Breaking The Circle
Just In Case
It doesn’t always happen the way they say
it does—some poor girl, sexually abused by her dad, becoming a prostitute. Sometimes you’re just industrious. Sometimes the men are actually kind, fatherly
or brotherly, preppy, toned with muscles, big-tippers, regulars who want to
talk more than touch. Sometimes it’s the
best gig around.
At least that’s what you tell yourself on a
suede-black night, staring out the motel window wondering where the moon is
hiding. You tell yourself the man in the
bathroom is the prom king you worshipped from afar throughout high school. You give him blonde locks of hair and denim
blue eyes, teeth paper-white and straight as a picket fence. You name him Randy Jarvis.
And when this new Randy reappears you don’t
notice how his breath smells like Lysol, how his belly drags over the stump of
his penis, but you do check under the pillow where you always stash the shiv,
just in case.
You say, “What’ll it be?” You ask how much time does he have tonight. You close your eyes while the rest happens
and picture that missing moon glowing radioactively, the biggest thing in the
universe, staring back at you like a bomb that can be dropped at any time.
An Unbroken Circle
You know the girl on the bed outside the
bathroom resembles your daughter, that’s why you picked her, but you don’t
think about it because thinking about it makes you queasy, a pervert of the
worst order, even though she’s a hooker and has probably already lain with half
a dozen men before the two of you ever walked through the motel door.
You just tried to urinate, but there was
nothing doing. This happens quite a bit
lately and it’s another thing--on the long laundry list of others--that
troubles you.
Your first prostitute was an Asian girl
named Suki. That was a lifetime ago, yet
you remember her well because the fake name reminded you of sushi, which you
loathe, and because she did this mewling act prior to fake-climaxing. After her, there were thousands more which is
why you work so hard, and after laboring so much to get ahead, you reward
yourself with a little fun. It’s an
unbroken circle.
Before coming out of the bathroom, you give
yourself a mental pep talk repeating positive affirmations: I am a great lover. I do not ejaculate too soon. I control what happens.
When you open the door, the girl fluffs your pillow and props
up on her elbows. She’s chewing
gum. She blows a bubble the size of a
light bulb until it pops, balloon-sticky on her nose. Chuckling, she again reminds you of your
daughter.
You turn off the lights. Through the sheer, piss-colored drapes the
sky is tar-black, no moon to light up anything.
You feel your way back to the bed like a blind man and then there’s skin
on skin and everything begins again.
Ignited
You don’t like memories. Recalling them is a slippery slope, a cord or
rope wrapped around your neck, drawing you back to the places and times that
ignited a bitter switch inside you. But
there are sirens going off in the city, not police cars screaming by, but fire
trucks, and you must be close to the actual fire because you can see smoke
twisting like black wraiths between two sky scrapers.
You remember how you’d become a fuse yourself,
and once you were lit there was no other way around it, strength you didn’t
know you had coiling with rampant rage, so instead of saying the things he
wanted you to say while he did it, one afternoon you told your father you would
kill him, and you were a lot of things, even back then, but a liar wasn’t one
of them. That night as he lay slumped
and passed out in front of a blaring TV, you got a gas can and spritzed
gasoline and dropped your father’s lighter over a puddle. Standing on the curb minutes later, you
watched scarlet flames eat everything.
You stood until the house and he were ash, not caring if the neighbors
saw you watching, not caring about the future or whether this was the last,
selfish decision you’d ever get to make.
Names
You pay the girl double because she
complied with everything you asked. She
says, “Hey, thanks, Bill,” even though your name isn’t Bill and she knows it’s
not Bill.
This triggers something and so you ask the girl what her
real name is. The way her eyes stutter
before she says, “Ashley” leads you believe she’s lying and this enrages you,
the lies, the fraud and phoniness. You’re
the John, but you’re not feeling hypocritical one bit—it’s just fury swelling
inside you.
You’ve never hit a hooker before, never hit
a girl or woman in your life, but Ashley won’t give up her real name, and so
you clock her on the chin. It happens
blink-fast, reflexively.
The girl goes wild, becoming a stallion suddenly. She calls you a bastard. Her hand leaps like a cobra out of her purse
and she swings a shiv an inch from your bloated belly.
You say you’re sorry, you don’t know what got into you,
hitting a girl isn’t something you’d ever do, honest.
She keeps her eyes—cobalt-blue eyes—on you
as she leaves. The door’s cracked
open. An old woman in a housecoat is lumbering
down the hall. She looks like your
mother, same spider web hair and cigarette-wrinkled lips. She looks up with a toothless grin and says, “Wanna
dance?”
Folly
You think about quitting for the thousandth
time. It’s folly, but you do it
anyway.
This always happens after a visit with a
bad John. Once an obese medical supply
salesman bit your shoulder so hard you had to have Holly, a now dead
prostitute, stitch you up with something that might have been fishing line and
the scar is usually the part of you, when naked, that customers find most
alluring.
You’ve started using again—no needles this
time—just huffing. It’s a way to make
the world flat and fair and somewhat redeemable. The pile of yellow powder looks like shredded drywall that someone’s mixed with
piss. You know this is leading right
back to mainlining, yet you’ve lost the will to resist an easy release and
lately your clients have had cruel streaks that show up out of nowhere.
The burn is a torch scalding your nostril,
reaching all the way down your throat to your chest, slamming your heart with a
machete. The sensation is familiar yet
new all the same, like a twisted trick sprung on you by a crafty client—vibrator
and penis inserted in your ass together.
Before the high seals, you think about what college life
would be like, wearing a backpack, tramping through a campus with many brick
buildings, kids your own age, not damaged to any major extent, their staid head
nods and “Hi’s” plenty enough to make you feel vibrant and alive.
Next you think about a child you might have had, maybe a
girl named Maggie with your same dimpled chin, her seated at the kitchen table coloring
outside the lines of Ariel’s mermaid tail.
When she asks, “Momma, why are there bad people in the world?” you say, “It’s
mostly bad men.” Maggie looks up, her eyes blue as yours,
saying, “But Daddy’s not bad.” You look
over at your husband doing dishes in the sink.
He cocks his head—Huh? Am I a
bad guy? You laugh and laugh and
then the world goes pale yellow, becoming an endless rug that rolls you up can
carries you off.
Empty Backpack
You stole a Gideon’s Bible from a Hilton
hotel the first time you picked up a hooker, thinking if you read some of it
right afterward, the shame and guilt would dissipate. Now the Bible stays in your car, in the cubby
buried beneath stacks of porn magazine featuring lithe and ridiculously slender
girls who look younger than their stated eighteen years of age.
You pull over two blocks from where the
hooker procession begins, a mile from the airport, rooting around in the car’s
glove compartment. The Bible is
stiff. Its cover feels waxy, like
cadaver skin. You open it up and read a
scene where Jesus is forgiving an adulteress who has fornicated with seven
different men. “Go, and sin no more,” Jesus tells her.
The girl you pick up is just that--a girl;
pigtails and bobby socks, tartan skirt and an
empty backpack, her teeth glittering with braces. Her fresh-faced nature is stunning and odd
because most of the prostitutes have a used, withered look about them, like
ill-fed livestock. You feel shitty for
making this last comparison, even though it’s just something in your head, but
it’s those thoughts jangling around inside your skull that are really the most destructive.
You ask if the girl, Casey, has a place to
go and she does. It’s a remodeled Motel
6 south of the airport.
Entering, you feel something’s off, but you’ve
been thinking about having her since she first smiled and all that metal
encasing her teeth winked back at you.
You pay and go to the bathroom as you
always do. Never once has a hooker
walked out on him, because that’s how they get a bad reputation and put out of
business.
Staring in the mirror you see the results
all of the drinking and excess eating you’ve done but you rationalize it right
away with the excuse that it’s impossible to get fit with as much travel as you
have to do.
You try to pee but can’t.
You disrobe and wrap a stiff towel around
your waist but have to hold the two ends together because it’s not long enough
to tie over your gut.
When you open the door there’s a man with a
ski holding a pistol inches from your face.
You feel urine run down your thigh.
The man demands your wallet. “You
tell him, okay, sure, just relax. The
towel falls off you as you search your pants.
You find it, take out all the cash and hand it to him but he says, “No,
I want the wallet and your cell phone.” When
you say, “Oh come on,” he stabs the pistol snout against your forehead and
there’s no way to think he won’t shoot.
After he’s gone, you sit on the edge of the
bed trembling, bawling. It’s the first
time you’ve cried since you were a kid.
You hate yourself for crying and for not following your instincts when
you walked into the room. You hate
yourself for so many things.
Rainbow
This client is into weird shit. He likes to be handcuffed and choked. He wants you to slap him and leave fingernail
scratches down his back.
It’s a nice switch, being the dominate one
for a change. When the sessions over he
says, “You did great,” as if you’re a personal trainer from the gym. He promises to be back for more. “We’ll ratchet it up a little next time,” he
says.
The rest of the evening’s Johns are not as
inventive, but it’s a calm night without incident unless you count the one
college kid, drunk off his ass, who threw up right after his orgasm.
The apartment building where you live has different colored
doors. Yours is lime green.
When you were a very young child you liked to color and
sometimes you’d even create your own images on clean white sheets of paper.
A woman who was not your mother came home
one night when you mom was staying at Aunt Jean’s. The woman had long wine-colored hair and big
brassy earrings. She smelled like
lemonade and told you your pictures were pretty. You knew she was lying but you said, “Thanks”
just the same. In the middle of the
night you had to pee so you got up and saw the woman and your father naked on
top of each other on the living room rug.
You thought your dad was trying to kill her because the woman was making
choking sounds, like being strangled.
In the morning the woman was gone and at breakfast when
you told your dad what you saw he stood up without a word, took off his black
leather belt and used on your behind until you begged him to stop.
“That’s what you get for meddling,” he
said.
You’re exhausted, but you don’t feel
sleepy. You go to retrieve your drugs
from where you’ve hidden them but remember you finished off the remainder of
the stash last night.
Your skin itches. It’s not DT’s, just a sense of dread that
this is going to be your life forever, even though you’ve only ever seen one or
two old women prostitutes.
Loneliness washes over you. Your friends are all hookers or drug
dealers. You take out your cellphone and
dial a random number using the prefix of the city where you grew up. You keep doing that until someone answers and
you stay on the line without speaking back until they hang up. You do this for hours.
After you’ve finally slept and eaten and it’s
time to start work again, you dress but instead of going to your street corner
you travel in the opposite direction where there’s a small strip mall. Hanging lopsided in the window of a boutique
that sells children’s clothes is a Help Wanted sign. You have no resume or references, but you
promise yourself to come back tomorrow during the day when they’re open.
You look up at the night sky, star-filled
for once, and pledge to a God you can’t see that this will be your last night
of hooking. As if on cue, something
bright flares across the sky like a powerful firework that suddenly peters out
almost as soon as it begins its flight.
But that’s enough. You blow the
sky a kiss and leave, skipping, singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.”
