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.
“Someone knows,” he said. Someone
in the neighborhood knew I was a stripper.
He came over right away. I told him I
didn't want to keep my money in the house if someone had tried to
break in. I didn't have a bank account at the time, either. I'd had
one before and had problems with identity theft, plus I believed that
a bank would report my earnings to the government and I'd get taxed.
He said he'd hold onto the thousand or so dollars I had stacked until
I was able to move. I gave it to him. I trusted this guy with my
life, so of course I trusted him with my life savings.
He kissed me and left, and I dragged my
mattress into the kitchen, where there were no windows and the fridge
would block anything thrown through the living room from hitting my
head. Ken had told me before that his mama forbade girls from
sleeping in her house because she thought that would lead to
grandchildren. So even though I'd (supposedly) paid this woman's
electric bill on multiple occasions, I didn't even ask.
The next day, I talked to the property
managers. Walking past other first floor apartments, I saw a few had
gotten pebbles thrown through windows, too, but none as big as the
rock I'm convinced would have killed me if it had hit my head. It
would be a week before the maintenance guy would show up to even look
at the damage. By that time, I had already decided that I was
breaking my lease.
There was a girl I
danced with, let's say her name was Brooke. She had an
awesome-sounding boyfriend, Mike, and at the time they were renting a
room from some friends they really couldn't stand. Brooke decided she
and Mike and Ken and I should all move into a two bedroom,
mont-by-month apartment just east of the Strip. Each couple would
have to pay three hundred dollars a month for rent, plus half the
utilities. Ken and I met them at Panda Express so he could see if he
trusted them. He did, and the only objection he had was to the
neighborhood, which he claimed was too dangerous a place for me to be
in. Brooke and Mike were in love with the building, though, and we
decided we would move in.
He gave them the
money, since he'd been holding all of it, even coming directly to the
club to pick it up sometimes, and I packed what I wanted from the
post-apocalyptic-looking one bedroom. That's when Ken told me he
really couldn't bring himself to leave his mom, because he was really
all she had. He said he would keep living with her and promised to
see me more often, and I accepted that.
Living with my
friend was fun, at first. We would go to work while her man stayed on
the couch playing video games, come home, watch movies. But nothing
in either of our lives was sturdy. Brooke got into a huge argument
with the crazy cokehead/alcoholic/opiate junkie manager at the club
and quit. Logging onto MySpace, I got messages from “Ken's
Stalker,” still claiming she was fucking him. He still claimed she
was crazy, but the more I investigated, the more I had my doubts. Her
page said she attended a high school that was different from the one
he'd gone to. I started to suspect he was lying, but I relied on him
so much, I needed him to be a good person so much, that my mind
wouldn't allow itself to believe he was anything else. I started to
think of my mom.
So maybe Ken had
been with this girl in the past. Maybe he'd even cheated on me once
or twice with her... so what? Pussy was pussy, and if he could accept
me fucking other men because it was my job, I should be able to
accept him fucking other bitches because he was a man and that's just
what men did. I knew he loved me, and I figured out a way to fix
things.
Instead of having
my intelligence insulted by dumb lies, I used my intelligence to help
him come up with an acceptable lie.
“Baby, her page
says she went to [high school on the south side] and everybody knows
you graduated from [high school on the east side]. But did you only
go there your last two years or something?”
“Yeah,” he
said. “My mom and I moved when I was in tenth grade.”
There it was. I was
willing to lie for him, and he was worth it. I was willing to fight
for him, and he'd be worth that, too. When the “Stalker” wouldn't
stop running her mouth, I told her to meet me at a motel near my
apartment late at night. I put Vaseline on my face and went there,
drove around the parking lot, but all I found were tweakers.
Next, my car broke
down. I started taking the bus and walking twenty minutes to get to
work in the afternoon, then catching the bus and walking home through
tweaker-land at three in the morning. Brooke was catching buses to a
studio where she did webcam masturbation shows. Ken was “collecting”
from me every couple days because we didn't trust our money in a
house where friends-of-friends we didn't even know came through.
Just like Brooke, I
was having problems with the management at the club. I was the one
who sold the rooms- half the time the day shift manager was almost
too high to function- and it made me mad that I had to talk tricks
out of a “tip” after they'd already paid up to three fifty to the
club, then give the manager at least ten percent of my tip. Once,
while we were at “our” favorite restaurant, Ken told me about his
homeboy's girl. She worked the Strip and no one took a cut of the
money she made. Apparently, she'd made twelve thousand dollars her
best week.
“I want to set up
a time for you to meet them so she can tell you how she does it.”
I was down.
Ken kept talking.
He told me that working the Strip, there was a good chance I'd get
caught. If that happened, I'd be in jail for maybe a couple days
before he got me out, but I couldn't tell anyone his name or else
he'd get charges worse than mine. Eventually, we could have other
girls working for us. I'd be his only love, and they'd have to
answer to me. I knew, deep down, what that would be. It would be like
what Eyes had going on with his girl. He would be like my
acquaintance Lariah's man, Rock. The crucial difference was, instead
of being under Eye's girl, instead of 'joining a team' like Lariah
had done, I'd be the bitch in charge. My roommate, Mike, told stories
about how he used to run an escort ring with the 'gorgeous,
money-minded' chick he dated before Brooke. A few months later, I
would dance with a nineteen-year-old who's mother used to 'run an
escort ring' with her boyfriend. So in the context of my world, it
was not like Ken was suggesting I transport black market kidneys from
Mexico or something.
I was a hustler. I
was all for increasing my street knowledge and using that plus my looks to make money. Therefor, I was a bad bitch. And therefor,
hell yeah, I was down.
I told Ken I would
talk to this girl whenever he could arrange it, but during those
couple weeks, he was busy and so was I. It was almost Thanksgiving,
and I'd bought a ticket to fly to Cleveland for the first time since
I'd left.
No comments:
Post a Comment