Valarie By John Benton

She was spared from jail, but offered a job she couldn’t refuse…

I have said it before:  as far as I’m concerned, John Benton’s YA Christian-scare novels of the 1970s and 80s are legendary around here. In 2014, we were introduced to Debbie, a shit-talking Brooklyn teen who encounters all of the hardships of 42^nd Street in 1981: drug addiction, Satanists, prostitution, and of course, exactly six face-eating rats. Last year we looked at Crazy Mary, and learned that security was extremely lax at psychiatric hospitals in the 1970s.

We were also introduced to the do-gooding Bentons, a couple who runs a home for wayward girls in upstate New York with a sometimes-delusional level of optimism (when Debbie’s pimp shows up to murder them, they are delighted that they will soon be held in the embrace of their Lord, Jesus Christ).

The Plot: …So I am slightly disappointed to report that Valarie promises an exposé on an very niche premise (teenage runaways exploited by massage parlors) and ends up being kind of phoned-in.

Told in the first person, Valarie does not bother to go into her whole backstory: she’s a teenage runaway and heroin addict who is working as an independent prostitute on 8^th Avenue’s frigid Minnesota Strip. Her only concerns are picking up someone that will pay her enough to score more dope and avoiding perverts:

Sometimes these perverts would kill a prostitute and cut her up into little pieces and stuff the pieces into the garbage or flush them down the toilet. They seemed to feel they were doing everyone a favor to kill a prostitute!

Valarie encounters fellow hookers Sheila (who is distraught that her daughter has been taken away by Child Welfare) and Corliss (who threatens to stab Valarie when she barfs all over her preferred corner).

The night goes from bad to worse when Sheila is beaten up by one of the perverts, and both she and Valarie are picked up by an undercover detective and tossed in jail.

And that is the one aspect of the book that genuinely stands out: literally every cop and prison guard depicted is irredeemably corrupt. In a surprisingly protracted scene, the jail matron ignores Valarie’s pleas for help when Sheila hangs herself in her cell. When the arresting officers scramble to cover their own asses and Valarie threatens to expose their negligence, they first rough her up, then threaten to plant drugs on her.

They finally decide to get Valarie out of the way by releasing her into the custody of “Uncle” Harvey, the proprietor of the Blue Lagoon massage parlor, ensuring her silence.

But the cops have double crossed Harvey as well, as he learns that Valarie is an addict, totally unable to function without a fix. Now stuck with her, he reluctantly gives her enough heroin to function, and initiates her into her new job, alongside Cindy, Martha and Candi. Candi is also an addict, and through her Valarie learns that Martha is dealing at a mark-up from the prices on the street.

The details of exactly what goes on in the massage rooms is left vague, although Valarie soon discovers that Harvey uses hidden cameras to record the action and make a profit on the side:

“Valarie, Harvey’s a smart dude. He’s got two big reasons for making those video tapes. First, if some guy tries to give him a bad time, he can use that tape to blackmail the guy. But more than that, he takes these tapes and sells them to the porno shops on Forty-second street.”

“That’s illegal!” I shouted. “I didn’t agree to appear in any porno films for a bunch of perverts to watch.”

Valarie spends her days preoccupied with the constant drama between the other girls and their regular clients, scoring drugs and shooting up, and towing the line with Harvey, who employs a low-IQ goon named Angelo to keep both customers and employees in line.

But it’s winter, business is slow, and Harvey decides to send Valarie out front to “Look alluring, and invite men inside.”

This is how Valarie meets Jennifer, a tough cookie who immediately makes Valarie for a junkie and informs her “What you need is Jesus Christ!”

Accompanying Jennifer is “Ma B.” who tells Valarie about the Walter Hoving Home in Garrison, NY where she and her husband help get teenagers off of the streets and off drugs. Jennifer explains that through Ma B.’s help (and a little book called Patti) she was able to kick her own habit and dedicate her life to Jesus.

Harvey chases Jennifer and Ma B. off, but Valarie starts to wonder if there may be hope for herself after all.

But first more complications, as Valarie deals with the twin crises of running afoul of Martha after stealing one of her regulars, and then buying drugs from a very crooked undercover cop.

Martha suspiciously wants to bury the hatchet soon afterwards, begging Valarie to go to the drug store to pick up her Valium prescription. She’ll even let Valarie wear her luxurious new winter coat to make the trip!

“Valarie, this coat of mine is one hundred percent nylon on the outer shell and one hundred percent nylon on the inner shell. And the insulation is eighty percent duck down and twenty percent waterfowl feathers. I mean, it’s a fantastic coat!”

Against her better judgement, Valarie is enticed into running the errand, but on the way up to 48^th street finds a packet of heroin in an inner pocket. Martha set her up! Dodging the undercover cops who have been following her, she trashes the drugs and avoids arrest, but is ready to unleash her fury on Martha for the double-cross.

Harvey seems like he’s had enough of this and gives Valarie a switchblade, suggesting that MURDER IS THE ONLY SOLUTION:

“I think she set you up this morning,” he said. “I don’t know why, but I think she did. If I were you, I’d kill her!”

By this time Martha has split, but Harvey assures her “We’ll worry about Martha later. I can put out a contract on her.”

Harvey has a VIP client on the premises and sends Valarie in to service him. In an extremely convoluted series of events, he turns out to be one of Harvey’s mafia connections and when his expensive watch goes missing, Harvey gets his fingers broken and everyone is in danger of being murdered unless it is promptly returned. Valarie follows Martha’s lead and splits this bad scene, first ripping off some other junkies on the west side, then jumping a subway turnstile and heading downtown.

On Houston Street, Valarie finds that the hookers do things differently downtown, and ends up in a John’s car headed for the East River. She panics and jumps out at a red light, and then, like The Warriors, realizes that once she’s off her home turf she might as well be in a foreign country:

When I looked around, I saw burned out tenements. Then I knew where I was- in the middle of the Lower East Side!

In this part of the city everybody looked dangerous, and probably was. The Lower East side was a hellhole- junkies, muggers, rapists, murderers. I had to get out of there!

As in previous volumes, Benton wraps up the heroine’s story in just a few pages. Valarie stumbles into a storefront mission and meet Patti, who is in fact Patti, who gets her upstate to the Walter Hoving Home, where she immediately kicks heroin (although at least time it is noted that “Patti told me it didn’t always happen that way. Sometimes the girls went through kicking cold turkey.”)

The final paragraphs switch to the present tense and Valarie announces that she has enrolled in Evangel College in Missouri and after she graduates she is going to work alongside Ma B., Jennifer and Patti, and in an unexpectedly sweet note adds that her special mission is to find Cindy, Candi and Martha and help them get off the street.

So although lacking exactly six face-eating rats, Valarie does have an unexpectedly explicit Anti-Cop message, which is very unusual for this genre.

Language Department: Benton seems to have developed a liking for the phrase “mean and ornery” which he repeats a number of times, describing: 1. Pimps 2. Other girls at the massage parlor 3. Cindy and Martha specifically

Art Department: It’s a little hard to tell in the thumbnail, but the later books in the series have exceptionally nice cover art, capturing the glamorous-sleazy settings.