by Meta Smith
“Damn. That must have been... interesting.” Dez looked at Ginger in amazement. She had always known that Ginger had a good heart; she’d just been hiding it. She spoke up on it. “I always knew you were a good person, Ginny. You deserve a good man who’s going to treat you right.”
“Yeah, well, I’m glad you thought I was a good person and deserved love, but there were times when I didn’t. But that’s enough about me. We’ve got time for that talk later. I’ll be glad to share any of my experiences with you then. Tell me where you’re at, Desi. Are you wondering if you’re a good person? Are you looking back at how far you’ve come and at what price? Are you wondering if it was all worth it? Do you feel like you’ve sacrificed too much of yourself and now there’s nothing left? Or what’s left–hell, you don’t even know who that person is?” Ginger looked Dez squarely in the eyes.
“Oh my God, Ginny, yes! How do you know?” Dez sniffled and started to tear up. Ginger had read her to a T.
“I was going through the same thing when you came to live with me. Girl, don’t worry. We’re gonna work everything out. Now, let’s relax and eat a little something. I’m starving, aren’t you?” Ginger tossed her arm around Dez’s shoulder.
Dez felt herself relax as the Lexus pulled into the gate of Sparks’s
home. Ginger would help her. They’d have dinner, perhaps some wine if Ginger still indulged, and chat like old times. Dez wondered how much Ginger had heard about the tape and her case against Dan. Dez knew she had to come clean and reveal to Ginger her true age, and she was hoping that Ginger could forgive her for the lies. But since Ginger was “born again,” Dez didn’t anticipate any problems with that. Christianity was based on forgiveness. Sparks had left Dez a note stating that he had to fly to Virginia for a few days on business, but to call him if she got bored and wanted to go out so that he could make arrangements. Dez was glad he was gone; she could reunite with Ginger in peace.
“You finally made it, huh, girlfriend? His crib makes mine look like the projects!” Ginger quipped after settling in and joining Dez on the patio.
Desiree had prepared her signature arroz con pollo and plantains along with black beans. Ginger bowed her head and said grace over the food. Without seeking approval, she held Dez’s hand as she prayed. For once, Dez didn’t mind Ginger’s spirituality. She felt so lost that anything was bound to help.
“I see you can still only cook one meal,” Ginger chided as she lifted her head and prepared to dig into the steaming-hot plate of food.
“I see you’re still a smart-ass,” Dez joked back.
“Well, hey, God made me this way. You got beef, take it up with Him.” “Or her,” Dez replied. They shared a laugh, happy to be with each other again. They ate in relative silence, engaging in minor chitchat now and then. When they were done, Dez cleared the plates and straightened
up the kitchen a little.
“You mean to tell me that with all this big house, Sparks ain’t got no maid? I see why he got you staying here with him, he got you cleaning up!” Ginger laughed as she helped Dez load the dishwasher.
“That’s not why Sparks has me here,” Dez said softly, looking at her feet.
Ginger took Dez by the hand and led her to the kitchen table. “Okay, spill it. I’ve been really patient with you, but you can’t avoid things any longer. Whatever it is that’s bugging you, tell me right now,” Ginger said firmly.
“Okay.” Dez sighed. “You still drink, or no?” Dez asked.
“A little. But if it’s like that, I do believe I’ll take a glass of champagne,” Ginger remarked. Dez extracted a chilled bottle of Veuve Clicquot from the refrigerator, popped the cork, and poured them both a crystal flute of the bubbly liquid.
“Okay, first things first,” Ginger said. “How did all of this happen?
The last time we spoke, you’d moved in with Dan. Then you fell off and I didn’t hear from you. Then all of a sudden you’re a big star and I see you everywhere! So did Dan help you like he said he would?”
“Fuck no! Dan was a big waste of time. I spent all my time writing lyrics, only for Dan to brush them aside, and when I finally did get into the studio, all I did was sing the bullshit chorus with a bunch of other females. My parts usually consisted of me screaming shit like ‘Do it to me doggy- style’ or ‘You like the way I shake my ass? I know you wanna spank that ass.’ Straight garbage. It didn’t take me long to realize that even if Dan put me on, I wasn’t going to go lead, let alone platinum. But the way I saw it, I would milk him for everything that I could,” Dez explained. “But Dan put me in my first video. Thank God it kind of bombed. It was so cheesy and embarrassing! Nobody ever mentions seeing me in it anyway, and I don’t put it on my resume. Anyway, he introduced me to my manager. It just blew up overnight from there. My manager got me some better gigs, and pretty soon I realized, hey, I don’t need Dan. So I moved out of Dan’s place and used his money to get my own spot. He didn’t seem to care too much. He probably went out and replaced me that night. But Dan caused me more trouble than you could begin to imagine.”
“Yeah, girl, I can imagine. I’ve known Dan a long time. He’s not a bad
person, but all he really cares about is money. But from what I saw, you were too talented to be hooked up with him anyway. At least it ended on a good note. A fair exchange is no robbery. You all used each other until it just didn’t work anymore. And I’m glad it didn’t work and that all you did was that one cheesy video.”
“Well, not exactly,” Dez said.
“Uh-oh! What does that mean?” Ginger queried suspiciously. “You really haven’t heard?” Dez replied.
“Heard what?”
“I can’t believe you haven’t. It’s been all over the tabloids and gossip shows. Where have you been?” Dez shook her head.
“I don’t buy that crap. And I don’t watch too much TV. The only reason I found out you were rapping was because I read about it in Sister 2 Sister. I read it because they talk about a lot of gospel artists,” Ginger explained.
“Well, I guess Jamie Foster Brown hasn’t gotten around to this yet.
I’m sure she will, though.” Dez frowned.
“Okay, just tell me what it is already. Besides, she seems very fair. I know she’ll get your side of the story. But will I? I mean, dag, Dez, spill it already!” Ginger said, crossing her arms in frustration.
“When I was with Dan, we went to Cancún for Memorial Day. I was kind of high, we partied really hard that weekend, and I let Dan talk me into making a videotape.”
“Oh, who would want to see you and that old motherfu–oops, I mean old man getting it on?” Ginger caught the curse word before it spilled out of her mouth.
“Not that kind of tape. It was a Sinful Strippers tape,” Dez explained. “You mean that bootleg Girls Gone Wild series? Is he still doing that?” “That’s it.”
“Let me guess, the tape has come back to bite you on the butt.” “Well, yeah, but um, you might need another drink on this.” Dez
refilled Ginger’s glass.
“Go ahead,” Ginger said tentatively.
“It was a girl-on-girl tape,” Dez admitted sheepishly. “And somebody let it leak,” Ginger finished.
“Uh-huh. You have no idea just how badly it leaked. This girl Ysenia let Bentley see it on the set of a video. She was jealous because I had beaten her out of the lead role. Then I hooked up with Bentley and got my deal and well, you can put two and two together. She couldn’t stand it because she wanted him and I had him. See, me and Bentley were in love or something like that until he saw the tape. Now he won’t forgive me.” Trouble clouded Dez’s face.
“Dang! Haters don’t stop, do they? But if y’all are meant to be, Bentley will forgive you. You’ve probably got to give him some time. That was a messed-up way for him to hear bout that. But if I found true love, believe me, you will too. I told my man about everything. And he still loves me. If Bentley can’t forgive you, he’s not for you. Because if my man could for
give me, and Christ could forgive the world all our sins, Bentley can forgive you for something you did before you even met him.”
“Well, Ginny, that’s not all. I have a confession to make to you,” Dez said, fiddling with her nails.
“Go ahead,” Ginger said as she sipped her champagne.
“When I made that tape, when I lived with you, I was only sixteen years old.” Dez braced herself for the fallout.
Ginger sputtered and choked on her champagne. “Get the fuck outta here. Excuse me, Lord, but I had a cussword coming to me. Sixteen, Desi?” Ginger stared at Dez in disbelief.
“Yeah,” she admitted.
“I knew it!” Ginger hopped up from the table clapping her hands. “Huh?” Dez was confused.
“I knew there was something. My instincts are rarely wrong. You never looked eighteen, but you were kind of mature, so I ignored my gut. You had a tight vocabulary, you were smart, and so I never really questioned you. But there were times, I can’t explain it, I just knew. You were too naïve, too untainted. That explains it.” Ginger took her seat, gulped the champagne down, and poured herself another glass.
“Are you mad at me?” Dez asked her friend.
“Let’s see... am I mad that I committed several felonies dealing with you? There’s the lewd behavior, the contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and who knows what else? Am I mad? Well...nah. It’s better that you met me instead of Dan or some other guy first. I know I wasn’t the best ‘guardian,’ but you’re a lot better off having lived with me first than some pimp, I’m sure of it.”
Dez breathed a sigh of relief. “You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that. I didn’t know if you’d forgive me for lying.”
“Hold up. You think I’m gonna let you off the hook that easy, you got another thought coming.”
“What do you mean?” Dez felt her heart pounding.
“I need to know how you got to me. I can only imagine. Runaway?” Ginger asked intuitively.
“Yeah,” Dez admitted. She had no idea how many times she was going to have to tell the story of her life. At least it got easier every time.
“I can only imagine what you ran away from. I know you had to be abused or something,” Ginger guessed.
“How did you know that?” Dez looked shocked. Could everyone tell what she had been through? Was she wearing some sign on her head that screamed sexual abuse survivor?
“Desi, I hate to break it to you, but most of us have been. By most of us, I mean women in general. A woman is sexually assaulted every two minutes.”
“Are you serious?” Dez had never heard that statistic before.
“You know I research my stuff. The Justice Department came up with that number. Those are the people who tell. Think about how many don’t tell and suffer in silence. I’ve been doing a lot of volunteer work lately. You’d never guess what goes on in the world. It’s so sad. But dancers especially have high numbers of women who are survivors of rape, incest, you name it. It isn’t caused by the profession as much as we seek that profession because of what has happened to us. We have low self-esteem. We always say that it’s the other way around and that we have to have all this confidence to strip. But we couldn’t have placed very much value
on our bodies if we thought a peek was only worth a ten-spot here, a dub there. We learned from the abuse to disconnect our bodies from ourselves. We used our bodies as a tool to get what we wanted or needed, instead of connecting them as a part of us. We objectified ourselves.”
“You were abused too, right? I kind of remember you hinting at that a long time ago.” Dez wished she’d confided in Ginger ages ago. All this time she had felt so isolated, so alone. She didn’t think that anyone could really understand her pain. She always thought that she had done something wrong.
“Yeah, Dez, me too. When I came over from Haiti, we had to stay at the Krome Detention Center. Our living conditions were shit in Krome. I was a refugee that hardly spoke any English. We were overcrowded, there was never any private space, and not all the refugees that were there with us were good people. A lot of bad shit happened to me.” Ginger looked as if she were in mourning for her childhood. “Things that no little girl should have to endure.”
“But you said you were only five when you came here,” Dez interjected. “Yes, I was.” Ginger silenced Dez with a look that spoke volumes. Age was everything to a pedophile. Dez shuddered at the thought of the horrors that her friend had gone through. Dez understood why Ginger was so tough, but also why she never wanted to be poor, and why she wanted respect so badly. They were the same as her own reasons. She also understood why Ginger had at one time preferred women sexually. Dez could admit to herself that sex with women seemed emotionally and physically safer. Dez and Ginger’s bond of sisterhood, although born of pain, was official. They both wanted the same thing: to not feel like a freak, an outsider. They wanted a sense of normalcy, and both had gone after the common denominator of the people who seemed to have it all:
money.
Dez broke down and told Ginger the story of her mother and father and Ernesto. By the time she finished, they were both in tears.
“How on earth did you get to Miami?” Ginger asked in awe. “You were only a baby!”
“Well, when I was fourteen, I ended up in a girls’ home called Morristown. It was a nice place to live, as far as places like that go, but I was done. I wanted out, and I was gonna get it, no matter what I had to do. I had it all planned out. I’d heard through the grapevine that Mr. Lopez, the neighbor that helped me, had moved to Miami to live with his daughter. He’d offered to adopt me or be my guardian when all that shit went down, but the state wouldn’t allow it because there was no woman
in the house. So that’s where I was headed. I’d decided that they would be my family. Marisol, that’s Mr. Lopez’s daughter, had just had a baby. I thought I could help her out, maybe even live with her. I didn’t know where she lived exactly, but I figured that I would cross that bridge when I got to it. I wasn’t worried about them saying yes because I knew they would never have the heart to send me back to a foster home, if I could just make it there. They would get lawyers and work it all out. I was going to get my GED, then go to college early. Then I’d get a good job and be set to live my life happily ever after. With that goal in mind, I was willing to do whatever I had to do in order to get out of Morristown as soon as possible. “It wasn’t that things were so bad in the foster home. For one, it was
in Mount Vernon, a much nicer neighborhood than where I’d been living. There were homes with grass in the surrounding area instead of wall- to-wall concrete like the Bronx. The other girls were decent, and there weren’t any perverts or creeps around trying to hurt us, but the way I saw it, I had already experienced the worst that life had to offer. In my mind no one could hurt me any more than I had been, so I was pretty fearless. As far as I was concerned, I was on my own, a renegade, or, better yet, an outlaw like Tupac. Just like his lyrics, it was me against the world. I used to listen to Pac’s CD every single day. That shit and my dreams were the fuel that kept me going when nothing else could.”
“Don’t I know it! You used to play the heck out of ‘All Eyez on Me.’ Drove me half crazy! So he’s why you wanted to rap, huh?” Ginger asked. “Yeah, I could relate to him. Plus, writing and rapping were easier than therapy. I hated the counseling sessions I was required to go to with a passion. I felt betrayed, because I went into it thinking that these people really wanted to help me. But it was so impersonal. They didn’t care about my feelings, they just only about statistics so that they could keep that money flowing. It was like they were trying to provoke me or make me crazy or something. They always managed to make things worse. It’s like they weren’t satisfied to just let me forget about my life. They had to keep dredging shit up time and time again, and I just wanted to forget. So mostly, I sat there with this blank expression on my face, and the whole
time inside my head, I was flowin’.”
“You shouldn’t try to forget, Dez. You can’t run from the truth,” Ginger told her.
“Yeah, I know that now,” Dez admitted. “But at that time I just wanted to escape. Most of the time I ditched school and went to the library. It was safe, warm, and there were usually field trip groups that I could blend into or stacks I could get lost in. I’d read all day. I read the classics like Catcher
in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. I read True to the Game and E. Lynn Harris. I read The Coldest Winter Ever like twenty times. Reading was the only thing I had that could take me away from it all. That and writing.
“But eventually, that wasn’t enough. I wanted out for real, but I knew I wasn’t going anywhere without money. I had no clue how I was going to get it, but I figured that anything that I needed to know, a vet at the home named Tasha could tell me. She was seventeen and had lived at the home since she was thirteen. Tasha knew the ins and outs of the home and the neighborhood, so she was the residents’ hookup on gear, liquor, weed, and anything else a girl would need to get her hands on. Little did I know just how thorough Tasha was with her shit.