by John O'Brien
She clucks her tongue: the disapproving mother. “How much of that did you guys want to spend?” she says.
Sixteen brightens visibly, but catches himself; his earlier boasting has not embarrassed him as he feared it might when they actually came up with the money. All business: “How much you want? How about two hundred for an hour?” he says: not my money.
“Don’t your friends talk?” she says, growing annoyed, despite herself, with this kid’s presumption. This is not a good idea; they’ll end up disliking her, probably mistreat hundreds of women down the road because of her. “Try three hundred for a half-hour.”
“Three hundred for an hour,” says double zero, grasping the next logical step as he speaks for the first time. Mistake. Though her manner has put him at ease he can hear a quiver in his own voice, and he resolves not to speak anymore.
“Three hundred and we’ll see how it goes,” says Sera, wondering if they could possibly all be virgins. Certainly one of them is, and she bets that this is some sort of ritual for his benefit.
They all nod and twelve starts to count out the money to her with a certain dejected resolution. He hadn’t expected this to go so well, and hoping to be absolved from all responsibility by the older boy’s leadership, he had other plans for these crisp bills.
She stops him with a gesture. “Where’s your room, what hotel?” she asks.
They tell her, and it turns out to be a little motel, not far from where they are. Not exactly top security for her, but she just can’t muster a rational doubt about this trick. Anyway, they’re all impressed with their friend now—he’s so well-bonded that he’s practically glowing—and she would hate to let them down.
“I’ll see you there in fifteen minutes,” she says. “You can pay me then. Why don’t you all take a shower while you’re waiting.”
“In fifteen minutes?” whines twelve.
“Don’t you guys live in a dorm or something? You must have some experience with quick showers, right? Didn’t you ever have two dates in one night?”—everybody’s all smiles now—“Look, I’ll only need one of you at a time, RIGHT? UNDERSTOOD?”—nods all around—“Well then, the other two can shower while I’m there.” She snaps her lips shut and stares at them: end of conversation.
They walk off giggling. Sera goes into the store and buys a bottle of beer to help her decide whether or not she really wants to go through with this, but she arrives on time at their door and sixteen opens up in his Jockey shorts. She feels the tension as she goes into the room and is about to leave when twelve pushes the three hundred dollars at her. Against her better judgment, she stays, and starts undressing as double zero emerges from the bathroom, looking rather pale.
“Who’s first?” she says.
(Of all the girls, she always went out first. Once she came back and they were all still there, watching TV, laughing, some of them fucking.
“It’s because I love you the most,” he said, “that I allow you to work the hardest.”)
The boys look around at each other and at her. She doesn’t want to think that they’re checking relative positions, but she’s been in similar scenes before. She still can’t believe that these guys are dangerous.
“I want to fuck her in the butt, Jim.” says twelve, looking hopefully at Jim. “You too, right?”
“Forget that,” she says. “No one’s doing that. You’ll all go straight, one at a time. If you want I’ll suck you instead, but that’s all. Then I’m out of here.” Yes, now it moves fast. I can feel it getting fast in here, she thinks.
“Jim, you said I could fuck her in the butt,” repeats twelve.
“That’s it, I’m leaving,” she says. “Here’s your money back.” She picks up her purse.
“No! Stay,” says Jim. “Shut up, Mike!”
“It’s my money and I want to fuck her in the butt, Jim!” screams Mike.
She turns on him. “Maybe you want to fuck JIM in the butt! Have you thought of that?” she says.
Then, as she will remember it later, the scene begins moving really fast—way too fast to even think about fast—or perhaps it simply compresses, crystallizes into a complex moment of images. Her challenge brings the room to silence, and she sees that the boy’s eyes are filling up with tears. Feeling bad, she tries to apologize, but is stopped by a blow, catching her full in the face. A flash of colored sparks lead her into darkness, unconsciousness. She wakes hurting, her face in a bloody pillow and someone on her back. A scream and struggle bring only a glimpse of the tall one—Jim… his name is Jim—in his underwear, then more darkness. Sounds and cries come to her ears as she fades in and out between blows. “Go on! fuck her!” … “Fuck her in the rear!” … “Can we go home now?” … “Look at me, I’m fucking on her!” Hot semen falls on her back, but she is too sore to know for sure if she is being violated at any given moment. She hears someone throwing up, and as she turns to look her hair is tugged hard, snapping her head back and exposing her face to another punch. “Stop that puking, Bobby.” … “What’s she gonna do, call the cops?” … “This is what she does for a living.” … “Don’t worry, she’ll be fine.” She is rolled over, wakes to see two of them urinating on her breasts, and is kicked sharply on the side of her head. There is a final flash of sparks, and she goes under, way, way under.
She bleeds freely, asleep on the well-bleached sheets, alone in the little room.
(They were just boys, unwittingly paving their lives with misery.)
A passing truck grinds by outside of the quiet room, its low rumble entering her dormant ears and echoing unnaturally inside her head.
(The bars were covered with blood and spit. The cop’s hand slipped off the iron rail as he rose from her, and the girls in the lockup pretended to rush him. They mocked his panic as he bolted, his pants still around his ankles. She saw other cops laughing, and wondered if he would ever live it down.)
Oooooooommmmmmmmaaaaaaaa, the sound oozes to the front of her head, first in a dream; then she almost knows it’s a real sound, and she starts to pry her eyes open.
(Sera could tell, just by looking across the circular bar at them, that the expensive West Hollywood call girls had no time for her, and probably wished she wasn’t around.)
The room is incandescent yellow at first, then white, altered by her mind as it recaptures awareness and strives for normalcy.
(They were afraid, afraid to be with her and with each other. Their bodies moved too fast for their brains to keep up.)
The pain knows that she is finally awake, and starts to assault her from all directions. Quivering, she pulls on her clothes. She knows that they won’t be back, and ignores an impulse to run from the room. She guesses that she has been sodomized more than once, and each step to the mirror brings tears to her eyes as the pain rips through her. She wipes the blood and makeup from her swollen face, realizing that she won’t be able to work for at least a week. She hopes that she can do well at the tables today, for a change. Finding her purse intact, she calls for a cab from the room phone; it arrives, and Sera, with visible difficulty, opens the door and sits gently on the bench seat.
“What’s the matter honey, get a delivery at the back door that you weren’t expectin’?” says the driver, laughing at her discomfort. He’s a veteran, seen it all. Long ago, dues paid, he dispensed with his obligation to be courteous; never even had the inclination—goes with the territory, he tells the new guys. He goes with the territory. “Looks like you been knocked around, too. You got any money left? You gonna be able to pay your fare?”
She silently pulls a twenty dollar bill out of her purse and, reaching forward, drops it on the front seat.
“Oh, don’t wanna talk to me?” he says, offended. “Well don’t take it out on me, I’m just tryin’ to cover my ass. What the hell do you expect sluttin’ around like that, dressed like that? What the hell do you expect? You just oughtta be glad the creep didn’t nail you the way I would. At least the way you got it you know you ain’t knocked up. Yo
u oughtta be glad, that’s all. Where you goin to?”
She mumbles her address through swollen lips.
“Fine,” he says, easing up. “That’s fine, and you’ll have change comin’. How’s that? See, it’s not so bad. Hell, I didn’t mean to laugh at ya, but you should have seen the way you sat down: like it was on eggs. I’m sorry you got hit, but you oughtta be glad cause it could be worse. I’ve seen worse. But this is fine, you got change comin’ and you could be worse. See, I’m not such a bad guy. Now this is fine, okay? Whaddeya say?”
“Yeah,” says Sera, “I’m fine. Thanks for asking. This is fine.”
The cab zips by a tattered woman carrying two overloaded bags of laundry under the hot sun, several children in tow. Sera wonders at the woman’s pain—or her ability to remain ignorant of it.
The shade of the hotel tower has just crawled off of the yellow Mercedes; actually, it seemed to crawl slowly over the car and then dart quickly from the peripheral area, like a little girl who suddenly realizes that she is sitting next to a spider. The windows have been open all night, befitting the perpetual heat of the season. Taking advantage of the newly directed sunlight, the man in the car looks again into the cant rearview mirror at the image of a solitary gold chain, nestled in and somehow at home amidst his voluminous chest hair and unruly neck hair. He nods—an internal debate apparently resolved—and removes a second gold ring from his left pinky. There are now no rings on his left hand.
There is, however, a single, heavily-jeweled ring remaining on his right hand—the index finger—and this is the hand that now, shaking almost imperceptibly, holds the plastic handle of a disposable razor. It scrapes dryly across his face, making an unpleasant noise until one of the hotel’s maintenance vehicles, brushes swirling, goes to work on a nearby area of the parking lot and drowns it out.
Passing the green and gray pebble lawn in front of the one-story apartment building, small change in the cab forgotten, Sera swings open the security gate and limps toward her door, distinguished from the others by a once black, now faded gray italic 6, permanently affixed and reaffixed to the veneer with various nails and small screws. Inside she shuts the door and feels, as she always does when first entering her apartment, both relieved and threatened by the surprising silence of her home, a silence somehow augmented by the low bombilation of central air and frost-free refrigeration. She puts down her purse and sheds her clothing as she hobbles about, restoring each belonging to its proper location in the appropriate room or closet, maintaining an orderly state of affairs. Herself finally naked and placed in the shower stall, she rotates the chrome knobs and releases the water, standing braced under the spray until her trembling knees fail and she collapses onto the tile wall in front of her; gripping the porcelain soap dish, she feels the water beat on her back and watches it disappear down the drain.
(Even the black girls were constantly hassled. The outcalls, the houses, everybody was in the path of The Policy Cops and their pervasive attempts to piss off the Very Bad Guys. The only girls left working—other than those in the Korean houses—were the desperate junkies. For Sera the problems were even more critical, more personal. She was haunted, pursued, tortured emotionally, sometimes physically, day and night by the one who had made her the object of his obsession. She was and would become his last, best gold chain, an unwilling bauble on his furry chest. He had made it just too hard for her to stay in Los Angeles, so three years after arriving from the East, she had to move, had to leave the little life that she had built.)
Spanking clean, she dries herself with two towels and walks tiptoe over the cold tile floor out of the bathroom and into her bed. As each muscle settles into temporary disuse, her mind, now entrusting control of her body to the soft bed, accelerates, reviewing the day, the week, the month—all the sublimity, all the poetically prosaic moments of her deliberate life—until it abruptly stops and, with the easy effort of survival, drops Sera and her past into a dreamless sleep.
Far outside of town on the way to Henderson there are four or five pawn shops littering the highway. In front of one of these is parked the yellow Mercedes, its owner waiting for the passing of a highway patrol car that might object to expired Canadian license plates. He has driven this distance to avoid being spotted at a pawn shop by anyone who may know him, but in truth there is almost no one who knows him.
The air is hot and dry, and though this man is genetically built for such a climate, these days he is not properly wound for his environment, or perhaps he is simply naked for the first time. At least now he has some money in his pocket, fewer rings on his fingers.
Sera awakens roughly seven hours later ta the early evening sounds of her neighbors returning home from their jobs. She turns to look at the clock and then stops before seeing it, remembering that, with her face beaten, she has no schedule of her own to keep, and with its disregard for hours, Las Vegas has none to impose upon her. Resisting a second impulse to look at the time, she gets up instead to urinate.
At the bathroom sink she peers into the mirror and examines the current version of her look. She has, on the right side of her face, two distinct multicolor bruises, one each in the areas of her eye and cheek, the latter extending inward to swollen lips and upward to her nose, where, compounded by the swell of the former, it transforms her once and future beauty into quite an asymmetrical event. Certainly it’s been worse, perhaps will be again. The pain is really only as bad as the time spent on it, and apart from the dull throbbing ache, punctuated by occasional sharp stings of pain, she feels mostly irritation at the inconvenience. Not that she didn’t walk into it, almost ask for it by ignoring her gut feeling, but she has always tried so hard to play by all the rules, and she feels that in exchange for this acquiescence she should be allowed to proceed unmolested to conclusion. Or, if that is not quite right, at least she knows that she is as hard as she’s going to get and has been for a long time. Glaring at herself, she waits for her vexation to pass, knowing that it has no more basis than its cause. Nothing has changed; there is no toll to be collected, no psychological scar to flaunt. The world is evidently about to let her stick around: good deal, she knows. She also knows that this episode is now, physical evidence to the contrary, pretty much over. She goes to the television and turns on the evening news. In the kitchen she makes a pot of coffee, puts some bread in the toaster.
Fed, feeling better, still in possession—not surprisingly—of the three bills from last night’s trick du jour—and then some—she brushes her teeth and hair, puts on her jeans and tee shirt and walks to the bus stop.
(Intentionally she stayed a step behind, hanging back in the bushes—the woods to neighborhood children, actually just a small grouping of trees in someone’s backyard—not quite hiding deliberately enough so that she couldn’t plausibly deny it should she be discovered. The yellow bus came and went, leaving her alone at the stop and gleeful at the success of her deception. She waited in the winter wind for the next bus, the late kids’bus, filled with not-so-familiar faces, kids that wouldn’t know her so well, wouldn’t know the mocking chants that stung her ears every other morning.)
She arrives downtown and makes a few passes up and down Fremont before strolling into one of the virtually interchangeable casinos in that area. Finding an empty five dollar table, meeting the resentful glare of the dealer, whose arms are folded in judgment and inactivity, she slips into the center seat and smooths a hundred out in front of her, rotating and casually examining it in mocking anticipation of the dealer’s own predictable actions. He, the dealer, stands immobile; his only reaction is an annoyed “shuffle-up,” which escapes his rigid lips without the benefit of even an insincere exclamation point. Sera knows this guy. All regular gamblers know this guy. He’s the Las Vegas equivalent of the dour postal worker who’s irked at the propagation of correspondence in this country; except that there are many more angry dealers per peer capita than there are angry postal workers. This one is fanning out his cards in front of him, flips them
over for a moment: everyone can see. Various ritualistic machinations follow, to the point where she finds herself in temporary charge of two green and ten red chips—these in exchange for her one hundred dollars—and two cards—these in exchange for her placing one of her red chips in the circle outlined on the green felt in front of her. She and the dealer then spend about twenty minutes swapping cards and chips back and forth without any substantial or lasting exchange of wealth.
Sera is a competent player knowing all the right plays but has never been serious enough to learn the memory mechanics of card counting, a skill that would give her a slight advantage over the house and therefore more or less consistent winnings during the course of her habitual play. As it is she experiences only short runs of good or bad luck, with the balance of her play blending into a low profile blandness that seems to make the casinos happy as they whittle away at her money until it is gone. Only then, her leisure time completed, can she go home and prepare to earn more, which will be willingly offered up, with full cognizance that it is being sacrificed, when she sits again at the tables, in the casinos, which are under the jurisdiction of the Nevada Gaming Commission, which, small evidence to the contrary, has no wisdom that hasn’t long ago been gained by Sera.
A well-built man wearing a gold cross chained around his neck, a moustache, and a cologne that he probably couldn’t name, nonchalantly sits down next to her and commences spraying her with quick sideways glances and vulgar grins. He offers to buy her a drink, and she points out that the casino would have already done that had she wanted one.
“High roller?” he smirks, indicating her five dollar bet on the table. He adds a chip to his own bet, bringing it up to ten dollars. “There’s a charm. My name’s Stephen. Maybe I’ll bring you luck, _____”.