Red Light Wives (17 page)

I
didn't like it when my wives-in-law made me angry. It made me have feelings toward them that I later regretted. But I couldn't help myself tonight. I wanted to kill Ester and Lula. It was just like those nosy bitches to follow me over to Capp Street in the Mission District. That's where a lot of the street girls worked. They took care of business behind or between parked cars, doing two tricks for the price of one, or for free if the motherfucker was packing a weapon.

I didn't make half the amount of money on the streets that I made working for Clyde, but in my case, every dollar counted. Besides, what I made on the streets was all mine.

Ester and Lula knew more about my business than they needed to know, and I didn't like that one bit. So what if I needed a little extra money every now and then. Let those heifers try to raise three kids on the few dates that Clyde set up for me.

Tonight was a bad one for me. Mainly because I was still pissed off with Ester and Lula for spying on me. I couldn't get rid of the scowl on my face. And it probably had something to do with my trick canceling a date after he saw me. Clyde had set me up with this Jewish doctor from San Jose, in San Francisco to attend a medical convention.

“Mr. Goldstein is a good time, baby. He's into spankin' so he needs a big, strong, strappin' honey like you. But don't worry, you'll get to spank the shit out of him, too. Don't you hurt him now. He's one of the biggest cash cows I know.”

“I've never spanked a man before.” I sighed, picturing some freak in a mask greeting me at the door with a paddle in his hand. “I've only spanked my kids,” I admitted.

“Just close your eyes and pretend you spankin' one of your kids,” Clyde said impatiently. “Anyway, he's a cool dude. I used to play cards with him when he lived in 'Frisco. You'll love him to death,” Clyde assured me.

I hadn't met a single one of Clyde's customers whom I “loved to death,” even though he said that every time he sent one of us on a date for the first time with a regular customer. It was just a job and there was no love in it for me. Except for the money.

Mr. Goldstein had a suite at the Hyatt Regency, the same hotel Liz Taylor stayed at when she came to San Francisco. As soon as that motherfucker saw me, he decided he wasn't so horny after all and practically chased me back out the door! I called Clyde from my cell phone as soon as I got in the elevator and told him what happened. But that goddamn Jew had already called Clyde and told him God knows what about me! All Clyde told me was, “Dude asked for a stout Black woman. He said he didn't like your attitude, girl. What's your problem?”

“Nothing. I just had some things on my mind,” I said, whimpering.

“Well, you better get them things off your mind if you want to get paid,” Clyde snapped.

“What about Mr. Bob? He hasn't asked for me in a long time,” I whined, so mad and offended I was trembling. I could tell that Clyde was getting impatient by the way he kept letting out his loud breath and snorting.

“Listen, baby, Mr. Bob ain't never called for you on his own. I only set you up with him when there wasn't nobody else to send. Now you sit tight. This is the Christmas week and things is slow. You ought to be at home with your babies anyway.”

“That's just it, Clyde. It's Christmas and I want it to be a nice one for my kids. You know how greedy my oldest daughter is. Please, hook me up.” I didn't like to beg, but then I did a lot of things I didn't like to do. Like put up with my daughter, Juliet's smart mouth. Juliet was only ten, but she was grown enough to criticize everything about me, from my weight to the way I dressed. I had to do everything I could to please that child. I couldn't stand the thought of her feeling about me the way I had felt about my mother. Well, it had already come to that, but there was still time for me to keep it from getting any worse. My kids were all I had left in the world. I
had
to keep them happy.

“Oh, I got beaucoup goodies for your three babies. Keisha's at my place wrappin' gifts for 'em now. But I can't help you with no other date tonight, sister. Now you have a Merry Christmas. I'll call you Sunday after I get home from church.”

Clyde hung up before I could say another word. I was so angry, I was gritting my teeth like a mad dog. It was still early and I had just enough money on me for a cab to take me over to Capp Street.

It was just my luck to get a cabdriver who was too paranoid to take me all the way there. Cabdrivers got robbed there all the time. A few had even been killed. He dropped me off on Market Street, in the middle of downtown where he felt “safe.” I had to take two buses to get to my destination.

Things started to look up once I got to Capp Street. None of the regular girls were on the corner. Just a scowling, homeless old White woman pushing a stolen grocery store cart filled to the top with her grungy possessions. She didn't waste any time getting on my case.

“Hey!” she yelled, waving a gnarled hand at me. She had on enough dusty, ill-fitting clothes for three people—dirty rags she had no doubt fished out of a trash can. A knitted cap covered her head and the top half of her face. I could barely see her bloodshot, beady eyes. But there was no mistaking the extreme look of contempt on her face. “I'm talkin' to you, you low-down piece of shit. The mayor's goin' to run all of you sleazy tramps off these streets. You fat horny pig!”

It had come to this. Even a filthy, garbage-eating old homeless woman had no respect for me.

I surprised her when I said, “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

The woman grumbled and moved on. A few minutes later, a few anxious men slowed down their cars and waved dollar bills at me. After four hours and a lot of fumbling around in the backseats of cars that looked like low-riding boats, with men so gross I almost threw up in their laps, I called it a night.

Even though I was depressed, I was glad my kids would have a nice Christmas after all.

I
always kept the door to my room locked when I was in it, and even when I wasn't in it. I didn't want my mama to sneak up on me while I was playing around on the computer Daddy gave me for my birthday this year.

“Maybe this computer'll keep you occupied enough so we won't have to worry about you all the time,” Daddy had told me, his gray mustache looking like a fuzzy worm wiggling up over his lip. He looked like a schoolteacher sitting at the desk in my room, showing me how to use my new Dell computer.

“I won't get in no more trouble, Daddy,” I chirped. My mind was spinning in so many different directions, I couldn't even remember the last stupid thing I'd done to upset my mama and daddy. I smiled at Daddy before I asked him what else I was getting for my birthday. Like he did most of the time when I got on his nerves, he just waved his hand in the air and rolled his eyes back in his head. Then he trotted out of my room back to the den to do whatever it was he did in there. I didn't care. I had me a Dell computer!

It seemed like every time I turned my Dell on, naked people popped up on my monitor, whether I wanted them to or not. I couldn't figure out how all of those people out there found out about me to be sending me so much stuff! There were titties, butts, and peckers all over my screen!

And I liked it.

I had been looking at naked people and playing around in chat rooms for a week that day when Mama came knocking at my door. She was beating on it like the police.

“Helen, open this door!” For an old woman, my mama had a young voice, and she knew how to use it. I hit a button on my keyboard to make the pictures on my screen shrink to a little bitty space down at the bottom before I ran and opened my door. I cracked it just enough for Mama to see my face.

“Yes, Mommy?”

Before some more words even got out of Mama's mouth, she let out a deep breath and looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time. I could tell she was tired. Her eyes were puffy and red, her arm was up against the wall outside my room to help prop her up. She was a wreck.

“Helen, would you please not lock the door to your room? There is no reason for you to lock your door.” Mama's voice did not match her face. She was sixty-six and looked and acted it. Ever since she retired from her job at a bank last year, she stopped dressing up and making up her face. Lines and wrinkles had taken over, making it look like she had on a mask made out of brown crepe paper. But she used to be a pretty woman. I knew that because of all the old pictures she had laying around of her when she was real young. She used to have thick black hair that touched her shoulders, big light brown eyes that slanted up, and because my daddy used to be a dentist, she still had perfect white teeth. I got my mama's looks. Not the way she was now, but the way she looked when she was young. Back then, hella men whistled at her. Uh-huh. Now I was the one the men whistled at. Every time I walked down a street. People would be surprised if I told them how many construction workers rubbed on my butt when I stopped to talk to them on the days that Mama let me go walking by myself.

And I liked that, too. I had been thinking about that just before Mama came banging on my door.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Rockelle Harper wants you to come to her house in an hour to babysit. She said to bring your sleeping clothes on account of she'll be out for the night. That old man she nurses has gotten sicker, and he will need her more. I hope you don't mind helping her with those children.” Mama rubbed her nose and stared at me. She had a face that looked more like a mask. Her expression was always the same. It was hard to tell when she was mad, sad, or glad. The only way I ever knew how she was feeling was when she told me. “I'm so glad Rockelle has so much trust in you.” Mama patted her jaw and parted her lips like she wanted to smile, but I knew she couldn't anymore.

I grinned and shifted most of my weight to one side. “Me, too,” I said, holding on to my grin.

“It's done wonders for your disposition.” Mama stood back and put her hands on her hips. “And that fool Reverend Mays said that there wasn't no hope for you…”

I nodded because our preacher was a fool and always had been. The only hope he had was trying to pinch my titties in the church basement. I had refused to go back to that church when Daddy and Mama tried to make me. They gave up real quick when I told them why I didn't want to go back. We even started going to a different church, but I didn't want to go to that one, either. I told them that if God was everywhere, all the time, like Reverend Mays said He was, then I could talk to God without even leaving my room.

“Uh-huh.” I stood up straight and opened my door all the way. “Tell Miss Rocky I'll be right on over.” Girls like me had a hard time hiding our excitement, but I tried. I started grinning and blinking. There was nothing I liked better than going to Miss Rocky's house. That's where I had the most fun. When she didn't ask me to babysit, and I had no other reason to be there, I'd watch her house from my bedroom window.

After her husband, Joe, left her to run away with another woman, Miss Rocky started having all kinds of strange folks in and out of her house. Every now and then, a man named Clyde with a cute face for a man came by Miss Rocky's house when I was there. He would look at me with a long eye until Miss Rocky would shoo me out of the room.

Clyde never stayed that long at Miss Rocky's house and sometimes when he left, Miss Rocky would be so fidgety she would have to drink a beer or something else. A Mexican woman and two other Black ladies came and went at Miss Rocky's house all the time, too. They would drink and grin and whisper in one room while I looked after the kids in another part of the house. Right after the ladies left, Miss Rocky would start cussing. Then she would tell me that they were greedy heifers because they always slurped up all her alcohol.

Miss Rocky had a computer, too. One night while I was online in a chat room, a man in Australia sent me an instant message, then an e-mail with a picture of his dick attached! At first, I thought it was a long, fat mushroom. So I laughed out loud, LOL in computer talk. But the real fun was all that other stuff that Miss Rocky tried to hide in her house.

Now, I didn't like to snoop through other people's things, but what happened with Miss Rocky wasn't my fault. While I was going through the closet in her bedroom, I stumbled across a box under a pile of clothes. In it, I found a copy of
The Spectator
with a picture of her in a skimpy little outfit, with her tongue sticking out like a snake.

The Spectator
was this newspaper small enough to fold under your arm like
The Enquirer
, and just as scandalous. The people in this newspaper liked to get naked or squeeze into some black leather, hide their faces with masks, and show off. Our paperboy didn't bring this kind of newspaper to our house. I didn't know where they sold this nasty stinking thing. I knew about it on account of I found a copy in my big brother's house smashed between some books on a case in his living room.

So, anyway I cracked open
The Spectator
, and there was Miss Rocky in a nightgown, stretched out on a black rug, looking right into the camera! Honest to God, my eyes almost rolled out of my head. I wondered what nasty so-and-so took this picture. Anyway, her just laying there half naked must not have been enough for her. There were words next to her picture:
Let Baby Love cum ROCK your world
. You would think that these people running a newspaper, even a nasty newspaper, would at least learn how to spell
come
. And Baby Love? Uh-huh. She could call herself whatever she wanted to. Miss Rocky's real name was Rockelle Harper.

Right below Miss Rocky's picture was a telephone number. Now I knew Miss Rocky's number by heart, but this was a different one. Then I remembered Miss Rocky had had the phone company come to the house and hook up another phone in her bedroom with a different number two weeks earlier. As soon as the telephone man left, she'd hooked up an answering machine to it and told me not to never answer that particular telephone when she left me in her house to look after her kids.

“Why?” I'd asked her.

“Because I said so, that's why.” She waved her thick, lemon-colored hand at me, her long curved nails looking like a hawk's. She was being a real bitch. Well, two could play that game. I decided right then and there to act like I hadn't heard her tell me never to answer that new telephone.

And it's a good thing I did answer Miss Rocky's other telephone, first chance I got. How else would I have found out what I did? Just last night, right after Miss Rocky left her house with that snooty Mexican woman named Ester who wore a red dress and drove a red car, that mysterious telephone started ringing. I just happened to be in Miss Rocky's bedroom looking for the key to her liquor cabinet. Miss Rocky had turned the ringer off, so I couldn't really hear the telephone when it rang. But the answering machine made a clicking noise when it came on, so that's how I knew somebody was calling. Miss Rocky and that Mexican woman pulled off in that red car just in time. I turned up the volume on the answering machine. Come to find out, it was a man, and he had a real nice voice.

I cleared my throat and took a real deep breath. Then I sat down on Miss Rocky's bed with that blue velvet bedspread she just got. I crossed my legs and cocked my head to the side, making myself real comfortable. I pretended I was in my bedroom.

“Hullo?” I said, so nervous I almost choked on some air.

“Uh, is Baby Love in?” He sounded White.

“You mean Rockelle?”

“I'm sorry.”

“That's her real name. Sometimes we call her Rocky.”

A long time passed. The man was being real quiet, but I could tell he was still there because I could hear him breathing and I could hear music in the background. I cleared my throat to get his attention.

“Is this 555–1986?” he asked, finally.

I looked at the number that was printed on the front of the phone. “Yup,” I told the man.

He coughed first, then he started talking again, but this time he sounded different. Like he was nervous. “I'm responding to the ad in, uh,
The Spectator
. I liked the photograph they featured.”

I figured that. The telephone number under the picture of Miss Rocky in that nasty piece of a newspaper was the same number on the telephone. “I figured that,” I told the man, trying to sound like a smart-ass, the way Miss Rocky did when I got on her nerves.

“Baby Love, Rocky, whatever. Is that you? That's a beautiful woman in that photograph.”

“No, but I'm a beautiful woman, too. You ought to see me in my blue dress.”

I couldn't figure out why this man was laughing. I didn't think there was anything funny about what I'd just said. “Well,” he was still chuckling a little, “is Rocky available?”

“No, sir. She had to go to work.”

“I see. Well, uh, when do you expect her back?”

“Oh, she comes and goes.” I held the telephone real hard and close to my ear. I looked at the door because I heard a noise. It would be just like that wild child of Miss Rocky's, Juliet, to have her ear propped up against the door like me when I was being nosy. I felt the smart thing to do was whisper. “She's got a lot of friends since her husband left her for another woman. That's why she's always on the go these days, if you know what I mean…”

The man took a long time to say something else.

“She sounds like a really interesting gal.”

“Oh, she sure is. Especially when she's naked.” I covered my mouth. I didn't want this man to hear me giggling.

He gasped and started breathing real hard. “I'm sure you are as hot as she is.” His voice was husky, like he knew something on Miss Rocky. “Are you her roommate?”

“Something like that,” I said, sounding husky myself.

Uh-oh, this was getting good. It sounded like I was about to get all kinds of good stuff on Miss Rocky. What I would do with it, I didn't know. Maybe if she knew that I knew all of her business, she would treat me more like a friend than a babysitter. Shoot. I really liked Miss Rocky. And other than babysitting for her, I tried to do other things I thought might impress her, too. Now, she liked to read her some books. I thought that if I started reading books like her, she'd see that we had that in common and she would mellow out some.

Well, reading a bunch of books didn't do much good for me. One time I wrestled with this granddaddy of a book that Miss Rocky had read called
Clan of the Cave Bear
and all it did for me was make my head hurt. I couldn't tell what that book was about because I couldn't get past page five. It couldn't have been harder for me to read if it had been in Chinese. Anyway, I never was that good when it came to reading.

I started wrapping the telephone cord around my fingers. Then I slid into the red velvet chair that Miss Rocky kept next to her bed. One thing I could say about the woman was she sure knew what to spend her money on. As soon as my butt hit that fancy chair, I snatched up a cute little bottle of perfume with a foreign-looking name I couldn't read, and I sprayed my face, my crotch, my neck, and my wrists.

“Do you…uh, date?”

“Yep! I date all the time,” I said, sniffing my wrists.

“What's your name? Uh, or do I already know you?”

Now that was a strange question for him to be asking me. I held the telephone away from my face and looked at it before I put it back against my ear.

“Uh-uh. You don't know me,” I said, wondering what made this man think we'd met when he was talking to me for the first time just now.

“I see. Well, tell me more about yourself. If Rockelle is already too busy these days, maybe you and I could work something out. Would you be interested?”