Random Acts of Trust (32 page)

I wanted to punch a wall. Yet another missed chance at something special with her. Years lost. Prom lost. Virginity lost.

Because
I
was lost.

I’d called in those few weeks before prom. Once. And her mom took the message.

Amy never called back.

We’re all lost in our own ways.

Bzzzzzz
. My mom.

Especially my own mother.

Knowing I shouldn’t do it, I answered anyhow.

“Sam. Thank God. Don’t you realize that if you don’t answer your phone, I assume you’re...” She sounded like Amy’s mom. Is there some sort of training you get in the hospital after you give birth to perfect the art of nagging?

“What’s up, Mom?”

“It’s your father.”
It’s always my father.

“What about him?” I asked, gruffly. The comment Amy’s mom had made floated into my mind.

“He’s sick.”

“No shit.”

“Don’t use language like that with me!” Her voice got shrill.

“Don’t call me and tell me what to do. You know the rules.” Two years ago I’d cut her completely out of my life with a letter that detailed my exact boundaries. My therapist at UMass health services had helped me craft it. Mom was like a toddler; I’d had to constantly remind her of the rules and make her follow them, but she still, occasionally, pushed it.

“He’s really sick,” she pleaded.

“His liver?” I guessed. A fifth of hard liquor a day would make any liver scream.

“No.” Her tone told me the answer was really
yes
. Ah, the lies. “He has pneumonia.”

“Poor guy. Bet his ribs ache. I know how that feels.”

Silence.

“Something else I need to know, Mom? Because I need to get to work.” Another lie, but least this one was
mine
.

“Work?” she asked, chipper. Change the subject when reality gets uncomfortable. “You have a job?”

“Yup.”

Impatience came through the line. “What is it, honey?”

“I’m a stripper,” I said, suppressing a dark laugh.

“Oh, you joker,” she giggled, as if we were best buddies, as if she hadn’t stuck by my father through what he did to me, as if she hadn’t betrayed the very essence of who I was and who she was supposed to be for me.

Black was white and white was black. I would tell the truth and not be believed. She wanted me to tell a lie and be believed.

Mirror opposites.

“Anyhow, nice chatting, Mom.” A lie.

“What about your father?”

“What about him?”

Her voice fell to a hush. “I’ve never seen him like this, Sam.”

“Did he ask for me?” The void inside me expanded as she hesitated, likely crafting an answer that would feed the lie.

“Um, he would if he were more rested, you know.”

“Bye, Mom.”

Click
.

Chapter Nine

Sam

They don’t actually want
me.
That’s one of the only reasons why I can do this kind of work. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that working as a bachelorette party entertainer is back breaking work. You could read the looks in the eyes of the women at these parties and know that they were drooling over something other than the actual guys in front of them. What they were really doing was projecting their fantasies onto us. What they
really
wanted was the guy that they already had back home to want
them
the way that they pretended to want us.

Pretend? Yeah. Pretend.

They were pretending to want us. The hooting, the chanting, the hands on my bare skin, the fingers that tucked dollar bills just far enough below the waistline to tease and try to titillate, it was all pretend. It was fun for them, at least. And it was fun for me, too.

My parents would tell me I was going to Hell for all this.

I’d have to tell them I wasn’t just going there. I was the tour operator. And the nightly show.

Who wouldn’t want a bunch of women grabbing them? Who wouldn’t want a crowd of women who were in a place for the sole purpose of watching you move your body, and bare your skin, so that they could entertain themselves with a little fantasy that looped around in their mind? But it was their guy’s face that they imagined; it was their fantasy men whose hips thrust toward them, whose legs were bare, whose chests heaved for them.

Once I understood why these women were here, why they wanted to touch me, I could work it. I wasn’t Sam anymore – I was their Paul, or Keith, or Mark, or John. I was the guy they wanted to be with, the guy they wanted to want them, and once I wasn’t Sam—I could do damn near anything. You want that
extra
bit of strength in my hips when I push up against you? I’m right there, babe. You want me to flash you a wicked grin and wink, and pretend that I’m gonna do you later on? No problem.

Liam had it down to a science. He went some extra little distance that I couldn’t bring myself to go, not because it was cheap or because I had any shred of dignity left—I didn’t. The first night I walked home with three-hundred and fifty bucks cash in my pocket and knew that there was a paycheck coming on top of that...dignity went out the door. What Liam had was a natural kind of showmanship, something that I couldn’t create inside.

My pretending meant it was Amy whose fingertips that slid up my muscled arm, whose lips teased at my neck, whose breasts pressed against my back as we fake danced. She became the woman I wished would want me, and so, in that sense we were all fair and balanced, weren’t we? My audience wanted me to be someone else, and I wanted them to be someone else. The difference was...well, maybe there was no difference. We were just trading on each other’s ability to pretend.

It’s not a lie if everyone walks away happy, right? It’s all fun as long as no one gets hurt.

If it wasn’t a lie, and it was fun, then why couldn’t I bring myself to tell Amy?
That
was the problem. Whenever I imagined telling her what my new job was, all I could imagine was how much she would stop wanting me.

And that’s when it stopped being fun.

And started being a lie.

Amy

The party Darla invited me to was in one of those Brownstones in the Back Bay, the kind of place that looked like it could be in a Sherlock Holmes film just as easily as it could house a Senator. But for tonight, it was a jamming place, full of college students and a group of musicians who had gained international notoriety and that, somehow, Darla had managed to befriend.

She was such an odd duck—her ability to mingle between different classes and different social groups was something I envied. I got quiet, and shy, and tongue-tied around people who were different from me. I didn’t understand how to act around someone who wasn’t part of my social group. Living in my little suburban bubble had seemed like the best way to live, until I’d gone to college and realized that there were lots of other ways to live.

The problem was that I felt stuck between the two right now; realizing that the way I was raised wasn’t the only way and that I had choices, and yet, possessing absolutely no social skills to function outside my own norm. I suppose I was grateful for even having that awareness, but how do you get from point A to point B? How do you go from knowing that about yourself to experiencing life enough to acquire another set of skills in a radically different social milieu? That’s what life is, right? Learning how to be all of the different yous that you can be.

Mom expected one Amy—her Amy. And one Evan, except Evan only knew how to be one kind of Evan, and that was Drunk and High Evan. So, I had to be one kind of Amy, and that was Good Little Girl Amy, because when someone else’s role is already defined you’d better find something very different so that you can get your own sliver of attention that’s just yours. So far, that’s how life had worked...until now.

I watched Darla, who had been living in a trailer park, working in a gas station, leading the way for me to go into a place so fancy that the door itself probably cost as much as my first semester of college. And she just walked in like she owned the place. Not in some cocky way; she wasn’t arrogant. She was just...there, moving through space, taking step by step by step through time, aware and alive. Boy, had I misjudged her. She turned out to be one of the better friends I could imagine having.

Plus, she was the keeper of the secret of my wireless vagina. I had to hold her close.

“It’s way up here, on the fifth floor,” she said, turning behind as we walked up a set of stairs, and then another, and then
another
. You would think that extraordinarily rich people could afford elevators. Maybe, though, we just weren’t allowed to use them.

When we got to the top floor, I realized that the structure of the townhouse was fascinating. It was one long, narrow home. This was an apartment, not a full townhouse. Imagine a row of ten, or twenty, or more, town homes, all five or six stories tall, it was hard to tell. Some were entire town homes; the richie riches could afford that, to have every single floor to themselves. Other homes were cut up into a combination of apartments. In some cases, people rented entire floors, and in other cases the floors themselves were chopped up into tiny little studios and one-bedrooms. This was a new layout for me, and I studied it avidly.

Living in my own little, quirky apartment meant that I had acquired an eye for the oddities throughout Boston. You take a city that’s nearly four hundred years old and you’re going to find some really strange historical details. That’s the way history worked. If you dug enough, and paid enough attention, you could find just about anything you were looking for, from the mundane to the bizarre, from the horrific to the glorious.

The crowd spilled out already through the threshold of the apartment as Darla wended her way through, moving shoulders and hips in ways that seemed to make people part. She said “hello” here and there to people she recognized, a quick wave of a hand, a glance of a smile, and then we were just suddenly on a back balcony that people seemed to be ignoring. It was small, and before we walked through the threshold, Darla stopped me. “Hey I want you to meet Jane.”

“Jane?”

“Jane Newhouse. This is her place.”

“Oh, Jane.”

A slim woman, with an auburn page-boy greeted me pleasantly. She was a good five to ten years older than us, and had that flawless creamy skin of someone who had been extremely Emo in her teen years. She smiled with her mouth, but her eyes stayed serious and hawk-like, hidden behind rimless glasses. A purple crushed velvet
ensemble
, I couldn’t think of a different word for it, finished off the look. She could have been the host of Oddities: Boston Edition, and it wouldn’t surprise me if somewhere in the house she had a completely reconstructed rat skeleton, or better yet, that guy Ryan from the television show, chained to a wall in a red room of pain.

Darla made quick small chat with Jane, who exchanged two or three sentences with her and then was off working her own crowd, while I marveled at the view from the giant French doors that were open. I had full access to the balcony until Darla grabbed me and said, “Once we have more than eight people out there, we need to leave. It’s an old building.”

I nodded, drawn magnetically to that space. The view was incredible. The Charles River gleamed with the moon smiling down on it. Entranced, I couldn’t see any stars tonight, not from cloud cover but from city lights. You take the glow of a few million people in Boston proper, Cambridge, and the suburbs, and you don’t get to see much of the heavens at night. But what you do get, instead, is one hell of a trade off. Cambridge beckoned, and over to the left, if I peered hard enough, I could probably see the very edge of my hometown. I didn’t peer very hard.

“This is beautiful,” I whispered to Darla who leaned against the railing and nodded quietly.

“Yeah” she thumbed the apartment “but that’s where all the fun is.”

And then, flashing me a wicked grin, she walked back in.

Sam

Sometimes Louise sent me and Liam together as two cops on jobs, and other times, like tonight, the party organizer had ordered a foursome. We dressed like that group from the ’70’s, The Village People, and Liam always chose to be the construction dude. He never explained why. I was always the cop.

This building was fancier than most, although we’d done a couple of jobs in Beacon Hill at those giant Brownstones where one of the old shimmering windows cost about as much as my entire college career. But here on the Back Bay, we were in one of those old brick buildings that stretched up high. This was a first floor apartment, which meant rent cost less than some of the others because there wasn’t a view of the river. Instead, they got a view of Storrow Drive. That didn’t seem to stop anyone, though. There must have been seventy-five women crammed into the joint.