Amy

Regardless of Janet’s reassurances, I’m still afraid I’ve ruined our day, but I follow her out to the car and we head for another place she’s excited to show me. It turns out to be a thrift store – just a regular thrift store, but one she swears gets really good stuff in. I follow her around as she picks out clothes to try on; not saying much, still kind of zoned out. Thankfully she doesn’t pressure me to try anything on – I’m nowhere near comfortable enough for that – just pulls me into the fitting room with her and starts trying stuff on and making goofy faces at me. I’m amazed to watch her deal with all the same problems I have shopping for clothes – things look cute on the hanger but weird on you, they don’t fit right, they’re supposed to be your size but you can barely get them over your head… I thought these were just trans-girl problems, but it turns out they’re every-girl problems.

Toward the bottom of the pile, she tries on this tiny black dress that falls maybe two inches past her ass. It’s scandalous. She twirls in the mirror and for a second I see her panties. Then she spins on her heel to face me, and I have no idea what face I’m making, but a smile lights up her entire face. “Anything that gets that kind of reaction from you is a definite buy,” she says. Then she leans in, stands up on her tiptoes, and kisses me. A minute earlier I might have been hesitant, but now I’m caught up in the moment, so I kiss her back, my arms wrapping around her waist. It feels amazing. I can feel the butterflies in my stomach dissipate and scatter. I guess I needed that.

She drops back to her feet after a few seconds, smiles at me, and taps my nose. And in that second, I understand, even though she hasn’t said anything. We’re not talking about it until you’re ready, but we’re still fine. Nothing is off the table. It’s a huge relief.

Janet buys the dress, and a couple of other things, and then we move on to a record store. I figure she’s just taking me here because she knows I’m into music, but as we’re both flipping through records, she suddenly flips out. “OK, I have to stop looking,” she says, holding up an LP. I don’t recognize it. “I fucking love this record. I must have it.”

“Tell me more,” I say, looking more closely. Conqueror, by Jesu. I might have heard of it, vaguely, at some point. They want $60 for it. I point at the price tag and raise my eyebrows.

“Yeah, that’s the American pressing, if I found a European press there’s no way it would be less than a hundred,” she says. “I’m not even mad about it. This record is so fucking good. It’s people from metal bands – the main guy was in Godflesh, does that mean anything to you?”

I shake my head and grin. “I’m not a metal girl, Janet. This stuff is not my world.”

She shrugs. “Not really mine either, but this dude I know recommended it because I like My Bloody Valentine and Nothing. I listened to it, and… holy crap, it’s incredible. Either the heaviest shoegaze record ever, or maybe the most shoegazey metal record ever? I don’t know. Whatever. I’m buying it.”

She marches over to the counter, and next thing I know we’re checking out. The guy ringing her up seems to know her. She makes friendly conversation with him for a minute, and then she steps toward the door. Before we walk out, she turns to me. “You didn’t see anything you wanted?”

I shrug. “I don’t really buy much stuff. I don’t have room in my little place. I listen to music on my computer, I read books on my phone… it’s fine.”

“Whatever works for you, babe,” she says, and pats my arm. “I just hope you’re not denying yourself pleasures that you could just as easily partake in.”

I’m not sure where we’re going now, but at a certain point, I realize we’re heading back toward the part of town we both live in. I figure our not-not-a-date has come to an end, but then Janet says, “Do you want to come by my place and watch a movie or something? We can order Chinese food.”

I’m nervous about the idea, but I’m also excited. I’ve never seen her place before. I want to know what her space is like. “That sounds awesome,” I say. Before long, we’re parking the car in a space under an apartment building and walking up a flight of stairs to what turns out to be a really nice, clean apartment that feels weirdly empty.

“So… this is my place,” Janet says, and flops down on the couch. I sit down next to her as she pulls out her phone. “Want to order dinner? I mentioned Chinese, but we can go another route if you want.”

I shake my head. “No, that sounds good. General Tso’s chicken?” She nods and smiles. “Let me know how much it is and I’ll Venmo you or something.”

She gives me a sideways look and says, “Your money’s no good here, babe. I got it covered.” She taps her phone with finality and says, “Looks like it’ll take an hour to get here. Saturday night, I guess. Anyway, want to watch a movie?” She picks up a remote from her coffee table and pulls up Netflix.

But I just can’t let it alone. “You don’t have to buy me dinner, you know. After I like… acted like a weirdo at the taco place and all that. It’s fine for me to pay my way.”

She shakes her head. “That’s not the point though.” She sets the remote down and puts her hand on my arm. “I don’t do the things I do because I’m trying to create some kind of obligation for you or something. This is just what I want to do. Like, you gotta understand – I’m lucky to be here. I’ve had some friends…” She hesitates for a second, swallows hard, and continues. “I had some friends that didn’t make it. I damn near died! When I finally decided to get off my fucking deathtrip and be alive, and know who I was, and love myself… I didn’t want to fuck around with bullshit anymore. Just be me. 100% real, all the time. Go toward the things that make me happy, and skip the things that make my life suck.” She drops her hand back to the couch. “I hope that makes sense.”

I look over nervously. “So… I guess that means I make you happy?”

She throws her hands in the air. “Yes! Yes, that’s what I tried to tell you at the taco place. You make me happy, so I try to do nice stuff for you. I have happy gushy romantic feelings for you, so I try to show you that. I don’t want to scare you, and I definitely don’t want to put pressure on you. So… if that makes you feel weird, it’s fine. Just say the word, and we can go on like we have been. And if that’s all it ever is, I’ll be happy to have it.”

She reaches for the remote, but I stop her. “Wait, before you put something on, is it OK if I ask a, um, a personal question?”

She looks over at me seriously and nods. “Anything. For you, I’m an open book.”

I smile in spite of myself. Then my smile fades as I remember what I wanted to ask. “So… earlier, you made a crack about having no friends. But you’ve told me in the past about a friend you had that… passed away. And you just said you almost died. What’s the story with all that? Were you being… hyperbolic?”

She shakes her head. “No no, the bit about me almost dying is a true story about a specific incident. And it relates to… those other things, too.” She runs her hands through her hair and leans back on the couch. “It’s kind of a long story if I give you the whole thing, but…” She glances at her phone. “The food won’t be here for something like 45 minutes, so I can tell you if you want to hear it. Fair warning – I will probably get emotional.”

I nod. “I can handle that.”

“OK, OK, cool.” She sighs, pulls her legs up onto the couch, wraps her arms around her knees, faces away from me across the room, and leans back against me. “So I gotta start at the beginning. You know I’m from Utah, and as I’ve joked about before, my family are LDS. Mormons, normal people call them. Anyway. I’m the third of five children. Joey and Mike, then me, then Johnny and Tammy. Lotta kids, you know? All of us up in each other’s shit all the time. I always hated it.

“Then when I was 15 or so, I found out that I could get attention from boys at school by just… you know, being slutty or whatever. I had the bottom bunk in me and Tammy’s room, and by this time I had a laptop. I’d use it to watch porn late at night with the sound off. That got to be an every-night thing. Sleeping a few hours, going to school all zonked out, stealing 5-hour energy drinks from my dad’s secret stash to get through the day. So that’s the start of my interest in stimulants.” She laughs darkly. I slide my arm around her shoulder and she leans into me and keeps talking.

“My parents didn’t pay too much attention to what we did after school, and I always got good grades, so with younger kids to worry about still, they kind of let me do my own thing as long as I kept my grades up. Which I did, because soon the boys I’m running around with are willing to get me whatever I want in exchange for, like, blowjobs and stuff. And I mean, fuck it, I like sucking cock! And then dudes buy me stuff? And I get attention from guys, and other girls in my grade are jealous? Like, fuck it if they all call me a slut. I’m getting high and having fun! That’s how I was thinking back then.

“So my parents had this whole college fund for me, and I don’t know how I managed it, but I convinced them that I was gonna come to LA, do community college for a year, get settled here, then transfer to UCLA or something. I was supposed to come home when I turned 21 and do a mission, then finish up school afterwards. Hah, as if. But so they give me the money, and of course I come here, and I’m staying in this shitty apartment I found off Craigslist with a bunch of crazy roommates. Regardless of what I let my parents believe, I didn’t come here to go to college. I came here to party and get laid and, hopefully, be a porn star!” She snorts. “I had no idea what I was doing. But I had control of my money – and there was a fair bit of it at first. And I’m 18, so I can strip, right? I buy my way onto a stage—”

“Wait, it costs money to be a stripper?” This is the first I’ve ever heard of this.

She laughs and pats my arm. “Oh you sweet summer child. It’s called a stage fee. You supposedly make it all back and then some at the end of the night, but it never changes so on shitty nights you get fucked. Men pawing you all night and you make about what you’d have made working the McDonalds drive thru. You live for the big weekend nights when every guy wants bottle service and all that dumb bullshit.

“Well, I came to LA loving to get high, but all I really knew about back then was shit like 5-Hour Energy, and buying cheap trucker speed, like Vivarin, over the counter at CVS or whatever. Turns out the girls at the strip club know about way more than that! They’re getting me to take bumps of meth and coke backstage, which is a wild time. I get nuts out on the stage, push what I’m allowed to do as far as I can, get plenty of lapdances, which… do you know much about this stuff?”

I laugh. “Nothing at all.”

“OK, well, there’s stuff you can do and stuff you can’t do, and the big hype among the girls was to always be careful, because the guy getting a lap dance from you might be an undercover trying to catch you going over the line into hooker territory or whatever. It’s gross. Never happened to me, but it scared me enough that I was careful. But I came to LA to be a porn star, and I’m high and wild, and I’m… you know, doing stuff. With whoever. Just trying to feel good about myself and have fun.” She sniffs. “God, I feel so shitty for 18-year-old me when I think back. I didn’t know what I needed and I had no idea how to get it.” I don’t know what to say, so I turn toward her and wrap my arms around her waist. She leans back into me and pats my arm. “Thanks babe.” She sighs.

“Anyway, I met Jim at the strip club. I guess he was scouting for talent, because he was my first suitcase pimp. He got me porn gigs, and I was wild and trying to have as much fun as possible, and now I didn’t have to hold back, so I just did whatever. And like… I don’t know if anyone wants me to apologize for this, but I love to fuck! You know? Is that so wrong?”

“Nope,” I say, and lean my head down onto her shoulder. “I do too. It’s totally fine.”

She pats my arm again. “My one-woman pep squad. Don’t know what I’d do without you. Anyway… Jim was great, but Jim wasn’t anyone I could feel a whole lot for. So… we became lovers, because that’s what he wanted, and the way I knew to get love was to give people what they wanted, you know? But in the end, I couldn’t love him. So eventually he moved on, and I moved on, and that was really fine. But by this point, the higher class of drugs on porn sets had me with a serious jones for cocaine. And that’s how I found Eddie. He was hooking me up with coke, and I’d just fuck him, because he was up for it, and honestly, he was a good-looking guy, so I was up for it too. Don’t threaten me with a good time, you know? I liked it before, but I got deep into coke while I was with Eddie. He was dealing big weight, and it was around all the time. I don’t know how much I was doing back then. I don’t want to know.

“I was fucking around on Eddie with Alex by the time Eddie had his big bust. I had this place back then, and it was always trashed. Eddie lived out near Beverly Hills, because he wanted to look like a kingpin or whatever. He stayed with me a lot, but the drugs were at his place. And thank god, because I think he was afraid I would do too much, and looking back, I probably would have.” She sighs heavily. “But so anyway, I had started to fuck around on Eddie with Alex, who was frankly the worst scumbag of the three suitcase pimps I was involved with over the years. But he was also the best looking, which was my downfall. Because I got involved with him despite all the red flags.

“I’m not proud of this, but I stuck with Eddie for a bit after I was basically full-on with Alex, because Eddie was still hooking me up with coke. By that time I don’t think he even cared what I was doing when he wasn’t around, but it all became a moot point, because he got busted with tons of coke and I never saw him again. I hear he’s in federal prison.” She laughs without humor. “Saved me from the consequences of my actions, I guess.” I don’t know what to say, so I don’t say anything.

“OK, god, so Alex. I was at my lowest point with Alex. Just partying all the fucking time. He moved in here the second he didn’t have to worry about Eddie catching him here, and he just sponged off me nonstop. I barely knew what was happening. I was high as fuck all the time. I’d get nosebleeds… it was awful. I was also super fucking skinny because I was running on cocaine and Red Bulls. It felt like whenever we weren’t shooting, we were at parties. And the parties were… I almost said ‘insane’ but ‘scary’ is probably closer to the truth. I’m not proud of how I was living back then.” She pats my arm. “Thanks for listening to this. I haven’t talked about it since it all went down.”

“I hope it’s making you feel better,” I say quietly.

“Maybe it will eventually,” she says, and pauses. “The next part is the really awful part. So… you can tap out now if you want to.”

I shake my head against her shoulder. “This is the part where you actually almost died?” She nods. “That’s probably the part I need to hear the most, if anything.”

She sighs. “Yeah… it’s what all this is leading up to. So let’s get it over with.” She turns in my arms, snuggles up to me. I’ve got my arm around her shoulders and she’s halfway in my lap. I find her hand and squeeze it. If she needs me, I want her to know I’m here.

“OK, so, there was this other girl I knew in the industry. Denise Azul. I don’t really remember where I met her, which is typical. But we shot together a bunch in those days, and we’d end up at the same parties a lot, so we got to be friends. We were on the same wavelength, since both of us were partying like there was no tomorrow. And we both got really crazy during shoots.” She turns toward me. “Did you ever see anything she was in?”

I shrug. “If so, I don’t remember. All the Pornhub and stuff I used to watch… it all kinda blurs together.”

She raises her eyebrows. “You remember me, though, huh?”

I nod. “You stood out.”

She grins. “If you had seen Denise in a scene, you’d remember her too. She had these bright blue eyes, and light blonde hair, way lighter than mine. She was as little as I am, but she was a terror. Like, when dudes say they want a woman to be a hellcat in bed? That was Denise. Goddamn.” She laughs. “A few times when we shot together, I’d end up with bruises on my ass from her slapping me. And I wasn’t even the person she was fucking! At least… not on camera.”

I look over at her. “Wait, what? Did y’all... have a thing?”

“I’m probably getting ahead of myself,” she says. “The deal was that Denise and I started partying together a lot. I feel like I originally ran into her away from porn because her boyfriend – it feels wrong to call your friend’s boyfriend a suitcase pimp even if you’d call your own boyfriend that, but if Alex was a suitcase pimp, Nick definitely was. Anyway, Nick and Alex knew each other. And I think that’s how Denise and I really got to know each other – from being at parties until the sun came up, and like… sitting on a patio drinking hard lemonades to cut through the coke comedowns.”

“Jesus,” I whisper without thinking, then blanch. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re right, it’s crazy. It’s a wonder we both didn’t end up dead. I mean… Denise did, that’s the whole point, but it’s kinda remarkable how long we kept it up. Anyway, we’d be up at like 7 in the morning, watching the sun rise, and we’d get to talking. And I remember one night, we weren’t even on different chairs, just laid out on the same chaise longue, and I started telling her that whole thing about how I’d always wanted to direct, what I thought porn could be, how I wanted to change the world… I mean, I’m sure it came out all garbled and half-fucked-up because we were still both so high. But she loved it. She thought it was brilliant. And after that, we started talking more seriously about a lot of stuff. She told me some… really dark stuff about her childhood. Made me and my compulsive need to be loved, and to blot out all the horrible religious shame I was running from, look tame. She resented the way everyone just thought she was a dumb party girl. She was convinced she had more to offer. She wanted to do legit acting. I think she wanted to be the next Sasha Grey, you know? But… that’s not what happened.” Tears are flowing down Janet’s cheeks now.

“There were a few times, over those last few months, where we’d end up on a bed together, or out on some patio furniture or whatever… and we’d hook up. And like… it was usually inspired by some deep conversation we’d been having. Like, I’d be all drunk and coked out telling her how beautiful she was, and how she deserved better, and she’d be telling me I deserved the eyes of the world on me, all this grandiose shit. But I think we both really meant it. And… fuck.”

Her voice breaks. She turns her face into my chest, and I can feel the wetness of her tears. I rub her shoulders and kiss her forehead. “You can stop if it’s too hard,” I whisper.

“No,” she says, shaking her head into my chest. “No, I have to tell it all now or I’ll never get it out. I’m sure you’ve figured this out by now, but I guess I was probably in love with Denise. Or… romantically interested, at the very least. I have no idea how she felt, but if she wasn’t interested, she sure never showed me that. The last time we had a hookup like that was maybe… three days before she died? Something like that.” She sniffles.

“So yeah, that night. We were at a hotel room party. There was a ton of coke around. And other stuff too. I’d been smoking weed a bit with some girls I knew from Blackout. There were probably 50 people there, and it was this whole hotel suite, so different rooms had different things going on. And Denise came and found me where I was smoking with those girls, and she dragged me into the bathroom. And she was like, ‘Look at this shit! My guy just dropped it off!’ It was a huge bag of coke. Couldn’t have been any less than an eightball. Way more than just the two of us needed. But she cuts the bag open, and she’s laying out lines on the counter, and I’m feeling good, plus here’s this girl I am in no way admitting I have a crush on, laying out lines of my favorite drug and offering them to me. What else am I gonna do but take a hit, you know?”

She sighs. “She hands me this rolled-up dollar bill, and I just go for it. Hoover the line right up. It burns. I mean, it feels wrong. But by the time I’m really catching on to it, Denise has done a line too. And I guess it didn’t feel so wrong to her, because she’s cutting up more lines. And I’m like, ‘Babe, I might have smoked too much weed for this. I feel sick.’ She’s trying to get me to stay and keep doing it with her, and I’m like, ‘I’ll stick around,’ but I end up sitting in the floor, and some other people are coming in, and everyone’s doing this fucked-up coke, and I end up hugging the toilet.”

“Damn… you threw up? That seems bad.”

She nods against my chest. “Right? Obvious red flag. But I was fucked up, you know? I just drank some water, left the bathroom, and curled up on the floor by one of the beds. Next thing I know, people are freaking out. Screaming, yelling, all kinds of shit getting knocked around and kicked over. I’m half asleep and feeling super out of it, which like… who has that feeling after a line of coke? I pull myself up and people are running out of the bathroom, and I’m looking around and I don’t see Denise. So like a genius, I poke my head in the bathroom, and there’s Nick, and he’s got Denise in the bathtub, and she looks… unnatural. He’s yelling for people to get him ice, and he’s running a cold bath, and he’s yelling at her, and… god.” She’s crying hard now. I just keep rubbing her back. I suddenly think, I hope the food doesn’t show up right now. Yeah, great thought, Ceci, real helpful.

After a minute, Janet looks up at me. “Babe, I need a tissue or something, I’m a mess.” I look at her coffee table and spot a roll of paper towels. I lean over and grab it. “Thanks,” she says, wiping her face. Then she kisses me on the cheek. “You’re an absolute queen to put up with all this.”

I shake my head vehemently. “Nope. This is just what friends do for each other. The amount of times Brandy and I have had conversations like this… It’s really fine. It just means we really care about each other.” I stroke her cheek and look into her eyes. “And we do, don’t we?”

She nods, still looking choked up. “There’s more to it if you want to hear it.”

I nod. “Of course. Anything you’re comfortable telling me.”

“It’s fine, I’ll tell you the rest,” she says, and settles her head against my shoulder. “Anyway, everyone bailed out of there pretty quick. I found out later Denise died of a fentanyl overdose.”

“Whoa!”

“Yeah, the coke was cut with it. It was kinda brown-ish, but I was used to that happening at times. Didn’t think anything of it. Wish I had.” She shrugged. “Can’t be changed now. Anyway, I went home. I was driving the Mustang already by then. I don’t know how I didn’t wreck it. When I got back here, it was all I could do to drag myself up the stairs. I felt really sick. And then I get myself into my apartment, and the first thing I hear is people fucking in my bedroom.”

“Oh no, don’t tell me.”

She nods. “Yup, Alex had two other girls in the bed with him. And I come staggering in, all kinds of fucked up, and I’m trying to be like, ‘Holy shit, what the fuck?’ But instead, I just get sick, right there in the bedroom doorway. And then I guess I passed out, because the next thing I remember, I was in the bathroom, on the floor, and I was naked and covered in cold water. He had ahold of me and was yelling, ‘Don’t you die on me, Janet!’ It was fucked. I have no idea how long that went on. I was in the bathtub for a while… couldn’t keep anything down. Finally after like a day, I wasn’t puking anymore, but I still felt horrible. I had a fever, I was having chills, all I could hold down was water and chicken broth… It was awful. And all I could think was, ‘Whatever it was that tried to kill Denise’ – because at the time I didn’t know she was dead – ‘is trying to kill me too.’ I knew I had to fight it. I sent Alex out with my bank card to get me Gatorade and soup and stuff. That’s where I fucked up, I guess. He got the stuff for me, and he got me to the point where I was sleeping normally and able to walk around the apartment. But I still had no energy. And then one day I got up and was walking around, and I was starting to feel better. This was probably five days in. And Alex wasn’t there, but I didn’t think much of it at first. I posted up on the couch, put the TV on, and drank Gatorade. Waiting for him to come home so I could be all, ‘Hey babe, I’m finally feeling better!’” She snorts. “He never came back. I never saw him again. It took a couple more days for me to figure out that my bank card was gone and my account had been emptied out. I had to cancel my card, and claim identity theft, and still I lost most of the money he made off with.”

“Shit,” I say. “How much was it?”

She shrugs. “To this day, I don’t know. I was too fucked up to have more than a vague idea of how much money I had. Might have been 10 grand, might have been more. Can’t imagine it was any less than five thousand dollars or so. Thank god the electric, HVAC, and water are covered by the rent at this place. I made rent that month, but my internet and cable got cut off for a while, and it was months before I could find all the automatic charges that were still going to my old card. Stuff just kept getting cut off. And I was having to work my ass off just to be able to cover bills, especially after I lost about a week of shoots when I was deathly ill. People were calling me up, wanting to drink to Denise’s memory at this bar or that bar… I told ‘em all to fuck off. I was like, ‘I nearly died too! Which of us is gonna be next?’ Real buzzkill, I guess. Didn’t take much of that before no one was calling me to hang out anymore.” She waves her hand. “Good riddance, though. Denise was apocalyptically fucked up and probably had one foot in the grave the whole time I knew her, but she was actually a good person underneath it all. I really believe that. The rest of ‘em were scumbags. I don’t miss ‘em, and I don’t need ‘em.”

The doorbell rings. Janet slides out of my lap and onto the couch. Her eyes and cheeks are red and inflamed. “Babe, can you get that? I don’t want the Doordash guy to freak out when he sees me.”

I rub her shoulder. “You still look beautiful to me.” Then I shrug. “But sure, I’ll grab it.” The doorbell rings again, and I hasten to grab our Chinese food.