This will shock you, but things weren’t working out between my mom and Mr. Kelley. I know, right? We were pulling for those two kids, weren’t we? Their arguments were getting increasingly frequent, and when they went at it while I was home, I just went to my room and put on my headphones. If they screamed louder, I just turned the volume up. I never got in the middle of it, and Mr. Kelley never would have hurt me.
One of the final straws was when he got out a shotgun in the house. I was on my bed, and my mom’s bedroom shared a wall with mine. He shot a hole through it and the buckshot tore through my closet, ruining all my clothes. If I had been standing up, I would have been shot.
After the initial “what the fuck?” shock, I said to myself: It might be time to get out of here. There was one more huge fight, where they were both breaking things. We already didn’t have anything, so I called Michael, the boy who’d broken up with me on Valentine’s Day in the seventh grade. He lived around the corner and his dad was a police officer. I tried to get them to come over and help me, but they wouldn’t. The neighborhood had disintegrated to such a point that this wasn’t worth getting involved in.
Finally, Mr. Kelley left. I hear he’s sober now, and I hope he’s doing great. I don’t blame him for leaving my mother. It was time for me to get out of Dodge, too.
The Christmas Tree Incident has become famous among my friends, because they had to witness it. The Christmas tree was still up in our front room, though it was January. On a Friday, my friend Anna was over to watch Late Night with Conan O’Brien with our respective boyfriends. Hers was a nice guy. And mine was Andy, who was not. At twenty years old, Andy was three years older than me and already out of school. He had long dark hair shaved on one side, ice-blue eyes, a really big penis, and a dark soul. Never toward me, but he had demons. He was super into guns and tried to be a marine to make his family proud, but he couldn’t hack it. He came home and their disappointment weighed heavy on him.
My mom was in her bedroom, and the house was quiet except for Conan. Suddenly we heard this bloodcurdling scream. It scared the shit out of us, but before we could react there was a rush of feet stomping. It was my mother running, still screaming, down the hall in her forest-green silk nightgown. She passed in front of us, jumped up on a chair—and proceeded to rip off her nightgown like the Hulk.
No underwear. None. She stood naked for one second, lost her balance, and fell back into the Christmas tree.
I moved out the next morning.
Andy and I got an apartment together for $335 a month on LSU’s campus. Andy had money from his job delivering pizza, and he had three thousand dollars in the bank from some relative dying. I kept going to high school like normal and kept up with my routine of visiting my horse, Jade, every day.
We had no furniture, unless you count a mattress on the floor and some plastic shelves for Andy’s CDs. He loved music, though he didn’t play, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of metal and hard rock. He turned me on to all the music I still listen to today: Metallica, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Skid Row, and Poison. We would go to all-ages shows in fields to watch local bands like Acid Bath, who were my favorite. They had a song called “Bleed Me an Ocean,” a line of which I still want to get tattooed on my body: “Just like a raindrop, I was born, baby, to fall.” Around when I moved in with Andy that January of my senior year, Acid Bath came to an end when the bass player, Audie Pitre, and his parents were killed, hit head-on by a drunk driver over on Highway 24.
At one of those rock concerts in a field, our first weekend living together, most of the people there were around Andy’s age. We were all hanging out when someone pulled up in a brand-new purple Camaro. This pretty girl got out and she was a magnet for people. Everyone wanted to know how a nineteen-year-old had a Camaro, which was like a Ferrari in 1997 Baton Rouge.
“Look at my new car,” she said, as if everyone wasn’t.
“Did you get this for graduation?” I asked.
She laughed. “No, I graduated two years ago,” she said. “I bought this.”
“You did?” I said. “What do you do?”
“I’m a dancer,” she said.
I was studying ballet in high school and I was on the dance team, so I was thinking Nutcracker. “Oh, what kind of dancing do you do?”
She looked around at the people gathered, with an expression that said, What’s with this fucking chick? “Uh, I work at Cinnamon’s,” she said.
Cinnamon’s was a strip club, and the only reason I knew about it was because they had TV commercials. “Oh,” I said. “Oh. Ohhhhhh.”
And before I could say anything else stupid, she said, “Yeah, if you guys are ever driving by, you should stop in and I’ll buy you all a drink.”
At the time there was a brief window when if you were eighteen you could drink in bars, thanks to the Louisiana Supreme Court finding that a drinking age of twenty-one amounted to age discrimination. But I was not even eighteen yet—I was a seventeen-year-old high schooler. So I didn’t think I’d be taking her up on the offer anytime soon.
I was wrong. Two weeks later, Andy and I were driving out by Prairieville on a Tuesday night. We had two of his friends in the back, and we drove by Cinnamon’s. “Oh, my God, that’s where that girl works,” I said. “Amy the Camaro girl.”
“You know somebody who works there?” one of the guys in the back said in this voice of excited disbelief.
“Yeah, she said we should stop in.”
Andy did a movie-worthy U-turn and we drove into the gravel parking lot.
Now, there are gentlemen’s clubs, then there are strip clubs, and then there are titty bars. Cinnamon’s was a titty bar. Basically, a trailer. It wasn’t even nice enough to be in Baton Rouge—it was across the bridge in Prairieville.
I panicked when I saw there was a bouncer checking IDs. The three guys were all over eighteen, so they got in just fine. When it was my turn, I reached into my purse, stalling by fumbling for my wallet. “Oh, yeah, lemme…,” I said. I had it in my hand, and a little voice in my head said to do something.
“Hey, is Amy working tonight?” I said her name like it was a magical spell. And it worked.
“Yeah,” he said, softening. “You’re friends with Amy?”
“She invited us.”
“Why didn’t you say something? Come on in!”
He never checked my ID. It was in my hand and he never reached for it. I crossed the threshold of Cinnamon’s and saw that our arrival had more than doubled the number of customers there. Tuesday nights were slow, I guessed. There was a guy playing video poker, and the ceiling was so low, you could reach your hand up to touch it.
Amy came out like we were old pals and bought us drinks. The guys couldn’t believe their luck. Amy called over to the dancers, “Come meet my friends!”
The girls started coming over, bored and looking for something new to talk about. A range of ages from twenties to thirties, they were all talking to me at once.
“You’re so pretty. You should do a guest set.”
“Have you ever danced before?”
“Where do you dance?”
“I’m still in school,” I said.
Only later did I realize everyone thought I meant LSU.
“We’re just going to borrow her,” Amy said to Andy.
They spirited me into the dressing room, a long rectangle with a table and chairs. It was very smoky and dirty, with two steps that went up the back to the DJ booth, which you walked through to get up to a stage that was the size of a queen-size bed. The girls began to play dress-up with me. I was Cinderella, with the bluebirds and mice making my dress and fairy godmothers making me feel special.