Cha-Ching! (6 page)

Everything about life in Yonkers felt like a punishment now. She hated Doralina, who'd taken to knocking on her bedroom door late at night and sitting dramatically on the futon.

“This is really hard for me, because I have a lot of shame,” Doralina would start, “but can I borrow twenty dollars until my check comes?”

Theo didn't believe it was hard for Doralina to ask for money, since she seemed to do it several times a week. She hadn't had any extra money since she'd moved to New York, and if she came into some she sure as shit wasn't going to hand it over to Doralina to buy Tang and cigarettes from the Kwik Stop.

When Theo wouldn't loan her money Doralina retaliated by creating fake problems in the house. One day when she came home from work Doralina was waiting for her, sitting somberly in the living room with her hands folded in her lap.

“Hello,” Theo said, surprised to see her out of her ESPN cave.

“I have a problem,” Doralina said gravely.

“Is your son okay?” Theo asked, her heart softening.

She worried for a second that he had been killed. Theo had never met him; he lived with Doralina's mother, but each day as she walked in and out of the house she passed his picture. He looked about eight years old and smiled stiffly from behind the armor of his maroon-and-white school uniform. Doralina's mother had agreed to take care of him while she went back to school. But in the three months Theo had lived in the house she'd never seen Doralina do any schoolwork. In fact, the only time she ever left the house was when Theo gave her a ride somewhere.

Doralina looked confused for a second and said, “My son? He's fine.”

“So what's the matter, then?”

She led Theo into the bathroom and pointed out some stray hairs trapped in a clump of suds in the bottom of the tub. Apparently, Doralina was pissed because Theo had been the last person to take a shower and four of her hairs were swimming in a small pool of water around the drain.

“We can't do that,” Doralina said.

“This is the serious problem?” Theo asked.

Doralina glared at her.

“The drain sucks,” Theo said. “I can't wait forty-five minutes after I'm done taking a shower for the tub to drain so then I can rinse it out. Otherwise I'd be late for
work
.”

Theo spit out,
work
—the thing Doralina didn't do. She tried to convey her disgust for Doralina's joblessness by looking straight into her eyes with a martyr's gaze when she said the word
work
. Even the woman on
Hooked
who smoked twenty-five PCP cigarettes a day went to work—she in fact had
two
jobs, but Theo didn't say that.

Doralina returned Theo's cold stare and then repeated, “We can't do that,” before angrily walking back to the kitchen, jerking her curtain to the side and going back into her cave.

Theo was desperate to find a job in Brooklyn, and at night after work she perused the get-rich-quick jobs on the back of the weekly newspaper. People were needed everywhere to donate their eggs, work on cruise ships and fishing boats, be in depression and alcohol studies. Most of all there were gentlemen looking for escorts. Theo picked up the phone and dialed Sammy.

“Tell me why I shouldn't get a job on a fishing boat?” Theo asked.

“Girl! It's cold and back-breaking and you will never get the fish smell off you. Never again.”

“I can't live in this house another minute,” Theo whispered.

“Good. Because I think I found us an apartment.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I'm just waiting for him to call back and make a time to see it. It's $695. One bedroom. Yard. In Sunset Park.”

“They take dogs?”

“Yeah. The only bad thing is it's right next door to a car alarm store.”

“How bad could that be?” Theo said glancing at the escort ads.

“Girl, are you there?” Sammy said after a short silence on the phone.

“Do you think I should be an escort or get into a depression study?”

Every queer Theo knew in San Francisco had done phone sex, been a dominatrix or a stripper or hooker.

“Oh, you're reading the back of the paper. Escort,” Sammy said laughing. “It makes me think of Cary Grant in a top hat.”

“Seriously. I have a wig,” Theo said.

People could do anything if they put their mind to it, right? She hadn't had sex with a man since high school, but how hard could it really be?

“You're not really going to be a prostitute,” Sammy said, a touch surprised.

“It can't hurt,” Theo said. The dare of it filled her with courage. “I'll call you right back.” She hung up and dialed the number of an escort agency.

“Hello,” a woman answered after the first ring.

“Hello. I'm calling about the ad for the escort job,” Theo said.

“Are you a police officer?”

Theo laughed.

The woman was silent.

“No,” Theo quickly said.

“Have you escorted before?”

“No.”

Theo could hear the woman hesitate so she added, “But my friends have. I know what the job is.”

“Tell me what you look like,” the woman said.

Theo knew not to tell her she was butch. Even though prostitution included special requests, she was sure there wasn't a great demand for timid sirma'amsirs.

“I'm five foot seven and a half inches. Brown eyes. A hundred and forty pounds.”

“What's your bra size?” the woman interrupted.

“36 B,” Theo lied.

Theo was flat as a board, even though she came from a long line of huge-breasted women. When she was ten she'd started to pray before bed
please God, don't give me any tits
. She'd been boyish for as long as she could remember, and when her chest remained flat while the chests of the girls on her soccer team grew, Theo wondered if she'd really saved herself with prayer.

“Well, there's a market for small-breasted women. What about tattoos? Do you have any?”

Theo was running out of truths the Madame could handle. Being a tattooed prostitute in San Francisco was a plus, but here in New York things were different.

“I have one,” Theo started.

“What is it?”

Theo considered how to word it, and then just said, “A dagger?” as if she was asking permission.

She could hear the Madame's skepticism, “Where is the dagger?”

“On my chest, uh, between my breasts.”

Theo was surprised to find herself invested in getting an escort interview. She was agitated by the woman's hesitation.

“How big is the dagger?”

“It's tasteful, I swear,” Theo insisted.

“Can you come to the East Village around three o'clock tomorrow so I can take a look at you and see if you'd be the right fit for us?”

“Sure,” Theo said, writing down the address.

•

Theo was too ashamed to tell anyone she'd gotten the idea for her first tattoo from a photograph in Madonna's
SEX
book. The picture was of Madonna sitting on the floor between two shaved-headed lesbians. Madonna, freshly emerged from a bondage scene, rubbing her rope-burned wrists. Theo didn't give a shit about Madonna having sex or getting tied up by lesbians. But she did care about the perfect dagger tattoo on one lesbian's chest, as if she'd swallowed the knife whole.

Theo had just broken up with Esther, her first girlfriend, but they were still doing everything together because even post-breakup they were committed to being
family
. On the bus to the tattoo shop Theo ran her fingers over the cross-hatched drawings in an ancient weaponry book she'd borrowed from the library. She liked how the ink on the cross-hatching sat raised on the page like a fingerprint. She was committed to two things for her first tattoo: It would be a dagger on her chest, and it wouldn't be wimpy. She remembered the fag bodybuilder who lived in her building and had the tiniest red rose tattooed on his rippling bicep. It was so small it looked like a sticker, or the design in the corner of a return address label. One day in the hallway they'd got to talking and Theo remembered him pointing to it and saying, “It was my first tattoo!” In that moment Theo decided,
I can never get a microscopic tattoo
. She would be tough, and her dagger would be a form of protection.

Many friends had recommended the tattoo artist, Gato. When Theo arrived for her appointment she handed him the ancient weaponry book and said, “I want a dagger on my chest.”

Gato nodded, smirking, “A dagger for a dagger?”

Gato looked like a Hell's Angel, enormous with a shaved head and a neck covered in scary skull tattoos. Theo gave him a lukewarm smile, hoping he was gay. He flipped through the book asking Theo a multitude of questions about size and color and style, none of which Theo had thought about. The more questions Gato asked, the more confused she felt. She thought of the whole thing as an experience similar to losing your virginity; she'd been completely prepared to just lie down on the table and get up four hours later, tattooed, but more importantly, changed.

“Let me do some sketching and I'll show you what I come up with.”

“Don't forget the filigree,” Esther had said. “That's one of the things she really likes about those drawings.”

Theo had grown weary of Esther's advocacy. Esther's only tattoo was a yin-yang symbol, the size of a quarter, on her ankle.

“I watched the tattoo artist tattoo for hours before I let her work on me,” Esther had told Theo.

Gato wrote the word “filigree” down on a piece of tracing paper.

Theo and Esther sat in the waiting area drinking coffee until Gato appeared with a piece of tracing paper fluttering in his hand.

“Want to take a look?” he said.

Theo looked at the flurry of whirling pencil lines that somehow cohered into a dagger in Gato's mind.

“What do you think?” Gato asked, and then Esther joined in: “Do you like it?”

Theo had been hoping to see the same dagger she'd seen in Madonna's book, though she would never have asked for that.

“Well?” Esther prodded.

“Yeah,” Theo said, even though it reminded her of some Dungeons and Dragons drawing or the cover of a fantasy novel. Theo hated the worlds and weaponries of wizards.

Gato pointed to the blade of the dagger and said, “I put in a lot of filigree here.”

“Yeah,” Theo said.

The worst part of the tattoo was the handle, where Gato had drawn a sparkling round jewel. Theo hated the jewel, but she was terrified of Gato.

“I don't really want a jewel,” she managed to say.

“You don't like the jewel?” he said, a touch defensively.

“You don't have to have the jewel,” Esther chimed in.

“I just want it plain. No jewel,” Theo said, her lower back sweating from asserting herself.

“That's easy enough,” Gato said. “Give me five minutes to make some changes and then I'll show you what I've done.”

When Gato was out of earshot at his drafting table
Esther
said, “If you don't like it, you don't have to get it today. He can redraw it.”

“I like everything but the jewel,” Theo lied.

Theo was not leaving without her tattoo, whether she liked the art or not.

“Take a look at this,” Gato said, bright yellow pencil behind his ear, holding out the sketch.

Theo was surprised to see the jewel still there, sitting on top of the dagger. In fact, she couldn't figure out what was different about the drawing at all.

“I couldn't take out the jewel completely, because that would be weird—but I took out the lines that accented it. See, it's less jewel-y but it's still holding the place where the jewel should be.”

This is how people end up buying new cars or timeshares, Theo thought. They're beaten down.

“That looks a lot better. A lot, a lot better,” Theo said in a cheery voice she only used when depressed.

“Are you sure you like it?” Esther said. “Because, the jewel's still there.”

“Yeah, I like it.”

“Well, then come on back and we'll get started.”

“Call me when you get home,” Esther said, and left for work.

Theo felt relieved that Esther wouldn't be hovering over Gato's shoulder giving directions. She took off her shirt and lay down on the table self-consciously. She distracted herself by staring at Gato's artwork covering the walls. The subject matter seemed to consist solely of pin-up girls wearing strap-ons and holding space guns, bullwhips inserted in their asses.

“Here we go,” Gato said, and Theo felt the needle go into her sternum where the horrible jewel lay at the tip of the dagger's handle.

“Tattoos always look different on the page than they do on the body,” Gato said, and she wondered if he had picked up her fear about the jewel.

“So your first tattoo is a twelve-inch dagger, huh?” his voice held a hint of admiration.

Theo wanted to acknowledge him but she was afraid if she spoke he'd be able to hear the pain in her voice. It felt like someone was grating the skin off her sternum. He worked his way down the handle of the dagger to the blade, the tip ending right above her belly button. Theo was proud of herself for not being the kind of person who avoided getting a tattoo because it might hurt, but when Gato started inking her stomach the pain was excruciating and she gasped, feeling the needle dig into her guts.

“Do you want to take a break?” Gato sounded annoyed.

“I'm okay,” she said. But in no time, when the tattoo gun resumed digging into her guts, she gasped again.

“If you need to take a break, just tell me,” Gato said.

“Okay, maybe give me a minute.”

One minute was exactly how much time he gave her before asking if she was ready to start again. He had bad vibes; exactly the kind of tattoo artist her friends had warned her against.