Читать книгу The Struggle is Real, but So is Jesus - Tessa - Страница 23

Chapter 16

Like I said, it was pretty great at first. I didn’t work and was just getting stoned and having sex all the time with him, living with him in a house that he rented a room from friends.

Things started getting a little crazy; I don’t even remember how we went from point A to B. But eventually, meth entered my life again, and he was the one dealing it. We lived in weekly hotels for a while. A lot of them, I started dancing again at a club called Baby Dolls, and he would load me up with baggies of meth to sell to the girls at work.

This went on for a while, then the cops came looking for me again. I didn’t know what for, but like anyone, speciously living the life I did was super paranoid. I didn’t have any warrants, but when they showed up at one of our hotel apartments, I hid in the closet. They didn’t ask to come in and search, so it must have not been really serious, and I didn’t have an APD out on me. It most likely had to do with the guy who stole my license and was stealing the social security checks.

I never found out because they never came back, but at first, I was so scared, and the meth didn’t help the paranoia. So he flew me to San Diego to stay with my friend, the one who had the rich drug dealer boyfriend.

They had split up, and she was living at some other guy’s house. Platonically, when her boyfriend broke up with her, he gave her an ounce of coke to sell instead of money to get on her feet.

It was a stupid thing to do to an addict. So long story short, within a week of me being there, we had smoked the whole thing. Things got ugly after that, of course. We were out of drugs and money and got into a huge fight.

She didn’t have a car, and it got so bad. She had this little skater friend take me to the airport to fly back home on the back of his bicycle. And it wasn’t a short distance either.

To this day, I don’t even know how I made it or how they even let me on the plane, I was so wasted. I kinda remember the ride on the back of his bike and stumbling off the plane in Arizona where my boyfriend/soon-to-be second husband picked me up.

We had gotten into a huge fight, I don’t remember why. It might have been because I was sick again of the drugs. It was out of control and possibly being on the brink of catching a felony and prison time.

I left in the middle of the night, just randomly took off. I forgot all my dancer outfits and my ID. When I called him to get them back, I couldn’t get a job with neither. He refused unless I came back; I wouldn’t.

I stayed with a friend who helped me get into an apartment on a ninety-nine-dollar move in, and since I couldn’t work with no identification, I found an ad for escorts in the paper, and that’s where I began my full-time career as a prostitute.

I worked for this girl. She would send me out on calls to hotels. I would get one hundred and fifty per client, and she would get fifty of it.

This was 1990, so back then, it was a lot of money. My friend and I talked about who helped me out a lot and is in a lot of my chapters, was stealing cars at the time, Camaros to be exact, and changing the VIN numbers and selling them.

As far as I know, to this day, he never got caught, and he was around and in my life till about 1995. And he let me borrow one of the cars. We were strictly friends. He helped me out a lot. He knew what I did for a living. I think it boosted his ego, he felt like my pimp or something, I don’t know. He never made money off me but was always there when I was in a bind, I would always pay him back.

Eventually, “the guy” husband two came looking for me, begging me back. He was never abusive or anything, just completely whooped on me. He started showing up with groceries for me, then he brought me a Persian kitten.

And quickly, I was getting brand new furniture (don’t laugh): a canopy waterbed with mirrors on the top. It was the most popular thing then that people wanted. Waterbeds were so in.

He even bought me the stolen Camaro from my friend I was borrowing.

I didn’t know where he was getting the money, I assumed from drug deals. I found out soon enough he was running bank scams.

Back then, all you needed to get a valid ID was have two people go with you to the bank to say they knew who you were if you had no paperwork to prove it and notarize their signatures and you could go to the DMV with them and get a valid ID. Of course, I wanted one too but just to have a different name, and I made myself younger. Twenty-one, I was only twenty-four, but I still wanted to be younger. Of course, the main reason people did it was for fake IDs to buy alcohol.

I picked out a really cool name for my alias—“River Marie”—and so everyone I met thought my name was River. I felt really cool. The stupid things we do to make us look cool and different.

I went off track a little. What my soon-to-be second husband was doing was making several IDs and opening bank accounts with each one at different banks.

He would then write a large check from one account and deposit it in another then pull out the cash. Back then, they didn’t make you wait till a check was cleared. You could get the funds immediately, so he made his rounds doing that for a long time. He also never got caught. I have no idea how we all got away with this stuff, but it certainly isn’t anything you would want to mess with today and do federal prison for.

I accepted his gifts for a while but wouldn’t let him move back in with me. I was sure he’d get caught, and I wasn’t going to go down with him.

He didn’t know what I was doing either. He just thought I was dancing again. Another reason I couldn’t take him back: it would be impossible to hide.

Eventually, though, I did take him back. The meth was out of the picture, but the cocaine came on full force. We were smoking coke almost daily and for days at a time. They sold really cool pipes back then that had glass tubes swirling up and around from the glass bowl and made it look really cool when we smoked it. Part of the fun was watching the smoke swirl around the tubes up to you mouth and get huge hits off.

This was still the days of freebasing, cooking it ourselves, way before people started making crack and using little glass tubes with brillo.

He bought us both a gun. They were registered and legal, and one day, we decided to drive to Los Angeles to see my friend, the one I danced with and called my sister. I don’t know how we made it, we smoked probably an eight ball all the way there.

The next day of being there, our Camaro broke down in the middle of an intersection, and he had his gun tucked into the front of his jeans. In Arizona, it was legal to carry as long as it wasn’t concealed. And the cops, of course came, to “help” then searched him, and he was arrested for carrying. It was not legal in California.

I got nervous and told them I had mine in the glove box, so we both spent the night in jail until they ran our prints and made sure the guns were registered to us and they weren’t used in a crime.

We got out without bond the next day but they confiscated our guns. I was pretty pissed ’cause they were legally ours.

Our trip was cut short, and we went back to Phoenix the next day.