Dolly (Unfinished)

Dolly

By
Varo Borja

Red Charles of the Ritz looks lovely with a black eye. And a busted lip. My name is Dolly. Dolly Divine.
My cigarette tastes like blood and candy and I’m coming down off that cheap cocaine that the jackass in the next room fed me to get in my pants. Haha. He doesn’t know that I have his wallet stashed in my pretty pink panties and no time to waste with 35 year old, small dicked used car salesmen who can’t get it up unless they’re beating on a woman and cheating on their wives with everything in a skirt. So I grab my pink purse with the silver sequins and I hit the door. I’m down the stairs of this dive in a wink of the eye and out on the street again. The night air is cool and damp, but reassuring. It hides me and my bruises and my bad teeth and my bad dye job that I shoplifted from Walgreens. My heels are too high and they hurt my feet so I take them off and go barefoot. Barefoot and pregnant. That’s what Daddy said. Ever since that nigger raped me back in Memphis last year though, the doc at the emergency room said I could forget about babies. So I came to L.A. All 85 lbs of me with a duffel bag and a dream. I wanted to be a movie star. Just like Marilyn Monroe. Little did I know that there wasn’t much need for movie stars anymore. At least ones from Mississippi. That’s what that man in the white limousine said. He said that I could make it in the porn business. I’d never even seen a porno (besides Daddy’s magazines under the mattress) until I came out here and was in a couple of them. Well, I wasn’t really in them. The man in the limousine said that since I was sixteen that I’d have to be a fluff girl. You know them ones who stand out in the hallway while they’re shooting and keeps the stars erect. The ones that they send out for coffee and cigarettes and that they beat up on when they’re bored. I’ve been beat up a lot. Daddy said that I deserved it. When a man hits me I feel like I’m getting the best of him, and then when I spit blood on the floor and pretty myself up again he loves me just like Daddy did.

The neon lights on sunset remind me of those country western songs that I used to hear on the radio on warm summer’s nights back in Mississippi. I’ve been here in L.A. for a while now, but I still can’t get over them neon signs. One day my name will be written on one of them. I can see it now. Dolly Divine, mistress of the night. I like that. Mistress of the night was one of them dimestore novels that I read when I was a kid. Well, I guess I am still a kid. But L.A. has a way of making you not feel like a kid. A way of making you tough on the outside and all cold on the inside. A way of growing you into a stone statue like them Confederate ones back in Vicksburg.

I’m hungry. I stop walking down Sunset for a minute and pull that hard dick’s wallet out from underneath my leather skirt. 50 bucks, a couple of credit cards and a photo of one of his kids. She looks all pretty with her high school cheerleader’s uniform on and her braces and her face free from blue-black love taps. I stand for a moment and gaze at the photo. I look into her soul. Yeah. She’s got scars. They’re just not on the outside.

I walk into a 7/11 and grab a bag of chips, a Snicker’s bar and a big gulp filled to the rim with 44 oz of Mountain Dew. I walk to the counter and the Arab clerk eyes me suspiciously as I pull out my newly won plastic money and slap it down on the counter next to my dinner like I own the place. I give him a wink and a half caste kind of smile that doesn’t show the bad part of my teeth and say “Its my Daddy’s” and he swipes the card. He hands me the little slip for me to sign and I scribble the name of the jackass that it belongs to in a really feathery way like I think a man of his upbringing might, and then I grab my loot and I’m back on the street.

I sit down outside of the 7/11 on the curb that smells of gasoline and stale piss and I open my chips and nibble a little bit. My stomach hurts nearly all the time, and even though I know with my head that I’m hungry, I can’t seem to stomach all the food. So, I toss the Snicker’s bar and the half empty bag of chips to a bum lying on his back in a liquor soaked fantasy land by the blue and white payphone (I keep the Mountain Dew; I hate water and coffee and Mountain Dew reminds me of Mississippi) and then I start to walk down Sunset again to look for someone to take me home so I don’t have to sleep in some alley that smells of the bums and the dregs of some B movie horrorshow.