Middlesex

San Francisco’s Sixty-Niners, Bob Presto’s club: it stood in North Beach, within view of the skyscrapers downtown. It was a neighborhood of Italian cafés, pizza restaurants, and topless bars. In North Beach you had the glitzy strip palaces like Carol Doda’s with her famous bust outlined on the marquee. Barkers on the sidewalks collared passersby: “Gentlemen! Come in and see the show! Just have a look. Doesn’t cost anything to have a look.” While the guy outside the next club was shouting, “Our girls are the best, right this way through the curtain!” And the next, “Live erotic show, gentlemen! Plus in our establishment you can watch the football game!” The barkers were all interesting guys, poets manqués, most of them, and spent their time off in City Lights Bookstore, leafing through New Directions paperbacks. They wore striped pants, loud ties, sideburns, goatees. They tended to resemble Tom Waits, or maybe it was the other way around. Like Mamet characters, they populated an America that had never existed, a kid’s idea of sharpies and hucksters and underworld life.

It is said: San Francisco is where young people go to retire. And though it would certainly add color to my story to present a descent into a seamy underworld, I can’t fail to mention that the North Beach Strip is only a few blocks long. The geography of San Francisco is too beautiful to allow seaminess to get much of a foothold, and so along with these barkers there were many tourists afoot, tourists carrying loaves of sourdough bread and Ghirardelli chocolates. In the daytime there were roller-skaters and hackey sack players in the parks. But at night things got a little seamy at last, and from 9P.M. to three in the morning the men streamed into Sixty-Niners.

Which was where, obviously enough, I was now working. Five nights a week, six hours a day, for the next four months—and, fortunately, never again—I made my living by exhibiting the peculiar way I am formed. The Clinic had prepared me for it, benumbing my sense of shame, and besides, I was desperate for money. Sixty-Niners also had a perfect venue for me. I worked with two other girls, so called: Carmen and Zora.

Presto was an exploiter, a porn dog, a sex pig, but I could have done worse. Without him I might never have found myself. After he had picked me up in the park, bruised and battered, Presto took me back to his apartment. His Namibian girlfriend, Wilhelmina, dressed my wounds. At some point I passed out again and they undressed me to put me in bed. It was then that Presto realized the extent of his windfall.

I drifted in and out of consciousness, catching bits of what they said to each other.

“I knew it. I knew it when I saw him at the steak house.”

“You didn’t know a thing, Bob. You thought he was a sex-change.”

“I knew he was a gold mine.”

And later, Wilhelmina: “How old is he?”

“Eighteen.”

“He doesn’t look eighteen.”

“He says he is.”

“And you want to believe him, don’t you, Bob? You want him to work in the club.”

“He called me. So I made him an offer.”

And later still: “Why don’t you call his parents, Bob?”

“The kid ran away from home. He doesn’t want to call his parents.”

Octopussy’s Garden predated me. Presto had come up with the idea six months earlier. Carmen and Zora had been working there from the beginning, as Ellie and Melanie respectively. But Presto was always on the lookout for ever-freakier performers and knew I’d give him an edge over his competitors on the Strip. There was nothing like me around.