The Struggle is Real, but So is Jesus. Tessa
a different name, and I made myself younger. Twenty-one, I was only twenty-four, but I still wanted to be younger. Of course, the main reason people did it was for fake IDs to buy alcohol.
I picked out a really cool name for my alias—“River Marie”—and so everyone I met thought my name was River. I felt really cool. The stupid things we do to make us look cool and different.
I went off track a little. What my soon-to-be second husband was doing was making several IDs and opening bank accounts with each one at different banks.
He would then write a large check from one account and deposit it in another then pull out the cash. Back then, they didn’t make you wait till a check was cleared. You could get the funds immediately, so he made his rounds doing that for a long time. He also never got caught. I have no idea how we all got away with this stuff, but it certainly isn’t anything you would want to mess with today and do federal prison for.
I accepted his gifts for a while but wouldn’t let him move back in with me. I was sure he’d get caught, and I wasn’t going to go down with him.
He didn’t know what I was doing either. He just thought I was dancing again. Another reason I couldn’t take him back: it would be impossible to hide.
Eventually, though, I did take him back. The meth was out of the picture, but the cocaine came on full force. We were smoking coke almost daily and for days at a time. They sold really cool pipes back then that had glass tubes swirling up and around from the glass bowl and made it look really cool when we smoked it. Part of the fun was watching the smoke swirl around the tubes up to you mouth and get huge hits off.
This was still the days of freebasing, cooking it ourselves, way before people started making crack and using little glass tubes with brillo.
He bought us both a gun. They were registered and legal, and one day, we decided to drive to Los Angeles to see my friend, the one I danced with and called my sister. I don’t know how we made it, we smoked probably an eight ball all the way there.
The next day of being there, our Camaro broke down in the middle of an intersection, and he had his gun tucked into the front of his jeans. In Arizona, it was legal to carry as long as it wasn’t concealed. And the cops, of course came, to “help” then searched him, and he was arrested for carrying. It was not legal in California.
I got nervous and told them I had mine in the glove box, so we both spent the night in jail until they ran our prints and made sure the guns were registered to us and they weren’t used in a crime.
We got out without bond the next day but they confiscated our guns. I was pretty pissed ’cause they were legally ours.
Our trip was cut short, and we went back to Phoenix the next day.
Chapter 17
Eventually, he met the girl I worked for as an escort. We became good friends, and even though my intuition had always been spot on, for some reason, I never saw this coming.
She always had some kind of drama and made me believe she was in danger of her ex and had a child. It started with her being scared to be alone and would ask us to stay the night. I always just wanted to go home, but stupid me, I would tell him to stay with her, having no clue, unless maybe I didn’t care and looked the other way. I really don’t remember.
She ended up telling him I was working as an escort working for her, but she never did it; was just in it for the money. He didn’t confront me for a while but started spending a lot of time with her.
One day after about a few months of this going on, she called me and told me she had been sleeping with him and she was pregnant. I put her on hold and called 911. I was so mad and wanted revenge. I was a very vengeful person then. He had no idea what I was doing and couldn’t say anything so he wouldn’t take off.
They started asking me questions, obviously knowing I was afraid for him to know what I was doing, so they kept me on the phone and asked me questions that I just could answer yes to, if I was in danger, if he had a weapon, etc. They told me the police were on their way. When I hung up, I told him about my call with the girl. He denied it, of course, and we got in a huge fight.
I knew she wasn’t lying because she told me about a birth mark he had on his genitals. He ended up throwing a pumpkin through the wall.
The police showed up and asked if he had a gun, he did and told them he did, knowing they would search the house and asked him where it was. In the bedroom closet locked up, they went to get it; they couldn’t arrest him for the gun as it was registered to him and hadn’t had it on his person or threaten me with it, but they saw the huge hole in the wall from the pumpkin he threw and arrested him for destruction of property. After they arrested him, I didn’t talk to him and wouldn’t answer his calls. I’m assuming she’s the one who bailed him out.
I immediately started looking for another place to live and found a really cool house that I rented immediately so he didn’t know where I was.
I was there about a month only, and one day, he called me and told me he was in Payson, Arizona, in a motel with her. It was an hour away and asked me to pick him up, that she was crazy and didn’t want to be with her.
My pride got the best of me, and even though I didn’t want him back, I also didn’t want her to have him, so I drove that night to pick him up and was hoping to catch her there and beat her up. I think he told her because when I arrived, she was gone.
Chapter 18
I told him the only way I would stay with him was if we moved back to my hometown. I loved the house I lived in but didn’t trust him. I had already gotten money orders for rent and all my bills. But I abandoned the house and cashed in my money orders to move.
The next day, we rented a u-haul and packed everything and abandoned my lease.
We headed back to my home about seven hundred miles away and stayed in a motel until we found a place to rent. It only took about a week. Rents were super cheap back then. It was 1990, and I had about three grand, but the condo we rented was only five hundred a month, and it was nice.
I got a job at a strip club right away and again made friends with the wrong people who we found coke to buy from.
It was almost a daily basis that we had my new friends over to smoke it with.
Later, I found out the cops were watching our place. We never got raided, but the most embarrassing thing was they even took my mom’s license plate and started to follow her.
We weren’t selling it, just partying every night, but people would come and go all hours of the night.
One of the girls I danced with moved in with us, and we decided we needed to make more money. We figured out we could make as much money as I did escorting and decided to run an ad for private dancing.
We were able to charge the same price, and we were pretty successful. At the time, my soon-to-be second husband was our driver, and we would go on our calls and hand him the money out the door in case someone got mad and wanted their money back. But that only happened twice.
We put an ad in an exotic newspaper. The Internet didn’t exist yet. We called our business barely legal, which fit what we were doing, and it wasn’t illegal in our state.
We made a lot of money, enough for me to go to beauty school. I really did try to get out of the business. Quite a few times, I had normal careers, but they didn’t last long. Beauty school was actually the one thing I did finish successfully, and I paid cash. I was twenty-five then. I still needed to do the private dancing gig to support us while I was in school.
My boyfriend would answer the phone at night while I tried to get some sleep and would wake me up when I got a call.
When I finished school and got my license, I tried to work as a hairdresser, but I wasn’t good at promoting myself and was told it took a year or more to build a clientele. I would have to sit in the salon and wait for walk-ins and still had to