Tempted by Trouble

by Eric Jerome Dickey

  It was a gentlemen’s club that had no gentlemen as patrons.

  While a dancer named Daisy Chain performed, looking like she was worth ten dollars for twenty minutes, I stood near the bathrooms and searched for a different dancer, one who was too beautiful to be in a place like this. I hid out in the rear of the den of lust, drink in hand and holding up the wall. It was Down and Dirty Thursdays at Club Pasha. The night customers were promised they’d be spoiled the moment they came inside. It was the night that three shots of overpriced Patrón cost twenty-five dollars. A fool’s bargain. There were over forty-five dancers in the room, most already topless. Women were imported from Atlanta, Miami, and California. Most were in heels so tall they looked like their fake hair could touch the ceiling.

  Men in sagging pants and shirts adorned with convoluted and outrageous hip-hop and thug-inspired designs competed with each other, moved to the front lines like warriors, and positioned themselves close to the dancers. Tonight men who were behind on alimony and child support were splurging, throwing money at women who were behind on their rent and had small children at home. The customers spanked the women and baptized topless dancers with money.

  I’d wanted to become invisible, but everyone noticed me. I was the only man in the club who wore a business suit and shoes by Johnston & Murphy. When I had walked across the room, some reacted like they thought I was an undercover cop; panic sprouted in the eyes of the men who were wanted or on parole. I carried a black fedora and wore a three-button dark gray suit that fit the way a suit should fit, not oversize like the suit of a ringmaster at a circus. That made me feel both out of place and out of time, an anachronism, because all of the other patrons wore outfits so large they hid all of their obesity. Women with cosmeticized faces were swinging from the bars in the ceiling. Others were working the poles at either end of the stage, stretch marks barely noticeable under the dim lights.

  Then the DJ announced that the dancer who called herself Trouble had arrived.

  I stared at Trouble as she took to the stage. Her beauty was uncommon and her unique appearance drew eyes. She was born in Brooklyn, but going back three generations, she was Dominican, Canadian, Jamaican, Chinese, and a few other exotic lands combined. Her heritage gave her a distinct look. Her hair was dark brown with golden highlights. She had an erotic face that, from some angles, reminded me of Maria de Medeiros Esteves Vitorino de Almeida. Soft, youthful features, round and doelike eyes, making her appear childlike and seductive all at once. Outside these walls the dancer was a conservative dresser, usually wore low heels and had an appearance as innocent and gamine as Natalie Portman, Norah Jones, Robin Meade, and Audrey Tautou.

  She was my wife.

  The heat in my heart and aching inside my chest confirmed that these were our hard times. The financial pressures we lived under felt like a mountain on our backs. But I was the man in the relationship, so inside I carried the onus of having to live up to being a husband and a provider for my wife.

  Society had conditioned me to feel the lion’s share of the shame when things fell apart, and standing in a room that provided entertainment for the lowest of the low put pain in my heart.

  Heat raced up my back and across my neck. I held a thin smile but I wanted to scream. Stress and anxiety did their best to break me down and drive me insane.

  My wife took to the silver pole with energy, every move reeking of confidence. In her sparkling thong and glittery bra, she went up the pole by spinning in circles, looked like she was defying gravity. In a flash she was upside down in a split, then she took the split to the pole, had her body in a sideways Chinese split. She used her legs to hold the pole and came down inches at a time, flipped before she made it to the floor, then landed in a dramatic full split. She landed so hard it made men groan.

  This was the result of her mother struggling to send her to gymnastics and dance classes from when she was a child until she graduated from high school and joined the navy.

  My wife saw me lurking in the shadows and lost her painted-on smile for a moment.

  I wanted her to see me. I wanted to see how she would react when she saw me.

  There was a pause that lasted no more than half a second. I knew my wife. I knew her every expression, no matter how subtle. She wanted me to leave. She didn’t want me there. But I was there.

  She could have motioned to a fat bouncer, and the fat bouncer would have asked me to go, but she knew better. She knew me. She knew my every expression as well. She read the look on my face. If a bouncer touched me, we’d come to blows. I’d lose the fight, but there would be a fight.

  I backed up a step, but not in retreat. That step reassured her that I wasn’t going to cause a scene. Not that night, but I wanted to. The love inside me made it hard to not hate what I saw.

  Each dollar that was thrown her way felt like a flaming whip lashing across my ego.

  Women went over to her throwing dollars, ugly women who had girl crushes and let it be known they wanted girl kisses as they leaned over and whispered in my wife’s ear. My wife smiled and flirted. I wanted to hear what was being said. Liquored up, women were as aggressive as men. Some of the women dressed in oversize clothing, talked with their mouths twisted, had hair cut short, and looked like men.

  Desperation’s heated breath singed my neck, its jagged teeth prepared to devour my flesh. Poverty growled too, waiting its turn, famished yet patient, a beast that dined on the bones of men.

  My wife finished her routine and stopped to gather the dollars that had been thrown at her feet. She bent over and hurried to get her dollars. It looked sad. It looked disgusting, the desperate way my wife picked up the money that had been thrown at her like she was the slave of the moment. She grabbed stray dollars that had fallen off the stage, pulled what she had garnered into one vulgar pile. I saw no dignity in what she was doing. I saw lust but no respect for her as a woman as she left the stage. She held her smile and flirted with customers until she vanished into the dressing rooms. Ten minutes later she came back out and walked over to me. She took my hand and led me to the back, away from all the eyes.

  My wife lost the phoniness she had given the customers.

  She whispered, “Go home, Dmytryk.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”

  “Why are you here? You promised to never come here.”

  “We’ve both made promises, Cora.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want this to end. I want you to leave with me.”

  “I can’t. We talked about this. We can’t afford . . . we’ll talk when I get home.”

  “Cora—”

  “This kills me too, Dmytryk. This is killing me too. And I know you don’t approve.”

  “This is supposed to be short-term. Only a few weeks, then we move on.”

  “It is. I’m not one of these girls. I don’t do the things they do for money.”

  My eyes went beyond my wife, watched dancers lead men into the private area.

  She said, “I have a few regulars out there and I have to . . . I have to . . . go talk to them.”

  “Regulars.”

  “Customers. They spend a lot of money to talk.”

  “To talk.”

  “They do all of the talking. All I have to do is smile and pretend I can’t smell their bad breath and act like I’m interested. Stop shaking your head, Dmytryk. This is why you’re not supposed to come here. I need you to leave. Baby, go home.”

  I reached inside my pocket and took out a ten-dollar bill. I slipped it inside her garter.

  “Dmytryk . . .”

  “Since you’re talking to me.”

  “Stop it.”

  “I can’t touch you?”

  “Why are you acting this way?”

  “You’re so nice to these men. At home, you hardly smile.”

  “Please. Go.”

  “You’re mad? I’m a paying customer.”

  “That isn’t called for.”

  “Stra
nge men do that and you smile like you’re in love. Your husband does that and you frown.”

  “Don’t raise your voice, Dmytryk. Please, don’t.”

  “You touch them and I have to beg you to touch me.”

  “Don’t do this here.”

  “Give me a few minutes. Then I’ll go home.”

  I walked away. I didn’t leave, just walked back into the main room.

  My wife passed by me a few moments later, went to walk the floor, flirting with customers.

  She was made up. As beautiful as she had looked on our wedding day, only instead of being dressed in white she was prancing around the room in honeymoon clothing. Her ring finger was as barren as our savings accounts. She wasn’t the prettiest woman in the room, nor the sexiest, nor the one with the biggest backside, nor the one with the largest breasts. If a man judged on those standards alone, she wasn’t the best in the room. But that didn’t matter. She was my wife. What I saw when I looked at her, no other man would be able to see because there was no love in their hearts for her.

  She used to labor on the assembly line at GM too. After she had graduated from Mumford High School, she had worked less than a year at GM, then joined the navy and did two years on the Shenandoah. My wife had been a lithographer; rank E4, petty officer, third class.

  She had said the navy had been a good experience, but in the end, financially, she had been no better coming out of the navy than she had been going in. Her high school friends who had stayed behind were spending money and living the life; people who had gone to Henry Ford, Pershing, Mumford, and Cass were all side by side, working on the line, driving new cars and owning homes.

  In the end, despite the training from Uncle Sam and training at GM, she was swinging from a pole with the rest of the women, half of whom were likely cut from the same cloth as the men and women who showered them with wrinkled dollars—the classless, the felons, and the undereducated.

  That night I sipped dark alcohol and tortured myself, watched lustful animals throw wrinkled and stained offerings at my wife, watched animals touch her flesh like they knew her in a biblical way, watched her move like a gazelle as she smiled and flirted and laughed and acted like a woman who was less than a stranger to me, watched those uncouth animals slap her flesh like she had no value as a woman.

  It was punishment.

  Some dancers led high-paying customers to the back area, behind the magic curtain. Some nights I knew my wife did the same. Knowing that made my head throb. Made my heart ache.

  The room was crowded, but the club used to have three times as many customers. People who were making it rain twenty dollars at a time used to make it storm two hundred dollars at a time.

  Another man walked to my wife, threw two wrinkled dollars, and slapped my wife’s backside. That was when I picked up my fedora and headed for the front door.

  The night felt like a form of self-flagellation and I’d suffered enough.

  That was around the time I heard about the man who had flown in from Rome. He wasn’t in the club that night, at least not while I was in the room. I would’ve noticed him because, like me, he would’ve stood out from the rest of the patrons. My guess was that as I walked out to go to my car, that career criminal had pulled up and was walking into the den of ill repute from the opposite direction. The career criminal was the man they called Eddie Coyle. My wife had met Eddie Coyle at the gentlemen’s club and later on she’d told me that he’d been in the club that same night. Maybe that was one reason she’d been uncomfortable. He was one of her top customers, and if I had remained in the club, I wouldn’t have appreciated how he had earned that status. I would have viewed everything through the eyes of a jealous husband.

  I’d promised not to ask her about her job, about what she did, about whom she met. But I wasn’t stupid. I knew what happened at gentlemen’s clubs. I knew what I had paid for when I used to go to the ones in Miami, back in my college days. But sometimes living in denial was the only way to keep a man from going on a killing spree. In my mind I was capable of walking inside that club and shooting bouncers, shooting dancers as they screamed to the god they had forgotten about the moment they had walked through the doors carrying their clear heels. I should’ve. That club was where Eddie Coyle had entered our lives and changed our world. Eddie Coyle had come into Detroit, spread stolen money around, and was treated like a rock star.

  He had stolen from the rich and was distributing the cash to the disenfranchised.

  Eddie Coyle had paid Cora to spend quality time with him during the daylight hours, had leased her services and wanted her to escort him around the Motor City starting at nine in the morning. He wanted to go on a tour, see the banks in the suburbs, check out Oak-land, Birmingham, see the connected areas, and wanted to be done with his tour by noon.

  He was going to pay her fifty dollars an hour.

  I told my wife to text me every thirty minutes and let me know where she was. I told her that it was about safety, that I wasn’t jealous. She complied, for a while. The tour of Detroit was completed by noon, but fifteen additional hours passed before I heard from my wife again.

  My calls had gone unanswered. The same went for three dozen text messages.

  That Sunday, she’d come in right before sunrise, had staggered in the house too drunk to talk. She was wearing a fur coat that looked like it had been stolen from a movie star. She had wrapped herself in it like a caterpillar inside a high-end cocoon. I asked her questions but she was too drunk to engage in conversation. I’d gone to church, had to leave before I went insane, and when I came back home six hours later, she was still sleeping. I cooked. I cleaned. I walked from room to room. I waited for her to wake up. But as soon as she opened her eyes I was there, standing over the bed, dressed in a white shirt and deep-blue slacks, golden tie loosened, a deep frown engraved in my face.

  I fumed, “Where were you?”

  “Don’t scream. Please. Don’t scream.”

  She struggled to her feet and went to the bathroom. I followed her and banged on the bathroom door. She came out of the bathroom with a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in her hand. Her hair was half pulled back, half down. Her illness had her sweating like she was standing in the rain. Her makeup had blended with her sweat, liner darkening both of her eyes.

  She looked like a dying raccoon.

  I repeated my question, demanded to know where she had been for those fifteen hours.

  After she’d taken the Pepto-Bismol she said, “We went to church.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “It was a Seventh-Day Adventist Church.”

  “Church lasted until five this morning?”

  “After church, Eddie Coyle took me to the Whitney for brunch.”

  “So, he spent a hundred dollars on a buffet.”

  “I didn’t look at the bill.”

  “Then what? Brunch doesn’t take all night.”

  “We went to the casino in Greektown.”

  She told me that her benefactor had blown a thousand playing poker. My wife lived for poker, and he had been kind enough to give her gambling money. Then they had headed back downtown to Tom’s Oyster Bar for another expensive meal.

  My anger had me ready to shout. I was at my wit’s end, but I bit my tongue and listened.

  I swallowed my growl and asked, “Then what?”

  “Dmytryk. Please, not now. I’m sick as hell.”

  “I don’t care if you’re dead. Answer my questions.”

  “Don’t scream. My head can’t take it.”

  I snapped, “You were gone all night. Then what?”

  She said they drove through the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel and landed in Canada, five minutes from the Marriott and the Ren Center in Detroit. That meant that Eddie Coyle had come to Detroit bearing a passport. He was probably an international criminal. And that meant that my wife had taken her passport, something that she rarely did. Again, it wasn’t adding up. She said that Eddie Coyle had to meet a business associate on the other side
of the tunnel at Shawarma Palace, a small eatery that sold Lebanese cuisine.

  I said, “Explain the fur coat.”

  “I told Eddie Coyle I was cold. He bought me a coat.”

  “How much did that fur cost?”

  “Fifty-two hundred.”

  She looked into my eyes and pulled her coat tighter, that reaction telling me she was not going to give it back, that no matter what I said or did she was keeping that present from another man.

  I was about to say some things, some horrible things, but she spoke before I did.

  She said, “Times are hard, Dmytryk.”

  “We have a new president.”

  “But our realities haven’t changed.”

  I told her to be patient, reminded her that the president had made promises to us all.

  My wife rubbed her temples and told me where I could stick any promise made at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She cursed in Spanish and I responded in the same language, only with greater venom.

  I pulled back, bridled my outrage the best I could, let her win the verbal war. We didn’t need that volcano to explode, didn’t need to get trapped in an avalanche of rage.

  “Dmytryk, we can’t keep living like this.”

  I nodded, then I waited. She was my wife and I knew her words, I knew that look in her eyes. This conversation was going somewhere, down a treacherous road she had already paved, but I just didn’t know where that road went. Everything inside me went numb.

  I waited for her to bring up the D word.

  She said, “There is no future for us here, because as far as I can see, Detroit has no future.”

  “Detroit has a future.”

  She reminded me that the Silverdome had cost fifty-five million to build but was sold for less than six hundred thousand. The stadium was situated on 127 acres, had been the home of the Detroit Lions, the Detroit Pistons, and the Michigan Panthers, and it had been sold for less than the cost of a one-bedroom flat in New York. It had been sold to a company in Canada.

  She said, “It was practically given away. So, what do you think the rest of the city is worth? They want to shut down neighborhoods because they are already ghost towns.”