Fear is emotional crabgrass.
It takes root, it spreads its tentacles.
It creeps over rational thought and smothers cold hard fact.
Especially when it comes to hookers.
At seventeen-years-old my psyche was a weed-choked abandoned lot and it was because I was skinny and because I was horny but mainly it was because I lived in mortal fear of Miss X. Oh no...no, no, Miss X wasn't one of the aforementioned hookers...no, far from it.
Miss X was my high school object of desire.
Oh, how I longed to perform gentle acts of intimacy upon her.
Oh lord, how she scared the living shit out of me.
Her smile, her smell, her words...it created in me a nauseating fear that I'd never be strong or worthy enough, or at least the equivalent body weight of a girl like Miss X. I knew her quite well, we were "friends" (her term) and spent time talking, communing, and pointedly not making out while she deepened my love for her through the mere flip of a bang or emission of a charming little burp, while I sat with my legs crossed stifling the second strongest and most persistent organ in my body.
I grew up in a decaying tough neighborhood and a strong Slavic family and shyness wasn't an option. You talked loud, you made your opinions known and screw the mute in the corner.
But...
But goddamit, around Miss X I was that mute!
Me, the guy who had her alone now and then to the envy of a hundred other teenage hand-humpers and she tongue-tied me! I had a desperate need to say something to her, to tell her...holy shit...I didn't know what exactly, but to make her notice me as something other than a buddy, a chum who listened well, a boy mooning at her feet.
I wanted her to see me as a man.
And now my fear of Miss X was seeping into my consciousness, my conception of who I was and who I was becoming, and I was desperate for something rock solid in place of my recently evolved jellyfish-spine.
That's when my uncle produced the lead pipe.
He slammed it on the bar, making salt and pepper jump.
He smiled, referred to it as The Enforcer.
After a couple years of waiting tables at my uncle's venerable diner I'd been appointed night manager. The joint was in a rusting but still legitimate downtown and at night the demographics shifted sharply.
It was younger, drunker, it was druggy.
Weirder and louder, it was creepier and more fun.
After midnight it was pimps and their ladies.
My uncle held the lead pipe by its handle carefully wrapped in tight surgical tape and said, "Sometimes late-night drunks don't want to pay for their hot dogs and chili but goddamn it!"...and slammed the pipe onto the bar and my teeth rattled..."Everyone pays!"
He handed me the pipe.
He smiled, said "Good luck, kid."
He stopped smiling, put a beefy index finger in my sternum, said, "Don't fuck up."
And I didn't, even though that first night of managerial duty went not smoothly or easily because you can't count a toothless alcoholic falling asleep face-first in a bowl of chili and almost drowning or two coked-up hillbillies still testosterone-pumped from the strip joint down the street having a belt-buckle fight smooth or easy. But I made money and kept the waiters in line and cleaned up the mess and was watching the clock at one-forty-five, praying for two a.m., when I saw him and her outside the front window, him looking at his watch, her looking at him, him debating whether they had time, me sending them subconscious message to Keep walking, the diner's closed, me failing and they pushed through the door.
He was a large black man in black leather, black sunglasses, red Kanga cap. She was a not young but not old white woman and it didn't matter what she was wearing (it wasn't much,) only that she looked alarmingly like Miss X.
I waited on them, I carried to their place at the bar plates of hot dogs smothered in chili sauce and onions, bowls of chili, a small coke for him, coffee for her, and I couldn't stop staring because through the spotty skin and crow's feet and zephyr of Winston smoke it was Miss X before me.
He said, "You like her, uh?"
And she smiled at me with bad teeth, teeth like an uneven skyline.
And I swallowed a pineapple and said, "What?"
He dipped his spoon and delicately placed chili between his lips, waved the empty spoon over the nearly empty bowls and plates and said, "I trade you. Take her back to the alley for fifteen minutes. We clean."
I said, "For hot dogs and chili?"
He said, "Fuck you care?" and I looked at her and she was still looking at me with the smile stapled onto her face above the two emptiest eyes I'd ever seen. I wanted to tell her that I wasn't what she thought I was, that oh yeah, yeah-yeah-yeah, the "yeahs" jackrabbiting through my brain and body...oh yeah, I wanted to take her to the alley for fifteen minutes all right, but...
He dropped the spoon into the worn porcelain-coated bowl, said, "You scared, uh? Kid like you," and stood from the bar and ran his tongue over his teeth as he buttoned his coat, took her by the arm, turned toward the door. And I admired him because he'd finished my thought, of course I was scared, but it wasn't my whole thought and I needed to say something.
I needed to say it now.
Not saying it would make me what he thought I was.
I reached under the bar and pulled out the lead pipe.
I slammed that son-of-a-bitch on the bar.
Diner noise evaporated in a quick wisp.
I pointed the pipe at him and said, "Everyone pays."
He paused. He stared. He turned back to the bar slowly turning her arm free, reached beneath his coat even slower and my balls cringed, and he produced a wallet, dropped a ten on the bar, said, "Keep it."
She looked past him at me with new eyes.
Certainly not lust, they were void of physical attraction, but with acknowledgement, and that was better.
He turned then and took her arm and led her out of the diner and watching them go I realized how large a man he was, much larger than me, but still just a man.
Like me.