The Moth (7 page)

JILLIAN LAUREN

I
was an eighteen-year-old NYU dropout struggling to pay my rent in New York by dancing at the Kit-Kat Club on 56th and Broadway, when a friend of mine approached me about a casting call. This casting call was supposedly to entertain rich businessmen in Singapore. It didn’t seem all that different from what I was already doing, so I went.

But when I got the job, they told me that it wasn’t in Singapore at all. In fact, I was being invited to be the personal guest of the Prince of Brunei.

Now, Brunei is a sultanate in Southeast Asia. It was a country I had only recently even heard of, and at the time the Sultan of Brunei was the richest man in the world. I was being hired to work for his youngest brother, who is Prince Jefri Bolkiah, also known in the media as the Playboy Prince.

My job description was elusive, at best. But I fantasized that I might get to Brunei and find a wild adventure, a pile of money, and an employer who was nothing less than Prince Charming. I suspected more realistically that I had signed on to be some sort of international quasi-prostitute. But even that seemed like
a wild and exotic transformation for a Jewish girl from the burbs of Jersey.

And honestly, I wanted nothing less than transformation. I wanted so badly for my life to be something more exceptional than just going to usually fruitless B-movie auditions during the day and squeaking around a brass pole at night. I thought maybe this was it, and it seemed like it would be worth the risk.

When I was sixteen, and I first heard Patti Smith’s album
Easter
, I decided that Patti Smith was the absolute barometer of all things cool and right. And ever since, I would ask myself when faced with tough decisions,
What would Patti Smith do?

So I weighed my options. Should I stay? Should I go?

What would Patti Smith do?

And I decided Patti Smith would go. She would get on a plane and go to exotic lands, and she would never once look back. And that’s what I did.

When I arrived at the airport in Bandar Seri Begawan, I was greeted by two Secret Service agents who immediately took my passport, supposedly to update my visa or something. I had the first flicker of a thought that maybe I had not completely understood the implications of the decision that I had made to come here.

But all of these apprehensions were overshadowed when I saw the royal compound. It was immense. It looked like a resort in Fort Lauderdale, if it had been imagined by Aladdin. There were gold domes, swimming pools, and tennis courts. I saw all of this, and my head raced with plans.

I thought,
Is it that far out of the realm of possibility that maybe I could make a prince fall in love with me, and my life will change in dazzling and unexpected ways?

Inside, the palace was just as impressive. It was cavernous, and in the entryway there was a big fountain, and the carpets glowed because they were
actually woven with real gold
. On the walls there were Picassos and Pollocks.

This wasn’t even where the prince lived. There were other palaces where he lived. There were still other palaces where his three wives lived. This was strictly his play palace. And at this palace, every night, he threw parties.

And at the parties there was alcohol although—strictly speaking—it was illegal in Brunei. There was music. There was dancing. And above all there were women—beautiful women from all over the world. There were women from Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Hong Kong, a handful of us from the US, and
all of us
were vying for the attention of the prince. It was like the original
Bachelor
.

We would go to these parties every night, and then we would stumble home drunkenly at five in the morning, and we’d sleep all day. And the days tumbled into nights, tumbled into days, tumbled into nights.

After two weeks there, contrary to all my big plans, I had not made a prince fall in love with me. Rather, I had sat there and watched from across the room as all the other women flirted with him, and he ignored me. I wondered what they had that I didn’t. I figured I just didn’t know how to play that game. I didn’t rate. And I thought that was gonna be it; I was going to be going home just like that.

But one morning I was spirited away from the palace, and I was taken to an office building in the capital city. I was locked in an office there, and it was freezing cold, and it was stuffed with all this tacky furniture and what seemed like a hundred pictures of the prince’s three wives. I tried one door, and it was
locked. I tried the other door; it was locked. There was no bathroom.

I waited there for four hours, until I was trembling from hunger, from cold, from nerves. I considered peeing in a trash can.

I hoped that I was waiting there for the prince, and not for some other mysterious, unthinkable fate, because they had taken my passport. And these were people who were way more powerful than me. Very few people even knew where I really was. I could vanish at that moment and there would be no culpability. And there was nothing I could do about it. So I closed my eyes, and I tried to imagine I was somewhere warm, and I fell asleep.

When I woke up, it was to the sound of the door opening. Standing in front of me was the prince. Until that moment, I had only seen him in casual clothes, but he looked—that day—like a prince. He was dressed in this snazzy uniform, and he had medals on his chest. I sat up way too quickly.

I wouldn’t say what I felt for him at that minute was love, exactly, but I felt this very deep sense of gratitude for the fact that he had rescued me from this freezing cold, locked room. I also felt a profound desire to be valued by this person.

And I think in extreme circumstances, the combination of these two things can look very much like love. The prince kissed me, and that was how our romance started. I got to know him a little bit, and as I did, I found out that the prince was not only handsome, he was also bright, educated, and, yes, charming. In spite of the totally bizarre circumstances, I liked him. And for whatever reason, he liked me too.

I rose very quickly through the ranks of the women, and I became his second favorite girlfriend. I know. You’re probably thinking,
His second favorite girlfriend, is that good?

It was. In the context, under the circumstances, it was good enough. And the prince at this time was looking for a fourth wife.

Now, for a fourth wife, it would not be inconceivable for him to choose from amongst the women at the parties. And honestly, I thought about it. I did. I imagined what it would be like to marry him. What Disney-brainwashed American girl would
not
think about it?

But I really tried not to add self-delusion to my growing list of character flaws at this point, because I realized that we were prostitutes. I mean, if you go to the same party every night, wind up making out with the guy throwing the parties, and walk home with a handful of cash, you are a hooker. And at first this didn’t really bother me. But eventually all of the locked doors and the constant surveillance we were under started to wear on my nerves.

So one day when I was with the prince on a business trip in Malaysia, a guard came to fetch me. He told me to put on an evening gown in the middle of the afternoon. This was not all that unusual, but what
was
unusual was, when we got in the elevator, he did not press the button for the penthouse where the prince was staying. He pressed the button for the roof.

I panicked. I thought,
What could be on the roof? Oh my God, what have I done? I know too much, and they’re trying to get rid of me. They’re gonna pitch me off the edge. They’re gonna fabricate the headlines. They’re gonna say, you know, “American teenager dies in a drug deal gone wrong at the Kuala Lumpur Hilton.”

But when we got to the roof, there was a helicopter there. That was a relief. I got in the helicopter, it hopped over to the next building, and I was escorted to a suite.

The suite looked like… if a wedding cake was dipped in
gold, that was what this hotel room looked like. And at the other end of the suite, a football field away it seemed, sat the Sultan of Brunei, the richest man in the world. I recognized him because in Brunei his face was everywhere. It was on the billboards. It was on the television. It was on the money. And the Sultan of Brunei asked me to come over and sit down next to him, and I did. I poured us a cup of tea, and he introduced himself as Martin.

Now, all of the royal brothers had Western nicknames from their schooldays in England. But I was a little disappointed by “Martin.” It did not seem very sultan-y to me. It seemed more like one of my Jewish uncles [
with a Jersey accent
]—
Uncle Marty
.

Martin and I chatted, and he was lovely. He was so different from the prince. The prince was moody and demanding. He was very hard to please. The Sultan was cheerful and breezy, and he was easy to please. He just wanted me to do a little dance (which, by the way, is a terrifically awkward thing to do with no music), and then he wanted some oral sex, and then he very definitely wanted me to leave, which I did.

I had been in Brunei for long enough to know that I was not meant to be insulted by the fact that the prince had passed me off to his brother. I was meant to be honored that I had been this gift.

But as I walked away from the Sultan that day, this trickle of truth started to work its way into my brain. I had come there really wanting an adventure. I had started out wanting to be free, and I had wound up a piece of property.

And I asked myself,
What would Patti Smith do?

And the answer was: She wouldn’t be there, really. She wouldn’t.

I would like to tell you that this stunning little gem of
self-knowledge instantly transformed me into a person who made wiser and more self-loving choices, but that’s not the case. Although eventually, I’d like to think that is what happened.

I stayed in Brunei for a while after that, until I really figured out that numbness is its own kind of misery, and that freedom from caring what happens to you is not freedom. And when I figured that out, I walked away from the prince, and I never went back.

And so now when I ask myself,
What would Patti Smith do?
I can usually say that I think she would like where I wound up.

I think she would stay right here.

Jillian Lauren
is the author of the memoir
Some Girls: My Life in a Harem
and the novel
Pretty
. Her writing has appeared in
The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine
, and
Vanity Fair
, among others. She has performed at spoken word and storytelling events across the country. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son.

A. E. HOTCHNER

I
’m going to take you back to Spain in the summer of 1959, when the big event was a mano a mano bullfight between the two great matadors of that era—Luis Miguel Dominguín and Antonio Ordóñez. There hadn’t been such a bullfight, a mano a mano, in thirty years, and there hasn’t been one since then. So it was a great event.

And my longtime friend, Ernest Hemingway, called me and said, “I’m going to go there and cover it for
LIFE
magazine. Why don’t you come on over, and we’ll have another adventure?”

I had met Ernest when I edited his novel
Across the River and into the Trees
, and afterwards I had adapted many of his short stories and novels for television and for the movies. We’d had some great adventures together.

So I went to Valencia where the first mano a mano was held, and both bullfighters were marvelous. The second mano a mano was in Malaga, where they were even better. And afterwards we all adjourned to the Miramar terrace, where we had a great deal of red wine and tapas and had a good time.
And during the course of it, Antonio, who was Ernest’s favorite bullfighter of all time, said, “You know something, Pecas, I think you should be in the ring. What do you think, Ernest?”

He called me Pecas, that was his nickname for me. Pecas means “the freckled one,” which I was at that time.

Ernest said, “That’s fine. Hotch, you should be a matador, and I’ll be your manager!”

And we drank a lot of red wine, and we’re having a great time. I’m extrapolating over where I’ll fight, and I know that’s just red wine talking and nothing is going to happen. And before we leave, Antonio says, “Tell you what, the next mano a mano is in Ciudad Real. You can be the
sobresaliente
, and I’ll put you in one of my suits.”

I didn’t think anything more of this.

When we got to Ciudad Real to see the mano a mano, we went up to the hotel room where Antonio was, to wish him
suerte
(“good luck”), and on the bed there was a bullfight suit, and it was Antonio’s.

He came over and said, “I thought you’d like the colors. They’re ivory and black with a touch of red. I think it goes with your complexion.”

I said, “My complexion right now is white and getting whiter.”

So they proceeded to dress me.

Now, I want to tell you, a bullfighter’s costume is no laughing matter. The undergarment is pulled on you, and it’s like new skin. Then they give you your
traje de luces
, which is your outer garment. It’s like an anvil being put on your back. So I was dressed up in my suit. There was no way really to move in any direction—I was mummified! You have to be suited like this because if you go in a ring and there’s a breeze, a little wind, and you’re wearing anything that moves, the bull is going to go
for you instead of the cloth that you’re waving at him. So I am now put together, and I thought:
Well, you know, this is one of those bibulous jokes. They’ve got me dressed up and then “ha ha” they go to the ring. And they leave me here in the room in this ridiculous costume. I’m not going to be in a bullring.

As the hour approaches for the fight, everybody leaves except Antonio and me. We’re alone in the room. Antonio goes over to a table where he has some religious objects, and he starts to pray over them. I’m in my corner wishing to hell I had something to pray over.