by Kambri Crews
Dad embraced the swinging bachelor lifestyle, but from reading his letters it seemed he was unlucky in love. Years of late nights, excessive drinking and drug use, and a two-pack-a-day smoking habit were stealing his good looks quickly. His itinerant ways and lack of steady work made it that much harder for him to snag a woman and, if he did, it never lasted for long. He blew through a few failed romances in quick succession, one with a woman he said looked like Xena, the Warrior Princess. “She has an inseam of thirty-six inches as long as me W-O-W!” But Xena didn’t last after Dad “found out she had too many men in seven days.” Dad didn’t say how many was too many. No rest for the wicked, however, because in the same letter he wrote about his latest love, a woman he described as a never-married, big-boned forty-five-year-old with dirty blond hair and bright blue eyes. After they broke up, Dad chalked it up to her jealousy and wanting him to pay her bills.
Then he met Helen.
Dad gushed about Helen, calling her kind and sweet. They had been dating for a few months and decided to move in together into a cheap one-bedroom apartment. Now that he was settling down, he ached to be a family again. Every letter asked when I would visit them in Texas or what my holiday plans were, and had him wishing I lived closer so we could visit more, “as much as once monthly.”
It had been more than twelve years since Mom and Dad’s divorce, and I was thankful to be hundreds of miles away. I had been so studious and dependable, growing up too fast, handling adult tasks for my deaf family, being married so young. Now I just wanted to keep it light, to have fun, finally.
While I still worked at the bank during the day, I ensconced myself in a frivolous life at night. I took side jobs in event marketing. Sometimes I was a model, a title that made me uncomfortable. Others complimented me on my beauty, but I still saw myself as an ugly, freckled tomboy. I wanted to be respected for my intelligence, perhaps overly sensitive that I had been denied my dream of a college degree.
I preferred being in charge of an event, hiring the models, and organizing the affair. We promoted everything from Pepsi and Lipton Iced Tea to Winston and Camel cigarettes to liquor like Stolichnaya vodka and Jose Cuervo tequila. Our on-site projects took us to fabulous locations. One weekend, I’d be in the Cleveland Indians dugout during a home game, another I’d be in a race car at a NASCAR tour stop, yet another I’d be in a private jet returning home from the Kentucky Derby. Knowing how much Dad and Helen liked to drink and smoke, I sent them care packages of free swag like T-shirts, hats, pens, and photos from the events.
In just a few years, I was recruited for better-paying banking jobs that moved me from Akron to Columbus, and then Cincinnati. I was making enough money to rent a penthouse apartment with a rooftop pool overlooking the Ohio River and Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals, and drive a VW Cabrio convertible. To some, it may seem extravagant, but I was careful to live within my means. I carried little to no debt and paid cash for everything I could. I even had a savings account and a 401(k).
Then Dad dropped a bombshell. Helen was pregnant, due on Christmas Day. “Are you in shock?” he asked in his letter. “We have a baby because I can’t wait for you and David to make me a grandpa.”
My reactive emotion was jealousy. When Mom remarried so soon after her divorce to Dad, I felt ditched. She had rebuilt a new life with a different family. Dad having a baby with Helen meant he would do the same. Even though I wanted my distance, I wondered where my brother and I would belong.
Soon jealousy was replaced with fear for the future of my unborn sibling. Dad had no business bringing a kid into the world. I had a fleeting fantasy that social workers would rescue the infant and give me custody. Not long after Dad broke the news, I received a letter from Helen.
Dear Kambri,
Things have been a little crazy around here and I have been real bad about getting in touch with people, but more on that later.…
On the 29th I started bleeding & on the 30th I lost our baby. Oh, by the way, if he doesn’t kill me (just kidding), we want to get married. We hope you will be able to be there.
We love you.
I felt sad for Helen and worried about her health. I knew her loss was devastating, but I still couldn’t help but be relieved. Now things could get back to usual, with occasional inebriated phone calls or letters filled with their latest hardship.
In the summer of 2000, I was hired as a marketer for Jose Cuervo for a promotional tour that was stopping in Cincinnati. There I met a man from New York who was also on the tour. He sensed I was ready for a change and raved to me about opportunities in New York City, where he lived. I had been to Manhattan a few times with friends of mine from the theater. We’d rent a van, share a hotel room in the theater district, and attend as many as five plays in four days, making the most of our visit. The Broadway excursions inspired me, but New York was extremely expensive.
For the first time, especially with my friend’s encouragement, I considered my East Coast options. I was bored with Ohio and tired of banking. I had even begun the application process to join the Peace Corps. My assignment was to be in the Fiji Islands to teach business management, but the United States was forced to scuttle the project after an unexpected coup d’état. My friend assured me that I would be able to find work in New York and I gave my resignation to the bank via email, packed up my apartment, broke my lease, and made my big move, filling my Cabrio with my belongings and unloading it at my new two-bedroom shared apartment in Queens.
I was filled with anxiety about moving without job security, after my childhood of deprivation. I quickly found work as a legal assistant to ease my fear. My new office was posh, and located in the British Empire Building in Rockefeller Center. Every day I walked through the throngs of tourists in Times Square, passed the Today show, 30 Rock, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and other iconic sites that I had visited as a tourist with my Ohio theater friends.
I missed acting, but I still worked nights and weekends in event marketing and promotions. I also worked as a party wrangler at private events, in charge of making sure people were dancing, interacting with one another, and having fun. Just three weeks after relocating, I worked at a bar mitzvah held at the posh Pierre hotel, on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park. The decadent, multimillion-dollar bash featured performances by Mandy Moore, Jessica Simpson, the Village People, and Barry White and his entire orchestra. It also landed the father of the bar mitzvah boy in the New York Post’s Page Six a few years later when it was revealed that the party was paid for with embezzled funds.
I was approaching my one-year anniversary of living in New York City when, on September 11, 2001, terrorists flew planes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Some new residents were spooked by the calculated evil attack and fled to the perceived safety of their hometowns. My reaction was the opposite. I dug in my heels. I had finally found a place where I belonged and I was staying.
I set forth to work harder, faster, longer than anyone else so I could make it. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but I wasn’t going to let the grass grow under my feet mulling it over. I had broken free and was carving out a life for myself. I went out to events every night, and watched the latest plays both off and on Broadway.
After a year of living in the city, I started my own party production business, and handed out my card to hundreds of people in hopes something would stick. It was starting to pay off, too. Over the years I would attend red carpet parties, premieres, and other only-in-my-wildest-dreams events where I would often find myself in the ladies’ room marveling at my reflection in the mirror. I’d smile broadly, shake my head, and say aloud without caring who might hear me, “Can you believe this is your life?”
Many times, I didn’t believe it. The juxtaposition from my old life to this fantasy I was leading filled me with an intoxicating sense of relief. I had escaped from Dad’s downward spiral and violent outbursts, the scariness of David’s self-destruction, and Mom’s devastation at her son’s disease o
f addiction and the obliteration of her marriage. I had run away and kept running until finally finding a place that I could call home. I felt for the first time that maybe, just maybe, I’d never be that girl again. The one who worried that one day she would wake up and find herself back in a tin shed.
I had just celebrated my thirty-first birthday when, on a hot summer night in June 2002, I found myself at an underground comedy show at Don’t Tell Mama. Rumor had it that Mark Cuban, a famous billionaire who often invested in new business enterprises, would be present.
“He’s a billionaire?” I asked, doubting the plausibility that anyone so well-to-do would be caught dead in that seedy little cabaret. In the off chance the buzz was true, my business partners and I wrote a note about an entrepreneurial venture that might hold special interest for him. Lo and behold, Mark was in the audience. My friends and I strode up to him after the show and introduced ourselves. Thinking that this encounter on the streets marked our only chance to make conversation, I gave him the letter.
To my horror, he ripped it open and read it right there on the sidewalk in front of the performers from the show. Part of me wanted to tear off running for the subway, but everyone else stood by, lingering expectantly. He shoved the note in his pocket, grinned at all of us—an eclectic group of comedy nerds—gathered in front of the nightclub, and said, “Let’s go grab a drink!”
Many hours and many more beers, bottles of champagne, and shots of tequila later, and the night became a blur. As we walked into one nightclub, Mark sailed past the maître d’ without checking in.
“You’re not allowed to do that,” I said playfully.
He patted my hand with a sly grin and whispered in my ear, “Kambri, when you live in my world, you can do anything you want.”
I could get used to a world like his.
That same night, 1,542 miles away, Dad was stabbing Helen.
I stumbled out of the dark bar and blinked my eyes at the bright lights of Times Square. Was that the sun rising? Mark piled the holdouts of the group into the back of his limo. “Come on, where you wanna go now?”
“Man, some of us have to work!” I raised my arm in the air to hail a cab to take me home. The impromptu night out with a famous billionaire had proven memorable and, who knew, maybe it would lead to bigger things.
I had become used to this thrilling, opportunity-filled, unpredictable life I was living in New York City. The brush with fame would make for an interesting blog entry or just an anecdote I told my friends. Meanwhile, I had a real fish to fry. In a matter of hours, I was flying to Marina Cay, a five-acre island in the British Virgin Islands dubbed “the Cuervo Nation,” a playground for the rich and famous, where I was going to orchestrate more all-expenses-paid depravity.
As part of their promotional marketing plan, Jose Cuervo hired “brand ambassadors” to spread the good word of all things tequila. In Cincinnati, I had toured bars in a double-decker bus with a full bar and DJ booth. My friend was one of the select few sent to live on the island several weeks each year and host small groups of contest winners. The tour was over but since I had been a brand ambassador, I was able to travel to the British Virgin Islands as an unofficial co-host. The company paid my way to essentially eat, drink, and be merry.
John Hodgman once told a story on This American Life about meeting another host of the Cuervo Nation, and described him as a person “whose job it is to force us to interact … because apparently this is something we’ve forgotten how to do. A job that seems so intuitive and skill-free that you initially think anyone can do it. It’s only when you are trying and failing to get someone to drink a shot of tequila off your head that you realize how hard it is to be ‘Cuervo Man’ ” (or, in my case, “Cuervo Woman”).
Listening to Hodgman’s account, I was both proud and grossly embarrassed. I was being paid to party, but it was a gig with no merit, morals, or thought required. It was a lifestyle of debauchery in a bikini doing tequila body shots, dropping poker chips out of my butt crack into a beer stein, and jumping from the upper deck of a boat into a pool of anacondas swimming in the deep blue awaiting discarded burgers and buns and me.
I was tan, young, happy, fearless, and free. Then the phone rang.
“Hey, Kambri, telephone!” the bartender yelled. I sat frozen, confused as to how anyone could track me down. The Cuervo Nation isn’t exactly listed in the phone book. It has no air-conditioning, no television, no radio.
The bartender smacked the table a few times and repeated, “Kambri! The telephone, it’s for you.”
I snapped out of my trance. “Telephone?” I looked at the guests seated around me. Empty bottles and glasses littered the dinner table. “I didn’t even know they had a telephone here.”
I walked to the bar in a surprisingly straight line and took the receiver. “Hello?”
“Hey, Kambri.” It was David. I hadn’t seen him since he stayed with me in Columbus to ring in the year 1999. With our busy schedules and my abrupt relocation to New York, I couldn’t remember the last time we had spoken. I was dumbstruck wondering how he had found me. “How’s it going?”
It is strange, in that brief static moment of anticipation when gaining unwanted news, how clear the message is before a word is ever exchanged.
This is about Dad.
“David, I know you didn’t track me down just to make small talk.”
“Yeah …” His voice sounded heavy and tired.
I looked back at the table of prizewinners, their faces red and shiny from our day in the sun. They looked curious and somewhat anxious. I interrupted David from saying another word.
“Whatever it is, I don’t want to know right now.” I spoke deliberately, cautioning him to not go any further. I didn’t want any of the tourists to know something was wrong. “I’m stuck on this island for a few more days and there’s nothing I can do or change from here.”
I knew when I returned home I would be saddled with the responsibility of dealing with the fallout of whatever had prompted this call. My gut told me that Dad had a more serious run-in with the law, something on par with JB nearly shooting him in the head. Whatever it was, David needed to handle it for now. I was being paid to be the life of the party, and I couldn’t fulfill that role if I were drowning in Dad’s sorrows.
“Okay, have fun.” He was forlorn and added with poignancy, “I love you, Kambri.”
“I love you, too.”
I climbed out of the vacuum of my thoughts and tried to focus on something else: the reggae music, the pattern of the wood-grain table, and the sounds of waves lapping against the dock. I walked back to the table of the last holdouts of the twelve visiting prizewinners.
“Hey, where’s my Cuervo?” I took a swig and added, “Who wants to go for a swim?” I skipped out to the end of the pier, stripped down to my bathing suit, and dove headfirst into the dark water.
The anacondas were waiting.
A few days later, after the last ferry of Cuervo prizewinners was shoved off the dock, I hitched a ride in a dinghy to the main island of Tortola and took a taxi into town, where I borrowed a computer from a friendly shopkeeper. Knowing there was some sort of message looming in the universe addressed to me, I scoured the Web not knowing what exactly I was searching for.
Was Dad dead or in the hospital? My leg bounced, and I chewed my fingernails. My father’s given name appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram with the grim headline “Boyfriend Jailed in Knife Attack.” The blood drained from my face. I clicked the link and read the brief report.
BEDFORD—A man was arrested on suspicion of stabbing his girlfriend Thursday night. A 45-year-old woman, who suffered cuts to her neck and upper chest, was in critical condition Friday at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth. Her boyfriend, Theodore Crews, 55, was in Bedford Jail on Friday with bail set at $100,000 on suspicion of attempted murder.
I thought back to Thursday night. I was partying with a charismatic billionaire in his world, while my world was falling apart.
My heart sank, but there were no tears. I was stoic and contemplative. My mind didn’t race to wonder what happened, why or how. I knew he was capable. It was wishful thinking that what Dad had done to Mom was a fluke. I had pushed aside any worries that his troubles with women were beyond what he described in his letters, choosing to believe that he wasn’t dangerous. But I was wrong. The only thing missing was the gruesome details.
When I flew home to New York, I returned to my full-time job at the law office. Arriving at my desk that first day, I acted as though everything were business as usual. Growing up, I was taught to keep quiet about family matters. This was how I was raised, but I was also shell-shocked and the routine kept me from collapsing. Throughout the day, my mind flashed images of a bloody attack on Helen or replayed the scene of Dad attacking Mom. When I slept, my sleep was fitful.
For years after Dad had attacked Mom, I had nightmares of murderous rampages. My dreams were a horror movie, where an unknown villain would stalk and butcher people. I would be the sole survivor, on the run, hiding in terror of being slaughtered. Other times I dreamed I had killed someone years before and hidden the body. Now the cops knew about my dark secret and were following me. I woke up feeling consumed with guilt and fear.