Stories | Bingo’s Lair

Revolver Page

The Revolver is the fourth part of Switch: a novel, the story of Johnny’s and Maeve’s adventures.

Weeks later, Johnny has even more girls (Maeve has lost count). Johnny gets another, the wife of one of his best friends. Maeve discovers she’s never lonely. She also discovers that she usually is not with Johnny.

The story, in eight chapters, covers events from Saturday, December 6, 1958 to Sunday, December 21, 1958. The events (about a month after the previous part’s—Comes the Bride) include prostitution and group sex.

This is the fourth, and final, part of Switch: a novel. The first part is Switch, the second is The Babysitter, and the third is Comes the Bride.

Links to Chapters
Story Codes and Disclaimer
Research
Writing Process

Links to Chapters
There are eight chapters, each covers a single day’s events. The Schedule at the end of the twenty-seventh chapter is referred to throughout The Revolver.

Chapter Twenty-six	Saturday, December 6
Chapter Twenty-seven	Sunday, December 7
Chapter Twenty-eight	Monday, December 8
Chapter Twenty-nine	Tuesday, December 9
Chapter Thirty	e="2">Wednesday, December 10
Chapter Thirty-one	Thursday, December 11
Chapter Thirty-two	Friday, December 12
Chapter Thirty-three	Sunday, December 21
The Schedule

The Revolver is about 70,000 words long — I hope you enjoy it.

Story Codes and Disclaimer
This story, like others in the Lair, deserves story codes. Here they are:

Predominately heterosexual — MF, MF+, FF, M+F, M+F+. There is one instance of Mf which is referred to only, not described.

Themes: Prostitution, gangbang, exhibitionism.
Oral, anal, vegetables/objects

BDSM themes: Bondage, whipping, dominant/submissive.

All sex is consensual. All sexually active characters are 21 or older.

None of the sex in The Revolver is safe sex, even by the standards of the time. I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone gets the clap. Oh well. Take it from Bingo, while waiting for one’s results for an HIV test is not the time to begin thinking about safe sex.

DISCLAIMER: Some of the things the characters do in this story are seen as offensive or frightening (even terrifying) by some if not most people. Please don’t surprise anyone. Always ask first. Have an agreed upon safe word even if you don’t do BDSM.

Research
Sources mentioned on Switch Page, Babysitter Page and Bride Page are relevant to this story.

In the weeks after writing The Revolver I read three books which provide additional information about prostitution. I wish I had known of them earlier.

Judge John M. Murtagh and Sara Harris, Cast the First Stone (New York: Pocket Books, Inc., 1957). Cast the First Stone deals exclusively with prostitution in New York City in the 1950s. Hundreds of prostitutes, pimps and johns were interviewed. The book begins with an overview of the prostitutes working in New York, from the high-class call girls to the lowest streetwalkers, and the distinct areas they worked in the city.

The book then provides in-depth stories of six prostitutes followed by more stories of prostitutes, pimps and johns. A history of prostitution in New York precedes a lengthy description of the process of arrest, prosecution, sentencing and prison for prostitutes.

The book as a whole, but especially the firsthand material gleaned from interviews, is an important resource. Most of Johnny’s girls are like Jean Lee Simmons, the twenty-four-year-old college educated prostitute in chapter seven, who turned to prostitution to help satisfy her sexual appetite. In this passage from pages 98-99 she’s married, a housewife, and, while she loves her husband, goes to bars during the day for sex:

She began to clean the house, scrubbing floors that had been scrubbed by her cleaning woman, making dirty work for herself. Nothing helped. She gave up and went out to get some men. She took one to a fleabag hotel on 46th Street and the other to one on 48th Street. Then she called Barney and asked whether he couldn’t please come home to lunch. She said she knew he was busy but she had to see him. "I guess I’m shameless," she said. And he said, "I’ll sock you one if I ever hear you talk that way about yourself again. Remember, you’re talking about the woman I love." She said, "Yes, I remember. Oh, darling, I remember."

She practically dragged him into the bedroom when he came home and he left without eating any lunch. That was when she vowed she’d save him from herself, no matter what, and went to Eddie Pastor’s again and picked up three men in quick succession. Then she went home and tried to read. But it wasn’t any good so she went back to Eddie Pastor’s. A young man in a lumberjacket and tight-fitting pants was drinking Scotch at the bar. He was clean-cut and she liked the looks of him. She sat down beside him and ordered a Scotch for herself.

Sara Harris, Nobody Cries for Me: The Story of a Prostitute (New York: The New American Library, 1958). The story of Joan, one of the prostitutes interviewed by Sara Harris for Cast the First Stone is present in this book. Joan was thirty-seven; she had been a prostitute since she was seventeen. Joan, like many of the women in Cast the First Stone, was a heroin addict.

Joan’s story in many ways is similar to Glady’s in Switch: a novel—raped at fifteen, prostitute at seventeen, plagued by abusive pimps. Joan had her first orgasm when she was twenty-seven. She’s very hard-boiled in the way she tells her story. Here’s an excerpt from page 42:

I never felt anything for the men I went with. No doubt I was afraid and I pushed my feelings down. But I didn’t know what I was doing when I first started in the business. I thought I really was casual. I’d tell myself I was in a business just like any other business. Supposing I was waiting on table for a living. What would I feel about that? I had to feel the same about my whoring. It was a living and that’s all it was.

Car dates are the quickest kinds of dates. Usually, the car trick is nervous and as anxious to get the thing over with as you are. He doesn’t care about preliminaries the way house and call tricks do. I hardly ever stayed in cars more than five minutes and I’d usually get three to five dollars a time. Once in a great while I’d find a trick who’s pay ten and want to keep me longer.

Alexa Albert, Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women (New York: Random House, 2001). Alexa Alberts is a Harvard Medical School graduate who did a condom public health study at the Ranch for several years. Brothel tells about the women she met who worked there, the support staff and the customers. Since Albert lived at the Ranch with the women she is able to provide an intimate portrait of them, their community and the communities that interacted with them.

Women in the brothel knitted and crocheted, like Neva in The Revolver, or found other occupations like reading to help them during their slack moments. This excerpt from pages 129-130 gives an idea of the book:

Sometimes, though, it was the prostitute who complicated the professional relationship. Like a prostitute named Mercedes had done with a customer named Gary. Gary had been Mercedes’s regular for over two years. In his early thirties, with curly brown shoulder-length hair, a soft gentle voice, and acne scars across his face, Gary was a self-professed late bloomer who was very shy with girls.

He first visited Mustang, in his words, “out of desperation." Although he wasn’t a virgin, he had limited sexual experience. Gary picked Mercedes, a tall, slender African-American woman in her mid-thirties, out of a lineup because of his attraction to black women. When she provided his most exciting and confidence-building sexual encounter yet, he got hooked. To her surprise, so did she.

Whenever Mercedes flew back to Reno from her home out of state, she called up Gary and begged him to come out to Mustang to keep her company. For reasons I didn’t entirely understand, at one point she began giving Gary a portion of her earnings. Gary once explained to me: "One night she said, ’There’s nothing like giving the money you make to a man.’ When I told her I didn’t want her money, she started to cry. When I finally agreed, she asked me what my quota was. I didn’t know what to say except that she should figure it out. The next day, a cab-driver came to my place and handed me a manila envelope from Mercedes with nine hundred dollars in it."

Writing Process
The rough draft of The Revolver was written in a two week period in August 2004. The story was written straight through. I used a binder, filled with special forms with information about characters and locations to help keep continuity.

Revision was relatively straight forward — correcting, rewriting, and polishing.

 

 

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