Mercy
Short story | Memoir | 27 min read
High on meth for three days, the narrator wanders into a nearly empty strip club and connects with a dancer named Mercy in a way that startles them both. Their fast, intense romance moves from the club floor to a farmer's market date to a motel room, narrated with the narrator's particular blend of tenderness and self delusion. When Mercy finally reveals what she actually wants from him, the story turns from infatuation to a harder reckoning about who used whom. Contains explicit sexual content, drug use, sex work. "At least I got to fuck her"
When I hear Gaga's Poker Face, I always think of the time I picked up this Kenyan stripper on meth. Fucked the shit out of that Kenyan's red little pussy. She was still in her teens. Late teens. She lost her virginity on Craigslist. Had a thing for white guys. That's probably because she was looking for a green card.
The reason I think of this Kenyan stripper when I hear Gaga's Poker Face is that when I walked into this strip club—containing the Kenyan stripper?—Poker Face was playing on this epic sound system and I guess I should mention that the Kenyan stripper's name was Mercy. I mean she's a real person, with a name, and her name was Mercy.
I had to get cash at a convenience store across the street, where I was being cased by about six black guys who watched me through the glass, go to the ATM, get out about three-hundred dollars, and then as I crossed Hollywood and Highland diagonally, these guys asked me if I could give them some money. Very dangerous situation. Say no and there's an extremely high chance those guys'll be waiting for you when you get out of the strip club and you'll get jumped. Say yes, actually give them money, you'll get jumped right now for your entire bankroll, your backpack, the emergency bottle of wine you always keep with you, your emergency corkscrew, and the little bit of meth you have left on you from your drug dealer's house, which is where you just came from.
Jesus, why I am I talking about myself in the second person?
I had just come from my meth dealer's house, where I had been hanging out for about three days wasting our money on internet poker, which was still legal then.
So I said, "Have a good night, gentlemen," when I crossed the street diagonally and went into this strip club. Went through some security bars and slipped sixty bucks under a bulletproof plastic window to like an eighty-year-old Asian man who gave me back a fat pack of ones, I paid him twenty bucks to get in, and he gave me a ticket for a free drink—non-alcoholic due to state law. Thanks. I'll be spending hundreds of dollars to look at women's pussy and have women rub their pussies all over me and I get a free drink ticket for which I can get a fucking Coke.
In a plastic cup.
With no ice.
I mean, fuck you.
I push through the doors and..bam..Lady Gaga's Poker Face.
I'm not really a strip club person. I never went to one before I moved to California. It was practically a requirement to escort the Chief Software Architect of the front company I was working for, to bars, strip clubs, and..yeah, that was pretty much it, bars and strip clubs.
But once I went once, I was more willing to go again. I thought it was ridiculous that you couldn't drink alcohol in a strip club (and most strip clubs were conveniently located right next to bars) and frankly I think the whole idea of strip clubs is ridiculous. I think this night I'm describing is the last time I went to one. Stips clubs are for lonely, desperate people. The most fun I had in a strip club is when I went with my friend and his girlfriend—going to a strip club with a girl is a whole different game and it actually is fun.
But this night was not that kind of night.
This night was someone high on meth for three days who finally had to leave his dealer's house because she politely let me know that three days was the maximum stay and she was going to have someone else come over and bleed them dry off coke and meth and internet poker. I love my drug dealer. I wish she would have let me fuck her. And when I left her house, I wanted to fuck someone. I was on a mission to do so. So I went to this strip club and my intention was to pick the girl with the prettiest pussy and somehow convince that bitch to come home with me or take me home and actually motherfucking fuck.
There were five people working and I was the only customer. There was the guy working the door, a DJ, and three strippers: a white one, young, tall, brown hair, beautiful pussy; an old, nasty one who I gave like one dollar as a consolation tip (I couldn't even look at her pussy); and Mercy, this beautiful dark-skin Kenyan with actual living facial expressions that indicated there was a real person underneath and a red, red pussy that contrasted in that light so sharply with her dark skin that—I mean—it was one of the most beautiful pussies I'd ever seen.
The young white one I would have loved to fuck. But I read her right away. There was no way I could go home with that girl. She's American, she's not gonna fall for this shit. So I tipped her well, drank my Coke, and ordered a lap dance from the Kenyan. Mercy. I said goddamn.
That's a quote from Pulp Fiction by the way if you don't know it you might as well shoot yourself in the face.
Actually just shoot yourself in the face either way.
So I order a lap dance from the Kenyan. It's like sixty. We go into the secluded cubicle and she rubs her pussy all over my crotch, which doesn't get hard because I've been high on meth for three days, I'm wearing thick pants, and, it's basically not going to happen. She asks me if something's wrong and I say no, you're doing everything right. And I tell her she's beautiful. And she is. As soon as she's done and I pay her, I pay her for another dance just to spend some more time with this person. My meth high is waning and I need something to replace it—actual human company seems a decent substitute, though I would kill to have someplace safe to smoke some more of this unbelievable glass my dealer gets.
I go back to the ATM across the street and I'm developing a potentially deadly situation because these black guys hanging out on a Sunday night are still there, they obviously have no money, they are obviously looking for a source of money, and now that they've seen me come out of the strip club to return to the ATM, I am undoubtedly their best source of that money.
So I play it careful when I leave the store with another three-hundred in my pocket. I speak first.
"What're you guys getting into?"
"Nothin', white man. What are you getting into?"
"Not a thing."
"Not a thing, huh, 'cause it looks like you out for some pussy tonight."
"Yeah, I'm a fiend for the stuff."
"Can I get a hundred bucks?" this guy says as I'm crossing the empty street, diagonally, with no cars coming in either direction.
I don't say anything to that, and I trot back into the strip club.
"We'll be here when you come out," the one guy says.
"Cool, we'll hit some bars together," I say, and I know I can't go back out that way again. That bridge is burned.
Then it's just me pathetically sitting right on the edge of the stage, leaning over the rail handing one dollar bills to the young white girl as she spreads her pussy lips right in my face and I look at her face and imagine fucking her and she plays it perfectly: she looks back at me like we're about to fuck, right then and there—even though this girl would never fuck me. She's a native, and the only thing that would make her spread her legs for me for real is if I was a movie producer driving a Lamborghini.
I wait for Mercy.
The older stripper comes out and sits next to me. She's brought me another Coke.
"So what are you looking for tonight?" she says.
She's wearing a see-through shirt, bra, panties.
I wonder if she can tell I'm high.
"Just like to come here after school. Calms me, you know."
"Where do you go to school?"
She puts a hand on my arm.
"The LA Film School. I came here from Ohio. I was editing some stuff earlier tonight."
"You smoke?"
"Not really."
"Too bad. I'm about to take a smoke break. Mercy'll be there."
"Mercy'll be there?"
She nods.
"Yeah."
"Yeah, ok, I'll smoke a cigarette with ya."
Then there's some confusion because as I'm getting up to walk out with this hag, music starts, and Mercy walks out on the stage. The hag looks and me, I look at the hag, and I let her to her cigarette while I let myself to my Mercy.
I sit down.
I give this woman tons of dollar bills.
I watch as the spreads her legs and spreads these healthy fat labia—just right—and I feel like I'm at the zoo staring into this woman's pussy and I just want to lick it and touch it and fuck it and rock Mercy sitting on top of me and make her cum, too.
She picks up all the money I set on the stage for her and crawls over the railing to me, holds my head in her hands and says:
"You wanna hang out with me for a while?"
I say yes.
We go to this room. There's a projector. It's playing really bad porn. I hate hardcore porn, nasty, unrealistic, salivating lusty fucking. The only porn I like is lesbian porn or (mostly) solo girls masturbating. I'm not really into anything that suggests abuse or misuse of a person.
"You seem like a gentle person," Mercy says.
She has my cock in her hands. I can't get hard.
"I hate this kind of porn," I say.
"So do I," she says. "Let's go."
So Mercy takes me to the back, behind the DJ booth, to the smoking room. It's this black box of a room with markered graffiti covering the walls, one door that exits to the back of the building, one steel table with high stools, and Mercy sits in one and I sit in the other.
I do have cigarettes on me.
Kamel Reds.
I offer one to Mercy.
"No thanks."
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"Not at all."
I smoke about a pack while I sit there with this woman. Each cigarette lights the embers of my meth high. I've still got butterflies in my stomach, that light feeling, and indestructible confidence.
I lead Mercy through a conversational vortex. I can talk anyway, but on meth, I'm a prudent predator that sober me would never go to the same lengths to pull off. I become one of those guys who is intentionally saying everything right to take this girl home, even though in strip club culture it is strictly forbidden for girls to go home with clients. I mean then you're into prostitution and that's still illegal in LA so I mean the reality is that this girl cannot go home with me. But that's a reality I'm looking to overcome.
First, I ask about her. Naturally. I ask about her brothers and sisters, a tender subject, to show that I care about her family. I ask about her parents, her home in Kenya. She says she's from the same town that Obama's grandmother lives in. I tell her that I've been to Africa.
Her eyes widen.
"You have?"
"It's been a while," I say.
And I tell her of my childhood trip to Africa. This is my high card in this particular interaction. What are the chances of this African meeting a white boy in Los Angeles who has been to Africa.
But I have.
I went to visit some family friends in Liberia when I was a kid and even though that's been forever ago I tell the story like it happened to me yesterday. Emphasis on how well I got on with the locals. Became a fixture in the marketplace. Was taken advantage of when I first arrives because my skin was so white—vendors could tell I just got off a plane. But how, after a few days, when my skin darkened as much as my white skin will ever darken, that I became a master of bargaining, rode a turtle some guy was trying to sell, and generally became friends with everyone.
Mercy and I talk for hours.
I didn't realize it had been that long before she said she had to leave and she led me into the main strip club area and all the lights were on, everyone but the DJ gone, and he was like:
"You ready to go?"
Mercy said, "Yes."
He was there for her safety, to walk her out, to make sure nothing bad happens to her at my hands.
But Mercy and I have really connected at this point, and she stalls.
The DJ goes to the bathroom.
Mercy looks at me with desperation in her eyes.
"Do you want my number?"
"Yes," I say, and I get it into my phone and put my phone away just as the DJ is coming back from the bathroom.
"Goodnight," I wave.
"Goodnight," the DJ says.
And Mercy takes my hands in hers, smiling.
"Call me," she says.
And I mouth, "I will."
I have more meth. When I leave the strip joint the group of guys are gone. There's nobody out. I walk carefully to the Sunset and Vine parking lot, looking behind me often, but I make it to my car safely.
I drive to Westlake Village, way north of Hollywood, where I rent a room in a trailer home within walking distance of work, a fraudulent software development company called Optimistic Solutions but they should have just named it Fraudulent Solutions.
In this trailer home I rent a mini-apartment of one bedroom and my own full bathroom with a shower. There's an empty bottle of Hennessy Paradis on my bathroom sink which I now use to keep water in.
I camp out in the bathroom and close the door to my bedroom because that's the farthest I can get from the bedrooms of the mother and daughter whose trailer this is.
I get out my meth, my pipe, my lighter.
I'm so fucking high the sound of the lighter sounds like a chainsaw to me. I feel that every sound I make is certain to wake my housemates. I smoke as little as possible, in tiny little inhales, to keep the smell of meth smoke (quite distinct) out of the rest of the house. I'm sure that I'm about to be discovered and arrested, evicted, kicked out on the street with the coyotes who share our canyon.
I nurse my high for hours, jerking off to porn of two girls kissing. Touching each other's breasts and genitals, yes, but mostly just kissing. One has a yellow shirt. One has a pink. Sober, it's incredibly sexy to me. High on crystal methamphetamine, it is more obsessional than the roof of the Sistine Chapel. I mean it's the sexiest thing I can imagine. I tease myself for three or four hours before I let myself cum.
And when I do, it's that orgasm you can only get on meth. If you've never done meth, this is the quickest way to describe it: not-cumming on meth is better than cumming off meth. Cumming on meth is an orgasm times thirty. A sober orgasm is pretty unbelievable. An orgasm on meth is fucking ridiculous. I mean it's more ridiculous than religious ecstasy—it's so good it feels impossible.
I actually decide to play it cool with this girl. I wait two, three days before I text her.
Mercy?
Yes?
This is Matthew. We met the other night. I was smoking infinite Kamel Reds.
Oh, Matthew, the gentle one.
Do you want to get together?
Long pause.
Yes. Saturday? Meet me at the farmer's market?
I say yes, of course.
Saturday we wander around the Hollywood farmer's market. She buys fruit, I buy us both sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves and we sit on the curb and talk and eat with people pushing strollers all around us and all these almost famous people, industry people, film school students, they walk around us.
I think, for a second, that this might be it for me, that I might be in love. That Mercy might be my next soulmate. Our conversation at the strip club the other night had been so good. And we had that physical magnetism, hands going everywhere all over each other, me letting her lead me like a dog as I held onto the waist of her shorts. She was cute, we had a good conversation, we were able to shop together without getting into a fight, it seemed like we both wanted to fuck each other—what else is there?
Mercy drops her fruit off at this home for battered women where she lives.
"Do you have to be battered to live here?" I ask.
"You just have to be single. Wait for me here."
She hands me an orange.
She says, "You'll be here when I get back?"
"Mercy, I'll be here. I'll wait ten hours if I have to."
She laughs.
"I'll be right back," she says.
And she goes into this home for battered women.
I sit alone at a round table with a sunbrella.
I polish that orange with my shirtsleeves.
Mercy is gone for longer than it takes to drop off her farmer's market purchases, and my mind makes up every horrible possibility it can muster, but soon Mercy comes out, skipping, wearing a new set of clothes. Her hair is different, beads of moisture on her neck.
She showered, she changed clothes—the girl wants to fuck. I mean it's a one-hundred percent certainty at this point. So I peel the orange and she sits in my lap and I feed it to her and my dick get hard and she can feel it and she squirms in my lap and she feeds me orange slices while I can feel the precum getting my short wet. Fuck.
I take her to an expensive seafood place down the street: fresh seafood, infusion liquors. It's called The Hungry Cat—one of my favorite places in Hollywood. She can't find anything on the menu, which is kind of understandable because it's one of these sparse Hollywood menus that's kind of the opposite of the wall-to-wall barrage that say, an Applebee's or Friday's menu is. There aren't a hundred menu items. There are ten. There are no pictures. Mercy says she can't find anything to eat here. Instead of walking her through the menu I just say:
"Where would you like to go?"
"Denny's," she says.
So we get up and walk to Denny's.
We sit across from each other in a booth and she puts her foot in my crotch, making sure my dick stays hard the whole time we're sitting there. I'm pretty much detoxed off the meth at this point.
Mercy orders fish.
"You're such a cute boy," she says.
"You're fucking gorgeous," I say.
"We'd make great babies," she says.
I agree.
She tells me about her village in Kenya.
"So for maybe one-tenth, maybe one-one-hundredth, of what it would cost to buy a tiny house here you could have a mansion in Kenya with servants and a huge area of land around where you could go hunting with my brothers—"
"How many brothers do you have?"
"Seven. But some of them are half-brothers."
"How are they gonna feel if you bring home a white guy instead of marrying one of their friends?"
"They won't mind."
"Really?"
"No."
So I show her grits because she's never had grits before and she orders a white fish I never even know Denny's served.
"This is how I would cook for you if you came to Kenya."
She massages my cock with her foot.
We actually talk about marriage, and I'm ready to strap in, let's do this. I mean I'm lonely and aimless enough that if someone as outgoing and cute as this little woman with the red pussy wants to marry and move to Kenya, I mean, why not—let's do it!
Mercy and I walk to the ArcLight and the whole walk my cock is hard. Just walking down the street with this woman holding hands, wrapping our arms around each other, makes my cock fucking rock hard and there's precum seeping through my pants and everyone on the sidewalk can see this and I don't care a lick what they think because in my mind I'm like, I'm with the hottest girl on the block and this is what happens to a man's cock when he's with the hottest girl on the block.
We stand in front of the huge lighted sign of movies and movie times and Mercy picks Slumdog Millionaire. We go in. The theater is three-quarters full. I let her pick the seats. We're way early and the lights are on. She immediately puts her leg over in between my legs and rubs it up and down, keeping me hard and driving me out of my mind wishing the lights were off or the theater was emptier or I had someplace to take her other than my rent-a-room in the double-wide trailer back up in Westlake Village. I can't fuck her there—I'll get kicked out by the mother I rent from. She doesn't want her daughter hear me fucking someone named mercy while I scream her name.
The show starts. It is the worst movie I have seen in years. Mercy can't stand it either. We leave after fifteen minutes and it's the movie that makes me swear I will never watch another Danny Boyle film again. That was ten years ago and I have not since seen another Danny Boyle film again and I re-swear, in this moment, that I never will. What a waste of thirty bucks. Or it might have been that a certain Kenyan named Mercy and her American Boy Matthew wanted to have sex so damn bad they just couldn't enjoy any film.
We left the theatre, my cock rock hard, cumming through my pants, dripping, and Mercy shamelessly reaching over and massaging it as we walked down the street. She sang that Estelle song to us both as we went down the street to the Super 8 motel in Hollywood, California.
The attendant wanted to see both our IDs, and after some convincing he accepted some sort of international ID from Mercy (not a passport) and he reminded us that there was no prostitution.
"Neither of us are prostitutes," I assured him.
He looked skeptically at me, like: Are you fucking kidding? Do you know how many couples I've checked into motel rooms in my lifetime? You're about to get played, boy.
But I didn't listen to his internal monologue.
Mercy and I went to the room.
We kissed.
We took a shower together.
We washed each other.
I washed in between her butt.
I touched her pussy and she knelt under the water and sucked my balls and the tip of my cock.
We got out of the shower, she laid down on the bed, I laid down on top of her, and I went down on her to loosen up her pussy enough to that I could get my dick in. She admired, always, the contrast between our skin, and I loved it too—a very light white boy and a very dark black girl. Our skin looked beautiful together. I finally got my dick inside her and we looked in each other's eyes while we fucked. She was tight like a cave and I filled her up all the way to the cervix. Pushed the walls of her vagina so wide open she gripped me like a fist.
What can I say? It was good fucking. She was responsive. I eventually turned her over face-down on the bed and fucked her lying on top and just pumping that girl and hearing the sounds she made took me to the top—I pulled out and came hot all over that girl's back.
After I wiped her up we got under the covers and she held me in her arms like a baby and told me Kenyan fairytales. Well, she told me one. I wish I remembered it now.
I was dosing off in that post-sex haze, and I remember thinking: This could be the life, falling asleep every night to Mercy telling me Kenyan fairytales. I mean, what else is there?
The next day at the bar I announced to the bartender, to everyone, that I had fallen in love.
"Like, as in, love love, the real thing."
"The real thing."
I held up my glass.
I could tell he didn't believe me because he had known me for a year and I had been single the whole time. Like I had sex with the random costume girl but that was it.
"Bring her in sometime."
"I will. I'll bring her in this weekend, like Friday, or Sunday, or Thursday."
I was trying to figure out what night she'd be off.
Then I called my mom. I told her. She asked me how we met.
I said, "We just passed each other on the sidewalk, and it was this magic moment, Mom, she looked at me and I looked at her and we stopped walking and we started talking to each other and we haven't stopped since. She has this verve, this energy, and I saw it in her right away, before she ever said a word."
"She saw it in you, too, I bet."
"What?"
"She must have seen the same in you," my mom says.
"Yeah, maybe. Maybe."
"I'm happy for you, my boy."
I imagined introducing Mercy to my mom someday. We would have to agree that the meeting on the street story was the one we'd use for our families.
I drank.
I texted Mercy.
I asked her if I could take her out Thursday. I was eager to show my bartender that Mercy did exist and in fact was a ten as I had claimed. Him, I told the real story of how we had met.
Then mercy started texting me about a green card.
I said what, you want us to get married and then you get a green card, and then we live here and have babies and live happily ever after—that kind of green card.
She said no, she likes me, she really does like me, and I'm cute for a white boy—I'm her American Boy—but she wants to find a black boy from her country to marry and have kids with. She can't see herself being with anyone who wasn't from her village..and her father would never go for it. She really liked me, she insisted.
So what are you asking me?
Will you help me get a green card?
Like we get married? How long is that gonna take? Would we be together?
What do you mean, together?
Would we be a couple, a real marriage?
It would have to look real, she texted.
And I put my phone away.
"Everything ok?" my bartender asked.
"She just wants a fucking green card."
"Did she say that? Or is that just how she's acting."
"No she said that. This girl was telling me Kenyan fairytales," I said.
"Damn."
"Yeah you know? I thought that was for real."
"Maybe it is for real. I mean maybe she wants a green card and she likes you."
"Well she likes me."
"Did you fuck her?"
"Yeah."
"Was it good?"
"Yeah!"
"Have you ever fucked a Kenyan before?"
"No."
"Have you ever fucked a black girl before?"
"Yeah, I fucked a black girl before. I'm telling you, she and I can really talk. I don't meet people that often that I can really talk to. You know, it takes, like, years."
"So marry her. Help her get a green card. Get some puss. Everyone's happy."
"Except I'm not happy," I said. "I don't just want to use her for pussy while she uses me for a green card. Plus, that's illegal. That's a long time to be faking a marriage and living together while she prob'ly has other boyfriends and getting inspected by the INS—if I got caught I'd go to jail. I can't do that. I mean, I do want to help her. Of course I want to help her. She's an amazing person. She could have been a friend. She could have been a lover. I wish she could have told me sooner."
"About the green card."
"Yeah, man."
"She was probably scared."
"Yeah."
"Are you upset? Do you want another glass of wine?"
"I'm a little upset, yeah, and yeah, I want another glass of wine. You know what she said? She said she lost her virginity to some guy she met on Craigslist. She told me I'm the second person she ever had sex with. We took a shower together, man. I washed that girl's butt."
Some guy next to me at the bar looks over.
My bartender brings me a double pour of my favorite Cab-Merlot blend—it's all I've been drinking lately. He pours himself a half glass and we chink glasses. He smiles, dimples flashing.
"At least you got to fuck her," he says.
"At least I got to fuck her," I sigh.
I drink.
I wish the world was different. I wish Mercy could just move to California if she wanted to, from any part of the world. I wish there weren't countries, and green cards, and laws, and tricky ways around those laws. I wish Mercy didn't feel like she had to fuck me to get my interest just to ask me to help her move here.
But I think she really did like me. But I'll never really know, will I?
It's weird, because she was playing me, but I'm the one who ended up using her—she got nothing, I got exactly what I wanted, which was just somebody to have sex with while I came down off crystal.
I wish she really liked me.
I wish what I told my mom on the phone was true, and I really had met her on the street, playing pantomime, knowing it was love at first sight, two people from different worlds, both having that spark that is so rare, and we could be together and not need to use each other for legal purposes.
What a waste.
But, as my bartender says—and he's right—at least I got to fuck her.
Then again, when it comes to poker, maybe Mercy won that hand. Because here it is, ten years later, and every time I hear that Gaga song, I think of that Kenyan and not just the sex, either—I think of the two days we spent together and I remember her like we were in love. I don't know if she feels that way.
But I do.