Major Conflict by Maj USA (ret.) Jeffrey McGowan

life is still difficult and dangerous. Many of the prostitutes, some say at least half, are actually illegal immigrants, so the protections designed to protect them as sex workers don’t even apply.
    When Zach reached me, I pushed through the fire door to the stairwell and started climbing the steps to the next floor. Opening the door to the third floor, we found ourselves walking into a totally different world from the one down below. This was apparently the African floor. Occupied entirely by black women, the energy here was far less subdued, more celebratory, freer. The women danced with one another in the middle of the hallway to a Milli Vanilli song that blared from a boom box in one of the rooms. They barely noticed us as we negotiated our way through the crowd of bodies. Slowly, as it became clear they’d received visitors, they collected themselves and moved back to their respective rooms and stood waiting or sat down on the chairs just outside the rooms. Unlike the reserved German girls downstairs, these girls had no problem talking to us, even yelling at us.
    â€œHey, pretty white boy, whatchuwant?” one toward the far end yelled. “You come to make love with an African goddess?” she went on, and then laughter scattered through the hallway.
    â€œWhy you so quiet?” another one said, then, “Girls—they look so nervous!”
    â€œWe have to calm ’em down,” the girl next to her said, laughing with her friend.
    Nervous was an understatement. Maybe the first two floors were a ploy, I thought, set up to lure in unsuspecting idiot white boys like me for the entertainment of the wild she-devils up on the third floor. As I tried to look cool, though sweat was now dripping from my forehead, and make my way down the hallway, one of the women reached out, grabbed my crotch, and held on, firmly. I turned my head abruptly and looked at her. She was smiling big, a Madonna-like gap between her two front teeth.
    â€œHey GI, wanna fock?” she said, still smiling, and still holding on to my crotch.
    I was momentarily stunned. My mind raced, what the hell did “fock” mean?
Fock, fuck,
I thought,
right,
I got it. I tried to regain my composure and answer her as politely as possible.
    â€œNo, thank you,” I said, sounding, I’m sure, like the whitest GI on the face of the planet. “I have a girlfriend, but thanks, thank you very much.”
    This was completely untrue, of course, and the girl didn’t care one way or the other. She tightened her grip on my crotch and started massaging me, and I felt myself starting to get hard. I pushed her hand away and walked on, feeling humiliated, and the laughter and yelling grew louder.
    â€œHe got one a dem skinny white tings?” one of the shorter girls yelled. She was kind of plump and had had her hair straightened. She was laughing so hard it looked as if tears were streaming down her face, and when someone else yelled, “Not so skinny on a big guy like dat!” She collapsed into the arms of another girl, whose shoulders were shaking from laughter.
    â€œYou gonna tell your girl you made love to a goddess?” said another, with arms akimbo and a look of truly venomous sarcasm across her face that made me think of what battery acid does to a car hood.
    â€œGo home and tell her to come back wit you and we teach her a couple a tricks.”
    Zach bumped into me then, as if he’d tripped, and kind of pushed us both through the door onto the stairwell. We stood for a moment, laughing at ourselves, Zach with his back up against the door as if to keep the women from chasing us.
    â€œGeez-o-peets,” Zach said, “what the fuck was that?”
    â€œYeah, I know, they kicked our ass, didn’t they?”
    â€œGeez-o-peets, Christ, I feel like a log on a table saw,” he said. “You want to check out the fourth floor or just give it up?”
    I looked at him steadily. A part of