Better With You Here (9781609417819)

by Zepeda, Gwendolyn

  No, I wasn’t dancing. I was only waiting tables. I wouldn’t have danced at Neno’s if you paid me a million dollars. Why? Well, first of all, every dancer there is either a crackhead or someone too old or messed-up-looking to get a job dancing somewhere else. Second, the tips suck, and they have to totally embarrass themselves to get them. Like, a guy holds up a dollar and the chick has to crawl all over the floor in front of him like she’s a dog begging for a bone. I got more tip money from shooting the shit with the customers, making them laugh and stuff. I got free tequila shots, too.

  How did I like it? I didn’t. It sucked. But it was better money than I could get working at a cafeteria or cleaning bathrooms at the bus station. Better than minimum wage. But I hated that place. I hate my cousin Neno. He’s a real bastard.

  Like I said, though, working for him paid better than any other job I could get without my GED.

  You sound just like Natasha. That’s what she said, too: Why don’t I just get my GED? I told her I didn’t have time. When was I going to do that? When I was already working six nights a week at Neno’s? Then I told her the truth: I never got it because I was too embarrassed. I said, “How’s it going to look for some old chick like me to be getting her GED now, after all this time?”

  We were sitting at the park by the apartments, watching the kids play on the jungle gym or whatever. I told her that I didn’t want to get my GED when all the other people there would be younger than me and wondering what I was doing there.

  You know what she said to me? She said, “I didn’t think you were the type to care about what other people think.”

  Something like that. Like, she thought I wasn’t afraid of anybody, so why would I be ashamed in front of a bunch of dumb-asses trying to get their GED, just like me?

  No, she didn’t say I was a dumb-ass. But you know what I mean. She was just like, “What are you afraid of?” And I thought about it later. And she was right. I’m not afraid of anybody—I’ll fight anybody that wants to start something with me. But I’m afraid to go back to school.

  After that? We quit talking about it, because that’s when Haley showed up.

  No, I didn’t want to talk about it in front of Haley.

  Right, because I was ashamed. That’s funny.

  No, not really…I just didn’t want to give her the chance to say something annoying to me. You know? I mean, I didn’t want her trying to give me advice. Haley could barely take care of herself, but she liked to give me advice or offer me money. If I’d told her, she would’ve said something like, “How about I drive you to the GED classroom and pay for your classes?”

  No, she never tried to make me feel bad. But that’s always how it came out. Like, she’d be telling me, “If you want, I can buy you a set of Baby Español DVDs, and then your kids can practice Spanish with Jared. If you don’t have a DVD player, I can lend you Jared’s and buy him a new one.” And then, meanwhile, Jared—that’s her kid—would be sitting under the swings eating dirt. Or he’d be getting ready to walk off into the street, and Natasha would have to jump up and chase him. And I’d be like, “Haley, you don’t even know how to run your own life, so quit trying to run mine.”

  No, I never said that to her. But I wanted to.

  I don’t know. Natasha liked her, so I never said anything. I just let Haley run her mouth. You know?

  Why? I don’t know. Maybe because Haley was, like, better than me.

  No, I don’t think she was really better than me. That’s not what I meant. I meant that she was…you know. Classier. Like, her and Natasha could talk about different things, like clothes from expensive stores or books or whatever.

  Why did Haley like Natasha so much? Because Natasha listened to her whining and gave her advice. Like she was the mom and Haley was her kid. That’s how Haley acted sometimes. Like a spoiled-ass teenager.

  But now that all that stuff went down and Haley did what she did? I guess she’s not a kid anymore.

  I don’t know if Natasha’s been talking to her. Maybe. You think she’d talk to Haley but not to me?

  Well, anyway. Here’s the thing about the Cabaret: It sucked, but not because it had strippers. That part never bothered me. What made it bad was how Neno ran it. He treated all the girls like shit, and all the good dancers got out of there as soon as they could.

  It was a little bit better if you were a waitress. None of the bouncers messed with me, since I was Neno’s cousin. And I tried to keep them off the other girls—especially the ones I had trained. But Neno was an asshole, cousin or not. He’d give me the opposite hours from what I wanted, just to be a dick. But then he always had me covering everybody else’s shift.

  Why? I felt like I had to, back then. One, like I said, it was the only job I could get, without having my GED or anything. Two, he was paying me under the table so I could claim unemployment and do food stamps with my mom.

  I know. That’s ghetto as hell.

  No, you didn’t. But you were thinking it. You don’t have to tell me.

  Well, okay, you’re right. I’m the one who feels like it was ghetto. But anyway, back then I felt like there was no way to get out of it. You know?

  And then I met Natasha and Haley.

  Yeah, they knew. I mean, they always knew about Neno’s, that I was a waitress at the Cabaret. I told them that right up front.

  No, that was the thing. It wasn’t that they thought it was cool to work with a bunch of strippers—well, maybe Haley kind of thought it was cool, because she didn’t know any better—but they didn’t look down on me for it. It was like they thought I was there because I wanted to be, because of the money. And they totally believed that I could go get a different job whenever I wanted.

  Yeah, exactly. After a while I started to believe that, too.

  I would look at them and the way they did stuff and think, yeah, I could get a job with better hours, make a little more money, and then I could do more for my kids. Buy them better stuff. Get a better car so I could drive them around to places instead of just sitting around in the apartment all the time, watching TV and being pissed off at life.

  Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about back then. Making a better life for the kids and me. And then that’s when Lisa came in and told me about the new place she’d started working at.

  I was doing a day shift at Neno’s for once. The girls were at school, and Junior was at Geronima’s. The Cabaret was dead as hell for a Wednesday, so I was standing around watching whatever game was on the TV. Neno was out, and his sister was watching things in the office. This girl that used to dance there, Lisa, came in to get her last paycheck and some clothes she’d left behind. She’d had it out with Neno a week or two before and quit. I always liked Lisa. She didn’t do drugs, and she didn’t act stupid. She has a kid Angelica’s age, and me and her used to talk sometimes, when she wasn’t dancing.

  So after Lisa was done talking to Neno’s sister in the office, she came up to me at the bar and asked how it was going. We got to talking, and she said, “I started at a new place last week. Remember Caitlyn?”

  Caitlyn was some chick who used to dance at Neno’s a while back. Neno hated her. He always called her “that dyke bitch” and “that feminazi,” so I definitely remembered Caitlyn. Lisa told me, “She’s at this new place called the Dollhouse. Some lady from Houston came up and started it. It’s not a club. It’s private rooms only.”

  I said, “You mean it’s a whorehouse?”

  But she said, “No! It’s like private dancing. Like VIP only.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but I knew that Lisa wouldn’t turn tricks, so it must have been true. She told me she liked it a lot there, at the Dollhouse place, and that the pay was way better. Then she said, “You should come check it out. I mean, if you were ever thinking about dancing here.”

  See, I never told Lisa that I wouldn’t be caught dead stripping, because she is a stripper, so that would’ve been rude. I always told her I was thinking about it but I wasn’t ready
yet or some shit like that. I kind of made it sound like Neno wouldn’t let me, in a way. Because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. But now I was screwed, because she thought she was doing me a favor by offering me a hookup at this Dollhouse place. I couldn’t just say no. So I said, “Oh, yeah, that’d be cool. Maybe when I get a few days off.”

  She went on and on about how nice it was—how much better it was than Neno’s. She said one of her other friends had visited and was thinking about getting into it, if she could lose enough weight.

  I figured she got some kind of bonus or something for recruiting new chicks into the club. Like a finder’s fee or whatever. So I just told her sure, maybe, and then she left.

  I don’t know what it was that finally made me go over there with Lisa. I was pissed off at Neno. I remember that. And I was…sad about Halloween. I felt bad, you know, about Natasha and Haley having to chip in to make my kids’ costumes. Usually, you know, I’d just put some bandannas on the kids’ heads, say they were hoboes, and hit up a few houses around the apartment buildings. But it’s like if you want to hang out with people who have money, you have to spend money, too. Otherwise they’re always trying to give you their stuff, and it starts to be a drag after a while. You know? I want to hang out with Natasha and Haley because they think I’m cool to hang with or their kids want to play with my kids or whatever. Not because they feel sorry for me and they’re giving me stuff all the time.

  I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I was thinking about, or maybe I was just bored. But I went with Lisa to her job, at the Dollhouse.

  When was this? Good question. Um, maybe back at the beginning of November? Yeah, it was the first Monday, because the girls were back at school after Halloween.

  It’s over by Continental, the Dollhouse. You’d never know, because there’s no sign or anything. It looks like a warehouse or something, with a big steel door. The only thing shady about it is that it’s right behind this store called Erotix, where they sell lingerie and sex toys and stuff. Jackie owns that, too. The buildings are connected at the back. I didn’t know that at first—Lisa and Caitlyn had to show it to me. There’s security cameras all over both places, and you can get out of the Dollhouse and into the Erotix store through the back door, if you need to. If a customer gets out of control or if they get raided by the cops. But that never really happens, they said.

  I don’t know what I was thinking. That it would be like a normal strip club, like the Cabaret, I guess. Or maybe one of those fancy places, like the Treasure Chest down on 45. You know, a normal nightclub but with a few extra rooms where the girls could give private dances. But it wasn’t anything like that. We went in the front door, into the waiting room, and it looked like a clinic, or the welfare office if they were closed down. Nothing but a counter and a couple of chairs. Nothing on the counter but a phone. Nothing on the walls except for the security camera up in the corner.

  There was a guy there, waiting. He saw us come in and jumped out of his chair and was all like, “Hello, ladies.” Then he looked at me and said, “You’re new.”

  Caitlyn told me not to talk to him. She pulled out a key and opened the big metal door behind the counter, and we went through with this guy watching us the whole time, like we were animals at the zoo. And Caitlyn was like, “We should’ve went through Erotix.” And Lisa said she didn’t want to give Jackie a reason to think she was late again.

  They took me down the hall, past all these doors. Lisa told me, “This is our dressing room.” And it was this big room with some couches and chairs in the middle and a bunch of lockers and mirrors on the side. Lockers like in gym class, I mean. And there was another chick sitting on one of the couches, just sitting there in her underwear, reading a book. Lisa and Caitlyn talked to her for a while, and then they introduced me to her, but I didn’t say much, because I was weirded out by the whole situation.

  It wasn’t a club at all. I couldn’t figure out what it was. I waited until the other girl took off and Caitlyn was messing around in one of the lockers, and I told Lisa, “This is a whorehouse, isn’t it? Tell me for real.”

  And she laughed and said, “No. Well, not for me it isn’t. All I do is dance here.” And she said she’d show me the other rooms, where they do the dances.

  And I was like, “Yeah, but where’s your boss?” Because I expected that their boss, Jackie, would be there running everything and telling them what to do. But no, it was just a bunch of chicks hanging out, kicking back on the couches. Relaxing like they didn’t have a care in the world.

  When I first told Lisa I’d go there with her, back when I thought it was like a real club, I figured I’d sit at the bar for a while and maybe have a beer. Or maybe, who knows, I’d meet Jackie and talk to her for a while and see if she wanted to hire any new waitresses. It was funny—I even tried to dress kind of nice, just in case she’d want to hire me on the spot. I would’ve called Neno right then and been like, “Hey, fat-ass, guess who’s not covering third shift tonight.”

  But it was so weird and different from what I expected that I didn’t know what to do.

  The phone rang, and Lisa said, “Caitlyn, it’s for you.” I saw she was looking up at something, and I turned around and saw all these monitors up on the wall behind me. One of them showed the front room, and I could see a guy in a suit standing at the counter holding the phone. The other screens showed other rooms, all of them with a little couch in the middle. Two of them had guys sitting on the couches, and I could see the top of somebody’s head in the front of the picture, like right under where the camera must’ve been. And I figured out that those were the other girls who worked here, and they were dancing.

  Is this boring as hell?

  All right. Just making sure.

  So the guy in the front was calling on the phone, and I guess he was Caitlyn’s customer. And this whole time she was messing around at her locker, changing her clothes and doing stuff to her hair. When I looked at her again, she looked totally different, wearing nothing but a robe and a shitload of makeup. And the shoes—really tall heels, with platforms and everything.

  She picked up the phone and said something I didn’t hear, then waved bye to us and went out the door. Then Lisa went to one of the lockers and pulled out a flask of vodka. She asked if I wanted a sip, and I said okay, to be polite.

  I saw Caitlyn on the cameras. First she went to pick up the guy from the front. Then, after a second, we could see them go into one of the rooms. The guy sat down on the chair. Then I saw Caitlyn’s head moving around. Then I saw her reach out and throw something on him, on his lap. It was her robe. Then I stopped looking.

  I told Lisa, “Hey, that other guy’s still out front.”

  She rolled her eyes and told me, “Yeah, that’s Marcus. The shoe guy.”

  I was like, “That’s him?” Because Lisa had told me about him before, when she came to visit the Cabaret. This guy ran his own computer business. Made a lot of money. He came to the Dollhouse all the time and used to get dances from this chick Donetta. Donetta told the other girls all about him, how he was weird and creepy. He never wanted her to dance or even take off her clothes. All he wanted was stories.

  Yeah, he wanted her to tell him stories, about the two of them. Lisa told me that most of the stories had to be about this guy Marcus being real little and Donetta, the chick, being real big. And she’d always tell him that if he couldn’t behave, she’d stick him in her shoe and smash him.

  Yeah. That’s what I said. Real weird, right? Lisa said none of the other girls wanted to do that with him, ’cause they thought he was a creep. But he kept showing up anyway, just in case somebody changed her mind.

  So that was the guy, standing out there in the front room. And Lisa had told me he was ugly, but now I saw what she was talking about. He was just weird, with googly-eyed glasses and an old-school Jheri curl and a big old butt like a woman’s. And he was black, or maybe mixed. See, that was the thing I didn’t know. He was black, and I’m thinking Donetta wa
s black, too. And I’m thinking no one else would dance for him because of that. You know, because they were all white or Mexican or whatever, and they didn’t like black guys. You know how people act.

  Lisa started messing with me, going, “You could give him a dance if you wanted.”

  And I was like, “Why would I do that?”

  And she said, “Remember when I was telling you about him, you said, ‘Shit, I’ll go tell some fool a story for a hundred dollars.’”

  And I told her I was just kidding.

  Then the phone rang again, and we looked up and Lisa said, “That’s my client.” It was a really old guy. He looked like somebody’s grandpa or something. Lisa asked me if I wanted to go into the room with her and watch her dance.

  I said no, that was okay. I was just gonna sit in the room and chill out. Then I looked around the room and didn’t know what to do. I’d be there all by myself, and those other two chicks were going to finish dancing and come back, and I didn’t want to sit there staring at them.

  So I finally said okay, I’ll go. By then we’d had a couple of sips each from Lisa’s flask. She told me she always liked to get a little tipsy on the job—it made it easier. She picked up the phone and told the guy that she’d be out in a minute, that she needed to get ready for him. When she hung up, she told me they like it when they have to wait. We saw him sit down in one of the chairs, up on the monitor. I saw that Marcus, the shoe guy, was standing there all embarrassed. They wouldn’t look at each other.

  Lisa told me I had to get dressed. Well, to get undressed, really. And I was like, “What? Hell no.” But she said it’d be okay, I could put a robe on and I wouldn’t have to take it off. She said we had to act like I was a new girl getting trained, and it’d be weird if I went in there with my normal clothes on.

  So I took off my jeans and my shirt real fast and let her put me in one of her slinky robes, from her locker. Then she whipped her clothes off real fast and threw on some lingerie thing and a robe on top of that. Then she said we needed makeup. I didn’t want to, but I finally let her put some lipstick and extra eyeliner on me. Then she said we were ready, so we started walking out, but then she looked at my feet and was like, “Hold up. You can’t go out there in those shoes.” I was wearing these black flats. She said I had to wear high heels, like hers. I said too bad, because I didn’t have any. She said I’d have to wear a pair of hers.