Who's your daddy?

[Wilson Gray]

My description is of the way the life is lived in Los Angeles. In my
lost youth, the picture that I had of prostitution was very close to
what you describe, that being what it says in books. The reality of
black street prostitution in Los Angeles, however, is very, very, very
different.

In any case, I have no experience whatsoever with any aspect of NYC,
never having spent more that a couple of days there at any one time.
So, I yield to your expertise. On the other hand, I lived and worked
for about twenty years in LA-LA Land, seeing, experiencing, reading,
and hearing about every aspect of that city's black neighborhoods. I
also accept your argument that now, even in South-Central L.A., things
are not necessarily the way that they were back in the day.
Nevertheless, I consider it extremely unlikely that, somehow, all
gorilla pimps have now been evicted from South-Central L.A. and have
been replaced by more-or-less ordinary businessmen only trivially
distinct from the people who run nudie bars and produce commercial porn
and that lightly-boozing whores have been replaced by serious dopers.

-Wilson Gray



On Oct 15, 2004, at 10:39 AM, Grant Barrett wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Grant Barrett <gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG>
> Subject:      Re: Who's your daddy?
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
>> That's an _extremely_ romantic concept of prostitution. It must have
>> come from a book.
>
> Well, I'm not going to get into a conversation about how anyone who
> isn't in the trade today can have good knowledge of it, but my
> information, such as it is, does indeed come from books, as well as
> from my father, a former cop, and from acquaintances who are
> prostitutes.
>
> Also, I don't want to do a point-by-point refutation of your
> comments--which are very interesting because every prostitute I know
> snorts or jabs some drug--but to me, they read like thirty years ago in
> St. Louis (where I am from, too, and where my father was a cop), and
> nothing like today's New York City, which is where I get my info. The
> best I can do is walk around, talk to people, and if that's not enough,
> I'll take your word for everything else.
>
> Grant Barrett
>