“I’ve been receiving some negative emails from Pitts,” Timberlake confided. “Hurtful stuff.”
“Why the hell is Pitts emailing you?” I asked.
“According to him, I keep on shooting dogs. He says I need to get my act together and find some better-looking girls.” Timberlake shook his head, miserably. “Pitts sure can write a mean email.”
I put my arm around him. “You can sleep with me tonight, if you think it’ll help.”
‘You asshole. You unsympathetic prick. Listen, I was an asshole as a teenager. I admit it,” said Timberlake. “But I grew out of it. You never did.” '
“I got straight A’s back then,” I said proudly. “My dad paid me to study for the SATs. Did I ever tell you that?”
“You were a nerd,” Timberlake explained. ‘I had a couple of friends like you, a couple of goody two-shoes brainiacs. I had to work at Little Caesars for spending money. Boy, you were lucky. You got coddled.”
“Fuck you,” I said, laughing. “You have no idea of the dark night that is my soul.”
“Dark night of your soul?” Timberlake said. “Dark this, kiddo: for a whole year of my life, I was forced to take lithium and Depakote. My mother and her abusive shrink stripped away every ounce of control I had in my life. Dude, I had long grunge hair when I was in high school! The Depakote made my hair fall out!”
‘You must have looked very odd,” I murmured.
“I looked awesome!” Timber roared. “You couldn’t even tell the hair was falling out unless you got up close and looked. And see, that was actually the problem. My mom convinced the doctor that I was lying, so I could stop taking the meds. The quack wouldn’t take me off the Depakote unless I brought them a Baggie full of hair. So chunks of my hair are falling out, and they expect me to walk around school putting it into a bag.”
I opened up a kitchen cabinet and stared deep into it: nothing but a box of wheat crackers. I closed the cabinet, leaving a lube stain on the wood.
“Fortunately,” Timberlake continued, “two weeks later, my mom hit the jackpot with a high-manic cycle and euphorically decided to move towns and let me stop taking meds altogether. Cool, huh?”
I said nothing, hearing the sound of the front door opening. Its smooth, oaken heft brushed against the floor. Keys jingled into a ceramic dish. A suitcase dropped against the ground. And Pitts stood there in front of us, back from Seattle.
“Good trip?” I offered.
“Let’s go out to a titty bar,” Pitts said, with an exhausted sigh.
“I’m in the mood for it.”
Timberlake cowered behind me, scared to death that he’d shot one ugly-girl scene too many. But Pitts was sincere: he just wanted to see some swinging tits. Pitts was like that. He was always sending you scary emails, but when you saw him in real life, he was never mad at all.
“Um, sensational,” Timberlake managed weakly. But behind Pitts’s back, he beamed, and went to go fetch his hat. It seemed Timber had nine lives. Outside, the crickets chirped.
We journeyed into the West Valley, chugging along in the Volvo. As I drove, I watched Pitts from the corner of my eye. He was tired from his journey, quiet and a bit preoccupied, but he held the power in the car, nonetheless. You simply couldn’t stop sensing him. I mean, his tractor beam? You wouldn’t believe. Hell, by the time we made it out to Bob’s Classy Lady, pride of Van Nuys, he almost had me in his lap . . . Timberlake, too. We were telling all our best stories, Man you should have seen Celine Maximal They make ’em differently in Holland, I guess! And boy, Calli Cox can take one, she’s a midwestem housewife-whore, best in breed! He had us boasting and bragging and competing for his attention like he was someone’s cool older brother.
Pitts was odd and impenetrable. That was his beauty. Like a lot of eccentric rich people who had focused their lives on one singular goal, he didn’t seem overly concerned with making friends, but strangely, with Pitts, that didn’t come off as narcissistic. More, it was patently obvious that he just wasn’t interested. And because of who he was, and how he carried himself, you never considered resenting him for it. Instead it just added to his charisma.
We parked in the mostly deserted lot, loped our way to the front, showed IDs, and paid the cover. “Need a drink?” I asked the boys.
“Sure,” said Pitts. He passed me a twenty. “Lemon Drop.”
As I waited for the bartender to get our drinks (Lemon Drop?), I watched Timberlake and Pitts take up seats at a table underneath the strippers, laughing. Timberlake pulled out his wallet and put it on the table. Right then, I could tell he was going to squander every dime in there. Not to impress Pitts, or to show his gratefulness for keeping him on board, or anything like that. He was just a guy who loved to shit away everything good he had, including money.
“Here you go,” the bartender said.
Clutching the drinks between my outstretched fingers, I tiptoed over the bumpy, cigarette-burned strip-bar carpet. As I walked, I gazed up at a dancing girl, transfixed by her tits. It was astounding: I could shoot every day for a month, the most graphic stuff you’d ever heard of, and still I never tired of seeing naked women. I wondered if there was something wrong with me.
“Thank you, Sam,” Pitts said, as I placed our drinks on the table.
“Cheers, buddy,” said Timberlake. He sipped at his beer.
Two girls named Golden and DanceHer writhed sexily up on the stage to a shitty song with lots of guitars in it. They wore pasties and bathing suit bottoms: you couldn’t get fully nude in places where they served alcohol. Pitts sipped at his Lemon Drop, fished in his pocket for dollar bills, and dropped a handful onstage carelessly. The girls cased him from the corners of their eyes, their interest piqued.
“Strippers are interesting people,” Pitts reflected.
“I don’t understand them,” I confessed. “They won’t let me inside their heads.”
“I’ve gotten to know some Seattle girls quite well,” said Pitts. “We’ve partied, and they’re fairly solid human beings. Strippers like me for my money, but that’s understandable, as I like them for their looks. It’s a totally workable, equitable transaction
“I dislike their names,” I offered. “DanceHer is not a good name.”
“Well, first thing you have to realize is that they’re not like you or me, Sam,” Pitts said. “They don’t have degrees, and whatnot. You shouldn’t come to a strip club and expect to find yourself up onstage.”
“Take DanceHer as she is,” suggested Timberlake, dropping his own slew of dollar bills up onstage magnanimously. “You’ll be happier.”
Both of the girls approached the edge of the stage, leaned on the railing, and crouched athletically, bopping their asses together in a crude sexual pantomime and staring hungrily at Pitts, who didn’t acknowledge either of them.
“I can’t remember when I first realized that sex with a stripper was probably the dirtiest sex I was going to be able to find without actually going to a hooker,” Pitts said, “but it was a big moment. Yes, essentially it was paid for, but it wasn’t quite prostitution, either, and that felt important. I’d stumbled across that rare, fine line, a special no-man’s-land where things were smutty and exciting, without being truly disgusting.”
“Porn girls are in that category, too,” I pointed out. “They’re not really whores, except sometimes they are.”
“Right,” Pitts said, nodding. “I’m very curious to see what makes them tick.”
“What makes them tick!” repeated Timberlake, hooting. He slurped at his beer. He was the kind of guy who got tipsy from a swallow. It all went straight to his head. “I know where this is headed!”
“I may attempt to meet a few of our starlets,” Pitts admitted. “Curiosity.” He pulled out a wad of bills and thumbed through them, finding a twenty. “Watch this. These women have excellent eyesight. They know when a twenty hits the stage.”