Working The Street

We'll call it something like Working Vice," the voice on the phone commanded soothingly. "You'll make busts with the vice squad."

"Why me?" I whimpered. "Why me?"

"Because you are a four-eyed skinny Jewish intellectual profligate who will be the last person in the world to approve of busting people for those kinds of crimes."

How true. As J. P. Donleavy said, "Writing is turning one's worst moments into money."

•

Making an appointment for a worst moment is no easier than arranging for a great moment. Vice squads do not seek publicity, it seems. The Los Angeles Police Department doesn't approve of Playboy--but at least they return my calls to tell me so. From the others all over the West, silence.

Finally, through the good offices of Los Angeles Times reporter Al Martinez, San Francisco Police Chief Charles Gain opens the door. I have a telephone conversation with Captain Shaughnessy, then head of the Vice Crimes Division. "How would you like to be the decoy," he asks, "and help us make some busts?"

Help make busts? My father was a professional criminal who did eight years in solitary detention at Dannemora. His cover was loan-sharking, as close to being straight as he could aim. Actually, he was robbing factory payrolls by frontal assault with machine guns. Once I put my hand in his coat pocket to sneak change and found bullets. A police captain was one of the pallbearers at his funeral: a good cop. On the take. What other definition was there? One uncle had been straight, a cantor in the temple at 16. He was picked up by the police for questioning in a burglary committed by friends. They broke his balls. Literally. Crushed his testicles. He was never sane again. What would my father think of my busting someone?

Who cares? It's pay the rent or hit the streets. Maybe the plane will be hijacked and I can write about that.

•

San Francisco, Veteran's Cab number 231.

I know that I am supposed to love San Francisco, but I don't. It is a nasty place, cold and bitchy, a city run by interior decorators. Hollywood pretending to be New York, totally without heart. Los Angeles is generous and sensuous: plastic, perhaps, but true to itself. Culturally, San Francisco is a suburb of Los Angeles, and all the wooden Victorian houses on Pacific Heights don't change that a bit, no matter how tastefully furnished.

Sexually, the Bay Area is, indeed, the land of consenting adults, but everyone is so blown out on drugs and alcohol that there's not much really to consent to. As Douglas Mount put it when he was with Straight Arrow Books, "They're all jacking off, but no one's coming. They keep stroking that thing, but they can't get it to squirt." Ah, yes, San Francisco, what a great place to commit suicide! Alcoholism is the number-one growth industry and fog the most significant product.

St. Francis Hotel, room 457.

I lie on the bed, reading a sheaf of Xerox copies of library research and interview notes like any corporate functionary on a business trip. "To live outside the law, you must be honest," Bob Dylan sang in Absolutely Sweet Marie. To live outside the law, you must be honest, because you are moving in uncharted currents where no one can tell you right from wrong. There is no honesty quite as dramatic as prostitution. You do it for the money. That's it. Maybe you get sweaty and come, but the primary lubricant is cash, and if you want the cash, you give them what they want. Here is what the Xerox copies say:

The entire notion of vice crime is pretty much an invention of industrialism. The word vice originally meant blemish. Sin is a breach of divine law, crime any act prohibited by political law, while vice is the public display of offensive acts. The worm in the apple is sin. The hole it makes is vice. An act such as drinking alcohol, which may be neither a sin nor a crime, becomes a vice when repeated to the point of attracting unfavorable public notice. In modern usage, it is this obsessive factor that is stressed. Gambling, drug abuse, prostitution, sexual promiscuity, and (continued on page 184)Working The Street(continued from page 135) homosexuality are common vices. When they also happen to be against the law, they are called vice crimes.

In ancient times, when the basis of civilization was mostly agricultural, the control of vice was almost entirely a family matter. Prostitution was not merely legal but also frequently a religious calling. Among the Semitic peoples, for example, the worship of Ishtar, Astarte, Mylitta, Baal, Moloch and other gods involved sexual union with temple prostitutes, not as a private pleasure but as a means of attaining intimacy with the goddess herself. The money paid was not a fee for services but an offering to support the work of the temple, which was vital to all fertility.

The Hebrews condemned prostitution and homosexuality because they were foreign forms of worship. In a religious state, this was a crime equivalent to treason. With the spread of Christianity, prostitution was suppressed from time to time as pagan sin but usually tolerated and often taxed. At the end of the 15th Century, an outbreak of syphilis killed a third of Europe's population in ten years. Prostitution was made illegal as a health measure, but this failed to control the epidemic. By the end of the 17th Century, sanitary regulation replaced suppression. During the 1720s, the Paris police began confining prostitutes to licensed houses, which were eventually supervised by special morals police. This system was soon adopted throughout Europe.

Official regulation of prostitution never became public policy in the United States, though many cities did have red-light districts that were unofficially tolerated and regulated by the police. Victorian morality began with the factory system and was essentially a pragmatic economic propaganda campaign designed to produce reliable workers, obedient and productive. Fueled by crackpot scientific theories about the need to conserve sexual energy, it became the prevailing force of social control in the rapidly developing industrial state.

In the early years of the 20th Century, mass communications systems made it possible to saturate whole populations with these ideas. Wilhelm Reich has described these strategies in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Sexual energy belonged to the state, not the individual. Personal expression had to be subordinated to the will of the community. Assembly-line technology required stricter and stricter standards of reliability and cleanliness. Sanitation became an important political issue. Sex was too messy. The red-light districts were closed down in the United States. Sex, in effect, became illegal. It did not go away, however; it went underground. The function of the vice police is to make sure it stays there: The blemish must not show.

Despite the relaxation of sexual repression during recent years, virtually every police force in the United States has vice officers. The area is sensitive and secret and usually comes to public attention only when there is a scandal. Significantly, one important book on the subject, Vice Squad, by Robert Hunter Williams, is cataloged under the heading "Police Corruption--United States." It is virtually impossible to find a good word about vice police in the media. Prostitution, drug abuse, gambling, pornography and most illegal sexual acts between (or among, since there may be more than two persons involved) consenting adults are considered victimless crimes and police activity concerning them a waste of time. Most people in the communications business would almost certainly agree with Roger Gentry, who, when editor of the freewheeling Los Angeles Free Press, said, "Maybe there are some good vice cops, but most of them are rotten." If police in general have a bad press in the United States these days, the vice squad has the worst press of all. The prevailing image is 1984, with overtones of Serpico.

•

Recently retired Los Angeles vice cop Rawleigh Fusilier was head of the Wilshire District unit and worked vice for 17 years. He's now an attorney, with an office in Hollywood, practicing mostly criminal law, defending, among others, the very people he used to bust--dope dealers, pimps, prostitutes, bookmakers. Here's a little of how it went when I talked with him:

What kind of person becomes a vice cop?

"Usually a very square and innocent individual who very quickly becomes less square and innocent."

What is the work like?

"Mostly a lot of fun. There's always action. It's so easy to make busts that you never have to work hard. I'd make my two busts a day and spend the rest of my time socializing if I felt like it. There's prostitutes everywhere. I can take you downstairs and show you some right on this street corner."

What about the case up in San Francisco where two vice cops were suspended for beating a prostitute?

"It sounds highly unlikely to me. You usually have the best of relationships with them, very pleasant. Lots of guys date the girls. They'd wait outside the jail when a girl they liked was coming out after doing 30 days and they'd take her home. She'd be clean, you know. You'd know that because she'd been in for 30 days. It's good for them to go in. Gives 'em a chance to rest and get clean. And real hot, too. You know, they had no action for a month. Don't forget, they're still chicks."

Is there any corruption in Los Angeles?

"There is corruption everywhere. Even a square can have rounded corners. I never took anything myself. Maybe some liquor at Christmas. I was making a good buck. I don't spend a lot. What do I want to blow a job like that, $22,000 a year, plus a pension? Here, look at this. This is my pension check. It came today in the mail. Every month. But you know, you bust some bookie and he offers you a thousand bucks to take a walk.... Like I said, even a square can have rounded corners."

Why do we need a vice squad?

"Just to keep a lid on it, to keep it orderly. They'll do it everywhere if you don't keep 'em in line. It's bad for the kids to see that. They say, 'Mommy, what's that lady doing?' It's embarrassing."

What's wrong with that?

"I don't know, really. It just seems wrong. But maybe it isn't. Who knows?"

Aside from that, what is the political function of the vice squad?

"To protect the administration. You're never going to stop graft, but at least this way you know where it's going, who it's going to. You know what's going on. There are no secrets. I could tell you things--who's using cocaine, for instance. You would be surprised, your mouth would fall open, if I told you. In the government. And you watch TV ... you see someone who's happening, some star who's happening big, almost always, he's on cocaine. Hey, we get everyone. We get the biggest stars, the biggest politicians. We get priests. I nabbed one of the biggest rabbis in Los Angeles. I let him go. But we get everyone."

And once you've got them?

"We've got them."

•

I also talked with William Margold, who writes for the Hollywood Press, a sex tabloid, and has written, directed and starred in many porno films. Margold was busted for appearing in a hard-core film called Sexual Ecstasy of the Macumba, 81 counts of conspiracy to commit oral copulation and prostitution with overt acts I (continued on page 256)Working The Street(continued from page 184) through 27, 288A and three counts of pandering. I don't know if I have that quite right. Margold has it all taped and loves to reel it off fast in that staccato delivery of his:

"I was busted by Lloyd Martin. He's a prude, of course, but very courteous and charming, kind of like a social worker. He's trying to help you. What was I doing in this, you know, an educated person like me? That sort of thing. I think of him as a sort of Javert in Les Misérables, a dedicated individual, misguided, of course, but dedicated. I think most of them are like that. The reports of brutality are vastly exaggerated. I think they're 99 percent provoked by the person being arrested. There's no reason to hit these people and the vice cops know it. They want to win them over, show them the sugar instead of the salt. Besides, these people are used to being beaten. Vice cops are pretty much happy people in their own way. If you make your job entertainment, you tend to be happy. And vice is entertainment, perverse entertainment, perhaps, but always interesting."

Hall of Justice, 850 Bryant Street.

This building is so bogus it would have been rejected by Playskool toys for lack of detail. Apparently constructed of cardboard painted to look like papiermâché, it is so gray you need radar to find it on a foggy day. Captain Shaughnessy is equally gray, but there is a glint of genuine steel in his gun-metal eyes. His gray suit, though perfectly tailored and nicely matched to a blue shirt and some kind of reddish regimental tie, looks as if designed to harmonize with prison bars. The captain himself is rather heroically handsome, but they have to keep this guy behind a desk because he would empty any bar he walked into. The Man. I liked him on sight.

In fact, the whole flavor of the vice office turned me on. The black lady at the desk in the reception area was unpretentious and smiling and friendly and gentle. The detectives wandering around were guys you'd play stickball with, if you played stickball. They were all really smooth and oddly vague and flat, like photographs, police-artist versions of people rather than people. There was a big black dude in an Yves Saint Laurent suit; a big hot female in tight denims with lots of light wavy hair and an ass that made you want to cup and squeeze it; a double-knit-slacks and shirt-sleeves bebop-goatee Dedini satyr barbered up sharp by Ronald Reagan's hair stylist. The furniture was leftover high school cafeteria basement metal spray paint. There was a row of small dark rooms lined with grim beige tile--interrogation rooms that had originally been holding cells for the courts.

The place induced a certain sense of forgetfulness. It was a limbo, a bland blur in which very few details caught the eye. The very walls summoned up phrases such as "To the best of my recollection."

To the best of my recollection, then, here are some scattered words and images: New administration with liberal reputation creates grapevine that San Francisco is wide open. Arrival of 2000 prostitutes from all over to work summer tourist trade. Ancillary crimes--beating, robbing, dry hustles. Thousands of complaints generated by nude encounter joints that lead customer to believe that he will receive sex but give conversation only. Streetwalkers accost dignified couples with come-ons such as "I can suck his cock better than you can, lady." Bad for tourist business, yet tourists want prostitutes. St. Francis Hotel complains of hustlers soliciting at its front door, robbing guests in rooms. Male hustlers. Female hustlers. Transsexual hustlers. Hordes of hookers of various sexes commuting from Oakland. Shaughnessy shows me mug shots of bruised and battered girls worked over by pimps. Pulls whip out of briefcase, mean-looking mother, too. Very surprised when I tell him that Cuba and China have both pretty much eliminated prostitution. How did they do it, by killing them all? No, mostly by eliminating hunger. Well, that's obviously not going to happen here right away, so it's up to the police at least to maintain decorum. It's all only a question of money. The money of the St. Francis against the money of the pimps and prostitutes? Yes, but the St. Francis is engaged in a legal business and prostitutes aren't, so we have no choice but to enforce the law in the hotel's favor.

Exit philosophy. Enter Lieutenant Foss. Bald head. Sideburns. Big mustache. Wild-West-railroad-engineer look to him. New on job. Determined-to-succeed bulldog tenacity evident in every word and movement. OK. They are going to send me out for a ride-along with Blah and Blah, right? Yeah, Blah and Blah will be great. They'll brief me, then put me out on the street and when a prostitute picks me up, I'll help them bust her. I am thinking that somehow I can make the bust not stick. Aha! I won't be able to be here to testify, anyway. Ergo, bust will not stick.

Foss is very concerned about how I will convince prostitute I am not a cop. Do I have out-of-state driver's license, credit cards, out-of-town identification of any kind? No. I don't have identification of any kind. I don't believe in it. Also, I always lose the papers. Also, I am not allowed to drive anymore because I space out and go through stop lights too many times. Also, I treat all credit arrangements as invitations to loot, steal and pillage. Thus, no credit cards.

I do have a checkbook, though. What good is a checkbook without identification? They are a little astounded at my total lack of paperwork. Don't worry, if I can cash a personal check in a Mexican bank, I am sure that I can convince a streetwalker that I am not a cop. "You seem to have a New York accent, there, Jules, maybe you could play on that, work it up strong." It will not be necessary, I assure them, but they are dubious. It seems it's hard to convince a prostitute you're not a cop.

Terrific. Tonight at 7:30, Blah and Blah will come to my hotel room. Great, I'll treat them to dinner. What? Nothing! We take nothing! Honest vice cops, servants of the public weal, take nothing-- not even a room-service steak at the St. Francis Hotel. They're a bit offended that I would even dare suggest this. One last rule: No names of undercover agents to be used. Shake hands all round and come out fighting.

Solomon's Delicatessen, 424 Geary Street, about ten P.M.

Liberals hate cops for seeing everything in racial stereotypes, but to the cop, it is merely a matter of daily experience, not bigotry. Simply a useful tool of operational psychology.

The reporter is Jewish? Yes, let us give him a couple of Jewish cops who take him to a Jewish delicatessen and buy him a tongue sandwich on rye. If I had been Italian, would it have been an Italian movie? If I had been black, would it have been that dude in the Yves Saint Laurent suit? Had I been Gloria Steinem, would it have been Wonder Woman with the great ass? I wish I had identified myself as an ass man instead of Jules Siegel.

But I have these guys, hereinafter known as Al and Bob, their cover names. Al could be any Mediterranean type, dark hair, dark eyes, vaguely olive skin. he's nattily dressed in a solid sports jacket with brass buttons and coordinating slacks, shirt and tie, good smooth shoes, dark socks. An automobile salesman, maybe, or a studio musician, Herb Alpert style. He's been in vice eight years, likes the freedom of working undercover. Bob has light-brown hair, almost blond, eyes that don't let you remember their color because they are always moving, checking out every corner and whipping around again, briefly glancing at your face as he talks. He's very casually dressed, wearing a tan plaid flannel shirt over his pants as a jacket. Cops always wear jackets of some kind to hide their pistols. Both men are extremely catlike and alert. There are strange lapses in the conversation as they tune into things I do not see but sense by their sudden lack of interest in me. Then attention returns.

"It seems to me that you want to be invisible," I say to Bob, "but you are in such a state of alertness that you stand out from the background. Your eyes give you away."

"Yes, I know that," he answers, "but you have to work with it. I'm nervous, see. I'm looking around for my wife. I'm ashamed. I'm afraid someone I know will see me. Besides, the girl wants to believe you. She wants to turn the trick. We can make up any story about ourselves that we want. And we do."

They laughed derisively when I told them that Shaughnessy wouldn't let me use their names. Everyone knows who they are. The car alone is a dead giveaway, a green Plymouth standard-issue California unmarked police car. It might as well have a red light and a siren. "We can't make anyone in headquarters understand how wrong that car is," Al complained when I cracked up at the sight of it in the St. Francis garage. When we drove out, they made me lie down on the back seat, so that at least I wouldn't be identified with them. They can catch experienced girls only by using decoys.

We began by cruising various nearby streets and observing the prostitutes working. It was like stepping backstage, only there was no backstage, just a sudden change in my perceptions of where I was. It had all been there all along. The whores popped into view, standing on street corners, hanging out in doorways. Watch that car. It's been around the block twice now. A trick trolling for a car date. Homosexuals camping outside gay pickup bars. Pimps sitting in Cadillacs. Neon signs crackling ghastly light on tricks and whores stalking each other on streets lined with cheap hotels. Sordid. The word came alive to me. Car dates. Men picking up girls or guys and getting blow jobs in their cars. It made me shudder with disgust.

When we sat down in Solomon's, a pretty boy hustler in faded blue shirt and jeans stopped to chat, vamping the two cops, then disappearing into the men's room. Their view of their job is very clear. They see themselves as there to protect the Johns from the girls and their pimps, who run all kinds of vicious scams on them; the girls from the Johns, who are often incredibly crazed and loony; the girls from the pimps, who beat them when they don't bring in enough money.

Busting the girls to keep the street in front of the St. Francis orderly is not their favorite job. They like investigative work best. There's a John who puts a bag over the girl's head, ties her up and leaves her naked on the street. He's done that about ten times now, and a woman vice officer has been posing as a prostitute in order to trap him. So far, he has eluded her, but she did run into one trick who told her he wanted to stick her head in the toilet and fuck her in the ass.

It's time to put me on the street. I reach into my pocket to pay the check and realize I've left my money in my other pants. Oh, well. They pay for me. Out to the street. They'll lay back as I cruise the front of the St. Francis. If I have a good bust, I'll brush the back of my head with my hand as I talk.

A good bust is highly defined. Being a prostitute is not illegal in San Francisco. Soliciting is. So is keeping a house of prostitution, which can be simply taking you to her own place. Pimping--living off the proceeds of prostitution--is also a crime. They have now explained the ritual of this to me three or four times, and I nod yes, yes, like someone receiving complicated directions to a place he does not really wish to go. Yes, yes, I've got it. But do I? I begin to feel that it really doesn't make any difference. I'm not going to go through with it, anyway. I just want to do enough to get it over with.

If she says, "Want some entertainment?" that's solicitation and a good bust. So is "Looking for a date tonight?" or any variation of that sort of come-on. I think. Or does she have to bring up the price, too? I'm ashamed to ask again. All I know is that I'm not allowed to raise the subject of payment directly, though I can hint strongly. They coach me through the routine again....

•

Ahhhh, fuck, never mind. Let's go do it. Walking down Geary. Virtually a mob of guys lounging in James Dean attitudes on this side of the hotel, boy hustlers. Some of them are just gays looking for action, amateurs. As I turn the corner, I find that boys seem to outnumber girls by at least ten to one, but this ought to be no surprise in a city with a population of some 700,000 where 150,000 people turn out for a gay-liberation parade. Sliding quickly past the hotel entrance, trying not to look back at my cover, as I cross the street I find a girl with amazingly beautiful blue eyes in the doorway of a storefront who says, "Looking for some entertainment?"

Sure. For a second, I am comfortable. I know how to do this. It's like picking up a girl in Westwood. It's a chick. She's really kind of attractive. God, she's great-looking: nice crisp, delicate features, white skin, black hair, pleasant voice. Actually, I wouldn't mind taking her to the movies right now. We could go see Annie Hall. "Do you," she says, "have any I.D.?" Just a checkbook. "Can I see it? You don't have to let me see your name--you can cover it with your finger."

She buys it. "Where are you staying?" The St. Francis. "I can't go in there." Does she have a place? "No." Where can we go? There's a hotel she knows nearby, but they won't let us check in unless I have better I.D. Ah, well, too bad. What a relief. Some other time. Her eyes hold me for a second.

"You have really beautiful eyes," I tell her.

"Thank you," she answers politely, but her mind is already elsewhere.

Back across the street to another doorway, where a black girl is smiling out at me. This time, it's even more like a pickup. What a nice girl. Absolutely charming. Not my type, exactly, but truly warm and friendly. "Looking for a date?" Something like that, maybe. "What are you doing in San Francisco?" I'm a writer, here with the booksellers' convention. "Well, would you like to have some fun?" What kind of fun? "Whatever kind of fun you want." I don't have very much money on me, only $50. "Let's not talk about things like that out here. Let's go to your room." It's pretty definite that even I can make an excellent bust on this girl. She's so eager and bouncy and alive and innocent. Yes, innocent. And so I decide to shine it on. End the experiment as cop.

I report back to Al and Bob, who are having jolly laughs with a girl directly in front of the hotel entrance. Inside, they tell me that she was joshing them about me. "We know you've got a decoy out there," she said. "We saw you driving by with someone lying down in the back of the car." Excellent alert system, ladies, but knowing there's a decoy isn't enough: You have to know who he is. Fortunately for you, it was me. Down via secret elevator to the basement of the St. Francis; there on the walls of the narrow yellow corridor outside the security office are hundreds of Polaroid photographs of girls, all of them identified as hustlers by the hotel's security people and now barred. Al points out the girl with the blue eyes.

What's next? Al is going to work the streets. No thanks. Bob is going to check out a swingers' party with a policewoman. No, I am not invited to go along on that one, even if I take someone. "It'll just be mostly waiting around. Maybe we'll quiz some folks coming out and figure out how to work our way in. It doesn't sound like prostitution to me, but we've received a complaint and we have to check it out." But I'm an expert on swingers' parties--that was my last assignment. Nope. Somehow I have the feeling that the reason I'm not being allowed to go on that one is because it's going to be fun.

But it's getting late, anyway. As I return to room 457, I walk past prom couples necking and laughing, and predictably struck by the contrast with what I have just seen on the street, I dispassionately make a mental note to figure out how to work it into the story.

Just as I start getting undressed to get into bed, Al calls. There's something he wants me to see at Central Emergency Hospital. Somewhat reluctantly, I go off into the night again.

St. Francis Hotel Lobby, Friday morning.

Heads are turning here in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel. The lady is 19, a baby-white Mississippi natural yellow blonde with blue eyes, one of them closed shut by a purpling greenish-blue shiner that is the dark climax of a swollen bruise of brown and yellow flesh that was once the cheek of a very pretty face. Battered. Yes, battered. It is so bad it is making mortuary shadows all over the place. In the room, a photographer is setting up his equipment. She calls her mother, a chambermaid working in Seattle: "I will be there on the Amtrak tomorrow. Try not to get too upset when you see me. I look really bad, but I'm OK." She is stripping naked. Her back and sides are scrawled with weeping welts. The skin is sliced down to the quick in many places and has just begun to stop oozing, the wounds drying shining hot pink. Her story is spattering out in bleeding fragments.

She met him in Seattle. He was a social worker of some kind, black, so nice. She was already turning tricks, just a few a week to make spending money. It was so much better than being a housewife. San Francisco was the big time: all those tourists. The tourists love prostitutes. It was great there--she had her own corner, Shelley's corner. It was really fun having guys tell her how beautiful she was. Yes, there is heaven on the street, when you're in love, doing the work you like, going home and sharing it with your man. The tricks are tricks. Occasionally they're exciting. But there are heavy terrors. As safety, she always has someone alerted to check with her after a certain time with a trick. One trick took a rope out of an attaché case and began to hang himself. "Don't worry," he reassured her, "I'm a magician."

Another produced a pistol in bed while fucking her, put it in her face and pulled the trigger on an empty chamber, and fucked her some more with the weapon at her head. Her friend came to the door. "God, wait until he comes!" she screamed. "Just wait until he comes."

But going home with the money was bliss. Then he had to have a new car. She had to bring in $100 a day. He began talking a lot about how his mother had failed him. It had been fun when she was just bringing in grocery money and rent and stuff to get high. It isn't fun making love all day. That's what she called it, "making love." But he had to have the car. One night, when she failed to meet her quota, he pounded her face with his fists. She curled up into a ball on the bed. He whipped her with a wire coat hanger. She is whimpering loudly as she tells this. "He turned me into a dog. What did I do? Why? What is it?" The bewildered sobbing, frightened squeal of a puppy being roasted alive in an open fire for its master's amusement. He kept himself between her and the door. When she tried to evade him, he whipped her across the bed and out the adjoining window. "It was my choice. The window or the coat hanger. I thought, I'm not going to die. I crawled back onto the bed and let him do it." He used three hangers. When one wore out, he went to the closet and got another and came out roaring and growling like an animal. No one helped her. She was just another white whore being whipped by her black pimp. In an instant, while his attention was diverted, she made it to the door and escaped. "I ran into an Italian restaurant where I used to take my tricks. The manager screamed at me, 'What did I ever do to you that you are doing this to me?' He wouldn't even let me use the phone."

Enter the vice squad. "I thought that they were going to tell me to get fucked. But they were really nice. They really cared about what had happened to me." And so she filed the complaint. "Those whores"--she pronounced it hoe-ahs-- "on the street, they really get down on any whore who turns in her pimp, but I don't care. He tried to kill me. How can I ever feel safe again on the street, knowing that he's out? I want them to put him away forever. Forever."

Room 2189, about eight P.M.

I'm waiting for Al to pick me up again. This is my last session with him. Foss had balked when I told him I wanted to go out again. They hadn't made enough busts last night because I was along. A quota? No, there is no quota, but they have to keep the pressure on, and busts are the evidence that they are doing it. But it isn't a quota.

"I've been thinking about that girl," I say to Al. "It's kind of like what's going on all over the country."

"Jules, don't make it complicated," he replies. "He is a nigger pimp. It's his dream to get himself a white girl, then when he gets one, it's like a wet dream. He's so in love. He's so lucky. He's so happy. He's so good to her, he loves her so much, she'll do anything for him. No one has ever wanted her like this. And then he turns her out, puts her on the street because he's a nigger pimp and that's what they do. And finally he beats her up."

"No, that's not what I mean. We're all kind of niggers. You know, you never have enough. You're never good enough somehow. You've got to have that shiny car. It's like we're all prostitutes and we're out there on the street and the television is driving us to do more, to do more. And the speed keeps getting turned up and all this crazy, erratic frantic behavior gets more and more intense. The liberal has to believe in the victimless crime because he is the trick."

Al looks out the window. "You're right. That's exactly what I'm doing. I am on the street."

•

The car tonight is a dirty white Dodge Matador with something wrong with the starter. Grind, grind, grind. Grind, grind, grind. Grind, grind, grind. It's never going to catch. The battery will die first. Grind, grind, grind ... we're on our way.

We're going over to the Hayes Valley, a predominantly black area, for a sweep. It has become a major pickup scene, with whores everywhere, and tricks trolling. It's wide open. They're coming from everywhere. Over in Oakland, they know that you go to the Hayes Valley to score and the whores are pouring in, more and more each night. The community is screaming. The local legislator is putting the heat on the cops because he's getting the heat from his people. It will be a mass arrest operation, bust them and move them out, a squadron of vice cops in their own cars trolling and picking up car dates and busting them: Spread the word. The heat is on in the Hayes Valley. Let them know in Oakland that it's finished here. It doesn't really matter if the busts stick or not. The important thing is to make it so hot here you need asbestos shoes to walk these streets.

Al is working transport. He'll hold the busts in his car until they can be transferred to a paddy wagon and taken to the Northern Station and booked. "I hate coming over here," Al says. "It's so depressing."

The car door opens and a sobbing young black woman is hustled into the back seat by a plainclothesman who looks like an optometrist, neat and square and well scrubbed, and hands Al her purse. She's sobbing loudly, the tears rolling down her face; she's clutching her face in her hands and choking. "Why me? Why me? Oh, God, why me?" She's absolutely hysterical. "Why me? Oh! I just wanted to make a little money." She looks like a schoolteacher, with big square horn-rimmed glasses and a little hat. Quite pretty and small and clean.

"Have you ever been busted before?" Al asks. His voice is harsh and angry and artificial. I feel that her sobs are hurting him. He can't handle it. It's all so sick and unfair and he knows it and it's driving him crazy. This is it. A worst moment. This is how he earns his salary. He wants so bad for it to be her fault, so that there will be some reason for this, but he knows that she's merely one more victim.

"Yes," she says, calming down somewhat, "but not here. I was busted for soliciting when I was 19 in Chicago. I wanted to get some money together to get me some clothes so I could do some modeling." Now she's sobbing again. "My husbin' lef' me 'cause he needed two womens. In Chicago. We've got three childrens. The baby is five months old. Milk is so expensive. He left me and I came to Oakland to live with my mother. I just can't live with my mother no more. I just got to have my own place. When I was in the hospital with the new baby, I had three nervous breakdowns.

"I thought I would come over here and make a few dollars. You know, to buy some things for the baby. A crib. Little things. Get my own place together. But I didn't make no money. Oh, God, why me? Last night, a trick robbed me. He put a knife in my face and said, 'I ain't goin' to give you no money for nothin', you black bitch,' and he took the money back from me. And now this."

"A black guy?" Al asks in that strange harsh voice.

"Yes, a black guy."

"One of your brothers." This seems to make him feel a little better. His voice is so strained with thick sarcasm that I feel, possibly not very accurately, that he could easily be on the point of tears himself if he allowed it to happen. "One of your black brothers."

She is quiet now. He opens her purse and shows me the contents. A roll of toilet paper. A couple of tins of cocoa butter. "We call it boy butter," he tells me.

"If I had a knife, and I gave it to you, would you book me for that, too?" she asks.

"No, I won't book you for it. Give me the knife."

From somewhere on her person she produces a miniature samurai sword, one of those novelty things in a wooden scabbard, a wicked little weapon. We are sitting with our backs to her. I feel a heavy psychic pain in the back of my neck as Al hefts the knife lightly in his palm.

"I got it after that trick robbed me. I was so afraid."

"Do you think you would have used it?" Al asks.

"No, not unless it was my life. I'm not a violent person. I just thought it would make me feel better to have it."

"Are you on welfare?" he asks.

"Yes, I get four hundred and seven dollars a month."

"Well, you can't make it on four hundred and seven dollars a month," Al says very gently.

"You are doing this for the children; what are the other girls doing it for who have no children?" I ask her.

"They are doing it for the mans. In order to buy the company of their man."

Al is starting the engine again now. At least 20 or 30 attempts and finally it turns over. We're pulling up at Northern Station, where a paddy wagon is waiting. "How much will my bail be?" Five hundred dollars. She'll need $50 in cash. I reach into my pocket and pull out a $20 bill and hand it to her. She starts sobbing again, and then she is taken out of the car and the barred door of the paddy wagon closes on her and she is gone.

"Please don't tell anyone you did that," Al says. "It's considered very poor form." For days afterward, every time I think about this, I feel a tremendous sense of embarrassment that I did not give her the whole $50.

We are alone in the car again now. It's quite dark. "What does your wife think of this?" I ask.

"We're separated," Al replies. "At first she didn't like it at all, but then she got used to it."

"Any kids?"

"Three."

We're in another parking lot and they are still bringing them in. "This one's a B," says the same cop who brought in the sobbing black girl out in the parking lot, putting him/her into another car. The boy is so much like a girl that there's no way I would have been able to make him for male--long brown hair, blue eyes, fine features, nice legs in sheer stockings, sullen pouting, bored expression on his lipsticked mouth. "When you get back to Oakland, tell your pals that the heat is on over here," the cop tells him.

"No one ever tells me anything," the boy answers. "Why should I tell anyone anything?" The voice is not a faggy swish but a perfectly petulant teenage girl.

Northern Station, 11 P.M.

There are about a dozen of them in here now, waiting to be booked. Now that I see them in the light, I understand better who they are. Street people, mostly. A few have neat, attractive clothing. Some are in tatters. It's really hard to tell the boys from the girls. There comes a point where you have to accept your position in society, no matter what your theoretical political and social opinions may be. I am not one of them. I am one of the cops, the enemy. The police are protecting me from them.

A door opens and they line up and pass through it. The door closes. A little while later, Al takes me back to the St. Francis and we say goodbye. He is a hero. He is living an honest life. Maybe he lies; maybe he is not Jewish; but he knows exactly where he stands. He knows exactly what he is doing. A no-bullshit guy doing an ugly no-bullshit job in hell.

•

Ah, it is so beautiful here in these afternoon redwood-bordered meadows on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge where we have come to score a couple of ounces of Colombian grass. The hot tub isn't hot yet, but it's just nice to sit here in the sun. I am drained, totally drained. I've smoked a very potent joint with the two pretty bare-breasted girls in the neat little cabin and now I am wandering around alone because I can't handle talking to anyone. What can I tell them? What can I say? I have been in the trenches for a few days and now I am in a rear area. And I can see it all, all the meanings. Everything makes perfect sense, and it is terrifying.

That little knife. No danger, really. But so close. The perfect touch of symbolism to make me understand. The street is a razor. The razor is connected to the assembly line. It is all moving very fast. And then I am sobbing with relief.

"If police in general have a bad press in the United States, the vice squad has the worst of all".

"If you make your job entertainment, you tend to be happy. And vice is entertainment...."