3 Women Walk Into A Bar

by Linda Sands

  Born in Granny’s four-poster bed in Windrock, North Carolina, on the luckiest day in the state— the birthday of Juliette Gordon Low. Everyone knew Crescent Moon Brigade was special.

  When news of her birth was announced—relayed by Bobby Joe, the cousin on the porch, to old Mrs. Wilkins, who knew everyone—it only took a few hours for the truckload of local Girl Scouts working on their bronze award to pull into the forgotten coal town with a trailer full of presents and an envelope full of cash.

  Hopeful people of the mountain town came out to greet the girls from the valley. They all knew of the Girl Scout tradition, but it was a first for Windrock. They posed for pictures, not really understanding the whole fancy camera thing, but they counted the boxes of loot the Brigades received and decided to use this occasion to start believing in miracles again.

  Little Crescent’s picture appeared in the paper that week, introducing her to the world. People saw the Girl Scouts from Asheville huddled around a mussed iron bed, dwarfing Mamma Fiona, Daddy Lloyd, and a tiny baby swaddled in a thick-knit blanket, tags still attached, smiling in her sleep.

  As time wore on in the simple mountain town, Crescent’s life continued to be magical. Special things happened only to her, like presents dropping out of the sky. It would have been a charming story if it had been a fairy tale with a happy ending. If the presents had been diamonds in satin boxes tied up with golden threads. Instead, the magical things were slippery, with people dying and leaving, with houses collapsing and futures cut short. Times of plenty were balanced by days more black than fortunate. Traumatic situations that somehow, magically, ended in joyful circumstances.

  Even if she didn’t turn out to be Girl Scout material, Cress made the best of her life. Being a famous orphan wasn’t all bad. In the beginning, Cress lived well off the money from the insurance settlement. Her father had owned more land than she’d thought, including a few shares in an untapped coal mine.

  Eventually, all the mines dried up. In the spring, they closed the road to Windrock, knocked down all the shacks, and she and the rest of the town had to move down the mountain and into the valley, where life got expensive.

  Someone always had their hand out. If you didn’t watch it, she knew, the funds would dwindle down to nothing and then you would be left with peanut butter—not even the good brand-name stuff, but the generic kind—and you’d be cutting the moldy part of the bread away and telling yourself that was okay because you needed to lose a few pounds anyway. But then you’d realize the rent had gone up and your income hadn’t and the bra you’re wearing was only held together with a weak safety pin. When you realize that, you know you have to make some changes.

  Cress thought about her life in the mountains and what it had prepared her for, then took a job at the city hospital dumping bedpans and mopping up vomit. She eavesdropped on nurses and doctors, watched a lot of soap operas and news programs, and began to model herself after anchorwomen and fake daytime divas with five names and no hyphens. She took Internet classes in psychology, literature, and finance, and got a night job cleaning a renowned plastic surgeon’s private clinic. An employee discount and the surgeon’s eagerness was all it took to convince her to go in for liposuction to reduce her mountain body to a sleeker city shape. By Christmas, she’d bought herself a pair of large, symmetrical breasts that she called Twin Peaks.

  In time she found a decent man—married and hardly available—which suited her fine. She had no desire to settle down or, for that matter, share her life. Cress was in love with herself and needed no one else. It was nice to be fawned over, even if the men who often accompanied her were as inconsequential as the socks under her thigh-high boots—and as easily replaceable.

  Reinventing herself, Cress grew farther and farther from the coal-town girl, the Juliette Gordon Low birthday baby everyone had called “lucky.” One day, she closed the door to her past permanently by hiring a voice coach, expressing her desire to lose her North Carolina accent and replace it with something softer, more subdued—perhaps with a European lilt?

  Everyone had a past, Cress figured, but not everyone chose to stay there, wallowing in what was, wishing for things that would never happen, imagining things that never were. Sometimes you just had to say “fuck that,” and move on.

  In her apartment, a white-walled, stark place where nothing was reminiscent of the greens, browns, and blues of the mountains, Cress adorned the walls with oversize portraits of herself.

  She had posed at an art studio, not for the twenty bucks they usually gave their models, but simply to share her body with others. To share beauty. The canvases and sketches had been conceived with artistic freedom, but all were in agreement on the loveliness of their subject, a petite blonde with a model’s cheekbones, a porn star’s body, and unique blue eyes that were frighteningly empty.

  People who saw only her name, Crescent Moon, might expect less of her, she knew. But once she was introduced, it was simple to surpass their expectations. She taught herself well, becoming a successful social chameleon with survival instincts. She fell short in only one area: romantic relationships. No matter how much she told herself she deserved a good man, a successful guy with everything going for him, no matter how many times people told her she was fantastic and could have any man she wanted, she found herself wanting the wrong ones. She found herself falling for weak men.

  Cress was a magnet for confused, hurt, broken little boys with mommy issues. They were usually dark-haired and handsome, and exuded a professional competence that they lacked internally. Some hid behind glasses and books, which she found charming. Others quit jobs that were too demanding, too materialistic, and gave themselves up to a higher power, offering their lives to a God that Cress was sure expected more of His creations.

  Each time a new guy washed out, Cress reminded herself she’d done it again. She’d fallen for a guy she thought would fill the missing piece of her, a guy who ended up being the missing part she never needed to begin with.

  Weakness begat weakness.

  Cress sometimes thought about what would happen if she put all the sorry men from her past into a locked room for a day. The one who cried after sex because she was too beautiful. The one who claimed to be unfixable—he was. The one who said she was too smart for him. The religious one who admitted that she scared the hell out of him. The dark, dramatic ones who were all talk and no action, who made promises to save the world while they could barely make their own rent. The sad, poetic, artistic, music-loving, cinematic ones who lived not in the now, but in a land of Hollywood rom-com make-believe. And the sad, lazy ones who believed because of past hurts and disappointments they were owed something wonderful in life but had no fucking clue how to get it or what it was, even when it was standing, five foot four inches tall, right in front of them.

  If she put all these losers in the same room together, Cress was certain the room would implode, leaving only a mushy, granular debris of self-pity and unmet desires. Something she could hose down the drain, then step over in her stilettos.

  They were air, water, and sand.

  She was hot molten earth, red clay, and fire. She needed a firmly rooted redwood. She needed a granite boulder.

  Cress went through enough therapy to understand why she chose weak men and why she was now done with them. She got so good at analyzing relationships that she even started a blog offering intelligent insight to men suffering from multiple inadequacies. She began by advising them to set their sights lower. Much lower.

  Women followers appreciated the “Dr. Moon” replies, especially when she explained to these querying men that until they faced the truth of what little they had to bring to a relationship, they would never have a successful one. Of course, she’d explain, those skirt-chasers who seemed to get as much ass as they wanted but still managed to moan about how inadequate their lives were, well, they needed to embrace bachelorhood and buy a cat. Because then they’d always have at least one pussy in their bed.

  When Cr
ess walked into Flannigan’s on a cloudy, cold Syracuse morning on the heels of a deliveryman struggling under the weight of a crate both wider and taller than he, she had one thought on her mind: Where’s the bathroom?

  When James Smith called to her from behind the bar, asking if she was there for the job, she hesitated. Before she could answer, he told her to follow him to his office. The way he said it, the way he took control, she felt for the first time in her life that she didn’t have a choice, that for once she wasn’t the one in control. And it felt good.

  A few minutes later, behind the closed door, when she tried to explain that she was only there to use the bathroom, he smiled and said six words that changed Crescent Moon Brigade’s life. “Start tomorrow. Be here at five.”

  Cress had grown up used to hearing the word “lucky.” Men used it as their excuse for being drawn to her, as if they thought her luck, her shiny fortune, would rub off on them and they would be given all the things they felt they deserved in life.

  But luck wasn’t everything. No matter how much she had of it or how shiny it was, luck couldn’t stop a bullet.

  Chapter 7

  TEDESCO GETS NOSTALGIC. SORT OF.

  I sent a text to Tommy about the Moon-Brigade girl, telling him to start his search with area plastic surgeons—the good ones. I closed with a riddle, knowing how much today’s youth enjoyed a good laugh, and though my joke had nothing to do with farts or inappropriate sex, I thought Tommy would like it. I typed, What’s the difference between a liar and a lawyer? Hit a few return spaces, then added, The pronunciation.

  My phone buzzed a few seconds later with Tommy’s reply—a smiling devil emoticon and his own riddle. Did you hear about the new sushi bar for lawyers? It’s called Sosumi.

  The kid had to always one-up me.

  I took a last spin in the leather chair, allowing myself a brief respite from the outside world. Sometimes I’d get nostalgic thinking about the life of the old-fashioned sleuth, imagining myself as one of those burly, crooked-nosed gumshoes in a brown fedora with a buxom blonde on my arm. But my nose was straight and I knew the only way a hat looked good on me was when I hung it south of my belt buckle—like during the bare-assed cowboy show that me and the boys put on in Dallas in ’79. Stripper Cowboys: Foamed and Deranged. (A twisted version of “Home on the Range.”)

  Our promoter, Axle Feagin, was definitely an artist before his time. Before anyone’s time, we figured, as on more than one occasion his ideas tanked. It was either that Axle was more advanced than the rest of us, or so European that Americans didn’t understand him, especially local reporters.

  We usually ended up having to explain our act, repeating Axle’s words: “Nudity is an analogy for societal trappings. The penis has become a weapon in the expression of freedom. To strip is to speak the language of the Universal Soul.” We’d bring up Salome, King Herod, and the Old Testament until questions moved onto the dancers’ physical attributes, with one person always asking if it was true what they’d heard about Fifi, The Italian Stallion?

  I’d have to stop myself from saying, “What? That he jerks off twelve times a day? That he has a perpetual hard-on? That when he comes he screams, ‘Mommy!’” Because all of that was true. And, yes, it was twelve inches.

  I can’t remember everything Axle used to say, but I remember thinking at the time that he sounded a lot like that irritatingly happy guy on late-night TV who sold the “You Deserve It All” series of self-help audiotapes from his castle in Kauai.

  Axle’s happiness wasn’t induced by money. It was induced by copious amount of drugs and caffeine. The guy never slept. He drank coffee all day and ate his applesauce laced with psilocybin mushrooms. But we loved and trusted him. Maybe that was the demise of our troupe, even of the whole approach to exotic dancing as “art form.”

  But who am I to say? I was just a guy found on amateur night at the Squat and Gobble. A half-drunk kid with a nice body and the confidence to move the way most women wished their husbands would. While it lasted the money was good, the travel great, and I had experiences stored up for a lifetime.

  At Flannigan’s, I left the office and went down the hall to another set of stairs. I pushed open Smith’s apartment door. It wasn’t locked. A quick jiggle of the handle revealed a broken spring—it hadn’t worked well in a while, if ever.

  Whoever this Smith guy was, he wasn’t the lock-up type. Some people were born lockers. I know. I’d lived with one. My wife, Michelle, couldn’t even pee behind an unsecured door—or if you spoke to her when she was in there. She had a worrisome evening routine that made me uncomfortable. Window latching, curtain drawing, and the double-bolting of every door. Michelle brushed it off by saying, “It’s how I was raised. In the city you have to lock up at night.”

  She wouldn’t let me crack open the window in our upstairs bedroom because she thought someone might drive sixteen miles off the beaten path, happen upon our cul-de-sac in the back of an unlit neighborhood, scale the dying oak tree, traipse through a bed of poison ivy, and scramble over our sloping roof, where they would have to remove the double safety screens, then drag themselves over a splintered windowsill to slit our throats. My only reply was to say that even if a killer did make it in, rest assured, he’d never escape.

  But that was no comfort to Michelle. Her paranoia made me feel like a prisoner in my own home. It got so bad, I’d started getting panic attacks at bedtime. My heart rate would elevate at the slide and “thunk” sound of her throwing the double bolt, my throat dried up when she slammed shut the windows, and my balls drew into my body like a frightened turtle when she tied the curtains together, eliminating all natural light.

  I tried to hide my sweaty palms and panting when she slid under the covers and reached for me with her long, cold toes. I tried to think about sex, about tits and ass and bumping and grinding, but felt like I was breathing underwater, slowly drowning in heavy, stuffy air. I was suffocating, going blind, and she had no idea. As soon as Michelle pulled her warmed feet back, rolled over, and started snoring, I’d steal my way to the window, opening it as far as I could, pushing the curtains aside, then turning on the ceiling fan. A few deep breaths, a few glimpses of the moon, and my heart would begin to settle back into my chest.

  I don’t how or why I’d let it get to that point, how I’d let her continue having her way. It must have been love. It weakens a man’s resolve. It’s another kind of death.

  I figured Michelle was happy living alone now, peeing uninterrupted behind a locked bathroom door, slipping into her dead-bolted bedroom and breathing all that stale, uncirculated air every night. Feeling safe, sweaty, and secure.

  Growing up, we never locked the doors to our house. My dad’s theory was that the people who held onto their shit too tight were the ones who got ripped off. People who put an importance on things like money and possessions; those were the ones who drew the burglars, the thieves, the scams and snares that cost them their car, bike, stereo, or life savings.

  He might have been right, because I left my bike in the front yard every night for a week hoping it would get stolen so I could get a better one, but no one touched it.

  We rarely closed our garage door, which created a sleeping spot for stray cats and the occasional opossum. My dad left his car keys under the driver’s seat. Our windows didn’t even have locks. I don’t remember owning a house key.

  So maybe Smith with his unlocked door was a small-town guy like me, or maybe he had nothing he couldn’t stand to lose.

  My friend Eddie was like that—rich in material possessions—not like a celebrity, just a guy with nice things, but still a guy who figured it’s only stuff. As if by opening his palm and saying, “Go on. Take it. It’s yours,” he relinquished control. If he got ripped off, he could feel good about it because it wasn’t stolen, but offered. Hell, he could always buy more.

  Was Smith like that? If he was the kind of man who put no stock in possessions—or possibly anything else—that would explain some things
. Not all, but some. I had seen the signs before when I spoke to families of suicide victims, of confused teen runaways, of depressed jobless men and drug abusers.

  And once I’d seen it in someone who made forever promises that were as airy as the clouds hanging over a three-bedroom fixer-upper on a dead-end street in Utica.

  Chapter 8

  JUST GOOGLING AROUND UNTIL I NEED GLASSES

  James John Smith V had been doing a lot of thinking lately. It had nothing to do with the way his wife, Angel, had yelled, “You’ve got some thinking to do, Jimbo!” as she backed their brand-new BMW out of the customized garage and down the flagstone drive, flipping him the bird before she sped away.

  The sound of her shifting the car from first gear right into third had made him yell, “You’re gonna drop the gear box doing that!”

  His words landed hard and heavy in the empty garage—a garage so clean you could eat off the floor. He pulled the string on his pajama bottoms and pissed in the Beemer’s empty parking spot, smiling at the sizzling sound of urine meeting heated concrete. It was almost as pleasant a feeling as the day he’d dropped her little Pookie off at “the farm,” aka the landfill two towns over. Fucker had squealed like a piglet the whole ride—a most annoying sound—even through two black plastic Hefty bags.

  After a while, Jimbo got tired of the house—her house, her things, her presence, which was everywhere, even in her absence. So he went out, taking long walks to nowhere, sitting for hours practicing his stare. He had money, but it all belonged to her and he wasn’t surprised when he returned home one afternoon to find the locks changed and his stuff jammed into his mother’s old Chevy. It was the only thing the woman had left him, not counting the medical and funeral bills.