Читать книгу Blue Money - Janet Capron - Страница 11
ОглавлениеAfter Corinne’s, I cut over to the Traveling Medicine Show, a saloon on Second Avenue and my old hangout. I had been avoiding it for a year—that is, until a week ago.
In the late sixties, we had a real St. Vitus dance going there, a whirling dervish of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Not only did I believe in magic then, I sought evidence, praying for signs, such as the supernatural handwriting that leisurely spelled God’s message to me, carving words in the sawdust across the barroom floor. Miracles of this kind only happened when I was whacked on methamphetamine, which was also when the divine order of things revealed itself, when inanimate objects gathered together to portend, when colors became backlit with the unseen rays of the moon, and jukebox tunes reverberated against the otherwise undetected, hollow sound of nothing. Crystal meth charged the circuits of my brain, leaping over synapses, chasing L-dopa down sleepy channels as sluggish as damned rivers until the banks of my mind flooded with revelation.
I did not fear this state, the drug-induced madness rightfully called “amphetamine psychosis”; I pursued it, guided by my own benign, urbane Charlie Manson, Michael McClaren.
Michael believed in crystal methedrine. Speed is to cocaine what heroin is to morphine—a very strong, very hard drug. But we cherished the tattered government brochure always circulating somewhere in the bar classifying methamphetamine as a psychedelic. This confirmed for us that it was a sacrament. After a few sleepless nights, I would grow preternaturally calm, and the high began to seem indefinite the way love does when it’s good. Michael administered lines of this powerful substance like a kind and watchful small-town doctor who runs a makeshift clinic full of locals come in for the cure. He believed and infected us with the belief that crystal methedrine could heal. We were all convinced. About this we were not cynics in the slightest degree.
Michael had invaded like a missionary from Greenwich Village in the spring of 1967, transforming a dreary Upper East Side singles parlor into what was for me a palace of the night. The corner saloon was lit by an eerie copper glow; the place oozed with drugs, and the small stage rang out with free music played by friends of Michael’s who dropped by to try out new material. The barroom walls were festooned with photographs of these local and world-famous regulars. There were mostly black-and-white head shots of the men, musicians, along with bartenders and drug dealers, all caught in deep and inscrutable contemplation, while the women were displayed in garish color: go-go dancers spinning their tassels on tabletops, or young uptown girls, myself included, wearing tiny bikinis and sunglasses, sprawled over the hoods of shiny cars.
Nothing checked, no restraint, unless it was Michael’s intriguing silences, especially intriguing because probably not a soul uptown or down consumed more speed than he did. And speed made most of us talk and talk in a shorthand of free association, broken sentences tumbling back and forth like flaming torches. But Michael stood out against the pack; he expressed himself in elaborate pantomime instead. He was always tacking something on the bulletin board with his staple gun, or spray-painting a lightbulb crimson red, or brushing his lips with the harmonica he never played, or tinkering with a mike onstage, or just running loose, a marvelous rhythm to his jerky step, the speed spinning him from wall to wall. All of us, his unabashed followers, loved to watch him. His long black hair streamed behind him. His skin was as white as candle wax, except for his flushed cheeks. His wide-set eyes were transparent ice blue, fixed with the vacant stare I once saw in a timber wolf’s eyes. You could almost hear his mind, as high as a whistle pitched for wildlife, and his mind drew us there night after night, all the young girls you could imagine, and the boys, too: we were enchanted.
That was the sixties, before male charisma got discredited. Sometime during the past year, while I was avoiding the place and trying to be a practicing radical feminist, the Traveling Medicine Show had turned seedy. Its lights were too bright now; the jukebox played the same numbers over and over, and Jimmy, the bartender, looked wearily at his watch. The place was changing back into just another local gin mill, but when I returned, all I could see was that Michael was still at his post where I’d left him the summer before. I reluctantly noticed he had acquired a slight potbelly, in spite of the fact that I was sure he continued to snort mountains of crystal meth (it was the daily quarts of rum and Coke, I guess). And the mortal growth of hair that poured out of his open work shirt, obliterating his once smooth chest, was thicker and ruder than before. But what mattered was that Michael was still there. The sight of my old hero and the stench of beer—old, sticky stale beer—lured me past the door.
I didn’t expect him to throw his arms around me after my year of pointed neglect, and sure enough, he went out of his way to shun me the first night back. He behaved as though I were a stranger all through the long evening, right up until last call. Even in decline, he had pride. You think you can just waltz in here after a year and expect me to fall all over you, bitch? But the truth is he had nothing better to do. The truth is he was happy to see me. I could tell from the way he immediately started stapling something to the bulletin board. Then he abruptly went and sat down at his long table, where he put his feet up on the neighboring chair and pulled open a copy of the Village Voice with a deliberate thrust of paper. He hid his face behind it, as if he had gone inside his house and slammed the door. All of this was for my benefit, I thought, but I wanted to make sure.
“I guess Michael isn’t talking to me,” I said to Jimmy. It was almost four by that time, and I was hanging on with both hands to the cool glass full of ice and booze and practically no soda.
“Of course he is. He’s real happy to see you,” Jimmy said, wiping the bar down with his wet, filthy towel.
“You could’ve fooled me,” I said.
“Oh, Janet, c’mon now, you’ve been away too long. This is how he always acts when he’s happy to see someone, you remember that much, don’t you?” he said.
A little while later, I noted with gratitude that Michael had switched to Penthouse, which he was reading with a half-smile on his face. A good sign. I walked over, careful not to stand too close. He looked up and smiled outright, as if I had just come through the door.
“Have a seat,” he said, getting up. “Want a drink?”
All of a sudden, after not having seen me for a year and then ignoring me all night, I was his guest.
He went over and got us both drinks, his a tumbler full of rum and Coke, and my umpteenth scotch and soda. When he came back, he sat down next to me and put his feet up again and stirred his drink with his long, graceful finger.
“You look like you could use a line,” he said.
“Yeah, I’m dying for a line. It’s been a year at least,” I said.
“How’d you stay awake?”
“I didn’t, really. I was walking around in a daze the whole time.”
“Here, I’ll put a little of this in your drink. It’s not the quickest way to get off, but it’ll do the trick.”
He took a square of tinfoil out of the breast pocket of his red shirt, a dark red that made his eyes look extremely light blue. Then he tapped some of the tinfoil’s contents, a thin trickling stream of white powder, into my glass.
“Try not to overdo it. I’m very clean, remember,” I said.
“Yes, but when you drink it, it’s gradual. Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.”
As soon as the Traveling Medicine Show closed that first night of my prodigal return, Michael hurried me down the block to his apartment, as if there were urgent business to discuss. He lived right on Second Avenue, above a hardware store. His studio faced the back where an ailanthus tree had presumed to grow in the alley, forcing its way through the concrete and up past his window. Michael’s house was the most hallowed cell, the most beautiful, whimsical shrine in the whole of the material world, as far as I was concerned.
For months, while I was out on the street picketing, or stuck inside the freezing offices of the radical feminist paper Gutter, sitting on a metal folding chair and hammering out policy with the other women, I dreamed of this forbidden little bunker with its dark red corduroy bedspreads, like something a college boy’s mother might have sent, and the billowing white cotton curtains that hung down from the ceiling behind the two beds. The effect these closed curtains had was to make you feel, lying there, as if you were backstage. The beds were arranged in an L shape so that they might lend themselves to a variety of offbeat positions, but not to sleeping together all entwined and sweaty. Which was fine with me on a couple of counts. First of all, who slept? And then, even if you did crash there, who, crashing, wants to share a bed?
Crashing is a serious business. It is the other side. Speed whisks away revelation when at last it departs the body. The profoundest truth, the one you thought would change your life, evaporates as if it had all been just a shimmering, whimsical dream. You are a husk, and if you are wise, you do not stir for days. Your senses dulled to the point of uselessness, you might as well lie prostrate in your open grave-bed until life creeps back in, or, more likely, until you decide to do more speed. The apostates couldn’t take it; they tended to get suicidally depressed. Speed never affected me that way, or Michael either. What happens, if you allow yourself to surrender to it, which is what you have to do, is that you go into a mild coma. This was no big deal as far as I was concerned.
But of course, when the time arrived, I would want to come down by myself. At that point, you are feeling so fragile, you had better surround yourself with the familiar. When you come to, it’s as if you were sleeping in the womb and then had to bust out of the birth canal all over again. You look ugly as hell when you wake up, puffy, gray, dried spittle plastered over the entire side of your face.
The atmosphere in that small, hot room, with only one fan whirring in the window, bore down on us. It was charged with the unexpected, electric weight of intimacy. The drenched air, ringing with silence, wouldn’t let us speak or even, for a minute, move.
At last, as if someone had started the reel spinning again, Michael stripped, always the first thing he did. He made us both a rum and Coke, and then he took a bubble bath. I sat by the tub and blurted out a lot of inane things. The drug was starting to hit, and I was caught off guard. I had forgotten how liberating it was.
“The speed’s working,” Michael said.
“I’ll say it is,” I said. “I feel like a fool.”
“We’re all fools,” Michael said, lifting his leg out of the bubbles and soaping it the way starlets used to do in the movies. Finally, he got up and pulled a towel around his body, the front of which was covered with black hair. This made him seem human to me. I loved him even more for the humility his giant spirit had assumed stuck inside the lowly flesh of manhood.
Ah, speed, mother of hyperbole. The drug has left its mark, as if the machine of my mind lost a knob. Even now, I find it difficult to measure in degrees. When I am moved, the emotion wants to fly to its limit like an old horse making its way back to the barn. Back then, I was altogether blind to the subtleties of feeling and impatient with them.
I wanted to touch him. All those days and weeks and months I berated myself because I, a genuine feminist, I thought, could not stop wondering about the de facto harem I had left behind on the Upper East Side, of all places, and now here I was, overjoyed just to be watching Michael trail soap bubbles into the other room. He sat naked on his towel under the pin light, put his drink down on the table in front of him and then started to fiddle with the tuner on the radio. After a few minutes, he settled in and picked up Penthouse again, while I, recalling the order of our ritual, stayed behind and ran a bath for myself.
“Drink some of your rum, that’ll take the edge off,” Michael called out to me.
I lay back in the tub and drank the alcohol and felt myself float off, until I was hovering for an instant over the deserted street outside. Just a little out-of-body experience, nothing to get alarmed about, I told myself. Then I saw some writing form out of the cracks in the plaster on the bathroom wall. It said GET WELL over and over in big script, a very personal hand. This was not as odd a hallucination as it might sound. Remember, we were all preoccupied with healing ourselves. And we thought there was a better chance of achieving mental health if we became psychotic first than if we just stayed mired in our neuroses. Michael put it this way: “There is no cure for the common cold, but if you catch a cold and then go stand in the rain, you might get pneumonia, and that they know how to cure.”
“What are you doing in there?” Michael yelled.
“Oh, I—I don’t know,” I said, pulling myself back into space-time.
“That’s all right, you’ll mellow out. Drink some more rum,” Michael said.
He continued to look after me, taking responsibility for my state of mind, clocking it every so often to make sure I didn’t go out and not come back.
I flashed on a memory of my handsome father, Rayfield, and I, driving in silence up to his riding stable in the countryside where he boarded his horse. I am about nine or ten. We are absolutely silent the whole time. He is shifting gears in his little Karmann Ghia and simply delighting in the drive. It never occurs to him that maybe his daughter next to him is feeling one long howling pain of rejection. Is feeling that he has so little interest in her that she, like a parcel, like a Sunday burden, is being driven up to the stable and put on a horse because she is an obligation he is now too sober to avoid. Unless—and here is where the fruitful imagination takes over for good—unless this is it. This is, in fact, love. Silence is the ultimate communion, the evidence of complete understanding. Yes, silence, sharing the solitude, that’s what love is.
And now, freshly bathed and wide-awake, I sat silently with Michael on the other side of the pin light. If all women were looking for their father again, then I was set. They resembled each other: dark hair, strong black eyebrows and contrasting light eyes—a distinctly Byronic look. But the quality of Michael’s I was most grateful for on my first night back was that he was such a stick-in-the-mud. Michael was still there, a castled king in his corner. Unlike other men who would probably go somewhere else or take up with someone else in your absence, unlike this father of mine who married again so fast, Michael never moved off his spot, never left the block. He was strangely reliable. True, I might have to share him with another woman from time to time, but it was vastly preferable to being outright excluded. Handsome, winsome Michael was still there where I had left him. That was compelling; it was the crux of his appeal.
I was thinking this as we sat together, naked. The soft, long hair on Michael’s chest was glistening wet under the pin light. His body had matured beyond him, suggesting as it did a warm and nurturing kind of man. I felt like a little girl.
“Guess it was tough trying to make a living out there as a full-time activist. Orthodox feminists. Humph. Doesn’t pay very well, does it?” Michael asked.
“Michael, don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not, I’m really not. But I could’ve told you that wasn’t for you. You have to find some other way.”
“What do you mean ‘not for me’? Because I like sex too much, is that what you mean?”
“Something like that. Listen, they’re repressive. The way I see it, they want to turn things back, put more distance between the sexes.”
“You aren’t hearing what they’re saying, that’s obvious.”
“Oh? So why did you leave?”
“Well, the truth is you’re right about me. I couldn’t handle it. It was too austere, that life. I’m just a sybarite, that’s all I am. I give up, OK? I missed getting high. And, well, I missed you. OK? I really did. Now I’m here. So let’s drop it.”
Silence. He had to weigh those words, “I missed you.” He had to let them echo for a few seconds above the sound of the whirring fan. And then he resumed his rightful place as the man who would run my life. From an amused distance. Nevertheless, he was willing to run it, which is more than I could say for any other man thus far.
“What are you doing for bread?”
“Nothing.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At my mother’s house right now.”
“We gotta figure out what you’re going to do. You can’t live off your mother forever. Any ideas?” he asked.
“You know me, I always figured the world owed me a living,” I said.
“Maybe it does, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t pay up. Have to think of something...gotta have a gimmick, that’s what you need, a gimmick,” he said. He was sitting naked with his legs crossed, tapping his knee, smoking a Camel. He was getting that mischievous look, playing with me now.
“I know. You could start a circle jerk, advertise in Screw. You would be the supervisor. ‘Supervised circle jerks...’ No? OK, maybe not. Then let’s see...how about ‘Private Viewing of Blue Movies for an Elite Few’? You’d be amazed who’d pay to see sixteen-millimeter flicks, all those poor schmucks too uptight to go to Forty-Second Street. You could rake it in! What’s wrong with that idea?”
“I don’t even have an apartment, let alone enough chairs to accommodate a movie audience,” I said, pretending to take his silly suggestions seriously. I lit up a Newport. I was pouting. I hated his cheery attitude. And I already knew where this was going.
“You know I got a good friend, Susannah, you remember Susannah?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
Of course I did. The pretty, femme Susannah, with her honest-to-God dark corkscrew curls and her actual flouncy skirts, was the first woman I ever had. She was his southern belle contingent. Came up here just to see him maybe two or three times a year. It was preposterous. We all had to defer to her when she came, as if she were special, which was hardly the case, it was only that she was infrequent. Nevertheless, everybody had to make a big fuss over her. The last time I saw her, the three of us went back to Michael’s house, and Susannah got to be the center of everything as usual, as if Michael and I were extending ourselves as host and hostess. I had not planned it, but I found myself going down on Susannah, after it was instigated by Michael, who lay underneath her. She was acting wild in a demure sort of way, sitting up with her back to him and rotating awkwardly on top like a helpless mewling little thing. While this was happening, Michael kept smiling at me around the back of her head as if we were in cahoots. Then he pulled out and pushed her toward me.
(In spite of the company I had been keeping, I had never seen a vagina that close up before, let alone tasted one. Not what I expected, it was, somehow, much neater. I had assumed it would be a flaccid, fleshy, amorphous hole, but Susannah’s pulsed with muscle hidden inside. When I tentatively circled her clitoris with my tongue, it stood up, and I felt her whole vagina spasm ever so slightly. The clitoris embarrassed me; it seemed like such a vestigial little thing. Poor women, with our tiny imitations. Otherwise, from what I could see, with its swollen labia and its thick inner wall, the vagina was just like an inverted penis. ‘But what a powerful sex organ,’ I remember thinking, a little surprised and almost frightened by the gravitational pull of it.)
“Well, Susannah knows this madam,” Michael went on. “I told you when she’s in New York, she always turns a few tricks and makes enough to pay all her expenses. I could find out the name of the madam, if you’d be interested. Better yet, why not get in touch with Corinne? She’d fix you up. Corinne really likes you; yep, she’d do it in a New York minute.
“You and everybody else, me included, is already giving it away. But you’re lucky. You can get paid for it. Who’s going to object? Nobody around here. Do you care what the straight world thinks? Of course not. In fact, whenever it disapproves, I take it as a sign at least I’m doing something right. I don’t see why you shouldn’t get paid for it.”
This was one of Michael’s longer speeches. I understood he was encouraging me to be defiant. I got it. His motives were very nearly pure. But if I’d been capable then of being honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was hurt. I wished that he would claim me, possess me, swear he’d never love another. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that Michael did want to possess me in his way by sharing my experience, because I already knew what he had in mind. I knew that Michael’s own peculiar interpretation of pimping would never include taking money—he had such an aversion to money—but he’d insist on hearing all the details. ‘Vicarious’ was his favorite word.
“Do you think I could do it? I mean, I don’t know whether I’d be any good at it,” I said.
“You good at it? You got to be kidding. Anyway, from what Susannah and Corinne tell me, there’s nothing to it. These johns are all straight businessmen, married guys, looking for a piece of strange. They’re so excited by the idea, they come after a few strokes. Nothing to it,” he said.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it,” I said, still pouting.
We were sitting naked together, I on one bed, he on the other, maybe two feet apart, not speaking. The only lights were the pin light and the glowing tips of our cigarettes. The radio was playing another tune, a preview from Europe the DJ said, something about a horse in a desert. Dumb lyrics I suddenly realized in an unwelcome moment of lucidity. Dumb.
Michael reached for his suede book bag full of vibrators. He pulled out a huge machine, which was flat across the top.
“Look at this, it’s new on the market. Isn’t it a beauty?” he said, a small boy displaying his latest gadget.
“What does it do?”
“The vibrations are so strong, they make the whole inside of your pussy contract. You come in about ten seconds,” he said.
But then he put it away.
“That’s for later,” he said, a papa now, teaching his kid how to postpone gratification.
Also, the truth is he had only brandished the thing to get us on the subject of sex in the here and now. Neither one of us was in the mood for a vibrator. But Michael’s problem was that he was shy. He was really soft-spoken and shy, and he could never get over the fact that women were so willing to sleep with him. Even after years of various girlfriends threatening to commit suicide on his account, he was still stupefied by the pitch of their desire. Not many men are ready to unleash a woman, watch her go, the way Michael was. So it’s understandable he would feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice sometimes.
He grabbed my nipple, which was standing straight up thanks to the tickling breeze from the fan, between his thumb and middle finger. I felt my clitoris jump like a little fish. He took hold of my other nipple. Then I think he actually kissed me. It was more like one mouth bruising another, the way children do it, but it was a kiss. He pulled me close, settling down right on top, skin to skin, heart to heart. The kissing changed. We opened to each other. It all came back to me, how it used to be when we first met, before the drugs took over completely. I remembered. We were back. No wonder I loved him. After a few generic thrusts, he recovered this stroke he had. The way his whole body moved on top of me—the sweetest rub, then the lushest friction, then throbbing velvet torture. God please let me come. I felt completely subordinated, pinned helpless and squirming under his big body. I held on tight. I could hear myself squeaking, grunting, moaning. I hated those noises, but I couldn’t stop. He was watching me. I opened my eyes and there he was. My legs spread wide. After a while, he reached down with one hand and pushed them back closer together. Acute pleasure was forcing me to give myself up. Inside the fierce heat I was thinking, ‘I love you.’ Michael whispered in my ear. I heard him say, “You’re here to stay. You’re doomed.” I wish I knew what it was he did. Not just in and out, he somehow slid up into me over and over until eventually even I would come. Not this time. I couldn’t quite let go, and he couldn’t hold it anymore. He stayed inside shuddering and twitching for a while afterward. I didn’t want him to pull out; I wanted more. My tears on my face.
He let himself out of me slowly and reached for a cigarette. I felt a keen sense of loss. Maybe if I had really come, put my hand down there and really got off, I thought, I wouldn’t feel so bereft now. But no, probably even that wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I would have felt deprived anyway, at least wistful. The better it was, the tougher it was when it ended. I could never get enough when it was that good. I remembered now why I used to think he was indispensable. I sighed out loud. Everything was missing; I was manless once again.
But he kept close. I could be thankful for that at least. I knew there would be more; I could tell and felt relief. Michael would never leave a woman hanging. He was strangely devoid of ego in that area. If I weren’t satisfied, he didn’t make me feel like I was hard to please. Like me, Michael had come to believe it was absolutely crucial that everyone have an orgasm one way or the other. He had read all about Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Box, and he knew that sexual frustration caused most of the misery between people.
He was lying now to my right, on the outside of one of the single beds. He reached for my pack of Newports and handed me a cigarette, lighting both of ours with his Bic. We lay there in the faint glow of the pin light. Then, without warning, he switched his Camel to his left hand, turned over, and grabbed my face with his right hand. His left arm now dangled off the narrow bed. He lay half on his side with his face up against mine and proceeded to turn my head in both directions, back and forth, while he conned my face as if he were looking for clues.
“I can’t get a handle on what you look like.” He was staring into my eyes now. “What do you look like? I’ve never been able to figure it out. All year, while you were gone, I tried to picture your face, but it always came up different.”
He continued to maneuver my head in the tiny glare of the pin light now as if my eyes didn’t exist, as if my face were a many-sided crystal he was trying to make sparkle. Then he thrust my head away.
“Too many planes in that face or something,” he said.
After which he collapsed on his stomach and lay there for a minute with his own face buried in his hands. Finally, when I was about to throw my arms around him, he jumped up, full of pep, a shining tribute to the regenerative power of speed, and made us both another drink.
Now I was back at the Traveling Medicine Show, waiting for the opportunity to boast to Michael about turning my first trick. I was armed with solid evidence of my intention to stay. Trading sex for money was the only way I could think of to get Michael to take me seriously.
I watched Tommy Shelter, an old friend of Michael’s from their Village days, climb on the tiny stage at the back of the room for a second set. He started thumping chords on his acoustic guitar with so much urgency you thought the strings might break, and singing his signature brand of delta blues with a driving rock ‘n’ roll beat, preaching to the converted. The story went that Tommy had learned how to play guitar on the stage of the Black Box around the same time Bob Dylan was still passing the kitty around. This would explain why Tommy strummed and hammered with such poignant frustration. His voice, majestic and raspy at once, shot through with soulful passion, catapulted him to the top. The fact that Tommy was missing his upper front teeth didn’t hurt either. The way he slid over his f’s and dropped his t’s made him sound like a very old, wise sharecropper. Really, he was only a year or two past thirty, with a Nubian cameo of a face. He was one of a dozen or so luminaries in the music business who still showed up periodically to try out new material.
The bar crowd was so blasé, so hard-boiled, so wired on speed and booze, it did not make a fuss over these musicians, who would otherwise get mobbed by groupies in the more fashionable clubs downtown. As a matter of fact, the regulars at the Traveling Medicine Show made a point of paying attention to the music but turned their backs on the performers themselves once they stepped off the stage. When two of the Beatles and their latest Uriah Heep manager showed up in the late sixties (at the height of their careers), Michael put them at a table in the corner, where they sat pointedly ignored by everyone until, perhaps deflated, they slunk back out into the night.
The real stars were the bartenders. These Irish Americans were big, handsome, and profligate with their drugs. They free-poured the booze and made generous love, drawing young women like me who, released by the Pill, would rather hang around getting smashed until last call in the hope that we might go home with one or the other of them than wait idly backstage at the ready for some stuck-up musician, or, God forbid, sit demurely by the phone, silently praying.
And here was Jimmy the bartender, still wiping the bar with the same dirty rag. A company man he was, devoted to Michael in this case, but Jimmy would have to have been devoted to someone. He was that kind of guy. Jimmy was a refugee from a big football school in Indiana. The army wouldn’t take him for some reason; he’d tried to enlist. He was a large and, unfortunately for him, open-faced strawberry blond who blushed for no reason at all. Rather than play against type, Jimmy hung on to his midwestern guilelessness, oblivious to the mores of the scene in which he now found himself. Michael adored Jimmy—“4-H Jimmy,” he called him—and took every personal kind of pain to drag him down into the muck with the rest of us. Right away, he had turned his hick buddy onto speed, derailing Jimmy off his career track. (Armed with a degree for it, Jimmy had once longed to go into the hotel business, but all hopes for that were gone now.)
Michael sat with his feet up on a second chair (he’d become more sedentary once he hit thirty) at his big, long table reserved for him to the left of the room against the wall. He had on a pair of giant earphones, which were not attached to anything; it simply meant he did not wish to be disturbed. He was polishing his cracked moccasins with a paper napkin as if they were Guccis, leaning forward to get a good look at them in the overhanging light. He kept pushing a lock of his long black hair off his face as he did so, until exasperated, he pulled his hair back in the fat rubber band he had been wearing around his fuzzy wrist. Michael seemed completely preoccupied with these self-appointed tasks, completely uninterested in his old friend Tommy, who was singing a mournful refrain about freedom on the tiny stage at the far end of the saloon.
And as always, Michael also seemed not to have noticed that I had just walked through the door. But 4-H Jimmy beamed and scooted over to where I was now standing at the bar.
“Janet, you sweet fox you—here again. I guess you really are back. And you do look fine tonight in that little black number...Dewar’s,” he said, pouring a glass with a few chips of ice in it full of scotch, spritzing the top with a little soda.
Then Bruno spotted me and broke out from a small crowd of regulars that hung wedged together in the corner. He sidled along the bar sideways like a crab, pushing his drink as he went, until he was standing next to me. He leaned over to Jimmy and whispered loudly in his ear, “She’s a feminist now.”
Bruno had cut one album about three years earlier that had produced one hit, the kind of upbeat pop tune lounge singers love to cover, and he’d been drinking in a steady, quiet way ever since, like an old railroad worker on a pension.
“A feminist? Nah. I never would have figured you for a feminist, Janet,” Jimmy said.
“It’s a fact. I saw an article she wrote for Gutter last year. That was you, am I right?” Bruno asked me, like a cop on the case.
Jimmy picked up the sticky bar rag and started pushing it around. “Is that true, or is he making it up?”
“It’s true, it’s true,” I said.
“No, no,” Bruno said, waving his hand and leaning over slightly as if to gather a thought from the sawdust on the barroom floor. Tommy Shelter was grinding away at his guitar. The rest of the customers were quiet.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Bruno said, pulling himself up. “She wrote about how men objectify women. How we use them like meat.” He turned to me. “But I gotta say, you do look pretty objectified yourself tonight.” He glanced at my breasts, still poking out of the low-cut black crepe dress, then at my crotch. “Pretty objectified.”
“Yeah, well, I got horny,” I said.
“Let’s drink to that,” Bruno said, waving his glass.
I turned away from Bruno to listen to Tommy’s cri de coeur pouring out over the stoned dive after midnight. I had a new status: I was a whore. In other words, past human redemption now, I didn’t have to be nice to anybody. Bruno sensed that he had been dismissed and retreated sideways again, guiding his drink along the length of the bar, back to his pals in the corner.
What I told Bruno about being horny was true as far as it went. In fact, I was chastened over the past year by the persistence of my desire. When I left the scene, I had been in a fury, a sweet, blind rage at men. I was tired of being pretty and playing a minor role. During the year that followed, I took to wearing hiking boots and a motorcycle jacket, I stopped shaving my legs and under my arms, and I joined up with a group of radical feminists who published Gutter. I practically never went to bed with anybody during that time, since, after a few abysmal experiments and to my dismay, I was clearly an irrevocable heterosexual. Too bad, especially when so many of my colleagues were gleefully coming out. And then, not long ago, my libido started to rise like a gorge inside of me, ripping up into my brain, until all I could think about was getting a man, and I didn’t care anymore whether I, the self, the person, was obliterated in the process. I needed rapture I decided, and fuck equality and fuck justice.
I had to come back. I missed Michael. Beyond that, I was a city kid who was used to hanging out. By the time I was thirteen, I was standing around with other delinquent teenagers on Madison Avenue street corners. There, as I posed coyly in front of Hamburger Heaven, I learned how to congregate. This is what I craved: the scene. Plans that normal people made, God, it was too much like work.
Having turned around to face the room, I leaned back with my elbows propped on the bar and, in my old black crepe dress, tried to convey the languorous attitude of a call girl. After a while, Michael removed his earphones. I was about to go over to his table when Melissa sailed in, dressed as usual in her halter top and cutoffs, her wild red hair shooting off in all directions, her scarecrow gait exaggerated-sloppy from quaaludes. She, too, had originally intended her destination to be Michael’s table, but, her head leading the way, she overshot the mark. Windmilling by, Melissa lurched instead into the middle distance, somewhere perilously close to the stage.
“Just another falling sparrow,” Michael said, sniffing the air, as she careened past him.
“The honeymoon’s over,” I said to myself. “Now I’m going to have to compete with this cunt. Well, fuck it. Maybe I won’t. Let him have her. Yeah, let the motherfucker wet-nurse her back to life all by himself.”
“Serves him right,” I said out loud as I twisted my body around to face Jimmy. I had eaten no dinner; the two Dexamyls I swallowed hours ago, before I turned my first trick, were starting to wear off, and Jimmy had already refilled my glass with barely diluted scotch. I was pretty drunk.
Eventually, Tommy Shelter stopped playing, gently laid his guitar down on the stool, climbed off the tiny stage, and began moving through the crowd in my direction. Right away, Michael was up pumping quarters into the jukebox, which was crammed with sleeper hits he had recorded off his favorite albums at a friend’s sixteen-track studio. A work of art, that jukebox. Michael panicked when there was no music. Keith Richards started singing, “You got the silver, you got the gold...” in his reedy voice. The smoke curling in the air seemed to be turning into incense, an ethereal blue. The whole room lurched into a downbeat rhythm. A kind of benign knowingness settled over the crowd, as if we had all been quietly blessed.
“You look fine, healthy. Your skin has a glow to it. The break from this scene did you good,” Tommy said, taking my elbow in his palm. He was wearing a long, flowing dashiki. He could’ve been some visiting African dignitary.
“What’ll you have?” Jimmy asked him.
“Oh, I don’t know, just a ginger ale,” Tommy said politely, modestly. “Would you like to come outside for a minute for a smoke?” he asked me, still cradling my elbow.
His bodyguard, Nighttrain, had moved up behind him, hugging the guitar now in its case, and was standing at his back.
“Sure,” I said.
The three of us stepped outside. Michael had followed us as far as the doorway. He kept peering at us until we disappeared around the corner. We were worthy of stares from any quarter: two black men, one in an African dashiki, the other one in loose overalls, and me in my cocktail dress. It was late and dead quiet, except for the sound of crickets chirping in the potted trees. Tommy lit up a joint. We passed it around for a while, gazing at the shiny pavement, wet from a brief shower, which shone green, red, green, red, under the changing walk/don’t walk light.
“Do you want to come home with me?” Tommy asked.
Nighttrain ignored us and stood watching the empty side street.
“The last time I went to your house, he was there the entire time, right in the room with us,” I said, nodding in the direction of Nighttrain.
“Let’s go to your place then.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a place right now. Crashing at my mother’s house. As a matter of fact, I’m looking.”
“That’s no problem. Let me think, there’s Jade, but no, she’s too street for you. I know, Sigrid, just right! She’s got a big pad on the West Side, right off the Park. I’m sure she’d put you up for a while if I asked her,” he said. “Oh, Sigrid, she’s a dream. You two will get along, I promise you.”
“Is she straight?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, she likes boys, right?”
Tommy laughed. “Right,” he said.
“That’s good, ’cause my last roommate kicked me out for being straight,” I said.
“Don’t worry, those days are over,” he said, sounding as if he knew.
Tommy took my number, or rather, my mother Maggie’s number, and promised to call. He didn’t ask me to go with him again. That impressed me.
After we finished smoking the reefer, which on top of the booze knocked me out, Tommy Shelter and Nighttrain took off, while I, sensing I was about to vomit and hoping to make it to the privacy of the toilet, marched myself back inside.
