Farrah
The summer was finally here. After two long, wonderful semesters at Stanford, I was at last going home.
To Venus, my aunt.
And to Honi, my best friend.
When I was younger, coming home for the summer from my hoity-toity private school was like finally being able to relax after months of pretending. Honi would put on makeup, and trashy, overstated makeup at that. There weren’t any bossy, spinster teachers to tell me to “act like a lady” or to “be proper.”
Honi couldn’t give a flying fuck how proper I was, so long as we were having fun. And we certainly had plenty of fun.
I remember once sneaking into Aunt Venus’ treasure trove of costumes for workers, stealing practically a circus’ worth of lace and high heels, only to try them on and feel like the prettiest girls in the world. Aunt Venus might run the ‘oldest kind of business,’ but no one could deny that she did it with class and style.
Another time, Honi and I joined my aunt’s workers for a party. Though we were only twelve, the escorts who worked under my aunt had no problem giving us a few beers and a couple swigs of vodka. We were fizzing happily as fireworks within an hour, and though we begged the hookers for some of that fancy white sugar they seemed to love so much, they drew the line there. They knew that Aunt Venus would stop at nothing to protect her girls.
That was the old days. Days when coming home to my aunt’s whorehouse, and seeing Honi, given to my aunt as a spoil of gang warfare, was glamorous, full of bright lights, fancy perfumes, and women who paraded around as lovely and mysterious as swans. It was easy to forget that I lived a different life from them, that my aunt’s love and hard work afforded me opportunities that these women— and Honi— could only ever dream of.
But now we were grown up. I was in college now, studying business, learning ways to manipulate and magic-trick money until it reproduced like a warren of horny rabbits left alone in a den.
Honi, too, had also come into her inheritance:
Whoring.
We could romanticize it all we wanted, but my aunt was a business woman, and Honi was a hooker.
That was why, after my year at Stanford, I felt really nervous seeing her.
Aunt Venus’ brothel looked the same as ever: clean, sparkling, and with just the right hint of dirty titillation. As I entered, she greeted me with a warm hug, sweeping me up into an embrace of flowery perfume and gossamer draping. She was a beautiful, towering woman, at least six feet tall, and with sculpted, painted lips. She leaned down to me to whisper, “Farrah! It’s wonderful to see you! I know you want to say hi to your friends, but tonight, at six, I want to talk to you. It’s really important!”
And with that, she pulled away, leaving a trail of glitter and mystery in her wake.
After that, I had about fifteen seconds before Honi emerged from her bedroom to figure out what the hell Aunt Venus meant. I imagined it had something to do with a new financing feat. Between her talents and my skills, we made a formidable pair.
“Farrah!” Honi’s shriek of joy burst into the room, and she quickly followed. For a moment, I was afraid she’d stop and stare, or be awkward, but it turned out that I had nothing to worry about. She flung her arms around me in a tight hug, and in a second we were like our old selves again.
“Farrah!” she exclaimed. “You look wonderful! So … professional!”
“Thanks, Honi,” I said back. “You look so professional, too!” I eyed her thigh-high stockings and her black dress that was so scant it practically could have been lingerie. Honi laughed, flexing her lewd young body to show off.
“I’ve been learning a lot, too, you know,” she bragged, winking to the other working women as they passed. Several smiled and waved at me, but most simply trudged on. They were not worried about me. I was not a part of their world.
“That’s great, Honi,” I said. “Come on! Tell me all about it.”
A devilish look came over her eyes. “To our same old hideout?”
I grinned. “Same old hideout.”
It would be that hideout which saved our lives.
# # #
Ever since we were old enough to reach the low-lying gutter that waited outside my bedroom window, Honi and I had been clambering up onto the roof of the pleasure house, named the “Berth of Venus” both for my aunt and for its closeness to the sea. From our perch, we could not only see the buildings surrounding the pleasure house, but all the way out into the water, where the rich men’s yachts sparkled in the brackish water. Honi and I used to joke about how the number of ships we could see on any given day would give us a strong clue as to how many patrons would be ringing Aunt Venus’ bell that night.
We settled in, with me breathing in the fresh sea air, and Honi lighting a cigarette. Smiling, I turned to her to make some such joke, but the words fell short in my mouth. There was a hardness, a bitterness in her face I had never seen before.
“You’re so lucky,” she said after a moment, pulling on her cigarette as if it had offended her.
“What do you mean?” I asked, but felt stupid for doing so. Come on, Farrah. You know exactly what she means.
She glared at me. “Why do you think we came up here so much, when we were kids?” she demanded.
I shrugged. “I don’t know, really. I guess because it’s pretty … to get away …”
“That’s right!” she cutin . “To get away. We could come up here and pretend, for five fucking minutes, that we weren’t trapped and orphans and so fucking doomed!” As she spoke, she waved her hand around, her cigarette tracing angry circles through the air.
I swallowed, the rough texture of the shingles biting through the sheer, satin fabric of my rich white girl dress. “I know it’s hard,” I mumbled. “Losing your parents …”
Honi whirled on me. “No, you don’t know,” she spat. “Your parents died. It was an accident. Mine, though … mine turned around and left me to the wolves!”
At that, a rippling of anger surged through me. Wolves? I thought. Aloud, I said, “If you don’t think Aunt Venus has been good to you—”
“Oh, Auntie Anna has been wonderful to me,” she sneered back. That she even knew Venus’s real name showed how long we had been friends.
“Then what’s the problem?”
She hunched up, her face halfway hidden beyond her knees. Two jeweled eyes, dark as obsidian, glared out at me. She looked like an animal about to strike.
“Do you know what it’s like to be a whore?” she hissed. I did not reply. I could not reply. Sensing this, she continued. “To be bought and sold? To be paraded around. No one cares about you, or your thoughts, or your feelings. Just your body. Do you know what that’s like?”
No, was what I should have said, but instead I frowned petulantly and muttered, “I care what you think, Honi.”
Honi bared her teeth in a snarl, as if she was about to say something. Instead, she took a violent drag on her cigarette, realized it was out, and tossed it angrily into the gloom below. Down, down, down, three stories it fell, and when it landed there was a loud, Clap!
“What was that?” she gasped, suddenly frightened. I hushed her with a glance.
Carefully, I leaned down and wiggled my way over to the other side of the roof and peered into the main driveway.
“Cops!” I exclaimed. “Three of them, parked out front!”
I squinted, tucking my honey-blonde hair behind my ears as I struggled to make out their faces. “Wait a minute …” I murmured. “Those men look familiar. They look like …”
“Come on, Farrah!” Honi squealed, seizing my hand and pulling me back. There was real terror in her voice. “Let’s get out of here!”
I nodded agreement, and together we began our careful climb back down to the window. Just then, however, Aunt Venus’s face burst out. She looked calm, but the cold pallor of her skin implied that something terrible was going on.
“Farrah!” she cried. “Thank God you’re out here! And Honi, too!”
“Aunt Venus, what’s going on?” I demanded. I was about to climb down beside her, but she stopped me with her hand.
“There’s no time to explain!” she said. “Here, take this!”
From her voluminous robes, beautiful as folded butterfly wings, she pulled a sealed envelope and thrust it into my hands. Inside, I could feel the tiny outline of a data storage drive.
“This contains all our records, Farrah,” she said. “Our clients, payments, everything.”
I stared at the envelope in confusion. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about? What you said earlier?”
She nodded, then sighed deeply. I know there was more to say, but she did not think there was time to say it. She kept on glancing over her shoulder, back into the room beyond.
“I want you to take this to your father’s old motorcycle club,” she said. She glanced over at Honi, who was immobilized with fear. “Take Honi, too, as a … as a gesture of goodwill.”
Those words seemed to cost her terribly to say, and it occurred to me, not for the last time, that Aunt Venus was a woman used to making hard decisions.
Distantly, I could hear the sounds of glass breaking, and the screams of the whores interrupted in their beds.
“But, why, Aunt Venus?” I started, but she swept my question aside.
“Now get out of here!” she ordered. “Climb onto the next roof and sneak down the stairs to Giorgio’s restaurant. He knows better than to give you a hard time. Got it?”
“But—”
“Got it?”
I sighed. “Yes, Aunt.”
“Good. Now, go!”
Just then, I heard the sound of a wooden door being kicked inward. Venus whirled, and at once her voice lost its frantic intensity. Sweet and oily, I heard her simper, “Well, hello officers …”
I wanted to leap down after her, to defend her, but Honi grabbed my arm.
“You heard her!” she hissed. “Come on!”
You can say what you like about women in Honi’s profession, but you had to give her this: she had good, strong legs, and it was easy for her to clamber across the gabled roof and leap across the gap onto the next building. While I lacked experience like hers, I worked out hard at the gym everyday while I was at college, so I was only a split second behind her. I could not hear Aunt Venus or the police any longer, and, though I did not yet know why, I felt my heart breaking.
With a wrestled bolt and a scream of rust, we fled down next door’s hidden stairwell and disappeared into the evening gloom.