To get me to fall asleep, my mother and father would fasten me into our family’s 1971 Toyota Carina, throw in an eight-track cassette of Anne Murray’s Greatest Hits and drive up and down South Main Street in Houston, Texas, to look at the prostitutes. The blinking neon signs of the no-tell motels, the bling of streetwalkers working their finery, and the day-glo hues of their billowing lingerie were too much stimulation even for a toddler; I would finally shut my eyes and stop struggling against the seat belt while “Shadows in the Moonlight” and the South Main ho stroll played on. I nodded off to sleep not only with visions of sugar plum fairies, but also of leather-clad fairies, common harlots, desperate dope fiends, glamorous go-girls, and rowdy rent-boys all gyrating in my little head.It wasn’t my idea to expose me to a life on the street like that, but back in the 1980s, you had to get out of your house to experience life and love and also to look at prostitutes. Today you can just go to some live-stream dung dungeon and e-jaculate along with the rest of the blundering online nymphos to stuff you’re not even creative enough to imagine, or ask for.Since then, I’ve visited prostitutes from Nuevo Laredo to Amsterdam, Hamburg to Tokyo, and Las Vegas to Havana, and one thing never changes: People are too quick to make assumptions about what “visiting”
