Tats (3 page)

Then the strangest thing happens. Vivian the Cheerleader grabs me by both elbows, leans in close enough that I can feel Sonny and Cher pressing against me and whispers right under my ear, “Please, God, I’ll give you anything. Just get me out of here.”

I wonder if her anything means the same thing as my anything.

This is one of those what-if situations that are always and forever getting me into trouble. On the one hand, I know this woman is bad news and I’ll probably either end up in jail or with another tattoo, but on the other hand, I know I can’t spend the rest of my life wondering what could’ve happened—if only.

“What time is it?” I ask a little too loud. “Oh my God, it’s time for your meds!” Vivian the Cheerleader looks at me with surprise. I’m even surprising myself with this little Oscar-winning performance. I grab her by the arm and pull her none too gently through the mud toward the Harley. I yell over my shoulder to a very stupefied Becky, “I’m sorry but my emotionally incontinent and developmentally disabled sister has to get back to the home before they report her missing again!”

Vivian the Cheerleader’s eyes burn a hole in the back of my head and I suppress a smile as I add, “We let her dress herself today, sorry ’bout that!”

Vivian the Cheerleader jerks her arm out of my grip, rips off one of her muddy shoes and whacks me in the back of the head with it, pointy end first.

“Shit! That hurt!” I grab the damn shoe out of her claw and heave it about fifty yards away. “Are you fuckin’ nuts?”

“That’s a Jimmy Choo!” she yells, hobbling off to retrieve it.

“No, that’s a weapon!” I shout at her back.

I watch her plod off to get the shoe, slipping and sliding in the mud, clutching her big red bag like a life preserver and I’ve got to admit I admire her pluckiness. What is it about cheerleaders? You could be down by fifty points, but they’re still jumping around, doing splits and backflips like there’s still hope. I shake my head and watch her trudge through the mud. She stops, pulls the panties out of her crack and scans the mire for her shoe. I catch myself smiling way too big and that’s when I smash face-first into the darker side of myself. I hate cheerleaders. I love cheerleaders. I hate them. I love them. Lord help me, I am going to love hating this particular cheerleader.

I must admit I’m not too proud of what I yell at her next. “Listen, if you’d rather stay here with your shoes and do some cheers with Becky, I’ll understand. I’m sure you and Becky have a lot of catching up to do.”

That does it. She does an about-face, takes off her remaining shoe, and marches back toward me. Without even so much as a glance in my direction, she brushes right by and swings a leg over the back of the Harley.

Believe you me, short skirts are not meant for motorcycles.

Vivian the Cheerleader looks up at me seductively and with saccharine dripping from her smile says, “We going? I believe I’m late for my meds back at the group home.”

Chapter Two

This is turning out to be a not-so-boring day. The sun has come out, the breeze is warm, and I’m riding a bike with a babe behind me. The grin plastered to my face gets even bigger when I pass a couple of good ol’ boys in a primered truck and they stare at us open-mouthed. I know, I know, don’t you wish you were me? I don’t know what Vivian looks like back there behind me, but I’m pretty damn sure she’s got enough skin showing that those boys are sweating pretty hard.

Her knees press into my sides and her fist is gripping the waistband of my Levi’s. I adjust the side mirror so I can take a peek at her without her knowing. She squints into the wind and her hair blows about a mile behind us. The tops of her tits jiggle in time with the motor and I like that. I don’t think she’s ever ridden a bike before, judging by the death grip she has on my pants, but I think she’s discovered that a big rumbling, vibrating machine between your legs can be inspiring in more ways than one.

I flip out the cruise pegs with the toes of my boots, stretch out my legs, lean back against Vivian and just stay in the now. Because right now is pretty damn good.

We zip past the airport on our right, then the zoo on our left and I’m starting to get a little un-lost, though I have no idea how to get where we’re going or even
where
we’re going. I try not to think about it because that’s one of the joys of riding. To most people the road is a way to get somewhere. To me the
road
is somewhere.

Vivian thinks she’s being sneaky, but I know exactly what she’s doing. She arches her back and leans forward a little. I look in the mirror and see that she has her eyes closed and is biting her upper lip. She squirms in the seat and I feel her tense and shudder against my back, then relax. A biker babe has been born.

I level with myself in my head before I get too carried away with this cheerleader who has her hand stuck halfway down the back of my pants: I know Vivian’s straight. I just hope she’s not straight
and
narrow. She wouldn’t be the first straight woman I ever had a good time with. So, I promise myself that I’m going to keep my hands in my pockets and just go along for the ride because you never know what little detours life will take. Plus, as long as I’m being honest with myself, I have a big time thing for redheads and straight women. I have to stop thinking about it or I might let the vibration get to me and that could be deadly.

I have about five minutes of numbing bliss before Vivian sticks her arm out to the right and punches the air with the heel of her shoe. She leans forward, sets her tits on my shoulders and yells over the engine, “Pull over there!”

I guess I’ve been in one of those driving fugue states where you just automatically go somewhere but can’t remember how you did it. I look to where Vivian is pointing her shoe and it’s none other than The Glitter Box.

“You don’t wanna go there!” I yell back, “That’s a titty-bar!”

She snaps the elastic of my boxers, hard, and yells again, “Pull over there!”

Then I understand. I pull into the gravel lot of the strip club and kill the engine. I hold the bike upright with both my feet planted on the ground so she can climb off first. I watch my side mirror in silent amusement as she tries to keep her skirt down and get off the back of the bike at the same time. Finally, after a few false starts, she gives up and just throws her leg off over the sissy bar and flashes anybody within flashing distance.

I kick down the stand, take off my sunglasses and throw my leg off the bike. “Are you late for work?” I ask.

“What did you just say?!”

I can’t tell if she’s deaf or pissed. I decide to try for deaf. “I said, do you work here? Are you a stripper or something?”

I’ll be damned if she doesn’t do it again. She takes her last remaining shoe and smacks me upside the head. I could’ve ducked it. I saw it coming. But I just couldn’t believe she was actually going to whack me with a shoe again.

A small spark of anger flashes behind my eyes. “You’ve got to stop doing that!” I pry that damn evil shoe from her hand and throw it toward the Dumpster at the side of the parking lot. To my surprise it actually lands
in
the Dumpster. I take a deep breath, blow out the fire and offer calmly, “You’re not going to have any friends if you go around hitting them in the head all the time.”

“That’s my last Choo!” she yells, running barefoot for the Dumpster. “The real fuckin’ thing! Do you have any idea how much those cost!”

“Yeah, well, I’m out forty bucks on Girl Scout cookies. So, what? Suck it up.”

She’s not about to let it go. She climbs the side of the Dumpster and fishes out her shoe while yelling, “A thousand bucks!” She turns back to me and emphasizes each word with a poke of her shoe, “One. Thousand. Fucking. Dollars!”

Shit, is she real about that? A thousand dollars for something you can’t even walk in? They must’ve been made out of real leopards or something. I’m astounded. I watch her walk back toward me picking her panties out of her crack before I say, “Do you know how many pairs of panties you could’ve bought for that much money? I mean real grown-up panties. The kind that don’t crawl up your ass every time you move.”

She stands dead-still for a moment and even squints at me a little. Then she actually cracks a smile. She flaps her hand in the air like she’s dismissing a bad thought, and punches me in the arm the way all straight women do when they’re imitating somebody macho, and says, “C’mon, I’ll buy us a drink.”

She opens the door for me (still being macho, I guess) and I enter the darkness. My boots take turns making sticking and un-sticking noises as I walk up to the bar in the back of the room and I don’t even want to imagine Vivian’s bare feet.

I sit on a stool, spin around and look the place over. It hasn’t changed much since the last time I was in here. Same smell of cigarettes, booze and sex, same flashing colored lights cutting though the dark, even the same tired girls gyrating around the poles on the raised platform in the center of the room.

Every time I walk in here it feels as if my I.Q. drops about fifty points and even before I’ve taken a drink my senses dull. There’s so much raw sex vibing in the air I swear I can taste it.

Tawny is dancing at the front of the stage. Tawny is Ginger’s ex-girlfriend and she’s always hated me. She probably can’t wait to get off the stage and call Ginger with the news that I’m here with another woman. I watch her shake her tits, but she’s had so many do-overs that everything except her tits shake. A 6.5 on the Richter couldn’t even make them jiggle. Personally, I think her money would’ve been better spent on a treadmill or one of those ab crunchers. I’m not usually that cruel about women, especially about their bodies, but I make an exception for Tawny who dances like she needs an exorcism.

Tawny grabs some poor trucker by the ears and pulls his face smack-dab between her girls, Pebbles and Bam-Bam. Her eyes shoot poison darts at me from over the top of his balding head. I give her a wink and my best go-to-hell smile before spinning back around.

Vivian stands beside me with her purse hanging off her shoulder and with a discerning expression, she looks around the room. She wrinkles her nose in Tawny’s direction before sitting down. I gloat a little bit over that snub.

The bartender throws a damp cloth on the bar in front of us and wipes it down, leaving behind a smear of sticky wet circles. He’s a big, mean-looking guy with full tattooed sleeves and a clean-shaven head. He’s several inches taller than me and about two hundred fifty pounds of glistening muscle. He has Dixie tattooed across a broken heart right over his left pec and if you ask him why he’ll tell you that’s his name.

I like Dixie a lot. He protects the dancers (he calls them Dixie’s Chicks) from the low-life, and he always tops off my drink with a little extra. Plus, he’s an old movie buff, so we have that in common.

He greets me with our usual game, “Hey, look Mister, we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast...”

I pick up where he left off, “...and we don’t need any characters in here for atmosphere.” We give each other a knuckle bump and I add, “
It’s a Wonderful Life
.”

“Frank Capra. Nineteen forty-seven,” he says, giving me one of his rare smiles. “How’s Ginger?”

“You’d know more about that than me.”

He purses his lips and nods sympathetically. “Haven’t seen your face in a while,” he says. “You been working hard?”

I dip into a bag of clichés and say the first one I pull out, “Hardly working, Dix, hardly working. I’ll have the usual Jack and Coke, light on the Coke and...” I jerk my thumb toward Vivian, “give her something fancy with an umbrella in it.”

“No umbrellas anymore,” Dixie says. “I can’t put pokey things in the drinks after the last incident.”

I laugh. “Make that two Jacks then.”

“I can order for myself,” Vivian says testily, sitting on the stool beside me and setting her shoe on the bar in front of her.

Dixie pauses in his wiping, waiting for her order. Now that she has his undivided attention, Vivian leans forward, resting her tits on the counter, and scans the rows of bottles in front of the mirrored bar back. Dixie’s seen enough tits that he doesn’t even glance at hers. I would look straight at them, but the reflection in the mirror provides a better view.

Finally, Vivian straightens up and says, “I’ll have a Jack, straight up, on the rocks.”

It must be my ears, but I could swear she just said that with a British accent.

Dixie rolls his eyes and begins pouring. “You want those on Ginger’s tab?”

I frown. “Better not.”

Vivian swings on her stool to face me. “Come here often?” she asks, like she thinks this is a truly amusing remark.

“Not for a while,” I say truthfully. “One time when I was here a dancer broke my nose.”

Vivian grimaces. “What the hell did you do to deserve that?”

“She didn’t hit me with her
fist
,” I halfway explain, hoping she’ll get it on her own.

She doesn’t. She looks at me blankly, props one elbow on the bar and plays with a strand of her hair.

I try again, “Let’s just say that I learned to ask before I stick my face somewhere it doesn’t belong.” I wonder if she got it this time.

She wraps her hair around and around her index finger. She nods and says profoundly, “Oh.”

I’m still not sure she got it.

Dixie tosses down a couple of napkins and places our drinks in front of us. Vivian scoots a twenty his way. She takes a swig of her drink and swishes it around in her mouth like it was a fine French wine, sets it down with a purpose and asks, “So...you’re a
patissier
?”

“A what?”

“A pastry chef,” Vivian explains like I’m dumb.

“A pastry chef? What gave you that idea?”

“The cookies? The funeral?”

“Oh, the cookies. No, I’m not a pastry chef.” Just the thought makes me laugh.

“I was being sarcastic,” she says.

“Oh,” I reply. “You sounded so serious.”

“What
were
you doing with a bunch of Girl Scout cookies?”

“Community service,” I explain. “It’s part of my parole agreement.”