I was going to post reader mail today, I have quite a bit of it but something happened this weekend and for some reason I am compelled to write about it.
I have always had a soft spot in my heart for strippers, hookers and porn chicks, when you get close to them, become an insider there’s a real beauty in their honesty, they see the primal side of us, even themselves, and they embrace it.
I got a call last week requesting that I come to Birmingham, AL. A local hooker needed good pictures to increase her rates and expand her client list and she knows of me and knows that my work is good. I had no plans and after sitting home since my return from Dayton I was itchy, needed to get out and get back close to the edge.
It was a cool but sunny day, I loaded the truck and took off early Saturday morning, early for me anyway. I rolled down the windows and listened to classic rock for the just under two hour drive.
I met her at a nice hotel, high on a ridge on the eastern side of the city, an upscale area that not long ago would have been “rural” Alabama, now it reflects life from glass, and chrome and steel instead of the life of the people who used to live there.
I walk into the room, a suite, it is very large and spacious, nice, white, and clean. Hotels have moved away from the dark colors of yesteryear gone are the paisley bedspreads and tinted walls and dark faux woods.
“Sassy” is young, maybe 21, and black, we all say that shouldn’t matter but we all know it does and in life “God is in the details” as they say and this is a detail. Being a black high end escort in Alabama isn’t easy, as you might understand.
Good quality photos in your ads set you apart and Sassy understands this. We get down to it.
She has one of those bodies that only a 20 year old can posses, slim, flawless, all natural. She has soft mocha skin and big pretty eyes and full lips. She is beautiful. I direct her in putting on her make up, for the first time in her life she wears false eyelashes and with my direction we turn her from simply pretty into glamorous and most importantly, expensive looking.
She is limber and I notice right off that her natural way that she moves, and sits and simply relaxes are insanely erotic. She sits on a chair and looks at me, relaxed posture, wide eyes and in a position that nobody my age could possibly be comfortable in.
I freeze moments in time, a sixtieth of a second here, a sixtieth of a second there. She will forver be young and beautiful in these photos, pictures of a person who is secure, elegant and exotic.
Pictures Lie.
In her ads she promises herself, the girl that guys like you just can’t get normally, but save a little bit and for an hour or two its you having this beauty, as a part of you, overlaid on you and for a brief while you are beautiful too.
When we are done she looks at her photos, she sees herself, but not really as she is, she sees herself the way I see her and she likes this glamorous, beautiful person she sees looking back at her. She doesn’t see her childhood, a poor little black girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose family scraped together what they could to get by.
She sees my talent and something in the air changes, it’s unsaid but we feel it, and we both know it. Still, she knows that which I do not and never will.
We go to dinner, she leaves on the makeup and the false eyelashes but puts on simple street clothes, it’s getting late.
When we return to the suite and I pack my things, she disappears into the bathroom. She comes back out as I knew she was going to, wearing the lingerie and the dress that we shot her in. She wanted my talent, my ability to make her feel beautiful, she wanted that to be a part of her. I wanted her beauty, her youth, I wanted wear it so that I too would be young again.
We gave each other what was desired, it was intense, we both got lost in our own worlds for what would be over an hour that seemed like a lot less. Afterwards time slowed back down and we were strangers, yet inside we knew each other, I saw who spiritually, I was once was and I think she saw who she would become spiritually.
It was late and she suggested I keep the room, she had to leave. I walked down with her, neither of us saying much to the other. We kissed goodbye at the entrance I watched her walk across the parking lot to her car, hair disheveled, dress a mess and carrying her bra and her high heels at 2AM going back into her world, and me going back into mine.
I don’t know why but I needed to capture this particular feeling and the events of the day.
I turn fifty this month.
3 Responses
Great post Mike. I liked every part of it. You might be 50 but you are great.
OK.
So most of the time what you write isn’t art…which is okay, because the people who read your website aren’t looking for anything uplifting in the first place. No one ever expected you to be Dostoyevsky, or even Hunter S. Thompson for that matter.
However, there are those of us in this jaded little world who live and die by the printed page, who see the ability to string words and sentences together into a cohesive whole as a gift from the gods, who see Good Writing as something akin to a Holy Chore. You read and you read and you read, anything you can get your hands on, always looking for writing of superlative quality so that just a little bit of that genius might rub off on you when you sit down to write. Then, you write and you write and you write, always trying to pay attention, to not be lazy, to pull the plow and do the work with, as Balzac put it, “clean hands and composure”.
Sometimes when you’re writing you get close to what you’re trying to achieve. Usually, that’s not the case, but you reread it all later, have a sit-down with your internal editor (always looking over your shoulder, he is) and you try to learn from your mistakes and go on to do better another day. But occasionally — not often, not nearly often enough anyway — you find yourself writing over your head, producing good work at a level of quality you really had no right to ever expect you’d be able to produce.
That’s one of the reasons we do it.
That’s where you were when you wrote that yesterday.
Nicely done, bro.
You might have a future!
Luke Ford you aint. I got to tell you Mike that the tallent Ive seen you with in the past few years truely likes you.
I see it and at the shows everyone else sees it.
Being one of the few good guys left in this business is a rariety.
You wear it well.