Lesson #9: Be Open To Learning Things In Unusual Ways
Previous Sex Worker Life Lessons here
I came home from work one day to find Lynette wrapped in a blanket and smoking a large spliff. Standard Operations. The joint was passed to me for a hit, which I gladly took. She involuntarily massaged her rugose neckline. Offput by her uncharacteristically somber silence, I decided to unthaw the air a bit and start filling out the roommate dynamic a little.
“What’s up? You alright?”
She let out an annoyed but relieved sigh. Clearly she'd wanted to get this off her chest.
“Shit ain’t great. My homie’s comin’ over. You get to meet Rhee-Rhee.”
“Yeah? What’d she do?” ”
I took my second hit off her BlueBerries® and waved, indicating a finished session, and waited on her to elaborate.
“ She wanted to talk to me today about somethin’ but wouldn’t say what over the phone. ”
“Is she.....”
“Yeah. A whore, like me. ”
I opted not to press her in favor of letting this bit of theater played out. So I stepped out onto the balcony, smoked a couple of cigarettes, lazily wandered back in and did the XBOX® thing. Lynette normally liked to poke fun at me for "being such a boy" with my video games. Not a peep in that moment. Man, I thought, this MUST be serious if she's not even going out of her way to recycle her usual swipes at me.
About a quarterway back to sober, a knock finally rapped on our front door. Entered Rhee, in a bare mid riffed top and acid washed booty shorts. She couldn't have been older than 25, and had beautiful ebony skin that wrapped her features in this glow I had rarely seen in any woman ever. Just a pretty, brown eyed black woman with a sweet and sour attitude.
“Rhee, this is Jon. ”
“Hi! ‘Nette told me you were a sweetheart. Nice to meet you.”
Hookers are always so nice and cordial and polite. I assume it's probably due to the fact that they kind of have to be given their profession. If you think about it, prostitution is the purest form of customer service there is. I paused Halo® to engage with them. As she sat up, she gave Rhee a look that I will never be able to replicate as hard as I try. She yanked Rhee by the belt loops in a downward and lurching motion, essentially exposing her entire lower abdomen and mons pubis. She began feeling her belly.
I wasn’t sure if she was about to beat the shit out of her or start eating her pussy, but either way my fascination had piqued.
“PLEASE tell me you ain’t about to tell me what you about to tell me.”
Rhee had "hand caught in the cookie jar" tattooed on her lower lip and the bridge of her nose. Lynette repeated her line.
Rhee finally eeked out hers.
“I’m late.”
“COME OOOOOO-ON, RHEE. COME OOOOOO-ON. ”
Listening to a prostitute lecture a colleague on the importance of keeping on top of her birth control game is easily in the Top 10 weirdest fly on the wall moments I think have ever had. Isabel's stoner personality was pretty catatonic, so the whole thing just sounded like yelling in slow motion. Eventually Rhee had felt she was properly admonished, so she cut to the chase and asked to borrow a couple hundred bucks for an abortion.
This then lead her down another slo-mo shoutfest. They were threesome partners, which always paid more, and with her "out of commission", Lynette was pretty pissed off that her orgy slots were all of a sudden empty. Never in my life had I considered the loss and opportunity costs of terminating a pregnancy.
The whole time I am listening to this go down, I just drooped my upper lip and nodded here and there. I was miles away from Sunday School and Youth Group Bible Studies of yesteryear, stuck on a couch getting a free lesson in Prostitute Politics 101.