The results were announced yesterday, naming Nhu Lan Bakery the best Vietnamese sandwich Chicago offers.

What follows is a text of the concession speech I delivered at my campaign headquarters on Thursday, June 23.

…

Hello, thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

They said it couldn’t be done! They said there has never been a best food winner of a “Chicago Reader Best Of” that wasn’t actually a food or involved even remotely in the preparation of said food.

They said, “Paul, you’re crazy! You’re just some wild-eyed dreamer, not a French-influenced Vietnamese sandwich made of delicious combination of head cheese, mayonnaise, carrots, daikon, peppers and cilantro on a baguette!”

Like walking on the moon, like cracking the human genome, like creating this country we call America, they said it couldn’t be done.

It turns out they were right. I lost, like, super-bad.

I am here today to congratulate Nhu Lan Bakery’s bahn mi sandwich on its victory, big victory. We live in a republic and our voters make these decisions and we respect that very much and it was a big win. In light of this win, I am officially suspending my campaign for Best Bahn Mi in Chicago, 2016.

I would like of course to thank my family for standing proudly at my side throughout this campaign. My wife Tammy Lynette, our three beautiful children, our two ugly ones, our dog America the Beautiful and our cat Dr. Hercules Veruca steadfastly stood by me through the late nights, endless campaign trips, late-night meetings in different parking garages with the underlings of my numerous, numerous illegal campaign contributors.

They literally stood by my side throughout the campaign, all standing in a row, smiling and waving literally nonstop since I announced the campaign. Even when the cameras weren’t on, or that time I went swimming, they stood by my side through it all.

Just… just standing there. The whole time.

You can stop now, Tammy. Please… just stop.

Of course, I also need to thank my campaign staff, from the high-level opposition research operatives who dug up every dirty secret Nhu Lan’s bahn mi had to the wide-eyed college interns who didn’t go to the media with the late-night genital photos I snapchatted.

From the valedictorian political science student I got to dress up as Pinocchio to follow my opponent’s rallies, screaming that my opponent’s a liar — thanks Gov. Rauner for the idea — to the high-level donors flooding my coffers with anonymous influxes of unregulated corporate cash, we couldn’t have gotten this far without you.

Thank you all. By my personal Lord and Savior, thank you.

And I would like to say thank you to one more group of people: America.

As I stand here before the American flag, proudly wearing an American flag lapel pin that itself has a smaller American flag atop it, as I stand before you on this podium made of flags in the actual American flag boxing gear Apollo Creed wore in “Rocky IV,” talking into a microphone that has not one, not two but seven small American flags and one Greek one left over from the Grexit symposium on Tuesday — Abel, you were supposed to get all of them… Abel, you’re fired — as I stand here in the greatest city in the greatest country on, yes it’s not “politically correct” to say this but by my personal Lord and Savior it’s true — the greatest quadrant of the greatest hemisphere on earth!

[Pause for cheers for the region located north of the equator, west of the prime meridian and east of the 180th meridian.]

Yes! Yes! God bless the northern quadrant of the western hemisphere, including but not limited to Mexico, Canada, Ireland, Greenland, Iceland, Suriname, Guyana, French Guiana, Venezuela, Belize, Nicaragua, Portugal, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire, sections of Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Mali, Algeria, Ghana, England, France and Burkina Faso, all the Caribbean islands AND AMERICA!!!

[More cheers, band plays “God Bless the Northern Quadrant of the Western Hemisphere.”]

Thank you thank you, no seriously shut up. Thank you.

I would like now to close now with a prayer, a prayer I wish to share with you and with my personal Lord and Savior. Please bow your heads and join me.

[Audience bows its collective head in silence.]

Oh Tlazolteotl the Filth-Eater, we thank you today for the blessings you have bestowed upon us. We call you of many names: She Of The Two Faces, She Who Devours Our Excrement or The Death That Comes From Lust.

You might not have gotten Chicago to choose me as the best Vietnamese baguette sandwich in a free weekly newspaper’s web poll, but I thank you for letting me bask in your glory, oh patron goddess of fertility, childbirth, steam baths and prostitutes.

And of me. Thank you, my God, for this moment.

May God strengthen our people. May God strengthen our nation. May God strengthen the conservative movement. May God strengthen the Republican Party. May God strengthen our eventual nominee. And may God always bless and strengthen this great nation, the United States of America. Thank you and God bless you all. Thank you very much.

Read the original bahn mi announcement

I might have had a little help on the concession speech

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Read the original stories from the teaser:

Hunter of Magic

Goodnight Wicker Park

The Smell of Magic

Cockroach on the Factory Floor

A Blue (Line) Christmas

Miss Sweetfeet Breaks

The Evidence of Leather

I would love it if you heard the results.

But it’s not that simple.

I like podcasts. No, I’m sorry. I love podcasts. I’ve got an iPod Nano stuffed to the gills with BBC’s Elements, On The Media and of course that nerd shibboleth Serial.

Part of it comes from my unapologetic love of NPR, which, if I had my druthers, would play around me in an airborne soundtrack like “Stayin’ Alive” when John Travolta’s just gotta strut. Like this, but with Terry Gross.

But podcasts can go further, deeper. They don’t have to be as populist and crowd-pleasing as a Backstory on the history of soap or that time Afternoon Shift brought in a certain, really sexy guest star.

You can drill down in a podcast, get all sorts of obscure and geeky.

Like, say, 1,001 stories about life in Chicago.

So I started a podcast. But it’s not that simple.

I enjoy the finer things in life, such as Aldi’s pasta and not going into debt in the purchase of Aldi’s pasta. So in May, I launched a Patreon campaign designed to cut my costs just a smidge.

It’s a crowdfunding platform where you pay what you want per story, which gets collected at the start of each month. The lowest membership tier is 10 cents, so I’m not asking anyone to go broke for this, but it helps me pay for my opulent lifestyle of food and shelter.

As one of the donor benefits, I promised a podcast collecting the best stories of each month. The first one went live yesterday, for patrons only.

If you want a go at this podcasty goodness, you’re going to have to put your money where my mouth is and support the Patreon campaign at the dollar-a-story level or higher.

I’ve pulled the first few minutes of the first episode as a teaser for you, so you know what to expect. The first episode collected both parts of the Hunter of Magic story about noodle soup and Cambodian sorcerers.

Give if a listen, if you will.

I do realize we live in a world where free has become the expectation. Heck, I don’t even pay for my Elements podcast and I can’t wait for the episode on Fluorine.

But think of it as an investment, a chance to be a patron of the arts without going full Medici. Fewer puffy Renaissance hats and stabbings.

My gratitude will be endless, and I think the podcast’s pretty good.

Read the first Patreon-funded story, a look at a lost captain

Read the first of the stories I turned podcast

Listen to a Christmas message from some CTA musicians

Listen to a group of men completing the last canoe a friend was working on before he died

Hear me at a live lit event

So what should I write this milestone story about?

I decided to toss that question to the folks who made up the first 499, asking the people who got me this far how I should kick off the second half.

My first call was to honorary nephew Roland, age 10, who appeared in #362: Uncle Go Paul and #237: On Dining with Children Where I Used to Get Shitfaced and who was the subject of #365: Why Write? A Letter to my Nephew.

He wanted to talk history, surprisingly focused on the 1893 Columbian Exhibition for someone who still makes up stories about robots.

“I thought you were talking about writing a fiction story, but I like, um, I can’t remember the name of it, but it’s the Ferris wheel. Because it involves the Fair,” he said.

“And if I were writing a fiction story?” I asked.

“The Cubs winning the World Series.”

“Did your dad tell you to say that?”

“Yes.”

His brother Milo, 7, suggested I write about boats.

“They would go boating!” Milo said.

The unnamed narrator of The Nut Hut Trilogy (#193, #196 and #199) is an old friend of mine who sat down for tripe soup and a chat about how she used to be the bait in a phony prostitution scam (read the stories — it’ll make sense).

“In keeping with my theme,” she said, she’s digging up the name of a church group she’s heard of that goes out to “minister to prostitutes, porn stars, strippers and other sex workers.”

Another longtime friend, fellow hipster striver Steven Gilpin, who made his musical debut at Schuba’s last month, was profiled in #140: Evil Twins back in 2013. He suggested I talk to the Chicago tamale guys, those saviors of hungry nights out who circle local bars with coolers full of hot, homemade tamales.

Puppeteer Stephanie Díaz, whose handmade constructions told the tales of Mariposa Nocturna: A Puppet Triptych in #424: Paper, Wood and Wire, suggested I profile the famous Chicago Puppet Bike.

However, this is the only of the ideas I already had myself, profiling the mobile puppet show in #66: The Kitties Dance to Country.

Geologist and paleobiologist Asa Kaplan of #484: The Man in the Dinosaur Hat sent this as a response, which I’ve decided to run verbatim because I’m pretty sure he’s messing with me.

“Hmm something about lightning bugs? Midsummer, I mean. Something in the middle of something.”

Joann Martyn, who each year celebrates the day she didn’t die in #444: Didn’t Kick the Bucket Day, took a different approach.

“You’ve profiled a lot of people and told us their stories, but what I want to know — how have those stories impacted you? How has your life changed because of these stories you craft and share with the rest of the world?”

The answer, of course, is that when I started this project, I was 6 foot 5 and so muscled I looked like an over-inflated Stretch Armstrong.

Martha Bayne was first featured in late 2013 in #251: Karen’s Stone Soup, which was about a fundraiser Bayne and her friends held for Swim Café owner Karen Gerod’s medical bills. Gerod passed away the next summer, much missed by the Noble Square community.

Although she didn’t appear by name, Bayne next showed on the site through artist collective Theater Oobleck, the focus of #344: The Most Sarcastic Child in Chicago Watches a Clown Show.

So it’s only appropriate that a two-timer give two suggestions, “one self serving and one a wild card.”

One’s on the Veggie Bingo event she holds at The Hideout (itself the setting of #473: Autophagy, or Why Progressives Lose). The event looks as insane as the name implies, and you can bet your kale and golden beets I’ll be writing about that soon.

Bayne’s other idea, which I might do as early as next week, is to “go to the corner of 500 N/500 W and then 500 S/500 E and report on the street life.”

Absolutely perfect. I think it’ll still work even if it’s not story #500 on the nose.

Sculptor, graphic recorder and one of Chicago Magazine’s Most Eligible Singles in 2014 Dusty Folwarczny also worked with the number notion.

“I think you should write about something that has to do with the number 500 and Chicago. Maybe it’s the address of where you interview, or how many bottles of beer are produced in an hour, or how many oysters are consumed at Shaw’s happy hour,” she said.

Dusty’s company Ink Factory appeared in #162: The Graphic Recorders and she guided me through the why of modern sculpture in #197: The Hypothetical Zulu Test.

Rachel Hyman, my co-organizer co-host in the Welcome to the Neighborhood reading series, suggested I do something lighthearted and fun, “Since you already took the meta angle with the last story.”

Yeah… wouldn’t want to get too… meta.

Hm.

I don’t think I’ll be writing about the Cubs winning the series, and technically every story I write is “something in the middle of something.” But I want to take this chance to thank all the people who have shared their stories with me over these last three years. And I’m looking forward to the people I’ll meet in the next three.

Now come back Friday for the completely original idea I came up with myself about boats that go boating.

Support 1,001 Chicago Afternoons on Patreon

Do you know former South Side steelworkers? I’m writing a book on the mills and want to hear their stories. Email me.

The man in the video is garbed in brown with an embroidered orange sash across his chest and a red kerchief atop his head. He’s sitting in a doorway, happily chatting in Khmer, gesturing with a handful of yellow candles.

“What are the candles for?” I asked.

Patterson chuckled and nodded toward his phone. A split second later, the man lights the candles and extinguishes them in his mouth.

“We had no idea he was going to do this,” Patterson said. “He’s possessed by a spirit at this time, a spirit that is the lord protector of the underworld or something like that. He’s talking right now about how fire is what burns out evil spirits and is like ‘If anyone’s affected by evil spirits, I’ll burn it out.’

“For the rest of the video, he’s just spitting wax everywhere, after he opened his mouth to show us he was unburned. He smoked three cigarettes at a time to represent the Buddha, the Buddha scripture and the clergy.”

Patterson is a Chicago-based journalist who has collected stories, video and photos of Cambodian sorcerers, fortune tellers and spirit mediums for “Vanishing Act: A Glimpse into Cambodia’s World of Magic.” The book explores magic’s role in Cambodian society, and how it’s changing or, in some cases, disappearing forever.

“After the Khmer Rouge is when there was a real explosion of this — spirit mediums, fortune tellers and things — in the absence of all other institutions,” Patterson said. “People just emerged from four years of brutal work camps. Too many people died of starvation, overwork, disease and murder. It rose up to fill the gaps of psychologists, counselors, all those kind of things that the government provides not nearly as much as it should.”

During the Khmer Rouge regime in the late 1970s, 1.5 million to 2 million Cambodians were slaughtered in dictator Pol Pot’s pursuit of an agrarian communist ideal.

This was when two child spirits came to one of the mediums profiled in “Vanishing Act.”

“’I saw her from on my perch in the holiest perch on the holiest mountain in Cambodia, suffering,’” she recalled the spirits saying. “’And I had to help her.’”

She’s now an older woman who reads fortunes of the serial numbers of money. When she channels the spirits, the old woman is gone. She laughs and jokes like the children she channels, making mouth noises at nothing and playing make-believe with the cash.

She lives a simple life, donating 70 percent of what she makes to charity. Patterson said this was common among the mediums and sorcerers. One or two seemed grifters, but most seemed pleased to take a pittance for helping their neighbors.

Others seemed almost plagued by the spirits, like the rural fisherman weary that fortune telling took him away from the water.

“’I just want to be a simple fisherman who can help people when the spirit comes into my life,’” Patterson recalled him saying.

For others, the spirits cause real hardship.

Patterson’s wife’s aunt is a Khmer Krom, an ethnic Cambodian from Vietnam. In the 1980s, she fell ill. She almost died, until the spirit of a monk named Lok Ta Soc, who died in the 1940s, reached out to her with a deal.

She would live, but she had to become Lok Ta Soc’s medium and follow his rules.

“The rules were you can’t work, you can’t eat meat, you have to help anyone that comes to you for help and you cannot take their money. So she’s in her house in Vietnam, this is what she told us, and she said the lines outside her house became so long that the Vietnamese government sent troops to try to figure out what the hell was going on in this house, like ‘What are they plotting? What is going on in there?’”

The government was knocking at the door. Offerings were piling up outside her house, but she couldn’t take them, dropping them off at a local temple instead. Panicked and weary, she renegotiated the deal.

Under the new deal, she still couldn’t work, eat meat or take money for her fortunes, but she could pick whom she advises. In return, she must donate about $500 a year to a temple.

The average Cambodian income is $950 a year. That’s for people not forbidden to work.

“’That offering buys you a year of life, otherwise you’ll die,’ she said the spirit told her. So her whole life has been struggling to make the money for this offering every year so she can stay alive,” Patterson said.

Cambodia is pulling further from the devastation left by the Khmer Rouge, and from the folk magic resurgence that followed. The youngest sorcerers Patterson found were in their late 30s. The next generation went to college.

While Patterson was doing his interviews, two rural villages accused local healers of black magic and beheaded them.

There’s no right way to be magic. Some read serial numbers off money or burn out demons with candles. Others take the numerology of names, write wishes on succulents or divine with the Western playing cards the French brought to the former colonial territory. There’s a clinic for the cursed in Cambodia. Mediums tell fortunes by cell phone to expats in the Cambodian communities of Long Beach, Calif., and Lowell, Mass.

There’s no good resolution to a tale of Cambodian magic because the story hasn’t resolved. As long as there’s faith, Patterson said, there will be magic.

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What a fake prostitute once told me in the same noodle shop

“She took me to a restaurant, a very serious conversation, like ‘What is going on?’ And that’s when she told me that her dad has nine wives and is a sorcerer,” Patterson told me over pho soup in Little Vietnam.

He was a Western journalist working at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. He was serious about his girlfriend Sopanya, so much so that she’s now his wife, but had always wondered why she would demur when he asked about meeting her family.

Not only was her father a prominent sorcerer, but her aunt was a spirit medium who channeled a dead monk named Lok Ta Soc. High-status in Cambodian society, but she worried her American boyfriend would freak.

“Once I knew that, I went back to the newsroom like, ‘Do you guys know who this guy is?’ and it was like ‘Oh yeah, he has lots of wives.’ ‘He’s really strong magic. How else could you get eight women to live together?’” Patterson said. “Then they were sure he cast a spell on me so his daughter would get to marry a foreigner.”

This was Ryun Patterson’s first encounter with Cambodian magic. Today, he’s a former journalist living back in the States and the author of “Vanishing Act: A Glimpse into Cambodia’s World of Magic.”

The book is a multimedia look at how Cambodia’s traditional folk magic is disappearing or, at the very least, changing. People tell fortunes with Western playing cards and divine over cell phones to Cambodian expats calling from Long Beach. Traveling one long dirt path to meet a rural sorcerer for an interview, Patterson noticed a little Cambodian girl snuggled in her mother’s arms, watching ‘Frozen’ on an iPhone.

This is the story about how Ryun Patterson sought magic.

The Glass Menagerie

“’Do you have any money I have for a plane ticket?’” Patterson asked his parents in 1999. “’Because I think I’m moving to Cambodia.’”

He was in his mid-20s, a copy editor who had spent the three years since graduation frustrated at various small newspapers across the Midwest. A job ad in Editor & Publisher magazine for a job in Cambodia had been taunting him the whole time.

It looked, well, great. The largest English-language paper in the country. Little pay, but free housing, adventure and a chance to make a real difference in a country struggling with poverty and corruption. He interviewed at O’Hare airport while the boss was transferring planes — you could do that pre-9/11 — and he got the job.

“As an idealist journalist, it was one of the purest expression of journalism you’ll come across, working at the Daily. You never will write a feature story about a lady who collects glass animals that has the headline ‘The Glass Menagerie’ on it.”

He loved the job, loved Cambodia and loved Sopanya. But he could only bring one of the three back home. In 2003, they came to the States and got married, settling in Uptown. Patterson returned to his old job as night copy editor for a suburban newspaper.

“I lived in this pure world, right? All of a sudden, I’m writing The Glass Menagerie as a headline. Because that’s what’s expected. ‘I don’t think this headline has enough pop.’ ’What about The Glass Menagerie? What about A River Runs Through It? What about If You Build It, They Will Come?’ So I wasn’t going to last very long.”

The Thing

In 2004, he quit journalism and got a job at an investment research firm. He had nights off for the first time in his life. He and Sopanya had a daughter.

“By that point, I sort of had a moment where I realized, you know what? Maybe the thing in my life, maybe I’ve done it. Maybe I’ve done The Thing people are supposed to do with their life, the one thing. And I was OK with it.”

Patterson had always entertained the notion of getting a traditional Cambodian protective tattoo, one of the ones that covers the entire back. In 2011, on one of their trips back, Ryun and Sopanya found a monk outside Phnom Penh willing to give him one.

“I’m getting this tattoo, for three and a half hours in 100 degree heat on a stone floor of this temple,” Patterson said. “The guy had a tattoo needle that he plugged into the wall, just a cord attached to a tattoo needle, complaining about how much I bled, ‘White people bleed so much.’ All these novice monks come and sit around me, ‘Does it hurt?’ ‘Does it hurt?’ ‘Does it hurt?’ ‘Does it hurt?’ Finally, the tattoo guy is like ‘It’s nice to see someone getting these tattoos.’”

That led to a conversation about how no one likes the traditional bamboo method because the results don’t look crisp enough. Then the tattooist said something that stuck in Patterson’s head.

“’I’ve got no one to teach this to, so when I go, no one else is going to be doing the tattoos that I do,’” Patterson recalls the monk saying.

Patterson found a new The Thing.

Come back Monday for Patterson’s stories of collecting Cambodian magic.

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A story of American magic

We were meeting over stories and Vietnamese food, this woman and I.

For the past few Mondays, I’ve been printing her tales of her former job as a fake prostitute, where she would lure men online to a warehouse with a futon and an ATM, where she would dance and tease and strip and twist and cajole men into giving her more and more money and where, at the critical moment in her swirling grind, she would toss them a Kleenex.

It would flutter to the stained futon where the men sat naked in bath towels. It was a white flag that signaled their surrender.

She wasn’t a hooker. She never had been a hooker. And any release the men would experience that night in that warehouse would have to come from their own hand, into that tissue, as she and the bouncer hiding in the next room with a billy club would watch. The men would.

“Honestly, first they usually feel really gypped and sometimes you would have really good conversations afterwards,” she said as she took a bite of mi xao.

“One of the guys was like ‘How do you live with yourself taking money from guys?’ And I was like, ‘Well, here’s the thing: If I thought I was taking money from orphans or, I don’t know, some other altruistic person…’”

She trailed off.

“I didn’t feel guilty about it mostly because of the clientele that would come in. The way I always thought about it was these are guys that could be spending money on their families, their kids’ college funds, going to Disney World, whatever. And where do they choose to spend their money? Trying to get their rocks off with me.

“It especially didn’t bother me whenever I saw a guy with a wedding ring come in. I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to take your money. I should find out who you are and call your wife, but I won’t that. But I am going to take your money.’”

She had told me earlier that she once got a guy to give her $1,000 before she tossed the Kleenex. I asked about him.

“He was pretty peeved. And then he calmed down actually really quickly. I don’t remember what I said calmed him down but afterwards, we were talking a bit about why I do this. He was the one who asked how I could live with myself.

“I’m like, ‘Here’s my situation. Here’s why I need your $1,000. I’ll only get half of that because the other half goes to the house, but you clearly have money to spend and a fool and his money are soon parted.’”

She laughed. I did too.

She had already told me about her $50,000 in student loan debt, about the severe anxiety disorder that debt kept triggering, about her previous work dancing for a now-closed West Chicago strip joint. This was better, she said. The men would come to her instead of her in glitter and thong having to work up the nerve to walk up and say, “Hey, baby. Want a dance?”

Her now-fiance knew about her job in the warehouse, but didn’t want to hear details. Her dad found out later – she doesn’t remember how. She might have mentioned it offhand, she said.

“I wasn’t doing anything illegal and I was making bank,” she said, shrugging. “Sometimes I was making bank. Sometimes I would go home with zero dollars just because no one would call in that night, or I wouldn’t be able to keep them. You don’t get paid hourly. You’re completely independently contracted so you only get your half of whatever you get out of these guys. And then you pay out, I think it was like strip clubs, where you tip the security guard at the end of the night. Yeah, it was. It was a mandatory 10 percent.

“So at the end of the shift whatever I brought in, 50 percent automatically went to the house, 50 percent was mine and then I would tip out 10 percent of what I had to the security guard.”

There was a revolving crew of about 10 other women, she said. High-turnover work.

“There were a couple of girls there who had been there for a really long time actually, for a couple years. It was always sad because they had like families, they were married with kids and stuff like that. I was like, ‘How do you go to a PTA meeting after this, y’know?’”

“Probably recognizing some faces,” I said.

She laughed.

“Yeah, that was the thing I think I was most terrified about, because at some point in the future I kind of foresee myself going into some public service role, like elected to something. That will be really awesome on the campaign trail. The opponents dig up whatever. I don’t think my real name is on anything, but…”

It’s not a joke. I would vote for her.

“Is it legal?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said promptly. “I don’t know how it’s not fraud, but the actual acts of things going on in the rooms is all legal. You have to be incredibly careful about where you touch a person especially based on where they are touching their own person, like all the rules change at that point, but, yes, it was legal.

“Now I do think that the owner must have been evading taxes or something like that or had otherwise pissed off DuPage authorities, because we would get the cops there all the time. So I think they were after him, but not necessarily the operation.”

“And then you said occasionally a girl would get busted?”

The lowest-performing girl, she told me earlier, would be thrown to the authorities on trumped-up prostitution charges to keep the cops off the operation’s back.

“Yeah, there was a woman who got busted,” she said. “She had had two kids, and her husband did not know and thought that she was cleaning hotel rooms at night. So that really sucked for her.”

“Geez.”

“Yeah. It was really bad. I don’t know whatever happened to her; I left pretty soon after. But it ended up in the papers.”

We talked for a bit about prostitution, about how the bosses and johns never get in the paper, just women in poverty, pasted up on the page in runny make-up to show that the cops are working.

“As lousy of as a gig as it is, and you would think every guy who would leave there would be really mad, sometimes guys would leave there pretty happy, like ‘You know, that’s all I really needed. A pretty girl and… that.’ I had one guy who left there just feeling in actually like the best mood he said he’s been in in a super-long time. I was like, ‘Good for you, buddy. All right.’”

“Probably not a lot of repeat customers, though,” I said.

“No. Actually, we did have one,” she said. “It was this Polish guy, because DuPage County is very Polish. Actually, we would attract a lot of immigrants from various backgrounds, because a lot of times guys migrate here to find jobs and stuff like that. They don’t bring their families over until much later, but in the meantime they’re very, very lonely, especially if there’s not a big community, an established community.”

I poked listlessly at a fickle-looking bit of tripe that had just swirled to the top of my Vietnamese soup.

“Or even if there is an established community,” she said. “If you’re Mexican and you come over the border, come here on your own to work, there might be a huge Mexican migrant community and they are all dudes. So they just get very lonely.

“So we get a lot of those guys. There was this one guy who — and those I actually did sometimes feel bad because you understand the situation a little bit. Sometimes you just really need human contact. You just do.”

We talked of lonely times.

“People need intimate emotional contact,” she said. “So I would feel bad for them, but at the same time I would be like, ‘Shouldn’t you be sending that money home? Wasn’t that the whole point?’ It’s tough. I try not to judge in general, unless the guy tried to make me feel like, dirty or like I had somehow done something wrong. Then I was like, ‘Pssh. A-hole.”

My digital audio recorder now tells me she and I had been talking for a half hour. It tells me it would still be another 10 minutes of tape before I finally said, “I think I have everything I need. Want to just hang out?”

I didn’t record this friend and I catching up on old times. I didn’t record our conversation, as her mi xao got devoured and my pho got colder. I didn’t record a lot of our talk about how prostitution laws punish the woman who needs money, not the man who would drive back to a safe suburban refuge with wife and kids after wiping his penis clean of whoever he had been with.

She spoke honestly, without forethought. She spoke from the heart, not the half-fed lies I have come to detest in my life. She spoke with whimsy and truth, and I like that.

I did record this:

“Did you not like your noodles?”

“Not really,” I said. “It’s the tripe.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Tripe’s a hard one for some people to get over.”

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“Kind of like in a doctor’s office,” she continued. “You’re naked and he’s in a coat and whatever he says goes because, you know, he’s the guy in the coat and you’re naked.”

She took a big, slurping bite of mi xao.

I was in a noodle shop in Little Vietnam, poking halfheartedly at a wad of tripe that stirred to the top of my pho and listening to an old friend talk about being a professional tease in a prostitution con.

She worked in what she would later call “The Nut Hut,” although that wasn’t its name. She would post ads on Craigslist and a site called Backpage, wait for men throughout the suburbs to call, thinking she was a prostitute.

She would then, as she put it in last week’s story, “Answer the phone in your saucy bedroom voice and try to convince these guys to haul their cookies from wherever in the Chicagoland suburbs they were out to where you are.”

Where she was was a warehouse in West Chicago, where she would lure them in, get them to strip naked and take them to an on-site ATM.

“So once you go back in the room, you start dancing,” she said as my noodle soup steamed around her.

“Depending on how much money you have, you start dancing around and doing like a little bit of a striptease. And how much money they paid determines how much you take off and then at some point you make it blatantly aware that there will be no contact whatsoever.

“Usually by tossing them a Kleenex. They kind of got the hint at that point.

“They would either get really pissed — usually they would get really pissed and then be like,” she slumped in her chair, her face dropping. I laughed.

“‘All right. It’s one of these operations,’ and they would, uh, ahem, I don’t know how to put this delicately at a public place…

A CD of a V-pop crooner warbled overhead. Families laughed and gabbed in Vietnamese. Children ran around and dishes clanked over the sound of called orders.

“But they would start jerking off,” she said. “Once they got done, they would usually leave in the quickest, most embarrassed, hurried manner — like forgetting a shoe — ever.”

“Forgetting a shoe?” I asked. “Did that happen?”

She cocked her head as she remembered.

“Socks more than anything,” she said. “But they would hightail on out of there. At that point they were both ashamed and out several hundred dollars.”

We shared a laugh.

“What’s the most you ever got out of someone?”

“A thousand,” she said.

In last week’s story she said she was one of the lowest-performing girls there. That’s why she left. The lowest-performing girl was always tossed to the cops on fake prostitution charges.

“A thousand? Wow. Did that person assume that there was going to be…”

“Coming in, they pretty much all assume there’s going to be, um, that they’re getting,” she considered her words. “A full-on prostitute.”

I circled back for some details. The V-pop singer overhead mercifully faded away, replaced seconds later by identical moody Vietnamese crooning.

“What did the ads say? What did you put in the postings?”

“Hm,” she said, considering. “Generally as much as you could say without fully implicating or promising anything illegal. ‘All your dreams come true,’ ‘Everything you want,’ that sort of thing, so implying that they’re going to get ‘whatever they want.’ And then usually some made-up prices, including the $40 or whatever we were charging at the door that day. Or sometimes we would just give them ‘$300 an hour’ or something like that.

“There would be a picture, either of one of us, but in such a way you that could not determine our identities, thank God. And our name and phone number. Like really basic.”

“Real name?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Don’t be silly.”

I asked the name she used. She told me. You don’t get that part.

“Of course, those ads would go up and our shifts would change or whatever and we would post whatever we had generated earlier in the day. So I pretended to be a Persian girl, I pretended to be Latina, all these things on the phone.”

“How did those people react when they got there and you weren’t Persian or Latina?”

“Well, I’d answer the door. I’d be the only person on at that time because during the day, in a smaller location you only really need one person. So I would be like, ‘Oh, oh. She’s in the other room, but she’ll be ready.’ You get them in the room, you get them naked, you get them sitting there for a while. And they’re starting to get nervous. And horny. But mostly nervous.

“After a while, you’ll come back in after making them sit there naked with some porn for a while. There would always be some nasty old gross porno magazine laying around. It was kind of crusty from years of never being replaced. One of them I remember was like a Christmas magazine, it was all candy cane and Santa Claus themed, but it was July so that thing had clearly seen a lot of use.

“So you leave them sitting there the whole time and then you just come back in and be like, ‘Oh, baby, she’s busy. She can’t. But how about me?’”

Come back next Monday for stories of the clients, including the reaction of the man who paid $1,000. Come back Wednesday for other tales of Chicago.

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“So first of all it wasn’t actually technically called ‘the Nut Hut,’” she said. “In fact I’m not sure what its official name was as a licensed business, because it was a licensed business.”

Crispy mi xao and tripe-laden pho ordered and on the way.

“It would have been two-thousand… eight? Obama inaugurated two-thousand… yeah. June 2008. Probably.”

V-pop crooner playing overhead. Chattering, happy Vietnamese families laughing over giant bowls of soup. A little boy, maybe 3 years old, running around, back and forth heading nowhere. He laughed at weird moments, his whimsy struck by things we’re too large and old to see.

“Only a couple months. Once the cops started knocking on the door and stuff like that, I was like ‘hmmm, I don’t want to get arrested.’”

I slurped creamy, sugary coffee served boiling hot in a glass and pushed my recorder a little closer.

We’ve been friends for years, this woman and I. There are relevant stories there, mood and atmosphere, but we agreed this interview would contain no identifying information, nothing that could be used to point at this woman and call her names for what she did and didn’t do. There will be no description, no “long, blonde hair” or “short-cropped afro.” No fat, no thin, no puckish, no coy.

To me, she’s a friend. To you, she will be nothing. Just a voice telling a story over noodle soup.

“I don’t know if it was Vice or who it was, but they kind of had it in for the owner, like the DuPage cops,” she said. “A lot of times what happens is – at least this is what I learned from some of the more experienced girls on staff – every now and then they feel they have to throw them a bone so that the cops look like they’re doing something, so they let one of the girls, the least performing one in terms of like how much money she’s bringing in, get nailed for prostitution. On like trumped-up charges. So that happens and then I realized that I might be the least performing, so I decided, ‘You knowwwww, this is a good time to leave.’”

She was living with her parents at the time. We decided for the story to leave the location as somewhere in Kane County.

“There were a couple different locations. The one I worked at most of the time was in West Chicago in like a commercial warehouse district almost, so why men were fooled by this for so long, I don’t know.

“What it is is you would essentially go there and hang out for your eight-hour shift or whatever it would be – sometimes 12, like there were creepy hours – and you spend part of your day posting ads on like Craigslist and Backpage back when Craigslist was like you could find like whatever services you so desired on Craigslist.

“The phone calls would start rolling in because you would post your phone number, like the phone number of the place. Answer the phone in your saucy bedroom voice and try to convince these guys to haul their cookies from wherever in the Chicagoland suburbs they were out to where you are.

“They’d show up. And it was always super-misleading. It would be like ‘$40 special’ or something like that which, first of all, what kind of ho-bag are you trying to get for $40? Ew.

“But it would be $40 at the door and once they posted that and gave up their drivers license – so guys would come, give us $40 and their drivers license through a window – and we’d let them in, like photocopy the drivers license and let them in.

“You would take them to a back room, which is like the back of the warehouse but they put down some carpet temporarily and some thick cubicle walls and like a curtain and a bed, like a really cute futon, and you would get all up in their business, right?

“You would be on their laps or as close to as possible and essentially what you – the line was on the lines of, um, ‘Well, the more…’ – because they’d ask like the services – some guys would assume that they were getting ‘the full girlfriend experience,’ if you will, for 40 bucks.

“But once you explained to them that that wasn’t the case then it was, ‘Well, the more you have…’ or ‘The more you’re willing to pay, the more fun we can have.’ So you’re still not committing to anything at this point.

“You’d try to suck as much out of them as humanly possible. And you’d take them to the ATM if they didn’t have any cash on them, because we had an ATM on site, make them pull out all of their money, give it to me, give it to the bouncer who was hiding in the back room with like the baton and shit and a video camera like on you like ready to walk in if there are any problems. And then go back in the room.

“Oh, and the whole time – like the first thing you do before you bring, before they come in, or before you start talking money, is get them naked.”

This story will continue next Monday. Come back in two days for a different tale of Chicago.

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The books in question were piled in four boxes left out for free on the sidewalk outside the Chinese Mutual Aid Association’s office in Little Vietnam (I know, I know). They were of various languages, including Chinese, Vietnamese, English and C++.

There was a 1995 directory of Chinese-owned Chicago businesses, a 2003 guide to QuickBooks, a parenting guide endorsed by Leeza Gibbons and novels in all the languages but the programming ones.

As I decided whether to take the copy of Alexandre Dumas’ “Ba Chang Ngu Lam Phao Thu” or leave it for a Vietnamese person who might want to read about the Musketeers, James sidled up to me. He had a cane, fisherman’s hat and black T-shirt from a defunct South Side pub named after an Irish lady-pirate. His teeth were as awkwardly spaced as the genders at a junior high dance.

He said I should recycle the books, make a lot of money. He was very insistent.

“Feel that paper,” he said midway into his spiel.

I obliged, fondling a page of something Chinese and blue.

“That’s good paper,” he said. “That’s how you turn that paper into green.”

Little Vietnam is a slip of the North Side Argyle Street in the larger Uptown community. It’s a comforting hodgepodge of Southeast Asia where you can get Vietnamese pho soup at one shop and top it off with Thai pastries a few doors down. The streets are lined with Vietnamese signs for shops, grocery stores, travel agents, cell phone stores and the other businesses it takes to run a small expat/emigrant community.

But, being in Uptown, the streets are also lined with dozens of wandering homeless. The smell of lemongrass and fish sauce from inside the small restaurants competes with the smell of urine from outside.

And James told me to recycle the books.

I listened, nodding, not wanting to tell him recycling centers don’t really pay as much for paper as he apparently thought. We each seemed to think the other was foolish but pleasant.

When he was about to walk on, he gave me a fist bump. It turned into a handshake after I asked his name.

“James.”

“Paul.”

“Good name,” he said. “You remember the Last Supper?”

I nodded, not wanting to tell him Saul of Tarsus’ conversion came after that.

“Not bad name yourself. You got two of them,” I said, referencing the Apostles James the Greater and James the Lesser.

“I’m a little grayer now,” he said, stroking his beard.

We shared a laugh, neither of us with a clue what the other was talking about.

As James walked away, he repeated “You get out of trouble!” several times, eventually calling it to me over his shoulder from about 30 feet away. I guess he meant “stay” or “keep” out of trouble.

There’s no real point to this story other than it happened and it made me feel good. I liked James. He was a nice crazy man, even if he wasn’t the most reliable on catechism or recycling codes.

I went to get Vietnamese soup. I didn’t take Dumas.

Written June 2012

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