Chapter 10 Not Again #2
I wasn’t a virgin, but Tony was a whole lot of firsts. My first blowjob, my first guy who had his own place, my first time doing harder drugs.
“Let’s move in together,” he said, looking at me all wide-eyed. “That way, you can get a job, and I can help you. You won’t have to be on the streets anymore.”
I thought it was cute that Tony wanted to save me. I said yes.
* * *
WITH THAT WALMART MONEY FROM her grandpa, Tonya found herself with a million dollars at eighteen. She’d used it to buy a cute little house on the Eastside and a nice car on rims. And Tony had the idea that we should rent a room from her together.
As he promised, Tony paid Tonya one month’s rent for a small room in her house that only had a mattress on the floor. But we didn’t care. We were just happy to have our own place—kind of.
It was all sex and drugs on that mattress, and one night, we were so fucked up that I got a bright idea.
“Let’s see how many times you can cum,” I said. Tony was never one to turn down a dare. We fucked all night—and he ended up cumming twelve or thirteen times in a row. We set a damn record that night. But around session nine or ten, I got a familiar feeling and grabbed my stomach.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, panting.
“You’re not going to believe this, but I think I just got pregnant,” I said. I expected him to react like Jordan, but he wasn’t fazed.
“Good,” he said. He didn’t bat an eyelash. We went back to it.
* * *
A FEW WEEKS LATER I was at my new, postexpulsion school, showing my face on campus for a class or two, when the cramps started. I figured it was my period, but it hurt so bad I could barely stand up. After a few hours, I couldn’t see straight, so I went to the school nurse.
“It sounds like appendicitis,” she said. “I need to call your mom.”
“Please don’t call her,” I begged. “I’m not living at home.” The school knew I was a constant runaway, and for whatever reason, they let me be—which in retrospect is a weird way to take care of a kid. But in this case, the nurse didn’t have a choice.
Big shock—Mindy raced in pretending to be a concerned mom who loved her stepdaughter more than anything. She was always good at that, able to put on her sweet Southern drawl and fake a big love bomb.
I hated the fakeness in her. It made my skin crawl. But to my surprise, I was relieved when I saw her. Even if it was fake, I was scared, and I really needed a mom right then. She hugged me with a worried look on her face.
I was in too much pain to do much of anything besides let myself get loaded into her car and try to keep breathing as she brought me to a clinic across from Sam’s Town, the massive casino way off the Strip.
Inside, I peed in a cup and waited in the exam room, shivering in the paper gown they made me wear.
I tried to ignore Mindy asking where I was living and what I had been up to.
A doctor came in with my chart and cleared his throat.
“You’re pregnant, Alisa.” Oh my God. Not again. Just like the first time, I’d called it. I looked over at Mindy. Fuck. Here we go.
“You’re having an ectopic pregnancy. It means the embryo’s growing outside of your Fallopian tube. Your baby won’t survive and neither will you if it bursts. We need to get you into surgery right away.”
From that moment, it gets blurry—just another traumatic episode I blocked out.
I do remember Mindy rushing me to the hospital and that I was scared shitless.
They took me back right away, sedated me, and did the surgery.
Nobody told me what was going to happen to my body.
No one told me shit before it all went black. Again.
* * *
I WOKE UP A FEW hours later in a hospital bed to the sound of my heart monitor beeping steadily. My dad and Mindy came into focus sitting at the foot of my bed. My throat was dry, but I managed to say, “This doesn’t mean I’m coming home.”
“Please, Alisa,” Bill said. “This isn’t working out for you.
” I wouldn’t respond, but they kept asking—until Tony showed up.
He was pale and worried about me and heartbroken that we’d lost the baby.
I must have called him before we left the clinic, so he’d only known I was pregnant for a few hours.
But a few hours is plenty of time to get excited about a baby on the way.
I ended up going home with Bill and Mindy because the hospital wouldn’t release me to anyone else but them. I was a wounded warrior and just needed to heal. But it didn’t last. I stayed a few days to let my body get back in the groove of life and then I was gone. That house wasn’t my home anymore.
I didn’t know that it would be the last time I’d see my dad until I was about twenty-two.
Bill ended up leaving Vegas and moving back to Texas a few months later.
They gave me an ultimatum through my friends to come with them—that they would wait for me on moving day.
But I never showed up, and once they left, I was really free. And really on my own.
While I was healing at my parents’ place, Tonya tried to hook up with Tony, he told me, so he left.
His mom and stepdad hated me, but he convinced me to sneak into his house one night after they had gone to sleep so I could sleep next to him in his bed.
We must have been giggling too loud, because his mom came knocking on his bedroom door.
We panicked and he shoved me under his bed.
He opened the door pretending like nothing happened, but she wasn’t going for it.
She walked straight over and looked under the bed.
“Get her the fuck out of here, Anthony!” she screamed. And then we were off to his dad’s trailer.
His dad lived in the hood of Henderson. He was an addict and had a rough life but a good soul—and that man loved me from the jump.
But a junkie lives like a junkie, and there were trash and needles everywhere.
That trailer probably hadn’t been cleaned in years.
I’d stay there for a while, trying to figure out my next move.
* * *
TONY WAS PROTECTIVE AS HELL over me—especially after what he’d seen me go through.
The nights I didn’t want to stay at his dad’s we stayed in seedy motels, living off his dental assistant salary and the money he made dealing on the side.
He’d become a drug dealer for no reason.
He didn’t need the money. Deep down inside, I think Tony yearned to be from where I was from and where all my boys were from.
He was fascinated with our culture and wanted to live like he wasn’t a rich kid—I can’t understand why.
I was a teen runaway, crashing in shithouse motels with my boyfriend or in his junkie dad’s trailer—even if he was the sweetest man alive for letting me stay—or on my friends’ couches.
I’d been pregnant twice. My mind raced. This is my fucking life.
I’m never going to get out of this shithole situation.
I was spiraling and couldn’t get ahold of my emotions.
I was disgusted with myself. And then everything that I’d endured hit me all at once.
Waking up in the bathroom with my pants off.
The abortion doctor who didn’t use enough anesthetic.
Mindy. Mindy’s piece-of-shit sister. The molestation.
That sick fuck man who whipped his dick out in front of me as a child.
It was all closing in on me. Tony and I were fighting over the phone, and I hit a wall.
I slammed headfirst into it. This was it.
“Fuck you,” I said. “I’m going to end it all. I don’t want to be here.” I hung up before he could respond.
Across the street from wherever I was crashing that night was a stretch of desert, and I walked out there, bawling my eyes out.
I sat down and really, really wept with my whole body.
Tears the size of raindrops fell in my lap.
Why the fuck was I born? What purpose do I have to be on this earth?
It was pitch black in my mind. There was no light through the cracks.
I saw a broken bottle a few feet away, and my body moved without thinking. I was on autopilot.
I took a shard and started hammering away at my wrist as deep as I could. The pain was unlike anything I’d ever felt before—amazing, clear relief. With every slash, more blood poured out and I kept gashing away, hoping and praying I’d hit an artery and bleed out.
I’ve got nothing but empathy for cutters who think the pain’s the only way out. Back then, I didn’t know any other way, and it was the calmest I’d felt in ages. As bad as it hurt, the peace I found with that release was almost euphoric.
Out of nowhere, Tony appeared.
“Baby. What are you doing?” He reached down and shook me, tearing the glass out of my hand.
“I don’t want to fucking be alive anymore,” I wailed, tears streaming down my face.
“I love you,” he said, flipping my wrist over to assess the damage. “You’re so much better than this. Please don’t ever do this again.” He grabbed my face to kiss my forehead and pulled me in to cry on his chest.
We both sobbed as we held each other in the middle of that desert. He gently took my hand and we went home and cleaned and wrapped my wrist.
Decades later, I found out Tony took his own life. He never moved on from the heartbreak of losing our baby and us breaking up. But he saved my life that night. I sure as hell wish I could’ve saved him.