“Hey, I didn’t know Louanna was a pill popper. I don’t know the signs and symptoms of a druggie!” My defense sucked, but it was the truth; I had been totally conned by a thief and a drug addict.
“Obviously. Louanna told me she fell asleep during sex with you. I don’t know how you didn’t know she was on something.” Rayya puckered her lips and tilted her head to the side. This was her endearing smug face. The one she used when she spilled the beans on secret information. She completed the look with condescending sarcasm when she lifted one eyebrow.
I sat back in my chair. “When did she fall asleep?” I crossed my arms over my chest.
“When you had sex. She told me. I guess you were supposed to go to see the lights on Fremont Street or something. She said she took too many pills and fell asleep while you were going down on her.”
“Holy shit, I wondered why she got so quiet! That bitch!”
When Rayya laughed, her mouth seemed to unhinge as wide as it could and her whole body shook. Her head practically rested on her back as she laughed until she coughed. She was a very loud, obnoxious laugher, especially when it was at my expense.
“Lindsey is a coke head too, and Afro Man sells his heart transplant pills for money. Did you know that? I walked out one night and the man was disgusting. Sweating and wheezing. Emma, he looked green. I didn’t even know black people could turn green. I thought he was dying on his dirty home invader couch. He has a life-size photo of you in his bedroom too. Creepy.”
The information caught me completely off guard, and, when I jumped, I nearly fell over backward in my chair. “What!”
Her hands carved the image of a door into the air. Then she mimed opening it with a knob. This imagery was some form of mockery as she explained it again only more slowly. “He blew up a picture of you, poster-sized, and has it on the inside of his closet door.”
“I’m going to toss. We have to tell the cops.”
“I ain’t doing shit. I still live there. What are you trying to do, put me in the streets? That’s if I make it to the streets. You know they got guns. Tell Louanna I got swindled by a chink and an afro, and tell her I said goodbye at my funeral. Bye, bitch.” She put her hand in the air and waved like a beauty pageant winner.
“Fuck Louanna.” I crossed my arms again. This time it was in disgust.
Her laugh was extra loud. It actually scared me, and I jumped a bit when she slapped the table. “No, you fucked her. She slept. Don’t get it twisted!”
Louanna and Lindsey were not the last of my conquests that were into having a permanent white line under their noses. They were certainly not the last to feed off of my lack of knowledge in the world of pills, crack pipes, and cocaine, which was affectionately referred to as yay-yo.
There was the Hawaiian who thought it was funny to bang my stripper coworker and make me smell her fingers while on shift.
And there was Monica the Mexican. I actually liked Monica much like when I first met Louanna. There was a connection with both women. It’s a shame, really. You could tell they used to be good people before their addictions.
Monica and I met at karaoke night in the gay bar. Karaoke drew a decent crowd on Wednesday nights, but there was ample room to move and hear a conversation. She came to my table to offer a drink while complimenting my singing. She was polite and funny. Any girl will tell you that the funny factor scores huge points and gets your foot in the door during the courtship process. She was a hippie chick with thick, wavy hair and wore some kind of hemp necklace woven through seashells. She was from Mexico but spent the last seven years living in Hawaii right on the beach. Her accent had lost most of its Hispanic influences for Hawaiian slang, but her Mexican culture still thrived.
She was so fantastic I lost track of time talking until the karaoke host began packing her equipment around two in the morning. She completely understood the status of my relationship with my husband but still asked for my number. “Naw, it’s cool, kid,” she said with a wonderful, straight white smile. The next time I saw Monica it was the same fantastic connection in the same bar. We got to know each other for hours until it was time to leave. She escorted me out, and, when we reached my car, we shared our first kiss. “I don’t want to let this night end, man. Let me take you to my place.” She had her thumbs tucked under the belt on my jeans, but nothing too forward or vulgar.
I accepted.
Her roommate and her roommate’s baby were not there, so Monica asked me to stay the night after a fairly steamy make-out session. I said yes after I texted Doug my plans and took a shower. During sex she wouldn’t let me take off her clothes. She flinched upward when I attempted to unzip her pants and grabbed my hands. “No, I don’t shave like you do, ” she said.
“I can’t touch you at all?” I asked as I pushed her wild hair away from her face.
“It’s all about you tonight, kid.” She rolled me onto my back, and we continued to have sex on the floor, surrounded by baby toys. When I finished, I gave her a few kisses and turned to my side to fall asleep. She mumbled something that I couldn’t hear, so I twisted my naked body around to her. My eyes widened in the dark when she repeated it again.
I half-jumped up and flipped over at the same time. “Did you just say your fucking girlfriend is coming home?”
“Bra… Yeah, kid, you can’t stay. I just realized what time it is, man.”
I was reaching for any clothing item I could recognize in the dark. I was frantic as I untwisted my underwear and grabbed my jeans. “What the fuck? How much time do I have?”
“She gets off of work in…” She looked across the room to a clock on the wall that I hadn’t notice. “Half an hour, man. I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? What the fuck, Monica? You have a girlfriend! This is not okay.” I snapped my bra closed and tugged my shirt over my head.
“Aw, come on, kid, you have a husband.”
“The difference is, he knows where the fuck I am right now.” I walked out and drove as fast as I could back to my normal husband, my normal apartment, and the stable life I knew. Crazy as that sounds.
It was a month or more before I bumped into an overly apologetic Monica. She told me that the relationship was in its final stages when that happened and she had since moved out. Her Latina charm worked some kind of magic on me, so I agreed to an official date so she could make it up to me. She picked me up on her new motorcycle and introduced herself to Doug. They chatted in Spanish, cracked jokes, and she shook his hand before we left for a nice restaurant in one of the casinos. You know, one of the places where the drinks are pieces of colorful alcoholic art in opulent glasses.
After dinner we rode back to the hotel where she was temporarily living to drink some more. Then she decided she wanted to take me to a strip club of my choice because I apparently didn’t get enough of the environment at work.
On the way to the strip club, a cop pulled her over for speeding. I sharply told her to keep her mouth shut while the officer was running her insurance. She was a Hawaiian-influenced drunk hippie with a Mexican attitude on a speeding motorcycle. The way she was talking to the cop sounded like she had been smoking pot for hours and had ferocious munchies. When the cop let her go with a warning, my blood pressure returned to normal.
Onward we drove to the strip club, where she consumed another three or four beers and two shots while I got a lap dance. After the dancer walked away, I leaned into Monica to let her know it was time to leave. She was fidgeting uncontrollably and asked one of the shot girls if they knew where she could buy some cocaine, aka yay-yo.