It occurred to me recently that it’s been some time since I’ve run into my favorite hooker. I’ll bet three years have passed since we met on some downtown street and stopped to yack about life in the city.

One night she was there strutting along and laughing. Then she was gone.

Please don’t get the wrong idea. I say she was my favorite hooker because there was something classic about her. She was like one of those street walkers you’d see in a `40’s movie, snapping her gum and firing off witty lines.

She was unabashed about her work. We’d pass each other out in the night and stop to gripe about our jobs, casual friends grousing about their respective professions.

It was the sunny side of prostitution, relatively speaking. Most of the hookers I’ve known have been sad characters, addicted to one chemical or another and living a night-by-night horror show. They pounce with frantic eyes on cars stopped at traffic lights. Faces etched with years and pain peer into car windows, trying to look seductive but looking instead insanely desperate to sell their only commodity for another fix, another toot or another drink.

This young lady, my friend, was probably on her way there. But she didn’t have that street-hard look about her yet, that gaunt, shrunken-apple look that evokes pity and revulsion.

No, this young lady dressed nicely, stopping just short of the scandalous look you expect to see on one of New York City’s seamier boulevards.

She didn’t talk tough and she didn’t try to sell you anything if you obviously weren’t buying. She’d offer me downtown gossip if she had it and pass on a compliment. A hooker with a heart of gold.

What got me thinking about it was the arrest made in Poland a couple of weeks ago. A woman admitted to running a house of prostitution there but defended the ladies who worked for her. They were drug-free, she said. They were women who needed to feed their kids, pay for college or keep the bill collectors at bay.

The customers were mostly lonely old men, I was told. But while police were rousting the place, a high school teacher from another city showed up for his appointment at the house of ill repute. A married man, he admitted he had visited the girls at the Poland home several times. He had a favorite girl there and he kept coming back.

It would be nice to think of all ladies of the night in the manner of Julia Roberts in “Pretty Woman.” Hardworking girls selling the only thing they have only long enough to make ends meet.

But I can’t defend prostitution any more than I can condemn the people who engage in it. Police are quick to point out that the profession spreads disease, leads to spinoff crime and sustains drug addictions.

For every hardworking hooker with a heart of gold, there are a hundred more who will knock you unconscious and steal your wallet if they get the chance. There are those who will continue exchanging sex for money even after having been diagnosed with a deadly disease.

I see them and I wonder if one day not so long ago, they too had dressed nicely and smiled when they went to work. Maybe they stopped to chat with friends on the streets, forgetting momentarily about how they made a living. I wonder what they were like before they made that decision to survive by cashing in on the desires of lonely strangers.

I thought I saw my friend the hooker not long ago in a department store. It might have been her dressed conservatively and pushing a shopping cart down the aisles. I couldn’t tell for sure and I didn’t approach her.

She might have wended her way down that infested path of disease and addiction, like countless others who swore they’d get out of that line of work any day now. She might have hit bottom with such a thud that I wouldn’t recognize the face that once had at least a hint of innocence in it.

But I like to think she found her way to another life – simply walked away from a life of selling her body to strangers and found another way to survive. Left the life without saying goodbye to me or the streets she prowled.

Either way, I liked her. I might buy her a flower if I see her again, regardless of how her life turned out.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.

Copy the Story Link