He frowned and cocked his head, softened into a smile. “What if I don’t want your money? What if I do it as a favor?”
The night was sticky and Johnson’s hand left a moist imprint on his wallet. His eyes were on Jeanette’s chest and she knew she had him. She brought her arms closer together. The cross of her gold chain disappeared between mounds of flesh.
“You don’t have to do that,” she said.
It was uncomfortable enough to ask for cigarettes; Jeanette didn’t know how to accept additional favors. She glanced toward Sasha but Sasha chewed a fingernail, not paying attention.
“It’d be my pleasure,” Johnson said. “Maybe you can pay me some other way.”
Jeanette wasn’t stupid. She got it right away. Oh, went a flick in her head. She knew when wanting her became wanting her. Usually it scared her a little, men’s comments. She’d walk down Kendall Drive by Sasha’s house, a street that felt more like a congested highway, and men would honk at her, would follow them, would stop to gawk and shout. She liked it. She hated it. Thought it was a fact of life, like waiting for the light to change or taking an umbrella just in case.
But she pictured the men following through on their promises, shoving her into their cars, to fuck her, to fuck that juicy ass. That’s what those cooler, harder girls did, wasn’t it? They got fucked. But she couldn’t picture the popular boys at school, boys like Chris and Raul and Marcelo, talking to their girlfriends like that, expressing such raw desire. She was amazed she could inspire such want, such need. She was baffled that these same men who shouted at her and Sasha did things that, say, her mother and father did. She could not picture her father fucking her mother. She thought, These men must want me more than anyone wants my mother, more than anyone wants the coolest girl in school. Then she felt good.
So she smiled some more at Johnson. Pretended she didn’t understand. “What kind of favor?” she said.
Johnson laughed. He looked around. He was the kind of guy who couldn’t stop looking around as if his next words were on cue cards scattered in the distance.
“What are you girls doing tonight? You know, after you smoke your cigarettes?”
Jeanette wondered what he wanted. She wondered if men who wanted to fuck her would accept a night driving around the city. She saw dirt under Johnson’s fingernails and wondered if he was the kind of man who built things or tore them apart, who knew about machines in a way her own father did not.
“We don’t have any plans,” Jeanette said.
The man nodded. “I see.”
Johnson looked at a cue card on the left, a cue card on the right, then opened his door to grab something from the passenger side seat. He handed her a flyer.
On the flyer was a woman in a silver metallic bikini, oil-shiny, hair cascading around her shoulders. The woman’s lips were slightly parted. The woman was so happy to be on the front of a flyer. She wanted to get fucked.
TMS Productionz presents Wet n Wild, the flyer read.
“What is this?” Jeanette said.
Johnson watched Jeanette watch the flyer. “You ever been to a foam party, sweetie?” he said. “This one starts in an hour. Lasts all night.”
All night, all ages, read the flyer. No Cover for Ladies. Little cutout faces of five men surrounded the woman in the bikini whose hard breasts shone like apples the size of their heads. They were the faces of various DJs—DJ Ztar Ztruck, DJ Taz, DJ Juicy J. Bubbles floated like halos around their heads.
“Let me ask my friend,” Jeanette said.
* * *
Sasha and Jeanette had their first fight. Sasha said no, absolutely not, she would not go anywhere with a man she didn’t know. This had angered Jeanette. Something was finally happening to them. Something besides getting high at the car wash and eating pancakes. Something was happening to Jeanette besides her father naked and sweaty passed out on the couch and her mother carefully reapplying mascara after crying and dabbing vanilla-scented lotion between her breasts because, she said, every woman should have a “signature scent.” Something was finally happening that didn’t feature a predictable ending. Jeanette didn’t understand how someone like Sasha, who went skydiving once and drove high without her seat belt, had never considered testing what lay on the other side of men in cars who wanted them.
“I’m going whether or not you go with me,” Jeanette said to her, and knew in that instant that Sasha was pretending even more than she was, that Jeanette was harder and floating closer to the girls they both thought they were.
“I’m not bailing you out if you get stuck in South Beach or something,” Sasha said to her. Jeanette heard the door jingle. Johnson walked out of the 7-Eleven and waved a pack of Marlboros at them, smiling. “And you can keep the stupid cigarettes.”
“Fine, go home, and I’ll tell you all about the party tomorrow,” said Jeanette. “I thought you were supposed to be my best friend.”
“This is so stupid,” Sasha said, already walking toward the IHOP parking lot. Jeanette let herself wonder for a moment how bad Sasha would feel if they found Jeanette’s body the next day, maybe at the bottom of some lake or worse. She couldn’t let herself think of worse. Excitement rippled through her, and fear. Two emotions too similar to tell apart most days.
Fear was her father drunk.
But this didn’t feel like that. This felt like growing up.
Jeanette’s mother had tried to talk to her about sex once. She’d found a condom in Jeanette’s purse. Her mother had tried to borrow her purse without even asking, which had angered her. It was a vintage quilted Chanel, her father’s gift to her on her thirteenth birthday. Her father gifted his love, her father who never bought her mother anything. Jeanette sensed an attempt at reclamation when her mother borrowed her purse without asking.
Jeanette liked that her mother thought boys were fucking her when she found the condom at the bottom of the Chanel bag. The truth was that she had been flirting with Manny, one of the popular boys, one of the boys who would flunk out in a year, who sat next to her in chemistry and copied her answers. She was good at chemistry.
“Do you like it raw?” Manny had said to her in class one day. Jeanette had no idea what he meant, though now she knew. But she had feigned knowledge because she liked that Manny thought she was the kind of girl who’d know. She liked that Manny pinched her waist and winked when he said it.
“Yeah,” she said, popping her gum and shrugging.
“Damn, girl. Me too,” said Manny. “Guess neither of us needs this then.” He handed her the condom and cracked up in laughter.
The teacher scolded them both, and the pathetic girls, the ones nobody wanted, looked toward them with disgust. Jeanette kept the condom and placed it in every purse or backpack she used each day or night, a reminder that she was wanted. And she pictured that when it finally happened, the fucking, she’d pull it out and the guy doing the fucking would know that other people wanted her too.
“Look, I’m not going to pretend I can stop you from, you know, doing … you know…,” her mother had said, refusing to meet Jeanette’s eyes. “I just want you to know that nobody is going to want you—for serious things, things like marriage—if you are, you know, if you’ve been, well, if you’ve been used already.”
Jeanette had giggled. Nobody looked more used up than her mother. She’d never have said it to her, but Jeanette knew her mother was just jealous her father didn’t want to use her anymore. That nobody wanted to use her mother. That her mother was useless.
On the car ride to South Beach, Johnson told Jeanette his name was Johnson. Jeanette was embarrassed she hadn’t thought to ask. She didn’t give her real name. She told Johnson her name was Caro. Caro was the hottest, most popular girl at school. Caro was Manny’s girlfriend the year before, which meant Caro liked it raw.
“How old are you really, though?” Johnson said, switching the manual gear up a level and getting on the highway. “You know what? Don’t answer that. I’m barely legal myself, ha ha ha
.”
Jeanette didn’t get it. She was so tired of pretending to get things. She switched the subject. “I’ve been to a club before.”
“Oh yeah?”
Johnson had the radio station tuned to Power 96. Jeanette thought he looked too old to listen to hip-hop but then realized she just thought that because her parents never listened to Power 96, only the easy listening station and Spanish talk radio, what she assumed all adults over a certain age listened to.
“Yeah. In South Beach. Got super drunk. It was so fun.”
This wasn’t a lie. Two months earlier she’d used Sasha’s sister’s ID, and even though the two of them looked only slightly similar, the bouncer at Club Tigre had glanced at her rhinestone bra top and slid open the velvet rope. She remembered dancing on a table. She remembered older guy after older guy buying her drinks. She remembered Sasha’s attachable ponytail that made Sasha’s hair longer and thicker. She remembered vomiting on the side of the road on their way home.
“Well, it’ll be fun tonight. You ever been to a foam party?”
“Yeah,” Jeanette lied.
After an uncomfortable pause she said, “So what do you do?” This was what grown people said to each other according to all movies and TV shows. They were passing the downtown skyline, which meant Miami Beach was minutes away. Select windows of high-rises lit up like those Lite-Brite toys from when she was young. She pictured reaching out and plucking each window into her palm so the whole city went dark.
Johnson eyed her before returning his eyes to the road. “Are you some kind of hooker?”
“What?”
“What’s your endgame here? I’m not giving you money. What are you trying to do to me?”
“Fine,” Jeanette said, measuring the depth of her next lie. “I’ll tell you. I’m seventeen and a half.” She thought that’s what he wanted to hear. She thought that would set him at ease.
But Johnson just frowned at her. “I don’t get it,” he said.
They drove in silence until they crossed the bridge to the beach. Immediately the human landscape changed. Women in stilettos. Men in suits. Sex and sexiness pouring from every crevice.
* * *
But the club was nothing like she’d expected. They’d passed the places with long lines and thin women checking names off clipboards. They’d passed the hotel lobbies lined with bored valets watching over expensive cars. Their club was in an alley off Ocean Drive that smelled like piss and mildew. There was no line, no velvet rope. There was one skinny guy with red eyes who didn’t bother to ask her for ID, which would have blown Jeanette’s cover. He gave them both orange wristbands.
Inside there were only a few people. More men than women. A handful who looked like high schoolers just like her. The space was one small black rectangle with a hoselike contraption blowing bubble foam that reached to Jeanette’s waist. A disco light circled in a frenzy. Get ur freak on, Missy advised. And if you want me, want me … come on, get me now—An air horn interrupted.
But Jeanette didn’t act surprised. She asked Johnson for a drink and he obliged. She asked for an amaretto sour, which Sasha had told her about at the first club, but he came back with something called a Long Island iced tea.
“With Bacardi 151!” he shouted over the music into her ear. “Let’s see what you’re made of. We’re gonna have fun tonight, little girl.”
She downed the ice tea quickly to impress him. He seemed impressed. He bought her another one. Jeanette wondered how many drinks she could get away with. She was mesmerized by this newfound power. Men wanting to buy her things just like her father did. She felt like Queen Caro, ruler of all the men, floating in her foam kingdom, watching women in bikinis grinding against men with their shirts around their necks. She liked the way they danced like they also knew their power. But how could she compete? How could she show Johnson she was even more desirable?
She felt woozy from the drinks. She decided to up her game. She bent over and dipped her hands into the foam. It was like reaching into a cloud. She felt her shorts rise up over her butt cheeks. She pictured Johnson wanting her butt cheeks. She backed up into him.
But he didn’t seem surprised. He just grabbed her waist and jerked it back harder. He had a drink in his hand and he tipped it over and a stream of liquid rolled down Jeanette’s back and into her hair and then into her ears and then into her nose.
She shook her head but felt dizzy. She stood up again.
“You little freak,” Johnson yelled into her ear. He pulled a spliff and a lighter out of his back pocket and lit up. He handed it to Jeanette. She noticed two guys beside them watching her. She puckered her lips when she sucked the spliff and stared one of them in the eye.
Johnson was sweaty. Wet orbits sprouted from his armpits. His car had smelled like cigarettes and perspiration, and now he smelled like his car. He was nothing like her father. Jeanette’s father was a drunk, but Jeanette’s father was a neat drunk. She danced a circle around Johnson, gyrating her pelvis. Her father went to work in a suit and changed into his surgical scrubs at the hospital. He always smelled of Listerine and rubbing alcohol. She put her hands on her knees and made circles with her ass. He’d only touched her once when he was drunk.
Johnson grabbed a handful of her ass and slid a finger along the seam of her jeans. That made her straighten. She couldn’t explain why she felt different all of a sudden. Nothing had changed. She couldn’t explain why Johnson kind of disgusted her—in a bad way—now. She wanted to go home. She was so dizzy. Jeanette sat down on a foam-wet plastic chair and felt her shorts saturate.
She pictured what the place would look like with muted sound—all those bodies in ridiculous movement, all those men eyeing convulsing bodies, perspiring, breathing heavy. The one bartender, a woman in a black bustier, looked like she watched the scene with muted sound. She was the only one who saw how funny it all was. Jeanette wanted to kiss her, the only real person left.
Johnson motioned with his chin and grabbed her arm. He dragged her to a corner by the bathrooms. Every wall was a mirror. The tiny space looked like a kaleidoscope and Jeanette smiled thinking of herself as a piece of colored glass that morphed, shifted into different patterns. I’m a star. I’m a Magic Eye. I’m nothing at all.
Johnson took a small baggie of white powder and a key chain with three keys out of his back pocket. He dipped a key into the baggie like he was collecting a teaspoon of sugar. Then he brought the key up to his nose in one quick swoop, snorted deeply, and threw his head back. He shook his head like a wet dog.
“God damn!”
Jeanette had never seen anyone do coke. She didn’t know anyone at her high school who even spoke about coke. She had always assumed cocaine was one of the drug addict drugs, like heroin in a syringe, the kind of drug nobody in her circles would ever do. The kind that existed so her drugs—weed, an occasional ecstasy roll or some bars from someone’s mom’s prescription—didn’t count as real drugs.
“Take a bump,” Johnson said to her, dipping the key again and holding it up to Jeanette’s face.
She was afraid, and he still disgusted her. But she was even more afraid of what would happen if Johnson discovered she wasn’t the kind of girl he thought she was. What kind of humiliation would rain down on her, whether he’d dump her on her doorstep like a child and nothing would have really changed in her life that night. The only thing that could make her harder than the hard girls was if she did things even they wouldn’t do. Jeanette was getting dizzier and dizzier. She felt nauseated.
“You’ve never done this, have you?” Johnson said to her, eyes suddenly all pupil, fried eggs with black yolks.
Jeanette didn’t say anything.
“Just snort it really, really deep, like you’re trying to breathe all the way into your skull.”
Jeanette took the key and snorted as Johnson had. She thrust her head back like him, like this was an action she’d repeated so many times it’d become automatic.
The snorting felt li
ke drowning. It felt like breathing in water accidentally when she chicken-fought in the pool with friends, a burning all up her face and then a metallic drip at the back of her throat. She had a taste in her mouth like she’d swallowed blood.
“Good little girl,” Johnson said, giving her ass a squeeze. He took the key in his hand and shoved the tip into Jeanette’s mouth. “Now run this on your gums like a good girl. Lick that key clean.”
Jeanette did as she was told, more metal in the mouth. More blood. She felt part of her mouth go numb.
The high came so fast, Jeanette wasn’t sure it was really a high and not some kind of trick of the mind. Her body felt electrified and the dizziness evaporated. She was seized by an excitement, the feeling of something incredible about to happen. She felt at the precipice of a whole new life and couldn’t believe she’d ever doubted herself. She was amazing! Queen Caro times infinity squared, ruler of all the dance floor, killer of all the men. What would it feel like if she turned the tables on Johnson? If she ended up chopping his body into pieces so everyone he’d ever known would grumble, What was he thinking, letting a stranger into his car who could have been a serial killer for all he knew?
“Let’s dance,” she said, unable to get the words out fast enough.
Johnson wore an exaggerated smile like a marionette. He sweated even more. Jeanette just wanted to dance dance dance. She just wanted to kill him kill him kill him. That was the solution! How had she missed it all this time? The next time her father came at her drunk, wanting a too-tight hug, the next time he had an angry outburst, she’d simply kill him. How simple. The music split into individual notes. That was the weed high bleeding into the coke high, she imagined. She could suddenly identify every instrument, every tempo change, every beat, every lyric. The music became physical like gas into water; if you had asked her at that moment what each music note tasted like, she’d have been able to answer.
They danced but it wasn’t about sex anymore. It was about the miracle of having a body. The miracle of not understanding a single thing about firing neurons, about the mechanics of moving her ass, but doing it anyway. She danced to I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly! She screamed, For the mamis and the señoritas, Cuban girls and fine Boricuas! She twirled and thought, U remind me of a girl I once knew …
Of Women and Salt Page 7