Tiger didn’t press. He got back to business, saying, “Jan, look…most of the luxury establishments nowadays have these types of secret spy systems. You don’t have to personally do the spying. You could put Lorna or somebody in charge of it.”
January was adamant, however. She insisted the removal be implemented and completed before her return from Spain.
“Cool,” Tiger replied. But before January hung up, he decided to cheer her up with some news he knew would make her smile. Tiger told her that he might later be proven wrong but that he felt as though he’d finally found the man of his dreams and that the guy was sitting right in front of him.
With a grin, E-Joe Bradford blushed. And because the couple had previously discussed who could and couldn’t know about them, Tiger told January that he was dating none other than superstar heartthrob of the daytime soaps, E-Joe Bradford.
“Yep…Victor St. Nicholas from ‘Young and Frisky;’ Deborah brought him to Warm Leatherette.”
E-Joe stared at the handsome black executive wondering if they really could make a serious go of their romantic feelings. They both loved golf, tennis, chicken quesadillas, and were completely masculine-acting. And one couldn’t find a more perfect hideaway than Warm Leatherette when it came to keeping a taboo love affair under radar. But as always with the charismatic daytime star, there were so many secrets and complications in his path.
Becoming one of Hollywood’s top actors was a driving ambition for E-Joe Bradford, far more important than finding true love and having it leak out that he was gay. In fact, he rather enjoyed the rumors that he had a wife stashed away in New Zealand. He couldn’t thank his publicist enough for spreading that. But then again, he was even more anxious to find out whether Tiger Holden was a bottom or a top.
Just watching Tiger talk on the phone, E-Joe’s dick was getting hard. And when Tiger hung up, the soap stud went around and leaned down and stuck his tongue in Tiger’s mouth.
They kissed passionately, but before the spell got too blinding, Tiger pulled back and told him, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to wait a little longer.”
~*~
Lorna Sinatra had her head under the bed with a flashlight.
For the life of her—she couldn’t understand where the awful smell was coming from.
It had been building for days now, originally hanging in the air over her bed like the faint smell of rotting oysters or raw eggs left drying in a garbage disposal—but suddenly today it was worse. It smelled as though something had crawled up in a crevice or up in the wall and died.
Lorna hadn’t yet noticed the subtle change in her secretary Regina at the office. Like most people who have a body odor, Lorna couldn’t smell herself the way other people did. The fact that the vitamins concentrated in the wet coating of the cervical membrane made it even harder to pinpoint. She imagined the odor was confined to her bedroom and bathroom back at the bungalow. She even called Tiger to have him get someone from Pest Control to come and check it out. But to her dismay, the Pest guy reported, “There’s no dead animal or anything unusual in your bungalow Ms. Sinatra. We checked every inch of the place while you were gone.”
While I was gone, they checked every inch of the place.
This was worse than any bad face-lift, Lorna thought.
Rage filled Lorna’s eyes as she screamed, impatiently, “What the fuck do I smell and where is it coming from?”
~*~
Deborah Crawford was caught off guard as well.
She was losing her virginity at last—and losing it in a place she’d never expected—her dressing room at the Sunset Beach Gower Studio where ‘Young and Frisky’ taped each day.
“Oh god,” she cooed as the show’s producer, Kent Gower, frantically ran his hand in between her thighs and dug his tongue in her mouth as far as it would go.
Should she tell him she was a virgin? Somehow Deborah didn’t think he would believe her. She was lost in the fire of his kisses and felt like a feather when he lifted her up and lodged her on the dressing room cot with her legs wide open.
“My god, your body’s magnificent! It’s so much younger than your face.”
“Take me,” Deborah replied with the last remnants of what had once been her girly-girl’s voice. And then she felt it—the strangeness of first penetration.
Only ten minutes earlier, she’d been fired from the show.
The show’s head writer—a bitchy effeminate gay man named Peter Dasher—had informed her that he was one of the few people who didn’t like her acting style and that he was writing her character off the show.
His co-writer, Coffy Monroe, had been standing behind him holding a clipboard and feeling sorry for Deborah, because she knew that in reality, Peter’s dislike had nothing to do with Deborah’s acting. Peter Dasher had simply been trying for years to get his Broadway actress sister on the show and had created the role of “Niagara” for her—but Kent Gower hadn’t been willing to pay his sister’s requested acting fee or build the special dressing room she demanded.
Working on soaps was very treacherous and political Deborah realized, because in the world of soaps, she learned—the Head Writer was often more powerful than the Executive Producer. And in using that power, Peter had planned to write Niagara off the show with a car accident. None of them had expected that over night Deborah Crawford would turn Niagara Horton’s scenes into Must-See T.V. But to Peter’s consternation, that’s what she’d done. Soap fans loved her and the ratings had shot up a full household point.
“I can’t stand this country ass bitch,” Peter had barked ten minutes ago, annoyed that Kent was doing something soap opera producers hardly ever do against such powerful head writers as Peter Dasher—defend a new fry.
Kent Gower knew a superstar in the making when he saw one, however, and he wasn’t about to let her be written off the show. He flipped open his cell phone and called Network President of Daytime Barbara Living to have her talk some sense into Peter.
And now it was done. Deborah’s role was secure.
“How do you feel?” Kent asked her after the lovemaking.
“I feel…like a new woman,” Deborah smiled.
“There’s something about you,” Kent told her as he caressed the angular plains of her face. “I can’t explain it, but your southern accent, your innocent crooked smile…it really gets me.”
“I’m glad,” she said. “But I don’t think our head writer is done fucking with me, Kent. He hates me for some reason.”
“You just keep acting, babe. I’ll handle Peter Dasher.”
Kent Gower was fifty-seven and moderately handsome. His wife had died in a ski accident several years ago and his kids were off in college. In many ways, he was a lonely man, and in some industry people’s estimation, a pushover. But with him in her corner, Deborah had a very good shot at taking control of the show.
“What do you say we go to Vegas?” he asked her.
“Vegas?”
“I want to marry you, Deborah.”
“But Kent—we hardly know each other!”
“I’m mad about you.”
“Mad is the operative word…”
“Look—I know you’re beautiful and I know you’re not a conniving bitch like the character you play. That’s all I need to know.”
“I’m not a conniving bitch?”
Deborah Crawford burst out laughing! Lorna came to mind and Deborah felt as though she was Lucy Ricardo in an episode of “I Love Lucy” playing some devilish prank.
Kent stared at her, waiting for her to reveal the joke—but she was laughing too hard to say anything. He finally laughed with her and demanded, “What is in this beautiful blonde head of yours that you can’t stop laughing?”
The Vichy Vitamin Pill, that’s what!
But, of course, she couldn’t tell him about how she’d tricked Lorna Sinatra into stealing her vitamins. Rotten bitch, thought Deborah. She’s probably eating them like candy.
>
And it hadn’t been difficult tricking Lorna. Deborah had simply coached a few of her most beautiful female friends to sit by the pool in the Warm Leatherette garden and fawn on and on about this mysterious bottle of Vichy Vitamin Pills and how they worked like a miracle—whiter teeth, bigger breasts, improved hair bounce, fountain of youth skin like a newborn’s.
These girls helped Deborah lay it on thick about the youth and beauty wonders these pills produced and how Deborah had shared a few bottles with them and was now down to the last twelve jars stashed in her bungalow. When Lorna finally asked Deborah if she could try a few—Deborah told her that the manufacturer had just stopped making the pills and that she couldn’t spare any because of their impending scarcity. She’d said, “Sorry, but they have to last me the next few years, Lorna.”
Later on, like clockwork, one of the girls saddled up to Lorna and whispered: “That jealous man-looking bitch just doesn’t want you to get any prettier, Lorna. Imagine how men would kill themselves over you if you were taking these miracle Vichy Vitamins.”
“I don’t know; I’m kind of skeptical.”
“Lorna—they really work! I’m telling you girlfriend.”
And now Deborah was laughing her ass off, standing in Las Vegas saying “I do” to the man who’d taken her virginity that same day. Not only was ultimate control of daytime’s hottest soap fully within her grasp as a springboard to bigger things—but she couldn’t wait for the smell of Lorna Sinatra’s “twat” to finally start generating the talk and attention it deserved.
~*~
The 5 Freeway, northbound
San Clemente, California
“Ashanti, you’ve never been to Warm Leatherette? Well…it’s nothing less than Sodom and Gomorrah by the ocean,” Blanca Castillo was telling February Foster as her raggedy Chrysler K Car sped north on the 5 freeway. In the backseat, Blanca’s children at Happy Meals and played amongst themselves. The California scenic view and the window breezes would have been nice if it hadn’t been for the Hillbilly country Christian songs by a group called Repent Ye Sinners playing over and over in the tape slot.
Having faith in God and using that faith to escape an abusive husband was normally a saving grace for low income women. But the longer February spent riding up the coast with Blanca, the more frightened she was becoming of Blanca’s religious bent.
“Somebody needs to blow that place up,” Blanca said in a softly casual tone. “It’s nothing but sinners and they all deserve to die.”
“But your brother Julio works there.”
“Yeah—and my brother is the biggest sinner on the property. I didn’t tell you that he distributes marijuana while tending the bar did I? The club uses him for that. Julio’s also a gigolo. That’s why certain types of Latino hot boys love Santa Barbara and Pismo Beach. Rich old Gringa-women that Julio cut the grass for started lusting over his muscles and his Mexican Chile meat. They paid big money to get the macho treatment. Now my brother owns a house in Arroyo Grande and sits around the pool at Warm Leatherette in Speedo thongs slipping fat joints to rich people in their drink napkins.”
“You don’t sound very happy with Julio.”
“I’m not! I’m going here to help save his soul before it’s too late. He doesn’t realize that rich people are the devil. He thinks Warm Leatherette is just a resort, but it’s more than that.”
“How do you know so much about it, Blanca?”
“I was a maid at Warm Leatherette when I was fifteen. My mom told Lorna Sinatra I was eighteen, though—not that anybody checked. I met my husband there, he was a janitor. We fell in love and ran away.”
Without warning, Blanca turned off an exit and drove through a very seedy run-down back street just outside the San Clemente city limits.
“I got to pick up Cindy,” was all she said.
The car stopped in front of a run down gray-colored stucco house that had a Harley motorcycle leaned against the driveway wall and a car stacked on bricks with a pit bull tied next to it. Beer cans and cigarette butts were strewn around the un-cut grass and weeds of the yard. A tattered American flag hung from the side of the house like an announcement of some kind.
Bomp-bomp!
Blanca Castillo stared at the front door, anxious for it to open. Then when it did, February became even more disturbed.
Cindy Griffith was a tall, bulky young white woman with a fat nose, beady blue eyes and extremely pale skin. As she rushed to the car wearing a tattered sun dress and Granny sweater, February noticed that she had her finger and toenails painted black and was carrying a stack of anti-abortion religious literature, a few bibles, a bunch of “Why You’re All Going to Hell” pamphlets and two framed photos of serial killer Charles Manson.
“I got him to sign these!” Cindy lied as she handed one to Blanca who was reluctant to take it.
“Take it!” Cindy insisted. “Not everything he did was right—but a lot of his teachings were true. You niggers and Mexicans are going to rise up and take over this nation. But after you kill off all the rich white devils, you wont’ know how to run civilization. You’ll need us white Christians to show you God’s way.”
There was a small crucifix carved in Cindy’s forehead, right between her eyebrows and February gasped when she noticed it. Blanca didn’t want February to see just how deep she was “in” with the fanaticism she’d picked up, so she tried to say as little as possible. She said, “Cindy this is Ashanti…”
“Hello,” Cindy nodded to February as she climbed in the back seat patting Blanca’s children on the head. It was a cold greeting, given indirectly and like an after thought. February forced herself to smile, nodding her own hello—but then Cindy said something that set the black girl’s “voices” to going.
“When I was in jail, I knew this black chick who kind of looked like you—she was a real ‘colored snatch’, though—me and my girls ended up cutting the fuck out of her.”
Colored snatch…colored snatch. The words of Adam Crown’s mother began echoing in February’s mind like acid on the brain.
Cindy pulled out a pocket knife and flipped it open. She leaned forward on the driver’s side and put the blade next to Blanca’s face with a huge grin. She giggled, “You promised, Blanca.”
“Oh that’s right.”
Apparently, their faith called on a cross being cut into the forehead, but Blanca Castillo seemed very frightened about going through with it.
“Please don’t show that in front of my children,” Blanca said. “We’ll stop at a place.”
“We don’t have to stop nowhere,” Cindy told her, excitedly. “We can do it right here at Beavis and Butthead’s house.”
Beavis and Butthead was actually a white tattoo covered prison parolee named Bobby Joe Gill who had nicknamed himself after the classic MTV cartoon characters. He was the leader of the religious group Cindy belonged to.
“Beavis and Butthead wanted to meet you anyway—he says we need to get all the Mexicans and niggers we can get in on this. The rich people have to be stopped once and for all.”
“We said I would meet him after we came back from saving my brother.”
Being bipolar and not knowing it, Cindy Griffith had always struggled to control her emotional reactions to people. Watching Blanca start the car and begin backing out, she fought to suppress the urge to stab Blanca in the neck as she replied, “We also said…that you were going to prove your stripes by letting me cut in your forehead. Now what’s the hold up, bitch?”
Blanca continued looking over her shoulder, backing the car out. And when she wouldn’t look at Cindy’s beady blue eyes—Cindy hauled off and socked her in the face! “Stop this car bitch and let Beavis and Butthead carve the cross of Jesus in your forehead!”
February jumped around, grabbing Cindy’s fisted-arm and telling her to stop. “You’re scaring the children!”
But it was too late. Blanca’s children were crying in terror as they saw their mother hold
ing her face in the same agony she’d held it when their father used to beat her.
“I’m sorry!” Cindy began swearing, her black finger-nailed hands pulling the children to her body as she apologized profusely to all in the car, “I’m sorry—I’m so sorry.”
Blanca realized then that she had made a mistake in joining the church in Cindy’s garage, but she’d realized it too late.
The white shirtless tattoo-covered “Beavis and Butthead” appeared in the doorway drinking from a beer bottle. As he saw Cindy crying and hugging the children, he got paranoid, throwing the beer bottle in the grass and pulling a gun from his back pocket.
The women in the car hadn’t had time to notice him, however. They were focused on the children, all three trying to calm and Aleve the children. And for February, as she wiped tears from the children’s faces and from crazy Cindy’s face, it became a milestone moment.
Suddenly, she was a student, back at the tough inner city Overbrook High School of Philadelphia—her body against the lockers as a group of menacing black girls surrounded her. One of them started to sock her just as Cindy had socked Blanca.
February held her head blinking as sharp flecks of memory stabbed at her mind. Foremost was her twin sister January—the strong one of the two—coming out of nowhere and charging the group of ghetto girls. As though it was only two seconds ago, February could see January kicking, flinging and socking the fat-lipped pouting girls in the hallway as though she wasn’t afraid of anything. “Get the fuck away from my sister, bitches!”
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