JUICY
The first two prostitutes were complete failures. I have a youthful face and I’m struggling to grow a beard, and I must have looked to them like a premature ejaculator. Plus, I was new to journalism. The first girls wouldn’t slow down for anything less than forty dollars, but even with money in hand, talk was impossible. I think they thought because I was holding money out to them, talking about how I was a journalist, that I was an amateur, or wanted something off-menu. Maybe the exchange was the precursor to a beating. Or I had a discolored penis. “Look,” one girl said. “If you want me to shit on you or whatever, just say it.”
Juicy, number three, sat across from me at Denny’s, silently surveying my clumsy attempt to Feng Shui my notebook, pen and tape recorder. She was a handsome woman, thin and muscular, with well-maintained braids and neatly shaped eyebrows. Up close, her left eye had a deep scar beneath the lid and her shoulder a golf ball sized growth that shifted as the bone did. Both of these, I supposed, were marks left by Johns turned boxers.
I began like I had with the others, explaining my concept for the article.
“I want to understand how the advent”—and I paused to start the recorder—”how the advent of the internet has affected your profession.”
Juicy didn’t respond or loosen her folded arms.
“How has the internet, like Craigslist, changed—”
“What the fuck does that matter?”
All I knew about journalism was that you were supposed to make your subject comfortable.
“Does the tape recorder make you uncomfortable?”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why the fuck’d that make me uncomfortable?”
I didn’t have an answer so I suggested we order. Juicy leaned over the table and I leaned in, too. “Look,” she said. “Do your story or whatever. But it wore out. You think I been hiding? Shit, I been on King the whole time. People know that shit. Y’all just can’t see shit less somebody make it on TV. So, way I see it is, you give me my motherfucking money, and you can do whatever for your hour.”
Journalistic integrity is maintained by keeping an objective distance. It is a violation of ethics to offer payment, favors, or a guarantee of publication in exchange for an interview. I was thinking about this as I handed Juicy sixty dollars. She tucked it into the pocket of her tight jeans and waved for a waitress to come to the table. It was ten a.m. and she ordered chicken-fried steak, an orange soda, orange juice, a side of fruit, bacon, and a double-side of hashbrowns.
“Is that your real name?”
“Juicy? That’d been fucked up, huh? Biggie, nigga.”
A few minutes later the waitress arrived with Juicy’s four plates of food, her two glasses, and my coffee.
“Alright,” Juicy said, pulling all the plates close to her. “Get on with your stuff.”
“You look very ready to eat.”
Chewing bacon she said, “I ain’t starvin’ or nothing but I ain’t no dummy.”
I wish she’d been thinner and that I had a picture of it. That would have been really tragic.
“Where are you from?”
“Alright, yeah. I see.” She pointed a bacon strip at me and winked. “Okay, Oakland. Next.”
“Yeah? Your folks from there?”
“Sure, sure. You know. Mom’s from there.”
“No dad?”
“Ah, no. I got a dad. And a real nice spread, too. A dog and Volvo and shit.” She laughed and then started eating her potatoes.
“So, your mother, then?”
“Oh, Rebecca?”
I wondered why she addressed her mother by her first name. “Rebecca is a pretty name.”
“Suppose so.” She took a large bite and continued. “Hard-ass woman, though. But like she got us through a whole buncha shit. We got kicked out this one place ‘cause she wouldn’t get with the manager, right? Like, he figures she was turning tricks, so he could sample. But she ain’t having it.” She drank a third of her orange soda before continuing. “So, he’s like, ‘Get the fuck out then, trick.’ And that’s how a trick gets U-Hauled.
“You’d get to a place and know in a day what you gotta do to stay. They find out you a trick and they want samples, right? They find out that they ain’t no daddy and they want you to sling rock, buy rock, watch a corner. Shit.”
“Who’s they?”
“Whoever run that block, that building, whatever. Right?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Naw, ain’t no sure, sure. Now, write this shit. That whole town is chopped up like this here steak, right.” She fingered her steak and then stabbed a piece with her fork and held it up to her face. “A nigga can get a bite but you gotta pay the piper to get a whole meal. So, what the fuck happens if you want a meal by your own self? And that’s the problem, right?”
I hadn’t followed the analogy. Juicy put the piece of steak in her mouth and chewed slowly as she continued. “They got all us bitches thinking you ain’t nothing without your steak dinner.”
“So, like, Momma goes off her four hours at the corner store and then to turn tricks, right? But I didn’t see shit coming.”
Juicy had just been talking and talking, and I didn’t have a watch and had at some point lost interest and track of time. I wondered how to end an interview. But, as it happened, Juicy’s food was almost gone.
“So, noon…power got shut off…then two…CPS…and that’s it. That’s all they is.”
Juicy had begun scraping her plate with her fork, relocating fat and gristle, tasting the fork, and then more scraping. Her eyes were watering.
“Good. Good. Hey, thank you for this.”
“Yeah, you know.”
“Next week?”
“For what?”
“For more.”
“Shit. More yammerin’? I don’t know.”
“Twenty bucks and a meal?”
Her going rate was sixty but I was sure she would order a lot of food again.
The next week I sat with an old college friend, James, a writer himself, who giggled when I described my article.
“So, how did this happen?” he said. “Because I don’t remember you being much for reporting or prostitutes.”
“The prostitute thing didn’t pan out. I’m supposed to be with Juicy now.”
“Juicy indeed. I won you over with a free burrito?”
“And your sage advice. What am I supposed to write about at twenty-six? Journalism is how all the old guard did it.”
“Sure, sure. I get it. But they—Ernest and friends—were near war or in wars. They were in Africa and Paris. You’re in Sacramento. You need to pack up the family and move out to New York, or maybe Jordan.”
“Things happen here.”
“Oh, sure, fabulist things. There’s no subtlety left on the West Coast. New Yorkers are passionate about everything. That’s what makes your stories fabulist and mine real.”
“It’s a question of subtlety? Or is it plot, James?”
“I’ve got it.” James pulled out a copy of a local paper from his backpack and unfolded it to a page three story.
“Here you are. This fucker.” He pointed to a photo of an unassuming Hispanic man. “He pulled over on the side of the 99, out by Turlock, and beat his baby to death. Right there on the side of the freeway.”
I took the paper from him. “What?”
“Fabulist stuff, huh? Pulled out his two year old on the side of the highway and swung him by his ankles. People right there, driving to Yosemite, probably. One guy tried to stop him and the Mexican guy threw him off. Told the man that the child was possessed.” James paused, knowing this would spark my interest. “Then he asked the stranger for a knife to finish the job.”
“Intense.”
“No shit. Cops shot the man dead because he wouldn’t stop. At the hospital two nurses went home early after seeing the kid. They had to identify it by its DNA. Great story. Completely unbelievable, but a great story.”
“But it was real.”
“Sure it is. But a real story about what? Crazy farm folk, religious nuts. The whole thing is very California.”
The Food Warehouse was a complete failure. Sure, Jorge had worked here, and sure, they knew he’d beaten his kid to death on the side of the road.
“Did you notice anything peculiar before all this happened?”
“With Jorge?”
“Yes.”
Nancy, who called herself Nanny and wore a name tag that affirmed it, kept talking as long as I kept giving her cigarettes. We leaned against the south wall of the Food Warehouse, the midsummer sun slowly baking us both. She had a pretty face, small breasts, and a huge ass.
“No, nothing. Told the police and other papers this. He was calm as ever.”
“Quiet?” I asked, then wondered how many bologna-on-whites and light beers she’d had to swallow to get that ass. It was distracting.
“Not really.”
“So, loud?”
“Normal.”
“You want to find some shade?”
“Look man, I said this like a million times and sure as shit believe it. He just went crazy. It’s all fucked up but-” Nanny pushed cigarette eight into the wall. “Man, my lunch is almost over and I’m still hungry.” She looked at her watch and then, without looking up, said, “You wanna, like, do this later? Tonight? After I get off?”
“No, this is fine.”
“All right. Well, see ya.”
She turned and wobbled back into the store. I started across the parking lot when I heard her shout something from just inside the store’s entrance. She waited, adjusting her tight pants on her meaty legs, until I’d met her at the threshold. The door was trying to close but Nanny seemed content letting it start towards us, retreat, and then come at us again.
“You know he said stuff like his son was possessed by the devil?”
“Sure.”
“Well, he went to the New Trinity? That wasn’t in the papers.”
I pulled out my notepad. “Is that a church?”
“A country church. All sorts of crazies. They pick up a truckload of homeless and let’m live there, at the church. They got like eighty people living in tents out there.”
“No shit?”
“I gotta roll back.”
“Wait. Where is this place?”
“Pick me up at six and I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Here?”
“Out back. The loading dock.”
The eastern gate at New Trinity was maybe a hundred yards from the church, a windowless, cinder block building nestled in high, California desert grass. I’d found it without Nanny, though I’d spent most of the night with her. A sign listed a single service at eight on Sunday mornings. It was now Sunday at half-past seven, and the gate was chained, but loosely, and secured with a new lock. The tents, barely visible just beyond the church, looked abandoned.
My cell phone rang. It was James, and I answered.
“Back in New York?”
“Safely, soundly.”
“Good, good.”
“You sound like shit.”
“I spent the night smoking and drinking.”
“Cool.”
“What’s up?”
“You do anything with baby killer?”
“I’m outside his church right now.”
“Fuck, man, a church?”
“Sure.”
“Church thing’s been done.”
“Yes.”
“Church thing, homeless thing, hooker thing, junkie thing. All that. Seventies took care of that.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.” The wind kicked up and whistled in the phone.
“Just send it to me when you’re done and I’ll pass it around here in the city.”
“Thanks.”
“Later then?”
“Oh, indeed.”
The phone back in my pocket, I tucked in my short-sleeve dress shirt, pushed on the gate, and slipped in. On the other side, the road to the church was powdery with dust. A man in head-to-toe whites, a Sunday suit, the cuffs of his trousers browned from the country, rounded the corner of the church. He moved slowly, slumping. Even from a distance I could make out his brown skin, crumpled like a paper bag. At the door he removed a hat and showed his tooth-white hair. He unlocked and opened the front double doors, kicked stops in front of both, and went inside. Lights came on and then moments later the old man re-emerged. He looked past me first and then at me. He crossed his arms and I stuck my hands in my pockets. Waving me in, he turned and re-entered the church. I went up the road alone.
