Free The Education of a Very Young Madam by Ma-Ling Lee Page B

involved in and how it worked. I stacked his bills, and once a month, I gathered up those stacks and took them to a bank thirty miles away for deposit in his safety deposit box. Andre was the one who taught me that $10,000 worth of $100 bills fit perfectly into a small Ziploc sandwich bag, which is a trick I still use to this day to keep track of the cash I have on hand. He also showed me that people like us could store money safely in the bank as long as it was in a safety deposit box and not an account. He even bought me a Cadillac Coupe when I was seventeen so that I could do my errands. I also danced at a strip club called The Body Shop on 123rd and Lexington in Harlem, but Andre was right, even with the dancing and the job I did for him, I still had too much time on my hands.
    Suzie and I rented an entire floor of a commercial building on West Twenty-first Street in Manhattan to use as our brothel. It was just this large, open warehouse space when we got it, so we had contractors come in to transform it into something workable. We had walls put up to form six booths with doors, each of which was just big enough for a twin mattress set on an elevated platform, a chair in the corner for clothes, and a narrow walkway. It was just the basics—white walls, no decoration, no frills. There was also a big wash area with showers on one side for the girls and wash beds on the other for the customers.
    When a client walked into our place, he'd pay an entrance fee of $40 to $60, which bought him a massage on one of those wash beds. The girls would sit on benches that lined the perimeter of the entry room and cop their most seductive or demure poses when a customer walked in. He'd pick out the girl he wanted, and then they'd head for the wash area. If he wanted to continue on to one of the booths after that, he'd have to negotiate with the girl directly. Generally speaking, a $120 "tip" would get a guy a hand job, and an extra $200 would get him sex. Those girls knew how to negotiate too, even with the businessmen who were our most frequent type of customer, though we really attracted all types of men.
    We placed ads in the backs of magazines like Girls and Screw and newspapers like The Village Voice to draw customers. Those ads, which featured pictures of young Asian girls, also attracted women looking for work. We weren't all that picky about who we hired, and we would try out just about any decent-looking woman who came by. All kinds ended up working for us; it wasn't just the young, poor, and helpless. Most of them were either Thai or Korean, and one of our biggest moneymakers was actually a sixty-year-old Korean woman. She wasn't ashamed to tell us her age because she looked like she was about thirty and had no trouble attracting men. She had had work done on just about every part of her body.
    One of my favorite ladies was a woman who became a really good girlfriend of mine. She was Chinese and in her twenties, but she looked nineteen at most. Her name was Carole, and she had grown up in Chinatown with nine older brothers, all of them gang members. Her brothers looked out for her by controlling almost every aspect of her life. She was never allowed to date when she was growing up, so she got married really young, to escape her brothers' care, I guess, although we never talked about why. Why just wasn't a question that any of us asked about anything. "Why are we here?" "Why are we doing this?" If anyone wondered about these things, they never brought them up. Things just were the way they were and that was that.
    Carole hated her husband. She would say things like "Ugh. It's Tuesday. I've got to go home and fuck my husband," like it was laundry day or something. She was hysterical like that. She was very innocent looking, almost like a little girl, but you never knew what was going to come out of her mouth. Carole worked only once in a while, and when she did, she would do maybe one or two customers and then go home. She didn't