CHAPTER ELEVEN

At the Mercy of the Trick

Norma never thought she’d survive in the business long enough to see a third generation of Good Men begin frequenting her house in the late fifties. J. Cornelius Rathborne III (Cocie, pronounced “Cokie,” to his friends) went to Norma’s for the first time when he was fourteen years old. He was taken there not by one of his family elders but by a friend who was a year or so older than he was. Norma opened the little window in the back door and recognized the young man. In the parlor she asked the new fellow his name, and Cocie told her. “Oh, yes,” she said, giving him the distinct impression that the name was familiar to her. She offered the boys a beer and chatted with them about school and where they’d been earlier in the evening. Then she asked how much money they had. The going rate was twenty dollars, but Cocie had only fifteen.

“Ten will do,” Norma said. She always left the boys a little “mad” money in case they had some emergency or needed a taxi.

The girls came into the parlor, some dressed formally, others in sexy little dresses, all with beautiful long hair—Norma wore the only short do in the house. The boys made their choices, Cocie’s girl brought him upstairs, and he found that he was a little nervous, somewhat embarrassed too. But not because this was his first time; his father had already seen to it that he’d been initiated properly—he’d left nothing to chance and had one of his mistresses take Cocie to bed, a half Cherokee woman who told Cocie, “Make a woman happy, you’ll be happy.”

Cocie was embarrassed this night because Norma’s girl gave him quite a look-over. She began washing him carefully, explaining to him that he’d never have to worry about getting anything at Norma’s house. Cocie saw the wisdom of this and felt better. He remembered what his father’s Cherokee mistress had told him and had a damned good time that night.

Cocie went away to boarding school soon afterwards, but whenever he was home on break, he went down to the French Quarter. First he and his friends would go over to Bourbon Street, where they’d catch an act at one of the clubs, not dives with strippers but exotic dancers like Kalantan or Lilly Christine the Tiger Lady or Evangeline the Oyster Girl, who made her entrance out of a giant oyster shell and had green seaweed hair. Or they’d go to the Paddock Lounge to hear Fats Pichon, the Dukes of Dixieland, or Papa Celestin. Then they’d wind up the night at Norma’s, where they’d run into their friends and have a few drinks before going upstairs. They knew better than to show up drunk; if they did she wouldn’t let them in.

One night Norma turned them down, but not because they’d been drinking. She opened the little window, and when she saw them she said, “There are some people here I don’t think you boys would want to be seen by.” Cocie assumed somebody’s father had gotten there first.

Cocie unabashedly admitted going to Norma’s and said, “Hell, yes, use my name. I’m not embarrassed that I went there. Going to Norma’s was part of growing up in New Orleans—those of us lucky enough to have some money.”

But not all of the Good Men were willing to be so open. Another of Norma’s third-generation clients preferred that his name not be used.

The first time he introduced himself to Norma, she said, “I know your daddy.” She also knew his uncles, from a family of Jewish merchants. “Come on in, Sonny,” Norma said.

Sonny and his friends had a few drinks, then Norma let them know it was time to drink up and leave or go with one of the girls. Sonny followed his girl out to the courtyard and up the stairs to the balcony. The steps were low. She said, “Watch your head!”

“Yeah, right,” Sonny answered and walked right into a beam, which he did almost every time he went upstairs at Norma’s because his attention was always focused elsewhere—say on the nice way the girl’s dress stretched across her rear end.

Sonny and his friends liked to sit around the parlor and drink; it was a great late-night destination after they dropped off their dates. Sometimes their dates would sneak out after they got home, take the keys to their parents’ cars, and drive to Conti Street to see if the boys’ cars were parked at Norma’s. The boys felt as if they were at their own private country club.

But Norma’s was nothing so ordinary as a country club. For Sonny the biggest thrill came from knowing that what he was doing was against the law. He and his friends liked to talk about it afterwards; for Sonny the sex was anticlimactic.

Sonny didn’t know that after he grew up and went into the family business he would suddenly yearn to be a police officer. Eventually he joined the police reserves and went out on night patrol; he had a beat on Mardi Gras; he chased armed robbers; he was even shot. But when he was at Norma’s he got a taste of what it was like to be on the other side of the law.

A New Orleans lawyer whose family was from Colorado started going to Norma’s while he was a student at Tulane University. He wasn’t one of Norma’s third-generation Good Men who never needed a password; the first time he went to the house he had a password, but he had to talk his way in anyway. Norma started calling him Waterproof when he arrived one evening during a rainstorm.

Waterproof liked the passwords and the nicknames; he liked that it was all so risqué and that the police station was only a block away. But Waterproof never felt that he was in any particular danger.

Most of the Good Men, including the college students, went to Norma’s on a lark, with an innocent desire to live life in the fast lane for a night now and then. They were made to feel important there, and they could have sex with girls who had the reputation of being the best in the business. They might not have known that some of the Good Women were going to Norma’s too—for sex with a man who broke the law of averages with his endowments: Pershing Gervais, who once charged a wealthy Uptown woman fifteen hundred dollars for his services, or Frankenstein the cabdriver.

But those were the people who were interested in straight sex. Some came for companionship—wealthy people who needed someone to talk to more than they needed sex. Others had indulged every hedonistic whim they could think of and went to Norma’s when they had run out of thrills. A girl like Simone would bathe them in golden showers and serve up hot lunches, fare not out of the ordinary in a lot of brothels.

Beyond the kinky and degenerate, though, were the true deviates, those who came to Norma’s with a desperate need they were unable to satisfy anywhere else.

One of these was a man from North Carolina. He wanted someone, anyone who would do it, to beat on his penis as hard as possible, even with a hammer. Most of the girls couldn’t handle that. They tried putting bobby pins on the skin of his prick, but that didn’t satisfy him.

He dealt mostly with Jackie, and it was several months before Norma met him. She was surprised by his looks. He was pale and terribly emaciated; she thought he looked as if he needed a transfusion. When she shook hands with him, his hand was like ice.

He continued to make trips to New Orleans every two to three months. One trip he got Terry, but he was not at all interested in Yum-Yum’s specialty. He asked her to stick needles in his penis. Terry did. She also hammered it. She didn’t mind the blood. The crueler she was, the more pleasurable it was to him, the more orgasms he had, and the sooner he had them.

After a while, though, needles and hammers weren’t enough; he asked Terry to cut his testicles with a razor blade and sew them back up. Terry complied. He had multiple orgasms. But this was very messy. Terry went out and bought a cover for the bed.

When Norma saw the room after one of these episodes, she was appalled: “This room looks like you’ve been butchering hogs!” Terry told her about the razor. Norma never would have dreamed that Terry, a pretty, dainty girl she knew to be very fastidious, could do such things. Terry was unfazed. “He pays well for it,” she said, “and he leaves happy.”

Norma, though, couldn’t get over thinking that Terry was callous. The razor blades were too much; she didn’t want the man to come to her house any longer.

The story got around, first to the girls at the house and then to the nightspots where they went, and Terry got a new nickname. Yum-Yum became known as Terry the Cutter.

One way Norma hid income was to have Gaspar Gulotta cash checks people gave her and run them through his business. Once a man gave her traveler’s checks for an evening of entertainment, and a week later Gaspar got a notice that the checks had bounced. According to a letter from American Express, they had been stolen.

Norma headed straight to the American Express office, where she described her customer as “outstanding because he was very short and inclined to be a humpback.” The clerk practically went into shock as she continued. “He has a big prick, and on one side of his leg not far from his prick is a birthmark.”

She informed the officer that she would contest it if the man continued to claim that his checks had been stolen. “I’m going to tell how he dropped his pants at Ten Twenty-six Conti Street for three or four hours and enjoyed it to the fullest.” Norma got her money.

Norma understood that, because she ran an illegitimate business, people were always going to try to take advantage of her, whether they were soldiers who demanded their money back after their fun upstairs and called the shore patrol to muscle her or Good Men’s progeny who liked the free drinks at the house. Even the Good Men themselves sometimes made unreasonable demands. Once one of them begged Norma to let a girl come to his house. He assured her that his wife was out of town. Against her better judgment, because the man was such a good customer, Norma relented on a rule she’d made based on experience. Only an hour after her girl arrived the wife barged in—she’d set her husband up with a phony vacation story. She took a swipe at the girl and threw her outside naked, refusing to give her her clothes. Norma said, “The poor kid was in a predicament, but, worse, she could have been killed. No matter what, you’re always at the mercy of the trick.”

On Conti Street, Norma always had a large, strong man on the premises during working hours. If the house got hot, though, and the girls were forced to conduct business in hotels and motels, they were completely vulnerable. In the late fifties, when Norma seemed as invincible as some of the politicians who had charge accounts at her house, one of the most gruesome acts of her career took place.

Norma had been warned by a police contact that a warrant to search 1026 Conti had been issued for the following Saturday night. As usual, that evening Jackie fielded the calls and dispatched girls to various hotels. One man was unknown to her, but he had impeccable credentials, a good reference, the right password, and all the right answers to her questions. She sent a girl to meet him at one of the Airline Highway motels.

When the girl got there, the man brutalized her over several hours. He bit off both her nipples and her clitoris. When he was finished he hung her from a coat hook on the back of the door. The hook pulled away from the door, and the girl survived. But the man seemed to have materialized from that dark place that was more frightening than any threat from the law or any act by a masochistic deviate, and he disappeared into the dark again, never to be found.