Amateur Night at the Bubblegum Kittikat Read online

  The small dog was an exact, scale replica of the big dog – his “Mini-Me,” as everyone liked to joke. I had to admit it was kind of cute, but just kind of, because honestly how cute can anything be that wants you dead?

  “They just need to get used to you,” my mom said, “Let them smell you.”

  I let them smell me. Big dog lunged and growled. Small dog jumped and yapped.

  “I’m going outside,” I grumbled, running my hands through my knotted hair.

  “It’s raining.”

  “The sun is out!” I argued.

  I opened the front door and stepped into a veritable monsoon. It rained so hard that the tissue thin blossoms of the red hibiscus flowers had collapsed in upon themselves and crowds of grey lizards huddled beneath the ledges of flower pots.

  I looked up at the sky. The sun was out. If there was a cloud I couldn’t find it. I started down the driveway, having no idea why or where I was going, but as soon as I took one step off the walkway and onto the patterned concrete, I slipped, fell hard on my ass and went flying. The driveway was like a Slip and Slide. I spun around and flipped myself over onto my stomach, but I couldn’t stop. By now I was soaking wet. I looked like someone had picked me up out of the shower and thrown me across the unusually slick driveway, where I was now testing out the whole object in motion tends to stay in motion rule of physics. The end of that rule is “unless acted upon by a net force.” My net force was a brand new, gleaming, silver, hard topped convertible Mercedes S600. The Mercedes, parked at the end of the circular driveway was the only thing stopping me from hurtling into the street where a UPS truck that had just turned onto our street surely would have flattened me.

  “FUCKING NEAL! God Dammit! I told him not to use that driveway sealant. I knew it wasn’t the right one and now look!!” I heard my mother yelling from the front door of the house. Neal was their yard guy and my mom was constantly complaining about him.

  She called for my dad who stopped burning onions and came to see why she was swearing.

  “Are you ok, Baby?” my dad asked, possibly laughing a little.

  Standing there in the morning sun, I could see why all my life my girlfriends had said I had a cute dad. He wasn’t a nerd with his pants pulled up around his chest, like most of their dads. He wore dark jeans, a vintage Stones tee shirt and bowling shoes. His black hair was closely cropped and with his aqua eyes I totally understood how, back in the 70s, when he’d met my mom, everyone said he looked like John Travolta.

  My mom stopped my dad from coming to my rescue, lest he slip too.

  “Did you dent the car?” she asked “Please tell me you didn’t dent that car!”

  I stood up and looked at the car door. It wasn’t dented because I hit the tire. I reassured her.

  “And I’m fine too, by the way. I mean, in case you were wondering,” I added, rubbing my ass.

  Throughout all of this it had not stopped raining and the sun had not stopped shining. I tiptoed very carefully back to the front patio where my parents stood protected under one of the navy blue awnings that decorated the doors and windows of their home.

  “What were you doing?” my dad asked.

  “Why is there a Mercedes S600 parked in the driveway?” I demanded.

  “Oh that’s Mohammed’s,” my mother replied as if I should have known that already.

  I looked towards my father, who nodded.

  “Who is Mohammed and why is he parking his Mercedes in your driveway?” I asked.

  “He lost a bet with me,” my mom explained, “Then that motherfucker tried to tell me he wasn’t gonna pay up and I said I will tell you what, Mohammed, your ass better give me that god damned car unless you want me calling your wife and telling her what you did in the Champagne Room at the Bubblegum Kittikat, and by God he brought that car over here at four ‘o’ clock in the morning last night and took a cab home, but I can only keep it a month.”

  “I see,” I said with a sigh. I wiped a wet lock of hair from my dripping face.

  I knew better than to ask what they’d bet on. Many things I was better off not knowing. Instead I asked: “Why is it raining with the sun out?”

  “Oh Lord, it always does that,” my mother said before disappearing inside the house.

  “Baby, you’re in a different world now,” said my dad, “a Mercedes appears in the driveway overnight and it rains with the sun out. The rules are different here. Welcome to Florida.”

  Now see, this is exactly why I’d vowed never to move back to South Florida. It was too decadent, too out of control and way too unpredictable.

  “There are no rules here!” I complained.

  “Make your own,” he said.

  He patted me on the head and went back in the house.

  3

  “You need a job,” my mom told me.

  We were sitting on my bed, formerly my sister’s bed. I’d taken over her room as soon as she left for college. I’d been in Florida for a couple months already and the summer had passed far too quickly. At first I’d intended to just stay a little while and then head back to Atlanta where I’d pick up where I left off at my two jobs and try to find a roommate to share an apartment with me. I figured the debacle with the house and my ex-fiancé would be over quickly, but I was wrong. The process server had already delivered two lawsuits from him and he was still in my house claiming it was his. To make matters worse, my friends had called and informed me that as soon as I left, another girl had moved right in. I spent most of my days alternating between crying and eating in front of the TV. On especially emotional days I would cry and eat at the same time while watching depressing movies. My favorite sad film was Magnolia, which I’d watch while sobbing at the onscreen rain of frogs and cramming chocolate chip cookies in my mouth. I’m not one of those people who gets really skinny when they’re upset. I tend to eat more, figuring that if my life has turned to absolute shit then I am at least owed the small joy that only a warm and melty combination of brown sugar, butter and chocolate can bring.

  I sighed when my mother told me I needed a job. I knew she was right. I knew there was no way I was going back to Atlanta and I had to face the fact that I’d have legal bills to pay and that I was way too stressed out to look for an apartment and a roommate and work the same two jobs I’d left. My best bet, whether I liked it or not, which I really did not, was to stay with my parents, fight the lawsuits as best I could and take some time to heal and get back on my feet. At least at my parents’ house I wouldn’t have to pay bills and at least I’d have my mom’s country cooking: roasted chickens and stuffing, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, massive slabs of lasagna heavy with ricotta and mozzarella. If you’re depressed, my mom’s meals are the ideal comfort foods.

  “I don’t want a job,” I told my mom.

  We were eating ice cream. Cross legged on my comforter, each of us held a pint wrapped in a dish towel to keep our hands from getting cold. My mom had the butter pecan and I’d taken the chocolate peanut butter. She ate hers with a soup spoon.

  “Nobody wants a job, do they?” my mom asked.

  I don’t know if that’s true. I loved both of my jobs in Atlanta. That’s why I had two. I liked them both and didn’t want to give one up for the other. During the day I’d worked as a kindergarten teacher’s assistant at a private school for wealthy hippies. We sang folk songs and taught the kids to knit. Part of my job was making the kids organic vegan snacks and I never had to do too much except play with cloth dolls and teach the kids to model animals out of beeswax. It was a stress-free way to earn a check.

  My other job was just as fun. At nights and on weekends, I worked in one of those paint your own pottery studios. I was a paint waitress. People would come in and I’d show them how to paint a piece of raw bisque and then I’d run and go get them refills of paint. It was the best job ever because when it was slow I could paint as much pottery as I wanted and I loved painting. I never got sick of sponging glaze on plates and the studio was a hip place to wor
k.

  “There’s nowhere for me to work here,” I said.

  It was true. There weren’t any pottery studios in Broward County and there sure as hell weren’t any private hippie schools and I didn’t want to do daycare. If I’d have wanted to work in a preschool in Florida I would have needed all sorts of credentials that I didn’t have. The school in Atlanta hadn’t had the same requirements and I’d gotten the job through a friend anyway. It had been kind of a fluke.

  With nothing but a GED and very little consistent experience in anything, there just weren’t many employment opportunities available to me and I tried to explain this to my mom.

  “I don’t want to work in a restaurant. I’ve done that. Restaurant work sucks,” I whined.

  No one can argue with that. Restaurant work is total hell. I’m not cut out for waitressing. I tried that when I was eighteen and worked in a dessert shop for all of about three weeks. That was my third job. I’m not the world’s greatest customer service person. I tend to get surly and when people ask me to get them things my initial reaction isn’t to smile and oblige. It’s to tell them to get off their ass and get it themselves. This quality, combined with my extreme clumsiness (it’s physically impossible for me to walk and carry a tray at the same time) rules out serving.

  Jobs four and five were also in restaurants – this time in the back of the house. For a brief time I actually cooked professionally. I still love cooking, but when you do it for a living you start to hate it. At least I did anyway. I’d work these crazy hours on my feet the whole time, sweating my ass off and the more I’d work, the madder I’d get at all the people who were not working who were coming into the restaurant and ordering food and causing me to have to cook it and by the time I got home and got a shower I could barely boil some ramen noodles for myself. Opening the seasoning packet even seemed like a lot of effort. I missed holidays with my family and I could never go out with my friends because I always had to work, so I vowed never to submit myself to restaurant work ever again.

  “You don’t have to work in a restaurant,” my mom said, “There are plenty of jobs you can do. You can get an office job.”

  We traded pints and I began mining out the pecans with my teaspoon.

  “Office jobs are boring and I’m only qualified for entry-level work anyway.”

  As much as I am not cut out for restaurant work, I am also not made to sit in a cubicle. I’m a creative sort. I like to move around and see things and office work prevents this. The monotony is lethal. Maybe I have a raging case of ADD. I’ve often suspected it but I’ve never been tested, but whatever the cause, I simply cannot sit in an office. Trust me I have tried. Job nine had me answering phones at the reception desk of an Atlanta collection agency. Day in, day out nothing about this job ever changed. Each day I’d sort the mail, tap out some data entry on an outdated computer and forward calls. By the end of the day I’d jump out of my skin at the sound of a ringing telephone. It was like the job gave me post-traumatic phone disorder. I barely lasted three months and I felt terrible when I quit because I’d been proud to have a respectable job like that and I’d imagined myself maybe one day climbing the corporate ladder there.

  “I tell you what you ought to do,” my mom said.

  She looked at me very seriously. My mom can be extremely intimidating, even when she’s sitting cross-legged on your bed wearing nothing but an oversized tee shirt with her hair in a scrunchie. She’s tall and big chested and she has this most annoying quality of always knowing what everyone else should be doing with their lives and telling them. What drives me nuts about this is not that she comes off as a busy body, because she doesn’t. It’s that she’s always right. Even when I don’t want her to be right, she is. I should have listened to her seven years before when she told me she didn’t trust Evan. She’d called him a rat bastard and I’d defended him so hard that my mom and I didn’t speak for months over it, but she’d been right all along.

  My mom continued to stare at me. We look a lot alike and my mom is only eighteen years older than me, so most people think we’re sisters. We have the same big, dark eyes, though mine are closer to cola while hers are more amber and we would have the same brown hair, but while I leave mine its natural chestnut and bob it at my shoulders, my mom likes to bleach hers platinum and grow it down her back.

  “So what do I need to do?” I asked.

  “You need to talk to Raymond Haines.”

  “About what?”

  “About getting a job at the Bubblegum Kittikat.”

  “Have you lost your mind? I’m not stripping! Seriously? My mom is telling me to be a stripper?”

  “You’re my child. Don’t you think I know you couldn’t be a damned stripper? Please. I’d probably strip before you would. Give me that butter pecan back.”

  I laughed because it was true. In fact, I was shocked that with all the other things my mom had done, that stripping hadn’t been one of them.

  “You know I can’t be a waitress,” I tried to reason with her as we switched ice creams again.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” my mom agreed.

  “OK, so what’s left? Because obviously I wouldn’t make a very good bouncer.”

  “You’d be surprised. There’s a lot of other jobs. You could hostess, work the door. That’s easy money right there. You know how much those door girls make?”

  “Well, I hadn’t exactly ever thought about it, to tell you the truth,” and I hadn’t, because you know what? I didn’t know that strip clubs had hostesses. Because I didn’t go to strip clubs!

  “They make a shitload and they don’t have to do much of anything. You need to talk to Ray,” my mother said, scraping the last of the butter pecan from the container.

  Raymond Haines was my mother’s tenant. My parents owned side by side houses, one of which they lived in and the other of which they rented out and Raymond Haines, owner of the Bubblegum Kittikat, currently resided next door. Raymond was in his early sixties and lived next door with his girlfriend, Tracy, who was about my age. She’d only just moved in. His last girlfriend, Amy, who was nineteen and pregnant, had left him for a rich Arab in New Jersey. The rich Arab apparently didn’t care that Amy was pregnant by someone else, which was unfathomable to me, and while that was unbelievable in itself, even more outrageous was the fact that Ray was expecting another child with another nineteen year old named Kelly. Honestly, it was mind-blowing. People like that just didn’t come over for a sweet tea back in Atlanta, but these sorts of colorful folk were just the types that my parents, who aren’t like other people’s parents, loved. This was evidenced by their recent nights out with Ray in the VIP area of his strip club. I mean, whose parents go to strip clubs? For that matter, whose parents encourage them to go work in a strip club? Most moms and dads would be heartbroken.

  I’d been to a strip club twice in my life. Once when I was eighteen, I accompanied a girl I knew to an audition, but the place was so sleazy that she changed her mind and we left within five minutes. The other time Evan had made me go. I think he’d insisted on going to upset me and we were there a total of ten minutes before he got thrown out for refusing to pay a skanky goth twenty-five bucks for a lap dance that he’d sworn he didn’t want in the first place, though I’d clearly heard him answer “yes” when she asked him if she could dance for him.

  I wasn’t the kind of person who would frequent places like the Bubblegum Kittikat. I didn’t even like going to regular night clubs, much less ones with naked people. I’ll admit it. I’m uptight and maybe I’m that way because my parents are so wild. Maybe having partiers for parents makes it impossible to rebel so the only other way to go is prim and proper. Whatever the reason, I prefer chamomile to tequila and movie nights to mayhem. Debauchery to me is having one extra cookie.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “I just can’t imagine going from a kindergarten classroom to a strip club. I don’t think I’m a strip club kind of person.”

  “Maybe it’d help you lo
osen up a little and look, you don’t want to work in a restaurant and you said offices are too boring, so you don’t have a lot left to choose from you know. At least you wouldn’t be able to say working at the Bubblegum Kittikat was boring. That place is anything but boring. You shoulda seen what went on last night. God damn. We got crazy.”

  “I don’t even want to know,” I sighed, and that was the truth. I didn’t. It’s kind of creepy imagining your mom and dad getting lap dances.

  But my mom had a point, as usual. For someone like me who got so easily bored with the tedium of a nine to five, working at the Bubblegum Kittikat would probably hold my interest and at least there wouldn’t be filing. God, I hated filing.

  “We’re going to dinner with Ray and Mohammed tonight and then we’re going. You should at least come and check it out,” my mom said.

  “Umm. No. I’m good.”

  For the month I’d been back home my parents had been going out with their tenant and the mysterious Mercedes driving Mohammed. While I’d met Ray a couple times in passing (he lived next door), I’d never set eyes on Mohammed, who was supposed to be a gazillionaire hedge fund manager from India in town wining and dining potential investors like Ray; people who had a lot of expendable cash.

  Raymond Haines was a multi-millionaire, but certainly not from the sex industry. He’d made his fortune in a pretty normal way, back in his home state of Alabama, by manufacturing trailer homes. He’d been married for something like thirty years and had several kids, amazingly with the same woman, and they were all grown. Recently divorced from his long-time wife, Ray moved to South Florida and bought himself a strip club when its original owner went to jail for money laundering and racketeering. Ray didn’t treat his purchase as a money-making opportunity. Instead, it was pure entertainment. Ray had bought himself his own personal all-you-can-fuck-buffet and the Bubblegum Kittikat was the modern day version of a harem.