by Yasuko Thanh
“Crack bumps,” she said. The drug-induced cysts on his face.
I wasn’t jealous or threatened, even when she winked and said he “did things,” like go down on her. The part of the conversation that made an impression was how she believed he’d slid downhill since then.
I’m making this up. I must have overheard her talking to another ho, because I can’t invent the circumstances that would have made her badmouth Avery to my face.
“He used to be fine,” she said, “but he’s not anymore.”
Her remark didn’t insult. Instead, a deep relief washed away the fear I’d been carrying inside: that every ho wanted to get with my man.
Over time I’d run off, or outlasted, all the rest. I’d had no wives-in-law for a while.
My staying power, the obedience I showed to my pimp, otherwise known as being down, had earned me respect and a reputation for being solid.
“Look at what Michelle goes through,” a pimp once told his ho when she was complaining about his treatment. “At least you’re not Michelle.” The horrors I was believed to endure were to me no more than quotidian aspects of The Game—bringing home a large trap, never talking back—but hearing that had renewed my sense of pride.
Now, hearing Tanya describe Avery’s deterioration made me pity him.
“Base head,” I think she said.
But he was my base head.
I was the only one now. Avery was too old, too washed up, to attract anyone new. That this made me want to treat him with a new tenderness tells me about who I was then.
To be so pleased that I was the last of the many good hos Avery had had in his ten-year pimping career, to be so pleased with being left with the dregs—that tells me I wanted to be viewed as a martyr.
Leftovers were my privilege. The injury crack had done to his reputation solidified our relationship; it made him dependent on me.
To be down gave me a sense of power. In a counterintuitive way, my obedience to a man who in the eyes of other hos no longer deserved it, or commanded it, my ability to put that onus of high performance on myself, fuelled a self-righteous streak.
That night, I told Avery nothing of what Tanya had said. Perhaps I mentioned that I’d chatted with someone he knew. If I mentioned her name perhaps he said “Who?” not to spare me jealousy, but the crack having made him forget, gratifying me further.
I reduced him to a little boy whom I had to protect. I didn’t think, Hey, other hos consider your man a loser. Maybe it’s time you abandoned ship.
Instead I grew secure in the knowledge that I’d never have to deal with another wife-in-law again. Avery had lost his game. His looks. His status. In the years we’d spent together he’d let himself go to the point where his only choice remaining was to rely on me alone. And I was happy, privileged, to comply.
I’d take care of him. I’d make everything okay.
I’d be such a good ho he’d never miss his stable.
Avery must have intuited the truth. It hadn’t occurred to me till then that his nighttime forays no longer involved elaborate preparations. The clothes, the hair, the meticulously detailed car.
Now he ventured out in tracksuits, without even showering first. His hair in a ponytail.
Avery had become a monogamous boyfriend. We lived common-law, introducing each other as “my partner” in public.
* * *
—
Yet even as these things were taking place, Avery and I had begun to drift apart, spending more time on solitary pursuits—I on my writing and he on his car collection, to which he’d recently added a ’71 Chevelle SS he was in the process of restoring. We shared the new house like two strangers, polite but distant, tolerating each other’s presence.
The Hong Kong developer who owned our house didn’t do much to maintain it. No repairs had been done since we’d moved in. The rotten porch steps barely held a person’s weight and the fridge ran warm, souring milk in two days. Still, our new endeavour benefited from a negligent overseas landlord: we’d decided to start a grow op.
Frances was the only person I would have told about it—about how, before I went to work at night, I’d go down to the basement where we kept our three hundred plants. Naked in grow-light heat, I’d pluck dead leaves and wipe away spider mites. I loved the pungency of the foliage, my fingers in dirt. I loved the geometry of the plants, the precision and perfection of their rows. I loved how our neighbour made hash oil out of the trimmings we threw over the fence.
* * *
—
One rainy evening, searching for writing magazines, I drove down slick streets to a bookshop on West Fourth. The woman there gave me a magazine with glossy pages that told you how to write articles, how to dissect stories, where to submit your work.
I sent three poems to Quarry magazine and a few months later received a handwritten rejection letter from one of its editors, with a note on how to subscribe and a free copy of their twentieth-anniversary issue. I opened its pages. My eye fell on Caroline Adderson’s short story, “Oil and Dread.” I’d not been discovered, but I was discovering something. I saw at once that these words were different from any I’d read before. The rhythm like a river, dappled currents of lyricism.
The story stayed with me as I tended to the plants that night. I kept thinking about the mystery and power of its language. It made me shudder, like a girl falling in love.
I’d crunched numbers and pointed out to Avery that the grow op made enough money to sustain us. At age twenty-one I was working the streets less now than ever before. For the first time in my life I had a home office.
And for the first time I became disciplined, fastidious about my writing. I worked for four hours a day and in the evenings I’d read for four hours, keeping tally in a scribbler: how much was fiction, how much nonfiction. I adhered to my routine as if clinging to a life raft.
Even as I was still going to work three or four nights a week, I was cultivating a new self. Literature was my communion. One day I’d make magic with my words.
Town of Quitters
By the summer of 1992 what lay between Avery and me was no longer love but a deep and narrow crevasse filled with resentments. We kept drifting further apart, I into my writing, he “out with the boys” for days at a time. I’d phone the jails, the hospitals, then awake to a loud knock on the door at three a.m. “Where’s your man? I need to speak to him very, very badly.” When I’d confront him the one thing that had changed was his attitude. No trace of bombast remained, only guilt and remorse on a sweaty face he’d lower into his hands. Eyes that looked up at me, minutes later, when he dared meet my gaze, filled with tears.
* * *
—
By October we’d saved enough money to go on vacation in Mexico. The preparations alone excited me: the reading of maps, fingers hovering over exotic place names. I loved that first trip. I loved how much more real everything felt without razors and makeup and hair extensions and stilettos. I hiked until the sweat ran in rivulets down my dirty face, streaking it like mascara. And over the six weeks we travelled, Avery stayed away from the crack pipe. We did nothing more than smoke Mexican red hair joints and drink our faces off.
I admired his ability to make friends, to break the ice, to get a room laughing, to turn a ho-hum night into a party. A couple of lawyers from Seattle staying in Tulum asked me, “Is he always like this?”
“Yup,” I said, and it was true. Like a little boy, Avery was either happy or mad. There was no in between.
He was my buffer. My link to the outside.
My identity had been subsumed by his for so long that I didn’t know how to be on my own. Travelling gave me the chance to discover who I was. We define ourselves in the context of others. Surrounded by young professionals, I met in myself someone new. We befriended an interracial couple from the Netherlands, a literary magazine editor from Belgium and his wife, a German man in his last year of med school. He was in his twenties. Not much older than me.
My
personality snuck out like a woman’s slip from beneath a dress. I left it like that, to see other people’s reactions.
I romanticized the shirts of childrens’ school uniforms in front of dirt floor shacks encircled by barbed wire. In a country where dogs ran loose in packs, poverty wasn’t a vice, not a character flaw. Poverty did not equal weakness or my father’s failure as a man; oversimplifying the equation, I began viewing poverty as an ingredient for happiness. And freedom.
Like someone falling in love, I idealised the reek of open sewers, and piles of used diapers in the river and plastic bags in the mango trees. Two months we travelled and smog, even dead dogs, became symbols of virtue. The Mexico I saw was one where I walked with wild hair and shoeless feet, sun scorching off my inauthenticity, the juice of a golden pineapple dripping from my chin not caring who saw, singing with the hurdy gurdy players on street corners. A place of sweetness. A place of reggaeton music. A place without disguise.
I’d always reflected the person Avery wanted me to be. It never occurred to me that this was a process. In the pursuit of love, I’d let him mould me. The best I could hope for was that his desires would evolve, that through his evolution he’d learn to bring out the best in me.
In other words, clay had better hope its sculptor is skilled. That his vision for what it can become is not only excellent but that his hands are talented enough to bring that vision to fruition.
But my sense-of-things permeated a question I often asked myself: Who would I be now if I’d chosen someone besides Avery? I could as easily have ended up with the type of man I’d heard horror stories about: who beat his hos with clothes hangers or cut out their tongues for talking back.
We returned from Mexico vowing to travel at least every two years. As with so much else, it never happened.
* * *
—
I’d been a smoker since I was eleven years old. I’d often tell people, “If I ever want to quit, they’re going to have to lock me in a room alone. Because when I’m nicking out I could kill someone.” Quitting meant that rawness in your body, nerve endings exposed.
I’d gone so far as to record how often I smoked each day in a notebook I carried in my back pocket. The idea was that before quitting you should shake up the foundations on which the addiction rested, first by recording and then by analyzing the data: what things prompted the need to light up. Then you could retrain yourself by choosing to smoke at longer and longer intervals.
With diligence, I managed to cut down so that, unless the track had been stressful, I no longer had days where I smoked two packs or more.
Controlling my smoking at work was impossible. My pattern had always been to light up as soon as I got into a cab with a date, then again at the hotel room, then again when the trick had finished. A violent date meant I chain-smoked. Lighting a cigarette gave me time to invent a response to a dangerous situation.
But when we got back from vacation, I quit. Cold turkey. How? In my mind, the equation looked like this: if you don’t smoke, you can retire. If you can cut your expenses to the degree that cigarettes are no longer a daily purchase, you can stay home. As I eased into not-working, day by day, the last thing I wanted was Avery saying, “You got to go back to work. How’re you going to afford smokes otherwise?” In my mind, the two were uniquely and absolutely related. If I could keep the cigarettes away from my lips, I’d never have to suck another cock for money again. Never have to stand in the rain waiting to break, my feet getting soaked through my leather stilettos. Never have to deal with another bad date—as I had the night before we’d left for Mexico.
He hadn’t been satisfied with my performance, especially after giving me an added couple hundred dollars on top of the one-fifty he’d already spent. He yelled at me. I couldn’t get out of the room; he was blocking the door. My body began twitching like a live wire. Even as it was happening I felt embarrassed by what it revealed about me—that I was scared. Always a terrible thing before a showdown. I tried to control my body by sitting down on the bed and calmly lighting a smoke, exhaling in a relaxed fashion, a ruse to let him know he didn’t intimidate me. What saved me wasn’t the cigarette but another working girl who burst into the room. She’d heard his shouts.
Her tactic was to call direct attention to my fear.
“Look at her,” she said. “She’s frightened. What have you done? You, this big man, and her, scared half to death.”
As she talked I inched closer to her, toward the door, and both of us edged ourselves past him and out into the hallway.
* * *
—
I smoked the rest of my Mexican cigarettes when we got home.
Returning to the track right away seemed unreasonable. I had laundry to do, souvenirs to unpack—a friend had looked after our plants while we were gone but there was a crop ready to harvest, to trim. The track would have to wait.
But what if, what if I cost hardly anything to keep? If I never bought another stitch of clothing? If I never smoked again? If there was nothing Avery could throw in my face?
* * *
—
I’d set it up as though one action caused the other, as if smoking triggered turning tricks. I’m astounded by my power to delude myself into making the oddest connections. My theory that quitting smoking meant I could square up made no sense. But at the time the formula seemed foolproof. And in the manner of cultures whose stories aren’t spoken for fear of draining their power, I said nothing to Avery about my plan. I told him only that I wasn’t going to smoke anymore, not why. The key element was the why: that this endeavour’s success or failure would change the course of my life. My identity.
I no longer wanted to be two people, Michelle on the track, and Suko at home.
I wanted to be me all the time. I wanted care about the people I met enough to remember their names.
Every time I wanted a cigarette I lit a joint instead. Then I’d put it out, stare out the window at the traffic rolling down Ingersoll Street, and think, How badly do you not want to go back to the track?
If not smoking meant that every day could be danger-free, that evenings could be as blank a page as my mornings and afternoons, to be filled with books, writing, tending the plants, watching Star Trek…then the cravings would become manageable.
The new perspective I’d gained from travelling showed me, showed both of us, that the world and what it could offer was bigger than the track, bigger than a grow op, bigger than we could imagine.
* * *
—
Once a week at the library downtown I’d read the bulletin board that advertised upcoming contests and editorial services. I read how-to-write books and magazines like Quarry. And the more stories I read, the more I fantasized about leaving Avery.
* * *
—
(In years to come we’ll be standing in a kitchen. I’ll lean against the counter of a house I don’t live in while Avery slugs from a bottle of rye. Smoking crack all night has made him chatty. As the sun rises he tells me that all the times he said he was going out with the boys, he was smoking crack. He seems excited to reveal this information to me, his voice rushing and cheerful. “I could have cheated on you,” he says, “a lot more than I did.” In this dynamic there’s no judgment or anger, only a shared crack pipe and a bottle we both raise to our lips.)
* * *
—
I began to see myself walking out the door, renting a housekeeping room, saving for travel. But other days, leaving the world I’d known for years seemed unfathomable, amounted to an admission of failure.
I joined a choir; no audition required, simply a desire to sing. Once a week I’d catch two buses and the SkyTrain into town. The Rainbow Choir was made up of a New Agey collection of mostly women. The one who led it called herself Julie Blue and wrote songs about dolphins and talking trees. One evening, in an exercise designed to expand intimacy among the group, Julie Blue passed out little stones from a fabric bag she wore around her neck.
I put the stone in my mouth while I cooked dinner or scrubbed the toilet. Small and grey, the rest of the time it sat in my office. When I wrote I held it in my hand.
I signed out new self-help books, with titles along the lines of The Art of Letting Go and How to Forgive.
Trying to write my way out felt like turning off one light while turning on another.
We had a shared history. We remembered the same parties, the same people. But Avery was no longer the man of my dreams.
We’d managed to keep things afloat. Our ventures had been profitable. We owned a Mustang, a Corvette, a Cougar speedboat, a Chevelle, and a van for our “auto glass business.”
* * *
—
Avery had run a company in Alberta, a shop he’d started with a friend involving auto glass. At least, I thought it did—they may have also done body work. The salient part of the story, though, was the fact that they’d taken out a thirty thousand dollar loan to make their dream come true. Avery was in his early twenties at the time and had gotten out of jail after a two-years-less-a-day stint for assault.
But after a year, the friend drained the bank account and ran off, leaving Avery holding the bag. As a result—with warrants out for his arrest in Alberta—he fled the country with what cash remained in the till. The warrants were provincial, meaning he couldn’t be shipped back to the land of oil and cowboy hats to do time.
We went to a bookstore and bought a how-to guide. Everything we needed to know to fill out the paperwork was contained within its pages. The book even gave tips on naming one’s business. We decided on Arrow Mobile Auto Glass, since beginning with A meant it would be one of the first things people would see in the phone book. I spent hours filling out forms, crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Our application for a licence was successful; it came in the mail, an official piece of paper that I put into a briefcase. We opened a business account. We had signs made up for our van, the same van we used for the bags of soil our pot plants grew in. The signs were magnetic, and so could be easily removed if we wanted. We designed a logo for the business: “Arrow” spelled out inside an actual arrow, two feet by three feet and coloured white, red, and black. We made up a slogan—“We move so you don’t have to”—and printed it as a tagline on the bottom of the signs, under the arrow. The professional-looking van signalled to people who drove past our house that responsible adults lived there.