Stories | Bingo’s Lair

Bride Page

Comes the Bride is the third part of Switch: a novel, the story of Johnny’s and Maeve’s adventures.

Maeve and Johnny get married, finally. Johnny gets two new girls; Johnny now has five. Maeve gets headaches. Why do they have to be so beautiful?

The story, in eight chapters, covers events from Sunday, October 26, 1958 to Sunday, November 2, 1958. The events (directly following the previous part’s — The Babysitter) include prostitution and group sex. Johnny and Maeve marry on November first, thus the title.

This is the third part of Switch: a novel. The first part is Switch, the second is The Babysitter.

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 first chapter is referred to throughout the Comes the Bride.

Chapter Eighteen	Sunday, October 26
Chapter Nineteen	Monday, October 27
Chapter Twenty	Tuesday, October 28
Chapter Twenty-one	Wednesday, October 29
Chapter Twenty-two	Thursday, October 30
Chapter Twenty-three	Friday, October 31
Chapter Twenty-four	Saturday, November 1
Chapter Twenty-five	Sunday, November 2
The Schedule

Comes the Bride is about 70,000 words long — I hope you enjoy it. If you do (or do not) let me know.

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

Predominately heterosexual — MF, MFF, 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.

None of the sex in Comes the Bride 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 and Babysitter Page are relevant to this story.

Leonard St. Clair and Alan B. Govenar. Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1981. Stoney Knows How is a great book, collecting Stoney’s reminisces of his life in the carnival and later as a tattoo artist of the old school. Stoney, although severely disabled, supported himself from the age of fifteen. This incredible book was important for Gloria’s tattoo scene in Chapter Twenty, Tuesday, October 28. Stoney’s joke comes from page 104. A later scene — in Chapter Twenty-two, Thursday, October 30, Gloria’s nautical adventure — mentions the belief that tattoos can help save one from drowning, which also comes from this book. Stoney actually was in Tampa, Florida in 1958.

Prostitute prices mentioned throughout the four parts of Switch are purely guesswork. A number of sources give an idea of the range of prices in the period:

Stoney in Stoney Knows How (above) fondly remembers $1 whores. It is hard to tell if this was in the 1940s or 1950s.

Women of Las Vegas (described more fully on Switch Page) mentions Conforte’s call girls in California in the 1950s charging $10 for a basic.

Earl J. Abbott. “Attorney General Bob Kennedy’s Legal Trap That Caught the Queen of Call Girls.” True Police Cases. October 1963: vol. 15, no. 155. Pages 32-37, 72-74. This article in a true crime magazine describes a Chicago call girl operation in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The “rock bottom price” was $20 and went up to $500 or more (p. 36); all night was $150. The call girls also were used as escorts at $30 an hour. Some of the prostitutes made more than $25,000 a year, a lot of money at that time. The girls got 60% of the take. Their hours were Monday through Friday, 2 p.m. to 2 a.m., never on Saturday or Sunday (p. 72). The organization had a number of apartments scattered throughout the city for the girls to use and had to make payoffs to organized crime. Still, it was a million dollar operation.

Sam Boal. “The Pros of Paris: love for sale in the city of light.” Playboy. October 1958: vol. 5, no. 10. Pages 30-34, 38, 40, 58. This illustrated article describes the range of prices in Paris. My impression is that the article is showing a Paris as a place with extremely inexpensive prostitutes. The least expensive women were $5 and under. The next tier was $7-10. The third tier was $15-20 and up. The highest tier was the courtesan who required, besides dinner and a seat at the theater, $100 for an evening. If I didn’t think there would be copyright problems, I’d include some of the photographs illustrating this article. Some of the women are beautiful (e.g., Babette, a $7 girl). Here is a short selection to give an idea of its flavor:

Since the girls of the Champs-Elysees [$15-20 tier] are the most charmingly conspicuous, it might be interesting to examine a few of them. There is, for instance, Janine, an extremely mobile girl who bears the nickname La Croix Rouge — The Red Cross. The nickname is inevitable, one supposes, since she plies her trade, in and around the Champs-Elysees, in an ambulance. She declines to use the hotel rooms the other girls use; she drives her own hotel. She finds her man, drives him to a side street, tumbles into the back with him and that’s that. The Red Cross is extremely popular; she is pretty and moreover with her the man can save the cost of the hotel room. Furthermore, she is immune from police action. There is a Paris law which makes it illegal to use a residence for “immoral” purposes; but the city fathers did not anticipate Janine, and thus it is not illegal to use a vehicle for similar high jinks. [page 34]

Gloria’s $70 charge is high. It must be remembered that her clientele were drawn from the economic elite in the city and that she is exceptionally good looking and skilled. Such a rate doesn’t seem unimaginable.

Gladys’ story of her past in Chapter Twenty-four, October 31, 1958, is based very loosely on an account of a young prostitute I read a couple of years ago. The woman had finally managed to leave home (and her grandfather’s abuse) at the age of eleven. She lived in the woods, surviving by becoming a prostitute. At twenty-eight she was attempting to deal with her addiction, HIV and lack of education. She witnessed acts of brutality by a pimp against one of his women in Philadelphia which shades the fourth part of Switch: a novel. It was that act of brutality that helped her decide to attempt to leave her profession.

Writing Process
The rough draft of Comes the Bride was written in a two week period in June 2004. The story was written straight through. I used a binder, filled with special forms on characters and locations to help keep continuity. A character sheet included physical description, sexual description (behaviors, appearance when naked, etc.), car(s) owned and the character’s personal history. These sheets were extremely helpful when describing a character’s eye color, for instance, or the car they were currently driving.

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

 

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