Drinking a ginger ale at an old-man bar with my friend Z, he says:
“I’m walking through the neighborhood the other night, and there are a bunch of cops hanging out across the street from a nightclub. And I overhear one of the shorter cops standing in the middle of the group say, ‘You know, gas prices are really causing an effect on the prostitutes.’ I wanted to stop and say, ‘Tell me more!’ but I just kept on walking.”
No one ever thinks about that: how are gas prices effecting the prostitutes? or the merchants of black-market wares, be they flesh, chemicals, or unauthorized services…
I hadn’t myself even been cognizant of the presence of prostitutes in the neighborhood until a few weeks ago. I’d been told by a long-time resident of the area when I moved in: “It’s a shit-hole. Lots of prostitutes.”
The only thing I had seen, however, was a ridiculously-named strip club that I had to walk by on my way to the grocery store. (What strip club doesn’t have a ridiculous name, though?) No prostitutes, though. And I tend to get home late (1am) and do laundry much later (3am) when there’s laundry to do. If I hadn’t seen any of these property-devaluing paramours for hire at that time, then maybe they were breakfast-hour prostitutes. Or my perceptual mechanisms are simply not entrained to notice such things.
What my perceptual mechanisms are entrained to are coincidence or, if you’re less “rational” or just less afraid of being judged as a weirdo, synchronicity–or magic.
And so I’m at a different bar, a different borough, and I run into an old friend I haven’t seen in quite a while. She’s with her very tall, newish boyfriend, a fairly successful performer who believes in her greatly and is helping her to finally manifest some of her own artistic dreams. We’re catching up a little bit and she mentions that my core feels a lot stronger than the last time she saw me. Perhaps at one time I might have thought I knew what that meant, and though I’m certainly happy to get compliments, I couldn’t begin to tell you these days what she was on about. Very soon after, we’ve stumbled obliquely onto the topic of magik in the form of a thank you. See, she’s a witchy kind of woman and she’s telling me that it’s working pretty well for her (making a nod to the man-friend who is now engaged in a different conversation). She says she feels that she owes me thanks for turning her on to magik in the form of some books I lent her at another time in both of our lives. In that life, I had been a magickal dilettante, an intellectual dabbler, so while I’m sure she sincerely feels thankful to me, I’m ambivalent about the my former self’s influence upon her present spiritual path. Blind leading the blind and all that, though I suppose she did something with it or, at least she feels like she has.
She asks me, “What are you doing with that these days?”
“Hard to say.” And maybe I could say, but whatever it is is between me and the Ineffable. It’s private, personal, and so not about be divulged for the sake of what, by her raised eyebrow, would amount to fishing for gossip.
“Are you seeing anyone?” she asks me.
“Not at the moment, no.”
And then she pulls out a plant.
“Want some pussy?” she asks mischevously, handing me a stick of pussy willow.
Well, why not.
Two blocks away from my house, and four hours later, I’m at the late-night deli, squeezing some mangos of dubious quality, hoping to find one worth purchasing at $1.29 a pop. (The gas prices are really having an effect on the mangos). I’ve got the pussy willow stalk in my free hand as I look them over. I hear a woman’s voice, sensual in an over-rehearsed way.
“I like your plant.”
“Thanks,” I say, turning to look in the direction of the voice. And there, leaned up against the side counter, next to the juice cooler, up against the window looking out on the street, is a woman with bleach blonde hair and a boustier. She’s very heavy set and wearing fishnets and black panties, neither of which is flattering. Standing next to her, still looking out the window is a man with a fedora, out of context with the flannel shirt and jeans he wears.
I turn back to my mangos. So these are the prostitutes in my neighborhood. Huh.
“You wanna date?” I hear her say.
Looking at the pussy willow in my hand, I have to laugh inwardly.
“No thanks.”
“I got women. Men. Whatever you want.”
Probably not what that witchy friend of mine had in mind when she handed me that plant, but a pretty funny joke.
As I’m leaving with a couple of 50 centbananas (the mangos were a wash), I hear the prostitute whining at the deli attendant about letting her use the employee bathroom and he’s telling her, no, no, no, please leave now.
Gas prices are really hcausing an effect on lesser magick.
Posted in Mundane Poetics, everyday forteana, everyday life, late night, magick | No Comments »
