Chloe Doe Read Online Free PDF Page B

we do the art to vent our frustrations. To provide a welcome hello to forgotten people. To let someone who’s suffering know there’s someone who knows. We do it as an outlet for bottled pain and violations.
    Lights-out is ten p.m. We lay in our beds and wish we could fall asleep without remembering other times we lay in bed and wished we could just fall asleep. Or play dead. In our homes, where we had maybe a mother who was blind and deaf and a father who stole our secrets.

Made in America
    T oday is my first time in group and all the other
chicas
with their long nails tap-tap-tapping against the arms of their chairs are waiting for my story.
    “I’m one of the best,” I say. I can nickel-and-dime them down to the lint in their pockets.
    “That’s why I do what I do, Doc. I’m a natural.” I was born into my trade.
    “I have
talento.
”
    A real gift.
    You get them really hot. You get them so all they’re thinking about is getting off, they’re begging for it,
Baby, baby, now!
And I say, That’s going to cost you a little more. We’ve already run through the sixty-dollar happy hour.
    By then they’re willing to pay.
    That’s one of the benefits of the job. Any extra is yours. Manny Marquez never knows. And what he doesn’t know is good for me.
    Dr. Dear leans forward in his chair. “Tell us more,” he says. Tell us a typical day in the life of Chloestreetwalker, he says. “What is it like? What concerns you the most?”
    Today he’s playing dress-up in a white coat like the other doctors. I like him better when he shows a little of himself. When he looks less like he’s practicing and I’m the mouse in the spin wheel.
    Here it is, I say, my autobiography.
    There are some troubles in my line of work. Sure. Things that make you wonder if you’re ever going to get ahead.
    AIDS. You worry about that all the time. Even while you’re suiting up. Even when you have him all wrapped up in a gold-seal Trojan, you worry if this is the one that’s got the hole. Is this the one that’s going to break? Is he poison? Is this one seventy-five-dollar trick going to have it in for me?
    Then I say to myself, Can’t be. That’s not the way I’m going. I had a premonition: death by drowning.
    I dream about it. I feel it inside like it’s happened to me before. In another life maybe. Or did I drown when I was a baby, was saved, and remember only the feeling of it? Like suffocating. Tumbling, and then the sweet oblivion. Not caring if I get a last breath. I’ve found what I’ve been looking for all my life.
    So I figure it’s got to be drowning. Or maybe strangulation. Maybe some twisted john’s going to get me with an extension cord. But he’s not going to kill me off slow.
    My death is decided and AIDS doesn’t come into it. But it’s something that’s always at the back of my mind. It’s got to be. It keeps me careful. It’s enough of a worry that any john that looks sick, any beyond skinny, any with scabs on his face or hands, and I say, No, thank you. I tell him, unless he has a bona fide, signed and sealed certificate of health dated yesterday, I don’t do it.
    “Not for a hundred dollars?”
    Not for a thousand. Not for ten thousand dollars and your Cadillac. I’ve still got things to do with my life.
    Another thing is junkies. They’re so hooked on smack, they’ll break your hundred-dollar trick by doing it for twenty.
    It’s robbery. They undermine the business. You get ten crackheads out on the street on a good night and your take is half what it should be.
    We try to run them out. But they come back, sure as roaches. The streets are infested with them.
    They bring down our worth. When it’s, I’ll die for a hit, a smack, a shot of the stuff, you can forget asking seventy-five dollars for what a coke whore will do for pennies.
    They’re killing themselves, and us, too. If I had one wish I’d wish they’d get the job done. If they’re going to kill themselves, then do it. We have rent