Sexy Ink!

by Jamie Collins

  Currently, she was living in one-room war zone efficiency, where roaches and drug pushers were her only neighbors. Door locks and window bars did little to discourage break-ins weekly, or to shut out the sirens and gang-capades as she referred to it that exploded nightly in the city streets behind her complex.

  Empty tenement units and stairwells served as convenient hiding places for crack runners—mostly children, some as young as seven or eight, who hung out outside her door. They had no guardians in sight, and were schooled not in a classroom or playgroup, but on the gritty pavements and combat courtyards of the projects.

  Most lived two-to-four families to a single unit. The level of stench and squalor was unspeakable. La Costa had only been living there for a couple of months and was beginning to imagine that life at the shelter would be better than the rat hole in Central City off of East Seventh Street. But the grim reality remained. Without a real address, La Costa would not have been able to get a job, and so, she agreed when the shelter arranged to have her share the run-down government subsidized apartment with a blind woman named Dottie.

  The shelter had made the arrangements. In exchange for low rent and a monthly bus pass, La Costa would see to it that Dottie was looked after, which was easy enough, because fortunately for La Costa, at age eighty-nine, the old woman was too senile and slow to do much else than sit in her recliner near the window and listen to squirrels scratch at the screen with a three-legged cat named Marigold folded in her lap.

  When Dottie wasn’t rocking in her chair and stroking Marigold’s ears, sheared and ragged from one too many brawls, she was praying fervently for the Lord to take her “home.” Sometimes she did this for hours on end, calling on Jesus Almighty to claim for himself, her weary soul.

  La Costa imagined that Dottie was somebody’s grandmother, tossed aside and left fatefully alone. It made her think of her own grandmother, June—Tallulah’s mother, back at the trailer park, sick, old, and mean as a wet hen most days. As for her paternal grandmother, she had never known her mother to speak of her, or Crete’s father. They were no more than ghosts in the wind to her. La Costa never knew a grandparent’s love, let alone the love of her own mother and father, without it coming with a price. Crete was the sickest bastard she had ever known. He could be dead for all she cared. Even if she didn’t know of a loving grandparent, she would not have wished on any of them, a fate as horrible as dying in a ghetto flat with cockroaches and filthy walls and garbage heaps for gardens. Luckily for Dottie, she could not see her surroundings.

  La Costa had indeed come such a long way herself, yet was barely able to make the climb out of the poverty-stricken ghettos that constantly held her down. The offer to work at The Mink Kitty would change all of that. Then, La Costa would have a way to claw her way out of the grim darkness into the light, never to look back from where she had come. No, a destiny like Dottie’s was not in the cards for La Costa.

  Just two days before La Costa was about to give her notice at Sophisticate, she was informed that her temp job was about to be terminated. Remarkably, the very next day, Dottie had passed peacefully in her sleep. It was divine timing, as far as La Costa was concerned. Fate had sealed the deal. She would leave the apartment complex and pursue her next life adventure—taking Panther up on her offer for a futon at her place—and a coveted introduction to the illustrious Miss Lucy of the famed Mink Kitty.

  Chapter Seven

  Newport Beach, CA – 2014

  “I was pretty nervous at the prospect of meeting Lucy DuMont,” La Costa explained to Felicia, as she gingerly opened the cover of a heavy scrapbook stuffed with Polaroids, bar receipts, and ancient drink menus, yellowed from the press of time. “I had never met a real Madame before, let alone one as beautiful and wealthy as Lucy. Here she is in this photo—third blonde on the left.”

  “Are you in this shot?” Felicia asked, studying it intently.

  “No, I took this picture. Not knowing that my time would soon come. She was a guardian on my journey, for sure, but Lucy’s story, as it was, could fill a book of her own. She was something of a legend.”

  Lucy DuMont’s reputation preceded her, La Costa explained. Born and raised in Utah to strict Mormon parents in the early nineteen forties, Lucy and her family ironically lived in a culturally diverse neighborhood on the west side of town called Rose Park. Lucinda Hansen, as was her given name, ran away in the fall of her sixteenth year with the son of the church’s pastor, Caleb Jones, in a raucous scandal that prompted a privately funded manhunt for the two across eleven states over two years’ time. They landed in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they laid low for several months. Eventually, Caleb’s father called off the search when the two minors had inevitably turned eighteen, just two weeks apart from one another. They were legally free, and so they set out to make their way in the world.

  Quickly, good intentions turned to hard luck, and Caleb’s aspirations of preaching and starting a church of his own in Little Rock vanished as soon as funds dwindled, and the recession offered no chances for Lucy and Caleb to find decent work in town. They resorted to having to steal fifty dollars from a friend whom Caleb knew trusted him. The guilt eventually turned out to be too much for him, and one day, he just up and left. He returned to Utah the wayward Prodigal’s son, where his family welcomed him back with open arms. Lucy, however, chose not to join him. Instead, she headed North, running as far away from convention, formality, and religion as she could, seeing as how it did not work out for her the first time.

  She landed in Canada, where she soon fostered a love for performing and studied acting in Quebec, while working as an interpretive dancer in Community Theater. She auditioned and won a part in a local American production of a nude musical called Slip Skin, remaining on as a regular cast member for the next two years. When the show traveled to London, Lucy stayed on with the troupe until the final curtain call. She then married the show’s director, Bernard DuMont, just three weeks after his divorce from an American screen actress. Lucy and Bernard decided to stay on in the city and call London their new home.

  Repressed by years of stoic moral upbringing, Lucy had been unleashed at long last in a wonderland of sin and delicious decadence, following her husband’s unbridled artistic aspirations as a producer and novice filmmaker, with erotica being Bernard DuMont’s singular specialty.

  The two enjoyed raucous trysts with multiple partners from time to time, and soon began filming themselves engaging in lurid sex acts and selling the amateur movies on the black market. They threw wild parties, serving up dangerous drugs and plenty of experimental sex—love fests, as they liked to call them—inviting off-beat actor types and prostitutes into their home, and oftentimes, into their bed, fast becoming consumed with their own visceral vanities and pleasures. Lucy especially found the mystique of woman-on-woman love to be a delightful addition to her own sexual repertoire; enough so to change things completely, and ultimately chart her course for different horizons.

  After several tumultuous years, Lucy lost her call for the theater life and her taste for Bernard. She hooked up with a transgender stripper named René, called her marriage quits, and once again, moved on.

  As a result of the profits from the DuMonts’ film company, Lucy was provided with a sizable settlement, which she promptly sank into a multi-unit brownstone in Soho, a colorful section of town frequented by tourists and transient looking for a little action.

  By this time, Lucy had cultivated a keen business sense and had a growing vision on how to turn the certain pursuit of sinful pleasure into cold, hard cash.

  The brownstone housed four separate flats, which she had immediately converted into a single dwelling manor home featuring three sitting rooms, a main parlor, two functional kitchens, a dining hall, five bathrooms, and ten sleeping rooms—“boarding rooms,” as she marketed them, one of which served as her own private quarters and working office. At any given time, Lucy was known to have anywhere from six to twenty young women residing at the DuMont Ma
nor, a local boarding house advertised for female students of the nearby University who were seeking an off-campus alternative to campus living arrangements. In reality, DuMont Manor was nothing short of a modern-day brothel.

  Within ten years, by 1977, Lucy amassed enough revenue to sell the manor and return to the States, where she moved to LA and later invested her fortune into some modest California real estate. She bought into the prosperous rise of the Wall Street boom in the early eighties, trading on the promise of huge stock swings garnered from “tips” acquired from associates in the know, enabling her to acquire The Oasis, a once-famous but now failing nightclub about to go under—for cold cash.

  A Saudi Arabian businessman, had previously owned the club. He took three hundred thousand dollars for the exchange of worn-out cabaret tables, a code-hazard kitchen, a slanted bar, and a gravel-pocked parking lot.

  “What will you do with this old heap of metal and moldy carpet, Ms. DuMont?” the man asked, smiling smugly through his gapped teeth.

  Where skeptics saw garbage, Lucy saw potential. “Ain’t nothin’ a little spit and lipstick can’t mend.”

  No truer words were ever spoken. It was the proven mantra of a millionaire maven who coined the very phrase with pride, which no doubt, would grace her tombstone someday.

  That spring the new club, renamed The Mink Kitty after her prize Persian cat, Pigette, opened its doors, putting all naysayers and disbelievers to shame. Lucy never looked back.

  Chapter Eight

  Los Angeles, CA – January 1989

  It was eleven thirty a.m., and Panther led La Costa through the empty club, which looked peculiar in the morning sunlight that streamed in through the streaky windows that were covered. The heavy opaque scarlet drapes were open, swagged elaborately from the ceiling to the floor. Gleaming marble cocktail tables dotted the entrance area, each with a set of high-backed leopard-print lounge chairs.

  The dining rooms were dormant but ready. White-topped tables and plush velvet booths with black leather and chrome stools were aligned perfectly in front of the sleek mahogany bar that spanned for miles. Locked liquor cabinets in matching mahogany housed rows of fine wines, liquors, and bottled spirits; rows of gleaming goblets and champagne flutes hung upside down from brass glass racks in the ceiling.

  The artwork was stunning. Large, bold oil prints of erotic scenes splashed onto huge canvas scrims, hung in gilded frames along the walls.

  “They’re all hers,” Panther explained of Lucy’s personally painted art collection. Apparently, she had a knack for oils. La Costa reacted with shock and curiosity at the contorted nude figures melting into one another in what looked like a Greek orgy. The females depicted in the abstract, appeared to be actual felines, with claws and tails protruding from their bodies.

  “It’s high art, all right.” Panther chuckled at her own joke. “The old bag had to be trippin’ on something when she painted them!”

  Together, they rounded a mirrored corner. La Costa followed Panther up a winding carpeted staircase to the VIP loft that overlooked the entire club below. It, too, was filled with unnaturally bright sunlight peeking from behind heavy blackout curtains, which hung from the windows behind the stage. A collection of low black tables created a cabaret feel to the loft, which was really a showroom where the top customers received “special” private entertainment.

  The showcase stage was a small motorized dais, atop which only the choicest Kittens pranced and posed beneath the spotlight. These were professional top-line strippers. Some girls flew in nightly from cities like Houston, Miami, or Chicago, just to perform their two shows—one at nine p.m., and the other, at midnight. They were highly paid dancers, who made their fortunes jet- setting to all the top clubs in the nation. Other dancers lived locally, like Panther.

  Those who lived in Lucy DuMont’s apartment complex had the best units in the city, along with fat charge accounts at all the local shops and boutiques. The Showcase Dancers parked their sports cars with the valets and walked into the finest restaurants anytime, where they received the choicest tables. Salons and day spas were at their disposal year-round, and each senior-level Kitten had a personal trainer, aesthetician, and her own Beverly Hills personal shopper. Not to mention a bevy of plastic surgeons, cosmetic dentists, nutritionists, and/or drug suppliers.

  Panther was not yet a senior Kitten, but she did strip twice a week on the VIP stage. The crowds were not as large, but the tips were hefty, and working the “stage” as it was called, was the next step on a Kitten’s way to the good life. At senior-level status, a Kitten could earn more money in two to three nights than most people made in an entire month. Attaining this was Panther’s singular purpose and goal.

  Mentoring and training the new “recruits” was one significant way of earning merit points toward senior-level status. Panther was a natural, and men gravitated to her lively and pleasant nature and drop-dead looks. She was hot and wore her sensuality like a pair of well-worn jeans, with natural ease and sexy confidence. One could not be in the same room with Panther and her fabulous body and not take notice. It would just not be possible.

  The reality of this made La Costa wonder if she had what it took to do the job. Panther seemed to think so. The more time she spent with Panther, however, the more self-conscious La Costa became. The Mink Kitty was big league.

  They toured the rest of the building. Next, the lounges and then the kitchen, and finally, the Kittens’ Den—a dressing area in the basement of the nightclub, where the girls prepared for work each night. Upon seeing it, the decision for La Costa was cinched right then and there. The bank of lighted mirrors, rows of pink lockers, array of makeup caddies, and bounty of hairsprays, lipsticks, and perfumes were incredible. Satin and lace teddies, G-strings, bras, and panties were hung like tiny doll clothes on each girl’s locker on fancy hangers. Rhinestone “cat collars” were also worn by each Kitten, complete with a tiny metal tag in the shape of a heart with their Kitty names engraved on the front—Jezebel . . .Tinker . . . Samba . . . Cleo.

  “Yours is purrrfect!” Panther teased. “Keep your name. La Costa is great!”

  They exited the Den and walked a little farther through the back of the house.

  “I’ll introduce you to her now. Wait here.” Panther disappeared behind a heavy steel door, leaving La Costa standing in a service corridor just off the kitchen. A Sous Chef was busy chopping salad vegetables on a cutting board with quick flashes of a huge knife. Soups and sauces were bubbling on the enormous stove burners, and Spanish-speaking dishwashers eyed her, chattering and rinsing and scraping dirty plates and arranging them noisily into industrial-size racks.

  A moment later, Panther reappeared and led La Costa through the same doorway, up a back stairwell to Lucy’s office. It was different than she had expected. Far less ornate than the interior of the club. The small room had no windows, and the walls were covered completely with hundreds of framed photographs. The tiny office was a bit stifling. It was obvious that Lucy was a chain smoker. Ashtrays overflowed with lipstick-marked butts everywhere. She was seated at her desk like a queen on her throne, with a phone pressed to her ear, motioning for them to come in.

  Lucy was a large woman with huge, billowing bosoms. The kind that greeted you well before the rest of her. And from the looks of things, she was quite proud of them, displaying her mammoth-sized chest prominently within a too-tight corset blouse, which had flowing scalloped sleeves that came to a point at her pudgy elbows. The rest of her rotund frame was concealed beneath a gauzy black skirt that extended all the way to her ankles and back up, with a sassy slit revealing a beefy white leg with grotesquely puckered flesh around her thigh. Her stomach protruded prominently, and the waist of the tight blouse threatened to pop loose at any moment. She was not wearing any shoes and appeared to have matching tattoos, one around each ankle.

  Lucy’s hair was a chemical wonder of peroxides and processes, which had stripped it quite completely of its natural color. It was a course te
xture of frayed blonde curls swept upward and fastened at the crown with a ridiculous-looking plastic barrette that was intended for a little girl to wear, not proprietors of trendy night clubs. She was, in short, a piece of work.

  Her desk, like her hair, was a confusion of possibilities, strewn with photographs, binders, and register tapes. La Costa simply stood mesmerized, taking it all in.

  “Tell Mr. Honeycutt that the next time he pulls that, he’ll be back in Wales so fast his head will spin!”

  La Costa tried to make out the peculiar accent as Lucy spoke into the phone, picking her front tooth with a white-tipped acrylic fingernail. It was sort of proper, yet decidedly street savvy.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Harlow. I don’t have the time to dick around. Just let him know, aye?”

  Despite the two of them standing there, Lucy continued with her phone conversation for several minutes more. Panther studied the photographs on the walls, while La Costa’s eyes were helplessly glued to Lucy. She may have been born piss-poor, but La Costa did know tacky when she saw it. The woman just did not fit the image that she had imagined. White rich folk were typically more put together than Lucy DuMont appeared to be. She had never seen anyone like her.

  Lucy’s eyes were a pale blue, void of eye shadow, and her sparse blonde lashes were spiked with clumps of thick black mascara that made them appear like two tarantulas fluttering on her face. A rosy glow, compliments of body heat, created red patches on the apples of her cheeks and along her white neck like a rash, and a smudge of frosty pink gloss had migrated from her thin lips to the outer corners of her mouth.