It’s good to be back in LA, returned to a safe physical and emotional distance from my family, enjoying the balmy sunshine on my bare skin — and bonus, slinky half-naked coeds everywhere. It’s all good as long as I keep thinking about UCLA in that context. Oceanside paradise stocked with melanoma-tan nymphets vs. cold dreary Iowa and my fucked-up homelife. But then I start asking myself what the hell I’m doing here, jumping through more flaming hoops of bullshit. Like this panel discussion.

At best, panel discussions are bright minds engaged in the kind of enlightening point-and-counterpoint which is normally strung out across the publication cycles of academic journals and monographs. At worst, they’re just a bunch of dopamine-challenged academics trading drivel. Just my luck — I’m always sucked into panel discussions of the latter type. During the interminable blather I prefer to zone out, a defense mechanism to protect my remaining sanity. Then the moderator will say something like, “Nick, if I’m not mistaken, your research bears on this issue…” and I’ll slip effortlessly back into character, putting my mouth on autopilot. I only remember what I say when I say it wrong, deviating from my own private script. I doubt anybody else remembers what I say either. A panel discussion is like a band comprised entirely of prima donnas, all on lead guitar, playing for an audience that wants to sing along but doesn’t know the words.

Today is even worse than usual. Barely five minutes into a discussion on representations of prostitution and — well, that’s the problem right there. Representations of prostitution. So I’m empaneled with a film school professor who’s deconstructing the scripts of “Klute” and “Pretty Woman” and “My Own Private Idaho”, an East Asian Studies postdoc with a dissertation on the “Japanese culture product” of kogyaru girls, and some architect who got up on the wrong side of the bed one morning and wrote an article about whorehouse architecture. Fascinating crap, all of it. And I mean that. But fascinating in microcosm only, because there is no macrocosm. The unifying subjects of all this representation — the prostitutes themselves — are completely invisible, voiceless, forgotten.

Maybe that’s not a problem for them, but it’s a problem for me. Sure, the Journal of Latin American Studies published an article I wrote about 1930s and 1940s Mexican anti-prostitution posters, which I likened to simplified two-dimensional morality plays. That was pretty theoretical of me. But I’ve also done fieldwork in border shantytowns, interviewing women and girls about this abstract thing called their “socioeconomic status” while they’re living beneath plywood scraps and begging me for money and food and por favor, senor! I’ve seen those women and girls sell it and trade it and sometimes just give it away. Now here I am, trying to purge their faces from my mind as I blah blah blah for a roomful of disinterested faces. Maybe I won’t have any self-respect when it’s over, but at least I’ll get another panel credit for my curriculum vitae.

Finally the tepid questions dwindle into silence and the moderator rises to his Teva sandals in benediction. There’s individual clapping that barely qualifies as applause, then a herd migration toward sunlight. The panel adjourns into the usual circle jerk of “you’re so brilliant” and “you’re so brilliant too” bullshit. It’s just a professional courtesy, really. If we didn’t praise each other nobody would.

An audience member is waiting for me outside, betraying personal rather than professional interest. Otherwise she would’ve hovered at the table edge, engaging me in the context of the panel. She’s a hottie in tight plaid pants and a black t-shirt with a white Malcolm X stretched across her boobs. Her almond eyes are frank and appraising behind wire-rimmed glasses. Fuchsia hair is whorled into a messy bun on top of her head and pinned with a couple chopsticks. “Professor Roberts,” she begins.

“Not yet I’m not,” I say, raising a palm as if I’m stopping all traffic on Sunset Boulevard. “Call me Nick.”

Her face is reorienting. Some of my sex appeal is already gone. Maybe more than some. She realizes I’m just a graduate student like her. And something in that slippage ruins it for me, whatever “it” was going to be. I loathe chicks who tune themselves to status. I’ve loathed them ever since I was a farmboy riding the bus five hundred years to high school with the townie girls. And just like that I’m on conversational autopilot again, trying to remember the last time I met a girl who made talking fun. A girl not named Nooshin, anyway.