My Life on the Road

The first one is like a spacious motel, with a couple of men sitting at the bar, waiting their turn. My friend goes out to the car to make phone calls, and I talk with a young dark-haired woman in a bikini and the highest heels I’ve ever seen. She, too, accepts my story and tells me her mother ran an illegal brothel in the South; it was where she grew up. The girls looked after her as a child and took the scariest S&M photos off their walls when she was around. Like the dancer in the topless bar, she also has dreams, and goes off to her room to bring back a notebook full of magazine illustrations that she has cut out and pasted into its pages. She confesses that she never went to school past the sixth grade, but she still hopes that her Dream Book will get her hired as a designer. Twice while we’re talking, she goes off briefly with a customer and comes back with breath smelling of disinfectant. In the daytime, she explains, it’s mainly truck drivers who stop for a blowjob. I ask if she feels safe, and she says management puts an alarm button in each room, but the times she’s had a bad guy, she couldn’t get to it. “It’s hard to do anything when they’re on top of you,” she says matter-of-factly.

The first one is like a spacious motel, with a couple of men sitting at the bar, waiting their turn.