Replaced by a Starbucks.
Nothing good ever stayed.
Then I met Valerie.
The earliest snapshots of Valerie are the ones from the Bush Company. The ones that kept me company on those long hot nights when I couldn’t sleep. I’d seen her dancing to “Thunder Kiss ’65” and I knew she’d be my favorite. I’d only stay there on the nights she worked. I’d sit patiently, nodding the other girls by, taking their dirty looks with them, until she’d finally come over to me. Skin like milk, hair black as coffee, and eyes to match.
“My name’s Karl,” I told her one night during a private dance.
“Valerie.”
“Okay if I ask where you’re from, Valerie?”
“Tucson.” Red lips against my throat. “What about you, Karl?”
“Right here.”
“No one is from here. So, where’re you from, really?” I noticed the accent then. Not Spanish like you’d expect in Phoenix. Something else, Eastern European, maybe.
“Okay,” I said. “Nowhere. Then here.”
But she wasn’t listening anymore, her back against my lap, sliding down between my legs.
I swallowed my beer and looked at my watch.
“Thinking of heading over to the Paper Heart later. They’re showing
“Seen it.”
“Come on, Cooper,” I heard Valerie’s husky voice behind me. “We should get to the motel already.”
I had to look at her. Her face, lined beautifully in the glow of the tiki lamp above the table where she and Cooper sat. I tried telling myself how much she hated being with Cooper. She made it clear to me that she had to act like she was into him. But knowing this didn’t make it any easier watching them together.
“Yo, you want something?” Cooper shouted across the floor at me. Valerie pretended to see me for the first time. She put her hand on Cooper’s arm, saying something I couldn’t hear.
Touching Cooper’s arm like that, I bet it was something she did a lot. One of her finest talents, touching guys, prodding them, making them do what she wanted. I hated that about her.
“Easy, friend,” I said. “No harm meant.”
I turned around and looked down at my beer, its foam sticking to the sides of the glass. “The fuck,” I heard Cooper continue. “You hear that shit? Ain’t your friend, yo!”
I finished my beer. That’s right, Cooper, listen to your girlfriend there. Forget about me and think about all that swag you got with you instead. I’m no one. Just another loser in a bar.
My throat burned. I smacked my glass down, feeling Valerie’s nails caressing Cooper’s arm, his back, other places too.
I couldn’t take it anymore. I stood up. “I guess I’m outta here. See ya, Sal.”
Outside, the night hadn’t cooled any. They rarely did. Not when the days hit above 110 degrees. That’s when the heat just soaks into the concrete and glass and waits there until morning. Riding out the hot nights, I’d lay awake in my apartment with the radio on, reading a Luke Short or Louis L’Amour paperback and listening to the whistle of the trains off Grand slide with the hum of traffic on I-10.
A Chevy truck rolled by on Grand, Ranchero music trailing as it passed me.
I could hear singing from the church around the corner. White globe lights hung from its trellises, glinting off the cars and pickups that lined the street in front of it.
My car, a fourth-generation Impala rolling out its last miles, sat parked around the corner on Fifteenth Avenue, across from the boxing club. I could see two Latino boys sparring in the ring. Another worked the bag while a woman, his girlfriend maybe, jiggled an infant on her knee as she watched him pounding the bag, working it, working it.
“He always brags about his jewelry business. How he’s a big entrepreneur,” Valerie had told me. We were in Mel’s Diner on Grand, after her shift. She stirred sugar into her coffee. She put lots of sugar into her coffee, I noticed. She sipped it quickly as she spoke. I wished she’d finish it and we could go back to my place.
“He’s just another guy full of shit,” I said. I was sick of hearing about Cooper already. “Phoenix is full of guys like Cooper. Forget about him.”
“Is Karl jealous?” She put her mug down, smiling on one side of her mouth.
“Karl’s tired,” I answered. “Karl would like to take you home.”
“And do what?”
“You’re a smart girl, Valerie. I’m sure you can figure that out.”
“Dance for you maybe?” That crooked smile again. “You’d like Valerie to dance for you again tonight?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe dance, maybe more than dance?”
I wanted more than the dance. She knew it. “Like I said.”
She sipped from her mug. That’s the snapshot of her when I first compared her hair to the color of coffee. “I like dancing for you, Karl.”
“Yeah?”
She got up from her side of the booth and slid over next to me, her short denim skirt high up her thighs.
“Do you wonder why I tell you about Cooper?”
“You already said it. To make me jealous.”
“He wants me to quit dancing. Work for him instead. I can make more money working for him, he says, selling his jewelry designs.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“He carries jewels around with him. He wants to get into the jewelry-design business. He buys from designers and sells them as his own. I asked him once where he gets his jewels. He tells me people who owe him money sometimes pay in jewels. I think he buys jewels with his father’s money. Maybe you’ve seen his father’s commercials on TV. His father is that car dealer from California. He marries beauty queens from Texas.”
“Again, why are you telling me this?”
“Cooper carries around jewels with him. He shows them to me. I tell him I know people he can sell jewels to maybe. Clients with money. I meet them doing escort jobs. Cooper wants to fuck me like a big shot. He is like a fucking teenager. But a teenager with too much money.” I could hear the Eastern venom in her voice.
The door opened and a pair of Phoenix PD came in. Young and athletic looking; ASU Sun Devils material. They both threw brief glances at us before taking a booth near the corner. I heard a cough of static from one of their radios.
Valerie smiled at them.
I looked out the window, at the fenced-in used car lot across Grand. I waited for her to get on with it.
It came with a flicker of hot tongue against my ear. A voice so low, hypnotic; a razor blade coated with the scent of coffee and cigarettes.
“Maybe Karl and Valerie teach the big shot a lesson.”
More snapshots of her for the slideshow then. Ones of her dancing for me at my place, swaying to the Roy Orbison tape on my cassette player, wearing nothing by the end of the third song. Then, only in my apartment, would she let me touch her as she danced.
But touching only, nothing else.
That would come later, she promised me.
Until then, she would do other things for me.
Sometimes, afterward, sitting in the chair by the window, she’d talk about her escort jobs, the blue smoke from her cigarettes drifting out into the night. But mostly she talked about Cooper. How he was growing impatient with her. When would she quit dancing and work for him. And when was she going to let Cooper meet with her people. He had big plans and wouldn’t wait on her and her people for long.
Then she stopped coming over to my place.
No reason why.
After the last night there, I found her spangled thong under my pillow. It glittered in the light from the window like dreams from the Emerald City. I didn’t notice when she left it, but knew she’d left it for me as a
