The Collected Novels of Charles Wright

by Charles Wright

  Except for the long stone ledges, there is nothing. The playground equipment has been removed. The toilets have been sealed for eternity in concrete. All that remains are the ledges, trees, and elegant lampposts. Most of the time, only a few lamps are lit. The other night, four teenage boys marched through the garden and surveyed the scene. Then three of the boys ran out of the garden. The fourth boy returned. He walked through the garden like a Midwestern basketball star before a county championship. But his turf was urban. Stone under those imitation French cycling shoes. His hand was steady as he shot out all the lights. And in the semidarkness the boy looked over at me and smiled. I saluted him. Hadn’t I reported him to the police (at their request) before? Once, surrounded by a gang, I cleverly signaled to a policeman. He knew that the boys were throwing bottles and rocks into the street, had hit a woman with a baby and had broken the window of a Ford station wagon.

  And of course, there are the dogs. People unleash their dogs; smile proudly as if they had conceived them on some passionate, dark night. Their eyes never leave the dogs, even when they defecate on the grass where winos sleep, children play, young lovers love. It is very sad. The dog owners appear to be sane, intelligent, well dressed. The artistic types are fashionably disheveled.

  The saddest scene that I encountered in the Chinese Garden was not the murder of Wing Ha Sze, nor a very masculine wino serving head at high noon. No, it was a fat, laughing Chinese girl about three years old. Even today, I can see the girl’s parents’ mood shift from pride to horror. Sunlight through the full-leafed trees, gleaming on the pale blue satin hair ribbons, the blue-and-white gingham dress. The laughing girl began running and fell to the ground. A rich image of dog excrement colored her bosom like a Jim Dine valentine.

  I can also see three mothers and four children picnicking on the grass. It was late August. A humid afternoon. The pollution count was high, and traffic cried, crawled across Manhattan Bridge. I locked my mental camera at 5:10, according to the clock in the parking lot on Bayard Street. Opened another King Rheingold, content with the world around me and the world out there. That is, until a half-ass domestic French poodle tried to dry-fuck one of the children, a boy about four years old. The three mothers, elegantly balancing cigarettes and bottles of Miller High Life in their hands, might have been figures in a Bonnard landscape. But the screaming small boy’s fear brought me back into the present. I finished my beer and watched the horny dog mount another child, a toddling tot, a boy still a little uneasy about what was underneath his feet. The excited dog knocked the boy to the ground. The dog’s tongue flapped as if dying of thirst. The laughing mothers continued to smoke and drink beer.

  I stood up, looked north through the arches of Manhattan Bridge, through the pollution screen toward the Empire State Building, then south toward the old buildings of Chinatown, sitting on a real-estate dish of excellent sweet pork. The cubistic Chatham Towers rise above them. With soot powdering their historic façades, municipal New York and Wall Street overpower them. However, new buildings such as the World Trade Center rise above history, as if to embrace the sky. In Chatham Square, chained to a young tree, three metal chairs proclaim JESUS SAVES.

  But there are eighteen broken parking meters in my garden, like the end of a rip-off happening of abstract sculpture. Drug addicts, functioning as human jack-hammers, carried them up from the streets between midnight and dawn. I arrived at 6 A.M. with coffee, the Sunday New York Times, and thought: Where are the police, the concerned citizens? Indifference might have a past. Am I right in assuming that it has a future?

  Of late, small armies of policemen (usually Chinese, with a couple of novice Wasp detectives) march through my garden on a groping, fascist search. But there is no one except me, two young lovers, and the winos. Open, open! There is no place to hide. Frequently, New York’s finest question me, their hands roughly moving from the top of my head to my feet. Then, apparently unsatisfied, they flash their brilliant flashlights in my face. This does nothing for them. So they turn the flashlights up into the thirty-nine trees. And as they walk toward the Bayard Street exit, I ask if I can help them. Their voices, like their eyes, are elsewhere. You see, New York’s finest say they are simply on a routine patrol, which is a goddamn lie. I am the senior citizen of the Chinese Garden, the resident historian, the wild-grass accountant. I also do extra duty outside of the garden. Within a ten-block radius of the garden, I am familiar with crime and corruption. Therefore, I hope no one will be foolish enough to think the rise in crime has anything to do with the police’s presence in my garden.

  The sentry knows who patrols the desecrated island of concrete and trees. Just the other day, a daring group of British tourists marched into the garden. The excitement of discovery seemed to color their voices and eyes. A Byzantine ruin, or a secret Persian Garden? Here, marijuana, wine, baseball outrank young love and volleyball. Here, the sons of Chinese immigrants are becoming skilled American baseball players. Dressed in red, the Free Mason volleyball team plays an excellent game, lacking only American competitive drive. Their game is passive, as if volleyball were programmed and, chop—a programmed karate class, still working out at a quarter of nine in the evening.

  The sky had not turned dark, and I watched the teacher and his male and female assistants. There was something uncomfortable about their voices and mannerisms. I tried not to think of the future of the mixed racial bag of ghetto students. No matter, no matter. Strange green thumbs are cultivating young plants here. I repeat: no matter, no matter—all of these people are in no way part of my garden. I do not regret their invasion. No, I regret America’s invasion into the porous walls of their minds.

  But the Cat Woman is the most radiant human being I encountered in the Chinese Garden. She arrived one afternoon in the summer of 1970, looking like a thrift-shop visionary, moving as if her yellow-shod ballerina feet were monitored by snails. The Cat Woman bowed toward the volleyball players in the former playground. Ah! She smiled—waltzed under the full-leafed trees that were like a roof. Presently I could see her lips move. Now and then, the Cat Woman held her hands above her eyes, then walked to the center of the garden. You could say the center is a cross. (The center has four squares of greenery.) Anyway, the Cat Woman prayed briefly, then stood between two trees and raised her arms toward the watercolor sky; then apparently passion seized her. She fell to the ground and began clawing in the dry earth with her hands, trying to dig up the beloved cat she had buried there the year before. More than a dozen people were in the garden that afternoon, and without talking to any of them, I discovered that the Cat Woman’s father, and then her nine-year-old daughter, had failed to give her enough love. The dead cat, “He was so nice.” Life was a soufflé without him.

  Almost a year later, I thought I saw the Cat Woman. I was going home, taking the tourist route through Chinatown. I stopped at the clam house which is across the street from the garden. The moon was full. City lights glowed. The neon veneer of Chinatown created a rainbow haze. But the woman I saw was more than sixty feet from where I stood popping clams. Almost at the top of the second entrance’s steps, where the trees began and where the light is dim. I ran toward the woman like a man possessed with a vision.

  Indeed, it was the Cat Woman. She was blessed with a vision. She knew that someone would enter the deserted garden and ask her a question. Her young daughter was fine. But mothers and fathers were out this year, she said.

  “The cat,” she exclaimed, offering me a drink from a Hiram Walker pint. “You remember. Well, I’ve got good news for you. He came back to life, and I’m so happy.”

  Was there a time when a once dead, now live cat, or a child with a balloon, would have startled me in the Chinese Garden? Yes, there was a time. It was during the early stage of the Great Society.

  LIKE MOST MEN, the Chinese prefer foreign sexual hors d’oeuvres, and there are many Occidental whores in Chinatown. But whorehouse hotels do not exist. Dollar-sign sex takes place in cars, in door entrances on dark,
deserted business streets, or in hotels near the Bowery. Recently, encounters have taken place in the Chinese Garden. Miss Nell from Dallas, Texas, works here. An exceptionally large woman, Miss Nell appears to be powdered from head to foot with white chalk dust. She looks like a visitor from a country where there is no sunlight. Strawberry-blond ringlets circle her wide pleasant face. Her voice is like a tiny rusty bell. Extremely sensitive about her size and profession, Miss Nell will exit from a taxi as if taking the first steps to the funeral of a beloved friend. By the time she has planted her feet on the sidewalk, she has become the sultry, shrewd businesswoman and moves slowly, like a great, proud queen, her bell-like voice a litany of love for sale.

  Shortly before 8 P.M. one night, Miss Nell arrived in the Chinese Garden with a customer. Standing under a Victorian lamppost, she surveyed the garden like a field marshal. Two young lovers sat with their dog near the former playground.

  Miss Nell, wearing a sensational black-and-white mini dress and white sandals (a pair of 1940 Joan Crawford “fuck me” shoes), motioned to the nervous man to follow her. She held a large white handbag, white gloves, a clear plastic umbrella decorated with white flowers in her right hand. A perfect Fellini whore, she moved through the tall grass toward a large tree about fifteen feet from where I sat. The man, who had his hands in his pockets, followed at a fast pace.

  Still clutching the white bag, gloves, umbrella, Miss Nell went through the ritual of going down on the man. She worked very hard. She worked with great feeling. She worked like a professional. Miss Nell worked for a very long time. Now and then, she’d look up at the man, and you could almost read her mind. Finally, she stood up, lifted her skirt, and offered her buttocks. This did not help the man, who was now working very hard. Miss Nell decided to try the door of life. Still clutching the bag, umbrella, gloves, she put her large arms around the man. She might have been a mother comforting a small child. But Miss Nell and the man moved with great passion. He was very relaxed and even smiled. He did not reach a climax.

  Exhausted, Miss Nell led the man over to the ledge where I was sitting. The man smiled and joked. Miss Nell was angry. She looked down at me, opened the clear plastic umbrella with the pretty white flowers on it, and tried to block my view. It was like trying to cover the Empire State Building with a single bed sheet.

  Once more the hard-working professional went down on her customer. And I thought they would make it this time. But Miss Nell jumped up and screamed, “My God! What’s wrong with you? I ain’t got all night. I’ve got to take care of business.”

  The man was still smiling and asked for a two dollar refund.

  Miss Nell snapped open her white handbag and said, “With pleasure.” Then she walked out of the garden swiftly, her head down like an unhappy queen. The man followed at a distance.

  Then the young lovers, who are almost nightly visitors, rose and walked out of the Chinese Garden, the small auburn dog running ahead of them, his metal leash hitting the pavement dully, sounding as I imagined Miss Nell would sound with a very bad cold.

  A profound statement from a country-club divorcée, age forty-two. A former secretary, the divorcée had also worked in advertising and public relations. It was almost midnight, and the tranquilizers and Scotch had failed to extinguish the lady’s anger: “Hell. People think alimony is easy. I worked sixteen years for that money. And when it runs out, I’ll become a whore. Men love whores. I know. Lennie married a bona fide whore.”

  The symposium, “Toward the Elimination of Prostitution,” reminded me of—say—the Ku Klux Klan in Iceland: absurd. The Babbitt sisters of Salem, Massachusetts, or simply a confused but sincere movement of sisters? Even the together women writers such as Susan Brownmiller were caught in the breeze that whispered Joseph McCarthy. The good, “straight,” middle-class white women should go underground like the Weathermen and produce an anti-prostitution pill, force chastity belts on the men they live with, or get married. Even an occasional lay would help. And although I’d vote for improving the female condition, I’m depressed by these hen-pecked solutions to the female-male misunderstanding. Depressed, depressed. It’s like trying to ejaculate inside a vagina the size of the entrance to the Holland tunnel.

  In a symbolical and a real sense, slavery hasn’t been formally abolished in the United States. But the majority of women who become prostitutes do so of their own free will. It seems like easy work and fast money. I refuse to subscribe to the women’s movement’s use of prostitutes as a Salvation Army cause. The propaganda oozes emotional perfume. The shtick is a roadrunner of a masculine Madison Avenue campaign. How effective will such a campaign be in our time? The good women stated it beautifully: “The topic, if allowed to be openly discussed, would have reached to the roots of our sexual fears and fantasies . . .” Ours is a perilous voyage. There is the uneasy knowledge that it might be our last; the harbor hasn’t been sighted. We could drown. How stupid of us! Why can’t we redesign the lifeboats, take a good hard look at our male-and-female relationship? Perhaps redefine sin, morality, and corruption for our time on this earth.

  The baptism of a whore is the acceptance of a pimp’s psychological rap. After this ritual, the “straight” woman becomes a whore and the pimp’s bank. If one rap fails to convince the “straight” woman, then the pimp will use another rap. Most pimps are not great lovers or handsome in the movie-star sense. I know a black, middle-aged pimp who is five feet tall and looks like a frog. Whores dig the man. They give him money, and he buys their clothes. All of them seem to be content with the arrangement. Recently I saw the pimp on Fourteenth Street. He had his arms around two of his girls, and all of them were smiling, and they might have been rehearsing for a 1980 television commercial.

  “Would you whore?” I asked a young actress who had worked briefly at a whore bar.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “No moral reason. I just wouldn’t enjoy the work.” But like most women, the actress found the whore-pimp scene fascinating. “I can understand how straight women fall for it. Especially emotionally insecure women. The rap is beautiful. Reassuring. If straight men used the rap of a pimp, male and female relations would improve.”

  “Would you make me whore?” Kitty asked.

  The words jammed against my Protestant shelter. But my male ego tripped. Kitty would whore for me. She would do anything for me. All in the name of love.

  “If it were profitable for both of us.” I laughed and took her to bed. Our relationship was warm, uncomplicated. We never mentioned whoring again. But a month later, Kitty told me that she had a dinner date at the Waldorf Astoria (Count Basie had just opened). The following afternoon, Kitty gave me $50 to buy food. She was an excellent cook. Mentally, the dinner that night lacked flavor. Of course, I could have got stoned, beat up on Kitty, and put her down or rapped about the fabulous Waldorf, then changed gears and, ever so sincere, rapped about a poor, uptight writer who loved her. That’s it: there’s nothing else to know. Kitty was an occasional whore, and it brought her little joy, although I believe she enjoyed it in a subconscious sense: it was degrading.

  Last year, a twenty-year-old addict asked me if I would take money from her. I needed money, and she wanted to help me. I was for real. Hadn’t I from the very beginning respected her? I had never put her down, made her feel like dirt.

  There are a variety of trees in the prostitution forest. My friend’s wife doesn’t enjoy oral sex, but tries to go along with the program. My friend, the father of two children, loves his wife. They have been married for eight years. A mistress would definitely complicate their relationship. The husband, father, lover, friend has whores orally.

  And oh, you earthshaking movement sisters! What about the boys in Vietnam? Your countrymen, husbands, brothers, lovers, and friends. As they wait to kill or be killed, would you deny them one of life’s greatest pleasures? Would you want them to use five fingers? As a former army man, I want to tell you this: I put my young life on the line for you. I hel
ped build roads, schools in Korea. I gave my time and money to those poor people. I hate to think of all the women and children who might have starved without some Korean woman selling her body for an hour, a night, or a month. To relieve the fear of the uneasy truce, boredom, and petty politics of barracks (tent) life, there was nothing else a man could do but get stoned and screw. Or use five fingers, abstain, or—a sign in an army john: FINCH WOULD DO IN A PINCH.

  Prostitutes forever! Long live the golden girls of the streets!

  I’m for legalizing prostitution. Suspicious of the women’s movement’s motives in their anti-prostitution drive. Afraid of competition? Outlawing prostitution gives “straight” women an advantage. But I doubt if it brings women and men together on an equal level of understanding, desire, and need.

  THE EAST VILLAGE worms its way through a Ponce de León garden of drugs. But flowers dry, die. In the sun, in a musical cigarette box on a glass-top coffee table, in an oven, and, fenced in a newspaper blanket (limp as pizza dough), on a radiator. A Reader’s Digest of scents, offering the fresh air of peace of mind or a hallucinating high.

  Journeying into the interior of Welfare-Drugsville, where the last of the flowers were in the final stage of exile, I remember the sparse summer trees seemed unreal: models for Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. In a ten-block area I encountered no police. The streets were monitored by junkies, thieves, pushers, a new breed of whores who sipped iced Cokes and coffee in the heat of afternoon. Domesticated hippies walked Doberman pinschers, German shepherds, or fashionable mongrels, while black and Puerto Rican teenagers, natives of “East Village” (the Lower East Side), mother-fuck each other with words. The ancient tenements are monuments to the splendor of welfare. The poor, the uneducated are powerless against the government’s yearly rape. Even whores get tired. Model tenements in Utopia! In lieu of flowers, garbage litters the pavement. Car arson is a big sport in the East Village (two cars in three days on East Eleventh Street between Avenues B and C). The fire department and police daily offer their services.