Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,21
to discuss his credit and to share ideas as to the need to maintain intact kneecaps in this cruel world. They understood a young actor’s difficulties in meeting financial obligations, but felt certain Rick could make a substantial payment within forty-eight hours.
Candace hit the streets. It was that, or see Rick maimed. After the casting couch and exotic partners under floodlights, somehow it seemed so commonplace doing quickies in motel rooms and car seats. She missed the cameras. It all seemed so transient without any playback.
The money was there, and Rick kept his kneecaps. Between her work on the streets and grinding out a few 9-mm. films each month, Candace could about meet expenses. The problem was that she really needed the drugs to keep her going, and the more drugs she needed meant the more work to pay for them. Candace knew her looks were slipping, and she appreciated Rick’s concern for her health. But for Rick the Big Break was coming soon. She no longer minded when he had other women over while she was on the streets, or when he stayed away for a day or two without calling her.
She was selling her body for his career, and she must understand that sometimes it was necessary for Rick, too, to sleep around. In the beginning, some small compromises are to be expected.
A pimp beat her up one night. He didn’t like freelance chippies taking johns from his girls on his turf. He would have just scared her, had she agreed to become one of his string, but she needed all her earnings for Rick, and the truth was the pimp considered her just a bit too far gone to be worth his trouble. So he worked her over but didn’t mess up her face too badly, and Candace was able to work again after only about a week.
She tried another neighborhood and got busted the second night out; paid her own bail, got busted again a week later. Rick got her out of jail—she was coming apart without the H, and he couldn’t risk being implicated. He had his career to think about, and it was thoughtless of Candace to jeopardize his chances through her own sordid lifestyle.
He would have thrown her out, but Candace paid the rent. Of course, he still loved her. But she really ought to take better care of herself. She was letting herself go. Since her herpes scare they seldom made love, although Candace understood that Rick was often emotionally and physically drained after concentrating his energy on some important interview or audition.
They had lived together almost two years, and Candace was almost twenty-five, but she looked almost forty. After a client broke her nose and a few teeth in a moment of playfulness, she lost what little remained of her actress/model good looks.They got the best cosmetic repair she could afford, but after that neither the johns nor the sleaze producers paid her much attention. When she saw herself on the screen at fifth-rate porno houses, in the glimpses between ducking below the rows of shabby seats, she no longer recognized herself.
But Rick’s career was progressing all the while, and that was what made her sacrifice worthwhile. A part of Candace realized now that her dreams of Hollywood stardom had long since w ashed down the gutter, but at least Rick was almost on the verge of big things. He’d landed a number of modeling jobs and already had made some commercials for local TV. Some recent roles in what Rick termed “experimental theater” promised to draw the attention of talent scouts. Neither of them doubted that the Big Break was an imminent certainty. Candace kept herself going through her faith in Rick’s love and her confidence that better times lay ahead. Once Rick’s career took off, she’d quit the streets, get off the drugs. She d look ten years younger if she could just rest and eat right for a few months, get a better repair on her nose. By then Rick would be in a position to help her resume her own acting career.
Candace was not too surprised when Rick came in one morning and shook her awake with the news that he’d lined up a new film for her. It was something about devil worshipers called Satan’s Sluts—X-rated, of course, but the money would be good, and Candace hadn’t appeared even in a peepshow gangbang in a couple months. The producer, Rick explained, remembered her in Camp Hell!