The Sandwich Blog

TULSA, Okla. — It’s getting to the point I’m gonna have to ask one of these prostitutes to make me a sandwich.

There is a seemingly delightful hotel bar/restaurant here at the downtown Hyatt in Tulsa, Okla. Has all the trimmings. They serve steaks and grind their own ground beef. Seem to take this seriously.

Yet you cannot get a sandwich of any kind at this restaurant. Two nights in a row, my attempt at ordering a burger (which looks totally delicious) was thwarted.

“We’re all out of the burgers,” the waiter says, and then mumbles something about grinding the beef.

Last night was Night Two of that, and it was also the night that, for the first time in my life, I was propositioned by an actual prostitute.

This also occurred at the media hotel — if you don’t know, I’m in Tulsa to cover the NCAA Tournament — where we got on the elevator late last night and some slovenly women popped on.

They soon made some remark about being on an elevator with a bunch of young guys, and asked what we were doing.

At this point in the story, it is important to point out that these women were not obviously whores. They looked skanky*, for sure, but I’ve seen a lot of skanky chicks** that as far as I knew weren’t into performing sex acts for money. These were a couple of chunky Hispanic women who, for all we knew, had been out for a night on the town.

*Do people still use that word?

**We also saw a bartender take her pants off last night. Just took them off, served without pants. Don’t know exactly what the goal was, but it appeared to be successful.

One of the six or seven dudes in the elevator told them we were working, and that’s when they hit us.

“Do you need company?” one of them said.

These women had business cards and everything. They seemed like real professional whores, but I’ve got to say — I don’t think they understood their clientele very well.

If you’re showing up at the media hotel at 2 a.m., you darn well better be carrying pizza or sandwiches. We really have no interest in your other wares.

Which made me wonder: Can you pay a prostitute to run errands for you? Like, if we had said, “No thanks, don’t need any of your sexual services, but would you mind running to Taco Bell real quick?” would they do that for a fee?

I suppose if you caught them on a busy night, there’s no way, because what you’d have to pay them to make up for the opportunity cost would be way too much for tacos made of 88 percent beef. But if things were slow, they had no business, and could get, say, 10 bucks to order some crunchwraps? Why not? Why would they turn that down? At the point you decide to become a prostitute, you’ve pretty much decided you will do anything for money, which I think is the real point, here.

Prostitutes are an underutilized resource for getting unpleasant chores done.

In a place where ordering a sandwich is virtually impossible, this is an untapped market.