I stepped into the back office, where stacks of $100 bills were being shuffled inside a money machine. Anna walked over, with her short, Anna Wintour–style bob and bright red nail polish. She looked me up and down. I stood trying to appear taller than my barely five-foot-three frame, with my hand on my hip and my legs crossed like all the young starlets pose on the red carpet.
“You’re cute,” she said and then turned to Fred. “She can do the job.”
The front doors were about to open, and Hollywood hopefuls covered in Ed Hardy and Chrome Hearts stood behind the red rope, eager to get in. Mike, the doorman, would tell them to keep waiting for a few more minutes, but he’d never let them in. It looked good to have random people waiting outside. Made them feel special. Made the brand important. Hostesses stood under heat lamps, chewing blocks of Orbit gum while waiting for a celebrity or socialite to come claim a reserved table.
It was one of my first nights of work, and I was standing in the all-encompassing stainless steel kitchen, clocking in, when one of the bottle-service girls approached me.
“Hey, hon.” She wore a white corset, a miniskirt, and fishnets, and had long blond curls and false eyelashes. “Can you zip me up? I can’t get it all the way.” She pointed to the zipper in the back, her breasts bursting over the frilly rim.
“Sure.” I pulled on the zipper as the bussers ran in and out of the kitchen with buckets of limes, lemons, and ice.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Yeah, doll.”
“How much money do you walk away with a night?”
“Depends on the night. A bad night is usually around four or five hundred, and a good night can be up to two thousand. Do you have experience?”
“No.” I couldn’t believe how much money you could make without having to take off your clothes. I needed that job.
“Well, you gotta get experience, you gotta hustle, you know what I’m saying? I don’t know about you, but I got a little girl at home to feed and a mortgage to pay.” I got the zipper up and then watched her fiddle with a walkie-talkie attached to her waist. “For security, like, if a customer is comin’ on too strong, you know?” she explained. “Gotta run, doll. Good luck.”
A little girl at home? A mortgage to pay? How did she do it? Come to work each night dressed in patent leather thigh-high boots with men groping at her waist and breasts, lines of cocaine sprawled across glass tables, then go home, sleep, and wake up her daughter for preschool the next morning. And not only that, but she had a mortgage to pay. With inconsistent pay from the nightclub, I wondered how that was even possible. I didn’t know the whole story, and I wasn’t one to judge. Each night, I rated clubgoers based on looks and social status because I needed money so desperately I was willing to do anything.
Later that night, as I was standing around near the DJ booth, a girl sauntered over to me, shouting over the music, “Can you add me to the email list?”
“Sure,” I yelled back and handed her my clipboard. Her eyes, full of hope that maybe she would get the chance to come back into the club again. She scanned the paper then looked up at me. “Are you rating people?” she asked, shocked.
I looked at her, speechless and guilty, then plucked the clipboard out of her hands and ran as fast as I could into the kitchen.
“Watch it!” one of the busboys shouted. A young man with a square jaw and dark hair slicked back into a low bun squeezed by me holding two large buckets of ice, beads of sweat along his forehead.
I was clearly in the way.
“Sorry, I’m really sorry,” I said, scooting over a few steps.
“Do you work here?” He dumped the buckets of ice on the floor and looked me up and down in my “club outfit.”
“Yeah, um, I’m the list girl.”
He let out a laugh, indicating that my position and ranking for employees at the club was on the bottom of the list. “What does that even mean? You mean bottle-service list girl?”
“No, I was hired to collect email addresses and . . .” I leaned in and whispered shamefully, “rate people.” I showed him my clipboard.
“Oh, man!” He shook his head. “Sounds like prison.”
Shocked that he had said the word prison, I replied, “My dad’s in prison.” It just fell out of my mouth, begging to be heard. No one I knew wanted to talk about prison.
The young man took a step back.
“Oh yeah?” He looked me up and down. “You sure don’t look like a girl who has a dad in prison.”
“What do you know about prison?” I asked.
“I know a lot about prison.”
“Tell me.”
“What’s your name?”
“Christina. What’s yours?”
“Jesse.” He stuck out his hand. A word was tattooed on his forearm, but I couldn’t make it out. The letters looked gothic in style.
“Nice to meet you.”
“Here,” he said. He pulled over another bucket of lemons and handed me a knife.
I held the knife and stared at the lemon. “Um . . .”
“You never slice a lemon before?”
“No.”
No, I had never sliced lemons before. I had never even made my bed. I never had a summer job. I never had to clean up after myself. I didn’t know anything about work.
Jesse shook his head, ashamed of me. “Like this.” He took the lemon and sliced off each end, demonstrating. “Then down the middle like this, then one slice, two slice, three slice, four.” He dumped the slices in the bucket. “And careful, your fingers.”
I took a lemon and carefully sliced as he sliced next to me. The bottle-service girls ran in and out carrying frosted bottles of Grey Goose and sparklers that looked like mini fireworks as they strutted through the club to their designated tables. Jesse and I continued talking that night, and for the first time I felt safe opening up about my father being in prison.
“I did some time,” Jesse said. He kept his eyes on the lemon, his voice real low.
“What did you do?”
He kept slicing the lemons. “You’re not supposed to ask that.”
“Oh.” I was not aware of any “prison etiquette.” “Well, my dad’s in prison for fraud.” I didn’t care what the etiquette was. I felt relieved to have met someone with a connection to prison too.
Jesse looked around the kitchen. “Assault . . . drugs, you know,” he said. “But I’m straight. I don’t do that shit no more.”
Jesse and I continued talking, and after I told him about my debt, he told me he was eleven the first time a gun was put in his hands. His older brother was a member of a gang and had been in and out of prison his whole life.
Jesse looked at me. “You know, your dad loves you. Just because he’s locked up, it doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.” I never told Jesse I thought my father didn’t love me, and it made me uncomfortable the way he said it—as though he could see some kind of pain in me that I couldn’t.
I turned around and saw Fred walk in and dropped the knife.
“Where the fuck have you been?” he yelled.
“I was just—”
“Get out there! Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan just walked in.”
I grabbed the clipboard and ran out the kitchen door back toward the dance floor. Fat Joe and Lil Wayne’s “Make It Rain” was playing.
I weaved through all the bodies on the dance floor, which smelled of vodka and sweat, when all of a sudden a trust-fund kid whose father owned a cement company or something started “making it rain” with $100 bills. I made my way to the upper-level VIP area and saw the blond, blue-eyed baby holding wads of cash in rubber bands as he released them over the dance floor. It felt like a suction of drunken hipsters, this force of gravity, pulling them toward the dirty floor covered in wet money—like mosquitoes to light. I made sure Fred wasn’t looking, and I dropped to my knees like everyone else, gathering as many bills as I could get my hands on. I stuck three $100 bills in my bra and stood up, when I got elbow
ed in the face. Blood gushed from my nose toward my upper lip. I ran back inside the kitchen to find my new kindred spirit, Jesse, all bloodied from chasing the rain.
“You all right? You all right?” he asked, handing me a clean rag. I looked at him, and before I could say anything, I began to cry.
It was like standing in the twilight zone: rays of light projected outward around my father’s head when the front door of the town house swung open.
“Bambina!” he exclaimed, swooping down to give me a hug. He appeared skinnier, and his hair was gray. I guess he had been dying it black all these years. Did he escape?
My mother had called me the night before. “Your father’s back,” she said, irritated. “I need you over at the house for dinner tomorrow night.”
“What?” I blurted out, confused.
“He was granted a furlough.”
“What’s a furlough?”
My mother sighed, always exhausted by my questions these days.
“I don’t know; he gets to come home for a day,” she said, exasperated. I thought furloughs were granted only under extreme circumstances such as a death in the family. There were no deaths.
My father was being moved from Herlong to a minimum-security prison in El Paso, Texas. On February 24, 2006, he wrote a letter to Nancy Palmer: “I’ve been assigned to La Tuna (Spanish for desert flower of some sort) in El Paso, Texas. It’s the worst of places, and I’m going to the prison, not the camp . . . the Bush administration is making a concerted effort to close the remaining camps. La Tuna is 85 percent Latino . . . my Francois will take me far . . . I hope to see Gayle and the girls during my travels . . . Mum’s the word on that event.”
He was able, somehow, to buy a plane ticket and fly across the state of California as a convicted felon currently serving time in prison. Probation had given him a bus ticket that would have taken a total of about two days to travel from Herlong down to El Paso, Texas, and my father decided he’d use that time to see his girls instead.
So there he was, in his khakis and white polo, grilling steak and holding a martini—like Leonardo DiCaprio in Catch Me If You Can. Chloe was downstairs in her bedroom, presumably doing homework, when I knocked on her door.
“Hey,” I said. She was sitting on her bed when I walked in. “This is weird, right?”
Chloe leaned toward me and whispered, “Yeah, he just, like . . . appeared. Mom didn’t even tell me he was coming until, like, an hour before she went to pick him up from the airport.” Chloe and I were both so uncomfortable, we didn’t know what to do other than laugh at the absurdity of it all. And besides, what could we accomplish with Dad being home for just a few hours? He couldn’t fix my credit in that amount of time; he couldn’t make us thousands of dollars to live off of. He was there to fill the gap because he felt Mom slipping away from him. I was hopeful that his being home even just for those few hours would make us feel like we could be a family again. But after a few martinis, my father was cruising around the TV area looking at all of the family photos on the side table. There was only one picture of him. I don’t remember which picture—maybe the one of my father kneeling between Mara and me, still in his pin-striped suit and red tie. We’re on the sidewalk, standing under hundred-year-old trees along Lowell Street. It was my third birthday party. I’m wearing a blue floral party dress, blue and white ribbons in my hair, and I’m holding a blue balloon. And Mara, on the other side of me, is posing as she sits on his knee, laughing in her pink smock dress.
“How come there’s only one picture of me in the whole house?” my father asked my mother, who was preparing the salad for dinner.
“I don’t know, Tom,” Mom said. “Why is there only one picture of you?” She challenged him, wanting him to answer his own question. But when Chloe and I entered the kitchen, they dropped it.
That night, I didn’t ask my father about prison. I didn’t ask him about my credit. I didn’t ask him about anything. I felt frozen from the jolt of his sudden presence, the tension between the words he exchanged with Mom. This was his night of “freedom.” But all I remember from that dinner was watching him—the way he chewed his steak, sipped his red wine—wondering how in those moments he measured freedom in between the hours and the days that he had been locked up. He would soon be locked up again—trapped—wondering if he, or any of us, even knew what freedom meant.
-13-
Josh and Christina to Washington, DC
I was staring at the champagne and crudités on the table, her mother’s sundress, and her father’s bow tie. I’d flown back to DC with Josh for a high school friend’s twenty-first birthday party, held on the top floor of a chic restaurant, and her parents were sipping bottles of Pellegrino while discussing the Duke University lacrosse team rape case. I hadn’t kept in touch with most of my friends from high school, but they knew that my father had gone to prison. I never spoke about the debt, or what was happening at home with my mother and Chloe. I had the steel Tiffany watch that my father had given me clasped around my wrist, and Josh on my arm to shield me—insecure from the thought of any of them finding out.
I suppose I needed to go back there to prove to everyone that I was fine. I thought I was; so sure I was moving in the right direction. But while I sat there at the round table drinking champagne and listening to my old friends talk of their internships on Capitol Hill, at think tanks, law firms, and investment banks, their wild and hilarious stories of frat parties and sorority balls, I was beginning to see all that I had taken for granted: my education, my background, my parents’ connections to the world at large. And I wondered if there was an answer to understanding privilege without having to lose everything, without having the rug ripped out from beneath you. How to become conscious of it when it’s all you know, or if privilege is destined to circulate and perpetuate itself insidiously down through generation after generation—an inevitable doomed and stagnant fact of life where change within oneself and, therefore, the surrounding community, is just not possible.
I fiddled with the clasp of my watch and had the sudden urge to take it off and hide it, bury it, smash it, feeling like a fraud. But instead, I kept playing the part—good manners, looks, possessions, and charm—while asking myself: Which was it? Was I from a wealthy family? A poor family? Did it matter? For the first time, I felt the gap, lost in some kind of a divide within myself, not knowing how to be, squirming in my seat, “Pass the champagne, please, thank you,” turning to Josh and kissing him on the cheek, hoping no one would notice how uncomfortable I was. Through my new pair of eyes, my friends appeared to have everything, when before, I’d never even noticed. Were they aware of it? And it was that word again: everything. What did it even mean? I knew only one thing: I had taken everything I ever knew for granted, but I could never say it out loud. I couldn’t admit it to myself—and certainly to no one else, not even Josh. I wanted to go back. I wanted to close my eyes and wake up in my bedroom and start over.
I took Josh with me the next day. The foreclosure sign was still stuck in the grass, now tall, uncut, and sprouting weeds. It was muggy outside, and the swirling hiss of cicadas grew louder as Josh and I hopped out of the car. It had been seventeen years since the ugly insects merged from underground. I was only three years old and in my car seat when I saw them for the first time. My mother was pregnant with Chloe, and Mara insisted she carry them with us wherever we went, like pets. It drove my mother crazy. These giant bugs were everywhere: in between car seats, in our shoes, and crawling on our sippy cups.
We parked down the street for fear of running into any old neighbors. Lois, the mother of the boy who tried to blow up our house with a Coke can, was the neighborhood gossip, strolling the streets with her pet ferret on her shoulder. I wanted to be spared the humiliation of running into her. I looked down the street until the coast was clear, grabbed hold of Josh’s hand, and led him up the stone walkway. It was more chipped and loose than I remembered it to be from years of hopscotch and jump rope. Josh stopped in the midd
le of the walkway and looked up at the estate. “Wow, you grew up here?”
It was bigger than I remembered. Overgrown ivy weaved around each window in between shutters, and along the gutter, and the once white Corinthian columns framing the front door were now faded, chipped, and weathered, paint peeling away with the wind. In my mind, it all still belonged to me, not the bank. Every brick, every stone. I turned the knob of the front door to see if maybe it was open. No luck. Josh stood back while I pressed my face up to the beveled glass. The house was empty, even the dining room chandelier had been ripped from the ceiling, loose wires poked down toward the floor. It must have sold at the estate sale, and I wondered how it was for my father packing up the house all alone. I wondered which door he walked out of on the last day. The front? The back? The garage? I needed to get inside the house. I wasn’t leaving until I did.
“Follow me.” I grabbed Josh, remembering the garage doors. My parents always kept them unlocked, even when we went to Nantucket for the summer. Josh and I shuffled down the green hill to the three-car garage beneath the house. A frequent act I did in high school when I’d come home late from a party after forgetting my keys. I could see through the windows that the alarm was off.
I yanked on the garage door handle. It was locked.
“Oh, wait.” I searched my purse.
“What are you doing?” Josh asked. I could see the paranoia growing in him as he looked left and then right.
“My key. I still have my key.”
“Yeah, right. You don’t think the locks have been changed?”
“It’s worth a shot,” I said with a shrug.
I pulled out the key, dangling it at him. “I haven’t taken it off my keychain yet.” What was I supposed to do with such a key? The key to every childhood memory I desperately wanted to hold on to? Just throw it in the trash? Give it away with everything else? By holding on, I could at least assert some form of control over something, over the nightmares, the dreams, the memories. I ran back to the front door. Josh kept watch behind me. I stuck the key in the keyhole, and with a quick click to the right, the front door popped open.
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