Braver (16 page)

“For my sake, I’m glad that you’re going to school and have need for a roommate,” I said. “I lucked out.”

“I guess we have Sandra to thank for that,” Casey said, busying herself with packing up her first aid kit.

“Sandra,” I repeated, racking my brain. “Oh, of course. Sandra. It’s just that we called her Blue at the nightclub. It’s hard to think of her as anything else.”

“Blue,” Casey tried out, narrowing her eyes. “Her eyes. Makes sense.”

“How do you know her?” I asked.

“We met at a party, before she went to the nightclub,” Casey said. “We kind of hit it off — oh. I’m bisexual. Is that a problem?”

“Nope,” I said. It wasn’t. In my opinion, there were two types of people in the world: good guys and bad guys. Sometimes, the lines blurred between the two, but at the end of the day, they always made themselves know.

Mama? Bad guy. Casey? Good guy. I didn’t care what got her off. I thought back to my own recent experience with the couple, Johnny and Electra. I’d had fun, especially since I was getting paid to do so, but women just weren’t my thing.

To be honest, I wasn’t certain that sex at all was my thing. I’d had so many bad experiences — along with so many emotionless fucks — that I felt like I could go the rest of my life without having sex ever again. I was probably ruined, too, unable to open myself up to love after everything I’d been through.

“Great,” Casey said. “That would’ve been awkward if it had been a problem.”

“You got to cop a free feel, though,” I joked, pointing at my bandaged breast. “I let you get away with it because you were fixing me up.”

“I’ll consider it a payment,” Casey said.

We both laughed. “Wait, so Blue — I mean Sandra — is bisexual?” I asked. “I never knew.”

“That was my problem, too,” Casey said. “I never knew. She’s just a free spirit. After that night, she was hard to get a hold of. Then I get a letter telling me she moved into some weird boarding house and was bartending at the same place and would I be her pen pal? It was trippy. We write letters every so often.”

“She marches to the beat of her own drum, that one,” I said. “I love her like a sister. She saved my life tonight.”

“To Sandra,” Casey said, raising an imaginary glass.

“To Blue,” I agreed, raising an imaginary glass of my own. We made them “clink” and laughed at our silliness.

“I bet you’d like to take a shower,” Casey said.

I eyed the tub. “I’ve been taking showers for the last nine years of my life,” I said. “Would you mind if I took a bath?”

“I’d mind it if you fell asleep and drowned,” Casey said. “So you’d better not do that. A bath’ll do you some good — ease your sore muscles and help your ribs.”

She pulled back the shower curtain and turned on the water, adjusting the knobs until a steaming stream of hot water came out. The tub started filling as she plugged it up.

“I don’t want to drown in your bathtub,” I said. “Do you have any bubbles? You could stay in here with me, keep talking to me to keep me awake.”

“Are you coming on to me?” Casey teased, pouring part of a bottle of fragrant liquid into the water. Immediately, the bathroom smelled of roses, foam rising in the tub. “Let me help you with your clothes.”

“Now you’re the one coming on to me,” I said, grinning. “I was hoping you’d ask that. I don’t think I have the strength to get them off of me.”

Casey’s touch was gentle and politely clinical. When I was naked and the tub was full, she helped me climb over the ledge and ease down into the bubbles.

“Fuck,” I said, drawing out the vowel at the exquisite feeling of being submerged in water for the first time in way too long. “Oh fuck. I feel like crying. I feel like singing.”

“Has it really been nine years since your last bath?” Casey asked.

“Boarding house,” I said, shrugging. “Common bathrooms, showers only.”

“Lame,” Casey commented. “So tell me about this boarding house set up. Did it have a bar or what? How did it work? Sandra never explained it very well.”

Casey had taken me into her home, dressed my wounds, and seen me naked. I didn’t see a point in holding back. I cupped my hands and brought some of the water to my face, enjoying the way it ran down my neck and chest.

“There was a boarding house,” I said, “but we didn’t pay for room or board. We worked for it.”

“Is that legal?” Casey asked. “It seems like an easy way to swindle people.”

“That became apparent to me pretty recently,” I said. “The reason I was getting shot at was because I tried to withdraw my earnings from working. There was a nightclub below the boarding house. We were all waitresses, except for Blue and a couple of other girls. They tended bar.”

“I think I understand,” Casey said, propping her chin up on her fist. She studied her pink toenails. “So you had to withdraw the money you earned from a bank?”

“Mama was the bank,” I said, the memory of her wild look and ugly gun making me shiver. “She kept all our earnings locked up in a safe in her office. We’d even give her our tips for safekeeping.”

“Sounds like a swindle,” she remarked.

“I wish I’d been able to see it years ago,” I said. “I don’t know why I didn’t. It’s kind of hard to explain. You get in a place where there are rules, and then you start following them. Maybe they’re not rules — just a way of life. But there comes a point where you’re not asking questions anymore. You’re just doing things. You normalize whatever situation you’re in.”

“So, I’m starting to understand what life was like there, but it seems like there couldn’t be that much money going through there for this lady to be all bonkers about it,” Casey said. “I mean, no offense, but you all were just running a nightclub, right? Wasn’t it just a few bartenders and cocktail waitresses?”

This was the big secret. If I wanted to, Casey would never know. But I didn’t feel like I had anything to hide. Maybe if I told her, I’d be able to forget about it forever. I took a deep breath and took a chance.

“We were bartenders and waitresses, but there was a hidden side of the business,” I said. “The nightclub was a front for a successful brothel.”

I stopped playing with the bubbles and looked at Casey, fearful she might just throw me out on my ass after realizing she’d brought in a prostitute.

“Sandra seemed to leave that part of the nightclub out of her letters,” she remarked.

“I don’t want you to have any doubts about me,” I said, “especially when you’ve opened your home to me. That part of my life is over, now, and I’m never going back. Actually, I don’t think I ever want to talk about it again.”

If I had the ability to shut the door inside myself that housed all of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences from working at Mama’s nightclub, I’d lock it and throw away the key. For the first time, I felt a nugget of gladness that I’d lost the tote bag full of my photos and notes from all the girls at the nightclub. They would no longer be a constant reminder of what I was — no, what I had been — when I’d decided that it was high time to move on.

What Mama had put everyone through was unfair. I thought back to all of the girls that I had known before: poor Scribbles, who had never recovered after sleeping with her first customer; Jazz, who’d almost died by the cruel hand of her last customer; and me — beaten in front of dozens of people, then almost gunned down for asking for a little recompense.

No one should have to live like that. And I decided that I wasn’t even going to have to dwell on it anymore.

In a mental force of will, I gathered up all of those memories — the good ones and the bad ones — and shoved them into a little room inside myself. The camaraderie with the girls went in there right along with the beating I’d taken from Mike. Maybe I’d never be able to be rid of my life at Mama’s nightclub. That would be part of me forever. But I didn’t have to let it shape who I was for the rest of my life.

I closed the door, locked it, and turned my back on it. It was time for a new life.

“I’m not worried about your past,” Casey was saying. “I’m just sorry that you’ve been through so much. The important thing, I think, is that it’s over.”

“It’s over,” I repeated. “Definitely.”

Casey waited half a beat before grinning. “So, what are you thinking about doing now?” she asked. “I guess you can’t put ‘prostitute’ on your résumé.”

I squawked and splashed soapy water at her. Trust this crazy redhead to make a joke out of the story I’d just told.

“I mean, you can hate me if you want for suggesting it, but there’s always need for fresh meat at the place I work,” Casey said. “Honestly, some of the girls turn tricks on the side, but no one has to.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to shimmy up any poles anytime soon,” I remarked, lifting my swollen ankle out of the bathtub. “And I’m never selling my sex again.”

“Good for you!” Casey said, pumping her fist.

“But maybe I will take you up on a job,” I said. “Once I can walk, of course.”

“It’s a deal, then,” Casey said, reaching out and shaking my soapy hand.

Casey’s apartment was nothing special, but that’s part of what made it special. She dressed up the dark-colored walls and industrial-quality carpet with bright posters of famous artwork and crazy rugs. Tiny, intricately folded origami swans hung and spun from the ceiling fan. What looked to be a secondhand sofa was embellished with a hand-knitted blanket in every color of the rainbow.

The coffee table in front of the sofa was covered in medical books and study guides. The tiny television perched on top of a small bookcase had a piece of paper taped over the screen.

“You can start watching again once you become a nurse,” the note read.

“You can take that down anytime you want to watch,” Casey had said after I pointed it out. “But I adore TV. It’s a problem around midterms.”

The kitchen was cozy but functional. Casey kept it free from clutter even as her refrigerator exploded in color. There were sticky notes in every shade imaginable touting reminders about test dates, quizzes, shopping lists, to-do lists, phone numbers, and other square-shaped bits of information. Nuzzled in between these notes were photos of Casey in various colors of hair, smiling alongside laughing people clutching drinks, glossy brochures for shows and exhibits around the city, and kitschy magnets to hold everything together.

“I don’t like telling people this when I first meet them, but I’m not a natural redhead,” Casey had said. “I change it about once a month. I’m kind of addicted to color.”

“There are worse things to be addicted to,” I said.

Casey’s bedroom was so bright that I wondered how she slept in it. Posters of bands covered every available inch of the walls in there and it was a miniature disco ball that hung from the ceiling fan instead of origami swans.

My bed was a futon crammed against the wall.

“It folds out to a full-sized bed, but I’m not sure the old bedroom is going to accommodate that,” Casey had said, looking around forlornly. The room was already struggling to fit a twin-sized bed and a dresser alongside the futon.

“It’s not a problem,” I said. “I can sleep wherever.”

“Well, if you ever want to have male company over, let me know,” she said. “I’ll move to the couch to give you some privacy.”

“Male company?” I laughed. “I don’t think I’m ever going to bring a man back to your house. I need some time to get to know myself.”

“Female company, then,” Casey said, winking. “Should we devise a way to let each other know? Maybe I could come up with some kind of ‘do not disturb’ sign to hang from the bedroom door.”

“Very funny.”

Casey had let me go to sleep that night — finally — only to wake me up a few hours later to go to the nurse’s school for an X-ray. Thankfully, having a nursing student as a roommate did have its perks, especially for how beat up I was. Casey had a pair of crutches on hand and shuffled down the stairs on her butt in a show of solidarity as we had to make our way down for the day.

The bus ride wasn’t painful or very far. And I found all of the nursing students — Casey included — to be cute in their excited curiosity over my swollen ankle.

“This is a valuable opportunity for hands-on learning,” the instructor announced as they bustled me to the lab in a wheelchair.

Thankfully, the students determined, my ankle was only sprained. They strapped a cushioned boot on my foot, let me keep the crutches, and told me to try to keep it elevated as much as possible.

“You can return to normal activity in two weeks,” Casey said, looking to her textbook for guidance.

“Very good,” the instructor said.

The two weeks flew by in the best way possible. I had enough money to start contributing to rent, even though Casey set it at a lower percentage. She didn’t want me wiling away my savings, as she put it, before I was able to start work.

I slept in until a gloriously late hour, snoozing away most of the time that Casey was in school. When she came back, it was her turn to take a snooze. While she did that, I got my day started with a shower and some chores. If Casey was letting me stay for less than half the rent, I could step up my contribution to the home in other ways. When it was time for her to wake up to do a little homework for school or get ready for work, I had something for dinner prepared for her.

“Ugh, you’re going to make me look fat in my costume,” she complained good-naturedly, shoveling down whatever I fixed.

While she was gone “working the pole,” as she put it, I’d read or watch television, flipping up the note on the screen to fit in some time letting the characters do my thinking for me. I never had this kind of free time at Mama’s nightclub.

In time, my body healed. Parts of me missed life at the boarding house — strange things, like hearing girls running down the hallway, giggling, or having to wait in line to use the shower. There were times when I felt unbearably lonely. I was so accustomed to having thirty other women close at hand.

Casey, though, could sometimes have enough energy for thirty other people.

I never understood how she was able to bounce back and forth between school and work and still have time for things like assignments and sleeping.

“Nature of the beast,” she explained, cleaning glittery eye shadow from her face with a cotton ball after her shift had ended. “Gotta strip to eat, gotta go to school to stop stripping.”

There were nights when she came back from work on fire. She’d pop a CD in an ancient boom box and dance around the apartment, drawing me in to dance with her and singing at the top of her lungs. She didn’t consider these dance parties complete without a neighbor shouting for us to shut up. Casey was on a constant high, it seemed like, and didn’t have an off switch.

It made me feel like I had to constantly catch up. I didn’t mind much. She was so positive that it was hard to feel anything negative around her. Casey drew me into her orbit of optimism and I stayed there.

In time, the hurts and betrayals I’d suffered at Mama’s hands fell away. Casey’s ready smile and constant friendship helped heal me.

By the time I’d graduated from not using the crutches to taking off the boot, I was feeling very good. I was intrigued by all of the costumes that Casey was wearing and ready to start a new career there. She talked to her boss and got an approval to bring me in one night.

“I know you said you weren’t going to sell your sex,” Casey said as she presented me with a wrapped package. “But you do know that you’re going to be selling your body, right?”

I opened the package, which contained a chocolate-colored lingerie set that dripped with crystals.

“This is gorgeous!” I exclaimed, letting the light play off of all the rhinestones. “I don’t think I’m selling my body. I’m just selling my dancing skills.”

I wriggled my hips and pushed my ass against Casey’s hip. She laughed, shoving me away.

“You’re going to give a girl ideas if you keep that kind of behavior up,” she said. “Well, are you excited for your first night, then?”

A twinge of nervousness blossomed in my stomach. I was more than used to performing in bed, but this was going to require a much more visible form of acting. Casey had been teaching me some basic footwork and other moves, but I’d still had yet to touch a pole.

“Of course I’m excited,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I was trying to convince myself. “I just wish I had time to practice on an actual stage.”

Casey waved her hand. “You’ll be great,” she said. “Just don’t try to do anything stupid like flips and shit on the pole and you’ll be swimming in singles. Now, let’s get out of here so we have plenty of time to get our makeup on.”

The strip club was closer to Casey’s house than the nursing school, which said a little bit about the neighborhood. We were some of the first girls who arrived. They all seemed jovial, almost a sisterhood. It made me pine a little bit for Mama’s girls, but I hoped I could start to fit in here, instead.

“Pleased to meet ya, Cocoa,” a beefy man said, pumping my hand. “I’m Marco.”

“Of course, Marco,” I said. “Casey told me about you. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to be here.”

“She’s got a tongue of honey, this one,” Marco said, looking at me with a pleased expression on his face. “Maybe you can take some notes, Casey.”

“Fuck off,” she said.

Marco explained — though Casey had told me what to expect beforehand — that every girl had to “buy in” at the beginning of each night. That meant that if you wanted to work, you needed to pay fifty bucks for the privilege to do so. You didn’t have to come in every day, he said, just the days when you wanted to try to make a little money. In essence, you had to work to earn your fifty bucks back — and then try to rake in profits.

Patrons usually paid a dollar for the favor of my attention when I was working the pole. They could, of course, pay whatever they wanted, but they could never, under any circumstances, touch me while I was up there. Doing so would get them kicked out of the club.

Touching, however, did take place in an area partitioned from the rest of the club by a heavy, velvet curtain. If patrons liked you well enough while you were strutting your stuff up on stage, they’d ask for a lap dance. A lot of them were a little grabby back there, but there was a bouncer to ensure that nothing out of line took place.

There were many ways to make money besides that, Marco said. If you got a patron to buy you drinks, you’d get a small percentage. They could also pay to dance with you on a dance floor adjacent to the main stage. Table dances were less intimate, more affordable options and took place right in the middle of the club.

Of course, Casey told me privately, agreeing to go to a patron’s home or hotel room or car after the club was closed and doing even more intimate acts would get you the big money, but I’d resolved to never do that again.