Mistakes to Run With

by Yasuko Thanh

  Each day as I grew to know her, I liked her more. She still scared me, but I appreciated my fear—if you played with a black panther, you accepted its ferocity as part of the intrigue and challenge of the game. Under her influence I could become someone to be proud of, someone like her. A person people smiled at because they dared not smile.

  I wasn’t surprised she had a son in boarding school. I could picture his uniform, his curly hair and dark skin, a rare addition among the all-white offspring of the rich—blond boys who went sailing in the summer and snowboarding in the winter. A school-aged son at twenty-five would have meant a teen pregnancy. I was reminded of a friend who’d gotten pregnant in grade nine or ten. Remembered her at eight months along, sitting in the dark kitchen of her mother’s house, waiting for her boyfriend to visit. She was fat, dressed in track pants, her greasy hair hanging down. She didn’t look happy. Her face didn’t even look like the same face I’d gone to school with, partied with, shared beer and tokes with. I felt sorry for her. But the news of Yvonne’s son made me realize that anything was possible. If I followed the right path, my “possible” would turn from the enforced domesticity of a drab kitchen to being able to buy my way into a boarding school, or beyond.

  Prostitutes were not known for being responsible or successful. Yet for the first time I realized how society could be wrong. How people could claim a certain knowledge while misjudging a situation. I became suspicious: what else had society lied about? What else had I been persuaded to believe?

  The world had turned upside down. Everything bad was good and everything good had become pompous, hyperinflated with the air of its own self-righteousness.

  Did she really have a son? Or had she invented him to make herself appear “safer,” to convince me of how much money I could make if I followed in her footsteps to the track?

  The boarding school was an hour and a half away, meaning she wouldn’t see him except on holidays. But if she was working the streets to send him there it would mean something that every parent knows: there is nothing they won’t do for their child. No vile place they won’t plunge into to make for them a perfect world.

  To get a job, any job—as my father had, in a foreign country—ranked as a success. At the time I didn’t recognize this. Only that Yvonne had makeup, clothes, a son in boarding school.

  Still trying to reconcile what I knew of the streets with this unexpected attitude of someone in them, I listened to the picture she described, putting me in the centre of it, in a train car, textbooks spread over the little table, leaning over them in a silk blouse, every piece of my tasteful luggage in the bin overhead.

  She took what she wanted from life, this woman. I thought of Johnny’s respect, reverence, when he sold her a joint. I wanted him to treat me that way, wanted him to see me the way he saw Yvonne. I wanted to have that power. I wanted to have that control.

  * * *

  —

  In the shoe store, Yvonne chose a pair of orange stilettos for me. “These will look great with your shirt.”

  I turned them over to see the price tag glued to the bottom. “You got to be kidding me.”

  She took them to the till.

  I couldn’t stop her. The next thing I knew the clerk was ringing them in.

  Yvonne pulled something out of her wallet I’d never seen before: a bill the colour of arterial blood. On the back was a ring of horses, each with a rider wearing a jacket the same colour.

  Yvonne held the fifty in the palm of her hand. “Don’t worry,” she said. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of these.” Then she winked at me.

  Torture by Mincing Machines

  Empathy isn’t the same as being someone else. My sense of separateness was mirrored by the sunshine that could never inhabit the motes it lit up in Yvonne’s hotel room. Those motes would never be able to curl themselves around that warmth, to become it; as soon as they tried it would disappear. In the shoe store Yvonne had reacted first with amusement and then surprise at the fact that I’d never seen a fifty-dollar bill up close. Now I was strutting in front of a jewellery shop on the corner of Broad and View. I’d thought, Maybe if I make some real money Johnny will respect me enough to want his tongue in my mouth.

  * * *

  —

  Juanita Call-Me-Chris would go with me for safety. We ducked into a doorway out of the wind. I wobbled in the red boots I’d borrowed from Yvonne, soft as butter, a size too big, the heels higher than any I’d yet worn.

  I watched the cars roll past. Then a man pulled over, asked if I was working. Chris and I had discussed this; we’d planned. But the first words out of my mouth were “Fuck off, you sick prick.”

  He cocked his head, confused. As he turned to pull away I felt an urgency; I flashed to Johnny’s lips, the way I’d kiss him, and thought, What the hell am I doing?

  “Yes,” I yelled. “Yes, I’m working.”

  We drove to his house, me in the front seat of his little green car, Chris in the back. I looked for her eyes in the rear-view but she was staring out the window, avoiding my gaze.

  As if to allay the moral misgivings that had made me swear at him, the man pointed at girls our age lounging at bus stops in tight jeans, swinging their ankles in lazy circles or digging for lip gloss in their tote bags. “Every girl,” he said, “do a little something.” I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but it didn’t matter.

  At the man’s house he showed Chris the living room—heavy curtains and floral-patterned couch—and told her to make herself at home. Then he gave her a bottle of homemade wine, told her we wouldn’t be long, and led me to the bedroom. It was tidy, with a crocheted blanket over the mattress.

  What did I think about as I turned my first trick? Johnny. How proud he’d be.

  When we were done the man paid me with a fifty-dollar bill. As beautiful and red and ringed with horses as Yvonne’s had been. Now I’d be able to support my street family. Johnny and I would end up a real couple, like Yvonne and Nicky.

  * * *

  —

  “We can get a motel room,” I said.

  Johnny stood on the corner of Broad and Yates and looked at the money in my hand. He retrieved his stash from an alcove and turned. “Well?” he said. “What are you waiting for?”

  I grabbed the others and flagged a cab. Johnny gave me a strange kind of grin. With my family in the taxi—Chris by my side, Dave in front—we drove toward the Gorge and then pulled into a gas station where I bought a carton of Neapolitan ice cream. I paid the clerk with the fifty. I luxuriated as he counted out my change.

  Back in the taxi, I talked a mile a minute about how I could even buy Johnny the newest Ibanez he’d drooled over in the last issue of Guitar Player magazine.

  Dave was the oldest at twenty-one. We sent him in to pay for the room and waited by the ice machines. After looking both ways and scooting through the parking lot, we were inside. Dave threw the keys on top of the television; they clinked with authority. Then he disappeared into the washroom to take a shower. Chris fell asleep the instant her head hit the pillow.

  Johnny and I were on the bed. Here was the moment I’d been waiting for.

  “You know,” he said, “now you’re nothing but a fucking hooker.”

  I crumbled inside. But I wouldn’t let him see me cry. I’d suck things up. And no matter how broken I felt, no one would ever know how much he’d let me down.

  Dave emerged from the washroom, releasing a cloud of steam into the room. I hurried past him with my ice cream and locked the door behind me. I cried perched on the toilet seat, scooping the Neapolitan from the carton, managing two small mouthfuls. Then I ran a bath, and in an act of defiance no one saw, left the carton in the sink to melt. As if proving I didn’t care at all.

  * * *

  —

  I’d been commissioned by a friend who bought drugs from me to steal a pair of acid-wash jeans, and though I hardly boosted anymore, I thought of this job as a personal favour. Jeans could be tricky: you had to dig thr
ough stacked shelves to find a specific size, drawing attention from clerks. Still, I had a system, an over-the-shoulder bag, and a friend to look out. Chris was blocking the manager’s view, and I’d slipped the jeans under my arm when the manager strode toward us.

  I ran out the door, around the corner, and halfway down the block. Chris was right next to me. Looking back, I could see the manager chasing us. I made for a stairwell but ended up at the bottom of it, trapped with nowhere to go—the clerk had somehow beaten me to it and now stood a few steps up. I had the fleeting thought that I should knock her down, run, but the moment passed. She grabbed my wrist. The next thing I knew Chris and I were following her back to the store, where I’d be charged with theft.

  * * *

  —

  Now I was back in the system. As a condition of my probation I was ordered to attend school and reside where directed, which turned out to be a group home on Ashgrove Street.

  The oldest girl was eighteen. Though she was friendly enough, she hardly said a word, just smiled. She lived on the ground floor next to Doreen and her husband, Kevin, our house parents. The other six of us lived two to a room. Evenings we’d sit in the basement playing video games, and days we’d go to school.

  Each night, leaning on my windowsill, I’d stare at the street-lamps, trying to will myself into the light. Then, when everyone was asleep, I’d clamber out the bathroom window and crawl across the steep roof toward the fire-escape ladder, clutching my shoes in one hand and gripping the slippery shingles with the other, trying not to think about the thirty-foot fall. I’d make my way down the ladder, breathing a sigh of relief when my feet touched ground.

  I worked a corner by the Empress Hotel, a few blocks from the harbour. Wind whipped my hair, the cold stung my ankles, but I was away from the group home and living, I thought, my own life. I never stayed out for more than one date and I always showed up for school the following day. Why did I do this? I know it had something to do with proving myself, or proving to myself—and to Johnny—that the money I earned made me strong and not “just a ho.” It had something to do with free will and my own weak life. Rectifying an imbalance. Believing that my problems were manufactured by the system.

  Tomorrow I’d wake up at seven, leave the group home weighted by the books in my backpack, catch two different buses to Esquimalt High. But tonight I could be anyone.

  I could reinvent myself on the barren downtown streets.

  One night I smiled and motioned to the lone car circling the block, its driver a year or two older than me.

  He said he had fifteen dollars.

  “That’s it?”

  I crossed my arms and drummed my fingers on my chest while I thought how the night would be wasted if I didn’t have something to show for it, however paltry the sum. I agreed to give him a blow job for the five-dollar bills.

  * * *

  —

  The next day I fell asleep during social studies class. When I awoke, the teacher was shaking my elbow. The others had left, the two of us remained.

  He looked at me earnestly, as if he wanted to hold my hand. “Have you ever been abused?”

  His words silenced me. I drew my arms across my chest, my loose white tank top with no bra, and mumbled something like “What do you mean?”

  I felt transparent, defensive. Insulted by his question without knowing why. The bizarre thought occurred that he was trying to hit on me. My face reddened. I grabbed my books, stormed out with as much confidence as I could muster, and stomped off to the nurse’s office. By the time I arrived my face was flushed and sweating.

  She asked if I wanted to call anyone.

  “No one’s home,” I lied. “And I’m not feeling well.”

  I cried myself to sleep in the comfort of the sick room until the bell rang.

  Late one night I came home to find the bathroom window locked. I’d been caught. I walked away with the clothes on my back.

  Abundance City

  I moved into a three-bedroom house on Austin Avenue with bikers who flipped coke. They’d been friends of Johnny’s, supplying him with the drugs he sold.

  I had warrants. In time, the police would catch me. But I decided to live for the moment.

  We pooled our money. We could afford to snort coke, to do lines or cocoa puffs instead of freebasing or banging it. We “got high on our own supply” and it didn’t seem to matter. We always had enough money for breakfast at diners where the servers knew us and the cooks would laugh when one of the guys, who was handsome and funny, walked into the kitchen and spanked the women with a spatula.

  We went to Thetis Lake, a twenty-minute drive from Victoria even on mornings when we’d been up all night. We always had enough cash in our pockets to buy what we needed on the half-hour drive, like beach towels or swim shorts or another cooler full of beer.

  Will was the most talented of the three. He’d drawn the homemade and jailhouse tattoos that covered him.

  He cooked my cocaine into rocks for me, and if he pocketed some after dropping a hit into my pipe, I’d ignore it. Share and share alike, right? After one good hit on the pipe the world disappeared, and I’d be accepted into a place of wonder and light where nothing could touch me. Where I loved everyone. Would die or kill for a stranger. After a good toke I’d be part of the connective tissue of humanity. For ten, fifteen minutes. Before needing one more. Then one more. Then one more. Always one more.

  Will took no shit and dominated the household’s pecking order. By allying myself with him, by straddling him in bed, pointing to each scar and having him tell me its story, by fucking him, I grew stronger. Nights we smoked crack and rolled around as naked as children until the sun came up and the birds began singing.

  The year I turned sixteen, girls stood elbow to elbow like china dolls on a display shelf that stretched from the Inner Harbour to the clubs on Yates Street.

  Other girls stayed out till all hours, but because I was a renegade, the word they used for a prostitute working the track without a pimp, it never occurred to me to make more money than I needed for blow, or chocolate bars, or going out to eat. I went to work and turned a trick and sometimes took myself out for dinner, which often included chiding myself. You girl. Sit up straight. Hold up your head and don’t order in your little-girl voice. You’re embarrassing.

  Every night I was getting better at not speaking deferentially to the waiters, and every night the stares I drew from other customers bothered me less.

  I deserved nice things. I treated myself to them. I raised myself up and stashed the money I brought home, rolled it up and hid it inside a sweater in the loft where I slept. Sometimes I counted it, slowly, before putting it back, thinking, My loft. My waterbed. My house. That house was 1930s Arts and Crafts bungalow clad in wooden shingles and a timbered porch. Much better than my parents’ house. It had a profusion of windows, real stairs, a front and a back door, three bedrooms, four dogs: pit bulls, and friends. The door always open. Harleys on the green grass. We lived near the Gorge Waterway, where the curving road was lined with houses good families owned. When we’d come home from a party the pre-dawn water would shine like a dinner plate, flat and smooth.

  * * *

  —

  Each morning during my first weeks on Austin Avenue I’d wake up and crank my favourite album on the stereo. A song by Boston about being forgotten by those you left behind.

  One night I got high with a Coke-can crack pipe and music blaring and I sang along and remembered my parents, whom I’d seen only a few times since our unsuccessful bouts of family therapy.

  Dawn dripped through tall double-hung windows onto the scarred linoleum floor. The kitchen smelled like dog. I passed Will the pipe and picked at the tuft sneaking from a rip in the vinyl kitchen chair. It occurred to me: I could take my parents out for lunch.

  Between hits, I curled my hair and put on eyeshadow and lipstick and changed outfits several times. I donned a pair of classy alligator-skin shoes and a three-hundred-dollar wool
coat—of which I was overbearingly proud—and called a taxi. In real life, the wool coat was two sizes too large and the hem dragged on the pavement, no longer white but filthy.

  I was a teenager playing dress-up, waiting in a chair at the front window. I took another hit of crack, jerking back the curtains every time I heard a sound.

  The taxi arrived at six-thirty a.m.

  My parents had no idea I was coming.

  I grabbed my matching alligator purse and stumbled outside into the sun.

  I fiddled with my hair in the back of the cab.

  My father appeared from the house as we pulled up.

  I rolled down the window. “Hi, Pop!”

  He stood on the other side of the fence. He made no move to open the gate.

  I hesitated, my hand lingering on the cab door. I began to sweat. He stood looking at me, his lips pressed in judgment.

  “Let’s go for lunch,” I said. “Come on, anywhere, the fanciest place.” Then I added, in case it wasn’t understood, “My treat.”

  “I don’t want your money,” my father said, rendering the bills I’d use to pay for lunch as dirty as the method I’d employed to earn them.

  Anger replaced my crack euphoria. The balloon of pride that had swelled in my chest on the ride over burst and deflated.

  “Do you know how expensive a cab is from my place?” I wasn’t fishing for a contribution but underlining my success: I was someone who could afford it.