My mom thought she was starting menopause when she found out she was pregnant with me. Back then, having a baby at forty-eight was practically unheard of, especially when they’d spent twenty years desperately trying to get pregnant and never managed to get caught.
They were great parents, but after my mom died in a car accident when I was twenty, my dad, who was nearly ten years older than her, quickly withered and passed away less than eighteen months later from a heart attack.
Knowing I’d never choose to live there, I sold their house and most of their belongings. Now the chair and boxes of keepsakes are all I have left of them.
Reaching for my coffee, I lift it to my lips and drink, savoring the sweetness. Once the mug is empty, I push up out of my chair and go back inside. Washing and drying the mug, I put it back in the cabinet and try to decide what to do with the rest of the day.
I could make the twenty-minute drive into town, but it’s before ten a.m. on a Wednesday, and I don’t have any reason to go. A kid from town started a new delivery service, so instead of having to stock up on groceries or head into town every time I need milk, I can just place an order, and he picks up what I need and drives it up the mountain to me. I have food being delivered this afternoon, I already had breakfast, and I refuse to become the type of guy who goes to the bar this early on his day off.
Working out is an option. My home gym in the garage could help me waste a few hours, but because we didn’t have any calls yesterday, Nero, Oz, and I hit it hard last night, and now today is supposed to be a recovery day.
Restless, I grab my cell and Google what to do in Rockhead Peak, Montana. The first result that pops up is a website talking about the scenic hiking trails. I’m not a hiker. I’m bulky, and my frame is more suited to lifting weights than walking ten miles. But I’m bored and I’m lonely, and if I don’t do something, I’mgoing to end up cracking a beer or binge-watching crappy TV like a loser. So I click into the web page and start to check out the trails closest to me.
TWO
VERITY
Twenty hasn’t been my year. But neither was nineteen or eighteen, or honestly any year. I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a good year, or even a good month.
But twenty has been a doozy so far, and if it gets much worse, well…if it gets worse, it’ll probably be my last anyway.
So far in the last three months, I’ve lost my job, my apartment, and my car and home on wheels was stolen. So now I live in a tent in the woods.
I guess a silver lining is that at least I have a tent, and I’m not just sleeping out in the open. Maybe that’s the reason I decided to keep the tent for all these years. Maybe it’s why my dad decided to haul the tent along with us every time we packed up the car and moved somewhere new. Maybe he wondered if one day we’d end up living in it.
He brought the tent home one night when I was about nine. I remember him coming into the apartment with it in his arms, a wide grin on his face. “We’re going camping, honey. You’re going to love it.”
Nine-year-old me was excited. I’d never had a vacation. So when he’d told me to pack a bag, I didn’t question it. I neverbothered to wonder why we had so much stuff in the car or why we had to leave then and there.
“Wyoming is beautiful. We can sleep under the stars and cook hot dogs over the fire,” he’d told me enthusiastically. That day, we’d driven for ten hours, singing along to the radio and eating junk foods until we’d arrived at a run-down campground in the middle of nowhere.
We’d pitched the tent, then crawled inside and gone to sleep. The next morning, he’d driven us into town and saw a help wanted sign in a pawnshop. We moved into the shitty apartment above the shop that same day, and just like that, the vacation was over and we never went back to the house I’d spent the first nine years of my life living in. I never got to say goodbye to my friends or retrieve the things I hadn’t taken with me.
Back then he never explained why we had to leave Idaho, but now that I’m older, I assume it was because he owed someone money or pissed someone off badly enough that leaving was his only option. For the next nine years, we moved every six months to a year, only staying in one place long enough to rack up more debt than he could pay.
We lived all over Wyoming before we moved to Montana when I was seventeen. The day I turned eighteen, he’d kissed me on the forehead, told me he was going to work, said goodbye, and never came back. About a year after he left, I heard he was living in Iowa, but I doubt he’s still there, although he could be dead and I’d probably never know.
The day he left, dear old Dad changed the lease on the apartment we were living in to my name and told the landlord I’d be settling the months of back pay he owed and all of the other debts he’d accrued in the months that we’d lived there.
Faced with homelessness and retribution from our scary-looking landlord, I’d dropped out of school and gotten a job busing tables at a restaurant. It took me a year to pay off all thathe owed. The day I finally did, the eviction notice appeared on the door.
One of the servers where I worked found out about my situation and offered me an old car that her husband kept promising to haul to the scrapyard. I didn’t really know how to drive, I didn’t have a license, and couldn’t afford insurance, but the car was dry, warmer than sleeping outside, and safer than a shelter. So I paid for enough gas to get the car from her place to the parking lot of the diner and slept in it for the weeks it took me to save up enough money for a deposit on a new apartment.
The only place I could afford was a studio apartment: small, shitty, and riddled with black mold. I loved every inch of that place, but the moment I started to relax, I lost my job. The owner of the diner saw me boxing up the leftover fries that were heading for the trash and fired me on the spot.
He didn’t care that everyone always took leftovers home. He didn’t care that the diner was closed or that I needed my job. He didn’t care that I worked hard, came in whenever they needed, and was always ready to pick up extra shifts. Instead, he called me a thief, threatened to call the cops, then refused to give me my last week’s paycheck or a reference before he kicked me out of the diner and warned me to never come back.
At nineteen years old, without a reference from my only employer, no high school diploma, and an address that screamed drug addict or prostitute, I couldn’t find another job. Which is how I ended up at BJ’s Boob Bonanza.
Exchanging my dignity and most of my clothes several times a night for money wasn’t easy, but it was better than living on the streets. I wouldn’t exactly call myself a natural entertainer, but on my first night, Heather, the manager, pulled my hair up into pigtails, dressed me in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit, then shoved me out onto the stage and told me to figure it out or fuck off. So I figured it out.
Calling on the very limited amounts of gym, dance, and cheer I’d done in the dozens of schools I’d attended, I managed to pull off an awkward two-minute dance that ended with me just in a white G-string and the club’s security guard having to position himself between the stage and the men all trying to be the one to shove money into my—who was clearly still a virgin—underwear.
I made fifty dollars that first night. It was nothing in comparison to some of the more experienced dancers, but to me it was enough. After that, Heather took me under her wing. She taught me to dance and advertised me as Cherry Pie—young, innocent, and completely untouched. The older, more disgusting clientele ate it up. Unlike the other dancers, Heather wouldn’t let me go to the edge of the stage. Security made sure that no one ever touched me, and the more off-limits I became, the more money the dirty old men and thirsty young ones would pay to watch me.
It seems crazy to me that in a place where women are mostly naked and available to purchase for a dance, an hour, or for some of the girls, a night, the one girl they weren’t allowed to touch was the most desirable.
Instead of making me look sexy, the outfits Heather made me wear were innocent and almost childlike.
