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NOT A PROSTITUTE
March 12th, 1994 by Clark Humphrey

Not a Prostitute

Weird fiction piece by Clark Humphrey

3/12/94

“I am NOT a prostitute,” she kept insisting to her sister, her best friends, and everyone else in her life who seemed to have found out about her new means of fiscal self-support. “I just have a few boyfriends who like to be generous.”

If she were willing to admit so, the truth is that she said this as much to convince herself as to convince anybody else.

By her definition, a prostitute was someone who sold herself on the street to any and all strangers willing to pay. She was not like that. She would never be like that.

She was just a long-term unemployed college graduate (art history) who one night found herself with a maxed-out credit card, a yearning for the nose candy she’d come to crave in school, and a nice dress. She found herself at a hotel cocktail lounge. She allowed herself to be picked up by a circuit-riding dental-supply salesman who mistook her for a “professional.” She needed the money anyway, so she went along with the mistake. She gave him her phone number, for reasons she thought she knew at the time but can’t remember now.

On his next trip through the area, he called her. This time, she gave him permission to recommend some friends of his to her.

Within two months, she had what she euphemistically called a “gentleman caller” on the average of once a day. Sometimes she went to their houses or hotel rooms. Some days she could just lie around the house, go to galleries, try to get her own art works started, or hang out in nice bars. Other days she had to work around three or even four appointments. Each gentleman caller was required to supply her with a “gift” of at least $100; some were willing to go as high as $150.

She spaced the hour to hour-and-a-half appointments far enough apart so she could bathe thoroughly between each session; she soon found she couldn’t stand to have the scent of her “boyfriends” lingering on her, even though she still insisted to herself that she really liked each of them. She especially appreciated the “boyfriend” who owned a legal-secretarial service; he maintained a phony payroll listing for her, so she could fool the IRS about her source of income.

She found herself gradually adopting the tastes of her clients. Her wardrobe evolved from faded jeans and sweats to muted-color dresses, scarves and high heels. She started getting perms. She added “nicer” vases, curtains and objets d’art to her apartment. She also came to sense her clients’ taste in art, not from any direct statements by them but from learning how their particular eyes perceived the world, how their confidence in their own “sophistication,” despite their limited aesthetic training, led them to prefer upscale versions of the craft works they’d enjoyed in college.

Then she found herself falling in love for real with a recent addition to her clientele. He didn’t mind going down on her for almost half their time together. He had a nice smile, brought her flowers, and knew about contemporary art (he thought most of it was just a commercial scam, and could give detailed rationales for his points). By their fourth session in her apartment, she agreed to go out with him on a not-exclusively-sexual basis.

She could still not support herself without her other “callers.” He could not support her current lifestyle on his job managing a chain video store, particularly if he left his wife for her. And during a recent date with the secretarial-service owner, he hinted “jokingly” that if she stopped seeing him, he just might have to tell his friends at the City Attorney’s office about her line of work.

All she could see herself doing at this point was to refuse to accept new clients, and let her current clients fade away from getting married and/or divorced, getting transferred out of town, et al.

Three months into this frustrating compromise, an opportunity opened up. Her true love applied to manage a new store the chain was opening in Walla Walla. His wife refused to move with him, since she was in the midst of grad school. With the lower cost of living in eastern Washington, he could support his girlfriend until she got an art school and rental studio underway. Within three years she’d developed that business into a lucrative line of upscale craft works, which her representatives sold at high prices to Seattle executives and attorneys. She became quite unpopular among other craftspeople, who sometimes harped that she’d betrayed the original counterculture spirit of the movement. In an oft-quoted statement to Art in America, she insisted, “I am NOT a sell-out.”


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