Broken Girl

by Gretchen de La O

“Have you thought about going to one of them shrinks? You know those types you go and spill your guts to and they tell you if you’re crazy and shit?” She said, wiggling across her bed, she adjusted herself to sit up.

  “Naw, I’ve always found ways to work through the shit clogging my head. The less people know about my business, the easier it is for me to forget about it. I sure in the hell don’t need anyone beating that fucked-up day into my head over and over again. Besides, I don’t have the money to pay some shrink to fuck with my head,” I answered truthfully. Every last dime I had saved was for the day I could get the fuck out.

  “They say it helps to talk about it to a professional,” she snapped.

  “Who’s they?”

  “They,” she answered.

  “Yeah, I heard you say they, I just wanna know what they you are referring to?” I argued.

  “They, the fucking shrinks,” she spat.

  “Right, ‘cause, there are plenty of fucking shrinks sick enough to implant fake memories into your dome. Trust me Sybil, it didn’t help me, all it did was teach me how to keep these bastards out of my head. We are manipulated enough selling our bodies for money. These shrinks are nothing more than the cheap ass John waiting to take advantage of you.”

  Okay, so maybe it was my defense mechanism; I always made someone the bad guy. But let’s face it; life wasn’t always about finding something beautiful in a heaping pile of shit. I fuck for money; I made guys come because their wives or girlfriends didn’t have the gall to do half the kinky shit their men fantasized about. So their boyfriends or husbands found me on the corner of Geary and Taylor and paid a fist full of dead presidents to live out their kinkiest fantasies. There’s nothing noble or life altering in what I do. I’m a whore.

  “Geesh, Ro, not everyone is out to fuck with you. All I was suggesting was that maybe one of these shrinks can help you. That’s all. I wasn’t trying to sell you on their shit,” she huffed.

  “Everyone’s out to fuck you, Sybil. You’re the fucking addict, who was disowned by her family . . . did you talk to anyone about that? I don’t need you worrying about my problems when you don’t even know how to deal with your own.”

  Sybil let out a gasp before she wiggled back under her covers facing the wall, away from me.

  Oh, man, I fucked up.

  Why did I always do that? It made no difference who it was or what they would say, it didn’t matter; I always pushed the other way. If she hated shrinks, I’d find words to argue for them. I was always the devil’s advocate, even when I didn’t agree with the bastard. I guess it was just my nature to push people away. A nature that was built upon the disappointments that were cast on me from the first day I was born. A destiny that was seared into my DNA the moment my dickweed father shot his sperm into the snatch of my narcissistic mother. Munching through the barrier of her egg, this fuck’s sperm beat the odds and nine months later, voila, there I was breathing the stagnant air of a life born to a winning combination of alcoholic as well as abusive parents. It was nothing I could have changed and only something I had learned to embrace night after fucking night when I’d hear dishes smash against walls, voices spewing hate, skin being slapped, then eventually fists cracking bones.

  I’ve twisted my emotions into a tight knot and dropped them into the belly of ‘who gives a shit’ my entire life. Eventually, the defense mechanism that saved my sanity as a little girl became the character flaw that kept me isolated as a woman. I knew I should have said sorry. I should have used the thoughtless word to pacify Sybil, but sorry came at a price I wasn’t willing to pay. I can’t apologize for the sins of others, no matter how much they try to convince me it was my fault. This time sorry clung to the back of my throat and clogged the ability to find a way to express my remorse.

  “Goodnight,” I chimed before I strolled into the kitchenette that filled up less than a quarter of our five hundred square feet. With exaggerated effort I filled the teakettle with water and plopped it on the stove. When all else failed, tea seemed to help.

  There wasn’t any reaction from Sybil. I’d pissed her off and I was going to live with the consequences of her silent treatment until tomorrow evening when she and I’d go hustle our pavement on Geary and Taylor together. The vicious circle reared its head in every relationship I had. I never kept lovers and I had always kept friends at an arm’s length away. Even though Sybil was one of my only friends, one of two people I considered anything close to family, I couldn’t apologize, it was something I just simply couldn’t do.

  The water in my kettle had begun to boil; I pulled it off the heat, robbing its opportunity to announce that it was ready. Marked by the moment I dipped the Sleepy Time tea bag into the scorching hot water, I finally felt the click of my mental clock and the need to go to sleep begin to rule over my need to relive the memory of that day over and over again. My eyes became too heavy to keep open and my mind stopped its endless barrage of torturous bullshit. “I’m sorry, Sybil,” I whispered under my breath . . . Finally I was able to fall asleep, without taking a sip of my tea.

  OKAY, SO I was wrong about Sybil forgiving me for being such a bitch to her. I should have known when she took over Bambi’s corner for the last couple of nights down on Jones and O’Farrell that she wasn’t as ready to forgive me as I initially thought. Damn, I didn’t want to have to work at this. I just wanted to be friends without all the bullshit drama of hurt feelings and guilt trips. I guess that was asking way too much.

  When I met Sybil a couple years ago, she was twenty-one and just as brash and unemotional as I was. We accepted each other for all the fucked up scars we had. She might not have had the same unhealed wounds that kept oozing from her childhood on a daily basis, but she had had her fair share of demons she fought every day.

  Sybil constantly battled the wicked grip of heroin, lured into its ecstasy over five years ago. Three hits later, she was a full-fledged addict. The claws of her sickness dug deep into her flesh, keeping her until she hit rock bottom and was found overdosing on the grimy floor of the AM/PM bathroom. Black tar heroin stripped her of everything until she was nothing more than a junkie frantically chasing the next hit to function in her daily life and avoid the sickness.

  Sybil had been clean for two years now. Every day that she survived staying clean become a huge victory most of us would never understand. She celebrated the basic choices in her life that anyone else wouldn’t give two fucks about. Instead of escaping into addiction she chose to embrace life in all its fucked up glory. She also knew how I felt about it and understood that if she ever fell back into that shit, she’d be the fuck out of luck for a place to live.

  Did I care about her? Hell yes, I’d be a heartless bitch if I didn’t. When we got into scuffles we’d always found a way to work it out. Up until this point, we never made it a big deal to apologize to each other. We didn’t have to roll that way in our friendship.

  Sybil had deliberately avoided me for two days. Either she was working through something bigger than my bitchy response or she was punishing me. At least I saw her down on the strip last night. Getting a glimpse of her was better than worrying that she was face down dead in a gutter or falling back in the grips of her demons. Actually, if anyone should be getting pissed it should be me. We had a pact, an agreement; we were supposed to have each other’s backs. Check in with each other every day. She had totally shut me out. She had come home when I wasn’t there and spent the night with who the fuck knew.

  I couldn’t get all caught up in Sybil’s shit today. I had to be up and out before noon. I had a dentist appointment at 1:15. Yes, even though I sell my body I still visit the dentist. Granted, most hos can’t afford it, or for whatever reason choose consciously to write off oral checkups and yearly cleanings. But, I’d be damned if I was ever gonna end up looking like some of the older ‘bitches’ in my profession, snaggletooth smile or missing pearly whites.

  I was under the gun, running a little late to my dentist appointment. The clothes I
had to wear which didn’t scream hooker seemed to be stuffed in the bottom of my black wicker laundry hamper. I shuffled around the other side of my bed, pulled open my dresser drawers and look for anything comfortably normal to wear. I’d pushed longer hours, hustling to make a little more cash from the afternoon seekers and worked through my nights I usually took off. No wonder I was scraping the bottom of my drawers for an old pair of holey blue jeans and a tit hugging white scoop tee. I collected the outfit I tossed off last night with some random pairs of thongs and lacy bras and shoved the clothes into my laundry sack. I figured after my dentist appointment I’d take my clothes to the Stop and Wash. I usually went to Soap and Suds, a place that was barely a notch above the one shitty washer and non-drying dryer in my building, doing my laundry was better than coming back here to silence. Besides, there was a one-in-a-million chance that Crystal’s savior, Shane might be there and, well, why not thank him for saving her.

  Splashes of Shane kept marching across my mind when I least expected it. I’d walk to a room, or be flat on my back or down on my knees making a living, thoughts of him had popped into my head. Fleeting fantasies where I had thought about him, where he had become the feisty actions I played out in perfect timing with him. If you named it; I had done it, with him, in my mind.

  Maybe I was fucked up, a little crazy, whatever, but I couldn’t seem to stop this laundry man from getting in my head. In the kitchen, stirring tea, I wondered if he drank tea. I’d watch TV; men would be saving damsels in distress and I’d visualize his thick-threaded-strong-arms pulling me against his strappingly giant body, and he’d save me from my own demise.

  What in the hell was I doing?

  I was like a little fucking puppy dog willing to piss herself in excitement over the idea of this stranger looking in my direction. I haven’t even talked to the man for Christ’s sake. And yet, I found myself asking what’s he doing right now? Does he think about me? How will he react when he finds out I fuck for money?

  Physically, I existed as nothing more than an instrument that men used to get off. I could count on one hand the very few tricks that wanted to see me come, most would shoot their wad, yank off their rubber and pull up their pants without giving me more than a careless glance. Some tricks were so wrapped up in the guilt of cheating on their wives or girlfriends, they’d act as if I had held a gun to their head and made them fuck me. Guilt was such a shitty emotion, nothing good ever came of it and it always ended up in a bad way. The trick would either cry like a baby, pleading to me that this was his first time ever cheating or paying for sex, or his hands would speak for his mouth.

  Either way, I started to discover what made it bearable for me besides a joint or alcohol. It was when I saw the glimmer of recklessness in their eyes as I made them come. The shiver that trickled down my spine every time I got them to surrender to me. Sometimes, that was worth more than any amount of money they’d give me. Sometimes.

  I pulled into a parking space behind the dental office. I wanted to take a couple of deep tokes off a joint before I went in. Numb the scars on the inside before I created more. It was the burn of the first hit as the smoke tore down my throat and into my lungs that reminded me that what I was doing wasn’t supposed to be glamorous or celebrated. It was a job, nothing more, nothing less.

  I pushed the door open at Brite-N-UR-Smile dental office. The receptionist’s desk was vacant like always. I’d never met the woman and only knew what she looked like because of her family pictures that speckled her desk.

  My dentist, an older guy wrinkled with the stress from cleaning and pulling teeth all day, was completely about creative financing. A year and a half ago I had a bad tooth and looked him up online. When I saw he accepted all forms of insurance, I booked an appointment and approached him with a perfect way we could square up with my financing. We both were in the service business, so I’d give him my supreme service and he’d make sure I’d have the most beautiful smile on Geary Street.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  The chill of the sterile waiting room used to tremble through my bones when I first started coming. A couple of waxy green plants with huge leaves spilled over the counter that separated clients from hygienists. I looked around the room, recognizing the places I reimbursed Danny Carmichael, DDS for my dental work and cleanings. We had our usual places, his desk, counters, walls, floors, and the couch in the front lobby, even the dental chair was our little secret. Closed on the third Friday of every month, he reserved that day for personal service. Never emotional, always business, he had a family with a couple of grown daughters, one my age. Pictures of them sat squarely on his desk and hung from his walls.

  Was he a sick fuck? Not really, just an older man who needed more than his forty-five-year stagnant marriage gave him.

  “Back here,” he hollered from his office in the very back. “Would you mind locking the door, please?” he added.

  I started toward his office; his door was closed. I gave a light warning knock before I pushed it open. I’d come to learn that Dr. Danny had a kinky side, simple fetishes that ranged from role-playing patient/doctor shit to licking the back of my knees while he stroked his junk. But this, well, this was a side of him I’d never seen. An edge I’d never particularly let any date have with me before. He was dressed in a dominant black leather suit, studs poking from a collar wrapped around his wrist, hands filled with a blindfold, handcuffs and a flogger hanging from his index finger. A smile built across his aging face and yet he looked like a teenage boy who just discovered that Cinemax After Dark was laced with porn.

  Emotionally, I knew my hardline stopping point and I couldn’t handle giving up so much. Dr. Danny seemed to be challenging the line I drew up with him.

  “Hey, oh, wow, is that flogger for you?” I asked.

  “Well, Rose, I wanted to try something a little different. Something that maybe I could practice with you and take home to . . . you know.”

  Dr. Danny rationalized everything, and I mean everything. From double charging insurance companies for work his patients already paid for with cash-in-full, to the warped excuse he continually chimed in with about how fucking me wasn’t technically ‘cheating’ on his wife. Every damn time we finished, him cleaning my teeth and me teaching him something new, he’d pipe up with his justification of how I was more like a sex therapist for him. How the angles and ideas he got from our ‘sessions’ made sex with his wife so much better. If that was the case, I should’ve started charging therapist fees.

  I let him swat my ass a couple of times and even blindfold me, no big deal, but I stopped at letting him cuff me. Personal rule . . . my hands must always be free. Pin me against the wall or a waiting room table, hell, I’d even let him restrain my ankles, but when it came to my arms, it was just a no-go, a deal-breaker.

  Like clockwork, when the time was up, the routine of Dr. Danny negotiating with himself and justifying his guilt had begun. Muttering about how much better and more intense sex was gonna be with his wife when he brought home the flogging techniques he learned while fucking me from behind. Always talking about coming up with something that was worth taking home to Mrs. Carmichael. He called our encounters his indulgence; I called it our business arrangement, but truthfully I didn’t care what we called it just so long as we both came out benefiting from the time we invested.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” he played in a drawl as he walked me out. His lengthened vowel tones rolling between the consonants froze me in my footsteps and created a single shiver that melted down my spine. His tone caused me to think about the strong, tall, gorgeous man I saw only a handful of nights ago in a dark, dingy alley.

  SHANE, THE LAUNDRY man, someone I barely knew and yet who seemed to be in my mind more than I cared to admit. The way he looked at me that night was different, cryptic, distinctive, like he knew what I was and yet he looked beyond the skin I was cast. He saw me as something more than a piece of ass he could pay a couple of bills to take. It was the way he talked t
o Crystal that night and the words seemed to offer freedom from the woman she had to become when selling her body. His warm manner was as foreign to me as having sex to express my love for someone.

  I don’t know why I thought searching him out was a good idea. Here I was heading to the laundromat, my dirty clothes in hand, my heart on my sleeve as I clung to a stupid idea that he was going to be there.

  I pulled into the parking garage, a block and a half away from the Stop and Wash. Usually, there were several open parking spaces but for some reason the garage was packed. People poured from their cars and hustled into uppity shops and trendy restaurants. They come here because they’re promised happy hour specials and moisturizing treatments with exotic oils; the upper block of Van Ness had always pulsed with a douchy hipster vibe. It was what lurked on the next street over and the back alleys behind the façade that tainted the veins of the haves with the have-nots. The count was endless, the clean and unpolluted souls who found the magic doorway into the impure world of prostitution.

  To most people a full parking garage was an inconvenience, too many people trying to fit into the square footage of an already bulging city block. The only thing I saw was lost opportunity. Maybe that was the problem with hanging out a couple blocks from where I worked. All I saw was dollar signs strolling across the melting fantasy of possibilities. New dates, Johns, clients, tricks, that meant new energy, new money and ultimately more referrals.

  I pulled my car into a shitty parking spot on the third floor of the garage, grabbed my purse, made sure I had a couple rolls of quarters and hoisted the laundry sack over my shoulder. By the time I had made it down to the laundromat a block and a half away, my arms felt like they were going to fall off.

  I pushed open the glass door with my ass before I tried to muscle the hefty sack of dirty clothes off my shoulder and into a rolling laundry cart. I thought it was going to be a good idea, but when I dropped my bag into the cart I tripped and fell into it. It wasn’t my most glamorous of moments.