Read Online Getting Screwed by Alison Bass - Free Book Online

ten and twenty — would stand in a lineup for the customer’s inspection. The women could introduce themselves — their names and a quick “Hi” — but they weren’t allowed to say or do much else. The customer would pick a lady solely on the basis of looks and what he was in the mood for that day. Customers who were too nervous or couldn’t make up their minds could go to the bar and have a drink. At that point, the women could go up and engage them in conversation. Joi was good at conversation, so she usually did better at the bar than in the lineup. Sometimes the women worked the bar in pairs; Joi would go up and talk to the customer, see what he wanted, did he like black or white girls, and then if the answer was a white girl, she would send in her friend. “We were just trying to get him to spend his money,” she says.
    Once the man made his choice, the two might take a tour of the facilities — to see the hot tub, the dungeon, and other specialty attractions the brothel offered. Then they would go to the woman’s room,where they negotiated the sexual activities desired and the rate. Once there was agreement on the rate, the customer paid up — cash or credit, please — and the girls took the money or card to the front desk. The brothel managers made a practice of listening in on the negotiations, according to Joi, so they knew exactly what was agreed to, and while managers insisted they then turned off the intercom, Joi says she wouldn’t put it past them to continue listening in.
    â€œ[The managers] seem all friendly — we’re here for you and all that — but as soon as you do something wrong, drinking on duty or drugs, they’re mean,” she says. “ ‘You got to go, you fucking whore, you’re not clean.’ ”
    Joi says drug use was rampant at Old Bridge while she was working there. “There was a heavy biker influence in Reno,” she says. “They had the Hell’s Angels; they ran a lot of drugs and women through there.”
    Joi says she herself didn’t use drugs while working in Nevada. “That’s just not my thing,” she says. The only child of a black preacher’s son and a white woman of French ancestry, Joi grew up in Sacramento watching her parents get drunk and smoke crack, and she vowed to do things differently. “My dad used to beat on my mom,” she says. “They were always fighting and he was an abusive guy.” She says her father never laid a finger on her — he took it all out on her mother. “She left him when I was five, but then they got back together for my sake,” she says.
    When Joi was in sixth grade, she came home from school to find her mother bruised and bleeding from yet another beating. Her father had disappeared — “probably down to the liquor store,” she says, so Joi took her mother by the hand, and together they crawled through an overgrown field near her house to a pay phone, which Joi used to call the police. The police took them both to a battered women’s shelter in Sacramento. A few months later, Joi went back to live with her father because, as she says, “I didn’t like it [at the shelter]; I was on the dance and baton team at school and I missed that. So I went back to my dad. I mean, in my neighborhood, everyone’s dad was a drunk. It wasn’t something to be ashamed of.”
    When she was fourteen or fifteen, Joi says, her mother’s father would French-kiss her and try to fondle her. “He tried to make out like it was his French background,” she says with disdain. Joi herself started having sex with older men when she was fourteen. “I was a wild child,” she says. “No one forced me to do it. But I think it’s abusive for twenty-two-year-old men to have sex with fourteen-year-old girls.”
    After her childhood, Joi found life working in the brothels pretty