Hello Reader,
Got dishonesty?
Getting you down?
Back when I lived with a prostitute I had an adult best friend. Friends are good.
As children, many of us had a best friend, remember? As adults, few of us have one. But there I was, with a self-described best friend, “Jodie.” In our relationship, because she had small children, I always visited her; she never visited me. The closest Jodie ever got to my door was when she had her limousine stop across the road to pick me up. Keep an eye on that limo, I’ll get back to it.
I knew Jodie during the years I happily lived with two sex trade workers. Call them “Kim and Casey.” They weren’t old or hard-bitten; no, they were young and sociable, just a little older than the fresh-faced students up and down our street: We three lived on “duplex row,” a street of students. Because Kim, Casey and I knew each other before we moved in together we got along fine. For me, the worst part was visitors making tiresome references to the TV show Three’s Company. Tiresome.
The women would always forget I was older, they told me, except at odd times when I showed my age with a comment like, “Real men don’t wear pink.” Once I said, “I tell people we play rap music” and then they proceeded to tell me no, there were lots of types of music such as “hip hop” and so forth. “Oh. I just thought it was all rap.”
Honesty counts. Lately, I’ve been thinking of those days when I had four ladies in my life: my best friend, two roommates, and a girlfriend. I’ve been thinking back on how our characters made our destinies.
I was not yet ready to face a counsellor because I was too fearful, and also too unsure of any need for therapy, but at least I was attending a self-help group. At least I had a full-time job, but— I could have been doing better.
I tried to be honest, while my being “insecure” (as my boss phrased it) meant I was not “getting my act together” as fast as I could have. My girlfriend was insecure too. I would stay the night at her place, but never she at my place, nor visit me except when the others weren’t around. She said I wasn’t supposed to tell Jodie about her. Too bad, because Jodie, besides surely giving me vital relationship advice, would have swiftly spotted my girl’s “manipulation,” while my girlfriends’s dishonesty, which dragged her down in her life, was something I didn’t truly discover until after the end of our relationship, after others told me. (An older friend told me she was glad for me, as I was feeling “post break-up,” that we had broken up)
It was at a self-help group which met at a downtown hospital that I met my best friend. She was wearing a cotton dress that day. (Usually she wore jeans) Jodie and I stood on the sidewalk after the meeting, talking excitedly and knowing we would become friends. I relished Jodie’s enthusiasm for life—and found she was a good hugger. Soon I was spending time at her place, while her two young kids decided to call me “Uncle Sean.” Jodie told me she liked it when I hugged her in front of her kids because then it sent a message to them that she was OK.
My friend was on Social Assistance, but was slow to use that assistance to advance her life. “Case workers,” she told me, “are like angry parents: You can only ask for one thing at a time.” I suspected her social worker was useless as a counsellor.
Jodie’s still-developing character, I came to realize, was why her attendance at any self-help group was intermittent; she wouldn’t even attend noon meetings held in the daytime, straight down the road, one bus, while her kids were in school. (Also, she had a car) I suggested she see a free government counsellor, at the Alberta Alcohol and Drug Abuse Clinic. AADAC amazed me: their TV commercials, unlike most advertisements by government “do-gooders,” were terrific. I asked them why they had good commercials: Turns out they tested their ads beforehand on youth and parents.
Jodie saw someone at AADAC for a while, but then she felt she had to quit. The reason? Her counsellor, she told me, after she asked him, had replied he could not guarantee confidentiality. Her big secret was not that she was gay, nor that she was in a relationship with an unemployed angry violent person.
Her big secret was this: Unbeknownst to Welfare, her lover had persuaded Jodie to secretly blow all her extra single mother welfare funds, funds that were intended for special assistance, on illegal drugs. Her lover then held that secret over her, like a raised battle-ax, if ever Jodie tried to escape the relationship. Poor Jodie: Character was destiny. Honesty counts.
Needless to say, it’s crazy to do drugs. As for craziness, I suppose the people I knew best back then, and me too, had been prone to moments of being crazy-like-a-teenager. Naïve teenagers can be so-o-o unbelievable, remember? Back then I believed, and I still do, that everyone is entitled to one or two naive unexplainable behaviours. Such as, say, standing me up. Nothing wrong with anomalous behaviour, once in a blue moon. But if a person shows a pattern of something, such as standing me up, then I have to pull the caboose-coupling pin, and steam on. I was sadly saying so on the phone when Jodie said, “I’m sure glad you told me!” and from then on she never stood me up again.
(Today I mostly believe in giving people feedback for their strange behaviour)
We had a nice friendship. I was struck by how “character counts” every time Jodie broke her word or lied, to me, herself or others. I’d fume to myself, “Jeez! No wonder she’s on welfare!” My friend was like my poor “low functioning” mother, who was a housewife, in certain ways, and so by learning about Jodie I was learning about my mother too.
A good part of my growing in confidence and learning about the big wide world was from living with other people. Naturally, by sharing a roof I was banking money, but I was also banking experience while warming my heart. I would never live with people who only wanted me for my rent money; no, it was nice to be liked. Speaking of rent, for a little while Casey helped me out: She had a heart of gold.
As an exotic dancer, Casey was technically a sex trade worker, complete with stage name.(If we met in public, then she would be acting “in character,” and I would just call her “Kid.”) To me she was just Casey, working hard, with her little grey steel filing cabinet in the living room for her tax files, travel receipts, deductions and so forth. Such a cabinet was beyond me: In my insecurity, I truly dreaded taxes, scared of the angry taxman sending me to jail for my poor arithmetic.
Maybe my life was imperfect, but I was a perfectly good listener, so at least I had that to offer. I liked how Casey found a boyfriend, “John.” He was a Sunday school teacher, besides being a streetwise guy from the States. (USA)
I remember when a tourist from Boston, on the bus, saw my daypack: She told me how down in the States people couldn’t wear their backpacks squarely, not on both shoulders, for fear of muggers pulling them down. I told John. His eyes lit up and he said, “I remember; we tried wearing our bags diagonally, so we could fight.” John could fight, and he was tough. Which was handy, as I’m sure when they went clubbing Casey, who was so pretty, would be “hit on” by strange men. John would be hit on when he was on the road—and cheat. I forget how Casey caught him. For a second time. Their relationship survived.
At home Casey would easily moan when I was massaging her—she was a vocal girl. She trusted me not to tell John if I heard her vocalizing in her bedroom with someone else. And hey, I trusted her not to laugh at me afterwards when I sang so loudly in the shower. Poor Casey and John each worried about the other cheating—with good reason. They were “relatively honest,” I guess, but not “rigorously” so. Too bad: For Casey and John, being a few degrees off true north, off true character, meant many degrees of stress on their relationship. Honesty counts.
At home we managed our daily stress through music and TV. Drugs? Doubtful. Not even cannabis. Or not much. At least, nothing I can remember.
(This was in Canada, less than a decade after we witnessed our US cousins declaring war on drugs with a White House TV campaign, but of course my fellow Canadians hadn’t declared war. It was merely peacetime for us: no beating the drum, waving the flag, shaking pom poms and trying to “win the hearts and minds.” Like watching a bus sliding on ice, we observed without comment as our cousins began “wasting” lives, committing grotesque collateral damage such as zero tolerance and no sliding scale. Grotesque.)
Certainly I would remember if we did any hard drugs at our home, a nice home that always felt half empty when Casey went on tour. Being a dancer was honest work. It was legal. Taxed. Not like being a prostitute. No little girl dreams of becoming a lady of the night. And so they don’t… not if they have good character. What I came to realize over time was the connection of prostitution to honesty—or the lack of it.
Down the years, I’ve occasionally heard young men talking, men who fancy themselves as worldly liberals—remember them? Posers. They would speak with knowledgable sympathy, saying prostitutes are normal folks who ply their trade only for survival. Not so. Honest people will starve first, or subsist on welfare like Jodie. This I know from intuition, and from knowing my roommate Kim.
At first Kim had a low wage job with a nonprofit. Casey said Kim could be a dancer too, if she lost a few pounds. But when Kim tried losing weight she only used the hunger method, which didn’t work.
Kim lost her job. Then she didn’t seem to look for work very hard. In fact, I remember her going to a job interview without washing her hair. Something else: At the time no one in our home was admitting to putting fees on our telephone bill by dialling for directory assistance, instead of taking a few seconds to use the phone book. Talk about lazy. And then lying about it. That was Kim.
At last Kim found a job babysitting evenings. I remember one night a mother called us when Kim was not home. The woman became very nasty, saying, “But we gave her a cell phone so she could stay in touch!” At the time I thought the angry mother was a spoiled brat, a yuppie dork. Then one day Casey and I were alerted by a matchbook. We clued in, did a little sleuthing: Kim had found work, all right—with an escort service.
Besides denying phone charges, Kim had also denied for a year knowing where a treasured belt of Casey’s was—we only found it in Kim’s room after she moved out. And I used to wonder if money was somehow disappearing from my jacket at times when I hung it on my chair at a donut shop—but no, that was Kim too, stealing, from when my jacket hung near our front door. In our own home.
When we first knew Kim she was normal, she was fun. We knew she was raised in a family with a cultish religion, initials JW, but we knew that was survivable. We three all knew about surviving, as we all had a past. I know now: It was not Kim’s religion but her dishonesty that enabled her prostitution.
Kim found a boyfriend in a bar. One day, while Casey was gone on a dance tour, Kim told me that somehow, she didn’t know how, she had gotten a black eye in her sleep. Looking back, I guess she didn’t want me asking, “Which door?” (did you walk into) And one day John and his friends piled into a car, as young men do, and they thought they’d drive past the big famous hooker stroll, as young men do, and there was Kim.
I learned how the boyfriend got Kim to turn her first trick. But only because Kim explained it, through tears, to Casey’s sister. Pimps have their ways. (Note: The sister was even more insecure than I, being as bizarrely untrusting as my girlfriend)
We tried to keep Kim in our lives but soon she moved out of the house, claiming we didn’t like her boyfriend—but we had never said a single word against him! Not to Kim. No, not even after I came home to find pimps playing cards in the kitchen… Surely, in this sad world, those of us with a past need to encourage each other, with whatever optimism we can summon, just as Casey and I had tried to encourage Kim, just as Jodie and I encouraged each other.
One day my best friend decided to get a trade. A diploma. Jodie asked me which, of two choices, would be the best for her: two year community college, or short beauty school. The specific college program Jodie was thinking of was the same difficult one where I had earned my diploma, so difficult that every year at college equals one at university, (instead of the usual two for one) a program where I had seen vulnerable students I liked crash and burn, so I thought she’d be better off learning hairstyling. And she did.
I remember Jodie agonized very much over doing what little homework she had—like me sweating bullets over taxes—so I came over and sat nearby, silent all evening, so she would feel supported to “get to it.” Jodie coped. And one day she had her big graduation, and she proudly came to pick me up in a big black shiny limousine, a limo that represented something very hard for folks like us: being able to sustain worthy effort over time.
Note: If Human Resources values a parchment then it’s merely because it shows a job applicant is stable enough for the semesters needed to graduate. (footnote)
Not long after Kim left us, Casey and I both left too. I began paying rent on a tiny room, (and maybe, I forget, Kim helped me wrap dishes and spices for moving) but I didn’t finally move out until Casey did. She moved out east. I remember the day we hugged goodby. Casey had a tear track, and I went off and immediately muffled my my feelings, “medicated,” in a cafe that played 1950’s music: That was the day I realized I medicated in cafes; I honestly hadn’t known.
Honesty, I know now, is part of part of a good life, a functional life, and more: of living up to one’s potential. Since then I’ve matured enough do things other people take for granted, to graduate university and be a junior manager. And more: I’ve gained the skills to be published for money. A social worker I knew back in the army said, “You’re a success.” In my humble opinion: “Yes.” I will never again move among less honest people.
Jodie moved out east. The angry partner went with her… …and now Jodie’s living with a schoolteacher. I’m sure she “has upped her game” to be as functional as her new partner. Oh, how I love a happy ending.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
August
2019
Footnotes:
~Small world: Carmela Hutchison, the lady that Jodie had at first lived beneath, (I had been acquainted with Carmela’s husband in the army) has passed away this week. They were friends. In the tabloid daily newspaper, the Calgary Sun on Saturday August 24 Carmela merited a news article, all across the bottom of the page, for being helpful to causes. (I had seen a news photo years ago of Carmela pushing her walker beside a mentally ill prominent socialite) Maybe one of Carmela’s causes was Jodie.
~ The concept that in modern society Human Resources people are using university degrees merely as a screening device (without regard for courses taken, course major or grade point average) comes from visionary Jane Jacobs in her last book Dark Ages Ahead. (Which quoted my city mayor) Her most famous book, condensed by Readers Digest, was Death and Life of Great American Cities.
~Since those days I’ve owned at least one pink T-shirt… but no pink slacks.
~A college girl once wrote a book about her life as an exotic dancer: It covered most of what I learned from Casey—No need to learn about that life by actual experience.
~I was able to tell concerned folks why Kim was transferred by her pimp three time zones to the east: to be disoriented and cut off from supports—There are writings by former prostitutes about that life.
~I’ve always assumed pimps learned how to control their stable by talking to each other, and I suppose they do, but hey, maybe there’s a book about that too.
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