A whole new universe of prostitution for me to witness, as I’d never been to Florida before.
Our motel room, the first night.
The other prong of my nightmare was our lodgings. From the outside it looked like a perfectly respectable two story, mid-range motel, the kind that might attract any family pulling off the freeway on their way to Disney World. But I could easily imagine the shock they would encounter if they had innocently drifted into that establishment for a night’s lodging.
The trouble was that it had weekly discount rates. I think ours was three hundred and twenty, one sixty apiece, not too bad for a five hundred and fifty paycheck. And I earned a second check working Saturdays and some Sundays. But these weekly rates, I quickly found out, attracted a certain, unique clientele. The whole place was one big crack house, half the rooms inhabited by young crack whores, the others by a few dealers and a host of low-life, blue-collar workers addicted to both. The hallways of this beehive were always the busiest around three and four a.m.
Our Hallway at 4 a.m.
Gomez sniffed this out within days, and by some miraculous fluke, ran into someone he knew from Montock, right in our hallway. It was as improbable a meeting as something you see at the end of what they call a ‘recognition play’. I was with him. A tall, skinny, fellow limps up to us and says: “Craig, is that you?” Within minutes he was sitting in our room, a very low-brow, criminal looking type. But he was gabbing away with Gomez and telling him some interesting, ear gripping news.
He’d come to Florida for a construction job as a laborer and found one. He had no trade, and from what I could see, no intelligence or any redeeming qualities, just vagrant, white riffraff. That Gomez knew him was telling. He’d worked a few months near this place and was injured on the job site, no fault of his, as a machine operator ran into him. This was a month before.
It was a back injury, permanent as the x-rays showed and the company put him up in this fine residence to await a one-time compensation check, after which they’d be done with him, the company free and clear forever, no court case, perhaps not even the insurance or safety board informed, just one paper signed in a company trailer, with one under the table payoff for a permanent debility.
He was just the type too ignorant to know of worker’s rights and also too ready to agree to one big check and be gone. His drug habit was beckoning him. He told us the check would be ready in two days and when he found out I had a van he asked if we could drive him to pick it up, (otherwise it might be three days in the mail, an unfathomable length of time and torture to a crack addict). He could hardly walk down the hall with his limp. So I promised to take him to a bank and grocery store, and he was overjoyed, swearing he’d repay us well. Gomez instantly agreed to this. He knew his friend was a drug addict and opportunity was knocking loudly on his door, which also unfortunately just happened to be mine.
That Friday, our checks cashed, we found him waiting outside our room, all excited. We sped to some nearby office, then to the closest bank which closed at six. It was five thirty and he had a check for twenty two thousand in his hand. He asked for a thousand in cash and put the rest in a new account. We drove him to the grocery store and he told us to stock up. He’d pay for everything. So we did, microwave dinners, snacks, sandwich stuff for a week. Next stop, the liquor store. Here he went to town, spending over two hundred, giving us three bottles of rum. Then back to the motel. Gomez spent the rest of the night in his room smoking crack. I had my Saturday job in mind and went to bed early.
That work was pleasant, the most enjoyable type of all for me because I was soon left alone. The supervisor gave me a tour of the site, called ‘Toon Town’. All the houses and buildings along this street were crooked, not a single ninety degree angle anywhere, which disoriented the senses. The paint they used on all the walls, he told me, was equally disorienting. It changed color with the heat of the day and cost two thousand dollars a gallon. It could actually change from green to blue in an hour, then violet, then red. He showed me the V.I.P. lounge and I could immediately see why he was unhappy with parts of the ceiling.
I told him I could fix it all, just leave me alone with the materials, the pipe, ladders and benders and come back at the end of the day, which he did. I love working alone. It’s all between me and the pipe. I treat it like I would a woman, gently, with care. And it never lies. It’s truly my mistress. With practiced hands I bend each stick to the desired shape. This takes both skill and experience because you can’t bend it twice. Any mistake and you have to start over with a new piece or there will be wrinkles, not the perfectly smooth curve you desire.
But once done it stays that shape forever, a picture you’ve painted. It never talks back, it can’t. It never ages. All blemishes are yours, your fault, and yours to correct. It’s like a page of calligraphy, requiring the steadiest motion, one blot ruining the whole page. So I took out the pieces of the graduated curves that were off and ugly and one by one replaced them with my own, smooth, elegant matches, the pattern they deserved.
Some pipework of mine.
A graduated bend is like the lines of lanes in a horse racetrack seen from above. The lanes retain their exact width but the curves have to be ‘graduated’ to do this. The inner ninety degree bends take up six inches but the next have to be seven and a half inches, the next nine and so on to fit the pattern and keep all the pipes exactly an inch apart. But there are no tools for these wider sweeps. You have to cheat the bender, make a five degree bend then slip the bender ever so slightly, a half inch or so along the pipe for the next slight bend, with even pressure on your toes, feeling and coercing the soft pipe into that shape, slowly, consistently, till the desired arc is achieved. This is what I was good at.
When he came back that afternoon and saw the half dozen curves I’d fixed he was pleased, delighted in fact. They were now beautiful to the eye of any beholder. He wanted me back every Saturday. He said he wouldn’t mention my repairs to any of his pipe benders, so as not to offend them. They wouldn’t complain and admire their work all the more. I did this for the next eight weeks and he put me down for ten hours for every seven I worked. That was all he could do as a bonus in a big company with set wages. Without that work I would have left Orlando sooner.
Gomez sat in our motel room every Friday night and Saturday smoking crack, along with his friend, who bought and shared and gave most of it away to a flock of twenty year old whores. They collected around him like moths to a flame. That guy did this every night in his room and spent his whole compensation check within thirty days. He probably bought himself a few half-remembered blow jobs in that fog of crack smoke. Then he disappeared, broke and broke-backed, a true fool and victim if I ever met one, permanently damaged, limping off into the dark night of his future. One could only imagine that with dread, and not for long.
La Rochefoucauld wrote: “Neither the sun nor death can be looked at with a steady eye”. I’d include his fate as a third.
But after he left, Gomez had a whole troupe of young girls hitting on him. And he well knew how to take advantage. They’d be by each weekend, like clockwork. He was just as regular too. Every Friday we cashed our checks. Next stop was the grocery and liquor store. He would buy a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and some snacks, maybe a few cans of sardines, then several bottles of rum.
Next I drove him straight to the front desk to pay his half of the room fee for the week. After that he’d disappear down the hall. That was where the crack was. He had about three fifty left from his paycheck. Fridays he wouldn’t bother me, slip to some other room, knowing I wanted to sleep. But Saturday nights were a circus, two girls sitting on his bed, often one on mine, the T.V. on, the pipe going non-stop from one set of lips to the next, except mine of course. I’d have my glass and bottle on my nightstand, propped up by pillows, in my clothes, enjoying their looks, their innocent airs and conversations as they got high, the talk of some very pretty eighteen year old girls all excited. Sometimes I would chime in with a remark, though most of the time half-watching T.V.
Around midnight I would show annoyance, turn the set way down and return to my bedside, click my lamp off, strip to my undies and climb under the sheets. Gomez would tell the girls to hush, but by four or five a.m. two would be gone and one would still be at it with him, (his choice for the night, his own light dimmed and both now naked and half under the covers). I’d catch a glimpse of this as I made a quick trip to the bathroom.
I remember one such night when a very pretty, young blond showed up around nine. She sat on my bed beside me and I couldn’t resist asking her how she came to choose this lifestyle and this place. We talked for hours, me sipping drink after drink of rum and she hitting the bowl every ten minutes as it came around.
She had the sweetest disposition and the mind of a child. She said she didn’t know how she ended up here and it didn’t matter to her. She was happy. I asked her if there was a pimp. She told me ‘no’, that’s what she liked about this place. Everyone was on their own. She shared a room with another girl. They did whatever sexual favors they pleased, hardly ever had to leave the place, bought crack down the hall, always available, a perfect life.
I told her, honestly, I was glad she had no pimp, no one controlling her, taking a slice of her money, free to make her own decisions. I asked if she was saving up any. “No” she replied. It was all spent on crack. She had no future plans, or any future at all, (none anyone would want to think about). Only the dealers were making money, or not, crack-heads themselves. Still, I went on in a paternalistic manner, philosophical even, telling her life contained much more than these hallways and she should try to travel someday, see more of the world. By midnight our talk was pretty much spent and I turned out my light and went to sleep.
The young girl. Victoriaderbyshire1704.jpg
Then, an hour or so later, she was shaking me awake and as I sat up in bed she took a big hit off the pipe and blew it all into my mouth, before I could resist. This was her way of thanking me, the only way she knew, sharing what she liked best. I told her “thanks” then laid down again wanting sleep. She saw that and moved over to Gomez’s bed, happy that she’d thanked me.
This weekly circus couldn’t go on. Every week by Wednesday or Thursday Gomez would be starving and I’d have to buy him a few meals. He’d never ask but I could see him staring as I heated up my dinner, like a wide-eyed dog, his bread and peanut butter all gone. I couldn’t eat my T.V. dinner in peace. His crack too ran out at exactly the same time each weekend, Sunday around noon. He’d always have a girl in his bed Sunday morning, wake up late and finish it off with her after the third or fourth bout of sex. The one’s around dawn always woke me up. He never had to pay the girls for sex with money, just with crack. After eight weeks of this I told him I was quits.
I searched around and found a room in a house nearby at nearly the same price. It had its own entrance from the backyard and a shared bathroom with another tenant. An old woman owned the place and lived upstairs. The place had been vacant a long time, though nice and fully furnished, with a patio outside my door and a beautiful backyard. I guessed most single people in the area were crack heads and they liked to live in groups. At least half of our fifteen man crew were addicts. It wasn't hard to tell.
