Masquerade

by Cauffiel, Lowell;

  By late December, less than a month after Dawn and the doctor first met, Cheryl and John were making their timed exit three or four times a week.

  She knew John liked to play hide-and-seek with tricks. Cheryl guessed he came up with such maneuvers to justify the money he received for basically doing nothing.

  Protection. There was no protection. All that John Fry, or any other pimp, ever did for a girl was lay a good beating on someone who raped her. But that was after the fact—if he ever found him, that is. Most of the time John got high at home and waited for more money so he could get higher.

  Cheryl knew from experience that a girl was largely defenseless when she worked. She had been thrown out of a car naked twenty miles from downtown, fought off a freak wielding a screwdriver, and stabbed a guy in the leg who tried to take what he wanted for free.

  Each time John was missing in action, talking “business” with his admirers on the street.

  When John did want to hang around their old house off Michigan, they played the sibling charade. He always preached it was bad business to roll tricks. But his professional scruples didn’t seem to matter if he was sick and needed quick cash. Then he used to hide in a closet or behind a shower curtain. Just after Cheryl got into bed with the date, John came crashing into the room, shouting:

  “What the fuck are you doin’ in bed with my sister, man!”

  The trick would go soft and run. The date was miles down the road before realizing his wallet had been vacuumed in the excitement.

  Now John’s playing it slick with Dawn’s new regular, Cheryl thought, hoping for long-term gains rather than cash on hand.

  She finally met Dr. Al Miller face-to-face one day when they were late getting out the apartment door. At first the man in the green sport coat looked like just another date.

  “Hi, Al, my sister Cheryl,” John said.

  The trick gave her an odd smile. She could have sworn he winked, but his eyelid never moved.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Cheryl,” he said.

  Cheryl and John went up a flight of stairs and sat in the hallway. They lit a couple of menthols.

  “I told you he was a goof,” John said. “It’s her first sugar daddy. She’s not sure how far she can play him.”

  Big fucking deal, she thought. He acts as if this is something new.

  She had seen a half-dozen regulars just like Al come in and out of her life over the years. Before the Arab, there was the plumber. He was fifty and married. In the end he was endorsing his four-hundred-dollar paycheck and handing it to her every Thursday. They only had sex three times in three months. She would make it a personal challenge: How much can I get without ever dropping my pants? She eventually lost all her regulars that way.

  At first she thought it was just the lure of illicit sex that hooked those types. But her own practices changed her mind about that. She figured such men just wanted a young woman at their side who paid attention to them. They were too old to romance one, but too young to forget what the affection of a young girl was like.

  Prostitution was the world’s oldest masquerade, she thought. It ran on deception as well as desire. All the girl had to do was become whatever the trick wanted her to be, and even the orgasms were fake.

  She’d had one gratifying night in two years on the street, but it had nothing to do with sex. He was a sixty-five-yearold guy she’d flagged. He paid her a hundred dollars just to lie next to her in bed for an hour. All he did was hug her.

  “It’s been so long since I’ve held somebody young and tender next to me,” he told her.

  It seemed awfully weepy, but her heart went out to the guy. It was the only night she felt good about the line of work she was in. Cheryl couldn’t bring herself to milk a guy like that. She never told John about it. He wouldn’t have understood.

  Cheryl wondered what kind of moves Dawn was shooting with her new regular in apartment 202. Later, after Dr. Miller left, she asked her.

  “He’s in love with me,” Dawn said. “But he’s a goof.”

  Christ, she thought, she sounds just like John. Well, the goof has been pretty good to her. Dawn’s working wardrobe had increased substantially. Al had taken her shopping at the malls several times.

  “He’s a doctor,” Dawn said. “He’s my sugar daddy. The rest of you hoes can go out and work the streets. But I’ve got me a sugar daddy.”

  And now her shit doesn’t stink, Cheryl thought.

  “Well, what does he get for all his money?” Cheryl asked.

  “Just head. And a lot of days, not even that.”

  18

  The most pressing topic in apartment 202 was the mixed jive. They talked about when they were getting it, where they were getting it, how good it was, and whose credit was still good at the dope house.

  “Getting right” meant getting the first fix. “Bogue” or “sick” was the state of needing one. A successful injection was a “hit.” More was one’s “do.” Fellow addicts were “dope fiends” or just “fiends.” They got their “do” at the “dope house” from the “dope man.”

  Cheryl Krizanovic pretty much had kept her vow not to give John Fry any money. She relished returning from the street with her private stash and shooting up in front of her old boyfriend. But sometimes she felt sorry for him and gave in when he pleaded his need to get right.

  Dr. Miller’s support, which by Christmas was heading for a thousand dollars a week, wasn’t enough to cover Dawn and John’s drug costs for two days. Despite Dawn’s boasts about a sugar daddy, he was only one trick in many. Despite his plans to help her out, he was little more than a lucrative oddity in the daily flow of dates, cash, and dope.

  Habits were paramount to the personalities. The heroin squirrel cage dictated that. John liked to describe dreaded opiate withdrawal as “the flu, pneumonia, and a good ass kicking all rolled into one.”

  There was no reason to doubt John’s expertise on the subject of drugs. He drank his first six-pack at thirteen and smoked his first joint at fifteen. He couldn’t remember a day he hadn’t lit at least one number through his twenties and early thirties. He acquired his first heroin habit at twenty-one, but unlike weed, hard narcotics were tough to come by in prison.

  Now any opiate or opiatelike drug was mandatory. If he wasn’t running heroin, he was shooting Dilaudid or swallowing Percodan or Demerol. In a pinch, Jack Daniel’s and a couple of handfuls of Somas or Tylenol 4s with codeine would do. John was finding it difficult to mark a decent vein anymore. Many of the accessible blood vessels in his arms and legs had collapsed, a common junkie’s dilemma.

  Dawn was more delicate, even though she had been using intravenously only six months. Her two-hundred-dollar-a-day habit was dainty by John’s standards, but she suffered more debilitating side effects. Her marked groin served her well on dates, but now she was paying the price.

  In late October, the area swelled with infection. Two days of chills, headache, and 104-degree fever forced her to the busy emergency room at Detroit Receiving Hospital. Doctors admitted her and administered an IV of antibiotics. By the third day, most of her symptoms were gone. She walked out, against the advice of physicians. They warned her the infection could abscess and create another set of complications.

  By Christmas week the problem was back. She told Dr. Al Miller about the increasing pain in her groin. He asked her to remove her jeans and lie down so he could examine the area. He pressed the edge of the small cavity on the inside of her thigh. The exam was brief. She needed antibiotics, he said.

  “I’ve got a friend, a pharmacist. I can get them, no charge.”

  The next day he brought a physician’s sample of pills, telling Dawn to take one every four hours. He didn’t seem too concerned. Still, she was uncomfortable with the diagnosis.

  “He just acted—different,” she later told another addict. “Not like a doctor would.”

  But Dr. Miller already had talked about a wide range of diseases during previous visits. She wanted
his pills to work. She didn’t want to spend the holiday in the hospital.

  As for Cheryl, the only thing that seemed as predictable as her own drug use over the last three years was John Fry’s frequent plans to kick his own habit. When John returned from a visit to his brother’s house two days before Christmas, he stuck true to his form.

  John announced he wanted to go to Gleason, Tennessee, for the holiday to see his dad, Pete. He and Dawn would hitch a ride with John’s younger brother Jim. Jim’s girlfriend, Janet, and their three-year-old twins were going as well. They were leaving on Christmas Eve.

  That’s a carload, Cheryl told herself. But for years she had wanted to meet the man that had fathered her old boyfriend. Maybe then she could understand him and free herself from the grip he still had on her.

  “John, I’m not spending Christmas alone,” Cheryl said.

  Her old boyfriend didn’t argue. The point was, he said, that Jim, the brother everyone called Six Pack, not be allowed to go south alone.

  “Six told me he’s going south to see our mother,” John said.

  Cheryl knew John’s mother died in 1967. She suspected Six Pack wasn’t talking about her grave.

  “The twins’ Christmas gifts were stolen,” John continued. “He’s really been hitting the T and thinks the fucking devil ripped him off.”

  T—THC, PCP, “angel dust,” “hog.” Technically it’s called phencyclidine. James Dale Fry had been using it for years. While he was on the stuff, Cheryl had seen him ram his head through a plaster wall and string a length a rope for himself.

  It was because of Six Pack that John’s travel plans included everyone kicking their habits.

  “We won’t take a thing,” he explained. “We can’t help Six if we’re all fucked up. We’re going to get clean. We’re going to get clean for Christmas.”

  But first, John said, they would have to raise money for the trip.

  “So you really do want to make the trip down south?” Dawn asked.

  “Without a doubt,” John said.

  Dawn reached for the telephone. She had in her hand the phone number of Dr. Al Miller. He’d instructed her to use it with discretion, saying it was the office suite of a colleague, a place where he took messages.

  Cheryl listened as Dawn made the call. It was the first time Cheryl ever heard Dawn work her regular for cash.

  “Al, I’ve got a chance to see some relatives in Tennessee for Christmas. But I need two or three hundred dollars to make the trip.”

  What a perfect little Miss Priss, Cheryl thought. She sure knew how to sound helpless. Dr. Miller already had paid a visit at noon. If he coughed up another three hundred dollars, that meant a four-hundred-dollar day for the regular.

  As she headed out the door to score her share, Cheryl wondered if the trick would comply. When she returned, Dr. Miller had already dropped off the money to Dawn.

  “What do you think of my Christmas present?” she said, flashing a handful of bills.

  He hadn’t brought the three hundred. He brought a thousand.

  There was plenty of cash, but Cheryl Krizanovic didn’t particularly look forward to a drug-free, eight-hour ride in a car loaded with five adults and two preschoolers. Soon that didn’t matter either. John initiated what he called a bon voyage party, a farewell of sorts to drugs and the Cass Corridor.

  When the dope ran out the next morning, they had only a few hundred left for the trip.

  19

  Bobbi Gray first considered skipping what she already had decided was to be her last session with W. Alan Canty. Considering the way her therapist had hidden Jeff’s homosexuality from her, how could she ever trust him?

  Then she decided she had nothing to lose. It was the day before Christmas, and she knew her shrink liked to play Santa. She had a freebie coming. Canty hadn’t billed her for therapy during the 1981 and 1982 Christmas holidays.

  “It’s something I like to do with all my patients at Christmas,” he told her the first time. “It’s my way of saying thanks.”

  Bobbi let Canty pour a cup of coffee. She lit a cigarette. Then she let him have it.

  “I feel you have represented him, my husband Jeff, and not me. It was not in my best interest to keep on with this for two whole years. I mean there was never a chance at reconciliation. He’s gay, for chrisake!”

  Canty was unshaken.

  “No, he wasn’t when he was married to you. Jeff was on the fence. He was on the fence, and when someone is on the fence and teetering in between, as a therapist it’s my job to try to push him over—to the good side. He was teetering between homosexuality and the life that is right for him—the happy, healthy life with a good home and children.”

  Canty had more theories.

  “All this is a result of the process of getting sober,” he explained calmly. “Jeff was basically fourteen years old emotionally when he came in here, He started drinking at fourteen, and when an alcoholic starts his drinking career, his mental development stops. In therapy, he can work this out and grow up …”

  The psychologist continued, but already Bobbi Gray’s mind was wandering. One hundred and ten dollars times a hundred weeks. That was eleven thousand dollars! She started feeling snotty. She could be cruel when she was mad. The things she could have done with that money. What is Al Canty doing with my eleven thousand dollars? His home office was out of the Dark Ages. The carpet was threadbare. Piss yellow walls. Neo-bizarre Danish modern, she labeled it. What crap! If Canty would have hired the cheapest decorator from Sears, he would have told him to throw everything out.

  She took a good look at the man she’d trusted for two years. He looked as though he needed a good shower. In fact, she thought, he had always looked dirty. His hair was greasy, and he had dandruff all over his worn-out sport shirt. His skin was sallow. Why doesn’t he take a damn vacation and get some sun with all his money? She couldn’t imagine anyone having sex with the man. What a nerd he must have been as a kid, she thought.

  “You can handle this setback,” Canty said near the end of the session. “Bobbi, I’m telling you that you have the strongest mental health of any patient I’ve ever had.”

  You bet, she thought. As she got up to leave, he had his hand out.

  “Al, this is Christmas, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you know, it’s always been the last session of the year is free. You know, a gift for your patients. That’s the way it was the last two holidays.”

  Canty looked at her quizzically, as though she was talking Chinese. What the hell is he doing? she thought.

  “I don’t know what could have led you to believe that,” he said in a patronizing pitch. “You must have misunderstood. But I don’t know how I could have ever implied that.”

  He began writing out a receipt. Why, she thought, was he trying to make her feel as though those free sessions were a figment of her imagination? Why is he lying?

  “Well, I’m sorry but I don’t have any money, Al. I don’t have my checkbook with me.”

  Bobbi Gray couldn’t wait to get out of the big Tudor on Berkshire. When she did, she never went back. Her husband Jeff quit going that week as well.

  She filed for divorce, but her husband continued his frequent visits to her house, often dining with her and the kids. One night she and Jeff compared notes about their former marriage counselor. They revealed what Canty had told them in individual sessions.

  Bobbi told him about Jeff’s “teetering” and Canty’s promise that he’d soon come home. Jeff listened in disbelief.

  “I wanted to tell you what I was,” Jeff said. “I wanted you to know. Every week I said that, damn it. I told him that I’d had enough of this farce. He told me I couldn’t do it. He told me he was building you up to be on your own because you were so weak emotionally.”

  Weak, no. Broke, yes. Bobbi Gray wanted her eleven thousand dollars back.

  20

  Pete Fry had just finished pulling a tanker of prim
e Tennessee clay across the Carolinas when he got the surprise phone call from his eldest son. John told him of his last-minute plan to accompany his brother on the holiday visit.

  “Got room for my old lady and her girlfriend?” John asked.

  “I guess we’ll find room,” Pete said reluctantly.

  Pete Fry had been expecting Jim and his family for the holiday. But he hadn’t heard from John Carl in five years. The younger of his two sons had kept in touch in the half-dozen years since the sixty-two-yearold trucker had resettled in the South. John, he figured, just didn’t give a damn.

  Pete Fry was spending the last of his working years in a three-bedroom mobile home out among the rolling bean fields and cow farms of western Tennessee. John was born nearby, just across the Kentucky line in Fulton, before the Fry family migrated to Detroit. But the last they had spent any time together was after John’s mother died in 1967. John was booted out of the Army and moved in for a short time. He stole most of Pete’s valuables the day he moved out.

  They had never gotten along. Most of the time Pete Fry couldn’t even bring himself to say John’s name, usually referring to him only as “that eldest boy.” Pete and Nell Ruth Fry had separated off and on through their marriage. Nell moved in with her mother, and Pete blamed his mother-in-law for spoiling his firstborn son at a young age. John Carl could not sin in his grandmother’s eyes, and Pete figured that prevented the boy from understanding the difference between right and wrong. He had always considered John a bad influence on his younger brother Jim.

  However, as Pete drove to nearby Gleason to get groceries for his guests, he resolved he would have to put the past behind him. After all, this was Christmas, and there was no reason to expect any nonsense. When he returned from town, Jim’s rusty Lincoln was parked in his driveway.

  “This is Dawn,” John said, eager to show off his girlfriend.

  Pete Fry couldn’t figure out how his son had hooked up with such a young girl. But his attention was more captured by Jim’s twins and Cheryl Krizanovic, who later said she had to fend off a pass by the old trucker.