“But?”
“But she’s trouble.”
“Funny. She said that about me. About Scott.”
“Scott wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t come with baggage like Dania does. You dig?”
Steven cringes. If only D.Wash knew about the baggage that Scotty had been carrying around the past decade. People met him and thought that he had been a free spirit his entire life. But that side of him went into overdrive after the accident. Scotty had moved around as much as he did because staying in one place too long made him have to think about the rest of his life. He was no good at that, so he kept moving.
“Like I said, I don’t judge you. I don’t care about her history with your brother. There’s definitely an allure to being with her. Something exciting.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s cool,” D.Wash says. “Just be careful, is all. I’m just looking out for you. I like Dania. Everyone does. But she’s got a lot of shit she’s dealing with, for obvious reasons.”
“Well, yeah,” Steven says, “she’s got that asshole manager, for one thing.”
“You’ve met him.”
“Yeah, that’s ‘Nez.’ That’s where Scotty is.”
“What?”
“Her manager. We kind of got into it the other night. I poured Scotty’s remains all over him. Down his throat.”
“What the hell?” D.Wash says loudly enough that the Aussies at the bar stop singing. “Why would you go and be crazy like that, boy?”
Steven laughs. “It seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
“How do you figure?”
“He said the wrong thing at the wrong time.”
“And so you—”
“—Shoved Scott’s remains down his throat, yeah.”
“And the big guy he’s always got with him?”
“The bigger they are . . .”
“God DAMN,” D.Wash says. “You are a crazy son of a bitch. You’re lucky to be alive after pulling shit like that.”
“That’s what Dania said.”
“She knows what she’s talking about,” D.Wash says. “She belongs to him.”
Steven takes a sip of his beer and grimaces. “That’s pretty much what she said. What the hell does that mean?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“She’s owes him a lot of money, man,” D.Wash says. “He’s not just her manager. He’s practically her pimp.”
“She doesn’t like that—”
“I’m sure she doesn’t. And I know she just sings. But that manager guy—”
“Nez.”
“—Nez tells her what to do, and she does it. She doesn’t have a choice. I get what you did and why you did it. But that shit didn’t change anything, man. She still owes him. It’s real loan shark shit, you dig? Guy might as well be mafia here.”
Steven takes a sip of his beer and looks down at his fingernails. He could use a good manicure. “Fifteen grand? You think that’s about what Dania owes him?”
D.Wash shakes his head. “Way more.”
“Jesus.”
“You got that right. Look, man, enjoy what you had and call it a crazy time in your life. But walk away from it. Okay?”
Steven feels that the empty cardboard box back at the hotel is laughing at him. He should have known that, sooner or later, trying to pretend he could be like Scotty was going to backfire. He should have known it was a bad idea. For the first time in his life, he acted on impulse, and all because of a woman. And, just like he feared, none of it seems to have been a good idea.
“I think Scotty was trying to be her manager,” he says. “I think he was investing money in her singing.”
“Maybe. But that Nez guy ain’t about to take a payoff, if that’s what you’re thinking. He doesn’t just want her money. He’s obviously into her. He likes controlling her. He likes owning her.”
“All because she wants to make music. That’s why she’s in debt.”
“Nah, man. She’s paying off doctor bills and medical stuff. Nez took care of that, and now she sings for him. That was the deal. That’s how he likes it. That was always the arrangement. And it’ll be that way for years, if he has anything to say about it.”
“Doctor bills?” Steven asks. “You mean the breast implants?”
“Yeah, sure. All of it. We don’t need to go into details. It’s cool. Look man, she’s a beautiful woman, right? But that cost money. That took a long time. She’s a singer now, but she used to be just another dancer at The Crazy Horse.”
Steven searches his brain and finally remembers where he’s heard that name. It’s the bar he went to with Dania their first night together. When he was drunk and first saw her sing. She took him to the bar with all of the gorgeous dancers. It’s where the bartender recognized her.
“I’ve been there,” Steven says. “With all the dancers and the horny men.”
“If you want to call them that,” D.Wash says.
“Horny men?”
“Dancers.”
“Yeah. Everyone is for sale there, right?”
“You got it. And all of those dancers want to be just like Dania. They’re just waiting for the right guy to come along and front the money. And it costs a shitload of money to look like she does, my friend. You’ll notice none of the dancers there look as good as she does.”
Steven feels uneasy all of a sudden and is now wishing he’d just stayed at the hotel. He notices that the Australians have left, and the bar now seems oddly quiet. The Christmas music continues to play, but no one is singing along.
“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about.” Steven grimaces. “You telling me that Dania used to be a hooker? Like the girls at The Crazy Horse?”
“The girls at the . . .” D.Wash looks at him seriously and shakes his head. He wipes his bald head with his left hand while sipping his beer with the right. “Damn,” he says. “I mean, goddamn.”
“What is it?” Steven asks.
D.Wash puts his beer down and scratches his head one more time. “Part of me wants to know if you’re messing with me. You really don’t know?”
“I’m not messing with you,” Steven says. “I have no idea what the hell is going on. Dania used to be a prostitute?”
“A man,” D.Wash says, and looks Steven dead in the eyes. “Dania used to be a man.”
17
Steven’s hair is hanging in his face. The rain is pouring down on him, causing his bangs to slide down his forehead and into his eyes. He doesn’t care. He just stands there on the sidewalk, in front of The Blue Bayou, letting it pour down on him.
A few minutes ago, he jumped up from his seat, stormed out of the bar, made his way to the street, and just . . .
Just stood there.
He realizes now that he has nowhere to go. He doesn’t even know why he left the bar. It just seemed like he needed to get up and get away. Like he wasn’t supposed to be there. He was supposed to be angry and outraged and offended and had to run. He had to get away from what he had just heard. Something in him felt that he had to escape.
Now he has and realizes that he probably belongs right back in that bar, sitting at that table, listening to D.Wash tell him everything. He needs to hear it.
He needs to hear the truth.
A man in an expensive suit with an enormous umbrella trudges past him on the sidewalk. He looks over at Steven and gives him a look that says “Are you crazy or drunk? Get the hell out of the rain, moron.”
Steven wishes he were drunk. He thinks that might be the exact place he should start now that he’s found out what he has. The shame is that he doesn’t have Scotty’s ashes to drink with him. He only has an empty cardboard box sitting back at the hotel.
It can’t be true, he thinks, and remembers the look on D.Wash’s face when he told him. But he knows that it is true. D.Wash wouldn’t make up something like that, would he? That would be a cruel trick to play on a guy, especially with all t
hat’s gone on in the past few days.
It is true. Steven pushes his soaking wet hair out of his eyes and, still standing in the rain, tries to stand up straight. Tries to stand with a little dignity, even while he just lets the rain pour all over him.
It starts to all add up and make sense. How secretive Dania always was about parts of her life. How she managed to never really answer any questions. How she always seemed to just get more mysterious, even when he thought he was learning about her. She was giving him clues and hints all along, and he never saw it. She was giving him answers without his even knowing.
Her hands, he thinks to himself, and feels a lump forming in his throat. They’re so strong. I never really stopped and looked at her hands.
He thinks back to the beginning and remembers The Crazy Horse. How the bartender gave her a knowing glance and how the dancers seemed to look her way. It was as if they knew her and envied her. He remembers the way she seemed to pity them and admire them at the same time.
“It takes a lot to look like that,” she said about the dancers. “Most men couldn’t handle them.”
She called me naïve, he remembers. When I said the dancers were beautiful, she called me naïve and sweet.
They were all men. Each of those dancers, in their skimpy clothes with their sexy, long hair. Each one had perfect makeup and a toned, athletic body. They were all men—all of them beautiful—wishing they could be just like Dania. Wishing they could be women.
And Dania is a woman. She has all the right parts. Her plumbing is just what it should be. Every inch of her body that he’s caressed or touched or kissed felt exactly as he expected it would, and everything about them being with each other felt right. There was nothing about it that seemed anything but perfect.
Why didn’t he notice?
“You need to get back in here,” a familiar voice calls from the other side of the rain. D.Wash is standing on the patio of The Blue Bayou. “Just stop standing there like that and get back in here. You hear?”
Steven says nothing. He turns and looks back at D.Wash, standing with his hands over his eyes, shielding his glasses from the rain. D.Wash shakes his head, but he’s not scolding. He looks worried.
“C’mon, now,” D.Wash says. “It’ll be okay. Just come back inside, and we’ll figure all this out, alright?”
Steven pushes his falling hair out of his face again. Like a wet mop, he feels it slap against the top of his head as some raindrops roll down his forehead. His sports jacket is soaked. He can feel the insides of his wingtips starting to get wet. He slowly straightens his back again and walks back into the bar.
Everyone is quiet, and even the Christmas music seems to have been turned down a bit. At the bar, the sexy bartender is pretending not to look at Steven as D.Wash walks over and pats him on the back and hands him a towel. People sitting at the bar stare down into their Tiger beer bottles. Steven looks at his shoes as he takes the towel and puts it over his head.
“Sit down, buddy,” D.Wash says, and escorts Steven back to the table they were already sitting at. Two fresh beers await them, but, alongside them, are two shot glasses full of whiskey. Steven doesn’t say a word, but quickly grabs the nearest shot glass and pours the liquid down his throat. Then he chases it with the beer, which is exactly what he needs. This doesn’t seem like a red wine moment.
“Alright,” D.Wash says, and downs his own whiskey. “Let’s just calm down and figure this out, okay?”
“Figure what out?” Steven says, his throat burning from the booze. “An hour ago, I thought I was falling in love with a beautiful Asian singer I wanted to bring back to Canada. Now I hear that I fell for a transgendered woman who’s an indentured servant to a Singaporean hustler.”
“Sounds about right.” D.Wash awkwardly tries to smile.
“Merry Christmas,” Steven says, and tips back his beer. He finishes the bottle in one, long gulp. Then, like he’s been there all his life, he tosses two fingers in the air toward the bar, just like he’s seen D.Wash do before.
“It’s going to be alright,” D.Wash assures him. “You really shouldn’t beat yourself up over this.”
“Really? How do you figure?”
“Oh, man, you’re not the first one to fall for her. I told you that, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“I just thought you knew.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Steven asks. “Back when we met?”
“Truthfully, buddy, it wasn’t any of your business then.” D.Wash wipes some rain off his bald head with his palm and then wipes his hand on his pants. “You were just here to get your brother and leave. It wasn’t my place to tell you Scotty’s business or anything about his girl. How would I have even brought it up, right?”
“Fair enough,” Steven says, and looks for his next shot of whiskey. “Did Scott know?”
“Everyone knows,” D.Wash says.
“And Scott didn’t care?”
D.Wash purses his lips together and sips his beer. He grimaces and looks around, as if he’s not really comfortable talking about this. He leans in a little closer and looks Steven in the eye. “Scott didn’t care,” he says. Then, he sits back in his seat for a second before leaning in toward Steven again. “And neither should you. Not about that.”
Steven just looks at D.Wash with his eyebrows furrowed and his mouth slightly open. D.Wash sighs and finishes off his beer.
“Look, man,” D.Wash says, “some guys find that kind of thing exciting. You dig? Some guys love something so different like that. Being with a woman who’s . . . new. You understand?”
Steven nods.
“Those guys are awful. They’re users. People seeking a thrill or thinking they’re being wild. It’s a fetish or something. Scott wasn’t one of those guys,” D.Wash says matter-of-factly, and sits back in his chair. The bartender walks over with two more shots and two more beers. D.Wash finishes his before Steven gets his hands on his own. “And I don’t think you are, either.”
Some of this surprises Steven, mostly because he saw his brother as being somewhat superficial. Scotty never had a single woman like the last one he was with. He always sought out girls who were different, somehow exotic. He loved women with accents or something unique about them. He sought out women who barely spoke English or had some fascinating background story he could get behind. He once dated a girl with an artificial leg simply because he found it interesting that she walked with a cane. He dated a deaf woman for a few months because he loved the way she communicated without speaking. Anyone who knew Scotty all of his life would have reason to think that Dania was another unique girlfriend in a long list of unique girlfriends.
Or was she truly unique? Steven thinks.
Scotty’s track record with women was long, but his time with each one tended to be brief. Not even “The Fiancées” lasted very long. Scotty got bored and moved on pretty quickly, even when it came to the women he professed to have loved with all of his heart. Dania had outlasted them, and he’d been willing to pour money into her and risk his life for her and live his life in this sauna for her. He knew everything about her, from her past to her life dealing with Nez . . . and Scotty stayed.
Yet this secret was obviously the last thing Dania wanted Steven to know.
“I just feel so stupid,” he says at last. “I can’t believe I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t you notice anything different? I mean, she’s a beauty, man. I admit it. But it’s not the same, you know. I mean, it’s different. Didn’t you . . . notice?”
“I don’t know,” Steven says. “Maybe. I guess something seemed different. I just didn’t think about it. I mean, we haven’t . . .”
“Haven’t what?”
“You know.”
“Not at all?”
Steven shakes his head. “Not yet.”
D.Wash raises his eyebrows. “Damn, you really do love this woman, huh?”
Steven doesn’t say anything. He just shrugs his shoulders and takes a sip
of his drink.
D.Wash nods slowly. “But you had to know something wasn’t the same, right?”
Steven feels more embarrassed now than he has since he heard the news. What should he have been looking out for the entire time? Her body was flawless, toned, and tan. Her hair was so beautiful. Her voice sultry and sexy. Her breasts were fake, but he didn’t stop to inspect everything else.
“I wasn’t really thinking about it,” he says, feeling his face getting red. “I mean, how often is that something you even think about?”
“Happens here more than you think.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, there’s a lot of that going on here, you know.”
“I do now.”
“That bar? The Crazy Horse? That’s why some people go there. That’s kinda the point.”
“I never asked. She called me naïve.”
D.Wash smiles softly and puts a hand on Steven’s shoulder. “Not naïve, buddy. Just new here.”
“Yeah.”
“Her family, her parents. She said they rejected her. That she hasn’t spoken with them in years. I thought it was because she was a singer.”
“That, too, but she came back here because she could get by, you know? She could fit in a little better. It’s not an uncommon procedure here like it is in other places.”
“Like London?”
“Like London.”
Steven realizes now that Dania’s family didn’t reject her because she wanted to sing or because her strict parents couldn’t stand the thought of her being an independent woman. In reality, they just couldn’t stand her being a woman at all.
“Don’t beat yourself up, man,” D.Wash says. “She’s not a man, right? Not anymore. She’s a woman. You fell for a woman, like any other woman. Just know that.”
“I do know it.”
“Really.”
Steven takes a good minute to think before he speaks again. There are so many different emotions going through him at this moment, and he’s not sure which ones are genuine and which ones are just coming at him because he has been caught off guard. Every minute he has spent with Dania is in the back of his mind now and—like watching a montage of scenes in a movie—he sees each one just as vividly as when he was experiencing them. He’s been with this woman for almost twenty-four hours per day for several days, by her side most days and every night. And yet, at this moment, he can’t decide what makes him angry or sad or just confused. Worst of all, he can’t decide how much of a right he has to feel any—or all—of those things.
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