My Three Husbands (10 page)

“This isn't a fashion runway,” Darlene said. “You gotta cut to the chase. Shake the components. Make it hot or you'll go home hungry.”

Together we dreamed up this rockabilly cowgirl outfit. I wore a fringed rawhide G-string, a little fringed leather vest with Velcro that I could easily pop open for a boob flash, and a big Stetson. Instead of high heels I wore red snakeskin boots ($450 at Saks). Around my hips I had a leather holster with two squirt guns. I didn't go for graceful; I went for down-home heehaw.

That seemed to work. The first night I made forty-five bucks. The second night I made ninety. The one after that, a Saturday, I made a hundred and twenty.

I couldn't believe the number of propositions I got.

“Just don't ever date them,” Darlene warned.

“Why not?” There was this one really cute guy who'd become a regular at my sets. I could tell he was interested.

“Just don't.” Darlene brushed back her hair and showed me a long white scar neatly incised in the side of her neck.

 

 

One night Big Bill pulled a box from behind the bar and handed it to me. Inside were a dozen beautiful red roses and a card. “I want you,” was all it said. Big Bill didn't know who'd sent them.

I thought I knew. Every night he was sitting there at a table, by himself, staring at me with glazed eyes and a dreamy smile. He never came up to stick money into my G-string. He was a little older than me, but not much. Cute. Clean-cut and sort of rumpled. Like a Banana Republic ad.

Weeks went by. More flowers arrived. They always came with short, unsigned messages. “You light my fire.” “To the tattooed tigress.” “In my dreams you're all mine.”

No man had ever been, like, romantic with me before. I was filled with this glowing sense of mystery. Someone thought I was beautiful! I found myself daydreaming about my secret admirer. I called him Bud Light because that's all he ever drank.

But Mr. Light never made a move. I figured he was deathly shy. So one night, just for fun, I squirted him with my squirt guns, as part of my topless cowgirl routine. Instead of laughing, he looked at me with this stricken, heart-rending expression, stood up, and left the bar. He never came back. I felt terrible.

But fate works in really weird ways. Three months later I married him.

 

 

One night my mother's old calico cat died. Crookedy was my cat, too. I'd grown up with her. She went back as far as the big Victorian house I'd lived in with Mom and Dad. After we left there, because Mom wasn't working and couldn't afford the mortgage payments anymore, I lugged Crookedy around from apartment to apartment and house to house.

Anyway, one morning Mom found Crookedy lying on her special catnip-laced pillow, stiff as a board. She called me and I rushed over and we cried and talked about Crookedy and then Mom said, “What do we do with her body?”

Neither one of us wanted to touch Crookedy. Her eyes were half-closed and her mouth was open and pulled back so you could see her crusty brown fangs. We couldn't bury her because there was no yard. In the Yellow Pages, I found Pet Away, a service that picked up deceased pets and disposed of them. I called the number and a guy said someone would be right over.

Mom and I were going through waves of shared grief over Crookedy. We'd be okay for a while, then burst into sobs. A part of my life was gone. I was so upset I didn't even look up when Mom opened the door for the Pet Away man. I just sat on the sofa sniveling and half-watching Bette Davis in
Of Human Bondage.

I heard his deep, sincere-sounding voice tell Mom how much it would cost to dispose of Crookedy. It would cost more if she wanted the ashes returned. She had to pay in cash; no checks or credit cards accepted. Mom didn't have the bread, so I peeled sixty-five from the wad of tip money I carried around.

The Pet Away man picked up Crookedy and laid her in a nice cardboard box. “Would you like to say good-bye to your pet one last time?” he asked.

Sobbing, we went over and peered into the box he was holding. Then I looked up into the Pet Away man's eyes. It was Bud Light.

 

 

His real name was Peter Pringle. The same day we met over my mom's dead cat I invited him over to my place.

Pete was very romantic. “You're so beautiful you could star in one of them slasher movies,” he panted as we made love.

“As the slasher?”

“No, as one of the beautiful girls who gets slashed.”

I'm highly susceptible to praise. I asked him if he wanted to move into my apartment. I didn't want to live alone and neither did he.

Well, this time I really thought I'd found Mr. Right. Pete was clean-cut and had a steady job. All day long he drove around the city collecting dead dogs, cats, birds, snakes, hamsters, turtles, iguanas, monkeys, geckos, squirrels, bats—every kind of creature that you can imagine. He called himself an Animal Disposal Specialist.

A couple of times I went on his rounds with him. His van had a weird sweetish smell that could make you puke if you paid too much attention to it. It smelled like that roach spray the exterminator used in the dads' apartment in New York. Pete was always respectful to the pet owner's face. But then, when he got back to Pet Away, he'd flip the dead animal into the incinerator with a comical whistle. Sometimes he'd toss it in with an underhand lob, sometimes he'd slam dunk it in like a basketball. It all depended on the size of the animal.

He said the job didn't get to him. “You can't take it personally,” he said, “or you go crazy.”

I admired his orderly ways. “Neat Pete,” I called him. Everything had to be in its proper place. He said he couldn't stand messes and asked if he could reorganize the apartment. Fine with me. I was still used to having my mom clean up after me. Once a week she'd come over to vacuum, pick up clothes, and scrub out the tub, sinks, and toilet. She didn't have to be my cleaning lady once Neat Pete moved in.

Pete wanted to get a degree in mortuary science and eventually have his own funeral home. But, like me, he had a problem with plastic. He owed thousands in school loans already, and he couldn't get out from under his debt load with the money he made at Pet Away.

He kept pointing out these programs advertised on TV that told you how to buy houses with no money down. “If you do it right, you can be a millionaire in a year,” he claimed. His credit line was maxed out, so I charged the program for him.

Pete didn't want me to continue working at Terry's Topless. I was sick of it myself, but I didn't know what else to do. “What about cosmetics?” Pete said. “You see those ads all the time for Lorrie Ann Cosmetics. Those Lorrie Ann Ladies drive around in white Mercedes convertibles.”

The trip to hell always starts with a toll-free number.

It all sounded reasonable enough. I liked the idea of being my own boss. And as a former model and exotic dancer, I knew the importance of makeup.

What could be simpler? The more Lorrie Ann I sold, the richer I'd become. There were “Commitment Tiers” that you pledged yourself to: You agreed to order a certain amount of merchandise each month. It was nonreturnable, but your discount increased proportionately to the amount of merchandise you ordered. If you brought in other Lorrie Ann Ladies, you got extra credits toward that white Mercedes convertible or bigger discounts on your merchandise. And best of all, your monthly or yearly stock of Lorrie Ann cosmetics could be paid for with a credit card. You got an even bigger discount if you joined and paid for a year in advance. That's what I did.

Pete, meanwhile, was trying to figure out how to buy real estate with no money down. We never went out to the movies. All we did was watch the No Money Down Real Estate System videos over and over again. All those people giving testimonials sounded just like us. They'd been bogged down in debt . . . they'd been sick of working for others . . . they were getting nowhere fast . . . and now they were millionaires!

But you were supposed to read this handbook, too. And I noticed that Pete never read it. Later on, I found out that he was dyslexic. Reading was a torment.

I pledged at one of the highest commitment tiers at Lorrie Ann. Before I knew it, boxes of shit were arriving. I freaked. Who was I going to sell it to?

My mom rounded up some of her girlfriends, and Grandma rounded up some of hers. I did my first Lorrie Ann Lady presentation to them. There was, like, no enthusiasm. One lady winced when she smelled the Midnight Lace perfume. “Smells like vanilla Clorox,” she said. Mom and Grandma said they'd buy the expensive Night Time Hydration Formula, and someone else bought a lipstick. That was it.

Then I got a bunch of my girlfriends together. We were jammed in my tiny apartment and I was trying to be the Lorrie Ann Lady while my friends smoked pot and drank beer. We started laughing and playing with the makeup samples until we all looked insane, and then we went to
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
at midnight. It's been playing at the same theater for over thirty years. It's so old that my mom went to it when she was young.

The next day I tried to cancel my membership in Lorrie Ann. No way, they said. I was in it for a year. I was committed. The Lorrie Ann merchandise would arrive every month as per my
signed contract.

I didn't tell the dads about any of this. Mom kept doling out money. She was working as a secretary-receptionist for a big corporation.

One day Pete looked up from the toilet he was scrubbing and said, “Let's get married.”

I didn't say anything, just looked at him. I tried on the name: Venus Pringle.

“We could consolidate our debts,” he said, “and apply for new credit cards as a married couple. With the new cards we could pay off all the old cards and maybe still have enough credit line left to buy a house. I mean, if we charged the down payment.”

I was kind of dubious, but after a certain point in a relationship what do you do? You commit. You get married. Or you bail.

I loved Pete because he was so in love with me. All those flowers he'd sent to me when I was at Terry's Topless; they must have cost a fortune. Pete adored me. He was so sweet. He kept saying he couldn't believe he was having sex with someone as beautiful as I was. I was his queen. He did whatever I told him to. Half the time I didn't have to say anything: He
anticipated
my desires. It was like having a mother, a waiter, and a boyfriend rolled up in one.

We did the civil ceremony thing. We drove to the courthouse in the Pet Away van because my car needed a new carburetor. When I told Mom, she was like, “Oh, sweetheart, why didn't you tell me?” and started bawling. Right away she started in about having a party for us.

When I called to tell the dads, there was a long silence on the other end of the line. They were on separate extensions. Finally Daddy said, “Do we get to meet him?”

“Obviously she's ashamed of us,” Whitman said.

“No!” I said, caught off-guard by the hurt in his voice.

Daddy suggested I bring Pete over for dinner. Whitman, ominously, said nothing.

The interrogation began the moment we walked in the front door. “I apologize in advance for being inquisitive,” Whitman said to Pete, “but our daughter didn't even have the courtesy to tell us she was getting married, so I don't know a goddamn thing about you.” He motioned for us to sit down on the new Italian leather sofa. “What do you do?”

“I'm an animal disposal specialist,” Pete said.

“Is that a euphemism for exterminator?” Whitman flicked his eyes in my direction.

Pete was confused. He turned to me. “What's a euphemism?” he asked.

I racked my brains. “I think it's something that means something else. Like ‘little girls' room' instead of ‘bathroom'.”

“I was asking if you're an exterminator,” Whitman clarified.

“Oh. No, sir, I'm not. The animals are already dead when I get to them.”

Silence.

“Do you have a degree?” Whitman asked.

Pete shook his head. “No, sir, not yet.”

“But you're working toward one?”

“Sort of, sir.”

“Sort of?”

Daddy brought in a beautiful tray of canapés: olive tapenade, crusty Italian bread, smoked salmon. He smiled. I stood up so he could hug me.

“Daddy, this is my husband, Peter Pringle.”

Daddy shook Pete's hand.

“Pringle,” Whitman said, pouring drinks. “You're not from the potato chip family, are you?”

Pete shook his head. “No, sir. I'm from Boring.”

“Boring?” Whitman said, a puzzled look on his face.

“Boring,” Daddy said to Whitman. “We've passed it on the way to Mount Hood.”

Whitman winced. “The place with all those little cabins and trailer homes?”

“That's Boring,” Pete said.

“It certainly is,” agreed Whitman.

It wasn't a successful evening.

 

 

We thought we were going to be yachting around as millionaires, but within six months we were drowning in credit-card debt. Every day, every night, there were threatening letters and phone calls from all the credit-card companies that had been so welcoming just months earlier.

As our dreams collapsed, Pete became more and more obsessive. There was always this trapped look in his eyes. It was kind of scary. He insisted that the dishes and glasses had to be arranged in a certain pattern on the shelf. The bed had to be made in a certain way. Our clothes had to be hung or folded just so. Every time I stubbed out a cigarette, Pete grabbed the ashtray and cleaned it. He showered in the morning and came home at noon to shower again, and then showered a third time when he got home from work and a fourth time before going to bed. He kept complaining of strange odors.