I was alone at the hotel bar until she came in. She was a little rougher than the hotel’s clientele in general. About 45, blue-jean shorts, tight top, edging gray medium-brown disheveled hair and a dusky sort of weathered and unattractive face. Figured her for either a trashy Dallas millionaire’s wife that had forgotten her gold jewelry or a morning after hooker. Not much difference really I guess. Sat one stool away from me and ordered a vodka kamikaze with a coke on the side in a hoarse and gravelly voice. Paid for it when the waitress brought it to her and tipped a buck. It was eleven-thirty in the morning and I was eating lunch, a bowl of clam chowder.
Small talk, I thought, would at least break what I felt to be an awkward silence and having traveled a lot, I’ve found it’s usually pretty easy to strike up conversations about where and why people are headed places. Turning toward her I say, “I’m here for a conference that ends today. Looking forward to heading home for the weekend.”
“I’m just here” came her somewhat existential reply.
OK, I think to myself, that puts at least one check mark in the “hooker” column. Makes two or three so far combined with the appearance, the voice, the eye-opener, and the way she paid for it when served.
Now wishing I hadn’t said anything at all, I return to spooning my lukewarm microwaved clam chowder as the hooker proceeds to try and arrange a way she can take an incoming phone call at the bar. The waitress intimates that the request is tentatively out of bounds (or at least that the hooker herself is out of bounds being there in the hotel at all) and deflects with a line about how there’s not really a way because the phone only goes to the front desk. I am confident here, that as a paying guest, it’s not the answer I would have received.
The hooker starts working the girl at this point, asks her name, uses it immediately in a sentence, and then introduces herself. Forcing a familiarity of first names. I recognize her strategy. It’s an old con tactic - moving a relationship quickly to terms of familiarity and friendship so as to leave the other party feeling less likely or able to say “no”. In fact, I think, it’s not unlike a variation of what I’d been learning in the communications skills seminar I was attending down the hall. Developing trust and sincerity in business relationships, using names, focusing on the person instead of the task or product or goal. Or at least appearing to do so.
Anyway, after a minute “Bunny” – which is how she introduced herself, explaining that the name was a sort of long story (and definitely worth a few more check marks in the hooker column) - is now set to receive a call at the bar. She had negotiated carefully through the waitresses objections, leveraged the forced familiarity subtly and at just the right time. It was disgusting to witness although it was again sort of like the communications seminar – plan it out, start with a goal in mind, anticipate obstacles, have a back-up plan. But it was starting to turn my stomach, listening to this coarse manipulation just one stool away, this nasty Bunny person pushing her own illicit agenda on the young waitress. I just wanted to get out of there, get away from “Bunny”. The karma oozing off her was foul. I was afraid some of it would crawl onto me.
I quickly spooned down the now cold and lumpy clam chowder. Avoiding any further eye contact or communication with “Bunny”, I signaled the waitress for my check and paid out.
The rest of the day was uneventful from that standpoint. “Bunny“ I suppose had gotten her call. I never returned to the bar. Finished out the afternoon in the communications seminar honing my negotiation skills. It had been a great seminar. Expensive, but great.
I thought about the “Bunny incident” some the next day. Mused it over morning coffee on the patio. Thought about the communications skills seminar too. It had been very good, excellent in fact. Shame “Bunny” had impinged on the day though.
And that’s about when it hit me, the thing about “Bunny”. One of us was a whore you see, and one of us was paying two hundred dollars a day for a seminar on how to be one.
The only other difference, I guess, is that one of us was at least honest about it. And more existential too I suppose.