Chapter 2
TWO
VERITY
Twenty hasn’t been my year. But neither was nineteen or eighteen, or honestly any year. I’m not sure I’ve ever really had a good year, or even a good month.
But twenty has been a doozy so far, and if it gets much worse, well…if it gets worse, it’ll probably be my last anyway.
So far in the last three months, I’ve lost my job, my apartment, and my car and home on wheels was stolen. So now I live in a tent in the woods.
I guess a silver lining is that at least I have a tent, and I’m not just sleeping out in the open.
Maybe that’s the reason I decided to keep the tent for all these years.
Maybe it’s why my dad decided to haul the tent along with us every time we packed up the car and moved somewhere new.
Maybe he wondered if one day we’d end up living in it.
He brought the tent home one night when I was about nine. I remember him coming into the apartment with it in his arms, a wide grin on his face. “We’re going camping, honey. You’re going to love it.”
Nine-year-old me was excited. I’d never had a vacation. So when he’d told me to pack a bag, I didn’t question it. I never bothered to wonder why we had so much stuff in the car or why we had to leave then and there.
“Wyoming is beautiful. We can sleep under the stars and cook hot dogs over the fire,” he’d told me enthusiastically. That day, we’d driven for ten hours, singing along to the radio and eating junk foods until we’d arrived at a run-down campground in the middle of nowhere.
We’d pitched the tent, then crawled inside and gone to sleep.
The next morning, he’d driven us into town and saw a help wanted sign in a pawnshop.
We moved into the shitty apartment above the shop that same day, and just like that, the vacation was over and we never went back to the house I’d spent the first nine years of my life living in.
I never got to say goodbye to my friends or retrieve the things I hadn’t taken with me.
Back then he never explained why we had to leave Idaho, but now that I’m older, I assume it was because he owed someone money or pissed someone off badly enough that leaving was his only option.
For the next nine years, we moved every six months to a year, only staying in one place long enough to rack up more debt than he could pay.
We lived all over Wyoming before we moved to Montana when I was seventeen.
The day I turned eighteen, he’d kissed me on the forehead, told me he was going to work, said goodbye, and never came back.
About a year after he left, I heard he was living in Iowa, but I doubt he’s still there, although he could be dead and I’d probably never know.
The day he left, dear old Dad changed the lease on the apartment we were living in to my name and told the landlord I’d be settling the months of back pay he owed and all of the other debts he’d accrued in the months that we’d lived there.
Faced with homelessness and retribution from our scary-looking landlord, I’d dropped out of school and gotten a job busing tables at a restaurant. It took me a year to pay off all that he owed. The day I finally did, the eviction notice appeared on the door.
One of the servers where I worked found out about my situation and offered me an old car that her husband kept promising to haul to the scrapyard.
I didn’t really know how to drive, I didn’t have a license, and couldn’t afford insurance, but the car was dry, warmer than sleeping outside, and safer than a shelter.
So I paid for enough gas to get the car from her place to the parking lot of the diner and slept in it for the weeks it took me to save up enough money for a deposit on a new apartment.
The only place I could afford was a studio apartment: small, shitty, and riddled with black mold. I loved every inch of that place, but the moment I started to relax, I lost my job. The owner of the diner saw me boxing up the leftover fries that were heading for the trash and fired me on the spot.
He didn’t care that everyone always took leftovers home.
He didn’t care that the diner was closed or that I needed my job.
He didn’t care that I worked hard, came in whenever they needed, and was always ready to pick up extra shifts.
Instead, he called me a thief, threatened to call the cops, then refused to give me my last week’s paycheck or a reference before he kicked me out of the diner and warned me to never come back.
At nineteen years old, without a reference from my only employer, no high school diploma, and an address that screamed drug addict or prostitute, I couldn’t find another job. Which is how I ended up at BJ’s Boob Bonanza.
Exchanging my dignity and most of my clothes several times a night for money wasn’t easy, but it was better than living on the streets.
I wouldn’t exactly call myself a natural entertainer, but on my first night, Heather, the manager, pulled my hair up into pigtails, dressed me in a skimpy schoolgirl outfit, then shoved me out onto the stage and told me to figure it out or fuck off. So I figured it out.
Calling on the very limited amounts of gym, dance, and cheer I’d done in the dozens of schools I’d attended, I managed to pull off an awkward two-minute dance that ended with me just in a white G-string and the club’s security guard having to position himself between the stage and the men all trying to be the one to shove money into my—who was clearly still a virgin—underwear.
I made fifty dollars that first night. It was nothing in comparison to some of the more experienced dancers, but to me it was enough.
After that, Heather took me under her wing.
She taught me to dance and advertised me as Cherry Pie—young, innocent, and completely untouched.
The older, more disgusting clientele ate it up.
Unlike the other dancers, Heather wouldn’t let me go to the edge of the stage.
Security made sure that no one ever touched me, and the more off-limits I became, the more money the dirty old men and thirsty young ones would pay to watch me.
It seems crazy to me that in a place where women are mostly naked and available to purchase for a dance, an hour, or for some of the girls, a night, the one girl they weren’t allowed to touch was the most desirable.
Instead of making me look sexy, the outfits Heather made me wear were innocent and almost childlike.
Pale-pink ruffles and ribbons, sailor dresses with bows, lots of knee socks, and plaid. There were several routines that involved props like teddy bears, dolls, and a giant rocking horse. She sold me as a virgin, and I was…am.
But although Heather loved how much money I made her, the owner of the club, Benito, didn’t like the idea that anything in his club wasn’t for sale.
Over the year that I worked there, he started to resent the persona that Heather created for me.
He wanted me to work the private room. He wanted me to offer the real virgin experience to his customers, and he didn’t like it when Heather told him no.
Benito is in his early fifties, with dark features and a thick New York accent. He looks and acts like a parody of a movie gangster. I’m not sure what exactly his and Heather’s relationship is, but the more she said no to him, the angrier he seemed to get.
The last night that I worked there, I’d heard them arguing.
The other girls in the changing room glared at me because we all knew this was about me.
Like Benito, the other dancers hated that I wasn’t expected to do private dances or get groped like they did.
They hated that while they had to dry hump the stage to get one-dollar bills thrown at them or shoved into their G-strings by sweaty-handed customers.
Heather only allowed me to dance in a room that had a door fee and a rule that if anyone tipped me less than a five, they were banned from the club for the rest of the night.
They hated that while they were giving blow jobs for fifty bucks a pop and having to give Benito forty dollars for providing them with the customers, I was making almost as much money as them without getting on my knees.
Heather made me a spectacle. I was a virgin stripper.
I was an innocent in a world of depravity, and it turns out that dirty old men and creepy young ones love to imagine what it would be like to have me.
They liked to watch me dance dressed like a child, to take off almost all of my clothes, to press my tits against stuffed bears and ride on a rocking horse while they jerked their dicks in their pants and threw money at the stage.
But Benito wanted to sell me and the fantasy Heather was peddling. My final day there, we all heard the sound of the slap and Heather’s cry of pain, followed by her muted sobs. No one had tried to stop Benito when he’d barged into the changing room and dragged me out.
“If you want to work here, you need to start earning your keep,” he’d growled, dragging me into Heather’s office and forcing me to my knees.
“From now on, you’ll be dancing your usual slot, then you’ll be working the private suites for the rest of the night.
You’ll be auctioning off that virgin pussy as many times a night as I can sell it.
Then once you’re well and truly broken in, we’ll do the same with your virgin ass. ”
“No,” I’d whimpered, shaking my head.
“There’s nothing special about you, Cherry. Everyone here sucks cock, and so will you.”
Unzipping his pants, he shoved them down, letting his wrinkled, semi-flaccid dick flop out.
“Cherry, you’re fired,” Heather yelled. “Go. Now,” she’d said as she’d grabbed my arm and pushed me backward.
Risking a quick glance in her direction, I saw her pointed look as she’d mouthed the word “run” at me.
I don’t know what Benito did to her that day. I didn’t stay to find out. I’d scrambled to my feet, grabbed my purse and run.
The moment I’d gotten back to my apartment, I’d started packing. Benito knew my address, and although Heather might have saved me from him, I had a feeling he wouldn’t just let me leave.
Everything I owned was packed into my car an hour later, and I dropped my apartment key into the manager’s mailbox on my way out of the door, driving away into the night without looking back.
After driving my car to Bozeman, I tried to find a job, but even fewer employers would take on a twenty-year-old high school dropout whose last job was as a dancer at BJ’s Boob Bonanza.
So with no money, no job, and no fixed abode, I parked my car up in a deserted parking lot behind an abandoned bowling alley.
I pawned anything I had of value—there wasn’t much, but it kept me in sandwiches and enough food to not starve to death, and spent all day, every day going from shop to bar to restaurant looking for a job.
I’d been in Bozeman for seven weeks when I walked back to the parking lot and found my car gone and what was left of my belongings dumped on the ground beside where my junker used to be parked.
That was two months ago.
I’d picked up as much of my stuff as I could carry, including the stupid tent my dad and I had taken from place to place for over a decade, and walked toward the bus station.
It was late, and there weren’t many buses or people around.
The first bus to pull in was one headed for a place called Rockhead Peak, so I bought a ticket and found myself in the middle of a tiny town full of expensive B & B’s and people visiting to see the lakes or the mountains that had been covered in snow only a month or so earlier.
With only two fifty-dollar bills in my pocket and a handful of coins, I’d followed a group of people down the street and listened to them talking about the trails they planned to hike and the campgrounds they were going to stay at.
Right then and there I remembered the tent I was carrying, and suddenly I had a plan.
It was dark by the time I made it to the start of the hiking trail, my arms laden with stuff. That first night, I’d only wandered a few yards off the trail, pitching the tent under the bright moon and the stars my dad had promised me all those years before.
The moment the sun had risen in the sky, I’d packed up and ventured further into the woods, following the hikers who started arriving early.
When I found a fork in the trail, I’d turned left when everyone else turned right and found a tiny copse of trees, only partially visible from the trail, and I’d hidden my stuff there.
Each night for a week, I found somewhere new to pitch my tent until I learned the flow of the trail and became familiar with the hikers and the routes they usually walked. Once I was sure I was unlikely to be found, I pitched my tent a hundred yards from a rarely used trail and left it there.
When the sun was up, I’d head into town, using the library to search for a job while learning everything I could about bushcraft. I worked out how to dig a fire pit and start a fire, which berries were wild blueberries and which were likely to land me in the ER if I ate them.
I found out that if I volunteered to help collect trash and direct cars and hikers, I could collect a hot breakfast sandwich and a bagged lunch each day from the ranger’s station.
I learned that several of the property owners along the lesser used trails had respite stations with free water and sometimes protein bars and fruit.
Obviously, I can’t live in a tent in the woods forever. But as long as I’m not obvious about it, I can shower in the multiple campgrounds’ communal shower blocks without anyone questioning who I am, and although I’m definitely not thriving, I’m surviving, and really that’s all I’ve ever done.