Mistakes to Run With

by Yasuko Thanh

  “Let me pay for the cab,” my father said, missing the how well I was doing point. “Come in for toast.”

  Why shouldn’t my father, along with my mother and brother, hop into the cab that instant even though it was seven in the morning and he was in his pyjamas? “Forget it.”

  I flipped up my collar and hopped back into the taxi I hadn’t yet gotten completely out of, a gesture of shamelessness. Forget reconnection. Forget it’s been such a long time. Forget about me.

  “Hit it,” I told the driver. I looked back to see my father’s thin pyjamas flapping in the breeze, his figure shrinking behind the fence.

  * * *

  —

  I adopted a tough-girl stance in miniskirts and five-inch heels that pinched my toes. I didn’t feel like me—not the old me—and what remained was a hole full of question marks. So I set myself to becoming the best prostitute I could be.

  Some tricks finished fast and some finished slow. Some talked dirty and some didn’t talk at all. Some spoke in whispers and some shouted. Some brought me jewellery or other small presents. Some tried to steal their money back. Each man was different but everyone was the same, wanting to play games, to be spanked, to be diapered, to wear my underwear. They paid extra for these things. Some wanted to be coddled, some to be peed or shat on. Some wanted to shit on you. Which I wouldn’t let them do. Some wanted to be tied up and some wanted to tie me up. I wouldn’t let them do that either, no matter how much money they offered.

  Some were fat and some were fit. Some wore shoes and some wore sneakers. The sneakers often paid better than the shoes. Some tried to pay in drugs. Some wanted to argue about the condom and some wore two or three. Sometimes I felt mad, but usually I felt nothing at all.

  I never remembered their names.

  * * *

  —

  Saturday night and some traffic throws eggs. Others throw pennies out the windows, or firecrackers, or they yell “Slut!” before speeding off.

  Some men talk as if they want sex even though they don’t have a dime to save their dog’s life. This is what you must get good at: knowing how to distinguish those with money from those with none. How to distinguish the men who want to kill you from the ones who don’t. How to dance on the line as if you were the worm in a sea of fish. Even the ones with money expect you to chase them.

  The night before, an international lawyer wanted me to paint his cock with my lipstick. He signed me into his office building—one of those downtown glass towers that echoes with the silence of a cathedral—and took me up to the twenty-first floor. He didn’t want sex, just someone who’d listen as he pointed his finger at his aquarium and talked about his exotic electric blue lobsters and freshwater stingrays swimming behind the glass.

  Then I took out a schoolteacher. He had a whole closet full of women’s clothes at his hotel room, high heels to match, and a chest full of makeup. He asked me to make him beautiful, so I did. I used blue and violet eyeshadow and purple lipstick. When he posed for me on the bed, I took Polaroid pictures of him. He asked me to call him Betty. After the photo shoot he said I should open my own house, with all the costumes in assorted sizes available for good paying customers (he’d paid me five hundred). His eyes held such excitement. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do,” I lied.

  “Yes, baby,” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  The next man I took out was nervous, twisting his fingers. He sat in his blue jeans and jacket on the chair across the room from me, giggling, looking down and running his hands through his hair. He paid me four bills from a stack of hundreds. After he undressed, he had a nice time. Afterward, I asked him what he did for a living.

  “Rob banks.”

  “I’ve never taken out a bank robber before. I bet you tip,” I said. As a joke.

  And he did, another fifty bucks.

  I can do any one of a million things and all of them would be the truth.

  * * *

  —

  A few nights later, I was leaving work. I’d flagged a cab and had shut its door when I heard a sharp knock at the window. Cat-eyed Ruth. Junkie Ruth from the receiving home. How long since I’d seen her? I sized her up, the pinpoint pupils and the way, when I rolled down the window, she pressed her body against the cab. High, drunk, or both, she slurred, “Hey, Suko.”

  “Hey. Ruth.”

  “You going in?” She nodded toward the doorway of Club California, spilling music onto the street behind us.

  “No. Home.”

  “Yeah? Can I come?”

  “Ummm. I’m living in this house? With these bikers,” I said, as if that explained everything.

  “Let me in.”

  “Ruth.” I tried to sound firm but affectionate. “I can’t. I don’t think they’d be cool with it. You know?”

  She couldn’t have been more shocked if I’d run her over.

  The driver locked the door, sensing some portent of trouble.

  “Let! Me! In!” She yanked the handle so hard the cab quivered.

  I turned away and told the driver my address.

  Ruth looked less angry than hurt. Had our past friendship meant nothing? But I’d come such a long way, I thought, moving forward while she’d stood still or moved back. In truth, she embarrassed me. Because she was a junkie and I smoked a pipe, which made me better than her, since my drugs didn’t pierce the skin. Those who used needles were the real junkies. I had a house. I had pit bulls, a TV, a waterbed. I didn’t do heroin, but if I let her into the cab I might as well start. Shame washed over me, and yet it didn’t cleanse me of my imagined superiority. Simply put, I was being a bitch. Just then she sucker-punched me through the open window.

  Certain actions require a response.

  I got out of the cab. My first shot clipped her chin. I threw another right, hit her cheekbone, and we both fell to the sidewalk. She lunged with her nails. She scratched my face. She gouged me and bit my back.

  As quickly as it began it was over. Ruth faltered down the street, half dancing away with the part of me that had giggled with her over handfuls of Valium chased with a shared can of Kokanee in the bathroom of Carey Road.

  I got back in the cab. I sat in the passenger seat, breathing heavily. I took out my compact and surveyed my face in the pearls of street light. I looked up at the driver. “Do I look really bad?”

  He shook his head. “No, no. You look, really, very okay.”

  I knew he was lying.

  * * *

  —

  I hurried straight from the front door of my house to the washroom, avoiding everyone. It was bad enough being fifteen. People already thought your age made you stupid. Now, at best, they’d be right. At worst, the boys would laugh at me. I wasn’t tough enough. For what? For them, my life, my house, my pit bulls; for fights that began before you’d even had a chance to take off your coat, kick your shoes away; for everything. Weak and undeserving, I washed away the blood and stared at my face from various angles, wondering how to conceal the raw red scratches across my cheek from lip to ear. The bite marks on my back throbbed. Fuck it, I thought. I needed my bed. I put my shirt back on and went to my room.

  I will never see Ruth again. Seven years later, I’ll open a newspaper and read that she’s been arrested, which makes the paper because she’s HIV-positive and had bit a security guard’s finger to the bone.

  * * *

  —

  Downtown, on the corner of Government and Yates, ten at night, spring of 1987. A man known on the street as Jimmy Page, a forty-something dope dealer, supplied Will with drugs. Story was, the last person to owe Jimmy Page money had opened his door to see him on the front step holding a Snap-on toolbox. Jimmy had calmly taken out a hammer as the man tried to run. Jimmy followed and beat the man unconscious. Now Jimmy’s friend Julie and I stood on the corner smoking. After a bad fix she’d given herself cotton fever—the chills and a temperature that came from drawing the drug solution through a cotton ball filter. Julie looke
d bad: green, as if ready to vomit. She was saying “Man, I feel shitty” when Jimmy hopped out of a cab on the other side of the street and jaywalked toward us.

  I thought, She must have called him. He must be taking her home.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  He whipped something from his pocket. Small enough that at first I missed its glint, like a mirror. It was a blade and he held it to my neck.

  “Shit, Jimmy,” Julie said.

  I froze. Will owed Jimmy money. For drugs. But they had that all worked out. They had a deal.

  “Where’s Will?”

  “I don’t know.” Why was this on me?

  “Calm down,” Julie said.

  She hopped up and down between us, waving her arms like a deranged jumping jack. “She’s not with Will,” she said.

  It was true: I fucked him and bought his coke but we were a couple only in the loosest sense of the word. His debts were not my responsibility. He slept with whomever he wanted, and left our bedroom smelling like sex and cheap strawberry body spray. I couldn’t be expected to be loyal or dutiful in the face of that.

  “I’m going to kill him or I’m going to kill you.”

  He spoke with a slow, sickly sweetness.

  “Jesus, Jimmy, leave her alone!”

  “Five bills,” he said, “before you leave tonight.”

  “It’s okay, I can do it,” I said, marshalling a courage I didn’t have. I don’t remember what I’d told Will I would do for him, or if I’d said anything at all. I might have kept it secret, holding in the knowledge like a drug created solely to fuel my sense of superiority. It’s equally possible I’d told him in a way that dramatized my skill in taming the wicked. The lethal. I was after his love, and whatever had or hadn’t said, my act would prove something to him: I was someone to respect.

  At dawn, I took a cab from the track to where Jimmy lived. I fingered the cash I’d earned, $540, thumbing the bills.

  I’d never been to Jimmy’s house and was unprepared for the maniacally conventional teacups littering the kitchen table, the newspapers on the chairs, the wads of gum on the counters, the dying plants on the windowsills, the domesticity of the spaghetti-sauce-instant-rice-Kraft-Dinner clutter on the shelves caricaturing normal life.

  “Jimmy’s not here,” the girl who answered the door said. “Toke?”

  She returned to the nest of blankets on the couch. Only then did I see her baby wriggling wormlike among the folds. She began nursing, offering me her joint. I took it and sat down next to her, keeping my jacket on. I’d heard about this girl. Jimmy’s “wife,” at seventeen.

  “You know I’m HIV, right?” she said.

  I couldn’t look at her. I stared at the TV, where Jean-Claude Van Damme obliterated villains, the requisite building of tension to hold the shitty plot together. “Yeah,” I said. I felt sad for the infant: the shadows in the room, the mess, those tiny fists that closed on nothing but air.

  The girl seemed pleased to be smoking with me and rocked back and forth with the infant in her arms. “You know how many people won’t share a joint with me now?”

  As soon as Jimmy walked in, I stood. “I have the five,” I said, in case he thought I’d come to beg for more time. Shaking, I fumbled with the money.

  He laughed. Poured me a coffee.

  “I’m, uh, good.”

  He put down the cup, crossed the room, and picked up the baby. He walked toward me smiling. “You want to hold him?”

  He offered me the squirming bundle. Was this the same man who’d tried to knife me? The same man who’d nearly beaten someone to death with a hammer?

  “Nah, I got a cab waiting,” I lied. I mumbled a quick goodbye and let myself out, onto a street of parked cars whose windshields were paisley with frost.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning, crawling out of my covers, I remembered something. In all the excitement, I hadn’t stashed away the two twenty-dollar bills that remained after paying off Will’s debt.

  My money roll wasn’t wrapped up in the sweater where I hid it. I looked through another sweater. Another. I couldn’t find it. I shook out crop tops, spandex, miniskirts; I flung my clothes across the room. I emptied every shelf.

  Will came to see what the thumping was all about. When I asked him where my money was he looked at me like I was crazy and shrugged. Then he went back downstairs, sat on the brown corduroy couch, and cooked up what coke remained on the coffee table.

  * * *

  —

  Jay, a pimp from Winnipeg and an acquaintance of Will’s, wore a pink suit and gelled his hair. In a household full of bikers, one of whom had slipped my bill roll into his pocket, his Jheri curls, diamond pinky ring, and tasselled leather loafers were glamorous. He danced in the glow of the wood stove, busting out all the new moves in our living room. His pink suit rippled with colour, and when he sat down beside me, his leg touching me on the couch, I felt a Taser jolt.

  I recognize now that what I liked about Jay was his attentiveness, his solicitousness toward my roommates, the intimacy he seemed capable of bringing to our conversations.

  About a month shy of my sixteenth birthday, the landlord evicted us for too many loud parties and we moved from Austin Avenue to a room at the Friendship Inn motel.

  The night I turned sixteen, the room packed with people, all strangers to me, Jay took my hand.

  All night I’d been doing drugs, lines, pills, whatever people threw at me as they yelled “Happy birthday!” Now, the crowd bearing down, I nodded, trying to conceal my gratitude, my eagerness, with long stately strides through the drunken rabble. Then I saw Will urgently shaking his head and mouthing “No.” He’d told me that Jay was a pimp with two women working for him. That I needed to stay away from him because pimps were no good. They took all a working girl’s money, and some set quotas.

  I squeezed Jay’s hand and he squeezed back—and that was all the reassurance I needed.

  I followed him out the door.

  He brought me to his own private room above the party, where we could talk, music thrumming through the floor. Knowing I’d be impressed, he showed me his jewellery, bags full of it, saying, “And this is only what I travel with.”

  He paid attention, to me alone, when we made love.

  I started spending more time with him. In the months to come I found myself following him to the mainland and back, living wherever he wanted to station me, in motel rooms in Vancouver and Victoria. His sister lived in Vancouver in a brick apartment building near the Broadway track a few blocks from the Kingsgate Mall. While he smoked joints at his sister’s I’d work with middle-aged women, mostly addicts, some who still looked good.

  I gave him the money I earned on the track, but the luck that had hit me with what felt like blunt-force trauma ran out. Jay no longer seemed as interested. The money I put in his hand each night didn’t make him want to hang out with me. I’d stopped being the focus of his attention.

  I was arrested for breach of probation in Vancouver. At the time I was wearing a satin camisole, a black satin blazer, and a pair of purple spandex pants.

  After your arrest a female screw tells you to strip, puts on gloves to examine behind your ears, checks between your toes, runs her fingers through your hair, makes you open your mouth and lift your tongue, and bend over. You have to take a shower with Kwellada to kill any lice or scabies or crabs and to rid your face of makeup. They give you pants that look more like pyjamas. They process away your personality until you’re no different from the page on which your pretrial report is printed, your life reduced to a paragraph, to black and white.

  After being flown back to Victoria in handcuffs, I found myself in Youth Court. In a room full of steno pads, business suits, and briefcases, I stood charges. The judge sentenced me to four months in youth jail.

  Black Rope Hell and Upside-Down Prison

  From within the walls of Victoria’s Youth Custody Centre, a maximum-security jail for young of
fenders, you couldn’t see grass or anything else green or alive, only the courtyard, a concrete square the size of a basketball court. Its walls were twenty feet high.

  The jail’s official capacity was about forty kids but it often held more than fifty. When that happened we couldn’t shower more than once a week and some kids were sent to Oakalla, the adult prison on the mainland. What I knew of Oakalla I knew from stories. A boy from East Wing had a brother who’d been killed there.

  East Wing had nine rooms. Most were six-by-eight shoeboxes made of concrete. West Wing had seven, and the one at the very end of the hall that I shared with two other girls was a little bigger than the others, meant to be a double. Our wing had a television we could watch on Saturday nights. We were allowed eight cigarettes a day, rationed on a strict schedule. And because the guards stored them in the freezer, each pack with our name written on it, the filter between my lips was always cold. As the weeks plodded into months, I tried to remember how liberated smoke tasted on the tongue, smooth and unrestricted.

  Every time we swore a guard would say, “Drop and give me twenty!” Push-ups, military style, every time.

  One of the boys told me about an older woman who’d tied him up by the wrists from the ceiling. Why he’d befriended me I had no idea. I refused to see all that he and I had in common. His helplessness, his confession that he’d slept with both women and men for money, churned my stomach.

  At breakfast, as West Wing filed toward the cafeteria past the boys from East Wing who’d finished eating and now stood lined up against the corridor wall waiting for us to pass, people would take shots at this boy’s face. His lips trembled as he was punched, but he never cried. His capacity to bear our violence was as macabre as the way his thin arms widened at his elbows. Why didn’t he fight back? Why did he let himself be treated like shit? People saw that as begging for more. The bigger boys were only giving him what he wanted when he turned a red and swollen cheek.