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.”
It was hitting me,
like an alcoholic coming to in a crashed car, a slow motion clash of
panic and regret, the knowledge of pain I couldn't even feel yet.
He'd played me. I couldn't...
I couldn't deal
with it right now, couldn't process it. I couldn't think about
anything other than getting this eighty dollars I needed to keep from
being homeless.
I stayed at the
club after all the other girls left. An hour before it closed, almost
eighteen hours after I'd arrived, a man came in. He bought a room. He
wanted a “contact dance.” I asked for a hundred and fifty
dollars. He said he could only give me, like seventy-five.
“Just give me a
hundred and you'll get a really good show,” I said.
He did, and I let
him grope the fuck out of me for half an hour. Then I was able to tip
out the manager and have exactly what I needed to give Brooke, plus
bus fare and maybe seven dollars for food.
I got inside, set
the money on the counter, went into my room, laid down and pulled the
Power Ranger's blanket Ken had left for me (how could a bad person
still sleep with their childhood blanket?) over my head, fell asleep.
The next morning
I kept waking up. I'd hear people walking around outside and think it
was him. I was sure he would come over as soon as his mama told him I
had called. He would bring me some money and tell me he was so, so
sorry, and I'd tell him it was okay, because it would be. But he
never came, and I could only fall back asleep so many times.
I called him over
and over but his phone went straight to voicemail now.
In a daze, I got
myself together and caught the bus. The first thing I did when I got
to the club was sit down in the office and tell Mr. War on Drugs what
had happened. He listened, and said, basically, “damn.”
It should have been a good day. I was the only girl at work so far. I should have sat in the dressing room, reading or writing, while I waited for a trick. Instead I wound up crying into a coffee filter, as we had no tissues. There were so many layers to my pain. I was mourning the loss of something I'd given so much to get. I was overwhelmed; starting from broke had been so hard the first time, I didn't know if I had the strength to do it twice. And I was suddenly, excruciatingly aware that the things I'd feared becoming- alone, unloved- were what I'd really been all along.
At some point, I
heard a man talking to the manager. I scraped my eyes dry until I
looked more on the stoned side than the life-completely-devastated
side. I went out to the counter where we girls did our “brother
line up” at night. The customer was black, tall, and looked to be
in his twenties- he'd tell me later he was 28.
“Keri, this
gentleman bought a half hour room,” Drug War told me.
I couldn't believe
it. A manager had actually sold a room- girl unseen. I can't even
stress how that just never, ever, happened.
I took the guy to
the back and told him, essentially, “I work for tips, and the
better tip I get the better show we get to do, so it all depends how
much fun you want to have. A good dance is equal to the price of the
room,” which in this case, was two hundred dollars.
He told me he
wanted to fuck.
I think I asked him
for four hundred.
“All I got is
two.”
“For two it's
just a regular dance.”
“Oh, for a
regular dance I can pay like sixty.”
It had been etched
in my mind over the last five months, that when you're “doing
extras” you just don't come down too low. If you were gonna suck
dick, you wanted to be able to say you got five hundred, four was
probably cool. If you were gonna fuck in the club, you better get
more than that or pray nobody found out.
But nobody was
here, and hadn't I just established in my mind that nobody gave two
cares about me anyway? I thought it through. This guy was not ugly.
He was not dirty or clucked-out or corny-acting. Chances were very
good, that if I'd met him at a different time, at a 7-Eleven or a
Carl's Jr. located in a parallel universe and we'd got to talking,
parallel Kaari would have fucked him for free. So what the hell was
stopping dead-broke Kaari from fucking him for two hundred dollars?
“Cuz you're
sexy,” I said, took the money, and handed him a Magnum.
(I can say that my
whole time turning tricks, I always used Magnums, despite the fact
that my clients were mostly Viagra poppers who didn't need to know
the first thing about a gold wrapper. Magnums were what I used in
'real life', and I guess I'd convinced myself that since I didn't
carry around the whole condom aisle like the real pros, well, I must
not have been a real pro. I must have just been a stripper who
occasionally did more.)
Another thing I can
say, that boy was the right size and that was thee one time I
actually felt any type of pleasure with a trick. Usually, I felt
either numbness or discomfort. This time, I was feeling good enough
to get me out of my feelings, into my thoughts. I thought that I was
having one-time sex with a 28-year-old, like a typical teen girl, and
at the same time I was making what Burger King paid the typical teen
girl for a whole week's work. What was so bad about that? I know it's
wrong on a fundamental level, but at that moment I was really
thinking God had sent this trick to me today. If He had, maybe He
still had a plan for me after all.
Of course, my
optimism wouldn't last. The next day, I was crying and
hyperventilating so bad, Brooke tried to give me a Xanax. I'd always
sworn I would never drink or do any type of drugs. It was the one way
I could guarantee I wouldn't play my role in the whole addiction
cycle thing. Not trusting myself not to take it, and not wanting to
be in this apartment anymore, because I didn't really want to be
anywhere, I threw my coat on, went down to the busy sidewalk,
and cried there.
Maybe I really
couldn't fix things or start over. Maybe this really was gonna be it
for me. I wasn't sure how I'd do it yet- pills, jumping- but I knew I
would need a note. I got myself together enough to go into a nearby
bank and ask for a pen. Then I sat down at the bus stop and pulled my
notebook out of my backpack, turned to a fresh page.
This was the
notebook where I sometimes wrote scenes for the novel I'd been
working on since tenth grade. The main character's story wasn't over
yet, though, so how could mine be?
I wrote, “This
was supposed to be a suicide note” at the top of the page. Then I
outlined how Ken had hurt me, how it was worse because I'd trusted
him, despite having trust issues stemming from getting abused as a
young child. Though it felt like he'd damn near killed me, I wasn't
going to finish myself off, I said. One day he'd see, the world would
see, that there had been a reason for me to live.
When the bus pulled
up, I hopped on. I got off and walked the rest of the way to Ken's
apartment complex. I knocked on the door. His mother answered.
“Is Ken home?”
“No.”
“Oh. Can you give
him this?” I handed her the note.
Then I went
straight to work.
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