The Daddy that Came Down for Bourbon by Bradley Carroll

I never have fit in anywhere. So I worked in The Quarter, I did stripped jobs without ever working the clubs. As in, "You, me, a hotel room--you just got the ride of your life, mister."
And boy did they ever.

When I worked on Bourbon, there were three different brands of daqueri shop. One with joker/Carnival masks, one with some weird almost-tiki setup, and one other kind…I guess I was to drunk or too uninterested to remember. Hell, it was just a job.

Three brands--but each and every and every single shop is owned under a different corporate name. That way, the shop owners can work your ass 50 hours a week between three stores and never give you a damn cent of overtime.

How long do you think I did that? If you said, "Half a week," then you're wrong. Dead wrong. I did it for five whole months before I finally took a slush-drunk businessman, black suit and all, back to my place in the Bywater.

(If you're ever down on Bourbon, spend just one night sittin' in one of those shops in between two and five in the aye-emm. You see that drunkass in a suit bent over in front of the ATM with the stripper right beside him, telling him what to push? Been there, done that.)

From then on it was me and a couple other girls from the daqueri joints. We'd find those suits at the daq shops, sure, but we hit some nice places. We hit the fuck out of Jackson Square, too.

Jackson square. Right in front of that big-ass church they've got there. Just diagonal from the end of the French market. We'd dress up in skirts and pretend we were high-school girls collecting money for a trip. Then one of us would stand on tip-toe, maybe have to put a hand on the back of a neck to get the guy's head down to us, and whisper in his ear…

End up in bed next to some guy with a loose tie and a hard dick--or at least what passes for hard after too much Chartreuse or Absynthe or whatever weird green shit we made him buy. He wakes up and we're gone but we've left a little reminder of ourselves: Four or five Polaroids of the night before and a little note says we got all his info from his license, and we'd appreciate a little bit of a head start, please.

Of course we'd already maxed out his plastic by the time he woke up.

How did it all end? If this were a movie, it'd be all about how "somebody had to fall in love." Not us. We knew better. Instead, the youngest of us found a daddy.

Like, for real a daddy.

Like, he really was her daddy.

He'd come down to "Nawlans" (gotta fuckin' hate that shit) to find the baby girl he'd abandoned nearly nineteen years ago. For some reason, the people who spent time, energy, and money actually raising the damn girl thought it'd be a good idea to send this man down to New Orleans to find her.

You ever heard of GSA? No, not "Genuine Sexual Attraction" or "Genitals Stimulated Anally" (though there was plenty of that).

It stands for "Genetic Sexual Attraction" and it's what happens when closely-related people meet for the first time as adults. Well, sometimes it happens. I swear this one's in the books. They've done studies.

Me and the other girl (no they don't have fucking names--fuck off) thought the man looked a little bit too much like her. We found her high-school glamour shot in his wallet. We'd have laughed if it weren't for the white crust on the photo.

He'd made it big in sales: insurance, cars, imported buttplugs--you name it. He went all around town with her and bought her every damn thing you please. Told her she was just what he wanted, he was gonna take care of her for the rest of her damn life, yadda yadda yadda.

We were worried when we found that picture (we found it in his wallet when we were looking for something else we needed). We were even more worried when we talked to her mom.

Cuz really guy, you're obviously not in it for life, not after that story you gave her folks. I mean maybe you weren't gonna let her have a little overdose accident once you'd had your fun but then maybe I never sucked a cock for a hundred dollars, either.

Everything I ever needed to know, I learned in kindergarten when Mama told me that the bastards'll get you if you don't get them first.

So we got that fucker, alright. Got him on tape with his thin powder-milk jizz runnin' down our chins while we lapped it up off each other's tits.

Our friend hated us but at least she ran off for a couple days.

He came to us looking for her. We made out like we were broke and told him for a thousand bucks we'd blow his mind and anything else he wanted blown, for three nights if he wanted, and we'd get somebody to find his little girl.

Of course that's not what happened. We kicked him out of a window when he was drunk and nobody came from out of town to investigate because nobody cared about him anywhere else.
No one cared about him in New Orleans, either.

Sure it's not every day a man falls 21 stories and lands on the side of Canal St. at two aye emm in the morning.

But the cops and the crooks and the girls in New Orleans all know that most people are shit and the value of your average human life is whatever you can get out of it.

He was dead and nobody ever gave a shit, except our friend. She got over it in about eight days.