Fallen Women 1010

          A group of 50 academics has urged the Rhode Island legislature not to ban indoor prostitution, which is legal in that state. 

                                                 The Boston Herald

I was sitting at my desk, trying to come up with a lesson plan for tomorrow's class, and getting nowhere.  Kids these days were so easily distracted, so blase--it was impossible to get their attention and keep it for 55 minutes three times a week, or 85 minutes for a Tuesday-Thursday schedule.

Nobody likes to teach the common core courses, but somebody has to.  I didn't design the freaking curriculum here at St. Mary Magdalene's College (mascot: The Hookers), but if I'm ever going to get tenure I have to do an introductory survey class every semester while the old farts on the faculty handle the upper-level seminars like "Sociopolitical Aspects of Common Nightwalking" and "Garish Fashion Design Colloquium", where you get two, maybe three students at most.  Nice work if you can get it.

I leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.  We were bogged down, like the Greeks, in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian Wars.  It is a classic, but you can hear classics any day of the week on Oldies 106.7, the kids say, so why read a book?

Thucydides:  Why the long face?

I was just about to throw in the towel when I heard a knock at my door.  Like all professors here, I'm required to maintain office hours to help students with problems, so I'm at my desk every fourth Tuesday of months without an "r" in them from 10:30 to 11:00 p.m.  It's the least I can do for the poverty-level wages they pay gypsy professors like me.

"Come in," I called.

"A hundred pages of required reading tonight?  No way!"

A woman and a man, flamboyantly dressed, appeared at the threshold.  "Professor Litz?" the woman, barely out of her teens, squeaked hesitantly.

"That would be me--I was about to close up shop but if you have a question about the syllabus, I can . . ."

"Actually, we ain't in yo class," the man said.

Double your pleasure with a National Honor Society President and Treasurer two-some.

"Well, the course is closed at this point.  I can put you on the waiting list for next semester or I could . . ."

"Get a load of this, doc," the man said to me, and then to the woman "Show him what you got, Amber."

The woman approached my desk chair and straddled it, stuffing her ample bosom into my face.  My pipe dropped to the floor, spilling hot shreds of tobacco on her platform heel-encased left foot.

"Yow," she said, shaking her leg as she did so.

"No rough stuff," the man said.  "I got to protect my investment.  Besides, plain vanilla, garden-variety pedagogy is your best prostitution value."

The woman began to massage the leather elbow patches on my tweed jacket.  It felt good--really good--in a way that my wife Clytemnestra could never match, not in a million years of reading Lady Chatterley's Lover or Andrew Marvel's To His Coy Mistress.

 "Ungh," I groaned, and I meant it.

"Thass just a little taste, man," the man said.  "You want the real thing I need to see some cash."

I wanted to walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Amber's mammary glands.  My rod and my staff needed comforting.

"How much?" I asked, fearing the answer would be beyond the means of a poor adjunct professor.

"A hundred bucks an hour," he replied.

"Ouch," was all I could say.

"I'm sorry," Amber said, her lips forming into a sensuous, coquettish moue.

"What's a moue?" her pimp asked.

"A little grimace, or a pout.  It's French."

"You want anything French, it's gonna cost you extra," he said.

"Listen--there's no way I can pay what you're asking," I said.  "I can barely afford to take my wife to free folk dancing on Friday nights."

The man looked me over, and emitted a little snort of contempt.  Amber got off my lap and straightened her skimpy outfit.  They were moving on to the next "john", even though my name is "Evan".

"Wait," I said as they brushed past my compact Oxford English Dictionary, almost knocking the reading glass to the ground.  "I've got something that's better than money."

They turned around and were all ears, except for Amber's humongous ta-ta's.

"What you got?" the man asked, clearly skeptical.

"I . . . I can get you into my Introduction to the Literature of Prostitution Class--and give you both straight A's!"

The man gave me a steely, disgusted gaze.  "C'mon Amber," he said after a moment that seemed like a minute.  "This guy thinks we're a couple a cheap whores."