Francisco Goya, Los caprichos (Caprices), detail of plate 40, "¿De que mal morira?" (1796-97)
The heavy-lidded months leading into winter should be conducive to sleep. They're not, not for me. It's been hard to tell, lying there - my eyes endlessly tracing the ornate Georgian crown molding from one end of the room, down, then across, then back up, then back down - when I'm dreaming and when I'm only dreaming. That is to say, when I'm seeing what I need to be, in some phantasmagoria the deepest part of me screams is true, or the wakeful hours when I can only imagine what that might be.
Well. Well, well. Funny, I think, as I pull the astrakhan up to my chin, how light sleepers are all over the place, and yet each of them is ineffably alone, inured as they are to what society's supposed to be. My experiments with hydrogen fuel cell dirigibles force me me to keep odd hours, which for an inquiring hermit like myself, is no sacrifice; I do not seek company, but do not wish to invite it during daylight hours, and from a police cruiser. Nevertheless, I will admit, I am sometimes shocked that less extraordinary people can live this way. The doorman I pass without a word, the train driver behind the tinted window, the solitary clerk at the Citgo near my airfield - who would they even have to discuss it with?
A prostitute? A vulgar word, I know, not empowering. But I'm only borrowing the language of one of our society's great men - one of our good guys - Nicholas Kristof. I read his heartfelt missives every so often, taking my brief repast of some cheese and bread around four A.M. in the radio tower, leafing through the paper. With everything else in the world for sale, it doesn't seem to me so objectionable that two adults might meet, where, when or for however much it's amenable to both.
This is wrong - and not just wrong, I found, but amoral. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as a sex trade in which consent is given - it is "trafficked." Kristof loves that word, "trafficked." Sex workers are only ever trafficked, enslaved, their plight typified by only the most depraved sexual violence imaginable. Kristof never seems to mention adult women (or men) who work in the sex trade without coercion, so I have to imagine they must not exist. Likewise, I have only ever heard of my peers buying drugs directly from Mexican drug lords & cartel hitmen; the stereotype of the dopey high-school classmate selling weed out of the Dairy Queen is a pernicious stereotype fostered by the media. Both truths cannot exist. To admit grays in place of black-and-white might stagger the Swiss-clock precision of too many New York Times op-eds.
But don't take my word for it - who am I ultimately? I've never clapped a luckless woman in irons for the crime of sex. Kristof doesn't seem like much of a night owl to me - he seems to sweat wholesomeness out of his pores, a real butter-and-egg man who probably kayaks or something before dawn. Yet, here he is, scouring nighttown in an ominous & unnamed "southern US city," rolling with a crew of hooker-busting, trinket-bedecked bubba cops, who I'm sure have only the women's best interests at heart (that's why they're being thrown into the safety of a jail cell).
The safety of a jail cell. I feel jaundiced and hot under my sheets, no closer to sleep, but at least I don't know that loneliness. I hear it's good for people who deserve it though. That's what the good people say. I bet Nicholas Kristof sleeps very well.
