The People in Rossford

Mixing It up With Me

The time she didn’t spend at Lee and Tom’s apartment, Danasia spent with Noah. She’d never really had a mother, and what she had experienced of her was so much worse than Naomi. She got the feeling, as time went by, that Naomi was hiding from something too.

The weather got better and then it got worse, and a huge snowstorm dumped itself all across the Midwest. For a day the skies were heavy and pewter. Danasia felt melancholy, but she liked it. And then the sun came out on the glistening snow, the sky was fresh icy blue and she remembered why she loved winter.

“This is the first winter I haven’t spent in California,” she told Noah.

“This is my second,” he said. “The first year I came here, I went back to LA at the first hint of snow.”

Naomi was talking to Danasia one night and she said, “I think I need a job.”

“I do too,” Danasia said. “If I was… in school or something it wouldn’t matter so much. But I’m not doing anything. I need to get up off of my ass.”

“You know,” Naomi took a drag on her cigarette—they were sitting at the kitchen table—“I had a feeling you’d say that.”

She passed an application across the table.

“That Diner on Birmingham?”

Naomi nodded. “We’d be working together. If that didn’t kill you.”

Danasia shook her head. “Did you get the job yet?”

“Not yet,” said Naomi. “But it’s a diner so, you know, what are the requirements besides a working knowledge of shorthand? And speed?”

Danasia admitted: “I don’t know if I have either.”

“If I can do it, you can do it. And I can do it,” Naomi insisted. “I’ve got to. I’ve spent most of my life having other folks do things for me. My father, my mother. Noah’s father. Then all the others.”

“Nay?”

“Um hum.”

“What was Noah’s father like?”

She laughed and said, “Like all the others.”

Then she said, “No. No, Jerry was different. Jerry looked a lot like Noah, actually,” Naomi said. “But he was… done in by life. Does that make sense? He was done in at twenty-three. And he didn’t have time to stick around for the baby. One good thing he did do, or he thought he did, was marry me and give the baby his name. I think that marriage lasted all of forty five minutes. Maybe.”

Noah took Danasia up to Port Ridge a week before Christmas.

“I shouldn’t let you go really,” he said.

“Why? I’ve seen the worst of it. And now all you’re doing is directing.”

“Guy says he has a movie for me in January. He says the folks are missing me.”

“I’d be missing you.”

Noah snorted and readjusted the rear view mirror.

“You miss me in quite a different way than guys busting a nut while watching me busting a nut.”

“You put it so eloquently.”

“I put it as eloquently as it deserves,” Noah told her.

“I know how you started with Guy. I know that,” Danasia said. “But you told me how you were once out on the streets.”

“Yeah?”

“I still don’t understand it. I mean, I feel like I get you, like I know you. But there’s part of you I can't possibly know because I don’t understand it.”

“What part of it? The part where I sold my body so other people could get off on it?”

“Isn’t that the only part of it?”

Noah said: “But I already told you. I mean, other people had been doing the same thing to me, and I’d never had a choice. So it was almost easy to sell myself. Shrug, think of England.”

“I couldn’t.” Danasia said. Then she explained herself.

“Before I came to live with Lemonade and Lee, my mama had a boyfriend. Mama was… fucked up all the time anyway. She read books, though. When she was sober. She was reading The Color Purple, and she put it down. So Randy, who was living with us at the time, reads it and says out of the book, while Mama is asleep: You gon do for me what yo mama wouldn’t. Which is what Celie’s stepfather says before raping her.

“And then he goes for me, Noah.”

“No!” Noah caught his breath.

“I mean he had my jeans down, my underwear, my mama passed out…. I got away. I cut the son of a bitch. I just left. I couldn’t pack. I got my mother’s wallet, and then I was on a bus and I found Lee and my father, my other father. But I couldn’t be touched after that. And you could be.”

Noah didn’t say anything for what seemed like a long time.

“Noah, are you alright?”

“I didn’t try hard enough,” he said in a different voice than she’d ever heard. “I didn’t fight, Danny. I just let them do what they wanted.”

“You ran from those boys.”

“I didn’t make it across the parking lot.

“Do you know what I think?”

When Danasia said nothing, Noah said, “I think that those boys, and those men could tell that I wanted it.”

“Noah, don’t say that.’

“I went to boys. I did stuff with folks. I did… I told you about about Bartlett. I wanted that. I wanted what happened to me. I…” he stopped.

“I do pornos,” Noah said. “How simple is that? I mean that explains it all.

“When I got to the streets I knew what everyone back home thought about me. And what those rich fuckers trying to score a little boy thought. They thought I was a little slut. I was a fag. I was fucked up. I wanted it. And you know, part of me tried to resist all that. All my life I tried to resist being weak, being a victim, being… dirty. And then one day I was just like. You know what?” Noah shrugged and took his hand off the wheel. “You want me to be all those things. Well, you’re right. That’s just what I am. And the first time I punked for someone—you know what that is? Whored. The first time I did that I actually felt free. And excited. And that’s how I felt doing those first movies.”

“Is that how you still feel?”

“Sometimes,” Noah said. “And then sometimes I feel like this is the biggest fucking waste and I am a big fucking waste and this is no kind of life at all. I feel both. Sometimes at the same time. Sometimes in the middle of a movie.”

“Noah,” Danasia said. “I didn’t ask for Jerry to try to rape me.”

“I know that, Danny—”

“And you didn’t ask for anyone to do that to you. You didn’t ask for it, and you didn’t deserve it.”

“I ask for it now,” Noah said. “And I can’t see where the boy blowing his mother’s boyfriend when he was five begins, and Noah Riley filming pornos ends.”

“I’m running away from someone I owe a hundred thousand dollars,” Danasia said casually.”

“Wha?” Noah began.

“I’m fleeing a dangerous man who wants money I don’t have, and he wants to kill me,” Danasia elaborated. “So see, we’ve both done bad shit. That’s why I like you, Noah. Because we’ve both done shit.”

When Nick and Niall,the Boffer Twins, had finished, and lay both exhausted and sweaty, on the bed, Nick massaging his penis, Guy said, “That’s a rap,” and Noah shut off the camera.

“What’s it like to do the filming, Noah?” Niall asked, folding his hand behind his head.

“Well, I get to keep my clothes on,” he said.

“Yeah, what’s the fun in that?” Nick got off the bed and toweled himself. “I’m gonna hit the showers. You and me, though, next week, Noah! They say the fans want to see that.”

“The fans are dying to see that,” Guy said.

Noah came out of the large room with the camera hanging from his hand. Danasia was sitting in the larger white carpeted room by the winding stair case, the scene of many parties.

“You know,” she observed, “at first everyone seems so happy go lucky. But if you watch long enough, then it’s easy to see everyone of these guys is a little ruined. Cut up by life.”

“Because they’re pornstars?” Noah raised an eyebrow and shifted the camera.

Danasia shook her head, and said: “Because they’re breathing. There’s something in Lady Life that makes her want to chop you into little pieces.”

Noah considered this, and then he remembered what he’d wanted to say and spoke.

“Danasia, you should have told me about this a long time ago. You should have told any of us.”

“I know,” she said. “But I felt really stupid. And, besides, for me it was like how you couldn’t tell your mother everything until just recently. You know?”

“I guess.”

“I thought Jerry was so good. I don’t know why. He was—pardon my ebonics—just another niggah. But he was the niggah that took me off the streets. At least the streets I knew. So he ran up a bunch of gambling debts. I used to gamble. For big stuff and for small stuff, and we didn’t have shit. So I said, you know, I’ll win your shit back. And I lost. That’s the abridged version. The long version isn’t that great.”

“The long version sounds like a novel,” Noah sat down, planting his feet apart.

“Well, it’s a novel you’ll have to write yourself, cause I don’t like it.”

“Well,” said Noah, “here’s the thing. Your situation is easily remedied.”

“What? ‘Easily remedied’? You sound just like Lee. Or Fenn.”

“Probably Fenn. I did live in his house. But what I am saying is still true.”

Danasia stood up and hissed in Noah’s ear, “How is owing a hundred thousand dollars—no, excuse me, a hundred FIFTY thousand dollars to some shark easily remedied? Unless you expect me to start doing—” she flapped her arms around the room—“this.”

“If by this,” Noah said, “you mean flapping your arms like a chicken, then no. And if by this you mean porn, then hell no. It’s not a hundred fifty thousand dollar a year career. But what I am saying is if you go to Lee or Fenn, I’m pretty sure they can help you out.”

“No they can’t!”

“I think,” Noah said, his voice very firm, “they can.”

Danasia cocked her head and said, “Whaddo you know, Noah?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I mean, nothing I can tell you. Just… you have to talk to them.”

Danasia shook her head.

“You have to understand that I can’t,” she said. “Even if they’re sitting on a million dollars, I can’t just ask them, I can't ask my father after all he’s done to do that.”

Noah was about to say, “But that’s what fathers do,” when a voice in his head said: “But what did your father ever do for you?”