My father reported it to Román and Román explained why Ugly was imposing more checks and balances.
‘He says it’s nothing to worry about,’ Papá told us over dinner. ‘This Mongoose guy is just a supervisor to make sure there are no more Milagros-type incidents.’
‘Totally gives me the creeps!’ declared Zulema. ‘At least we never knew when Román was following us around. This other guy, like, sucks at his job.’
I had no opinion. Not on that or anything else. Forming an opinion was too draining. All I had energy for was functioning on autopilot.
Until late one night, while watching infomercials for wonder products all conveniently priced at US$19.99, I knew with absolute certainty that someone’s eyes were on me. Splayed across the couch in my habitual T-shirt, I drew my legs into my chest and straightened up, muting the television. Glancing at the windows to my right and the porch doors to my left, I realized my first classic-crime-victim mistake: I’d left the overhead light on so the glass panes showed nothing but a reflection of my own tense face. I got up and pulled on the cord dangling from the ceiling fan. With a click the living room went black and the porch doors transparent, showing the man standing on the back porch, looking straight in at me.
I clamped a hand over my mouth to stifle … something … although I was too startled to scream.
It was Mongoose, standing with a mango in his hand. He must’ve gotten it from our tree – it was laden; every day was punctuated by the soft thuds of overripe mangoes falling onto the grass, attracting manicous and rats that sent my mother and sister into absolute fits when they scurried across the back porch, claws clinking against the tiles, narrow snouts dripping with mango juice. The irony wasn’t lost on me that now a man named after a large rodent was also on the porch, lightly tossing the mango up and down, eyes fixed intently on the porch doors. Intently on me. I needed to get to the switch so I could turn on the porch lights and make the glass panes opaque to him. But that meant getting up, walking towards the doors, and letting him watch me as I did it.
A long terse moment stretched by in which my brain was too clouded by fear to signal my arms and legs to move and switch that light on or run down the hall and wake my father, or just … do something. It was exactly like when Ugly first appeared in our backyard all those months ago. The shock of the moment simply paralysed me.
Seeing that he’d been spotted, no doubt delighted like every voyeur fervently hoping to get caught, a slow smile twisted Mongoose’s face, showing unevenly spaced milk teeth set into glaringly scarlet gums. A narrow tuft of hair just beneath his lip twitched as he smiled, its pointed tip flickering up towards me like some tiny hairy phallus. And then he raised the mango to his mouth and I saw that he hadn’t picked it from the tree, ripe and whole and sunset-orange. He’d taken it half-rotten from the ground. The skin was speckled black, pocked with gaping fleshy holes, rough-edged where it had been pecked by birds or gnawed by squirrels. He lifted that rotting, filthy fruit to his mouth and sank his tiny square teeth into it. The juice sluiced his chin as he kept the mango against his mouth, sucking obscenely on the soured flesh of it, mouth puckering hard as though pulling on a nipple.
It snapped me out of my momentary paralysis. I ran to hit the switch and illuminated the back porch. I could still see out but he couldn’t see in any more. He hadn’t even moved, was still sucking on the mango, eyes still fixed to the door. I turned away just as he brought his free hand to his crotch.
In the bedroom hallway, I pressed myself against the wall, my body slowly slumping down until I was crouched, panting, skin crawling with what I’d seen, with the way his eyes had felt on me. I wanted to shower immediately, scrub my skin clean.
When I’d gathered myself, I went to my parents’ bedroom, moving quietly to the nightstand to pick up my father’s cell phone.
In my room, I sat at my desk and skimmed Papá’s contact list until I came to Román’s emergency number, hesitating before pressing the call button. Ugly had tapped the line for starters, which I knew thanks to Román, and I didn’t know how Román would even react to me calling him – I’d never done it before, not on this number or any other, to avoid Ugly knowing I had any sort of direct relationship with him, even just in his capacity as blackmail enforcer. But my father had enough on his plate without me filling him in on Mongoose’s stunt, and I had to do something – there was a man sucking lasciviously on rotten fruit while stroking himself on my back porch. I couldn’t exactly tuck myself in and sail to sleep knowing he was out there.
Román picked up after one ring.
‘Yes, Hector?’ You’d have thought it was nine a.m. on a Monday from the alert clarity of his voice.
‘I’m calling to report a problem with Mongoose.’ I kept my tone formal and dry.
A pause. I’d thrown him.
‘Who is this?’ Smart.
‘Yola.’ I hesitated, adding, ‘Yola Palacios’ for more credibility in case Ugly listened in.
‘What’s the problem, Yola?’
I told him what had happened like I was making a complaint to a cable technician, with no familiarity whatsoever. When I was finished, Román was silent for a long moment.
‘Thank you for the report,’ he said finally. Though his tone was curt, his voice was gruffer than usual.
I deleted the call from Papá’s call log and returned the cell to his nightstand, already knowing I wouldn’t tell my parents anything about what had happened. I had to spare them feeling the way I did at that moment.
As soon as I got back into bed, prepared to spend the night awake, listening for any sounds of forced entry into the house or heavy breathing or juice being greedily slurped from a mango outside my window, my phone rang. Private number.
Román didn’t give me a chance to say hello. ‘He’ll be dealt with, Yola.’
I wanted to cry with how badly I wished he were there with me right then, shame-faced as I was for feeling that way because you’re not supposed to be that patriarchy-constructed, twenty-inch-waisted, flailing Disney Princess needing to be rescued by her prince, but goddamn did I want him there all the same, beating up mango-slurping baddies and keeping me safe.
‘It was scary,’ I said, because I couldn’t bring myself to say what I really wanted to: I’m scared. I’m shit scared and I want you to come over immediately and kill that pervert lurking outside my house.
‘I promise he’ll be fucking dealt with.’
The following day, I’d find myself shaking off a shiver whenever my mind skipped back to the moment I saw Mongoose watching me, like when you see a spider and swear you can feel the tips of its eight legs creeping over your skin for ages afterward. And the following night, I couldn’t help getting up out of bed every hour to peek between the louvres. But no matter how many times I felt as though he were there staring at me with a fruit pressed up into his inflamed red gums, he never was.
None of us would ever see Mongoose again.
A couple days after the incident, illegals were dropped at our house. I let them in, set them up, and when I went back to my bedroom, Román was there. Oddly, I wasn’t startled to see him – after our conversation over Mongoose, some intuition had told me to expect him. Just as, by that same intuition, I knew exactly what would happen when we saw each other.
He was sitting at the edge of the bed and was on his feet as soon as I shut the door. Without hesitating we crossed the room, meeting in the middle, mouths colliding, the two of us stumbling towards the wall until my back was pressed up against it, legs hoisted up around his waist.
He had to hold me up afterwards, my knees were trembling that badly.
‘I thought we couldn’t see each other,’ I said between breaths.
‘Fuck it. I’d rather be around to make sure you’re safe after what happened with that hijo de puta.’ He pulled back, lowering his gaze to mine. ‘We were careful before. We’ll keep being careful now.’
‘What if Mongoose sees us?’
‘He’s no l
onger an issue.’
‘Román, what did you—’
He brought a guava-jam-sweetened finger to my lips. ‘I said he’s no longer an issue.’
I pulled his finger into my mouth, tasted its sweetness. Tasted all the sweetness of him.
STRIP-CLUB STREET CRED
In a stroke of genuine irony, our strip-club servitude at The Pink Pie began on August 1st, the day of the Emancipation Day holiday in commemoration of the abolition of slavery. On the grand albeit secret opening night, my father drove me, Zulema and Mamá to the club for seven o’clock sharp, as instructed. On a quiet side street off Trinidad’s bustling equivalent of the Vegas Strip, Ariapita Avenue, we pulled over at a quaint gingerbread-style house with delicate fretwork, a spired roof, and jalousie windows. In the well-tended front garden, a sign read ‘The Grosvenor Square Freemasons’ Executive Lodge’ in swirly gold letters. There was absolutely nothing – not a decibel of music, not a glimmer of a red light – to hint that it was really an illicit strip club. Even the private parking lot at the side of the house, with a guard booth and a gate bearing the same gold-lettered sign, looked completely legit. Seeing the club’s innocuous façade, my nervousness waned. Even Papá seemed less tense when he saw it wasn’t some dingy hole-in-the-wall with clients masturbating in the window and dead-eyed strippers tying off their veins on the front steps before their shifts.
‘Suerte, ladies.’ He kissed my mother goodbye in the front seat, craned his neck around to give Zulema and me a smile of encouragement. ‘Remember, if there’s anything that makes you uncomfortable, do not do it. Don’t let anyone force you into anything you don’t want to do.’
Mamá rubbed the back of his neck. ‘Everything’s going to be fine. You heard Román. It’s just normal work.’
I was impressed at how together she was. I’d expected her to be pounding at her chest and gnashing her teeth at the degradation of working in a strip club, but I guess she was also so relieved by the club’s charming exterior that she could almost convince herself she was heading to work at an elegant little patisserie.
Zulema, Mamá and I walked up a path lined with pink periwinkles, leading us to a covered verandah furnished with dainty wrought-iron tables and wicker chairs. You could just picture a little old biddy sitting there sipping her tea and eating her crumpets if it weren’t for the whirring security cameras following us eagle-eyed from above the heavy wooden front door.
With a courageous flourish of her freshly blow-dried, extra-bouncy hair, Mamá marched up to the door and knocked. It swung open almost instantaneously. A brick wall of a man stood in the doorway, dressed in a sharply tailored suit. He didn’t say a word, just motioned for us to enter like one of those Frankenstein-type butlers from old horror movies.
Inside, I looked around at the high ceilings, the sleek recessive lighting, the chandelier, the leather couches, a glass coffee table with magazines arranged in fan-like displays. I’d expected lamps draped with red silk, naked women splayed on velvet chaise-longues, Japanese businessmen smoking opium while fondling themselves. Instead I felt like I’d just walked into the lobby of a posh attorney’s office.
The mute doorman pointed us to a tall receptionist’s desk made of well-oiled oak at the far end of the room, where a woman in a snug skirt suit was beaming at us. We walked across the room to the desk, our heels echoing on the hardwood. The woman was a petite little thing of indiscernible race, with voluminous curls and a face full of make-up. She had the distinct look of an air hostess.
‘Welcome, welcome!’ Her once-over was so subtle and swift I almost missed it. ‘You must be the rest of the Palacios! Sancho and the other girls just arrived, too. Though, remember, you’re meant to get dropped at the side of the building next time. There’s a fire exit back there for staff.’ She climbed down from her tall leather stool and walked out from behind the desk. ‘I’m Breanna.’
We shook hands, introduced ourselves. Breanna had a helluva grip on her. That grip said she was not to be fucked with and she wanted us to know it.
After introductions, Breanna led us deeper into the house. It was infinitely bigger than it appeared from the outside. We followed her small, wiggling behind down a short flight of stairs, then along a narrow passageway that led at last to an enormous door that stretched all the way up to the ceiling. Above the door there was a security camera, and next to it, a security pad. Her back shielding the pad, Breanna entered a code and we heard a latch unclick. She pushed open the immense door with some effort and we followed her into another reception area, except this one did look like what I’d expect of a strip club. The floors were carpeted in black and the walls were painted hot pink, trimmed with gilded crown moulding. Hanging from every wall surface were gold-framed photos of bizarre erotica: buxom women mummified in clingwrap, gimps choking on ball-gags, naked nymphs lying spread-eagled, a close-up of a bright pink tongue licking a dirty grey pavement, a topless girl in a Stetson riding a cow while three large-breasted women lay on their backs squirting milk into their mouths from the cow’s swollen udder.
There was a receptionist desk as well, with a desktop computer, a phone, and a cash register, but it was unmanned. In the wall to the right of the desk, there was an open doorway, blocked only by heavy, pink velvet drapes. On either side of this curtained doorway stood two huge juiced-up men like the one who’d let us in. They were also wearing monkey suits. Muffled music and chatter seeped out from behind the drapes, but Breanna led us away from the men and the doorway up a flight of stairs to the left of the receptionist desk. Up we went, pausing on a landing where Breanna pointed out the bathroom for ‘the girls’ and us. Then finally we got to where we were going: the dressing room.
If you’ve never been in the dressing room of a strip club, let me tell you: it’s an experience. It was like someone sprinkled oestrogen into the atom bomb and then dropped it right onto that sweet old colonial house. The dressing room was an absolute explosion of girly everything. Underneath wall-to-wall mirrors framed by rows of blazing light bulbs, a long countertop wrapped all the way around the room’s perimeter, its entire surface covered in spilled powders, creams, self-tanner, bronzing wipes, false lashes, tampons, eyelash curlers, vaginal wipes, washes, douches, perfumes, mouthwash – every single product ever manufactured for the enhancement of a woman. The floor was just as disastrous, scattered with balled-up lingerie, crumpled costumes, thigh-high boots lying flaccid, and garish pink and animal-print suitcases splayed open full of still more products.
Then of course, there were the strippers.
Some were in panties, some just in bras, but most were completely buck naked. It was the most surreal thing I’d ever seen – even more than Aunt Milagros in military mode. Tits and ass everywhere. Anywhere you turned there was a differently sized and coloured nipple. Vaginas abounded, and I never knew until that moment how rich God’s vagina tapestry truly was. You think of one generic vagina when you think of the female form: the neat Barbie-doll puss, hairless, compact, everything tucked away. I’d just so happened to have that puss myself, so I thought everyone else did too.
Wrong!
There was all kinds of action going on below the belt that I had no clue about. The only thing uniform about all those vaginas was the hairlessness. No one had so much as a landing strip. I wondered if Mamá was seeing the same business potential I was – did she realize she was standing knee-deep in prospective waxing clients?
But my mother wasn’t even scoping out the room. She was listening to Breanna who was telling her that she was going to be the ‘House Ma’am’.
‘What is that?’ Mamá was asking when I tuned in.
‘You see that table over there?’ Breanna pointed to a far corner of the room. There was indeed a table there, and behind it on the wall, a shelf stacked with beauty products. ‘There should be everything there that you need to take care of the girls. Your job as House Ma’am is to make sure everyone meets Mr Ugly’s standards – nails and hair should always be done, everything
should be hair-free, and if any of the girls looks a little pasty, there’s a spray-tan machine there too. You know how to give a spray tan, right?’
‘Um.’ Mamá looked bewildered.
‘We’ll figure it out,’ I said, knowing my mother must’ve been completely overwhelmed. She was looking around the room like she’d just been plopped into the aftermath of Chernobyl. I could see in her face that she had not been mentally prepared to ever witness so much nudity at one time.
Breanna, on the other hand, was clearly a hardened veteran of the strip club biz. Unfazed, she put her hand on the small of Mamá’s back and guided her through the maelstrom of naked women, open suitcases and scattered stripper heels, to the table which was to be Mamá’s, the House Ma’am’s, new post. My mother sat at the table, still looking lost, while Breanna pointed out a few other things, opened up drawers to show her what went where, and so on. Then she left Mamá to it and skipped back through the bedlam to Zulema and me.
‘Right,’ she said, chipper as a cheerleader, ‘you two are going to come with me to the manager’s office to get your uniforms!’
‘Who’s the manager?’ asked Zulema. ‘Ugly?’
Breanna covered her mouth daintily to laugh. ‘No, no. Mr Ugly has too much on his plate for that. The manager is Gordy Griffin. We all call him the Captain – well, he asks us to, anyway.’
We left my mother unsupervised with the strippers and followed Breanna up still more stairs to the manager’s office. It was your standard office, with filing cabinets, a flat screen monitor showing all the security feeds, and a large metal desk with a computer. I even spied a fancy coffee machine, and there was a printer going in the corner, adding to the officey feel. Seated at the desk, leaning right up to the computer screen and squinting hard at an Excel spreadsheet, was the guy I rightly guessed to be the manager. As he noticed us, he jumped up from his chair. Though he was good-looking and built enough to be a Magic Mike extra, with chiselled features and a pristinely groomed, right-on-trend beard, I took one look at his shiny metallic suit and decided he was a cock. He came bounding forward, showing aggressively white teeth, and vigorously shook our hands as we introduced ourselves.
One Year of Ugly Page 21