He's sitting on the ground, on the pavement, outside of the HellHole. We're smoking. This other guy walks up to us; he's mexican.

- Hey bro! How are you doin'?

- Good man. Store's closed though. Sorry.

- Can I get a cigarette, man? He puts two fingers to his lips to show me what he means.

I don't like giving away cigarettes. Buy your own, fucker.

Grudgingly, I give him one.

- So what's open around here?

- Down the street. The Mobil.

He looks confused, so the Mexican Kid explains it to him in Spanish. He leaves. The mexican kid looks at me from his perch.

- He had a bitch with him.

I don't know what to say. I really don't want to talk to this guy if I'm going to have to refer to every girl as a bitch.

- Ohh. Great.

But he didn't mean it that way. I see the older guy drive off, waving to us, and I spot the person in the passenger seat. I thought it was a guy in a baseball hat. Then I realized: The Clark Street Girls.

The girls who wait for the bus on Clark Street and then watch it go by when it comes. Dressed up at two a.m. Thursday night. Watching my car, looking me in the eye; cold eyes, hand on a hip, deadpan when they puff out their chests. They look away like they're flirting. You can't see the rust on my car in the dark.

The Mexican Kid says to me:

- When I got off work one of them came and said we could do it for forty dollars.

The Kid gets off at five. It's still dark, then. I don't know what to say to him. He's making some kind of joke that I can't get through his broken english. But there is a look in his eye. He's not leering. He's not mean. But he's hopeful, looking up at me.

- She was really pretty. A craitin.

- Croatian.

- Yeah Croatian. Forty dollars. She said she'd do it with me.

And this is the point where I'm supposed to say, yeah, don't worry, we all sleep with the prostitutes. But I can't tell him that. I wish I could tell him that Syphillis was a bitch. I can't tell him that either. I flick my cigarette in the street and I go inside. The drag about the whole thing is that for the rest of the night I'm thinking about some lost Croatian girl, hunting down mexicans for cash.

- Okay, see you inside, man. Lock the door behind you.