Junkies were a part of our life, although it was uncommon to see a white one in those days. Sharon is the dope-head I remember best. She was a black hooker who hung out at Jack's, and she liked me a lot, always buying little trinkets for me, ties, cufflinks, and the like.
When things start to go bad for a street girl, they go bad in a hurry. Her old man, street lingo for "pimp", took every cent she had, beat the shit out of her so that she couldn't work, and jazzed off for New York. The law picked her up twice in one week for vagrancy. The landlord kicked her out of her trick pad when he heard that her old man was gone. She thought she was pregnant again. And, being unable to pay for any heroin, or borrow from even her closest friends, she was going into withdrawal.
This was before federal and state agencies were equipped to handle such problems. If she had shown up at a local hospital for treatment they would have called the police to haul her off to jail.
However, the street was well prepared for such situations. Her sisters of the night, also mostly junkies, got together. Clarabelle donated her apartment-trick pad and moved in with Junie, who had the same pimp. Then a guard was set, military fashion, around the clock. Sharon and her caretaker were locked into the pad, and every few hours a replacement would show up to baby sit. I sat several day watches. It was the most horrifying experience of my life. There was a movie called Man with the Golden Arm, in which Frank Sinatra vividly portrayed a junkie going cold turkey. Most people who saw this so-called ultra-realism were appalled, but to me it was child's play; Sinatra didn't even come close to what Sharon went through, the sweating; the screaming; restrained on her bed with rope so that she wouldn't kill herself or somebody else; moving her bowels and rolling in her own feces; urinating all over herself; breaking loose a hand and throwing her own shit around the room; smearing it over her body; the tremors; the indescribable agony; the vomit everywhere, and the constant retching when there was no vomit left; the unbearable pain of that old monkey on her back.
And finally she slept, in fits at first, and then for longer periods. In four days the symptoms diminished to the point of controllability. Two girls came in to clean up the mess and change her sheets. They sprayed the room to clear the incredibly foul odor, brought her nourishment, and gave her better care than she would have received from the best nurses in the best hospitals in town, because they knew that when their turn came, when they couldn't afford their own goodies, Sharon would take just as good care of them.
They didn't have much in the way of facilities in that old apartment on Sterner Street near Geary, but they made do, and in a couple of weeks Sharon was almost her old self, and off junk.
But the way of the street is a hard way, and some lessons are never learned. Within a month Sharon's bruises had healed, she had found a new old man (a pathological need for all of those girls), she got a new trick pad, made herself a few bucks, and went right out to find Mister Sandman with his expensive little envelopes. She was off and free of it, but she couldn't stay that way. The pressures of life on the street were too strong, and like all the girls, Sharon was too weak.
As Vacation ended I got a job playing for a while in the pit orchestra of the old President's Follies, the last of the late, great San Francisco burlesque houses. To a drummer, doing bump-and-grind music is the most boring, uncreative job in the world.
The girls, some of whom were national headliners, were as finicky and temperamental as old-time opera stars. If you gave them a riff in the wrong place or missed a boom on the bass drum, they would chew your ass for an hour after the show. I goofed and got chewed out fairly often because I couldn't concentrate for very long on that shitty music, three shows a night and four on weekends.
The front rows were full of older guys who kept their coats over their laps. From where I sat I could watch them jerk off under the coats, twisting and banging a bit in their seats when they shot their loads.
Weekends were fraternity time, and we would get gangs of kids from Cal or Stanford who were lit on 3.2 campus beer, and would shout obscenities at the girls. The cops had to come often and throw out the worst of them.
During rehearsals, such as they were, and between shows the girls did nothing but bitch at one another. Petty jealousies and hatreds were rampant. Some strippers wouldn't even work the same show with certain other strippers. They were always fighting over billing or how much money they were getting. When a treasured item such as a G-string or gown got misplaced, every girl in the show was accused of theft until the missing article was found, usually right where its owner had left and forgotten it.
The comics, Bill and Sam, were two old Jewish vaude-villians who looked like Mutt and Jeff. Using a few of the girls in their skits, they did every tired routine that had been abandoned by more successful performers' years before. But they did sort of play father to the girls, and tried to settle arguments.
Only a few years before, I would have given anything just to catch a quick glimpse of a naked tit. Now I didn't even look up. The place was full of them, even if the nipples were covered with pasties and the crotches with G-strings. Like anything else, it became boring, just another job.
Occasionally we blew smokers for our great American fraternal organizations, the Elks, the Lions, the American Legion, etc. Although the average schnook would be thrilled to see one, with its old porno movies and everybody fucking everybody else, to us they eventually became a bore, like the strip shows.
The Saturday night before I entered high school we blew an American Legion stag at the Beach Chalet, a big rental hall on Great Highway near Playland, fronting the Pacific Ocean.
The scenario for most stag parties is the same. First the guys have a go at the bar, during which the drinking is hot and heavy. Then the projector and screen are brought in and the film threaded, while everybody stands around making nervous jokes. Finally everyone is seated, the lights are killed, and the projector is started. Usually the film has been threaded improperly by a drunken volunteer and starts to jump all over the screen.
So the lights go back on while four or five "experts" from the audience stand around with their thumbs up their asses, trying to figure out what went wrong.
A little fiddling, the lights go out, and they start again. Still no good, so the lights go back on while everybody groans in disappointment.
More fiddling, a lot of rethreading, and they try again. This time it works, and the gang, applauds. On with the sex.
But these are old films, made mostly during the twenties and thirties. They have been run through a thousand projectors, manhandled by scores of sweaty fingers, broken and spliced and rebroken and respliced. So the film runs about one minute and just as the girl starts to strip, whap, whap, whap, whap, it breaks again.
The horny audience groans once more as the lights come back on, and the broken piece is threaded far enough onto the take up spool to get everything going.
The films are silent, with subtitles or title cuts, most of which have nothing to do with what's happening in the movie. The men are quiet; they sit there watching the fucking and wishing they were alone so they could jerk it a bit. The laughter is forced, self-conscious, as though they were saying, "See? It doesn't bother me at all."
But it does. So much so that some joker usually shouts that he'll give a buck to the first guy who stands up when the movie is over. Often the desire for pornography, a form of voyeurism, is so strong that instead of rewinding the film from spool to spool they just put the projector into reverse and run it again, backward. Then it is really comical in certain aspects, but the Johns don't care about that, a cock sawing in and out of a cunt looks the same backward or forward.
When the films are over and everyone is good and horny the band starts and the girls come out. There are always at least three and sometimes as many as six. That particular evening was a big affair, with about a hundred Johns who had paid twenty apiece for the hall, the films, the band, and Six-Girls-Six.
The broads start out by singing risquй songs and dancing a little, with pasty-covered tits flopping up and down. They make a guarantee from the door money, plus whatever they can get out of the Johns. It was a cinch that a John who wouldn't wrap at least a fiver around his hard-on would end up beating his meat alone, because the girls wouldn't touch him. With a crowd this size a smart whore could make herself four or five hundred for her evening's work.
Of course there was always some smartass drunk who would heat a silver dollar with a match and try to shove it up a girl's cunt, but these chicks were wise and if they saw any silver they would back off and touch it first, to be sure that they didn't get a pussyburn.
That evening ended up pretty wild. One of the chicks was on a table in the corner of the room and there was a long line of Johns waiting for her. The John whose turn it was would unzip his fly and she would throw her legs over his shoulders as he slipped it in and started fucking her. Other Johns were standing all around the table, throwing cash at her. She had her head turned to the side and was sucking off one guy. Seven or eight other guys were jacking off on her, and when they were through, others would follow. I thought she was going to drown in cum, she had it all over her belly and tits. It lay in a big pool in her navel and covered her face, with big gobs of it dripping from her hair. Both of her hands held cash, but she still used one to jack the John she was sucking and ran the other in big circles over her body, spreading semen around like cold cream.
I walked over and watched, fascinated. As she rubbed her hands around, the jizz-sticky bills would come out of her hand and cling to her soaking body. When the John at the head of the table pulled away from her cunt and the next one stepped up, I could see a river of white running out of her and into the crack of her ass, the insides of her thighs were covered with it.
A John standing by her head let go a load that spattered her forehead, covered her eyelashes and nose, and part of the prick of the guy she was sucking off. She was by far the richest broad there. She must have had five hundred just stuck to her body.
On the other side of the room, in ring number two, the Johns had collected a cash bonus to get two of the girls to make love to each other, and they were busy on the floor, thrashing around with mock passion while sucking each other's twats.
The other three girls were more conventional, they were fucking and sucking around the room, picking up all the spare cash they could. It should have turned me on, but it didn't. After the job, Herb drove me straight home. I was cold, tired, and sick in my soul.
By the time I started high school I was sick of the Tenderloin and sick of hustling, despite the good money I'd made.
I was sick of the poverty and the filth.
Sick of dingy clubs and hotel rooms.
Sick of the whores and pimps and drugs.
Sick of the winos and alkies, the gays and perverts.
Sick of the glory holes and alleys.
Sick of the faceless mouths rooting in my crotch, draining me of my juices faster than I could replenish them.
Sick of the rough, stubbly cheeks and booze breaths trying to kiss me, rub my chest, lick my neck.
Sick of watching the impotent old queers trying in vain to get their pathetic tools hard just one more time while they sucked frantically at me.
I had run out of tears.
Out of sympathy.
Out of compassion.
I was wasted and dead inside.
After a year and a half on the street, I retired as a hustler, knowing that if I didn't, I was finished as a human being.
I was not yet sixteen.