The streets became grimier and more visibly vice-ridden as they unwound into Over The Rhine. At the corner of 14th I stopped at a red light. This was the eaten-out heart of that blighted neighborhood. Veiled transactions took place in dilapidated doorways and on empty lots. Standing on the corner, to my right, was a woman who would have grabbed my attention anywhere, and she was looking straight at me. I wondered what a beautiful white woman was doing in that neighborhood at one o’clock in the morning. As I turned away it finally dawned on me that she was a prostitute. I looked over again. She was smiling and nodding her head in an inviting manner. Time slowed down. Her eyes sparkled. The light turned green. I leaned over and flipped the lock to the passenger door.
“Hi honey.” She climbed in, and any concerns that she might have been a transvestite were instantly dispelled. I could scarcely believe my eyes... my nerve... my luck. She was slender but potentially voluptuous. Her dark hair was piled up. She wore faded jeans and a colorful horizontally striped blouse that was cut low, exposing part of a tattoo above her right breast. Around her neck hung a large cross. Face powder covered the rougher parts of her complexion. I stared into her eyes. She wanted to know what I was looking at.
She seemed to expect me to open the negotiating. I asked her how much she wanted.
“Seventy-five bucks,” she said without much conviction, seemingly expecting me to talk her down. But I wasn’t feeling too talkative. I said that would be fine. It was unsettling to consider how much less she might have settled for.
“What are you into?” she asked.
“My tastes are very simple,” I said. I didn’t tell her that I had never been with a hooker before. Such was the shakiness of my stunted utterances that I was afraid she might think me a dangerously repressed deviant. But she didn’t appear to make anything of it.
She said she had a place that we could go to. I suggested we head back to my motel room. That was fine with her. We were already headed that way, although I was plunged into such a state of distraction that I lost all sense of direction. She didn’t have much of a clue either.
I told her I didn’t have any prophylactics.
“We should get some,” she said in a rusty whine, which sounded both tired and alert, jaded and innocent.
Five minutes ago I had been driving back to the motel in a disenchanted mood, a moment later a beautiful woman was sitting beside me. Suddenly we were thrust together in the night. There was a conspiratorial aspect and an element of trust was involved. An arrangement had been made. Her name was Sylvia. She hailed from Lexington Kentucky. She was twenty-four.
“That’s right,” she said, “a single mom.”
Once over the bridge and in Kentucky again the lights of a White Castle stand could be seen shining from a few blocks away, and after driving the wrong way down several one-way streets we made it into the drive-through lane. She tried to order a Number One meal but the employee on the other end of the intercom couldn’t decipher our requests. We drove up to the window where the order was taken in person by an ashen-faced old woman.
“So what do you do?” said Sylvia. “What’s your profession?”
Thankfully we were interrupted by the server’s muddled instructions.
“Shit, I’m wore out now,” said Sylvia at the end of a complicated exchange during which the word “coke” had to be repeated four times.
While we were waiting for the order I stared at her.
“Hello,” she said, apprehending my gaze and smiling sweetly.
“You have a great smile,” I said.
“Thank you,” she said. “It helps.”
She started singing as she delved into the bag. “Best White Castle I’ve ever eaten,” she said after a couple of bites. “It’s wonderful right now... I probably won’t think that tomorrow.”
“Prophylactics,” she sang out as we drove off. “Now where the fuck is the store?”
There was a drive-through liquor store a few blocks away, Big Daddy’s.
“You’ve got it babe.”
“Uh-oh, another one way street,” I said, backing out.
“That didn’t stop us before,” she said, and I erupted in tension-releasing laughter.
“Can I get a little half-pint?” she said. “Something dark, not clear.”
“Whiskey?”
“Yes... Kessler. Just get something that’s cheap,” she said, requesting the smallest bottle of rotgut. It was beginning to distress me that someone of such singular charm and beauty had to scuffle when so many led graceless complacent existences.
“Do liquor stores stay open this late here? In Lexington at 12.01 it’s over.”
“Lexington seems kind of repressed,” I remarked. “There isn’t much going on there.”
She groaned in assent: “Nothing... absolutely nothing.”
I ordered a half-pint of Kessler’s and a pack of condoms.
“Alrighty,’ she said as we drove away, “let’s do it.”
“Is Travel Lodge pretty nice?”
“Not particularly.”
The motel was a few blocks away. I took care to enter through a side door, avoiding the night clerk. I opened doors for her. I had seldom known graciousness to flow out of me with such ease. As soon as we entered the room she wanted to get the distasteful matter of payment out of the way so that we could relax and enjoy ourselves. Money changed hands. I had the exact sum of $75.00 in my wallet.
“You’ve cleaned me out,” I said as I lay down on the bed.
“Aren’t you going to take your shoes off?” she said.
I turned on the television. Some election coverage was screening. She couldn’t be bothered to vote; she was fed up with the government. She lay down beside me and I reached out to touch her prematurely sagging breasts.
“How often are you with a woman who’ll let you do anything you like to her?” she said.
“Actually,” I said, “quite often.”
She stood at the end of the bed and encouraged me to breathe deeply. She made the appropriate gestures with her arms... breathe in, breathe out... and excused herself to brush the White Castle taste from her teeth.
As she emerged from the bathroom she was singing: “An old R&B song... by Shirley Murdock.” I had never heard of it.
She wanted to take a shower. She said it would “make it nicer,” and suggested, with a mixture of kindness and mockery, that while she was gone I should “create a mood.”
I could hear her singing in the shower and it gladdened me that she could relax in my presence even if I couldn’t do the same thing.
She emerged with her hair down and a towel around her. “I probably won’t be able to get it up,” I said as she lay down beside me and and pulled out my prick.
She began lazily sucking on it and I relaxed at once. Then she picked up the tempo and started making a lot of unnecessary noise.
“Do it slowly,” I said, “soothe me.”
I formed the impression that she was probably mentally reliving some pleasant event from her past that had nothing to do with sex. But at least she was making the effort. That, in its way, was affecting and deserving of reciprocation. To my surprise, I found myself with something resembling an erection: enough of one that she was able to slip a rubber over it.
“I’ll do you from behind,” I said.
She bent over the edge of the bed, exposing a skinny white ass. I positioned my knob at the portal and, with her help, stuffed it in. I got a few good thrusts in before her exaggerated moaning deadened any incipient ardor. It felt as if I were thrusting at nothing. Her absence was almost palpable. Her body felt weightless, as if the substance had fled elsewhere. I told her not to bother faking it.
“I’m not,” she said unconvincingly, “it’s erotic.”
“How many other men have you been with tonight?” I asked, giving it another weak thrust.
“One other guy... a chiropractor... in his fifties... fifty dollars... straight sex.” Her hair fanned out wildly across the synthetic bedspread.
“When was the last time you had an orgasm?” I wondered aloud.
“A month ago,” she said. “Just because you have sex doesn’t mean you come.”
“I know,” I said, wilting in earnest.
She reached down and offered some halfhearted encouragement and I lost it to a degree that rendered any further squirming futile. We collapsed into laughter. I removed the condom from my limp knob, stretched it several feet and launched it across the room.
“I doubt I’ll come,” I said.
“You said you wouldn’t be able to get it up,” she said, suggesting that maybe I’d already achieved enough for one night.
I was pleased that she felt comfortable enough around me to exhibit the full range of her apathy. I asked about the proclivities of other men. “You’d be amazed by how many men are into being dominated,” she said. “Then there are the other kind, the ones who like to dominate... I don’t like that.”
“I’ll bet that’s the easiest seventy-five dollars you ever made,” I said as she got up..
She agreed that it probably had been. “It’s been a pleasure,” she said, “it really has.” She claimed that she had to be somewhere at two-thirty. She had an appointment to watch another girl being fucked by a man who was so fastidious that he wore condoms on his fingers.
She couldn’t find her cigarette lighter and became more distracted about it than a missing 25-cent lighter seemed to warrant. After combing the room for about a minute she gave up the search. I was glad that it couldn’t be found. It would make a good souvenir. As we walked out I peered into the bathroom. My pomade jar was open.
“Did you use my pomade?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she answered with guilty sweetness, “just a little bit.”
As we walked down the corridor she defiantly waved her half-pint of whisky at the ceiling surveillance camera.
We got into the car and drove off. I remembered my camera and asked if she would mind if I took her photograph. She didn’t mind at all. I wanted to get a shot of her standing as she was when I first laid eyes on her. I stopped the car and we got out. She stood in front of a wall on a quiet street. A police car cruised up behind us. “Don’t worry about them,” she said as they drove by slowly. Once again she flashed that winsome smile.
“Are you going to show them to your friends back home?” she kidded me: “This is the whore I fucked in Cincinnati.”
“D’you live downtown?”
“Right down there, close by where you saw me.”
We drove along fourth street to Covington and from there across the bridge into downtown Cincinnati. I told her where I had come from that day, that I had driven from the northeast to southwest corners of Ohio.
“Ohio’s a big state,” she said. “There’s really no way around Ohio. You have to go through it. You came a long way, baby.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s L.A. like?” she asked. “I’m curious.”
“Well,” I said, “the city is a place unto itself.”
“That’s what I hear,’ she said. “What are the people like, are they fucking assholes?”
“Yes,” I said, “but there are many different kinds, it’s quite diverse.”
“Cincinnati’s got a little of everything,” she said.
“It’s all black and white,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s true... that’s true... that’s very true... it’s either black or its white.” She pondered this. It seemed to contain fresh significance for her: “That’s very true... it’s either this or that. It’s either shit or crap. There’s not too many in-betweens.”
She complained about the company she was forced into on the street and lamented the toothlessness of other hookers. A police car loomed in the rear view mirror. “How long have you two known each other?” she said, imitating their likely overtures. She was in a hurry to make her appointment and expressed impatience with traffic, yelling at a lingering vehicle to make haste. We found Vine street. Clusters of dubious sidewalk activity were still in evidence at this late hour. Yet another police car drove behind us.
I pulled over on the corner of Fourteenth and Vine. Sylvia stuck the half-pint into the top of her pants and got out of the car.
“Thanks babe... have a good evening, baby.”
That was it. The lack of ceremony was somewhat disheartening.
Alone again. I drove back to the hotel in a state of rapt wonderment and went to bed, pressing my face into the pillow where she lay.
Cincinnati, like Rome and San Francisco, is a city of seven hills. I stood on one of them, beside Mirror Lake. It dropped onto another verdant ridge and afforded a pleasing view of far-flung rooftops and red brick below. There weren’t many other people around. I was tired but suspended in the lingering glow from the night before. The experience had brought me into contact with life, opened me up.
I had never sought out a whore or romanticized the condition of one. Once or twice I had admired one on the street but I never considered doing anything about it. I imagined it was something I might be obliged to resort to as an older man.
I stared at a tree. Its leaves were beginning to fall. Whatever blossomed in the autumn of its years? Not much, but if one had never blossomed at all, a certain moldering efflorescence might be possible, even at this belated stage.
A familiar melancholy was seeping in, one that rose up in the wake of memorable chance encounters. A fresh potency and poignancy altered my surroundings. I recognized once again that it was only when traveling, plunging into and rising out of these states of transient alienation and transcendence, that I experienced with clarity the true beauty of life.
I couldn’t picture her clearly anymore. All that remained was a beguiling blur, an insinuating essence in danger of becoming over-idealized. The features would resurface, only becoming clear again when the memory faded. Many faces had been lost forever in the void of fixation. A photograph, however, would eliminate such concerns.
I drove down Vine one last time and took a seat at the bar in Kaldi’s. A motley assortment of solitaries were gathered there. “I met Syd Barrett somewhere east of Cincinnati,” said a young fellow on the other side of the bar. Nobody picked up this thread of conversation. The girl who had accidentally set fire to her hair a few nights earlier passed by on the sidewalk.
In the light of my imminent departure the city became elegiacally serene. Workers poured out of office buildings into the soft autumn evening. Everybody appeared helpless, blameless and incorruptible. Some other whores were milling around the vacant lots on Vine and the surrounding streets. Sylvia was probably sleeping. Or maybe she was back in Lexington, picking her daughter up from the day-care center. Did she divide her time between the two cities? Who looked after the kid when she was in Cincinnati? I was beginning to ask myself a lot of stupid questions. Doubtless she had already forgotten me. I was just passing through, with a hunger for experiences that she regarded as ordinary. I couldn’t touch her life as she had touched mine. And it would all inevitably recede into dull memory.
Paintings by Louis Eilshemius
You found a hooker with a heart of brass…