Working girls on the road to Tel Baruch

Midweek, two hours before a late summer dawn that rises nowadays around five, the sidewalk cocktail party is over in most of Tel Aviv. But there are some corners of the city where people have not yet chosen sleep.

There's a traffic jam on the sand strewn asphalt road that leads to the Tel Baruch beach, where in a sprawling cafe built on the sand there's the smell of grilled fish and the rhythym of the waves to accompany Wednesday night sing-alongs of Palmah songs.

But the traffic jam isn't for the cafe, allthough it's usually packed between 11 p.m. to one in the morning.

The traffic jam is because of the bare midriffs and exposed legs, open blouses and half opened wraparound skirts of women who appear and disappear in the shifting headlights that move over the dunes and scrub between the road to Haifa and the beach north of Sde Dov airport.

The girls are like the girls on Dizengoff. Some are attractive and some are not. Some are tall and some are short and some are skinny and some are fat.

They call themselves girls, working girls, and everybody else is called respectable.

The trip from Rehov Hayarkon, which was once the red light district of Tel Aviv, to the sand dunes of Tel Baruch, began when the seaside Tel Aviv boardwalk brought respectable people to Rehov Hayarkon at night, and respectable people always want the police to move working girls away from where the respectable people go.

So the girls moved north, along Ben Yehuda Street toward Yordei Hasira, the old Tel Aviv port at the northern end of Dizengoff, where an entertainment district of blintzes restaurants and bars, night clubs and Chinese food, grew up in the 1970s.

But there, too, respectable people congregate in the evening, and so the ladies again moved north, over the Yarkon River bridge, to a construction site along the side of the road that goes right past the penthouse neighbourhood of Neve Avivim.

The respectable people in Neve Avivim -- ministers and businessmen, MKs and professors -- weren't happy about looking down from their rooftop patios into the backseat bedrooms of big American cars and small Sussitas, Peugot pickups and late model Volvos, so the girls eventually found their places in the west, across the highway in the Tel Baruch dunes.

The traffic at two thirty in the morning in Tel Baruch includes a tow truck stationed to free cars that get stuck in the sand either because the driver runs off the road in amazement at the scene or because the driver is part of the scene and gets stuck while following the girl's instructions to a secluded place for some professional necking in the back seat. Some nights a border patrol jeep parks off the road and in the darkness the four men on board keep an eye on things, because sometimes the traffic gets out of hand, and because sometimes there are nasty scenes.

The working girls -- according to the police there are about 100 streetwalkers in Tel Aviv, though on most nights only about 30 work the dunes -- organized their own cafe, because respectable people go to the cafe on the beach and respectable people don't want to sit around big round tables singing Palmah songs while working girls discuss customers at the next table.

Their cafe is an old ice cream truck, and its light combines with the only street lamp in the area to create the illumination that shows that a tall girl in a white dress is not wearing anything underneath the dress, which anyway is open enough to bare her most of her breasts, the length of her thighs, the small of her waist and back.

She drinks coffee from a styrofoam cup, bought at the mobile canteen, and looks back frankly at the men in the cars that slowly drive by. When she bends over to look in the passenger's window to tell a driver how much it costs, she gives her coffee cup to her friend, who is dressed in a pair of red hot pants slit along the legging hems so that they fit like an Indian warrior's loincloth.

When the girl in white comes back in fifteen minutes, her friend will have a fresh cup of coffee ready.

When the working girl who found Maya Malevsky's body beside one of the strange roads that come and go through the dunes, testified in the Hava Ya'ari and Aviva Granot case about what she did after she saw the body, she said, "I went to the office."

The office is that little mobile canetter, which does not serve liquor and is run by two tall t-shirted gentlemen who keep up a light patter of commentary about the quality of the passing cars, the way the people in the passing and pausing cars patter about the quality of the loitering girls, who have a stage-like dignity and composure in the footlights of the car headlights.

The police occasionally do roundup the girls , but there are no neighbours complaining about the traffic or the commerce going on below their kitchen windows, so the police act only when it's a slow night or something unusually ugly happens there and it gets into the paper and makes respectable people in City Council get hot and bothered.

By the way, the girls, which also means some boys dressed up to look like girls, say that there are some very respectable people who take late night drives into Tel Baruch.

They say that professional ethics prevents them from naming names, but the police confirm that on occasion, during roundups forced on the cops by a sudden upsurge of interest and respectable people's horror about what happens in Tel Baruch at night, some very respectable people have been embarrssed and then allowed to quickly speed home.

The girls don't like voyeurs, the types who drive slowly back and forth, and when a driver -- especially if he's in an old jalopy, and unlikely to spend the NIS50 to NIS100 it costs to take a girl for a spin -- has passed by more than twice or thrice and obviously is not trying to make up his mind but rather getting more obscure kicks, some of the girls get angry and throw handfuls of sand at the car.

Business starts much earlier than three in the morning.

Some girls get to work at seven in the evening, just in time to get respectable customers on their way home from respectable jobs.

Friday and Saturday nights, say the girls, are busy times, but midweek is better because on the weekends the married men, who are the girls' main customers, go out with their wives.

On the weekends there are a lot of young soldiers home for the weekend and in their parents' cars, after a few drinks downtown, they cruise up and down the narrow tarmacs amidst the dunes, counting their money and considering the girls.

In midweek, say the girls, respectable husbands wait until their respectable wives have gone to sleep after the last tv show of the night, and then the husbands go cruising along the sandswept asphalt of Tel Baruch, looking for Tel Aviv's working girls.

By four thirty a.m., the sand dunes of Tel Baruch are empty, the traffic jam is over.

Some of the girls get rides home with last customers of the night. Others have pimps or boyfriends, husbands or girlfriends or lovers, who pick them up. Some own their own cars, and others make appointments with a cab driver. There's an early morning cafe near Mograbi Circus, which served the girls when they worked Yarkon Street, and some still go there after work for a drink.

But by the time the first bus of the day carrying sleepy workers travels down Ben Yehuda, the girls are gone.

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