Not all hookers are like “Kristen,” the gorgeous, high-living prostitute allegedly employed by Eliot Spitzer.  Not all prostitutes work for wealthy and powerful executives or politicians.   Not all prostitution is provided under the supervision of a sophisticated club like the Emperor VIP club.  

A friend of mine, Geri Dreiling, wrote a detailed article about the other kind of prostitute, the kind that will trade sex for “a sandwich from a nearby convenience store, even a bucket of chicken from KFC.”  Geri’s award-winning article was published by a St. Louis alternative newspaper, The Riverfront Times, in 2002.

Here are a few excerpts:

Like most prostitutes working the streets of St. Louis, Tammy Sue Curtner is a drug addict.

A 33-year-old mother with wavy brown hair and pale skin, Tammy traded her body for drugs, a blowjob for twenty bucks. She’d turn tricks in an alley, in a stranger’s car, on a dirty communal mattress in a vacant building littered with broken bottles and used needles.

Her johns were downtown businessmen on the way to work in the morning, construction workers on lunch breaks, married men bored with their subdivision lives.

“I’ve met all types of guys, straight down to the weirdest and the nastiest,” she says. “Lawyers, doctors, straight down to bums.”

. . . The four-hundred-plus women [Judge Jim Sullivan] sees are, on average, over the age of 31 and sexually abused drug addicts; some are mentally ill, dropouts with an eleventh-grade education and the mothers of two children. Some have HIV, and at least one study suggests that close to 30 percent of the women have hepatitis C, another deadly disease.

And no one resembles Julia Roberts.

Many are overweight, filthy from living on the streets, sick and desperate. They don’t wear seductive garb; instead, these women sport dirty T-shirts and shorts or discarded clothing thrown away in alley Dumpsters.