Freak Parade
By
Marilyn Jaye Lewis
What reviewers are saying about Freak Parade:
“Freak Parade is a compelling, vibrant novel exploring eroticism and the harsh realities of inner city life with genuine authenticity.” -- Emanuel Xavier, author of Americano
“A no-holds barred erotic novel with a social conscience. Marilyn Jaye Lewis has a lot to say -- and she’s not afraid to say it -- about fame and infamy, class and gender, sex and real estate, and love and humanity. Despite having seen it all (and perhaps having done it all!), Marilyn Jaye Lewis hasn’t lost one iota of her generous spirit, enormous heart, and fierce talent.” -- Janice Eidus, author of The War of the Rosens
“A big sprawling read with heart and smarts and a near-limitless erotic imagination--Freak Parade’s gritty, glittery New York will get under your fingernails. And your skin too.” -- Molly Weatherfield, author of Carrie’s Story”
“Marilyn Jaye Lewis takes readers on a wild tour of the glitz and grime of New York City in all its sexy, sparkling allure... By turns harrowing, amusing, and intensely arousing, Freak Parade is a big, fat page-turner that will have New Yorkers and those who just lust after us compulsively reading.” --Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of the Best Sex Writing Series
Freak Parade
© 2010 Marilyn Jaye Lewis
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For Mikey Rivera,
With Love
Chapter One
That’s right, I used to be famous. I’m exactly who you think I am: Eugenia Sharpe, that one-hit wonder with a bullet. I was as platinum as it got on the Billboard charts, and what a fine feather in my cap that was. It wasn’t so long ago, either. Then I traded my fame for Darryl, my producer. I moved in with him because he asked me to and then I promptly retired from the music business. On hiatus, as they say, indefinitely. Hence, my one-hit wonder-ness.
Yes, that was my idea. I chose true love over fame and now look what it’s gotten me: this handful of filthy porn. Well, how the mighty have fallen in four fucked-up years.
It’s not like I’m a prude or anything, Jesus Christ. I have no problem with porn. I mean, I may have the long hair and the disposition of Heidi when I need it; I did sing like an angel on my platinum-selling CD, Alarmed at Carnegie, blah blah blah. But you know as well as I do that you don’t get famous in this town by staying the naïve waif for more than a nanosecond. And I’m from Kentucky, to boot – eastern Kentucky. Which doesn’t mean I’m stupid, thank you very much, but it does mean I practically wrote the book on starting out white trash and poor and then sleeping my way to the so-called top like everybody else in New York, and it’s not like I haven’t seen triple X everything by now. But this takes the porno cake, the scumbag.
“Genie!” Wanda called out.
“I’m in here,” I suddenly screeched.
Patient as a saint, Wanda called back, “Where?”
“I’m in Darryl’s office!”
Wanda came in. She’d been to the bar in the living room to pour me a generous refill of my Wild Turkey and Diet Coke. “I was looking for a book of matches and I found something else instead,” I told her. “Look at this shit!” I took the drink from her then practically flung Darryl’s little porn collection at her. I gave her time to flip through the thing, to take in what it meant, that travel-sized trip-tick, brimming with full-color digital photos of naked girls lewdly, shall we say, pleasuring themselves? And I knew most of those tramps, for chrissakes. I used to let them party with me when I was famous. Darryl sucks.
“What are pictures of these sluts doing in Darryl’s flight bag?” I demanded of Wanda, as if she would know. (At least I hoped she didn’t know; Wanda was one of the very few friends I had left.)
She examined the X-rated travelogue; page after page of spread-open pussies stuffed with oversized sex toys. It resulted in a look of absolute disgust on Wanda’s face – and she was usually all in favor of naked girls taking on oversized sex toys, in photos or in the flesh. But this was too much, even for her. “What the fuck is this supposed to be?” she spluttered. “I mean; what?”
“I have a good idea what; Darryl’s been a busy boy, that’s what.”
I felt like crying. When Darryl and I had first begun dating, when he was Senior VP of A&R in the pop music division of Surroundaround Discs and I was his newest discovery, he and I were screwing like sex-starved bunnies. He was Executive Producer on Alarmed at Carnegie so we quickly became inseparable; day and night we were together. And on some of those nights he’d taken quite a few nasty snapshots of me that were sickeningly similar to the photos crammed into that little photo album. I suddenly felt very cheap. It had sure taken me long enough.
“You know what this means,” I said; “don’t you?” The ice-cold drink in my hand was starting to sweat as I took a healthy swallow of booze. “It means I have to act like I don’t have a clue this is going on or he’ll accuse me of snooping through his things again. So how am I going to explain bashing his brains in with a steel folding chair the fucking minute he gets back from L.A.?”
“You’re watching way too much wrestling, Genie. Right now, we need to consider something a little more rational than the WWE.”
Rational – right; when was the last time there was anything remotely rational in my life? “Wanda, what am I going to do?” I moaned. Two previous cocktails were already coursing through my veins. The booze sent me into a swamp of self-absorbed self-pity in record time.
I stuffed the disgusting photos back into Darryl’s bag. “It’s over with me and Darryl, I know that,” I went on. “I’ve known it for months. But now it’s like, well, it’s really over. Do you realize that this makes me a full-fledged asshole? How many girls would you say are in that photo book? Every single slut on both coasts must know he’s cheating on me. Jesus. How did I end up such a pathetic loser? I used to be such a nice girl, goddamn it.”
Wanda followed me out of Darryl’s office and into my room, where she lit a Parliament and plopped her huge, six-foot-two-inch frame down on my already sagging sofa. I plopped down beside her, my drink still in hand. Muff, my ancient black cat, sauntered up and joined us.
“You’re not a loser, Genie,” Wanda said. “You didn’t want to be famous anymore, remember? You hated it. It made you nuts. And you loved Darryl – at least you thought you did. You gave up your career so you could be with him. You did what you thought was right at the time, but he’s turned out to be a creep. He’s the loser, not you.”
I gave up my career! Good lord. “Do you realize this means that I’ll have to get a job? If I leave him, I mean.”
Wanda stared at me in disbelief. She jammed her cigarette in the side of her mouth and cleared a place on the coffee table for us to set down our drinks. The table was covered with stacks of half-written song lyrics and piles of unopened mail. “If you leave him? You’re not serious, Genie? What’s this if business?”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? You tell me. It’s not like I have any skills. It’s not like I have any savings left, either – not enough to survive long in this town, anyway. And it’s not like he’s asking me to move out. Yet. God. Fuck him! What the hell am I going to do?”
Darryl owned the incredible apartment we shared on Central Park West. And he owned the weekend house we shared out in the Hamptons. He owned the house in L.A., too. I owned zippo. I received occasional songwriter royalty checks from BMI, which I used for mad money – ‘mad’ in my case usually meaning Madison Avenue. I binged in couturier boutiques whenever possible. I’d saved nothing and my royalty checks were getting smaller. Alarmed at Carnegie still made the occasional sale and I’d written every song on it, but that wasn’t going to last forever.
In a way, the songs were timeless, though. Not standards, per se, but they spoke to twenty-year-old white girls, the ones who lived in college dorms across America. Let’s face it, every year there was a new crop of twenty-year-old white girls living in college dorms across America. I made a little bit of dependable money off that. But I was thirty-five now; my relevance was waning. I needed to come up with another source of income to fall back on, fast. But from who, or from where? I didn’t know how to do anything.
“You know, Genie,” Wanda started in. I could tell she was going to drop a bomb on me; it was in her rude-awakening tone of voice. “Don’t you think it’s kind of weird that Darryl would leave something as explosive as those photos behind in a flight bag when he left for L.A.? I mean, he’s so anal. It’s not like he ever forgets anything. Why would he forget to take his flight bag and, least of all, a bunch of incriminating porn? Do you think he was maybe trying to tell you something?”
“That I’m nosey?”
“Well, that, maybe, but I meant the other incredibly obvious thing: he wanted you to find them.”
Oh shit. She was right. This wasn’t funny anymore. My walking papers were as good as served. I panicked. I gulped down the rest of my drink. “What the hell am I going to do?” I blurted again, this time with significantly more gusto. “I have nothing, Wanda, nothing. And the only education I have to speak of is that stupid finishing school my publicist suckered me into. How much are they paying these days for knowing what to avoid wearing on talk shows if you have any amount of cellulite whatsoever?”
“Not much. Unless you want to be a career coach or something.”
Or something, indeed. I was doomed. And just where was I going to live while I looked for work, for an actual job, with this flimsy, unmarketable skill?
“You know,” Wanda went on, “Darryl’s probably going to offer you a big chunk of cash. I can’t imagine he’s going to boot you out into the street with nothing. You’ve been really good to him. I’m sure he’ll give you enough to survive on for awhile and you can always come work for me.”
“Retail?” I shrieked. This struck me as the worst possible idea. Its glamour quotient didn’t even register on the semi-acceptable-careers scale. I used to be famous, for chrissakes.
Wanda dismissed my panic as she stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette. “It’s not really retail. It’s a thrift store; it’s a great charity. It’s laid back, you’d be working for me, and you’d be in Chelsea, an incredibly trendy part of town. You could get back in touch with the real world, Genie. There are some remarkable things going on out there.”
“In your opinion, maybe; you’re a college-educated dyke with a social conscience. You vote. You give a shit about people and their problems, all the injustices. A city as corrupt as New York is your oyster, Wanda. But I’m not like that.”
My third bourbon and Diet Coke of the afternoon was drained. I got up from the couch in my room to go get another refill. Wanda followed me, with Muff trailing not too far behind us. It was a round-trip journey Wanda and I had made together how many times? We have always drunk an awful lot. I lit myself a Chesterfield out in the hallway and took a distracted drag on it. Wanda had stood by me through everything; pre-fame and post-fame. We’d been friends almost since the moment I came to New York, fifteen years ago. She came to every one of my gigs before anyone knew I was alive. Sometimes when I was at loose ends, Wanda and I were lovers. But it wasn’t a lifestyle I was committed to, being a lesbian or anything; mostly she was my friend. She put up with me in all my sociopathic guises.
“That’s not true,” Wanda insisted. “You do give a shit about people, Genie.” When we reached the living room, I went straight for Darryl’s well-stocked bar. “Maybe you hated being famous,” she went on. “You hated being a piece of meat that the suits were always coming on to, or being a commodity that always had to stay at 110 pounds; but you wrote those great songs. They came from your heart. I remember it all very clearly, no matter how dismal you’re feeling about it now. You made a lot of people feel hopeful, Genie. You made them feel like they mattered. That doesn’t come from not giving a shit about people. You’ve just lived too long in your gilded cage on Central Park West to remember who you really are. I think you should accept my offer of a job. So what if you hate it? You can always quit. I don’t purchase indentured slaves or anything. I’m just trying to help.” She planted herself on a barstool. “If you don’t like the job, you’re always free to leave.”
Now, that was a concept: I was free to leave. I was going to be free to do a whole lot of things from now on. I put more ice in my glass and poured a generous amount of Wild Turkey into it, topping it off with a splash of the effervescent Diet Coke. It was a killer cocktail, 101 proof – my fourth in two hours.
Wanda reached for my lit Chesterfield and took a drag on its unfiltered tip. Then she choked. “Jesus, how do you stand these things?” She coughed, passing it back.
“Well, why do you always try to smoke them?” I said. “You know you can’t handle a Chesterfield.”
“Who can? Why do they still make cigarettes like that, anyway? They’ve got to be cancer times twelve.”
To Wanda’s credit, she was trying to quit smoking. I was still from Kentucky down in my veins, though. I came from sturdier stock; a long line of frontiersmen and the occasional savage Indian squaw – a thing as flimsy as a finishing school in Soho had been no match for the tenacious bad habits of bourbon and unfiltered tobacco that were entrenched in my very core. Try as they did to persuade me at that image-conscious monkey house, I had never been able to make the switch from bourbon to white wine spritzers or to take up the ubiquitous Marlboro lights. They’d claimed that if I must smoke, then Marlboro lights would seem more charming, more suited to the angelic persona they were dredging me in at Surroundaround Discs. Their efforts were wasted; I was still hooked on Chesterfields Kings.
“Wanda,” I said, inhaling the harsh unfiltered smoke, flecks of tobacco sticking to my lips. “I don’t know what I’m going to do. I know I should call Darryl and confront him with this right now, but I don’t have the guts to hear what he obviously wants to tell me. How am I supposed to give it up, all the great restaurants, the trips, the First Class bullshit everywhere we go? What am I going to have without that?”
“Well look at the bigger picture,” she offered. “There’s still life.”
It brought to mind ancient oil paintings at the Met: A still life. Yet that was me; I’d been standing still for how long? And now I was going to be free to jump with both feet into the heady traffic jam of life on the ground floor, or perhaps even the sub-level, if I could sink low enough.
“Just drop by the store tomorrow, Genie, come on. At least take a look around. Surprise that bastard. Have a job when Darryl comes back from L.A. Be the one to decide you want to move out and move on. Have a little dignity. You have friends who love you, you know; me, Chas, Frankie. And god knows how many new friends are out there, waiting to be met.”
I took a sip of my fresh drink and realized I was past the point of feeling buzzed and well on my way to being just plain smashed. I stubbed out the cigarette and left my drink sitting on the bar. “You want to go take a walk?” I said. “Maybe walk through Central Park or something?”
“You’re kidding? You want to take a walk – in public, in broad daylight? You, the gal who never ventures farther than the elevator in the hall to sign for a delivery of take-out food?”
“Yeah, me. I need some air.”
“Air it is, then,” she agreed happily.
I went into the master bedroom to put on a pair of sneakers. Then from the huge closet full of designer clothes that I rarely wore anymore, I yanked out a black hoodie and tugged it down around my ears. But I couldn’t manage more than that. With the hoodie still around my neck, I collapsed on the bed in despair. The room was brimming with Darryl’s expensive furnishings, his elegant taste. When I’d moved in with him, there’d been no room left for most of my downtown stuff so I’d sold it all. I had clothes and shoes and handbags galore. I had movies and CDs and books. But the pricey stuff – the things like a bed or a dresser or a couch, all of it I would have to buy from scratch. Salvation Army, here I come. Maybe a job in a thrift store wouldn’t be so impractical.
Then I did start to cry, finally. It was a deluge of tears. “What is going on here?” I sobbed loudly. “Did I somehow ask for this?”
Ever the nurturer, Wanda was in the master bedroom in a heartbeat. “Oh boy,” she said. “I knew this was coming.”
“How long has he been a creep and a bastard?” I wailed. “How long have I been looking the other way? From the moment he and I met? There are an awful lot of naked girls in that photo album, Wanda. You don’t acquire an impressive collection like that overnight, or even in a year! Have I been kidding myself all along?”
Wanda sat down next to me on the bed. For a large and seriously butch-looking dyke, her voice could be quite soothing. “I can’t answer that, Genie. For a record guy, he seemed decent enough. But I never lived with him. How can I know?”
For a record guy, he seemed decent. That was like saying he seemed considerate – for a Gestapo guy. Jesus. I choked on my self-pity, feeling my heart cave in.
I was sleeping with the enemy – a record guy. Only with Darryl, everything had been A-list and First Class so it hadn’t seemed so obvious that I’d completely betrayed myself. I gave up my music career because I couldn’t stand the record guys. Why the hell had I chosen to move in with one?
“Come on.” Wanda tried to get me to sit up, to finish putting on my hoodie. “Let’s take that walk.”
“I changed my mind. I don’t want to be seen like this.”
“Put on a pair of shades. No one’ll know. Let’s go look at a tree or something; it’ll make you feel better. I’ll treat you to a cup of coffee and we’ll take a little walk around.”
* * *
When Wanda said coffee, she didn’t mean anything hoity-toity like a double decaf extra light café latte, or anything. She meant a cup of coffee. The kind of coffee that was served in a paper cup that had a drawing of old Greek guys dancing around on it. The kind of coffee you got for seventy-five cents at the grimy bodega that was wedged between a plastic surgeon’s office and the Sushi Express. It was blistering hot bitter coffee that had cooked on a burner for hours. But who was I to complain? My palate was already trashed from the bourbon and cigarettes. It was only the caffeine I was after now.
We dashed against the changing light on Central Park West, crossing over to the park. The exertion of running made my drunken brain dizzy. I had to pause and regain my balance. Then I tore a small hole in my plastic coffee lid and took a sip of coffee for sustenance and I burnt my tongue.
“Isn’t this great?” Wanda declared, heading into the park with me stumbling close behind. “It’s really fall, isn’t it? Look at these leaves.”
I looked. Even with the dark sunglasses on, I could tell that the park foliage was stunning. There was something bittersweet about it. It reminded me of Kentucky, only with a sophisticated urban sort of edge.
If I did leave Darryl, I wondered, would I wind up living anywhere near Central Park again? Would it still be right outside my door?
It was nearly four in the afternoon now, the neighborhood schools had let out and the playground in the park was filled with little white kids in fall coats, laughing, running, screaming, and having a real ball. On the benches lining the playground, the West Indian nannies chatted noisily among themselves, rocking the occasional sleeping infant back and forth in a well-stocked stroller.
I looked away because it was too heartbreaking. Until now, I’d taken it for granted that I’d bring my own kids to this very playground one day; the kids I’d have with that creep, Darryl.
I wandered across the grass and found a bench that looked out on the many scampering squirrels instead of the scampering kids. Together, Wanda and I plopped down on the bench.
Passersby stared at us while we sipped our burning coffees. At Wanda first because her gender was indeterminate and perplexing; she lifted weights; she was big-boned and masculine looking. Her bleached-blonde hair was cropped extremely short and yet her tits were real, every enormous inch of them.
Whenever strangers stared at me, however, it was always the same. There I’d sit, thin as a stick, in my black hoodie, my black jeans and expensive sneakers, jet-black designer shades blocking out my eyes. I was clearly uncomfortable in my skin so people just naturally assumed I was famous. They often did double and triple takes. Sometimes they stood and stared outright. “Who are you?” they’d ask, as if at this point, I had even the vaguest clue.
“Eugenia Sharpe,” I’d answer. I’ve never been comfortable being rude. It’s not in me to ignore people.
If the stranger was twenty-something, male or female, there’d usually be a pause of doubt and then the dawn of recognition would wash over their faces. “Eugenia Sharpe!” The exhilaration of discovering a once-famous person was almost always followed by their un-asked-for chorus of my biggest hit, Pushing My Limits, sung in high-pitched voices. Everyone everywhere always unconsciously tried to imitate my angelic soprano twang:
“Pushing my limits, baby,
Not going to stand it for too long.
(Yeah, yeah)
You’re pushing my limits, baby.
Where did it all go wrong?”
I’ve never minded it, truthfully. It’s kind of cool having a part of me so deeply ingrained in everyone’s psyche. But I would like it a whole lot better these days if I could somehow get BMI royalties on the song hooks that got stuck in people’s brains.
“Remember the old days, Wanda, when Darryl and I first met? My first record deal and how exciting it all was?”
“Yeah,” she said.
“What do you suppose was going on in his head? I mean, he always had his pick of the women. All of them threw themselves at him, including me, because he could get the serious deals made. And in my case, he sure did. But if he wasn’t planning on giving up any of those other girls, I wonder why he wanted me to move in with him? It seems like I must have really cramped his style, especially when I didn’t follow through on my follow-up album. What the hell could he have really wanted from me if he was still fucking around with everyone else?”
A sexy gal in a pink hoodie, whose ass was squeezed tight into a pair of low-slung jeans, had caught Wanda’s interest. “You’re a pretty good cook,” she offered distractedly. “You look like a model when you get dolled up. Plus, you know, you’re a hillbilly – which is charming – but you’re smart.” The girl in pink kept moving and Wanda sighed in defeat. Now she gave me her complete attention. “Face it, men like that stuff. They get a lot of mileage out of it – ‘good looking and cooks, too.’ You know, men have certain criteria for the live-in significant other, little slots to be filled and if you fill enough of those slots, you get the job.”
“And dykes aren’t like that?”
“Oh, sure they are. But slots have nothing to do with love, you know – whatever your sexual preference. In fact, love is usually about trying to overlook the huge number of slots your dearly beloved doesn’t fit into.”
“So, love isn’t so much about filling slots as having the slots remodeled to fit your lover?”
“Yeah.”
“So, love means never having to say you won’t remodel, is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“You know an awful lot about love, don’t you, Wanda?”
“Not really. I’ve just been down a lot of dead ends and I hate to make the same mistake twice. I try really hard to make a better mistake the second time around.”
At last, she’d dragged a smile out of me; a weary one, but a smile, nonetheless.
It would probably be okay, working for Wanda, I figured. A girl could do a lot worse. If I had to have a useless job, I might as well have one where I could hang out with one of my best friends all day. “I was just thinking,” I said, “maybe I’ll take you up on your offer and work for you for awhile. I’ll give it a try, at least.”
She gave me one of her overwhelming bear hugs. Wanda didn’t know her own strength and she nearly spilled my coffee.
“I’m so glad, Genie. You’re doing the right thing; I know you are. You’ve got to get on with your life.”
I got the distinct impression that she’d wanted to tell me that for a long time.
* * *
The dull crash and burn came later that evening, long after Wanda had gone back downtown, expecting to meet me at 9 A.M. the following morning to show me around the store and introduce me to her other employees. That’s when the thought of a useless day job, any job at all, Wanda or no Wanda, sent me into apoplectic tears. The bourbon, the cigarettes and the caffeine had done their collective damage to every one of my nerve endings, leaving me feeling spent and raw. I paced mindlessly through the apartment – all 3000 square feet of it, trailed faithfully by Muff. I moped from one exquisitely lit room to another, sobbing over all the splendor I’d soon be leaving behind. I’d never been one for being too closely in touch with reality, but even I knew that no thrift store salary on earth was going to snag me an apartment anywhere near as palatial as this one, the one I’d shared with Darryl for the last four years.
Heavy with self-pity and grief, I could not resist the masochistic temptation to venture back into Darryl’s office. I took the photo album from his flight bag and took it to bed with me. What was the use in being careful with it now? Why pretend I hadn’t seen it? Even in the unlikely event that he hadn’t intended for me to find it, the book still existed. I couldn’t hide from that.
The WWE blazed on the larger than life plasma screen that hung across from our well-appointed king-sized bed. Muscle-bound men in riotously colored latex costumes tossed each other violently against the ropes then leered menacingly at the audience and bashed each other avidly over the head with their handy steel folding chairs. The testosterone soap opera was in high gear, providing a suitable backdrop for my little torture session.
Propped against the bed pillows, I pored over Darryl’s travelogue; page by page, girl after naked girl, each with her most private asset luridly exposed – most of them stuffed to capacity with freak-sized silicone dicks. Yet with each fresh assault on my heart, on my dignity, I couldn’t help but notice the obvious: photo after photo proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was nothing new under the sun, porn-wise. If it weren’t for the fact that I recognized some of these overly made-up, smirking faces; that I knew for sure these girls knew Darryl belonged to me, or that I recognized our living room in L.A. as the backdrop for several of these garish testaments to pornographic excess, then the whole uninspired collection would have been downright boring.
I finally slammed the book closed and tossed it across the room. It landed with a skittering thud in the corner; its pages splayed out like the legs of a Hustler centerfold.
I snapped off the bedside lamp and flopped down hard on the pillows. I wanted to call Darryl immediately. I wanted to shriek at him over the phone. I wanted to interrupt any little rendez-vous he might be having with his current pussy of the month, whoever she was, and give him a piece of my mind at maximum volume, unleash something really obscene.
But what if he put me on speakerphone and played me for even more of a fool? Turned me into an absolute laughing stock all over the drunken, drugged-out West Coast music scene?
As each agonizing moment ticked by, Darryl grew increasingly sadistic in my fevered imagination, until I didn’t recognize him anymore. Until I almost felt afraid of him, of who he’d turned out to be: my arch nemesis rather than my trusted lover.
He was the worst of all lowlifes, I decided, because he had money and power. He could sign lucrative contracts, make deals. Darryl wouldn’t suffer any heartache over me; he would merely pick up and start fresh with any eager hopeful who came along with a sweet voice and a guitar. He wouldn’t miss a beat. My hell would be a public affair, a slide from the A-list with great speed. But rich and powerful lowlifes never fell from grace out in the open like their cast-offs did. The retribution that men like Darryl suffered were private hells; like genital herpes outbreaks or other decidedly unglamorous STDs. Their little tragedies were only gossiped about in a whisper, divulged with caution because money and power and connections were not to be crossed, ever, no matter what you really thought of the creep. If he could sign a major deal, then you kept your mouth shut about his STDs.
Muff jumped up on the bed and planted herself down by my feet while I stared mindlessly at the wrestling match underway on the plasma screen. Now and then, a random tear blurred my vision. I blinked it away, feeling blown open inside. I knew I would sleep, if only from exhaustion. I was worn out.
Then suddenly I remembered to set the alarm clock. I had a job to go to in the morning. Jesus Christ! I was going to work in a store. It couldn’t be possible. Already I wanted to call in sick. A stream of tears spouted all over again.
“La vida es dura!” Rey Mysterio, the tattooed masked luchador, was chanting on my television screen in living color and the whole world was egging him on. “La vida es dura!” the crowd replied.
Life is hard, Rey, yes indeed.
Chapter Two
I haven’t really perfected the art of traveling incognito. It used to be that the grungier I dressed the more often I was recognized and outed for being a famous person. Now it seemed that no amount of clothing at any price mattered. I wasn’t even a blip on the radar of the paparazzi unless I was out with Darryl. But still. Imagine any one of those crazy bastards with a camera spying me walking into a trendy thrift store, being shown the ropes as if maybe I were going to be employed there. You know, getting my demise on film and everything. Jesus. How exactly was I supposed to survive that?
I poured too much dry cat food into Muff’s bowl; it overflowed onto the kitchen floor but I left it there, all over the hand-painted Italian tiles. Eventually she’d eat every speck of food. She always did. Then I forced down a vitamin pill with my morning O.J. and wondered if maybe I should check the feeble notes I’d scrawled those many eons ago at the finishing school. Perhaps there was a wisp of advice there on how to keep even a shred of my dignity intact as I plunged to obscurity.
Christ, do I really look that bad? I saw my haggard reflection in the glass door of the built-in microwave.
“Another luxury that’s going to go,” I reminded myself. Meaning a microwave; built-in or otherwise. I’d never even owned a microwave until I moved in with Darryl.
I switched on the coffeemaker, feeling that I understood the Japanese penchant for saving face, of opting for Hara-Kiri; falling on to a pointy sword was now holding a certain appeal over working in a lousy store. Thank god the phone rang.
“Genie, you’re up! I was just checking. I didn’t know if you were really coming downtown this morning or not.”
It was Wanda, my saving grace.
“Yeah, I’m up,” I croaked. “I’m still coming.” My thick, rasping voice made me sound nothing short of terminal. After Wanda had gone home the day before, I hadn’t uttered a word to anyone. Unless of course you count all the curses and wails I’d let loose during the night, whenever I had the misfortune to wake and recall my self-loathing, my disgust with Darryl, my bleak and penniless future; the list went on and on…
“God, you sound terrible. Are you sure you’re up for this? You want to make it tomorrow instead?”
A loophole. One more day in the comfort zone. How inviting. But even I knew that I couldn’t fall into that trap. Darryl would be home from L.A. in a matter of days. I needed to re-position myself. “No, I’m coming. I already ordered the car. Wanda, I had such a terrible night. I need to get away from this torture, if only for a few hours.”
Wanda laughed in amazement. “You ordered a car?”
“Yeah, I did. Why?”
“Don’t you find that a little amusing? I mean, hiring a driver to take you to a job at a thrift store?”
“What else was I supposed to do? The store is sixty blocks away.”
“Have you heard of that thing called the subway? My god, Genie, it’s right there on your corner. It would take you ten minutes to get here on the C. That car and driver – in rush hour traffic? It’ll probably take you an hour.”
I’d forgotten all about things like subway trains. I used to know the trains like the back of my hand. And I was not sorry to kiss them all goodbye when Alarmed at Carnegie flew up the charts. “I think that’s asking a little too much of me right now. First things first, Wanda; let me tackle the horrors of a day job. Then I’ll think about tackling the wretched depths of the subway again.”
“Hey, come on, everybody rides the subway. I once saw Susan Sarandon on the subway. It’s convenient. It’s not a mark of failure or anything.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” I said. “Tomorrow. Or the day after that.”
For now, I was still too hung up on the notion that I might be spotted in the relative confines of a moving car. To be out in the open, vulnerable, on a public subway train was more than my nerves could handle.
Yet I was committed to taking Wanda up on her offer, this chance to start over before Darryl could take a crack at humiliating me even more – perhaps dumping me then shipping me out right as This Year’s Model was loading her stuff in. It was part of my pioneer heritage. It was down in my blood, the drive to conquer the unknown even in the face of near debilitating fear. Come hell or high water, I would stake out some new ground for myself. No sleazy record guy would make a fool of me twice.
“I’m proud of you, Genie. You’re getting some of your spirit back.”
“I guess I am. Too bad I needed the roof to fall in first.”
Most of that pioneer resolve evaporated, though, when the doorman buzzed to say that the car had arrived to take me downtown. I took the elevator down to the lobby feeling like a festering nest of butterflies was trapped in my gut, only to discover, when I stepped precariously out into the sunshine of Central Park West, that I’d forgotten to specify tinted windows! What I had waiting for me was your basic black town car. From its spacious backseat, I could see all of Manhattan just as easily as it could look in and see me. And Wanda had been so right; the rush hour traffic barely inched along 7th Avenue. It was wall-to-wall un-tinted glass as we lurched en masse from stoplight to stoplight.
I hunkered down in the seat, or as best as my bony body could hunker. The dress code at the thrift store was decidedly casual so I was in the black hoodie again; a black tee shirt under that, my black jeans and my brand new black Air Jordans. And to put it mildly, I had a headache. Tension, caffeine, vitamins, nicotine, the after effects of 101-proof bourbon; you name it and it was pulsing through every tightly constricted blood vessel in my brain.
Why had it come to this? I asked myself repeatedly in a sort of mantra chant. When had I stopped looking out for myself, my future, and everything I’d come to New York for in the first place? Christ, I could have stayed in Kentucky if I’d wanted to be broke and unglamorous and work in a store.
And how was I supposed to talk to people anyway, to converse? Even a simple thing like small talk had become foreign to me. I didn’t interact with people anymore, or strangers, anyway. Maybe the store would have a sort of backroom warehouse where I could hide away from the general public and yet still be on the clock.
I guess it came down to that: I at least wanted to be on the clock. I was more leery of the general public than the social stigma of working in a thrift shop. A store was a finite idea, a physical, dependable structure that never changed, barring any acts of nature or something like that. The general public, however, was an unseen enemy, always on the move; stalking you, watching; waiting to pounce when you were at your weakest.
“Eugenia Sharpe!” I could hear the peals of laughter coming from every phantom corner of Manhattan. “Why on earth are you working at all, let alone in a store?” She’s a loser. She’s broke. A has-been, a barely was – it was an undercurrent of murmurings, carrying the stream of my consciousness as the car weaved its way to the left hand lane. We were almost at West 19th Street, where Wanda’s store was located. Doomsday was upon us – or upon me, anyway; I doubt the driver cared one way or another. We turned onto the quiet street and he pulled over to the curb. I was going to have to get out of the car.
“Thanks,” I said distractedly, as I signed Darryl’s name to the credit card receipt, adding a more than generous tip. Then I let myself out of the car. So far, I seemed like a perfectly normal human being.
Good lord, when was the last time I was down in Chelsea in broad daylight? I wondered. It seemed like a whole other world when the sun was shining. The sky was a crisp fall blue.
“Yo, Genie!”
I turned in the direction of the voice that now filled the early morning quiet. Thank god, it was Wanda. She was smoking her half a Parliament outside the store’s front door. A short Puerto Rican woman with a butch crew cut was smoking along with her.
Probably the morning ritual, I thought; a good dose of nicotine before they faced the onslaught of the bargain-hunting masses.
I crossed over to them and Wanda gave me a big hug. “Baby, I am so glad you’re doing this! Chica, say hello to Genie; she’s the friend I told you about. Genie, this is Benita. She’s my Assistant Manager.”
“Hey,” Benita said, extending her hand. “Call me Benny. Everyone does.”
“Hey, Benny,” I said, shaking her hand.
Benny had a winning grin. Her brown eyes crinkled pleasantly when she smiled. “Welcome to the madness,” she said. “I hope you’re going to like it here. When you have any questions, just ask me.”
Wanda put in, “Benny’s been here forever.”
“Who can leave?” Benny said to me. “It’s the only place so far that’s promoted me to Management. I got minimum wage everywhere else. I’ve got a felony conviction,” she explained unexpectedly. “And I’ve got five mouths to feed at home. I need all the money I can get.”
“You’ve got five children?” I said. That seemed stranger to me than her being so candid about being a convicted felon.
“That’s right – five. And I’m 100% dyke; weird, huh?”
Wanda said, “Benny was a slow learner,” and Benny got a real kick out of that.
Even if she was a slow-learning dyke, when I tried to imagine the very butch woman in front of me giving birth to even one baby let alone five, or ever being naked underneath any guy anywhere, my mind couldn’t grasp it.
“I had longer hair then,” Benny said, as if she knew I was trying to picture her naked and doing it. I felt transparent and worse, I blushed.
Another Puerto Rican woman, this one much younger than Benny with long curly tresses, opened the front door of the store, stuck her head out and said, “Chica, phone’s for you.”
Benny stamped out her cigarette and followed the younger woman inside.
“Well, I finally did it,” Wanda said.
“Did what?”
“Got you to come downtown for something besides a cocktail. I’m pretty proud of myself, I must say.” She stubbed out the rest of her Parliament.
I wanted to keep things upbeat, but my poor stomach was still churning and my head was pounding. I wasn’t sure what to say. I wanted to say something sincere, give her an offer of my gratitude. I felt like she’d thrown me a life rope.
“Come on,” she said, not giving me a chance to get sappy. “Let’s go inside. I’ll give you the grand tour.”
Wanda opened the door for me and I went in, not knowing what to expect. In all the years Wanda had been working there, I’d never once come to visit her even though I knew that the store was popular. It was always getting written up in the trendy weekly presses because movie stars and supermodels were sometimes spotted shopping there. Inside, the compact space was packed wall to wall and nearly floor to ceiling with merchandise. Everything seemed to glisten. From the shelves stacked with gleaming sterling silver pieces to the ceiling festooned with crystal chandeliers. Strands of white Christmas lights were wound around the store’s four large central columns. Classic Danish Modern furniture was squeezed in alongside towering antique mahogany armoires and smart leather loungers. Lamps of every size and shape decorated the tops of bureaus, dressers, desks, and tables from every era of contemporary design. And on every other available inch of floor space stood racks and racks of designer clothes, a riot of fabrics and colors. It almost felt like Bloomingdale’s on a very small scale. Nothing seemed second hand. The merchandise had been expertly laid out to appear high end.
To top it off, music blared in every corner from overhead speakers. It was Tom Jones, of all the unlikely singers, doing his rendition of “Burning Down the House.”
“I love Tom Jones,” I shouted over the music.
“It figures,” Wanda shouted back.
“Why?”
“You’ve always been a little corny, face it. But it’s all part of your charm.”
“My charm, huh?” I said this more to myself as I took in my surroundings. I already felt over-stimulated and the workday hadn’t even officially begun yet. The music, its insistent beat, was pounding at top volume. Frankly, I’d always considered Tom Jones sexy, not corny. This was clearly another sign that I was getting dated. The other clear sign was the median age of the rest of Wanda’s employees – it appeared to be about nineteen, tops. The guys were wearing the ubiquitous baggy jeans and loose fitting tee shirts with Sean John and Enyce emblazoned across the backs. The girls were wearing tight, low cut blouses and jeans slung low on their ample hips. Everyone seemed raging with teenage hormones. And they were all Puerto Ricans, speaking noisily in Spanish to one another. “Is everyone here just out of high school or something?” I said.
“Pretty much – high school; or they’re in art school. I mean, it’s not like the job pays that great. It’s better than a fast food joint, but that’s about it. Although,” Wanda added, I guess as my consolation prize for coming to work for her; “we do have great benefits.”
The staff was busily readying the store for its bewitching hour: 10 A.M. They seemed oblivious to me; the newcomer. Already, a crowd of impatient customers was lining up restlessly outside the door. Benny was off the phone now, her own energy in high gear as she corralled everyone to their places.
At that moment, someone somewhere lowered the volume of the music. Its overpowering beat was now replaced by a sobering whoosh of fresh air as the front doors were opened and a throng of noisy shoppers pushed in like a wave. The crowd instantly swelled to an impressive size, spreading out to every corner of the small store.
“Wow. Is something on sale here?” I instinctively moved closer to Wanda for protection from the incoming invasion.
“No, it’s like this every morning. These people are addicted to us.”
“To shopping?”
“No, it’s more like they’re addicted to bargains. They want to be first in line for that find of a lifetime, or at least the find of the hour. They’re all regulars. You’ll see most of these people come in here several times a day.”
I found that hard to believe. “Don’t they work?” As if I should talk.
“Most of them do. They pop in here every time they go on a break.”
Wanda escorted me through the throng and quickly introduced me to each of my new co-workers. My feeble brain already feeling taxed by too much unfamiliar stimuli, I tried hard to fix the names to the faces. There was Julio, Tito, Enrique, Gloria, Pablo, Rosario, and Daria. Engulfed in the sea of shoppers, they each in turn welcomed me in perfect English and then returned their attentions to the store.
We maneuvered our way through the bargain hunters and Wanda took me in to the back of the store, to where the merchandise was processed. I was doubly unprepared for what we encountered there. Aside from two white people who were more my own age, Freddie and Bonnie, and a few more Puerto Ricans – Benny was back there now, and she introduced me to Maria and Leda and Chico and Jorge – there were literally mounds of donations of every imaginable type, waiting to be sorted through and priced. Electronics, clothing, books, CDs, videos, old record albums, house wares, toys and pieces of toys, silverware, stemware and pottery, obsolete computers, and heaps of other stuff that could only be called jeejaws and gimcracks. On the walls there were metal shelves going clear to the very high cement ceiling. The shelves were crammed full of baskets and boxes that, in turn, were stuffed full of things. And it all looked filthy and forgotten. How was it that everything in the front of the store had looked so dazzlingly new?
“My god, what do you do with all this stuff?” I asked.
“We clean it up then we price it and sell it,” Wanda said simply. “Or we throw it away.”
Freddie, who was one of those arch queens, found this amusing. “Mostly, we throw it away. If it were worth anything, why would they be giving it to us?”
“Don’t mind him. He’s just bitter,” Jorge explained. “He’s worked here too long and he needs to get a life.”
Wanda led me to a mound of more stuff in the corner, which actually turned out to be her desk piled high with donation run-offs. “Let’s get you started here officially,” she said, moving the heap of stuff on her desk on to another pile of stuff on the floor. “I need you to fill out an application and then I’ll let you sort of wander around and meet everybody, see what they do. Then, if you like it, we’ll find a spot to stick you in and you’ll be one of us.”
“That seems simple enough.”
Wanda cleared off a chair for me to sit on.
I looked at the official application in front of me and it no longer seemed simple. References? Who the heck would I list as my references; Surroundaround Disks? Darryl, for chrissakes? And my employment history? You mean, prior to fame, I wondered; does fame even count as employment? They even wanted the street address of my old high school. Who remembers that? Did I ever even know it? It was simply Coolidge High over in May Hollow – pronounced “holler.” Please. What is the zip code for a “holler?”
“Do I need to fill in all of this?” I said weakly.
“Actually, yeah, you do. It goes to the main office and gets processed there. Any lines you leave blank will only make them send it right back over here and you won’t get your first paycheck until the application is verifiable and complete.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No. It has something to do with our non-profit status. Just do your best.”
“What do you mean by verifiable?”
“We’ll need a copy of your high school diploma, for one thing.”
Where on earth was I going to get that? I’d graduated nearly eighteen years ago. When was the last time I’d laid eyes on my high school diploma? Was it buried deep at the back of my closet, under the Gucci shoes or the Dolce & Gabbana handbags? Was it stuffed in the pocket of a Todd Oldham faux fur coat? More likely it was hiding at the bottom of a dark desk drawer, under a stack of worn out song lyrics.
“Well, I’ll see what I can do, Wanda.”
“Good. Otherwise you might have to call up your old school and ask them to send us a copy of the diploma directly.”
My lord. Wasn’t it bad enough to be hitting the skids in the relatively anonymous crowds of New York? Would I be forced to announce it to tiny Coolidge High, too, that their hometown girl was no longer making good?
The mental strain was starting to give way to depression again, and to an underlying feeling of hysteria.
Wanda clearly sensed my shifting mood. “It’s no biggie, Genie,” she said soothingly. “We’ll figure it out. Come on, why don’t we do this later. I’ll take you out front and we’ll stick you behind the bag check area. That’s easy as pie and from there you can kind of watch everybody at work, watch how the store runs, get a good view of the customers. We’ll ease you into it. You’ll see; it’s going to be fine.”
Back out front, now that the initial opening rush of shoppers had passed through, the store had become a lot quieter. Julio was doing the bag checks. A large, affable young guy with tattooed arms and a light covering of facial hair, Julio walked me through the full routine of the bag check chore in about two minutes flat and then turned it over to me. “You need anything, Boo, you ask me. I’ll be right there, doing the donations.” He pointed to a spot directly in front of me, on the other side of the counter. It gave me courage, knowing that he wouldn’t be going far. How could I explain to a self-possessed kid like Julio that the thought of making eye contact with any of the customers filled me with enough anxiety to walk right out of the place? A kid like Julio couldn’t care less about being “discovered” working in a store. Like Benny the Assistant Manager, he was probably happy just to have a job, to have good benefits and not to be working in fast food.
“So I hear you know Wanda?” he said.
“Yes. We’re good friends. We’ve known each other a long time, fifteen years.”
“Whoa, mami, you don’t look that old. How old are you? I think Wanda’s almost forty.”
Julio made forty sound as if it were unthinkably old. “I’m thirty-five,” I said.
“You don’t look it. My mom is thirty-five and she looks a lot older than you, Boo. So where did you work before here? Miss,” he said, commandeering an incoming customer. “You need to check your bags with her.”
Wow. He was making my simple task even simpler. The woman handed me her bags and took her claim ticket. She was too possessed by the need to shop; she didn’t look me in the face at all. “I didn’t work anywhere before here,” I answered him. “I’m breaking up with a guy so now I need a job.”
“You didn’t work? You’re kidding, right?”
“Well, I was a singer, but I’m not one anymore.”
“A singer? Cool. I know a lot of guys who rap, or they Deejay. But all of them work other jobs, too. Or they sell drugs – you know.”
An elderly man with a box of clothes to donate came in the front door and momentarily took Julio’s attention.
Well, there it was and it wasn’t so bad. The words had come out of my mouth: I was a singer, I’m not one anymore. It had been no big deal. Maybe working with people young enough to be my kids was going to make this job a piece of cake.
Once he was free again, Julio came back. He leaned against the bag check counter. He picked up where he’d left off. “So you’re breaking up with a guy?”
“Yes.”
“Where’re you living?”
“Uptown,” I said.
“In the Bronx? I live in the Bronx.”
“No, I live on the Upper West Side.” I had never once stepped foot in the Bronx.
“Where’re you going to move to?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Maybe you can crash downtown with Wanda for awhile – but she’s gay, you know; she’s a dyke.”
“Yeah, I know.”
He leaned in closer, asking curiously, “Have you ever gone out with her?”
His innuendo was not lost on me. I was taken aback by his frankness but I answered him anyway. I liked Julio. He seemed genuine. “Yeah, I’ve gone out with her,” I said; “Once or twice.”
“My mom used to go out with her, that’s how I got this job. My mom’s what you call bisexual. But Wanda, she’s pure dyke. And speaking of dykes…” He lowered his voice and grinned self-consciously from ear to ear.
It was Benny. “Julio, can’t you at least try to look busy? Don’t lean on the counter, man, or I’ll put you on Dressing Rooms.”
From the way Julio snapped to attention, I took it to mean that “Dressing Rooms” was a dreaded chore.
Then Benny turned to me. “I’m going out for a smoke,” she said. “Is everything cool here? You need anything?”
“No, I’m fine,” I told her, and to my surprise, I really was starting to feel all right.
A couple hours later, though, the small of my back was killing me. I didn’t think I’d ever stood that long in one place in my life. Customer after customer had come through, either checking a bag or retrieving a bag. Each new face approaching me added to the vague tension I was holding in my lower back. Donations were slow so Julio had long since been re-assigned to a different part of the store and I had been standing alone in absolute silence, trying to come to terms with why I needed to be there.