enough dirty money to afford a bus ticket to Los Angeles. There, she found things dirtier.
Her Nashville agent had promised this and passed her on to a Los Angeles agent who had promised that, but the promises never really came true and neither did Niane’s wishes. She slept with the people she was told to sleep with, and she landed a few bit parts in trash films, mostly done directly for videocassette. Niane had a very good body, a naturally pretty face and smile, although she thought her nose too big, lots of shining straight black hair, which she wore Cleopatra style, and an East Tennessee accent that only Nashville should have loved. She took voice lessons, but her film career proved as hopeless as her music career. She could always find work waiting tables in bars, and this she did. Niane took pride in the fact that she hadn’t had to turn to the streets, as had so many other crushed hopefuls.
This, despite her growing drug habit.
It had started with a little coke and smack at those parties where she wound up screwing important producers who weren’t really producers for important films that never seemed to materialize. And it went on. No stardom. The drugs helped. Niane kept reminding herself that she never took money for screwing on the casting couch. Her only receipts were broken promises and tracks on her arms.
Niane wanted to go home, wherever that was. She saved some money from tips waiting at the topless bars, made a good bit more dancing nude, and, while she refused to admit it to herself, turned a few tricks for customers whom she really did like and who gave her enough money for smack and crack. One night stands was all. She wasn’t a prostitute.
Niane was gang-raped one night at a crack house. She was stoned, didn’t remember how many and didn’t care at the time. She seemed to remember that she owed them some money. Afterward, they gagged her and threw her naked body into a dumpster with her wrists bound and her ankles tied back to a noose around her neck. Then they left her to die in garbage. An example to other bitches.
A bag lady, sleeping inside the dumpster beneath the trash, awoke and found Niane writhing in death throes. She untied her before Niane had completely strangled, and somehow summoned the police.
Niane could tell them nothing. Her only clear memory was of strange dreams as she lay dying in the trash.
Her beating was severe enough to hospitalize her for more than a week. She confessed to her drug addiction as soon as the withdrawal started. They put her on Methadone, Valium and Xanax, and sent her packing once she could walk. Niane was pleased that there would be no scars.
So she hurriedly withdrew her savings—enough for a plane ticket and some to live on—packed whatever she had worth packing, and caught the first flight to Knoxville, Tennessee. The boys at the crack house would be looking for her, this time with bullets to make sure of the job. They wouldn’t bother looking as far as Tennessee for a few hundred bucks, and Niane had a girlfriend from Nashville who now worked in Knoxville. Crash space and maybe a job.
Niane’s friend worked at Kim’s Klub. She was a statuesque black woman named Navonna Wardlow—about three years Niane’s senior and above five inches taller than Niane’s five-foot-six. Navonna had danced at one of the topless bars in Nashville where Niane had worked the tables. They had stayed in touch after both had left Nashville without stardom. Kim’s Klub had opened in Knoxville, and Navonna got a job as waitress/dancer and was in a position to get Niane work there. Good pay, yuppie tips, and crisp bills stuffed into your G-string when you stripped.
Navonna had a bag of bootleg Demerols in her purse, and Niane needed them really badly. But Navonna knew the signs, and Niane was already into her for fifty bucks and her half of the rent money. Niane had been a little overindulgent with her prescriptions. She was running low, trying to stretch them for another few days until she could renew them, and she really needed some Demerols to see her through. And Navonna wouldn’t let her have them. And here they’d been pillow mates for several months now. And she’d even let Navonna wear some of her dresses from Los Angeles. The ones she’d worn to auditions. And the red bustier she’d