THUGLIT Issue Four (9 page)

My little ballet netted an extra $
75 in my next check, almost doubling what I made most weeks. I now understood how Allure Furs stayed in business despite its poor sales. It was a strip club. A strip club for private customers. Seedier even than the ones I heard about across the Detroit River in Windsor. Places where desperate men sought relief from their loneliness and bad marriages.

My check grew over the next weeks even if my self-respect did not. If virtue was its own reward, a lack of virtue paid well too. The performance became rote and my initial interest in the men and their faces waned. I felt like a prostitute and would’ve denied I did such a thing to even my closest friends. Various unpleasant circumstances arose too. Men whispering words like “slut” under their breath; men masturbating while they watched me; men taking photographs of me wearing a mask if they ponied up enough money, men panting, sighing, and in one case, crying.

Gradually, Mr. Polifax treated me differently too. Although the men didn’t touch my body, they’d touched something deeper and it became harder and harder to live with it. By day I was a virginal seventeen-year-old; by night I was a stripper in the sleaziest club on earth.

It ended in the way you might expect.

One night, well after closing hour, a man I’d never seen before entered the shop for an appointment. I should have been suspicious because Mr. Polifax had been on pins and needles all day, opening and closing drawers, multiple trips to his private john, rearranging coats, mumbling, hushed conversations on the telephone. Another thing that should have tipped me off me was Lisa had backed out of the night’s job when she saw the client’s name in the appointment book. She covered it up by saying this fellow went to her church and she couldn’t risk him recognizing her. As soon as I saw him I knew this guy had never seen the inside of any church.

“Iris
—this guy, this guy,” Mr. Polifax stuttered, in the moments before the client entered the shop, “well, he likes a little contact. Nothing too fancy but—well he really pays well. I can probably pay you double the usual rate.”

“But more or less the usual?”

“More or less.”

But Mr.
Polifax didn’t look me in the eye.

The man who entered the back room a few minutes later topped 6’4. But his width or girth was even more impressive than his height. He looked like Bluto in the
Popeye
comics. An acid wash began swirling in my stomach. Most of the guys I’d modeled for were either jokey or solemn in a creepy way. But this guy, this monster of a man, had a look of venom on his face—just like Bluto, in fact. He saw me for what I’d become and intended to take advantage of it.

“Iris, if you need me, I’ll be in the next room.”

Before I could protest Mr. Polifax’s quick exit, Bluto had slammed the door shut with his heel.

“That’s not our arrangement,” I shouted. “You’re supposed to
…”

The client put his mammoth hand over my mouth. “You don’t need to say another word,” he whispered. “And don’t pretend to be an innocent kid either. Some guys like that kinda stuff—but not me.”

A smile crept up his face as he pushed me up against a mirror and raised his knee, knocking my shaking knees apart. There was no way I was going anywhere. His mouth, lips large and livery, was on my neck, and his breath was both hot and fetid. His other hand, ham-fisted and awkward, searched for my breast. Finding it, he squeezed hard enough to make a scream leak out from behind his other hand. He was surprised, and I used that moment to raise my foot sharply. Using the heel, I broke the mirror behind me. The shattering glass brought Mr. Polifax back into the room within seconds.

“Hey,” he said, looking Bluto in the face. “What do you think you’re doing in here? That glass cost good money.” Then he noticed me cowering in the corner. “You okay, Iris
?” I was shaking too hard to answer.

“Look,” Bluto said, and he was looking at me. “Don’t give me any of that stuff, girly. How’d you like it if a piece of the glass under my foot found its way to your face? That’d put an end to your little shell game. A few guys out there like scars, but not enough to make it worth hiring you.”

But before his hand reached the floor, Mr. Polifax pulled a gun from his jacket pocket. He was far less awkward with the weapon than I’d have expected.

“Time to go, friend. Ten seconds and I pull the trigger.”

“What’re you trying to pull, you four-flushing fairy,” the man said “You know what I come here for. Same thing as always. What’s-her-name knows the score. Where’s she tonight?”

But Mr. Polifax said nothing as the gun inched higher. I heard the sound of a hammer being pulled back. Bluto was out the door in seconds.

“Sorry ‘bout that, Iris,” Mr. Polifax said once we heard the door close. “It’ll never happen again. I guarantee it.” He put the gun back in his pocket, wiped his sweating face. “Sometimes… unfortunate…
things
like this happen.” When I said nothing, he drove me home. “Lisa knows how to handle him,” he said at the curb. “I suppose you’re out of…things, after this.”

I got out of the car without answering.

A month or two later, the trio of stores anchored by Allure Furs burned to the ground in a spectacular blaze. You could smell the odor of an accelerant mixed with burning pastry, animal skins, and acetate along with other chemicals used in screening movies. The Fire Marshal couldn’t decide whether it was the faulty projector at the theater or the oven at the donut shop that caused it. Although the fire was at night, both Mr. Polifax and a client were on the premises and perished in what was called an extremely rapid-moving fire. Myrtle called to give me the news although she needn’t have bothered. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on your point of view, neither man died—at least not right away.

My mother threw the newspaper on the table at breakfast. “Looks like you got out of that place just in time, Iris.”

I wondered if she could smell it on me. Not just the chemicals but all of it.

by Garrett Crowe

Before he was blue-lighted, Rex sped by the road lines so fast they turned into one long surveyor-yellow tightrope that only he and his motorcycle were brave enough to balance across. The speed turned him into a blur, a transparent ghost flying down empty roads. He had just left Snow White’s Bar after knocking some Young Boy out.

Everything starts slow in the beginning, so when he saw the blue strobe, Rex stopped the bike as quickly as he could. It gave him enough time to pull the leather pouch from his jacket pocket and give an underhand toss. The pouch arced into the tree
line, Mile Marker 7. He’d come back tomorrow.

When the white Chevy Impala pulled behind him, the vehicle's blue strobe and headlights lit the scene. There was Rex covered in homem
ade tattoos of the finest dirty-kitchen quality. He wore a sleeveless denim jacket with
$3 SOULS
embroidered on the back in champion-yellow and had a head full of soap-hating black hair. And then there were the two police officers that got out of the car. One was older, shorter, and broader than the other.

The older one said, “Where you going? The moon?” His partner didn’t say anything. “If this was Memphis, there’d be guns drawn.” They got on each side of the motorcycle. The older one continued, “Have
I had run-ins with you before?”

He had. The older cop was Jerry Powers, and when Rex was a teenager, he once rode in the back of Jerry’s cop car after being caught trying to steal beer fr
om the Little General convenience store. He remembered the car's radio tuned to the oldies station, the volume so low he could only make out the choruses. He also remembered how the night lights of the town rolled in the dark backseat. On the way to the police department, the officer glanced in the rear-view mirror, trying to talk sense to the sixteen-year old. The standard lecture; “What’s your family going to think about this? Better straighten up because I know exactly where you’re headed if you don’t.”

But that was almost ten years ago, and Rex knew by Jerry’s face he didn’t remember. “Don’t believe we‘ve met,” Rex said.

“Well, license, registration, proof of insurance?” Jerry asked. Rex pulled the information from his wallet. The officer didn’t look at it and handed it to his partner. “Tip, run that for me.”

Rex didn’t know Tip. The younger officer was tall with buzzed dark hair. Unlike Jerry, his forehead was free of wrinkles. Rex could tell Tip hadn’t been with the J.P.D. for long by the way he had followed Jerry out of the car and waited for his partner to talk. He didn't even rest his hand on his holster like Jerry had.

Rex looked at Tip’s badge, the Jackson Police bald eagle with its open-mouth and unfurled wings in the blinking blue lights. Underneath the badge, a nametag that read Ofc. Carrington in engraved letters. Rex knew a Carrington from somewhere, but the name lost itself as Tip went back to the vehicle, leaving Jerry and Rex alone. Jerry walked in circles around the motorcycle. The hand that wasn’t resting on the gun holster carried a flashlight that surveyed the bike like a silver baton, the light traveling between the crannies of the engine, muffler, and spokes.

“Why you going so fast?” Jerry asked.

“Didn’t realize I was,” Rex said, but he knew he had been. The longer he drove the faster he accelerated. Sometimes he imagined being in a race with his father’s '69 Pontiac GTO. Richard Fowler called it The Goat, already a classic by the time Rex was born. Taking night-rides with his father as a boy, Rex tried counting the yellow rectangles that lay in the road, but he could never get a good count going. His father simply drove too fast. While Richard raced beyond 60 miles per hour, and then beyond 70 miles per hour, Rex could only get to numbers like thirteen or fourteen before the markings passed him at speeds faster than he could count, a pace beyond memory and comprehension. Rex would give up, the velocity of The Goat taking his mind elsewhere.

However, those rides only happened on occasion. When Richard was in one of his rare moods, he’d ask his son to take a ride, and without a thought, Rex always went.

Richard brought his son outside the city limits. “The cops don’t really care out here,” he said. And in that country darkness, trees became another component of the night, another shade of black. Rex’s father pressed down on the gas pedal, and the Goat’s engine yelled violence at deafening levels. The father tightened his hands around the steering wheel, gripping it so hard his only tattoo on his right shoulder moved. The tattoo depicted a cobra striking a panther. When he wore sleeveless tops, his son watched the snake stir with wrath against the cat. And if Richard got really excited, he screamed with the engine, “
It’s the speed that matters. The speed.
” Rex nodded, giving a weak smile.

But those memories of his father were the only ones Rex remotely appreciated. He had come to believe that when he was a growing boy, his father couldn’t accept being grown. Richard was rarely home. And if he was home, he didn’t pay much attention to BeBe or Rex.

BeBe had told her son that when Richard clocked out of his factory job, where he manufactured car door handles for Toyota, he wandered off to other places. “He likes going to John-Ray’s,” she said, “where he smokes pot from a glass bong and enjoys feeling trashy.” When BeBe was pregnant with Rex, she had told her husband no more of that in the house, so Richard went elsewhere.

She also claimed Richard dined in bars where he took a few sips and let strange women borrow both a cigarette and a light. “But he don’t go to places like the Drink Box or the Fishing Pond to just beer-up and talk to women,” she said. “He likes visiting those places because of the attention his GTO gets. He thinks when he pulls up in the parking lot with the engine cranking in demon power, all the bartenders and barstoolees say, ‘There’s Richie Fowler, hollering at hell.’ Or when he leaves, ‘There’s Richie, rip roaring away.’
He thinks people want to watch The Goat’s red paintjob go in and out of sight from the parking lot.”

But most of the time, Richard didn’t go to any of those places. When he came home on those nights, he didn’t smell like John-Ray’s sweet leaf, nor did he have the attached film of bar smoke on his factory-blue overalls. He smelled like nothing.

“Where you been?” BeBe asked, while Rex hid in the hallway and listened.

“Nowhere,” Richard replied.

Rex imagined Nowhere being a place where everything was much different than home. Nowhere had no edges or boundaries. His father drove his GTO in a planet of black and anti-everything, like one of those motorcycle cage-spheres made out of steel he had seen in movies. And instead of a dirt bike, his father drove the GTO forwards, backwards, down, up, left, right, diagonally, and in other directions too. All in darkness. Nowhere was where Richard truly wanted to be, where he was truly happy, where he was truly himself. And when Rex was thirteen, it was where his father went when Richard suddenly packed his bags, left in his car, and never came back to BeBe or Rex again.

*****

Jerry kept walking in slow circles around the motorcycle. He had stopped shining the flashlight on the bike and put it to Rex’s body, the orb rotating around his chest, arms, and back.

“Where you coming from?”

Rex wasn’t about to lie just yet. “The bar. Only had one and a half before you ask.”

Jerry stopped walking and shined the flashlight into Rex’s eyes. “Which bar?”

“Snow White’s.” Rex began to squint.

“Light hurting your eyes?” the officer asked. He brought the flashlight down and saw the tattoos on Rex’s hands. “What in the hell’s on your knucks?” The cop picked up Rex’s hands and read the tattoos aloud, “An Upside Down Star, E, A, T, G, O, D, Upside Down Cross.” Jerry made a sound with his tongue and continued, “What drives you to put something like that on your body?”

Rex didn’t say anything.

“Well, I tell you what’s interesting,” the officer said, letting go of the tattooed hands. “It’s interesting you coming from the bar. We just heard a call about Snow White’s on the radio. You know what I’m talking about?”

“Don’t have a clue.”

“Don’t know anything about a fight?”

“No fight happened while I was there.”

“Yeah? There was a fight sure enough. A report that some kid got it g
ood,” Jerry said. “By a biker.”

“That’s something.”

“Something alright. You’re coming from a biker bar. And you’re a biker. I ain’t fooled, I know what a Three Dollar Soul is,” he alluded to the patch on Rex’s back. “I know you fashion yourselves a motorcycle club,” he said. “Coincidence is something.”

“I wasn’t the only biker there. I didn’t see a fight. I haven’t thrown a punch all night, and I ain’t g
ot nothing for you,” Rex said. However, he had seen the fight…real good.

Who knows how it got started. One of the Young Boys could’ve said something smart to Pettin, K.J. or Killer Juice, Endless Frank, or any of the Three Dollar Souls. Maybe Big Cody threw a beer at one of the Young Boys for getting too close. Or maybe it was none of that. Perhaps a wind came into the bar, pushing smoke from any of the numerous lit cigarettes in the face of T-Boy who hated the smell of “that bullshit”, which in turn made him mad as a hornet and ready to start something with any of the cocky-shit Young Boys playing a game of darts adjacent to the Three Dollar Souls’ pool table. It wasn’t that difficult to get a fight started in Snow White’s on a Friday night with the Three Dollar Souls.

“Oh, shit. You knocked him cucumber-cold,” Pettin said as he came from behind, shaking Rex by the shoulder. Everyone knew that when one falls like that it’s over. “You boys came on the wrong night.” He started dancing around with his right middle finger in the air and his left hand on his crotch. “Y’all didn’t know Rex here got the fist from Hell.”

Rex watched the Young Boys drag their friend out the door, the boy’s feet pointing to the c
eiling like a body in a morgue.

“Anyone got a toe tag?” Pettin asked as if he read Rex’s mind.

The Young Boys weren’t a motorcycle club like the Three Dollar Souls. They weren’t a neighborhood gang either. They were only called the Young Boys because that’s what they were—young boys. Boys that just graduated high school and came to Snow White’s on weekends for the 75 cent-a-game pool tables, the jukebox that played anything from Merle Haggard to Danzig, and the bar-mothers who might just partake in serving a minor if the boys “acted nice.”

Five of them came in
to Snow White’s on this particular night, all wearing tight t-shirts that showed off their youthful weight-bench biceps. Rex watched them walk around with their chests cocked and shoulders wobbling. He knew the night would end with dramatics because the Three Dollar Souls didn’t stand for Young Boys acting like Big Boys.

Before the fight started, Rex was sitting at the bar by himself until Pettin came along from the pool table. Pettin was a long-time member of the Three Dollar Souls and Rex’s roommate.

“Them Young Boys ready for some stuff tonight,” he said.

Rex nodded. “They
usually are. What’d they do?”

“Saying it was their turn for the pool table.”

“But there are two pool tables.”

“That’s what I told them, but they said we knew damn well the one we were on was the flattest. Just horseshit, you know.” He began laughing, “And when they dribbled that mess, fucking Big Cody, straight-faced as a metal pole, said, ‘Looks like y’all gott
a get a new set of rules then.’”

“What’d they say back to Cody?” Rex asked

“Nothing. Probably mumbled out their ass.” Pettin waved his hand to alert Vickie the bartender. Rex smelled the combination of leather and body odor from Pettin while he moved.

Vickie came over, grinning, and said, “What you want, sonbitch?”

“Damn, woman. Always got something smart to say, don't she?”

“Don’t I know, could barely get this,” Rex said, holding up his beer.

“Oh, don’t turn on me. I pay attention to you.” And she did. They had a thing for each other that hadn’t come to fruition, partly because Rex wasn’t good at flirting. They were getting there though.

“But when I deal with the likes of him,” Vickie pointed at Pettin, “I gotta be smart. Now what you want?”

“Bad bitch,” Pettin said. He looked behind the bar, searching for something. “I want uhhh…”

“We ain’t got Uh
hh,” Vickie said with the snap of a comedian.

“You’re on one
tonight. Just get me a Bud L.”

“What about you?” she asked Rex.

“I’ll take another,” Rex said. Vickie nodded and gave him one of those winks that said the beer was free.

“Boy, that bird's got something for you,” Pettin said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“You don’t, but I do. Her red-hair and freckles shake when she talks to you. You’ll be the stud of the parking lot if you get that. Ready for a girlfriend?”

Rex looked Pettin dead in the face and said, “You're nuthouse crazy.”

“Which means yes. I ain’t ever known you with a girl before, but you ready.”