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.

Me, I was just as much of a contradiction as any of this. Strippers wore a lot of makeup, I'd heard, so I wore a lot of makeup. All that did was turn a face that usually looked twenty-one or twenty-two into a face that looked twenty-six. The customers- who'd come into this liquor free, eighteen and up club specifically because they wanted a Barely Legal- didn't believe me when I told them I was eighteen. The other girls didn't believe me, either, since I didn't act like a kid in a weed, Xanax, and Oxy store. I was too world weary for drugs, too naïve to understand why no one seemed to want me. It would be a while before I learned that in Vegas, every single person just wants to play dress up.

When the only customers in the club bought bed shows with other girls, I would go into the dressing room and call Ken. One night, he didn't answer, and the next day, his phone was turned off. Panic conquered me one neuron at a time. Finally, I called his house and his mother picked up. She told me he was in jail- just over some weed and traffic tickets he'd never paid- but he was going to have to sit in there for a few weeks because she didn't have the money for his bail.

I told her I had it because I did, barely. We went down to the bonds place the next evening and I counted it out onto the desk, fifteen hundred dollars in twenties. I told myself I'd think about how I was going to pay rent once I could think straight. I'd be able to think straight once my man was back. It turned out, he had a hold in a neighboring city and would still have to do about one more week.

During this time, I sat on his mama's couch, ate her food. “I'm so disappointed in Ken for going to jail,” she said. “But at least he's going to college. He's gonna be a heart doctor someday.”

 

She told me about how she'd given birth to him a week after her high school graduation. They'd left Detroit when he was about ten because she didn't want him ending up in the streets. The whole family, consisting of Ken's mom and the Filipino “aunt” who slept on their couch, seemed to revolve around Ken and his dream. Being focused on the same thing as these women made me feel like I belonged.

In the afternoon, I lugged my laptop to the library, got on the internet and went to MySpace. “Free My Baby Ken” I wrote beside my name.

Then I got a message from some girl. “You date Ken?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Oh. So do I.”

Instantly, I hated her. I just knew she was lying, knew she was a bitter ex trying to fuck up his happiness, and when he got out, he told me that's exactly what she was.

“We went to high school together and she used to stalk me.”

I didn't get any of that bail money back. He told me it had gone to pay off his tickets, and I was just happy he hadn't had to miss more school. Now that I'd invested so much into him, my mind was committed to believing he'd been worth the investment. He made me laugh. He made me feel secure, and that abstract sense of security was especially important because my actual security- in the form of roach filled apartment walls and a roof- was once again threatened.

Around this time, I started working in a different, small, eighteen and up club. This one had cheetah print carpet, like an eight-year-old girl's dream room, only it had soaked up puke and cigarette ashes, had shoes track dirt from Idaho and India across it, touched the skin of girls who slept on it because they couldn't sleep anywhere else. The hiring manager gazed at me with eyes so opiate-dulled they looked like the stage mirror after girls had put their hands all over it, and told me, “Every guy who comes through here gets fucked. Some literally, some figuratively.”

Then a semi-recognizable boxer came in. He offered me a couple hundred extra if I'd suck his dick. I did it. I told myself it would just be this one time, but afterward I knew some part of me had changed. Now I would technically be a 'former prostitute' for the rest of my life. And now I'd be able to stay in my apartment for at least another month.

I could have kept it a secret. But I loved Ken so much, and I felt like love couldn't be real unless I was. So I told him what I'd done while we ate at his favorite Chinese spot.

His dark skin lay smooth across his high cheekbones and relaxed jaw. His slightly slanted eyes looked like they were trying to keep something under control. But that something wasn't sadness. He told me he didn't have to be the only man I had sex with. He just had to be the only man I had sex with for free. He actually seemed pleased, just like he'd been when I brought him those gummy worms. After always being the black sheep growing up, it was amazing to feel like someone was proud of me, and not just proud. Ken actually seemed to understand me.

“It's all about money, right?”

“Exactly,” I said.

Before, Ken had pushed me to keep re-auditioning at the bigger eighteen and up clubs, where he thought I could make more money. Now he was happy to have me working right where I was.

As we left the restaurant, he told me to open the door for him and I did. It was like a joke, just not meant to be funny. It was no big deal.

My heart leaked out love, the overwhelming excess love that makes you do crazy things, like thank a God you used to not be sure existed. I really believed Ken had been custom sent, to protect me, to guide me, to love me despite the things that would make ninety-eight percent of men leave my ass alone.

I was finally having four, five, six hundred plus shifts now that I was okay with doing the occasional extra. We could feel like ballers. Ken could go buy the sneakers and clothes he loved, and the only reason I didn't shop with him was because I spent so much time at work. I could never be sure when the next guy willing to shell out five hundred dollars or more (the club always took the first two to three hundred, and the manager got ten to twenty percent of whatever I made) would come in. Ken would come visit me once I got home. We'd take the money out of my drawer and spread it all over the counters.

There would be awe in his voice. “Look how much money we have, baby.”

“We?” I said once with a smile.

“Yeah. This is ours. Because I got you.”

Every R&B love song ever written described how I felt when he said that, and at the same time, none of them even came close.

He'd ask me for twenty dollars for gas, a hundred to help with his mom's light bill, and I wouldn't trip. I had condoms. I knew how to achieve a zen-like trance when tricks put their fingers and tongues and dicks up inside me, how to count songs while I gave head, and make it a peaceful routine. I was good at this hustle. I could play the people I had to play, lie to the people I had to lie to, all while feeling like I held onto my realness because I kept it real with the one person who mattered. Simply put, everything fit.