by Yasuko Thanh
Sirens wailed in the distance, finally. My body trembled. Frances pulled the curtain shut for me.
Lori started going on about this trick.
A second ago we’d watched a woman fall to the sidewalk. How could Lori have forgotten so quickly? Hadn’t watching a human being throw herself off a balcony affected her?
I closed my eyes but couldn’t banish the image of the woman dropping through the silent black night.
“He didn’t only pay me,” Lori was saying, “but he wanted me to steal all his stuff, too. He told me to take his microwave and his stereo and his paintings off the walls. He even gave me the combination to his safe. And then, get this.” She leaned over the table, lowered her voice. “After he gives me the combination, he says thank you.”
“I don’t think I could do that,” Frances said.
Lori beamed, as if her superiority had been confirmed.
A part of me understood wanting to be cold, not wanting to be broken. I could acknowledge Lori’s anger. We all had it. Anger against tricks, society, the world, sometimes even our pimps. The only thing that made us different from each other was what we chose to do with it. Where we put it when it got too big to swallow down.
Lori tossed a snapshot onto the table and said, “He wanted to be burned, starting with cigarettes.” The burns around the man’s nipples and on his inner thigh resembled the smallpox I’d seen in books. Even as part of me admired her thick skin, her fortitude, I grew nauseous.
“Did you leave him there?” Frances asked.
“Duh.”
“You should have at least called 911,” I admonished.
“Mother Teresa, here,” Lori said.
Frances would have called 911. Frances would have waited with him until the ambulance arrived.
Frances hugged me and I broke. For the girl on the balcony, for the man in the photos who’d paid Lori to chain him to the bed and nearly kill him, for the world’s hurts when beauty slipped away like a silken sheet.
“Of course I called 911, stupid. What do you think? I killed him?”
“We should have tried to save her,” I said. “We should have saved her life.”
Frances rubbed my shoulder. “That’s right,” she said. “Let it out.”
* * *
—
My turquoise corset-backed dress from the Leather Ranch on Granville Street had cost $350. It came apart at the waist, and sometimes I wore the strapless top with black pants, other times the skirt with a satin blouse. The leather flared over the skirt waist and could be worn tucked up or down.
I owned a lot of leather, but I’d bought this dress before Avery, before handing over my money each night. Two years before, I hadn’t yet realized that the ability to buy whatever you wanted immunized no one from despair. The leather’s rich smell had wafted from the bag as the clerk passed it over the counter. Any misgivings I’d had about My Life So Far softened to the buttery texture of the dress it held.
No one had yet told me that a tight skirt with no stretch could hobble you, as the original hobble skirts had prevented housewives from fleeing their kitchens and setting their cookbooks on fire in the streets. I’d yet to learn that a dress that can’t be hiked up when it’s time to run can kill you.
I was seventeen now, and, having worked for two years, proficient at spotting trouble. I should have known better, but nothing twigged my radar when the date asked if we could go to the Biltmore instead of the trick hotel.
I went to his room, took his money. Still wearing my turquoise dress, I excused myself and retreated to the bathroom, where I hid his money under the insole of my shoe.
I’d been giving him a fake lay for a couple of minutes when he grunted and stopped. I thought he was taking a break. But when he sat up silently next to me, trying to hide the condom hanging from his flaccid penis, it was clear that he’d come. I have no memory of whether I tried to cheer him up, since it wasn’t the first time this had happened with a date.
Sometimes if you stay calm, a date on the edge of freaking out will mellow. So I lit up a cigarette. The bonus was having to cross the room to lay my hands on my purse, which positioned me closer to the door. Still, my exit was blocked: he stood between me and my possibility of escape. The heavy burgundy curtains were tightly drawn. The room was suffocating.
“Hey. You’re not done,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere until I get another lay.”
I explained to him that he’d paid the minimum. I’d be happy to stay if he wanted more time. All he had to do was go to the bank machine. I’d even go with him. I told him all this as I was dressing.
“Fuck that. You’re gonna give me a lay for free.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
I felt the roughness of the carpet against my cheek before I realized he’d smacked me down. I tried to stand but he grabbed my ankles. I screamed, struggling to throw him off my legs, but the leather skirt acted like a lasso; its binding tension meant that I couldn’t kick hard enough to hurt him.
Then somehow I was up, and before he had another chance to grab me I brought the heel of my shoe down on his head as hard as I could. I dragged the embedded heel along his scalp, ripping open the flesh.
But he didn’t go down like they do in the movies. He touched his head, blood beading from the wound, then looked down at his fingers. Deliberately, leisurely, he said, “You crazy bitch.”
I opened the door and struggled as he tried to pull me back in; I battered his torso with my purse until he let go. Before I could jump out into the hallway he grabbed onto me. I held the door open with one hand and screamed.
“Shut the door, you little asshole.”
You little asshole? Who says that?
“Shut the door. Or I’ll kill you.”
He had me by my hair. They’re extensions, I thought. Glued on. They’d give. I’d tumble from his grasp and run, leaving him holding only my ponytail, wondering what had happened.
Security would come. Any minute now.
Bleed on the carpet. Leave DNA. Whatever you do, don’t let the door shut.
No one heard my screams. Or they’d heard and didn’t care to get involved.
Bite, kick, go down swinging.
An hour later, he let me go. Beat up and raped, he let me go.
I shook myself off, casting his memory away like dust from my shoulders. As I walked to a gas station I held up my head—don’t stumble, don’t cry.
A greasy metalhead wannabe sat behind the glassed-in counter on a bar stool.
“Can I see your phone?” The words rolled like rubber in my mouth.
“The phone? Customers only. You buying something?”
“Yeah. A cab.” I ran my fingers through my hair and chunks fell out.
“Whatcha doing later? I know a party.”
Had everyone lost their mind?
“Don’t you like to party?”
My dress, blood-spattered. My eye already swelling. I looked into my compact—my earrings? Fuck. Gone.
“Just kidding. Cat fight?” He winked. “Bet you kicked her ass.” He paused. “Seriously, though. There’s a pay phone on the corner.”
I stormed out to the pay phone, dug in my purse to find a quarter. Goddammit. My change purse, like my earrings, was gone. I limped back to the gas station.
I bought a pack of gum, flipped the attendant the bird, made my way back to the phone booth.
When the cab came, the driver asked me to show my cash. I wasn’t surprised. With my hair crazy and my clothes bloodied, I looked like someone who’d rip him off.
On the way home I noticed that the trick’s blood on my dress wasn’t red, like you’d expect, but forest green against the turquoise. I never wore it again.
* * *
—
I didn’t look at Avery as I walked across the room toward the couch. The bump on my head hurt and my right cheek felt taut under my eye.
“You’re home early,” he said. He put down the video game controller and l
ooked up. “What happened to you?”
“I had to come home. I wasn’t going to go back to the track so the date could come looking for me. I got raped. But I made a couple bills,” I added quickly, “before it happened.”
I threw the money down on the coffee table. The bills sat there, an image of themselves on the mirrored surface. Avery lit a smoke as if deciding on a plan.
We’d rocket over on his bike and kick his ass.
Avery would make him pay. We’d rob him.
He was still sitting back in the couch. “Well?”
“I’m not going back,” I said. He couldn’t tell me to return to the track. I wouldn’t.
“Your wife-in-law had a bad date, too.”
I went into the bathroom and washed the cut beneath my eye. Not big, but I’d have a shiner tomorrow.
“I’ll give you a call in the morning,” he said.
I came out of the bathroom. “What?”
“I have to go spend the night with Gina. She’s messed up.”
My stomach dropped. Every part of my body was telling me to run, but I had nowhere to escape to. My face grew hot as I took a deep breath, measuring my words. “Because she had a bad date?”
“Yeah.”
“What about me?”
“Well, here’s the other thing. Gina’s best friend in high school, she tried to kill herself tonight. Gina got the call a little while ago.”
I could picture Gina alone in her apartment as she would no doubt like Avery to find her—sitting cross-legged on the floor, wearing one of his T-shirts, uncombed hair, eyes bulgy from crying. Playing him, I was sure, for his sympathy.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” I was stepping on thin ice but was too mad to care. “She’s working you. Is that what I have to tell you to get you to spend the night?”
He draped a suit from the closet over his arm, then retrieved his eel-skin toiletry bag from the bathroom—the black one in which he kept his shaving gel and razor, Jheri curl spray and shower cap—slipping his hand through the lanyard so that it dangled from his wrist.
“If you walk out that door right now,” I said, “then don’t plan on coming back.”
For a moment he seemed to think about it, resting his hand on the doorknob and taking a deep, sustained breath. Then he shrugged. “Okay. Later, then.”
Later, then? How dare he call my bluff? Had the months we’d spent together meant nothing to him? I saw him walking out with all I’d invested up to that point. My expectations for tomorrow, our dreams for the business we’d talked about opening.
Without him I was nothing.
Without me he was nothing.
He couldn’t do this to me.
He couldn’t do this to himself.
I hurled myself at him in a panic. “No, don’t.” I pulled the door closed, heaving. “I’m sorry.”
I fell to my knees. He joined me on the floor, then gathered me up into his arms. He rocked me while I sobbed.
After he’d gone, leaving me to all the ghosts of the brown hotel room, worse for the fact that clinging to the air was the scent of his cologne, I spilled my angst onto the page. I asked for answers about the nature of good and evil, the distance between souls, between the lines of what I already knew, asking for wisdom. I hoped, by rereading it all, to divine the answers between the spaces.
In truth, the pen was too soft for this world. The pen moved like prayer between supplicant and god, when it moved. But mostly the pen was quiet. The pen was quiet but the questions, they screamed in passing, like people on a rollercoaster. Piercing but unremarkable, part of the background, ambience.
* * *
—
One night, Avery was waiting to take me to work on his bike, a new rice-rocket CBR 600 we’d recently bought. It went so fast that when he’d accelerated on an open stretch, I’d nearly fallen off the back at 220 kilometres an hour. When I’d told him how my butt had come off the seat, still stunned by the g-force that had made my lips flap, he laughed.
A portent of danger to do with my outfit hammered at me. Avery drummed his fingers on the doorknob, waiting for me, but I couldn’t ignore the warning’s migraine-like insistence; I took off my dress and high heels and changed into tights, flat boots, and a short leather jacket.
He dropped me off on the corner. I was fluffing my hair, flattened by the motorcycle helmet, and watching his taillights recede into Vancouver’s pink dusk when a truck pulled over. Noticing a police car down the block, I foolishly hopped in.
Right after I shut the door the man reached across the bench seat and grabbed me. He threw me against the passenger-side window and said, “You’re going to fuck me.”
As if money were the issue, I blurted, “Okay. But it’ll cost you two hundred.”
By now he’d pulled over. “For free.”
I struggled to escape his grasp but he had a firm grip of my hair and kept slamming my head into the glass. In the midst of wrestling I unlocked the door, swung it open. He sped off again and I saw my chance to press down on the horn.
I punched and kicked and when he slowed for a busy intersection I made myself into a ball and rolled out onto the street.
I’d ended up on the outskirts of Chinatown. As I made my way back to the track, brushing off the road debris, it dawned on me that my leather jacket and tights had protected me from the pavement: I’d been able to jump from his truck because I was wearing clothes to fight, kick, and run in.
A man in a suit looked at me with pity and asked if I was okay.
“Do you want some company?” I asked.
This man had stopped to help me, but my anger had clotted and broken like thunderclouds. He read it. “I-I-I just think now’s not the time.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“How about coffee?”
“What the fuck are you doing talking to me?”
I stormed off, clothing myself in a vestige of fury to hide how vulnerable I felt. I’d allowed the assault to happen. To reclaim any remnant of self-respect, all I could do was rage.
I didn’t need God. I could read signs.
After that, I looked to mysticism for answers.
Feng Shui.
Divination.
The Tarot.
My Chinese horoscope.
Poems, condensed, full of imagery.
When I turned up at home my pimp put a glass of wine in my hand and ran me a bubble bath. He told me I was amazing, brilliant, and that “You’ve never looked so fine,” as many times as I needed to hear it.
Underworld Mansion
We moved hotels every few weeks. I had two grey vinyl suitcases, a smaller burgundy Samsonite, a garbage bag filled with clothes, another bag for my hot rollers, blow-dryer, purses, and stilettos. The stilettos’ steel tips were so worn down they were more like knife blades than heels—not only did they puncture the plastic when I’d heave the garbage bag to the car but they also left holes in the trunk lining. More than once they’d cut my arms. Looking at the gashes those heels made provoked in me a mixture of disgust and embarrassment.
I envied the hos who did the circuit—Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Vegas, Honolulu, Tokyo, sometimes with their men, sometimes alone—imagining them in airports with suitcases worth more than their plane tickets, wearing matching yet sensible three-inch heels. Avery had promised travel, and I was still waiting for it to happen. He’d taken my wife-in-law Gina to Winnipeg. He hadn’t taken me anywhere.
Avery’s luggage was no better than mine, but he did have a suit bag and the toiletry clutch made of eel skin. I hated that clutch and had even stood over it with scissors: it symbolized my wives-in-law and the pain they caused me. He also had a briefcase full of soul cassettes—Oran “Juice” Jones, Midnight Star, Parliament. He kept it locked. But I’d figured out where he kept the key, and after I listened to them I’d try my best to put them back in the same order.
We had no fixed address. Turtled all we owned from place to place. I wasn’t sure how this made me feel.
> When I was home I thought about the track, and when I was on the track I thought about home. With the money I earned Avery bought cocaine while I splurged on leather boleros and house-plants, frying pans we’d leave behind, stickers never removed.
We ordered room service or delivery—pizza or Chinese—or we ate leftover popcorn from a movie we’d gone to the evening before, or burgers for days on end. Or we’d drink two litres of root beer and call it dinner, or a half-dozen candy bars, or a box of licorice. Overflowing ashtrays and room-service trays covered our floor. We’d have tomato soup and fries or French toast with peaches and roasted almonds topped with whipped cream and maple syrup. Then I’d dress and go to work on the track.
Between the spring of 1988 and the spring of 1989 we moved hotels an average of once a month, sometimes back and forth between Vancouver and Victoria. Hotels always found a reason to kick us out. The Robsonstrasse, the Huntingdon Manor, the Helm’s Inn, the Century Plaza, the Pacific Palisades, the Comfort Inn, the English Bay Hotel. We never lived any place long enough for it to feel like home. The year I was seventeen we lived in at least ten different places, including the Century Plaza Hotel, where we stayed longer than anywhere else.
It advertised itself as “the only all-suite hotel in the city.” We lived on the twenty-sixth floor. The suite was large enough for a living room with a couch, a loveseat, and a coffee table; off to the side were a kitchen and a small dining area. A queen-sized bed, comforter, pillows. The hallway glowed a soft rose colour and the carpet quieted the click of my heels.
Avery wore a plastic shower cap to protect the couch and pillowslips and all the other things he greased with his Jheri curl spray.
Our corner suite overlooked much of downtown. The balcony side looked over the bay toward the mountains—our future like our view, limitless. We paid for the room nightly at the front desk in a chandeliered lobby. But I couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a hotel, I couldn’t pretend I was home.
Avery told the desk clerks we’d just arrived from L.A., owned an entertainment agency, and were looking to buy a condo in Vancouver. Later, swimming in the hotel pool, I pretended these lies were true. Imagined how it would feel if it were true.