by Yasuko Thanh
If a guard caught a boy he went to the Blue Room: a cell, painted blue, that had nothing inside it and whose function was to calm those who were out of control. Left to run its course, a tantrum would become self-inflicted violence: spitting, kicking, punching walls. Until at last, with broken hands and torn, bleeding knuckles, the boy would lie exhausted on the floor.
* * *
—
A guard named Jane introduced me to Hermann Hesse and Siddhartha. Siddhartha moved through different walks of life to become wise, to reach enlightenment. He’d bucked the system. And he’d won. As did Robin Lee Graham, who wrote Dove after he’d circumnavigated the globe on a twenty-one-foot sailboat starting when he was sixteen, the same age I was now. I read both books cover to cover until the pages were stained with my fingerprints and the endpapers had fallen off. I wanted that. The world. Adventure. Without the sailboat that had been stolen from me when my first boyfriend had cheated, but a knowledge-seeking expedition nonetheless.
I had a job in the laundry.
Volunteered to push the library cart.
Every morning our wing was awakened not by an alarm but by “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses blaring over the loudspeakers.
We’d race to the clothing room to grab a new pair of pants and a T-shirt.
Then we went to “school.”
I acid-burned glass, carved wood, made moccasins. I drew—and won a prison art contest.
I’d sketched a mother and child in a Madonna and Jesus pose using charcoal, smudging lines, cross-hatching with the sharpest pencil I could find.
* * *
—
I returned to Jay when I was released from juvie, catching a ferry to Vancouver with the clothes I’d worn when I was arrested. I didn’t care how the tourists on the boat stared at my spandex pants or my satin blazer. This was the beginning of adventure. Now. I’d kiss the deck. Let people watch. All I had was my clothes, and my freedom.
Jay picked me up. He picked me up like a misplaced wallet and slipped me back into his life.
Within a few weeks he began ignoring me again, and I knew I’d made a mistake coming back.
I spent many nights alone wondering what I’d done wrong, finding answers in the generic environment that mid-range hotels can provide with their patterned carpet, their floral designs, their impersonal still lifes framed in fake wood above an empty dresser. Each room the same as the last.
Jay belonged to me. After all, Julie, my wife-in-law, lived in Winnipeg, over two thousand kilometres and a twenty-four-hour drive away. Wife-in-law referred to the other women in a man’s harem, in his stable. But I pretended I wasn’t sharing him. That I wasn’t in a state of competition for his affection. I hated the Other, imagining how I measured up. Since she was in another city, the distance meant I could dissociate from her, sidestep questions like “Did she fuck him better tonight than me?” “Whose trap was bigger?” “Does he like the smell of her hotel room better than mine?” I’d spray perfume on my comforter, my pillowcases. I wanted every aspect of Jay’s time with me to be comfortable, alluring, so much so that he’d be unable to pull himself away. And if he did, the lingering scent on his clothes, in his hair, would force him to carry my memory.
The worst thing a pimp could do was relinquish his time without charge. Chat over a drink with a secretary, a dental hygienist, a stripper; invite her to dance, ask her to the movies. On the house. Not because it meant cheating on his ho but because pimps, like prostitutes, required payment for their time. To paint the town with a woman who wasn’t putting money in your hand proved several things. That such a man was a “popcorn pimp,” as bad for your health as junk food. He lacked the skill to transmute a woman’s “square” life into a gold mine. His personal pot at the rainbow’s end. Accomplished pimps influenced women to the degree that they believed the choice to stand on a corner and rent their bodies to the highest bidder was their own. Anyone who craved love was a target. Anyone with a backbone, who threw themselves all chips in. How could love—its acquisition—not be a noble pursuit?
Jay’s reputation for being a “free fucker” was a concern. On the track a girl told me she’d seen him with another woman. It wasn’t that this girl cared about me; it was that Jay’s rule-breaking damaged my position, standing, and prestige on the track, and that she took pleasure from cutting me down.
“I seen him dancing with some girl at the Biltmore,” she said. She lifted her chin in challenge. She wanted to convince me, half through intimidation and half through the semblance of girl-on-girl bonding, to join her family, to choose her pimp and leave mine. She added, raising the stakes, “I seen him sucking face with her at the bar.” As if to say, What are you going to do about it?
“Probably someone he was trying to bump,” I said, lamely defending him. My heart wasn’t in it. I imagined his tongue invading her mouth like an alien mandible. I felt small, an ant carrying a load heavy enough to push me into the ground.
My back aching and my feet blistered from my cheap shoes, I caught a cab home to the motel. During the short ride from Broadway and St. Albert to the City Centre on Main Street, I wondered what had captivated him about the girl at the Biltmore. What made her so much better than me? I’d formed a picture of her in my mind, piecing her together from those who strutted their stuff with more jiggle and sway than any ho I knew. Who drank at table after table like a bee dropping into different flowers to suck back as much nectar as possible, not caring which man paid. Who laughed too loudly, throwing back their head. Who lived never looking over their shoulder. Bold, crass, white-trash armour thrown over the heart on their sleeve, inches of black eyeliner, the feathered hair, the tight jeans, the tasselled leather jacket, the boots. Why her? Why wasn’t he satisfied with me?
In the years to come I’ll wear the scars of competition. I’ll recognize the chip on my shoulder for what it is, but I’ll be unable to rid myself of the belief that I’m second best. That I’m less valuable. That if a man goes elsewhere to find what he needs it’s my fault; I must be deficient in all the ways that matter—beauty, youth, obedience, an intuitive ability to predict what he wants. That I’m not enough to encourage him to keep his dick in his pants. These temptresses must have tapped in to some secret.
Today I can say that I hadn’t made Jay cheat on me with a square girl. That I hadn’t created my own pain.
But back then, by making up an excuse for him, by nodding my head at the girl on the track, I was creating my own pain. The actions were his. But the choice to stay was mine.
I rode the few blocks to the motel with a tight ball in my stomach. I’d try to change: I’d run him baths, light his cigarettes, pick up food for him at four a.m. when he woke me from a sound sleep to say he was hungry…I could do better. Become more pliable. More obedient. More “down.” When girls spoke of me on the track, other hos would say, full of awe and respect: “Jay’s woman? Props, man. She’s one down ho.”
I turned my key but the door wasn’t locked. I thought, Maybe he knows I found out; he’s bought roses, is waiting to say sorry; I’ll see his heart changed. I pushed open the door and saw Jay.
And another woman, who gasped and shuffled in the blankets as she tried to pull them over her breasts.
Jay smiled at me and lit a cigarette.
“What now?” he said while the girl, still clutching the blanket to her chest, searched for her clothes among the tangled sheets. “Bring us a glass of water?”
No shame on his face. His brazenness stunned me. Had he wanted me to see? To show me he could do anything?
I thought about hitting the pretty blonde but stomped out of the room instead. He followed me. We glared at each other in the parking lot and then began yelling, cars forced to drive around us, me in my ho clothes, him shirtless in bare feet and the pyjama bottoms he’d pulled on.
“You’re nothing but a big fucking headache,” he said, “you know that?”
Because I’d caught him?
“Fuck you.”
Jay and the woman left in a cab. Determined not to lose sleep, I crawled into bed, the motel sign glowing red through the window. The parking lot traffic had died down. I tried to shut my eyes and push the affair out of my mind by reassuring myself that Jay understood the mistake he’d made. By telling myself he’d never dare do it again. My mind flashed to the boy at juvie and for the first time I realized what I’d hated about him: it had been like looking in the mirror. Digging deeper under the covers, losing myself to exhaustion, I felt something touch my toe. I leapt out of bed and shook out the blankets. Then I saw it. Silky and black. Her panties.
I had to get out. I couldn’t breathe. I packed, or rather, threw my belongings into whatever luggage I had at the time. A mixture of tote and garbage bags. Maybe a suitcase. What I remember is the conviction that I had to flee. Like a wild animal. Under attack.
* * *
—
I opened the door and stepped out into the pre-dawn stillness. With the weight of my bags straining my shoulders, I sighed, looked left and right. Good girls could handle anything. Could withstand anything, like Siddhartha in Hesse’s book—still as a forest effigy in the pouring rain, bearing up under the onslaught of the elements. I wanted to claim such strength as my own. Good girls rolled with the punches, turning them into a ballet, absorbing blows with a fluidity of movement I dreamed of.
I crossed the street and walked a few blocks to the motel of a girlfriend, Frances, who also worked the track. She commiserated, saying things like “Fuck, Suko.” But it wasn’t solace that I needed. Why couldn’t she reprimand me? Say, “If only you’d lit his cigarettes, run his bath, made more money, this never would have happened.” That could have marked my path as clearly as paving stones. Reinstated hope instead of taking it out back and shooting it.
I had to admit it: in Siddhartha’s position I wouldn’t have lasted a day.
I wouldn’t survive. Not like this. What was I willing to do to toughen myself up?
* * *
—
The next morning, Slim, Frances’s Seattle pimp, gave me a ride to Vancouver. Frances sat in the passenger seat, twiddling with the car stereo.
“You got to give him something to bring you along,” she’d said the night before. “How much money have you got?”
“My whole trap. Jay left before taking it.”
“Kay. I’ll ask him. He’ll probably charge you about fifty dollars.”
Deal made, we now sat on the car deck of the Queen of Nanaimo ferry boat, seagulls plying the sky while we listened to Keith Sweat in Slim’s tinted-down Cadillac and smoked.
Over the next few weeks, I renegaded. On Broadway, numbers of renegades worked alongside dumpsters, their take too low to interest most pimps. Only downtown, one block from Granville Street’s neon and nightclubs and theatres, could a girl earn a good living. There, women stood on display with the poise of supermodels in leather and fur, swinging designer purses. Tricks paid double and triple what the junkies on Broadway charged.
Fast money, my alter ego rationalized, was more honourable than slow money, and working the streets more honourable than, say, flipping burgers for minimum wage. You gave up less time for a bigger return. If you had to sell out, wasn’t it nobler to sell out for big money?
So, despite knowing that the entire block bounded by Seymour, Helmcken, Richards, and Nelson streets was controlled by pimps, that renegades would be a target there, I moved downtown.
When asked “Who’s your people?” I’d answer Slim. Or I’d say my man was down in Vegas, or doing the cross-Canada circuit with a wife-in-law. Sometimes I’d say he was in the pen, doing a seven-year stretch. Of the three, that last lie met with the least resistance. Jaded working girls wanted to believe in this long-suffering-shaped love. They found hope in the idea that to suffer long would provoke the kind of gratitude that came shaped as a wedding band, sacrifice redeemed.
It was Frances who told me that Jay was coming back to town. “Girl…,” she said, and didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to. I’d be in a heap of trouble if he found out I’d used his name. I panicked.
Repeating Spring
Frances suggested I meet another friend of hers, and that we all go out for dinner together.
Then she hesitated. “But you don’t even know what he looks like.”
“Is he fine?”
She curled her fingers into the okay sign and then fucked the hole with her other hand, chortling.
Her friend Avery had a lisp and walked with a wiggle. His skin was the colour of fudge-flavoured caramel squares. His moustache, beginning to show filaments of silver, made him look like my favourite R&B singer Morris Day.
We went to a restaurant on the harbour. The waiter hovered to refill your water glass, let you smell the wine. Avery sat to my right, his elbows on the table. He took up the room with his charisma. He was exuberant, and boisterous, and unashamed of being loud, black, and covered in gold chains. His eyes sank deep into me like anchors.
I admired his set jaw, darting eyes, laughter that suggested an “or else.” I admired his tough-guy stance in a world I knew would stop at nothing to beat you down. More than anything, I think it was his eyes. They shared that trapped, manic look I’d seen in my own reflection. I circled the rim of my wineglass with my finger and tilted my body toward him, toward his sadness, like mine, that I could sense even when he smiled.
“The pimp in me is doing fine,” he said, laying down his line of drag. “The man in me is looking for a woman to spend the rest of his life with.”
I asked him if that meant I’d have to share him.
“Yes, I do have other women. Of course they’re beautiful. But not like you, baby. Those other women are just ladders. If you want to travel the world, if you want to live in West Vancouver, then think of them as taking you where you want to go.”
“Unless you’re a woman who can make eight bills a day.”
“Could that be you?”
“I don’t deny it. I like to live well.”
“But what I got to do to get that pocket lining. Do you think I enjoy having to make love to so many women? I’m waiting for rescue too, baby. If you were the one who could make eight bills a day, I could throw the others out like toilet paper. A million-dollar ho would complete me. We’d escape. Do everything. She’d never have to worry about sharing me. I keep a stable because I’m forced, when in essence I’m a one-woman man.”
We went to a nightclub where he became the kind of person people would form a circle around, move back from on the dance floor so they could watch. The kind of man girls lined up to dance with. And when he was finished dancing, he was the kind of man other men slapped on the back with words of encouragement.
“You gonna hurt them girls.”
“You tearing the place up!”
* * *
—
I chose to be with Avery, pretending it was a choice, pretending Slim wouldn’t kick my ass. I had to choose someone.
It might as well be him. Avery set me up in the Robsonstrasse Hotel, asking whether I liked the place, strutting around in an expensive suit, spinning the keys of a rented sports car on his index finger. But I remember clearly the dread I’d known waiting for my father to enter the room with the ruler slipping away.
We drove to the West End, where Avery introduced me to his sister. I’d put on thick eyeliner and dark lipstick to mark that moment, the beginning of something good, something real. And to make myself look older. On the street, where so many wanted nothing to do with me because of my age, my youth felt like a curse, especially now that I had a pimp eleven years older than me. I’d lost too much to lose Avery over something as stupid as being sixteen. By law I was still a child, and most pimps would have nothing to do with girls younger than eighteen. For Avery, my age represented a criminal risk. I didn’t see him as taking advantage of me. Instead I was grateful that I’d been given a break, a chance to prove my love and loyalty. I was eager to learn, ready to p
lease.
His sister hugged me in the doorway of her apartment by the water. “She’s so pretty,” she said, glancing toward Avery approvingly. “She’s so pretty.”
The windows were shut up and the place stank of cat piss. Not even the pot smoke helped mask the acrid odour. As if seeing her place for the first time, in the way that fresh eyes, when a friend drops by, make you notice the mess you hadn’t before, his sister said, “Your first set of furniture is supposed to be cheap and ugly, because you don’t plan on keeping it.” She explained that this was a pit stop on the road to success, the luggage she’d leave behind when she upgraded. Then she told me about the coffee table she planned to buy.
Over the following years I’d come to understand that the thrill came not only with the upgrade but with the jettisoning of the old. The ostentatious display of purging. Of emancipation.
* * *
—
Trick hotel rooms are always bathed in a cool, drab light. In the water-splashed mirror above the sink, I don’t look that unhappy. Bright light makes tricks aware of every minute passing. The lights are also on for safety. No one tells me these things. I learn on my own.
As a sex worker, you’ve got to be tough, you’ve got to assume that every man is a serial killer. Forget his better nature or his nobler self. Don’t fool yourself into thinking people have a capacity for self-control, for compassion, for understanding. It’ll get you into trouble every time. Don’t let down your guard even for a second: what’s on the line is too precious to leave to fate or destiny. It’s nothing other than your very life, so you’d better not fuck around.
Don’t, for instance, ever get into someone’s car. Don’t give him the chance to drive you wherever he wants to go. Because even if you think you could jump from a moving vehicle, have you seen what happens to a body that hits the pavement at fifty miles an hour?