« Everyone else has the Clap, so of course I want it too | Main | Second thoughts about desperate men in cars »
February 06, 2005
I might LOOK like a whore, but. . .
Everything I do is done for love, not for money.
Before I tell you the story of what happened to me walking home today, I should say hello to everyone wandering by here from the RAOK group, which I just joined, and also to all of my new Bloglines subscribers (I'm assuming that my recent surge in Bloglines subscribers has something to do with joining RAOK). At any rate, welcome! I hope I don't drive you all away with my trashy stories and bad language. Because there's some of that coming up.
So. Walking home. You have to picture it: I was wearing jeans (okay, they were tight, but not really enough to offset the frumpiness of the rest of my look), tan coloured sneakers, a thick black sweater with an unflattering kangaroo pocket and one of those black fake ski jackets with the thick ribbing on the cuffs. And carrying my knitting and the Globe and Mail in a plastic bag. I did not even style my hair today, let alone wash it--just sprayed some water to soften up yesterday's gel and moved some hair over to cover the flat spot I slept on (oh, baby, you gotta love the way I tart myself up to go blow up balloons for a living). Plus my long blue bangs, which stick out because I'm lazy and can't be arsed to force them straight, make me look like one of those expensive little dogs.
So here I am walking home, and this car pulls out of a side street, right in front of me, and sits there blocking the sidewalk, and the driver (a good looking guy) puts down his cellphone and stares at me. I give him a dirty look for blocking my way and go to walk around the front of his car, and he says "can I ask you a question?".
"What?" god, I'm charming.
"Tell me you don't have a boyfriend" he says. WTF?
"Why?" I say, giving him my best ninth-grade "you're a stupid shit" look.
And he says "Because I'd like to ask you to lunch".
As if.
So I said, "no, I can't" and he said "okay" and drove off.
Um, did you want to fuck me first and then eat, or buy lunch first?
Actually, what pissed me off was not the assumption that I was a whore, that happens all the time. I live on G. street, in a nice friendly neighbourhood with lots of happy children and families, very wholesome and normal. But just one block away (about the length of two regular city blocks) where our street intersects with W. street, is a major pickup corner for street whores. There are two bus stops here, one I use to get to school and one I use to get to work, and I have been mistaken for a whore many times while waiting for the bus. At the W. street bus stop (a busier street), the guys usually just pull up to the bus stop and wait and if you ignore them they go away. Around the corner on G. street is the major ho stop, with an alley right alongside it, and they come around the corner off W. street, cruise by the bus stop and turn into the alley and wait. Sometimes when they do this and I ignore them, they will call out the window "working?". Dude, do whores knit while they wait for clients? Do they wear party store shirts? Jeez. Except for the party store shirt thing, it's kind of understandable for someone to mistake any woman standing at the ho stop for a prostitute, because around here they don't dress up like in the movies; most of the regular prostitutes I see here wear jeans, sometimes even sweat pants, hoodies, frumpy winter coats. So that when the police give them a hard time they can pretend they were just waiting for a bus.
No, what really pissed me off was partly the boyfriend thing, and partly the offer of lunch. First of all, lots of prostitutes have boyfriends; does having a man to protect me make me off limits? If I want to get in a car with someone and go for a drive, have lunch or have sex or whatever, I will do so, boyfriend or no boyfriend. But I certainly will not get in a car with someone who doesn't even have the courage to just say "I want to pay you for sex". Man, I've been waiting all day to have lunch with a wimp like that.
Posted by jodi at February 6, 2005 04:17 PM | categories: assholes : self-absorbtion
Comments
"Hi, my name is Jodi and I'm mistaken for a ho all the time."
You kill me. Don't put that on your grad school apps...or maybe you should.
;-)
Posted by: claudia at February 6, 2005 07:56 PM
Maybe I'm just dense, but how do you KNOW he thought you were a whore and didn't sincerely want to take you to lunch?
Posted by: elabeth at February 6, 2005 08:19 PM
Jodi you always make me laugh! You also made me mess up my knitting as I was reading and not paying attention, but I'll forgive you that, I fixed it!
When we lived in Germany in winter the whores there used to wear those full body snow suits and moon boots. Must have taken them ages to get enough clothes off to do anything!
Anna
Posted by: Anna at February 7, 2005 06:06 AM
Did you ever think that you're just such a hot mama that you can stop traffic? :)~
Posted by: Tara at February 7, 2005 08:59 AM
That is really nuts. Nothing like that has ever happened to me, but probably because when the guy said "can I ask you a question" I would have said "is it about the can of mace in my pocket?"
By the way, I was born and raised in Madison and wish I could be living there now instead of here in California. There are great knitters there, a couple of great neighborhoods (my old neighborhood went for Kucinich in the presidential primary, if that tells you anything) and lovely knitters. Email me if you want more info on how great my hometown is....
Posted by: Emily at February 7, 2005 12:51 PM
Honey...this is the plight of all devistatingly gorgeous woman...you are just going to have to learn to deal with it (as unflattering as some of the proposals may be)
Posted by: Rob at February 7, 2005 01:38 PM
Once this happened to my clueless sister, and it took her a while to get it when the nice young man asked her if she was new, and if she was working, and then she yelled in horror at the top of her lungs, "You mean like a PROSTITUTE???!!!!"
Heh. He drove off real quick-like.
Posted by: Rachael at February 7, 2005 04:29 PM
The neighbourhood in Vancouver where I used to live was known for hitch-hookers, so I know that look where the guy in the car is trying to figure out whether you're working. But this encounter sounds to me like he just thought you were hot. Seriously.
Speaking of hot: your red Rogue!
Posted by: alison at February 7, 2005 06:43 PM