and waiting, when finally the door opened and another guy came in. He was shorter than Texas with a close-cropped head of dark curls.
“Roxy? I’m Mitch Turner.”
“What happened to Texas?”
“I ask myself that all the time. I think when Ann Richards was governor in the 1990s, the right-wing Republican establishment realized they were going to have to really step it up—”
“No! Not the state of Texas! My lawyer. What happened to Texas, my lawyer?”
“You know Sam?”
“Oh my God, is no one in my entire life telling me the truth about their name?”
Mitch cocked his head and studied me. “So you know him?”
“Yes. But why are you calling him Sam?”
“Sam is his real name. Texas is the name he goes by when he plays out with his band.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Why?” Mitch looked uncomfortable. “It’s like his nickname. So his clients don’t go see him when he plays, which could be really awkward.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
“He likes to keep work and music separate, you know?”
I suddenly, and for no explicable reason, felt my face burning red with a fierce, fiery, and uncontrollable blush.
“The thing is,” Mitch continued, “there’s been a mix-up and I’m actually going to be your attorney.”
“I knew I should have hired my own lawyer,” I moaned.
“Again, I apologize,” Mitch said. “This sort of thing is highly unusual for us.” He kept talking but I couldn’t even focus on what he was saying. I was so unnerved. Texas must have recused himself from my case. I couldn’t help but feel the bitter irony that having Venus as a planetary deity was supposed to make people like me more, not run out of the room to get away from me. It didn’t make sense, since we’d just cleared up the misunderstanding about him ghosting me.
“Would you mind if I take a minute and really read over your case?” Mitch asked.
“Go ahead,” I said. I cracked open “A Confederacy of Dunces” again. As I read, I comforted myself with the idea that Ignatius J. Reilly’s protests didn’t ever go as planned either.
When Mitch finally looked up at me, I put the book down. “Okay. You are being charged with vandalism—a Class A misdemeanor. And resisting arrest, which is a felony. The entire incident was captured on video, which is on record. Let’s watch it together, see what we’re up against.”
Mitch pulled out a laptop, logged into some PD evidence database and opened a video, which he began to play. It had been taken with an iPhone and showed the protesters marching in a circle and chanting. The presence of the burlesque girls made the protest in general look much sexier than your average anti-corporatization march. I spotted myself, carrying my sign, looking incredibly happy and kind of overwhelmed as I shouted, “Don’t give me no overpriced tights; we just want our civil rights.” (No wonder news stations were having a hard time pinpointing the point of the protest—at the time our chanting had seemed clever and passionate, but I realized it made no actual sense.) Then Artemis came busting through the door of the Lululemon yelling, “You guys need to shut the fuck up and listen!” She looked so fierce as the burlesque dancers moved into formation behind her.
“She was one of my two best friends,” I said mournfully.
“Did she die?” he asked, alarmed.
“No. We broke up,” I said.
By then Artemis and the burlesque girls were running the world with their sexy dance moves. As the song ended, the person holding the iPhone moved in for a closer shot of me taking the spray paint from Artemis’s hand—my face was clear as day in the video—and then Artemis and I stepped forward together and started spray-painting the store windows.
Now the cops were on the scene. The popos grabbed me. Artemis screamed my name, ripped off her gold pasties one at a time, and threw them at the cops. As Artemis stormed toward me and the police, chest bare, an older, squat woman came out of the crowd, grabbed her, and yanked her back into the throng. The cops tried to follow them, but Artemis and the older woman seemed to disappear. By then I was kicking and fighting like hell, and once they had me in the police car, Mitch turned off the video.
“What’s going to happen to that other girl?” I said, meaning Artemis.
Mitch looked at me. “Can I give you some advice?”
“You’re my lawyer. Isn’t that your job?”
“My advice: tend to your own butter churnin’.”
“What does that mean? And I’m