Chapter 14: Here I Go Again on My Own.

I began my day's work at dawn, but found customers scarce in the open sunlight. Perhaps this was owing to the lack of cover that the darkness so eagerly provided at night, like that curtain over the door to the adult section of the video store. Or maybe it was that, in the harsh solar glare, my festering sores were visible. Whatever the case, clearly my back-alley stripping career was off to a tepid start. I practiced for a gang of hobos who I felt were overly critical considering their own physical condition. They also made a mathematical mistake in calculating the degree of difficulty.

By and by, I decided that perchance I needed a shower to attract superior clientele. Throughout my adventuring, I had been at my cleanest and most desirable during my incarceration. The daily forced showers and fire-hose spraydowns made me moist with water. But the good old days of prison life and its alternating beatings and intimate cleansings were far behind me, and I had scarcely an ATM card, a handful of jewels, and written letters of credit from six international banks to my name now.

Then, from across the street, inspiration struck like a mob of angry union members on "Sell Your Daughter to the Factory Day". There it was- glowing with a mosquito-zapping tubular neon aura and dripping with the polluted runoff of a thousand muscle cars- a self-serve car wash. The big, bold, and brassy letters practically shouted the name: "Pay N' Spray." This was fate, surely, for "pay n' spray" was the slogan for my childhood prostitution ring. I was going to get myself cleaner than I'd ever been before, or have sex trying.

Finding some quarters in the pocket of a nearby murder victim, I carefully inserted each one into the slot, while thinking vulgar thoughts about putting things into slots. The array of options at my disposal took me aback, for I had not one but three waxes to choose from alone. Yes, I needed waxed, I decided, as my hand slid downtown. I selected a soap, wax, and spray force, then took the brush to my head and pulled the trigger. Fruity, oozing goodness in the form of pinkish foam squirted forth with a volume I had scarcely seen outside of the annual West Belgium Japanese Film Festival. Oddly, it did not taste like I imagined.

Having achieved a good lather all over, I moved to take hold of the high-pressure rinse gun, when a hot pink limousine screeched into the bay and slammed into me, bruising my body like Paris Hilton after a fight with her boyfriend. I vaguely recall writhing and moaning atop the hood, half-naked, soaked and sudsy, struggling to focus on the face of the man standing above me.

"Oy! That's her! That's our star!" he yelled to his driver, who was attempting to dislodge me from the windshield by running the wipers.

He handed me a backstage pass. "Oy! Name's Rendol Van Carthing, and I'm the lead singer for the death-metal band Kïllfũck!" He paused to power-spray the blood from my lip. "And I want you to be our new hood ornament girl in our video for Disembowel Her Slowly! If you live."

"Katrina von Pain, crown princess of the House of Pain," I answered back, coughing up some blood.

"You look fucked!" he offered. And with that, he slagged off into the corner of the garage and urinated. "Oy! That burns!" he yelled.

Things were looking up.