‘Big Mike’ looks very similar to the late Chris Penn, both in appearance and perceived sleaze. He’s chubby and perpetually sweating, always decked out in the Italian jewelry trifecta — gold watch, rope chain nuzzled under a thatch of chest hair, and a ring that looks like it belongs to a national champion.
A man who is never charged cover at any strip club in the downtown area, he drives an Escalade, refers to blacks as ’shines’, and his nose – which is about five years from swelling into a vein-busted strawberry – always seems to be whistling. If his office door is locked, that means he’s either doing a line, jerking off to internet porn, or getting blown by a member of his staff.
Big Mike is my boss.
“You juh way up?” he asks, his voice muddled by the ball of mashed donut in his mouth, a mist of powdered sugar covering his lips. He slaps a clipboard into my stomach and, sucking on his fingertips, walks back towards his office without waiting for an answer. His office is slightly smaller than the rest of the place, which is always kept around sixty-five degrees and bathed in the dull florescent lights that reflect off art deco white tile. If one didn’t know any better they’d think they were in Miami.
Sitting in the far corner at a cramped desk overflowing with stacks of paperwork and an outdated computer is Lee, Big Mike’s right-hand. Lee works the phones, and generally lurks behind the scenes unless a particular situation can’t be handled civilly. He sports a thick, graying fu manchu, a shaved head and a leather vest over a black t-shirt. Faded tattoos cover his thick, leathery arms, and one of his eyes is dormant, the result of a decades-old altercation outside of a bar he once worked security for. He often has the TV hanging in the corner tuned to Fox News, though he rarely pays attention to it. Tonight he leafs through a wrinkled skin mag from the 80’s, a disturbing grin creasing his face.
“You got Mari doing her usual at eight,” he mumbles, not bothering to look up from his jizz-encrusted copy of Oui. “Bianca’s on with some out-of-towner at the Renaissance about ten…sounded like a business dude or somethin’. Kelly’s floatin’.”
I rifle off three signatures and give the clipboard back to Mike, who in turn hands over a nine millimeter, a clip, a few bill-sized manila envelopes, two Nextel radios and the keys to a 2006 Lexus IS 350. The gun goes into the center console, and the clip into the glove box, where they will most likely stay until it’s time to turn them in at shift’s end.
Though I’ve always held an affinity for public transportation, the car is one of our society’s greatest sanctuaries. And for the next eight hours, my sanctuary comes equipped with heated leather seats, a six-disc changer and excellent reception. The tranquility before the night’s first pick-up is usually enough for me to shake the grim scene over at dispatch, although initially it took a good while before I could easily shake the sight of Lee surfing some bizarre fetish site while Bill O’Reilly ranted about ‘Hollywood pinheads’.
Maricel had left Quebec with the intention of making it to New York City as an exotic dancer, but, as all plan go awry, she somehow found herself in Cleveland seven years later. She lives in an old apartment building just outside of Coventry, is (legitimately) thirty, prefers 96.5 FM, and likes mango iced tea, a can of which I always remember to pick up at the gas station around the corner from her place.
“Hello, darling,” she says as she swings open the door, her back turned and walking away before I even enter. If it weren’t for several misguided tattoos and the wear and tear of lifestyle, she could easily be the most beautiful woman of any room she walked into. She has the full lips that women inject chicken fat into their face to achieve, cocoa skin and thick, teased out hair that reeks of exoticism.
“There’s some in the box above the T.V. if you’d like,” she calls out from the bathroom, fixated on the last few crucial touches of make-up that the intended audience will never notice. Mari always keeps small quantities of high-grade grass around, in a little faux-Chinese box that sits on a shelf of her entertainment center, though she rarely ever partakes. As far as I can tell, most of the time I’m the only one who smokes it.
She only turns one trick a week, with the same john, a polite and well-off man in his fifties whose wife passed away that we refer to as ‘Mr. C.’. Every Saturday he takes her to dinner, sometimes a show, and then they retreat to a room at the Renaissance for two hours.
This is a unique case — most johns merely want a stranger to whip in and out of a hotel room, occasionally a drink or two at the hotel bar to set the mood. They don’t want a date, but rather to dominate. Standard procedure consists of me having a brief chat with the john where I give a perfunctory listing of terms before I return with the girl and collect the initial fee, never to be seen again unless things go awry.
The Mr. C gig requires me to be a chauffeur of sorts, a position I often find myself uncomfortable with, not out of any shame or degradation, but because I feel that neither the situation or myself possess the class necessary to not feel like a complete schmuck wearing the only suit he owns catering to a very lonely man. But the free buzz Mari provides while she does her make-up and the twenty Mr. C. always slips me at date’s end combine to make it one of the routines I look forward to.
“You on all night, darling?” She calls everyone ‘darling’, unless we’re working the act. Somehow I get the feeling that Mr. C’s guts would drop like bricks if he ever realized that the moniker wasn’t reserved for only him.
“When am I ever not?” I ask with a wheeze as I hold in smoke, thumbing through the same coffeetable art book I’ve flipped through about a half dozen times.
“You’re an old soul in a baby boy’s body, you know that right?” I always find that the ‘old soul’ compliment bats 1.000, as everyone believes it about themselves, and it carries the compliment of sophistication and scarcity.
She glides into the living room as she affixes an earring, reaching two shelves above the grass box to grab a tray containing a small octagon shaped mirror and a thin glass straw. Sitting over the table on her knees, she taps out a small pile and carves herself a line, looking towards me for my usual dismissive head shake.
“Whew,” she says, vacuuming her sinuses and blinking rapidly for a few seconds after intake. Once again, I picture whatever warped fantasy Mr. C harbors being painfully destroyed if he were to ever know. I don’t know what’s sadder — this scenario or the fact that most relationships aren’t that much different. One revelation, one realization, one hidden secret away from collapsing the whole house of cards.
I do not look him in the eye. I do not speak unless spoken to. Once the rate has been set and the retainer has been paid, I am a ghost in the presence of the john. He does not know my name. I do not know his. I am entirely anonymous, aside from the fact that I am in a way the guardian of this girl and his secrets.
I try not to think so much during the down time. The Cavs game on the radio, late night call-in talk shows, crossword puzzles, hollow but needed conversation with strangers at the hotel bar — any and all distractions must be utilized to avoid the quicksand of thinking about what I’m doing or where I’ve been. Like so many others, I focus on and lead a life within a life, carrying on text and phone conversations with friends and lovers of a past life who are hundreds and thousands of miles away in geography and beyond. Technology has provided us with the opportunity to transform them from static memory to active distraction from present reality.
Though I try not to, I picture Mr. C’s contorted face in the heat of the moment, and in my mind it’s not much different than Lee’s back at dispatch. I see through Mari’s act to the bored face and dead eyes. A drop of Mr. C’s sweat falls on her collarbone and it chills her to the core. She tries to focus on the Saturday Night Live monologue coming from the unwatched T.V., but can’t block out the pathetic and passionate call of her name. Then again, maybe it’s not all that bad.
Once boredom sets in, I find myself chastising him out loud, demanding that he hurry up and get on with it. I ponder how a man as old as he is can go this long. I rifle through the radio dial and light a cigarette and sometimes take an unnecessary spin around the block to watch the parade of the desolate stalk through the decaying streets of Cleveland. Perhaps she’s in the midst of receiving an awkward display of affection or confession. They’re fairly common from what I’ve been told. A lot of the girls have reported tricks that involved more rudimentary forms of therapy than fucking.
Most roads of thought lead to the conclusion that the hollow transaction between the two aren’t much different than the vast majority of relationships I’ve survived and witnessed. I’d like to think that more often than not I let romanticism win out over cynical nihilism, but it’s not easy in the confines of a heated Lexus, protected from the schizophrenics that pound the pavement looking for marks, floors below Marciel and Mr. C, listening to the news at the top and bottom of every hour that’s made up of reports of chaotic inhumanity and gross incompetence; talking idly with ghosts from the past who converse for the exact same reason – a lack of passion for what’s in front of us and a desire for a life that’s passed.
On the way back, he kisses her neck softly. The stereotype in our business is true — kissing isn’t cool. But, ever the exception, Mr. C pays hefty bonus money for his hourly romance. She puts on a fine act, but I can hear the patronization in her breaths and giggles, and I can feel her body worm as it happens, and, every once in awhile, she darts a quick, frantic and hopeless glance directly at the rear view mirror and I catch it.
Lately, when that happens, it’s the closest and most honest bond that I feel to anyone.
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