A Pleasure Jaunt with One of the Sex Workers Who Don’t Exist in the People’s Republic of China - 2

by Tom Bradley

Sugar Daddy’s chauffeur peered hard into the back seat from between a bunch of shampoo-colored plastic grapes festooning the rearview mirror. He observed Sam’s eyes as they passed over the scabby heads moiling outside the slit in the black curtains, and fixed on the fringes of the rout. Hanging back there were a few fully grown individuals with normal cephalic indices and frightened, but clear eyes.

"Politically retarded," said the driver. "Ideologically derelict."

Little girls lucky enough to have avoided infanticide took up positions on curbstones fit for an occidental princess, and began to perform. Tiny shell games, card tricks, distressing sorts of gyrations and other potentially profitable behavior combined smoothly with the reflex-motions of lice catching. Some of them lacked digits and other expendable body parts, which had no doubt been removed by Chinese Fagins back in their hometowns to inspire greater generosity and fewer kicks from pedestrians.

The miniature girls didn’t expect remuneration from the once-in-a-lifetime cadre mobile. One look in their empty baby eyes revealed that they’d already discounted Sam and his party as a shadow left over from last night’s odd dreams. And they didn’t cling to the impeccable curbstones for fear of being trampled in the street. Barely heftier than they, and much less agile, the adults posed little threat even to their flaky bones. No, gutter-side shell games and so forth were all they had ever been taught, the extent of their repertoire. Sidewalk gyration was their only reaction to any situation that wasn’t immediately life-threatening.

The little whore was delighted. With no strong objections from behind the wheel (anything to draw attention from the large nose that poked between the curtains), she climbed out her window and perched on the hood like a visiting empress in a very short motorcade.

It was permissible for her to view this "indigenous minority," for she was a native and could not possibly unaware of this "ethnic" presence throughout the length and breadth of her motherland (and throughout everybody else’s motherland, for that matter, except maybe the Swiss). Even socialism with Chinese characteristics couldn’t make the inevitable millions of unsocializables disappear. There weren’t nearly enough bullets or crematoria at this stage of modernization.

She took off her imported spike heels and let those who were interested admire her toenails, all reddened by polish, a gift from Sam, who’d seen the stuff for sale in a joint venture hotel’s deserted gift shop. When some of the less socialized "natives" began to nip at the protein-rich borders of yellow callus, she withdrew her feet, primly folded them under herself, and got up on hands and knees, impersonating a hood ornament that some parking lot joker had twisted around ass-backwards.

"The south is red, too!" screamed this working girl, and reached between her thighs to pull down on the crotch piece of her acetate drawers. Sam noticed for the first time that her belly was a bit large. Her arm had to stretch further than might otherwise be expected.

Maybe the driver was stimulated by his smaller passenger’s hooliganism into entertaining thoughts ill-befitting a patriotic shifu. And perhaps the resultant sensation of guilt that itched behind his red-spotted mask spurred him into recollecting the party line regarding the whore’s clamoring fans. In any case, he began trying to erase from Sam’s memory that momentary lapse into candor of a few seconds before.

"No, not ideologically derelict. There is no ideology involved here, Dr. Edwine." And he repeated, yet more firmly, "This is just a particularly backward national minority."

"Bad genes, huh?"

Sam began slipping good things from the ice chest through the velvet gap, trying to give them the widest possible angle of dispersion without flashing any physiognomy. Some of the older and younger ones failed to recognize the packaged delicacies as such; so this muscular Christian decided to unwrap a few before sowing, and got past half a sandwich before a dinosaur-sized attack of atavistic late-sixties munchies overtook his narcotic soaked medulla oblongata. Throughout the ensuing conversation his mouth was stuffed and restuffed many times over.

"Gene pool murky from inbreeding, huh?" The sarcasm was scarcely muffled by the masses of Heilongjiang cheese that occupied the entire front portion of Sam’s head. "That’s just like the folks where I come from, who rot in towns not too dissimilar from this, as a matter of fact."

At this point the driver decided that the official mendacity might as well be dispensed with. He sighed, "Before old Deng’s advisors cooked up the Internal Resettlement Program, the one thing we were able to pound into their heads--the apolitical heads, I mean--was to run away like madmen, as if their lives depended on it (because their lives did depend on it, if you take my meaning), at the sight or sound or smell of foreigners. Tourists and businessmen are not as morbid as you decadent intelligentsia. They don’t travel ten thousand miles to coo over human refuse. So, in the early days of the Open Door Policy, we had a more emphatic way of disposing of the ones who lingered in open cities. And plenty of these, er, people were born with just enough cerebral cortex to remember that time. Your left eyebrow alone, Dr. Edwine, orange as it is, could depopulate this town, which was populated at considerable expense to the People’s Republic, and we’ll have semi-ambulatory refugees drooling among tea communes in the hills, interfering with the harvest."

The chit-chat seemed about to turn to the inevitable commie topic of production, so boring to a middle-class boy like Sam, whose mom had never allowed him to take summer jobs because they should be saved for the Navahos. He couldn’t have the conversation going in that direction; so he tried to stick to the subject.

"You do know there are still a few downtown, don’t you?" Sam paused long enough to swallow much of what was in his mouth, burped, then continued. "Hey, I know a good way to catch the slipperier morfs and spazzes who’ve managed to elude you even to this day. Here’s what you do: Put on curly orange fright wigs and white pancake makeup and elevator shoes, and march down Derelict Hell Alley, and have some mean-assed drivers like yourself stationed in Black Marias at the other end of the street to scoop them up when they come scrambling out."

The driver shook his head, it seemed, in amazement at this barbarian’s utter perspicacity—but it was hard to tell for sure without seeing the bottom part of his face. He said, "That, or something like it, was my assignment before the minister recruited me."

Then the army men on the tanker truck began spewing husky rice gruel into the beautiful gutters. Everybody forgot about the unprecedented Red Flag and the hood ornament with the shiny red toenails. They started to claw past one another and scramble on their sable-black feet to fall face first in it: laundry, lavatory and lunch collectivized.

Sam saw the real reason for the small girls’ seating arrangement. From their elevated position on the curb, they were able more or less to gorge on the splashes from their elders’ feeding frenzy. Adoption of children is unpopular among the Red Chinese.

With one arm the driver dragged the whore back inside, and the Red Flag passed out of Spaztown and into soggy commie nighttime.

© Tom Bradley 2008

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