Hookers Hick Has Known

And now, by popular demand, to stifle the clamoring of the lone reader who wanted to hear the REST of the story...I present: Hookers Hick Has Known.

Okay. Hick has not really known any hookers. THAT I KNOW OF. But he sometimes professes to be an authority on subjects that he thinks others are not well-versed in. I could see him as Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom, telling his wife's boss that he's re-wiring the house. "Two-twenty, two-twenty-one, whatever it takes." Except that Hick DOES know a lot about electricity. On other subjects, he merely fancies that he is knowledgeable. Women, for instance.

I once overheard Hick telling The Pony, at the tender age of six, about the quality of women in the various countries where he's traveled. And where he hasn't.

"There are some pretty girls in Sweden."

"Pretty girls? Like here?"

 "There are pretty girls in Norway, too. But in England, they're not so pretty. England is like here, and some are pretty, and some are not. Now, Germany has some pretty girls..."

But that's not the hooker story. Merely a character sketch of Hick and his self-appointed authority. The hooker story began with an innocent evening of America's Most Wanted. Hick was on the case, eager to solve a crime rather than assist the boys and me in dyeing Easter eggs. We finished up and joined him in front of the TV. He filled us in on what we had missed.

A serial killer had left a trail of victims across the southwest. Their pictures flashed across the screen. Not gory pictures. Candid shots. Driver's license photos. Senior pictures. They were all young women, with long, dark hair, parted in the middle. I glanced at them and exclaimed, "They all look alike!" Meaning that the killer had a certain type that he liked to murder. The narrator mentioned that most of the victims were prostitutes. Again, the killer had a type. Just like Jame Gumb in Silence of the Lambs had a type, his being full-figured gals with enough skin to make himself a woman-suit.

Hick snorted at my proclamation that all of the victims looked alike. "Of course they looked alike! They all had the same profession. Streetwalker." Along with being rooted in Mayberry in 1960 and using a Sheriff Andy Taylor euphemism for prostitutes, woefully misguided Hick seemed to think that working girls had a uniform. Like the white pants of a union painter, the ladies of the evening had their long, dark hair parted in the middle.

Genius tried to explain that there were blond and redheaded prostitutes, too, with a variety of coiffures. Where my fifteen-year-old learned so much about prostitutes, I did not know. It was obviously not from his father.

Hick grew downright surly upon our questioning of his call-girl knowledge. "Fine. Make fun all you want. But the next time you want to earn forty dollars, have somebody else drive you to town to mow Grandma's lawn."

"Or," I said, "grow your hair long, part it in the middle, and stand on the street corner."