Red Light Wives (27 page)

“Look, Meg, you ain't got to be layin' up with none of them dudes if you don't want to. We can always get money from somewhere else,” Clyde told me when I was forced to tell him what I was into, after I'd broken so many dates with him. “I got all kinds of ways to make money.”

“Knocking drunk old men in the back of the head, ripping off drug dealers, breaking into cars—is that any better than what I do?” I wanted to know. I didn't enjoy working as an escort. But it was the only way I could get the money I needed to be with Clyde as often as I wanted.

“That ain't the point. They got some maniacs out there doin' all kinds of shit to girls when they get 'em alone. You ain't scared of hoppin' in a car with a stranger? You ain't like them girls from my neighborhood and the barrios. Sisters and Latinas, they know how to get down when some motherfucker try to disrespect them and get ugly.”

I shrugged. “I can take care of myself, too,” I insisted, waving the ten crisp twenty dollar bills I had just made an hour earlier. Clyde's anxious eyes lit up as he looked at the money. “The service checks the men out first. Old businessmen, regular customers. These men are not only real harmless, some of them are quite nice. That guy from United Airlines that I went out with tonight, all he wanted was a simple hand job. It only took ten minutes,” I said proudly.

An anxious look appeared on Clyde's face. “And?” In a flash, he snatched the money from me and was looking at it like it was something rare and precious. To a boy like him, I assumed it was.

“And what?”

“And what else did you do for a trick?” With his tongue sliding across his bottom lip, Clyde counted the money with a flourish, tapping it with the tips of his fingers before folding it in half. Then, like it was money that he had earned, he stuffed it all into his pocket. “It was that easy, you say?”

I nodded. “It was that easy.”

Clyde gave me a brief blank look, and then a naughty smile eased onto his face. “Shit,” he mouthed, patting his pocket with the money in it.

“Most of the guys do want hand jobs, tittie fucks, blow jobs. I haven't even had to fuck any of them yet,” I revealed, cringing at the thought of my next date with a stranger.

“Hmmm,” Clyde said. “Like I said, you ain't got to be layin' up with them dudes to make money. But, if you ain't got no problem with it, I ain't got no problem with it neither. You just keep bein' cool, and I'll do the same thing.”

“That's cool,” I said, proud that I had become so street smart.

Clyde still came around to do maintenance work at our house, and, on me, on a regular basis. I had lost my virginity the year before to the visiting cousin of a casual friend. And I'd also slept with a few other boys before Clyde, but making love with Clyde was an experience within itself. I had never enjoyed sex as much as I did with him, and I never would, not even with the man I married.
Especially
with the man I married. With Clyde, I would get excited just by the sight of his dark brown skin being close enough to mine to make us both sweat. I had no trouble sneaking out to meet him in motels and drive-in movies, paying for it with money I'd collected from the many eager men, young and old, who had made my life more exciting and so much more fun.

 

During the seventies, having unprotected sex was not that big of a deal. Almost everybody I knew had had a curable sexually transmitted disease at least once. Abortions were legal in California, so getting rid of a baby before it could be born only meant a side trip to a clinic and a few hours to recuperate. It was nothing more than a minor inconvenience. I had girlfriends who had already had more than one abortion, but the notion frightened me.

I don't know where or when I got pregnant, and I don't know why I was surprised when it happened. The first and only time we discussed condoms, Clyde laughed and said, “Usin' a rubber is like takin' a bath in a raincoat—what's the point?” Him pulling out of me before ejaculating made him laugh just as hard. “That's like chewin' up a piece of fried chicken, then spittin' it out instead of swallowin' it. Shit. What's the point?”

I was not prepared for Clyde's reaction when I told him I was pregnant. We were sharing the well-used backseat of Mom's new Buick in the last row at a drive-in movie theater. I don't even remember what movie was playing that night. Clyde's body stiffened, and he pushed me away as soon as I'd revealed my condition.

“You been mighty busy at that escort agency. How I know it's my baby?”

“I have not had full sex with anybody but you in the last three months,” I told him, and, it was the truth. “And you are the only person I've ever fucked without a condom.”

“Well, whether it's mine or not, what you plannin' on doin'? What you goin' to tell your mama and daddy? This kind of news could kill 'em.”

“Oh, I doubt that. Not after all they've been through, losing my brother and my sister and all.”

“Well, I ain't got much to offer, jobwise, but I'll marry you, if you want me to.” Clyde scratched the back of his head, which no longer sported a bushy Afro. He was one step from being bald. And on him, even that looked sexy.

Married?

I was the one laughing this time. “You have got to be kidding.
I
can't marry
you
.” I could not believe my ears. My friends and family would never accept my marriage to Clyde. Not because he was Black, but, like he said, he didn't have much to offer me.

I had heard too many horror stories about abortions, so that was out. But even before I told Clyde, or anyone else, that I was pregnant, I had made up my mind to have the baby and give it up for adoption.

“Well, if you think you too good to marry a brother, I got news for you,
Miss Meg
, I'd be too embarrassed to bring you around my family, too. With your flat ass, stringy hair, and your my-shit-don't-stink-'cause-I'm-White attitude. But I'd be willin' to put up with whatever shit I had to put up with to be there for my child. I plan to do what my daddy should have done for me. Put your clothes back on so we can get the hell up out of here.”

Clyde and I left the drive-in movie in silence. We were halfway to his house, where I would drop him off, before we spoke again.

“So, how far along are you?” he asked in a distant voice.

“A couple of months, I think.”

“Let me know when you wanna go to the place to get took care of. We ain't got to tell 'em our real names or nothin'. The county'll pay for it, too.”

“I'm not having an abortion, if that's what you're talking about!” I yelled. I didn't tell him that two of my closest friends could no longer have kids because of botched abortions.

“Well, what else the hell do you plan to do? If you plannin' on havin' it, you and your precious family can expect to see me at your house
every
day anyway 'cause I'll wanna see my kid.”

“You care enough about this baby you want to be a part of its life, but you'd be willing to let me abort it?” I hissed.

Clyde slammed his fist against the side of the car door so hard the windows rattled. “What's your plan then?”

“Adoption,” I said calmly.

“Bullshit! Oh—heeeell no! Ain't no child of mine goin' to be out there in the world bein' raised by some stranger as long as I'm alive. If you have this baby, you give it to me. I will see that he or she get taken care of real good.”

After losing my brother, Paul, to Vietnam, and my sister, Fiona, to the unknown, Mom and Dad had experienced enough pain where their children were concerned to last them a lifetime. My little “problem” didn't raise as much of a ruckus as I'd expected. I was my parents' only hope if they wanted to have grandchildren. However, my first child was considered more of an inconvenience.

“My cousin in Mississippi, Bobby Lee, he'll keep the child with him and his wife down there in Mississippi. That way, y'all ain't got to worry about nothin' embarrassin',” Effie insisted. “White folks is too frail-minded to be tryin' to raise a half-Black child. Especially y'all.”

Effie, Clyde, my parents, and I had gathered in my parents' living room, for the last time, I might add, to discuss the situation.

“We will take care of all financial obligations until the child is of legal age,” Dad said, clearing his throat. My poor father looked twice his age. In the last ten years, he'd lost all of his hair. And the handsome face that I'd bragged about all through elementary school looked ragged and beaten. Mom didn't look too much better. There was sadness in her eyes that no amount of makeup could hide.

“We don't want your money,” Clyde barked, holding his hand up defensively. “All I want from y'all is my child.” He leaped up from his seat and started pacing the floor like a caged tiger.

“Clyde, raisin' a child is expensive. We gwine to need all the help we can get. These folks are the child's grandparents, and they have some say-so,” Effie insisted, looking older by the minute. She was already in her late sixties, and sometimes needed as much care as a baby herself.

“I want to be with my child,” Clyde insisted. “I don't want no countrified relatives in no hick town in Mississippi raisin' a child of mine. They couldn't even deal with me!”

I could not believe my eyes. Clyde was crying!

“Then you can take it to Mississippi when it comes and stay there to help raise it,” Effie snapped.

“I don't want to go back to Mississippi,” Clyde whined, wiping his eyes with the back of his trembling hand.

“Then shet up!” Effie roared with such emotion, everyone in the room jumped.

“I'm goin' down there to see my child every chance I get,” Clyde stated, a determined look on his face.

“Son, whenever you want to visit with the child, we will cover all your travel expenses,” Mom offered.

“That won't be necessary, y'all,” Effie said, looking from Mom to Dad. “We want that baby; we'll be responsible for that baby. Yall can go on about your business like nothin' ever happened.” Effie rose with her hands on her hips. “Now if y'all will give me and this boy a ride home, we'll be on our way.” Turning to me, she added, “Miss Meg, you take care of yourself. I don't want you givin' us no puny baby.”

Effie retired shortly after I gave birth to a child I chose not to see, not even once, and I never saw or heard from Clyde Brooks again.

Until now.

E
verything started to unravel right after Clyde and Ester got back from that cruise to Mexico. Clyde would leave messages on our answering machines with date instructions. But other than that, he was avoiding everybody. It was by accident that I ran into him at the bar in Alfredo's, the Fisherman's Wharf restaurant where Clyde spent a lot of his time drinking and socializing with friends like that creepy Lou Cummings from the used car lot. I happened to be there with my favorite out-of-town trick, a software specialist from New York. A lot of the out-of-towners liked to go out to dinner first, before hemming one of us in a hotel room.

I wouldn't have noticed Clyde sitting at the bar, hunched over his drink, if I hadn't gone to the ladies' room before leaving.

My trick, Dylan was his name, had changed his mind at the last minute about which restaurant to go to for dinner. I would have ignored Clyde and he would have ignored me, like we'd been instructed. Clyde didn't like to be around us when we were with a trick. He said that his presence at such a crucial time might make the trick nervous. But the place was crowded, and I had to do a lot of maneuvering to get to the rest room. For about a minute, I was within a few feet of Clyde.

Clyde was a heavy drinker, but he was pretty good at holding his liquor. I had never seen him staggering and slobbering around the way some people did when they had one too many. This time was different. He glanced at me with the strangest expression. Looking over my shoulder to make sure my trick wasn't watching, I leaned toward Clyde. I didn't know how many drinks he'd had, but he smelled like a distillery.

“Clyde, you want me to call you a cab? You look awful, and you smell even worse. You really need to start takin' better care of yourself, brother,” I whispered, touching his arm. Despite how I felt about what I did for Clyde, I cared about him. I guess when you've lost as many loved ones as I had, it was hard not to transfer the leftover love in your heart to someone else.

Clyde looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time in his life. He rubbed his nose and grunted, blinking eyes so red, it scared me. He looked sick.

“It's me, Clyde. Rosalee,” I whispered.

“Oh.” He shook his head and waved me away. “Don't you worry about me. You just go make that money, honey.”

“You don't have to worry about that. That's a done deal. It's you I'm concerned about. All of us are worried about you, Clyde. You haven't been yourself lately.”

Clyde lifted his glass and drank, then he waved me away again, muttering something about some “crazy White bitch…she don't know all what I been through…”

I didn't want to know what that was all about. And I didn't want to stir up any mess so I didn't mention the incident with Clyde in Alfredo's to Lula, Ester, or Rockelle that night. We all had enough problems already. We didn't need to start worrying about Clyde bringing a White woman into our lives, too.

Lula and Ester were already walking around looking like pallbearers. And Rockelle was one step from grabbing tricks by their dicks off the streets. And me, well, I was sick and tired of lying to my mama about how I was making my money. But I felt even worse about the way she was controlling me.

After each of my trips to the senior citizen's complex to visit Mama, I got so depressed I had to get good and drunk just to make it to the next day. If Clyde had lined up a date for me for that same day, I had to get doubly drunk to go.

 

It seemed like we were all already in some kind of mysterious grieving period, all for different reasons. So when Sherrie Armstrong died, we were already in mourning.

Sherrie already had full-blown AIDS by the time I met her. From what I'd heard from Ester, Sherrie got infected with HIV when she was seventeen, twelve years ago. I was happy to know that she had not caught the virus from a trick. She'd caught it from the first guy with whom she had a sexual relationship. But the most ironic thing was, she'd caught it just from having oral sex with the guy.

Ester said that Sherrie had told her that during the time of her relationship with the guy who'd infected her, she'd had an open sore in her mouth—some kind of an ulcer that a mild gum disease had caused. Sherrie didn't go to a doctor when weird things started to happen to her body after she'd sucked that guy's pecker a few times: flulike symptoms, mysterious sores that took too long to heal, extreme night sweats, and the list went on. Since I wasn't a doctor, I didn't know that much about medical situations except my own. And so far, all I'd ever had to deal with were menstrual cramps and other mild ailments that most healthy people experience.

From what Ester had told me, Sherrie knew she was sick even before she started turning tricks. But that didn't stop her. She made her tricks use two condoms at a time, and she refused to kiss any of them on the mouth. Not even with her teeth clenched and her lips pressed together.

However, as soon as Clyde found out, he “divorced” her, so to speak. I remembered some comments he'd made when I first started working for him. The subject was condoms and Sherrie, and why he'd let her go.

“I can't have one of y'all killin' off none of my regular tricks. If one of y'all fuck one of 'em to death, that's one thing. Some of them older tricks ain't nothin' but heart attacks waitin' to happen anyway. A good piece of pussy is all it'll take to push some of 'em into the grave. But that AIDS shit—uh-uh. I can't hang with that shit,” he said.

Anyway, Sherrie had lived on her own and still turned tricks for as long as she could. But when she got to where she couldn't take care of herself, she went home to her family in Berkeley to die.

By the time I met Sherrie, which was about three months ago, she was experiencing some kind of dementia. On some days her mind was as clear and sharp as mine. On others, she would see big green elephants in her room, and long black snakes crawling up the walls.

I liked Sherrie. She was the first White woman with whom I'd ever really associated. But I could not bring myself to go to her funeral. After going to the funerals for my daddy and all four of my siblings, all in less than five years, I had developed a phobia.

I was surprised that I had not gone stark raving mad, or at least as nutty as my mama was. I had not told Mama or anybody else, but the only other funeral I planned to attend was my own. I didn't even think I could go to Mama's, if she went before me. With the business I was in, my chances of going before her were about fifty-fifty. I didn't think that I'd catch AIDS from my relationships with my tricks, but other things concerned me.

Every now and then, we heard about tricks going off on other working girls. And not just the foul, buffoonish tricks you see picking up street girls, but the so-called upscale gentlemen in thousand dollar suits. The police had found one of the most expensive call girls in town, in one of the most expensive hotels in town, strangled to death. The out-of-town trick who had killed her, a Chicago-based computer company CEO, had confessed, but offered no explanation as to why he'd killed the woman. Tricks didn't need any good reasons to do whatever they did to us. Other than getting paid, we had no other civil rights. Rockelle told me that she'd read in one of her books that back in the old days when they were still burning women at the stake for being witches—the equivalent of our ugly stepsisters—women like us were either stoned to death or run out of town. If a woman was unlucky enough to be considered a slut and a witch, her goose wasn't even worth cooking. When it came to respect, as far as mainstream society was concerned, we were one step above child molesters.

One of the first dates that Clyde set up for me was with a fallen priest. A regular trick had called Clyde up and told him that his ex-wife's brother had just left the church, and at forty-eight, he couldn't wait to get his hands on a woman for the first time. And after spending several years, doing whatever missionaries do in some village in Africa, and having to face the healthy butts of the tribeswomen, he couldn't wait to get his hands on a Black woman. And, he'd requested one of the blackest. As soon as I got my orders from Clyde, telling me “get your Black ass out there and act as Black as you can, girl,” I headed for the South San Francisco address I'd been given. A tall, dark-haired man with an Irish accent opened the door and invited me into a living room that was even more disorganized than mine. I felt right at home. There were so many old magazines, newspapers, fast food containers, wine bottles, and empty glasses on the couch, the only place for me to sit was on the frisky ex-priest's lap in a corner on a flowered love seat.

It didn't take much or long to please this man. He paid me three hundred dollars just to let him fondle me, massage my ass, and play with my titties. He said he didn't think that he was ready for intercourse yet. Explaining that procedure was a little extreme for a forty-eight-year-old virgin. He wanted to take a few weeks to get more familiar with women's bodies. That was his excuse, but I'd accidentally glimpsed a pecker that couldn't have been too much bigger than my thumb.

While I was in the bathroom scrubbing off as much of his sweat as I could, that sucker went into my purse and stole back the money he had paid me! I didn't know what he'd done until I got all the way back to my apartment. When I called his house to cuss him out, he had a surprise for me. “Hark! You're nothing but a wench, a she-devil!” he roared. “A demon will erupt from your loins! You will burn in a lake of fire!” Before I could get a word in edgewise, he hung up on me. Clyde retaliated by not sending us on any more dates with the trick who had referred the backsliding priest.

Anyway, we never knew what to expect from a trick. Sherrie's death was just a reminder of what could happen to us if we got too close to the wrong man. You would think that with my history and my devotion to my superstitious mama, I'd be working in a convent or a children's hospital. I thought about what could happen to me all the time and each time, I told myself that I was one day closer to quitting the business.

With me having to pay Clyde's “commission,” in addition to my expenses and Mama's expenses, it was next to impossible for me to save much money. I had a few thousand dollars in a brown padded envelope that I kept behind my refrigerator, but that wouldn't get me too far.

The bottom line was, I didn't have a plan. I didn't know where I was going to go. I didn't know what I was going to do with Mama. I didn't know what I was going to do with myself.

All I did know was I had to get out of the business I was in before it was too late.