Prologue
Staci
W e all remember moments from our childhoods:
the moments that change us. The moments when we realize – I am not like
everybody else.
There
is something about me that is different. There is something about me that is
strange.
I
am alone, and there is a mystery in me.
I
was four when I realized it.
But
of course, realization comes in stages. I was two when I first realized that
being hungry didn't mean you would get food. Most babies in Nevada, in Vegas,
they learn that when they cry for milk, they get it. When their stomachs growl,
they get fed. Not me.
My
mother worked hard. In fact, my mother worked harder than anyone else I knew.
Even when I was a toddler, I knew that much. She always seemed so tired. When
she held me to her breast at the end of a long day, when she cuddled and
coddled me and held me tight, she always shook – just a little bit – like the
day was too much for her, like she couldn't bear my weight on top of all the
other burdens she was carrying: on her shoulders and in her heart.
And
so, when I was too, I realized that milk was not always something we had in the
house, not when it no longer came from my mother's breast, nor was food
something we could always have. My mother gave me what she was able, but life
at the motel was expensive, and cleaning only paid some of the bills some of
the times, and so sometimes we lived in darkness when the electricity was out,
and sometimes we had no phone and my mother had to stand in a payphone to call
her clients, hoping against hope she'd find a quarter's worth of change on a
Vegas sidewalk.
All
this I knew, slowly. All this I came to early in life.
Vegas
is a place of highs and lows, joy and sorrows. It's a place when you can win
big or lose the shirt off your back. That much I learned before I could walk.
Some days my mother would be lucky. Some days she'd get a gig where the master
of the house tipped her a few extra dollars, and those dollars seemed like
enough to make us millionaires. Then she'd buy me ice cream and soda and all
the treats we could imagine; then we'd turn up the heat so hot the radiator
burned our toes just to feel warm, together, just to feel like we had
something.
And
then there were times when work was slow, when people cancelled or refused to
pay, when my mother was too sick or too worn out and she'd miss a spot on
someone's floor and they'd dock her pay accordingly. Then we'd go without:
food, heat, even water, sometimes. Then we'd learn to adjust on rice, noodles,
bread, nothing. Whatever we could afford.
Life
wasn't easy. Not in Vegas. Maybe not anywhere.
And
the whole time life went on being not easy, it never occurred to me why. Why
my mother was poor and I was poor and we were both so hungry, so desperately
hungry all the time – I had no idea. I just thought that was the way the
universe worked. That was my big guess. People are poor and hungry because God
picks people to suffer. He says: this one shall live in a great glass house
with servants and gold and a view of the sea, and this oneshall live in
a motel and get kicked out, sometimes, and shall always, always be hungry.
That's
what I thought, until I was four. I don't know how I even got that idea into my
head. My mother wasn't religious at all, and the only thing of religion I
learned about was whatever the street preacher said outside all the casinos,
those street preachers who cried THE DAY OF THE LORD IS AT HAND and wrote Bible
Verses on placards and tried to steer people away from sin, away from
degradation, away from vice. Away from sex.
Sometimes,
now, at the Blue Room, I think about those preachers. I
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