Mexican Mafia

I remember clearly the event that sparked my ten months in hell.  Jade bounced into the dressing room, whipping her teddy over her head and barely remembering to shut the door.  She was gorgeous and I had a hard time taking my attention off her small, perfect breasts, the silver loops swinging in each of her dusky nipples. I hastily stuffed the dollar bill in my bag and licked the last of the white powder off my finger as I watched her shimmy out of her bottoms and select the next outfit out of the wardrobe.

            “He likes you, really likes you,” she gave me a look that clearly said she had no idea why he liked me, whoever he was.  I frowned at her as the crank dripped into my throat and I breathed with a contented sigh, swallowing around the sour liquid. 

            “Who?” I replied stupidly. 

            “My dealer.  But don’t talk to him here.  He’s mine you understand? Don’t fuck this up. Come with me to my house after work.”  I nod.  I think I’d do anything for her at this moment though I really have no clue what she is referring to.  Her dealer meant my dealer in a sense, though, that much I understood.  She was the one who kept me supplied in the baggies of white powder, the only thing that strengthened me night after night in this ridiculous place.

            I heard my name called over the pounding rock and roll and slipped past her into the dark, smoky bar.  Penny was just finishing up on the double stage and I waited in the shadows for my turn.  I couldn’t see anything from the stage when the lights were shining in my face but I could hear the raucous cries from a group of younger guys that had come in while I was in the dressing room.  It was crowded for a Thursday night, more than just the usual and I slipped onto stage as the fat bouncer and DJ turned on a Metallica song.  He only played songs that were actually danceable to the girls he liked the most.  I ended up with 80’s heavy metal that was impossible to dance to, much less in these six inch heels that threatened to trip me at every turn. 

            The line I’d done in the dressing room fortified me and I whirled through the song, bending over the side of the lighted stage to accept the dollar bills and accompanying comments. Our clientele was typically older, fat men and strange characters that never said a word, just watched and left. Those were my favorite though, the ones that never said a word, though I wondered who they raped when they walked out the door.  They reminded me of serial killers and men who lived in their mom’s basements.  There were several other nicer joints in town and that was where the professionals went.  Here at Donna’s we got the leftovers.

            The other girls were working the floors, begging drinks off the customers and giving lap dances to those that could afford them.  I looked through the crowd for the man Jade had been talking about but couldn’t figure out who it was.  Was it the black man with the diamond necklace?  Jade had a soft spot for black men.  Or was it the middle aged skinny white man in the wrinkled three piece suit slamming down whiskey shots at the bar and sliding dollar bills into the bartender’s bra?  I nearly stumbled and stopped looking around so I could concentrate on moving my body in some semblance of dance. 

            The music finally ended and I headed towards the bathroom to count my money.  I hated being on the floor, the owners made us get the guys to order tons of drinks and I hadn’t mastered the art of  pretending to drink even though the bartender watered them down for us.  After three drinks, I had a harder time dancing and I always tried to knock off early to drive home. Except tonight I wouldn’t be going home to my studio apartment to curl up with my cat.  Jade wanted me.

            A man stopped me on the way to the bathroom and I smiled.  This guy was my favorite, a weasel of a guy but he paid me twenty bucks everytime I came in just to pull my bra down and flash my titties at him.  See, Nebraska has a law that their dancers can’t get naked where alcohol is being served.  Stupid law in my opinion but I didn’t complain.  I got five hundred dollars a night for prancing around in more than most girls wore to the beach. 

            I checked to make sure no one was looking and then hastily pulled aside my bra and shook my titties just a little for extra measure. He whispered a thank you, so polite, and shoved the twenty dollar bill at me and went towards the door.  There was a one drink minimum and after he’d had his one drink, he always came to find me.  The owners didn’t like him, he didn’t spend enough money.  If they ever caught me doing what I did, I’d be in big trouble.  I slipped into the bathroom stall after making sure none of the bills in my panties would fall in the toilet and checked my stash.  I only had a little bit of white left and three days till I worked again. I’d have to talk to Jade again before the night was over.

            The rest of the night passed in a blur and after searching in vain for the man Jade was talking about, she finally told me he’d left after I danced.  I drove her back to her apartment in my car since she didn’t have a license and spent the several miles breathing in her perfume, sneaking glances at her breasts peeking from her tight cut baby tee and listening to her bitch about her “baby’s daddy.”

            Jade’s apartment always had people in it, no matter how many times I went there.  Jade, despite selling me the crystal meth, was really a huge pothead. She hit the bong immediately when we walked in the door.  We were alone for a second as she told me about her big shot dealer, holding the breath in her red cheeks. She always wore too much makeup, even when she wasn’t on stage. 

            “Don’t fuck this up for me.  If you don’t do what he wants, I won’t have any more shit for you.  You understand?”  I nodded.  If she got mad at me, I’d have to find another dealer. And she would also cause hell for me at work.  She ruled the roost there except for the older black divas who didn’t talk to anyone and didn’t need to get their drugs from the skinny white bitch.  I went to the bathroom to do a line and check my makeup while she changed yet again. I looked like shit but that was nothing new. I’ve looked like shit since I started on the crank again after being clean for three years. But I admired my figure nonetheless.  I had lost a little weight since I’d started again and my breasts were perfectly offset in the leopard print top.  My breasts were my best asset, men who wanted a woman with large breasts and a flat stomach came to see me.  They paid extra to just get a peek at them.

            When I came back out of the bathroom, the small apartment had become more crowded.  I hadn’t even heard them come in, my high was full on now and I had probably spent twenty minutes just staring in the mirror while my mind went crazy with tweaker thoughts.

            There were two Mexicans and Penny and Gigi from work.  Penny was trying to flirt with the taller Mexican and Gigi was scrounging in the kitchen.  She was the chubbiest dancer at the bar, Jade’s sister, and looked like she was forty when she was only twenty-something.  Jade took the arm of the shorter, chubbier Mexican and brought him over to me.  He wasn’t ugly but neither was he good looking, a little too soft around the middle and a little too short for my taste. But he dressed nice and he had great shiny black hair.  When he smiled, it made him a little more handsome. 

            “Reina, this is Jorge.”  She gave me a look and I knew instantly that this was her dealer. I gave him the once over while I smiled. His companion looked more lethal, the typical Latino cowboy with a long lean body and bright red boots.  Jorge mumbled something in Spanish to his companion and Miguel looked at me and smiled.  I only caught one word and that word was chichas.  It seemed my breasts were again being praised. 

            “I like the way you dance,” his words were heavily accented and I got the feeling he didn’t speak much English. 

            “Gracias,” I mumbled and he raised his eyebrows in surprise. 

            “You speaka Spanish?”  he asked and I grinned and shook my head.

            “I took a couple years in school but that was it.” 

            “Ah…” he said.  His arms were around me in an instant but not so fast that it startled me. He turned me around so I faced his friend and placed his arms beneath my chest, nearly spilling my breasts from my low cut top.  His face nuzzled my neck.

            “Ah, guera…” he whispered and I wondered what it meant. Jade whispered a couple words in his ear and then before I knew it we were moving toward Jade’s bedroom. I’d always had fantasies of being in her big bed but not with this man before me that smelled of CK one and said not a word as he stripped off my shirt in the dark and buried his face in my chest. 

            The sex was not even grand enough to mention.  It lasted a minute at the most and he was so small I derived no pleasure from it whatsoever.  I thought about Jade while he sweated over me, remembering her warnings and thinking of silver loops in dusky nipples.  After he’d rested a moment, he did me again and then rose without a word and threw my clothes at me.  I’d thought that might be the end of it but then I found myself driving in his car to my apartment while his friend drove my car behind us. 

            He’d said he needed a place to say and I had mumbled protestations – I had no real furniture, it was too small.  He had laughed off my words and called me pinche guera.  It became his nickname for me and I translated it roughly to fucking white girl or maybe damn blonde.  He had also pulled out a big bag of crank, as big as an apple, out of the pocket of his leather coat and it was the thought of that which made me salivate as we drove home. When he’d pulled open his coat, I’d seen the gun, a shiny gray Glock on his hip.

            After that, it all blurs together.  He was sweet to me and called me beautiful and told me he loved me but he urged me to quit work and after being with him for two days, I did.  He told me at first he needed me at my place and would supply me with enough drugs that I really had no need to go to work.  My apartment was always filled with men whose names were twisted on my English tongue, the air poisoned with the smoke of fetid crank fumes and Spanish expletives. 

            I found out within a week that he’d shot a guy two days before over a drug deal and needed a place to hide out but at that time, I was already lost.  He would speak so sweetly to me about me flirting with others, about me giving apartment keys to his friend and I would protest and cry, out of my mind with the ready supply of drugs.  Within two weeks, I never left my apartment.  He would come every couple days, sometimes for a day or so at a time and hold his taco discussions in my living room with his friends. He’d put up a blanket in between the tiny sleeping area and the living room and most of the time, he’d make me sit on the other side while he talked in Spanish with his friends. I’d do as he asked with a Spanish dictionary and tablet open on my lap, trying to figure out what it was he was saying.  They called themselves “La Eme” or the Mexican Mafia.  I thought it silly but didn’t dare say so.  They all carried guns and would often take them out and play with the bullets or clean them as they ate tacos from a taqueria down the street.

            I didn’t know where I was or who I was most of the time.  I spent the moments he was gone surfing the web or tweaking out on my house, spending hours cleaning it and never accomplishing a thing. I didn’t have a tv.  If I wanted to go to the apartment complex’s laundry room in the basement, I had to wait until he got home. Then he would come with me, laughing and brandishing his glock in front of the security cameras. He liked his jeans ironed and I tried to make sure to bleach his socks too.

            Part of his cover involved an old car salvage yard and a mechanic with no teeth that talked too much and eyed me when Jorge wasn’t looking.  That was the only place I would go to, the only reason I would ever leave the apartment.  Maybe once a month I got to go with him to the yard and he would smoke with the old white man with no teeth and they would discuss hiding drugs in the wheels of the cars.  At least I think that is what they would discuss, Jorge never talked business in front of me and he never let me smoke my crank in front of his business friends. I think he was a little ashamed of the monster he had created.

            He had a wife and two kids, I found out in due time, an American woman who worked at the courthouse. It surprised me to hear this, he did not seem like the type to marry an uppity second generation Mexican.  He took me to his house once or twice when she went back to Texas to visit her family. Once he even tried to fuck me on their bed.  I refused and pulled him into his son’s room instead.  The house looked so normal for a drug dealer, the typical family household with baby toys strewn all over the living room and camera parts all over the basement.  Jorge’s brother, a shifty eyed ugly excuse for a man, was a paranoid tweaker.  He was trying to piece together a camera system for Jorge to place outside the house.

            I don’t know what went down, I think the salvage yard got raided and I didn’t see Jorge for days at a time. After my supply ran out, I would cry and sleep for hours that sometimes stretched into days. When I woke up, I was clearheaded for a moment and remembered that Maura had given my car to his brother for some reason and I couldn’t leave if I wanted to. I considered checking myself into the mental hospital but I wasn’t ready to do that yet.  I was still hooked on the drugs. 

            When Jorge returned from these absences, he was always in a foul mood.  He would want sex and food and wouldn’t say a word about what had happened while he was gone.  I heard him talking a couple times outside my apartment, asking people what I’d been doing while he was gone, if I’d left or not.  They would talk about hearing me sing, hearing the music playing. I had been too scared to leave, too scared to make him angry.  I figured out eventually that he had buddies that lived in the apartment just above mine and there were nights I could hear his voice in the vents.  I never figured out if that was just a hallucination or fact.  Some days I spent hours prostrate in front of the door of my apartment, watching for feet to walk by though I can’t really tell you why.

            9/11 came and went and I didn’t know about it for days after it happened.

            He’d been gone for a couple days one morning and I had just woke up, crabby that I only had a little scum left in my pipe and unable to reach him on his cell phone.  I heard a knock at the door and hurried to it, trying to peer out the peep hole on my tiptoes. It was dark outside but I was tired and high and so burnt out I didn’t even know what day it was. 

            “Who is it?” I called.  Jorge had taught me never to open the door unless I knew it was him.  But I missed him or more accurately his drugs and when a deep voice called out “Me” I threw aside the bolt and opened the door.

            I barely registered the black clad bodies as they swarmed into the apartment, huge automatic rifles on their shoulders and fierce expressions.  I was pulled out into the hallway and questioned by an older man with the words DEA emblazoned across his bulletproof vest. It was like a dream and I could only think of the pounds of meth I’d had in my apartment days ago, the garment bag full of guns, the ten thousand dollars in my file cabinet.  Jorge had come and got that a couple days before and all that remained was my measly eight ball and a couple glass blown pipes.  He had even taken the gun he usually left me for my protection.

            They questioned me about where he was, where he lived and I remember just laughing at him, insanely thinking they were idiots if they didn’t already know but I’m sure they did.  They didn’t find my stash or more accurately, they did but it wasn’t enough to concern them.  I think it was only pity that kept them from hauling me away, that and realizing exactly what I was.  Just some drugged up whore that didn’t deserve what I had already been subjected to. 

            When they’d left, I called Jorge immediately but couldn’t reach him.  As a last resort, I called his brother and told him and he yelled at me for using the phone that he was sure the cops had bugged while they were searching my apartment.  Then I waited, sobering up because no new supply was forthcoming, picking at my scabs and combing my thinned hair.  I didn’t even recognize myself when I looked in the mirror. There were dark circles under my eyes, my hair was limp, my face was scarred with recent acne and my teeth hurt constantly.  I had also lost about twenty pounds in the last ten months, something I wasn’t even sober enough to appreciate. 

            It was a week after the DNA incident that Jorge’s brother showed up at my door to tell me Jorge was in jail.  After that, I slowly got better.  I was evicted from that apartment, the manager had been feeding information to the cops for months.  I moved into a roach infested room on the eighth floor of a downtown apartment building until the manager told me that Mexicans were prowling around and asking about a girl that kind of looked like me.  I moved immediately.  After going to the beginning sentencing where they didn’t permit Jorge to be let out on bail and being bitched out by Jorge’s wife on the steps of the courthouse for being a home wrecker, I didn’t speak to him again.  For months, I wandered around Omaha feeling followed at every turn and in some essence, I was.  Jorge didn’t know who had turned him in and my refusal to communiPennye after he was in jail and I had sobered up a little proclaimed my guilt to him. 

            I did end up in the mental hospital after all and released to a homeless shelter for a rehab program.  I was ferreted away from the program at one point and put in a woman’s shelter after the front window was broken out in the homeless shelter.  The director was pretty sure the Mexican’s friends were after me and his wife had left some threats on the voicemail.  After it settled down, I went back to start the program and get my life together. 

            Now all that’s left are memories and lessons. I would love to say I never touched another crystal of meth again but it wasn’t so. I dabbled in it after getting involved with the wrong guy in rehab and finally got clean when I left town and left the state.  Then, a year later, I found out I was pregnant and was that was the turning point for me.  I have been clean since the moment I saw that plus sign.  I hope he has forgotten me as I have forgotten him, only a memory now when I reflect upon the paths in my life that never should have been taken. 

 

**Names have been changed to protect the guilty

Copyright 2009 – All rights reserved

           

           

 

Introduction

“I just can’t use it.” I sigh, cradling the phone gently against my ear. Something inside me dies at his words. I knew it would be this way, I had known it all along. I am surprised I have even made it so far as submitting the manuscript in the first place.

“Why not?” I ask simply though the answer does not really matter. They will not publish it and I don’t know if I will ever write again. All that hard work for nothing. Despair eats at my insides like acid.

“Well your main character is unbelievable for starters. Who could be so fucked up in the head and still manage to function? This woman has enough neuroses to fill an entire ward at the nuthouse. And then the ending… Everybody wants a happy ending. You can’t just leave it like that.” There is a pause on the other end and the silence fills with the tick-tock of the cheap wal-mart clock above the stove. Its ticking is so loud sometimes I swear there is a bomb in my house scheduled to explode at any minute. “You’re a good writer. You have talent. Make the heroine a little more loveable and a little less crazy and turn it into a happy ending. You know, she finds the man of her dreams or something and lives happily ever after. Then send it back to me.”

I mumble a few platitudes and a quick good bye and then hang up the phone. So he thinks the main character is too neurotic? Funny, I think to myself, fighting down hysterical laughter. The main character is me, no holds barred, my life story written in fiction because it is so messed up no one would believe it was true if it were marketed as non-fiction. And I still manage to function; I still manage to go on day by day in this mummer’s farce, this pathetic attempt at a life. I see it all the time, zombies walking the world in the glaring sunlight. I am just another soldier in their ranks, not even important enough to merit a name. And the ending… well real life doesn’t always have happy endings.

I release the phone finally, cradling my head in my hands. I have been writing since I’ve been old enough to read. My childhood was filled with stories and books, both my own and those of others. In between the fear and the beatings, I would escape. Though my body remained, I was miles away. I tend to write the most about fantastical worlds, faeries and dragons and women heroines that conquer everything put to them with a smile on their face and their hair in perfect order. It has been gnawing at me for some time to write about myself because the drama of my life is more fantastical than anything I could concoct in my imagination. And surprisingly, it is the only manuscript I have ever finished. The tattered beginnings of countless others litter my hard drive like balls of crumpled paper in a wastebasket but this one I finished. However, it appears that it won’t be published. The thought itself makes me sad but not overly distressed. This is not something that is unexpected. I have known it all along. My husband will attribute it to my negative attitude, my lack of belief in myself, my poor self esteem. I contribute it to my superior knowledge of reality despite my meanderings into fantasy.

The house is quiet. My husband is at a meeting, my child at school. I have one more hour all to myself and I have no idea what to do with myself. I could write but the phone call has left a sour taste in my mouth. I could jump on the internet but I do that too much, spending hours surfing and wandering around the cyber world and accomplishing nothing. I talk too much to other lonely people that don’t really give a shit about me but pretend they do. My husband would say at this moment that I just need to get up and go out, go for a walk and move my body. I don’t have to stress the fact that I have no energy and no motivation. It’s the story of my life. Moving comes easy to him. To me, its never easy. The good feeling I get when I get out and walking never translates to that moment before the first step. Walking would also mean leaving the house and I just don’t feel like it. Ah, the story of my life. Which, evidently, no one is interested in but myself.