“Quote me some poetry.”
What? I twitch my head like I’m trying to shake water out of my ears. The coke is wearing off and I swear she just asked about poetry. I jiggle my leg.
“It says here on your app you a English Major.” She backhands the sheet, which also says that I can rock my rump at 85 rpm, that I have no problem with backroom manual stimulation and that clients can call me, anytime, anywhere.
“Well?”
I stare past her, through the two-way mirror, and watch my competition, a muscular black man dancing on stage. I can tell from his tats he’s spent time inside. Hard-time. I remain silent. He’s got the moves. The twenties are flowing. I need this job.
I slide my eyes back to Ms. Janice. She’s watching me watching him. Her lips are pursed. She’s been in the business-bizniz, Miz Janiz-a long time. Eyebrows penciled in. Powder and blush fight for supremacy on her cheeks. Lipstick bleeding. One black line arches upwards. I sense her request is some sort of test. I expected the usual slap and tickle, thump and hump bullshit, but poetry?
“Com’on, Sonny. Cut the crap. If a man say he clean, I look at his arms and his eyelids and between his toes. If a man say he sober, I make him kiss me. To taste. If a man say he can bounce, I make him swing for me.” She points to a baseball bat in the corner near her desk. “And if a man say he a goddamn English Major, I ask ’bout poetry.”
I clear my throat. My eyes skip back through the mirror. I look down at my hands in my lap, at the tattoos on my knuckles. “S-O-R-R-Y.” Both hands. Sorry. I got them my first day in. Hurt like a motherfucker, the needle ground deep into the bone.
“I don’t mind much,” Miz Janiz says. She swivels her chair to look at the stage. “The whores, the work, whatever.” She flaps a hand. “That come with the territory.” Her back is to me. “But I do mind if folk lie to me.” She turns to face me. “It say something about a man’s character. And if you can’t trust what a man say in this here business, how you supposed to trust the man?” Her eyebrow is now impossibly high.
“Tell me the truth.”
I clear my throat again. I look her straight in the eyes and start to speak softly.
“Weeping your I love yous
On the blues
Of my shoulder,” I whisper.
“Louder,” she says.
“Blue I make you
With push and pull and pound
Blue ink spilled
Cry
Sorry
Imprinted forever
On your cheek.”
She looks at me long and hard. “A client?” I shake my head. “Okay, then.” She licks her lips. “Start Saturday.” I stand and turn to leave.
“Sonny?”
I pause at the door.
“Got a title yet?”
I shake my head again.
“How ’bout Blue Inked?”
Carla Gericke lives with her husband and three cacti in a rather decrepit loft in Chinatown, NYC. Before turning to writing full-time, she practiced law in South Africa and California. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming both online and in print. She is currently enrolled in the Creative Writing MFA program at City College in New York, where she is working on her first novel.