There is a ruckus from behind. Every Good Samaritan has two cents to put in. "You have so much to live for!" and "Life is beautiful!"
Their faux concern scratches at her impetus.
Shit, I didn’t have any suicidal inclination until you all showed up and made me think about it.
Then, the voice of authority: "Ma’am, we need you to come down from there."
Rosalee maintains her pose, eyes closed and ears fixed on the faint ripple of the water.
"Ma’am, this is Sergeant Roberts with the Salem Police Department. Whatever the problem is, I am sure we can take care of it. But we need you to come down from there so that we can talk about it." His voice knows no empathy. Just a robot reading a script. She smirks but does not move. There is silence for a short while before he speaks again. "Ma’am, are you aware that there is a fine for bridge jumping in this city?
She laughs. I haven’t jumped yet . . .
He barks more orders. Then, there is talk of jail, and Rosalee realizes that she must escape this place. Jail is jail, and there will be no not jail in this jail. She squats back down on the rail, eyes still closed. But she turns around and climbs down on the wrong side, one misstep away from falling.
"Ma’am, you need to get down; you need to come with us."
She steps sideways, inches back the way she came.
"MA’AM!"
Time slows to a crawl. Rosalee ignores their orders and keeps on. She winds her way around the bridge’s pillars and jumps back onto the bridge. She pumps her arms. Pumps her legs. She is fast, almost too fast for a woman her age. Uniforms huff and puff behind her; too many doughnuts drag on their waists. Rosalee sprints out of the park and halfway through downtown before they catch up with her.
"Let me fucking go! Let me FUCKING go!" She thrashes about. Wriggles like a fish out of water. Swivels on her back like a turtle. One of them drops to tackle her, but she rolls away and uses her elbows as propellers. Propellers that are soon raw and stamp the sidewalk in blood. She launches herself onto two feet. Half-moon stance. Shoulders squared. She pulls back. Takes a swing. There are sirens and flashing lights. Twice as many spectators as there were on the bridge. Plenty of witnesses when Rosalee’s fist connects with the first officer’s Adam’s apple.
All that’s missing is a TV camera.
Years of living on the fringes make for one mean throw. The officer drops to the ground, stunned. He gasps for air. A crowd of dropouts and teenage troublemakers roars. Rosalee is their instant hero. She raises both of her fists in the air and takes off running again.
Her triumph is fleeting. The squad cars swarm from every direction. They reach the intersection at the same time she does. Meanwhile, the police on foot converge from behind. There is nowhere to go. No escape. Still, Rosalee does not give in. It takes six cops and a taser to deliver her to the jail door. All because someone found a way to make her experience of the world NORMAL.
Part Two: Enter the Summer of Gin & Juice
1
It all started out innocently enough. Call it friendship matchmaking: not as horrible as a bad blind date could be but not as awesome as a good one could be either. Georgia, one of the few friends I have kept in touch with since high school, has been talking this girl Julia up to me since I moved back. And while I appreciate that she is offering to introduce me to people and all, I’m a little dumbfounded by her obsession with Jane + Julia = Best Friends Forever. Unsure of what Georgia could possibly think I have in common with her self-described "most gangster friend", I skirt around the issue for as long as I can. But it is not like excuses are even necessary. Who has time to make friends when her aunt insists they drive to Beaverton RIGHT NOW for spicy tofu? Or when she is breaking out in hives from yet another goddamn random somatoform allergy? Or jumping out washroom windows? How could I possibly have time for friends when just a short trip to the grocery store could mean ten paranoid phone calls? Oh, and god forbid I date or ever get laid. Surely Rose would think it is her job to brandish the shotgun.
But I finally get a much-needed break when my aunt goes to jail in mid-May on a host of charges for a little skirmish with the Salem Police Department. Of course, she was probably just acting out her latent sadness over the loss of Pretty Bird—something she refused to acknowledge back when Mother delivered the corpse to our door—but somewhere deep inside of me wants to feel at least a little guilt for relishing the time she spends behind bars and out of my hair.
It is a little ironic that my first act of freedom is to get a job, but I need money in order to have a life outside of caretaking, and this little twenty-four seven gig with my aunt is all room and board, no personal incidental fund to speak of. So I beat the pavement and talk to most of the restaurant and bar managers downtown. The bulk of them are not hiring, but I hit just the right note with Jenny, a bubbly blond with a huge ass, at an eclectic place called Heaven & Hell.
"We’ll make room for you," she winks.
Strangely enough, this is also where I meet Julia for the first time. Jenny introduces us on my tour. "This is Julia," she says. "You’ll work with her a lot."
I say "Hi" and give her a little wave, and she responds with a monotone, "Hello." She comes off all business, no smiles. There is definitely an uncomfortable vibe, akin to that awkward first date, and I wonder what Georgia said to her about me in her sales pitch. She looks different from what I expected: shorter, thinner, paler, less gangster. Instead of an Amazon with lips lined in black kohl and a blue bandana flirting out of her back pocket, Julia is my height, a few pounds heavier than me, and pretty normal looking with plain brown hair and soft green eyes.
Our first shift together is that Saturday night, an enigmatic make-the-rent type of night. The kind of night with cash to be made so long as the drinks flow quickly and the service comes with a coy smile and a swivel of the hips. By ten, Heaven—the ground floor—is full, and all five of the pool tables in the basement that is Hell are in play. Julia props her elbows up on the bar mat at the well, unconcerned with the puddle of spilled martinis and lagers.
"I’m going to take my fifteen," she says with a smile that is both nervous and earnest. "I’ve got to run home and check on things," she explains. "It’s his first day out, and I heard some girls’ voices in the background."
I look up from the bar’s triple sink mid scrub and catch the bartender's eye. We are both thinking the same thing—no one takes fifteen minute breaks in this industry. There are smoke breaks, seven minutes tops and you pick up glasses on the way to the back to refresh your lip gloss. But no one takes a break and LEAVES the bar. Of course, we cannot stop her; breaks are the law even if they are not standard practice. There is something about the way that she grabs her purse and promises to be right back that makes it perfectly clear she will not return.
Maybe it does not matter. Maybe she did me a favor. Maybe I made more money that night than if I would have if I had to compete with her for tips. Either way, that first impression still left a bad taste in my mouth. Georgia, however, is convinced that given better circumstances, Julia and I will be the best of friends. "It was just a bad situation. There were people in her house that she didn’t know, including females. You would have done the same thing." Georgia wants me to meet her at Julia’s house, but I am really not feeling it. "Cut her some slack," she pleads. "Just come over, have a couple of drinks, hang out. It’ll be fun, and you will like her; I promise!"
Reluctant, I agree, but only because I do not have anything else to do, what with my aunt locked up and the night off of work. Georgia’s directions lead to the back door of a duplex, lit up with a small cluster of blue Christmas lights. Past the threshold, it feels like walking into an indie film from the seventies. Blue light filters through the room, an eerie indigo to camouflage the inevitable drama lurking below the surface. All of the clear incandescent bulbs have been replaced with blue ones, and candles burn at the bottom of oversized cobalt vases.
Georgia is a flamboyant redhead with two canta
loupes on her chest and officious cheekbones flushed to match the fire of her hair. She introduces me to Julia knowing we have already met under less auspicious circumstances. Julia chuckles at the introduction, a nervous laugh that does not bother to hide its lack of confidence. No one introduces either of the two men there, but one of them must be Daemon, Julia’s lover and reason for walking out on her job at Heaven & Hell.
I sit between Georgia and Julia at an oversized secondhand table that blocks the door from opening all of the way and sprawls from the eat-in kitchen into the living room. It is a real table, sturdy, from a time before the marts took over the world. There are a few moments of silent discomfort before Julia jumps up and, grabbing a glass from a cupboard, offers me a drink. "Sure, what do you have?"
"Alize. You want ice?"
"Yes, please." Alize is like drinking Kool-Aid spiked with cough syrup. The first sip of fluorescent blue slides down my tongue slow, overpowering my taste buds the whole way. It is painfully sweet, like too much candy on Easter morning, and my attempt to buck up and suck it down is in vain. So I wait for the ice to melt and tame the sweetness, wishing I had some vodka instead.
The two men join us at the table. We still have not been introduced and neither has yet to show any affection towards Julia, so I can only deduce that the thuggish one with braids and a tidy scar on his forehead who sits down next to her must be Daemon. The other one is a little too khaki and oxfords, and probably too light skinned, for her taste. He looks young, too—not THAT young but too young to be her man. Daemon pulls a quarter ounce of bud from a blue velvet box on the table. Julia hands him a Black & Mild from the kitchen drawer, which he cuts open and empties into a nearby trash can. (It is blue too.) Next, he tears the bud into teeny tiny pieces until the wrapper is full and rolls it back up. He hands it to me to light, and I feel a little honored. With quick, shallow puffs, the cherry starts, and I pass it to my left at their insistence. Left is the Crip side, they say. Julia takes a shallow hit which sends her into a fit of coughs. Daemon rolled the blunt but he does not smoke. Julia passes it past him to his unnamed friend who in turn passes it to Georgia.
Georgia is a goofy girl, her big freckled face a canvas for all sorts of theatrical moods. She tends to be an unpredictable bitch: your best friend forever one minute, she hates your guts the next. I suspect that her real motive for this matchmaking attempt is more sinister than she lets on. Is she trying to dump this girl on me so that she can be free to explore new friendships? And if so, what is the major flaw that has spurred such an action? Is this girl Julia terribly clingy? Smothering? Possessive and jealous? Or is it the other way around? Is she dumping me on Julia? Had my constant cancellations and bitch sessions about Aunt Rose made me the dumpee? My thoughts are interrupted by a twangy ditty about a dog that ran away and a wife who is a good-for-nothing cheater as Georgia’s cell pierces the air. She is out the door with nothing more than a sly smile as explanation.
"Booty call!" I yell after her, a lame attempt at a joke in the silent room.
Smoke hangs in the blue air. Indica calm fills the room. The world moves a little slower. Before I know it, the blunt is a roach and Julia wants to go out, so we are piling into her mid-nineties Coupe de’ Ville. Mental fog follows me into the backseat. There are muffled voices; a phrase or two pops out at me—ridiculous things like, "Even if you didn’t fuck her, you would if you got the chance."
Daemon’s friend joins me in the back. His name is Paul, and he is just nineteen, so there is only one place he can get into—a strip club called Lulu’s where Daemon knows the owner. The ride there is a blur. Somewhere downtown, we turn down a short alley and step out of the car, gravel crunching under our feet. Red carpet and a Broadway-style awning stretch out to meet us at the end of the unpaved parking lot. It is what I see at the end of the walkway that grabs hold of my attention and holds it in perplexity. I blink and it is still there. Again. This cannot be real. My mind is mistaken. I pinch myself. Hard. The 1920s A-frame remains. With enough cannabis, even novel situations can seem absolutely and undeniably surreal, but a strip club in a house? A house?!
Imagine this being your childhood home. You come into town to visit your parents at the old folks’ home and take a drive by for nostalgia’s sake. Just to see who has moved in. Maybe they have a kid like you. Maybe he sleeps in your room with the Winnie the Pooh wallpaper and bunk beds. Maybe she plays in your tree house. No, no, none of this. Instead, the silhouette of a naked go-go dancer greets you from the living-room window as you drive by. If you are brave enough to satiate your revolting curiosity and venture inside, you will be greeted at the end of the red carpet by a stocky security guard perched atop a bar stool. He looks to be in his late thirties or early forties. He is well dressed and bald as a cue ball. Once he checks your ID and takes your five dollars, he will let you pass so that you can discover the shiny floor-to-ceiling pole right where you used to watch Sesame Street. Your childhood bedroom is now the champagne room, where private lap dances and god knows what else are given. One thing is the same, however; your mom’s kitchen is still a bar.
The doorman pulls my attention back to the hazy slow motion of reality with a hearty chuckle and bouncing belly as he hops off of his seat. "How you doing, Daemon? I ain’t seen you in a minute . . ." He lets us in without ID checks or cover charges. Inside is an awful, indistinguishable funk: something between piss-stained carpet, cum, and cheap vanilla body spray. Little has been done to remodel the place, to rid it of that house feeling. The ceilings are low, and the bar shelves are no more than the house’s original cupboards with the doors pulled off. The so-called stage is floor level, nothing more than a ten by ten island of linoleum in a sea of crusted indoor/outdoor carpeting. Placid metal chains hang from the ceiling and act as a cage. Behind the chains, a dancer wraps her plus size thigh around the silver pole, and the black light fails to hide the dips and mounds in her skin even as it bathes her eyes and teeth in an awful greenish-yellow glow. The unbalanced lights do no one justice, and the audience looks mostly like a crowd of transfixed zombies.
The dancer’s lounge is curiously close to the stage. Every time the door opens, we get a glimpse of the fish bowl. Two girls sit on an old holey couch. They smoke and drink and gossip. Another girl changes her outfit, her breasts exposed to the entire club when the door swings open. Dancers are in and out to talk to the DJ, get a drink at the bar, and back and forth from private shows. At least one out of every two stops to give Daemon a hug and a kiss on the cheek. Julia rolls her eyes and shakes her head each time but does not say anything. Her tongue will be sore and dented by the end of the night. A girl saunters past us towards the dressing room, a trail of thick white goop smeared down the back of her leg.
"How could she not notice?" Julia gags.
I nod in shared disbelief. When my attention shifts back to the pole, my vision is slow on the uptake. The girl on stage is a blur of youth. With that baby face, she could not be any more than sixteen. In addition to the cellulite, the fucked-up black light also fails to hide her C-section scar. Several depressing scenarios find their way into my stoned imagination, and before long, I have invented a life where she is an incest victim whose progeny is being raised by its grandmother/unknowing stepmother while she gets naked to feed the meth habit that is a vain attempt to mask the pain. My eyes flit and wander about the room in search of something less sad and more comical. In a slow trail of blurred lights, I find her butt naked on a bar stool. A mousy girl with thick round glasses and long brown hair of the plainest sort, she solicits the patrons around her, but none take her up on a private dance. She is thin like a little boy, with nothing more than nipple buds on her chest. I start to feel a little sick as I take a closer look around the club. Not a single girl here looks legal. A blonde dancer emerges from the dressing room for a refill, and I scrutinize the thinness of her lips and hips that suggest she has only recently ventured upon puberty. She catches my glance as she moseys back to where she came from, and her blue
eyes scream of corrupted youth. Mercedes, who has just taken the stage, looks the oldest. She could be eighteen, though she still carries the pudge of a sedentary childhood.
"Here comes the catcher’s mitt," Daemon announces with a loud clap of his hands. I cannot hear him over the grainy sound system, so Julia leans over and repeats his comment.
I wrinkle my brow in confusion, but before they can explain, it practically hits me in the face. Mercedes lifts her right leg and wraps it around the pole, exposing a gaping hole. It looks like a bottomless well, a giant black cavern. Her lips, both the inner and the outer, have the worn appearance of leather. Just like a catcher’s mitt.
That is when it hits me. This is not a real strip club! It is an underground club where the underage victims of incest and genital mutilation grind on guys with mullets and diseased hard-ons! Paranoia takes over, and I am immediately and absolutely convinced that any minute now, a SWAT team is going to bust in and take us all to jail. I spend the next half hour listening for sirens, but the raid never happens. I am both shocked and relieved when we leave of our own accord and not in handcuffs. A few days later on a drive through downtown, I see it: a black silhouette pops out from a window in one of the rare freestanding houses left in the grid. Lulu’s, the sign says. Huh, well ain’t that a bitch.
2
That second time that Julia and I meet, there is some sort of cosmic connection made (in spite of our seemingly mutual standoffishness) and the first link is fused in a circle we know nothing of just yet; a circle that, when fully formed, will have six different stories of origin, all of which are true.
We are a lot alike, Julia and I, and yet seemingly nothing alike at the same time. We both ascribed to the wannabe gangbanger culture of our high school years. But while I like to delude myself with the idea that I have moved onto a more complicated identity, Julia has carefully cultivated her gangsterism. She maintains her relationship with blue and admires all things Crip. And although I may not be into the whole thing anymore, there is something about it that brings out my contrariness. Give me the passion and vibrancy of red any day. That red is the outcast, while the rest of our future group will align over its opposite, is an extra bonus. And this is where it all starts, the case in point of our mutual bid to shape this new universe with our respective values: Julia to exercise her natural leadership and my own rebellion against the very notion of hierarchy to begin with.
Jane. Page 9