Previously I had met girls who had sugar daddy types in tile background, but I was always too proud to ask anyone for anything. And, even though I had been shocked when Evelyn St. John gave me the money, after he treated me so nicely it occurred to me that it wouldn’t be so bad to have this happen more often.

It would have been wonderful if Evelyn had asked me to return to Paris with him, but of course I understood why he could not. He was, after all, a married man.

But after he left, I went back to happily screwing my brains out all over town and having men take advantage of my constant horniness.

My job at the consulate was really boring me now, too, because it was routine and unchallenging.

The rare bright moments were when I met some nice man who called in for legal or some other kind of advice. One of them, a Dutchman named Dirk, called up one day to find out about getting an entry visa to my consulate’s country.

As we grooved on each other’s voices on the phone, I got the impression he was very handsome because he certainly sounded it; and after talking for about ten minutes he said, “Forget about business – why don’t we meet today for lunch?”

I met Dirk at a restaurant across from Rockefeller Center, and while he was not exactly as handsome as he somehow sounded, he was a charming, spontaneous kind of man.

At lunch we talked about his private life and his twenty-year-old marriage that now existed only in name and how he just lived for his job and his children.

I asked him bluntly what he did about his sex life. Did he have a girl friend?

“No, I just use call girls when I need them,” he said.

At that time, to show you how innocent I was in some areas, I did not exactly know what call girls were.

I knew they were not listed in the Yellow Pages, but I thought it was a service you called if you wanted a black girl with big tits or a Chinese girl with no tits, on a rental basis and not for a one-shot session. More like an employment agency.

Dirk was a man in his mid-forties, so I supposed men at that time of life did that kind of thing.

When lunch was over, he suggested we meet after work to go somewhere and be alone. I willingly agreed. After all, I had made it with half of Rockefeller Center, so why deny my own countryman?

It so happened that Sonia was away on three weeks’ leave, so I suggested my place at six P.M. He was eager, and I was looking forward to some exciting sex with a man who was a nice, humorous person.

But things weren’t to be exactly as I expected. It turned out that Dirk was utterly impotent and got his kicks freaking out on the phone with other girls in between performing cunnilingus on me.

After an hour he had to leave, but I could tell he had had a good time, and even though he was no Valentino, I enjoyed his company also.

And recent history repeated itself that night. After he got dressed, Dirk took out his wallet and handed me $150.

I was dumbfounded, but not for the same reason as with Evelyn St: John. The amount was what astounded me. Evelyn gave me $100 for a whole week of making love and Dirk gave me more for an hour of not making it!

He also gave me a similar lecture to Evelyn’s, but something even more constructive.

“Xaviera, if you are going to make money out of this, we have to help you meet the right people. And you should. Why give all that pleasure away?”

By this time I was in complete agreement. “Okay,” I said, “let’s do something about it.”

Dirk dialed a number, and a raucous female voice picked up on the other end. “Who is it?” she yelled.

“It’s Dirk here, Pearl, and I have someone I think you ought to meet.” Pearl Greenberg was a small-time madam, and Dirk was a sometime client of hers.

He told her all about me and recommended we get together for the benefit of us both.

“Sure,” she screamed into the phone in a happy voice. “Get her over here, and she can start work tonight.”

Dirk gave me an address down on the wrong part of Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, where I had to be at eight o’clock. I had one problem, though – I didn’t know what prostitutes wear to work. I didn’t want to wear what my image of them dictated: wigs, heavy makeup, tight clothes, and black stockings. “To hell with it,” I thought. “I may behave as a prostitute, but I’ll be damned if I’ll dress like one.” So I went Aura natura in the blouse and skirt I had on.

The cab dropped me off at a shabby brownstone, and I ascended five flights of dusty stairs and knocked on my first whorehouse door.

“Who is it?” Pearl’s raspy voice came through the door.

“It’s Xaviera, you were expecting me,” I called back. After a long minute of rattling of chains and shuttling of locks, the door fell open to reveal a homely big-boned girl, naked except for an Afro wig, with pendulous breasts threatening her ample waistline.

“Pleased to meetcha,” Pearl said. “Ontray voo.”

I entered this whorish place with red curtains, and ragged carpet, and very messy with scarves, wigs, shortie pajamas, and assorted lingerie all over the place, and a projector for dirty movies.

In the middle of the room, lying face up on a sheet, was a fat, ugly Jewish man naked as the proverbial jaybird. Pearl had obviously been working him up, because his equipment was pointing skyward like the Statue of Liberty.

“Okay, this is your first victim.” My hostess gestured to him. “Go ahead, baby, and fuck him.” So I took off my clothes and jumped on top and fucked my brains out, and I really enjoyed it, because he turned out to be a nice person and his cock was as hard as a cock should be.

I could see he enjoyed me, too, and Pearl was out of her mind with the excitement of discovery – as she told everyone in Manhattan on the phone in the next hour. “I’ve got this lovely Yiddishe madel from Holland who loves sex and will do anything you want,” she broadcast.

So that was the beginning of a pleasant if not too profitable relationship with Pearl. She was what we call a “mensch” in Yiddish, good-hearted, good-humored, spontaneous, and warm.

Pearl had a black pimp somewhere in the background who kept her more or less on the poverty line. Her clients were mostly men from the garment district, not the bosses, but the middle-management guys who paid only $25 or $50 tops. I remember times when I would service my clients in their workrooms after the staff had left for the day.

The men, in threes or fours, would pull two racks of dresses around to make an L-shaped screen and put some other garments on the floor and make love to me one by one.

Facilities were never the best, and one of them would always bring a toilet roll to use in lieu of towels or showers. After I stood up following one of those two-hour sessions I would have imprinted on my back impressions of zippers, hooks and eyes, buttons, and any other trimmings in their current line.

Pearl’s financial arrangement with me was forty-sixty percent, so for every $25 date I got $15. It wasn’t much, but in quantity it did make a difference to my $150 from the consulate job.

For the first three weeks I was able to take customers back to the apartment while Sonia was still out of town, but when she returned things became tough. I had to take them either to Pearl’s whory whorehouse all the way downtown, or borrow a crummy room belonging to a fag friend and buy him a shirt or a bottle of after-shave as payment now and again.

Obviously that was not a satisfactory arrangement, and I still remember standing in the street weary and cold at three A.M. trying to get a taxi after a grueling night’s work.

I had already solved the daytime transportation problem the way all Dutch people do, by buying a bicycle from my first earned money with Pearl. I would ride around to my lunchtime and early-evening assignments on this and save time and money.