“Yes, and yes.”
Shit, and more shit!
“Did Tim give you a ticket?” I asked.
“Huh?”
Shit again. I handed Patty another ticket and asked the question again.
“No.”
I sighed. However, if Patty received a ticket from somebody else… who was it?
Another ticket later, I found out: Debbie Lombardi.
I decided that Debbie could wait for a while.
One more ticket later, I protected Patty from Tim Hawking. I left a bewildered Patty behind me and it wasn’t until I got to gym class that I realized that I should have told her the situation with the tickets.
In the past few days, I used quite a few tickets. So much for my desire to cool down on using them. However, I was starting to feel quite paranoid.
On Wednesday night, I realized that Camille gave me a clue to how I could get more information.
“Camille?” I asked.
“Yes?”
“You said you know where your sister lives.”
Camille nodded.
“Is she still there?” I asked.
“Do you intend to call her?”
Actually, I didn’t. I shook my head. “Kristen, could you get me reservations on a red-eye from Chicago to New York City?”
Both girls’ eyes went wide.
The “New York City” I envisaged in my mind was Manhattan: big buildings, large crowds, Wall Street, the Empire State Building, the World Trade Center, and the Chrysler building.
Camille’s sister lived in Queens, which was still New York City, but not on Manhattan island. From La Guardia, I took a cab to the apartment where I was told Debbie lived. Kristen had given me a lot of cash for such expenses, which were in various pockets and in my shoes. After all, New York had a reputation!
As I was driven, I could see the world famous skyline and I guess I stared like a typical tourist. The cab driver didn’t say much, but I doubted he spoke English very well. When we stopped, I was surprised by the amount of the fare, but paid it and gave the driver a five dollar tip.
At Debbie’s apartment building, I knocked on the door to her apartment, and it opened a bit, with a chain keeping the door from opening too far.
“Hello, Ms. Lombardi,” I said to Debbie Lombardi’s familiar face. “I need to talk with you.”
“How did you get upstairs?”
“A teenager let me come in behind him. Please, I don’t intend to harm you.”
“What’s this about?” Debbie asked. She then furrowed her brow and said, “Do I know you?”
I said the two words that I thought might get me into Debbie Lombardi’s apartment.
They worked. Debbie closed the door, unlatched the chain, and then opened the door to let me inside. Once we were inside, Debbie asked, “How do you know about them?”
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
“Should I?” Debbie asked, confused. “You look a bit familiar.”
Had I changed that much in three years? “My name is Jim Crittenhouse.”
“Jim? From Illinois?” Debbie was very surprised.
“Yes,” I answered. “Cammy gave me your address.”
“Why?”
I repeated those two words. Debbie looked shocked.
“Is Cammy abusing them?”
“I might be abusing them, Debbie.”
“Huh?”
“I need to know about them. I found somebody else who is using them to ruin people’s lives. I made a few mistakes when I first discovered them, but up until recently, I’ve mostly been using them as a weird ‘truth serum.’”
Debbie looked at me. “That’s strange. I thought Cammy got them.”
“Huh?”
Debbie shook her head. “I was an asshole, Jim. I abused her. I think I may have even abused you, but not very much. You were just a kid. Even when I didn’t abuse them…” Debbie ended with a sigh.
“What happened?”
Debbie sighed. “Why should I tell you?”
“There’s somebody who is trying to ruin people’s lives. You’ve done things like that, and you seem sorry now. I’ve done things like that, and now I’m trying to make things right. This other person tried to rape your sister.”
Once again, Debbie sighed. She got up and went into her kitchen. She came back with a glass full of something that I recognized as whiskey.
Debbie offered me some, and I respectfully declined.
Debbie sighed and told me her story.
Debbie did indeed have possession of the tickets at one time.
Unfortunately, Debbie abused them. She discovered how they worked with Camille, and then with me. She found out a week or so after she found them that she could make an outrageous wish, and it would be granted, much to her horror. (Debbie never explained what this outrageous wish was, but told me that she swore to never use them again when she saw the consequences.)
It was about a month later that she found the tickets again. This time, she couldn’t help but heed their siren song. (This was another area that I couldn’t get Debbie to talk too much about.)
After a while, Debbie found herself to have bisexual tendencies, although she only did girl-girl things with her sister. (Debbie expected me to be surprised by this revelation; I wasn’t and she was shocked.)
Debbie eventually got sick of her life, and left the Midwest. She wanted to get lost in Manhattan. She used the tickets to get enough money to be comfortable, and to just live her life anonymously.
One day, at a strip club, Debbie met the love of her life, a stripper named Jenny. Once they met, they hit it off immediately. Both of them discovered that they had an attraction for each other, and for the first time, Debbie found herself in love with somebody. She wanted the relationship pure, so Jenny was one of the few people she slept with that she hadn’t seduced using a ticket.
Since Debbie had money, she decided to help Jenny fund a new club that Jenny envisioned. Jenny used to work in a number of “wiggler bars” (her name for strip clubs). Jenny told Debbie about her dream to own a place like the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway, but specializing in women patrons.
It was a shocking idea, but Debbie agreed to it.
The biggest difficulty was obtaining a liquor license. Such a club would be doomed without one, and the licensing bureau was giving them problems. In addition, there were problems with the local Board of Health.
Suddenly, a savior of sorts came into the picture. His name was Vinnie and he offered to help the two women for a small cut into the venture… only twenty percent.
The two girls were witnessing their dream flying away, and agreed that twenty percent wasn’t too much of a price to pay, but only if Vinnie came through and made their problems with liquor and the Board of Health disappear. As soon as they agreed, their problems melted away like ice in a hot oven.
The club opened a year ago.
Vinnie had quite a head for the business. He suggested that Debbie and Jenny get official jobs as “Hostesses,” where they could draw a nice income, and the girls did so.
Things were going fine, but after a few months, Debbie and Jenny noticed that there seemed to be slight problems with the books. They discovered that some of the people that they hired were less than scrupulous.
A bartender, for instance, was caught stealing money. Debbie confronted the guy, using her lucky tickets of course, and found out that he was part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Vinnie to rob the club blind. Vinnie, in addition, had managed to create a whole lot of shady deals that worried the two women.
Instead of firing the bartender, Debbie kept him on, using him to keep tabs on Vinnie.
Vinnie wasn’t a stupid person, and found out that Debbie somehow had some sort of power over the bartender. Before the inevitable confrontation, however, Debbie managed to finally get rid of the tickets, and they disappeared forever. (This was another thing that Debbie would not discuss, no matter how much I asked her.)