Lauren - Some girls: my life in a harem

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Table of Contents

A PLUME BOOK

SOME GIRLS

JILLIAN LAUREN is a writer and performer who grew up in suburban New Jersey. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

Lauren is a gifted and lyrical writer whose coming-of-age tale has the reader firmly under its spell by the end of the first paragraph. Its an amazing ride as she seeks, and then finds, meaning and connection in her life. I couldnt put it down.

Nina Hartley, author of Nina Hartleys Guide to Total Sex

Catfights, mad cash, priceless jewelswelcome to the sultans harem. What starts out juicy quickly turns soulful in this elegantly crafted, multilayered stunner of a memoir. A spellbinding tale of one womans exotic search for identity and true love.

Rachel Resnick, author of Love Junkie

Some Girls reads like a novel, but gets under your skin in a way fiction cant. This is a striptease of a book, sexy and mesmerizing, but at the end a very real woman stands in front of you, exposed and vulnerable. I couldnt put it down, and when I was done, I couldnt stop thinking about it.

Claire LaZebnik, author of Knitting Under the Influence

Few women dare to speak of their sexual adventures with such honesty, fascinating detail, and personal clarity. Jillians journey is the most exotic sex worker memoir Ive ever read.

Annie Sprinkle, PhD

to Scott
love redeems all

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack And you may find yourself in another part of the world And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile And you may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife And you may ask yourself, well... how did I get here?

Talking Heads

acknowledgments

Special thanks to Becky Cole, Alexandra Machinist, Patti Smith, Jim Krusoe, Leonard Chang, Joe Gratziano, Anne Dailey, Colin Summers, Nell Scovell, Claire LaZebnik, the Writers Sunget, Robert Morgan Fisher, Tammy Stoner, Ivan Sokolov, Suzanne Luke, Carol Allen, Catharine Dill, Amber Lasciak, R. P. Brink, the Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Lindsay Davis, Sean Eden, Dr. Keely Kolmes, Julie Fogliano, Jennifer Erdagon, Jerry Stahl, Shawna Kenney, Bett Williams, Austin Young, Lily Burana, Lynnee Breedlove, Gabrielle Samuels, Sherri Carpenter, and, always, Scott Shriner.

Deepest gratitude to my family and to all who shared my story.

prologue

The Shahs wife was unfaithful to him, so he cut off her head and summarily declared all women to be evil and thereby deserving of punishment. Every night the Shahs grand vizier brought him a new virgin to marry and every morning the Shah had the woman executed. After too many of these bloody sunrises, the viziers eldest and favorite daughter asked to be brought to the Shah as that nights offering. The grand vizier protested, but his daughter insisted, and this daughter was known throughout the kingdom for her powers of persuasion. At the end of the day, the Shah married the viziers daughter while the vizier wept in his chambers, unable to watch.

At first, the daughters wedding night was indistinguishable from the wedding nights of the other ill-fated virgins who had married the Shah before her, but as morning approached, the Shahs newest wife began to tell him a story. The story had not yet reached its conclusion when the pink light of dawn crept around the edges of the curtains. The Shah agreed to let the woman live for just one more day, because he couldnt bear to kill her before he learned the storys end.

The next night the woman finished that story, but before the sun rose over the dome of the palace mosque, she began another, equally as compelling as the last. The following one thousand and one nights each concluded with an unfinished story. By the end of this time, the Shah had fallen in love with the woman, and he spared her life, his heart mended and his faith in women restored.

This is, of course, the story of Scheherazade. Its the story of the storyteller. We lay our heads on the block and hope that youll spare us, that youll want another tale, that youll love us in the end. Were looking for the story that will save our lives.

One thousand and one nightsnearly three years. Thats about the span of this story. Will you listen? Its almost morning.

chapter 1

The day I left for Brunei I took the subway uptown to Beth Israel, schlepping behind me a green flowered suitcase. The last time I had used the suitcase was when I left my room in NYUs Hayden Hall for good, dragged all my crap out of the elevator and onto the sidewalk, and cabbed it down to the Lower East Side, where a friend of a friend had a room for rent. The time before that, my mother had helped me unpack from it my college-y fall clothes, labeled jammies, and ziplock bags full of homemade chocolate-chip cookies. Each time I unzipped that suitcase it contained a whole different set of carefully folded plans. Each time I packed it back up I was on the run again.

I heaved the suitcase up three steps, rested, then heaved again until the rectangle of light at the top of the staircase opened out onto the bright buzz of Fourteenth Street. Underneath my winter overcoat the back of my shirt was damp with sweat. I hadnt thought Id packed so much. Id stood in front of my closet for hours wishing the perfect dress would magically materialize in a flurry of sparkles, would soar through the door, held aloft by a host of bluebirds. I was going to a royal ball, goddammit. I was traveling to meet a prince. Was my fairy godmother really going to leave me with such a lousy selection of clothes to choose from? Apparently she was.

In the end, Id settled for packing two tailored skirt suits, three fifties prom dresses, an armful of vintage underwear-cum-outerwear, two hippie sundresses, a pair of leather hot pants, and some glittery leg warmers. All those not-quite-right clothes weighed too much. Or maybe it was the anvil of guilt I was carrying around for the act of desertion I was about to commit by abandoning my sick father in favor of an adventure in a foreign country. Either way, Id yet to learn how to pack light. I pointed myself toward the hospital, merged into the stream of pedestrian traffic, and allowed the collective sense of purpose to pull me along.

My father was being operated on for a paraesophageal hiatal hernia, a condition in which part of the stomach squeezes through an opening in the diaphragm called the hiatus, landing it next to the esophagus. The danger is that the stomach can be strangled, cut off from its blood supply. Hiatal hernias occur most often in overweight people and people with extreme stress levels, both of which apply in my fathers case. In 1991, the surgery for a hiatal hernia was dangerous and invasive, requiring a major incision that would travel from his sternum around to his back. I had originally told my mother I would be there to help out in any way that I could, but when the Brunei job came around, I changed my mind.

This compulsion of mine to be forever on the move may have been a genetic inevitability. My birth mother named me Mariah, after the song They Call the Wind Mariah, from the Broadway musical Paint Your Wagon. Maybe she knew Id soon sail away from her in the airborne cradle of a 747. The name didnt stick. My adoptive mother renamed me Jill Lauren after nothing at all; she just liked it. An amateur thespian herself, she thought Lauren could serve as a stage name if I ever needed one, and so it has.

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