I encountered a woman at the east-bound rest area in Dandridge, Tennessee tonight. I thought I should mention it. I had stopped to use the bathroom and had walked up to the vending area for a drink. She came up behind me and asked me if I had any spare change. I gave her about $3 in quarters. All else I had were $20 bills, and I wasn't about to go there. So I gave her the quarters, wished her well, and went on back to the truck. But after I got back to the truck, I started feeling a little guilty. She had said that they were trying to get together gas money to get home to Ohio. $20 would take them a long way.

Before I could get out of the truck, I noticed her walking back down towards the main building. She stopped and talked to a guy, who seemed to try to avoid her. She went inside to use the bathroom. That's when I realized that there were several people around who were acting strangely. There was a trucker with a cowboy hat, beer belly and big belt-buckle (yes, the stereotype), who was wandering around talking to people at random. There was a guy from an RV who was wandering around smoking cigarettes and looking a little lost. And, of course, there was the chick's male friend, who was sitting farther up the parking lot in their car. At the time I wasn't sure who was with who, but I thought this panoply of characters should be observed for a few minutes.

Long story short, chica came out of the rest area and stopped to talk to a guy in a pickup truck who had just drove up. It became apparant from the length of time that she was talking to him that he wasn't just giving up $3 in change. After a few minutes, she went around to the other side of his truck and got in. Quite clearly, since I couldn't see her in the truck, this meant that the guy had solicited a blowjob. And he got it. This bothered me.

Now, I'm no school boy. I know how the world works. I don't care if a woman wants to go out and sell her body, or perform whatever act. I'm not embarassed by that. It's a business transaction. He wants it, she has it, and you go from there. This bothered me because I couldn't help thinking about chica's story; that they needed gas money. Now, she seemed very clearly to be a woman who had lived on the edge. She had probably done far more dubious things that give a stranger a blowjob in her life. She was no angel. But neither did she look like the typical crack whore. She bore the marks and lines in her face of someone who had done some hard living. But while she was thin, she had some shape to her, and she did not strike me as a drug addict looking for her next high.

I thought about what I should do. Not that I was going to go knock on the door of the truck or anything. But it bothered me to think that perhaps chica had asked the guy for some spare change, just as she had me, and he had initiated something else. I took out our digital camera and was planning, as I left, to stop behind his truck and take a picture of the tag. I didn't plan to do anything with it. I just thought maybe I would make this guy sweat a little bit. Maybe he'd think twice before soliciting someone for a blowjob again.

Anyway, before I could leave chica got out of his truck. Dude immediately left. Then chica walked up to her male friend and got in their car, and they left. That left me thinking that whatever she did for Dude gave her enough money for them to leave. Now, I realize that this all is predicated on accepting her initial story. But I suppose I prefer to think the best of people. I left, wondering that if things had worked out how I thought they had, I might have saved chica another nasty memory by simply being more compassionate toward another human being and sharing more of the money that I had in my pocket.