Girls Like Us (12 page)

He responds briefly, says his name is Fazil, and up close I see that he is probably early to midtwenties, and fairly handsome. He’s dressed in the style popular with the eastern European guys: leather jacket, T-shirt, tight jeans, and a chain. He speaks a little English, as broken as my German, but it saves me from having to rack my brain for the remaining four sentences I know. Bella hovers, not particularly subtly, waiting for the champagne order. I know if he were German, or British, that she’d give it more time. He finally buys me a drink, although I hear Bella sigh loudly again, as it’s the cheapest variety of champagne we serve. Either I’m already three sheets to the wind or it’s been a busy shift, but I’m relieved to finally be talking to a guy who’s close to my age and not one of the pervy older men who make up the majority of our clientele. At seventeen, anyone over thirty-five, particularly if they’re wearing a suit, seems old to me. Twenty-four in a leather jacket? That’s boyfriend material.

“I understand . . .” He motions to Bella and makes a drinking sign. “I buy you another drink outside—I give you the money if you want,” he says.

I know the rules about dating outside of the club, but Bella has been annoying me all day and I feel like telling her to take her little racist attitude and shove it. I know that if we get caught, I’ll get fined, but fuck it. I make a plan to meet Fazil around the corner after my shift ends.

We go to a bar, where he orders us some cognac. The champagne plus the cognac plus not having eaten anything all afternoon has the room spinning a little, although in a pleasant way. I don’t understand much of what he’s saying. The music’s loud, his accent strong. But I don’t care that much. He’s cute, seems to like me, and I’m desperate to have a romantic, physical,
something
interaction with someone who isn’t paying for my time. It feels like a date. He’s talking about money, percentages, some other shit. Thirty, seventy. You’d still get thirty, I hear him say. I try to snap back into focus. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Business. You and me. I manage you.”

I’m a little too drunk to pick up right away what he’s talking about. Why on earth would I want a manager? Sixty-five percent of my money now goes to the club. I already have a boss and she gets on my nerves. This doesn’t seem like a good deal, drunk or not, but he’s persistent. “OK, sixty, forty,” he says.

It finally dawns on me: He doesn’t want to date me, he wants to make money off of me. I already have enough people in my life doing that. I ask him to drive me home. The alcohol has made me groggy and I doze off in the car. When I come to, Fazil has stopped in a part of town that I’m not familiar with, but it’s easy to figure out where we are by the number of women and girls in the street leaning into cars, the men lingering in doorways, and the dope fiends shooting up in the open. I try to shake myself awake. “What are you doing?”

“You going to work here for me. This is you.” He points to a couple of girls, and says,
“Hure,”
the
Deutsch
word for
whore
. Believing as I do, and as Bella has taught me, that working in the club is really just being a hostess and that the taking-your-clothes-off-onstage part and the going-into-the-VIP-booths is just something you don’t really think about or talk about, I’m horrified. What I do has nothing to do with what these women are doing, I tell myself. I know I don’t want to “work” for him, and I say so. His demeanor immediately changes and he becomes rough and threatening. I realize that no one knows where I am and that I don’t even know if the name he has given me is real. I’m crying but compliant and when he begins to drive me home, I’m relieved. When we get to my apartment building, he insists on coming up with me and forces me to show him where I live. He rapes me, telling me that it is only fair, as he has to try it first. Afterward he throws a gold necklace worth about twenty-five marks on me and laughingly tells me he’ll be back to collect his money. I throw the necklace out the window when he leaves and lie awake all night, still not really understanding how things went so bad.

When I tell one of the older women at the club what happened, she explains that “Fazil” is a pimp looking for girls to sell. While I’m aware that pimps exist, I’ve never given them a lot of thought. Growing up, we would say
pimp
but not really have a clue what it meant. There was a guy in our town called Luther Cool, who was rumored to be a pimp. With a body like an upside-down triangle, all shoulders and pecs and chicken legs, and a perpetual uniform of huge, oversize sunglasses, a muscle shirt, and high-water sweatpants in every color, Luther Cool was just one of those odd characters that every town has and that every kid makes fun of. We didn’t really understand the concept of pimping; we just knew he was sleazy and we snickered every time he walked by. It’s this image of a pimp, a caricature, that more than anything is stuck in my head. Fazil didn’t fit this image at all. I feel stupid and vow never to get caught up with anyone like him again. Fazil does come calling for his money, but I hide from him for weeks and eventually he seems to give up. One afternoon, I see him trying to recruit a teenage girl at the Bahnhof, and I turn and speed-walk in the opposite direction.

Just a few months later I’ll meet JP. Ex–U.S. Army, currently unemployed but with so much potential. Strikingly handsome, with his huge doe eyes and high cheekbones, it will be love at first sight. Hearing his sexy baritone voice and strong southern accent, I want to melt every time he speaks. He’s funny and smart and we click together from day one. I’ll be so enraptured with him that I’m happy to give him anything and everything he wants, until of course it’s no longer a choice. I’ll love JP with all my heart and soul and feel sure that I never have and never will experience anything like this again. I’ll think I could die for him—and I nearly do.

His growing addiction to crack and my addiction to him make for a volatile combination, but in my mind it’s just the way love is supposed to be. We’re Romeo and Juliet; I’m Billie Holiday, he’s “My Man”; I’m Carmen, he’s my jealous lover. The one thing I never see him as is my pimp. It isn’t until much later that I remember the conversations that we’d had about his father being a pimp, that I’d been told to call him Daddy, that he had twisted some wire coat hangers together into a “pimp stick” to beat me, that I turned over all my money to him every night and got beaten. It’s not until I start hearing the stories from other girls and women that I’m able to contextualize my experiences. At the time, he’s just my boyfriend and I’m just a girl who dances in a club.

The average American adult probably imagines a pimp as a cross between a caricatured seventies Huggy Bear or a sleazy, leather-jacket-wearing, drug-dealing scumbag from an early
Law & Order
episode. Most teenagers, however, inundated as they are by glamorous, sexy, relatively benign images of pimps on television and music videos, have a very different view. The distorted glorification of pimp culture began in the seventies with the blaxploitation films and Iceberg Slim’s pulp fiction. Today pimping has gone mainstream. It would be easy, as some do, to point to hip-hop culture as the primary culprit in this tidal wave of acceptance of pimps. Hip-hop clearly needs to take responsibility for its ongoing misogynistic images and lyrics, but rappers alone could not have achieved what has become a mass acceptance of pimp culture.

The tipping point came in 2003, when 50 Cent released his platinum-selling song “P.I.M.P.,” in which he describes one of the girls working for him as having “stitches in her head.” Several months later, Reebok rewarded him with a fifty-million-dollar sneaker-deal endorsement. A few years later, Vitaminwater did the same. Why wouldn’t they? “Fiddy” proved unequivocally that no one was objecting to his blatant degradation of women and girls when “P.I.M.P” went platinum three times and reached the top ten in eighteen countries.

50 Cent isn’t alone in his corporately sponsored pimping. Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus), who is infamous for bringing two women on dog leashes to the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards, was featured on the cover of the December 2006 issue of
Rolling Stone
in a Santa Claus red hat and a copy line reading
America’s Most Lovable Pimp
. In the article, Snoop brags about his pimping, which he claims he took up during his successful rap career because it was a “childhood dream”: “’Cause pimpin’ aint a job, it’s a sport. I had a bitch on every exit [in Los Angeles] from the 10 freeway to the 101 freeway ’cause bitches would recruit for me.” Snoop’s endorsement deals range from Orbit gum to Boost Mobile cell phones, and he was even featured in a General Motors commercial with former Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca.

HBO has made a deal with the Hughes brothers, makers of the movie
American Pimp
, to produce a scripted series about pimps titled
Gentlemen of Leisure
. Ice-T, a self-described former pimp, now plays a sex-crimes detective on
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
on NBC, despite still making yearly appearances at the Players Ball, a convention that awards real-life pimps with trophies for Player of the Year, Mack of the Year, and Number 1 International Pimp of the Year.

Examples of pimp references permeate every aspect of popular culture. Some argue that the meaning of the word has changed and now reflects something positive. The rapper Nelly had a short-lived scholarship fund called PIMP (Positive Intellectual Motivated Person), ostensibly to promote education but more likely to promote his energy drink Pimp Juice. The word
pimp
has become a verb, as in the name for the TV show
Pimp My Ride
and for a campaign by a Christian youth organization in Finland, called Pimp My Bible. Yet when MSNBC reporter David Shuster commented during Hillary Clinton’s campaign that it seemed as if Chelsea Clinton was being “pimped out,” people were aghast and Shuster was suspended for two weeks by the network. The connotation of the word remains the same. It’s society’s attitude toward pimps and pimping that has changed.

As an award-show junkie, I was glued to my television for the 78th Academy Awards. I was always convinced, from a very young age, that I was going to be a famous actress, so I’ve had my acceptance speech prepared since I was five years old. Over the years, I’ve slowly come to terms with the fact that my dream of winning the best-actress Oscar would go unrealized. Still, I love the red carpet specials; the best- and worst-dressed competition; the drama of underdogs beating bookie favorites; and tearful, rambling actors onstage receiving the ultimate validation. That night, like every year, I curled up on the couch and prepared for an enchanted evening. I expected to be swept up in the glamour of the night, cheering for my favorites. And then the esteemed Academy honored “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp,” which won the Oscar for Best Original Song, and I felt like I had been slapped in the face.

I watched the audience in their Badgley Mischka dresses and Armani suits clap vigorously for Three 6 Mafia and listened as presenters spouted on about the historic moment for hip-hop. Having seen the earlier musical performance of the song, I thought it was pretty clear to anyone watching that the song denigrated women and positioned pimps as hustlers just trying to “get by.” Apparently the Academy had considered the word
bitch
to be too risqué for prime-time television, as it was replaced by
witch
, yet somehow they did not think that lyrics like
Wait I got a snow bunny, and a black girl too
/
You pay the right price and they’ll both do you
/
That’s the way the game goes, gotta keep it strictly pimpin
/
Gotta have my hustle tight, makin change off these women, yeah
were offensive. Admittedly this was the same venerable Academy that awarded Roman Polanski with an Oscar for Best Director, which he was unable to accept due to his still pending charges for raping a thirteen-year-old girl.

As I watched the audience and subsequent presenters embrace the moment, perhaps because they thought it was a great song, perhaps because they thought they were embracing “black culture,” not understanding that these images did not represent or benefit it, or perhaps because to them, pimps were larger-than-life caricatures, driving Cadillacs and sporting diamond pinkie rings, I couldn’t help but think of all the girls I’ve visited in hospitals, girls with lifelong scars, girls traumatized and broken, girls who’ve been brainwashed, girls who’d been beaten for not meeting their “quota.” In my world, pimps are not managers, protectors, or “market facilitators,” as one research study euphemistically called them, but leeches sucking the souls from beautiful, bright young girls, predators who scour the streets, the group homes, and junior high schools stalking their prey.

That night, furious at the Academy and the audience that was applauding, I imagined walking onto the stage, grabbing the mic, and giving them a reality check. As I fantasized, I struggled to think of an emblematic story but there were simply too many. How could I explain the violence, the devastation, the brainwashing with just one story? What could I say that would accurately convey the harm? Should I share the story of Jessica, who was fourteen when I met her in a detention center? Jessica is not entirely sure how her parents died. Recruited from a child welfare shelter by an adult man and his wife, she sleeps in their bed and they feed and clothe her. I first meet her when she’s locked up on prostitution charges, struggling to figure out this relationship with the people she believes to be her adopted parents. The following week when I go to see her, she’s shell-shocked. She’d taken an HIV test and it has come back positive. Jessica calls her pimp to say, “Daddy, I’m positive.” He’s nonchalant. “Of course you are; I’ve been positive for years.”

Or would I talk about Sarah being beaten by a two-by-four, and like 50 Cent described, being left with “stitches in her head”—in her case over thirty. Or Naima, held down by her pimp and his friend while they used a home-tattoo kit to tattoo his name all over her body including on her hands and neck. Latavia, Tanya, Marie, Elizabeth, Jeanine, Markasia, all teenagers, all viciously beaten by pimps. Would I talk about Tiffany Mason, Christal Jones, or Hanna Montessori, all recruited by pimps, one in San Francisco, one in Vermont, and one in Los Angeles, and all later found murdered at the ages of fifteen and sixteen? These were of course just the girls who had made the paper, white girls who’d warranted a few lines. What about all the countless girls, especially those who were black and Latina, who had gone missing and were presumed dead? What would it take for pimps not to be seen as cool or sexy? For people to believe that they cause real harm?