Authors: Beverly Simcic
Upon
entering the apartment there was a living room area with a sofa, chair and
coffee table. It had a cute little breakfast bar with two stools and the usual
galley kitchen set up, but it was more comfortable than a hotel room, so I was
thrilled that Chris had found this reasonably priced gem.
The
bedroom was small with two single beds and a tiny bathroom off to the side, and
if you stood on the balcony of the long front porch you could peer right into
the apartment from the oversized picture window and see straight through the
entire apartment. The only rooms not visible while looking in the front window
were the bedroom and small attached bath. You could, however, see the bottom
halves of the two single beds and the part of the bedroom where the door
entrance to the bath was. Stepping outside the apartment door you could walk
directly to your left, down the front steps and arrive at the hot tub and pool
area. This was just peachy….
I’d
never had this much sunshine in all my life, never actually had a vacation in a
sunny spot like this before. It was paradise to me, but it was June in Las
Vegas and getting hotter with every day that passed. The days were scorching
and the nights were freezing cold, and neither one of us brought coats, so we endured
this strange weather. We jumped hastily in taxis in the evening hours, only to
arrive at a casino and realize that their air conditioning wasn’t turned off or
even turned down at night. The hotels and casinos were refrigerators that never
turned off.
Passing
thoughts were of living in such a wonderful, sunny climate that was unlike
Pittsburgh, where you never knew what the summer months had in store for you.
Sometimes you were roasting hot with a horrible humid season and other times
you were rained out for the entire summer. I loved the thought of having
sunshine all the time.
We
were laid out on our beach towels, and I had started to relax in the burning
sun. I tried to resist napping so as not to fall asleep—this sun could burn you
up in a short period of time, I sensed that. After closing my eyes for what
seemed like five minutes, I propped myself up on my elbow and looked around.
Chris was gone. I thought I had heard her talking with someone, a man’s voice,
but it was so vague that I assumed she’d gone back to the apartment or went to
the vending area. I didn’t pay much attention until I saw a security guard
dashing past me to an apartment on the other side of the pool. I couldn’t
really see what was going on from my view at poolside, so I lay back down on my
towel.
Ten
minutes later, Chris appears out of nowhere and plops down on her towel. I sat
up quickly, “Where have you been Chris? Did something happen over there; I saw
security running around on the other side of the pool.”
She
stares at me with an evil grin, her face was flushed with anger, “I went with
this guy to his apartment for a massage and he wouldn’t let me out of the
room.”
“Whaaat?
What are you saying?” I was trying not to scream, even though there were only a
few people around the pool area. I am feeling helpless and meaningless right
now. I wanted to grab her by her shoulders and twist her. I wanted to smack her
in the face so hard that she would cry, but she would probably punch me in the
face. I knew that, and I was trying to think of a way to find out what happened
without annoying her even further because she had the look of already being
annoyed and pissed. So I sweetly asked her if this creep had been here at the
pool earlier on.
“Yes,”
she said. And then she proceeded to tell me that he didn’t want to pay her for
the massage; he thought she liked him and was going to his room for sex.
“Well,
of course he did Chris; if you go with a total stranger to his room, he’s going
to assume you want to have sex!” Why the hell would you do this? You can’t run
around Las Vegas selling massages to strangers—it’s crazy, its nuts, and its
insane bullshit.” I toned down my voice because I knew things would escalate if
I continued lecturing her. I tried calming myself down so I could find out what
happened, and I removed my sunglasses so I could see her face and talk directly
at her. I lit up a cigarette and leaned into her….
“Tell
me what else happened over there, Chris.”
Chris
positioned her bikini clad body on her towel as if she had already shrugged off
this incident and was ready to get down to the business of sun bathing.
I
said calmly, “Please tell me what happened Chris—are you okay, did he hurt
you?”
I
could still see the anger on her scrunched up face as she ignored me for a
minute, then she sat up and started fiddling with her bikini top. I refused to
press this issue any further. If she wasn’t willing to tell me about it, then
fine. I’d just have to live with that.
Suddenly,
she erupts in a quick speech, “No, well, maybe, I mean he threw me all over the
room. I was trying to grab the phone on the night table and the lamp fell over.
I threw the lamp at him and it crashed into the wall; it didn’t seem to bother
him at all. I was sprawled across the bed and he was dragging me off, and when
I fell near the phone I picked it up and dialed the office.”
I
pictured this scene in my mind and felt extreme anger building up inside of me.
She had actually had a brawl with this stranger in his room, and security had
to come and rescue her. I didn’t even think of asking her what they had to say.
I guess no one cared about this crazy shit in Vegas. Chris didn’t care either.
I could tell by her wide-eyed expressions of excitement that she was
(unbelievably) enjoying this craziness, and again I felt like punching her.
Instead, I just took deep breaths, sighed and grabbed my peach lipstick from my
cigarette case and smeared it all over my lips, then had to wipe most of it
away with my towel.
I
put my sunglasses back on, and sat there silent, but my heart was pounding and
I was scared. I had to think about this for a while, I was starting to have
feelings of panic about who I came out here with, and I suddenly didn’t know
this girl who was sunbathing next to me; I didn’t know her anymore, and she was
ruining a nice vacation with her erratic behavior. Who could I call? There was
no one to call, I didn’t know anyone in her family, and I felt completely
helpless to do anything; there was nothing I could do—nothing.
I
resigned myself to ignore her. She made me nervous and wrought with anxiety. We
would be roommates in the small apartment, and I would make my plan of escape
back to Pittsburgh following the fights. She had talked me into going and I had
agreed, but now I didn’t want to go anywhere with her. She was so excited about
the fights that I felt I couldn’t break my word. She asked me to help her with
doing her hair and makeup, and I wanted to do that for her, I truly did. It was
just getting hard to be around her, not knowing what explosion was going to
happen next. She was a firebomb waiting to go off in an instant. A little voice
in my head kept screaming at me, “Is this girl stupid or what?”…then the other
little voice would answer saying, “No, I think she just hasn’t been out of
Pittsburgh much.”
The
word my brain was searching for was naïve, and my heart was telling me that
Chris was just going to do what she wanted to do and that was it—an attitude I
related to for myself and my own stubbornness of refusing to listen to anyone
in my own life.
The
bold, the brave, the stupid, the naive, the bad choices—were all descriptions
of myself at an earlier time in my life. I knew them well, although I never
quite understood why I never paid any attention to red flags either. I saw
myself in Chris but not quite at this level of impetuousness.
Chris
was angry that she hadn’t been able to control what happened in that man’s
apartment. Come to think of it, the entire time she was telling me the story of
what happened, she displayed no fear whatsoever.
There
was something subtlety shrewd here that I could not digest. I felt naïve
suddenly and didn’t understand the feeling because I didn’t consider myself to
be naïve; I thought I knew everything there was to know in life at this point
in time. I never thought about scheming people. Not that I hadn’t ever been
affected by them, because I had been—in office jobs from the past, in high
school friendships, and in life in general, so when I felt this feeling now, it
baffled me that the feeling emerged at this moment. It was starting to feel
like Chris had turned into a monstrous schemer here in Vegas, and it felt
dangerous to me, it gave me chills down my arms. How could a person take a
vacation in a strange town and start scheming about anything? Truly, her attitude
was beyond my comprehension. I had lived in New York and Toronto with Rick; I
knew what real operators were, and Chris did not fit that description for me.
She exuded Pittsburgh in her demeanor and her mindset and the words
cool
operator
did not come to mind. I believe that someone had implanted in
her a confidence that she was a cool operator from Pittsburgh—a place I’d lived
all my life and had never encountered any. Pittsburgh people notoriously
revealed their inner most thoughts and feelings to strangers in the grocery
store on a daily basis. There was nothing to hide in Pittsburgh, only for the
secretive clans that operated beneath the radar of everyone else’s momentum.
These types were far and few between in Pittsburgh.
I
knew things wouldn’t get any better, and I believed that from this point on we
would become acquaintances only. There was never a friendship between us.
Chris was en-grossed in whatever it was she was planning, and she wasn’t
telling me her plans. I got only bits and pieces of stories and I knew that
there was never a real friendship with her. I must have made it up in my mind,
for the Chris that I wanted to be friends with was the one who tickled my son
and played with him like a small child would.
I
didn’t like the feeling of offering up my sincere emotions and being stepped on
for doing so. I didn’t like her constant state of anger, and I didn’t like
Marty, even though I had never met him. There was so much I didn’t like at this
point that I turned off everything in my brain, and once I turn myself off, I
was
done
feeding the monster.
Even
if a person stops feeding the monsters, they will still come looking for you.
There is no guarantee in life that not feeding them releases you from their
attention. They seek you out, they mark you for their prey and they devour you.
Being
the victim of a monster has nothing to do with whether or not you seemingly set
yourself up to be victimized, or whether you’re naïve or worldly, or whether
you’re an innocent bystander. Monsters are monsters. They look for their
victims in different ways, smell them out with senses that regular people never
think about.
Monsters
were closing in on their prey.
I
wake up early out of habit. Being a single mom has
many disadvantages, and one of them is that there is no one else to share the
wakeup call in the morning with your child.
You
are it. It becomes habit.
Chris,
on the other hand, is a late sleeper. So I’m quiet while making my coffee this
morning, because I sense she’s not getting up early—but I’m wrong.
She
is already in the bathroom having a shower as I come back in from the patio
with my coffee, and then she’s getting dressed. She’s putting on the white
professional masseuse outfit that she purchased, and she’s packing up lotions
and oils in a case that looks like something masseuses might use in their
trade. I had completely forgotten about the tickets from the fight promoters.
She’s
ready to leave and the sight of her in all white with her hair slicked back in
a tight bun was a shock to me. Once she put on her glasses she looked exactly
like someone who would be working in a health club with a professional
clientele, and I’m impressed.
She
heads for the door with her carrying case and mumbles on the way out, “I might
see you later on at the pool.”
Yesterday’s
craziness is forgotten. I’m going to do some laundry and then Larry and Kathy
are picking me up to go to some different casinos to hit the slot machines.
It’s all starting to become mundane to me, and I’m feeling somewhat bored—like
maybe it’s time to go home. There is only so much you can do in Vegas if you
don’t have money for shows, dinners and tourism. I am not the tourist type in
any sense of the word.
During
lunch Chris explodes through the front door of the apartment and she is all
smiles. Looking up from my tuna sandwich, I felt happy for her already, “Hey,
how’d it go over there?”
She
starts throwing off her uniform and unpacking the masseuse case and talking at
the same time, “Oh, it was wonderful. In fact, it was fabulous. Steve is the
epitome of polite gentleman with class, and funny, too—so funny—so funny! He
was impressed with my knowledge of deep tissue massage, and we talked and
talked about sports, mainly boxing of course, and he’s just the greatest guy—he
tipped me a hundred bucks and told me to call him when I open my health club
here, and he’ll see if he can recommend some clients.”