Moné

This funny thing happened to me. I ate lunch at Taqueria, one of the two Mexican joints around the corner from Jaime’s, and then ducked into the Internet café to do some email. After a while, this beautiful and staggeringly pregnant young woman came in and sat down at the computer next to me. Conversation arose and I learned she was from Minnesota, she was 24 years old, she played hockey and rugby at university, she used to work as a nurse, she was due to give birth to a boy on January 2nd. She also complained about her 44-year-old boyfriend, the father’s child, who rarely made time to see her. She lived on the North Side of Chicago, he the South, and it seemed they saw each other about once every 10 days.

So, it was one of those pleasant, unremarkable encounters that happen on the road. Until this woman asked me for computer help. She needed to post an ad on roomservice.com, which is some kind of escort network. It turns out, that under the name Moné, she had been working as an escort for the past ten months.

“It’s the best job I ever had,’ she told me. ‘You earn 300 dollars an hour and you just have to be able to separate having sex from making love.’

Maybe … but I wasn’t so convinced by the happy hooker thing. For my research on my next book (the murderer was an aspiring pimp) I read Iceberg Slim’s ‘Pimp’ and Moné’s story seemed like one of Iceberg’s stories. She met her ‘boyfriend’ in a club and began prostituting herself less than two months later. The man didn’t seem to care much about her or the child. And she was from rural Minnesota and the word was that Chicago pimps loved to prey on young women from rural Minnesota because they are blond, blue-eyed and incredibly naïve.

Then there was the whole question of the baby. Moné was still working, still taking calls at nearly eight months pregnant, putting on great shoes and slinky maternity dresses and arriving at the downtown hotels to service clients. My great love, the woman who saw me through the book and is now, sadly, my ex-great love, had a theory about pregnant sex. She thought the baby could feel the father’s energy and that the splashes of the father’s sperm were healthy for the baby. I believe this too, so the inverse must be true. How does the baby feel about his mother’s hooking? There must be incredibly bad energy there.

After the Internet café, Moné took me to the Salvation Army to try and buy me a warmer jacket and the whole thing was extremely disconcerting. A part of me was charmed because she was such a lively and fun woman (a Gemini); part of me wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her (she would have none of it; her mother tried to talk out of hooking but to no avail); part of me hated men, especially asshole pimp men; and part of me hated myself because there was a tremor of titillation to be shopping for used clothes with a beautiful pregnant escort.

In the end, there was nothing to be done. Moné drove off to try and track down her boyfriend and I drove up north along Lake Michigan to Winnetka, wondering where Moné and her child would be in two, five, ten years. I am optimistic by nature but I have a hard time seeing a happy ending here.