Maybe Another Time… (A San Francisco Story) PART 4

Abraham Woodliff
4 min readOct 31, 2019

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The bedding was soaked from sweat as Destiny awoke from her drug induced slumber. Her lips were dry and chapped. As she sat up, her heart began to race. The cold San Francisco air brought goosebumps to her open pores that worked to rid her body of the very same toxins she so desperately needed hours before. She reached for her phone to check the time. She never set her alarm. This was a disappointment. Destiny liked the idea of setting an alarm. It made her feel normal. Not that she needed an alarm, the blaring car horns, and roaring engines of the morning commuters’ daily grind was as effective as any alarm clock could be. She glanced at her phone to check the time. It was just past 8 in the morning. She had three unread text messages: one from Zach, two from Herman. During her tenure as a prostitute, Destiny realized, as he became a regular, no one she had previously encountered was as outwardly strange as Herman. At times he acted like he was a robot, made by some sort of alien society, studying humanity, trying to live as many experiences as needed to get a sufficient amount of data to take back to his mothership for further analysis. One human characteristic Herman regularly displayed was insecurity, in between fits of jealousy.

The whole reasoning behind him seeing prostitutes was to hate-fuck them, while cursing the name of his true obsession, Emily. Emily and Herman met via an online dating app. They instantly hit it off upon meeting each other, but their courtship was short lived. Herman had a wife back home, in Michigan. Emily, on the other hand, had a long line of men who were interested in her. She fed off the attention men gave her, and wasn’t looking for a serious relationship. She found Herman to be sweet, but a bit clingy, and decided to break things off. This made Herman furious. Herman used any, and all freetime he had to stalk Emily’s social media accounts.

He came to the Bay Area to work in the tech industry, and used his expertise to monitor her online interactions. However, this made things worse. He found out she had been having casual sex with an undeniably handsome man named Ryan from Marin County. This mixture of rage and sexual energy left him with few healthy outlets for expression of his feelings. He did have what he would on occasion refer to as his “sweet day of revenge,” where he managed to get into a house party hosted by Ryan. To Herman’s surprise, him and Allen actually got along fairly well. Yet, this didn’t stop Herman from going into his bathroom to violently masturbate, and ejaculate on a toothbrush Herman assumed belonged to Allen, all while tears streamed down his face. He thought this would make him feel better. It didn’t. Realizing he couldn’t keep cumming on oral hygiene products that belonged to men he didn’t even know, he figured hiring a prostitute was the next logical step. Herman sent a picture of a man he suspected Emily had sex with to Destiny. Directly under the photograph, Herman asked, “Is he better looking than me? Be honest!!!” This was typical of Herman. Destiny didn’t even glance at the picture, but responded, “No way! Ur way hotter.” Destiny knew he’d quickly respond back.

Zach’s text was as predictable as it was infuriating. “Do you still need it?” He knew she needed it. Destiny heard his voice in her head as she read the text. His cavalier tone carried over through the message. “No… I got it from someone else,” She replied.

Uncharacteristically of Zach, he replied almost instantly. “From who? One of the nigs on the corner? LOL” This was another aspect to Zach’s personality Destiny hated. The arrogance he spoke with. Destiny grew up upper-middle class in Northern California’s Napa Valley, and people like Zach weren’t anything she hadn’t seen before. People born into privilege gravitate toward the alt-right because it’s an easy ideology to digest. When your parents get you a BMW, but you still have to deal with the slow bureaucracy of the DMV, and you’re treated as a number, equal to everyone else around you, anti government and pro nationalist rhetoric can seem appealing, because its core political goal is to let you know that you’re special at the expense of everyone else. White ethno-states are like parents who proclaim their children to be the best, even if the children keep pissing and shitting themselves at the first sign of a challenge, they’re proclaimed as better by birthright.

Zach was selling drugs, just like the men on the corner. Yet, because of circumstance, he was sure he was better. A narcotic pushing Ubermensch, if you will. It made her blood boil. Destiny didn’t really know if she cared for social reasons, or if she just hated the idea of a college kid, who dealt drugs because it was edgy, looking down on her. Maybe she hated Zach because, aside from racism, the same youthful arrogance, coupled with the sheltered existence of suburbia, led her to the shitty hotel room she sat in, in the shittiest part of San Francisco, a city that hung the poor on their tree of prosperity; just close enough for the world to see they’re allowed to exist, but far enough away to obscure the noose around their necks, holding them in place.

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Abraham Woodliff
Abraham Woodliff

Written by Abraham Woodliff

Bay Area native, Hip Hop nerd, literature and poetry enthusiast, freelance writer, gamer, caffeine addict. Follow me on Twitter.

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