Love Lies Beneath (5 page)

“You know how I feel about gambling.” Mel's voice is stern. Having spent our teen years in Las Vegas, we witnessed the gaming dependency from many angles. Mom had a problem, and so did a number of her revolving-door boyfriends. Sometimes that resulted in hungry days.

“Yeah, but we're playing with my money, so no worries. In my experience, betting someone else's chips stimulates the good-luck fairy.”

Reluctantly, she follows me to the crowded table. A couple of guys in uniforms make room, and when I plunk down a wad of cash, ask for hundred-dollar chips, one of them whistles. “Did y'all just hit the lottery, ma'am?”

I laugh. “Oh, I hit it a while ago. I hit it three times, in fact.”

The cute young marine looks really confused until Melody clarifies, “She's talking about her husbands.”

“Ex-husbands, and yes, I am.”

I don't play systems or try to outsmart a game that was invented to keep the house well afloat. Winning at roulette is all about luck, which is either with you or not on any given day.

When I try to give Mel a stack of chips, she shakes her head. “You play. I'll watch.”

“Okay, then, give me two numbers between one and thirty-six.”

“Twelve and fifteen.” Two of her kids' ages.

I put a hundred-dollar chip on each, plus one on the zero and another on my personal favorite, thirty-three. Then I ask the marine, who is playing dollar chips on red or black, for one more number. “If it hits, I'll share,” I promise, placing one last hundred-dollar bet on his preferred twenty-one.

The dealer spins the wheel, rolls the ball. Round and round it goes, drops into the sixteen. Ugh. It's a collective groan. Everyone loves to watch high-roller bets, share the giant rush of adrenaline attached to having five hundred dollars at stake. So I give it to them again. I play the same numbers, with a similar result. Again. And again.

A cocktail waitress comes by and asks about drinks. Everyone orders a freebie. Everyone except Mel and me. Alcohol would take the edge off my rush.

Melody, I'm pretty sure, thinks she needs to babysit me, a fact that's confirmed when she hisses in my ear, “What are you doing? Five hundred dollars a spin? You're down six grand!”

“You have to play big to win big.” To prove it, I put two chips on each number. What the hell?

My sister's acidic glare could melt skin. “That's half of Kayla's tuition right there.”

The dealer spins the wheel. Rolls the ball.

“Probably more like a quarter, and I told you, I've got that covered. Anyway, what good is having more money than you can spend in a lifetime if you can't take a chance with a little every now and then?”

Round and round. Slowing down. The ball drops into the four, and Melody grunts. No, wait. It takes a fortuitous bounce, straight into the twenty-one! The table cheers, and the marine clamps his arm around my shoulder, tugs me into him and kisses me, hard. “Maybe I'll catch a little of that luck,” he says. “I hope it's contagious.”

The dealer pushes a tray of chips—seventy of them—across the table. I hand one back as a tip and give two to the Marine. “Merry almost Christmas, sweetheart.”

One thing I do know is when to call it a night. Melody accompanies me to the cashier, “pissed” etched on her face. “What's wrong? I won, didn't I?”

“No. You broke even, minus the three hundred you gave away. You could have lost the whole thing! Who does that? Who takes that kind of risk?”

She is seriously clueless. “It's only money, Mel. Some people risk much, much more, and those people wager lives.”

We have great seats in the cabaret—a dead-center booth at the back of the first riser. The show is called
The D-Factor
(
d
for “diva”) and is presented something like the
X Factor
television show. Eight women cover today's hottest pop songs, and for the most part they're pretty good, though I doubt they'd get paid nearly as much as they do if they sang fully clothed.
X Factor
(as in X-rated) would be a more fitting name, but they'd probably get sued for using it.

Two “judges” and an emcee, all male, ask the girls inane questions, then make requests, like “show me your best Miley Cyrus.” As I suspected, the vocals are better than the twerking, though the men in the audience would probably disagree. It's interesting to watch their reactions, especially the older gents right down in front, who are getting way more than an eyeful.

The members of the audience are supposed to clap approval after each performance. A higher noise level adds points to the girls' scores, which are kept tallied on a lighted board. Melody has been anything but raucous with her applause, and now she actually yawns.

“Not impressed, I take it?”

She sips her drink—we've both moved to sidecars—before answering. “The show is entertaining enough, I guess. A couple of them seem like they could have more mainstream careers.”

Onstage, a dark-skinned girl (okay, they could have been a little less obvious) attempts a Beyoncé number, “Irreplaceable.” The young woman is pretty enough, but physically, she's no match for Ms. Knowles, and so her dance suffers. “You've got to have legs like a Thoroughbred to pull off this number,” I tell Mel.

“Back in the day, you could have done it.”

Back in the day, I could have. And, had my life not taken a hard right turn, I might be up on that stage today. At twenty, I was a dancer in a Vegas strip club. I started at eighteen, right out of high school. In some demented corner of my brain, I figured the money I earned—and it was decent money, especially for someone that young—would pay my way through UNLV.

I wasn't sure what I wanted to be, but I thought a college degree was the key to success, especially since my mother didn't believe it. I would have done anything not to be like her, and if she wasn't going to support my dream of higher education, well, amen. I'd find a way to handle it myself.

There are a couple of problems with stripping, the main one being that most customers are absolutely positive you do more than take off your clothes for pay. Had I stayed in the business longer, perhaps I would have, but there was still enough Idaho innocence left in me to be disgusted by the thought. Giving a stranger a peek wasn't so bad, but I didn't want the guy's hands on me, let alone his other body parts. Imagine where the nasty things might have recently been poking.

Even though I avoided that, the work was demanding. But I made bank, more than some of the other girls. Probably because word got around among the pedophile underbelly that there was a kid dancing at the Jellybean Club. I always did look young for my age. And making that easy cash—upward of five hundred dollars a night on weekends—made it harder and harder to commit to earning my BA.

One night this moderately attractive middle-aged man came into the club. He sat in the front row, and as far as I could tell, his eyes never left me, though other girls offered a lot more to look at. He returned the following evening, and the one after that, and his tips got bigger and bigger. I asked around about him.

“His name's Raul Medina,” my favorite bouncer, Scotty, told me. “He owns a chain of pawnshops. Seems like a decent guy.”

“Yeah, except he hangs out in strip clubs,” I joked.

“Doesn't mean he's not a decent guy.”

One of the other girls had been eavesdropping. “Raul's wife got killed in a car wreck a few years ago. Drunk driver took 'er out. Their little kid, too.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I spent a little time with the guy. He was lonely. Paid me to fuck, but he wanted to talk first.”

Raul was, indeed, lonely. The next time he came in, he waited for me to go on break, then sent a note back with Scotty.
You've caught my eye. Would like to spend some time with you. No strings. Nothing kinky. Just want to talk. Cordially, Raul.
He didn't say he'd compensate me for my company, but it was implied. I could have declined, but something about the man had piqued my interest. Besides, I liked the word “cordially.”

I agreed to a cup of coffee, and we met up at a little diner off the strip. Strangely, I felt shy. I mean, he'd seen just about every inch of my flesh, but exposing my personality was something else altogether. Good thing he was easy to talk to.

He told me his story first—how his grandfather, a Peruvian immigrant, started collecting stuff from yard sales. Whatever he could find, repair, and resell to make ends meet for his growing family. How Raul's father was the only child of six to see the value in that and continue the tradition, building storage sheds in back of his rented property to house excess items. How when he passed, too young, of cancer, he left everything to sixteen-year-old Raul.

“He made me promise to take care of my mother and sisters,” Raul said. “I was just a kid, but I made that vow. I worked hard in school. Learned about business. Saving. Investing. I got my college degree, but even before I did, I opened my first store. The biggest lesson I ever learned was to be fair with my customers, even though they weren't being fair to themselves.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Gambling is a sickness, like any addiction. I've never yet met a gambler who didn't know he was sick, yet they rarely ask for help, or walk away. If you have a fever, you take aspirin, right? A pawnshop is the opposite of aspirin. It won't fix you; it only enables your illness. So I made sure never to cheat my customers, take advantage of the weak. I thought it was the least I could do.

“Somehow, I always made a profit. Then, I invested that profit, invested again. One store became six, and they all flourished. They're still healthy. The economy may fluctuate, but good or bad, there will always be a demand for ready cash, especially in a city like Las Vegas.”

As he talked, I studied him. For a guy in his late forties, he was decent looking—caramel skin; gold-flecked brown eyes; black hair, salted with gray. He had a gorgeous smile, with perfect teeth, not a single filling or need for one. He told me that was the one thing he made sure to do for himself. I liked that about him. That, and he always smelled clean. Not perfumed. Just straight soap-and-water clean.

“Now you know all about me,” he finished. “Tell me about you. What's your story?”

I gave him the basics. Crazy mother. No father, at least not one I could identify. Grew up in Idaho. Mom chased a loser boyfriend to Vegas five years before, when I was fifteen, then pretty much left me and my younger sister to fend for ourselves. I managed to graduate high school, was working my way through college.

“One tip at a time?” he asked.

“That's right. Slow going, but I'm determined.”

“You have a man?”

“Lots,” I joked. But when I saw he was serious, I amended, “If you mean do I have someone special in my life, the answer is no.”

“Why not? Pretty girl like you.”

“I guess dancing sort of puts things in perspective, you know? All those men, worshipping my body, with no concern about who I am or what I want or what would make me happy. If I let them, they'd have sex with me, and then they'd discard me.”

“But sex is only part of a relationship. What about love?”

I laughed. “What about it? I've never seen it, at least not up close.”

“That is sad. Twenty years old and you never—”

“Hey, now. I'm not a virgin.”

“You didn't let me finish. Twenty years old and you've never been in love? That needs to change, and very soon.”

I wouldn't say I married Raul for love, but he never knew that, and over the next few weeks, he definitely fell in love with me. He was kind and caring, and that was not something I'd ever experienced, either. He took me out of the club, whisked me away from that life and into his lovely home, but only after our nuptials at a quirky Elvis-themed wedding chapel. “I don't want you to be my lover,” he told me. “I want you to be my wife.”

Raul valued education. In fact, I credit him with feeding my fascination with language. I've always had a love for words, one of the few traits I share with my sister. As kids, when things got rough at home, we'd escape into music, listening to our favorite songs over and over, until we'd committed the lyrics to memory. R.E.M. Genesis. The Cure. Duran Duran. And later, Nirvana. Green Day. Pearl Jam. Hole. There were times I would have sworn Patty Smyth was singing straight to me.

But Raul taught me the importance of cultivating a good vocabulary. “To earn the respect of the world, you must learn to speak eloquently,” he said, “and you must understand the meaning of your words. There isn't much worse than a person who assumes knowledge he doesn't possess.”

He put me through school, allowed me to earn my degree at my own pace. He taught me business. Investment strategies. How to manipulate a better deal. To appreciate quality over quantity. How to drive a stick shift—in a really fast car.

And, yes, he showed me how good sex can be when your partner wants to please you. I wasn't a virgin when we got married, but Raul Medina was most definitely responsible for my first orgasm.

Raul also taught me to ski, or at least provided me with the ability to learn, putting me in private lessons at Mammoth, Kirkwood, Diamond Peak, Squaw Valley, and Alpine Meadows. Each mountain had its challenges, and each instructor, strengths. By the time I first skied Heavenly, I didn't need lessons anymore. Raul continued to take them because, he said, he wanted to keep up with me. Though he tried very hard to do just that, he couldn't. And, as it turned out, he shouldn't have tried.

I was twenty-three and a widow. It was my first funeral and the last time I let myself cry. Tears are a sign of weakness. The wolves gathered quickly.

it only reinvents itself,