Only two years earlier, a twenty-two year old dancer had been strangled after leaving work at a club only a few miles down the highway in North Miami. She’d been stuffed in a box and dumped in the Everglades and when they finally caught the scumbag who did it he said she was a whore who’d willingly left with him for five hundred bucks and they’d been having some rough sex that got out of hand. He confessed that he trashed her body in the swamp in hopes that the alligators would “take care of it.” It. He called her an it. Her name was Jeanette Smith. Later it turned out that the murderer, who had been a regular at that club, had been charged with stalking another dancer three years earlier.
There were probably hundreds of stories like that. Everyone in the club world claimed to know somebody who knew somebody who worked with a girl who’d left with a customer and never returned. Many of them were urban legends – stories long ago based in reality but embellished and altered over the years to sound more terrifying. Back when I was a kid, similar stories would circulate through the middle school cliques. We’d scare the hell out of ourselves at slumber parties hearing about how someone’s cousin had supposedly been approached by a man in a black van wearing a clown costume and handing out candy to lure unsuspecting children, whom he would then molest, decapitate and broil for dinner.
The yarns spun around the club were pretty similar, except take out the part about the clown suit and substitute dancers for kids. The stories we shrieked at as tweens and the ones we gasped over backstage at the Bubblegum Kittikat actually served the same purpose. Urban Legends are cautionary tales warning us not to make the same mistake as that other poor girl who ended up in a shallow grave with a butcher knife shoved in her vagina and her nipples sheared off all because she got too friendly with a customer who ended up being an escaped mental patient. Who had a hook for a hand of course, because no good urban legend is complete without a hook handed someone up to no good. Don’t take candy from clowns in vans. Never trust someone with a hook for a hand. Don’t leave with customers. These were important lessons, so why did I think the rules didn’t apply to me or to this situation that night?
Because the guy with the silver eyes looked normal. Because I wasn’t a stripper and because all the stories about escaped mental patients involved them killing strippers and not door girls. Because it was me and what were the odds? Come on, but mainly I left with him because I wanted my life to conform to the script of a romantic comedy instead of a B-movie horror and because I was lonely and unimaginably stupid.
It was about seven-thirty in the evening by then and had just started raining. I dodged the drops and ducked into my car, waving at the parking lot attendants who wished me a good night and went back to waving their flashlights. It was getting dark fast and I was hungry for dinner. Maybe I’d suggest that little Caribbean place with the spicy conch fritters that I’d recently discovered, though in all honesty, I didn’t really expect the guy with the silver eyes to actually be waiting for me by the Holiday Inn. My gut told me to pull out and turn right, towards home, and just forget about him because I’d only be disappointed when I saw that he wasn’t there, but my heart said to turn left and to take a chance on love. Follow your heart, I told myself.
Hearts are always saying dumb shit like that. Follow your heart is some of the worst advice imaginable and it’s always coming from the same people spewing about everything happening for a reason. I know, because as I turned right, giddy with heart following anticipation, I was explaining to myself that, yes, my God it was obvious now, everything DID happen for a reason! Evan cheated on me and sued me so I’d have to move to South Florida and live with my parents and work at a strip club all so I could be in the right place at the right time to meet my soul mate. Of course that was it and now it was finally obvious. There really was a reason for all the crap I’d been through in the past year and here was the proof. The guy with the silver eyes really was waiting for me by the Holiday Inn and what a cynical pessimist I was to doubt he’d be there.
“I’m so sorry I left you standing in the rain,” I said, “Took me a few minutes to get out of there.”
He emerged from under the eaves of the hotel. He’d taken shelter around the side of the building that faced the Bubblegum Kittikat’s valet lot and had been leaning against the door to Room 106.
“Hmm,” he said and when he’d snapped himself in to the passenger’s seat, he turned to look out the window.
“So, um, I’m pretty hungry,” I ventured, hoping he’d take the bait and ask me to dinner, which he didn’t and I couldn’t stand the awkward silence that followed.
There’s only one thing to do when faced with an awkward silence and that’s to start talking. Say anything to make that silence go away. Whatever comes to mind and the first thing that came to my mind was surprisingly practical. I had no idea where to drive, so I asked him where I ought to be headed.
“Towards Pompano. Off of Powerline,” he said.
“Is that where you live?” I asked, because that was a weird, industrial area.
“Palmetto Bay,” he said.
“Palmetto Bay? Isn’t that all old people?” I asked.
He nodded, still looking out the window and told me to make a U-turn, which I did at the next stoplight.
“I work there.”
“I thought I was taking you home,” I said, getting confused.
“You are. I live there too.”
“How old are you again?”
He said he was twenty-eight and I told him I needed a little more detail.
“I’m the maintenance man. I get free housing.”
I didn’t get it. He wasn’t dressed like a maintenance man. His professional attire suggested to me that he’d come to the club straight from work, which was pretty common for dayshift customers, but perhaps I held unfair stereotypes of maintenance guys, likely reinforced by growing up watching Schneider permanently buckled into his tool belt on One Day at a Time. I figured maintenance men lived in navy blue jump suits and work boots.
“Ohhh,” I acted as if everything suddenly made sense, although it didn’t and I was actually even more confused, because dammit, the guy wouldn’t make eye contact and it was starting to freak me out.
“Hey, you know, I never caught your name. I’m Victoria,” I said, trying to lighten to mood a little. I forced a big smile.
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“Your name.”
“How?”
“I overheard one of the waitresses talking about the hostess and she said your name.”
It must have been Patty, that fucking bitch. I groaned.
“Older lady right? With the big ass? Yeah she’s got a little jealousy issue.”
“She said you weren’t very smart,” he replied and finally, he faced me.
By now the rain was really coming down. I switched the wipers on full speed but the rubber strip tore off of one, got caught under it and caused the wiper to skid and drag across the windshield making a horrendous ripping squeak. Every time the wipers tried to swish back and forth the rubber strip would get stuck and the bare wiper blade against the glass would sound like someone was dismembering a live rat. I tried to ignore it.
“I’m plenty smart,” I argued.
He raised his eyebrows and half smirked.
“Oh really? You weren’t smart enough to know not to talk to strangers.”
I am terrified of flying. I hate airplanes and every time I get on one I feel ok as long as the plane is on the ground because when the plane is on the ground you can still back out. It’s not a good idea to make the plane turn around and go back to the gate because you’re having a panic attack, but technically, you can still disembark. All that changes when you lift off. I begin to sweat. That’s when my throat tightens and I get nauseous. Every weird sound the plane makes convinces me that we’re going down and to try to calm my heart I’ll look around to see if the flight attendants look concerned because airplanes are foreign territory for
me. I don’t know a damned thing about them, but the flight attendants do this every day so they’d know if something didn’t sound right and their calm expressions serve to regulate my panic meter.
Driving this guy, who still hadn’t told me his name, and who clearly had a problem with something as simple as eye contact, was giving me the exact same feeling as being on an ascending plane. The doors were shut, the cabin was pressurized and we were at twenty-thousand feet already. Except, this was a rickety cargo plane. There were no smiling flight attendants in lipstick and neck scarves to reassure me that those noises were perfectly normal and that in a minute they’d come around with the drink cart and offer me a ginger ale. There was nobody but me and the pilot on this plane and the pilot may as well have been John Wayne Gacy wearing his clown suit. There was no way off of this plane.
What the fuck was wrong with me? Maybe I had finally, officially gone nuts because I knew better than this and a few months ago I would never have considered half of the things I had done in just the last few weeks. Pose naked? Show my coworkers my tits? Attempt to strip? Leave work with a customer? Who had I become? At first working at the Kittikat had provided me some harmless fun and diversion. Teasing my hair and painting myself up, even wearing leather pants, had all been in good fun, but somewhere along the way I’d crossed a line and the things I was doing could have permanent consequences. You can wash your hair and scrub your face but other things you can’t undo, like X-rated photos or getting yourself raped. Killed even.
The events of the past year had culminated in this. I was driving a total stranger, who at best was socially awkward and a bit off, and at worst was a psychopath, in a rainstorm to a desolate, industrial part of the county with which I was unfamiliar. To top it off the windshield wiper had broken and I had no cell phone.
Having a personal revelation is all well and good, but when you’re stuck in a car with a guy who might kill you, realizing that hey, maybe it was pretty stupid to offer him a ride in the first place, isn’t going to save your life. I wanted my father. I wanted someone to save me, and wasn’t that what I’d wanted all along, all through the mess of the past year? Someone to come along and whisk me away and make it all better? Every time I checked my Jdate messages and every time I went through the elaborate rituals of getting ready for my dates – shopping, shaving, plucking, pruning, even taking pre-emptive Gas-X, to make myself desirable, wasn’t it all because I hoped my own handsome prince would save me from feeling lost and unloved? My ashy hearth was a broken heart and I wanted a man to gather me in his arms and carry me away from my pain towards a happily ever after. Chick-lit, fairy tales and romantic comedies, most recently the aptly named Clueless, brainwashed me into thinking that life would be perfect if I had a makeover and once I had that makeover that I’d finally be a success and escape all of my problems by getting a man to fall in love with me. But you know what? It takes a hell of a lot more to empower yourself than dressing up and knowing how to flip your hair. Nobody was going to come and rescue me from this car but myself.
Good sense had to prevail, though as yet it hadn’t. I couldn’t think of any even remotely clever comeback for my passenger’s disturbing comment regarding my lack of intelligence, so I tried to figure out how to get out of the present situation. I worked on calming myself down by attempting to assess the actual problem. Nothing had really happened. I was driving a very creepy guy and it was raining really hard and I couldn’t see. He hadn’t tried to harm me. Not yet anyway, though it seemed a real possibility, but then I second guessed myself. Maybe I was freaked out from reading about serial killers all day and I was blowing this whole thing out of proportion and perhaps the guy was screwing around with me because he’d seen me reading about the Zodiac and he thought it might be funny to give me a good scare. Or not. Maybe he saw me reading the books and thought I’d make a good victim. The most frightening thing about this was that I had no way of knowing what he was thinking or what was going to happen, so I decided to err on the side of extreme caution. I turned on the radio and tuned in to NPR. I don’t know why. It’s so boring that it’s soothing and listening to public radio makes you look smart. I guess I thought maybe if he noticed me listening to “All Things Considered” that he might be like, oops, she’s not dumb after all. Maybe I had better not stab her in the throat and pose her corpse.
I have always paid very close and serious attention to everything I heard on Oprah and I distinctly remembered two episodes about women who were attacked and how they escaped. On one episode the victim went absolute ape shit on her rapist. I mean she just went psycho crazy and scared him and she even went so far as to pee on him, so I kept that in mind. If this weirdo tried anything I was going ballistic and I was ready to pee wherever I needed to. Hell, I’d even try to muster up a poop if that’s what it took to save my life, although peeing on command was a lot easier.
“I know a shortcut,” my passenger said, “It’s right up here. If you make that next left.”
No way. I wasn’t about to take a shortcut. One of the police experts on the talk show said that sexual predators will always try to take you away to a remote location and if you can prevent that from happening you have a better chance at surviving. Lord knows to what remote location this shortcut led. I was sticking to the main roads that I knew.
“I don’t know that way and I can’t really see so great with this messed up wiper, so I’m going to go the way I already know to get to Palmetto Bay,” I said, trying to sound firm and confident. Axe murderers don’t like to mess with women who are self-assured. Wimps and doormats require significantly less effort to kill.
“Hmm, oh, well the shortcut is much faster and I was thinking you could drop me at my friend’s house instead,” he answered. I thought he seemed to be getting agitated.
“I don’t want to get lost on the way back from a strange neighborhood, so I’d rather take you to Palmetto Bay since that’s where you said you wanted to go in the first place and plus, we’re almost there anyway,” I said.
Palmetto Bay was safe for a number of reasons. The retirement community was isolated. There wasn’t much around it except for warehouses, but its entrance was off a heavily trafficked road nonetheless and more importantly, Palmetto Bay was a gated community. To drop him off, I’d have to stop at a guardhouse with a gate arm and there’d be security on duty to protect me who’d be able to call him out if, in fact, he didn’t really live and work there as I was beginning to suspect.
“No,” he said, “I want you to turn left up here and drop me at my friend’s house.”
His voice lacked emotion. His speech was flat and monotone. That’s how psychopaths talk. I knew this from watching late night horror flicks on cable. The person who speaks with no emotion always ends up being the killer.
I argued, though I feared it may have been a bad idea. I didn’t want to make him mad. You do not want to piss of a potential sexual predator. Trust me on this.
“I’m sorry. I’m taking you home and that’s that, ok?”
We drove in silence. I was heading west now, and I’d passed the Pompano Beach business district where stoplights blinked on every block and where there were plenty of well-lit parking lots and fast food drive-thrus to pull into in an emergency. I could’ve kicked myself. Why didn’t I just stop at that McDonalds a mile back and boot him out right then and there? I could have used the broken wiper as my excuse. But he knew my name and he knew where I worked. If I made him mad and threw him out, he could find me again. He could stalk me or hide outside some night when I least expected it and follow me home to get revenge.
“Turn there,” he demanded, pointing at a side street I could barely see.
“I’m going up to Powerline. Palmetto Bay is off of Powerline Road. I’ve passed it a million times.”
“No, it’s not, there’s an entrance off of that street and it’s closer. Turn there.”
I felt myself turning the wheel left, drifting into the turn lane. I watched my hand push the t
urn signal down, felt my shoulders drop and my ass slide further down in the seat. He’d intimidated me and I didn’t know why I couldn’t put up a better fight or for that matter any kind of a fight. Why couldn’t I stay resolute? Why did I let men push me around and make me do things that I knew weren’t in my best interest? Why did I linger too long in situations where I knew I was in danger of getting hurt?
“Look,” I started, “I don’t know about this.”
“I told you. It’s closer. This is the back way. Why do women have to argue with everything?”
I knew it. He hated women. Big surprise there.
He’d made me turn down a one lane road so narrow it was practically an alley. Warehouses, devoid of people and unlit, loomed on both sides of the street. A rusty metal barrel leaned against a stop sign post that was bent at a sharp angle, probably from being rammed with a truck. Rain filled the potholes and a thin feral cat skittered across the pavement and under an overflowing dumpster while lightning tore across the black sky, illuminating long, jagged arteries of electricity across the clouds. I drove past a storage facility – one of those places where people rent a garage to stash their junk. I’d read news stories. They’d found bodies in those things before. That’s probably why this freak had me drive all the way out here, I thought. He was going to break my neck, do God knows with my lifeless corpse and then stuff me in a public storage. This was like something out of Silence of the Lambs. It kind of figured, didn’t it, that I couldn’t just get old and die in my sleep, happy and senile. I’d have to go out at the hands of a maniac I met in a strip club and then I’d become the hapless victim in the urban legends. Once there was this door girl…
“Stop up here,” he said.
“I’m not stopping in the middle of nowhere,” I said.
My passenger gave a little huff of frustration.
“The back entrance is up here. Don’t be ridiculous,” he pointed up to the right.
Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Page 37