I can’t forget Mercedes in her white nighties, always dancing to Ratt. She was this tall, super-leggy blonde, and she barely fit on the stage. Her go-to was a vertical split, lifting her leg until her foot was flat on the ceiling. Then she’d start bumping the pole with her pussy. She wore classic nineties pumps, and she had to take one off as she raised her leg or she’d be too tall to do the trick. Mercedes had these great, natural boobs, but the main thing I remember is that she had found these baby ducks with no mom and was caring for them. She brought a little kiddie pool into the dressing room on weekends and there would be these brown ducklings wading around.
Billie was a fitness model who drove a white Chrysler 300, so I am pretty sure she had sugar daddies. She only came in to work for emergencies, usually two days before her rent was due. Then there was Venus, a lesbian who I thought was so hot. And Phoebe, tall and skinny with a pixie cut, hate-dancing to Lords of Acid’s “Pussy.” She’d hit her heels hard on the stage, but in the dressing room she was always crying, pleading with whoever was on the phone to let her see her kid. “You promised I could see him tomorrow” was the litany every weekend. He was about three, and she had to go to court to try to see him, but they used a solicitation charge against her. She danced with anger.
The oldest, Cheryl, was in her late forties and very pretty. She was a grandmother, which I couldn’t get my head around at the time. Now I feel like I am hurtling toward that age. She was older and made no secret that she’d had a rough life, but she was unfailingly kind. Her good soul shone through and made her beautiful.
These women raised me, doing the job my mother had bowed out of. Thanks to them, I learned I was putting in tampons wrong. They taught me how to shave my bikini line so it wouldn’t break out, and how to do makeup. I saw this weird little contraption on the dressing room table and blurted out, “What is that fucking thing?”
“It’s an eyelash curler,” said Cheryl.
“You’re supposed to curl your lashes?” I asked.
“Oh, sweetie,” said Mercedes.
“Raised by wolves,” sighed Cheryl, fixing her lipstick.
I grew up in a strip club, and like all the dancers, I called Cinnamon “Mom.” My grades never suffered, and no one from school ever knew except for my best friend, Elizabeth. My trainer, Nancy, had introduced me to her husband, Dr. Dan, at the LSU veterinary school just down the street from the barn. I started working there after school, and the highlight was caring for a foal. I applied to a veterinary school in Texas, and in the spring I was accepted with a scholarship. But I still worried about living expenses.
I was the baby at Cinnamon’s, though no one knew just how young. The weekend before my March 17 birthday in 1997, they got me a cake. HAPPY 19TH BIRTHDAY! it read. But it would be my eighteenth birthday, one of the worst days of my life.
There were subtle signs, then an avalanche. Around the time I moved in with Andy, I noticed that Jade seemed a little more timid about jumps. By then, we’d had each other seven years, so we could read each other. I became much more concerned in February, when she started a rapid decline. She had consistent diarrhea and seemed increasingly listless. I led her over to Dr. Dan at the veterinary office where I worked. He had always done checkups and let me work off the payments in the office, or simply didn’t charge us. He did a full workup on her and even tested her for toxins to make sure she hadn’t been poisoned. He wondered if maybe she had a heart murmur, and we took a wait-and-see approach.
Then she deteriorated quickly, and by the first week of March she was wasting away. Her hair became dull and she resembled the poor, pathetic horse she had been when I first got her. I knew she had been through a lot of abuse before I had her, but she was only twenty. The average lifespan of a horse is about twenty-eight, plus or minus a few years. But she had rapidly gone from doing these huge jumps to looking like she was near death.
The last day I rode her, I knew it was the end. Spring had come and an early run of warm weather had coaxed out all the yellow butterweeds and buttercups along the trail. That day with Jade there was a sudden cold snap, so it was surreal for it to be so cold yet still have wildflowers all over. I put Jade’s blanket on her to ride her—she was too thin to saddle her up, and this would keep her warm. We did a trail ride and I told her I loved her. I knew what I had to do, and afterward, I went to Dr. Dan.
“It’s not fair to her,” I told Dr. Dan. “She’s so miserable.”
“I know,” he said. “I agree.”
We decided to put her down, and the only time they could schedule it for was March 17, our shared birthday. I wanted to be there for it. I knew this would be bad. If you are picturing it like the gentle passing of a dog, nestled in a blanket, you’re wrong. Horses don’t curl up and die after they get a lethal injection. Their reaction is pretty violent, with the horse collapsing and sometimes rearing back.
All the vets came in to support us. I didn’t cry much because I had already said good-bye on the trail. They let me braid her forelock so they could give it to me after, and I talked to her as I separated and twisted the hair. I told her not to be scared.
And then she was gone.
They pulled her shoes to give me, everyone tearing up. They never sent me a bill or expected anything from me for the care and kindness. Because this was a veterinary school, I knew they were going to examine the body to learn what went wrong. A couple of weeks later I was at the barn, still working just to be around horses, when a few of the vets came over to me, seeming shell-shocked.
“Jade had been operating on one valve of her heart,” one told me.
“It had been dead for so long that her heart was a different color,” said the other. “We don’t understand how she was walking, much less jumping.” He went on to explain that what caused the sudden deterioration was that she stopped absorbing food from scarring in her stomach after years of parasites. She was just destroyed on the inside.
Jade came into my life when I needed her, and she left when I needed her to leave. I had an apartment and plans for school. I couldn’t afford her anymore, and at eighteen, I couldn’t be tethered to a horse. I had to move on, and she let me. I’ve had so many horses since Jade, but she was the best I ever had.
I graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School with straight As and a goal of deferring college for a year. I was “taking a year off,” I told everyone. I wanted to continue working, build up savings, and then be able to focus on my studies when the time came. I taught summer camp at the equestrian center for five dollars an hour and continued dancing at Cinnamon’s for a lot more. I started dyeing my hair red and noticed that I made more money as a redhead than with my natural dark hair. I made $325 one night and thought I’d won the lottery. I actually went shopping for once, which I had trained myself not to do. I was so proud of being self-sufficient that I put a bumper sticker on my Toyota Celica. It read, FOLLOW ME TO CINNAMON’S.
At the very end of August, I started having symptoms that felt like strep. My throat was on fire and I had a fever so high I was hallucinating. I didn’t want to go to the doctor because I didn’t have insurance and I knew it would be a fifty-dollar visit, plus whatever for the medicine. It was the weekend, and I was already out the money from missing some work at Cinnamon’s. Finally, my boyfriend Andy got so worried about me that he dragged me to a clinic on Sunday, August 31.
The doctor prescribed Cefalexin. Now, there’s nothing wrong with some cephalosporins among friends, but it turned out I was allergic. I took the first dose, not knowing it was a time bomb in my body. Andy went to work, delivering pizzas late into the night, while I lay on our mattress on the floor. By then we had an old TV, but no cable. It had rabbit ears, so it would randomly catch a signal every now and again. But I had it on for white noise.