The Education of a Very Young Madam (12 page)

My game is blackjack, and I went from casino to casino playing night after night for five weeks. The whole period is mostly a blur. When I gamble, I gamble hard, and at that point in my life I gambled harder than ever before. Pretty soon I had lost nearly everything I had.

I remember, after almost all my money was gone, waking up in my car because I couldn't afford a room. Once again, I knew it was time to move on. I was tired of being there. Besides, Atlantic City is no fun when you're broke. I knew I wasn't ready to settle down again just yet, and, for me, the only way to avoid that was to keep moving. So that's what I did.

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CHAPTER 7

My Canadian Escape

I
arrived in Montreal with a change of clothes stuffed into a backpack and my fur coat over my arm. That's all I thought I needed. Montreal was supposed to be a short vacation—a chance to figure out what to do next and an escape from the last place I'd escaped to—but somehow I ended up staying in Canada for four years.

I got to Montreal by borrowing a car from Jack, a big-time player from NYC. He was a good friend of Andre's, but I had actually met him even before Andre and I started going out. He used to come into the strip clubs where I danced when I was living with Jackson. He would often give me weed, which made me think he was just a petty weed dealer. I later found out that he was one of the biggest hustlers around.

When it was time to leave Atlantic City, I had almost no money and nowhere to go. Jack helped me through a rough spot, but not without strings attached. He had wanted me from the first time he saw me years ago. Even though he was powerful and ready to come to my aid, I also thought he was one of the most disgusting-looking guys I'd ever seen in my life. Once I didn't need him anymore, I couldn't get away from him fast enough.

I got him to loan me his car by telling him I was going to visit my family for the weekend. I ended up in Montreal because I knew he couldn't follow me there. He was one of the main suspects in a high-profile murder at the time and wasn't allowed to leave the country. Once I was there, I had someone drive the car back over the border and leave it in a parking garage. Then I called Jack and left him a message telling him where he could find his car and that I wouldn't be coming back after all.

Things started off okay in Montreal. I was on my own, so life was pretty relaxed—no one working for me, no one living with me, no real attachments of any kind. I danced now and then at a local club to make some money, but most of the time I just hung out and did whatever I felt like. I started casually dating a stripper, which was new to me since I had never really just dated before. I'd always had boyfriends, one powerful guy after another, who had taken care of me, taught me what I needed to know about life, about business, and about getting by. Not that any of them would ever have taught me directly how to be independent. In fact, they were all quick to tell me that I couldn't do anything without them, but I had learned just by being around them. By the time I got to Canada, I didn't feel like belonging to anyone anymore, and I now knew that I didn't need to.

Then I met Charles. He caught my attention at a local bar where I used to gamble on the Loto-Quebec machines. The bar was right next to 281, the hottest male strip club in Canada. Girls used to line up for blocks on a Friday night just to get in. This was Saint Catherine Street, where you could find, and buy, just about any type of sin, and there was at least one church and one bar on every block.

Charles was adorable, very cocky and confident. He had this way of keeping his distance from people while, at the same time, making himself known to everyone. We'd run into each other a number of times along Saint Catherine but had not really spoken much. I'd been keeping my eye on him though.

One night, the stripper and I had a date that ended early, so I asked him to drop me off at the bar afterward. He had just left when Charles walked up to me.

"I see you only date pretty boys," he said, as it it were an accusation. I took it as a compliment and shrugged.

"You're pretty enough," I said. "Why haven't you asked me out yet?"

He did, of course, and I knew right then and there that I would never see the stripper again. The stripper was fun and, more important, head-turningly gorgeous, but Charles, well, I just thought he had so much potential.

Pretty soon I had moved out of the hotel where I was staying and into Charles's small studio apartment. It was located right outside the city in a not-so-great part of town. Charles was on probation, so the first thing he did was school me on what to say if, for example, the phone rang after a certain hour of the day and he wasn't home. (I was always supposed to say he was sleeping or in the shower unless it was someone I knew.) The studio was rundown, with a tiny kitchen and an even tinier bathroom. Charles had only the bare essentials to get by and nothing more.

Charles was a drug dealer, but compared to the guys I had dated before, he was strictly small-time. Most nights he'd stand on a corner on Saint Catherine Street selling small pieces of rock wrapped in tinfoil for twenty dollars each. If the cops came, he'd put the foil in his mouth, and if they really bothered him, he'd swallow it. The penalties for selling drugs were very high in Canada, especially for a repeat offender, and Charles was determined not to go back to jail.

Occasionally Charles's pager would go off and he'd hop into a cab to make a delivery, often for just forty to sixty dollars. Most of his clients were worn-out prostitutes and junkies. I watched him for a while before deciding that I was going to help him. I had to. His way of doing business was like climbing a mountain with no equipment ... it was going to take forever for him to get anywhere. If he was going to make any real money, then things needed to change right away.

I made pretty good money dancing, and since I was living at his place and didn't have a business of my own anymore, my expenses were practically nothing. So I decided to help Charles out the same way my Andre had helped me, by putting up the money and showing him how to really do business the right way.

I gave Charles the money he needed to buy a larger quantity of product, which, I explained to him, meant he could get more for his money. Now he could supply the boys who worked the corners on Saint Catherine with him or, better yet, get those boys to work for him exclusively.

"This is how things should work," I told him. "Go to those boys and tell them that you'll supply them with their product from now on for the same price that they were paying before, only for every five pieces of rock they sell, they'll get one for free. This will be their incentive, both to keep buying from you and to sell more stuff, and the more they sell, the happier everyone will be. And no more standing out on the street waiting for people to come to you. It's too dangerous. You can keep the customers you already have, but from now on, they have to call and wait for you. And you have a hundred-dollar minimum for deliveries. If they don't like it, fuck 'em. You don't need to be running around town for small-time customers anymore."

Pretty soon Charles was making a lot more money with a lot less risk. He got to the point where he had five employees working for him, and they were the ones standing out on the street selling every night. All Charles had to do was make sure they were fully stocked with product so that the money would always flow. He hardly had to work at all. Most of the time he stayed home or went out and played. Business was safer, easier,
and
he made more money. Why would you do it any other way?

Charles was a good student. He listened carefully and did everything I said. He didn't have the attitude that Andre or Allen had, so he didn't have a problem taking advice from me as long as

I didn't give it to him in front of anyone else. Hut not having an attitude can be a liability in this line of work, so I had to teach him about Respect, with a capital
R,
too. I started by giving him his first gangster nickname. I began calling him Capone, after my childhood hero.

Everyone we knew and everyone around us was some type of hustler—pimps, hookers, dealers, gamblers, junkies, gangsters... you name it, they were around. That was the world we lived in, and the problem with that is, as soon as you have something of your own, someone is going to be there to try to take it from you. Charles was suddenly in a place where he had something to lose.

As for me, I had made my stand early on, when I had first arrived in Montreal, so that people knew right off the bat not to mess with me. I had been at my favorite bar sitting by myself holding a beer in one hand and playing the poker machine with the other when a chubby blonde who had been sitting with a bunch of girls came up to me.

"You need to get a pimp in your life," she said, no doubt at the prompting of her own pimp, who was looking to recruit some more "talent."

I kept my eyes on my game as I responded, "Why don't you go suck somebody's dick and get out of my face."

I obviously offended her with that comment, and she started screaming at me: "Who do you think you are? You can't talk to me like that!"

So I picked up one of the nearby bar stools and went after her, chasing her through the bar like a madwoman. In a situation like this one, it didn't make that much difference if I beat her or she beat me. It's the way you fight that matters. There are certain unwritten rules. Don't pull hair. Weapons are fine. Just keep going until someone stops you, someone can't get up, or you hear the sound of sirens. And if you do hear sirens, just walk away as if nothing ever happened, no matter what you look like, even if your ribs are broken and there's blood streaming down your face. You can never let them see you hurting. And if you get knocked on your ass, you have to get back up again and keep punching. That's the way to let people know that you can't be taken down.

My fight with the blonde was split up pretty quickly, but from that point on, everyone knew I wasn't the type to take any shit. It was a small world that we lived in and word traveled fast.

I told Charles that he was going to have to make an impression too, one that said loud and clear that he wasn't to be messed with. "Since you're a guy and a real drug dealer now, you're going to have to send an even stronger message," I told him.

His chance came when I got into a fight with the girlfriend of one ofthe kids who worked for him. The guy was barely eighteen, but he thought he was a real pimp. His girlfriend was twenty-four and a stripper at one of the local clubs. He always took all her money and spent it on gambling or on trying to get laid. He threw it away like it grew on trees. I used to play pool with him because he was an easy mark and I always knew I could quickly take some of his money for myself.

One night, after I had gone double or nothing with him several times—winning every game, of course—I asked his girlfriend why the fuck she would give her money away to a loser like him.

"My man is the best man in the world," she said. "He treats me like a queen. Whatever I want, he gets it for me. It doesn't get any better than him."

I had to laugh at that. This girl didn't have a car, she wore the same outfit every week and lived in a tiny apartment where the heat barely worked. The bitch needed to be checked, so I told her, loudly, "You stupid cunt, your man is a whore. I see him chasing a different girl every night while you're out working to make the money that
he
takes from you and then quickly loses half of to me because he sucks at pool. And if he's such a big pimp, why is he working for my man?"

I knew that would start a fight between us, and it did. The girl could really throw a punch, and I went home that night with knots all over my head. I told Charles that he had better do something about this before the girl's boyfriend got it in his head that he could do whatever he wanted. It was all bullshit really, but it was an opportunity for Charles to publicly let people know that he was not to be messed with, nor was anyone close to him.

The next night Charles tracked down the girl and her boyfriend at the bar and pistol-whipped them both in front of everyone. Soon after, I ran into the girlfriend again and got right in her face. To my surprise she just walked away. Charles had apparently made his point. Neither she nor her boyfriend ever talked shit around either of us again.

Our lifestyle improved after that, but our relationship just got worse and worse. Quite frankly, in making Charles over in the image of my past loves—in my own image, really, since I had become what they had taught me to be—I'd made him into a monster.

Things really got bad when I started teaching him how to run girls. There is a difference between running girls and being a pimp, but Charles couldn't see that. And if he was going to act like a pimp around his girls, then guess what he was going to act like around his girlfriend. He conveniently forgot the fact that I had taught him practically everything he knew. Some people have no class that way.

I finally left Charles for good when I found out that he had been dipping into the $200,000 we had saved as our "retirement fund." He blew the money on trips to the casino and $1,500 games of pool, which was a disastrous way for him to try to make money since I beat him at pool every time we played and I was no pool shark (though I wasn't bad either). When I heard what he'd been doing, I demanded he open the safe where we kept the money. I found only $30,000 inside.

I left Charles the money, telling him to use it to get a decent education since he wasn't going to make it on his own any other way. Instead I took all the jewelry he'd given me and went straight to the pawnshop. I didn't get much money for it, not compared to the amount I left Charles with, but it was enough to start over.