Taking Jana (Paradise South #2)

by Rissa Brahm

  She got to the back office door and before even messing with the keys, she pulled out a small container of menthol vapor balm from her purse. A nurse comes prepared with the minimum essentials. She dabbed some under her nose to be able to function in there for even a few minutes.

  Not having been in the back office too often when she was younger, she had no immediate recollection of the key, so she tried the rest of the bunch. The eleventh key clicked.

  Just the sight of the closet-sized hole of an office with all the stacks and samples and catalogs and broken knobs and parts made her crumble to the grease-slicked floor and sob. She gasped between every few outpours, but covered her mouth with her shirt as a pseudo-filter, knowing the poisonous sewage-like air of the thirty-year-old commercial kitchen was killing her slowly with each and every intake.

  After all the years she’d worked to escape the potential of becoming her parents in that restaurant, and then the fight to save them, then her escape from the strip club scene…after all that, now she was being stuffed back into a dark black hopeless box, one she didn’t think she’d ever have the strength to climb out of in the first place.

  Three years in at The Wet Spot, Newark, then four more at the Manhattan sister club during her nursing school stint. God, she’d been gyrating eye-candy by night, at the mercy of horrid, horny men and boys, while by day, a nursing student, busting ass on organic chemistry and pharmacology when she should have been sleeping. Why hadn’t she drowned her nursing dream in the Hudson years ago? She could have kept dancing at The Wet Spot for Christ’s sake, eventually worn down enough to take an offer from one of her many creepy regulars, as a mistress or hell, as a dutiful wife. Why not dive right into a loveless, fuck-filled marriage of comfort and ease? And when her tits started to sag, she’d be traded in for a younger, tighter version of the shell of a woman she’d once been, but she’d still have the ease and comfort, right? She’d even have it better than her mother by this time.

  God, why had she put herself through any of the upward struggles? She’d gotten into her dream school, then for a taste of the energy surge at one of the best hospitals in the entire fucking world, to have her family take it away from her, snatch it the fuck away. Again!

  The floor safe, covered with dust, dented at the top edge, stared at her. She laughed out loud through her salty, pathetic tears. The undoubtedly empty safe, except for maybe twenty dollars of coin rolls, doubled as a printer stand and a “refrigerator” magnet door, with vendors’ phone numbers haphazardly stuck onto its rust-splotched surface.

  God, she’d probably need to help her mother replenish the coins tomorrow. Because Ilana back at MMU Hospital had probably already snagged her week’s shifts. And because why wouldn’t a skilled, trained nurse need to go to a Fort Lee, New Jersey bank to get twenty bucks of dime and quarter rolls for an already dead restaurant? And the joke of the century: She’d have to come up with ten-thousand percent more than that for her father’s hospital bills.

  She pushed herself up off the floor. Her tears had slowed. The odor of the place was making her gag while the mint balm made her upper lip tingle and not much else. She dusted off her backside, wiped her face, and fully entered the dingy broom closet of an office. The huge CRT monitor took up most of the damn space, dangerously weighing down the warped, albeit thick, piece of plywood mounted to the entire length of the wall, acting as a desk. Under the ‘desk’ was the decade-old computer tower, which, to her surprise, powered up when she pressed the greasy little ‘on’ button. Why was she even thinking her parents had kept any information updated on the damn thing? They’d told her up front they wouldn’t use it when she’d bought it for them before moving closer to campus. She’d gotten them a brand-new tower and LCD monitor to make their lives easier. Where the hell the thin panel monitor was, though, she couldn’t imagine. They’d probably given it to Cousin Daniel, their acting accountant, as payment for some tax prep.

  While the computer booted, she saved time and her soon-to-explode stomach, by rummaging through the twelve-inch pile of papers next to the kitchen equipment catalogs her father had no business thumbing through.

  She was looking for the most recent tax returns that her spineless cousin, Daniel Kwon, prepared for them every year. And every year that asshole would conveniently forget to tell her parents they needed to quit, that the state of their business’ financials was abysmal. But Daniel’s folks were doing great in the carpet and flooring business, and the passive aggression was clear to no one but Jana.

  Nothing in the pile, so she threw open the file cabinet drawer as her guts started to really turn. Wow, alphabetized? That was an unforeseen second surprise. Categorized by what? ‘All-Food Service.’ Okay, by vendor name then. ‘Blue Tickets.’ Okay, so, no, by topic. She prayed ‘CPA’ would be in the ‘C’ section because there was no ‘Accountant’ under ‘A.’ Her father had always bragged about Cousin Daniel becoming a ‘Certified Public Accountant.’ Yes, the title was his thing. But in C, there was no ‘CPA’ file, but before she closed the drawer to move her search to the lower M-Z drawer, her eye caught something. Laughing her ass off, but choking on the putrid air at the same time, she found a file labeled ‘Cousin Daniel.’ C for Cousin. Of course.

  It was a thick file and—hallelujah—it had the current year’s return all the way through five years back. She yanked the folder, slammed the self-locking office door, and sprinted out of the kitchen, out of the restaurant, taking a deep and only slightly less disgusting breath in the stairwell. It wasn’t nearly satisfying or clearing enough. She opened the exterior door and stuck her head out for the fresher, albeit hotter, summer air.

  Yeah, the oxygen was way better outside, so she ran up to get her roller bag while balancing the file under her arm, then back down, escaping, letting the door slam shut behind her. She’d call a cab and sleep at the hospital, standing up if she had to, but she wasn’t about to reenter that stench.

  *

  She locked the door behind her and leaned against the brick wall of the building. She called the cab that had dropped her off. Who knew cabbies carried their own business cards these days? She wouldn’t know since subways were her sole means of getting anywhere she didn’t walk to in the City.

  The cab dispatch lady said it would be a ten-minute wait, which was plenty of time for Jana to review the folder tucked under her arm.

  Having done years of tax returns for Charlene, Amber, and a few of the other girls at the clubs, and, of course, her own, she felt confident when she let the file fall open in her hands. The Tax Form 1040 for that year was on top. Just what she’d thought, hardly breaking even. It was worse when she considered the fact that her father under compensated himself to minimize payroll taxes. So much for them counting on Social Security in three years. Jesus.

  With her clothing already tainted by having even stepped into that kitchen, she crouched down to sit on the filth-strewn sidewalk. She pulled a pen from her purse for her fidgety fingers to jot down notes and numbers as she thumbed through more of the documents. By the time the cab came to take her back to the hospital, she’d figured that the restaurant wouldn’t last more than a month without her father standing in it morning to night.

  She then added the accruing medical bills and took into account that she’d be making zero money while missing work for the foreseeable weeks while her father was in the hospital. Then he’d be brought home, and he’d assumedly need expert care that they couldn’t afford. Would they need her to do it then? Probably, except for her father’s extreme lack of trust in her; she was a hospital piss-pan maid and nothing more. Yeah, she definitely had to hire someone, an experienced homecare professional, a real hard-ass. Add another seven or eight grand to the pit.

  She knew the coverage available to the uninsured at her hospital was difficult to acquire, and Jersey was even worse. Even Medicaid was out of reach for her folks because their current tax returns showed just over the maximum allowed to even qualify. They were in the gap, and although th
ey’d be eligible a year from now when the restaurant was dead and gone, this year, now, she was just, well, extremely fucking screwed.

  She remembered her savings account, which had approximately thirty grand in it, savings for an eventual down payment on a brownstone in Brooklyn. Reset that clock.

  And with her few empty credit cards, maybe twenty thousand available on them, she’d take out cash advances.

  She couldn’t ask her parents’ extended family; it would ruin their reputation, more important to Chang Park than his daughter’s life, she was certain.

  She laughed out loud when she realized that she’d completely skipped her brother as a source of help. She had taught herself on a deep, subconscious level that Dane was an empty, cold-hearted stone, not worth skipping across a murky, scum-covered retention pond.

  Fuck. Just, fuck!

  She swallowed hard, then looked down at her phone. Her finger slid across the screen three times, swiping through names and numbers from her past until she found Eddie’s number, her old manager at The Wet Spot.

  She’d blurred her lines before for her family. Now, it seemed, she’d have to blur them again.

  CHAPTER 5

  When the operator’s recording said that Eddie’s number had been disconnected, she ended the connection and tried again. She got the same automated message, though. Eddie was the go-to guy for the entire Tri-state area; he’d had thousands of contacts in the strip club industry. His number was disconnected? How strange.

  She looked at her phone in thought, then browsed through more contacts until she got to her next lead. Never too late at night to call Amber, and so she hit her number as the cab pulled up.

  *

  Amber sounded great on the phone, even though it was too late to call her, as she was apparently no longer dancing. She was, in fact, being a new mom, hushing a rudely awakened baby, thanks to Jana’s pre-dawn call.

  “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Amber. Go back to sleep, I can call another time.”

  “Don’t you dare hang up, Jana Park. It was feeding time in a few minutes anyway, love. How are you?”

  Jana’s heart warmed. Her sweet friend with what sounded to be a newborn? And the little thing’s crying didn’t seem to fluster the new mom at all. Jana smiled. Amber hadn’t always had that ability, to be calm and controlled in the face of chaos, and neither had Jana. It was Charlene who had taught them both the art of serenity, even and especially in front of the hundreds of hungry fantasizing faces at the club.

  God she remembered in the very first week of Jana’s life as “Winter,” Jana had gotten out on that stage and had been slammed with queasiness. The queasy feeling like she got from her motion sickness, except that she wasn’t moving, not a bit. In fact, she’d been paralyzed. Frozen stiff. When the jeering and booing started, her paralysis had turned to a quivering trepidation. God, she thought she’d pee right there on stage.

  But Char had come to her rescue. “Dance like no one’s watching,” she’d ordered in a harsh whisper. Charlene had taught her to block out the noise, the catcalls, the club clientele’s dirty, filthy looks, and intentions. And looking up at the bright blinding strobes, she began to dance like no one was watching.

  And made a shit-load of money from it.

  “God, it’s good to hear your voice,” Amber gushed.

  “You too…you sound great. Like a happy little mama!”

  “Yeah, I really am happy, Jana. I haven’t danced in over a year now. Got pregnant by Dominic.” The weekend bouncer at The Wet Spot, a decent guy, protective, with only a slightly dangerous jealous streak. “The club begged me to stay on, you know, the whole novel prego-dancer thing.” When she was still dancing, they’d made Tandy stay on until late in her third trimester. It had made Jana sick to think about it. “But, of course, Dominic refused. And I’ve got my lines too, right?” Amber asked as if she wasn’t entirely sure.

  But Jana knew that Amber and Charlene had held to more stringent lines than most of the girls. So Amber screwed the steroidal head bouncer. She may have just wanted the out, and who could blame her? And there were far worse than Dominic. Far worse.

  And as for Char, that was an entirely different story. Her lines had been crossed by force. And Jana shoved the surfacing thought back down deep into her mind’s lock box, safe and far away.

  “Man, you remember what Char did to me when she caught me in the back that time? Talk about lines.” Amber had been inches from snorting her first line of coke when Charlene found her and pulled her away by the ponytail. Then she shoved her head in a shitty toilet bowl. Desperate measures, maybe, but with white snow being everywhere in the club—front and back of the house, in the parking lot, and being sold out the back door—Char did what she had to. Jana and Amber were like little sisters to her, she’d said.

  And the trio were the only girls in the club who walked the straight and narrow. Their mantra: “Never high, never fucked, get in and get out with the bucks.” Completely cheesy, but they needed the levity, and, more importantly, they always needed the reminder because some of the shit that went down in the club was crazy enough to send someone over the edge, seeking the great high, white escape. But they’d stayed clean, and that’s how they’d made such bank, the highest grossing dancers in the place.

  “Feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?”

  “For sure. And Jana, that’s so amazing for you, getting the nursing thing done! I hate that you need to jump back into dancing again. But you can get in and get out, a few months tops, right?”

  “One month. One month is all I think I can take. I gotta get back to my ER, to my Trauma Team. If they even hold my position that long. Yeah, I’ll make the rest of the debt up over a few years’ time, juggling credit cards. Hold off on buying a place. But yeah, one month is definitely all I can do.” Jana was telling herself as much as she was telling Amber.

  “You still in the same shape, hun?” Amber asked, slightly distracted with the baby, who was now cooing into the phone.

  “Despite the lack of sleep and the little time I take to eat, I look fit. And I do my yoga and crunches each morning, so yeah, I’m good.” She wasn’t as worried about her body as she was about her emotional state and, more than that, her ability to swallow her pride again.

  “Good, you’ll need it, sweetie. The young ones are coming in even younger now…it’s totally insane! Fresh, young pussy overrides all, right?” Amber laughed while the baby hummed. The sweet rolling noise swelled and fell as Amber must have been bouncing the child in her arms.

  Jana jolted forward suddenly, jarring in contrast to the mesmerizing baby sound at her ear. The cabbie had slammed his brakes for some asshole who’d cut them off. “Shit!” Jana directed at the cab driver.

  “You okay?” Amber asked.

  “Yeah, no, I’m fine. Jersey drivers.”

  “Don’t I know it…so, hey, you remember Char called the young newbies the ‘tight twats’?” Amber laughed into the phone.

  “Yeah, sure.” Jana smiled softly, solemnly. Yeah, she remembered. God, she hadn’t understood anything, let alone what tight twats or a virgin vagina actually meant to men until Char awakened her to the fucking real world. Jana had always been petite, young and sweet looking. Innocent. And after hearing Char’s ‘The great virgin dream of men’ theory, it all became crystal clear to her, how men saw her. As a tight-twat virgin. But one that was up on stage spreading it for them. Oh Lord, the dream in living color. All the way through her dancing career, Jana made tons of cash working the young virgin girl angle. Charlene had even helped her dress the part in schoolgirl uniforms to the nth degree. It paid the bills, but still to this day it made her sick to walk by a parochial school during dismissal. How sick and twisted the whole thing had been. Still was.

  “Well, anyway, if you’re still toned, you have nothing to worry about, even the tightest cunts still get coked-out or out of shape in no time at the club. You’ll be golden, as always,” Amber said with a hint of obvious envy. “You’re a
gorgeous Latino-Asian mutt!” Amber blurted.

  Jana laughed. She had a healthy-sized ass but didn’t have the full and curvy voluptuous thing going on up top. She was on the small side of a B cup.

  Char had damn near made a marketing plan for her at her start. Jana fulfilled two very specific niche markets in the club scene: the Lush Latino, with the full-fledged backside, lips, and lashes; and the Exotic Asian fantasy, with the eyes and high cheekbones, small, tight frame, and long, lustrous hair. How crazy, to view one’s attributes as marketable. But it was business, it was money.

  “Oh, and forget about the pole, girl…no one can touch you there!” Amber added. “I’m still jealous of your ‘Open-V’ and your damn ‘Helicopter.’ And, oh God, your ‘Caterpillar’ drove them insane! None of the girls do much more than a climb anymore.”

  Jana had had a unique and unknown advantage at the start of her dance career. She’d been a gymnast since age six and had competed all the way up through high school until senior year, in fact, when dancing took over her schedule.

  “Jesus, I actually miss the pole. I almost joined one of those new pole fitness clubs, but it was too close of an association, you know?”

  “Yeah, totally.” Then the baby started crying for something. “She’s hungry for boob, one second, doll,” Amber said, then whispered sweetly to the baby to hush and eat.

  Jana caught herself imagining herself in Amber’s place. Or being the woman on the bus, with nothing else in the world mattering but that tiny, innocent being at her breast. A small ache surfaced in her chest until Amber’s voice brought her focus back.

  “Okay, sorry. Anyway, J, I wish I could make a call for you, just to get you started quicker, especially if Eddie isn’t answering his cell. Which is totally weird. But Dominic burned the bridge with Eddie and the Demontes when I got knocked up, and he wouldn’t even let me step on property now, let alone call, even if I did know anyone there anymore. But hell, go there; see if Eddie is still there. That boy’d do anything for you.”