The Power Of The Dog (17 page)

Which is just bearable if, like, she has enough good weed.

The kids at school call her “Nora the Whora,” but she doesn’t care and neither, really, do they. It’s not really so much a term of contempt as it is an acknowledgment of reality. What do you say about a classmate who gets picked up from school in Porsches, Mercedeses and limos, none of which belong to her parents?

Nora is stoned one afternoon, filling out some stupid questionnaire for the guidance counselor, and under “After School Activities” she puts down “Blow Jobs.” Before she erases it, she shows the form to her friend Elizabeth and they both laugh.

And don’t be pulling that limo into the drive-thru at Mickey D’s, either. Ditto Burger King, Taco Bell and Jack in the Box. Nora has the face and the body to command Las Brisas, the Inn at Laguna, El Adobe.

You want Nora, you provide her with good food, good wine, good dope.

Jerry the Doof always has good coke.

He wants her to go to Cabo with him.

Of course he does. He’s a forty-four-year-old coke dealer with more memories than possibilities; she’s sixteen with a body like springtime. Why shouldn’t he want to take her for a dirty weekend in Mexico?

Nora’s cool with it.

She’s sixteen but not sweet.

She knows dude isn’t, like, in love with her. She sure as shit knows she isn’t in love with him. In fact, she thinks he’s more or less a doof, with his black silk jacket and his black ball cap to cover his thinning hair. His bleached jeans, his Nikes with no socks. No, Nora gets it—dude is just terrified of getting old.

No fear, dude, she thinks. Nothing to fret about.

You are old.

Jerry the Doof has only two things going for him.

But they’re two good things.

Money and coke.

The same thing, really. Because, Nora knows, if you have money, you have coke. And if you have coke, you have money.

She sucks him off.

It takes longer because of the coke, but she doesn’t mind, she’s got nothing better to do. And melting Jerry’s popsicle is better than having to talk to him, or worse, listen to him. She doesn’t want to hear any more about his ex-wives, his kids—shit, she knows two of his kids better than he does; she goes to school with them—or how he hit that game-winning triple in his league softball game.

When she’s finished he asks, “So, you want to go?”

“Go where?”

“Cabo.”

“Okay.”

“So when do you want to go?” Jerry the Doof asks.

She shrugs. “Whenever.”

She’s about out of the car when Jerry hands her a Baggie full of fine herb.

“Hey,” her dad says when she comes in. He’s stretched out on the couch watching a rerun of Eight Is Enough. “How was your day?”

“Fine.” She tosses the Baggie onto the coffee table. “Jerry sent this for you.”

“For me? Cool.”

So cool he actually sits up. All of a sudden he’s like Mr. Initiative, rolling himself a nice tight joint.

Nora goes into her room and closes the door.

Wonders what to think about a father who’ll pimp his own daughter for dope.

Nora has a life-changing experience in Cabo.

She meets Haley.

Nora’s lying by the pool next to Jerry the Doofus, and this chick on a chaise across the pool is clearly checking her out.

A very-cool-lady type of chick.

Late twenties, dark brown hair cut short under a black sun visor. Small, thin body cut in the gym, shown off under a next-to-nothing black two-piece. Nice jewelry—spare, gold, expensive. Every time Nora glances up, this chick is looking at her.

With this know-it-all smile, just shy of a smirk.

And she’s always there.

Nora looks up from her chaise—she’s there. Walking on the beach—she’s there.

Having dinner in the hotel dining room—she’s there. Nora shies from the eye contact; it’s always Nora who looks away first. Finally she can’t handle it anymore. She waits for Jerry to lapse into one of his postcoital siestas and goes out to the pool and sits on the chaise next to the woman and says, “You’ve been checking me out.”

“I have.”

“I’m not interested.”

The woman laughs. “You don’t even know what it is that you’re not interested in.”

“I’m not a lesbian,” Nora says.

Like, she’s not into guys, but she’s not into chicks, either. Which leaves cats and dogs, but she’s not that crazy about cats.

“Neither am I,” the woman says.

“So?”

“Let me ask you this,” the woman says. “Are you making any money?”

“Huh?”

“Being a coke bunny,” the woman says. “Are you making any money?”

“No.”

The woman shakes her head, says, “Kiddo, with your face and body, you could be an earner.”

An earner. Nora likes the sound of that.

“How?” she asks.

The woman reaches into her bag and hands Nora a business card.

Haley Saxon—with a San Diego phone number.

“What are you in, like, sales?” Nora asks.

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Huh?”

“ ‘Huh?’ ” Haley mocks. “See, that’s what I mean. If you want to be an earner, you have to stop saying things like ‘huh.’ ”

“Well, maybe I don’t want to be an earner.”

“In which case, have a nice weekend,” Haley says. She picks her magazine back up and goes back to reading. But Nora doesn’t go anywhere, just sits there feeling stupid. It’s like five full minutes before she finds the nerve to say, “Okay, maybe I want to be an earner.”

“Okay.”

“So what do you sell?”

“You. I sell you.”

Nora starts to say “Huh,” then checks herself and says, “I’m not sure what you mean.”

Haley smiles. Lays an elegant hand on top of Nora’s hand and says, “It’s as simple as it sounds. I sell women to men. For money.”

Nora’s quick on the uptake. “So this is about sex,” she says.

“Kiddo,” Haley says, “everything is about sex.”

Haley gives her a whole speech, but basically it boils down to this: The whole world is—all the time—looking to get off.

She wraps up the spiel by saying, “You want to give it away, or sell it cheap, that’s your business. If you want to sell it for big bucks, that’s my business. How old are you, anyway?”

“Sixteen,” Nora says.

“Jesus,” Haley says. She shakes her head.

“What?”

Haley sighs. “The potential.”

First the voice.

“If you want to keep doing backseat blow jobs for trinkets you can talk like a beach girl,” Haley tells her a couple of weeks after they meet in Cabo. “If you want to move up in the world …”

Haley puts Nora to work with some alcoholic refugee from the Royal Shakespeare Company who drops Nora’s voice about an octave. (“That’s important,” Haley says. “A deep voice makes a dick sit up and listen.”) The dipso tutor rounds out Nora’s vowels, punches up her consonants. Makes her do monologues: Portia, Rosalind, Viola, Paulina …

“What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?

What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?”

So her voice becomes cultured. Deeper, fuller, lower. It’s all part of the package. Like the clothes Haley takes her shopping for. The books Haley makes her read. The daily newspaper. “And not the fashion page, kiddo, or the arts,” Haley says. “A courtesan reads the sports section first, then the financial pages, then maybe the news.”

So she starts showing up at school with the morning paper. Her friends are out in the parking lot having that last-minute bong hit before the bell rings, and Nora’s sitting there checking out the scores, the Dow Jones, the editorial page. She’s reading the National Review, The Wall Street Journal, the freaking Christian Science Monitor.

And that’s about the only time she spends in the backseat.

Nora the Whora goes to Cabo and comes back Nora the Ice Maiden.

“She’s a virgin again,” is how Elizabeth explains it to their bewildered friends. She doesn’t mean it unkindly; it just seems to be true. “She went to Cabo and had her hymen reattached.”

“I didn’t know you could do that,” their friend Raven says.

Elizabeth just sighs.

Raven asks her for the name of the doctor.

Nora becomes a gym fiend, spending hours on the stationary cycle, more hours on the treadmill. Haley hires her a personal trainer, a fascist health-freak chick named Sherry whom Nora dubs her “physical terrorist.” This nazi has a body like a greyhound, and she starts whipping Nora’s body into the tight little package that Haley wants to market. Gets her doing push-ups, sit-ups, crunches, and starts her on weights.

The interesting thing is that Nora starts to dig it.

All of it—the rigorous mental and physical training. Nora is, like, into it. She gets up one morning and goes to wash her face (with the special cleanser Haley buys her), looks in the mirror, and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?” She goes to class, she hears herself discoursing about current affairs and she’s like, “Wow, who is this woman?”

Whoever she is, Nora likes her.

Her dad doesn’t notice the change. How could he? Nora thinks. I don’t come in a Baggie.

Haley takes her on a drive up to the Sunset Strip in L.A. to show her the crack whores. Crack cocaine has hit the country like a virus, and the whores have caught it. Big time. They’re on their knees in alleys, on their backs in cars. Some of them are young, some old—Nora is shocked that they all look so old. And so sick.

“I could never be one of these women,” Nora says.

“Yes, you could,” Haley says. “If you don’t stay straight. Keep off dope, don’t let your head get fucked-up. Most of all, put the money away. You’ll have ten to twelve peak earning years, if you take care of yourself. Tops. After that, it’s all downhill. So you want to have stocks, bonds, mutual funds. Real estate. I’ll hook you up with my financial planner.”

Because the girl is going to need one, Haley thinks.

Nora is the package.

When she turns eighteen, she’s ready to go to the White House.

White walls, white carpet, white furniture. A pain in the ass to clean and maintain, but worth it because it quiets the men the moment they walk in. (There’s not one of them who wasn’t as a boy scared shitless of spilling something on his mother’s white whatever.) And when Haley is in attendance, she always wears white: The house is me, I am the house. I’m untouchable, my house is likewise untouchable.

Her women always wear black.

Nothing else, always stark black.