B-Girl

“Did I ever tell you about my job as a B-girl?” This was our good friend Ruth (I’ve changed her name) last Sunday, as we were schmoozing after a leisurely brunch. Of course we wanted her to tell us the story and she did.

She was 22 at the time, an American working in Israel as one of that country’s top models. She liked the clothes that sometimes came with the job and of course the money, but she found the work stultifying. At dinner with a friend, the second engineer of a vessel bound for Southampton and temporarily docked in Israel, she asked if there were empty staterooms on his ship. When told there was space only in first class, she impulsively bought a ticket and embarked for England the next day.

But she was now penniless, having used all her funds to buy that ticket. Once in London, she knocked on the door of a rooming house and told the proprietor that she needed a room but had no money. Would he trust her? Awed perhaps by her good clothes if not by her good looks, he checked with his wife and together they agreed to take a chance with her. Ruth’s friend gave her some shillings to feed her room’s heater, she pawned some of her good clothes, and she started looking for work.

Her friend had given her a letter of introduction to the head of production at the BBC. The executive was impressed by her looks (at 74 she's still beautiful, so at 22 she must have been a knockout), and by her American accent, which was in demand at the time. “You’re just what we need,” he told her. He’d hire her if she had a work permit. But at that time these were difficult if not impossible for a foreigner to obtain without marrying a British subject. The executive told her he could provide any number of homosexuals who would be happy to marry her as a means for obtaining an American green card. Horrified, she rejected the suggestion. She would marry only for love. In the meantime, she could always work as a waitress.

But just as the BBC would not employ her without a work permit, neither would any of the many restaurants she approached. Her friend, the second engineer, then suggested she apply to an after-hours private club. The first one she entered needed no waitresses but it did need hostesses. Would she be willing to work as a hostess? She thought that she would be asked to show patrons to their table and give them menus. But no, the job required her to sit at the bar and encourage male patrons to buy her drinks - drinks that only appeared to be alcoholic. The club would pay her two shillings for each drink ordered for her and would guarantee her a minimum of 12 pounds a week. This, she knew, from having examined the help-wanted columns, was the salary offered to executive secretaries. Still, she was doubtful about accepting a job that seemed to her disreputable. When she asked her friend for advice, he told her that many female university students accept such work and that no one will expect her to go home with a customer, this last point confirmed by the club.

The first night on the job, a good-looking man came in, sat next to her, and started to speak in what Ruth described as “word salad,” making no sense whatever. After he left, a group of men entered. When one of them sat next to her and asked her if she went to that club often, she said no, this was her first time. She would sit there every day from six in the evening until the early morning, she explained, and went on to say that she would earn two shillings for every drink he ordered for her – not real drinks, she added – and she hoped he would buy her lots of drinks because she needed the money. At this, his mouth opened wide, but he told his friends what she had said and all of them bought her drinks. She was a great success.

Soon, she had a regular clientele. One would come at seven, another at eight, a third at nine, and so forth, with each one complaining about his wife. At first she would offer what she thought to be sensible advice, but she soon understood that they hadn’t come for advice but for a sympathetic listener. After a few weeks, the man who had spoken to her incoherently returned, this time with a young woman on his arm. Ruth made herself scarce around him, but she noticed that this time he was making better if not complete sense.

By now the work had become depressing to Ruth, who had to listen night after night to a series of sad stories. She decided to quit. But before she did, the word salad man returned again, this time alone, and this time he was perfectly comprehensible. He told her that she had been the first person who listened to him after he left the asylum. He knew he hadn’t been making any sense at the time and was grateful to her for listening to him respectfully anyway.

That was not the end of Ruth’s story at the club, but it was the end of her career as a hostess there. The club’s management, by this time probably figuring out that she was not only gorgeous but also smart, offered her the job of straightening out their accounts, a job she accepted. This seemed to her both more respectable and less depressing, but it never yielded the trove of interesting stories that she had accumulated during her work at the club bar.

After listening enthralled by her account - in the interest of brevity I've left out some details, such as those concerning the intensely dislikeable woman who owned the club - I said to Ruth, "I'm tempted to steal your story for my blog." To which Ruth, generous as always, said "Go ahead, take it. It's yours."