by Rebecca Lee
Donna didn’t know where this was coming from, but it sounded right and felt even better.
Brea nodded her head, stepped forward, and patted her mom on the shoulder.
She had no intention to stop but she knew that things would have to change in how they operated. She even sensed an opportunity to make a little more money.
The first thing is she had to confront Prentice.
“I don’t know how you found out, but can you send me whatever you were given?” Brea said. “I think I am being set-up. I want to get this handled.”
Donna said nothing but forwarded the email.
Chapter 15--Find the Money
Donna felt satisfied about one thing as she got dressed for the day. She had moved the ball forward in her communications with her daughter. There was new respect for sure.
Still Donna was aware that there was likely some well-honed ability within Brea to say or do anything to win the moment. She had a great talent to operate in secrecy.
So respect yes, but full and complete confidence and trust? Not even close.
Donna had to block it out for the time being. She’d just hope her daughter understood her very firm message. If nothing else, she was experiencing a deeper sense of normalcy in their relationship. She was the authority figure and Brea was the one taking the orders. At least if felt right. It felt comfortable.
She knew that thinking too much about it was creating a mental soap opera in her mind. It was distracting. Having just emerged from what she considered two decades of distraction and then the whole relationship with Chris, Donna was done with it all. It was vital to her goals to not get bogged down.
She checked her messages on the Youtube account she created last night. There was nothing from Rachel. She got her message because it was clear it had been opened.
Donna was disappointed. She’d give it a few hours and maybe send another
For her it was off to Compton of all places. She didn’t know if she was going to see much over there at this plastic surgery place Peter talked about. She wasn’t going to call. Instead she identified the only plastic surgery clinic in Compton. It was called the “New You Cosmetic Clinic” where you could pay as you go.
Donna figured it was worth a look just to satisfy her own curiosity that such a place existed.
…
In San Pedro, if you are able to afford to live there and work in the ship channel as a simple longshoreman, you often have a hand me down for a house. The small seaside community on the Ocean was actually a sub-corporation of the city of Los Angeles. This meant it was the only coastal part of a city which was actually incorrectly associated with being coastal.
San Pedro was a melting pot in it’s citizenry featuring a significant Italian community among many other ethnicities who arrived generations ago to work in the largest commercial port in the United States. The geography was likewise a melting pot with spectacular ocean views. You would sit high on cliffs to the west and then in minutes be deep in seedy industrial docs to the south nearest the channel separating the community from Long Beach.
Gigi Valano was part of this Italian community and despite living in a family that had worldwide origins, she had scarcely been out of the community she was born in. Only nineteen, her days were spent rushing home after school to handle babysitting her little brothers and sisters.
She was pretty enough to be noticed by some boys at school. She had jet dark hair with a natural curl and deep dark olive skin. She wasn’t in great shape but had a “cute” shape in her barely five foot frame. Her teeth needed work but the family didn’t have a lot of extra money. They gave their house in Pedro back to the bank a year earlier and they all crammed into a small apartment complex. Seven of them were packed in two bedrooms.
Gigi's boyfriend was quite a bit older. She met him at one of the local bars she was at using a fake ID with her friends. She wasn’t overly inspired by him but it was something. Like so many richly talented girls from poorer backgrounds, her early years were spent having those abilities discouraged by her environment.
Her future plainly was rudderless except for the rudder that others, like a man in her life, could give her. It was plain astonishing that in these times with all the ability to see the world and expand a person’s horizons, it actually happened for a very very small percentage of girls.
GiGi was clinically depressed but didn’t know it. It was normal life and it was shared by millions of girls just like her.
She was a product of her discouraging environment.
One day, she saw Rachel Evans online. She bookmarked it. Then another day she left a comment. The concepts didn’t really resonate. She loved the videos. Especially the one where men were being transformed into hot women.
One day she left a comment that would change the trajectory of her pretty mundane life and future.
“Wish I was that pretty even after make up...LOL”
The name was her actual name and location her actual location.
She continued to surf the net dropping comments when the mood hit her.
Gigi had to get dinner for her brothers and sisters. She just missed her mom. Why did she die?
…
Try as she might, Donna couldn’t get Brea’s situation out of her mind. In her view it all came down to one thing: Donna needed to find money to live so she could really start living. Running low on money and her daughter operating like a prostitute wasn’t cutting it.
It was her biggest fear because she had never had more than a couple thousand in the bank at any one time in her life. Now she was heading off to Compton, the poorest community in the area to visit a sight-unseen plastic surgery clinic on the advice of an old black man she didn’t know but for a couple hours.
Donna still thought it was a waste of time.
Chapter 16--My Daughter and Her Lover
As she approached the “New You” clinic, Donna instantly noted that a lot of what she was seeing was expected but there was a lot that wasn’t. True to her recent more open-minded approach to things, she was more interested in what wasn’t expected.
There were nice houses and well-kept neighborhoods in Compton. There were areas of vibrant commerce already apparent at about nine in the morning on a weekend. The sun was rising to the Southeast and the place sparkled in spots.
It was no warzone. Even as financially stressed as Donna was, she was always trained to see Compton as a place where no one walked around for long because bullets were flying everywhere.
This was all very eye-opening and it enriched a mind that was rapidly opening and looking for opportunity.
“And I am here at this place why?” she said to herself in the car.
It still seemed pointless.
After finding Rachel Evans the previous evening, she pushed the roulette wheel button on the radio to see what she could find.
“We’re here talking to Barbara Corcoran from the Shark Tank,” the male voice on the same talk radio station Donna found the previous night. Donna had seen her on TV.
Her attention at that moment was taken to the windshield and the car crossing in front of her.
It was a late model black Lexus and the driver was bald but she could see him clearly as the car was coming from the left. The passenger was a stunning black girl and in the back there was a teenage black male. He looked sternly and fiercely at Donna. Their eyes met.
She shivered while her mind raced wondering she had seen that car before. She felt she was in Compton as everyone told her it was.
Her fear was setting in. Suddenly getting out of a car in this neighborhood went from silly to frightening.
She drove through the intersection and then took a left turn down what looked like a street of homes, not commercial properties.
“I am horrible with money,” Barbara Corcoran said with a loud aggressive but unquestionably engaging and happy tone.
“I think one of the biggest mistakes any person, especially a woman, can make who wants to make big m
oney in business, is to look at that as some sort deal breaker about having money. I hear all the time from gurus about “respecting money” and I don’t disagree. I respect it because it can be great fun to have it and spend it. Maybe you can overly respect it. You have to be great with asking for it because trust me it is everywhere.”
Donna drove by the clinic situated right in the middle of the string of houses. It didn’t look out of place even though it resembled a pole barn and not one of the Sante Fe or Mediterranean style homes common to Compton.
It was clean on the outside, landscaped with grass with intermittent weeds. There was no parking on the front nor back of the building. There was a concrete walkway path running right up to the door that bisected the grounds in the front.
The clinic appeared to be closed.
Donna kept on driving and was overcome with a feeling like it was best to keep driving right on back to Inglewood. Not that she felt fear. On the contrary, she felt peace. She just thought it was all fruitless.
She was battling herself in her own mind. Just like always.
“Will it ever end?” she thought as she pulled to the side by the curb.
Now she was battling herself over battling herself.
She closed her eyes for a few seconds into some sort of meditation. When she woke, she swore she saw the black Lexus from the intersection a few minutes earlier. It was peeling past her at a high speed.
She got the license plate.
Chapter 17-- Real Beauty
“What the fuck are you doing here lady?” the young male voice said with obvious intent to scare. “Don’t move or I’ll slit your throat. You don’t belong down in this area and you sure as hell don’t belong sitting here sleeping with your window open. Are you nuts?”
Donna had never been threatened like this before in her life. The only confidence she had at the moment was the man’s voice gave off the impression he was concerned for a woman who was in a place she shouldn't have been.
Being that she didn’t have any recent experiences being threatened by a teenage gang member holding a knife to her throat, she didn’t have any script on how exactly to act.
“I um..” she stammered. “Could you take the knife away? I am a woman from Inglewood and I mean no harm. I’ll leave and I’ll give you whatever you want. I just want to live.”
It was all honest and made sense. She was only hoping it would it would play well with her audience.
“Don’t play games,” he said taking the knife away from her neck by a couple inches. “Answer my question.”
Donna wondered if maybe this was the kid from the back of the Lexus. Strange her mind would be working that way at this time.
“I met this man at the Forum,” she said. “A black man. He told me to come to the plastic surgery clinic in Compton. I looked the place up. No I don’t have an appointment.”
The young man suddenly stood up after being hunched down over Donna’s shoulder. He walked to the front so she could see his face and he even smiled. This was absolutely the kid from the car.
He was tall, sort of lanky. It was hard to tell because he was wearing baggy jeans and a baggy t-shirt and an oversized coat better suited for Minneapolis in November. He was gorgeously handsome when he smiled.
“Well shit,” he said. “You are quite the risk taker. What was the man’s name?”
“Um Peter,” Donna responded.
The young man could only shake his head.
“Nutty old man,” he said. “Lady, I can take you to the clinic. The doc doesn’t see strangers though. You can talk to the doc. Maybe. But I doubt it.”
Donna wasn’t following what he meant, but since she had come this far and it appeared she had the trust of the young man she regarded as a thug with a brain, she pursed her lips together and made eye contact.
“I’m in,” she said trying to sound a little “street”.
The young man could only shake his head ladened with corn rows and wave his knife at her as if to say “come on”.
…
The head of the Symington Agency of Beverly Hills was doing what he did a lot more than what he would ever admit to his employees. He met behind closed doors in a semi-social environment with his biggest competitors on the West Coast. There was Image First Models of Laguna/Orange County. The head was a thin elegant woman named Candace Morton. There was the other big hitter from Beverly Hills called Elite Direct. The head was a new person on the scene from Europe named Devlyn Schwartzau. Then there was New York making a rare appearance. This agency was also a woman and former super model named Lisa Dradenton.
The Symington boss took the floor in a conference room at a secret location in Malibu overlooking the ocean.
Ladies and Gentlemen, our problem is obvious,” he began. “Though we are competitors, our collective livelihood is being eroded and eroded fast by the free access to beauty the general public can find online. Our best faces are being relegated to mere faces in the crowd. To be elite, you have to be rare. The internet assures us that rare is dead.”
Although this was nothing the other agency heads hadn’t heard before or tried to solve in their minds, this felt different and their collective attentions were fixed.
In an industry built squarely on the illusion, they all were clearly feeling that it was time to get real. The survival of what they did depended on it.
“What if I told you I have a way for us to not just survive but thrive in this totally new media world?” Andrew asked rhetorically.
Each of the industry titans at the table gave their approval in their body language.
“We need to own the buzz words and the media energy behind the “real beauty” movement,” he said. “I am going to ask you all in seven days time for a pledge of $250,000 apiece to do a deal with a young woman you likely never heard of. Her name is Rachel Evans. She is from Ohio of all places. She is coming to L.A. and should be landing within an hour. Our limo will be picking her up and she is about to become a very very rich young lady.”
Chapter 18--In or Out?
The knife thankfully was put away.
But Donna knew from the size and menacing glare of from her guide Dorian, that she better obey all the rules he was laying down. He took her down to the end of the walk and insisted they walk the alley way around the back of six houses and apparently to a back entrance into the clinic building.
Donna had a sensation that the alley would be a great place to get attacked by one or more of Dorian’s gang brothers.
It was all unknown and it was damn frightening. .
He kept his arm around her shoulder lightly as they walked side by side past the back of the houses they had just passed from the front.
Donna was out of her mind with fear. She was a middle-aged woman who had consciously avoided black people she didn’t work with or live by. Now she was now in the veritable belly of the beast and she had no lifeline.
They reached the back door to the clinic. There was no sign designating it. The area was clean and well-kept, like the front. She noticed that the building and back fence were totally graffiti free unlike the fence of every other home they had passed on both sides of the alley.
Dorian sensed she was taking it all in and processing it.
“The doc just had to ask and everyone complied,” he said. “Never an issue. Never even put out a damn sign warning them about a dog’s gonna attack them or it being a violation of the law. None of that white person shit.”
