40

“Stop ringing the bell or I’ll leave you in there all weekend,” a jailer barked over the loud speaker. I laid on my back. It felt like hours were passing. I focused hard on the shimmer-scratched words. The word “Mom” left a taste of ashes and vanilla in my throat, and I wanted to call her. Who could I call? My breaths were short and tight. I mouthed the written words with the taste of her ashes in my throat, like a prayer. Unable to sleep, I breathed in the vanilla sweat from my jacket armpits—echoes of Mom’s rice pudding smells haunted me.

Breakfast was dropped through the mail slot as if I were a stray dog. I felt like one as I nibbled a sausage patty, then I fell asleep briefly under my jacket. My answering machine dreams were back: Mom’s voice talking about a detour ahead. “You’ve made a wrong turn, honey. Turn left up ahead. Would you just look at this spaghetti squash?”

The woman below me stirred. “Fuck, fuck,” she said.

It slowly sunk in. My cats weren’t going to be fed. My car was going to be towed. My rent was going to be late, and I was in a cage.

I thought about my brother, who had been in and out of jail for petty theft. We wrote letters when he was in San Quentin. I had my brother’s back when he was in jail. He got degrees in jail. He cooked and fought fires. Mom sent packages with socks and money for cigarettes, but she was still saddened and disappointed by Alan.

I didn’t want to disappoint her, but I knew that I was. This was the tipping point I was afraid of—the serious fucking-up my life part. A series of bad turns until I was lost, never to return. In this cage, I was subhuman: lower than an animal because animals ate drank, slept, and shit. I did none of those things. Hours later, we were led to another cell with a bunch of concrete benches. The jail guard pointed to a woman who was busted for smoking weed in her car. “You have a visit.” Then she looked at me. “You do, too.”

“What?” I said, feeling stupid.

The jailer gave me a stern, annoyed look, and talked slow as if I was a retarded monkey. “You. Have. A. Visit.”

I followed the woman who had smoked weed in her car and stood, waiting in line. When I got to the window, it was Kara. I put my hand on the glass on top of hers and cried.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” she said. My tongue was so dry I couldn’t speak. “You don’t belong in here.” She laughed gently. Shook her head. “You’re the most innocent prostitute.”

After a while I said, “I thought they got you, too.” I was led back to the concrete cell with the others and covered myself with a scratchy gray blanket, waiting in the dark. One girl was passed out on the floor, but most of the women sat with their knees up on the cool cement bench, waiting.

I must’ve dozed off because I heard the same jailer yell, “You’re O.R.” I was sticky, smelly, hungry, tired, and ashamed, but I knew what those letters meant, and they meant I was free.

Back in my apartment, the cats were loud and hungry. I removed all my sensual massage ads from the Internet. T-Mobile threatened to shut off my phone in twenty-four hours without two hundred bucks, and I was in shock—too scared to book any more clients. My apartment was in disarray. I received hurt and angry emails from the client I was supposed to meet me later on that night—a finance man from Palm Beach. Kara was spooked as well. We had been doing sensual massage jobs together and hadn’t feared the cops. We figured there was enough violent crime in Los Angeles to busy the police. We thought wrong. I’d heard from a sober junkie who used to rob banks say that, “Once you get arrested, you keep getting arrested.” I couldn’t break my mom’s heart the way my brother did. My brother, who was dumb enough to hold up our favorite corn dog shack, Fresh Freeze, where we rode our bikes as kids and sat at the picnic tables outside and sipped chocolate milkshakes and nibbled fish sandwiches with way too much mayo. He got three years for his troubles. I didn’t want to ruin my life with a misdemeanor for prostitution on my record. I couldn’t do that to her again. Even dead, I wouldn’t do that to her.

Then again, it was a tribe of sex workers who had helped me survive, by showing me how to make phone calls and being kind to me; explaining that I could be released O.R. and that I had no business being in jail—no business at all.