Cha-Ching!, page 15
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When Theo got home Sammy was shuffling around in her pajamas.
“Girl,” Theo said, depressed.
“Girl,” Sammy said, listening to her story from the night before.
“I love her,” Theo sighed.
“You don’t love her. You just met her. She’s probably just embarrassed she got shit-faced and told you her life story. Don’t worry. She’ll probably call you before the end of the day.”
“Will you go with me to Atlantic City?” Theo asked. “I just want to get out of town.”
“Only if we go somewhere with a good buffet and you give me half of everything you win.”
“Okay. We can get a room and take Cary Grant and spend the night.”
“Somewhere with a hot tub?”
“Totally.”
Sammy rolled a joint in the car and smoked it.
“Girl, I’m so fucking broke. You have to hit it big.”
“I’ve been lucky lately,” Theo said.
Even though she had five thousand dollars of her winnings left, Theo still felt pressured to win more. She needed money for retirement, after all. She didn’t have a profession in the works like Sammy did with massage school and she didn’t want to work shitty cashier jobs or continue her haphazard shifts as a janitor in the junk-mail factory.
“Do you know my father gambled away every single paycheck of my childhood?” Sammy told Theo.
“Does that mean you don’t want to go?”
“No. I was just thinking about it. He didn’t really bet in AC. He was more of an OTB kind of guy.”
Theo felt guilty for a second for asking Sammy to come. But if something bad happened at the casino, if she fell into a losing streak, she didn’t mind if Sammy saw her at her worst. Plus, she just wanted to escape, get out of town so she wouldn’t torture herself about Marisol. If she won she’d help Sammy buy her expensive books for massage school, the kind with beautiful maps of the body, books where each page lifts away one layer of anatomy—first veins, then muscle, then bones. In a few seconds, the entire body disappears. Gambling was like that, too. A few pulls of the handle and everything would start dissolving: her confusion about a future with Marisol and the rest of the fears she carried around.
“I feel lucky,” Theo said. She said the same thing at the start of every trip to a casino.
There were many intonations for this statement depending on how her life was going at the time.
“I feel lucky,” like a runaway wife with a black eye on a Greyhound bus.
Or, like when a terrorist says to a hostage, “It’s your lucky day.” The hostage is given the choice to have his fingers cut off with either pliers or a hatchet. That kind of luck.
Or, I feel real lucky, her voice laden with disgust, heavy with the memory of what had happened at the casino last time. And then four or six or eight hours have gone by and Theo has lost all her money for the buffet, for even a hot dog or a cookie at the stand outside the casino doors, the vendor who sold sad snacks to destitute people waiting for the bus to take them far away from this hellish place.
But so far, she hadn’t experienced that kind of bad luck since moving to New York.
Theo got them a room when they arrived at the casino and they immediately went to the buffet to feed Sammy’s hummingbird metabolism. Theo was trying not to gobble her food and rush off to the slots, but once she was in the casino and could hear the sound of the machines it took everything in her power not to run off to them. In less than twenty minutes inside the casino all of her worries had morphed into a single problem—she just needed to find a slot machine where goats were surgeons and find up a way to line up five surgeon-goats in fifty-three different directions. If she could solve this simple problem she would be a very rich person.
Theo wanted to gamble in the smoking section even though Sammy was allergic to cigarette smoke. Deep down Theo couldn’t really believe Sammy was allergic since she smoked weed every day.
“Are you getting a feeling from any of them?” she asked Sammy, pointing to the rows of slot machines.
Sammy sniffled.
“Girl, you know I’m no good at that.” She refused to pick. She didn’t want to be responsible if it didn’t end up a winner.
Theo was getting antsy and finally said This one, just so she could compulsively start shoving money into something.
Sammy sat down at the slot machine next to her, but she wasn’t playing.
“Start slow, girl. Start slow,” Sammy coached, sniffling.
Theo fed a hundred-dollar bill into her slot machine and another hundred into the one Sammy was sitting in front of. She’d brought a thousand dollars down from the room
“No, girl,” Sammy said. “I don’t want to lose your money.” Sammy had never had the terrible misfortune of winning in a casino.
“You have to think positively,” Theo said, and Sammy started to play her slot machine but not with any conviction.
Neither one of them was doing well and before long they’d both lost a hundred dollars.
“Let’s go to the hot tub,” Sammy said.
“Let me just win back that two hundred dollars first.”
She quickly lost another two hundred dollars. She could feel all her promises about buying Sammy’s schoolbooks going out the window.
“What’s your limit?” Sammy asked nervously.
“Two hundred more dollars,” Theo lied, thinking about the envelope of money in their hotel room.
“Girl,” Sammy said.
And the way she’d said it filled Theo with shame that she could flush money down the toilet so easily.
“Let’s try this one,” Theo said, stopping at a slot machine called Ice Age.
The object of the game was to have a seal slide across the ice a certain distance and activate another seal to pop out of an ice-fishing hole with money fish in his mouth. When the money fish seal pops out of the hole it giggles like a teenage girl. If the seals slide too far, they disappear right off the side of the video screen, giving a sad little wave good-bye. And sometimes they don’t slide far enough, never reaching the ice hole. When this happens, they push themselves up with their dejected little seal shoulders and crawl back off the screen. Theo had to try with all her might to telepathically control the length of each seal’s slide. A player’s level of luck is determined by how many money fish the seal tosses, and the fish flip and squirm in the air with each of their cash values emblazoned in their sides. So far the only seals Theo had been lucky enough to get to pop out of an ice hole had been depressed and unmotivated, flipping malnourished fish with low monetary value.
“Girl, can you try Reiki on the machine?” Theo asked.
“I don’t know, girl.”
“But you just got an A on your test, girl. It’s not like it could hurt.”
If Sammy could hover her hands the right way over the slot machine, then maybe the seals would pop out of the ice hole like the story of the loaves and fishes in the Bible, a constant replenishing basket of money fish! She could see the fear in Sammy’s face. She was afraid of doing anything wrong with the Reiki that would somehow prevent the seals from popping out of their money ice hole.
“Please,” Theo pleaded.
Reluctantly Sammy stood up from her stool and moved to Theo’s left side, placing one hand on her shoulder and the other on the slot machine. Theo kept pushing the spin button while Sammy stood quietly with her eyes cast down, not closed, like she was meditating. If God is here come help us, Theo thought. spin. spin. spin. Her credits dwindled as the seals went about their day on the video screen, their bellies now full, and with no need to stop at the ice hole and pull out any fish. Maybe Reiki needed time to warm up—it was energy work, after all.
“Should I keep playing?” Theo asked Sammy.
Sammy nodded quietly and sniffled. Theo tried to imagine herself, Sammy, the money fish and God walking down the street with energy elbows linked. She took a deep breath and when she exhaled she felt the weight of Sammy’s tiny hand on her shoulder, light like a bird foot. She knew Sammy’s hand was acting as an energy conduit but she couldn’t help but think it felt more like a foreshadowed consolation. Theo concentrated hard and pushed the spin button again. The seals had become like strangers in the subway passing her with their dead eyes. They had things to do, places to go. Theo’d get them.
“That’s right, fuck you,” she said angrily each time they went down the wrong hole, betraying her until each and every credit was gone. She pushed the spin button one more time to double-check that she was broke.
Sammy’s eyes were open now and she stared at the video screen. Her face had the bereft expression of a TV surgeon who, despite repeated valiant attempts, loses the patient.
“Sorry, girl,” she said, removing her little bird foot from Theo’s shoulder. “I just remembered, Reiki only works on things that are alive.”
“It’s okay, girl,” Theo said. “Thanks for trying.”
“Can we go in the hot tub now?”
“Yeah,” Theo said, cheerily. But she was already formulating her plan to keep on gambling.
twelve
Marisol had a terrible hangover. She wanted to spend the day in bed under the covers but she was terrified of falling into some sort of shame spiral about her blackout from the night before. She took a long shower and prepared herself for her first day of being a stripper. The fact that she’d known so many people who’d tried it at some point of her life, including her mother, demystified the job for her. Plus, now that she was unemployed she needed structure. Her drunken antics from the night before had proven that.
“Nice wig,” Candy said when Marisol walked through the doors wearing a burgundy wig.
“Thanks,” Marisol said, touching the tips of it.
She’d been a go-go girl for Halloween years before, and now she was glad she hadn’t gotten rid of the wig, feeling some nervousness in her stomach as she looked around the empty bar, imagining it filled with partying men.
“Did you come up with a stage name?” Candy asked.
Marisol shrugged her shoulders.
“You need to pick one.”
“I don’t know,” Marisol shrugged again.
“How about Chloe?”
“Okay,” she said, feeling about as far away from a Chloe as a person could be.
“I’ll show you where we get ready,” Candy led Marisol into the back room. “Take this,” she said, handing Marisol a tiny white pill.
“What is it?’
“It makes you feel like you’re floating. You can just feel the music.”
Marisol swallowed the pill and then had a moment of panic about taking something when she had no idea what it even was.
“Don’t worry,” Candy said, reading Marisol’s thoughts. “It’s just Xanax. Half of America is on it.”
The back area was filled with women in G-strings, and Marisol let the Xanax move through her body. She felt less ashamed now about telling Theo her life story and throwing up on her floor. She wondered if Theo would come in to the bar tonight, although she didn’t see Sammy bartending.
In no time The Looney Bin filled up, and Marisol was surprised how easily the dancing came to her. At one point both she and Candy were dancing on the stage at the same time and Candy started grinding up against her. It made Marisol giggle. She appreciated Candy’s friendliness; the other girls were chilly.
When a new group of girls got up on stage Candy took Marisol’s hand and led her into the small bathroom where sometimes the men got blowjobs.
She pulled out a tiny plastic bag of white powder.
“Want some?” she said, placing a paper towel down on the back of the toilet and then pouring two lines.
“Cocaine?” Marisol asked.
Candy laughed. “You’re kind of square, huh.”
“No,” Marisol defended, even though it was true that she’d never done cocaine in her life. She was so afraid of becoming her mother.
She watched Candy snort the line and then she followed suit, tasting the drug sprinkle down the back of her throat.
“You ever throw up on a first date?” she asked.
Candy was checking to make sure she didn’t have any cocaine on her nostril, and she looked over at Marisol and smiled.
“I just got laid off from my job as a librarian.”
“You were a librarian and now you’re working here? That’s just sad.”
“It doesn’t feel sad.”
Candy reached out and grabbed Marisol’s boob, squeezing it.
“That shit real?”
Marisol laughed, slapping Candy’s hand off. She nodded.
“That pisses me off,” said Candy, who was pretty flat-chested.
Marisol wanted to say, “But at least you have parents.”
But she didn’t know if Candy did have parents, so instead she said, “Perfect tits don’t make you happy. Just like being rich doesn’t.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have no problem being happy if I had your tits,” Candy said, “because then I would be rich!”
Someone knocked on the door.
“Let’s get out of here,” Candy said.
At the end of the night Joey brought some of the girls drinks while they were getting ready to leave. Candy asked Marisol if she could do her a favor and pick up a case of video equipment for her the next afternoon. She’d have to meet Candy’s cousin Sean at the top of the subway stairs, get the case and bring it to The Looney Bin the next day. Candy had already told her The Looney Bin provided opportunities for advancement; some girls gave blowjobs in the bathroom and some did porn on the side. When Marisol hesitated, Candy added that if she didn’t do it then her sister was going to get pissed at her because she’d have to watch her kid again. Marisol always zoned out when people talked about children.
“Please,” Candy repeated.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to do Candy a favor. It just felt like her life had become so confusing, and she was afraid to be pinned down with commitments in case she needed to take a nap.
“Okay, okay,” Marisol answered.
“Thank you.”
“Can you give me a few more of those pills?”
Candy looked at her.
“Just until I get my own.”
“Here,” Candy said handing her the bottle, “just don’t pull no Marilyn Monroe on me.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ll tell Sean to meet you at the top of the subway stairs tomorrow at three.”
•
The next day Marisol still hadn’t heard from Theo. She lay on her couch eating Xanax and staring at the red digital numbers on the cable box atop the TV until it was 2:45. She grabbed her keys and walked down the stairs to the subway station. She was delighted to find her legs rubbery from the anxiety medication; it had been hard to know if the drugs were working while lying on the couch.
The man in the bodega who sold her overripe bananas saw her standing at the top of the subway stairs and waved to her. She gave him a half-hearted wave back. She didn’t want to invite conversation. It was very sunny for such a cold day, and she turned to press her hands against the sun-warmed railing of the staircase. Many people will walk up those stairs, Marisol thought, but never my father or mother. Eventually a train arrived, and a cluster of people ambled up the staircase. She scanned their faces until she saw a teenage boy with a shaved head carrying a hard, gray plastic case. He caught her eye.
“Are you Chloe?” the boy asked.
Marisol nodded.
“I’m Sean,” he said.
She was expecting someone sleazier-looking to be delivering a suitcase full of porn video equipment. He looked like an athlete, muscles developed everywhere. He was wearing a brown nylon sweat suit with a team name on it, like he’d just come from practice.
He wiggled out of the crowd and stood next to her. Angelina was tattooed on his neck in too tiny script. In a few years it would be blurred into nothing. Marisol started to grab for the suitcase.
“It’s kind of heavy. I can help you carry it to your apartment if you want.”
“That’s okay,” she said.
She caught a whiff of his cologne, she knew it—what was it? Something cheap from her childhood that the boys at school would wear. Old Spice, she thought, staring at the gold dollar-sign stud in his earlobe.
“You sure? I don’t mind carrying it,” he looked her right in the eye when he spoke to her. She liked his politeness. Or was it sexism? Surely he knew she worked with Candy. Marisol thought she should ask him if he wanted to get some garlic knots or a slice from the nearby pizza shop. How old did a person have to be to have those jutting neck muscles? She studied his polite smile to figure out if he was thinking of her as a porn actress or stripper, or someone of Candy’s generation—an elder. A mother.
“Let me see how heavy this is,” she said.
She reached her long rubbery arm down and grabbed the handle of the suitcase. It wasn’t that heavy. Like a few weeks of neglected laundry with a full bottle of soap on top.
“It’s not that heavy,” she said smiling.
The smell of garlic knots wafted over from the pizza place. The combination of the pills and leaning against the sun-warmed railing had given Marisol a sense of hope she hadn’t felt in a while. Now, standing next to polite Sean, she felt like she was on vacation from the numbness of the last few months.
“You want some garlic knots?” she said out of the blue.
The boy’s eyebrows lifted.
“Or a slice? My treat.”
“Nah,” the boy smiled. “I’m straight.”
But Marisol saw his eyes lying. No young man could resist garlic knots or a free slice of pizza.
“But it’s such a great day for pizza,” Marisol said.
He laughed. “Maybe another time. I have to go to practice,” he said, looking down at this watch, “I’m late already.”
“Oh.”
“Nice to meet you,” he turned to leave.
