I grew up in a big city, and I used to live in one. I'd never live in one again, but I still find big cities to be interesting. That's because every big city has three parts.
The part most people know about is the bright lights, the theaters, and the cocktail lounges where the bartender will fix you a "Batanga" with El Tequileño Blanco tequila and Mexican cola or a "3:10 to Yuzu" with High West Rendezvous Rye, Yamazaki 12 Single Malt, and yuzu juice and tamari. If you're a beer drinker, the bartender will have an assortment of craft beers and if you want to experiment, the bartender will fill you in on the variations in flavor from first taste to finish for each beer they have. The wine list will be extensive as well as expensive, and will be sold by the bottle rather than by the glass.
The people on the street look like they stepped off the cover of some fashion magazine. Most don't live in the city unless they live in penthouse apartments that require a special key card or elevator code to get the elevator to their floor. Most live in gated communities of expensive suburban homes or in exclusive, gated condos in the suburbs and they get to the city in style. Some get there in chauffeured limos with drivers dressed up in suits and ties and wearing chauffeur hats. Some get there by driving themselves and letting a valet park their Mercedes or BMW.
The sounds of this part of the city are the sounds of stiletto heels on the sidewalk, car horns blaring out as cab drivers jockey for position in front of the hotels, theaters, restaurants, and cocktail lounges, and the soft jazz that plays in the background of quiet conversation by the drinkers and diners.
This part of the city is like the women in the restaurants, on the street, in the theaters and in the cocktail lounges -- gorgeous, spoiled, and well aware of the image they present.
The women are wearing either dresses that show a lot of their tits and nylon-sheathed legs or pant suits that show a lot of their tits and fit their asses so you don't have to imagine much. Chances are those women are about ten years older than they look. Those women have the money to pay to reduce the effects of aging and gravity. The cosmetic surgeons with offices in the tall office buildings are more than willing to make those effects go away.
The older men are all wearing tailored suits and ties with a little handkerchief with three or four points sticking out of the breast pocket. The younger men will be wearing sort of a suit, but the pants might be jeans and the shirt will be either a T-shirt or a plain shirt with no tie.
Those who don't live relatively close to the city probably checked into one of the five star hotels for the night so they could change into what they're wearing. Once they've changed, they go to one of the restaurants where you have to know somebody just to make a reservation and the food comes displayed like art and costs just as much.
They're there for two reasons. The primary reason is to show everybody how much fucking money they have. The secondary reason is to take in a play at one of the theaters and then have a drink or two at one of the cocktail lounges. They talk with the people they call friends about money and politics and if they've decided to go to the beach house that weekend or to drive to their summer home in the mountains.
The second part of the city is where most of the people live in apartments on floors over the shops at street level. The only bright lights are on the street and in the windows of the corner bars that have been there since forever. Those bars serve American beers from the taps on the bar, and if you want something a little stronger, the bartender will pour you a shot or two of Wild Turkey or Jack or Jim Beam, or if you're a woman, a rum and Coke or a vodka Sour. There won't be a lot of wine drinkers, but the bartender will have at least one red and one white, probably in a plastic bag inside a cardboard box.
There usually won't be much in the way of sounds other than the laughter at a bar or the sound of a stereo or a television from an open window of one of the apartments high above the street. That part of the city retreats inside once darkness turns the streets into small islands of light from the streetlights amid threatening expanses of dark and shadow everywhere else.
That part of the city is like the women in the corner bars on any Friday or Saturday night - not gorgeous but still pretty, and well aware of the fact that they're looked down on by most of the elite in the city. They don't really give a shit about that because they're happy where they are.
The women there dress in ordinary dresses that cover up their tits or in pants and blouses that also cover up their tits, though their asses sometimes do show you that they're real women. The men wear working men's clothes, either jeans and a T-shirt or a pair of Dickey's uniform pants and a matching shirt. If it's on a Saturday night, you might see a few men in bowling shirts with little bowling pins for buttons.
The talk around the tables and at the bar is about which ball team is going to win next weekend and how their job sucks but it pays the bills so they're going to hang in there until they can retire. That's what the men talk about. The women talk about how much groceries and everything else has gone up and how they're planning to have some time alone with their husband if they can get their mother to take the kids for the weekend.
The third part of the city is the part most people never see and the part nobody wants to talk about. I don't call it the "underbelly" like you read in some novels. I call it the "stink and pink", because it's the unwashed crotch of the city.
There are apartments over the boarded up former businesses that people - usually pimps, hookers, and drug dealers - live in. They all have at least one backed up toilet you can smell a block away and the roaches and rats will carry off any food you don't keep shut up in the refrigerator or a sturdy metal cabinet.
The same corner bars are there as in the second part of the city, but they've not been maintained for years. When you walk into one, the first thing you see is that you can't see because of the cigarette and cigar smoke. The second thing you see is that the wood floor is black because nobody has ever cleaned up the spilled beer, puke, and street dirt tracked in over the last fifty years or so.
They'll serve you any mixed drink you ask for as long as it's in the 1957 edition of "The Bartender's Guide" and doesn't require fresh fruit or fruit juice or some fancy mixer. The liquor will be the cheapest brands and the glasses will usually have some spots on the inside and outside. The bar will also have a selection of beers -- all cheap American brews. The people who go to those bars go to get drunk and forget how they live, not to have fun with their friends. They don't really have friends anyway.
The walls and ceilings are kind of a streaky tan because nobody's cleaned them of all the cigarette and cigar smoke over the years. If you've stayed long enough, the next thing you'll notice is the smell of stale beer and the unmistakable stink of piss coming from the door that says, "Men". There's a door that says, "Women" as well and it stinks too, but not quite as bad. I suppose that's because men stand up to piss and if they're drunk they can't aim their cock worth a shit. Women always sit down to piss so they don't have to aim. Neither john has a sign to remind people they should flush.
That's the "stink" of that part of town. The "pink" is the women there. In this part of town you won't find any women in nice dresses or pants and a top that make them look a little sexy but still socially acceptable. The women in this part of town are dressed so you'll know exactly why they're there.
They wear little shorts or skirts that show their ass cheeks and tops that barely cover their tits. They'll flash their tits at you and tell you it's such and such for a handjob, about twice that if they suck your cock, and about three times that much if they let you fuck them. If you don't want to wear a rubber the price is double. You can find several that will let you fuck them in the ass if you have the money and you're into that sort of thing. The lube they carry in their purses is free.
There'll be a few women there in the strip clubs where they dance as well as do some hooking on the side. They just look used up. Most of them are. They were hookers or strippers when they were in their twenties and early thirties but they worked the strip joints and corners in the areas between the first and second parts of town. When they aged into their late thirties, men in those clubs wouldn't pay much for a lap dance or a fuck from a woman with tits that have started to sag and an ass that looks like bubble wrap. The women took a step down to keep doing the only thing they knew how to do.
The men who come to that part of town to watch a woman strip or to get her to blow their cocks or let them fuck her in the ass don't care if her tits sag or if her ass is fat. They're just interested in the price. Just like anything else that's for sale, the quality of the product determines the price and in this part of town, the price is cheap.
The men dress cheap too. The men who are there to sell you a chemical escape from your problems dress in non-descript clothes and usually wear a hoodie that mostly hides their face. That's so when some cop radios in that he's chasing down some motherfucking drug dealer, the only description he can give is "brown pants and a black hoodie." That description fits about half the men in that part of town.
The pimps and bouncers dress a little better. The bouncers in the bars and strip clubs dress in tight clothes that let you know they can toss you out on your ass without breaking a sweat. The pimps dress in gaudy clothes with a ton of jewelry. They're a little like the elite in the first part of the city in that they like to show their wealth. They're just not as sophisticated and subtle about it.
Life in that part of the city is lived in reverse. The people who live there are the human equivalent of the night hunters of the animal kingdom. They sleep during the day and come out at night looking for whatever they can find. As a result, that part of the city is quiet during the daylight hours, but a mix of loud music, hookers reciting their menus to the johns, drug dealers in the shadows shuffling money in one pocket and baggies in the other, and the obscenity of what good jazz can sound like when it oozes from the door of a cheap strip club or the bars where the hookers go to take a piss and clean up a little before going back out on the street.
Like I said, most people never see that part of town because it's the crotch of the city. I have. I'm Matt Shively, and that part of town was where I made my living as a private investigator. My office was in the block on the good side of Dunley Avenue, and I was one of the few PI's who'd venture across the street and into the third part of the city during the day, let alone at night. I did a lot of my work at night because that's when all the action happens.
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That night I was looking for a hooker and not because I wanted to have her suck my cock or fuck her. I didn't get fucked a lot back then, but I'd never paid for it because a couple of the fringe benefits of fucking a hooker are fucking hard to get rid of. I was looking for her because her sister paid me to find her and bring her home. Her sister didn't know that her sister was a whore, but figured I did.
I've known a lot of hookers during my years on the dark streets and not one of them ever told me she just woke up one morning and thought, "I wonder how I could have fun jacking off guys and blowing their cocks and letting them fuck me a dozen times every night and make a shit pot of money too."
Actually about half of the hookers I know are lesbians or at least really hate men. To them, doing what men want them to do is like they have enough power to make a man pay to get what he can't get on his own. Don't ask me how the fuck that works because I don't have a goddamned clue. I just know that's how it is because more than one has told me that.
They like me because I'll pay them for just talking to me, and they come in handy from time to time. Hookers are on the street when everything is happening and like all women, they tell each other everything they know. They'll tell me too as long as I hand them a twenty.
Most girls become hookers for one of two reasons, sometimes both. A lot start out as runaways. They head for the city to be free from the rules they had at home, but quickly find out there's not one goddamned thing in any big city that's free. Every fucking thing in the big city costs money.
