painted whores, praying

On Sundays, because the public library shuts its doors and turns off its wireless router, I buy a hot tea and blog from a chain eatery that provides Internet access at no additional cost. This week, while re-posting the shit out of tumblr and tweeting POTUS beseechingly, I got a real treat when a skinny girl with an attractively-muscled upper back and shapely legs who was wearing a low-cut halter top and skin-tight shortshorts sauntered past me on laced-up high heels to sit at a booth a few down from my own. While I frequent this eatery primarily to feast my eyes upon the tight bodies of such dolled-up professional women and attention-hungry milfs who regularly grace its nonslip tiled floors, this girl and her twenty-something companion seemed worthy of more than just a few perverted and sidelong glances. An equally skinny girl wearing a similarly revealing upper and shortshorts that left little to the imagination, the companion's eyes were made up a bright aquamarine blue to offset the relatively subdued paint-job on the rest of her face, with a clunky necklace and a pair of reflective metal discs shoved into her perforated lobes rounding out her ensemble.

Having observed whores at work in Berlin, Bangkok, and Tijuana, I have scrutinized done-up street walkers and down-and-out alley rats alike, and upon seeing these two young ladies, my first thoughts were, “Oh brother, these ladies-of-the-night are out during the day and not even trying to hide the nature of their business.' Regardless of my tendency to avoid buying sexual favors, I was mulling over the prospect of getting a Billy Joel in one of the bathroom's stalls, or paying for a Howard Johnson in the back of the one girl's car, when the girl facing me – the one with the painfully-bright, aquamarine-tinted eyelids – set a tray of food onto the table, distributed the various dishes, bowed her head, crossed her hands, and prayed for a good thirty seconds before digging in.

This is a religiously-conservative area, one in which the local Catholics stand out on the square in the center of town for five weeks at a time protesting abortion and birth-control and generally trying to revoke a woman's right to her own body. Therefore, I was not expecting – early on a Sunday afternoon at just about the time when churches here let out – to see two girls dressed in the manner of prostitutes praying over some hastily-constructed panini sandwiches and meager cups of chicken tortilla soup. I even feared for their safety, since the Old Testament of the Christian bible instructs true believers to kill or at the very least banish and persecute persons painted in the manner of whores (Psalm 51:4). I have seen Thai girls stop to pray at alters to their god, asking Buddha to send them a man who will support them financially; I have no problem with prostitution, even supporting its legalization here in America; I wonder, though, if those girls had dressed up in the manner of cheap sluts in order to make a statement, as a reflection of the latest trends in mainstream fashion, or out of a misguided effort to make themselves look pretty. However things shook out for them that day, though, at least they supplicated to their god in a socially acceptable way, praying quietly and otherwise keeping their opinions to themselves, unlike the anti-abortionists and their nuns and priests, who make a terrible stink any time anybody even looks like they might be going into Planned Parenthood.

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