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By J.D. Oxblood

It’s well-documented and downright hilarious that Attorney Generals are going after Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster for the prostitution ads on the well-worn website.  Just last week South Carolina led the charge, offering up this tasty morsel: over a two-year period, sheriff’s deputies in Richland County have made 121 prostitution-related arrests from Craigslist ads, according to department figures provided Tuesday to The State newspaper.

But here, in New York City, despite the bum’s rush on prostitution following Governor Eliot Spitzer’s dramatic fall from grace, chasing after ladies of the night and the Johns who love them is JUST.  NOT.  GOOD ENOUGH.

Now, I love personal ads.  I started reading them on the back pages of free weeklies almost twenty years ago — back then, chillun, there weren’t no interwebby, and shore weren’t no Craig — and found them to be a luxurious unguilty pleasure, like watching a soap opera in a foreign language.  It’s the place where fantasy and prescription meet — where else can you find about a nude Jell-O wrestler looking for a pre-op transsexual for mutual flogging and repeated viewings of “Terms of Endearment?”  I loved the specificity; I loved the fantastic requests; I loved the sheer freaky-deaky-ness of it all, and more than anything, I loved  learning the vocabulary.  Such great acronyms — ISO, GBM, DWF, POT (I never could figure if that meant pre-op, post-op, or 420-friendly) — and so much reading between the lines.  Ya see, kids, back when newspapers were actually MADE OUT OF PAPER, you had to pay for a classified ad, and you paid by the word.  Yeesh… nowadays you all browse by the word — the less amount of words on the page, the more likely you’ll read it.

And, no, this is not a digression.  Because the thing that always cracks me up about cops is they’re just so stupid.  Sure, we all like to get off on flicks like “Heat” and “Copland” and “In Too Deep,” all those celluloid fantasies that make us believe that cops and robbers are basically the same type of person — marginalized, street-smart, living on the edge.  And there are great true-life stories of people crossing from one side to the other with great success (take Frank Abagnale, Jr. for example), but when you get right to it, most cops are a lot closer to that scene in “Rush” where Jason Patric asks Jennifer Jason Leigh to roll a joint.  Her dooby is pathetic, and falls apart when she tries to smoke it.

So dig:  buncha cops down in South Cary-o-lina tryin’a make heads or tails out of all the new-fangled read-between-the-lines lingo that Craigslist hookers use to avoid being “flagged for removal:”  no f/s, in, out only, greek, roses, great conversationalist, Jell-O specials, etc.

But Craigslist isn’t JUST for call girls, right?  I mean, I know at least one person who’s gotten a job out of Craig, at least two people who have gotten laid (for free), and everyone and their dog has gotten a roommate, found a room, or bought a friggin’ toaster.  And EVERYONE cruises the personals, whether they admit to it or not.  A vanity search on Google is your basic masturbation of the ego, but cruising the “missed connections” section on Craigslist is like… masturbating with the outside chance of someone taking over for you.

(Cynics note:  I will personally pay $5 to the first person who can give me a verifiable & corroborated story of tracking down or being tracked down via “missed connections” and the incident leading to sex.)

And the crème-de-la-crème of the Craigslist personals is “casual encounters.”  AND THE CRÈME-DE-LA-CRÈMEDE-LA-CRÈME OF CASUAL ENCOUNTERS IS THE SKI BUNNY CIRCUIT.

What’s a ski bunny?  Heh… heh… allow me to introduce you to my little monkey, Cocaine.  You’ll find him on a lot of skinny girls’ backs.  And what a skinny little girl with my little monkey on her back needs is a dude — or douche, don’t really matter — with a shit-ton of blow.  And what a dude with a shit-ton of blow needs is a skinny — or fat, it don’t really matter — girl — or old lady, it don’t really matter — who wants some blow bad enough to come over to some total fucking stranger’s apartment at 5 o’clock in the morning.  “Ski instructor seeks…”  “ready to hit the slopes…” “ski bunny looking…”  Yeah.  Check the times on these ads — they don’t go up at lunchtime.  And the logic is flawless:  you’re a dude, you’re alone, you’re horny, you have a ton of blow.  You can call a prostitute who will come over, do all your blow, charge you for sex that you’ll barely be able to manage anyway, and leave.  OR, you can find a ski bunny who will come over, do all your blow, help you pass the time, maybe offer you some sex for FREE — or at least some heavy petting, since you probably can’t get it up anyway — and leave.  And for a bunny it’s a great deal too:  Free cocaine, and no obligation of sexual payment.  You might have to fight the guy off if he decides you owe him something, but you’re a chick in the big city, so you’ve probably dealt with that bullshit before from some drunk moron who was a sober friend of yours earlier that night.

Cutting to the chase:  the following copied and pasted directly from Craigslist:

My man was arrested for coke last nite – w4m
Date: 2009-05-09, 11:59AM EDT

everyone please be aware, the police are running a huge sting this weekend to bust craigslist skiiers and 420′s. My man was arrested last nite when we invited a ski bunny over to join us. she showed up and when we started doing lines, she whips out the badge, calls in backup (two uniforms there in 60 seconds) he is arrested, cuffed and he is at Rikers now. He is being charged with felony possession of coke, which carries mandatory jail time. The uniforms told me that they plan on using 5-6 new undercove [sic] female officeres every nite until the posts stop.

So let me get this straight, NYPD:  there’s so little crime in this city that the best use of your time and our tax dollars is to cruise Craigslist looking for ski bunnies and ski instructors and set up meetings with them to bust them for cocaine possession?  Who’s fucking idea was this?  Some ski instructor on the force who decided he could confiscate some free blow?  Some ski bunny who thought moonlighting as a cop would be a kinky thrill?  I hate to keep coming back to the movies, but doesn’t the lifer usually get RIGHTEOUSLY PISSED at the rookie for busting some penny-ante dope dealer after he’s spent months trying to chase down the big-daddy connection?  Who the fuck do you think you’re gonna bust?  Some Wall Street exec guilty of “blowing” his last corporate bonus?  Some strung-out skinny chick?

Let’s be clear — “felony” possession simply means more than a gram of coke.  The “logic” behind out Draconian Rockefeller drug laws — if you want to call it that (and BTW, if you’re all for our antiquated drug laws, and still think the “war on drugs” is a good idea, you’re an idiot, but you should still keep reading because my point holds) — the “logic” is to separate the hard-core dealers from the casual users.  Not even an evangelical Christian thinks that a 17 year-old kid with a dime bag should face the same punishment as a hardened street-wise criminal sitting on weight and pushing bricks to the teeny boppers.  Lemme let you in on a little secret:  A gram of coke split between a lady, her man, and the coke whore that they’re hoping to have a three-way with is NOT A LOT OF BLOW.  Split three ways, it ain’t even felony possession.  And this guy’s sitting in Riker’s for wanting to get a little high and get his joint worked on by two chicks.

And New York is a safer place for having him off the streets?  Sorry, Commissioner Kelly, I’m not following you.  The story above simply does not jive with the press you’re putting out, like this and this, which I found on Craigslist but have been unable to find on MSNBC, from whence it (supposedly) came:

Alex Johnson
msnbc.com
updated 8:04 p.m. ET, Tues., May 5, 2009
Craigslist.com, the wildly popular online community and classified bazaar, is coming under intense pressure from law inforcement [sic] authorities to eliminate what they say are ads for narcotics uses. New York Police Commissioner Kelly sent the company a letter Tuesday giving site leaders 10 days to remove illegal content related to narcotics use or face prosecution….

This weekend alone, the department nabbed 15 individuals, several of them prominent businessmen. They will be facing felony charges for cocaine possession.

These are the policies of what William S. Burroughs called a “shit.”  It’s a technical term, but, basically, it’s one of those motherfuckers who’s too much NIMBY and not enough mind-yer-own-beeswax to pull their heads out of their fucking asses.

Naw, I’m being bitter.  Honestly, I’m just so glad that these people are off the streets.  How dare they try to use cocaine to get women into bed — and how dare these women try to use their bodies to get some free blow.  You never see that kind of behavior with legal substances like alcohol.  I’ve never, like, bought a girl a cocktail because she was pretty and asked me to.  And besides, isn’t it better if we shut this whole coke whore/ sugar daddy / ski bunny/ instructor thing down completely?  Let’s get these strawberries back on the street soliciting strangers in passing cars — “suck your dick for twenty dollars.”  That would be better.  And I would MUCH rather see a bunch of overweight, drunk, horny bastards with overweight wallets pushing each other around in bars and manhandling girls with one hand while they wipe their noses with another, than think of those guys at home, cruising Craigslist one-handed.  Let’s think about SOCIETY as a whole.

Sniff sniff,
JDX