Fools' Paradise

 “You sure this is where you want to go?” I asked the lady in the back of the cab. Fools’ Paradise was the local biker hangout, about two miles out of town, near the off-ramp from the highway. During the day you might get a few of the tougher interstate truckers stop in for a beer and a gawk at the strippers, but after six, the clientele was strictly guys with handles like ‘Mother,’ and ‘Piston.’ From time to time, some dentist or accountant who’d had a mid-life crisis and bought himself a Harley showed up, but it never ended well. 

The girls who worked there were too young to be legal and too used for anyone to make a big deal about it; if they had a fake ID that said they were a 42 year-old man, it didn’t matter. It was just something that someone copied and shoved into a file that disappeared into the manager’s office, and was never seen again. The girls tended to last at the club about as long as an accountant’s teeth, as their ‘boyfriends’ hustled them from sleazy club to sleazy club; profits, all around, depended on a constant stream of new, if not fresh, talent. The lady in back didn’t look like she qualified for a job there; she was older, for one thing, and looked like she knew how to cold-cock a Brahmin bull, for another.


“Yeah, this is the place,” she said, checking her phone. “Now I just have to find the Neanderthal who owns it.”



-- 30 --

3/31/2024

The Prompt was: "Fools’ Paradise was the local biker hangout, about two miles out of town, near the off-ramp from the highway." I chose to open with a quote though, once I realized where the prompt was leading me.

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