Vice and Justice
by Jonathan Quince
Tuesday, October 5, 2004 19:00:47
She looked almost forlorn, standing on the street in the loneliness of the night. A hooker’s garb covered her flesh from the October chill, though she was somewhat conservatively dressed for the lot of a streetwalker. Yet something was not quite right. A sharp look to her eye, an irritable twitch to her posture, a predatory demeanor—some hint I couldn’t quite put my finger on told me that there was more (or less) to her than met the eye.
I decided to pull up my car and say hello.
We exchanged brief pleasantries, and she hinted almost right off that some transaction of business might be in the offing. She was beating around the bush, though; and of course, I did not solicit her. Abruptly I went silent, fixing her with a steady gaze as I sat back in the driver’s seat and ran one hand over my steering wheel in a lazy caress.
“It’s wrong, you know. What you are doing out here is wrong,” I told her.
Having worked the street for years, she was accustomed to dealing with every customer, every situation, every type of abuse. Yet my sudden about-face from prospective customer to moralizing demagogue caught her off balance; and I have no doubt that the intensity of my stare augmented the effect. She opened her mouth to respond, but I cut her off.
“I don’t want what you’re selling,” I told her. “No, indeed; I am no customer of yours. But you should be told that what you are doing here is wrong, and I am just the person to give you the message. There is no reward in heaven for the destruction of innocent people’s livelihoods and the infringement of their God-given liberties.”
That last point confused her since she still thought she had the upper hand of deceit; and thus keeping her as an audience captive for at least a few more moments, I decided to elaborate. However, while I lectured her, I did not speak as a fiery preacher or fanatic. With my guise as a john cast aside, my voice was calm and measured; I cast judgment with the utterly confident, purring roll of a hypnotist.
“You make your living by infringing on people’s natural rights to private business. You sell not your body, but your soul,” I continued. “Rather than giving your customers pleasure, you give your customers humiliation, degradation of dignity, and a night in jail. You are much worse than a whore; speaking in the most pejorative sense of the word, you are the real whore: Cheap, immoral, and harmful to society.”
She was accustomed to power, the raw power of authority backed by handcuffs and guns and an army of peers. Yet I pinned her beneath my eyes and the smooth roll of my voice; each word I spoke was a chill star in the night, radiating command such as froze her bones and bent her mind towards submission.
“You wrap yourself in a pretext of protecting the community; you hide behind the laws and mores of a corrupt society. You take pride in your work and would deny it to be loathsome as it is; in your sadly constructed world of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’, you believe yourself to be one of the Good Guys. Yet right and wrong are absolutes that do not care for your sham moral authority. You cannot escape the fact that your employment is based on violations of the rule of humanity and the principle upon which this nation was founded: Free will, particularly for private choices that harm none not party to the transaction.”
My chuckle rang condescendingly in her ears. I did not give her a chance to speak; rather, as she searched for a way to regain control of the situation, I preempted her very thoughts. “Oh, no. That just won’t do; no, it won’t do at all. I have not threatened you in any way but the judgment of a higher power; and I haven’t solicited you for sex, either. Although the laws of America may violate sexual freedoms, my words to you are still protected by the First Amendment.
“Hide not behind your badge, for it is truly a badge of vice and it cannot protect you. Remember that you, too, shall face the sword of justice on Judgment Day. Good night.”
Flicking the switch to roll up my window, I drove away to my business in the night, leaving her stammering at the curb.