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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Stiletto
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It’s a lousy night, but they’ve all been lousy nights, lately. Marcy blames the girls, but it’s not the girls’ fault the economy’s bad, or the fact that people see strip clubs as something they can cut from their budgets when times are tight. And because no one’s making any money, girls don’t always come in, so we’re short tonight. So I’ve only got three minutes to pee before I’m back on stage.
When I open the door to the women’s bathroom I stop, listen; you hear urban legend kind of stories about girls getting attacked at the job, and its always in the bathroom, so I’m cautious. But the women’s bathroom is always empty (except that one time a girl was giving her boyfriend a handjob in one of the stalls). And it’s quiet, so I walk to the nearest stall, slide in, and close the bolt. I’m pissed off. I’m barely on target tonight to make cab fare, and I’ve already resigned myself to kissing the money I put in the jukebox goodbye. My time isn’t free, but I seem to be donating a lot of it lately. But I think I could handle all of that if it weren’t for Marcy, always blaming us for the fact that Tory’s is struggling, treating me like I’ve been ungrateful or a bad employee. I just- And then I realize the floor’s wet. I don’t know if there’s someone in the next stall, or if the toilet’s backed up again, but I reach down to pull my skirt up before it gets soaked, and I get it about to my knees when my hands stop moving. The floor is slick, and it is coming from the next stall: a long, thick trail of blood. I swallow hard, trying to ignore the timid instincts that tell me to run away; I’d seen this kind of thing before, not here, but when I worked at Coldstone, there was a little girl who’d just started her period, and didn’t know what it was or what to do. “Shit, do you need a tampon?” I asked. “I think I, think I have one in my bag.” There was shuffling, nervous shuffling in the other stall, and my neck tensed. I realized I couldn’t see feet under the stall wall- that I really should have seen feet. “Hello?” I asked, and my voice trembled. The blood was starting to pool near the drain in the floor, and I realized there was an awful lot of it; I was starting to wonder if there was too much, when a woman's foot splashed into view. But there was something wrong about it, something about the angle, how it wasn’t right if she was sitting on the toilet, or standing- it was just hanging limply there. I knew something was wrong, and how completely stupid it would be of me to find out for myself, so I pulled my skirt up and flushed, and was reaching for the bolt on the door when suddenly there was a loud thump and a splash, and I could tell the girl in the other stall had fallen. I unbolted the door, uncertain if I should check on her myself or call the bouncer, when a hand shot out from under the stall and grabbed my stiletto heel. I looked back, and could tell from the way the girl had fallen, and from the black coat and glove, and build, of the hand, that it wasn’t hers- it was a man’s. I shrieked, and yanked until my foot came out of the shoe, then I ran. The bathrooms are at the end of a long haul, as close to backstage as the customers ever get. The bouncer heard me and was already at the club end of the hall when I rounded the corner. He’s big and scary, but with soft blue teddy bear eyes that usually are comforting. “Bathroom?” he asked, and all I could do was nod. He walked past me, and there’s an energy in him I’ve never seen. I followed him back around the corner, and he hits the door so hard if it were a person I don’t think they’d ever get up. But he doesn’t come back out. I wait as many seconds as I can, then run out of the hall to the club. The music has stopped, and everyone’s staring at me. The bartender, Malcolm, realizes he’s the only other male employee in the place; the customers are all frozen in place in their seats. He walks around the bar, obviously unhappy about being in his position at that moment. He walks down the hall, around the corner. He steels himself outside the restroom door, then pushes in. He emerges a few seconds later, blood halfway up his forearms. He tells me, “Ambulance, and police.” I look at one of the other girls, and I realize I don’t know her name, but she understands and runs down the hallway and over to the phone. I follow Malcolm back into the bathroom. Mike, the bouncer, had pulled the girl out of the stall. He’s hunched over her, performing CPR, and I hear her ribs creak like old floorboards. Her stall is empty, and I don’t see the man in the black jacket on the floor. I look in my stall, for my shoe, but it’s gone. The rest of the night was a bust. The girl went away in an ambulance, but the cops were there long enough that all the customers left. At least Malcolm gave me a ride home, so I didn’t have to pay for a second cab. There’s a moment where I’m not sure if he wants to hit on me or just try and say something comforting, but he doesn’t do either, so I get out of his car, numbly mumble a thanks about the ride, and lock myself in my apartment. I’ve been carrying my one heel around most of the night. I feel bad about losing the other one, like the other shoe will be sad about missing a part of itself; I care entirely too much about it, but I tell myself I’m just frazzled. I want to call the hospital, to check on the girl, but I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me, anyway. I dance under the name Sin Dee, which had started as “Sin Deep,” and I imagined using the slogan “Beauty is only Sin Deep” until I found out that I wasn’t getting as many bookings for bachelor parties because Sin Deep sounded kind of Indian, and not many men wanted an Indian stripper (and the ones who did were disappointed when I wasn’t, and didn’t tip as well). I don’t sleep. I can’t stop myself from thinking about her, who she was. And I’m terrified, because I know I have to work tomorrow, at another club, and that if I can’t get myself together, I can’t hustle, and if I don’t hustle, I won’t make any money, and I won’t be able to make my rent. The night becomes a blur of insomniac time-killing, reorganizing my make up and listening to music, baking and freezing a month’s worth of cupcakes, anything to distract me from thinking. I finally fell asleep for a few hours before my next shift, only to be woken up by my horrible clock; I picked it up and threw it at the wall, but the cord had wrapped around my wire bed frame, so it flew until the cord snapped it back, and it swung ineffectually from the headboard. The next week likewise became a blur. I picked up a private party and three day shifts at a few other clubs, including one someone called off of, but days are always death. Most people are at work, and even those who aren’t and actually have the money to tip don’t think to come to the clubs, but for some reason club owners insist on bringing in girls and staying open. I thought about trying to replace the heel I’d lost. I’d got them at a sort of made to order shoe place, and I think the guy there had kind of a crush on me, so I could talk him into making me just one shoe and not another set, but I couldn’t decide if that would make me happy, or if every time I looked down at the heel I was going to see blood beneath my feet. It had been a week, exactly to the day, and I was back at Tory’s. Mike was bouncing, and Malcolm was behind the bar. That was actually kind of odd, because Marcy didn’t like to keep the schedule static; she said it made the girls complacent- better that they fight to get and keep the good shifts, and that if the girls' schedules were constantly changing that it was only fair to rotate the men, too (and she lumped Kas, our one female bartender, in with the men). But it made me feel a little safer, since they were the ones who’d come to my rescue (or whatever) last week. But it was a better night. Some law or accounting firm down the street had given out bonuses no one had expected, so some of the lower-level execs suddenly had money they had nothing else to do with. And Kimberly even showed this week, so we had the perfect number of dancers for the size of the crowd. I was just finishing up a set on the main stage, mentally preparing myself to hustle for lap dances when Malcolm flagged me over. “Gentleman waiting in the Champagne room,” he said with a snigger, since we pretty much never actually sold champagne in there. But it meant he’d paid double for three songs- and meant that in fifteen minutes this would be my best night of the month. Our back room wasn’t really separate, just three walls and a thick red curtain. Some men liked the privacy, the intimacy, of being alone with a dancer. Some men thought they were going to get lucky, and sometimes got handsy, but Mike was pretty good about staying close any time one of us was back there. The guy was already slumped in the half-circle booth, looking timidly down and away. When I got close he jumped a little, and smiled in a nebbish sort of way. “I was here last week. I wanted to pay for a dance, but…” he realized he was close to asking me to think about what happened last week, and his eyes shifted back to the ground. “I know girls work at different clubs, so I’ve been going to different ones, hoping to run into you.” “Well, here I am.” I sat down in the booth next to him. “What’s your name?” “Jack,” he said. “What do you like, Jack?” “Shoes, and, and feet,” he said, then hesitated, before bending towards the floor. There was the rustle of tissue paper. “I, uh, brought a pair of shoes I’d like you to wear.” I bristled. “There’s a hundred bucks in it, if they fit.” Normally I wouldn’t. I have a few regulars who like to buy me things, shoes, or outfits, because they’d like to see me wear them (or like to see me take them off), and for the regulars it’s worth it, and there’s a level of trust that comes with that regularity. But I’d made negative money this week, and my rent is already late. He handed over the bag, and I parted the papers. Even in the low light, I recognized the heels I’d worn last week. My heart skipped a beat as I picked up the left one, the one I’d lost, but my mark, a slash of red nail polish across the label, wasn’t on the shoes. It seemed weird, but he said he’d seen me last week and wanted a dance; some people get obsessive about dancers, and if I’d been wearing those shoes, then he probably wanted me wearing those shoes when I danced for him. I’d learned some time ago the line between creepy and sweet is blurred at best for regulars. Jack reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and extracted a crisp $100 bill. “You can keep it, just for being a good sport and trying it on; wouldn’t be fair to punish you for me guessing your size wrong.” I started to strap on the shoes, and once I’d finished he softly pulled my foot into his lap. “A perfect fit. Like they were made for each other.” His hand lingered, not on my leg, but on the straps of the shoe. “You didn’t recognize me. Heh. To think I’ve spent the last week terrified, yet fantasizing, that you knew me. Recognized me.” I gasped, and I wanted to let the breath out loudly, but I felt cold metal pressed to my leg, and thought better. “That for once, a pretty girl knew me, understood me, that I was finally going to be noticed for who I am, and what I do. I don’t know whether or not I should be disappointed; it’s too late to be relieved. I mean, you’re probably stupid, but I think you’d have put things together soon enough, especially all that with the shoes.” “What do you want from me?” “I want you to dance, while I figure out what I want to do. And behave; one jab from this stiletto in the femoral artery and you’ll bleed out before that gorilla can even respond to your scream. And I’d give myself even odds of stabbing him, too, then getting away.” I stood like a corpse, all of my limbs trying on being dead as my mind started to shut down. Slowly my muscles remembered how to move, then how to move seductively. I planted a foot between his legs, then slowly stretched the other up in the air, then stretched it out, resting it on the back of the booth behind his head, and I leaned inward. “I wasn’t lying. I did see you last week, and I had wanted to buy a dance. If things we different” he stopped talking long enough to stroke his cheek along my foot as I pulled it away from him. And suddenly I saw the shoe as I had that night, blood running underneath it, only this time it was a heavier flow, a gushing wound, and I stamped my heel into the soft flesh of his throat. He tried to bring the stiletto around towards me, but I leaned down on his arm. He was stronger than me, but his other arm was trapped beyond my leg, so it was one of his arms trying to pick me up from a reclined position. Blood bubbled around my heel, and after several seconds, he gave in, and his arm went limp, and the stiletto slid out of his fingers and onto the seat. And still I kept him pinned there, impaled. His eyes became sad, as the realization finally came over him, and I almost felt sympathy for him; because of that, because he made me feel bad for him for even a moment, I twisted the heel in, twisted until his face became a twisted parody of pleasure, and his body went limp. I waited another moment, to be sure he wouldn’t leap back to life like some horror movie monster, before I called out, and when I did, all of the strength from a moment ago was missing from my voice. Mike was there in an instant, and reacted quickly, moving me back and shoving the knife off the seat, farther from Jack. Then he checked for a pulse. “He’s dead,” Mike said. “Good,” I replied. |
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