Jesse ignored him. “All you gotta do, Larry, is find a girl that’s willing and then pay her for the ‘Forbidden Dance.’”
Darryl flicked ashes into the ashtray. “The Forbidden Dance?”
Jesse nodded. “Yep. Pay four hundred bucks and they take you in a back room and show you the secrets of the Forbidden Dance. It’s a code and shit. Means you want to get laid.”
“For real?” Darryl sounded intrigued.
“Most definitely.”
“Bullshit,” I said. “I can see tricks being turned at a massage parlor, but a strip club is a lot more high profile than that. If it was true, the cops would shut them down.”
“Ask Lou Myers.”
“Lou Myers is an ass-clown.”
“Yeah, but he knows his hoes, too. Dude spends like half his paycheck on them every week.”
I grunted. “It’s easy to understand why. Lou’s never met a Big Mac he didn’t eat. I’m surprised the fat fuck can get laid at all.”
“I heard that. But he does get laid. And he does it at the Odessa and the massage parlor. And the cops don’t do shit about it because they get laid, too—along with some money on the side. Think about it. Why you think a dude like Whitey Putin brings these chicks over from Russia? It ain’t just to dance. He gets them turning tricks. Doesn’t have to pay taxes or health insurance or give them paid holidays. It’s the perfect set-up. And if his stable runs dry, he can always order up some more girls.”
“So—Whitey’s a pimp?”
“Maybe, but I don’t know for sure. I only know that he’s connected and that you don’t want to fuck with him. According to Lou, he finds these girls in Chechnya, Georgia, Armenia, and shit.”
“Georgia?” Yul frowned.
“Not our Georgia,” Jesse said. “Georgia overseas—in Europe. Dumb shit. Whitey’s people bring these girls into the States. Smuggle them through the port down in Baltimore. Feed them into the network from there. Send them off to other cities. They don’t have to worry about immigration papers or any of that. In return, the girls turn tricks in order to pay the Russians back. So they put them to work in strip clubs, massage parlors—places like that. Like the ones Whitey owns. He owns other joints, too. Restaurants. Bars. Whitey’s a big man here in York, but he’s small time in the grand scheme of things. Supposedly, he’s connected to a much larger group out of Brighton Beach up in New York.”
“So he’s not just a pimp,” I said. “Tonya was right. He’s Russian mob.”
Jesse held up his hands. “Yo, I’m just talking. That’s all. I ain’t
I wondered if Whitey was actually tied into the mob, or if everything Jesse had said was total bullshit. Jesse had a bad habit of exaggerating the truth. Deep down inside, he’d always had some real self-esteem issues. Usually, his lies and half-truths were designed to make him seem more important. More exciting. Like this time. Wasn’t enough that he took us to a cool strip club. It had to be a strip club owned and operated by the Russian mob, and he had to know all the big secrets that the rest of us weren’t let in on.
But Tonya had hinted that Whitey was in the mob, too. Hooked up. Was she serious, or just feeding into Jesse’s bullshit? Playing along with the customer.
I wondered about the club’s name. The Odessa. That wasn’t Russian. It was German. It stood for Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Angehorigen, or Organization of Former Members of the SS. I knew this from watching The History Channel. The Odessa was supposed to be a secret society dedicated to rescuing Nazi war criminals. So how did that tie in to the whole Russian mob thing?
On the stereo, Circle of Fear segued into some Deftones. Jesse had closed his eyes again and fallen asleep. Yul was back to biting his fingernails. Darryl lit another cigarette and nodded his head in time with the music.
Could Sondra really be a whore? It didn’t seem possible. Most hookers that I’d seen, usually on old reruns of
Maybe I was naive, but I just couldn’t see it. Sondra seemed above all that. Just watching her dance—she’d seemed like an angel, not a devil.
Jesse woke up when we exited the highway and stopped at the red light. He rubbed his face and looked around.
“I need some coffee,” he muttered.
“True that.” Darryl flicked his butt out the window. “I could go for some Dennys. One of those Moons over My Hammy would be the shit right about now.”
I rolled into the GPS parking lot and dropped the guys off at their cars. Yul was in full panic mode now, wondering if Kim would somehow psychically figure out where he’d been. The backseat was covered with glitter. We fucked with him about it some more and then said our goodbyes. Yul went home looking anxious. Darryl and Jesse headed out for some breakfast. I drove home with a raging hard on, thinking about Sondra.
When I walked through my apartment door, my cat, Webster, hissed at me. He was annoyed. His food dish was still half-full, but Webster has never been a half-full type of feline. He always saw the dish as half-empty and got really pissed if I didn’t keep it topped off at all times. This explained why he was so fat.
I’d had him for years. I used to work at the Harley Davidson plant through a temp agency (no option to hire on, which sucked, because I would have loved to get some of those union wages) and I found him there. He was just a kitten at the time. Figured either somebody had dumped him and left him to fend for himself, or a stray had a litter somewhere and he’d wandered away. One of my co-workers found him hiding beneath a stack of skids. Good thing, too. If we hadn’t found him, he’d have been killed soon as a forklift tried to pick the skids up.
His eyes were barely open, he was so small. His skin was paper-thin and his ribs stuck out. I took him home, got some special milk from the pet store, and nursed him with a doll baby bottle until he was old enough to eat real food. I’d had him ever since. Now he was big and fat and grumpy. Coal-black fur and green eyes, a belly that swayed when he walked, fond of sleeping and eating, still had his claws and knew how to use them—especially on the fucking furniture. My sofa and chair were torn to shit.
Webster hated everyone, especially Jesse. Growled and hissed at Jesse every time the guys came over. But he loved me and I loved him back. My apartment would have been a much lonelier place without him.
I bent over. Webster allowed me to pick him up. I scratched the top of his head and behind his ears. He purred a little, enjoying the attention and forgiving me for neglecting his food dish. After a few minutes, his tail started swishing, the signal that he didn’t want to be held anymore, so I put him down and fed him. Then I checked the answering machine. There were no messages. There never were. Just like my cell phone.
The apartment was quiet. Always quiet. I hated how it made me feel. I turned on the stereo, put in some Machine Head, and tried to kill the silence.
Despite my short schedule at GPS, my social life wasn’t exactly active. Usually, I hung out with Darryl, Yul, and Jesse after work. On Sunday afternoons, I visited my folks and had dinner with them. Mom would always ask if I was dating anybody. Dad would always mumble to himself. I think he thought I was gay. Sometimes I thought about fucking with him, telling him I was, that I had a life-partner named Andre and we were in love. But my Dad’s got a heart condition and that shit wouldn’t have been funny if he had a heart attack.
Occasionally, I’d go see a movie by myself or go to a ballgame or a concert with the guys. But that was pretty much it. No girlfriend. It was hard to meet girls. Sure, I had the occasional fling here and there—one night stands or weekend trysts. But nothing permanent. Nothing meaningful or serious. I’d given up on the bar scene. The women I met in bars usually turned out to be batshit fucking crazy, and most of the time I didn’t find that out until after I’d dated them for a few weeks. They were all drama queens or attention whores or just generally unhinged —and one had been married (she’d revealed this to me on our fourth date, when her husband came home from work early).
There were women working at GPS of course, but none in my load area, and it was difficult to meet them while on the clock. I couldn’t exactly walk into another load area and say, “Hi, I’m Larry Gibson. I don’t know you but do you want to go out some time?” First of all, I couldn’t be away from my trailers for that long, or I’d back the whole line up. And secondly, I didn’t want to look like a stalker—just approaching strange women and asking them
