The Bikini Lounge had been on Grand since late 1947. It would have remained a forgotten dive until hipsters like Cooper discovered it. I liked it anyway. It was close to where I lived. Started coming here after the Emerald Lounge closed down. Either here or the Alaskan Bush Company, just a piece further down Grand.
Grand Avenue slashed diagonally through Phoenix’s grid-lined streets. Certain streets in the city are sunburnt. This stretch of Grand had gone on to skin cancer. But lately the neighborhood had seen something of a revival. Artists found the rents affordable and the setting appropriately retro-beat and moved in, luring adventurous suburbanites in with them, pushing the hustlers, vagrants, and addicts deeper into the shadows just off the main drag.
I’d been to most of the galleries: Red Door, Perihelion Arts, Art One. I didn’t know art from Shinola but I’d gotten used to the boho scene. I figured galleries were better than payday stores.
I once saw a hell of a good Rockabilly band from Tucson in one of the galleries. Can’t remember their name anymore. But that’s what I liked about Grand. It wasn’t lined with phony bullshit you’d find in Scottsdale. Now
that
was a city made for the Coopers of the world.
Phoenix had grown on me. I liked the cowboy skies as the sun exploded against the western clouds, the pomegranate sunsets. The dead streets at night downtown. The lingering mid-century postcard architecture, motel dives, and plazas. I wished the rest of the world would just leave Phoenix alone.
I lived on McDowell, near Seventh Avenue, in a bungalow apartment. I moved there after the Air Force. I’d been stationed at Luke and when my time was up I decided to stay.
Back when I moved into my apartment one of my favorite places was the Emerald Lounge on Seventh Avenue. I’d seen the Hypno-Twists play there a handful of times. Great place to see a band.
The Emerald Lounge was gone now.
Replaced by a Starbucks.
Nothing good ever stayed.
Then I met Valerie.
The earliest snapshots of Valerie are the ones from the Bush Company. The ones that kept me company on those long hot nights when I couldn’t sleep. I’d seen her dancing to “Thunder Kiss ’65” and I knew she’d be my favorite. I’d only stay there on the nights she worked. I’d sit patiently, nodding the other girls by, taking their dirty looks with them, until she’d finally come over to me. Skin like milk, hair black as coffee, and eyes to match.
“My name’s Karl,” I told her one night during a private dance.
“Valerie.”
“Okay if I ask where you’re from, Valerie?”
“Tucson.” Red lips against my throat. “What about you, Karl?”
“Right here.”
“No one is from here. So, where’re you from, really?” I noticed the accent then. Not Spanish like you’d expect in Phoenix. Something else, Eastern European, maybe.
“Okay,” I said. “Nowhere. Then here.”
But she wasn’t listening anymore, her back against my lap, sliding down between my legs.
I swallowed my beer and looked at my watch.
“Thinking of heading over to the Paper Heart later. They’re showing
Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!
tonight,” I said to Sally. “What about you?”
“Seen it.”
“Come on, Cooper,” I heard Valerie’s husky voice behind me. “We should get to the motel already.”
I had to look at her. Her face, lined beautifully in the glow of the tiki lamp above the table where she and Cooper sat. I tried telling myself how much she hated being with Cooper. She made it clear to me that she had to act like she was into him. But knowing this didn’t make it any easier watching them together.
“Yo, you want something?” Cooper shouted across the floor at me. Valerie pretended to see me for the first time. She put her hand on Cooper’s arm, saying something I couldn’t hear.
Touching Cooper’s arm like that, I bet it was something she did a lot. One of her finest talents, touching guys, prodding them, making them do what she wanted. I hated that about her.
“Easy, friend,” I said. “No harm meant.”
I turned around and looked down at my beer, its foam sticking to the sides of the glass. “The fuck,” I heard Cooper continue. “You hear that shit? Ain’t your friend, yo!”
I finished my beer. That’s right, Cooper, listen to your girlfriend there. Forget about me and think about all that swag you got with you instead. I’m no one. Just another loser in a bar.
My throat burned. I smacked my glass down, feeling Valerie’s nails caressing Cooper’s arm, his back, other places too.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up. “I guess I’m outta here. See ya, Sal.”
Outside, the night hadn’t cooled any. They rarely did. Not when the days hit above 110 degrees. That’s when the heat just soaks into the concrete and glass and waits there until morning. Riding out the hot nights, I’d lay awake in my apartment with the radio on, reading a Luke Short or Louis L’Amour paperback and listening to the whistle of the trains off Grand slide with the hum of traffic on I-10.
A Chevy truck rolled by on Grand, Ranchero music trailing as it passed me.
I could hear singing from the church around the corner. White globe lights hung from its trellises, glinting off the cars and pickups that lined the street in front of it.
My car, a fourth-generation Impala rolling out its last miles, sat parked around the corner on Fifteenth Avenue, across from the boxing club. I could see two Latino boys sparring in the ring. Another worked the bag while a woman, his girlfriend maybe, jiggled an infant on her knee as she watched him pounding the bag, working it, working it.
“He always brags about his jewelry business. How he’s a big entrepreneur,” Valerie had told me. We were in Mel’s Diner on Grand, after her shift. She stirred sugar into her coffee. She put lots of sugar into her coffee, I noticed. She sipped it quickly as she spoke. I wished she’d finish it and we could go back to my place.
“He’s just another guy full of shit,” I said. I was sick of hearing about Cooper already. “Phoenix is full of guys like Cooper. Forget about him.”
“Is Karl jealous?” She put her mug down, smiling on one side of her mouth.
“Karl’s tired,” I answered. “Karl would like to take you home.”
“And do what?”
“You’re a smart girl, Valerie. I’m sure you can figure that out.”
“Dance for you maybe?” That crooked smile again. “You’d like Valerie to dance for you again tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe dance, maybe more than dance?”
I wanted more than the dance. She knew it. “Like I said.”
She sipped from her mug. That’s the snapshot of her when I first compared her hair to the color of coffee. “I like dancing for you, Karl.”
“Yeah?”
She got up from her side of the booth and slid over next to me, her short denim skirt high up her thighs.
“Do you wonder why I tell you about Cooper?”
“You already said it. To make me jealous.”
“He wants me to quit dancing. Work for him instead. I can make more money working for him, he says, selling his jewelry designs.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“He carries jewels around with him. He wants to get into the jewelry-design business. He buys from designers and sells them as his own. I asked him once where he gets his jewels. He tells me people who owe him money sometimes pay in jewels. I think he buys jewels with his father’s money. Maybe you’ve seen his father’s commercials on TV. His father is that car dealer from California. He marries beauty queens from Texas.”
“Again, why are you telling me this?”
“Cooper carries around jewels with him. He shows them to me. I tell him I know people he can sell jewels to maybe. Clients with money. I meet them doing escort jobs. Cooper wants to fuck me like a big shot. He is like a fucking teenager. But a teenager with too much money.” I could hear the Eastern venom in her voice.
The door opened and a pair of Phoenix PD came in. Young and athletic looking; ASU Sun Devils material. They both threw brief glances at us before taking a booth near the corner. I heard a cough of static from one of their radios.
Valerie smiled at them.
I looked out the window, at the fenced-in used car lot across Grand. I waited for her to get on with it.
It came with a flicker of hot tongue against my ear. A voice so low, hypnotic; a razor blade coated with the scent of coffee and cigarettes.
“Maybe Karl and Valerie teach the big shot a lesson.”
More snapshots of her for the slideshow then. Ones of her dancing for me at my place, swaying to the Roy Orbison tape on my cassette player, wearing nothing by the end of the third song. Then, only in my apartment, would she let me touch her as she danced.
But touching only, nothing else.
That would come later, she promised me.
Until then, she would do other things for me.
Sometimes, afterward, sitting in the chair by the window, she’d talk about her escort jobs, the blue smoke from her cigarettes drifting out into the night. But mostly she talked about Cooper. How he was growing impatient with her. When would she quit dancing and work for him. And when was she going to let Cooper meet with her people. He had big plans and wouldn’t wait on her and her people for long.
Then she stopped coming over to my place.
No reason why.
After the last night there, I found her spangled thong under my pillow. It glittered in the light from the window like dreams from the Emerald City. I didn’t notice when she left it, but knew she’d left it for me as a souvenir, a promise from her to add to the pictures in my head.
At work, she acted like I was just another creep.
I’d watch as she danced for the other men, waiting for her to come back to me. She wouldn’t even look my way. I’d stay up late after coming home from work, eating chili or tamales from a can that I’d heat over a hot plate. I played my tapes low as I ate. Roy Orbison sang “Mystery Girl” and I would mouth the words along with the song, running the slideshow of Valerie real slow, timing it to the music. She had once danced to “Mystery Girl” for me, before, when she used to come over. I always thought of it as her song.
Of course, it worked.
I had one of the other dancers give her my message.
I was in. I would help her teach Big Shot Cooper a lesson.
I waited in the Desert Sun Motel’s parking lot. Cooper and Valerie had a ground-level room, across from the empty swimming pool. The doors to the rooms were painted blue. Arizona-sky blue. Highway blue when the clouds are the only things that break and fall into infinity. Cooper’s Lexus sat in front of their door. I’d seen them park there, having followed them from the Bikini Lounge.
No one had meetings in a dump like this, unless it was with a hooker or a dealer. Cooper had to be naïve, stupid, or both to come here with Valerie to do business. This was going to be too easy, I thought.
“Wait for me,” she’d told me. “I’ll leave the room to get ice and leave the door open. You will come back to the room with me and take the jewels. No problem. Got it?”
It seemed simple enough. That was all I had to do. Go back with her and take his swag.
I waited in the darkness of my car, thinking about how she and I would celebrate later. Thinking about the way she danced for me—until I saw her open the door to their room.
I got out of my car. She looked at me and nodded, an empty ice bucket in her hand.
I went up to the door and waited for her to return with the ice.
“It’s about time.” Cooper stood up from the bed. A gym bag sat on the corner of it, next to him. He looked at me for a moment, confused. “Hold on a sec. He’s that guy from the bar. What the hell is this?”
I heard the door close behind me, the chain sliding on the lock.
“Take it easy, Cooper,” Valerie said.
“No,
you
take it easy.” Cooper’s voice cracked with fear. “What the hell is he doing here? You set me up!”
“Take it easy, Cooper,” I repeated.
“Screw you, man!” Cooper dove to the bag and wrenched a small gun from it. He pointed it at me. I don’t know shit about guns. I just know that you don’t want to get shot by one, no matter how big or small they are. They fuck you up. His gun soaked up the wan light from the lamp. It was small and black in his fist. A woman’s gun, I thought, a chick’s gun. I could see the barrel tremble.
“You think I’m going to just sit here and let someone rob me? You think I’m stupid or something?”
“Cooper, put the gun away. You’re not going to use it.” Valerie reached out, as if to calm him. “You said yourself the jewels were insured. Put the gun away.”
“Forget it. I’m not a fucking chump! And I’m not letting no cheap whore and her goon-boy rip me off!”
Cooper pointed the gun at her.
I jumped him then, hitting him just as the gun went off. The gun sounded simultaneously with the shattering of the lamp. The room went dark. My ears rang from the shot.
I held onto Cooper’s wrist, twisting it, punching him with my free arm as we rolled off the side of the bed. Cooper landed beneath me, the bag spilling beside us.
Cooper yelled then, unintelligible words in the darkness between the bed and the wall where we struggled. I grabbed a loose pillow and crammed it against his face, stifling the noise and trying to keep the gun away. Valerie pounced on us, pulling at the gun in Cooper’s fist. It happened before I knew it. Cooper’s muffled screaming ended the instant she fired the gun into the pillow. Cooper’s body collapsed beneath me. My vision tunneled. The small room filled with the smell of shit, gun powder, and burnt pillow foam.
The light from above the sink came on. Valerie stood above us, the gun in her hand.
I saw a cut across her right cheekbone. A thin line of blood trickled from it, leaving a teardrop’s path.
That’s the one I told you about before. The last one of her.
“Karl.” I could barely hear over the dull ringing from the gun. “Karl, we have to get our asses out of here, now!”
The phone started to ring.
“Don’t answer it,” she said.
Valerie above me. Yeah, that shiny streak of blood on her cheek. I could crawl to her to lick it off …
I scrambled away from Cooper’s body.