Helena never cared for her profession even though it was the oldest one. Oh sure, she always got hot meals and she worked in the clear fresh Montana air but the bending and lifting tired her and she never ever felt she was very good at it. Every night, after servicing battalions of priapic miners she would simper and wonder if she’d ever be good enough for the life she’d chosen. Even for a prostitute she had remarkably low self-esteem.
Her parents had lost her in a card game to an enterprising fellow that ran some cribs in the Canal Zone. Never the nostalgic type, she threw her self into her new life with enthusiasm and soon the sailors and visitors to that marine cross road were a blur to her. Of course, the first time a girl takes on the crew of a super carrier is always a fond romantic memory but she was touched to discover they remembered as well when they re-named the USS Carl Vinson, “Thanks Helena”. She recalled the time fondly and no matter how many times she was pounded into a mattress by subsequent crews or fleets, she always carried around a photo she and 4000 sailors had taken together outside the shabby hovel where she’d serviced the men and women of the mighty war ship.
The good times don’t last forever though and she was run out of that seafarer's paradise by the Colon City Council who decided that she was detrimental to the morals of the other prostitutes. She moved on to the greener if sooty pastures of Montana where a coal rush was full swing.
Miners had flocked to the Big Sky State where by dint of hard, backbreaking, labor they could earn enough to barely survive. She stood by the coal breaks outside mining camps and asked the miners if she could service them and then pay her what ever they thought it was worth. Frequently they would pay her in coal that they coughed out of their lungs or worthless bits of twine and sticks they fashioned into objects that they told her was money in their Slavic homelands.
All the miners loved her and gave her a pet name. "Little sperm bucket!" They'd yell out whenever they saw her servicing three or four of their co-workers by the mine head gate and then they’d line up to be serviced as well, while devising cruel, humiliating and degrading ways of abusing their favorite little prostitute. The miners were a penurious but inventive group and she often felt as worthless afterwards as the payment they rendered to her.
As she washed their sooty fingerprints from her supple young body she would mewl softly and count her pathetic earnings, barely enough to buy her food and lodgings for the day and never enough to pay for the course of antibiotics she usually required.
"Would no one ever rescue me from this terrible plight?" She wondered in her despair.
Other prostitutes led glamorous, drug addled lives, constantly being beaten and abused by Johns and pimps and if not dead by violence, they were often prematurely old and hobbled by disease. She had been around the world more often than a successful chain letter, she’d seen more strange penises than the Village People’s urologist, she’d swallowed more semen than the Bermuda Triangle, you do the metaphor, she was tired of waiting she wanted hers now.
LeRoi, her pimp, did the best he could by her, setting her up on the lucrative fraternity party circuit, introducing her to Carney folk that passed through town and giving her a sound beating whenever she needed it. But it was never enough. The money she gave him didn't pay for the gas his Lincoln used while he ran his stable of girls, let alone keep him in colorful feathered derbies or the garish fur coats he required. Despite his sentimental attachment to Helena, he didn't think she would ever make a go of it as hooker.
One day while she was taking a break from her day job as fluff girl for a traveling donkey show, she watched, stared really, at a young stranger riding into town. Helena liked what she saw. He was different from the other fellows in the town; he had dark curly hair and clear blue eyes, two, both of them on the same side of his head. When he dismounted and walked into the hotel his knuckles didn't drag on the ground. She could tell he wasn't drunk as there was no colorful pattern of vomit on his shirt, which had the added benefit of making him a good deal cleaner than everyone else she knew. Helena liked the cut of his jib, an expression she had picked up from the fleet and set out to meet the fascinating man.
He was the son of a well to do Boston family sent out west to make a separate fortune. He had a vision of a chain of shoe stores that specialized in selling dance pumps through out the mining country of the Northwest. It turned out they had much in common despite their different backgrounds. He collected scrimshaw; she had done most of the merchant marine in the free world. He ran shoe stores; she had feet. He'd traveled around the world locating master cobblers that could supply the kind quality foot wear he demanded; she'd given an around the world to a cobbler in trade for a pair of vinyl boots that a certain quality of client demanded she wear.
It was magic from the first time they met and soon they were in love. They held hands as they walked through the town, laughed at each other's jokes and gave each other goofy smiles. It never went any further than that perhaps because he respected her, perhaps because he didn’t quite understand what she did for a living. He proposed one night after she explained what could be done with a knotted handkerchief and a bowl of ice. She said yes, they started making plans and soon there were wedding bells in Helena's future.
The whole territory was glad for their simpering whore. Sentimental miners lined up around the block for days on end for one last go at her and just for old time’s sake, they didn't pay her. Le Roi even agreed to give her away; actually he slowed down the Lincoln and pushed her out in front of the church after she had pulled a train in a gang bang by a soccer team made up of degenerate Italian playboys. The experience might have spoiled another woman but Helena brushed off her wedding dress and headed straight to the altar. A few minutes later she left under a shower of rice while the strains of Handle's wedding march rang in her ears. She was a bride.
Their wedding night was so romantic; she only charged him fifty bucks and let him stay the night.
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