Take Me With You

“Okay, I believe you now,” I told Born Here on the phone after she'd left the gym. “All I know is I've been dating him since the summer. I know his mama. I've been in her house and she told me I'm the only girl he has.”

“I'm bout to go to his house and get my shit and tell him I'm done.”

“Take me with you,” I said.

I told her where I lived and gathered the condom wrappers off my floor. Twenty minutes later I hopped the fence and walked up to where her car was parked with her friend, a girl I'd never met, in the passenger seat. I slid in the back.

The friend asked me if I used to stay at an apartment complex a few blocks away, and when I told her yes, she started describing the posters I'd had on the walls in my first apartment. Ken had brought her and Born Here inside my house while I was at work.

“He said you were just his best friend, but you gave him money.”

Love Like Numbers

Cleveland, Present Day: People sometimes ask if I was scared the first time I got onstage and took my clothes off. I honestly can't remember. Every time I went to a new club, I was nervous about being too big or too tatted up for management to hire me, and I was on edge around the other girls until I got a feel for the place. But I can't say I was scared of getting naked, scared of dancing on a man, or even turning a trick. At a certain point, it just became such a routine, it felt like the easiest thing in the world.

What I do know, is that when I started my 'real' job two weeks ago, I was terrified. I set multiple alarm clocks because 6 AM was an hour I rarely saw unless I hadn't gone to bed yet. Even though they told me there was no strict dress code, I wore dress pants and a sweater thick enough to keep any stray ions of my true self from radiating out into the air, my true self being the wild, tatted-up, free-spirited girl who never really felt comfortable with freedom. Oh, and I wore glasses, because I had it in my head that if I ran into someone who recognized me from the club, glasses would be an adequate disguise.

I can say that so far, I love it. And no, even though it pays more than any of the other 'legit' jobs I've had working in food service or childcare, I'm not yet earning enough to afford my tiny-apartment-car-old-enough-to-be-a-seventh-grader lifestyle without still dancing on the weekends. But I've gotta start somewhere, right?

Vegas, December, 2009: Ken slid back into my life with ease, my pockets without even a question, my heart, well, he'd never really left there. He would come to the apartment to chill and collect from me, and one time he brought his close friend, who I'm just gonna call Bay because he was from the Bay. After they left, I walked to the bookstore. That's when Mike called me.

Daddy's Girl, My Mother's Daughter

My phone rang and the caller ID said Private.

“Hello?”

It was Ken. “So you wanna break up, and you want your money? You'll get your money.”

“Okay...”

“You left a suicide note at my house?” He told me he'd read it, and that he understood, sort of. “I got abused, too. I got touched. It was my uncle. But I didn't let it destroy my life because I'm stronger than that.”

Somehow I knew, I just knew, that he was lying in an effort to manipulate me. But I didn't say anything.

“The reason I didn't call you is 'cause somebody stole my phone and my wallet at school.”

“Oh...” My voice sounded soft as sand falling through an hourglass.

The Note

I can remember walking through the mall with my cousin and my sister on Black Friday, seeing all the sexy thug types who were still wearing baggy pants (mercifully, the tight jeans disease that had already hit Vegas had yet to reach the Midwest) and thinking, what was really so special about Ken? But as soon as my plane touched down at McCarran Airport, he was the first person I called. Just like the lights of the Strip, which I saw the moment I stepped outside, breathing the air here put me right back into a mindset, and that mindset was him.

Ken told me he'd 'missed me so much!' but was super busy getting ready for semester finals, which he needed to do well on to keep his scholarship. I quickly became busy, too, busy working. Rent was just a few days away, and the thing about my club was, sometimes tricks came in and dropped a lot of money, and sometimes good tricks didn't come at all.

I called Ken two days before rent was due and told him if I didn't make the full amount by early the following afternoon, I'd need him to bring me up some of our money. He said that was fine.

The next day, I found myself about eighty dollars short and called him. He didn't answer. I figured he was in class and would call me back soon. When he didn't, I called once more. Twice more. Five, six, ten times. I called his mama's house. She told me he was in the library. I stayed in the club, waiting for tricks, and calling. Calling when I knew from the first ring he wouldn't pick up, then calling again. As much as I didn't want to be disrespectful, I called his mama's house late at night.

“He's asleep, baby.”

“Can you wake him up? It's important...”

“Okay.” Pause. “He's so tired he won't get up. I'll tell him you called in the morning.”

Bad Bitch in the Game

A bunch of Ken's friends showed up at the tattoo shop where we were both getting work done (with the money I had earned at the club, or course.) Ken was getting some sparrows on his forearm and I was getting the first part of my foot piece. One of the girls in his clique, I'll call her C., seemed like she was flirting with him. She was his play-sister's best friend, though, and supposedly she was dating his close homeboy. I let it go, and lost myself in the pain of that needle. Ken drove me home then said he had to go do homework. I took two steps into my apartment and remembered I didn't have any Vaseline. So I crossed the parking lot strewn with bread and broken bottles and shadows cast by a sun just beginning to set, got in my raggedy car and drove to Walmart. Somehow, I managed to hobble and float down those aisles at the same time. I felt so lucky to have someone who shared my interest in ink, who would hold my hand while I fought the reflex to pull my foot away. I got what I needed and went home, put the Vaseline on in the bathroom, then went into my bedroom and saw the huge pieces of glass all over the floor.

The window was shattered and a rock the size of a brick lay a few feet away from my air mattress. I walked into the living room and noticed someone had thrown pebbles through the window right next to my doorknob.

I called Ken.

How I Ended Up For Sale: Part II

Ken was the best thing I could claim. When he hugged me, he held onto me in a way that made me feel so secure, so cared for. He was with me all the time but told me that once fall came, he'd be busy with college. That was okay. I believed in his dream of going to med school. He loved talking about how he'd be a heart surgeon someday and I loved listening.

In those late August nights, when asphalt radiated ninety-plus degree heat into air that had turned a matching, faded black, I had money on my mind. I was working in a tiny strip club where the “top girls” acted like spoiled Homecoming queens even though they were meth heads. One manager- a middle aged former stripper- had the classic, jerking tics of a tweaker, when in reality her drug of choice was crack. The other manager was kind, almost seemed like a cool grandfather type- except he was black and alive and my grandfathers were both white and dead- but I'd later find out all he wanted was to fuck me. And the owner, he was a sixty-something-year-old Saudi Arabian dressed wig-to-white boots like Elvis. He barricaded himself in an office filled with giant stuffed animals and portraits of Marilyn Monroe, watching every inch of the club on security cameras better than a prison's, at a desk in front of the hot tub which apparently hadn't been used since his liver scare caused by cocaine and baseball steroids a few years back. The goal of this club was to sell “bed shows.” These were where the customer paid hundreds (of which the club would take more than half) for something he assumed would involve sex. He'd really get a naked girl dancing over his fully clothed, reclined body, and undoubtedly be mad. At least he got to lay in a bed, I thought. At home I watched network TV, got dicked down, and dreamed of better days, all on an air mattress right on the floor.

How I Ended Up For Sale: Part I

For a while I've been wanting to write about when I was... selling sex? Getting trafficked? It just hasn't seemed like the right time yet.

But I've found that waiting for the right time can take forever. I've been waiting- and working, and wondering- when things in my life are finally going to be “all right.” The truth is, I don't think I can safely say I've made it. I still have financial problems, still struggle with relationships and making good decisions despite my emotions. All I can say, is my life is better than it was four years ago, and if I can use that blessing to help someone else, then I should. So even if I still am not 100% comfortable describing myself as a victim, especially when I compare myself with girls who've had it so much worse, and even if I'm not quite a success story, I think too soon is better than too late.

In this post, I will begin to tell how I found myself in “the game,” and catch up with the present little by little.

Summer, 2009, Las Vegas: I pulled into my parking lot and scraped myself off the leather seats of the beater with no AC. A few men stared from the folding chairs where they were already drinking beer and listening to mariachi blast from a pickup truck, though it was barely after noon. I ignored them. I went into my apartment where the roaches ignored me. I ignored the red eviction notice sitting on my counter as best I could.