C.J. Laing was born Wendy Williams in 1953. She was originally from a traditional Jewish family in New York, but moved to San Francisco when she was nineteen. “I was from New York, so I was confused in San Francisco. When you’re twenty and you’re hungry and the rent’s due, you’re really just an idealistic youth; you’re not a whore. Even though you are.”In order to support herself she did a number of dead-end jobs. “I started working North Beach, started hustling, rolling drunks. They’d come into the Nude Encounter, a massage parlour where I was working. There was ‘nude wrestling’ and ‘nude encounter’, you know, in different rooms. I don’t know if there could be actual physical contact, but they could look at you naked. Maybe there were hand-jobs – you know, look at my titties, and get a hand-job. While they were doing that, I was lifting money out of their wallets, say, a hundred bucks, I don’t know how much I could make because I was just so sloppy. I guess I didn’t have a sense of pride in my work.”