Free The Hooker: A Reprehensible Acts Story by Simon Wood

 
    THE HOOKER
     
     
    My bachelor party came to a bleary-eyed
end around two when the bar closed and the refugees of the event, a dozen of my
closest friends, spewed onto the sidewalk.   The night had been the usual affair of too much drinking, a strip club
and the obligatory lap dance.   The bar’s
security had called cabs for us.   As the
taxis rolled up, we were all more than ready to go our separate ways, hoping to
be sober enough for Saturday’s wedding.   Lance, my best man, was the exception.   He'd been tossing around his theory all night that it was every
condemned man’s duty to bang a hooker before getting hitched.   Nobody had the stamina for the last hoorah
and everyone tried to shout Lance down, but he wouldn’t stop harping on about
prostitutes.   The last cab pulled up and
I went to get in, but Lance waved it away.
    “Sorry,
cabbie.   You’ll have to find another
fare.   My boy, Mark here, still has work to do.”
    The
taxi driver shook his head and roared off.
    “We
have to find you some pussy, my man.”
    “Lance,
no.   I’m too wasted to know fact from
fiction.   I’d be no good to a
hooker.”   Alcohol wasn’t the reason for
my lame libido.   It was the fact that sex
with a prostitute was something I just wasn’t into.   I found something about paying for sex,
depressing.   Superficial love or lust
held no desire for me.
    “Mark,
Mark, Mark, you’re letting the team down.   You’ve got to.   You don’t have a
choice.”
    “I’m
not interested.   I’m getting
married.   The last thing I need is AIDS
or some other kind of dick rot.”
    “Jesus,
I can’t believe you’re being such a pussy.”   Lance shook his head then inhaled.   “Blowjob then.”
    I
frowned.  
    “Fuck
it, dude.   Don’t turn your nose up at a
blowjob.   What can you catch from a
blowjob?”
    It
was my turn to shake my head.   “Whatever.”
    “Now
you’re talking.”
    So
yes, I agreed to the hooker hunt.   Not
because I buckled to Lance’s peer pressure but instead, betting on the
improbability we’d actually find one before Lance lost patience or a hooker
would find two drunken idiots as acceptable clientele.   I didn’t know much about prostitutes, but my
guess was they wanted a simple transaction with an interested party.   The last thing they needed was two wasted
jerks.
    Lance
guided me to his Cherokee.   He was just
as drunk as I was and I shouldn’t have let him drive, but he was a grown man
capable of making his own decisions, regardless of how blurred by alcohol they
were.   Besides, if a cop picked us up, it
would be the end of our hooker search.
    We
trawled the south end of Delaware Street.   By day, it was a bustling commercial district, bristling with office
building after office building wedged up against one another.   This was where Lance and I, and most of my
buddies, worked.   But when the sun went
down, a different kind of business took over.
    Prostitutes
hung out on street corners around the block.   The prettier ones clustered under the streetlights.   The not so pretty ones used the shadows for
cover.   If you were innocent, you might
have wondered why so many women hung around in clumps, especially when no buses
ran down Delaware.   But if you had any
street smarts, you knew exactly what they were there for.   Not too many were dressed like movie hookers,
with feather boas and the like, but nothing was concealed.   Skirts were a little too high, makeup a
little too heavy and stares a little too searching.
    We
weren’t subtle about our approach either.   Alcohol collided with adrenaline to make a volatile cocktail.   Lance powered down the windows and hollered
at the prostitutes, spewing infantile abuse that wouldn’t have been acceptable
from construction workers.
    “Hey
baby,” he shouted.   “My man here needs to
be blown, real bad.   Can you help him
out?”
    It
wasn’t surprising to see the hookers retreat into the shadows,