An Ordinary Crucifixion – No. 2

The woman working at the parking attendant’s booth looks to be about 40 years old. She’s got some very blond hair, bleached, permed, about two feet long, topped with a baseball cap. She looks like she’s had a rough life. She’s there every day and I've never once seen her smile. Quite the opposite; she does a great deal of scowling. She looks like she used to have very attractive facial features that settled into this mask through years of scowling. The baggy polo shirt that constitutes her uniform conceals what must certainly be a wraith-like frame. Underneath it, I imagine that even her breasts are angrily scowling. Her forearms are practically skeletal, and wrapped in big veins, like earthworms draped over her skin. She does not speak, ever. My guess is that she used to be a stripper and has only recently been forced to retire from that profession. That has to be humiliating. I suspect that’s where she developed her scowl. I imagine that a few long years of stripping will suffice to drain a good bit of the joyful magic out of life. I’ll bet that will leave you a little bitter and jaded. This can only be aggravated by her current situation. Consider the timeline of a stripper. Stripping is certainly a field that rewards youth. More accurately, it is a field that does not tolerate age. In her prime, she probably made quite a bit of money stripping, which is why she stuck with it so long. Inevitably, as time passed, that cash flow must have diminished to such a point that it led her to retire from stripping and start a career in professional parking lot attendance. I suppose that’s all that 20 years of stripping qualifies you for? I don’t know. Moreover, it must engender a strange cocktail of emotions. The money that she could no longer make dancing was essentially stolen by an abundant set of younger, more nubile girls. Whereas she may resent them for taking money away from her, she cannot honestly fault them for making the same decision that she made herself. They’ve done nothing different than she did. I am quite certain that a healthy and well-justified hatred of men would also run throughout all of those sentiments. Who can blame her? It’s difficult to speculate whether or not she’s had other issues or what those issues might have been. Alcohol? Drugs? Abusive relationships? Who knows?