Unashamed (16 page)

In a black address book within the pile there were at least thirty Vegas addresses. Some had what appeared to be account numbers written next to them. A few of the account numbers had passwords. The address of the old lady was crossed out.

“Shut the fuck up…she showed me Mardi Gras animal masks on web cam! I wondered why the hell she had them. It seemed so random.” I looked closer at some of the papers with several other names on them.

“She’s a crazy, chink home invader. Good job. Read this, it gets worse.” She handed me a three-page letter written from Lindsey to a girl who was her cellmate somewhere. Lindsey was apologizing to the recipient for an apparent sexual fling with someone else and asking for a second chance. The letter referenced a relationship of over a year and the recipient’s beautiful green eyes.

“Ew, she says she only dates women with green eyes.”

She threw her hands high into the air. When they slammed down onto her thick thighs, they made a cracking sound. “Your eyes are blue. Great, a color-blind home invader. This just keeps getting better. You sure know how to pick ’em. First, Louanna, the druggie, and now a thief. Don’t get it twisted!”

Before Rayya and I moved our friendship out of the club scene, Louanna was her butch sidekick. You never saw one without the other. They were both outstanding dancers and heavy socialites. But favoritism, governed by appearances, was evident when they were known as the hot black girl with her fat Arabic friend. Louanna’s athletic build, flawless skin, and killer smile tore them apart. Well, the girl they were both after tore them apart. It was the same girl Louanna left me for. This fact was the common ground that sparked a friendship between Rayya and me.

“Hey, I didn’t know Louanna was a pill popper. I don’t know the signs and symptoms of a druggie!” My defense sucked, but it was the truth; I had been totally conned by a thief and a drug addict.

“Obviously. Louanna told me she fell asleep during sex with you. I don’t know how you didn’t know she was on something.” Rayya puckered her lips and tilted her head to the side. This was her endearing smug face. The one she used when she spilled the beans on secret information. She completed the look with condescending sarcasm when she lifted one eyebrow.

I sat back in my chair. “When did she fall asleep?” I crossed my arms over my chest.

“When you had sex. She told me. I guess you were supposed to go to see the lights on Fremont Street or something. She said she took too many pills and fell asleep while you were going down on her.”

“Holy shit, I wondered why she got so quiet! That bitch!”

When Rayya laughed, her mouth seemed to unhinge as wide as it could and her whole body shook. Her head practically rested on her back as she laughed until she coughed. She was a very loud, obnoxious laugher, especially when it was at my expense.

“Lindsey is a coke head too, and Afro Man sells his heart transplant pills for money. Did you know that? I walked out one night and the man was disgusting. Sweating and wheezing. Emma, he looked green. I didn’t even know black people could turn green. I thought he was dying on his dirty home invader couch. He has a life-size photo of you in his bedroom too. Creepy.”

The information caught me completely off guard, and, when I jumped, I nearly fell over backward in my chair. “What!”

Her hands carved the image of a door into the air. Then she mimed opening it with a knob. This imagery was some form of mockery as she explained it again only more slowly. “He blew up a picture of you, poster-sized, and has it on the inside of his closet door.”

“I’m going to toss. We have to tell the cops.”

“I ain’t doing shit. I still live there. What are you trying to do, put me in the streets? That’s if I make it to the streets. You know they got guns. Tell Louanna I got swindled by a chink and an afro, and tell her I said goodbye at my funeral. Bye, bitch.” She put her hand in the air and waved like a beauty pageant winner.

“Fuck Louanna.” I crossed my arms again. This time it was in disgust.

Her laugh was extra loud. It actually scared me, and I jumped a bit when she slapped the table. “No, you fucked her. She slept. Don’t get it twisted!”

Louanna and Lindsey were not the last of my conquests that were into having a permanent white line under their noses. They were certainly not the last to feed off of my lack of knowledge in the world of pills, crack pipes, and cocaine, which was affectionately referred to as yay-yo.

There was the Hawaiian who thought it was funny to bang my stripper coworker and make me smell her fingers while on shift.

And there was Monica the Mexican. I actually liked Monica much like when I first met Louanna. There was a connection with both women. It’s a shame, really. You could tell they used to be good people before their addictions.

Monica and I met at karaoke night in the gay bar. Karaoke drew a decent crowd on Wednesday nights, but there was ample room to move and hear a conversation. She came to my table to offer a drink while complimenting my singing. She was polite and funny. Any girl will tell you that the funny factor scores huge points and gets your foot in the door during the courtship process. She was a hippie chick with thick, wavy hair and wore some kind of hemp necklace woven through seashells. She was from Mexico but spent the last seven years living in Hawaii right on the beach. Her accent had lost most of its Hispanic influences for Hawaiian slang, but her Mexican culture still thrived.

She was so fantastic I lost track of time talking until the karaoke host began packing her equipment around two in the morning. She completely understood the status of my relationship with my husband but still asked for my number. “Naw, it’s cool, kid,” she said with a wonderful, straight white smile. The next time I saw Monica it was the same fantastic connection in the same bar. We got to know each other for hours until it was time to leave. She escorted me out, and, when we reached my car, we shared our first kiss. “I don’t want to let this night end, man. Let me take you to my place.” She had her thumbs tucked under the belt on my jeans, but nothing too forward or vulgar.

I accepted.

Her roommate and her roommate’s baby were not there, so Monica asked me to stay the night after a fairly steamy make-out session. I said yes after I texted Doug my plans and took a shower. During sex she wouldn’t let me take off her clothes. She flinched upward when I attempted to unzip her pants and grabbed my hands. “No, I don’t shave like you do, ” she said.

“I can’t touch you at all?” I asked as I pushed her wild hair away from her face.

“It’s all about you tonight, kid.” She rolled me onto my back, and we continued to have sex on the floor, surrounded by baby toys. When I finished, I gave her a few kisses and turned to my side to fall asleep. She mumbled something that I couldn’t hear, so I twisted my naked body around to her. My eyes widened in the dark when she repeated it again.

I half-jumped up and flipped over at the same time. “Did you just say your fucking girlfriend is coming home?”

“Bra . . . Yeah, kid, you can’t stay. I just realized what time it is, man.”

I was reaching for any clothing item I could recognize in the dark. I was frantic as I untwisted my underwear and grabbed my jeans. “What the fuck? How much time do I have?”

“She gets off of work in…” She looked across the room to a clock on the wall that I hadn’t notice. “Half an hour, man. I’m sorry.”

“You’re
sorry?
What the fuck, Monica? You have a girlfriend! This is not okay.” I snapped my bra closed and tugged my shirt over my head.

“Aw, come on, kid, you have a husband.”

“The difference is,
he
knows where the fuck I am right now.” I walked out and drove as fast as I could back to my normal husband, my normal apartment, and the stable life I knew. Crazy as that sounds.

It was a month or more before I bumped into an overly apologetic Monica. She told me that the relationship was in its final stages when that happened and she had since moved out. Her Latina charm worked some kind of magic on me, so I agreed to an official date so she could make it up to me. She picked me up on her new motorcycle and introduced herself to Doug. They chatted in Spanish, cracked jokes, and she shook his hand before we left for a nice restaurant in one of the casinos. You know, one of the places where the drinks are pieces of colorful alcoholic art in opulent glasses.

After dinner we rode back to the hotel where she was temporarily living to drink some more. Then she decided she wanted to take me to a strip club of my choice because I apparently didn’t get enough of the environment at work.

On the way to the strip club, a cop pulled her over for speeding. I sharply told her to keep her mouth shut while the officer was running her insurance. She was a Hawaiian-influenced drunk hippie with a Mexican attitude on a speeding motorcycle. The way she was talking to the cop sounded like she had been smoking pot for hours and had ferocious munchies. When the cop let her go with a warning, my blood pressure returned to normal.

Onward we drove to the strip club, where she consumed another three or four beers and two shots while I got a lap dance. After the dancer walked away, I leaned into Monica to let her know it was time to leave. She was fidgeting uncontrollably and asked one of the shot girls if they knew where she could buy some cocaine, aka yay-yo.

“What the fuck are you doing?” My face scrunched with anger.

She couldn’t keep her head still and it swirled as she spoke. “Bra, I’m fucking drunk. I need some coke to wake me up so I can drive, kid.”

“You are not doing drugs on our date!” I didn’t know what else to say.

She tucked her wild hair behind her ear and leaned in to try to whisper to me, but it was just as loud as if she had shouted it. “I just need one bump, so I can ride. I’ll do it in the bathroom, then we can go; it will wake me up.” She meant to sit back in the chair, but the booze in her system forced her to throw herself at the back of the seat. She bounced awkwardly before her whole body leaned to the left.

“I would rather walk home from here. If you do it, I’ll walk. Just sit here for a while and sober the fuck up. I can’t believe you want to snort coke so you can drive! That’s your fucking answer?” I held my hand out to receive her keys, completely prepared to walk if I had to, but she handed them to me along with her wallet in good faith. Then she reluctantly drank water for the rest of the night. It was maybe an hour and a half later when I hesitantly mounted the back of her motorcycle to head for the gay bar.

It was karaoke night there, and I insisted she get something to eat before we drove the rest of the way. My apartment was over fourteen miles from the strip club, but so help me, God, I would have walked home. At least if the night got any worse, the walk from the gay bar was less than six.

When we arrived, Monica ordered a pizza and chilled out in a booth while I sang. A gay couple was so impressed they offered to pay me twenty bucks to sing another song as we were preparing to leave. I looked to Monica, she looked to me, and we waited to go up again. After the second song, I chatted with the gay couple for about fifteen minutes until my scans of the club for Monica were beyond futile.

After returning from the bar, I asked the boys, “Have you seen the girl I was with?”

“Sure, she was talking to someone in the back while you were singing. She is probably in the bathroom.”

I waited nearly half an hour before scouring the place to look for her. My gut told me what must have happened, but my heart desperately ached for my hunch to be wrong.

Back at the table with the boys, I didn’t quite know how to express the gravity of the situation. Staring at the swirling disco ball on the dance floor, I said, “I think she left.”

I stared at it a little too long before one of the boys spoke up after whispering to his boyfriend. “Oh, honey, she is probably in the bathroom.”

“Nope, I looked.” My voice was monotone as I let disco sparkles dance in my eyes.

“Well, she couldn’t have gone far,” he reassured, but his partner reminded him that the pizza was gone.

My eyes left the glittery ball and broken reflected lights to see the grease spot on the table where the box had been. The shining oils picked up the reflected lights from the disco ball. Without moving my eyes from the grease, I mumbled, “How will I get home? I didn’t bring any money.”

A tender hand warmed the top of my shoulder. “Honey, she is probably sleeping it off in the car.”

“She has a motorcycle and, if it is gone, she left me here on our date.” On autopilot I got up to check the first parking space to the left of the entrance. Just as I suspected, it was empty.

Frozen in disbelief, and then reanimated by a slow-burning anger, I returned to the booth. One of the boys knew what had happened by the look on my face, but he asked anyway, “She left you?”

With direct eye contact I said, “With no money, on a date, and she took the fucking pizza.” Through my anger I smiled just before my eyes began to water; then I lost it, buried my face in my hands, and cried.

The boys were kind enough to hand me a twenty-dollar bill, all they had left, to help me out. They were staying in the casino up the street but had walked. They were worried that the money they gifted wasn’t enough to get me home.

“I have no idea. I’ve never taken a taxi home before. I always drive everywhere. Thank you, I’ll just walk from wherever he stops if it isn’t enough.” I wiped my face and sat with the couple smoking their cigarettes until my taxi arrived to take me as far as twenty bucks would pay for. I cursed Monica all the way home but cursed myself more for letting it happen.