#handsfirst

    “Mmhmm, maybe I’ll do just that.”     Nick had a shaky left hand that could only be calmed with slow-release SSRI’s and or a shot. He also had an ex-girlfriend who once found this physical tick calming, pulling the vibrating hand around ribs to rest on a breast before sleep. He found contract work through Craigslist and made do on ever dwindling student loans. She’d been an admin assistant at a self described boutique marketing agency with a focus on the funky     in Gastown, which gave her more pleasure to say over tapas with friends than Nick could stomach. Her Zooey Deshcanel looks and silk shirts just starting to show wear from when she’d first been able to afford them and amazing tits were too much to take with this gloating. He put up with the friends and the vegan wontons for just long enough that he’d been sickeningly pleased when the firm went under and she’d been forced to move in just for a while, you know     so that his hand hadn’t ever spent a night empty. When Nick couldn’t afford the medication anymore he took to alternative therapy - he’d type teen amateur     into Google. Click on Most Viewed     or Free Preview!     and Hot this Week.     When his lack of job led to the internet being shut off and both he and the girlfriends phone plans suspended, Nick would rest the hand in-between his thighs, close his eyes and wait. Something about the sensation gave him immense pleasure alongside a deep repulsion he couldn’t quite understand, as he’d slowly pull himself off with the calm hand. These habits and a sincere lack of funds had been the downfall of Nick’s last relationship.     “When’s your interview, again?”     Lori with her fist hidden in a snow blue micro fibre cloth, circling a white wine glass. She knew that a poppy seed was lodged very plainly between her first and second pre-molars and that Nick didn’t bother telling her. He was one of those kinds of people. What is with it with these men these days, these boys.     she thought it used to be that only the asshole’s were those kinds of people. Kind of people who don’t tell you when there’s shit stuck in your teeth.     “Three.”     “I’m telling you - hands first. Might as well slap some clear polish on while you’re at it. You could get by as a stickman or a floor-man, maybe. Maybe. You’re good looking and all. But with that hand, card dealing?”     Lori’s eyebrows raised. Nick licked the last bit of salt from the rim, pressed the bleeding hole of his tongue behind incisors. The shaking had stemmed only slightly but still it murmured on polished wood bartop. Lori thought I wonder how that hand would feel on my tit. On my-     “I need another drink,” Nick sighed.     Lori swallowed, her throat dry. She ached for a cigarette.     “What you need is another woman.”  -     The new girls were started during the day. Dee had a fresh spray-tan glow and gold dust brushed from clavicles to calves. Lights in the tones of fire hung from the ceiling high over the main stage, but no light had ever reached the corners of this room. Even sweating under them it was difficult to make out true colours - pumpkin orange in daylight faded to nothing inside. Dee strapped new clear platforms twice as tight as needed, bulging taut flesh in diamond shapes between golden ribbons. The flats of her feet began to wet the plexiglass.     Stu and Diane were always around for the beginning of shift, other than Sundays. True owners. Diane was in that last sad stage of cancer where hope is a pointless four letter word no one dares throw around. They caught it late in her left breast, a place she found laughable. She made desperate jokes whenever regulars or the girls offered consolation.     “Shoulda been me up there all these years, eh? None of our girls coulda gone this long with a lumpy tit.”     Her eyes never wet when she said this but her smile didn’t travel to her laugh lines either. She smoked endlessly, Red Rooftops, and the quality it leant her voice along with the murky amber colour her teeth and fingertips, it seemed obvious that if it hadn’t been her tit it would have been her mouth or hands soon enough. Dee had terrible thoughts about Diane, even though she was a kind and dying woman. Thoughts of how she must of failed as a hooker, failed as a dancer. How if she hadn’t already she would have eventually - all her useable parts rotting and rendered useless. Dee wasn’t sure why she thought of Diane as only as useful as sex warranted her - she couldn’t make sense of it.     Diane’s shadow walked around the kitchen, occasionally darkening the glass of the main room. It crept under the door but never passes through it - seeing Diane was starting to depress the regulars, and you couldn’t be having that. Her skin had begun to tauten over shoulder blades and stretch when she made her sad smile. She was swept into the darkest corner of the room, a place Dee wished she could go and hide daily.     Dee was almost ready to go but knew enough to wait until the music started and the lights dimmed lower. Lower. Until noon became dusk and the night creatures came out to play. Until Stu introduced her to her clients of the day.     Bursts of cold wet air puffed in, raising chills from her spine to the base of her neck. Doors were open - the lunch crowd filtering in. Each open and close of the door brought a surprise. The biker, the graphic designer. The cockroach, the moth. Penny loafers and dirty white Nikes, they all met here. Eyes without shame and some shaded, some glazed, fingers twitching, tweaking. Intent was muddy here, was rarely clear. Lynard Skynard began to pour from the speakers and Kitty and Candy each finished the last snort of white they’d have for the next eight hours.         “Go and get em, tiger.” Candy took a lip gloss from the back pocket of her white cut-offs and applied it to Dee’s lips as she crouched, eyes shut, mouth open.     “Make us lots of money honey, you’re too pretty to be a day girl. Get a little dirtier with it and we can all walk with rent today. I like you too much to see you working for the daytime assholes.”     Kitty said this while ignoring texts from her daughter, stashing the chipped white iPhone under the cash box. Today was unofficially blacklight day behind the bar - Kitty and Candy wore only white. In pictures their eyes and teeth glowed blue. Dee thought they were banshees. She didn’t like them touching her, but here she was. Candy’s hands holding her jaw straight to paint her mouth with poison.     “Good afternoon gentleman,” Stu’s voice came muffled over the loudspeaker, “and welcome to the Emerald Palace. It’s another beautiful day and we are lucky, I say lucky, to have the gorgeous Rosie joining us today. Who can’t wait to see Rosie’s cheeks?”     Candy’s lip gloss stung at the edges of Dee’s mouth and glopped over the edges. It was always hard for her to apply it like this as Dee’s mouth never stopped moving. This opening moment she never heard Stu’s kind words. Eyes shut and lips fluttering Dee prayed in a whispered fury.     Like a prophet emerging from a trance Dee woke from this stupor at just the right moment. She unfurled and stood, smiled wide and empty at the bar girls and gave a wink back as Candy slapped her ass. Each day she was reborn as Rosie, golden, blushing, dirty. She was everyone and no-one and for six hours in plexiglass, pleather, and vinyl, she waited. She’d had a dream once. It was the Emerald Palace that would give her deliverance.         “We need to start giving that girl a bump before she goes up there.” Candy sliced lemons with eyes spastic, eyeing Dee and the Thursday crowd. “I mean she’s single, she’s up there, we’re fucking workin it with everything we’ve got -”     “ - uh huh -”     “ - and it’s like, she’s barely even looking at them. They’re customers and she’s moving all right but she dances like a girl that’s got a boyfriend, you know? Like, is she a lesbian? Is she? Not that I care but goddamn if you can tell she don’t want to fuck a one of em.”     Kitty blew the fluffs of platinum bangs from her eyes and concentrated on blinking normally as the first customer of the day approached. The tracks of sewn in extensions at the back of her head itched and her thong was chafing. Her hands stayed motionless, resting at her waist. She attempted a sultry look, whispered,     “Tell me. A-fucking. Bout it.”  -     Nick took all the shifts that didn’t matter. Had to. Rather, he had them hung on his shoulders. The early morning and mid afternoon shifts, hours of minding tables surrounded with last nights human garbage. Men on benders who stumbled in off the last Skytrain, women with liver spotted forearms and sweating upper lips - the dregs. No big rollers here, just nickel and quarter chips.     Nick didn’t have a way to know that he was a favourite in the booth. When Maria the doorgirl or Adam the Tuesday-through-Saturday bartender smiled and waved at him, he hadn’t a clue why.     Where ever he was stationed, any personnel with access to the security booth was sure to drop in to watch him. Nick couldn’t help but remain moving - shuffling, shuffling, shuffling, shuffling for no one. Practicing tricks. They wagered and laughed at what the cause could be - the frayed nerves of someone new to the game, ADHD, a wicked habit? Mr. Darwish as the head of HR in floor staff management took it for practice with incentive to succeed     and quickly moved Nick up the ladder to better and later shifts. MSP benefits, dental. The whole bit.     The hand couldn’t be left still. A shift might start off with a bloody mary and a shot, baileys in his coffee, but Nick could only take so much and it would only last so long. With time he came to know from which angle and when his table was being watched and could rest the hand accordingly on his thigh. This led to the inevitable stiffening which at first he thought not such a bad side effect. But after one occasion when things went to far - fingertips tracing the edges, grazing the tip as to send electric shocks through spine up to the nape of his neck - he could swear that Jerry the weekday lookout had caught on to his previously private game.     The possibility of putting on a show for others was abhorrent to Nick, and soon his surroundings would ruin this one bit of perfect personal pleasure that he so enjoyed. The repulsion became so strong that the last time he’d try to get off in the shower he’d vomited up last nights Mediterranean take-out. Bits of falafel got stuck in the drain - it was terrible. He couldn’t drink enough to make it stop. Couldn’t come. Anything to do with work became tied into the shame brought on by looking for a moment of rest from his hand. The Hand. The smell of cigarettes began to turn him off where previously the stink of it in his ex-girlfriends hair didn’t effect him in the least. He’d rather liked it once.     “You, uh, you doing alright today Nick?”     The bags under Nick’s eyes had begun to swell and even his thickly toothed smile and swish of oiled black hair couldn’t detract from the fatigue. The whole world can tell when you’re not getting any     Nick thought maybe I’m dying     he mused you’re not dying, you’re blocked, this is why prostitutes have business     he thought shit, I wouldn’t even take money to fuck me.     “Just swell Jerry, thanks for asking.”     Weeks became months. The tick worsened while Nick faded into the shadows. -     “What’s that smell?”     “Clinique. It’s Happy, my daughter wears it.”     “No, no, like I don’t know what Clinique fucking Happy smells like. What is it? What are you wearing?”     Dee was in her other place, mind-wise. Kitty’s gel nails had worked magic on her scalp, massaging slow circles of argan oil to promote growth and add sheen.     Dee’s hair was tangled in places now, but this type of knotting was known to Kitty only as volume.     “It’s, it’s-”     “Candy. Stop fucking guessing. I’m asking Rosie. Rosie, what are you wearing?”     “It’s Burberry.”     “Candy.”     “What Kitty, it’s fucking -”     “I’m wearing whatever you’re wearing.”     Dee’s eyes flickered back on as she unfurled from the barstool, unsticking herself from the leather. It was easily six in the morning on a Sunday and the women were coming down off a wild night. Dollar bills too wet to care about littered the garbage bins along with broken plastic tall rocks, chewed up and cut up black straws, confetti in gold and bronze reading Daddy’s Princess     and Birthday Bitch.     “I borrowed it out of Candy’s bag.”     Candy smiled victorious as Kitty set about washing the oily mess of dandruff from under her fingernails. Dee hadn’t realized just how much volume her hair had received - she couldn’t pull her own fingers more than an inch away from scalp before the thicket of twined strands stopped her. Her hands began to make moves pulling it up tight, and  smoothing unruly bits down. Dee’s hands no longer knew apathy - they pulled and pushed and held her up. Her topknot tight, her fingers began to squish the mess down and sneak bobbypins in at every angle. Everything hurt - even her fingertips ached. Dee felt nothing. In her head counting one two three four     breathing in five six seven eight.     Dee could barely hear or see her surroundings. She wasn’t in any other place, per se. She just wasn’t here.     “I knew it was Happy, I fucking-”     “Just shut it.”     Dee was Kitty and Candy’s new favourite project. She got all the shifts Stu could throw at her - Diane had passed three weeks earlier and it was all he could do now but to press play on the 5 disc CD player, hit random, and sit in the back with a brown bottle in his lap. The schedule had been left for a time up to the women of the Emerald Palace, but that had quickly descended into chaos. Stu stopped playing favourites and put the best earners on the best shifts. Kitty and Candy couldn’t quite understand it, but miracle of miracles, that somebody was suddenly Dee.     Dee was flawless. She had quickly become the master of her daily yoga class, shaming even her incredibly pregnant spandex wearing teacher. Even her sweat smelled of shea butter. Stu joked that girls like her shit diamonds.     Her breathing so perfect that even hanging upside down on a pole with only the crux of her knee and calf to support her, she felt invincible. Felt nothing. Her hands could rip sheet metal to shreds. At work she’d look at the garbage around her and think I wonder if I should get my boobs done     while sipping water backstage she’d muse so this is what owning a condo feels like     licking the top curve of her top customer Ben’s ear one night thinking I should really start composting.     Every week it was something new. A new machine at the gym. Seaweed smoothies. Fish oil treatments for cuticles. Pig blood soups. Hair tinted brassy, no, not brassy. Let’s go golden. This week - platinum. Lowlights. She’d quit drinking alcohol and had given up on cigarettes. Dee’s new passion was leveling up on the scale of Pasty Patty to Bronzed Betty     at the only organic tanning salon in the city. Having her nails glued on, clipped off till the edges bled. Every other week the colour changing. Kiss Me Koral     and Put a Ring On It Purple.     Dee found a certain zen at work that didn’t quite follow her home. At home she’d train to be better at work because that was all she could think to do. She was becoming better and better every day at being worse and worse at anything else. Rolling out her hips doing the side splits on her parquet floor later that night, Dee realized that she was re-modeling herself but hadn’t picked a style.     “What you need,” she exhaled into the stretch and found bliss as a tendon somewhere deep in her left leg seemed to snap, “is a reminder of where you came from.”     She inhaled one two three four     she thought what you need is a train wreck to jump on, so at least you can ask around where it is you’re going. -     Renovations had gutted the casino years earlier, still long after anti-smoking laws had banned the practice indoors. First the carpet, from an autumnal brown motif of crushed leaves to a modern approach of cubed mottled grey, sea blue, and emerald green. This had do nothing to curb the smell of the place.     “Didn’t you say they re-finished the place?”     Nick brought up the constant smell of old tobacco with Mr. Darwish in the breakroom during his twelfth week of sexual frustration.     “Uh, yeah. In oh-eight. Right before I started.” Mr. Darwish peeled a mandarin orange with exquisite care, focussing on only his fingers. Nick was beginning to suspect that his co-workers were no longer making eye contact with him. He was afraid of being labelled a pervert, didn’t know it but was developing an ulcer from all the caffeine and booze and acid and worry this brought him. Bacteria were settling in. Getting comfortable.     “The walls too?”     “Yup. You know the colour in wing three, the basement?”     “Mauve.”     “Yeah. Used to be mauve. Now it’s all that blue. I like the blue.”     “It’s really still -”     “Really very partial to that colour. Always liked blue.”     Mr. Darwish ate whole chunks of the orange. His eyes never parted from them. This behaviour seemed infused with the intent of escaping Nick’s questioning. Nick closed his eyes and tried to breathe deeply. Tried to remember a time when his breath didn’t taste of smoke and rot. Yoga breathing. One     
    he counted two three four five     he was sweating and holding his breath counting six seven eight     his mind couldn’t be turned away from the flaccid dick that hung shameful in his boxers. Nick exhaled. Mr. Darwish ground flesh, sucked, swallowed.     “Where does it come from? I mean where? How?”     “The women. They bring it in with them. You don’t seem them out there in the parkade. It’s a bonfire. A wonder their hair doesn’t catch fire, can you imagine? Big blonde hairspray soaked fire.”     Mr. Darwish laughed, sniffed, stroked his beard at the thought.     “Imagine.”     He threw out the orange peel and waved a short goodbye to Nick, whose left and right hands were busy shuffling, shuffling. Then at the click of the door closing he stopped and thought to himself. There is something seriously wrong with you     he counted one two three four     he thought you’ve got to make this stop     he decided I’ll get my hands done and go, how bad could it be? At least I’m polite well I can be, I can’t be the worst one there there is nothing wrong with you five six seven there is something so seriously wrong you can’t pay enough to have someone touch I won’t even fuck me one two three four there is something seriously wrong with you -     It had been a long time since Dee and Nick had seen one another. Back when all her friends from school still called her Deandra. Trying desperately to pull down at the zebra print bra peaking up from under her last nice top, the one with a coffee stain at the neck. Not even sad to be gone from Nick’s apartment. Annoyed more than anything having to move in the rain.         Nick had played the good guy as long as he could. He had promised to do all the heavy lifting     with a wink, which Dee had taken only to be a jab at her laziness in bed. She’d given up on being turned on by his weird tick and was no longer fazed by the performance that was his face. When The Hand     trembled a second too long, causing Nick to drop the box clearly labeled FRAGILE THIS WAY UP shattering perfumes, chintzy mugs from her travels abroad and most noticeably her Macbook - Dee lost it. She wrote a note with the address of her friend Carol’s place for the cabbie to go to, hailed a different cab, and took off. There was no official goodbye - just a smattering of porcelain and clay and tin and plastic in the street and Nick left scoffing at a white sky. They’d each lit a cigarette as soon as they could bum one, thinking thank god that’s over with.     Nick entered the Palace a ghost. He was weak from worry and immediately ordered a double gin to get things going. The tonic eased the pain from his gut.     Dee noticed the puff of cold wet air as the last of the evening stumbled in. He smelled of the industrial cleaner used in big hotels, and the old wet leather of his jacket. He was haggard yet somehow keeping it together. Used to be attractive in another life     Dee thought so was I. What a perfect wreck.     Dee had just returned from a quick jaunt to her new favourite plastic surgeon south of the border. Her eyes this week were True Sapphire