Army Barracks
The old Army Barracks held an honored and cursed place in North Jersey lore. It stood midway down Hudson street, a big brick-faced box of building, stood up rapidly in the rush to war in late 1916. Utilitarian and purpose-built, all aesthetic considerations had been ignored. But now it was “so ugly it was cool.” The casualty rate for the soldiers serving in WW1, WW2, and Korea were higher for solidiers stationed in these barracks than any other in the United States. Now on the eve of the Gulf War many said that the high casualty rate would continue unabated. Not in spite of but because now “Army Barracks” was a “Gentleman’s Club,” complete with patriotic, warrior décor displayed in homage to its earlier incarnation. Coke was everywhere because police were incented not to see it. It was this, not Germans or Koreans, creating the casualties now, and this time it looked like the home team might lose. Three of the girls had died in the last six months from overdoses.
The Army Barracks was a money loser, which was not a big problem because it was there to money launder. And the drugs of course.
War was good for business and helped increase patronage at the club. The “AB” looked the part, festooned with flags, Pattons, Pershings, Bradleys, and Eisenhowers. Besides that, the club was associated with NFL Jets star Leonard “Don’t-you-ever-fucking-call-me-Lenny-motherfucker” Carpenter. He was a shark among goldfish in North Jersey, where he chose to live and haunt in place of the more likely celebrity base just across the Hudson River and visible from the Barracks.
His girlfriend worked here, though she did not really work too much after it became apparent she was his girlfriend. In fact, the owners got Carpenter to agree to advertise on the marquee: “Fri&Sat – See Leonard Carp’s GF on main stage.” It would have been better to spell out “Girlfriend,” but no one was willing to trim the “Leonard” to “Lenny” to fit it. It was just assumed that word of mouth would do the trick. The “GF,” Threpony Devereaux, (actual name, Hester Sue Merrimarple) was not thrilled to find out about this plan when she saw the marquee and the line of howling wolves around the block. But like so much of her life she would try to make something out of that which she was not thrilled about.
Carpenter was married with two kids, but he didn’t flinch on the advertising. “I’m so big I can save a failing club just by getting wet in the talent,” was the only reaction ever heard from him. More concerned with his family’s reaction was Threpony. Thunderous laughter was heard upstairs one day in the office just after she questioned whether it was right to advertise the infidelity of a man with a family.
The owners didn’t charge a cover, there was no need as what they were really doing was recruiting an army of new cokeheads into old barracks.
At this club, most dancers performed unnatural physical acts on a stage under a watchful God for which appropriate euphemisms were waiting to be invented – to give a name to what they were put through. Not Threpony. She sort of shuffled around in a bikini, over-the-top heels, and a short denim jacket with the sleeves rolled to the elbow so as not to compete with the bangles and rings she’d been awarded for putting up with a lot of things. During breaks she could be seen staring at and fingering her baubles. Not happy, not sad, but in thought, as if she were in the process of deciding whether or not they contented her enough to be worth the cost.
Beauty x Effort = Amount of Tips. Threpony cleared more than all the other girls on the stage put together, all beauty and apparent minimal effort. Time was not her friend. Besides the normal threat it posed to women in this world, Leonard Carpenter would eventually move on. When that happened she would be yesterday’s news, remembered only as the one with her nose in the air who never made eye contact because of whom she once fucked.
Tara had to work hardest. She has no illusions about the beauty variable in her personal equation, so she was all hustle and self-abnegation. After Threpony, she made the most because of her on-stage calisthenics. If there were filthy floor dances in the Summer Olympics she and her gold medal would be on the adults-only Wheaties box. She was Threpony’s best friend.
Tara even hustled midweek middays, for the sad sacks who never figured out how to be, and went in to eat at the lunch buffet, alone, often crying to the dancers who were their only outlet for emotional intimacy. The trapped air smelled of over-cooked beefsteak and burnt potatoes, mixed with the heavy perfumes, lotions, hair products and the vague scent of sweat hiding behind sickly-sweet deodorants that together made up the finished product of manufactured femininity.
Threpony’s reality was not harmonious but built on contradictions. A queen at the club and a punching bag for the man who made her a queen everywhere but in his presence. He promised to get her auditions with people who pretended to be his friend in TV and film, but to this point her experience was limited to acting like she believed he was telling the truth.
The other workers envied her freedom, freedom to look like she wasn’t trying and still make the most bank, though it took a great deal of effort to pretend to be so insouciant because the stopper in the drain of her life could be pulled at any minute. The overlord providing the bounty, despite speaking of her in public as an extension of the club that he claimed to have saved, was quite insecure when it came to her. The man voted the greatest NFL Defense End of the last twenty-five years found time to track her. Period. He visited her on those days and removed the tampons from her apartment, her car keys, and wallet so that she would not feel secure to leave. One time she did anyway, Tara brought her the necessities, leaving her own shift to do so. When Threpony returned to her apartment several hours later it was a bombed out memory.
The previous year’s NFL Man of the Year (for his work with abused and at-risk youth) had taken a sledgehammer to the interior, Swiss-cheesing the yellow walls, and had applied a chainsaw to create two dining room tables. The only room unravaged was the bedroom. He needed that in working order, so he just left a single bullet atop a pair of her underwear placed with care in the center of the undisturbed bed. He bought her a new place, even nicer, and the other trapped queens at the club remarked at the continued good fortune of the little homewrecker. His point was made regarding the futility of resistance. If she were unfree in a gilded cage she would be just as unfree if she attempted to leave it.
Once she called the police and they left with autographs and locker room passes. “I don’t know what goes on here exactly, but for a girl like you, from Newark, this is pretty good,” the Police Chief told her, after insisting he needed to personally take the call involving the man who had broken the NFL sack record two years ago, and then again last year, when he also broke Threpony’s ring finger to remove the aquamarine gemstone ring he bought her. In a rare act of contrition he replaced it with a Citrine. “The Jew Jeweler in the city said this one is the healing stone,” he told her.
“Girl come over here,” he summoned her off the stage shortly after the assault, to show his teammates the ring he owned. “Gotta mark my territory one way or another, thought she likes the other way I do it too,” he lied. “I got carte ‘blanche’ when it comes to her,” he told the coterie, mispronouncing ‘blanche’ to sound like the woman’s name, and the word that aptly described the look of humiliation on Threpony’s face at that moment.
Like a lot of monsters, Leonard Carpenter loved his child and so believed that this made him at heart good and always redeemable, rather than simply a man who prioritized the future of his own genetics as a way of prioritizing himself. Achilles had a heel and Leonard Carpenter had a daughter.
“The police won’t help you. They showed you that.” Tara said. “This is how you help yourself.”
“If I do this, involve his daughter, what does that make me?,” Threpony responded. The this was a plan that they had together arrived at over the weeks and months of tears, bruises and thickly-applied, post-traumatic pancake makeup.
“His wife doesn’t care, you said so yourself,” Tara responded, reminding her of a key fact on which the relentless logic of their plan was dependent.
This this was the threat to inform his daughter what last year’s MVP got up to when he wasn’t home.
“The threat to do it is different from the doing itself, Thre. Women like us don’t have many options when it comes to men like him.”
“He will burn down Hudson County to find me. You too Tara.”
For six months every extra dime was stashed in a bank account, accessible only by the co-conspirators. This would be the fund they would draw from when their livelihoods became unsustainable, and they had to hide.
Through a hole in the closet, night after night, Tara video-recorded the sexual assaults on the bed. Threpony never told her that the man who golfed with the President of the United States regularly couldn’t get an erection unless she first cried. If she couldn’t produce tears he would do it for her. Tara wished to donate her own tears.
“I own the bed and any slit what’s atop it,” he would say, or something close to it, as he climbed to climax again and again over the weeks that followed.
The tape, horrible as it was, was beyond what was hoped for. Once again, Threpony’s freedom was twinned to its opposite: “I needed to make a tape of me as a sex slave to get myself free,” she noted to Tara as she watched herself get urinated on through a curtain of sandy static on the low-quality video.
One day a superstar broke down the door of the apartment after umpteen unreturned threats saturated Threpony’s answering machine. She was gone, along with some clothes, all the jewelry and the one picture of her family that he allowed her to keep. On the left-most dining room table was a VHS tape. The grainy montage not unlike the John Gotti tapes that had recently sunk the celebrity mafia Don, but with much more profanity and threats. There was also a note.
“I don’t want your daughter to see this, but if you look for me I will make sure it’s delivered to her at the school. Forget me and there’s nothing to worry about.”
“THE STRIPPER WHO WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO PLEASE,” screamed the headline of the December 14th edition of the NY Post. A photo of her in cuffs, being brought in by police to face extortion charges brought by the Hudson County District Attorney.
“Ms. Merrymarple won’t be having a Merry Christmas,” the DA stated at the press conference. “No marriage is perfect, or the business of the state for that matter. But when children are threatened, then it’s the business of the Office of the Hudson County District Attorney. A strip club performer, living beyond her wildest means as a result of gifts from Mr. Carpenter, decided that enough wasn’t enough and threatened to expose graphic evidence of the affair not even to his wife, but to his child. I am only thankful that our Governor made available all the resources at the State’s disposal to find Ms. Merrymarple before she could make good on her threat to forever wreck the home of Mr. Carpenter’s daughter.
Threpony surrendered the original tape she never intended to use, in order to get a reduced sentence. Behind her bars in the women’s ward of the Hudson County Correctional Facility she had a measure of freedom finally, away from a man who caused and returned for touchdowns two fumbles in two different Super Bowls. For the threat involving children, the court of public opinion ensured she received the harshest sentence for extortion in the history of New Jersey; three years. Tara sustained her with visits. As her release date approached, after all the publicity it was unlikely that the man who had publicly recommitted himself to God and his family would threaten her again, especially as it would jeopardize what looked like his winning campaign to be the next senator from the State of New Jersey post-retirement.
Once released, she lived with Tara in her Passaic apartment. She was getting ready to move somewhere out West, somewhere far from any NFL teams and the fans that might recognize her. Tara was going to come with her. Then one day Hester came home to find a purple-yellow version of Tara under her own vomit. Dancing in heels and doing the legendary calisthenics had done severe damage to her spine, hips and knees. The pain was constant until her doctor prescribed her opioids. Now the pain was gone forever. No one who knew her had any idea what became of Hester, though it was reported she’d been spotted in Salt Lake City sometime later.
The Army Barracks was renamed, to disassociate it from the scandal, and the drug bust that followed. In a corner of the VIP Room, upstairs in the Gentlemen’s Redemption Night Club, was a small picture of two legends embracing each other and smiling, unforgotten by the veteran bartender who understood that winners write the history but the heroism, humanity, and loyalty of the vanquished are often the most resonant parts of war stories.
Brannon O’Brennan is a writer living in Northern Virginia. His work has been published in Isele Magazine, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, and in The George Washington University Press. His literary fiction short story “Symbiosis” will be published in Secant Publishing’s anthology titled “Best Stories on the Human Impact of Climate Change” and that story is nominated for the Secant Publishing Prize. He is seeking publication for his upmarket historical thriller, THE EMIGRANT, about an IRA volunteer haunted by a violent past and unrealized musical dreams. He is also seeking a publisher for his upmarket crime fiction novel THROUGHLINE, a novel about a dysfunctional family of outlaws and the effects of trauma across generations.
Alien Buddha Press 