Moodswing - Dead hooker

I’ve been weighing the cost of homicide lately, wondering if it might be worth it in the long run. Of course I dream about killing my overexcited sister Cheryl – who has appeared from Nicaragua to squat in my life again – all the time, but dreams aren’t that satisfying. For one, there’s all that remorse. “Dang, why did I do that?” I remember thinking in my dream, my dead sister at my feet. “I stained my favorite shirt, and now I have to dispose of the body.”

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Lary has often offered me his cleanup services in this regard. After a lifetime of pensive research, foolproof body disposal is supposedly something he’s finally figured out, and he’s eager to put his theory to work. For example, he likes to remind me that he’s the one to call if I ever wake up with a dead hooker in my hotel room.

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“Why the hell would there be a dead hooker in my hotel room?” I used to ask him.

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“You never know,” he’d say, his teeth gleaming.

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At first I thought the probability was pretty slim, but then I realized you don’t have to actually hire a hooker to have her end up dead in your hotel room. Who knows, she could have knocked on your door after huffing too much glue and die right there by the luggage stand with you as the hapless bystander. It’s possible. I’ve known plenty of hookers in my day, and not all of them limited to the crack whores who used to populate my neighborhood. Some of them worked at the same steakhouse with my sister back in San Diego, and that restaurant was located in the lobby of an actual hotel, which made it pretty convenient. None of them ended up dead, though, that I know of.

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I worked there myself one summer. We’d lied about our ages and said we were 20 and 22, respectively, when really I was 16 and she was 18. Until then I’d made money sewing the uniforms for the girls, which was a cake job if there ever was one, because the skirt portion took so little material I could make them out of cut-up pillowcases if I wanted. It was the aprons that were difficult. They had to be exactly 10 inches in length with a dozen pockets and a Velcro waistband, all tailored with pleats, yet lay flat enough so as not to tilt them as they teetered on their come-fuck-me pumps and wagged their asses in the faces of the customers, 90 percent of which were airline pilots and rich criminals.

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It was the dinner shift that was notorious for its line of call girls working the tables, so it’s not surprising that many of the dinner girls got caught “working the box,” as my sister put it. There’d been an actual raid a few years prior, and many were prosecuted to little avail, so by the time I’d started there the girls had figured out how to get creative with their payment demands. One waitress worked the box for rent checks and others for car payments.

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My sister did not work the box, but rather the lunch shift, but still she made so much money it should have been outlawed for a girl her age, what with her penchant for unemployed boyfriends, to have so much cash on hand. I worked the breakfast shift, a time of day usually shunned by the playboys known to frequent the place, so most of my customers were clueless hotel guests who’d wandered in expecting regular coffee-shop fare. So I spent most of my shifts trying to read the newspaper with the pin lamp the bartender kept by the cash register to tally the checks, as the entire restaurant was void of even one single ray of natural light.

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What it did have, though, was gold-and-red brocade wallpaper, booths upholstered in red vinyl and menus that were made – I swear this is true – of actual red meat. Every morning the cook covered serving platters with decorative lettuce and laid slabs of raw steak on top, and it was our job to carry these to the tables and point to each piece like a prize on a game show. “And here you have your aged, Angus-farmed filet mignon ...”

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When I left at noon I’d be blinded by sunlight and so relieved to be free I’d run to my car with my arms outstretched. After a few months I tried to get fired by revealing my real age to the owner, a Jewish-Italian beast of a man in a satin shirt unbuttoned to his nipples.

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I thought for sure he’d fire me, as I was too young to serve alcohol, and even in the morning there were a lot of boozers in there, but he just shrugged and told me to be sure to pick out all the red cabbage from his salad before serving it to him.

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So before long I started picking up a lunch shift here and there, started making real money, started getting used to it. Then one day a customer asked me if I needed my rent paid, and I declined. But after that I knew, I just knew in my 16-year-old retard head, that if I kept this up I’d be in trouble. If I kept this up, in no time, I’d be dead.

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Hollis Gillespie is founder of the Shocking Real Life Writing Academy. For more information, go to www.hollisgillespie.com.