Hope everyone had or is having a spiritually fulfilling Easter/Passover. Now let me supply you with yet another blog about prostitution.
I return to this issue because it was again made apparent to me Friday night that if you want to see Africa's have/have-not dichotomy in its most ghoulish light, you need to walk into an African disco.
Which I did, because I was drinking with some girls who wanted to go dancing. They danced, and I sat back and waited for the other guy in our group to get sick of dancing, which did not take long. He and I sat with beers and repeatedly told the nigh endless stream of rumpshaking twentysomethings that our wives were out there on the dance floor, so No thanks, it'd be better if they left us alone.
There's something so fundamentally jarring about this kind of wall-to-wall prostitution. It deranges all the understanding of sexuality and courtship and relationships you've amassed to date: by pining through middle school and then slowly learning to conquer your butterflies, gaining piecemeal insights into the fair ladies, and thereafter wandering through years alternately thinking you know the score and then getting knocked on your ass again.
And then you walk into this place and it's a monetary transaction--a cheap and unstigmatized one. The old flirting and headgames and necessity for compromise is gone: you are suddenly beating them off you with a stick. Nevermind that you have next to nothing in common with them, that you went to college and they have a sixth grade education, and that both of you know that the whole relationship revolves around a hope on their part that one sex-for-money transaction will somehow morph into a visa opportunity.
Nevermind all that. You hang around these places one too many nights and, in the words of my friend Greg, "You're skewed, dude."
Luckily, I got happily unskewed on Easter by sitting on my front porch and watchign this new species of bird that has invaded our yard. It looks like some kind of Mayan god: about the size of a cardinal, but with a big brown mohawk on its head and ten inch feathers shooting out posterior.
Jast sat out there all day among the detritus of white people who have gotten used to having a cleaning lady--stained coffee mugs, orange peels, candles burnt down from the blackout--and enjoyed the birds. For a Saturday hangover cure, it beats college football all to hell.
