I.

I sat outside a Subway so Clint could interview me, which meant scope out what I looked like. He wore an Astros baseball cap and smoked a cigarette while he asked me about my work history, which was mostly margaritas at the Mexican place. He had fat lips and bug eyes and his breath smelled like Funyons, but I smiled anyway like he had half a chance. He was from Austin, which everyone knew was cooler than Houston.

He said his bar was opening in a month, but the date kept getting pushed out, and by the time they were set, it was already too late. I’d moved back in with my dad and his new wife, into their new house on the twelfth hole of a community golf course. I started going to school again on Dad’s dollar, a Baptist college at his insistence. I’d gotten busted for a DWI, and was given this ultimatum: get your shit together now, or never.

By then the Mexican place had gotten weird. “It went coyote ugly,” Dee said, so she left too, and took my spot behind Clint’s bar. I’d go up there sometimes on Fridays or Saturdays, now one of the weekend warriors I’d once pitied. I’d order vodka tonics and flirt with Enron execs, who were winding down before they went home to their wives. I’d drink until Dee got off work and could drive me back out to my dad’s, where I’d stumble in and pass out in the guest bedroom, which was my room now.

Clint was short and bald and in his thirties. I wasn’t attracted to him, god no, but he was somebody in that scene so I didn’t totally blow him off. I flirted back. I had capital: he wanted to fuck me and I wasn’t interested. I was young enough to believe that this meant something.

For New Year’s, we went to his bar — me and Dee, Meadow and her brother, and some other people I’d never seen before or since. This was before Meadow met Israel, before they had a baby – the last time we ever hung out. She’d lost weight. Her hair was long. She’d become someone else since we’d moved out of the apartment on Westheimer. She said she felt more like who she used to be in Colorado, before she moved to Houston and we became roommates, back when she hadn’t been fat. What she meant was I never really knew her. It meant the new her may have never been friends with the old me.

The new her didn’t drink Diet Coke all night and leave early to binge on circus peanuts and ‘Friends’. The new her wore a strapless top and drank kamikazes and flirted with anyone who had a dick. She was a storyteller, the kind who actually got better after a few drinks, not worse, and when she turned it on, she could keep the attention of anyone in the room, a regular Scheherazade. She was gorgeous: blonde hair, blue eyes, hourglass figure.

That night she got drunk, let loose. Clint was mesmerized. He came over and sat with us. When her brother left, he asked her, “Are they real?” and she said, “Wanna see for yourself?” – just like that. I was shocked. “Right here,” he demanded, grinning like the Cheshire cat, and then she started to waffle. “In the bathroom,” she said.

After some more of this back and forth, they got up and left me at the table, feeling like someone’s dopey kid sister.  I knew flashing was a thing, but it was something Angela did, shitshow Angela after a few shots of Jager, not Meadow with her nice nails and nine-to-five job. Not Dee the ballbuster, and definitely not me.

After a few minutes they came back out, her face flushed and him all smirky. “They’re pretty fucking perfect,” Clint said. They were laughing, so I laughed along with them, “Y’all are crazy,” like I thought it was hilarious and wasn’t totally freaking out inside. I didn’t know what to think. Female empowerment or a sad attempt at attention? Brazen and bold, or cheap and pathetic? Was I what my mother would call “ladylike,” or uptight and repressed?

 

II.

A few weeks later, Dee and I headed downtown again, just the two of us. Maybe on some level I wanted to see if I could still hold Clint’s interest, if I could be as sexy as Meadow and her pretty fucking perfect tits. Maybe that’s why out of all the bars, I chose that one. I felt threatened.

Since it was my birthday, drinks were on him, Clint said. He was working the bar that night. Back then, I was used taking shots till the bar closed, then capping it off at a 24-hour taqueria called Ruchi’s — me and Dee drinking Dos Equis out of red plastic cups until dawn. That night, we got drunk quickly.

When Clint’s shift ended, he joined us as we went to another bar across the street, and there I ran into Joel, one of the regulars from the Mexican place. Joel was a poet, and I remember telling him how school was going, that I was majoring in English, that I was taking a writing class, that I missed him.

The next thing I knew it was morning and I was alone and naked on an IKEA futon, wondering where the hell I was. Exposed pipes above me. Hardwood floors.  Light shining through windows with no curtains. Outside, skyscrapers against mottled grey sky, a slice of Houston’s jagged skyline.

I found my clothes strewn across the floor and I quickly put them on, my first concern. As soon as I started trying to piece the night together, the phone rang. I looked around before I finally found the phone on the wall near the kitchen. I answered it.

“Hey sweetie. It’s me.”

I recognized his voice.

“Where the hell am I?”

“Relax. You’re at [redacted]’s. I’ll be there in five.”

I hung up and walked up the half flight of stairs to the bed, which was untouched. I lay down and pushed my legs through the covers, pulling a blanket over myself. I wanted to go home.

When Clint finally got there, he kissed me like we were together.  It made whatever had happened the night before seem legitimate, made leaving me naked on a couch in a strange loft in the middle of downtown Houston seem okay.

“So how does it feel?”

“How does what feel?”

“Being twenty-two.” He grinned.

“What happened?”

“I told you – I had to go home.”

“I don’t remember shit.”

“You got fucked up. You fell asleep. But before that…” he nudged me and winked. “Damn, girl.” He kissed me again, his mouth tasting like cigarettes and coffee.

He had a Land Rover and a dog, which I could discern by the smell. He played Nirvana while we drove. I remember thinking it was weird to see him, sober, in the daylight. He asked me where I was working and I told him I was in school, which is what I always told him when he asked. When he finally dropped me off at my car, which was at Dee’s, he kissed me again. I took off without saying anything and I didn’t think about him again for about six weeks.

 

III.

He agreed to meet me at a piano bar underneath the Rice Lofts, the two of us returning to the scene of the crime. He had a beer, I drank a cranberry because booze tasted weird now, and for some reason, it didn’t seem right to drink. Also, I wanted to make him sweat.

He gave me the classic story. He’d been in an accident. “Doctor said there was 99% chance I can never have kids.”

“Well it’s a fucking miracle then!”

I remember thinking I was being sassy right then, that I was standing up for myself. Actually I felt like a high school student playing an adult role, the lines not quite feeling real. I had a whole speech planned about how at his age, he should have learned to keep his dick in his pants, and that I knew people who knew people, but I forgot it and none of it mattered anyway.

Before him, I hadn’t had sex in a year, not since one random night with my ex that hardly counted. I wasn’t on birth control — I was on probation. I was living with my father and stepmother in a golf course community and going to a Baptist college, for Christsakes.

“Look on the bright side,” he said. “You get to fuck around all you want.”

“Excuse me?”

“You can’t get any more pregnant, so you may as well enjoy it — and your tits are gonna get so nice.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“They’re already nice. Baby, I’m just joking.” He put his arm around me and pulled me toward him, and I let him.

He offered to pay for what the doctor later called a “termination.”

Part of me wanted him to be involved, to help me play out the role of the distraught couple so I could have a partner in this, someone with whom to share the burden of this thing and its destruction. I wanted someone to stay with me during the nights leading up to it and afterwards. I wanted someone to convince me not to do it, so I could convince myself why I should.

“I don’t want your money,” I said as I got up to leave. “I just wanted you to know.”

Years later, it would dawn on me, the absurdity of me telling him anything when there had been nothing for me to say, no explanation owed, no future to imagine or unimagine. But I was twenty-two and I still believed men like him cared about consequences, and girls like me deserved to pay.