Hella Nation - Evan Wright [34]
“Having a boyfriend must be tough.”
“My boyfriend says he can’t trust me, because I make my living touching people.” She adds, “He always brings up my job when he makes a mistake.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“Cheats on me.”
Sarah looks incredibly sad, and I am sorry to be sitting with her, carrying on a lying conversation in order to elicit something personal from her. I tell her it’s time to clock out.
She clamps her hand on me. I look around the half-empty club. There are few prospects for Sarah tonight. I may be her only chance for a good tip.
“My boyfriend says his cheating is a Clinton thing.”
“Clinton?”
Her armored finger crosses a boundary. Sarah places her hand in a position that in Sergeant Veliz’s book would probably constitute lewd conduct. She looks directly into my eyes.
“A Clinton thing. My boyfriend says some sex isn’t cheating. Not even if someone gives you a blow job. What do you think?”
In 1932, Cressey saw the modern city fragmenting into “a mosaic of contradictory moral worlds.” He saw a future in which city dwellers, fundamentally detached from one another, move among these contradictory worlds, forming temporary alliances of mutual exploitation according to their needs.
The taxi-dance halls of today, which appear to be little more than seedy anachronisms, may in fact be the realization of that future—not substitutes for normal social life, but what is normal today. Isn’t the bartering of money for cheap fantasy what L.A. is all about?
I HAVE MY THIRD DATE with Priscilla. I show up at her bungalow apartment on a Sunday afternoon.
“Oh God,” she says, opening the door. “I totally forgot to call you. I have to go in to work in ten minutes. Come in anyway.”
There’s a computer on the kitchen table. Science textbooks are jumbled beside it. She boils water in a frying pan on the stove and makes me a cup of instant coffee.
“Sorry I don’t have any milk.” She stands at the mirror. Her hair is pinned up. She removes the pins and combs it out. “I always wear my hair down. I don’t make my dance card if I wear it in a bun,” she says.
We step outside into the courtyard. Unseen neighbors can be heard shouting through thin walls, a multicultural cacophony. Busted screens flap out of windows. There’s a broken lamppost. Someone has placed an empty can of beans where the light used to be.
“I’m the only one that works in this courtyard,” Priscilla says. “I’m the only one that doesn’t live in a one-bedroom with ten other people.
“My neighbors call me ‘the bitch.’ The lady who lives next door came up to me the other morning. ‘I’ll kick your ass, bitch,’ she said. ‘You bore me,’ I said. She was totally confused.”
Priscilla stops. She notices I have a new car.
“Is that yours?”
I nod.
“We could drive someplace in your car.” She thinks about it for a moment. “I love nature. We could drive someplace far out of the city. I’ll call you.” Her smile is clean and warm, and I never hear from her again.
WINGNUT’S LAST DAY ON EARTH
It’s a couple of Saturdays before Christmas at the Out of the Fog coffee shop in Eugene, Oregon, a place where Santa Claus is just another capitalist oppressor. The Fog, ground zero for Eugene’s thriving anarchist population, is located in a warehouse at the edge of town. A young man who calls himself “Wingnut” sits at a rickety wooden table on the loading dock. A week ago Wingnut was living atop an old fir tree west of town to prevent it from being cut down by loggers, but in just the past few days his life has gotten considerably more complicated, and now it looks like he had better get out of Eugene quickly.
Wingnut, twenty-six, is one of about twenty local anarchists who nearly a week earlier crashed the demonstrations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) conference in Seattle. Conference organizers, among them President Clinton, had intended this meeting to cap a decade of efforts to reduce trade barriers and usher in a new era of globalization. Tens of thousands of protesters opposed to the WTO had begun converging on the city