Yesterday’s Harlot

Back in the black and white days of typewriters and bowties, days of broads and dames, butt slaps, black butlers who called their bosses ‘boss’, chain-smoking hard talking coffee drinking gold digging housewives, cloak and dagger schemes, football dreams for Jimmy the eldest.  Back in the days when a woman’s worth was measured by how squeaky clean her floors, counters, dishes, hair is.  Pearls and heels, remnants of prohibition, women who drank whiskey were rough and tumbled, uncultured.  They smoked and they cussed, and they swore that no man would define who they were, no man would choke them down or stifle them with ideals he had, ideas of lady-like behaviour decided by someone with no lady-like attributes of his own.  Liberation through libation, undulation, it became a revolution of the genital kind, revolution through the power of feminine wiles which include the unclothed kind.  While a woman gyrates around a pole a man watches the tv behind her, one cigarette in his mouth and another behind his ear.  On the screen two women wore tight dresses, big brimmed hats, and smoked one black and white cigarette after another, the new one lit with the last.  She tossed it away and the white sailor beat the coloured man to the burning filter.