Out of Orange: A Memoir

by Cleary Wolters

  I finally spotted Phillip taking a seat at the café below my window. He looked up and saw me. He nodded but had no discernible expression to gauge his mood by, just a blank expression. He was joined by Piper. She looked up to see who Phillip was nodding at, smiled, and waved. I couldn’t read anything from her either. If she was angry, disgusted, or uncomfortable with me, I couldn’t decipher any of this from her wave or smile, and she looked away when Phillip said something.

  I got up from my seat, intending to head straight down to the café and make sure Piper did not share whatever happened the night before with him. But when I stood, the room felt as though it had tilted slightly. I felt like a ball in an arcade game. I rolled left instead of right and ran out of floor, toppling back onto the bed. Once I was down, that was it. The fluffy bed hugged me and felt so good. I knew getting back up wasn’t happening; going back to sleep was a much better idea. Screw everything, I thought.

  I recalled what had triggered my reaction the night before: Some woman hitting on Piper had asked her whether we were a couple. Piper said no, emphatically and with no hesitation. The emphasis of her response pissed me off. We weren’t girlfriends, not even pretend ones anymore, and I knew that. But she acted like it was absurd to even consider the idea of our being together, and it stung. I had thought of little else since we’d left Bali. I remembered wondering if her animated response meant that she was ashamed of being presumed my girlfriend.

  The possibility that she was actually into the woman we were talking to and didn’t want my presence to get in her way triggered my unexpected jealous response to the situation. It came to the surface as alcohol-infused, bitter, vitriolic nonsense. It sounded exactly like one of my mother’s rants when I replayed it in my head. Piper had looked at me as if I’d had four heads and had told me to go fuck myself. So I had. I’d walked out and left her at the restaurant.

  The ruse about being a couple that we had played in Bali had ended when we’d left there. But I couldn’t help myself. I was unable to turn it off. There had been more than one occasion since we’d left Bali when it seemed possible that I was not alone in this, that she was feeling the same mad attraction. Silly little incidents happened repeatedly where my heart suddenly fell into the pit of my stomach and turned into butterflies.

  I had started anxiously anticipating these moments like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting for morning. I had thought we were close to one of those moments where instead of nervously retreating, still not quite convinced my feelings were reciprocal, I would know they were mutual. I would kiss her, she would grab me, clothes would fly, and the angels would sing, or something to that effect. The point is, I thought we were on the verge of falling in love. I thought it had almost happened on the flight to Paris from Bali and again when we reconvened in Chicago. The last few days had been the most exquisite torture. I had assumed that once we sat still for more than a moment, the inevitable was going to occur. But her actions at the restaurant had proved to me that I was wrong.

  I pulled myself out of the bed and sat up again. Phillip being pissed at me was icing on my bitter cake. But it was what I needed: a cold slap in the face, reality, reality, reality. I had spent over twenty thousand dollars in Bali. After Craig and Molly, the next two bags we had been waiting on never came. Our delivery had been canceled and I had just spent a month at the resort in Bali supporting Garrett, Edwin, Donald, and Piper. Were it not for the money trip, we would be in serious trouble. Something somewhere was going very wrong in Alajeh’s world and he had wanted us out of Bali, out of Jakarta, and out of Indonesia, entirely and immediately.

  We were not safe there anymore and he would not tell us more. That was why we were not slumming in Yogyakarta at the moment. That was why the night before could even happen. That was why Phillip was pissed at me for spending too much money on my friends and emptying the minibar. The last thing he needed to hear was that he had been funding my attempts to bed Piper.

  Now that I knew nothing was ever going to materialize out of our faux marriage in Bali, I wanted to make sure Phillip never found out about my little jealous scene the night before. In fact, I didn’t want anyone to ever know about it. I wished Piper hadn’t seen it. What I could remember was embarrassing and humiliating. I stepped over to the window to see if the two were still at the café. They were not.

  I knew I had been up until daylight the night before. I had reassembled most of the previous night now from the wreckage in my head. Not much more had occurred after my insolent exit from the restaurant. I had gone back to the hotel and gotten stupid drunk and written in my journal—another brilliant practice for a criminal, keeping a personal journal on the unsecured PowerBook I toted around the world with me. At some point I must have passed out and ended up on the floor. I woke there at one point early that morning. Piper had been there, standing over me, pissed off. I remembered that. She must have helped my sorry ass to the bed Phillip had found me in when he arrived.

  I saw my laptop sitting on the desk. I went to see if and what I had written, how much, and at what time I had closed the file, if I had. My laptop was asleep, not turned off, and it was plugged in, thank goodness. I had run into technical problems before, letting the battery die without closing everything and shutting the computer down properly.

  I tapped a key to wake the laptop. There were no open files, but there was a new file, which was good. That meant I could see what time it had been saved and no one else would have seen my writing, almost certainly an example of literary genius. That would tell me approximately when I had last been functional enough to properly save the document. Reading my writing might also jog my memory and shake loose the rest of the night’s events.

  I found the system time stamps on the document. It had been created at 3:14 and last modified at 6:23 A.M. Considering my typing speed, this likely accounted for all of the time. The subject of the document was no surprise: Piper. There were no mentions of any other contact with Piper or the world, thank goodness. If all I had done after what I had said to her was leave her in the restaurant and make her find her own taxi home, I hadn’t said or done anything unforgiveable.

  I returned to my bed without toppling over this time, crawled in under the soft down comforter, and curled into a ball. I actually felt a little better. I was still dead tired but no longer felt as though I was going to be sick, and my headache had gone. The codeine even made me feel a little bit euphoric. I set the alarm on my watch to four P.M. If Phillip did not come back and wake me, I didn’t want to end up sleeping any later than that. But I did want to sleep now.

  I woke to Phillip’s voice. He was on the phone with Alajeh, talking about money and Zürich, Switzerland. I lay still and didn’t open my eyes. I was not at all ready to talk to Alajeh or even Phillip for that matter. I peeked and could see Phillip was in his boxers, his bed was in a different state of disarray than it had been earlier, and the room was dim, not dark. The call lasted longer than usual. Alajeh was generally very brief and to the point in phone calls—no chatty banter, just quick instructions and goodbye.

  Phillip laughed, said thank you, hung up the phone, and hooted like he had just won the lottery. He said Alajeh had agreed to reimburse us for all that we spent. Alajeh hadn’t even objected to the fact I had spent so much. He had also told Phillip that we were going to be traveling in three days, and not back to some far-flung corner of the world. We were going to Zürich and, from there, home. “Are you hungry?”

  “Starved.” I stood up, stretched, and did a little Flashdance run in place. I was so happy to be going home. Hopefully, I could stay a little longer this time.

  “What time is it?” It looked like it could be either A.M. or P.M., and my glasses had fallen off the bedside table and under the bed.

  “It’s a little after seven.” Phillip noticed my blank stare and added, “It’s dinnertime. I told those guys we would eat about an hour ago.” He had already pulled his pants on and was fumbling with his belt and stepping into one of his shoes at
the same time.

  “I need a minute.” I ran into the bathroom, stripped, and jumped into the shower before he could object. A few minutes later, I heard the door open and could hear Piper’s and Garrett’s voices. I rinsed the conditioner out of my hair and heard the door close when I turned the water off. I listened, but there was only silence. I grabbed a towel, dried off, and wrapped it around myself in case I had company, but there was no one in the room when I opened the bathroom door. Phillip had left a note on the desk instructing me to go to Le Bistro and how to get there.

  After I dressed, I felt much better about the world in general, and more important, I thought I was almost up to facing Piper again. It couldn’t be avoided, and I hoped it would be uneventful or at least quick and painless. I popped one of the last two codeines, thinking it would smooth my edges and give me courage.

  I made the quick walk to Le Bistro. I stopped and took a deep breath before entering the crowded restaurant, like one might do before jumping off a cliff or out of an airplane. There were two things that were true about the many restaurants in Brussels we frequented: they were small and they were dark. Two other things that were true then about restaurants in Brussels: they were smoky and crowded. I’m certain the same is true now, except for the smoking. I bet in another twenty years there will be a table, just like ours was, full of young drug smugglers, but it will be tobacco-sniffing dogs they fear.

  I greeted the waiter walking by me and waved at the sous chef I thought might be about to catch his face on fire in a blazing skillet. The last to arrive gets the lousiest seat, so I took my place at the corner of the table. Piper sat directly across from me and I did not try to avoid her glance. I had screwed up enough already. I needed to just suck it up and take my lickin’s, whatever they were. But all she did was smile broadly and genuinely. Then she handed me her glass of wine and said, “I think you might need this worse than I do.”

  I cannot begin to express how grateful I was at that moment. Nobody watched for my reaction to her offering, not even Donald. She had said nothing to anyone. She was compassionate, discreet, and it appeared she was going to do the nicest thing anyone could do in a situation such as ours. She was going to simply act as though nothing had happened. I smiled back and thanked her. I took a long sip of her red wine as my heart welled up with codeine and gratitude.

  Phillip held his glass of scotch up to toast. Instead of a toast, he announced we were all going to Zürich on Friday.

  The next day Phillip and I slipped away from the hotel and our friends to talk in private. We finally had the discussion we should have had when he arrived the day before. He explained to me that he had charged so much to his American Express, wiring me money in Bali, that when he tried to purchase his plane ticket to Brussels, he had been told to speak with an American Express account rep at the ticketing office. We had no money left from what we had managed to make from Craig and Molly’s trips, and not only that, he had no money left from his own first trip. We had not taken any cut from the money that was moved, because if our friends didn’t get a payday soon, we were afraid they would abandon us like Molly and Craig had done.

  Before I panicked about our destination, he told me that Alajeh had had someone named “Antony Benet” in Los Angeles wire Phillip five thousand dollars while I was passed out all day, and “John Smith” would be wiring an additional five thousand dollars to Brussels from Chicago. The names that Alajeh’s people used to wire money were sometimes quite funny. With Western Union, as long as your transactions were under ten thousand dollars and conducted with cash and not a credit card, you could send money from any name to any name you wanted with a secret passcode as your only identification. Alajeh still preferred not doing any cash transactions where a paper trail existed, even if the paper trail led to Daffy Duck.

  Phillip was still freaking out that he would end up with a fifty-thousand-dollar debt to American Express before we found our way out from under Alajeh’s thumb. He was also concerned about the obvious stupidity of using his American Express card at all. I couldn’t argue with that, but it had certainly come in handy in Bali. For some reason, it was nearly impossible for Alajeh to get cash to us there. Besides, I said, “If we get out of this and all you have to do is file for bankruptcy, you should be happy.”

  He talked about having this trip be the end, consequences be damned. We would make the money from this last trip, get his Amex bill paid, and get out while we were ahead. Once again, we considered our options. We dissected every little thing that had ever happened to make us so certain Alajeh was really a threat, and in the end we came back to the same frustrating conclusion. We simply didn’t know if the threat was real or not. We could create a more tenable situation than we currently had though. We couldn’t get away from Alajeh, but we could eliminate some of the traveling we had to do.

  Phillip had the same idea about his friend Garrett as I did about Piper. Garrett lived in Chicago and Piper was living in San Francisco. Not only could they occasionally travel in our place as the escorts, they also could find recruits. Surely, between San Francisco’s and Chicago’s gay communities we would have a nearly endless supply of single-use couriers. As noted, Molly and Craig had told Phillip they were not going to do any more trips when they’d left him in Chicago. If our numbers dwindled any more, we would be back to carrying the bags ourselves if we were not careful.

  We went back to the hotel in time to get our friends to vacate for a bit while we made a call to Alajeh. The crew was heading out for lunch while we took care of that. We headed up to our nice room. Our view was spectacular. It looked out onto the stone-paved roundabout in front of the hotel, encircled with ancient cast-iron hitching posts connected by a heavily oxidized chain turned green. The roundabout was surrounded on all sides by the stone facades of buildings too old and grand for the modern commerce they hosted. It was easy to imagine things like horses, knights, and carriages filling the small square below our window, where bistros and cafés colored the street level and ornate street lamps would light the way later. I sat down at the desk and opened the room service menu. I asked Phillip if he was hungry. It was likely we would be stuck in the room for lunch.

  “Cheeseburger?” I asked while scanning the lunch menu.

  “How about breakfast?” He was hungry but preoccupied with unpacking the rest of his bag.

  “Too late.” I double-checked the lunchtime menu for any brunch items that might suit Phillip and there were none.

  “Okay. Cheeseburger.” He looked around the room like he had lost something. “Is there a pen and paper over there?” There was.

  A while later we were finished with our phone call and brainstorming session. The little notepad was filled with notes and drawings that looked more like a road map or a flowchart than simple instructions. Phillip had made these while on the phone with Alajeh and I was glad he had. We had a very strange new twist to negotiate in order to get home this time.

  Piper came back and knocked timidly on the door, probably worried we might still be talking to Alajeh. Phillip grabbed my arm and dragged me quickly into the bathroom, closing the door behind us, but not completely. He motioned for me to be very quiet. Sometimes Phillip was more like a child than an adult. But it was all in good fun. I could see in the bathroom mirror that Piper opened the room door. She stuck her head in, craned her neck, and said “Hello?” inquisitively.

  Phillip threw the door open and jumped into her path, screeching “Hello!” right back.

  Piper didn’t even flinch.

  “You better lay off the coffee.” She was clearly irritated by the prank, but her response to Phillip jumping out and trying to scare her was funnier than the prank itself. At least I laughed. Phillip was already pulling the brown liquor from the minibar.

  “Tonight we are going out to play.” He hooked Piper’s arm by the elbow and spun her in a dosey doe. She broke into a smile. I was glad to see her smile. There was a weird tension in the air between these two and I didn’t like or
understand it.

  We got to dinner around eight o’clock that night and found a nice restaurant on our first try. I liked the big blocky mahogany tables with no tablecloths, austere and functional like the menu: meat and potatoes.

  My favorite dish in Brussels is mussels—seriously. At the restaurant we went to that night, they were served in a little cast-iron pot in a white wine broth of leeks, dill, chives, and butter and with fries. No flowery garnish or swirls of anything to decorate the plate like in Paris, just food. Everything was served by an old guy in a long white apron and black tie.

  We ate our dinners and then started at one end of the Grand-Place, working our way through the small streets, popping into each nightclub we found, each one smaller and more subterranean than the last. Clubs on Boulevard Maurice Lemonnier were on the street level, but on the older side streets near the Grand-Place many were almost hidden, down stone stairs so old they curved from centuries of wear. We were hitting all the bars, not just the gay ones. Phillip was with us so we had to be fair. We lost Donald, Garrett, and Edwin when we found a lesbian bar, with a packed dance floor and playing house music. Piper and Phillip danced and everyone watched. They looked like the perfect couple; both were tall, well dressed, attractive, and both were good dancers.

  I watched them while I waited for our drinks at the bar. They were trying to have a conversation while dancing. I was absolutely entranced, watching them move so fluidly. I laughed because a bunch of other girls were staring at Piper too. They were goggling over Piper, but Phillip was eating up all the attention, and Piper had no idea what was going on. Phillip had a thing for sleeping with lesbians. She was clearly responding to his attention, probably unaware of the fact that it was for the benefit of their audience.