There's a hooker who works on the corner in front of my building sometimes. When I first moved in a little over a year ago, a couple of my guy friends drove up to visit me from out of town. As we were headed into the lobby after spending the night at a bar, she asked why we didn't have any women with us. "Ain't no one gettin' laid if you go up there by yourselves," she half-shouted after us. She sounded almost angry. She seemed insulted that we hadn't offered her to join us.
She hasn't said a word to me since that night. I don't see her very often, but every few weeks she's out on the corner again, in short pants and high heels, walking with a friend or staring anxiously down the street. I live on the third floor with a sliding glass door and balcony that looks out to sidewalk below. I leave my blinds open at night until right before I go to bed because I like the city lights and the way the buildings tuck away into shadows in between. I see her down there some nights, and I'll watch her for a minute, forgetting that she can look back up and see me in the wide open glass door just as easily. She never looks back up.
I've seen her leaning into a car that's pulled up to the curb. Sometimes she gets in, other times the car drives away and leaves her shifting her weight from heel to heel. She's not the only hooker that works my neighborhood. Sometimes she's not around for weeks at a time, but new girls in sequined strips and plastic heels take her place. One night I was walking home from work after staying too late in the office and saw a man sitting in a parked car. His right arm was extended over the passenger seat and it looked like he was staring at the steering wheel. When I got closer I saw a woman's head pressed into his lap, just barely moving.
He looked at me and I immediately felt like I was trespassing. I turned away, staring down at my shoes. I didn't look back.
You pay the prostitute to leave at the end. I used to work with someone who told me that, and it seemed so perfectly opaque to me that I thought it must have been a lie. I was still young and thought that there was some great secret to sex. It seemed like there was some private language to finding a partner. I could see it happening all around me but I didn't understand the words.
When I had sex for the first time, I was twenty-three. It was a delicious anti-climax. It was like a good shit crossed with an indulgent soak in a hot tub. I had romanticized things so hopelessly up until that point, I hadn't been able to discover how stupidly easy it is to find someone to have sex with. I thought there would be some elemental signpost drawing me to my missing half then something vaguely mystical would happen, like inadvertent levitation. I thought sex lay buried in some glyphic tomb of intimacy.
But no, it was just a body function in the end, an empty vessel. It could be filled, but alone it was an empty serving plate covered over in garnishes. Once I got my sex legs beneath me I found out how strangely awful it can be to wake up with someone you don't want, to have their taste in your mouth, and their smell around your body. Sex was a cheap parlor trick when I didn't care about the person on the other side of the bed. As good as it was at the height, the drop back down to the morning after seemed to last so much longer.
When I see the hooker on my corner, she seems invincible. She walks with her back straight, she struts, she speaks loudly, yells at passersby when moved to do so. She seems strong and unbridled to me. She would have to be to spend so many nights being told to leave, over and over again. Just for a little money.
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Sex Machine: If You Can Get Me Hard I'll Show You A Good Time
Date Machine: Tool Academy, or Watching TV with Your Girlfriend
Sex Machine: Getting Laid
Love Machine: I Was a Six Year-Old Virgin, or Is There A Happy Ending?
Date Machine: Getting Pierced on a Date
Love Machine: Hitting Snooze on the Morning After
Date Machine: Let Me Seduce You With The Cardigans
Date Machine: I'm Too Sexy For Your Blog
Love Machine: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do, or Leaving Home
Date Machine: Super Macho Man Slumber Party
Sex Machine: Having Sex in Your Parents' House During the Holidays
Date Night: Trying to Behave on a Boring Coffee Date
Sex Machine: Sex with Older Women, or How I Would Make Love to Gloria Swanson
Love Machine: Using Your Words, or I Like Pap
Date Machine: Drunk Emailing with J, or How To Fail at Seduction
Sex Machine: Listening to the Neighbors Have Sex
Date Night: In Which I Try To Believe In Aliens
Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines Redux
Love Machine: Loyal as a Dog