As anyone with a sense of history knows, the link between Organized Crime and Organized Politics in Chicago was so solid it was often difficult to discern one from the other, especially during the reign of Hizzoner, Richard J. Daley.

So it was that Chicago's First Ward (The diamond necklace on the Windy City's North Side) was booty to be plundered by those wielding peremptory power. Ergo Chicago's ward heelers were in cahoots with Chicago's racketeers so they might mutually fleece the fuddled public. So in the mid 70s massage parlors -- blowjob bordellos – began to sprout like venereal warts throughout the First Ward and later into other neighborhoods.

About midway through my tenure at Faces magazine (By that time I'd taken to calling it "Feces".) it became apparent that, in order to make ends meet, I needed to supplement my income because Francy's drug habit was out of control and if I didn't provide the money she'd be doing whatever she needed to do to procure her pharmaceuticals.

My friend, Bob Rudnick, had taken a job at the Harem, a massage parlor on LaSalle Street literally around the corner from the Chicago Avenue police headquarters. Bob told me that they could use someone to work the desk, that the perquisites were intrinsically libidinous and that a clever boy could easily skim extra bullion from the cash-only business.

Ironically the Harem was in the same location that, a scant few years prior, housed the Chicago Seed. The Seed was Chicago's firebrand anarcho-communist underground broadsheet -- a voice for radical change and militant feminism. But sedition and revolution had become unfashionable and had been replaced by the ascendancy of the vain and deplorable disco epoch.

I took a job at the Harem, working three nights a week. My duties were to work the desk, count the money and make sure everything tallied, protect the girls from aggressive customers and sniff out cops in case of a raid.

Of course the law and the outlaws were in league. But occasionally the police were required to put on a show of feigned force in order to assure the gullible public that local government was doing its job. It was explained to me that – if raided –we'd all be paraded down to the local police station but within an hour we'd be bailed out and back to work.

The night I started at the Harem someone tossed a bomb through the window of Oriental Arts, a massage parlor a few blocks away. Like any family the Chicago Outfit experiences sibling rivalry. And, like wild dogs, the kin are territorial beasts, alpha-males snipping and snarling at others of the brood when encroachment is perceived. Such was the bombing of the nearby parlor. A minor spat between brothers. Like children fighting over a toy.

At the Harem you could purchase a blowjob for 20 bucks. If you wanted a fuck it would cost 40. The girls weren't supposed to fuck but most of them did it anyway. Part of my job was to keep an eye on what the girls were up to via closed-circuit tv and to let my Mafia overlords know if they were porking. I enjoyed watching them have sexual intercourse but I never turned them in.

I'd had a slight connection to the massage parlor business before I became an employee. Toward the end of the Gallery run the magazine was going to do an article and/or a pictorial about Chicago's massage parlors. An editor and I met with Vince Gerace, a proprietor of a parlor at Belmont and Clark Street.

But one day Vinny went missing. I suspect his bones rest with those of other unfortunates in the polluted silt of the Chicago River. Vinny had tread on the wrong toes. And perhaps because he was not a member of the immediate family, he was not afforded the protection generally reserved for the immediate family. It was Vince Gerace who became the model for Neon Vincent, a comic strip character I'd later serialize in Playboy magazine.

My job at the Harem only lasted a couple of months. Shortly after I arrived I was assigned the desk at Gentleman's Retreat, a new parlor that was being opened in a more blighted neighborhood than the Harem. The Harem was fairly upscale. The girls were attractive and the patrons were lawyers, priests from the Archdiocese, off-duty cops and Michigan Avenue businessmen who needed to relieve the stress of the workaday world.

However the girls working at Gentleman's Retreat were more like biker chicks – snarling, jailhouse-tattooed, acne-scarred and fucked up on barbiturates and angeldust. And the neighborhood was the kind place where anyone with the price of a blowjob in his pocket would be ill advised to wander around after dark. I was provided a pistol and advised I'd probably need it.

The roughneck Jezebels at Gentleman's Retreat often livened the tedium of minimal customer interaction by coming to blows with one another over some perceived transgression. It would start with epithets -- "Bitch!" "Cunt!" -- and blossom into a full-fledged catfight. Screeching, punching, clawing, pummeling howling and yowling. Hair-pulling, rending (minimal) clothing, rolling around on the floor. Vomiting.

But because of a lack of business Gentleman's Retreat went bust about the time Rudnick was caught pilfering.

Bob was taken into a back room where his head was wrapped in towels (so's not to leave marks) and he was beaten with a telephone book. "Good thing for you we're reasonable guys," he was told. "Anyone else woulda broken your legs." Seemed like the right time to give notice.