Every Saturday, we’ll be posting a new illustration by David Lester. The Mecca Normal guitarist is visually documenting people, places and events from his band’s 27-year run, with text by vocalist Jean Smith.
Actually, once a week was fine with me, but it needed to be based on honesty and communication and not with a man who preferred hookers to having a relationship with a non-hooker. He liked hookers because he didn’t have to do anything he didn’t want to do. He paid to be excused from intimacy, and he liked that exchange so much that he fell in love with a hooker.
Once he told me a story of how he’d seen a beautiful woman, a black woman, and she had this flowing hair with a black flower in it, and he thought that was really something. Months later, nearing the end, he asked if I’d wear a black flower in my hair.
“I don’t know why,” he said. “But I just have an idea that would look really good.”
I was thinking, “I guess he forgot that he told me that story. I know exactly why he wants to see a black flower in my hair.” But then I started to wonder if the woman he saw was a hooker. I searched around on the internet, googling “black flower” trying to find out if wearing a black flower in my hair would tell the world that I was a hooker. I couldn’t find any info on the subject.
I saw a woman in a drug store with a black flower in her hair, and I wanted to go over and ask her what it meant, but I didn’t. She seemed happy. I wasn’t sure I could hide what I was wondering. “Excuse me, miss, but does the black flower mean that you have sex with anyone for money?” She might take offense.
On Valentine’s Day, we were downtown and saw a store for hair accessories and went in, found the black flower, and I put it in my hair even though I didn’t like how it looked. I thought it looked sad, and it made me feel old and sort of common, as if I was trying to be a woman that I was not. Younger, prettier. It looked like a failed attempt. I suppose it was. I wore it, and he seemed to like it, and yet I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what it symbolized to him. I felt very alone and not myself at all. I could have asked him what it meant, but I knew he’d probably lie and say it meant nothing or that he didn’t know why he liked it.
I felt like I was telling the world I was a hooker. That everyone could see that. The joke was on me.
