i
n the morning I wake up early, the way alcohol can race in your blood all night, give you crazy dreams, snap you in and out of sleep. When I wake Nicki is still asleep, snoring quietly in a big bed behind the bookshelf, I peek at her
through it. She’s not wearing a scarf or a wig or anything at all, and I’m surprised to see a full head of long gray hair, a soft face with no makeup so I can barely recognize her from the night before. Alf has jumped ship in the middle of the night and is curled in a perfect fluffy circle on a pillow next to Nicki’s head. I fold the sleeping bag up and stack it with the pillow on the couch, then look around a little.
Nicki’s apartment is wall-to-wall photos, each in their own little frame. I step closer and peer into one:
An old black-and-white photo of two queens, neither one Nicki. Matching white dresses with tan thighs exposed, the photo cutting them off at the knee. Black eyeliner, wicking up at the corner of each eye and matching brunette wigs flipping up at their shoulders. One of them leans towards the camera laughing with her hands on her hips, while the other leans back with her eyes big and soft and her chin up, her hands tucked behind her back. Behind them is out of focus, the window of a liquor store and inside, the blurry face of a man smiling with big white teeth, his hand perched in the air next to his head, palm open, fingers splayed.
I move over to another one, a color photo from the ‘70s, the colors faded out to orangey-yellows and browns. It’s taken at the head of the table on Thanksgiving I think, a giant shiny brown turkey planted square in the middle. I see Nicki way down on the far right, wearing a blonde wig with long
curly black eyelashes. All the other girls pose carefully, but Nicki has her thumbs in her ears, her fingers dancing around on either side of her head, her tongue sticking out. When I laugh out loud I hear Nicki move around in her bed. I see her lift her head and look at me through the bookshelf.
“Okay, out you go,” she puts her head back down on the pillow and gestures, a run-along-now gesture with one hand.
“I was just looking at your pictures,” I say.
“Honey, it’s too early for a picture show, now let yourself out before I get mean.” Alf stands up, stretches his back way up high, and looks at me like
you better leave now
. I mouth goodbye to him, close the door as quietly as I can behind me.
b
ut two days later when I show up at Nana Jimbo’s, Nicki is nonstop teasing me, shaking her finger and saying stuff like, “Where have you been Hannah-Rosanna-Dana? You think you can just leave your old granny sitting in a wheelchair for days on end while you run around town?”
And this is how it started. First we were hanging out once a week, then twice a week, and then I found myself over at her house every other day or so. In the afternoon I would call her to see what she wanted for dinner, then I would go to Safeway for the evening’s groceries, pick up any prescriptions she had waiting, and a little present like a mini nail polish set, or a shiny balloon on a stick that said
Happy Birthday! or Congratulations! and then I’d show up at her door. She would open it in a bathrobe with her hand on her hip, give me a half smile and a “you again?” But she was always thrilled with her presents. She lined all the nail polishes up by color on top of the TV and was beginning a balloon collection by the window, keeping them until they were hovering, wilted, a foot or so off the ground. After she celebrated the gift of the evening, I’d cook dinner for the two of us while she watched
Cops,
Alf rolling around on his back on the linoleum floor under my feet. After dinner we’d smoke her bright green medical marijuana and she’d school me on old films from her collection of home-recorded VHS tapes. Sometimes her other friends would come over too. Like Paul, a real young performer from Nana Jimbo’s, who was a boy most of the time. There was also Babette, this crazy girl from Brooklyn, real girly and small but with a voice that gave her away. I started walking Nicki through the Tenderloin to Nana Jimbo’s on the nights she performed. It didn’t feel safe to let her go alone which seemed to really insult her when I would even allude to it. She would roll her eyes with her hands on her hips. Say stuff like, “Hannah? Who do you think you are, saying this to me when you’re just a child? I’ve walked on every street in this city since before you were ever born.” She’d say, “If I was gonna get killed on the street, somebody would have done it when I was young and pretty,
not old and tired!” Nicki told me she wore slip-on heels so she could slide one off quickly and nail anyone that dared. I had seen this happen at the Chez Paree. One night when I was in a lap dance I heard a girl screaming angry from somewhere down the hall. I jumped up and pulled the curtain back and saw Lexie, Doni, and Angel running in that direction. And then the brawl spilled out from behind the curtain, four girls total now, heels in hand, raining down on a big guy who was curled into a little ball. The kind of ball they teach you to do under your desk at school if a nuclear weapon should come your way. The kind of position that could never ever save you.
O
ne night when it was just the two of us we passed a joint back and forth after dinner, our plates on the coffee table, empty and stained with red sauce from the lasagna I had made. We were watching
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
, one of Nicki’s favorites. She kept hitting my knee and saying, “Pay attention Hannah, this is the best part!” Then it would be the creepiest, weirdest scene ever. Like when Bette Davis dances around with a big bow on her head, holding a doll in the dark living room. Nicki would laugh and laugh and I’d end up laughing too mostly because it was funny to see Nicki laughing so hard. Laughing till tears came out of her eyes and she had to cough into a napkin.
When it was over we sat in silence for while, then Nicki turned to me, said, “You know Joan Crawford used to beat her children with a hairbrush.”
I looked over at her, she was nodding with her eyebrows raised up high, her skinny hand running over Alf’s back.
“I hope you never beat me with a hairbrush,” I said.
“I might start.” She was smiling at me so wide, and then she stuck out her hand and ruffled my hair. Like I was a dog, or a little kid, and it felt so good to be so small.
n
icki turned out to be the best remedy for heartache. Every time I started to talk about Bella, even just mention her name, Nicki would snap, “Shut up! I can’t hear you!” stick her fingers in her ears and sing fake opera, shaking her voice and looking up at the ceiling. It always made me forget about whatever sob story I was about to tell. It always made me laugh. It was like spring-cleaning. Sweeping Bella right out the door every time she came in.
O
ne morning I woke up at home, stretched in bed, listened to the muffled sounds coming up from the street below, the sun cutting into my eyes as I sat up. I got dressed and ready to go eat the lumberjack special at the Pinecone Diner on Turk. I reached into the jar in the bottom drawer of the dresser and pulled all the money out. Only five
twenty-dollar bills left. I sat down on the bed, holding the bills in my hand and stared out the window. I felt shocked, even though I shouldn’t have been. Time away from sex work was measured in the length of my leg hair, my pubic hair, my armpit hair, and I had a good quarter inch of fur taking over. Bella had cleared out half our savings, I’d been avoiding the Chez Paree because I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing her. I’d been ignoring Chris’s calls for a couple of weeks, plus I’d started to spend more money, now that I had Nicki to spend it on. I peered out of the window at the street below. A gray-haired guy, teetering on legs like two twigs, was ripping up a loaf of bread and throwing it into a swarm of pigeons gathering on the steps of Saint Mary’s Charitable Services.
I have to call Chris. I have to go back to the club
. I felt an impending doom deep in my gut. The pigeons were getting crazy, becoming a blur of gray wings. I was watching him swing a leg out trying to kick them back. I looked back down at the money in my hands, the doom in my gut creeping up to my throat. The apartment felt too tight around me.
I stuffed the money in my pocket, headed out, down Ellis. Eventually I found myself at Union Square standing under the statue, watching rich ladies go in and out of Tiffany & Company. Outside of Tiffany’s there was a red and yellow umbrella with a hot dog stand underneath it. It reminded me of the boardwalk in Long Beach, Coney Island too.
I should
save money, eat a hot dog for breakfast
, I thought. But then a sign caught my eye in the window of a tiny coffee shop a couple of doors down, a red Help Wanted scribbled on cardboard sitting behind the glass. That’s when it occurred to me. It occurred to me so suddenly I might have jumped, startled. It was like a bright yellow light bulb popping up over my head. Something so obvious that I had never thought of before, I could get a regular job. I could get a regular job, like I was a regular girl. Like none of this had ever started.
I headed towards the shop, crossing through a steady current of pedestrians to tuck myself into it. I stood in the doorway blinking a little, making out a few crumb-covered tables and chairs haphazardly placed, a family of flies buzzing a tight circle in the middle of the room. I looked up at the counter. There were pastries, individually wrapped in plastic, stacked in little towers behind glass. The guy working was the only one there, too skinny, wearing sunglasses, leaning on his elbows watching me.
“What’s the starting rate?” I asked.
“Minimum wage.”
“What’s that?”
He laughed like I was so lame for not knowing, shaking his head back and forth.
“$5.15.”
“$5.15?”
“$5.15.”
“An hour?” I asked.
“Ya, what else would it be?”
I sat down at a table, pulled out a pen and an old receipt, and wrote on the back.
$41.20 before taxes, for the
entire
day. I looked at the guy behind the counter. He looked back at me. I wondered how he lived on that. He must sell drugs when he’s not here, I thought, which suddenly explained the sunglasses. I made four or five hundred a night in the club and six hundred a night with Chris.
How lucky am I!
I worked a few nights a month instead of every single day wearing sunglasses in the fly airport, pouring coffee. I had all my days to walk around, cash in my pocket, in exchange for a few shitty nights each month.
It’s so strange. The way the world can think you’re nothing. That your life must really suck. When really you are so free.
I’m so free
, I thought. I looked out the window of the café, the trees shaking in the wind, shaking their shadows onto the street. People flying in every direction. From where I was sitting I could see the sky, a long column of it, blue and still, between two buildings.
I’m free
, I said to myself again, and saying it changed me, momentarily at least, like a parachute popping open over your head when you’re falling so fast.
I got up and walked out, down to the pay phone on the corner, which was greasy and smelled weird so I had to hold
it an inch away from my face. I called Chris, told her I was sorry for being a flake and made plans for a date that night. Then I called Nicki and left a message saying that I wouldn’t be over for a few nights, that it was time to make rent.
i
n the evening, I took a shower and did my makeup. I scrounged around for the cleanest outfit I owned, pulled all kinds of crumpled up stuff from under the bed and the bottom of the closet in my search. I finally chose a maroon dress that came to my knees, a cardigan over it, the little black jacket Bella had bought me to arrive to work in, and black heels, normal ones, not stripper heels, so I could walk to Reds in relative peace. I stood in front of the mirror for a moment. It felt funny to be in girly clothes when I’d been out of them for a couple weeks. I pressed my hands down my dress trying to smooth the wrinkles. Looked at my face, my eyes heavy with black mascara, and my hair falling in wet curls on my shoulders. I thought of my mom for a moment by accident. How happy she’d be to see me like this. I heard her voice saying things like
my beautiful daughter,
and words like
presentable
and
proud
. It made me laugh a little, grabbing my purse and heading for the door, how in real life nothing adds up all the way.
I got there before Chris, and chatted with the bartender Lusha whom I’d befriended in a real casual way, ever since I’d
begun meeting Chris there. I assumed she knew I was working, because she always stopped chatting me up the minute Chris arrived. Lusha was a very tired-looking Russian woman. I thought she was in her early fifties until a night at Reds when a big sheet cake came dancing out in Pat’s arms, and the whole place was clapping and when it landed on the bar in front of her it read, Happy 39th Birthday Lusha We Love You! in green cursive. I remember looking up at her, amazed. She looked liked she’d been a sailor on a ship that chased storms, for the last one hundred years.
Chris sat down, pulled my drink out from under me and took a sip of it, her little lips squeezing around the two red straws. “Hi handsome,” I said smiling. I looked at her. Her dumb fish face. Her shirt buttoned too high. I looked down at the straws in my drink.
Contaminated,
I thought. If I wouldn’t kiss her then she should know better than to put her mouth on my straws. My heart started to sink a little.
I’m free, I’m free, I’m free
, I said to myself, over and over again like treading water. I got Lusha to make me another drink, and gave my contaminated one to Chris. She thought it was so sweet, like I was buying her a drink when I’d never done that before.
Chris launched into a never-ending rant about work. The department had made her take an apprentice, an especially clueless one, and I was saying comforting things. Stuff
like, “That sucks, Chris” and “It’ll take him a while to learn, but he will.” But I was just hearing myself say it.