The Passion Agency (2 page)

Chris Talion was a last man on the bench for the
Lakers but wouldn’t likely hold that spot the next season. He was
handsome with dark hair and a Hollywood jaw. T

hat day he didn’t say much but tried to make jokes
with Donna who was a little too tired to care. Turns out he had
heard about this pretty waitress from a couple of his buddies who
weren’t with the team, but had come to the restaurant.

They told Chris the stats. She brunette, dark, sexy,
and with a great body and as the guys in the group liked to say, a
“slammin” booty.

Chris acted shy but it was all an act. He didn’t have
a serious girlfriend because it wasn’t necessary. Every night there
would be set of willing beautiful young women of all shapes,
colors, and sizes waiting outside the player’s exit at whatever
arena the team was at. These women would require no more than a
pulse in return, provided you were a pro basketball player or
“baller”.

It was that easy and Chris Talion was enjoying the
lifestyle to the fullest during his season on the end of the
Laker’s bench. There was always room for more and he put his eyes
and mind on Donna right away.

When he asked her for her number, she was flattered
and didn’t try to play like there was a reason she couldn’t or
wouldn’t. Having received word from the dishwasher in the back that
he was a pro and Laker, Donna knew her odds of ever seeing him
again were pretty low. Bottom line: playing hard to get wasn’t a
good idea when a catch like that was on the line

He called that night after their game ended at around
ten and her along for a burger and a drive to the coast. She
readily agreed. That’s how it was. A poor woman and guy with lots
of money and prestige asking you out, you didn’t quibble. Donna
told herself she would never jump in a car with a man she didn’t
really know, but here existed one of the very acceptable
exceptions.

If she didn’t, some other girl would.

Donna Casteel was looking hard for a better life in
her early 30s when she met her baller.

That night after they reached the coast, he drove
them to a seaside bar in Hermosa Beach where they downed
drinks.

They got along famously.

Donna had some sports knowledge and even more street
smarts. She could always talk about everything.

She talked about it being her dream to start her own
business (hair and nails salon) and he talked about nothing much
but how interesting she was. He was a Stanford grad so he did have
a brain. Clearly. But he wasn’t on the date for the intellectual
exercise.

Chris saw what he wanted and he bided his time
figuring he’d get it that night.

After about an hour and a couple drinks apiece, Chris
suggested they go find a local room and spend the night. Donna put
up little resistance.

Out of that night of passion, a relationship that
lasted for well over a decade was born. It was still continuing but
with an ugly subplot on the day Donna headed out to Carson for her
job interview.

Donna had nothing to lose and was rolling the dice
that this one great catch could be something more. She knew what
she was doing. She figured that maybe if she played along and
rolled the dice it might become an actual relationship.

It did. TFor large chunks of time, Chris, though no
longer a Laker, would crash out at Donna’s small home. He even
moved in for a spells beginning in 2011.

This cohabitation is where the relationship took a
permanent and unsavory turn of events. But it was also the starting
point of the path to real passion for Donna Casteel.

…

Donna always saw herself as a hands-on and caring
parent who loved her daughter Brea with all the passion she could
in the limited time she had in her day. Being lower middle class
with little formal education and no great earning prospects in the
future, she either kept working jobs she hated or go on
welfare.

Like a lot of people from her economic status, she
qualified for a lot less “free stuff” than she thought she could.
She knew because she checked. One clerk put it to her straight.

You don't just come down and fill out some paper work
and sit on your duff for eternity.

So she worked and she worked hard. She worked, like
so many in her position, without any real hope of ever not working
that hard.

Her dreams were going nowhere. She quickly aged
beyond her ability to get them met by a man with money. Her
basketball player catch wasn’t in the habit of giving out money to
his girls.

He believed (and correctly as it turned out) that you
didn’t have to actually spend any money on women if you were rich.
You just had to give them a smell of the bread baking. They’d
simply hang around hoping for a taste.

But as time went on through the middle part of the
2000s, Chris’ money dried up. Not only was no longer making the big
salary but for a while here and there he was no longer making any
money. Yet he spent money like crazy. He behaved like the good
times would never end, even though they already ended years
before.

Many times it was Donna throwing money his way.

When she’d become exasperated and ask him why he
wasn’t out putting that Stanford degree to good use, he would
always fall back on a tryout he was having with some team.

Then he’d disappear like he didn’t want to talk about
it. He's always come back a week or so later claiming he had
impressed some team. At one point, he went to Europe for a spell
and another time he went to Asia for a couple months. Both times he
made a few bucks but then never seemed to have any.

He'd soon return to Donna’s life and Donna's bed.
Chris, Donna, Brea, under one little roof.

Donna working harder than ever. She was constantly
hearing rumors she would lose her job with the city. This was the
one she couldn't afford to lose because it had the benefits for her
and Brea.

The stress was enough without feeling like you were
being used by the guy Donna got with because she envisioned him
being able to make her life easier.

Everywhere she turned, Donna felt like she was
trapped by her lack of money. It was an awful feeling but one that
hung over Donna Casteel’s life since the day Darry walked out the
door and left her on her own with baby Brea.

She knew the dream of running her own business was
the key to breaking out from the cycle.

As time wore on, the idea of being a businesswoman
became a bitter taunt of something that was never going to
happen.

One thing Donna knew about being in the working poor:
dreams, such as starting a business to make decent money and
provide a better life for your family, were fleeting. If you
pursued them, you often did so at the expense of something else. If
you failed, you had no safety net to protect you.

Donna couldn’t afford to lose and when you can’t
afford to lose, you can’t really try to go into business. Not on
your own and not without the clear path being illuminated by
someone who knew it.

Donna was caught in an endless cycle of fear. The
world grew around her and seemingly prospered while she
struggled.

Donna wasn’t a bitter person but she was a
pessimist.

…

Brea Casteel was almost nothing like her mother. Not
that they didn’t get along. They did. It was really impossible not
to get along with Brea because she was fully and completely
non-confrontational. She lacked any edge whatsoever.

She rejected, for whatever reason and no one really
knew why, things like make up or the latest fashions. She read, and
read a lot, but even that had a certain mystery to it.

What was she reading? Why wasn’t she spending her
spare time with her friends being a high school girl?

It wasn’t a lack of physical beauty. Brea had her
mom’s complection only slightly lighter skinned. She had a small
nose and brown to black hair that fell wherever because she let it
do so.

She just seemed like she was indifferent to the whole
concept of trying to create beauty. She dressed in oversized
corduroys and pullover long sleeve shirts or t-shirts. She wore a
rubber band in her hair.

She was kind to her mom and did what she was told.
She never showed much interest in boys or partying. Donna knew she
had some friends. But for a 19-year-old girl, her existence
couldn’t have been any different than Donna's at that same age.
Donna was an alpha dog and one of the most outgoing and popular
girls in school.

Brea brought home great grades but did nothing
practical with them. She didn’t seem to care about going to college
but she was quietly filling out applications to both schools and
scholarship endowments left and right. This was just her and her
way. Rather than talk about it, she’d go do it. She always would
stay out of everyone’s hair in the process.

Wispy and non-athletic, Brea was hardly a hit with
the boys. It wasn't hard to figure out. She didn’t respond to their
signals of interest with any of her own. She came off as cold.

She would have loved to have a boyfriend. Brea told
one of her friends once when they were getting really high in her
friend’s backyard over in Hawthorne that she wasn’t going to go out
of her way to do anything “abnormal” to make it happen.

Brea called it “not bending to social pressure”.
People who knew her called it downright weird, even going so far as
to say she was mentally disturbed.

When one of her counselors at school (who was
desperately trying to get Brea into a magnet program for the
gifted) told her people thought she was mentally infirm, she
responded: “let them think what she want.”

To Brea, this was just more judgmental behavior from
judgmental people. This behavior she detested more than anything.
To her it was just one more reason not to seek out and connect with
people.

She believed the connections she was making were of
greater depth. There just weren’t many of them. This was fine.
Because to Brea, secrecy was paramount. The people she met and the
lives they shared together were always on her terms.

She could be powerfully attractive because she was so
intelligent and also so difficult. If you were a woman, you’d sense
your own mental superiority being let into her inner circle. If you
were a man, you doubtlessly saw an understated beauty who would
never fail to turn you on by her appearance, despite her outward
indifference to “being made up”.

Donna had always taken a hands-off approach to
raising Brea. She found her brilliant but complicated. Something
that Donna found to be total happenstance and having nothing to do
with her parenting. She figured the girl would find her way,
whatever it was. As it was, Brea was not a lot of trouble. She was
also very light in the expense department compared to what Donna
could have seen with other girls her age.

Conversely, Donna was forever fixated on things Brea
could care nothing about if you forced her at gunpoint. Things like
the latest shoes or how to apply mascara.

Donna never stopped chasing her youth through the
rebirth of her appearance. She had a natural curiosity that was
never satisfied. She was chatty and had a quick cadence, and often
a poor attention span.

Where Donna came off as high energy and engaging,
Brea always appeared lethargic.

When asked about her mom one day by her counselor
during Junior year, Brea remarked that she loved her and Donna was
a great mom. The relationship might have been one of the only
semi-normal things in her Brea's life.

This was the “puzzle of Brea” as Donna called it.
Together they lived under the same roof but wholly separately in
spirit, personality, and outlook. As it turned out, it was this
long-standing acceptance of each other’s differences and lack of
any great need to force themselves on the other which kept their
relationship intact during whatever trauma.

…

Donna never asked how it got started, but she knew.
He had a lot of extra time on his hands while Donna was off working
her day away. Brea was home earlier in the day from school. She
never worked and wasn’t particularly active.

Donna knew Chris was never faithful. Do she could
hardly act surprised when she surprised them in Brea’s bedroom one
afternoon.

The interesting part was how it all came to pass.

They had begun “fooling around” as Chris called it to
his hoops buddies or “having sex” as Brea described it to Lacey her
friend from Hawthorne. Neither of them were in a social support
structure that would give them the faintest idea what they were
doing was wrong. She certainly wasn’t going to learn it from Donna
who didn’t believe in getting deep with people about sex or their
morals. This belief extended to how she raised her young
daughter.

One day Chris was laying around the house when Brea
came home. He’d been thinking about it for a while. This skinny
young girl with model features and a somewhat aloof bitchiness (as
he saw it). She was never with a guy.

One big thing he knew was Brea would never say a word
to anyone who would let it get back to Donna. He and Donna were
stilling having sex most every night he was there. le.