Ode to a Hooker in L.A.
It’s the middle of the night. She’s standing in the road and waves as I drive by. My headlights are a flashbulb burning the scene into my brain. She looks shy, as if she’s new at this and I can’t tell if she wants me to stop or is glad I don’t. I bang the steering wheel with my fist and scream obscenities into the night. It’s a futile demonstration and the futility feeds my anger. I curse a world where blonde girls have to risk their lives to make a living.
There’s an old drunk asleep on the park bench, and across the street a well-groomed businessman climbs into a Bentley. A single mom is working the graveyard shift and I’m on vacation, but in the cosmic sense, there’s not much difference between any of us.
Everyone has a personal, self-contained universe of pain: broken relationships, failed dreams, and the kind of hope that only makes it worse. Looming over it all is the imminent mortality threatening us and everything we love. It’s the old joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall: not only is the food terrible, the portions are small.
Everyone is carrying a cross. It’s not a contest, and there’s no sense comparing wounds. In theory, this might be comforting. I am not alone – everyone can relate to my pain. In practice, it usually means everyone is too overwhelmed trying to keep their own head above water to be of much help to anyone else. There’s a common cliché in anti-suicide literature: you are not alone. The truth is, we are all alone, but we are alone together.
Trauma and mental health problems are in vogue. Everyone has a disorder, a diagnosis, a prescription, and if you don’t, you’re not trying hard enough. Posers fight for attention, victims try to stay broken, an older generation ignores, a younger generation wallows, and no one will ever know what it’s taken for you and I to still be here. With no greater achievement beyond existence, and that doesn’t seem like much of an achievement, considering the cost. How bad we feel. How little we have achieved. How many times we self-medicate just to make it to the end of the day.
The voices shame us: “How can you feel bad when you have so much? Why haven’t you done more, like Whats-His-Name? You’re weak and pathetic; other people don’t need to drink, or cut, or use.” Maybe they don’t. Maybe other people have done more and feel better. But there are also those who never found a way to survive. There’s something smart and even brave about finding a way through. The only problem is eventually realizing one needs a cure for the cure. No one knows that process, either; how many times you leave the bottle on the shelf or the browser window closed. How many times you make small, healthy choices instead of going down that familiar road. It’s not a sexy achievement, the kind of personal victory you share with your friends.
Even the prospect of getting better has its downsides. It means carrying a heavier weight of responsibility and along with it the potential for real failure. It’s easier to be a victim. Not just because one can blame someone else, but also because of the community among drowning men and compassion from those on shore. When our demons threaten to engulf us, there is commiseration and late night phone calls. I’m in a better place than I used to be, but I miss the sympathy for the devil in me. There’s always something. No easy way through. Only a variety of scars and bruises – the passport stamps of life on earth.
Lin-Manual Miranda wrote, “Dying is easy; living is harder.” For me and everyone else still living it, as miserable as our best efforts so often are, I am proud. We don’t live because it’s easy and we don’t retain any delusion of finding a lasting comfort or happiness. We live because it’s worth doing. Affection is not enough to combat what we are up against. We need love. Whether they are drowning in the sea or safely on land, whether they are hookers, stockbrokers, you, or me, we love people because it’s worth doing. The tragic song is worth singing with every ounce of energy, rage, love, and life we have. This is our revenge.
J.
May 30, 2023