jobs, and all day and all night on Sunday. 12-15 hours a week on the New York City subway. 40 hours a week in Wall Street, kissing white male ass for horrid wages, and then kissing and whipping the same horrid white ass, only this time becoming intimately aware of the pimples thereon, the smelly feet, and the statement: “Don’t leave any marks.” Yes, they have wives. Yes, they are paying you. And yeah, they may be on their knees, but guess who works for whom and what will happen if the customer ain’t satisfied? Ania sat in the filthy chair, and she booked our tricks. I stared at her body. It was nice, but she was no conventional beauty, and she knew she didn’t have the “software” to be “on the floor” with us…or did she? We spent idle hours bingeing on pot and ice cream, laughing about our naïve forays into Europe, where we thought we may have tasted “culture” but we couldn’t really be sure. All we knew was that our meaty butts had suddenly been beautiful to the men of those foreign lands, and we’d realized, for sure, that money equals freedom, and freedom equals an increase of choices, and this equals a greater opportunity to escape, although we knew there was no escape…because we were heterosexuals, and we’d always find ourselves under some man. Before long I grew to like Ania so much, I started inviting her into my sessions, for tips. She’d leave with cigarette money, or a little more, and it was only a question of time before she was “on the floor” with us, the whores. What a sight she was with her white Lithuanian skin, her bleached blonde hair, those long legs, and God, tattoos on each arm. On one arm, a sexy woman posing in a tiny bikini. On the other arm, a sexy man posing likewise in a sexy bikini. Large tattoos, covering almost each upper arm. Good detail and shading and lots of pastel colors. Over the years I watched Ania’s tattoos loose their clarity somewhat, but good tattoos will almost always stay good—they just change. There’s a sort of metaphor inherent in tattooing—nothing certainly is permanent. You’ ll live with it until you die, but you will die. “This, too, shall pass.” Accepting the impermanence of all things and all situations can cause a person to end up in places like 23rd Street, working as a sleazy whore. The ends justify the means, but the ends have no permanence; therefore, any judgment of the means becomes quite meaningless. Yes, you are a sleazy whore, but you will probably eat well that day, go home, sit in Washington Square Park for half an hour, buy a little of some drug you haven’t tried much, yet, and still have enough cash left over to wander in Balducci’s, guilt-ridden, and buy something wonderful to cook for dinner, probably picking up a Spanish melon to give to the old single man who lives in the apartment next door, who looks like he could use some fresh fruit. Shit, it’s probably been years since he had a Spanish melon, and maybe he’s never had one. And after you’ve given it to him, and he’s thanked you, you go away, with your Balducci’s bag of unnecessary alimentary indulgences, and you’re thinking only about that new drug and which video you’re going to look at while you consume it (“Videodrome”) and you honestly believe the old man doesn’t know you’ re nothing but a sleazy whore. “Thank God there are whores living here,” the old man thinks while he eats his melon. He doesn’t actually need the melon, he’s eaten a cheap apple every day on his late doctor’s orders for the past forty years, but he’s watching the television news while he eats, and there’s a recession raging, and whores like his neighbor are certainly helping the economy with their undeclared tax-free earnings, and their “marginal propensity to save.” The old man was a research analyst on Broad Street for 42 years. His employer fucked him, and his kids are long-gone and barely even bother with a card on the High Holy Days, and he can’t point a finger at a neighbor because she’s fucking the system, and God knows, he thought he had been living a “decent” life and was, he thought, better than “her kind…” And now, although he really hadn’t needed that offered melon, he’d certainly taken it, and had watched her ass jiggle as she walked away on those stiletto-heeled mules and heavy Balducci’s bags swinging from each tattooed arm, into her little studio apartment…and he envied her. Ania didn’t seem to care a whit about what he family thought about her profession. She’d been, I learned many years later, a street whore at the age of 12, complete with a couple of Italian pimps she’d delighted in taking advantage of. I thought I knew almost everything about Ania after 15 years, but recently, while doing a four-hour session with Irwin, her best slave, she’d decided to tell us about how she’d come to enter the world of prostitution. Irwin and I had been smoking dope with Ania and we were well into a bottle of Absolut, but suddenly we were very alert because Ania had chosen to tell us of her origins, and we had no idea about her “wonder years.” She told us she’d been in Junior High School in Middle Village, and she’d decided to cut school one day and hang out in the East Village, in Manhattan. It wasn’t 20 minutes before a couple of pimps spotted her and were laying down their rap. “I can’t believe this,” thought the pre-pubescent Ania. “These Dagos are actually wasting their money buying me a meal, and trying to TURN ME OUT!” She’d decided to have some fun with them, and since she knew she would, ultimately, end up back in Middle Village with her family and would have to answer to the school truant officer, she decided to play the situation for whatever it was worth. She acted excited at the prospect of turning tricks for these two guys, and after a large lunch, she told them very firmly that if she was going to be their whore, she’d need to look the part, and that she was, at the very least, in need of a new makeup kit. Somewhat reluctantly, they agreed and took her to one of the big department stores in Manhattan, such as Saks or Bloomingdale’s. There, she allowed the sales help to show her all the latest in cosmetics, and she took one of almost everything. The sales help, smelling a good commission, quickly fell into doing their sales raps, and little Ania was a willing customer. Soon, the pimps started to argue. “Why do you need four different mascaras?” they’d ask, watching the tabs mount. “Are you kidding?” retorted little Ania, in her loud, crude, Middle Village accent. “You want me to look good, HUH?!” “Yeah, of course,” they responded, probably growing nervous at the attention their underage protégée was attracting on the sales floor. “Well, then,” she’d go on, “I NEED the four fucking mascaras, OKAY? HUH? OKAY?” “Yeah, yeah, sure,” they muttered, and gave in. Ania “worked her “marks” for more than two months that way, demanding clothes, records, large meals, and even drugs, and almost always getting them. “Did you turn many tricks for them?” I asked. “Oh yeah,” Ania answered, inhaling deeply and passing me the joint, while readjusting the clothes pins on Irwin’s balls and nipples. “And I was hardly ever on no fuckin’ street corner, neither!” She paused, adjusting Irwin’s latex hood. She exhaled loudly and poured herself another vodka. “Those pimps had me working for steady customers.” (She pronounced “customers” as “CUSTOMAHS”.) “I went to see the same ugly old men, and I fucked them. I never saw no money change hands, so I had to keep after those stupid pimps to keep buying me stuff. Usually they put up wi’ my shit, ‘cause they had a little twelve-year-old ‘ho’ to send around, and THEY knew the value of my ass!” she chuckled. I looked at Irwin, and couldn’t see his _expression because of the latex hood, but his eyes were wide, and I could tell he was as shocked by this story as I was. “Did you know this about Ania?” I asked him. “No,” he answered, “and I’ve known her for more than ten years.” I was laughing and Ania was busy rolling another joint. I was so absorbed in the story, I’d forgotten to check the video camera. Possibly all this was recorded. I’ll never know. Ania put a latex ball gag into Irwin’s mouth, handed me the pump and encouraged me to squeeze it, to inflate the ball in Irwin’s mouth. I dod so, checking his hood to make sure that his nostrils remained unobstructed. He was such a good slave, he often lapsed into unconsciousness before begging, “Mercy, Mistress!” A bona fide nut, but then, who am I to point a finger? Finally, Ania told us, she’d figured she’d taken that pimp situation to the max, and she’d retreated to her family’s home in Queens, much to the unhappiness of her sleazy employers. For several weeks they tried to track her down, and finally, getting her parents’ phone number, they took to calling the house, trying to speak to their errant little piece of underage ass. One day, in exasperation, Ania’s mother, having fully grasped the situation, shouted into the phone, “Dat girl is twelve years old! I’m gonna have youse all ARRESTED!” This blunt tactic proved effective, for the hapless pimps ceased their calling and Ania returned, for a time, to the rich fruits of the straight life in Catholic School in Queens. Ania returned, I suppose, to the Catholic school where she knew Rowan, and rebelled from the nuns like all good Catholic girls. I don’t know whether Ania graduated or not, but Rowan graduated only because, she claimed, the nuns felt sorry for her. Rowan’s father, an electrician, had never paid income taxes, and the prospect of an IRS audit finally rendered him dead one overcast weekday at the family kitchen table. The nuns at school felt so bad for Rowan, they passed her with straight Ds. Ania’s family probably knew such crises. One day, Ania revealed to me that she’d been sexually abused by her father. “Why, that’s horrible,” I said, not really knowing how to respond. “Nah, my whole family, we’re all in therapy,” Ania said, “and anyway, I don’t remember nothin’. It fucked wi’ my sistuh’s head worse than it did with mine. I remember my father’d pick me up and hold me when I was about four, and my older sister’d get REAL upset! “Stop that!” she’d order him. And the father would, guiltily, put little Ania down, and cease to fondle her. Ania said she didn’t have any clear memories of an actual sex act with her father, but she was aware of his arousal, and his “special affection” just for her, among all the children of that large family. Eventually he died. Ania liked to wear her blonde hair in a sort of Louise Brooks-ish bob, and had the look of a wide-eyed silent film actress. “I love gangsters,” she told us one day on 23rd Street, pronouncing “gangsters” as “GANGSTAHS.” “I think I was a gun moll in my past life,” she continued. Her goal was to find herself a gangster, and to be his “squeeze.” What she found was Paco, a low-level thief from Staten Island. Paco was the boyfriend of Itsy, one of the whores on 23rd Street. Ania set her sights on Paco—Itsy-be-damned! Paco’s sister, Rosita, came to work with us on 23rd Street as a dominatrix, and quickly, Ania and Rosita became fast friends, united in a wild and sleazy war against Itsy, who disappeared quickly from 23rd Street, but not without demanding the return of her “leopard underwear” from Rosita. “She wants her fuckin’ leopard underwear,” Rosita snorted, chugging a beer in the whores’ “waiting room” on 23rd Street. “Yeah,” sneered Ania, “an’ she’s complainin’ about those leopard shoes she bought Paco!” Paco shifted his alliance to Ania and went to live with her, his own family’s house being off-limits to him after he’d stolen and sold his mother’s antique jewelry, the silverware, and everything else he could fence. “That Paco is no damned good,” mused Rosita one day, yet she seemed largely unconcerned with the pain he’d inflicted on his family, a lower-middle class, hard- working Portuguese clan who were not, themselves, entirely without guilt when it came to having light fingers. (Rosita would often show up on 23rd Street with boxes of merchandise for us to take—deodorants, cat food, cheap perfumes, etc. The father was, I gathered, a crooked driver or “lumper” somewhere in the city.) Ania quickly learned the ropes on 23rd Street and became a switchable whore—she could do both dominant and submissive sessions and was one of the top money- makers in Jack’s dubious “stable.” Because she’d done her first sessions with me, as mentor, her style was similar to mine—friendly, gentle, making almost everything a game. My own slaves were very loyal—they knew I was basically a happy person, out mostly for a bit of twisted thrill and grocery money. Ania was no dummy—she’d book me solid on nights when the other whores sat idle, wondering why my fat white butt was so damned popular. She copied, at first, my style, and to this day, pulls in a nice piece of change each week. I like to think I helped to train her in sleazy arts. She and Paco became common-law spouses, unable to actually marry, because Ania was on public assistance and was getting a monthly welfare check, food stamps, and medical coverage. After years of working in dusty whore-bunkers, Ania developed asthma, and is now seriously ill. She’s completely dependent on Uncle Sam’s free health insurance. What a twisted system in the USA. A working whore is unable to get straight medical insurance, both for the fact that she has no acceptable “legal” means of support, and also, that she now has a “pre-existing condition” and is uninsurable at this point. I “retired” from whoredom in 1984. A year later, Ania, Rosita, and Paco came to a party I was having in my Brooklyn apartment. Ania was thin, and she had let her bleached blonde hair grow long. She was a dead ringer for Debbie Harry, but was so hollow-cheeked, I feared she might have AIDS. This wasn’t the case, but, like me, she’ d found “The Life” a dreadful strain on her immune system, and had begun a slow but definite physical decline. I saw Ania again in the first part of 1993. She was still working for Jack, but the enterprise had relocated to 28th Street in Chelsea, the new street for the kinky brothels in New York. I was still a Wall Street secretary, still dabbling in freelance journalism, and a French magazine had hired me to interview Ania. What a strange feeling, seeing some of my coworkers from a decade earlier, still plying their kinky trade. It was as if time had almost stood still. But Ania didn’t look good. She was too thin, and was smoking pot and drinking too much. Often, her answers to my questions were completely unrelated to what I’d asked. But her technique as a Mistress hade blossomed. She had an enormous metal trunk, absolutely packed with strange implements. She had everything out and scattered around the sleazy, windowless room, which was cold and smelled bad. About six months later, I left my second husband and returned to The Life. Of course, my first choice for places to work was 28th Street, with Ania. She’d gained weight, and was sexier than ever. We spent a lot of time in her room, smoking joints and talking about everything. One night, we’d smoked a lot, and I was heavily into a bottle of champagne. “Let me give you a massage, Mistress!” I quipped, pushed her face-down, onto her sleazy bed. I began to massage her, and she protested only lightly, being as stoned as I was. “Oh, Mistress, what a lovely ass!” I screamed, and pulled up her mini-skirt, exposing twin spheres of soft, white buttflesh. “Stop!” she giggled, as I started to kiss her ass. “What, Mistress?” I asked, pretending not to understand her. I turned her over and lunged for her pussy, thrusting my tongue deep inside. She yielded for several minutes although complaining half-heartedly about the assault. I had a taste of cunt I hadn’t experienced in years, being long-retired, and only sometimes bisexual. I was wearing bright red whore-lipstick, and began to tickle her and plant red kissmarks on her thighs and butt, above the tops of her black, sheer stockings. She got up, and staggered to the waiting-room area, where she sat in the phone-girl’s chair, trying to occupy herself with her former role as receptionist, but I wouldn’t leave her alone. I threw myself onto the dirty floor, at her feet, and began tongue- cleaning her shoes. “I love you, Mistress!” I chanted. “Stop!” she kept screaming, amid laughter, but doing nothing to actually stop me. Finally, she teetered into one of the little fuck-rooms where the rest of the whores were lounging (it was the warmest room in the place), probably hiding from us. “Look what she did to me,” Ania wailed to them, pointing at her kiss-bedecked white flesh. I remained on the floor, watching TV and chuckling to myself. Ania’s cunt tasted so good.