Losing Johnny

by Rachel Dunning

  All the men, every single one of them, put his hand into his leather coat as if reaching for a gun—

  My knees went weak.

  —and pulled out...a hockey mask?

  “However,” he said, “if we were, say, masked...” They all put them on. It looked like something out of a horror movie. “Well, then you could go ahead and sell these photos, and no one would need to know who we were, right?”

  Already I was seeing the potential shots, all these men in front of me, looking dangerous, some on their bikes, all masked, tattoos bulging, muscles bursting.

  “But,” the man continued, “we would also like one photo, unmasked, just for us. Our own copy. Do we have a deal?”

  Alice looked to me as if for approval.

  Yes! I mouthed, impatient to get started.

  Alice turned to the man, started to speak—

  “Uh-uh-uh,” he said. He took two long strides toward her, hand outstretched. And when he shook her hand, he held it, boring deep into her eyes with his own. The grin...became flirtatious. Alice stood shocked for a second, unable to move, flushing just slightly. He moved his lips down to her ear and said something I didn’t catch. She flinched, but she also blushed. When she turned to me, her eyes couldn’t keep my gaze.

  She was completely red.

  -2-

  But we did get some shots without masks. The leader of the gang (I assumed they were a gang) hinted that only some of them “preferred” to keep their identity secret.

  His name was Thunder, the tall guy who’d shaken hands on the deal with Alice. He had the tiniest of tats on his neck, visible only when he turned his head, otherwise his jacket collar covered it. It said:

  Rain

  2011

  Nothing else.

  When we asked if Thunder was his real name, he said, “Of course.”

  What got interesting, was when Jax’s owner, the reigning beer-belly guy, agreed to sign a release “in exchange for some ‘sexy’ photos with the redhead and...the older woman.” He had looked at Thunder briefly, as if for permission, before saying “the older woman.”

  The sexy photos were...out of this world.

  The beer-belly guy’s name was Stone, he said. But when he signed the release form and I told him I’d get in real trouble if he used a fake name, he looked at me sympathetically in the eye and said, “Y’ever tell anyone mah real name, I’ll huntcha down an killya.”

  He signed as “Worthington Westerley.”

  Alice and Nicole posed with him. Two sexy women, one dog, and a large, hairy man. The biker gang cheered them on. Beers came out, they made their way into the shoot.

  Have you seen that music video with Kim Kardashian getting all hot up on Kanye West on his bike? Yeah, now swop Kanye with a hugely overweight dude in biker gear, and two girls three times hotter than ole Kimmy. Now add in a real desert behind them, not that fake shit they used, and you’ve got our photo shoot.

  Thunder, a head taller than Alice, went up to her as the light was getting low. Food Shark was long since closed for the day. Many of the artists had hung around, and we’d been washing down beers and sodas all day. One girl had pulled out a canvas and was painting the bikers and me.

  Thunder put his hand behind Alice’s back and yanked her against him roughly. Alice’s eyes caught mine uncomfortably as she tried to pull away. She was evidently embarrassed to be hit on so...skillfully...in front of me. Thunder didn’t push her, just stood there, confused. I hinted loudly, “Alice, we’re going over to the bar. Have fun!”

  I started walking away. Alice chased me. She pulled me aside and said, “I’m coming with you.”

  “Why?”

  Her eyes quivered with pain. “Because...because...” Then they watered. “Because it’s...embarrassing...for me to do this...with you around.”

  I brought her to me, brought my lips to her ear. “Mom,” I said super-quietly. “We both know that’s not the reason, is it?”

  She shook her head slowly.

  “Do you want to be with him?”

  She hesitated only a moment. “Just for a drink, nothing else.”

  “So that’s a yes.”

  She nodded, fighting back the pain.

  “It’s OK with me. It really is.”

  She put her hands on either side of my head, pressed. “Promise me. If it’s not, I won’t go. It’s not a problem.”

  “Mom...” My voice was pleading. She shouldn’t do this to herself. “He would have wanted us to move on.”

  He.

  A tear trickled down her cheek. She wiped it off. “OK,” she said hoarsely. “OK. And you’re sure it’s fine?”

  “Hey, stop using me as an excuse. Go get ’em, tiger.”

  She brought me close to her, hugged me tightly. “I love you,” she said. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too. Now go on over to this guy before he thinks we’re lesbians or something.”

  She moved back, held me at arm’s length. She turned to look at Thunder, who was gazing at us quizzically. The dude was unbelievably good looking.

  Her lips twitched up expectantly. “Uhm...”

  “Alice, you’re starting to drool. Stay with me,” I said.

  “Yeah, er, sorry.” She turned her head abruptly to me.

  “You’re such a teenager,” I said. “I’m gonna call you every hour to make sure you’re OK. These are bikers after all.”

  “Thanks...mom,” she answered sarcastically.

  -3-

  I wanted to upload all the photos and it was gonna take a while, so we stayed an extra day in Marfa. The photos were gold. Besides, mom had gotten tight with the biker gang, and so had “the redhead,” and they were all hitting the art museums together today. God’s truth.

  Some of the sites didn’t accept the masked shots without release forms, which really pissed me off. I didn’t want to ask Alice to use her new connection to get me the remaining release forms. That just wouldn’t be cool. I didn’t need the sales, anyway. I was proud of my work for itself. They were the best shots I’d ever taken. And they’d be good for Nic’s portfolio. She might end up being the next Kate Upton.

  We all met up at the bar that night for beers. Thunder kept putting his arm around Alice’s waist and bringing her to him.

  Alice looks very cute when she blushes.

  I felt oddly happy for her. So happy. And it was clear that she was also happy.

  I pulled out my iPad and showed the gang—ahem, “The club,” Thunder corrected me—the shots on my FB page.

  They went nuts. They hooted liked monkeys and said they wanted more photos done. Some of them told Thunder they wanted to be allowed to take “sexy” shots with “the redhead” as well, unmasked.

  I gave him the group shot I’d promised him, and he uploaded it onto the club’s page. Then he shared a bunch of the other shots I’d taken on the club’s page as well.

  Thunder pulled me to the bar, putting his arm around me. Alice was dancing with Nic and some of the other guys. “Your mom tells me you’re still having some trouble because of lack of release forms?”

  I didn’t ask him how he now knew she was my mom. It was clear they’d done some bonding of their own. “Uhm, yeah, but it’s cool. I don’t need—”

  He put his hand up to stop me, his classic move. “Do you have these forms here?”

  “Yeah, yeah, in the car.”

  “Get them.” He let go of my waist. I waited only a second before I ran out to get them. When I got back inside, he gestured over to the first gang—sorry, club—member to come over. The guy signed it. After he was done, another guy instantly appeared. Thunder assigned Stone to present the next form while I sat at the bar sipping a La Frontera Pale Ale.

  In the end, he signed one himself. “You understand this is not for the main unmasked group shot. That one’s not for sale. Like we agreed.”

  I nodded.

  He handed me the form back. Curiosity couldn’t stop me from looking at his name. But he si
gned it as Thunder Cunningham. When I looked up at him, he grinned. “The name’s real. Had it changed.”

  “Oh, yeah, cool. I was just...looking.” I would make a terrible spy.

  “Now,” he said to me, “would you be averse to me and your momma spending another night together, this time without you calling every hour? I think you should know by now that you can trust me.”

  “Uhm, I...” Alice could do whatever she wanted. But I felt a protectiveness over her that I’m sure she also felt for me every night. I just wanted her to be safe.

  I think he read my mind. “OK, fine, you can call every hour. But I’d like her to spend the whole night. I’ll have her at your door fresh and ready for your trip to the Big Bend tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s really her choice, isn’t it?” I said.

  “You’d think. But it’s not. She won’t do anything that would lower your opinion of her. And I...” He looked up at her. She smiled at him. “And I like her. And I want to spend the night with her. And I want to show her that I like her, if you catch my drift.”

  I was speechless.

  “Catherine, don’t go wonky on my now.”

  “Uhm, right, yeah...” Are we really having this conversation about my mom? “Well, like I said, it’s her choice at the end of the day.”

  “Could you tell her that?”

  “T—tell—her?”

  He broke out into sudden laughter. “I’m goin’ out for a smoke.” He got up and left me there. Before he left, he called out, “Alice, Catherine wants to talk to you!”

  Alice’s left eyebrow dropped and she came and sat next to me.

  “Your, uhm, boyfriend just asked my permission to...y’know...with you.”

  “Oh, God,” she said, her head dropping to her hand. “This is so embarrassing.”

  “Since when did we change roles here?” I asked, mildly amused.

  Alice was going her traditional red again.

  “Do you need my permission?” I asked.

  She looked away at first, then back at her knees. She didn’t answer.

  “Well, you have it. I think he’s a good guy.” I wanted to say, And Dad would have wanted you to move on. But I didn’t.

  “This is mortifying,” she said.

  “Welcome to being a teenager. Let me know if you want me to buy you drinks.”

  “Just...so you know, I like him. And I didn’t sleep with him yesterday.”

  I almost choked on my beer. “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Too much information.”

  -4-

  Mom and Thunder spent the night. I didn’t call after midnight. I was convinced she was safe after my third call.

  It doesn’t mean I didn’t worry. I think I was up all night worrying about her.

  It’s tough being a mom.

  -5-

  She had a rosy glow at breakfast the next morning. I mean, you hear it in movies, when the best friend just knows her girl “got laid” or had “the best sex of your life!”

  Yeah. She was glowing.

  She was more than glowing.

  I think she was in love.

  -6-

  “Mom.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ask him what that tat on his neck means?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What does it mean?”

  Mom picked at her pancake, looked out the window. Then: “Rain was his wife. Rain and Thunder. She passed away in 2011.”

  Oh, dear God.

  -7-

  It was Nicole’s idea that I start my own website. Not a blog, an actual site that sells photos and accepts payments for them.

  I only stared at her blankly.

  “Your own site. Start it. Then sell the photos yourself. Twenty-five cents a pop? It’s ridiculous. These biker shots are worth thousands.”

  “That sounds like a lot of work.”

  “It’ll take a few hours to set it up. And then a few days to be able to accept online payments ’cause you need to get approved and shit. But meanwhile we can get around that by paying slightly higher fees to a third-party service.”

  Meet Nicole Fermann, my closet geek sexy best friend.

  “Besides,” she said, “I think your mom might, erm, want to...hang out...for a few more days. You two are cute, you know that? So Freaky Friday.”

  “Freaky what?”

  “Never mind. Look, just...trust me. You can still put some up onto these sites. But save the good ones, the really good ones, for your own site and sell them there exclusively.”

  She had a knowing grin on her face. “What aren’t you telling me?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “Er, yeah? Throughout the entirety of high school?”

  Three days later, still at Marfa, the biker gang still hanging around, and mom still spending both days and nights with Thunder, I had my site up, ready to accept online payments.

  What Nicole had failed to tell me, and what I had failed to notice, was that the BlueHorn Angels MC Page had over three hundred thousand followers...

  As a result of Thunder sharing a few of my photos:

  My blog now had a thousand new subscribers.

  My FB page had seven thousand new followers.

  My blog’s page views were into the tens of thousands.

  My sales at the third-party sites were through the roof.

  And I had given up trying to keep up with emails from people commending my work.

  I sold the photos on my own site for an insanely low price, five bucks a pop. But that was almost five bucks profit.

  By the end of February, I had made two and a half thousand dollars on my site alone.

  I made another five hundred from the other photo sites with their whopping twenty-five cents a pic.

  I immediately splurged three hundred of my earnings on an expensive dinner for Alice and Nicole.

  I owed them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ~ Tiago ~

  -1-

  April. We were back home, renting our place in Brooklyn Heights. My mom was the one who suggested Nicole stay with us, and she accepted instantly.

  After settling in, Nicole told me she was going to visit her dad. The same dad who was doing twelve years of hard time upstate for sexual assault. That dad.

  “Why?” I asked her in her bedroom.

  Nicole’s only knowledge of interior designing was The Poster. Almost her entire wall was covered with posters of semi-naked dudes. Dudes with tattoos, dudes holding chains, dudes making orgasmic expressions while they looked under the hood of a beat-up truck in the desert, gargantuan muscles bursting through skin-hugging tees. Dudes covering their junk with boxing gloves. Those kinds of dudes.

  And then there was her dresser, pink, the mirror splattered with photos of me and her during our trip, hugging, kissing, sticking our tongues out at the camera.

  Nicole had these ways of warming me up to her.

  “Because he’s my dad,” she said petulantly. “And I haven’t seen him in nearly a year.”

  Nicole never told me exactly what he’d done that had put him in prison. I never had the guts to ask. When she was ready, she’d tell me.

  “I told you,” she continued, “that I see him every now and then. He’s the only dad I got, prick that he is.”

  She was emotional, and the anger was a front for something more painful underneath. This is just how she is. It was not my place to question it.

  “OK,” I said. “But I’m coming with you.”

  The anger subsided, and she sprang off her bed and to the window. “Sure,” she said. “That’d be...nice.”

  I stayed outside the prison while Nicole went in. It looked like someone had dropped a city-sized slab of concrete in the middle of nowhere and then covered it with armed men. Nic was in there for an hour.

  When she came back out, she looked calmer. She’d brought him a card and flowers, an
d she didn’t have them anymore.

  “All done?” I asked.

  “All done.”

  That was all that was said about it.

  She put her hand on my leg as we drove off. When she said, “Thank you,” she gave my thigh a squeeze.

  I put my hand on hers, and didn’t let it go until we got back.

  -2-

  I dyed my hair a medium chestnut. Don’t ask me why, I just wanted to. Nicole said it brought out my eyes, but that I should have gone for a darker shade to bring them out further. “Blue-eyed and dark-haired is hot,” she said.

  I wasn’t interested in being “hot.” I just wanted a change.

  College was out of the question for me. It just made no sense anymore. I was a photographer. I was a good photographer. “Humility doesn’t pay”—another one of mom’s many financial mantras.

  I was making four Gs a month now. It’s nothing if you want to live in New York by yourself, but it’s not bad considering I’d only been making any real money since February.

  Alice was my best friend. We were as much roommates as mother and daughter. But we were indeed still mother and daughter. So we needed a Boys Rule, more to avoid awkwardness than for any moralistic reason. We all agreed that the apartment would be sanctum sanctorum, no men allowed unless we knew the apartment would be empty.

  Nicole was getting modeling gigs regularly now. She got some cool fashion gigs, photos taken around the city against old buildings in the latest designer trends. None of them paid too great, but each one was another page in her fast-growing portfolio.

  But she knew she wanted more.

  She signed up for an eight-week Acting for Film Workshop at the New York Film Academy. After that, she wasn’t sure what she’d do. She’d caught the writing bug with her diary, so she was considering doing a screenwriting workshop afterwards as well. Or she might sign up for a one year conservatory in acting. After being on the road for so long, it was hard for either of us to commit to any plans which necessitated staying in the same place for an extended period of time, so she decided to try the acting workshop out first and decide on longer-term things later.