Nightcrawling(14)

It doesn’t take long before it’s over and my pants are back up. He puts his belt back on and doesn’t look at me again, just pats his pocket, and I think he’s referring to his wallet.

“I’ve only got a couple hundred on me.” A couple hundred. Bucks. This man trying to pay me. His fingers press a roll of money into the center of my palm and even though some part of me knows I probably shouldn’t, I take it, close my fist, every inch of me shivering, teeth chattering, and he doesn’t say anything else, but he reaches up and removes a scarf from his neck, placing it around mine instead. He doesn’t even say goodbye, at least I don’t hear it, before he has returned to the elevator and disappeared.

I need to piss. The ocean all swelled up inside me.

I stumble toward the pond, slipping out of my shoes and pulling my pants off, then wading in. I let it all out, my body streaming like all plugs been lifted with those bills, that red liquid coming out yellow into the pond and I don’t know how bodies can consume one thing and produce another, but I guess tonight gifts us every kind of anomaly. I pull up my pants, slip my shoes back on, and make my way to the edge of the roof, looking out over the city to the way the fog parts just enough for me to see the bridge in the distance, all the hidden things showing themselves, and when I inhale, I don’t smell piss or cigarette smoke or weed. I just smell remnants of the red drink still lingering on my breath.





I met Camila the same night I met Polka Dot, when I was wandering home, trying to figure out how to get back to East Oakland when the buses weren’t running no more. Marcus and Alé weren’t answering their phones and I was freezing, lips cracking. I didn’t know what I was doing, stumbling toward the sound of the freeway.

A car pulled over in front of me, black and shiny, and this woman climbed out from the backseat, removed her coat, leaned back into the car to give it to somebody I couldn’t see, and shut the door before the car pulled away. Her extensions were bright pink and matched her outfit, the dress matte and tight. The way she walked made me think of the way you walk when the wind is pushing against you: determined, swaying.

I stood there in my gray shirt and that scarf still hanging from my neck, trying to pretend I wasn’t staring, but Camila saw everything through those lashes, saw everything bordered in that kind of curiosity that crawls out the eyes and sucks you in. She strutted up to me, and said, “What you looking at?” I probably would have started punching or running if anybody else had said this to me, but the way she spoke wasn’t enticing me to fight; it was like she thought it was funny, like I was standing in a crowd where I didn’t speak the language and she was the first one to see my tongue.

“Nothing.”

“You a baby ho, huh?” Camila’s lips curled, revealing clear braces that I didn’t catch before she was this close. “Listen, you ain’t gon’ make much just wandering the streets like this. Escorting where the real money at. I got me a pimp too, and I bet he’d take you on if I asked. Point is, nobody gonna take you serious out here like this and, I’m tellin’ you right now, nobody gonna do shit if you get hurt. You hear?”

She was so radiant I couldn’t find the words to tell her no, that I wasn’t like her, that I didn’t mean to do it, because what if I was her type of woman? Polka Dot’s bills still stuffed into my pocket, my body still unsure how to make sense of that rooftop, that man.

Camila took my hand, her acrylics careful not to puncture my skin. She called a car for us, said she’d give me a ride on the way to her john’s house. In the car, she told me about what I had to do to be like her, where to go, when, how to dress, and I thought maybe this is where girls go when they are tired. Maybe this is where I go to find my hum, make my body rumble big like Mama.



* * *





I couldn’t stop thinking about Polka Dot and Camila the next day, how easy it seemed for her. How many bills Polka Dot handed over to me for only a few minutes. I called three different escort agencies and phone sex companies, but they all told me my age was a liability, that I could give them a call when I was legal. They said I could try online, but we stopped paying for Wi-Fi last year and I don’t have a smartphone or a computer. Camila said if I had to walk the streets, I should have somebody to make sure I was safe, that it wouldn’t be quite so bad. Maybe I could do it a few more times while I tried to persuade Marcus to get a job. I’ve had sex now and I can do it again, nothing more than a body, I tell myself. Skin. I don’t gotta make it more than that. Just till I get us out of our rent debt.

It didn’t take much to convince Tony. I showed up at his door last night and he lit up like I was the surprise lotto ticket his mama bought him for Christmas. When I sat next to him on the couch, Tony tried to slip his arm around me smoothly, like his body mass could do anything that slick. I sat forward so his body couldn’t collide with mine and turned to him, remembering what Camila said.

Tony could tell something was wrong and his skin wrinkled up on the bridge of his nose.

“Need you to do something for me,” I said, twirling a loose thread from Polka Dot’s scarf around my finger and pulling until my skin bulged.

“I talked to Marcus already,” Tony said, unwinding the thread from my finger.

“Thought you weren’t gonna do that unless I showed up.”