Cha-Ching! (7 page)

“You don't want someone to tattoo you who's going to be a dick,” they'd said. “All their bad energy goes into you.”

“Too late,” Theo thought, holding in her pain for as long as she could before gasping again.

“You're going to make me fuck up if you keep breathing like that!”

So Theo made herself disappear—staring at Gato's tacky pin-up girl art until she finally heard the tattoo gun stop buzzing.

“Okay,” he said. “The worst is over. Next visit will be a piece of cake.”

Theo took a second to get up from the table. She was nauseous and her whole body was buzzing. Gato held up a hand mirror in front of her. The dagger that had once been on the piece of tracing paper was now permanently on her chest.

“Whoa,” Theo said. “That's big.”

“That's what twelve inches looks like,” he sleazed.

When Theo got home she stared at her new tattoo in the mirror, from every possible angle. It was strange to see this new thing on her body. Did she like it? She applied lotion to it and slipped a V-neck T-shirt over her head, leaving only the handle of the dagger exposed. It looked too short. She looked harder into the mirror and her heart sank. She realized that with only the handle of the dagger emerging from the V-neck it looked like she had a penis tattooed on her chest. The jewel that Theo had thought too Dungeons and Dragons now looked like the tip of a penis, complete with piss hole. The harder she looked the more horrors she noticed: coursing veins running down the shaft. Theo turned off the light in the bathroom and walked numbly into the living room to call Esther.

“Can you come over?” Theo asked.

“Are you okay?”

“Just come over.”

Over the next two weeks when Theo showed her dick tattoo to friends, some suggested Gato had done it on purpose because he was an asshole or misogynist or because Esther had nagged him about the filigree. Worse still, maybe he was a soldier in some sort of secret misogyny militia tattooing dicks on queer women across America. But Theo put all her hope into her next visit, when Gato could correct the problem.

When she arrived he asked her how she was getting used to her new tattoo.

She immediately betrayed herself. “Fine.”

“Tell him, tell him,” her mind said.

He'd been tattooing a few minutes before she got her courage up.

“Um,” she started, “I was wondering if you could do anything to fix the handle of the dagger. It kind of looks like a dick.”

He stopped tattooing and looked at her.

“You think it looks like a dick?” he laughed.

Theo had never expected him to dispute it.

“It does look like a dick,” Theo said. “Everyone thinks so.”

“I wouldn't say it looks like a dick,” he said. “Maybe a cigar.”

Theo looked at his horrible face.

“Can you do anything,” she asked, “to de-dickify it?”

“Once all the shading is down I don't think it'll look like a dick.”

A little while later Gato said, “Okay, you're all done!” and handed Theo a mirror.

She took a deep breath before looking.
Please God
, she thought,
don't let it be a dick
.

When she opened her eyes the dick was still there except now the veins and piss hole were shaded in perfect 3-D.

“How's that?” Gato said. “Do you like it?”

•

Theo felt a touch guilty calling in sick to her data entry job in order to go to the escort interview. She had nothing to wear, so she waited for Megan to leave for her job at the bank and then snuck into the rabbit hoarder's room, rummaging around in her dresser until she found a pair of ruffled peach panties. Theo put them on, thinking
now
my
pussy
has
touched
her
pussy
. Doralina's TV was already on, giving sports recaps from the day before. Theo prayed she wouldn't come upstairs and catch her cross-dressing in Megan's room. She scowled at the wallfull of rabbits in cages, warning them into silence.

Once she secured the panties, Theo sifted through the makeup on Megan's bureau. She knew enough to know that it was all cheap drugstore stuff. If it wasn't three hours earlier in San Francisco and Olivia didn't sleep until noon, Theo could call and find out exactly what color eye shadow a person should wear to an escort interview. Instead, she put on bright blue, with hot pink lipstick, and completed her conversion by hiding her Marine haircut under the Butch Bathroom Wig. With the wig, panties, and drugstore makeup, Theo wore her regular clothes— jeans and a hoodie and her pair of busted black Converse hi-tops. She snuck out of the house with Cary Grant and drove to the Kwik Stop to get a cup of coffee.

Theo was surprised to see a news crew interviewing Randy in the parking lot. She waved to him, but he didn't wave back. She went in and poured herself a coffee.

“Hi,” she said to Randy who came in and stared at her blankly. “It's Theo!”

“Why do you look like that?” he said.

“I'm going on an interview. What's up with the news crew?”

“Someone bought a winning lottery ticket here but hasn't claimed the prize yet. It's over three million dollars.”

“No!” Theo gasped.

Randy nodded.

“Three million dollars,” Theo said.

She put her coffee on the counter to pay, feeling something bubble up inside her.

“Let me get five of those,” she pointed to a lottery scratch-off ticket called
Dog-Gone Riches
.

“That's not the kind she won on. It was a quick pick.”

Theo held out her twenty-dollar bill until he took it.

“Coffee is on the house,” Randy said, ringing her up for the lottery tickets. “Come hang out with me.” He tapped the milk crate behind the counter.

“I can't,” Theo lied. “I have my interview.”

“For what kind of job?”

She started scratching the metallic dog bones off.

“What if I won fifty thousand dollars right now?” she asked Randy.

“Is that the top prize?”

Theo nodded. She scratched all of the dog bones off and double-checked she hadn't won anything.

“Fuck.”

“What kind of job?” Randy repeated.

“Oh. Receptionist. That's why I have the wig and make up. To look professional.”

“But it's okay if you wear jeans?” Randy asked sweetly looking at her Levis.

“Well, I was going to go to a thrift store in the city before my interview and try to find some woman clothes. I'll let you know what happens.”

“Look for me on the news tonight,” Randy said as she walked out.

Theo didn't want to drive to the city in rush-hour traffic so she stopped at a donut shop for an apple fritter. She had enough money for eight more
Dog-Gone Riches
scratch-off tickets, a coffee and the apple fritter. From her table she could see Cary Grant looking out the truck window. She left the lottery tickets unscratched while she ate her donut. She had a feeling they were more duds and didn't want to rush finding out she was unlucky. As long as the tickets sat beside her unscratched, the possibility remained that she could become instantly rich and not need to find a job. She ate her donut waiting for someone to bust her, call her out on her costume, but no one was paying attention. They were chain-smoking or reading or doing crosswords or clipping their fingernails and letting them drop onto the floor, a practice Theo found harrowing to watch.

Her lipstick had gotten smeared with the first bite of apple fritter. Her attitude about becoming a prostitute, so cavalier last night, had become a nervous dread. She hadn't even had sex with a man since high school, what was she thinking? She could be murdered, she thought, even though none of her friends had ever been murdered working as
prostitutes
. They'd made it seem as easy as returning a video, but they weren't butches. Theo dreaded undressing in front of the madam, trying to explain her dagger tattoo.

When she was first coming to terms with the penis on her chest, her friends suggested she turn lemons into lemonade: “Use it as a pick-up line. You can pull down the collar of your shirt and say, ‘Hey wanna suck my dick?'”

Theo finished her donut but was afraid to move the wig hairs out of her face because her fingertips were covered in donut glaze. She pulled a quarter from her pocket and began scratching the first ticket.
If I
win
, she told herself,
I will not go to the
interview
. She began scratching the metallic dog bones. If she revealed three of the same amount, that's what she would win. She won nothing on the first ticket. On the second, she almost won $50,000, getting two out of three necessary. But in the end it amounted to nothing. She continued scratching the rest of the tickets, hoping the jackpot would be revealed in the last ticket the way such fortunes reversed in old stories, but the last ticket gave her nothing either. She'd wasted almost twenty dollars. She dropped the losing tickets in the trash can and walked out of the donut shop, the cold wind hitting her face, blowing long strands of the wig into the corners of her mouth and eyes. She wasn't used to having long hair and she felt like she'd walked face-first into a spider web. Cary Grant pawed at Theo when she sat down in the driver's seat, and she decided to drive to Brooklyn to see Sammy.

The inside of the truck was toasty and Theo rested her hand on the dog's back as she drove. Her plan was to show up on Sammy's doorstep in her escort interview costume and ask her if she looked like a believable prostitute. When she got to the cluster of apartment buildings she couldn't
remember
which one was Sammy's so she called her from the pay phone downstairs. It was 10
am
.

“Sammy?”

“Yeah.” She sounded like she'd just woken up.

“It's Theo.”

“Hey.”

“I'm downstairs,” Theo said.

“At my place?

“Yeah. Where the pay phones are.”

“Why?”

“I called in sick from my data entry job so I could interview to be an escort.”

“I'll be right down.”

Theo wrapped her arms around Cary Grant, who was shivering, and waited for Sammy to come downstairs.

“Do you need a winter sweater?” she said to the dog, who kept shying away from the wig. Cary Grant started to wag, and Theo turned to see Sammy coming toward them.

“Cary Grant,” Sammy said and the dog's ears went back, waiting to be petted. “You look insane,” she said to Theo.

“Really?”

“Uh, yes. But I have good news. Remember that apartment I was telling you about for $695? The one-bedroom in Sunset Park?”

Theo nodded.

“You want to go look at it? The landlord said he was going to be there this morning until noon, working on it.”

“What about my interview?” Theo asked, certain now that she was too chicken to go.

Sammy just stared at her like she was some kind of impossible math problem. They got in the truck and drove to the address Sammy had written down. Theo parked a few blocks away so she could take off her wig and makeup. They left Cary Grant in the truck and walked down 4th Avenue under the giant green BQE overpass, adult video stores peppered in between bodegas. With each step, Theo's hopes were dashed a little more. The humble little apartment she'd imagined when driving cross-country was surely not inside the house that matched the address Sammy had on a slip of paper.

“What do you think, girl?” Sammy asked.

They sensed each other's apprehension and stood staring at the three-family house with peeling green paint. Theo tried to find the word for what was wrong with it.
Soulless,
which was strange because how could a dilapidated house where so many people lived be without a soul? Usually soulless was for new, sterile apartment buildings built for the unimaginative dweller. To the left of the house was a car alarm store, and across the street a graffiti-covered Muslim Elementary School.

“Maybe the inside's good,” Theo said.

In fact, it didn't matter if the inside was good or not; Theo desperately needed to get out of Yonkers. She followed Sammy's gaze down the peopleless street where many of the houses were covered in Christmas lights and Puerto Rican flags. It felt like an early Sunday morning but it was a weekday close to noon, and even though the sun was out it seemed to shine sadly.

Sammy opened the gate in the chain-link fence and rang the doorbell of the first-floor apartment. Behind her, a light wind made tiny cyclones of garbage swirl in the driveway, occasionally pushing them flat against the fence. Theo watched a prostitute come around the corner with a bag of plantain chips and a soda. She'd once heard someone say that intersections under overpasses are major hooker corners, because guys who like $5 blowjobs also like to get right back on the highway.

When no one came to the door Sammy shrugged her shoulders at Theo and came back out to where she was smoking and shifting from foot to foot to keep warm.

“I need boots,” Theo said. “And a coat.”

Just then a gray sedan screeched to the curb in front of the house and a middle-aged Hasidic man popped out of the car, walking toward them in a rush and giving each a weak handshake. He fished through a bunch of keys on a ring.

“I'm Abraham,” he said.

They followed him to the metal front door and Theo watched over his shoulder as he tried the same key in four different deadbolts. Theo presumed the fresh coat of shiny green paint was an effort to try and cover the obvious pry marks from where someone had tried to break in. Once inside, Abraham pulled on a chain hanging from a lightbulb a few times before giving up and leading them down a dark hallway to a second door. Theo tried to inconspicuously point out the glut of mousetraps lining the baseboards to Sammy. Finally, Abraham got the second door open and they entered the apartment through the living room. The walls were painted the brightest white, but even though it was on the first floor it had the darkness of a basement apartment because of a second-floor window that protruded over the driveway. Some thin stripes of light filtered through the bars over the two front windows and fell across an expanse of thin brown linoleum that rippled across the living room, the corners curling up. Theo and Sammy walked over the wavy linoleum, following Abraham into the enormous kitchen.