The case histories which follow are those of specific individual girls whom it was my pleasure to interview. Their names and all other names have been deliberately changed. The names of their airlines have been omitted, and data concerning various cities and schedules and whatever has been either changed or deleted to such a point that no one should bother attempting to identify any of the persons involved. Such an undertaking would be witless and wholly unrealistic.

With this one reservation, the material which follows is presented as I received it, rendered largely in the words of the stews themselves, frequently in interview form.

To the stews who made this book possible, and indeed to all their fellows in the sky, this book is most respectfully and affectionately dedicated. May they all have happy landings forevermore.

Lynn �falls in like� easily. This does not mean that she goes out with or to bed with every man who asks her. No stewardess would have the time, let alone the inclination, to accept all the propositions tossed at her. Lynn likes to have fun, and she accepts dates from those men whom she thinks she will have fun with. Her idea of a good time includes dining well, going to night clubs and parties, and generally living it up. She thus prefers to date men who seem likely to enjoy the same sort of evening. Deep conversations put her off, and at one point she herself suggested that she might be afraid of them, afraid that a deeper probing of her feelings might lead her to some unspecified upsetting discoveries about herself or life or whatever.

Lynn�s ideal date is a first-class passenger, divorced, between thirty-five and fifty. She has no particular moral qualms about dating married men. �If a man wants to cheat on his wife, that�s not a girl�s responsibility,� she said. �If he�s over twenty-one he ought to be able to decide this sort of thing for himself, don�t you think? And if he�s younger I�m not interested.� But she is not often interested in married men anyway, as it happens, �Some girls will tell you that the married ones only care about sex. I don�t think that�s it, exactly. Of course some of them are like that. The very ones, the ones with dirty eyes. The winkers and the fanny-pinchers. The ones who go to great lengths to let you know that they want to screw you, but who most of the time aren�t even serious about asking you out. I guess it�s a virility thing, they want to show off a little. They would be just as much of a drag if they were single.

�But there�s also the kind of married guys who I could have fun with, except that they�re so married they can�t have fun. They�re so busy being guilty, you see. They�ll try to keep me from knowing that they�re married, which I really resent, frankly. Or they won�t want to go anywhere with a date because someone might see them. They take you somewhere because they know they have to, it�s the right thing to do, and then they skulk around and you can sense that they�re nervous about it and that puts you off as well. You would think that a man a thousand miles from home in a strange city could either stay faithful to his wife or, if he�s going to cat around, that he could do it openly and cut loose. Some of them can, but they�re the exceptions.�

Lynn occasionally dates pilots, but doesn�t do this often. Pilots, she said, tend to want their sexual involvements quick and simple and without going anywhere first. Most of them are either married to an ex-stew or having an affair with a current stew or both, all of which makes them less than ideal as far as Lynn is concerned. �Most of the time they want the three B�s � a broad and a bottle and a bed. Some of them just want you so they can cut another notch on their gun, and others hate to sleep alone. A lot of them are great guys and I love them dearly, but I usually have more fun with a passenger. Pilots and other airline types are fun if you have a mob scene, a drunken blast where everybody cuts loose and maybe you wind up in somebody�s bed with a guy and maybe you don�t. but as far as dating pilots regularly, let�s say there are better ways to spend an evening.�

Tracy speculated at some length upon the possible psychic aspects of her �crazy� love affairs. She advanced a variety of theories, some of which seemed unlikely at best, others of which had a logical pitch to them. While I found all of these quite interesting, they are outside the scope of any study of sex and the stewardess. I might suggest, though, that readers with an interest in this sort of thing might have a look at Brad Steiger�s recently published book, Sex and the Supernatural. (Perhaps Steiger and Tracy can someday collaborate on Sex and the Supernatural Stewardess, for that matter.)

Shirl went on at some length, describing her early experiences with sex and her attitudes before becoming a stewardess. After completing stew training, she rather quickly fell into the habit of dating passengers and leading a generally swinging existence. These dates did not always wind up in bed, but that was their general pattern.

�It�s virtually impossible to date a man under those circumstances and not go to bed with him,� she said. �That is, it�s impossible unless you simply go out of your way to be a tease. You see, it�s not like normal dating. The guy can�t call you again the next day, and you can�t take time getting to know one another. It simply isn�t in the cards. You both know that you are going to see each other this once and then not see one another again for a long time, if ever. And since sex is the point of all dating, in one way or another, the only way the date can serve its purpose is if the two of you wind up in bed the first night. Some girls say that this speeds things up in a positive way, that it makes you learn to get to know people much more quickly than you would otherwise. I think this is a song-and-dance we like to give ourselves to make a very casual sexual experience take on a bit of a glow. Actually it speeds things up by simplifying them. You learn to be very casual not only about sex as such but about the whole business of relating to people. You learn to develop a fast surface relationship and then you never get beyond that relationship.�

She sensed that her relationships with passengers whom she dated was an extension of the relationship which prevailed on the plane itself. In either case the conversation was essentially superficial, the interacting all on one level, and the roles quite clearly defined � she played the part of a devoted servant who existed to feed a man�s ego, and the role remained essentially unchanged whether she was tightening his seat belt, serving his dinner, plumping his pillow, or servicing him in bed.

�For many girls,� she said, �this is all very exhilarating. When you�re busy kicking off the traces of East Jesus, Kansas, there�s something very exciting about all this. The sense of movement, you know, can be very stimulating. The idea that you are in New York in the morning and Chicago in the afternoon and Los Angeles at night and New Orleans the next day, and so on. And sexually there�s the same sense of movement. One night it�s an advertising man and the next night it�s a professional basketball player and the night after that it�s a businessman, each night a different man in a different city. A girl can get a tremendous sense of freedom this way. She�s not only free from home-town restrictions and parental supervision but she�s free from the limitation of any set situation. There�s the feeling that you never have the chance to go stale because your entire world changes every time that you get on that plane and meet new passengers and a new crew and head for a new scene, and that it changes the same way every time you get into bed with a new man.�

She enjoyed this excitement, this exhilaration, at first. But the enjoyment didn�t last.

�For a while it was very thrilling. I suppose I can understand the thrill a real nymphomaniac gets. One man after the other, and not even knowing their names. Not that I was having sex on anything like that kind of a scale, but I can extend the experience mentally and get some appreciation of what it must be like... and it was exciting, and there was a great sense of freedom. I would only accept a date if a man seemed interesting and appealing, and I wouldn�t invariably go to bed with him. Some girls absolutely take it for granted that they will sleep with anybody they date. They feel the man expects it � which is perfectly true, the bastards always take it for granted � and they also feel that, if they aren�t going to sleep with him, they shouldn�t accept the date in the first place. I always felt that a girl has a right to change her mind, and certainly there are times when a man will seem all right on a plane but will later turn out to be a total shit for one reason or another. I don�t think it�s right to force yourself to have sex with a man out of a sense of duty.

�But after a while, and here again this is what I would guess a nymphomaniac feels eventually, after a while there was just no pleasure in it at all, in this constant emotionless sex. And I couldn�t get past this tremendous sense that I was being used by all these men. That it was sort of an unpaid part of my job, that I was just continuing to service them as I did on the plane.�

In time, Shirl lost all respect for men. �Perhaps it was the setting, the way I met them all. Men really feel liberated the moment they step on a plane, you know. And the first thing that comes out is their sexual yearnings. What a hung-up collection of idiots they are! So many of them act as if they�re on stage. I wonder whether they�re showing off to the stews or to themselves or each other or what. The grabbers are the most obviously disgusting ones, but in a way the really smooth and suave fellows are every bit as bad. Even worse. The grabbers use their hands, and you find a way to put them down, and they keep their hands to themselves, and while they may be disgusting they never get to you. They touch you literally, but on a deeper level they don�t touch you at all. But the really nice guys who pitch you cleverly and wine you and dine you and talk oh so pleasantly to you, all so that they can get you in bed and give you a nice efficient screw and roll over and go to sleep. Oh, they�re the worst. They�re usually married, and they�re always scared you�ll fall in love with them and contemptuous of you if you do and twice as contemptuous of you if you don�t � because how could you be so sluttish as to go to bed with them if you don�t love them? You know, sooner or later they all look alike to you, they all sound the same, they all speak the same words. Sooner or later every man is just the same as all the men who have gone before him. Every penis is identical, an instrument for probing you and piercing you and leaving you without really touching you at all.�

�I found myself losing respect for myself,� she went on. �I think what bothered me the most was the way I was able to go on with this way of life without finding any joy in it. And the way I was going to bed with these men without taking any pleasure in it, and, worse than that, without liking them at all. There�s something pretty grim about that. I felt at times like a dreary dismal whore. And an unpaid one at that.�

How long had she been flying before she began to feel this way?

�That�s hard to say. It happened gradually, you know. I suppose you could say that by the end of the first year of flying I was a confirmed man-hater. I still dated from time to time, but I was beginning to turn down dates more often than not, and I was pretty sick of what went on when I did go out with a fellow.�

And was she aware of lesbian impulses at the time?

�Not at all. I was never really aware of the impulses as such. Everybody has homosexual impulses, you know, whether or not you ever give into them or even consider but most people go through life without ever being consciously aware of this.� She grinned impishly. �A girl takes a set early; she likes fellows, so how could she possibly like girls? Of course everyone on God�s earth is born bisexual. You take a baby and tickle between its legs, and it couldn�t care less whether the tickling is being done by a guy or a gal. All that a wee child knows is that it damn well feels good.

�It takes society, I think, to make people either heterosexual or homosexual. And most people, once they decide which they are, they aren�t inclined to question that decision.�

�That�s less true now than it once was.�

�The sexual revolution and all that? I suppose.�

�Beyond that, the whole stress placed upon sex and the increasing amount of writing and talk on the subject. The average person is apt to spend more time contemplating his own sexuality. And he�s more open to new ideas because he knows everybody else is in the same boat.�

She thought it over, nodded. �I guess so. Guess I�m just a child of my time. But as far as I was concerned, I didn�t figure it all out for myself that I was a lesbian. I got taught.�

�Another girl?�

�Uh-huh. Another stew, actually. I had a few blue moods over the years, oh, and I tried to tell myself that I had been seduced, which I suppose was literally true, and that this girl had corrupted me, which was a lot of crap, if you�ll pardon the expression. I didn�t realize it at the time, but I was already pointing hard in that direction. I don�t know how long it would have taken for me to get there under my own power. You can never know about something like that, can you? But I don�t suspect it would have taken too long. I had the inclination.

�And I was sort of, oh, drawing away from men in general. I don�t mean sexually as much as emotionally. There were no men that I really talked to outside of the context of the job. Every man was another passenger, someone to be waited on, someone to be supplied with coffee, tea or milk. And at the same time I was drawing closer and closer to a variety of other girls. You really learn the meaning of friendship in this line of work. Stewardesses become close in about the same way as combat soldiers or any other isolated group, I would guess. We lead a life that is so utterly removed from the ordinary run of things, and we have so many stresses all our own. Other people have their own frames of reference. A home, a fixed point to which they can relate the rest of their lives. We aren�t like them and we don�t have anything comparable. We fly through the air, and it�s not always with the greatest of ease. Sometimes it�s pretty rough, and if you don�t have each other to lean on, it gets close to impossible.

�I had never really had friends before I became a stew. Not really. I was kind of off by myself as a kid, and by the time I did open up socially it was as a teenager and I was in a dating situation, so most of my rapport was with the boys I dated. I didn�t have a really close girlfriend all through high school.

�So this was a big change for me, and I really warmed to this sort of friendship. Looking back on it now I can see how my feelings toward certain girls were sexual in nature although I didn�t realize it at the time.

�For example, I had this one girlfriend whom I would frequently room with on layovers because we often wound up working the same flight. A very sweet, loving girl from Minnesota, a Finnish girl, tall and absolutely gorgeous. She went back home about a year ago and married some husky farmer and gets up every morning to milk the cows, if you can believe it. I�m not sure I can myself. I was invited to the wedding, which was sweet of her. I didn�t go.

�Anyway, Cara was a really sexy kid. She had been holding out on the Minnesota farmer, but when she got her wings she really cut loose and let herself fly. She went out with passengers almost every night, and always went to bed with them, and as often as not she would get involved in some pretty far-out orgy scenes. A couple of times she got taken to nude parties and got herself laid by half a dozen men in the course of the evening, and got into some threesomes and things like that.

�This wasn�t unusual in itself. Face it, a lot of stews get into a lot of crazy scenes. We�re attractive and we�re liberated and men like us. But the unusual thing with Cara is that she liked to talk about it. I think she got as much of a kick out of coming back to the hotel room and telling me about it as she did in doing it.

�I know that I got more of a kick from the talk than the actual sex. We would lie there in our beds and tell each other stories about what we had done and what the men were like and how we enjoyed it, everything. There were times when I would be out with a man and I would go to bed with him and it would be a big nothing for me as far as I was concerned. And I would let my mind wander, the way you�ll do when sex isn�t working out as well as it might, and I would imagine myself back at the room telling Cara all about it.

�The thought of that would actually get me going. I would concentrate on that during the actual sex itself, and the thought would be more exciting than what we were doing in bed. You would think it would be the other way around, wouldn�t you? You would think that talking about it would be exciting because it would bring back the mood of the original act. Here I was reversing this completely, which I suppose is about the same as imagining that you are masturbating while you�re having intercourse.�

�Some people do that.�

�They do?� She shook her head. �Well, I can believe it. I can believe almost anything where sex is concerned...

�With Cara, I�ve thought recently that maybe she was just waiting for me to make a pass at her. If she was involved in all those orgies she must have had some experience with women. I�ve never been to those parties myself, but from what I hear every other woman at those things is bisexual and knows it, and the rest of them go along with it for the hell of it, and some nights there�s more girl-girl stuff going on than anything else. So it stands to reason that Cara had had a girl�s face between her legs somewhere along the way, and that she wouldn�t have minded getting something like that going with me.

�But she never mentioned it. Maybe she was worried that it wasn�t my scene, which it wasn�t at the time, at least as far as I knew. Maybe she was afraid of offending me. Maybe she was in the same boat as I was, ready for the gay scene but unaware of the fact. If that�s the case, I don�t suppose she�ll ever learn now. Not up in Minnesota with all those cows.�

That evening with the two couples represented the crossing of a sexual Rubicon for Lauren. From that point on, she considered herself a member of the Swinging Generation and conducted her social life accordingly. She developed contacts supplied by the Denver couple, added new contacts of her own, and became increasingly involved in group sexual activities throughout the country.

�For a person who travels,� she explained, �the swinging scene is really ideal. When you spend your life bouncing from one city to another, you honestly don�t have the time to develop long-term relationships. And assuming that what you want is to have sex on the run and enjoy it, well, the problem is that with most people it takes a long time to develop a really good sexual relationship. You have to learn each other�s bodies, you know. You have to get the feel of the whole thing, and this takes time that you just don�t have available when you have to fly to Omaha first thing in the morning.

�But with swingers, there�s this immediate rapport. It starts with rapport on an emotional level. There�s none of this business of feeling each other out conversationally. Swingers don�t have to go through that shit, any more than you have to worry about your wardrobe at a nudist camp. You know, it really amounts to pretty much the same thing, doesn�t it? Swingers are like nudists. They don�t worry about putting clothes on their minds and hiding their desires. Putting clothes on their minds � that sounds almost precious enough to be from a Jim Webb song, but you dig what I mean. There�s this immediate honesty, because you�re all swingers and you all know what you�re there for, so why bother coming on strong with each other?

�But at the same time, even though they don�t try to falsify things, swingers are very intent upon making a good impression. They work hard to put you at your ease and make you feel at home. And all of this makes for a much better scene when you hit a strange city than you would get sitting around some creepy nightclub with some clown who keeps putting his hand on your leg and pretending it�s an accident.

�I don�t want to give you the idea that my entire bag is group sex. I would say that I like that the most not just because I�m kinky but because frankly that�s usually the most fun for all concerned. When there are just two people in a room there are just so many things they can do, and they can only do it for so long before one or both of them gets too tired or too bored or plain worn out. With a group, everybody gets turned on by everybody else and the whole level of excitement is much higher. And lasts much longer. And in a strange way there�s a lot more individual leeway in a group scene. For instance, if a guy and a gal are together, and if he can�t get it up for the moment, it can be a very tense and unhappy scene all around. He feels compelled to do her some good, and she is brought down by the fact that he�s not hard and therefore she figures she must be turning him off, and you know, one thing leads to another and nobody is exactly happy.

�But if the same thing happens at a group thing and it does, incidentally, because anybody is apt to be turned off at any particular moment, you know � well, then, the party goes on around the guy. If he feels like participating he can always go down on somebody or finger somebody and the chances are that no one will even notice that he isn�t physically excited. Or he can just sit around and watch if that�s what he would rather do. You know the saying, whatever turns you on, well, that�s what it�s all about.

�I have a particular advantage as far as swinging is concerned. Well, you could even say it�s an advantage as far as sex in general is concerned, but especially in terms of the swinging scene. And that�s that I�m a girl

�See, extra girls are always in big demand. You know the way it works. The whole scene is up to here with extra guys who want to go to orgies or have parties with couples. I�ve been to parties advertised in the underground newspapers where they will specify that only couples will be admitted, and in the course of the evening maybe fifty dateless guys will try to talk their way in, and it�s an odd thing if one girl shows up unescorted. So an extra girl will always be in demand if only to balance out the extra men who are always available.

�But on top of that, every group would rather have more girls on hand. I�m not exactly sure why this is. Maybe it�s because every man has this dream of himself as the sultan of his own private harem, and wants to have extra women all over the place. Or maybe it�s this big lesbian element in the swinging scene. I suppose that�s possible. Of course I don�t have to tell you that the whole idea of the threesome is very big right now. In the club bulletins, I would say that a quarter to a third of them are just for that purpose � married couples who want an extra girl for a threesome. Sometimes these people are just looking for casual sex and sometimes they really want a permanent three-way living agreement...�

Did she expect to go on living this way indefinitely? Or did she have a different sort of future in mind?

�I would hate to give up swinging. I�m sure I wouldn�t want to do that. But I know I�ll want to get married sooner or later. If I met the right man now, I think I might almost be ready to start wearing a ring.�

What sort of man would she want?

�A swinger,� she answered, without hesitation. �No question about it. I think it would be good to be married because otherwise sooner or later a person winds up lonely. You look at your life after a certain age and if you don�t have memories to share with some other person, it is just an empty life. I haven�t felt this way myself yet, I�m too young, I think. But I have heard people talk, and I can understand what it must be like.

�But if marriage meant turning square, I don�t think I could make it. Not for any length of time. Oh, people talk about love and the way it changes a person, but I don�t know. Maybe some day I�ll understand that kind of love, maybe I�ll believe it, but for the time being I can only say that, like, I don�t believe that kind of love exists. Or that it exists for me.

�See, I know about sex. I know all about sex. Maybe that�s putting it a little heavy, but, oh, I�ve been making the scene for a long time now, and it�s a fairly crazy scene at that, and I know it pretty well. And one thing I don�t know much of anything about is love.

�You know, like what is it? What�s it all about? Dig, John, I would almost like to be very cool about this now, very sophisticated, but you know, what am I trying to prove? I�ll admit it � there�s this thing that people call love and I don�t know what it feels like.

�I�ve never really cared about anybody but myself. Not the way people do when they�re in love...

�So screw it. I mean, I�m a happy kid, I have a good time. Right? I enjoy myself. I know how to swing and I know how to let myself go and have a really good time. I can walk into a party and not know anybody and a couple of hours later I�ve copped every joint in the room and I�ve come all over the place and I don�t know much about love, but like the old joke, I know what I like. Right?

�If I meet a man, and if he�s a nice guy and bright to talk to and comfortable to be with and good in the hay, I mean really he would have to be very damned good in the hay or I would probably be very conscious of what was wrong with his style. But if he was all those things, and I dug him and he dug me, you know, to be with. And if he was a swinger and if we both liked to make the same kind of scenes. And if he made a good enough living so that we could live a decent life, but at the same time he had enough time off so that we could cut loose and swing together.

�Well, if we had all of that going for each other, I don�t guess I would ask too many questions about love. And in that case I�d be glad to give up stewing and all and get married. I would do it. I guess anybody would.�

RONA: Sometimes, you know, I wonder if it�s all just an act that I�m putting on. I feel very Peter Pan. You know: If you grow up you can�t fly. I like to fly, but sometimes I wonder if it might not be worth it to grow up.

Especially, well, when I go back home for a visit.

In this life, you know, you lose your points of reference. I suppose the same thing would happen to someone who spent his life in the military, or in a religious order, or anything like that. You get completely away from your home and family and the people you grew up with, and you lose the sense of how your life has grown completely apart from the way theirs have.

But when I do go home for a visit, and when I see the girls I knew in high school � oh, it�s just strange, it really is. My best friend all through high school, she�s married with two children and another on the way, and she and her husband have a house and a station wagon, and, I don�t know, they�re old! Really old. But then if I think about it, I think that it�s me who is young, really.

And nobody looks at it that way, not there. They all think I�m the one who�s been everywhere and done everything.

JWW: Because you�re a stew?

RONA: Right. I�m a stew, and everyone knows the lowdown on stews. That we�re all easy, and that we ball the pilots in the cockpits, and that we�re so mature and hip and sophisticated. Sometimes I almost find myself playing a part with old friends, named-dropping and place-dropping like mad, and while I won�t exactly say anything I�ll do what I can to give the impression that I�ve done certain wild things. That I dated a certain actor and went to bed with him, that I�ve been on wild parties with the jet set. It�s the easiest thing in the world to let people believe the things they wanted to believe about you in the first place, so I don�t actually tell lies, but I might as well. It comes down to the same thing.

JWW: I suppose every stew goes through this to one extent or another. That special confusion that comes from returning to the home environment and encountering old friends who seem to have grown much older than oneself without extending their horizons at all. It does make one wonder just what constitutes maturity, but�

RONA: But it�s different for me, you see. Because I feel like such a child. And not only when I go back home, but all the time, and it�s � oh, I don�t understand myself, I swear I don�t.

This virginity business is crazy. I honestly don�t think it started out as a hang-up, but it turned into one.

JWW: How do you mean?

RONA: Well, you know, you don�t become a virgin. It�s not something that happens to you.

JWW: It�s something that doesn�t happen to you.

RONA: That�s it exactly. Something that doesn�t happen to you. And that�s the whole story, really. It didn�t happen to me. For the longest time it was perfectly natural that it didn�t happen to me. I mean, oh, there was nothing unusual in a girl�s not losing her virginity in my high school. Those who did were in the minority. Some of them did, of course, and it wasn�t unusual for this to happen, especially if they were engaged or going steady, and there were a couple of girls in every class who were fairly promiscuous, but virginity was the general order of the day. I guess things move faster in the big cities, and in Florida and California, and in the plush suburbs and slums and all the fast places you hear about, but I grew up in a good old-fashioned American small town, straight out of a television situation comedy. Everybody was middleclass and white and Protestant and with an English surname. Not quite, but just about...

In college, that was where most girls crossed the bridge. The majority of the freshman class was always composed of virgins, and the majority of the senior class wasn�t. Even so, I don�t believe that it was as impossible for a girl to graduate as a virgin as some people would have you believe. We had the usual campus legend. About the statue?

JWW: If a virgin passed the statue, he would draw his sword?

RONA: Our statue didn�t have a sword. He was supposed to tip his hat if a virgin passed. But virgins were by no means that rare there. It was nice propaganda for guys who wanted to get you to do what everyone else was doing, but there wasn�t much of a factual basis to it. The idea that if you weren�t sleeping with some boy then you must be either a lesbian or a freak or just too ugly to interest anyone, well, that wasn�t true.

JWW: And yet virginity became a hang-up for you?

RONA: I guess it did. Yes, of course it did.

The trouble is figuring out how it happened�

Well, I suppose I can answer that easily enough, really. If I put my mind to it. And it probably wouldn�t hurt to talk about it.

And, as they say on �Laugh-In,� I�ll be a much better person for it...

What happened, essentially, is that during the second half of my freshman year in college I started going out with a boy. Greg was a very sweet, very sensitive guy, a music major, very tall and thin and blond with a sort of haunted look about him. He was a year ahead of me but only a month older. Very brilliant and all, and very good-looking, and I fell pretty hard. I really loved him.

And the two of us had what I thought was the perfect relationship. He always wanted to be with me but he was never remotely possessive or jealous. He was always interested in me and interested in the things I had to say. We would spend hours on end just talking about one thing after another. Most of the boys I had gone out with previously had never really talked to me. In fact I would say that most boys don�t talk to girls, and vice versa. There�s no communication, not in the real sense of the word. Everyone�s too busy trying to make a good impression, and the guys are concentrating too hard on seduction, and the girls on holding out, and, oh, it�s all so damned phony. When I think of teenage sex that�s what I really think of first, the overwhelming phoniness of it all. Girls trying to get the guy to give them a fraternity pin before they put out. Guys hoping the pin will guarantee that the girl will let them go all the way. That whole pretentious artificial routine that they call the dating game in modern America.

I missed all that with Greg. And thought at the time how lucky I was.

We went together for two full years. And in all that time he never tried to seduce me. We would kiss, and even do a little petting, but it really never went any further than that. I�m sure it would have gone further if he had wanted it to. I was very much in love with him, and very impressionable at the time. I suspect I would have gone along with anything that he wanted to do. But I just told myself that he loved and respected me, and that he and I weren�t the average sort of people. That instead of catering to animalistic impulses we could honestly respect one another.

I suppose you know how the story ends.

JWW: I could probably guess.

RONA: Of course. The crazy thing is that I couldn�t. All the time that I was with Greg, I never suspected a thing. When I look back on it now I guess he dropped a million unconscious hints, but I didn�t have the subtlety to pick them up. Besides, I don�t think you sense that sort of thing unless you�re looking for it. You know the saying that it takes one to know one? That�s true I think, but that�s only because it takes another one to be looking for that sort of thing, and you just don�t see it unless you�re looking out for it.

JWW: Then he was homosexual.

RONA: Of course.

There were times afterward when I thought back on it all very bitterly and felt that he had been using me as a front to keep the rest of the school from knowing the truth about him. Of course that wasn�t it at all, and it was uncharitable of me even to think so. When I think back on it now I realize what a horrible time it must have been for Greg himself. He had to keep all of this to himself, you see. It was his secret, his private hell that he had to live with. He was trying to fight this part of himself, this homosexual aspect. I guess he honestly thought that he and I could have a chance together, and that we could make some kind of a life for ourselves.

What hurts is that we probably could have, if we could have brought it out into the open early enough in our relationship. No one is all one thing, you know, and I think we might have had a chance. But instead we evolved into this artificially sexless relationship, and we built secret walls between each other, and he had another life that I never knew about, he would go into the city every once in a while and spend a night at the YMCA, and he would meet some total stranger and they would do things to each other...

There was a scene, of course. Ultimately we were almost getting to the stage of discussing marriage, and we tried to go to bed together, and he was impotent. I thought it was my fault, that I had done something wrong. He suggested � I wish there was a proper way to put this, but there isn�t. He suggested that I take him in my mouth, and I did, and he got hard and had an orgasm all in an instant.

If I hadn�t been such a child! In retrospect, I don�t see anything that objectionable about fellatio. But when it happened, when he ejaculated in my mouth, I was just sick. Literally sick. I retched and threw up all over the place. I couldn�t help it.

And then after that there was a long talk in which everything came out, and we broke up. That did it. We broke up.

JWW: And that one experience turned you off men? That seems an extreme reaction.

RONA: No, it didn�t work that way. I did keep to myself for a while after that, because I was really torn up emotionally, but as a matter of fact one of my first reactions, or you could say one of the first parts of my reaction, was a desire to prove to myself that I was a woman after all. Because whether it was Greg�s fault or not, I naturally had loads of self-doubts and wanted to make sure I was adequate myself. You know the sort of Freudian questions girls ask themselves at that age. I was wondering if maybe there wasn�t something wrong with me, or else why would a homosexual have been attracted to me in the first place? And why would I have been drawn to him? So I wanted to go out and lose my virginity as soon as possible.

JWW: Yes, I would have expected that sort of reaction.

RONA: But it didn�t quite work, damn it.

JWW: Oh?

RONA: I don�t know what it was, exactly. I guess I was a little bit of a social retard, for one thing. Two years of Greg had spoiled me for other boys. I was used to this great rapport, and at the same time I was afraid of sensitivity on a boy�s part because I was afraid it meant he was a homosexual or afraid of sex. And of course the obviously masculine types, the ultra-virile sort, put me off completely. I had built things up in my mind to such a point where I was afraid to go out with them...

I dated, but my social life was nothing too spectacular. I had cut myself off from other boys while I was with Greg. And from girls, too, as far as that goes. When I did begin circulating again, and began having dates, I must have been very awkward with boys. I know for example that I dated a lot of boys who never asked me out a second time. I used to tell myself that it was because I wouldn�t have sex with them, but at our school not that many boys expected anything on a first date. It wasn�t that. I was just a massive drag, that�s all. I got tongue-tied or else I babbled and I was, oh, a drag, that�s the only word for it.

A couple of times I began to get involved sexually with boys, but it never worked. It was a horrible situation because I absolutely couldn�t relax about it. I suppose that must be the best thing of all, if you can just be very relaxed and normal about sex and then it just happens when it�s time. That�s what would have happened with Greg, if he hadn�t been the way he was. Because I had had more than enough time to get to know him and to like him, so there would have been no abrupt leap into sex, you know, a sexual situation, and I think it would have worked out much better.

But as it was, it seemed as though all a boy had to do was touch me and I would freeze. Literally freeze. I used to wonder why they had that expression for not being a sexual dynamo. Why it�s always put in terms of hot and cold, you know, they say a girl is fiery or an iceberg�

JWW: It�s not just colloquial. Frigidity describes temperature, but also describes sexual temperament.

RONA: That�s right, and I always wondered why, and it�s because you really do get cold. It�s a physical coldness that you feel. All tight and cold...

I began to develop into a terrible tease. That honestly wasn�t what I had in mind, either, which made it all the worse. I would go with a boy, and I would honestly be hoping not only that I could respond to him but that we would go all the way. I wouldn�t spell this out because, oh, I just wouldn�t have been comfortable saying to a boy in advance that I wanted him to have intercourse with me. Actually I think any boy would have been turned off by that sort of approach anyway. But I couldn�t have done it because � and this is part of the whole point � because I didn�t have that kind of feeling for these boys, any of them, that sort of rapport.

I would go with them to their place, or in their car, or wherever they would take a girl for the purposes of having sex. My God, but that sounds cut and dried! For the purposes of having sex. You know what I mean � the places kids go to make out. Usually a car. And we would kiss, and it wasn�t exactly exciting but then it wasn�t bad either, and it would even begin to give me a sort of warm feeling. Nothing fiery but kind of warm. And I would think, well, maybe this will do it, maybe I�ll really get involved this time.

But it wouldn�t work that way. Somewhere along the line something would hit a snag and I would just know that I couldn�t go through with it. This happened several times. And then after that I just told myself I had to force myself to grow up, that nobody ever died from sexual intercourse and that even if I did it would be better than living like this. I was dramatizing like mad but that�s what you do when something like that reaches the obsession stage.

JWW: So you tried to go through with it?

RONA: Yes.

JWW: And couldn�t?

RONA: That�s right. I... I forced myself not to fight it. The first time it went that far, I was in this boy�s car, and I was absolutely determined to carry through with it. I had been with him two nights before and had stopped him at the very last moment, which didn�t exactly thrill him. He was frustrated then, and I had to do him with my hand in order to satisfy him. Which wasn�t what he had in mind, but I guess either he had hopes for something more or the hand job � please pardon the way I�m talking � it did something for him, because here it was two nights later and he was back for more. Or maybe he was just a masochist.

JWW: Or maybe he liked the challenge.

RONA: That�s a thought... he kissed me and went through the usual college ritual. Kissing, soul kissing, feel the breast, take off the bra, kiss the breast, hand up the skirt � the approach is so standardized you would think every college sophomore learned it step by precious step in phys ed class.

JWW: They learn it when they pledge fraternities.

RONA: Honestly?

JWW: The same time they learn the secret handclasp.

RONA: Oh, you�re putting me on. I�m a fairly gullible person, as you may have gathered. Where was I?

JWW: In the back seat of the car with his hand up your skirt.

RONA: Good grief! �When last seen, little Nell was in the back seat of a two-door Ford sedan with a boy�s hand up her skirt.� That�s too much.

Seriously, I just told myself, all right, whatever happens, this is it. And I let him get my skirt up and my panties down, and I watched while he got a rubber out of his wallet and put it on him, and then I valiantly kept my lily-white thighs wide apart while he got in position, and then nothing.

JWW: He was impotent?

RONA: No. I was locked up. I used to know the technical term for it�

JWW: Vaginismus, I think.

RONA: That sounds about right. What it meant was that some muscles down there refused to cooperate. The door was locked forever. I absolutely couldn�t relax. He tried, and I tried, and ultimately he came all over me, and that was it for that night.

I could go on, but it was just more of the same. And for a long time. It didn�t have to happen too many more times before I learned to stop trying. I was almost through with college by then anyway, and I virtually forced the whole subject of sex out of my mind. Or out of the front of my mind � that�s probably more like it. Out of the front of my mind and off into the back of my mind where I didn�t have to think about it, but where it could just fester and breed germs.

BAMBI: You know, they say experience is the best teacher, but sometimes I wonder. There are times when I have the feeling that I just never learn a thing from experience. That all my life I just make the same mistakes over and over. You would think I would learn, but I never do. I read somewhere that that�s the definition of a neurotic. That you do the wrong thing even when you should know better. That you�re so messed up in your head that you can�t learn certain things. An aunt and uncle of mine have this child that�s retarded. You wouldn�t know it to look at him, but there�s something wrong with his brain and there are things he can�t learn. He can�t understand the idea of any number more than two. He can understand one, and he can understand two, but beyond that his little brain just can�t help him out. And sometimes I wonder if I�m retarded like that, but emotionally.

JWW: You keep making certain mistakes?

BAMBI: Oh, the men I pick to get involved with. You would think I would learn better but I don�t. If a girl wants to get married the one thing she ought to have sense enough to do is not go out with married men. That�s the most basic thing there is, I guess, and it isn�t as though I just learned this the day before yesterday. I guess I�ve always known it, really. But knowing it doesn�t seem to do me any good. For some cockeyed reason married guys are always the ones I�m attracted to and the ones who get interested in me, and when I do go out with someone who�s single it doesn�t lead to anything, and when instead I go out with someone who is as married as can be, that�s the date that leads to an affair.

JWW: Have you been dating married men since you started as a stew?

BAMBI: Just about. That was something everybody always would talk about in stew training school, you know. Whether or not you would date a married man, and how to tell if a man was married or not, and the whole moral question of whether it was right to go out with him or not. See, for most of us, this was something that had never come up before. How could it? You take my case, now nobody in the town I grew up in was going to go out with a married man. It was just impossible. Everybody knew everybody else, and anything like that, it would have to be a matter of sneaking around. Just sex for its own sake. Not dates out in the open, the way you might with a married man in a big city.

JWW: How did you feel at the time? When you discussed it all?

BAMBI: That this was something I would never do.

JWW: For moral reasons?

BAMBI: Partly, but I don�t guess that was the main thing. Mostly I thought it would be a waste of time. A lot of the girls took the attitude that there was nothing immoral about dating a married man if it was his idea to begin with, and why not have a nice fun evening on the town if you felt in the mood. But I didn�t think of dating in the sense of fun. I was pretty cold-blooded about the whole thing, now that I think back on it. It was all a question of finding a husband as far as I was concerned. Almost as if I didn�t have time for fun, or as if I wasn�t interested in fun to begin with...

JWW: But you did begin dating married passengers.

BAMBI: Married passengers and married pilots, too. But it wasn�t a case of changing my mind, not at the beginning. At first it was a matter of me being pretty na�ve, and of a couple of guys who took advantage of me.

JWW: How do you mean?

BAMBI: One told me he wasn�t married, and I was stupid enough to believe him. That was the first married man I dated, and I did it without realizing it. The second man, I knew he was married, but he sold me a bill of goods and got me to believe that he was separated from his wife and intended to get a divorce. The oldest line in the world, and I knew at the time that men always say something like that, but he seemed so sincere that I fell for it.

JWW: And with each of these men you became involved in an affair?

BAMBI: Yes.

I�ll tell you what happened. The first man, the one I thought wasn�t married, was a passenger. I had been flying for about two months at the time and I hadn�t really developed any social life to speak of. In the beginning, you know, it�s such a struggle to do your job properly and to keep up with the whole tumult of being a stew and flying all over the place that you don�t really have time to date. I went out with a few passengers but it was really nothing. Some of them were nice and some of them were just fellows on the make, but there was nothing serious in the cards with any of them.

Then on this one flight to Dallas I met a really nice fellow. About thirty-five with dark wavy hair and eyes that went right through a person. Penetrating. I don�t usually get strong feelings one way or another just looking at a person, not as a general rule. With me it�s more a matter of getting to know a man and responding to him gradually. But in this case I just looked at him and felt this strong immediate attraction.

The flight itself was the first time I was ever frightened in the air. I know now that it wasn�t really bad, but I experienced rough flying for the first time and although I managed to keep a lid on it, well, I panicked. I was sure we were going to crash. And I used this man as an escape valve. I latched onto him, and when he made a pitch for me I was glad for the chance to spend time with him and try to forget my worries.

To make a long story short, I went out with him in Dallas. He told me he was a sales representative for an electronics manufacturer in Cincinnati, and that he was single. The first part of this was the truth and the rest wasn�t.

I had never gone out with anyone like him. He was much older than I was, and smooth and polished and poised. He took me to a restaurant and ordered in French. He ordered for me � I thought this was the suavest thing in the world, and I was so dazzled that I never did find out what it was that I was eating. Not that I paid much attention to the food. I was, well, swept off my feet. I had heard that expression but I never before knew what it felt like. And it felt wonderful.

JWW: When did you find out he was married?

BAMBI: Not for two weeks.

JWW: You continued to see him?

BAMBI: Oh, yes. Regularly. I saw him that first night in Dallas, and then I began juggling things so that I could fly into Cincinnati as often as possible, and I also found out where he was going to be traveling and we worked things out so that we could be in the same place at the same time as often as possible.

JWW: All this in two weeks?

BAMBI: No. I started right away, with getting myself booked in and out of Cincinnati, but the rest followed while we were going together, which was a period of a few months. Yes, after I found out he was married.

I was that crazy about him. The first night we went out, I slept with him. That may not sound exactly remarkable, but I was a virgin at the time, strange as it may seem. And dead set on staying a virgin until I found the guy I was going to marry. Corny or not, I was going to save it for my husband. I don�t believe in that anymore, and I frankly think most men would rather marry a girl with some experience, whether they admit it or not. But at the time�

I can tell you what happened. We had this spectacular dinner, and he really made me feel like the most desirable woman on earth, and we both had a lot of wine, and I wasn�t used to it, it went right to my head. And when he took me to his hotel room, well, I can�t say I didn�t know what was happening. I knew. I remember being conscious of the fact that here I was in a man�s hotel room and that this was a compromising situation � those were the words I thought of � and that I was probably going to have sex with this man. I felt as though I had no choice in the matter. That we would do whatever he wanted us to do, the same as he had picked dinner for both of us in the restaurant.

He got me really excited for the first time in my life. I had petted a little in the past but it never got to me the way he did that night. All he had to do was kiss me and I was physically excited, and when he put his hand under my skirt and touched me I got wet immediately. I remember thinking that I ought to be embarrassed, getting so obviously passionate like that. As if he would think I was a whore or something.

I let him do everything...

JWW: How did you find out that he was married?

BAMBI: He told me.

JWW: After you had been having an affair for two weeks?

BAMBI: Yes. At the time he made it seem as if it was very noble and self-sacrificing of him to tell me. As if he hadn�t been purposely deceiving me for two weeks. Later on I realized that he told me so that I wouldn�t expect him to marry me or spend time with me when he didn�t feel like it. A married man, you know, is in a very good position in an affair. He has a beautiful excuse handy at all times � his goddamned wife and kids. He can see you when he wants, fitting you into his schedule and just taking you to bed without any big build-up, because his time isn�t his own, he�s got all of these responsibilities. And you can�t expect him to introduce you to his mother or marry you or any of those things. He�s got that perfect excuse that he�s already married. Listen, it�s such a perfect setup that I�ve known of single fellows who say they�re married just for the convenience of it.

JWW: And you continued to date him?

BAMBI: I was in love with him by then. And I don�t know, I thought he would maybe divorce his wife and marry me.

JWW: Did he say he might?

BAMBI: No, but I had hopes...

GILLIAN: Of course you�re right about that. I was a very na�ve and unsophisticated kid when I left Wichita. Not in a sexual sense, because I had been having the whole catalogue of sex from the time I was fourteen years old. I know that a large percentage of girls come to stew school without much in the way of sexual experience, but believe me, that wasn�t my bag. I started screwing in ninth grade and I was a veteran of gang bangs at a tender age, so I wasn�t one of those stew school virgins by any means.

But although I had had a lot of sexual experience, I was still surprisingly square. This is something a lot of people have trouble understanding. They think that just because an individual is hip in a certain area, she�s hip in other areas as well. I notice this attitude nowadays on the part of so many Johns. They know that I�m a hooker and as a result they take it for granted that I�m hip to drugs and crime, that I know Mafia people, that I�m generally hip to all sorts of scenes. At one time I was insulted that they would think I was involved in these scenes until I realized that they didn�t mean it as an insult, but simply that they thought hipness cut across all these different areas.

When I hit stew school, I was still very much caught up in the whole middle-class value system that I grew up in. I thought, you know, that good little girls went to Heaven. But at the time I didn�t know the other side of it: that bad little girls go to Bergdorf�s. To put it another way, I was breaking all the moral standards, but I was still conscious of them and busy hating myself for what I was doing. The whole guilt thing.

JWW: And being a stewardess broadened your outlook?

GILLIAN: Yes, I would say so. I was still a lot further out in my own personal sexual behavior than the girls I met, but at the same time I was meeting girls whose values were a good deal less rigid than the attitudes I grew up with in Wichita. These girls might not have done the things I had done, but their minds were more open. They believed in premarital sex, for example, while I grew up doing it like crazy but thinking it was sinful.

To put it another way, everyone on earth has a gap between the way they behave and the way they think they ought to behave. Everyone, saint or sinner. With me, this gap had been really huge, and that made me eat my heart out. The people I met in stew school and afterward helped me narrow that gap. Some of them actually had their own private gaps turned the other way around. I knew girls, for example, who believed in premarital sex and all the other aspects of sexual freedom but who hadn�t done anything, and it bothered them that they weren�t living up to their ideals.

JWW: This sort of broadening of standards, and what you could call a narrowing of the gap between normative and existential rules of behavior, I think you might have found this anywhere away from home.

GILLIAN: I don�t think there�s any question about it.

JWW: If you had gone away to college, or if you had moved on your own to New York or Los Angeles�

GILLIAN: I agree with you. I think being a stew may have accentuated all of this, because I�ve found that the whole world of commercial aviation is very fast and very open both at once. By this I mean not only stews and pilots but also the passengers who do a great deal of flying, the commercial travelers and all. The whole scene is one that involves a lot of very fast-moving people. Relationships form in a hurry, both personally and sexually. And along with this general speed, there�s a great deal of honesty.

And there, incidentally, is something that I don�t think stews get enough credit for. I think we�re by and large a very honest group of girls. That�s funny � I said we. Did you notice that?

JWW: Yes.

GILLIAN: As if I still think of myself as one of the gang. That�s interesting, isn�t it? And here I�ve spent a few years as part of a different group of fast but honest girls.

Where was I? Honesty. Right. You know, a lot of people think of stews as basically artificial. As phony people. I�ve heard it said that stewardesses look as though they were molded out of plastic according to some master plan, lacking in individuality and all. And stews will be criticized for being polite to passengers all according to company policy, as if a girl who puts people at their ease and makes them comfortable is a phony for what she�s doing.

But I really think you would have trouble finding a more honest group of girls. Once you get past the automatic in-flight ritual, the average stew is a girl who is more willing than most people to face the truth about herself and to be open and realistic in her personal relationships.

JWW: Yes, I�ll go along with that. Why do you suppose it is?

GILLIAN: Because of the life we lead. I did it again � we. But seriously, I don�t think a stew has time to be phony. Oh, on the one hand it�s very easy to be completely pat and artificial with the sort of people who don�t matter at all � the men you work for a steak dinner on a layover in Omaha and never see again, for instance. A stew knows how to develop a quick and meaningless feeling of rapport with a man like that and be the sort of dinner partner he wants without letting him really reach her at all.

But that�s with the people who don�t matter. With people who do matter, it�s completely different. Then it�s a case of not having time to waste with conventional crap responses. If you meet a guy and really like him, for example, and you know you may never see him again and certainly won�t see him again for a month or more, you�re more or less forced to get to the heart of the matter right away. I don�t mean that you ball him on the first date. That goes without saying, but then so does an office girl who picks up a young executive on a Friday night on First Avenue. Instant Sex is just part of the American routine. But that office girl will be very careful to come on strong with the guy and create the right impression, while a stew will be apt to be honest about it, because why not?

It�s an attitude you develop, I guess. The fact that planes crash doesn�t hurt, either. That old life-and-death business does make a person get to the heart of the matter. I used to think that was just an excuse for a lot of things, because nobody thinks about crashes all the time, but it does influence everyone. The same as the bomb influences the way we all live � we may not think about it often, but it�s always there, and it has to have an effect on us...

I just thought of something really weird.

JWW: What?

GILLIAN: Actually I suppose it�s odd I never thought of it before. But I was thinking just now of the similarity between hookers and stewardesses.

In several ways. What I said about being able to be completely artificial with people who don�t matter, that would be as good a description of the way a call girl is with a John as it is of the way a stew is with a passenger who doesn�t mean anything to her. Learning how to be just what the man expects you to be but without letting him touch you in any real way. You know, if I had been talking about how to get along with a John I might have put it in exactly the same set of words.

JWW: That�s very interesting.

GILLIAN: Isn�t it? And the other part, that we�re more honest with each other and with people who matter to us. I think that holds up, too. Not always, of course, because so many of the girls I know in this business are just absolute phonies in every respect, and so full of neuroses that you can�t get through to them. But even so, we are open and honest some of the time, and for the same kind of a reason. As if the kind of work we do, the lives we live, it�s all so intense and so cut off from the rest of the world that we don�t have any time to be phony and to wear the conventional sort of masks. Do you understand what I�m saying? I never thought of this before, it�s all coming right off the top of my head, and I don�t know if it�s making any sense or not.

JWW: It makes sense.

GILLIAN: But at the same time, I wonder if maybe it isn�t partly just a matter of the kind of person I am and the kind of life I lead. I was a certain kind of person when I was a stew, and I�m basically the same kind of person now, in the life I�m leading now.

JWW: How did you get from one to the other?

GILLIAN: It was easy enough. We talked about this before, didn�t we? The last time I saw you...

What it amounted to was that I sort of found my way into prostitution gradually. I suppose it grew out of my being basically discontented with my life at that point. Not with my career as a stewardess as such, although I was beginning to feel confined in my job and to realize that I wasn�t particularly good at it, either. But the real problem was my own emotional situation at the time. I had been involved in an affair which I had mistaken for love. I can�t blame the man because it was strictly a case of my misreading things. As far as he was concerned it was a handy little affair and I was someone to sleep with when he happened to be in Los Angeles on business. He thought I saw it the same way. I had had that sort of scene with a lot of fellows up to that point, and that was normally all I was looking for, just a good time and a few laughs, so it wasn�t his fault that I happened to pick him to fall in love with. Except that it wasn�t really love except in my own mind�

Well, that whole scene had an unhappy ending, and poor little Gillian wound up with her ego in shreds. I went out one night and tried to get drunk but it didn�t work. Did you ever have that happen? The more I drank the more sober I got. And I�ve never been much of a drinker, no capacity to speak of. I get drunk smelling the cork from a wine bottle, and here I had God knows how much to drink and it didn�t have any effect on me.

JWW: I�ve had that happen. It�s supposed to be medically impossible, but it happens.

GILLIAN: It certainly did that night. I never did get drunk, but I finally went back to my place and went to sleep, and in the morning I had the first real hangover of my life, which seemed so damned unfair. Here I was with the hangover and I hadn�t even had the drunkenness beforehand. I went and stood under the cold shower for an hour and then got to the airport in time for my flight.

The flight was depressing, too. The other stew had had a fight with the co-pilot, and they weren�t speaking, and the whole atmosphere up front was really terrible. And maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed as though there were more than the usual number of cruddy passengers, fanny-pinchers and wise guys and vomiting children and first-time fliers and all the little petty aggravations. I guess it was just that everything got to me.

I was desperate for a date by the time we landed. I wanted to be wined and dined and sucked and fucked, if you�ll excuse the expression. But I really wanted to lose myself in a happy time followed by some good honest sex. Men like to unwind that way; is it that surprising that a girl wants the same thing for herself?

Well, at first it looked as though no one was going to ask me out. Just to make the day complete. But I struck up a conversation with this one fellow and practically put the words into his mouth for him, and he took me to dinner.

He was a monumental drag. In a sense he was the usual square passenger, the kind with the corny jokes and the pictures of his snot-nosed kids, the typical dummy whom the average stew has to know how to handle, and on an ordinary evening I would have done that, I would have handled him without paying any real attention to him. The same way I would handle the average trick today, making him happy without letting him bring me down. But I was in such a bad mood to begin with that this crud got to me. All through dinner I wanted to tell him, Look, let�s skip this shit, let�s just go straight to bed. Because I could stand screwing him a lot better than I could stand listening to him. But no, he was sure he had to treat me like a lady first, and so we not only had dinner but we also went to some dismal little strip club afterward and watched Miss Saggy Tits of 1943 wiggle her behind. I don�t know why men assume it will put a girl in the mood to watch another girl do a strip. It certainly doesn�t have that effect on me. And this particular show � well, a lesbian would have been turned off by this dancer, believe me. She was really bad. And the comic with the revolting dirty jokes, and the cruds in the audience�

He smuggled me into his hotel room, Mr. Bourgeois Guilt himself, and although I was used to that scene it really sickened me that night. I wasn�t feeling all that good about being me in the first place, and it seemed as though the whole day and night was designed to make me feel cheaper and more inferior.

In the room, well, let�s just say he was a puritan. Do you know what I mean by that? A puritan is a son of a bitch who thinks you�re disgusting if you do what he wants to do, and twice as disgusting if you like it. The mere fact that I had come to his room with him meant that I was beneath contempt, you understand. Therefore he could stop having any regard for me whatsoever.

How shall I put it? Well, I didn�t see it this way at the time, but using hindsight I can sum it up perfectly. He behaved exactly like a John. No money changed hands, but otherwise I might as well have been a paid prostitute.

He touched my body, you know, not to excite me but as if it was just there for his pleasure. He played with me. Like a toy, like a rubber duck in the bathtub, for Christ�s sake. And then he stretched out like King Shit and told me to go down on him. Which is something I had never objected to, but in that room with that guy it became a dirty act to me. An obscene act.

Then we had intercourse, and I guess he had fun, and I know I didn�t. I couldn�t wait for it to be over. I had had sex before without enjoying it but never anything like that, wishing it was over, just wishing it was over and done with. Not that he made it last very long, but it seemed long because it was so impersonal and distasteful and, oh, really disgusting.

This was a big turning point for me. Really. I mean, it�s not as though I had been hung up before this on the idea that sex had to be loving and beautiful and holy. I was a kid who had taken on a dozen boys one after the other, remember. If you could possibly imagine what that is like, a line-up, a gang bang. I can�t even explain what it�s like because it�s hard to put my mind back into that groove. It was never good sexually, you know. Anybody who ever tells you that a girl, a teenager, gets a sex kick out of a gang bang, that�s a lot of crap. But there was some emotional kick in it. There really was, at the time. A feeling of, I don�t know, being important and wanted. I�m sure this isn�t exactly news to you. Teenage girls who put out like that are such sick messed kids. I guess I was no exception.

JWW: But this particular night was different. You felt cheap, I imagine, but in a different way.

GILLIAN: That�s right. A completely different way. And you know, when he got his gun, he rolled off me and fell asleep immediately. And there I was, all alone with myself in that room. I was never so completely alone in my life.

I sat up smoking a cigarette and wishing for a drink and feeling sober and tired and old, and something strange happened. It was like drowning. My whole life was passing in front of me, one rotten part after another. Just the bad parts. There was no way to keep from thinking of them. They were just always there in my mind. All I could think of was how cheap I was, how small I was, how worthless. And how I seemed to be on this earth so that men could use me for their own pleasure and give me nothing in return. The whole thing was an absolutely terrible trip.

JWW: I can imagine.

GILLIAN: I have never felt so completely depressed before or since. Never. To think back on that night, I can only say that it�s a miracle I didn�t commit suicide. I would have done it if I had thought of it. It just never occurred to me, for some reason. But I think if it had ever come into my mind I would have gone to that window � I can see the window in my mind now, right alongside the foot of the bed, and I remember it was the twelfth floor so I could have made a job of it. Just a quick little dive out of that window and no more Gillian, and can you imagine that sanctimonious bastard trying to explain that one to the cops and his wife and all the people back home in the Rotary Club?

I almost wish I had done it...

But what I did instead was turn my first trick.

JWW: How soon afterward?

GILLIAN: The same night.

JWW: Really?

GILLIAN: Uh-huh. Well, why not? I felt like a whore, so why not be a whore?

It almost came down to that. I couldn�t stay there with him and I didn�t want to wake him up, so I got dressed and let myself out. I took a cab back to the hotel where I was staying. I was very close to broke, and when I paid the cab I remember thinking that I should have taken a few dollars for cab fare from his wallet. A man will generally give you cab fare in those circumstances, usually five or ten bucks or even a twenty occasionally.

Well, you can probably imagine where my train of thought was leading me. I was thinking that this man would certainly have given me cab fare if he had been awake, but of course I hadn�t wanted to wake him up and ask for it, and I hadn�t even considered helping myself to money while he was sleeping. And I thought that he never would have missed it if I had taken some money, and I thought, oh, about how little money I had and how I was always broke, and how this man had spent I don�t know, fifty dollars at the very least that night, just to take me to bed, and most of that he spent taking me to a show I hated to sit through. It occurred to me that I would have been much better off taking the money directly and skipping the show, and just balling him in return for the money, since I had gotten nothing but grief from it anyway and couldn�t possibly have felt more like a whore.

I went to my room but I couldn�t sleep. It was still early. I went downstairs to the cocktail lounge and had a couple of drinks, and sure enough this fellow hit on me and started buying drinks for me. This was no surprise. A girl by herself always gets her drinks bought for her.

I wound up at a table with this fellow, and the funny thing is he was a pretty decent and hip guy, and if it hadn�t been for my mood I would probably have gone to bed with him and had a reasonably good time out of the whole thing. But you understand how I felt by now. He was just another man who wanted to use me, and he had recognized me for a tramp the minute I walked in the door, and, oh, the usual things were going through my mind. He asked if I wanted to go somewhere for a late bite. I think he suggested a place where they specialized in steaks and had a jazz quartet for entertainment. The reason I mention it is that this was the sort of thing I liked to do on a date, the ideal way as far as I�m concerned to spend some time with a man before going to bed. That�s the whole point, in a way � that this man who was really my first trick was an ideal date and the complete opposite in every way of the pig I had gone out with earlier that evening.

JWW: If you had met him first�

GILLIAN: It would have been a completely different evening. But let�s not get into the convenient trap of saying that if I�d met Mr. Okay Guy first I wouldn�t be hooking today. It might have taken longer but I would have wound up in the same place.

JWW: But you might have come via a different route.

GILLIAN: Right. But all roads lead to � well, not Rome, but wherever the hell am now...

When he asked me out, I started to accept, and then something happened. Now this is funny, because I honestly hadn�t planned my approach. Looking back on it I can see how I was all primed to ask for money, the business with the cab and all the thoughts that had been going through my head, but I had never actually worked up a plan. I was playing things by ear.

But I started to accept, you see, and then I got a long face and sort of lowered my eyes, and he wanted to know what was the matter. And I went into my act. Completely unrehearsed, and the words surprised me as I said them, but they couldn�t have worked out better if I had stayed up nights committing them to memory.

I went into this number about how I was really up against it financially, and how I didn�t need drinks and a steak any more than he needed to buy them for me, but that I was really broke. And I went through this bit about, Look, let�s be honest with one another. I said that I knew that he wanted to go to bed with me, and that I wanted it too, and I would just as soon go now instead of going out and listening to music first. But I also told him that I needed to make some money, and I suggested that he might want to match my honesty and straightforwardness by giving me the money he would have spent on food and drinks and all. I said, �You know, you�d spend money on me and not think twice about it, and you would send me home in a cab, and you might even go overboard and decide to send me flowers or even a gift. Well, not to take the romance out of it, but I could really use the cash.� I invented a reason why I needed money. I don�t remember what it was.

He was completely stunned.

JWW: I can imagine.

GILLIAN: And he bought the whole story. He put two and two together and figured out that I needed cash for an abortion. He gave me a hundred dollars and told me there were no strings attached, none whatsoever. He said he liked me and would enjoy making love to me but that wasn�t part of the deal. If I wanted to do that, fine. If not, the hundred was still mine with no hard feelings.

What a tough little whore I was! You would think I would have found a way to give the dough back and say I was kidding, something like that. But I was all caught up in the role I was playing and all excited at the idea of going through with this, of balling a man for money. I made myself refuse to see him as a decent guy. I didn�t know the words at the time, but what I did, really, was make him a John in my mind.

I took him to my room. I guess the circumstances were so unusual that he found them very exciting. He made love to me in a very sincere and loving way, but as I said he was a John to me and I was as completely turned off as I had been with the other man. In fact it was the same thing again, the whole bit of being into it but not feeling anything and having my mind somewhere a thousand miles away. This complete detachment that I have with tricks, to the point where my body is all involved in pleasing them and they think they�re getting the screwing of their lives and actually I don�t even know they�re alive.

We made it a couple of times, and I dropped off to sleep while he was still there, which was pretty unprofessional. It would have served me right if he took his hundred back and my own money along with it. But as I said, this was Mr. Nice himself. When I woke up there was a second hundred weighted down with the ashtray, and a note with it telling me it wasn�t payment, that it was a loan, that I should use it for whatever I wanted and that someday when I was in the chips I should give the hundred to someone else who was up against it.

I cried, John. I broke down and cried. The one thing I wasn�t ready to handle was that kind of human decency. I just wasn�t ready for it.

I didn�t know anything about him, his name or where he lived or anything. We had never gotten past first names the night before. And something � I guess I knew that I shouldn�t try to see him again, or even think about him if I could avoid it. Because all I would do was build up another love situation in my mind and set myself up for another fall.

So I looked at it cold, you know, and I made myself see it for what it really was, with all of the pretty part cut out. I told myself that it made a beautiful story with the right violins in the background, but that instead of violins all I had in the background was the cruddy guy I�d met earlier in the evening and all the other cruddy guys my life consisted of, and that Mr. Nice would have been a cruddy guy himself except that he was hipped that particular night on the idea of helping a damsel in distress. And after all, it was all a con, and by falling for it he was just a fool, and as for me, well, I was nothing but a whore, which in a sense was all I had been all along, but at least this time I was a whore who had made two hundred dollars in one night�s work, and if you were going to be a whore anyway, which it looked as though I was, then it seemed to me that I might as well make it pay off as well as I could.

KIM: I know that this all started taking shape a long ways back, like when I was caught up in the teenybopper scene with the fan clubs and screaming at concerts and all. Not that I ever had any personal contact with any of those musicians or anything like that. I didn�t. I never got sexually close to any of them. But when I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen and just beginning to be really aware of sex and of my own body, this was also the time that I was completely hung up on these musicians.

JWW: And they served as sex symbols for you?

KIM: Oh, completely. I would say completely. This is what they do. The average teenybopper doesn�t know anything about music. At those concerts, well, you can�t even hear the music in the first place, not with all the screaming that goes on there. It�s all a sexual thing. You scream and shout and carry on, and you get completely caught up with the whole crowd in the rhythm and all, and you look at those boys and imagine doing things with them, and that�s how teenyboppers get their cookies.

JWW: You actually had climaxes this way?

KIM: Are you serious? Well, I suppose people don�t realize this. I suppose they don�t. I guess if they did parents would never let their little daughters trip off to those concerts. My God, yes, of course I used to come that way. That�s what the entire teenybopper groupie scene is about. It�s sex, pure and simple. You know those revival meetings they have in the South, where the women roll around on the floor and scream and shout? Well, they have orgasms that way. They come.

JWW: Sometimes they do, yes. But in most cases I don�t think they think of it in those terms. It�s a religious experience, and if it�s basically sexual in nature, I don�t think most participants see it that way.

KIM: Maybe teenies don�t at first, either. Because the first time it happens you don�t know what it is. I had my first climax at a concert. I didn�t know what it was. I had never had one before, so how could I know? Then I talked about it later with a girlfriend of mine, and she told me what it was, and showed me how to have the same feeling happen whenever I wanted it to.

JWW: By masturbating, you mean?

KIM: Yes. I got so I used to do that all the time. Rubbing myself with my finger. I could come easily that way, but it was never anywhere near as powerful a sensation as what I used to experience at a concert. Masturbating was just doing it to myself, you know, and I was in control of it, and you can�t blow your mind that way. It was all too self-centered. But at a concert with all the girls around me going ape and the music and the boys on stage, it was much bigger and more explosive. Instead of my doing it, I was there and I couldn�t even keep it from happening. It was like, oh, getting carried away on a wave. That�s a good description of it. Getting picked up by a wave of feeling and just carried out to sea.

JWW: Did you try to duplicate the environment when you masturbated?

KIM: You mean by inviting a crowd of girls over? I don�t think�

JWW: No, I don�t mean that�

KIM: Oh, I see. I didn�t understand you at first. Yes, I guess I did try to get the same kind of thing started. I would play rock music, for instance. It�s amazing that I have eardrums left when you consider the volume I used to play that stuff at. I�m lucky I�m not deaf... I would play the records and look at pictures of different musicians while I touched myself, or sometimes I would close my eyes and imagine that a certain musician was doing various things to me. That we were having intercourse. I used to have certain pictures of this one star with very tight pants so that you could see the outline of his penis and I would think about that, you know, and do things like kissing the picture. Crazy kid things. You look at the average girl that age and you think how cute and nuts and kooky she is, and actually she has sex fantasies like this. And I was pretty tame compared to some of the girls in that bag. I never managed to get next to the stars, see. But the real dyed-in-the-wool groupies will find ways to get to the boys� dressing rooms or their hotel rooms, and they�ll have sex with them. These are girls as young as thirteen or fourteen who are doing this, and there are more of them than you would think. They�ll even bribe other men in order to get to the musicians. For example they may have sex with a bellhop in order to get upstairs in the hotel. Just young kids, and here they have all these ways of using sex which are too old for them and which are also not normal and can�t lead them to a normal attitude toward sex.

JWW: Aside from your experiences at concerts and in autoeroticism, did you have any direct experiences with sex during those ears?

KIM: Not until I was done with the teenybopper thing. But as I said, I outgrew that fairly early, at fifteen or so. I had been pretty ugly before then, flat-chested and kind of pimply, and at fifteen I started to blossom. I didn�t go and turn into Miss America, but my complexion cleared up and my figure filled out, and boys started to take an interest in me.

JWW: Perhaps that was why you began to get away from the rock music scene.

KIM: Oh, probably. But also it was a matter of outgrowing it and feeling too old for it.

JWW: I see.

KIM: But the dating I did, it didn�t really take the place of what I had had before. That�s why I don�t think you could say that being popular was the reason for my getting away from the teenybopper scene.

As far as sex was concerned, I did get involved to a degree with the boys I dated, but it never really meant anything to me. I couldn�t feel it.

JWW: You didn�t become excited?

KIM: Excited, yes. But not really excited. Do you know what I mean?

JWW: I don�t think so.

KIM: Well, it was the same as the difference between what I felt at the concerts and what I could make myself feel by playing with myself. When I went out with a boy and we necked or petted, I would get sexually excited, but I was never really transported. I might even have an orgasm, but it was the kind of orgasm that I could make myself have by masturbating. It wasn�t a moving experience. It was an orgasm, but just a little sort of tickle, not a big moment.

JWW: I see.

KIM: That�s probably why I never really did that much with the boys I dated. I would park with a boy if I sort of liked him and if he really wanted to, and we would run through the things that kids do. Feeling each other and handling each other and so on. And eventually I did have intercourse a few times. I guess I must have done it with three boys before I started as a stew.

JWW: And it, too, was not particularly satisfying?

KIM: That�s about it. It wasn�t a bad experience the way it was for some kids, but it wasn�t terrific, either. I figured maybe that was as much as sex could be. What I had experienced at the concerts, well, I began to think that maybe that had only been going on in my imagination. That it was part of getting caught up in what all the other girls were feeling and that it wasn�t exclusively sexual at all, and that what I was getting with these boys was all there was to it.

But at the same time, oh, I had the feeling that there was something more, and every now and then I would get a little bit of a hint of it. I don�t know how to put this into words exactly, but I thought, oh, that I was like wasting my time with these boys.

JWW: That you should have been doing something else?

KIM: No, see, I put it wrong. Because what else was there for me to do? No, maybe not that I was wasting my time but that I was sort of marking time. Sort of like running in place and waiting until it was time for me to do whatever it was that I was going to do.

Sometimes I would have this crazy conversation with myself where I told myself that I was destined for great things. It was just a game I played with myself. Great things, gee, I didn�t have anything great that I wanted to do. I was an average girl, you know, and I never pretended to be anything better than that, either.

JWW: And you were still fascinated by celebrities?.

KIM: Yes.

JWW: In a sexual way?

KIM: Yes, although I don�t know how completely I realized it was working that way. I had certain movie stars that appealed to me and I might have fantasies about them during masturbation, or I might even try to imagine that the boy I was with was someone in particular, some movie star. Or just that he was someone famous but not anyone specific, just that he wasn�t an ordinary nothing from my high school but someone glamorous, you know...

Then the summer after I graduated from high school I met � and had sex with him, and you might say that was the turning point of my life.