for her, “spending the evening dressed as a hooker.”
Dana put her hands on her hips again. She tilted her head to one side. She narrowed her eyes. Then she pulled out the big guns. “You peed on that stick yet?”
I sighed and willed my eye not to twitch.
“Fine. I’ll be a hooker.”
Fifteen minutes later Dana was coaching me on hooker-speak (which apparently consisted of a lot of “yo baby”’s and “wa’sup dawg”’s) and pulling dress after increasingly tiny dress from her closet. Finally she settled on a neon pink, strapless spandex thing that looked small enough to be a size negative two. She added a long red wig that reached clear down to my butt and a pair of four-inch acrylic heels chunkier than a Snickers bar.
As she sat me down on her bed to put the finishing touches on my make-up I filled her in on Ramirez’s latest news about Richard.
The great thing about really good friends is that they often get as upset as you, if not more, when your boyfriend does something really stupid. Like get married.
“That bastard. That cheating son of bitch. The motherfu-”
“My thoughts exactly.” I cut her off before she got too colorful. She was, after all, in character.
“How could he be married? I mean, you’ve met his freaking mother!”
I’d been thinking the same thing. In fact my first irrational thought when Ramirez told me about Cinderella was, had all his family and friends been lying to me for the last five months? Had they all been briefed beforehand to keep Maddie in the dark? It was like I was a bad reality show contestant. Only there was no cash payoff with this hoax.
But even as I listened to Dana cuss him out, I couldn’t help a teeny tiny part of me from hoping that maybe Richard had an explanation for all this. And that wasn’t just the denial talking. I knew Richard. Okay, so there were a few aspects of his life I wasn’t privy to, but deep down I knew the man. I knew he was no more capable of leading a double life than he was of growing seven inches and playing for the Lakers. This kind of deception just wasn’t in his makeup. Somehow, I knew there was a logical explanation for all of this and I was having a hard time hating him as much as I should until I heard his side of the story. I just could not believe Richard was actually married.
Then again, I had a hard time envisioning him consorting with killers and yet, here we were.
“Okay, I’m done.” Dana capped her lipstick and pulled back her closet door to reveal a full-length mirror. We stood side by side and Dana put one arm around my shoulder. “Oh, this is going to be so much fun!” she squealed.
Again with that “fun” thing. Why did everyone think dressing up in dangerously ugly clothing was fun?
The wig itched a little, the spandex was riding up on my thighs already, but I had to admit as I stared in the mirror for the final effect, it was a good disguise. I looked nothing like myself. Thank God.
“Honey, we look fabulous,” Dana said. “Let’s go.”
I’m not ashamed to say I had a knot in my stomach the entire drive up the 405. Well, that and a wedgie from the incredibly tight and unforgiving spandex causing my granny underwear to bunch. I shifted in my seat, promising myself I’d do laundry tomorrow.
We decided to ride in my Jeep as Dana said it looked more hookerish than her car. I wasn’t sure if I should be offended by that or not. As we crawled through rush hour traffic, I couldn’t help looking in my rearview mirror every two seconds for signs of a black SUV. I was a little paranoid about Ramirez spotting my car now. As if having him see me in the Purple People Eater wasn’t bad enough, catching me as the Happy Hooker would probably kill me of embarrassment on the spot. Not to mention put a serious crimp in our plans.
Speaking of which…
“So, what is this
“Don’t worry,” Dana said, flipping down the visor to check her makeup, “just leave the talking to me.”
Why is it when someone says, “don’t worry,” it makes me worry even more?
“So,” Dana asked, before I could question her further, “where exactly is this place?”
I consulted the directions I’d printed from Yahoo maps before leaving the Actor’s Duplex.
“Lankershim and Vanowen in North Hollywood. We should be there in about twenty minutes.”
Dana nodded, pulling out a tube of lipstick and lapsing into silence as she added another layer of Circus Clown Red.
We wove north up the 405 and through the hills, which were actually quite scenic, until we reached the 101 and started our descent into the Valley. As we neared the 134 split, I slowed down, exiting the freeway at Lankershim as we entered North Hollywood.
While Hollywood features famous landmarks, celebrity footprints, and glitzy tourist shops, North Hollywood’s name is unfairly deceptive. North Hollywood is Hollywood’s ugly stepsister. Homes have bars on the windows, ‘79 Oldsmobiles propped on cement bocks cover brown lawns and old toothless men of every conceivable race sit on front porches yelling things like, “That my damn garbage. Touch that and I’ll break yo’ arm.”
As we passed toothless man number three (yelling about the damn dog going on the damn lawn) I instinctively locked my doors. It wasn’t that I was afraid of North Hollywood. Hey, I grew up in L.A., it took a lot more than bars on a window to frighten me. But the way that toothless old man had been staring at me like he was counting his pennies had me worried about the kind of propositions two hookishly dressed young ladies might get in this neighborhood. I did a little yucky squirm in my seat at the thought.
“It should be up here on the right,” Dana said, reading the addresses as we passed by a liquor store, a closeout furniture place and a Desi’s Porn Palace.
My stomach began to feel queasy as we neared the address and I spotted a woman wearing my same spandex dress negotiating at the passenger side window of a dented caddy. Unlike Dana, I was no actress. Granted, I was exercising my truth bending skills quite a bit lately (lying sounded so tawdry), but I wasn’t quite sure I could pull off “hooker with a mission.”
Too late to turn back now.
“Here it is.” Dana pointed to a run down motel on the right. Ten units on the bottom, ten on the top and a metal staircase running along the side. A small building in front served as an office and behind it I could see green dumpsters overflowing with trash. The beige, stucco walls of the motel had seen one too many nights of gang tagging, being a tri-colored mass of symbols that meant nothing to me but could likely get one shot at in South Central. The windows predictably sported prison-like bars and the roof likely would have leaked buckets – if it ever rained in L.A. that is.
I pulled into a spot under a sickly looking palm. Dana got out and immediately adjusted her top. I followed suit, trying one last time, in vain I might add, to retrieve my grannies from my cranny.
“Dana, I don’t know if I can do this.” I glanced nervously at the front office. Or, as the sign read. _ront O__ice. It looked like someone had shot out the “F”’s.
Dana looked in the side mirror, adjusting her wig. “Relax, it’ll be fine. Just leave the talking to me. I’m a sweet-talking expert.” Dana gave me a wink.
I took a deep breath. Okay. I could do this. Maddie Springer, Happy Hooker Extraordinaire.
Chapter Eight
The first time I ever saw Dana was on the blacktop at John Adams Middle School. She was wearing pink stirrup pants, a Madonna cut black, mesh shirt, and way more make-up than any other seventh grader I knew. She was standing with Alan Miller, our pre-teen equivalent of Donnie Wahlberg, and flirting. And not in the giggle, giggle, hair-flip way other girls I knew did. Dana had moves that made Alan’s pants look like a little pup tent. She did the eyelash batting, the hip jutting, the shoulder thrusting, and what was later to become known as her signature move, the Lean and Shake.
