Gas and Prostitutes

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 gas prices are effecting the prostitutes or any of 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 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?) No prostitutes, though.  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 hour, then perhaps my neighborhood had breakfast-hour prostitutes. Or maybe my perceptual mechanisms are simply not entrained to notice such things.

What my perceptual mechanisms are entrained to notice are coincidences or, if you’re less “rational,” or just less afraid of being judged as a weirdo, synchronicities–a.k.a magick.

So I’m at a different bar, a different borough, a different week, 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 stumble obliquely onto the topic of magick 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–magick, that is–and she nods toward her man-friend, who is engaged in a different conversation. She says she feels that she owes me thanks for turning her on to magick, for helping her find her spiritual path, in the form of some books I lent her at another time in both of our lives. In that life, I had been very much a magickal dilettante, an intellectual dabbler; so while I’m sure she sincerely feels thankful to me, I’m ambivalent about the influence my former self had on her present spiritual journey. Blind leading the blind and all that, though I suppose she did something with it or, at least, she feels like she has.  (And hell, if she feels it, then she really has.)

She asks me, “What are you doing with that these days?”  Magick, that is.

“Hard to say.” And maybe I could say, but whatever it is is between me and the Ineffable.  It’s private, personal, and so I don’t feel like divulging for the sake of what, by her raised eyebrow, seems to be an attempt to fish for gossip.  I probably have read her intentions totally wrong, but there it is: my choice–silence.

“Are you seeing anyone?” she asks me.

“Not at the moment, no.”

And then she pulls out a plant.

“Want some pussy?” she asks mischievously. Then she hands 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 blond 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 ask.

Looking at the pussy willow in my hand, I have to smile.

“No thanks.”

“I got women. Men. Whatever you want.”

This is probably not the result my witchy friend had in mind when she handed me that pussy, but it’s a pretty funny joke.

As I’m leaving with a couple of 50 cent bananas (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 causing an effect on lesser magick.