Wedding cake prostitution

OK so first of all, NO MORE VODKA BEFORE BED.

It is 440 am and I can honestly say I've never had the pleasure before now of waking up in a cold sweat and realizing oh thank GOD I wasn't in charge of those two wedding cakes on the way to my prostitution court date.

So here is the dealio.

I rode a bus downtown with a friend who was going to teach me how to turn tricks.  But when I arrived she said I was wearing the wrong boots.  I needed thigh highs with a $50 price tag. 

So I called in a favor with a friend who was also the father of one of my labmates.  He pulled up to the side of the road in his blinged out SUV and when I explained why I needed the money, he hesitated, not wanting to get into legal trouble - since he was a lawyer and could be disbarred.

Eventually I promised I'd use my earnings to pay for his daughter's wedding cake.  She was to be married on Tuesday - New Year's eve - and here it was Saturday and he had no ideas. 

I had needed the money from hooking in the first place to pay for another special event cake - a friend was graduating - so I told him I'd just get an extra cake from the same place.

Relieved, he handed me the fifty, we embraced, he drove away, and a very pretty female police officer arrested me for intent to engage in prostitution.

I told her, tearfully, that I never got out much, just worked long hours, certainly had not spent much time downtown, that I didn't understand what was happening and so probably needed a lawyer.  She nodded, smiled.  It was a very genial arrest.

After I'd been booked, given a hearing date, and released, I began textbook grieving my arrest.

Bargaining - or as I like to call it, scheming: What could I say to explain my actions that would be plausible and obscure my true intention to sell sex for money?

Denial and anger: What had actually happened?  I got money from a friend.  Is what I had done actually illegal?  Can you be arrested for INTENDING to do anything you have not actually done?  I probably would have chickened out anyway.  How could the police possibly predict the future?

I also cried a lot - sadness - and of course, never got to acceptance.

Meanwhile there was the small matter of the cakes.  Now in this bizarre juxtaposition of two unprecedented anxieties dream you might think the problem was that between my time-consuming arrest and the chilling effect it had presumably had on my new revenue stream there was no cash or time to buy the cakes.

Not so, dear logical reader, for this is my brain on a greyhound (the drink AND the bus I traveled home from Christmas on - ha! a twofer!). 

Both cakes sat chilling in my fridge when I arrived home.  The problem was that they had not aged well.  The events - wedding and graduation - were to take place in two days' time and already, after only 24 hours storage, the one with strawberry mousse and wafer towers was starting to ridify and the one with fresh flowers was beginning to wilt.

Looking at them now, these cakes that had seemed such perfect solutions to the tasks I had signed on for, such fitting tributes to the solemn events, now looked cheap and old.

How could I possibly find replacements that were better over a holiday with such short notice?

I woke - Never so relieved to be hungover and dehydrated.