I recognized him immediately. He was an actor; you know him. I knew him, but he looked different in person, without the wolfy sideburns they made him wear for the show, without the ears sprouting from his scalp. He had been in other stuff, too. Movies. Pulpy and poorly written, but easy to watch. Like reality television for men. Throw enough punches, fast cars, and D-cups in the script, and you’ve got a big-screen win on your hands. That’s what Ma was always saying about those Vin Diesel movies. I could write the next big action flick myself, Ma said, when we left the latest Fast & Furious movie with armfuls of everyone’s leftover popcorn cartons. People never toss their trash at the movies. Put any human being in a room dark enough, and they’ll forgo all basic etiquette. We turn animal in the dark, all of us.
Get me a Vin Diesel and some skinny blond with fake tits. Put them in a truck. Let’s say she’s hitchhiking because her boyfriend got punchy and he pulls over to pick her up. She’s real mean to him, to Vin, in the beginning. Thinks he might be a creep. But it turns out he’s looking for something.
What? I said, more invested in her movie than I’d ever been in Tokyo Drift. What’s he looking for, Ma?
His little brother’s gone missing. He’s looking for his little brother, a naughty little shit who’s into doing drugs. No, wait, into dealing drugs. He deals. Vin Diesel thinks the little brother’s gotten himself into some shit, and now he’s going looking for him. Skinny blond tits agrees to help find him in exchange for a ride to wherever he’s going.
And then what?
You got a million bucks?
What?
I’m not giving the story away for free, bunny. You call yourself Paramount and pay me a million bucks upfront, and I’ll tell the rest of the story.
I never heard what happened to Vin Diesel and Skinny Blond Tits, but I liked to invent my own endings to the story depending on my mood. If I was happy, daydreaming before drifting off to sleep, Vin and Tits found the little brother and got married. If I was sad, because I couldn’t go on a field trip or because it was college application season, Vin and Tits found the little brother’s corpse and Vin Diesel died from a broken heart. If I was mad, at Ma or at Lacey or at some client who got handsy in the janitor’s closet, Vin and Tits got in a fight and he pushed her out of the passenger seat and watched her body roll along the highway in his rearview mirror.
* * *
He was getting older, the VIP, I’ll call him X for the sake of the NDA. He looked much older than he looked in the werewolf show Mia and I liked to watch.
“Hi,” I said, when I opened the door.
X looked around, nervous as a rabbit, and ducked into the room without being invited.
“I’m Lady,” I said.
“Sure. Can you take a look out there? Make sure no one saw me?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “There’re a hundred photographers out here.”
The fear in his eyes.
“I’m fucking with you,” I said.
“I’m X,” he said.
“I know.”
“You’re familiar with my work.”
I said nothing.
“Well, shall we get started?” he said, shrugging off a jacket that must’ve been more for disguise than warmth. It was still blazing hot out there. “Your boss told me you’re the best of the best.”
“He did?”
“Sure.” He nodded. Then frowned. “Damn,” he said. “You look like my girlfriend.”
“I get that a lot. People telling me I look like someone. I think I must just have one of those faces.”
“No. No. It’s not like that. You look just like her. The outfit and everything. It’s actually kind of freaky.”
“Freaky?”
“Freaky,” he said, leaning in to squint at me. “You could be sisters.”
“Who is she?”
“Willa. Willa Jordan.”
Willa Jordan. She was the first female Bond. She won an Oscar for playing a young Audrey Hepburn in the movie of her life. Ma and I watched her soap California Girls every night at 5:00 p.m., our very own happy hour, and Ma had told me once that I looked a little like her but was twice the actress she was. She has better teeth, though, is what Ma said.
I thought of Daddy and Mia and the way the Bunnies kept saying, She looks just like Willa, and Daddy’s new Willa, and Willa’s replacement. Willa wasn’t a common name, is what I was thinking.
“Did she used to work here?” I said. I was sure I was wrong, but I had to ask. “Was Willa Jordan ever a Bunny?”
X frowned. “No one’s meant to know about that.”
Willa Jordan, Oscar-winning Willa Jordan. Willa Jordan from the movies. A Bunny. A hooker. “Willa Jordan was a Bunny?” I said. “Willa Jordan was a Bunny?”
“Yeah.” He nodded. Grimaced. “It’s a secret, okay? Can you just, I mean, can you keep a secret? She’ll kill me.”
“Why would she keep it a secret?”
“Because,” he said. “She’s, like, a serious movie star.”
“Hookers can’t be serious movie stars?”
X snorted.
“Is that what you think?” I said. I felt myself getting angry. Overreacting. I knew I needed to calm down, take a breath, perform, but my mind was on the murders, the lives, the Bunnies, my sisters. “How can you be dating Willa Jordan, a hooker turned movie star, and still believe that hookers can’t be movie stars?”
X shifted, uncomfortable. “You did sign an NDA, right? You can’t tell anyone about Willa, and you can’t tell anyone I was here. No one can know I was here. I would die.”
But he wouldn’t die. Women were dying out there every day, but this man would not die. I looked at him and I tried to breathe. Empty yourself, Ma would say. Become the character, she would say. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t feel like Lady Lane or like Daddy’s new Willa or like this man’s wildest fantasy, because all I felt was a low rumble of fury. At him and at Willa Jordan and at the world. People were dying. Girls were dying. Sex workers were dying, and all this guy cared about was no one finding out that he’d visited one. My gut was hot. My throat ached. “Why do you keep it a secret?” I said. “Your visits here. Why do you hide them?”
“I mean, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
“Because you’re in a relationship?”
“No. That’s not it, I mean, Willa and I, we’re not monogamous, you know.”
“So why would you care?”
“I’m not a pays-for-sex kind of guy. No offense or anything. My fans wouldn’t like it.”
“It’s legal, you know. Here, in Nevada.”
“Legal, sure,” he said. “Sure it’s legal, but it’s not exactly . . . you know.”
“I’m not sure that I do know.” Breathe, Ma would say.
“I mean, there are connotations.”
“Connotations?” Empty yourself, Ma would say.
“Implications.”
“Implications?” Become your character, Ma would say. But in that moment, I was all self. And all I was, was angry.
“You know what I mean. You’re playing dumb.” He scratched his stubble. “You know? I’m X. I don’t pay for sex.”
“Except you do, and you are.”
“Right.”
I’m not sure that I can explain what happened next. Something happened in me. Something switched. Vol-Kate-no, is the way Ma would’ve explained it, the way everything came up at once. The women dying at the hands of an angry man, their bodies so dismantled their identities were never discovered. Their identities, so difficult to discover because the women were working illegally. The laws that made these women illegal, these women wanting to work to survive. The only thing they had to sell was sex and for that they became criminals, punishable, imprisonable. Gary, who thought strippers could not be mothers. Sunny, who kicked Lacey so hard her baby died inside her. Oliver van Ness, who wouldn’t date me in public because to him I was more genital than girlfriend. These men who thought of us as bodies long before we were dead, and because of this, and because the law thought hookers weren’t worth protecting, because of all of this, maybe it didn’t even feel like murder when that serial killer took apart each new girl; she was already nothing but body to him.
And then the VIP said, “No offense.” No offense. He said, “It’s nothing personal.”
Well, of course it was personal.
That’s when I started talking. Angry and loud. I said, “You know, maybe, maybe, if people thought that guys like you did things like this, then there wouldn’t be so much stigma around it.” I said, “Maybe then, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. Maybe then it would be more socially acceptable, and if it were more socially acceptable, then maybe it would be made legal in this country, and then maybe it would be made legal in the world, and then maybe there wouldn’t be so many girls working the streets and getting attacked and raped and murdered. And maybe, you know, maybe you’re a little responsible for that,” I said. “Maybe you killed those girls whose bodies were found in a dumpster. No offense.”
You know what he did? That son of a bitch. He laughed. He raised his hands like, Whoa, down girl, and he said, “I didn’t really come here for a lecture, babe.” Then he said, “Your boss said you were a professional. Unless this is part of your little bit, in which case I might be into it. I mean, is it? Is this your thing?”
But I wasn’t done. I was far from done. I was, I don’t even know the word, I felt animal, monster. I said, “Those women are dead because of men like you. Men who have the power to change things, to save lives, men who could do something about it and don’t. Men who protect themselves instead. Men who make girls like us sign nondisclosure agreements because, why? Because you’re embarrassed? Of us? I’m embarrassed of you.”
And that’s when X unzipped his fly and took his dick out of his jeans.
I barely saw it. Everything was hazy, blurred. “It’s fucked up,” I said, kept saying, couldn’t stop saying. “You’re fucked up. It’s so fucked up. People are dying. Girls are dying. You’re killing people, and you don’t even care.”
Which is when X’s breathing got heavy. He reached for my chest. I slapped his hands away. Then I slapped his face, once, twice, I think. “Your girlfriend is one of us,” I said. I was pummeling him by then. My fists on his chest. “You love one of us, and you still want us dead? You’d still rather protect your little ego? Your image is more important to you than a life?”
X held my fists, hard, and said, “Get on your knees.” I didn’t.
His semen hit my stomach. He groaned and grunted, bovine and primeval. He came in this never-ending gush and closed his eyes and smiled. I went to the bathroom and fell to the floor and hurled into the sink. This neon-pink vomit. I looked up, at myself, my reflection, and wiped my mouth. Everything was falling apart. I was.
He knocked on the door and said, “How much do I owe you?”
He thought we’d had an appointment. He’d enjoyed himself.
I told him to get out. I think I said, “Get the fuck out.”
He said, “Can I make another appointment?”
Can you believe that?