“Crystal, it’s time to break out the champagne.” I want to celebrate, but I also feel like the mantle of responsibility has been passed to me like I’m about to take my place on the Iron Throne. Is this moment too solemn for champagne?
* * *
An hour later we’re at our new office. I don’t know what we’ll do with it but it has a bar, a kicking sound system, and a stage. “I think we should keep the club running and maybe set aside a certain amount for office space,” I suggest to Crystal.
“I like that. We could have singles’ events.”
It’s going to be awesome.
I take a selfie of us making crazy excited faces and caption it: Guess who just bought a strip club?!
“So should I quit stripping tonight?” Crystal asks.
“Probably wait until JP gives me the deed, or however that works.”
Now that I almost own the property, I think it’s fine for me to start a fire in the parking lot—just a small one, in a trash can. It’s the last thing on my list for the day. I call out to one of the security guys, “Yo, do you have a light?”
“I got a book of matches,” he says. Everyone who works at GoldRush smokes, which is fine by me. I’m not going to be a fucking health evangelist, even though I’m a vegetarian.
He waits for me to stick a cigarette in my mouth so he can light it for me. What a gentleman. “Can I just have the book?” He hands it over, mystified.
In one corner of the parking lot there’s a metal trash can. It looks like an old oil barrel, black with bits of rust and empty except for some beer bottles that should have been recycled. Not a lot of environmentalists at the strip club. GoldRush 2.0 will have a recycling bin. #dolphins.
I hold the yellow dress close to my heart for a moment and shut my eyes tight against my emotions as I think about the last week, about the person I was. I’m not mad at her. She did the best she could and she brought me to where I am today, ready to officially move on. Hell, I already have moved on. I’m wearing a brand-new dress from Forever 21 and some pretty cute shoes. I’m a bona fide business owner and I have a damn good friend in Crystal, even if she did try to kill me. Even JP—I never expected him to care about something just because I do. Is that love, or just an awakening?
One kiss, and I drop the dress into the barrel on top of cigarette butts and Budweiser bottles, their blue labels peeling from exposure. I douse my old life in Everclear taken from behind the bar and light a match. The flame goes out before it hits the dress. I try again and again. By the fourth match, I’m practically in the trash can so I can hold the flame against the yellow fabric. It won’t ignite. I’m getting streaks of rust on my new dress from leaning into the can to light the old one.
“Fucking dress!”
After I use the entire book, the dress looks slightly blackened in a couple of spots where some old paper burned on top of it, but the dress isn’t going unless I take it to a crematorium, and it’s not quite that serious. I really wanted to take a picture of the flaming dress for Instagram, but I have to settle for a plain old shot of it in the trash. I caption it: Moving on.
Maybe it’s symbolic. The old me isn’t gone. I just threw her in the trash with a few other bad habits—lying, cheating, and red meat.
I almost take the dress out of the barrel. Imagining the once-beautiful garment being picked up by trash collectors and tossed in with food waste and dirty diapers makes me cringe, but what am I going to do with a partially scorched Prada gown? It doesn’t spark joy. My old self doesn’t spark joy.
So it has to be good-bye. I have things to do and places to be. I blow a kiss to the can and walk away. I have a date at a taco truck.
71 Three so far! 35k × 3 = I’M RICH!
CHAPTER
TWENTY-EIGHT
I can take the blue Metro Express bus most of the way to L’Empire Tacos, about a 90-minute ride according to Metro Trip Planner.72 The homeless guy next to me smells so much like old piss and cigarettes I can barely breathe. Plus the bus fumes. It’s time to hurry up on those zero-emission buses, LA! I miss my (JP’s) Ferrari. But this is part of the process. If I embrace this cocoon of reality for long enough, I’m totally going to emerge a millionaire.
“I’m going to snap a pic, okay?” I tell the guy. I have to document this shit for my fans.
I smile with teeth and he smiles without. #Meth #ThanksKobra.
I erase and rewrite the caption approximately twenty times until I finally settle on: Bussing it to the taco truck date, Max. Stay away from meth, kids.
While deciding between the pink bubbly hearts and the red heart emoji—is the red heart too much like long-stemmed roses on the first date, because I think that would scare him away—I miss my stop. When I finally get off it’s almost 8:30 p.m. What if Max waited for twenty minutes and left? I kick myself for not taking an Uber. I’m an idiot.
I run as fast as I can in my Payless heels. The sun is setting, and the stoplights seem to glow extra bright against the dusky backdrop like they’re charged with the electricity of a summer night. I’m feeling it too. I’m electric blue against the evening sky. Everyone else is moving in slow motion in their booty-hugging shorts and bare-midriff tops as I race toward L’Empire Tacos.
Running in the heat has done nothing for me. I arrive out of breath and sweaty. Blisters are starting to form where the heel of my shoe cuts into my ankle, and Max is nowhere to be seen. I sit down at the communal picnic table to catch my breath. He’s running late, too—no big.
The perpetually too-long line at the taco truck is, as expected, too long. That’s part of its charm—twenty extra minutes to stare into the eyes of your loved one and talk about whether you’re going to take a risk on an enchilada or get the tacos like normal. The parking lot is filled with the same amount of trash and janky cars as last time. There’s no grass anywhere in sight. Unlike last time, my dress isn’t splattered with blood from a recent head wound and I know who I am. I am prepared to be happy.
If Max comes.
He didn’t respond to my Instagram post and I can’t even be sure that he saw it. I feel like Meg Ryan at the end of Sleepless in Seattle. You might say the stakes were higher for her because she had to get from Baltimore to the top of the Empire State Building, probably in bad traffic. I think a 90-minute bus ride through iffy neighborhoods with a missed stop is probably about the same.
Mostly I hope that Max shows up, but I also hope that he has a car. It’d be nice if I didn’t have to ride the bus back to Crystal’s in the middle of the night. But I’m prepared. I burned my yellow dress today (sorta). I own a strip club. I can ride the bus after midnight. I’m one of the weirdos on the bus.