Selected Short Stories Featuring Cry Wolf Page 10

further disappointing that ornery old bastard turns my knees to jam.

  But I think it’s high past time I popped open a cold one, turned on whatever late night show might be on and enjoyed a beer in space.

  Table of Contents

  S'Work

  First of all, I’m not a pervert. I mean, I’ve got my issues, with women more so. I like them- I love them- but somewhere between my awkwardness and my lazy eye and one leg an inch shorter than the other, they don’t love me. Mostly they don’t even look at me, and I don’t blame them. Not a bit. I look like an alley rapist; I wouldn’t talk to me, either.

  I have guy friends, or acquaintances and coworkers, maybe, enough so I don’t feel I’m lacking. But I’ve never been able to keep a girl friend around. I don’t know, there’s always that Harry Met Sally moment, where one of us wants to take it further, and sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t, but eventually the women always get tired of me, bored with my strangeness or bored with my boredom.

  I have lots of “friends” who are strippers, and a bad economy hits them harder than it does most. Working at the dry cleaners, or working at the local deli, it’s not like they can cut your wages 80% just because there’s a recession, but strippers, strippers rely on the kindness of strangers- or at least that mix of desperation and excitement that keeps men chasing a woman that doesn’t want to get caught.

  But the lousy economy is making everybody desperate. The regulars, worried they’re next in line for a pink slip, decide they can’t afford to drop a hundred bucks a week on girls, so they stay home and spend a fraction of that on internet porn. Without the regulars, competition in the clubs increases; the owners don’t give a squirt, so they push the girls to get closer, maybe decide the state law against contact dances ain’t as concrete as it used to be, pushing their boundaries that little bit further. But there still ain’t enough money to go around. Something’s gotta give. Some girls quit in these circumstances, find some other job, others ask if it's so bad to take that next step, from letting a customer see to letting them touch, or if letting them touch wasn’t so bad how bad could it be to do more.

  Now, don’t get me wrong, 'cause sex work is the most noble profession I know. Forget cops, firemen, soldiers, even: noble, sure, but they risk and potentially sacrifice for the good of society, and they’re respected and compensated for it. Sex workers by contrast are stigmatized, and often live under the constant threat of violence, from their pimps, from their johns, from an excitable vice cop.

  I ain’t taking anything away from cops- except maybe that they trend towards fascism and self-interest- but cops got about a 1 in 10,000 chance of dying in the line of duty in any given year; sex workers have a 100% chance of getting screwed on any given night. Doing something for somebody else when it costs you, and I mean really costs you, now that’s noble. I’m no prize, but there’s far worse than me in the world, and sex workers fill a void there.

  And it’s not just the sex, though the sex is a part of it. I don’t know why we pretend sex isn’t something you need. Maybe it isn’t like food, or water or air, that you’ll shrivel up and die without it, but in a way, maybe spiritual, you do. Life without sex is only barely living. I don’t mean to sound like a governor or nothing, but sex is only a part; there’s something to that crap about intimacy, closeness. Some of the working girls I’ve picked up have been dumb as a sidewalk, and a few made me feel like a fucking moron, but there’s something in warm, soft skin, it’s primal and necessary, and makes you feel like a damn person more than anything else I know.

  I’m not naïve. I understand a lot of sex workers don’t do it cause they like it, because on career day they ran straight for the prostitution booth cause that’s what they’d always wanted to be from little girls. And some are underaged, or illegals forced into it from Europe or wherever. But that’s what prohibition does: it pushes an industry into the hands of criminals.

  But I’m getting too far from the point; I don’t get to talk to many people, really talk, people who listen, not just wait for a chance to tell me how they would have done it different, or to segue into a better story they could tell me about their day. I know a girl; well, know is relative, I know, and I don’t mean biblical, because she’s not that kind of girl, not yet, anyway. The name I know her by, it probably isn’t even hers, but she has me call her Jasmine, and it’s from a Disney movie I don’t mind admitting I’ve watched more than once, and it feels a little romantic even.

  She’s young, barely twenty-one- a baby, really- young enough she makes me feel older than I am, but I think that’s part of her charm, too; she makes me feel old, but in that same moment, she makes me feel like it doesn’t matter, like there’s enough interesting about me, that I’m storied and worldly enough that a girl like her could forget about the rest.

  But because she’s young, she’s got no seniority. She can’t get the good shifts, ends up working day shifts in empty clubs. Even when she gets nights she’s taking home less than twenty bucks a night, half of what a cab would cost her, so she’s been doing a lot more walking and taking the bus.

  That’s how I know half of what I know. It was after one of her shifts, she was closing out on a Wednesday, and I knew she was down about the shift because Wednesdays are always bad, and I’d brought her a present, some lace-up boots- I like boots, especially the way they look on her. And I had no place in particular to go, another six hours before my shift, and I didn’t feel like sleeping, so I was just walking when I noticed those boots, bright red, walking away under an unassuming trench coat.

  I called out to her, and ran over to her, and I realized she was tense, so I stopped further back, not wanting to scare her. I said it wasn’t safe, a pretty young girl unescorted this time of night, that I’d walk with her if she wanted, cause better the creep she knew than the one she didn’t. She laughed, a young, light laugh, and said I wasn’t creepy, I’d just startled her. I told her it was awful sweet of her to say, but that I wouldn’t mind at all if she wanted to walk with her pepper spray out anyway. She didn’t.

  We walked, and she told me things were tight. This was the first month she’d missed her rent since she started dancing. At first I thought it might be a grift, like how so many strippers are doing it to get through school that all college educated women would have to be former strippers for it to be true, but then she sniffled, and I saw light glint off her cheek, and I realized she’d never used lines on me, not once. I realized right then why I’d become one of her regulars. There was a diner still open just up the block, and I offered to buy her some coffee or something to help warm her up.

  Over a cup of cocoa she told me she was worried. She’d been stretching her own food budget thin, but now her dog, too, wasn’t getting enough to eat. She wasn’t against dancing at all, but if she couldn’t make a living at it she wanted out. But she had zero marketable skills in an already competitive job market and she knew it. And one of her friends, who wasn’t as pretty as her, she was still making money with some side work.

  When she tried to explain “side work” her lips trembled, and she got all teary eyed, and I knew right then what she meant and that Jasmine didn’t want to do that, and I mean in a gut revulsion way, not just the way that nobody ever really wants to go to work.

  That’s the thing about sex work, it ain’t for everybody. If you can get over the hang-ups, can live with the inequities and bullshit, the stigma, it can be one of the noblest professions in the world. But it can also be soul crushing, trading pieces of yourself to a parade of rapists for pennies on the dollar. Depended on the kind of animal you were, and in that forest it was plain as day she was just a scared little bunny rabbit.

  She didn’t live very far from the café, and when we got there for a moment she thought about asking me up; I’m not dumb enough to think she wanted me for herself, not even for my sympathy, but I think she figured I was already a customer, and if she was going to transition to a different business, why not start with an existing customer, some
one she was as comfortable with as she was likely to be?

  She touched my shoulder, and it was the first time I’d seen her awkward, for a moment caught between herself and her stage persona, struggling to find some third way while remaining seductive, but keeping a distance to keep it professional. I reacted by instinct, snapped forward like a snake, kissed her forehead, then took a step back, turned to go. “See you, uh, your next day’s Tuesday, right?” She nodded, blushing, but without smiling; her whole body shrunk inwards, head bowed, arms folded in, ashamed at what she’d been considering a moment ago. She whispered a timid goodnight, and went inside.

  I walked around another hour, without really having anywhere specific I was going, or anything specific I was thinking, and before I realized it I was standing in front of my ATM, and I’d come to a decision. I emptied my account, put it all in an envelope. It was every dime I had in the world, and I wished I had a credit card to get an advance to give her more. I slipped it under the door.

  I wrote a note, too, and I’ll try to paraphrase. “Don’t think I’m telling you what to do, or that this comes with strings attached, but you should get out. You’d make an excellent