Objectify Me: A Fireworks Novella (The Fireworks Novellas) (6 page)

“Holy fuck,” I say.

“What is it?”

It’s not a name and phone number. The letters say
Please help me.

Chapter Eight – Charlotte

“How far away is it?” Levi sits in the passenger seat of my crap-wagon Mazda, staring at the image on his phone.

“About ten more minutes, I think.” The address was somewhere just past St. Bernard’s Parish. Out where the busses don’t run. It’s been half an hour since Levi got the text, and I can see he’s getting worried about his friends. He’s texted them back about a million times, and they haven’t gotten back to him. “They’re probably just dancing and having fun,” I say.

He’s been pretty quiet since we left the French Quarter. We were lucky enough to squeeze onto a packed bus along North Rampart and got back to my place in under ten minutes – some kind of record. Then my car started – pretty much a one in three chance – which means that so far, this mission, whatever it is, has been blessed with some good Louisiana juju. I hope it stays that way.

“You speak Russian, huh?” I say to break the silence.

“Just a little. My grandmother taught me some writing. Mainly because I wanted to draw violent comics at her place all the time. There’d always be someone hanging from a cliff or on fire or something, and they’d be screaming ‘
pomogi mnyeh
!’ And then the hero would kill a bunch of people to rescue them.”

I shouldn’t laugh when he’s so tense, but that really is funny. I can just imagine him as a little dude drawing superhero cartoons.

“I was kind of a geek,” he says. “I guess I still am.”

“Do you still like comics?”

“When I can find ones that aren’t horribly misogynistic.”

We drive in silence for a few seconds.

“You know, I’ve never heard a man say ‘misogynistic’ before.”

That makes him smile. “My sister has a Ph.D in women’s studies.”

“So she wouldn’t approve of me?”

“I don’t know. I know
she doesn’t approve of
me
.”

What a hard-ass his sister must be. Here’s a guy who’s too polite to properly enjoy a lap dance, who tips, who complimented my kimono and shoes, paid for dinner, and gave me two screaming orgasms. And he wants to be a socially responsible lawyer? What the hell more could you want?

“Your sister needs to chill.”

He laughs, clicking his phone off and tucking it away at last. “What about your family? Your Dad’s not well?”

Well, captive audience and all. I might as well go for it. “He got brain damage from drinking too much.”

There’s a long silence.

“Jeez, Charlotte. That’s awful. I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah. He needs twenty-four-hour supervision, because he wanders off and gets in fights, so I found this private group home deal. It’s not too bad. Better than jail.”

“And you have to pay for it? You don’t have insurance? Where’s your mom?”

“She died a long time ago. Drug overdose.”

This time he doesn’t say anything. He just puts his hand on my thigh. I let one hand fall off the steering wheel and rest on his. He gives it a reassuring little squeeze.

“I bet your stuck-up sister is looking a lot better now, huh?” I say.

“You know, I think I’ll buy her flowers when I get home.”

“I believe you actually will, too.”

I slow down to avoid hitting a couple of feathered parade escapees crossing the road in precarious shoes. The horizon ahead to the east is just starting to lighten to a purplish blue. And I’m wishing somehow this night would never end. But I know Levi just wants to go home – to collect his troublemaking friends and get the hell out of this crazy-ass town. Who could blame him? And it’s not like I’m anything special for him to hang around for – a lap dancing dropout with a fucked up family. God knows what he thinks of me.

I could just leave it there, but I’m tired and sad now. Talking about my father always brings me down, and thinking about how trapped I am makes me even sadder. And the icing on the cake is that this nice young man probably thinks I’m some kind of slut.
That
I can’t live with.

“You know, I’ve never done that before,” I say before I can stop myself.

“Done what?”

“Had sex with a guy from the club. I don’t do that.”

“Oh. Okay,” he says.

“I know my family is trashy, but I’m not.”

He turns to look at me. “Of course you’re not.”

“I had a scholarship to UNO. I had it all planned. I was going to focus on hydraulics and work on the levies.”

“In case there’s a another tidal surge?” he asks “Like in Katrina? That’s awesome.”

“The lap dancing thing – I have to do it for money.”

“I know. Why are you telling me this?”

The GPS on my phone tells me it’s time to turn off St. Bernard. I head right, down towards the swamp. The Cypress trees along the road drip with ghostly Spanish moss, turned blue in my headlights.

And I let it all out. Everything I would probably tell a therapist if I could afford one. “I don’t want…I’m just trying to get…I don’t like the idea of you bragging to your friends about making it with some stripper in the Big Easy. I probably should have thought of that before having sex with you but…well…I don’t know why I did it. You seemed nice, and you’re really cute, and I’ve just been really… depressed I guess. It’s depressing what I do, dancing for old fat lawyers and bankers, when I had dreams about saving this city. Anyway, I just have to deal with it for now, but I guess I wanted to pretend I had a nice, decent man for a few hours.”

This would be the moment he says ‘let’s connect on Facebook and keep in touch. You could come visit. We could Skype,’ but he just sits there, looking out at the trees flying by us.

“
Your destination is ahead on the left
,” my phone says, and the moment passes.

“I wasn’t going to brag to my friends,” he says. “I’m not like that.”

Of course he’s not. Now I’ve completely screwed it up. Whatever
it
was. Which was basically nothing.

“So, I’ll just go and find Omar and Buck. Will you wait for us?”

Change the subject. Good strategy. “I’ll come in with you.”

“No way! A party like that is no place for a lady.”

I slow down, park across the street from a large warehouse, and turn to look at him. “You seriously think I’m more likely to get into trouble than you are?” I ask. “Baby, you picked up a lap dancer on Bourbon Street. You are
not
to be trusted.”

“I don’t normally do that either,” he says.

“So what’s
your
excuse? Depression? Anxiety? Obsessive-compulsive politeness disorder? Just couldn’t say no?”

“I don’t know. I think I was just doing as I was told. You told me to pick up a girl. The doorman at the guesthouse said the same thing. I guess I’m obedient.”

“Well, lucky I came along then.”

“Yeah.” He takes a breath. “I mean that, Charlotte. I’m really glad I met you.”

Oh, how I wish he hadn’t said that. I was just starting to get my fingertips around letting him go, dismissing him as just another jerk, and moving on with my sad little life. I open the door and get out onto the cold, empty street. Levi jumps out and joins me on the road, putting his arm around me protectively as we cross.

“So what’s our plan when we get inside?” I ask.

The warehouse is dark, but as we walk through the packed parking lot, I start to feel the telltale, low vibration of a killer sound system.

“Look for Omar and Buck, I guess,” he says. “Don’t really know what to do about the girl. I mean I suppose we could call the police.”

“But get your friends out first.”

“Fuck, yes. If the police bust it up, they’re likely to get arrested. Omar especially.” He goes quiet for a few seconds. “I mean, you know how the police are with black guys.”

“I’ve heard, yes. So, fine. We find your friends. Drag them out. Call the police. Good plan.” I don’t want to break it to him that the police probably know all about this little soiree. The chief of police is probably in there right now, balls deep in some teenager. I keep that to myself. “Let’s be discreet about it, though. Will your friends make a scene?”

“I doubt it. They talk a big game, but Buck mostly just wants to get wasted, and Omar is kind of a pussycat to be honest.”

The door to the warehouse is closed. No sign, nobody there. The only indication of anything going on is the faint sound of thumping dance music, made tinny through the thick steel. Levi shrugs at me and knocks lightly on the door. A few seconds later, the door cracks open to a familiar face. One of Objections’ bouncers, Thaddeus Hunter.

“Thaddeus!” Levi and I say at the same time.

“Well, look at this,” Thaddeus says. “I’m some kind of magician. Charlotte, don’t tell me you let this nice young man buy you for the evening.”

“Whoa,” Levi says. “It’s not like that at all. I ran into Charlotte after her shift and…uh…took her to the Ivy Grill for a late meal.”

Well, he left out some incriminating details, but I’m okay with that. “Levi’s friends are here and he’s worried about them.” I say. “Let us go look for them.”

“I’m not supposed to let anyone in without a password.”

“I’ll tell Jack you’re moonlighting at a dirty old pop-up brothel, Thad. How’s that for a password?” I glare at him. “I’ll tell your mama too.”

He pulls the door completely open. “All right. All right. No need to launch WMDs. Come in. Come in.”

I take Levi’s hand and push past Thaddeus and through the door. “Thanks for thinking the worst of me. You owe me an apology.”

Thaddeus hangs his head. “Sorry, Charlotte. Please don’t tell Mama or Jack. I’m just trying to put together some money for my sister’s wedding.” He closes the door and follows us in.

We’re in a completely empty and rather dark room. The floor is littered with old machinery parts. There’s a faint smell of motor oil. The dance music is a fraction louder but still sounds pretty far away. Where is this party?

Thaddeus points to a grimy and unremarkable door. “Go through there. Up two flights of stairs. Password at the top is “Delacour”. When you’re ready to leave, come back down the same stairs.
Don’t
use the back stairs. Just trust me on that. The back stairs are not for decent people.”

I wonder what he means by that. But before I can clarify, Levi puts his arm around me and leads me across the room to the door.

“Hey, Levi,” Thaddeus says, as Levi pulls the door open. “Keep an eye on her. Most of the women here are, you know,
working girls.
Don’t let anyone get the wrong idea.”

Levi gives my shoulder a squeeze. “I won’t let go of her,” he says. “Count on it.”

Damn it. Why can’t he just be a jerk? It would make my life so much easier.

We slip through the door to a dim stairway beyond. The door swings shut behind us.

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Levi says.

“Star Wars,” I say. “I got that reference.”

“Captain America. I got that one.”

Fully geeked out on fandom, I head up the stairs in a much happier mood.

On the first landing, the door is boarded shut, which seems a little inauspicious. Levi stops and puts his ear against the wood for a moment before shrugging and following me upstairs. We find another door, this one steel, behind which we can really hear the music now. It’s mainstream dancy hip-hop of the most inauthentic kind. The bass is rattling the steel of the door.

Levi knocks, and a second later the door swings in. I half expect Thaddeus to be guarding this door too, but it’s a big white guy who looks like he’s had his nose smashed with a hockey stick one too many times.

“Delacour,” Levi says.

Smash-nose steps back and lets us in to a kind of cloak room. Another bouncer tugs Levi aside and runs him up and down with a metal detector.

“Open your bag,” says the first one. I unzip my tote bag and he shines a flashlight in, pawing around the contents a bit with his large hand. “Are you a cop?”

“I’m a dancer at Objections
,
” I say, and point at Levi who is now being frisked. “He’s a client of mine. In town looking for something a little extra.”

The bouncer smiles a little too salaciously as he hands me back my bag. “He’s okay,” he says to his colleague. He lets Levi go.

Another door is opened, and finally, we’re at the party. Levi squeezes my hand so tight it hurts.

Chapter Nine – Levi

“Holy fuck.”

Charlotte steps closer to me, pressing into my side. I put one arm around her and take her hand with the other.

“This is a lot more….untidy…than I expected,” she says.

Untidy is one word for what we see – a large open space, flashing with colored lights and shaking with music. Half-dressed servers of both sexes drift through crowds of mostly men with trays of drinks. Sofas and tables are arranged haphazardly around the space. In between those, completely naked women dance around poles on pedestals, lit up by bright-blue lights from underneath and above. They appear to be attached to their poles by jeweled chains. Above us, a haze of fragrant smoke hangs over everything, like an enchantment.

And as I blink away the disorienting lights and smoke, I can see that quite a few guests are having sex right there in the room. A big guy is leaning on the wall, drink in hand, while a naked girl sucks his cock. Two guys are doing something with a girl on one of the sofas. With the dark and smoke and the way she’s twisted up, I can’t quite see what. There are lines of white powder laid out neatly on the table in front of them. Another girl is rough-riding a guy on a chair. His jeans are around his ankles, and he’s smoking a long curved pipe like Gandalf.

“This is a bit too New Orleans, even for me,” Charlotte says.

No one else seems concerned with what’s going on. While we stand there, dumbstruck, a server casually hands the blowjob guy another drink.

“Let’s find the guys and get the hell out of here. This is demented.”

Charlotte clings to me as we push through the crowd. I wave smoke from my eyes as we come upon a circle of men sharing a hookah pipe; each one of them has a drowsy girl in his lap.

“They looked really young,” Charlotte says as we pass. I glance back to take a better look. One of the girls makes eye contact with me. She’s tiny, wasted, and can’t be more than fifteen, if that.

“Drinks? Drinks?” The server is wearing nothing but green satin panties and nipple clamps with flashing LED lights hanging off them. Her pupils are so dilated, she looks possessed.

“No, thank you.” I try to wave her away.

“Wanna fuck me, mister?” she says.

“No! No, thanks.”

The girl props her tray on her hip and wipes her sweaty brow with the back of her hand. I notice the word “Virtue” tattooed on her wrist. Ironic. “Fuck your girl?” she says, her eyes unfocussed. “You can watch.”

Charlotte drags me away before I can answer. “Okay, first…holy shit,” she says. “And second…holy shit. What is going on here?”

“This isn’t normal?”

“No! Jesus, what do you think we are?”

We slither through the crowd, getting jostled by teetering drunks and tiny, dazed women in sparkly lingerie. Most of them seem to be Asian or Middle Eastern, though a few are white. They all look like zombies with sunken cheeks and vacant staring eyes. I feel like I’ve stepped into an X-rated horror movie. When I nearly trip, I look down to see a skinny naked girl crawling along the floor, gathering damp and crumbled dollar bills in her dirty fingers.

Charlotte jumps, suddenly yelping. “Someone just grabbed my crotch,” she says.

“What?” I pull her into my chest, looking around for the offender, but the crowd just swims around us, moving to the music.

Charlotte yelps again and looks up at me, helpless.

“I’ll give you five thousand dollars for her,” a sweaty bald guy says, leering. He reaches for her hair. I whack his hand away, bending down and scooping Charlotte up. She wraps her legs around me as I push away.

“We’re going to leave,” I say. “This is fucking crazy. Omar and Buck will have to fend for themselves.” I spin around with her. Through the smoke and lights and crowd, I can no longer see where we came in. Everything is just a sea of sweat and debauchery and drugs and money. After what seems like an hour of dodging hands and bodies, we reach a wall. My arms ache from carrying Charlotte, but I don’t want to put her down.

“Which way?” I yell in her ear. The music seems to be louder here, though I can’t see any speakers. She searches frantically from side to side, trying to see over the heads of the crowd.

“That way, I think!” she says, pointing.

I edge along the wall, stepping over unconscious people, empty bottles, shapeless unknown blobs of discarded clothes and other debris. My foot catches on something, and we go crashing down. I narrowly avoid dropping Charlotte into a pile of broken glass. When I stand with her still wrapped around me, I feel blood dripping down from one knee.

Mom was right about that tetanus booster.

“There!” Charlotte says. “There’s the door!”

In my rush to reach it, I walk right into a low table. A half-comatose kid, barely old enough to shave, moans and rolls off the table onto the floor.

“Is he dead?” Charlotte asks as I step over the kid.

“I don’t think so. He made a noise.”

When I reach the door, Charlotte slides down, mercifully. Despite the pins and needles in my hands, I manage to find the door handle and turn it. Before I can even open the door, someone on the other side opens it for us.

Another bouncer – this one looks like a James Bond villain. He looks me up and down before turning his eyes down to Charlotte, who clings to my waist, her face pressed into my chest.

“Want company?” he says to me.

“What?”

“You want other girl? Or just this one?”

“Just this one, we’re going –”

“Downstairs. Seventeen.” He hands me something, which I take without looking at because I’m so desperate to get out of this. “Down,” he says again pointing across to another door. “Ring when done.”

Charlotte and I practically run across the small room to the door on the other side. I have a twinge of unease as I open the door, as though I’ve forgotten something important. But when the door opens and I see the stairs going down, I nearly cry with relief. Only when I’m halfway down the stairs do I look at the object the bouncer gave me. It’s a key.

“What’s that for?” Charlotte asks.

“I don’t know.”

We reach the first landing, one floor below the party. The door, which should be boarded up, is just a regular fire door.

We skid to a stop.

“Shit.”

“This is the wrong stairway,” Charlotte says.

“Shit!” At this point I don’t really care about this one not being for decent people. I just want to get Charlotte out of here. “Let’s just go down. There must be another door.”

We dive down the second stairway two steps at a time. On the bottom landing, the door clearly reads
FIRE ESCAPE – DO NOT BLOCK
.

It’s bolted shut.

“Fuck!” I take Charlotte’s hand and pull her back upstairs, past the second floor landing, back to the door into the party. “We’ll have to go through. Find the other door. We’ll stay by the wall and only go in one direction.”

I try the door at the top of the stairs. It’s locked.

“Oh, come on,” Charlotte says with a sigh.

I bang on the door with my fist.

Nothing happens.

“Hey, come on, let us back in! We’re done!”

There’s no answer.

“Wait!” Charlotte says. “The key!” She steps back and examines the door. “But there’s no lock. No keyhole.”

I look at the key. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about it. Just an ordinary key on a small red keychain. The number seventeen is written on it in black marker. On the other side of the key chain, also scribbled in ink, are the words,
ring when done
.

“There’s a bell somewhere. A bell to get back in?”

We look around the landing, around the door, along the bottom of the wall. Nothing.

Charlotte tries banging on the door again. “Let us in! We want to leave!”

Still nothing.

“What about the door on the second floor?”

Charlotte shrugs. “We could try it.”

I take her hand as we head back down to the second floor. This door doesn’t have a lock or a keyhole either, but when I try it, it just opens. I peek through, recognizing what I see easily enough. I push the door so Charlotte can see. “It’s self-storage. Look.”

“Weird”

I step through the door.

“Wait!” Charlotte digs through her bag and pulls out one of her cute little fuck-me shoes. She wedges it under the door to keep it from swinging closed.

“Good thinking.”

My parents have a self-storage locker in Portland. It’s also in a huge labyrinthine complex. To find it, you have to be able to hold large numbers and the position of Mars in your head. I’m not too keen on venturing into a similar place at this moment, but what choice do I have?

“Stay with me,” I say.

Charlotte squeezes my hand.

The rows of lockers are lit by flickering, insipid lights, their buzzing the only sound apart from the faint thump of the music upstairs and the soft padding of our shoes. We practically run down to the end of the middle row, where it branches off in a T to either side of us. I pull Charlotte left, now actually running, until we reach another T.

“Okay, wait.” I’m thinking of myths and Minotaurs, and Hansel and Gretel, and that scene in the fourth Harry Potter movie just before all hell breaks loose. “Let’s go back.”

“We could follow the numbers.”

“What?”

Charlotte points to the doors. “The numbers of the lockers. They’re in order. If we follow them, we can search the whole floor.”

I pull her into a hug. “You’re a genius!”

“Engineering brain,” she says.

We go back the way we came and sure enough, just by the door, we find locker 001. Charlotte looks around the walls by the door.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking for a bell. Remember? There’s some kind of bell that will let us off this floor.”

“Right!”

We both search around the door again, but there’s nothing.

“Let’s go this way. Start with one.” I take her hand again and we head down the aisle veering right from the door.

After a few seconds, Charlotte pulls me to a stop.

“Look,” she says pointing at a locker.

I have to step closer to see what she’s looking at. The green metal door is locked with a heavy padlock. And painted with a number.

Seventeen.

“Try the key,” Charlotte says.

“What do you think is in there?”

“I have an idea. You’re not going to like it. But I also think there will be a bell in there.”

That sounds good to me. I hold up the key and grab the padlock. The key fits easily, and when I turn it –
clunk
! The padlock pops open.

“Stand back.” I nudge Charlotte behind me as I roll the door open. I can just make out a bulge on the wall. When I feel around, I find a light switch and flick it on. The locker fills with sickly light. And my stomach rises up into my throat.

On the bare floor are a dirty mattress, a bunch of condom wrappers, and an incongruously granny-ish wicker basket filled with very ungranny-ish sex toys – handcuffs, ropes, and some stuff I don’t even recognize. Like most men, I explored Internet pornography quite extensively in my teens, so that’s saying something.

“Huh,” Charlotte says with a dry laugh. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Truth is, I would
love
to have sex with her again, only not right now, and literally
anywhere
on earth rather than in this heartbreaking little room. We stand there, just looking at the mattress, in stunned silence for at least a minute.

“Levi?” Charlotte finally says. “I need a hug.”

I pull her into my chest and just hold her there. I don’t know what she’s feeling – whether she’s scared or sad or horrified – but I’m sure I’m feeling pretty much all the same things. This place is like the dark backward version of Objections – the side of the “sex industry” few people want to talk about. A sweatshop for hookers.

“I wonder where that girl is?” Charlotte says into my shoulder.

“I wonder where Omar and Buck are?” Over the top of her head, on the wall above the bed, I see a grubby doorbell button. Raw wires run up the ceiling in a tangle before disappearing through a rough hole in the metal. “I found the bell.”

Charlotte turns, distastefully leaning over the stained mattress to reach for the bell. When she’s an inch from ringing it, I suddenly think of something.

“Wait!” I pull her hand away. “That guy at the top of the stairs thinks you’re one of the girls who works here.”

“He does?” She thinks for a moment. “So what?”

“So all these locks and doormen are to keep the girls under control. What if he makes a fuss when you try to leave?”

“I’ll make a fuss right back.”

As she reaches for the bell again, there’s a faint noise, like a kitten mewing.