Sex, Secrets and South Beach (27 page)

"Yeah, girl, I
can
imagine. I've known
Dan a long time. He's not a bad person, but all he really cares
about is money. But from what I saw, you were too talented to be
hooked up with him anyway. At least it ended on a good note. A fair
exchange is no robbery. You all used each other until it just
didn't work anymore. And I'm glad it didn't work and that all you
did was that one cheesy video."

"Well, not exactly," Dez
said.

"Uh-oh! What does that mean?" Ginger
queried suspiciously.

"You really haven't heard?" Dez
replied.

"Heard what?"

"I can't believe you haven't. It's
been all over the tabloids and gossip shows. Where have you been?"
Dez shook her head.

"I don't buy that crap.
And I don't watch too much TV. The only reason I found out you were
rapping was because I read about it in
Sister 2 Sister
. I read it because
they talk about a lot of gospel artists," Ginger
explained.

"Well, I guess Jamie Foster Brown
hasn't gotten around to this yet. I'm sure she will, though." Dez
frowned.

"Okay, just tell me what it is
already. Besides, she seems very fair. I know she'll get your side
of the story. But will I? I mean, dag, Dez, spill it already!"
Ginger said, crossing her arms in frustration.

"When I was with Dan, we went to
Cancún for Memorial Day. I was kind of high, we partied really hard
that weekend, and I let Dan talk me into making a
videotape."

"Oh, who would want to see
you and that old motherfu–oops, I mean old
man
getting it on?" Ginger caught
the curse word before it spilled out of her mouth.

"Not that kind of tape. It was a
Sinful Strippers tape," Dez explained.

"You mean that bootleg Girls Gone Wild
series? Is he still doing that?"

"That's it."

"Let me guess, the tape has come back
to bite you on the butt."

"Well, yeah, but um, you might need
another drink on this." Dez refilled Ginger's glass.

"Go ahead," Ginger said
tentatively.

"It was a girl-on-girl tape," Dez
admitted sheepishly.

"And somebody let it leak," Ginger
finished.

"Uh-huh. You have no idea just how
badly it leaked. This girl Ysenia let Bentley see it on the set of
a video. She was jealous because I had beaten her out of the lead
role. Then I hooked up with Bentley and got my deal and well, you
can put two and two together. She couldn't stand it because she
wanted him and I had him. See, me and Bentley were in love or
something like that until he saw the tape. Now he won't forgive
me." Trouble clouded Dez's face.

"Dang! Haters don't stop,
do they? But if y'all are meant to be, Bentley will forgive you.
You've probably got to give him some time. That was a messed-up way
for him to hear bout that. But if I found true love, believe me,
you will too. I told my man about
everything
. And he still loves me.
If Bentley can't forgive you, he's not for you. Because if my man
could forgive me, and Christ could forgive the world all our sins,
Bentley can forgive you for something you did before you even met
him."

"Well, Ginny, that's not all. I have a
confession to make to you," Dez said, fiddling with her
nails.

"Go ahead," Ginger said as she sipped
her champagne.

"When I made that tape, when I lived
with you, I was only sixteen years old." Dez braced herself for the
fallout.

Ginger sputtered and choked on her
champagne. "Get the fuck outta here. Excuse me, Lord, but I had a
cussword coming to me. Sixteen, Desi?" Ginger stared at Dez in
disbelief.

"Yeah," she admitted.

"I knew it!" Ginger hopped up from the
table clapping her hands.

"Huh?" Dez was confused.

"I knew there was something. My
instincts are rarely wrong. You never looked eighteen, but you were
kind of mature, so I ignored my gut. You had a tight vocabulary,
you were smart, and so I never really questioned you. But there
were times, I can't explain it, I just knew. You were too naïve,
too untainted. That explains it." Ginger took her seat, gulped the
champagne down, and poured herself another glass.

"Are you mad at me?" Dez asked her
friend.

"Let's see... am I mad that I
committed several felonies dealing with you? There's the lewd
behavior, the contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and who
knows what else? Am I mad? Well...nah. It's better that you met me
instead of Dan or some other guy first. I know I wasn't the best
'guardian,' but you're a lot better off having lived with me first
than some pimp, I'm sure of it."

Dez breathed a sigh of relief. "You
don't know how glad I am to hear you say that. I didn't know if
you'd forgive me for lying."

"Hold up. You think I'm gonna let you
off the hook that easy, you got another thought coming."

"What do you mean?" Dez felt her heart
pounding.

"I need to know how you got to me. I
can only imagine. Runaway?" Ginger asked intuitively.

"Yeah," Dez admitted. She had no idea
how many times she was going to have to tell the story of her life.
At least it got easier every time.

"I can only imagine what you ran away
from. I know you had to be abused or something," Ginger
guessed.

"How did you know that?" Dez looked
shocked. Could everyone tell what she had been through? Was she
wearing some sign on her head that screamed sexual abuse
survivor?

"Desi, I hate to break it to you, but
most of us have been. By most of us, I mean women in general. A
woman is sexually assaulted every two minutes."

"Are you serious?" Dez had never heard
that statistic before.

"You know I research my stuff. The
Justice Department came up with that number. Those are the people
who tell. Think about how many don't tell and suffer in silence.
I've been doing a lot of volunteer work lately. You'd never guess
what goes on in the world. It's so sad. But dancers especially have
high numbers of women who are survivors of rape, incest, you name
it. It isn't caused by the profession as much as we seek that
profession because of what has happened to us. We have low
self-esteem. We always say that it's the other way around and that
we have to have all this confidence to strip. But we couldn't have
placed very much value on our bodies if we thought a peek was only
worth a ten-spot here, a dub there. We learned from the abuse to
disconnect our bodies from ourselves. We used our bodies as a tool
to get what we wanted or needed, instead of connecting them as a
part of us. We objectified ourselves."

"You were abused too, right? I kind of
remember you hinting at that a long time ago." Dez wished she'd
confided in Ginger ages ago. All this time she had felt so
isolated, so alone. She didn't think that anyone could really
understand her pain. She always thought that she had done something
wrong.

"Yeah, Dez, me too. When I came over
from Haiti, we had to stay at the Krome Detention Center. Our
living conditions were shit in Krome. I was a refugee that hardly
spoke any English. We were overcrowded, there was never any private
space, and not all the refugees that were there with us were good
people. A lot of bad shit happened to me." Ginger looked as if she
were in mourning for her childhood. "Things that no little girl
should have to endure."

"But you said you were only five when
you came here," Dez interjected.

"Yes, I was." Ginger silenced Dez with
a look that spoke volumes. Age was everything to a pedophile. Dez
shuddered at the thought of the horrors that her friend had gone
through. Dez understood why Ginger was so tough, but also why she
never wanted to be poor, and why she wanted respect so badly. They
were the same as her own reasons. She also understood why Ginger
had at one time preferred women sexually. Dez could admit to
herself that sex with women seemed emotionally and physically
safer. Dez and Ginger's bond of sisterhood, although born of pain,
was official. They both wanted the same thing: to not feel like a
freak, an outsider. They wanted a sense of normalcy, and both had
gone after the common denominator of the people who seemed to have
it all: money.

Dez broke down and told Ginger the
story of her mother and father and Ernesto. By the time she
finished, they were both in tears.

"How on earth did you get to Miami?"
Ginger asked in awe. "You were only a baby!"

"Well, when I was fourteen, I ended up
in a girls' home called Morristown. It was a nice place to live, as
far as places like that go, but I was done. I wanted out, and I was
gonna get it, no matter what I had to do. I had it all planned out.
I'd heard through the grapevine that Mr. Lopez, the neighbor that
helped me, had moved to Miami to live with his daughter. He'd
offered to adopt me or be my guardian when all that shit went down,
but the state wouldn't allow it because there was no woman in the
house. So that's where I was headed. I'd decided that they would be
my family. Marisol, that's Mr. Lopez's daughter, had just had a
baby. I thought I could help her out, maybe even live with her. I
didn't know where she lived exactly, but I figured that I would
cross that bridge when I got to it. I wasn't worried about them
saying yes because I knew they would never have the heart to send
me back to a foster home, if I could just make it there. They would
get lawyers and work it all out. I was going to get my GED, then go
to college early. Then I'd get a good job and be set to live my
life happily ever after. With that goal in mind, I was willing to
do whatever I had to do in order to get out of Morristown as soon
as possible.

"It wasn't that things were so bad in
the foster home. For one, it was in Mount Vernon, a much nicer
neighborhood than where I'd been living. There were homes with
grass in the surrounding area instead of wall-to-wall concrete like
the Bronx. The other girls were decent, and there weren't any
perverts or creeps around trying to hurt us, but the way I saw it,
I had already experienced the worst that life had to offer. In my
mind no one could hurt me any more than I had been, so I was pretty
fearless. As far as I was concerned, I was on my own, a renegade,
or, better yet, an outlaw like Tupac. Just like his lyrics, it was
me against the world. I used to listen to Pac's CD every single
day. That shit and my dreams were the fuel that kept me going when
nothing else could."

"Don't I know it! You used to play the
heck out of 'All Eyez on Me.' Drove me half crazy! So he's why you
wanted to rap, huh?" Ginger asked.

"Yeah, I could relate to him. Plus,
writing and rapping were easier than therapy. I hated the
counseling sessions I was required to go to with a passion. I felt
betrayed, because I went into it thinking that these people really
wanted to help me. But it was so impersonal. They didn't care about
my feelings, they just only about statistics so that they could
keep that money flowing. It was like they were trying to provoke me
or make me crazy or something. They always managed to make things
worse. It's like they weren't satisfied to just let me forget about
my life. They had to keep dredging shit up time and time again, and
I just wanted to forget. So mostly, I sat there with this blank
expression on my face, and the whole time inside my head, I was
flowin'."

"You shouldn't try to forget, Dez. You
can't run from the truth," Ginger told her.

"Yeah, I know that now,"
Dez admitted. "But at that time I just wanted to escape. Most of
the time I ditched school and went to the library. It was safe,
warm, and there were usually field trip groups that I could blend
into or stacks I could get lost in. I'd read all day. I read the
classics like
Catcher in the Rye
and
The Great
Gatsby
. I read
True to the Game
and E. Lynn Harris.
I read
The Coldest Winter Ever
like twenty times. Reading was the only thing I
had that could take me away from it all. That and
writing.

"But eventually, that
wasn't enough. I wanted out for real, but I knew I wasn't going
anywhere without money. I had no clue how I was going to get it,
but I figured that anything that I needed to know, a vet at the
home named Tasha could tell me. She was seventeen and had lived at
the home since she was thirteen. Tasha knew the ins and outs of the
home and the neighborhood, so she was the residents' hookup on
gear, liquor, weed, and anything else a girl would need to get her
hands on. Little did I know just
how
thorough Tasha was with her
shit.

"She told me she and this other girl,
Shelle, worked at this strip club, Sue's Rendezvous. They had
things all worked out with the guards and managers and stuff. Tasha
said she could hook me up with a fake birth certificate so I could
get a real ID. Then I could work at the club. They always seemed to
have plenty of money. I wanted out, and Tasha was offering me the
way. I figured, what harm would it do? I'd just do it long enough
to save up for a few months' rent on a place in Miami till I found
the Lopezes, maybe get a car, and pay for college. I figured six
months max and I'd be ready to roll. In my eyes it was a do-or-die
situation. Once I turned eighteen, Morristown was going to turn me
out to the streets with not a pot to piss in or a window to throw
it out. I had to start thinking about my future because it was
clear to me that no one else was."