dinsdag 27 mei 2008

A letter from Danny

Vandaag kreeg ik een erg mooie brief van een vriend uit de states:

"Hey Frank

How you doing, you've been good? We haven't really been mailing for a while, but I've been keeping real busy. It's easy to lose track of each other when you're so far apart.

"You know sometimes I feel like such a fucking prostitute." I watched her sitting there, poundered her statement for a minute. She was naked, small, crying. She looked like a little girl. Finally I answered: "That's because you are a fucking prostitute." She seemed utterly indifferent to my sudden judgement but still I felt obliged, or more likely, inclined to add: "There's no shame in that. It's just what you do. You invite men to have sex with you for money. Oldest trade in the world." Back then I was madly in love with her, enchanted by her looks and her sharp mind. Nowadays, I'm not so sure what I am.
"Sure beats being a manager." She said that; a real tough kid, she is.

It all started, like most of it, with family. Her father was fat, obese even, loud and very abusive. Her mother didn't really give a damn. Just your average modern world fairytale, she got herself out of the mud, studied, looked after her sister, got into college. "Well, sh-should be real proud of yourself", slurried her uncle Walter, trying to get himself some prime teen titty. So she got into college, and soon, away from her abusive and violent home, found herself leading a happier life. But as some kind of natural rule dictates, she still had to meet the wrong guy for her. Dean was handsome, a real jock, real witty too and she fell madly in if not love something closely resembling love with him. They danced and talked all night for months, she felt like a queen, he made her feel like that. Soon she said: "It doesn't matter if he hits me, that's my fault, as long as he loves me." They married, a humble ceremony, Dean didn't like to spend money on things that you couldn't snort. "If it doesn't disappear in your nostril, it probably's not worth the money" was one of his fixed expressions. He was a real tough mother, probably screwed a lot of women on the side, too. But you can't be sure of that, not totally sure at least. Well, they married and he stopped loving her. But he left her with a child to take care of, the one thing he did give her, and nowhere to turn.

Can't say I'm sorry about all that, because I wouldn't get to nail her if it hadn't happened. I know she needs the money. She knows what I need. Greatest deal in the fucking world. So in a way, I guess there really exists some kind of cosmic balance, even if some people only get to know the downside of it.

I approached her over at Grover Streer where she was solliciting for some good old bucks. She wore a skimpy pink tanktop and a real short skirt and even though she looked like the next tacky whore superficially I really knew there was something special about her from the start. She moved me, you could say, I can't explain it, it's just like her face opened up, I could see what was beneath all the paint and it really got to me.

"I shouldn't have been born." she told me one night, when our nightly encounters had been going on for some weeks, she liked to take her time after making love. I never did anything but make love to her, I never fucked her. When she said that, I looked at her, gazed at such honesty in a professional girl and I became a listener where I was a costumer before. Every time I gave her money for sex afterwards I felt like I betrayed her. I began to think maybe I have fallen in love with her.

I know I should take care of her, but I can't handle it. Where does a man get the strenght to pull another human being out of the mud from? I sure as heck don't know.
Would I be inclined to help her, to take her to a better life, if she looked really ugly? It's a valid question, I guess, but one not worth asking, because she is there now, breathing, crying, breaking me to pieces and tearing me apart.

I'm turning to you, Frank, my friend, because I don't know what to do. If I do take her with me to live someplace in a cleaner, more wholesome neighbourhood, I would gain a lot, but I will almost certainly lose youth. I will gain a kid, some beauty, and a profoundly poetic story in my life. I don't know if that's enough.

I would also gain the knowledge that I was doing the right thing, but hey, who gives a damn about that these days. Right?

Your friend
Danny F."

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