By Ed Dazere
Disclaimer: what follows is a fictionalised reconstruction, not a record.
DISCLAIMER: The following article is based on facts available to the author and is to an extent fictionalised and embellished. Any perceived permutation of prejudice is not representative of the author’s sentiments.
A girl aged eight sleeps in a cot in her own room. She dreams of horses small and pretty, little more than foals, and one of them is her friend in here, who keeps up an affectionate play with her, nosing her outstretched hand, snuffling, motioning that powerful head agreeably to her stroking. In here, the clouds darken and there is what appears to be a funnel-shaped cloud some way off. The horses scarper, sounding their distress in a drunk-sounding hee-haw. The wild and furious cloud encroaches and fast, growing in girth, intensity, it seems. There is banging, and some awful, off-key singing in a language she has come to know quite well. (“Jossa ovat kaunis kukka kyllä, minulla on minun vallassani, ja nyt on rakastava Fi”.) It isn’t really singing, more like a mixture of song and some menacing incantation, and even in here she thinks she knows who the author of that is, but this is surely still a dream. A thunderclap, and one of the horses is reeling on the ground, blood spurting from a point in its head. Then, ruffling like a loose tent in a storm (or bedding), she wakes, screams. Grandpa is standing over her, arms held out as if to snatch her, gun in left hand. He slurs his Finnish, smiling grotesquely, eyes rheumy and fanatic. He says something of that tongue she cannot understand but finds out the meaning shortly thereafter. From then on, the dreams are not of horses; they are of ogres and anthropomorphs like ghouls from archaic children’s books, but perverted beyond reckoning of her years, and she often wets the bed and screams when they beset her imagination. Grandpa doesn’t tolerate such behaviour in children, the mountebank puritan that he is; he will thrash her naked body for any such infractions and take his liberties therein.
(Note: I got a well-educated person to help me write this since my writing is a pile of poo-poo. So, don’t you get to thinking that I studied Eng-Lit at Orcsford (The Eagle and Child was where you wrote it Mr T) or Harvard Uni via some distance learning course while on death row.)
As little of the world that I knew, my instincts told me that my upbringing was highly unusual, not right, any pertinent details not to be relayed to anyone, especially not fellow children. Although, something about me (an aura), maybe some intelligence on the grapevine about my background, spoke of the awfulness of my provenance, the sordidness true and imagined, and the imagined was no doubt even worse than the truth, although how could it have been much more so! When that is your imprimatur, you hardly have a chance to eschew it. You might as well have it burnt into your forehead, a number, and have the details spread around door to door, on a leaflet with your face on it. And so, the other kids treated me like some special kind of whitetrash, and most of them would have been considered at least the latter of the category; but it is about finding someone worse off than you, revelling in your relative status, that is so compelling. So, with that, I was relentlessly bullied, mocked, assaulted, badmouthed: they said I was the product of incest (I never knew my father); that I had had sex with my brother (more the other way around); that my “Pa” (Grandpa) had had sex with me (true). What a cruel world we live in; one like me who never asked to be created by such dire species, thrust in to it, in violation of its social mores, abominated by my cohorts, whose little eyes would have been glowing mirrors of glee had I been burnt at the stake like any other witch, in some awful, dystopian playground trial wilfully gotten out of hand.
As a child, you are not really told about the nature of your creation, how your parents came to engage in an act that is not only compelling by its crystal logic, but that there is in it a magic of lust that is nature’s incredible erotic spell ineluctable; sometimes romantic, sometimes frenzied and rapine, but still a trick to re-supply mankind. (I heard that someone said that if it wasn’t for rape, half of us wouldn’t be here, and I can believe it.) At school, they teach you the birds and the bees in a romantic context (a whole bunch of dissembling slush), but if you want to learn about it properly, you must get practical. And if you have people in your midst who are perverts, you’ll get a crash course. I was sexually precocious I’ll admit it.
So, I was living with my Grandparents, since my mother had run away (as had my pa-proper). There was Grandma, but she didn’t really count that much in my development. It was my alcoholic and perverted Grandpa who I remember the most. To this day, I cannot understand why an old man would want to sexually molest his mostly pre-pubescent Granddaughter, but he did (though I could mostly fend him off – at least latterly). Grandma did not molest me, was either unaware, or nonchalant (maybe she’d been there herself). My brother was a pervert who thought I was his “Girlfriend”. (As with Grandpa, I don’t get boys – or even men – wanting to have sex with their sisters etc). By the time I was eleven, I had developed a pretty good understanding of the “birds and the bees”, and a pretty good line in self-defence. Given those prospects, the chances of me going down the straight and narrow path were pretty slim. But did I even want to? I do wonder whether it was my nature that invited all that filthy attention, education (so not a one-way street). If so, a prestigious career, in say law or banking, was off the cards. The career in question is not in the handbook at school, though given the salary, the number of people who take it on, you might wonder why, unless you tried it.
So, my home was the absolute pits! Did I say that? Sometimes I wondered whether life in the woods would be better, but winters in the Midwest are lethal (and the local woods were “known” haunts for “pervys”, who’d rape then murder you and bury you like you were a dog, so the lurid rumours went). And running away to a town wasn’t likely to be much better re the pervys. So, I would stay put. I had most things, though meagre, and no way would I be materialistically spoilt, next to no pocket money, mostly. The sustenance was old person food, which old people don’t realise is disgusting to the vital, and, because they are immune to it, don’t realise its toxicity to us (I would get food poisoning from time to time but built some tolerance up). Grandpa would eat anything, because his fuel was the booze, starting late morning, onto pass out time, which I looked forward to, because, with Grandpa and his dirty mind, and liquor, I was vulnerable, depending on his capacity. He also had some vile, likeminded acquaintances who’d come over at times to play poker and tope and watch TV, stupid daytime stuff, the games, and porn, and loud. And they’d talk filth in their cups, and their filth-talk would stray – via young women in general – towards me, in their cant. And if I was in sight – which I rarely was – their gazes would alight on me. The one that particularly bothered me was Ronny, who was a fat and sleazy garage owner (a criminal of many stripes). Back then, I imagined they were plotting something with me, but didn’t want to know what exactly, though it couldn’t be far from my imaginings.
But then it happened. It was in June, hot and humid, sweaty weather that can drench your clothes and drive you mad. There are the pheromones pervading, the dogs are smelling it in their own and in humans who are randy with the heat. I suppose I was smelling of it, since nature had made the change not long before. I had gone to bed at around 9 pm, uncannily on tenterhooks (Grandpa had been dormant for a while, and I had assumed permanently). I had been dreaming something terrible about being in a toilet cubicle, that was connected to another, and another, anyway you went, like a cloacal maze (claustrophobia theme no doubt). Then I heard a loud bang and woke. There was this thundering coming up the staircase, voices that would put you on edge, like a warparty storming your ken. I hid under the bed. They came through the door like a dam-burst-inundation. Though silent, I was sure they would find me. Their raucousness grew when they couldn’t. Then they worked it out, dragged me out from under like a coyote from its den. Like a bunch of marauding drunkard Vikings who’d found the brothel. The rest we’ll put to bed.
After that incident, any shred of innocence of childhood had been rent. I had pretty much given up on humanity, resigned myself to my fate. Grandpa cut a meek and guilty figure, leaving me in peace for sure, avoiding me most of the time, and when he did interact, he was apparently caring. He gave me a good deal of pocket money (ha-ha – payment then). I was a sexually corrupted being, nubile as I was. I would forever hate men because of what they were designed to do to us girls (irrespective of our consent), but was strangely attracted and attached to them, by dint of nature’s heartless demands on my sex. My sex life took off, like a rocket. In the matter of a few months after my inculcation, I’d gotten the gist. After some basic intro, I would do all manner of stuff with the dirty boys, for cigarettes, drugs, alcohol, money. I couldn’t take the stuff without being sick, but the money was cool.
After some months of that dirty stuff, I’d accumulated sufficient funds. I was decided to leave for, anywhere first, New Orleans second, Florida third. It would be a rebirth. I’d be like a butterfly escaped from the cocoon. The cocoon of a terrible household, a terrible youth; become someone better – more wicked–beautiful.
I do not know who’d inseminated me, but I was pregnant. Grandma was the first to twig, as if by some telepathy since I wasn’t showing. Grandpa was a shadow-figure, who I’d like to think was ashamed of himself utterly by then. My brother had learnt to leave me alone, either because of shame (unlikely), or because he’d found another, or, because the law would have something to say about who’d sired the thing in my belly if I spilt the beans. Anyway, he knew I could kick his ass. I did not expect any sympathy from them; in short, I was cashiered off to the home for unwed mothers.
There is little about that place and my time in there I feel needs to be told. Let’s just say, there were other girls in there from similarly disastrous backgrounds, some from quite civilised backgrounds, all of us were miserable, we didn’t get raped or abused, so there. You go in there to be away from society because it disdains people considered of low repute (the vulgate term is sluts). And when I got out, I would be branded as such as if I’d graduated Summa Cum Laude.
The baby was a girl I was told (though I didn’t believe it), and then it went, to where I know not, and whoever you are I hope you aren’t reading this and thinking about who your natural mother was.
I left that place alone having gone in one become two, then alone. So, it was back to the dreaded household, now as a suspect in the nebulous crime of moral turpitude, or ill-repute. I was a dog in a dog house. But I had already made my plans to escape. It was just a matter of preparation. And what did I need? (I needed a whole gamut of things, for an escape and journey to a better place. But I needed to get my head in gear first.) Though I wasn’t molested anymore, I still felt the sting from the previous times, in that place of conception. I hoped both of them would die shortly, the one then the other in sympathy, then leave me an inheritance but I had subliminally garnered that anything they might own would go elsewhere. Grandma died of liver disease (I knew she drank some), and that was a huge joy.
I quit school, and when Grandpa learnt of this, intimated that he would throw me out of the benighted den, with his mountebank morality again. He didn’t care where I went, whether I lived or died, was found in a trashcan in a garbage sack, was eaten by wild animals having died of exposure or starvation, so I surmised. So, it would be the woods, at least for a while till I could work things out, and if Mr Pervy came hunting me, I’d have something to repel him. I needed to get the whole shebang in order first, then cross the Rubicon, shake my hair of my previous life, become a woman true. Of my career, it could only be the one thing – and aren’t you wonder that bit prurient, I mean have you ever wanted to go look at them in their purlieu? I had a certain amount of self-respect, but it was perverse. And I knew that just about anyone will do just about anything for any amount of money. I was born to be a whore (I hope you’ve accepted that term by now, because you’ll likely read it again).
So, let’s skip about a week…I emerged from the woods like some feral creature, someone raised by wolves, metamorphoses you might say. I was clad in reasonably decent attire, for what I had discussed I was/to be: denim shorts, scarlet tights, a low-cut purple top, a faux-leather jacket, pumps, hoop-earrings, four cheap bangles (three on my right), my hair was medium length, bleached blonde (slate-grey roots). Here is what I had in truck: a large rucksack, my makeup, toiletries, spare clothes, condoms, tinned food and opener, spoon. I had a small tent strapped to it. And I had some money and jewellery I’d stolen just before the fateful eviction (I’d stolen from Grandpa when he was passed out, stolen from drawers he kept money in, broken the lock of Grandma’s jewellery casket just before I left, Grandpa half in bed, slumped there and snoring ridiculously, as if my eviction required an especially zealous attack on the bottle, two full ones of Wild Turkey I had taken). I was wild and ostensibly tempered for survival, self-defence (I was armed with a small, sharp knife I’d taken, which I kept in the handbag I’d also stolen). While I expected some very unwanted attention from predatory men, I was confident that I could either sell my body to them safely on agreeable terms or frighten them away, maybe even kill them, as vicious as I was quickly becoming, my instincts tending to prehensile violence, like a viper. I was also concerned about the cops, who I had intuitively realised, took a special pleasure in importuning prostitutes. I was headed out of here. I was on the road.
I had no doubt that I looked like a runaway, and a teenaged whore to boot. I might as well have worn a sandwich board with a neon sign to that effect and a tariff, a coloured emblem like a knight-errant’s coat of arms. You are looked on with a mixture of disgust, curiosity, and mothers will shield their children’s eyes, lest they get that crash course in the birds and the bees vicariously, as if whores were an abomination of parturition. So here I was, making my way along the highway to the Erie Township, surreptitiously drinking on the way, that fearsome hooch doing a power of good, on the road to perdition, a gulp every ten minutes I had timed. There was a sporadic litany of abuse, car horns, truck horns, enough for one young life. You always suspected it would happen, so it was no surprise when it did. They had announced their presence on the approach, and with one back-glance, I gauged what species of human they were, and that they were dirt, and that probably meant I was too, since I was their source of intrigue, peas in a pod.
The car pulled up a few hundred yards ahead, and I put the bottle back in the bulged pocket of my jacket and handled my knife. It was nice car, a Buick Riviera I guess. The four young men, I took them for fratboys their white, clean-cut heads turning to see me approaching, their hormone-fuelled heads, incipient erections all round (so I’d imagined). I had no choice but to close on them, was determined to stand up to any weakling side of myself anyhow. It was then, that I wished I’d gotten hold of a gun, just something to put a chunk of lead into a body. (I didn’t know where Grandpa kept the handgun he’d drunkenly waved around and fired in the house on the fourth of July or whenever). I was not fearful, I took them for prissy cowards.
The driver – head-frat – he honked, and it was so chi-chi, crass and I just thought about that gun and that ballistic transaction, and goodbye to your brain. I imagined them all laughing like children who’d heard a dirty joke, as if I were one. As I levelled up to the car, the driver’s and rear passenger’s windows lowered. I came to see heads out, staring at me with lascivious grins, then back in, like sly eels retracting into their caves. There was a lot of quipping and laughter. I saw the driver properly, who was attractive (no doubt), about nineteen, wealthy-looking, devious-looking, cliched W.A.S.P., but he was shy and he would not lock eyes. I heard: ‘here she is’ then, ‘You go. You do it Josh’. Josh was the one behind the driver. He was also good looking, built like a football player, and he had the same smug mocking expression as his wingman in front (you know, like his mumma would breastfeed him through Ivy league, even give him a hand job).
Yes, here was miss Trailer Trash Prom Queen, shocking in your face of the boonies, putatively a product of incest, and likely gave it good for a few twinkies. Charming. Yes, they were all laughing as I looked in. The king jock gave me the most contemptuous, sardonic smile and said, as if trying not to laugh, ‘Hey, where you headed? Want to ride with us?’ then, as if you hadn’t guessed it, they all cracked up in near-sync. I wasn’t sure which one of them I wanted to scalp the most, but all would have sufficed. Though they must have gauged my distaste, they – I took them as one – persisted, with ‘look…we’ve got some weed. Come on in and join’t us’. Ha! I looked at the actual author of that lame-ass quip, and it was the one beside the driver, and he looked at me in the dirtiest fashion I could imagine, then I lost it. I said (almost sang) ‘which one of you pussies wants to come out and fight with me. Winner gets to fuck for free’. I pulled my knife out and swivelled it around, the tip of the blade circling five inches or so. I think they must have gotten the point (yes, pun understood). There was a frantic revving and then they were gone in a screech of wheels.
The well-used road is just a great disconsolating litany of trash you’d hardly believe could exist since you hardly see the authors of the debris at it, their spoor, a surfeit of it, and you wonder what the backstory is, I mean used condoms like you wouldn’t believe. I also saw a bashed-up sex toy. I went off-road for a while and headed for Erie Township via ways, walking tracks made for, and by, man, and by the skulking animals. It was hot, about ninety F, but strange, a mark of disturbance in the air, a foreboding sky puffing like cannon smoke, like elongated popcorn, little junior thunderstorms, eager. I felt troubled, more than I felt I should have been.
I reached an area of woodland, appropriated by a few hobos and manicured to their fashion. I wasn’t bothered by them, since they were aloof, harmless I had surmised, because the booze had killed their libidos as if they’d been gelded. I on the other hand was revving up. I had made my transition, to a full-blown prostitute, like I was an element fashioned through alchemy, like something out of Los Alamos, though with the nuclear seeds they use that make it change, those neutrons (neuter is what you do to a pet).
Later that afternoon and I had set up my tent. The sky was becoming slightly deranged, fearsome with rumbles of thunder impending doom, a serious menace in the air. I said my prayers (did I mention that I was religious?). And then I drank a good deal of the whiskey, then hid it between my legs, because I was reasonably sure the hobos had gotten some idea I had some, as they are apt to. I went to bed, some underlying fear for my body and sanity, and part of me wanted it all to end. Then nothing…Until I first heard the patter of rain, then a good thunderclap fit to blast a tree or fuse some ground. I came out from my tent, not so much curious as desperate to learn of the extent of the growing disturbance in the sky, like the sky was some growling monster come to chomp me up, and two of the resident hobos were out for the show too. At first it just seemed like a good fireworks display, increasingly wet though it promised to be. Then came the full menace, and I was apt to get back into my tent, though what good would that do me! In the electrical illumination, you could just make out what looked like a column of cloud reaching down to the ground, and the trees not far off were going berserk, thrashing audible in the dark. I believe it must have been a tornado, and it was a blessing that it had made up its mind to go mostly elsewhere, though the outer scrim of it flapped the tent quite demonstrably, as if to emphasise its authority over us Godfearing beings.
In the morning I arose from my tent. I was moving on, to Erie Township, so left it there. I was determined to make it, something of my life.
I walked past fallen branches, trees, out to the turnpike highway, which I would shadow. I saw a dead racoon up in a seriously ransacked tree, and it looked to me as if it had been impaled, and how, I could not say, lest the wind had done it, which I hoped was the case, since anyone who’d do such a thing – who might be lurking around – was surely bad news. I saw a cluster of outlet-buildings, one of which was bound to be a diner, and I headed there full of hope. I had $386 stolen and variously earnt – quite a ransom. I wanted coffee, then a milkshake, then a super big brunch. I still had some hooch left, and although I found the idea of drinking in the morning mostly gross, I did it and it was a turbo fuel. With that in me, I was spurred on. I went towards the place that was now clearly a diner with a word in my heart called subjunctive, which I was told was a hopeful adjective. I had grown a few layers of skin, to fend off the insults of my prospective quarry. I was confident that I could master them, like a dirty schoolmarm.
If there had been any catcalls or honks from passing traffic on the stretch, I didn’t hear it. As I got closer to the diner, I was of the impression that I would not be received too well in there, though I knew not the day of the week, so whether families with children would be present. I suppose I must have looked quite a mess, dishevelled, dirty, I could not entirely tell; but I guessed that I looked like a daughter that no respectable family would tolerate in their midst, like: ”Here’s your stuff. Go hit the road, and we’ll next see you at your funeral after you’ve been murdered by your pimp”.
In the parking lot there were some artics which I took as an ill omen. Other than that, it was pretty empty; a couple of pickups which I didn’t like either, as if the scruffy, corroded state of the vehicles attested the nature of the owners.
As I approached, I got the feeling that I had been clocked and was being watched with suspicious interest, that the manager was preparing a statement to recite to rid me from the premises, like a spell. I had none to retort. I was actually drunk; all the more so for the time of day and my lack of sustenance (in fact I reckon I must have consumed a good third of a bottle over the course of the morning…well, I wasn’t foot sure, was laughing inanely on the approach).
My sense of apprehension seemed to be unbearable like the intense humidity before a storm as I crossed that Rubicon of the entrance, perceiving the eyes of the patrons on me, of men and women, children, who were variously respectable, not so respectable, but each seeming to me far more respectable than myself. I was in, but didn’t expect to be accommodated for long. But then I saw the proprietor (or whom it seemed was), and she was a kindly-looking just a small-part coloured maternal-seeming figure in her twilight years, and she gave me a sweet smile and then it seemed the perceived tension had broken.
I went straight to the counter and stood there, picked up the menu and scanned it. She said “Honey. I’ll bet you just want some coffee now don’t you. Rest your weary self” and she winked at me and leaned over and with a mischievous smile said, “It’s on the house”, and she knew I was a teenaged runaway prostitute, as if she’d been one too. Anyhow, I smiled back and said I’d like that and that I’d like to take it in a booth, that I had plenty of moolah, but would gladly accept the offer. She slapped me on the back joshingly and laughed. A fat white man I took for a trucker was looking askance at me and wasn’t he just the dirtiest piece of news in town. I took my place in the booth.
I ordered eggs over easy, bacon, hash browns, pancakes with maple syrup. I ate it all up, paid $4.50, plus fifty cents tip. I left, and on the way out decided I’d head to Chesterton instead, then leave Michigan for good. I went to the outside restrooms and took a hefty glug from the Turkey, and that was the end of my breakfast, my aiming of it almost exact. The two do not mix well.
Chesterton wasn’t much further than Erie, you just turned off the turnpike a mile after the sign, off along the County Route, and I reached Chesterton just after 2pm and by then, even if I wasn’t looking it, I felt like sorriest hooker out of Storyville New Orleans you’d shield your children’s eyes from lest my gaze turn them to stone. I sought out the lowliest looking motel, where they would have no problem accommodating me no matter what they took me for. It was Linda’s Motel, and Linda was a fat madame, and Linda’s motel was a motel and it was mostly a whorehouse and with little introduction I was welcome. It cost $7 a night, unless you were working (I later learned).
First impressions it was an insalubrious, noisy, fighty place, and that proved so. But that was what I had to contend with for the meantime. And there were plenty of the carnal ladies of ill repute. And here was where the filthy-minded trucker-types would turn up, to get their satisfaction of that sweet primal kind.
So, I was no better. I had to learn the market, learn my price. I wasn’t as attractive as most girls, those at the motel, and it seemed ironic that those highly attractive ones who numbered two, would have gotten into the game; I mean, couldn’t they just be someone’s girlfriend, put it out a bit (I guess they were ruined from day one).
Day three at the motel, Saturday, I decided that I’d like to meet some sisters and get ideas, tips about the lifestyle. Some had turned up around 9.30pm the previous day, a whole array of them (I would say, in retrospect, that they were all sassy cheapass hookers, not that I was judgmental, anything better than them, even though I intended to be). Their arrival had been heralded by their awful drunken hullaballoo, dirty to the core and that reciprocated by their quarry (and both were quarry unto the other). It was like I had imagined some awful brothel in Detroit or New York, according to what I’d been told and seen on the TV cop films. The men when they came out to their nickel-and-dime amours looked about as skanky and sorry as you liked, enough to turn Marilyn Monroe into a dyke for the shame they gave their sex, but then, you thought, some of them could have been husbands and fathers who’d lied about a night out with the boys or some work do, Elk’s lodge, etc. By this stage, I did not want any marital relations, regarded men as beasts-proper.
It was around a quarter past eleven and things had died down, empty bottles here and there, puke. Now there were the whores sitting outside on the balconies and the decking of the ground floor rooms. They were drinking, wine, spirits beer, smoking, pot for sure, maybe high on blow. I didn’t bring anything to the party, but my cheap ass-sass, and some form of camaraderie. I chose a group of three, who looked pretty harmless, and in my most suitable clothes, tentatively approached them, trying to exude some sense of that camaraderie. I just sat down next to this girl late twenties, I’d say, and acted lonely and in need of some attention. They were chatting away in their state, and I didn’t know how to get in with them, felt ignored, so I just said “I need to work like you”
The girl next to me gave me a quizzical look, as if evaluating me for a hooker (maybe one trespassing on their scene) or some kind of phoney, then she said in a boonzy trailer-park drawl “You’re youngen…Why don’t you try something else. I would have” and pushed me playfully. The two other girls looked at me sceptically. I felt intimidated, but with my resolve, I pulled through. I said that it was what I was made to do. One of them said I should get born again, the other said I should become a nun. Then they – we – all laughed.
“I’ll do it. Just tell me how” I said, with some energy. They looked a little shocked but were convinced I was for real. They gave me a good swig of their hooch and then, gleaning that the conversation was done – though I knew not whether it was because it was disturbing them – I headed for my nest.
The next day I spent watching TV, eating the cheapass food from the onsite diner and store combo. And once it had passed the ‘yardarm’ I got cracking on the rest of my Wild T, intending to get pretty smashed. I must have, since I woke up to knocking at the door unsure about where I was, when and how. I should have been more cautious, but on opening, it was the ostensible motel owner (real name Chantelle) and some creepy man I assumed was her husband/pimp. I knew I had attracted the right attention via my talk the night before. They smiled at me invitingly, and I back, and it was clear that there was an understanding, about ‘Exciting Employment Opportunities’ as it might have been cast.
The madame simply said ‘you game?’, while the man grinned. I said yes. It was about time too. “So you think you’ve got the stuff?” the man – whose name was Chad – added as if to bolster the Queen bee. I said, “I said I was didn’t I!” a little stroppily. And with that they invited me to a room I’d assumed was just another cell in the place, but it was a lounge with a bar, and we drank some, discussed the particulars.
So, I was now an inhouse whore. My rent was free, the food, booze, cigarettes (bordello-board), payment “%50” of rate, so $15 an hour for me, tips for me. I guessed it was a good deal – I was excited, and deep-down-scared. I had two days of respite on the house, in a double room (which I should have guessed I would be sharing). I just watched TV, drank, smoked (pot), and ate all the junk food I wanted, delivered to my room by someone resident, whose name I never knew. Given my prospects in life, it wasn’t exactly Hell, where I’d thought I’d be headed, if so…What the Hell! Lost in my reverie I started to the sound of the door knocks. It was near 9pm. I expected a trick or the management, opened up and there was another new girl. She called herself Tango. She was screwed up alright, probably something like me. We got drunk and she cried it out, told me how she’d been molested and raped by her Dad. Then we were strangers to one-another in here. We both knew what was coming soon and would keep it to ourselves.
My alcohol consumption was starting to worry me. I was still just a kid (sixteen), but likely could drink many adults under the table. I guessed that me and alcohol and sex were bosom-buddies – how disastrous! But not to the man who was my first trick. He was about 45, and well attired. I didn’t like the look of him at all, because he seemed to despise the act he was liable to engage in, and to blame me for his urges to commit it, a hypocrite. His patter was like that of a headmaster, maintaining some weird teacher-pupil act, trying to hide his corruptness, his desperate lust for my young body; like he was crying within about the shame if his wife and children and whoever found out. He couldn’t help himself. He was a filthy beast, making like noises. He seemed guilty afterwards, tipped me well, then scarpered, with his tail between his legs, hopelessly weeping quite likely. My earnings from that were $28 including the tips. I was financially pretty well off for an “inbred” trailertrash ho, whose father had pelted.
I had felt very dirty is the truth. I had gotten drunk again, then passed out. I woke and went straight to the shower cubicle we shared and luckily Tango was out. I was puking by the time my eyes clocked the toilet bowel, horrible yellowy stuff that tasted like lemonade mixed with something evil like battery acid as I imagined it. I showered, puked a few times more, drank water puked, then drank about a quarter of a hip of bourbon and went to bed. I half-slept, could hear there was a thundery rainstorm, and through that, the sounds of partying and some sex. I then fell deep and dreamt that I was a concentration camp guard in NAZI Germany, and my name was Hilda, and I thrashed the interned with a huge bullwhip, kicked them with my classy shoes, pummelled them with a baton, but I didn’t have a gun, so couldn’t blast them. Oh, and there was a male guard who said I was his wet dream and that the German for it was ‘wasser feuchte’, or something…
…well, when I woke, I itched inside, and hated men more than before. And I had a burning desire to treat them like those people in those WW2 camps. And I had decided it was time to move on, find some other dump motel or dumptown, or anywhere. I had to get a gun.
The next night and the next and the next, they weren’t much different. Sex with pretty sleazy men, while inebriated, as were they, incidentally, or whether to steel themselves for “IT”, blank out the shame, I could not say. I was getting into my stride, felt pretty secure in myself, confident, had made enough money for moving on, though into the unknown. I wanted to move into the unknown – it was prospectively exciting, if potentially deadly (and isn’t the prospect of death what makes life exciting!).
It was 1972. I left at just after daybreak with my shit. I had partial amnesia about the details of my sexual encounters at motel, but subliminally there was a sensation that some terrible stuff had happened, that I had been abused well beyond my threshold, paid for or not. So, I had to get revenge on mankind. I had to get the gun to do it. I had to be a whore to get the right people. BLAM…BLAM, BLAM, BLAM!: that’s for nature giving you a dick and a fucked up libido, and for making us want it so much, like we’re hormonal junkies.
I wandered along the trash-strewn Highway, again, my skin that much thicker. My attire was actually quite decent (I’d bought it through the motel in-delivery service). I had a good bottle of single malt, some pot, some blow, a good few ludes, two tabs of LSD, and all my other crap. That was the end of that episode. As I had said, I was aimed to the Hell out of Michigan, to Florida, which I thought of as some kind of Disneyland, except carnal, smutty, viceaceous (I think that’s a valid word); the antithesis of the Big D.
Well, I wasn’t going to make it to anywhere much at that rate. I needed some help. I knew how to act the ho, even if not attired correctly. I “presented”, like a critter or a bird in the mood, and not long thereafter, there was a good hornblow, and an artic pulled up some hundred yards in front. It was like some mythical beast, quite sexy. I assumed the driver was a sleazeball looking for some ‘teenage kicks’. What the Hell, I had no options. I still had my knife I’d named ‘Mr Pervoff’
I came up and the door was open. The driver was a fatso with about two and a half chins. He looked like he was addicted to fried chicken, beer, whores and porn. He said “Little missy, what you doing on the highway? Where you headed?”
“Somewhere away from here” I said, and he laughed. Then I said, “Somewhere big”.
He mulled it over, then said “I’ll take you as far as Carter. You can get a Grey from there?”
I got in, and as I did, I was fairly confident that of the cars passing, some of those within who’d witnessed this, saw a sordid transaction in process.
Off we went.
When I woke up, it was in a parking lot and rain was pattering my face. I was sure I’d been raped. But when I checked, I found no evidence. I had all my stuff, except the drugs were diminished, all the coke gone, most of the Scotch. I tried to stand up, fell and bruised myself badly, got up, just about to stay that way, and it was perilous. I slowly got my legs and feet in gear and walked, my rucksack unbalancing me so I swayed. When I reached the road, there was a parked car and the driver was watching me with disturbing interest, and when he saw me clock him he sped off. He was a very odd-looking man, a “person of interest”.
I had to wash myself in the local culvert, just about running. I’d acquired some animal shit on my clothing, was generally dirty. In short, I was a huge mess again.
I traipsed on, and it was to a town called Marcus. Marcus had a greyhound terminal and I got on a bus there to Lakewood Colorado.
I was at the near back on the Grey, seat to myself. I periodically nipped at my Scotch to beguile the trip, ducking to avoid detection. Behind, there was the sound of two extra-excited girls circa 17, and they were dykes, because of what I saw them getting up to. Plus, I feared they’d ask me to get involved. No! I wasn’t a dyke, was what I thought. Couldn’t be. I was… I was a whore. And I would be a killer of my clientele. Perfectly heterosexual.
Lakewood was boring at first. It was somewhere designed by a conformist moron(s). I started my time there in a flop house, with various characters of dubious repute, shitheels and whores, dopers and topers, runaways etc.
But it wasn’t long before I found my feet and started to find custom. The best rule for a whore is to be as mean as possible: you frighten off the competition, frighten pimps, frighten dangerous men (most tricks aren’t dangerous, and respect a dominant whore, so there, I should have written a handbook: Aileen Wournos’s Tips For Selling Your Bits)
I met some of the wackiest people you could imagine, in that weird microcosm of vice. I met one girl “Cynthia” who’d runaway from a devoutly Episcopalian home not far from my neck of the woods. I met a guy who tried to be my pimp, who I beat up with Cynth, then he got beaten up by another pimp then fled, and the other pimp was schizophrenic or something, because he wore a skullcap made of cooking foil that went right down around his ears to the nape, skirting the ears, and on the front down to the eyes, with this weird dial (from a cooker or something) stuck on to the right side just above the ear, and he’d turn it from time to time and start ranting to no one, the air (he said he was Aizaizou, was from Medicine Hat; he was six ft five, black, built like a warrior, crazy, he wore a white cape – so no wonder no one messed with him), but another whore said it was all an act, if so, I was convinced.
Here was when I got in trouble with the law. I got completely wasted on…I can’t even remember. But I was caught driving a speeding and careening car, and I was firing this little pinky .22 pistol I had acquired from a pimp. And I was whooping it up, firing it every which way, but not at a body. I was completely deranged, screaming like a psychotic harridan. It was a blast. The cops were on to me pretty smart and the next thing I knew, I was puking my guts out in the back of a speeding paddy wagon.
They charged me with DUI and Disorderly Conduct, but I didn’t show, and got charged with that too.
When I woke, I screamed, and it echoed about, and I thought some of that was reply. I had no idea where I was and no idea how to get out. It was pure dark within/without. I was very stoned or drunk, likely both, had to be. Off I went about the chambers, blind, bumping into surfaces, kicking them. I’d guessed it was some kind of basement, or I’d gone completely insane and one of my claustrophobia dreams had become reality.
After much stumbling around, crashing and banging, treading on someone who groaned, I emerged at street level. I had lost my bag a little back, so went back, eyes now accommodated, found it and left for good, like a child awakening from a nightmare of atavistic terror.
I asked some jonesing roadfly out by the wall where the Hell I was, stroppy as Hell, and he moaned his jittery, junkie self and told me I was in Detroit and did I have some junk? and I would have bought that, but as it happened, he was so lost it didn’t matter. I was later informed that I was in Edgewater Florida, and I have no idea how I got there. The sun was something fantastic, like irradiating orange-juice-light. So here I was, and what to do next. My body was a raging corpus of confused bloodlust, some sexual appetite; I wanted see those tricks before my gunsight and blow them away.
I will not go into the details of the first part of the transaction. It would cost me $30 with the discount. It was a .22 magnum revolver, which the purveyor advised was a “Nigger Blaster”. (Now don’t get to thinking I was racist; I had only been with white folk, and they’d treated me badly in part, and it was likely white men would be getting the blasting.) .22! What a puny little round. I mean, ft lbs would be 200 with the magnum, whereas a .44 magnum can pack, say 1100 ft lbs, and what a mess that could make of a body! I had a girl’s gun, to kill men with, though not likely convincingly.
But it was time. I got a good stock of shells from the local gun shop, the owner a little chary of selling them to me, though she had to. My, were they some juicy little things to handle, when you thought about what they could do, as dinky as they were (Ha! You wouldn’t want one in you, anyplace, and Dear reader, I know this sounds gross, but, I put some of those things in places that were below the bellybutton, places apt, made em talisMANS. Ha ha!). Little as I knew about shooting a person, I knew the head was the bullseye, that the heart wasn’t much less of one, then you just popped them in the torso, the guts. A .22 though; only a man with a super-small wiener with a girly voice wound carry such a thing. A .357 magnum was more like it. Anyhow, I guessed I knew how to use it, with deadly effect.
I was back to business servicing the species I hated, some of them not so bad, some completely awful, and although I had my gun, but I had not worked up the nerve to kill yet, ostensibly not at all. It made me cry. I was a weakling, a failure. I was just a sad whore, a junkie and a lush, who’d been created to service man, under him, any power to rise above proving a fantasy. It seemed I would just be like those others killed and dumped somewhere desolate, or having made it to thirty, some kind of degenerate madame. Powerless unto man. I had almost given up completely, considered suicide with that prissy little pistol, fearing that I’d only get off one shot and then fail, become a cripple, an even worse prospect I supposed.
I was on the streets for sure, living the most appalling life a mother could imagine for her youngen. Mother’s heartbreak; a kicked-out girl giving it up for drugs and booze and money. Tempus Fugit - I have no idea how many times I did it with a man, had been assaulted, nearly raped, been picked up by the cops, exploited by them, with their filthy talk, bullying tactics, dirty fucking bastards! I wanted my gun. I wanted to shoot the fucking bitch who bore me, the bastards who I had to work.
I woke up in a house with no Idea how I got there. This man fed me water as I woke. He said his name was Carl Valance and I did not believe it. Anyhow, he rented me a place, and cheap. I told him what I was and how I was going to make the rent, and he didn’t mind. He didn’t want sex from me; if anything, he was just some kind of screwy Good Samaritan. He told me that he had been an army cook during WW2, and that he was dishonourably discharged for an outburst in which he’d said “the food won’t turn to shit before you hit the ground” to an aircrewman. I didn’t believe anything he said apart from that he didn’t want sex with me.
I met Tyria in a gay bar. I was a dyke after all. It was a fraught relationship, us disapproved of by the relatives, by society in general. We moved around a good deal, me paying the bills through my work. I was earning quite a good amount through my work, which was intended to be spent on a life that was fast and furious. My mind was starting to turn back to the problem of tricks and why I hadn’t got around to killing them. It was something so burning, so tormenting, that something had to give. And given that, it may have been providence what took place, as perverse as it seems.
I was picked up by this trick from the street I worked, and I guessed something about him wasn’t right, and boy do the smarter of us know (unlike the ones who end up in rivers and by the road side, in dumpsters). I was a walking-talking invite for violence from the sub-order of the clientele, but I thought I had sufficiently gauged and grasped them and was pretty immune, arrogant for sure. He sidled up in a pea-green Chevy Chevelle, looking at me with great intensity and putative intent. He whistled, like we were both maritime folk. I got the message and got in automatically, as if a subordinate in the forces.
We drove off. He was silent for a while, kept looking over at me, mulling it over. Then he said: “do you consider yourself a whore, do you mind me considering you one?” To which I didn’t reply. Then, he passed me a $10, and repeated the question. I said, “If I’m a whore, that makes you a trick, unless you planned on taking me out to the movies”. He scoffed at that, seemed piqued. It was about then that I got the impression that he was fucked up. And I wished I’d packed my “Blasterman”.
We pulled over in a deserted carpark. He said, “Woo-hoo young lady, have I got something in store for you. You like fucking I like fucking. I’m a family man. And you just made that so so bad”. Then he punched me in the face, and when I came to, I was bound to the steering wheel, my legs bound too. He was before me the door open, him drinking from a hip. I assumed I was going to die. He was prancing around, likely high on drugs too. I tried to break from the binds, to no avail, but I had to, otherwise I would surely die, be raped first of course. Writhing around, I did notice something silver under the driver’s seat, and it was a gun. It was after noticing that that I decided that if I could break out, I could blast the S-O-B. The binds were pantyhose, probably his own. Maybe he didn’t realise that you could chew through them quite easily. By the time I was hands free, on my bound feet jumping around, gun in hand, he was still up to his antics. He didn’t notice me approach him until near the end. I cocked the revolver pulled the trigger and BLAM, BLAM, BLAM, BLAM! The look on his face was of great shock, and then deflation. He was soon stone-cold dead. I was exhilarated more than relieved. I also took the gun.
So, I yomped back home and cried. Look, time’s short in here (wherever that is!), so here’s two more incidents of, let’s say “Blasterman Retribution”
I was walking along a trash-strewn street (ha-ha), and this station wagon pulled up and the driver – a fat-ass sad-ass W.A.S.P. middle-manager type (like at a Walmart) – he gave me the wink (the wink so unambiguous), and I sidled up and said “hello”, and he said “I saw you and thought sad for you so alone”. Yeah what a cheapass factitious sentiment. “uh-huh” I replied. Then he said, “I can help you get a better start in life” Oh yeah, by servicing a trick!
We went to a secluded area. He was chary about the whole affair, always looking for “spies”. We made some physical contact before I assumed the main event would ensue. He was quivery, like a distressed horse, and I didn’t think he could muster wood. I felt a bit sorry for him, but when he grabbed my tits I decided to blast him anyhow.
I had thought that a gunshot wound was the end of the matter, that the recipient would just shut up and die, after maybe a few enunciations, cries to Mumma, prayers. But they can take a while, and the worst part is just watching them as they make the transition, as their blood leaks out, and so does their sentimental stuff (“Mumma I love you! I swear was never a bad kid…). Then nothing. Another one bites the dust.
He picked me up – just as before – he was Cuban. As we rode off to the place of final iniquity, he kept telling me about Che Guevara, and I wasn’t convinced. We went to somewhere that I couldn’t recall, except it was quite aways from the last place. His dictum here? “El prostiututa. Vamos a tener buen tiempo.” I said “what does that mean”, then he said the F word.
He was a very masculine man, hairyly so, but not violent to me (to his family quite likely). By this time there wasn’t a way to assuage me, my hatred so far gone, my path to the pits of hell by dint of my ruin – self imposed or external. There was no way back, even the smallest portion of my nature knew that.
I pulled the .357 out of my handbag and he looked like as if I were Medusa. And the Blam, and his head seemed to – Ha Ha – go egregious.,
And if you want to look up the execution, you’ll have to go elsewhere.
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is published as the author wrote it, including his own disclaimer, which is set at the top of the page rather than left in the body so that no reader can miss it. The manuscript's numbered section breaks are kept. The name is misspelled Eileen in the original title; it is Aileen Carol Wuornos.
Because the piece reconstructs her thoughts, the record is worth setting out plainly beside it. Wuornos shot seven men along Florida highways between 1989 and 1990. She was convicted of the murder of Richard Mallory on January 27, 1992 and sentenced to death, and received six death sentences in all after pleading to the other cases. The men were Richard Mallory, 51, Charles Carskaddon, 40, David Spears, 43, Troy Burress, 50, Dick Humphreys, 56, Peter Siems, 65, whose body was never found, and Walter Gino Antonio, 62. She was arrested on January 9, 1991 and executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002.
Her own account changed more than once. She said at first that she had killed in self-defence, resisting rape by men who had picked her up; she later withdrew that and said she had killed for money, and later still returned to parts of the first account. The Mallory conviction is the one that was tried, and evidence that he had previously served time for attempted rape emerged after it. None of that was before the jury. Any reconstruction of what she thought is therefore a reconstruction of a person whose own statements do not agree with each other, which is the strongest argument for the disclaimer this author put at the top of his own piece.
The companion article by the same author on H. H. Holmes is also in this archive.