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july 10, 2000. Sometimes I really have to work on finding something interesting to say. And sometimes...man...sometimes the interesting mows me down.
Let's start at the beginning: when St. Stephen and the Boy moved into their cute little apartment, the upper floor was full of Mormons. They never made much noise, just kept to themselves in their neat, sober grey suits. It was a little creepy but what the heck.
Then this girl moved in. She had a little dog, one of those stereotypical yappy dogs that starts the yark yark yark at the slightest provocation. (Oddly enough, Ceilidh - who can be a very skitterish cat - doesn't react to these ill-tempered outbursts at all. She's really come a long way from the profound neurosis she displayed in Froghopper Nook.) There's also a lot of stomping around, a lot of door slamming and occasionally (but more or less regularly) there is impassioned shouting. We wondered about her: why she had callers all night long on weekends, why she so often appeared at the door all dressed up but without shoes (you know, as if she wasn't about to go anywhere), and of course, why there were screaming fights.
Fast forward to last week. The ceiling's been leaking since March, causing the wall nearest the bathroom to bubble in a most unattractive manner. The landlord's known about it since the beginning, but like all landlords, he doesn't much care to fix it right in the middle of a 12 month lease - there's no real percentage in that. Last week the Boy felt a drip of water while in the bathroom, looked up...and saw that the whole ceiling was bulging unattractively, as if it was about to give birth to something horrible. He poked a hole in the biggest bulge to drain away the pressure - and that was when the ceiling started to fall in.
Another call to the landlord produced a surly repairman, who figures that he'll have to rebuild everything. All of the tenants were gathered together & phone numbers exchanged. At this point, there's only floorboards between the boys and their noisy mystery lady, allowing them to hear much more of the skewed goings on upstairs. Yesterday the Boy decided to do a little Encyclopedia Brown-style sleuthing...i.e. running her number through the local classifieds.
We have a winner. She'll do everything and apparently her rates are quite reasonable. (Follow the link if you like; there are a lot of ads there and I have no intention of pointing out which one is the right one.)
I was told these latest developments this morning, at which point I had to ask the Boy if they were going to hire her for the bachelor party. It does seem kind of funny, having the talent so close at hand. We decided that his "stickman" or proxy would have to be Dirk, for reasons and nuances more complicated than I can explain here. But I can only joke about it for about 30 seconds - then it starts to really creep me out. Not because of her and what she does, but because the whole situation makes me sad. Despite popular myth to the contrary, most sex trade workers are fairly independent people acting of their own volition. I don't think she's a victim, exactly. I just want to live in a world where the most valuable thing about me on the open market is my brain and not my body. It seems like such a big problem, though...I find it difficult to develop a grass roots plan, to make it small enough to deal with.
And meanwhile the gentlemen callers continue to arrive all weekend long.
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