Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow [111]
“Just the story, thanks.”
“Suit yourself,” Teddy says, “but I’m sitting down. It’s been an exhausting couple of days, as you know.”
He sits down in the large leather easy chair and looks at the fish in his tank. “Tell him, Tammy. It’s almost over now anyway.”
Tammy tells her story.
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Tammy grew up in El Cajon, out in East County.
The usual stereotypical stripper back story: Her dad wasn’t around a lot; her mom made an unsteady living as a waitress in a local restaurant and usually stayed for a few beers after her shift was over.
She was a lonely little girl. A latchkey kid who made herself instant macaroni and cheese, which she ate while watching celebrity shows on television and dreaming about becoming one of the actresses on the red carpet. It didn’t seem likely then—she was skinny and gangly and had red hair, which the boys made fun of.
They stopped making jokes around the time she turned fourteen. Tammy didn’t blossom—she exploded into a sexuality that seemed to happen overnight and was scary and confusing to her. Suddenly, boys wanted her, and she saw the way that grown men looked at her when she’d go to the restaurant to say hello to her mom. She wanted to say to them, I’m fourteen years old; I’m a kid. But she was afraid to speak to or even look back at them.
A good thing. Men would see the intensity in those incredible green eyes and mistake it for something else.
Okay, she learned to use it, she admits it freely. Why not? High school was a nightmare. She was never good at school—there were diagnoses of dyslexia and ADD—so being an actress wasn’t going to happen. She couldn’t read a script out loud and never got cast in the Drama Club productions. She thought about being a model, but you don’t exactly bump into Eileen Ford in El Cajon, and she couldn’t afford the money for photographers to create a portfolio. She did a little modeling for a local “sportswear” catalog and made a couple hundred dollars, but that was about it.
Tammy graduated from high school with a C-minus average, and it looked like waiting tables was her future. She did it for a year or so, enduring the crappy tips, the leers, the comments, and the offers, and then one day when she was twenty, she was walking home in the hundred-plus heat along the flat sunbaked sidewalk and decided that she had to do something, anything, to get out of there. So she took her red hair, amazing green eyes, and long legs, got on a bus to Mira Mesa, walked into a strip club, and auditioned.
She thought it would be hard, but it wasn’t so hard, taking her clothes off. Okay, so it wasn’t the red carpet; it was a platform and a pole. And yes, it was a cliché. But Tammy learned quickly that if she paused in her dance and cast those eyes out over the front row, she would get tips; if she picked out one guy and trained those cat eyes on him, she could easily get him into the Champagne Room, or the VIP Room, or whatever the hell room where the bigger money got made.
A year or so later, she found her way to Silver Dan’s.
A couple of weeks after that, Dan Silver found his way to her.
Of course he did.
The owner of a strip club—in this case, a chain of strip clubs—has a sort of droit du seigneur when it comes to the girls. They don’t have to date him, and if they do date him, they don’t have to sleep with him, but it’s a good professional move if they do.
You sleep with the boss, you don’t have to blow the night manager to get a good shift. The bartenders pour your drinks without coming on to you or wanting a cut. The other girls find space for you in front of the mirror. The really creepy customers pick up on the vibe and keep their distance.
Tammy had been around long enough to know that, and even if she hadn’t, Angela would have told her. Angela was her best friend at Silver Dan’s. They hit it off right away—similar background, similar outlook, same tough attitude. It was Angela who told her that if the boss came calling, she’d better open the gates, or life could get impossible for her at the club.
So