VICKIE STAR
The
DEATH VALLEY
MADAM
As Told To
Robert B. Griffith
Published by Arrowhead Classics Publishing
Los Angeles, California • Newcastle, California
http://www.arrowhead-classics.com
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Smashwords Edition
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ISBN (13): 978-1-886571-29-7
ISBN (10): 1-886571-29-5
Copyright 1988, 1995, 2012 by Rober B. Griffith. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. For information, address Arrowhead Classics Publishing, Los Angeles, CA; Newcastle, CA. visit: www.arrowhead-classics.com
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FOREWORD
When Vickie Star contacted me to help her write her life’s story she had already retired to northern California, where she lived in a comfortable house that she declared, “Is the first house I ever owned that wasn’t a brothel.” She also had money in the bank and her retirement pretty well set in place.
I had never “visited” a prostitute nor had I any intentions of doing so. But there I was, heading out to visit a well-known madam who started her career in the California Bay Area. By career end she was recognized as The Death Valley Madam, in of all places, Death Valley. Needless to say, I didn’t know what to expect.
Vickie, who’s given name was Goldie, was older than I was by about eleven years. When she answered her door I was stunned by her outgoing and accepting personality. I hadn’t even gotten through the door when I felt we’d been friends for years. In that regard she was amazing.
She lived alone but quickly introduced two friends who were visiting her for the week. Each of them had spent lifetimes as prostitutes and all three appeared to be as happy as the ladies I’d ever met at any country club.
Before getting further along here, let me explain that during my Hollywood writing and filming career, I had worked on a documentary about the dirty side of life in Hollywood. The show was directed and produced by a very good friend. We were each a former Marine and that alone brings some men together as brothers even if they didn’t know each other before. But Pat and I did know each other and when he called and said his documentary was to be about child hookers, I hesitated until he explained why the film “had to be done.” We all knew where those children came from, and how they’d dropped out of sight and into their dark world along Santa Monica, and Hollywood boulevards. Now, we had a chance to expose the problem.
I nearly got killed doing it and not by a random accident. Instead, some of the subjects were themselves violent. The subjects we filmed weren’t always young people who’d been kidnapped into prostitution or dealing with drugs, but more often the pimps and drug lords themselves and they weren’t exactly friendly. The young people were the documentary’s subjects, but the perverted criminals continually upstaged them.
West Los Angeles and Hollywood were, and still are a hotbed of nightstalkers who prey on others like wild animals in search of lower beings for their food. Young people from around the country who hop a bus to L.A. looking to fit into the motion picture world are their targets. The pimps meet them at the bus or train station (most can’t afford to fly), and lead them away. In other words they kidnap them, drug them, then put them into a nightstalker life of male or female prostitution that would horrify you.
Prostitution is rampant in Los Angeles. The L.A. police can barely keep tabs of it simply because there are more gangs and drug dealers and prostitutes – and other street criminals than they have officers or budget to conrol or stop them. You can easily learn more about the rampant dangers on Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood with a search on Google. Additionally, more than 50,000 hispanic gang members alone roam the streets of L.A. with thousands of Asians, blacks, Russians, white gangs, and others joining in on the violence. Think about that? Multicultural bad guys actually control night-life in Los Angeles. L.A. has as many cultures running the streets as the world seems to have trying to take over whole countries.
Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards segue into complete character changes around sunset every evening. The conversion from day time shoppers and business types to nightstalkers is startling and we filmed it all.
So, when I traveled to visit with Vickie Star, I was picturing one of those street hookers we’d recorded on tape.
That was not at all the case. Vickie appeared more like the ubiquitous lady next door than the human debris we’d witnessed in L.A.
Her story doesn’t “name names,” nor does it fracture the fiber of society she worked in. For her, prostitution was a job and one she steadfastly claims she liked. When I met her she had definite socio-political viewpoints, spoken freely as any other attentive citizen might, and she was adamantly straightforward and honest.
After we conversed that first day she wasn’t sure she wanted me to write her tale. “You’re a man,” she exclaimed. “And you ain’t ever been in a whorehouse. What are you going to know about all this?”
I explained as succinctly and straightforward as I could that it was her story that I came to write about and not a how-to book concerning prostitution or being a madam. She fell silent for a few moments until her friend Ginger said, “He sounds fine to me.”
So, I spent the next six months interviewing Vickie and recording every session. During that time we had discovered that indeed we had met many years before. We met in her brothel in Ash Meadows, which was in Death Valley on the Nevada side of the border. I had not gone there seeking a prostitute. It’s a lot funnier than any fiction could be since nobody would believe a fiction writer who’d come up with this one.
I was stationed with the Marines at Barstow, California and got to know some of the locals. I was also a licensed pilot at that time. One of the locals, who I won’t name here, wanted to know if I’d fly with him in his small Stinson aircraft to Ash Meadows and back. I’d fly it back after his meeting, which is how he described his upcoming session. He claimed that such “meetings” wore him out and that he might not fly back safely without help. For me, any break on a weekend from my duties at the base, which started at 0400 every morning and went through 1700 hours in the afternoon, was accepted.
So, on a bright and typically hot day we took off from the small Barstow airstrip (where a school now sits) and headed for a place I’d never heard of before.
Death Valley didn’t earn its name from being the friendliest place in the world to humankind. It is truly desolate and defintely without human life support. The scorpions, lizards and snakes seem to do well, but after that, forget it. Except of course for Vickie Star who thrived there for a long time.
We flew over a small uninhabited old west town called Shoshone, and then started down for the gravel runway at Ash Meadows Sky Ranch. Sounds big doesn’t it? Not a chance. No other aircraft were at this dot on the map and neither did I yet see the Ash Meadows brothel owned by none other than our Vickie Star. She called the Ash Meadows brothel, Vickie Star’s Ranch.
Soon after stopping the engine an old Ford stationwagon showed up. We got into it and met our driver who I quickly realized was a salty desert rat with an immense knowledge of desert life, but not much else. I don’t think he’d owned a razorblade in years and certainly the area was short on bath water.
He pulled up in front of the “lodge.” There was one small sign over the front door that was so weathered by the rays of the never-ending blazing sun that I wasn’t able to read it or possibly, I just disregarded it.
When we walked into the place I immediately spotted the cafe type counterop with stools in front of it and a sign over the cooktop on the other side. Hamburger twenty-five cents, fries fifteen and a Coke for a dime. Good, I was hungry. When we sat at the stools the redhead behind the counter came over and asked, “What’ll you have?”
I glanced to my friend, shrugged and said, “Burger, fries and a Coke.”
Laughter came from behind me. I whirled around to see five women, each in a bikini, each sitting in a posed sort of way. I still hadn’t caught on that I was sitting in the “lounge” area of a Nevada brothel.
My friend pointed to one of the women and said, “Her.”
The young lady stood, came over, grabbed him by his hand and led him out of the place through a back door to what turned out to be a shed or “cottage” that stood in a line with a few others.
“Rare or well done,” the redhead asked with a deep voice that carried a bit of laughter with it. She was teasing me the way she teased everyone.
“Oh my God,” I muttered. I was very young and in their minds probably very innocent. I begged off, bowed out of there and walked back to the airstrip hoping things would move quickly so I could get into the air and far away.
When Vickie and I chatted about that event during our interviews many years later, she howled with laughter. She claimed that she remembered it because that was the only time in her long career anything like that ever happened. I believed her.
Vickie’s career began in a small Missouri farm town. Everything was as we understand it for farmers during the Great Depression. Grow your own food, cut your own firewood, use the outhouse. As to getting to school she had to take a bus.
And that bus ride would eventually change her whole life. The schoolbus driver Otto, would set her on a course she couldhn’t imagine at the age of sixteen. Only a year later her “professional” turning-out took place in northern California.
This is a story of that career as told by Vickie. No fiction exists in this story, it’s all very real. As we know, our lives aren’t always pieced together as well as a good novel might be, or even that of a great historic work, but I think we put this one together quite well. Vickie’s professional life began in San Francisco and ended in Death Valley. She started without a dime and ended with enough money to live on in retirement through her eighties.
At this writing, she is still alive. Considering that she was born in 1923, and that she worked exclusively as a prostitute, that’s an impressive record.
– Robert B. Griffith
Chapter 1
I remember how gorgeous it was that first afternoon. The lazy California sun floated across the sky, kept me comfy warm while the ocean breeze worked its magic stimulating me into
a worldly enthusiasm I hadn’t previously known.
Unfortunately, it over–stimulated my date. I was sixteen at the time.
“What are you doing?” I squealed. A short, stocky, all hands Lou Cadonna had sexually teased me too much. The olive skinned son of a bitch thought he had a license to screw me. Cadonna came from a different culture than I had. The only thing he ever wanted to do was sow his oats while I was still thinking about sowing wheat.
At 16 I wasn’t big enough to punch my way out of those situations, but I could be a tough fighter when I had to, using muscles developed on the family farm in Missouri where lifting firewood, digging ditches and pulling a plow were common work. Unfortunately, my muscles weren’t large enough to push Cadonna off me. He was a hundred pounds heavier, a helluva lot stronger, uglier than hell and sweaty as a wet pig in a sty.
He was struggling on top of me in the back of his black 1937 two– door DeSoto. We were parked at Half Moon Bay, south of San Francisco. That was a remote spot back then, but today it’s a real touristy area. He said I had sexually excited him. If I did, it was innocent, at least unknowing. And nobody knew nothin’ ‘bout all that consenual adult thing back then. As to rape, forget it. It was always the girls fault.
Didn’t matter though since I guess whatever I did, I raised his expectations above my own and in the process raised his phallic tool to a visible although painful, he claimed, stiffness.
God when would I learn? For me, it’d always been the same: neck and pet and then get wet.
“I really do like you, Goldie.” His breath wreaked of garlic, onions, and some kind of slop he’d eaten that morning. He smelled just like the hogs at home on the farm. “And I like your sister.” he added as though I gave a big damn. I was called Goldie a lot back then, which was fine with me.
“You asshole,” I screamed into his ear. I was a fiery, red–headed teenager who could be a spitting, scratching bitch when I had to. “You touch me and Dolores will kill you.” Dolores was my older sister. Cadonna’s whole body was dripping wet while he moved back and forth, up and down, trying to get into me while I was working up a sweat keeping my panties up and my legs crossed and trying to get rid of him.
He laughed hoarsely. “You wouldn’t tell her.”
I was tiring quickly. I looked out the DeSoto’s tiny, triangular rear window and saw a policeman about fifty yards distance. He was foot– patrolling the empty beach. “Look,” I said to him, “I’m gonna let you do this. But not in here. How about on the beach?”
“What?”
“The beach, dummy, you know, outside where you can spread out. Look at you? Shit, you can’t do it in here. Doublel over like that with a hard-on,” I laughed for his benefit, but I desperately wanted him closer to the cop.
Back then I figured most of that episode was my fault since my parentally assigned guardian Dolores, had warned me earlier about Cadonna, a roomer in her apartment house. If she’d been aware of our date, my life would’ve ended in the back of that DeSoto ‘cause she’d of killed me instead of him.
Actually, Dolores had warned me about all the men in her apartment house, and about the men at the parties we went to. But I didn’t pay much attention to all that, since Dolores always said the same things about each of them. Dolores was always warning me ‘bout everything from the can opener to the bedbugs and of course men. She didn’t trust me anyway, so chances were she’d bruise me up badly before she’d do anything to Cadonna. That pretty much prevented me from ever telling Dolores about what Cadonna was doing. But, Cadonna didn’t know that, and I wasn’t about to tell him.
Cadonna looked out the window, spotted the cop and turned back to me and laughed again with that deep, hoarse, threatening cackle of his. “Funny girl.” Then, with incredible excitement, he shouted, “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Jesus Christ didn’t have nothin’ to do with what happened. That asshole came right there on my dress. He wasn’t in me or even near my skin. He was on top of my clothes and had rubbed himself so much trying to get into me, that the goddamned guy jerked off on the new dress Dolores had made for me a few days before.
Sure as hell, disaster would come to me when I got home.
Looking out the car window afterwards with a different purpose in mind, I couldn’t help but reflect that every time I got together with a guy, any guy, it spelled trouble.
Just like that son of a bitch of a bus driver at home in Garrison, Missouri. And to think that I was just fourteen.
“Everybody out!” His name was Otto Krantz, and he was the school bus driver. ‘Otto Potto,’ is what we called him. He didn’t like that name, either. To me, and to the other girls, O.P. was big like his farm hogs, plain as a barn’s backside, and ‘bout as uneducated as the rest of us. He was a German to boot. Least ways his parents were. Otto reacted stupidly when anyone sexually teased him, and everybody teased Otto. Hell, we saw his pecker once and you gotta picture it like a baseball bat stickin’ out of layers of fat. Even with that though, he was always like a dog in heat. His gaze would narrow in on any girl who’d pushed his button, his breathing would become shorter and louder, his German accent nearly indistinguishable. Yet, he’d probably screwed more high school girls during his five years as the official school bus driver, than Garrison ever graduated.
Otto was not tall, but also wasn’t exactly short. He had blond, short– cropped hair, sharply defined facial features and a leering, penetrating stare. He always wore the same dirty Levi jeans and he believed strongly in the “low level Levi club.” In other words, he was an early day flasher.
I shouted back to him, “I got another two miles to go.” I wasn’t getting out just because he said to. Hell, it wasn’t my stop.
“Not you, Goldie. You stay. Everyone else gets off.”
After the other kids left, Otto closed the door of the faded yellow and worn out Ford school bus, and with an awful sounding roar the vehicle sped away from the other children, who now stood in a cloud of dust that rose up from unpaved intersection. He was leaving behind all my help. When I looked back I could see the dust mixing with the bus’s diesel exhaust. God, I thought, I’m alone with this creep, again. It wasn’t the first time he’d done this. And I wasn’t the first kid he’d done it to. But his last effort failed for him, although it scared the beejeezies out of me.
“How was the game?” he asked, but he wasn’t fooling me. I knew better’n anybody O.P. wasn’t interested in our basketball team. He was winking at me, blinking with both eyes because he couldn’t control just one or the other. I knew what he wanted and decided to play cutesy, but act irritated.
“Fine.” I remember wanting to sound strong buy my voice cracked and it came out sort of falsetto. “What’d you expect?”
“Thought your dad didn’t want you on the bus ‘less Woody was with you.”
He was right about that. Woody, my older brother, had been assigned to protect me from guys like O.P. But Woody had ditched me earlier. He said he thougth I was safe on that day. That nobody’d harm me, especially that “sucker drivin’ the bus.” He’d already had one to-do with O.P. and didn’t expect the guy to come after me again. Sides, Woody had his own thing to do. And if’n I wanted to keep him on my side most of the time, I couldn’t ever tell my dad he ducked out ‘a his job of bein’ my bodyguard.
I cocked my head and curled my mouth, innocently but sensually wiping my lips with my tongue. “Woody knows where I am right now,” I said with some bravado and some tease. That’s what Woody told me to say. But not how he told me to say it.
“Woody still make you carry his firewood?” He laughed. I remember the son of a bitch laughed when he said that.
Everybody in that farm town knew everything about everyone else. Nothing was ever private. “Yes. So’s I can get him to go with me on these bus rides to the ball games.” I’d been ordered to never board the bus to the ball games or go anywhere without Woody along. I saw Otto’s face in the mirror and suddenly became very scared. He was lookin’ at me for more than basketball scores. As the saying goes, he was lookin’ to score me.
“So, then, where is he that he knows where you are now?” The bastard was searching for the answer to how distant Woody was from us at that moment. He knew Woody’d kill him if he tried anything funny like raping me. I didn’t answer him. My throat had tightened up. He continued, “Comin’ by Saturday with my guitar,” he said. “Could play ya a real purty tune if you’s up to it.”
Shit. Was he kidding? Otto considered himself some kind of Jimmie Rogers or something, but he was terrible. He sang cowboy songs with a flat voice and that damned German accent. It just tore the hell out of a good country song. “You gonna sing again?” I thought my inflection was perfect, stating flatly that the bastard was in no way a singer.
“Ja.” He laughed, but it wasn’t like a laugh after a good joke. It was deep and menacing sounding. I looked to the back of the bus just then to see if I could get out the back escape hatch. No. O.P. had locked it with a padlock. “Ja,” he repeated, “you get to hear me again.”
Funny thing ‘bout his singing was that my Mom and Dad liked that creep. It was true that a year earlier we had necked, mostly at his forcefulness. Hell, we’d even passionately petted, and I’d gotten him so aroused he said it hurt. I was thirteen. Man alive I was just thirteen. But after he tried to climb on me to ride me like a damned bronc (his words not mine), I quit seeing him when we was alone. I guess I hadn’t learned much more at the ripe age of fourteen. I don’t remember why, but so far I was one of the only girls left in that high school who was still a virgin. Oh, other girls had been screwed all right, but mostly on top of their dresses or with their panties held on to tightly. All that those guys were doin’ was masturbatin’ on some girl’s clothes. I guess that even though it was the nineteen–thirties, the girls in Garrison, Missouri considered themselves a bit advanced.
Otto searched for more conversation. I looked out the window and watched the country slip by and didn’t say nothin’. This jerk had plans for me and I think they included me unclothed.
I didn’t want any part of that.
I could visualize Momma in our kitchen She’d look down into my eyes and say, “Don’t you ever get on that bus alone, Goldie. You hear?
Bad things will happen. You hear me Goldie?” She’d recognized the evil in O.P.’s eyes, even while she smiled at his awful singing.
I never understood how she could like that guy, and then warn me to not get on the bus alone with him or she’d whup my butt. Momma, like most of us in our later years, had a better perspective of what that sensual thing in us — or lack of it — can do to our “control.”
“Stoppin’ here,” Otto called out. Otto was a rotten smelling son of a bitch. I figured he hadn’t bathed in at least two weeks. He got up from his seat, came back to me, and pulled me straight up like I was a straw scarecrow, which is about how light I was. He was strong too. When he wasn’t driving a bus, he worked on his family’s farm lifting hay bales and probably the full grown hogs. His brute strength was well known to everyone in the area. “‘Cause vee are goin’ to have some fun.” He put his face into mine and added in a coarse, smelly voice, “Virrr–gin.”
Damn. The only thing that worried me right then, was that I couldn’t let him ruin my dress. My Mom would kill me, and Dad would take Woody behind the barn for letting me out’a his sight. Nobody would touch Otto, ‘cause Otto could have beaten the shit out of anyone who tried to mess with him.
My mind raced with ways to get out of there. I was on the early side of fourteen, and about to get raped by a creep. I understood that I had teased the bastard too much, licked my lips once too often, winked once too many times. Link that together with my shapely body and full grown breasts and it must have brought back all the memories of those necking sessions we had in the hay wagon while out in Otto’s family wheat fields. I looked straight into his eyes and tried to warn him. “You don’t wantta do that, Otto. Woody’ll knock the shit out’a you.” I spoke like a sailor even back then.
“No, he von’t. He’s too small.” He laughed. “I turn Woody into pretzel realy easy.”
“His gun ain’t too small.”
Otto paused but just for a second. “You foolin’ with me, ja? He don’t got a gun, ja?”
“He does. And my dad’ll blow your head off with his varmit gun. Damned guns don’t care how big you are. You ‘member that guy last year tried to mess with me? You read ‘bout him in the paper, right?” I was reaching, ‘cause there’d never been a guy last year ‘ceptin’ for him.
He let go of me. I fell back into the bus seat, intentionally jamming myself in between the seat back and the floor, where I smelled the old gum, rotten apples and god knows what under those hard, plywood benches.
“Think that’s gonna stop me?” He unbuckled his Levi’s and dropped them below his waist, then fell on top of me and started moving back and forth while he held me down. I could feel him harden up while I listened to the cadence of his breathing increase like a German umpah, umpah beat. This was my first experience with a man’s uncontrollable penis.
“Leave me alone you bastard!” I reached up to his face and scratched him again and again but he kept going, up and down, up and down until quite suddenly he moaned real loud and collapsed, exhausted. I didn’t know it then, but he’d had an orgasm. On top of my new dress. My first spoiled dress.
“Jesus, shit.” He stood, weakly.
“I think you just got yourself kilt.”
“You ain’t gonna tell are you, Goldie?”
“God look what you’ve done. Get this sticky stuff off ’a me.”
He pulled his pants back on, pulled out a rag he called a hanky and wiped my dress.
I had an idea. He didn’t know I’d never tell my mom or dad, or Woody. Hell, they’d probably beat me more’n Otto would. “Tell you what, Otto.”
“Yeah?”
“You carry Woody’s firewood — “
“Yeah?”
“And I won’t tell nobody.” I had to turn the event into something that would at least work for me for a while. “And that means you don’t jump on me anymore, either.”
He put the rag back into his pocket while keeping his eyes on me. “Ok. But you can’t tell nobody.”
“Swear. You carry the firewood and Woody’ll always ride with me. ‘S fair, right?”
I’d just made my first exchange of sex for goods.
My Dad worked hard for everything he got. Before I was born, he’d been able to save up and finally get a nice place in Miami, Oklahoma. His farm had over two thousand head of cattle and lots of racehorses. He was big. But none of that did him any good when the dust storms hit. The tornadoes and winds wiped him out along with a bunch of other farmers; took their cattle, their horses and pulled the rich topsoil right off the ground and moved it westward. It cost him every dime he had, and in the process he lost five thousand acres of land, and his farming business. A few years after that, the depression hit and no man, not even my father could recover from so many compounding disasters. By the time the depression was near its end, with the help of WWII, Dad was too old to compete with the younger generation. Worse, he was too old to care.
He moved to Missouri. Although he was originally from Centerville, Missouri in the northern part of the state, he returned to the southern area, settling in Garrison.
“Got a good deal on about a hundred fifty acres,” he explained to me much later, long after I was born in the Garrison log cabin he’d built. “Cost me everything I had left, but it was worth it, Goldie.” He was at least able to adapt. He made that hundred and fifty acres look and produce like those five thousand acres in Oklahoma. To my family, and to me, Dad was a big success.
I’d heard all the hardship stories so much, I grew to believe that what they didn’t need to add to their lives was me. Another child. But I arrived anyway, entering the world with a wild mix of ancestral blood. I’d inherited a combination of traits that came from his demonic German and Irish background, and mother’s full–blooded Irish heritage. She was full of fire, worked hard, ran the family and was forever guilty for everyone else’s failures. At least, that’s the way she behaved. Those two heritages became mine, and they set me up for a mean, devious, but mostly organized temperament. Little did I realize how I’d use them. Family life with two brothers and four sisters was tough but not unfair. Mom was a hard worker and so was dad. Naturally, they expected the same from us. Lucky for me though, being one of the three babies, I was able to get away with murder and didn’t work with the same effort the others did. While they were busting their butts, I’d be hiding, or playing somewhere else. But still, there were times I believed I was doing my share cropping the fields and splittin’ firewood.
When I wasn’t pulling my load, or when they thought I wasn’t doing enough, I had to listen to the stories of why things had to be done, who had to do them, why it was important to learn those responsibilities at an early age. I’d hear the same reasoning over and over until I had them memorized to the extent I could move my lips to their admonishments each time. “Standards were set a long time ago,” my mother would begin, then she’d tell me about my grandfather, the family standard bearer.
“Your granddaddy fought for the south in the civil war. He was captured and then he escaped.” Mom would emphasis the escape part each time with some pride. Then she’d add, “He was forced to hide, live off dead horses, chickens and rats. The poor man starved down to under eighty pounds.” That was hard for me to relate to since, back then, I’d never gotten that heavy.
“He’d’a died,” mother repeated, “if’n it hadn’t been for a big ole black lady out in the woods.” In each of Mom’s stories everything happened, “out in the woods.”
“What’d she do?”
“She’d had her own baby, so she took your grandpa and nursed him back to health with her baby’s milk. Right from God’s own breasts she did it. Gospel truth.”
I believed her even though I never put together his age at the time and the black lady’s age. Ole Thomas Mullens was his name and I spent a lot of nights picturing this old man lying in that black lady’s lap, sucking on those big brown nipples, his head resting on her breasts.
Not a bad picture, for a white southern Baptist girl.
We were all Southern Baptists until my sister Dolores broke away from family tradition and joined the Catholic Church. That was hard for her to do since Southern Baptists hated the Catholics so much. But Dolores did it. It was after all, part of her personality, her drive to be a person apart from the rest of us.
Dolores was thirteen years my senior, and prettier than a robin in spring with flaming auburn–red–hair, just like mine. She could be an overpowering woman at times. She was two–inches taller than me, with a graceful straight nose and hard blue eyes. She always stood straight– backed, proud, and responsible. She would not, could not fool around.
Not ever. She was the first of the seven living children and demonstrated every first child characteristic I’ve ever heard of since.
“Study catechism, Goldie.” Dolores encouraged me. “It will improve your life.” I believed her.
So, after she moved to San Francisco, I remained in Garrison and studied the Catechism materials she sent me. If I had to, I’d be a mail order Catholic. My motivation was simple enough. If I would learn to be a Catholic, I could move to San Francisco with Dolores. Catechism would serve as my ticket out of Garrison, one that unwittingly would march me straight into a life of prostitution.
It was a choice that I never regretted.
Chapter 2
I loved my folks and I know that they loved me. It was the kind of love we search for all our lives only to discover toward the end of that life that we had it all along, and it was right at home. It was the caring, the trust, and a feeling for each other that doesn’t have to be said every day. It’s just there, always present, too often taken for granted.
But in my mind at that time, all that the state of Missouri had to offer was a bunch of trees, some rivers and lakes in the Ozark, a few water moccasins, and a lot of back breaking work. More important for my teenage mind however, was that Missouri lacked the excitement I had come to desire.
No Excitement? I guess that I did run into some of that but I refer to it now as the only type of thrill Garrison, Mo. offered. I had just started what I considered boring catechism lessons when Otto sprayed his semen on my dress. For excitement and a future, that’s what my rural hometown had to offer: a rapist freak like Otto.
By the time I had studied all the catechism materials from Dolores, her letter inviting me to San Francisco finally arrived. Two years had passed. I was sixteen. I was definitely ready to get out of town.
My mother screamed when she learned of the offer. She was upset with Dolores’s invitation, which surprised this teen. We’d never discussed the matter before and not much afterwards other than the screaming. Never once had my mother envisioned that San Francisco was why I studied all that Catholic stuff so much.
“Says she’ll pay my way to San Francisco if you’ll let me go. Dolores wants me to be a nun.” I didn’t know what a nun was, but if it got me to the city by the bay, I’d do it. After all, how could I resist all those letters and postcards from Dolores? San Francisco looked and sounded like some kind of Utopia.
The kink was that my mother didn’t want me to leave home, not at age sixteen and not under the care of Dolores. She also didn’t believe that Dolores had the forty dollars for the bus ticket. Forty dollars was a helluva lot of money back then. What mother didn’t know — and neither did I understand — was that Dolores was making an unheard of fifty to sixty dollars a day working for the Swiss Colony wine garden at the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition on Terminal Island. And that was just from tips.
In 1939 I couldn’t blame my mother for believing that kind of money didn’t exist. Especially, since the only thing I could relate money to was the fact we had very little of it. Most of our food came from the farm we lived on and mother, along with Dolores when she was home, made most of our clothes.
That’s part of that love I discovered many years later. Living like that with so little, but making like it was so much. Wearing homemade clothes that looked better than store bought made me feel proud. I understand now that it was part of what made me feel loved.
Finally, with exasperation and in frustration, my mother, believing that forty dollars was unobtainable, agreed. “If Dolores sends the ticket,” she sighed heavily, “I’ll let you go.”
Two weeks later the ticket arrived.
“No,” my mother cried again, “you can’t. I don’t know where Dolores got that money, but you can’t go.” Her face was old, tired, red. The wrinkles had come early for her, most likely because of our large family and the hardships she had endured.
It was time for the little girl treachery I could act out so well, the same treachery I’d played on Otto, Woody, and all the others. I wanted out of there and I was determined to go. “You taught me all my life to be honest. You said I could go and now you say I can’t.” My tone clearly questioned her honesty. I was such a brat.
“Dolores is gonna need that money. You return the ticket ‘cause you can’t go.” She stamped her foot on the old terribly wornout lineoleum floor. For her, the argument was over.
But, my father wasn’t that much against it. He could see the benefit of one less mouth to feed and besides, I was his pet. He argued with mom for me, explaining that Dolores was strict and responsible. “She’s taken some of the other children for periods of up to six months,” he reminded her, “and they survived. Dolores is the oldest, the smartest, and the most mature,” he concluded.
Mom sobbed a little, after all I was her “baby,” but daddy ended by flatly stating, “She can go.”
I was the seventh of nine children. Two children died at early ages and the others, except for Dolores, were still at home. My favorite of the bunch was Woody. He was such a good looking kid, too. He was a bit scrawny, had a scraggly face, made up for by the fact that he was tough as an armadillo’s skin and as sweet as a ripe freestone peach.
Woody ended up in the Marines fighting in World War II, where he took a few Jap bullets in his arms and legs. He was sent home never to fight in that war again. When we visite, which wasn’t much, I hated looking at the holes, the scars in his limbs, but never once did he complain. He was a helluva brother.
When Woody and I were kids, he was always gettin’ into fights protectin’ me. Even when we were both so little and the grass was tall he was fighting.
“Goldie. Goldie Blake.” The teacher’s voice was high pitched, squeaky.
I was four and a half years old and scared to death. It was my first day in school, and I had done something wrong. I had violated one of the many rules of the small, moldy classroom. I had walked the wrong way up an aisle, and that damned milquetoast of a teacher, Mr. Barnes, ordered me to the front of the class where he slapped my face.
Can you imagine that today? This teacher leaned down and slapped this little four and half year old girl’s face and it was common practice.
Problem was, he slapped Woody’s sister. Mr. Barnes had just written a ticket to hell.
I was about the sweetest little thing you ever saw, too. I was also about the smallest thing in this world who couldn’t pound Mr. Barnes into the ground. That was the first and last day I ever wanted to be in school.
“You son of a bitch!” Woody yelled from somewhere in the back of the one–room schoolhouse. Then, he let out a holler that sounded like someone jumping off a cliff and came running up the aisle straight at that old shithead of a teacher. When he got to Barnes, he started hitting the old bastard right at the knees and midsection. Not bad for a seven year old kid. I was so proud of him, I stopped crying and started laughing, which didn’t help things much.
Mr. Barnes pulled him up into the air and slapped his face, too. Not once, but twice. First with his palm, then backhanding him.
Woody reacted by swinging his fist around and hitting Barnes right on the nose, causing it to bleed. Barnes slapped him again, only this time real hard. Then he set him back down so hard I thought Woody’d have broken legs. Barnes pushed him toward his seat in the colorless room and shouted, “Get straight or I’ll tarn your hide ‘til it bleeds.”
Woody looked like he would kill that old bastard first chance he got. I believed he would.
Woody was like my father. He never yelled when angry. Both just deepened their voices and spoke slowly, with an intensity I haven’t heard since. “Someday,” Woody said, “I’ll be big as you and I’ll come back and whup you. So help me, God.” He seemed glued to the spot where Barnes had pushed him, his little fists clenched at his side, shaking from both fear and anger. His eyes bulged out like tiny balloons and his face was redder than summer apples with just a trickle of blood coming from his nose. At seven years of age he was defiant, protective, and very definitely a tough little kid.
The next day my father came to the classroom with a shotgun in his hand and walked straight to Mr. Barnes at the head of the students. He pressed the muzzle of the gun right up under the frightened teacher’s chin and firmly said, “You ever touch my kids again, and I’ll blow your goll durned head off.” I believed then, and believe now, that he would have. So did Mr. Barnes. He never once laid a hand on us again.
Ten years later at a Fourth of July picnic, Woody, who was seventeen, got his chance for revenge. Mr. Barnes was off by himself, sitting under a shade tree drinking moonshine when Woody found him. Lordy, it was fun watching.
“Well, well, lookee here.” Woody stood over Barnes, his legs spread, his arms crossed over his chest.
“Woody!” Barnes was smashed from too much corn liquor.
“‘Member that time you whupped my sis and me? I told you then I was gonna grow and whup you right back? Well, sir, today’s the day.”
Woody beat the shit out of that old fart. Picked him up from under that tree, slapped his face first, then punched him in the gut, and slammed him around until Barnes was unconscious. I think everyone was happy about it except the sheriff, who locked Woody in jail for three days.
The smile on my brother’s face told me that he really did think it was “worth it.”
“Dolores says it’s worth it, Mommy,” I found that even though Daddy said I could go, I was still arguing with my mother about going to San Francisco.
The lack of household money, or the cost of things was the basis for most of her arguments. Looking back, she was dead on right about the money. Us farm folks didn’t have any. We knew very little about big city folks havin’ most of the money those days.
“She’ll just get homesick and come right back,” Daddy told her. My father, who I came to understand a great deal more years later, knew in his heart that I’d never return except for a visit now and then, yet he continued to argue for me. He stood slowly from the kitchen table, walked to her, put his arms around her and spoke softly, winning my case with finality. “Let go, Martha. It’s time.”
The next day I was on the bus westbound. It was a Greyhound with these magnificent plush-leather seats, not at all like those plain wood-hard old school bus seats. The windows were large and could even be opened. We traveled south out of Garrison, then west through southern Kansas, down into Texas, back up through New Mexico, Arizona, Los Angeles, and then finally, northward to San Francisco. Mom was right. It was a long, desert-dry, boring trip. I got hungry a lot too, since I didn’t prepare for the cost of food on the road and took only two lunch bags of sandwiches and fruit.
Dolores met me in San Francisco. “My gosh, Goldie, you look exhausted.” She put me into her car — a new Ford coupe — and drove me through the first fog I’d ever seen in my life to her apartment. Wow, I thought, my sister is so beautiful.
Dolores was wearing a new fur coat and makeup to match her red hair, which she had permed that same day at a beauty parlor. I was impressed. Garrison didn’t even have such a parlor. Never, not ever in Garrison, had I seen anyone with a permanent. And I never knew anyone who had bought a new car.
She wore a gigantic white hat with a wide, full brim that matched her shoes, which I thought were the finest looking footwear I had ever seen.
I was exhausted and excited at the same time. I wanted to tell Dolores all about the family, the trip, and what I’d seen enroute from the time I left Garrison. I especially wanted to describe the orange. People from Missouri didn’t see fresh oranges like the one I bought in Los Angeles that morning.
“I got this big orange in Los Angeles,” I told her, excitement in my voice. “This big.” I held my hands out. “I ain’t ever seen one like it ‘fore.”
She smiled. “Lots of those out here.”
“Only cost me a nickel.” Dolores had also sent me fifteen dollars for food, but proudly, I spent only two dollars and fifteen cents during the whole trip.
She smiled again.
“And Arizona and Texas were either too cold or too hot and the bus driver kept loaning me his jacket ‘cause I didn’t have one and —”
She put her hand on my lap and squeezed me a bit. “Goldie,” she laughed, “you can tell me all about it tomorrow.”
When I awoke the next morning I was stunned by San Francisco’s beauty. Looking out Dolores’s window I could see the bay and the new Golden Gate bridge. A few sailboats were on the water racing each other. They soon passed out of view beyond the small island.
“Look at that.” I called out to her.
“Alcatraz. It’s a prison.” The tone of her voice reflected her negative attitude toward anyone who didn’t play by society’s rules.
When we walked onto the ferry boat to go to Terminal Island, the sun was shining brightly and the air was crisp, clean, scented by the ocean with Seagulls flying everywhere. The Oakland Bay Bridge, which passed from San Francisco through Terminal Island to Oakland, had been built a few years earlier in 1936. “Doesn’t matter,” Dolores had explained, “the ferry is cheaper and easier for us.” I didn’t know it then, but years later I would be involved in a horrendous shoot-out on that very bridge.
“Here.” She handed me two dollars and fifty cents. “You keep yourself busy at the fair while I work. Lots of rides, hot dog stands and some water dancing.” She pointed, then added, “Over there.”
I nodded enthusiastically.
“Goldie.” she could see my excitement. “Stay away from Sally Rand, the Miss America pageant, and that baby birth exhibit. You hear?”
I nodded again, but asked myself, Why?
She smiled and told me where we’d meet at the end of the day and left me there. My first day in San Francisco and I’m at a world’s exposition holding two dollars and fifty cents in my hands. Pretty heady stuff for a farmer’s daughter. I was really excited.
The first exhibits I visited were the ones she said to stay out of. Other than pigs on our farm, I had never seen a baby being born, so I visited the Caesarean birth display first and watched these two babies come into the world with all that blood and the placenta. It caused me to become a little ill, almost vomiting right there in the viewing area.
After that I saw Sally Rand and other nude women and checked out the Miss America exhibit, and then ate hot dogs and drank Pepsis until I couldn’t move.
For ninety days I did that. Dolores took me to the fair everyday, gave me two dollars and fifty cents and turned me loose. Most of the time I remained at the fair. But sometimes I would leave, go back into town and look around and occasionally, without telling Dolores, I’d date one of the male roomers from the apartment house. At sixteen I was convinced I was grown up.
Then the day for my entering Catholic school finally came. “It’s the reason you read all those catechism books. It’s also the reason mother allowed you to visit,” Dolores reminded me. “You’re to become a nun.”
Dolores called the school, “The mother house.”
“They named a mission for mother?”
“No,” she laughed. Her auburn hair billowed out from under her large–brimmed, white hat. “It’s named after the Blessed Virgin Mary. That’s where you’ll enroll for school. It’s where you’ll learn things about becoming a nun.”
Dolores explain the nun’s school, the religion, my future and while she did I remembered Lou Cadonna again. He was Dolores’s boyfriend, and she had no idea I had snuck away from the Fair just the day before with Lou. She definitely had no idea that he’d just ejaculated on my new blue and white dress.
“Dolores will kill you!” I screamed when Lou did that. Cadonna was nervous enough without my adding to it. Dolores probably would hurt him, but she’d hurt me, too. I remembered Otto the bus driver, and how he carried my firewood for two years just to keep me quiet. The jerk came to the house every Wednesday and Saturday and carried the cut firewood I was supposed to move for Woody. He did all that because he had spread his oats on me. So, why wouldn’t Cadonna? “Tell you what, Lou.”
“Yeah?” He was ready for anything.
I was still wiping his semen from the new dress Dolores had made me. She was a great seamstress and could have made a good living at it. “I won’t tell her if you drive me everywhere I need to go. I ain’t got no car and Dolores won’t let me ride in hers or take a cab or the cable cars.” I was tired of walking up and down the hills of ‘Frisco.
He looked at me threateningly for a while with his large black, boring eyes. Then, he smiled and nodded. “You’re a cunning little bitch, ain’t you?”
For some reason I resented that accusation. “Hell no. I’m gonna be a nun.” I still had no idea what a nun was. “I just need a ride and you don’t want’a die yet, do you?” He didn’t.
I got my rides. Except for those times I was forced to walk with Dolores.
I couldn’t understand it. Dolores had a new Ford, but she preferred to walk most of the time. So, when she decided it was time for me to start my education toward becoming a nun, we walked from her apartment down streets lined with other apartment buildings, to the Mother school.
On the first day, and without warning, Dolores grabbed my hand and pulled me across the street away from an apartment house that had little red lights strung around the front door. I didn’t know then it was a brothel, and certainly had no inclination that I would be working in that very same house a short three years later.
“Why’d you do that?” We walked faster. “Red’s my favorite color.”
“Quiet!” Years later when I’d reflect on that morning, I’d laugh to myself remembering Dolores. Now, there’s a girl, I would ruminate, who would never have considered my lifetime–career as a prostitute and madam.
“My God!” I gasped out of surprise when I saw the inside of the mission school. I had never seen a Catholic nun in my life. They didn’t have them in Missouri, at least not where I lived. Lots of Baptists, but no Catholics. There, standing in front of me, was this stern looking woman hiding under a black hooded outfit with some white trim that was starched to beat the hell outta concrete and wearing tiny glasses that looked like slits of glass borrowed from the bottom of a coke bottle. She was like an apparition from the scariest of the ghost stories I’d ever heard or read.
“Sit straight,” Dolores told me.
I looked at her with astonishment still in my eyes. “I am,” I moaned.
The Mother Superior was looking at some papers Dolores had filled in for me. After a few moments, she finally looked up and greeted us. “Good morning.”
“Good morning Mother Superior. This is my little sister, Goldie.” Goldie was my given first name. My dad gave that to me and I cherished it. Well, this nun squinted over those narrow pieces of glass she called eyeglasses and frowned, “What’s your Christian name?” “Goldie,” I answered.
“What’s your middle name?”
“Mary.”
“We’ll drop the Goldie and use Mary.”
No we won’t, I thought. “My dad gave me that, and I ain’t droppin’ nothin’.” No one ever called me by my middle name. Just mama sometimes. I would have loved to use “Goldie” during my professional career, but my goals were always to protect the family name and the family. For me, Goldie was a family name.
She continued to frown. I knew right then, that never, never in my lifetime, would I become a nun. I saw that woman-in-black two more times before I chucked the whole thing. During those visits I never saw her smile. I didn’t see any of the others at that school smile either, and that included the students. It was all too depressing for me.
“I ain’t gonna be a nun,” I told Dolores on my third trip. “No way.”
Dolores started calling me Mary after that, and it’s never changed.
She called me a few other names too, mostly for my having dropped out of the school, but eventually, she accepted my decision.
Instead she thought I’d make a good pianist. Dolores was persistent when her mind was made up. Since I’d won out over the nun stuff, she wanted me to learn something else. It seemed that my older sister was intent upon me becoming educated. Polished. “Sophisticated,” she said.
So, for a while I took piano lessons. I didn’t like them, but I would try. What I thought I’d like to learn, I told her, “was the guitar.”
“What?” She always acted stunned by my requests.
“I wan’ta be a guitar player,” I announced, arguing for the wooden instrument a few months after the first piano lesson.
“No, learn the piano first.” She thought if I learned the piano, I could play anything. Maybe she was right, but the damned thing wasn’t for me.
I hounded her like brats can do, until she finally gave in and paid for guitar lessons. Things were going along fine until the day she caught me singing while practicing. What a mistake for me. I was the most terrible, unteachable human in the world when it came to music. The attempt at singing was a dead giveaway. “Good Lord, Mary. Put that thing away.” Next day, she enrolled me in a beautician’s school.
The owner Mr. Alfred, a short, effeminate man, didn’t appreciate my technique or attitude. Poor Dolores. She had blown about seventy five dollars on my new uniform and the combs and brushes I had to have. Blew all that money away because I couldn’t get along with the rich bitches who came there for free hairdos.
“Goldie,” Mr. Alfred croaked out painfully on the day I was released. “What in the hell are you doing?”
“That bitch had me do her hair twenty times.”
“That’s what you’re here for. This is a school.”
“Bullsh — “
“I like you Goldie,” he lied. “But you’re never going to be a beauty operator.”
That did it. Dolores was mad after that. Really angry.
“I’m sending you home,” she declared. “Tomorrow.”
Chapter 3
I
was a minor without a job, a home, or parents and I was in Calfiornia. Dolores could send me home if she wanted to, and right then she really wanted me out of there.
“I’m not going.” I, just as desperately, wanted to stay. Dolores was as mad as a cornered copperhead. She pointed her right index finger at me and sternly announced, “You’ll be on that bus tomorrow, or I’ll get help from the authorities.”
I pleaded, begged, got on my knees. But Dolores was the oldest of us kids and she’d picked up street smarts I hadn’t yet learned. I was so naive back then. “Daddy will get mad at you, little girl.” Daddy did like me a lot and he hadn’t paid much attention to Dolores back when we all lived together.
“No he won’t. Daddy says I can stay.” Daddy was the only leverage I had. If she threw mama at me, I’d have been in trouble.
“Daddy doesn’t have a thing to do with this. I’m shipping you out of here first thing in the morning. Pack your things and be ready.” She stormed out of the room but returned quickly to deliver one last admonishment. “I’m within my rights. I can do this, Goldie. So don’t fight it.”