One Of Rizzo's Ho's (RC, DG)

[FannieGillespie]

One Of Rizzo’s Ho’s

The idea that led to my predicament came in an elegant place worlds apart from where I am now. Mason Monroe, the editor of Gentrify, took me out for an over-priced lunch to discuss future articles and features I might write for his magazine. I had seared ahi on a bed of field greens (unbeknownst to me, for the last time in my life) when the conversation drifted to a number of my favorite hobby-horses — poverty, the exploitation of women, the theft of money and life by the Elite Status Quo. I harangued and complained that, because of these “Elites,” too much of the United States had become a Third World country, and that much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America had to be called Fourth or Fifth World zones. I am a great admirer of Clark Hodges, the former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winner who rails against the Corporate State, turning us all into beggars, thieves, or mind-controlled cheerleaders for self-oppression.

I knew even mentioning Clark Hodges was dicey in front of Monroe; I had no idea if he respected Hodges or not, and I didn’t know (and I still don’t know for sure) if running off at the mouth this time sealed my fate with the magazine. He listened patiently, letting me do all the talking: “Someone ought to do the old-fashioned kind of journalism — you know, go out there and try it for themselves.”

I had no idea I had just exactly quoted another of my journalistic heroes, Barrie Breitenbach, when Monroe gave me exactly the response she got from her editor; a smile, and a one word answer:

“You.”

Once I recovered from my shock, I had to ask him: which of those hobby-horses was I supposed to cover? I had gone, politically and journalistically, all over the place. “All of them,” he said, “Try to find some way to cover every one of your concerns; and don’t edit yourself — brainstorm a number of ideas and bring them to my desk, tomorrow morning.” Letting my mind go wild, I brought a list, with descriptions, of three-dozen scenarios; the sanest and most likely at the top, the most outlandish and frankly preposterous toward the end. With alarming swiftness, he skimmed over the first four pages, studying in more detail the “crazy stories” at the end.

“These two.” Monroe pointed to the very last scenarios on my list. The craziest ones.

The second to the last issue was the plight of “Strip-Shop” workers. Strip-shops were far more exploitative than sweat-shops: the women were housed and essentially imprisoned in the buildings in which they worked, and they were paid nothing except the food they ate, the water they drank, and a place to sleep on the mattresses on the floor in the rooms where they were locked up for the night. Never seeing the light of day. And with an added feature: owning no possessions of any kind — including even a stitch of clothes. These women were locked in a factory 24/7, in the nude. Horribly enough, two such strip-shops were found in the United States, one in Chicago, another in Dallas, both within three months of each other. Though none others had yet to be found, the very existence of such places — in big cities in our own country — strongly implied the existence of more.

The very last idea was an expose on sex-workers in Central America. Desperate women who had to have sex for money — or not eat.

“Why not,” said Monroe, “combine those last two?”

Before my surely shocked face, Monroe laid out a new scenario: “Tourists — and we don’t have to mention what kind of tourists — have reported that sex-workers in Latin America have formed ‘settlements’ or ‘colonies’ just outside of the largest cities. These are not merely the exotics you find in Rio de Janiero during Carnival; these are women so poverty-strickened that they make do feeding themselves on pennies a day — that is, if our preliminary reports are correct. You see? This combines everything that offends you: poverty (the city where this colony borders has multi-billionaires living in it, the biggest income-gap in the world), racism (all the ladies are brown or black-skinned; and the darker you are, the worse you get treated), sexism (all the prostitutes are women or transwomen), exploitation and commoditization of women, AND the oppression of the Fifth World by the First World. Having access to very cheap sex is one of the ways this Latin American country keeps the male population from rising up in protest and overthrowing the corrupt system! This is made for you.”

I was on fire. Monroe was right: this one was right up my alley, and I didn’t get into journalism to cosy up to rich people (even as I thought this, it occurred to me that Mason Monroe was hardly poor...), I got into it — drum roll, please — To Make A Difference. But the fact of these settlements was already known, and reported on, or Monroe and myself would not have known about them. Yet I noticed some difficulties doing this report, and I had to bring them up.

“Yes, yes, you’re right, this one IS made for me. I will have to brush up on my...Spanish? Portuguese? To handle this one. That will take time, and I will have to be paid for that.” As eager as I was to take the assignment, I knew my languages had to be better than they are now, and Monroe had to know that.

“That’s not a problem. The real problem is, you will have to do it.”

“No problem, Mason, none. I’m a big girl; reporting for a week, or even a month, in squalid conditions does not bother me. I’m going to report on real news, not whether Latin American seared ahi tuna tastes better than ours does.”

“No. I when I mean you have to do it, I mean you have to join them.”

“What? What do you mean??”

“You will never gain your subject’s trust, and you will never get the real facts, unless you go undercover and become a prostitute yourself.”

“Are you CRAZY??” Peoples heads in the restaurant turned our way. I didn’t care!

“No, no, please sit down...please...hear me out...”

He told me. I heard him out. He pulled out an ace-in-the-hole, a photojournalist who published a book on big-city strippers by auditioning for, and working as an exotic dancer while she photographed her subjects. He pulled out a copy of the glossy paperback, the gritty black-and-white photography in pre-tech Seattle, in the pre-digital age. No way at all she could have made that book great unless she took the same job as her stripping and dancing subjects. But if I had to pass for a prostitute in Latin America, I still had one really big, First World, white-skinned objection, written all over my face and body...

“Don’t worry. I have...access...to very, ‘Elite’ solutions. Won’t it be nice to use the Elite’s own — very hidden — resources against them? Take a week off, paid, on me. Prepare yourself for an extended ‘vacation’ and meet me at the Matheson Building at Nine O’Clock, next Friday.”

* * * * *

The Matheson Building is taller than fifty stories. Monroe had a way of using his thumbprint, and “programming” the elevator buttons in exact sequence, like some rising-and-falling, people-carrying VCR, to get us to a floor in the building hidden from the public. The entire floor was a genetics laboratory. “Consider yourself very privileged; almost nobody in the world visits this place. One of the few, is a certain patriarch of an old American family who is 101 years old now. This is the reason he’s still alive.”

“What? No way! No, change that; he can afford anything he wants can’t he?”

“It isn’t just about wealth. Steven Jobs never learned about this place, and his net worth was — reportedly — much larger. If Jobs knew about this, don’t you think he’d still be alive?”

“I don’t know if I believe what you’re telling me.”

“You’ll see for yourself, You won’t need to take my word. Besides: You don’t really think that that patriarch of that old wealthy American family had six heart-transplant operations? The last one at age 99? No. One of the things that this lab can do is turn back the genetic clock: it can make you younger.”

“You’re joking. You must be.”

“Not a joke, no,” Monroe’s face was serious. “One of the perks of this job, if you choose to accept it, is that we will be shaving a number of years off of your life. Hey, we head in here...”

He lead me into a perimeter room, with a view of the city. As if to put a proscenium arch on what Monroe just told me, sunlight streamed through the clouds in beams. New York City had never looked so glorious.

“Okay, are you still interested in going through with this? What are you thinking?”

“Why doesn’t he rejuvenate all the way? He looks awful. He can, why doesn’t he?”

Mason Monroe laughed. Laughed hard and long, almost alarmingly. All I did was ask a good question...

“I knew you were the right person for this job! You learn that the Fountain of Youth is about to splash years of age off of you, and, just like a good reporter, you ask instead about a celebrated scion of an old, rich family!” Just as suddenly, the laughter and smile comes off of his face. “He likes the power and wealth in the life he has right now. Eventually, he will have to take the full rejuvenation; but as he gets older, he has (reportedly) gotten more paranoid. Frankly, the longer he puts off this latest rejuve, the less he is going to trust that someone isn’t going to cheat him, or have him killed ‘by natural causes.’ To be honest, just by knowing about this place, just by being here now, your life is in some peril, and that won’t change for the rest of your life. I’m sorry I brought you here without warning you about this, but I think this assignment is exactly what you live for, isn’t it? But it’s not too late, you can still turn back, not go through genetic reassignment, and forget this ever happened.”

“Listen,” my life is already in ‘peril,’ as you put it; asking a few more — crucial — questions won’t make it any worse. I assume that any genetic changes you put me through can be totally reversed, is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“You can rejuvenate me, and I don’t have to give those years back when this assignment is over, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What sort of changes are you going to put me through, to disguise me where I’m going?

“Change of race. Change of height and weight. Reduction of physiological age to seventeen or eighteen. Any germs or disease in your body, right now, will be gone. Heightened immune system. You will be just about bulletproof to any diseases — venereal or otherwise — as long as your body is changed. We can change just about any physical feature you have to something else, but I have to tell you: we will also be using means to alter your mind. Not to alter its contents or your intelligence, but to keep you incognito. You won’t have to think about your disguise; you won’t look like yourself — and you won’t act like yourself.

“Totally reversible changes, right?”

“Absolutely. That much I can guarantee.”

Does Monroe know?

Does he know of my, my...nature? My...kinky...fixations? Every change he suggests putting me through, feed my deepest submissive fantasies. Could Monroe know of my “submissive” streak? I only suggested the last ideas for the essay for Gentrify to satisfy that humiliating streak in me — I had no idea he would choose them! The idea of prostituting myself, literally prostituting myself, for an article in a magazine fulfils both a deeply hidden fantasy — and frightens me half to death...

“...Mr. Monroe, you have the right person. Let’s do it.”

I undressed and got into a large, glass-lined tank of water. A mask blocked off my nose and mouth so that I could breathe, and my eyes were sealed against the fluid. “You will be in here for a while; by the time we’re finished, your entire body will, until we reverse the process, no longer be your own. You will have different DNA, different appearance, voice, proportions, everything. The only thing that will stay the same is your mind and your emotions. Are you ready?”

Already getting sleepy in the body-temperature liquid, I nodded my head — and then I don’t remember anything else...

...I am standing in a row, with six other women. We are nude. One of the girls is dark, dark black — “skillet-black,” as a friend of mine from college once described a relative. Another has breasts sagging against her belly, nipples pointed downward almost to the level of her navel. One of us is obese, a cauldron of wobbly butterscotch pudding, wiggling and jiggling with every move. None of us look like models from Vogue, Cosmopolitan, or Playboy, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the men entering the room. A middle-aged, white male takes the dark girl from behind, bending her forward and making her breasts sway with every thrust. A Latin man stands behind the fat girl, puts her arms and legs in shackles, and reaches around her and tickles her belly. Quivering rolls of soft fat surge in waves in time with her peals of laughter. A black man stands before me, his cock erect and long. It’s clear what I must do for him: I kneel, wrap my hands around the smooth skin of his hips and buttocks, and take his erection into my mouth...

...sunlight shines before my eyes, although they are still sealed shut, and I cannot see. They were a dream...a submissive dream, no doubt in response to the crazy assignment I'm about to do. I suspect, as I’m being lifted out of the water, that Monroe could have no idea of my sexual predispositions, of just how my soul is wired. I wait for the breathing mask and eye sealant to be removed, knowing, with a sick-and-silly little thrill, that my editor is seeing me dripping wet and naked.

“Open your eyes slowly. They are not used to the light, you’ve been in the tank for seven days.“

Mason Monroe is a blur. A painful blur that’s higher up than I remember. He is not standing on ceremony; he wraps a towel around me and dries me off, a puddle of water still surrounding my bare, dark feet.

Dark feet??

“I’m very sorry, we will have to move. We only have less than an hour in here, alone, and we must be out of here well before that time.”

He puts his arm around me and guides me to...a mirror...

I am shorter. I can’t even be five feet tall. My skin is very dark. My waist is thick, my breasts are small, my hips are narrow, but my butt is big. I see Native Mexican, Caribbean Island Black, and, maybe, Amazonian aborigine in the face and body of my reflected image. No sign of the “Shiksa Goddess,” what my Jewish ex-boyfriend called me, in the mirror at all.

Surely, Monroe can’t know that my nipples aren’t supposed to look like this...I hope he thinks all “primitive tribeswomen” have pointed nipples like mine...because I’m so aroused by the shameful sight of me that I can hardly breathe...

“Quickly, in here,” he points to a padded box built to look like a pet carrier. “Officially, you don’t exist; we have to get you out of the country straightaway. Very sorry for the cramped conditions, but a loudspeaker in the box will fill you in on the rest.”

He thinks that being stuck in a box and shipped out of the country makes all of this...worse. For the sake of suppressed desires I’ve had all my life, things are only getting better and better. This is madness, the fulfillment of my wildest, even sickest, fantasies is just plain crazy; but the sexual thrill is getting the better of me. Maybe it’s for the best that my submissive nature, my “sub-space” is kicking in, just as I’m getting locked in a box, naked, to be shipped out of the country.

* * * * *

I knew how dicey, how risky the whole enterprise was going to be. These prostitutes were mostly, even in this enlightened day and age, illiterate. Walking a mile in their shoes was also going to be tough: given the sultry climate and their extreme poverty, even shoes or sandals were beyond their means! If I was going to live as one of them, I’d have to spend that whole month completely naked, just like them!

In fact, the trickiest part of the photo essay was: how was I going to stay in character and incognito if I had no clothes or any bag to carry around the camera?

I have no idea how much money Gentrify — or whoever — spent to change me, both physically and mentally. When Mason packed me into the pet crate to ship me out of the country, I looked nothing like the tall, Caucasian career woman and professional photographer I really am. I was four feet, ten inches in height, about 165 lbs, and indistinguishable from the prostitutes who, for the next thirty days, would be my companions, roommates, and even confidantes!

But the trickiest part of my disguise was not visible — it was what the water tank in the lab did to my mind! I was willing to go through this much transformation because, after all, being discovered before the publication of my articles and books was rather dangerous — to my career! As I have no talent for accents or acting, deep electronic-chemical hypnosis made me mute. As long as I thought, in the privacy of my head, I could think like myself; but as soon as I tried to talk, I just couldn’t make the words come out! This guaranteed that my disguise would be complete. Even though my editor took pictures of me, I looked so much like the whores I’d be living with that the only way to positively identify me was the microchip implanted just under my skin.

How would I get into the barrio? How was I going to penetrate the walls of distrust surrounding the prostitutes and their homes? I would enter the “common square” of one of the prostitution dens under the cover of night, with a heavy dose of cannabis. Heavy doses of cannabis were known to cause paranoia, and were often used to kidnap and break the resistance of women to recruit them for prostitution. If I came in, paranoid and delusional, my disguise as a illiterate brown woman would be complete and believed immediately. Being paranoid in a Central American slum was going to be very frightening; but, for my career advancement, it would be worth it!

In the dead of night some men who will be forever unknown to me dropped me off, in an untied burlap sack, next to a pile of bags of garbage. Whew, what a stench! I poked my head furtively out of the sack and the smell got worse. Nobody was around. There were no lights but the stars above, and the fires and gas lamps of the barrio off in the distance.

Why did they drop me off in the middle of a garbage dump? I know it insured that nobody would see me, but I had to walk through an acre of garbage! The bags ripped and burst open when I stepped on them, and horrible smells and sickening wetnesses assaulted my nose and splashed on my bare legs. Only by sheer luck did I avoid stepping on broken glass or rusty nails — or poisonous snakes — and by the time I got through stepping and walking and falling down in the trash and muck, my entire face and body was coated in dirt, trash, and slime! I took a dip in a pool of open water just short of the slum. I knew that the stagnant water was dirtier than any drainage ditch back home, but I just, just, had to wash some of the sewage off of me. By the time I waded waist deep into the water the cannabis kicked in. I felt very afraid, although I knew I had “nothing” to be afraid of. Nothing except that I was going to be a mute, naked, brown whore for the next twenty-nine days. I knew, too, that I was going to be artificially paranoid for the next twelve hours. The temperature was sticky and hot, but I shivered from fear; I found a piece of cardboard on the outskirts of “town” to lay down on, and went fitfully to sleep.

I awoke to a skinny dog licking my face, and some woman shouting at me. I could not understand her, and she frightened me. Still in the thrall of cannabis paranoia, I fluttered my hands in panic and curled up in fear as she asked me questions in some Latin language — I have to assume it was heavily-accented Spanish — that I could not figure out. A crowd formed around me, and I could not tell them that I was scared just to be in the middle of them. A sulty contralto voice spoke to the assembled women and the circle widened, then parted. A caramel-brown, naked matron knelt next to me. Softly she touched my shoulder, and her gentleness calmed my fears. She could tell I was intoxicated with drugs; and through her the community accepted me as a guest, if not yet one of their own. Slowly she raised me to my feet, stroking her hands over my back and on my thighs. Her fondlings should have been lascivious, but they were not. I was soothed, reassured, even babied by her touch; and I began to understand why, even in dirty surroundings and in the open air, the whores of this barrio were sought after all over Central America.

I must have seemed dimwitted or retarded to the women and girls. I could not understand a single word spoken to me! When I found a scrap of magazine with Spanish on it, I could read the words on it; but when I tried to say the word I just read — nothing would come out of my mouth. As the cannabis wore off, I saw the path the women took to fetch drinkable water. My first act on my own steam was to fetch some water myself and bring it to the cistern where drinking and cooking water were kept. I blinked to find the cistern already full; but the women then knew that I wasn’t retarded. They knew I wanted to be helpful, and that I was friendly. I just couldn’t talk.

So now the prostitutes trusted me, but now I had to buckle down to the cover job I came here to do: I had to become a prostitute, myself! For the next two weeks, before the magazine staff provided me with my camera, I entertained men of all sizes, descriptions, ages, and (most of all) cleanlinesses! Thankfully, I have that submissive streak in me, that I usually have to keep tightly bottled up, lest it cost me professional advancement! Letting the “subbie” in me loose to service my “Juans” kept me totally in character. Fortunately the modifications to my body made me sterile-reversible, but I felt deeply humiliated and ashamed to seduce, kneel before, spread my fat legs open to, and suck the rampant cocks of, brown and husky third-world men who were total strangers! How degrading and humiliating! I both hated it, and loved it; but the more I hated what I was doing to myself, the hornier I became and also the more I loved every minute!! My camera — cleverly packaged — couldn’t come too soon, because I could just feel myself becoming addicted to this naughty, nasty, naked life! If I could just have a camera in my hands, the respected professional in me could come to the fore, and I’d be able to ignore the hardening of my nipples and the moistening between my legs and produce the work I really came here for — the work that would turbo-charge my professional reputation!

As much as I was tossed in a whirlwind of sex, shame, and orgasms (my “Juans” — and mine!) everything was going according to plan — until SHE showed up.

A photographer from a rival magazine — and a personal rival as well — showed up with great fanfare to this very section of the barrio! Stylishly attired in very expensive “expedition” gear, she announced to the matron who accepted me into this world — sort of the defacto mayoress of our community — that her magazine was going to do an extensive article and photo spread on prostitution in Central America! My idea!! Stolen right from me! Of course, I had no idea if she stole my idea somehow or thought of it at the same time, but the execution couldn’t be more different!

Any objections any of the women had here were promptly smoothed over by meager payouts of money into dirty, brown, feminine hands that were used to mere pennies! Instead of candidly photographing the women in their honest lives, this tall blond bitch freely rearranged the women, the poses, even the backgrounds in the barrio to give more “colorful” shots for the article. Twice, she even ordered me into a photo, and forced me into a pose she thought more “representative” of the lives we barrio whores led! The second time was the worse: even though the women in this compound of prostitution were, well, prostitutes, they were not lesbians. To provide additional detail for the readers at home, a lesbian “scene” was arranged, between the leader of us prostitutes, and the only prostitute who could be forced to orally service a woman on-camera — me. This rival photographer snapped shot after shot of me, licking and sucking on this kindly matron who was so good to me when I arrived here. As my face was deep into her pussy, I can only imagine what her face looked like, but I’m sure she was mortified. Even so, I know I managed to garner a number of orgasms from her, almost against her will!!

Ooooohhhh!! How I couldn’t wait to start shooting my own photographs! I’d show that poseur what real photojournalism was! Imagine my horror, to find out — one morning — that Rival had in hand a very different camera than the one she came with! I recognized it at once: it was MINE. She must have found it, and thought it was hers, because, after all, what illiterate whore around here could possibly own a precision piece of equipment like that? A whore so poor she couldn’t even afford clothes? As I couldn’t even talk; no way I could prove that the camera was mine, and that I knew how to use it far better than she ever could! That meant that my purpose here was gone. With no camera to take the pictures I was really here to do, I would have to keep performing as a prostitute, and service horny and macho men, until my magazine identified me by the microchip under my skin, and get me out of here!

Had my month passed yet? With no way to tell the passage of time, I didn’t know. I tried to make hash-marks in a hidden place, but my mental conditioning meant I could imagine hash-marks in my head, but I couldn’t draw them! This was soooo distressing, but there was nothing I could do but wait, and be rescued by my editor...

...the month passed by, into further weeks, into further months. I was trapped! Without the magazine editor pulling strings, I was stuck here, naked, brown-skinned, unable to speak! The anxiety from being trapped in a Central American barrio, maybe for....the rest of my life....felt unbearable, and made me unbearably horny. Having nothing else I could do, I threw myself into my shameful job and degrading life, servicing sometimes dozens of men in a day! I had enough food to eat, clean water to drink, and the soft skin of fellow whores touching me at night as we slept in the same hut, rubbing and cuddling up against each other; but my life as a professional woman and photographer for a world-famous magazine seemed farther and farther in the distance, receding rapidly away from my reach as I sucked cocks, took them into my wetness, and swallowed cumm multiple times a day....

* * * * *

Four months later She came back to the barrio with — a magazine in her hand. It was the photo-shoot she did of us! It took up a very large amount of the issue, and most of us were shown in the photos more than once. The centerpiece of the article was the “lesbian” shoot with me and our matron-leader. Most of the ladies were, surprisingly, delighted to see themselves in print! The only exceptions were us two “lesbians”. I could now see what her face looked like when I licked between her legs: deeply flushed, blushing, truly mortified.

But it was something to read! For the first time in months! Ooohhh, just wait, you posing blonde phony, just wait! As soon as I regroup and start taking my photographs, you’ll be left in my dust!...Was my mental conditioning affecting my ability to read?? Oh, my gosh, I hope not! But then I read two things in the magazine that made my blood freeze:

First, my rival’s magazine had, just a month ago, purchased the magazine I worked for! No way was I going to get to photograph this story — MY story — my way! Then, I noticed a horrible notice on the credits page...

“....a week before the acquistion of Gentrify Magazine by LikePeople, Mason Monroe, Editor-in-Chief of Gentrify, died of a cerebral hemorrage. We, the writers and editorial staff at LikePeople, express our....”

Oh, NOOO!! Mr. Monroe was the ONLY person at the magazine — the only person in the entire world — who knew I was on assignment!! I expect that I’m “presumed missing,” but nobody knows where I am, and nobody knows what I am now!!!

Nobody is going to look for me....here! And I think something else is happening to me: when my rival at LikePeople talked during her first visit, of course I had no trouble understanding her. Now, understanding her is much harder! Is my mental conditioning making me unable to understand speech — even English — as well as making me unable to speak??

* * * * *

Only much later did it occur to me that Mason Monroe probably did NOT die of natural causes. Didn’t he have access to the same rejuvenation techniques used on me? Surely a cerebral hemorrage would not have taken him — knowing about that room did.

Not that I can tell anyone!

Perhaps hiding out as a brown-skinned, illiterate prostitute is the only thing keeping me from suffering his fate...

“She” is a regular visitor now. In time, she left LikePeople and created her own magazine. Gentrify was a much classier magazine than LikePeople ever was, but it’s a silk scarf compared to the dirty rag she created: “Rizzo’s Ho’s.” It specializes in third and fourth-world sex! It’s the most popular new magazine in the world, and by far the most popular one still printed on paper.

If I could only leave this Central American country, go home, and find a microchip reader which would prove that I’m me! But, as I have not worn any clothes at all in well over a year, I have no chance of leaving the barrio without being rounded up, thrown in jail, and then returned here. Besides, “She” wouldn’t stand for it, I’ve become one of her “favorites.” Every time she comes, I have to lick her between her lily-white legs, then take her strap-on. Due to the immense, new popularity of “Rizzo’s Ho’s”, wealthy and middle-class tourists now take the “Poontang Trek” in search of cheap, third-world pussy and ass! Many of them, of course, show up here, but we still get only our few pennies per coupling. No doubt, Rival makes most of the money by charging the rubes to get here; once they are here, they can hire and fuck as many of us poor, brown, naked women as they want — after all, over here, they’re rich! Wealthy beyond the wildest imaginings of any of the coffee-brown ladies who live here! And they act like it!! It’s not unusual to find over two dozen of us nude “chickas” attending hand and foot — and cock — to some portly blowhard from Skokie, Illinois, treating us like they are one of the “One Percent.” Even when we are not having to fuck or suck the tourists, they get to photograph us as much as they want. I guess I have become one of the most photographed prostitutes in the entire world, but nobody — still — knows my name or who I used to be.

My skin is coffee brown. My belly swells with jiggling fat. My breasts droop down as if they’ve never worn a bra. As the slim, tall, professional woman I used to be, I would — I am ashamed to say — never have given the woman who is me, now, a second glance. Even with a cheap dress and sandals — not that I will ever own any such things ever again — I would still look too primitive to pass for an American resident anywhere in the United States.

My chances of being changed back to my real self are just about gone. I know that nobody I know can recognize me, but I can just never get used to knowing that any of my friends and family — or anybody in the world with five dollars in their grubby hands — can buy a magazine, or look up on the web, and see my cheaply-bought, naked body — for sale to all bidders.

[Hongo1000]

Really enjoyable., thank you for posting it

[Lyssa]

This was really a gut wrenching story. I really liked it.

[lendani]

Fantastic story, very well written and I loved it. Can't wait to read more similar stories. Thank you for posting it

[FannieGillespie]

Fantastic story, very well written and I loved it. Can't wait to read more similar stories. Thank you for posting it

I've been busy, so I haven't been here for maybe three months. You're very welcome!

I'd like to write longer ones, but unlike many here who write (often really good) serial stories, I prefer to write the whole thing -- at least in a first draft -- then post installments.

Incidentally, the "gritty photojournalist book from Seattle" mentioned in the story really does exist. It's called "The Lusty Lady," written and photographed by Erika Langley. I have no idea how much a copy would cost, as it was published back in 1997.

[lendani]

Yes that book looks interesting, although only available to hard copy.
I like your writing style, especially Rc/DG, and I'm really looking forward to similar stories like this in the future
Do. You know where else there are similar stories of this genre?

[FannieGillespie]

Really enjoyable., thank you for posting it

Over two years ago you said you liked my little short story. I have an intermittent lazy streak, which I'm now pushing aside. Thank you for letting me know! One tries to write the best stories one can, and you never know if what you wrote connects, or not, unless someone replies

I want to eventually write longer stories, but I won't post a thing until an entire story is all written -- at least in a decent first draft. I've seen too many stories peter out towards the end, though I'm still grateful they get written.