The first time I actually saw someone using a slut card was when I was in my final year at law school.
It was the end of the week when everyone goes for interviews with the big law firms downtown. The interviews are stressful, to say the least, and all of my classmates were in the mood to blow off steam. We were a bunch of over-confident kids in our late twenties who thought the world was at our feet, so there was a lot of bad behaviour. Cocaine, obviously, was everywhere. People were bragging about how well they had done, and how good their job prospects were. No one knew if they were getting an offer, but we all pretended we knew, and that our futures were secure.
The type of student that dominates these downtown law firm interviews are all the same sort of student—the ones with good enough grades and very good family connections. Most of them took law school seriously, but not as seriously as they took networking and sharing inside knowledge about compensation rates and senior partners.
I wasn't actually part of this crowd, normally. I usually found these princes-in-waiting to be obnoxious, and wasn't desperate to get a corporate job. Those big law firms put you either on the partner track or the mommy track, and I wasn't interested in either of those narrow paths. I was the other kind of law student, the bookish one who had ideals about justice and a burning desire to help people.
I guess my kind of law student was also pretty obnoxious.
But on this weekend, I decided to go out drinking with a bunch of the cocaine-fueled rich kids. I figured that, given they were mostly boys with family money, I would at least be able to get drunk and high for free. I was entertaining the idea that I might even fuck one of the better looking ones, if the mood hit me right.
Back in those days, very few people were taking the risk of using a slut card. We had all heard the bargain: you can try and buy whatever you want, but there is a one in ten chance that instead of being a customer you end up being the merchandise. The rates back then were much simpler than they are now. It was a straight 100:1 deal. For every $100 you try to spend, the store owner gets you for an hour.
A girl named Andrea was using her slut card to cut lines of coke before we were going to head out to the bar. She was the sort of law school girl who pushes a lot of boundaries because she knows exactly how little danger she is in. She was a top-of-the-class student and had plenty of connections. She didn't need to attend class much, and instead spent her time building a network of contacts that would last her the rest of her life.
She also had the sort of body that would make even a straight girl think about giving pussy a try (and I was hardly a straight girl). She wore tight men's tank-top shirts that showed off her perky braless tits (god I miss my twenties) and had a shaved head. She was casually bisexual and made sure everyone knew it, and was very aware that it kept everyone's eyes on her at all times. "Yeah, I got waved over by this chick at a mall and she said I qualified for it, I guess they only hand out the card to certain people."
"Are you going to use it?" One of the other students asked, with a badly-concealed hungry look.
"If I did, I wouldn't tell anyone. Half this school would probably be skulking creepily behind the aisle hoping that my number would come up."
"Oh, I definitely would be," I said to her. I always get a bit too sexually aggressive on cocaine. The whole room burst into laughter, but I kept eye contact with Andrea so she knew I wasn't kidding.
She checked me out silently. I wasn't normally in these sorts of settings, like I told you. So she might have been re-evaluating me. I felt myself getting wet imagining that she had lost her bet on a pricey purchase, maybe a pair of chunky combat boots. What do those cost? At least a couple of hundred dollars. That's two hours where she has to let the store rent her out in order to make back the money they've lost on the other nine out of ten customers who got free boots.
A guy with short blond hair and a set of arms that really demonstrated his dedication to the gym piped up. "I was at a bar the other day that accepts the slut card. Our waiter was a dude who had tried to get bottle service and instead ended up spending the whole night waiting tables naked."
"Was he hot?" Andrea asked.
"He was cut as hell, and I don't know if they made him shave all his body hair off after his number came up, or if he was just like that all the time. He seemed pretty gay, though."
"Shouldn't matter, from what I've heard," another student said. This one was Raheem, who I knew a little from Wills and Estates class. He was a nerdy guy who usually spoke up in class whenever he thought he knew something. I was kind of surprised he was even there. He certainly wasn't touching any of the coke. "They are talking about bringing in restricted cards, so that a straight guy can use it and say that he won't touch any men even if he loses. But they don't have the restriction system worked out yet. So if he's gay, he still has to eat any pussy the bar tells him to eat until his time runs out."
The guy with the arms smiled. "Really? That's intense. I should have tried to make him eat Sandra out in between bringing drinks over." I guess Sandra was his girlfriend.
"Anyway, I'm not going to end up waiting tables naked for all you creeps. If you guys want to go somewhere that accepts slut cards, I'll go along, but I'm keeping mine in here." Andrea put her card back in her wallet.
