When I joined him on the couch, we nonchalantly talked about his classes while I counted my tips on the coffee table. When it was time for bed, I peeled myself out of sweaty club clothes while Douglas carefully placed my boots on the shoe rack in our closet. My shower never felt so good.
The ease with which we lived our hectic lives was normal to us. It is easier to blame my transition into promiscuity on our comfort level with extramarital affairs, than to admit I had just enjoyed being a ho. Unleashing repressed sexuality was the next step, and the only way to achieve this was to explore. Something about the City of Sin gives good people permission to do bad things.
Desired is an understatement. It wasn’t my features that made me attractive, but my lack of involvement in love triangles. This fact makes an average girl beautiful in the lesbian world.
One wonderful aspect of Vegas is that it is a hub of cultural diversity. There were all types of beautiful women in all shapes and sizes. I was overwhelmed trying to pinpoint who I wanted to be with. The general rule was, if you were interested and I was interested, it was on. Especially, if they didn’t mind the idea of me being married; this was always my disclaimer before it went any further than a first date. But, girls who didn’t mind are not exactly quality women. Hindsight is blind.
I made a lot of beer friends, you know, the type of girls that are fun only when they drink. They introduced me to more club heads that eventually networked me to Lindsey.
She was a hot Japanese butch girl with the most mysterious history. She was a very reserved wallflower. Her wardrobe consisted of worn Keds, baggie jeans, and an oversized black leather jacket that she never took off, no matter what time of the year. She dyed her hair a horrendous platinum blonde, and her only friend seemed to be a lanky old black guy with an afro. I told Douglas all about her as we laughed at her misspellings during an online conversation. Education is unimportant when it comes to sex; besides, Doug was already my scholar.
Rayya, my closest beer friend, thought Lindsey was the ugliest thing she had ever seen.
“She’s trash, Emma. Ugly chink trash!” Rayya, a heavyset butch girl, grew up in Iraq but claimed her Dominican side when she sensed a hostile crowd. Despite her mixed ethnicities, she really tried to live the life of an American, albeit a hick American with racist shortcomings.
“Lindsey is hot!” I immediately defended. Not every girl is for everyone; I get that. But she was attractive by many lesbian standards, not just mine. She would have been the catch of the day had she developed a better fashion sense. A sexy girl in a busted outfit equals ugly to a lot of women, but my philosophy was, the clothes can come off.
She dismissed me with a head and eye roll. “Whatever. Fuck ‘sushi’ if you want to. All I’m sayin’ is stick with the white girls. White is right, don’t get it twisted.” Her head tilted to the side as if what she just said was gospel. Then she laughed as hard as I did.
“You are the most ghetto bitch I have ever met!” I managed through the kind of squealing laughter that makes your stomach muscles pinch up in pain.
Money was tight for everyone, so a month later Rayya moved in with Lindsey and Afro Man due to a financial jam. Or so she said. She called me in a panic a few weeks later and insisted I pick her up because she had “some seriously fucked up shit” to tell me about “Sushi” Girl.
She’d overheard Afro Man talking on the phone about some “old bag” that had a heart attack during a home invasion. The woman had to be placed in intensive care, and Rayya explained how Afro Man giggled about it to the person on the other end. She said he talked about his heart transplant and how he almost died when he had to jump from a second-story window when the woman’s dog attacked him.
Her first instinct after overhearing this was to snoop.
Rayya waited for him to get off of the phone and leave before she began some of her own investigative rummaging. She claimed to have found over twenty-five high-end DVD players stacked neatly in the garage under a tarp and some very interesting papers.
“Emma, what do you know about this girl? She’s trash. Look at this.” Rayya dumped a plastic grocery bag upside down on my dining room table and pulled out a state license from the pile. “Who’s this bitch?”
Giggling, I grabbed the identification card out of her hand with an old photo of Lindsey smirking on the front. It was a painful smile, really. She looked miserable. Her shoulder-length mouse-brown hair was teased in an attempt to recreate an eighties style. The Pennsylvania ID captured Lindsey wearing huge, thick glasses and a turtleneck that seemed to be very thick and suffocating. She looked to be about nineteen.
“She said she was from New Jersey,” I frankly noted.
“She also said she was twenty-six! Do the math. She looks good for…thirty-three!” Rayya pointed out the birthday printed on the front. Then she pointed out the name on the card. “I didn’t know you spelled Lindsey that way.” In clear black print the name on the card was April.
“What the fuck!” My mouth was open in shock as I sifted through every piece of paper.
“She’s the home invader! She stole that lady’s bird, sold that fucking thing on eBay.” Rayya slapped another ID on the table with a different name printed on the front. “You know, one of those exotic rainbow birds that talk. She brought it to the house, Emma, and tried to feed it crackers and tuna! It was loud and Lindsey—or whoever this bitch is—tried to give it some drugs to sleep! She stole the poor old bag’s pet after giving her a heart attack. Who does that?”
“On eBay? They ship pets?”
“You mean stolen property! She was scared to death of that bird. Emma, she tried to give it water and it bit the bitch’s finger. I laughed so fucking hard. Serves her right stealing someone’s pet bird. I thought it was odd that they got a bird like that if she was scared to death of it. Seriously, who does that? I’ll tell you who; crazy people and murderers.” She crossed her arms and sat back in the dining room chair as if her statement was, again, gospel. She certainly believed everything that was coming out of her mouth. Her conviction when she spoke was genuine. “The papers said the invaders had animal masks on, and I saw animal masks in Lindsey’s room!” Rayya exclaimed with wide, worried eyes but without moving from the back of the chair.
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.