Old Fogey

Just now, 7:30 PM on a Sunday, I'm driving from my Darling's back to my studio, all on little, rural-seeming Brunns Road, I haven't gone more than a couple of hundred feet, and a young girl, uh, woman, just as I come abreast of her, sticks her hand out, waving for me to stop. I do. What do you want,? says SybaRight. "Could you give me a ride?" she asks. She's thin. She has a pretty face with flesh in the female areas of it: oriental of some flavor. Where are you going? "Oh, just down the road."

I open the door. She gets in. I'm giving you a ride, I say, so that no one else does. Don't you know that it's dangerous to ask rides of strangers?

She smiles sweetly. I'm only going down the block, I add. Where do you want to be let out? Hammock Road? Are you going to the Circle K? "That would be nice," she says.

Then suddenly she indicates a local side road going into one of the developments. "Here," she says. "This will be fine." We're still a few hundred yards from Hammock Road, not even yet to my park where I have my studio, but I stop. I tap her on the shoulder. Be careful, I admonish her. She has flinched a little bit. She smiles somewhat less sweetly. She gets out, crosses the street, and immediately flags the car going into the opposite direction: a couple of young men its occupants.

That car stops. She gets in. And off she goes: flat north instead of south.

Now I presume that she had seen the car turn onto Brunns Road, judged the riders to be male: maybe a little bit hornier, a little bit less fatherly, than this dud had turned out to be. No wonder she flinched from my advice if she was rushing to solicit a better prospect.

Looked to me by then like she was a road-whore: a possibility I'd considered in the first place but hadn't yet judged probable.

How long was she going to keep that sweet face? Unmarked? Unscarred?

How long would she keep that slender figure? straight up and down like a boy? This gal had more flesh in her cheeks than in her tits or her ass.

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Reminds me of the whore in Fear of Flying who kept gaining weight and couldn't figure out why: she dieted so severely: until finally some advisor suggested that she keep track, write down, every single thing that she puts in her mouth all day long.

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The first time a girl ever waved at me like that—got the same dialogue from me, by the way—was back in the 1970s when I was driving from Hempstead to Long Beach: along Long Beach Road.

I told her to be careful. She asked me if I liked to party.

No, not much, I answered. And I don't have any dope: I don't use it.

Still, she stayed in the car with me till we were almost crossing Sunrise Highway. Maybe she'd find more party people there.

Or by "party" did she just mean get a blow job while driving?

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What happens to these girls? How many of them are there?

How many of our mothers and sisters and daughters are whores?

I presume a good number of them become mothers themselves: don't get cut up, survive somehow.

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I'm a little bit better at recognizing road whores when I'm in the Apple, but I haven't been in NYC now in decades. In NY the road whores tend to hang more on particular corners: especially in certain neighborhoods. And they're not coy: don't waste time waiting for the john to initiate.

One night—could have been my very last time in the Apple—1986 maybe, down on West Street, underneath the Henry Hudson, I'm turning left, oh, onto 12^th Street maybe, West Village somewhere, and a tall, good looking redhead, rushes the car like she's in trouble. I stop. Crack the window. Not much: I think it was coolish: night time, toward autumn maybe. She sticks her face up to the opening, smiles winningly, and asks me in a sweet innocent-enough-seeming voice how I'd like a nice blow job.

No thanks, I answer. She pouts. Seems sincerely disappointed. "Oh," she complains, "why not?"

I don't got no money, I explained. That lost her interest. Swiftly.

Actually, there was plenty more I'd have like to say to her. But I understood that she was working, that time counted. She may also have been under close supervision by a pimp ...

So I merely fantasized the rest of the conversation as I rode the tunnel, on my way back to New Jersey where I was crashing on a friend's "farm": in his wreck of a travel trailer: writing my novel. Yes, I would have liked to have said, especially if you'll sit on my face while you do it. Uh, provided you can convince me you're clean.

Maybe I should have narrated my novel to her. Maybe she'd give me a freebie—on scholarship.

Yeah, and maybe I'd wind up with my face cut wide open with a razor blade.

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Shaish. Here we are: dangerous creatures: large, meat-eaters, wearing camouflage ... Sex requires vulnerability: especially for the female, but for the male as well. One is generally on top of the other. Even standing, or both seated, you have the other's genitals at your mercy.

No wonder some cultures have insisted on arranging marriages.