MattMaroon.com

I had an interesting experience at a bar in Atlantic City Thursday. It happened while I was watching the Steelers game that I had accidentally bet on at Wolfgang Puck Bar & Grille in the Borgata. I was at a corner seat, and there was another guy at the adjacent corner seat, though the bar has somewhat of an odd layout so we were a good distance away from each other. We were watching the game when a not-very-attractive girl, probably in her mid twenties, came up and stood in between us. I was so excited about the game (or nervous about my inadvertent wager, however you choose to look at it) that I wouldn’t have noticed her except she started coughing. I don’t mean “swallowed a little Pepsi down the wrong tube” coughing, I mean “get this girl to a hospital right away” coughing.

She just stood there for a minute or two, seemingly making a concerted effort to expel a lung. I was thinking “what’s a polite way to ask her to go somewhere else?” Or, alternately, “I wonder where I can I buy a surgical mask in Atlantic City at 10 p.m.” I couldn’t come up with any answer to either of those so instead I just said “are you alright?” She said she had just swallowed some Pepsi down the wrong tube, but I had already eliminated that from my mental list of her possible ailments so I knew she was lying. Luckily, though, she seemed to get my hint that whatever was wrong with her, I’d rather not catch it, and she sauntered out of the restaurant. The guy on the other corner and I exchanged “thank God” looks and went back to our game. That was all shortly after half time.

In the middle of the fourth quarter I was watching the game and suddenly heard a loud coughing noise approaching. Sigh. She took the corner seat that the guy I was talking to had vacated. She actually stopped hacking and wheezing for just long enough to ask me questions. “Where are you from? What do you do?” The usual crap people ask people at bars. I just gave her one word answers, trying to show my extreme disinterest and simultaneously pretend to be enraptured by yet another cheesy beer commercial. I gave an Oscar-caliber performance, all the while wondering whether she was a working girl or just annoying. She quickly answered that question by asking two of her own. “So, do you have a room here? Want to have some fun?”

That’s when it occurred to me that she needs some serious marketing help. I mean, I don’t know much about that industry, but I have to imagine that the whole “I may or may not have SARS” routine isn’t going to increase her sales figures and boost her bottom line. I guess the people in her target demographic are probably not very selective, but I have to think that even they would have to have a thought along the lines of “I bet somewhere in this city is a prostitute I can buy that doesn’t have the whooping cough.” I know some people who are into that sort of thing, and next time I see one I’ll be sure to ask whether or not severe respiratory illness is a turn-on, but I think the smart money is on no.

Also she needs a better lead-in than “want to have some fun?” Everybody always wants to have some fun, though maybe not the type she was referring to. But even the people who do probably don’t want it enough to risk contracting the plague. I don’t think anybody’s idea of fun is a cheap hooker followed by a week of coughing up blood. Well, I’m sure that probably is somebody’s exact idea of fun, but that has to be extremely rare.

Obviously I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s probably the least appealing whore in Atlantic City, a place known around the world for unappealing whores, so I just said “no thanks” and went back to ignoring her. I don’t give away advice like that for free anyway, and as far as I know call girls don’t have affiliate programs. They should take a page from amazon.com and institute that. And all of the hip-hop songs I’ve heard on the topic (all three of them) seem to suggest that pimpin’ ain’t easy, so I just take their word for it and leave tuberculosis-ridden hookers to their own devices.

Luckily the Steelers won and I haven’t developed any unusual symptoms, so if whatever she had was airborne I probably avoided it. But I know if I start coughing any time soon I’m immediately putting myself into quarantine and calling the CDC. The way I’m running lately I figure there’s a 50/50 chance of going down in the history books as the only person to ever contract a fatal illness from a hooker he didn’t even touch.