Down in the dispatch office, Captain Jerry held out the ticket so I could read the call he had for me: Sunrise Trailer Court to Touch of Mink #2, the massage parlor.
“It’s a relay call,” he warned. “Aunt Bea called it in from the Touch, asked you pick up a friend of hers and bring her into work.”
“They must be short-handed.”
“Also: Friend doesn’t have a phone, so you got to get out and knock.”
“I got a horn.”
Jerry shook his head. “Now look, you got to say: ‘Aunt Bea needs you to come work at the dry cleaner.’ Like that. She doesn’t know you’re coming.”
“So then she doesn’t know she is either.” I barked laughing. “But 10-4.”
So I drove out to Sunrise to roust “Aunt Bea’s” friend to the “dry cleaner” at a weird hour.
Touch of Mink #2 used to be on South Dubuque, where the appropriately named Broken Spoke was before it was torn down. “KNOCK HARD,” somebody had Sharpied over the knob. As a rookie, I was on shift every Sunday when the ladies got the nag for Gringo’s enchiladas. I’d get sent to fetch and end up talking shop on the lobby couch, smoking reefer while they ate with sporks, like I was a regular Malcolm Little, or a eunuch.
So I got to know the masseuses. And I knew B. But she didn’t go by “Aunt Bea,” at least that I was aware. She and Jerry were playing at some kind of phone code and I didn’t like it. I could smell a deal.
When I got to Sunrise, I found my way to the trailer, a fine doublewide with a screened porch. A Leer topper leaned in the drive against cut wood covered with a green tarp. All windows dark, no porch light burning.
I said into the mic: “#22, stepping out.”
The screen door wasn’t held by a spring so it swung out wide and about knocked me off the stair. Then I stumbled across the dimly lit porch tripping on shit, what turned out to be free weights with a lot of poundage on the bars. I wondered if I had the right trailer. Either the woman I was picking up was a serious lifter, or some big fucking dude lived here.
Shave and a haircut, I pounded on the door. Five cents.
The door swung wide, my knock answered by a child no older than three and wearing a bib.
Ah fuck: “Hey little buddy, is your … is there a lady here?”
Inside the trailer behind the child I saw a dark parlor made gloomier by the fluorescent light that beamed out of the kitchen. From around this corner she came and I recognized her at once. The Latina, I’d called her in the office, knowing her as one of our bona fide streetwalkers, having seen her cruise the south side taverns, SoHo’s and RT’s and the Kittyhawk, always scooping her off a corner with a different drunk dude while she was dead sober, which was how I connected her dots. Seeing her and the child, I really hoped she was the aunt of the house.
My words tumbled out like Scrabble pieces: “Aunt Bea needs you to come into work at the dry cleaner … ?”
Now from out of the harsh kitchen light came pounding the Big Fucking Dude. He looked a lot like Lou Ferrigno, no shirt, no shoes, jeans ripped off at the knee. He carried a fork and knife in either hand as if to prove to me that I’d interrupted supper.
The woman obediently stepped out of his way and let him take the door. He mad-dogged me and said to her: “Who the fuck is this?”
“I’m here to pick her up,” I said, first pointing at her then throwing a thumb over my shoulder. “Aunt Bea needs her down at the dry cleaner.”
“What’s at a dry cleaner?”
“She needs to get to work. I’m just here to drive her there.”
The woman’s face knotted with terror as she cowered into the gloom of the parlor, pushing the child behind her hip, putting herself between the kid and the big dude. She was shaking her head at me.
The big dude bent to get in my grille, and to shake his fork at my eye.
“Are you talking about her? Because she don’t work outside this house. This is the only roof she’s working under. You got me?” Like this was exactly what he’d been trying to drill into her head. “Now get off my porch, you white n*****.”
I asked the woman directly: “So you don’t want the cab?”
Dude: “What the fuck did I just say to you?”
Me: “Yeah, what the fuck did you just say to me?” and continuing with the woman: “You sure don’t want the cab?”
In the moment before dude slammed the door, I could see in her eyes that the woman needed more than a cab. She needed a full-blown escape plan.
BAM — door in my face. So I left, tripping on a barbell as I went, pissed that Jerry had put me on another bunk-ass call. I didn’t even bother checking back in on the radio and instead drove straight back to the office to yell at him.
By the time I arrived, Jerry was hanging up the phone and sending another driver out to Sunrise Trailer.
“That lady there snuck out to a neighbor’s to put in another call,” he said, laughing. “Now she tells me she’s going downtown to ‘babysit.’”
“She must really need the money,” I said, and since that was the case, “She owes me a no-show for that bullshit.”
Sean Preciado Genell is author of the Vic Pasternak novel ‘All the Help You Need,’ available now at Prairie Lights. This article was originally published in Little Village issue 196.
