by Sara Gran
Tony thought for a moment. “Raquel, I think. Maybe Roxanne? I don’t know. The girls’ll know, they’ll remember. But honestly, Joe, I’m not even sure it’s the same girl.”
“How about the guy?”
Tony shrugged. “After a while, they all look alike.”
I knew what he meant. I walked to the back, where the girls sat on stools by the bar. They were laughing and complaining over their half-price drinks, probably talking trash about Tony and the customers and the girls who were off that evening.
I recognized one of the girls, a brunette in a bright red dress, and I walked over to her. “Daisy,” I said. She turned and looked at me. I could tell she didn’t recognize me. The laughter quieted down. “I worked here for a while, maybe eight years back. I’m not surprised you don’t remember me,” I told her. “I spent most of my time in the first stall in the ladies’ room.”
That got a laugh from her and the rest of the girls. The first stall was bigger than the rest, and all the dope fiends preferred it for shooting. So now they knew I was telling the truth.
“Looking for work again?” Daisy asked, a bit friendlier now.
“No, actually, I’m looking for them.”
I gave her the picture of McFall and Nadine. She looked at it and then back up at me. “Did she work here?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“She kinda looks familiar. . . . Gina, come here and look at this.” A tall slim girl in a pink dress came down from the end of the bar. She looked at the photo over Daisy’s shoulder.
“I don’t know,” Gina said, with a rough Brooklyn accent. “Isn’t she the girl who left to go work at the Royale?”
“Maybe,” Daisy said. “What was her name, anyway?”
Gina shrugged. “Jeez, they come and go so fast. Roxy?”
“Nah,” Daisy said. “That ain’t it. That was the girl who moved to Alaska.”
A dark Puerto Rican girl leaned over and looked at the photo. “No,” she said, with a Spanish accent. “That’s the girl who went to the Royale. I went there once with a girlfriend—don’t tell Tony, for Christ’s sake—and I saw her there.”
“When was that?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Over a month ago.”
Gina pointed at McFall. “I dunno. But him, I think I’ve seen him before. Hey, Clara,” she called. “Clara, come take a look.” Clara was a pretty, curvy blonde in a fancy strapless white dress, like a girl might wear to a formal. She looked too young to be here. She hopped off her bar stool and came over to look. When she saw the photo she blinked and pursed her lips, just enough to see it if you were looking real close.
“No,” she said quietly. I imagined that she always talked like that, quiet and soft. “I’ve never seen either one of them.”
Daisy passed the photo down the bar. The rest of the girls said they hadn’t seen either of them. I thanked them, and they went back to their drinks and their chatter. Except Clara, the blonde. She sat on her stool and looked at the floor.
“Hey,” I said to her, smiling. “Let’s have a drink.”
She nodded. I took her by the arm and led her over to a table a few yards away from the bar, where we sat across from each other. She didn’t resist. Her arm was soft and practically limp and it sort of made you feel like crying to touch her.
“How do you know him?” I asked.
She shrugged, defeated. Her pretty face looked young and tired. She looked down at the floor again. “We went out to dinner a few times, that was all.”
“You meet him here?”
She nodded. “Yeah. We went out to dinner a few times, that was all.”
But that wasn’t all. She was still looking down at the floor. “Why’d you only go out a few times?”
“That guy,” she said, sighing. “He seemed different, you know? Nice. He really seemed like somebody.”
“And then?”
She kept her eyes down at the floor.
“Did you go to bed with him?” I prodded.
She looked up. “Yeah, I did. And when I woke up in the morning, all my money was gone. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars. I was saving it in a little tin on my dresser.”
“You ever see him again?”
She shook her head, relaxing back into a slouch, her eyes turning back toward the floor. “Boy. It took me a long time to save up that two hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
I talked with Tony for a while before I left. When I was getting ready to go a group of five businessmen came in. They were fat, with shiny pink faces, and they were laughing like going to spend money on taxi dancers was the funniest thing they had ever done. Like that’s why they were doing it—for laughs. When the girls by the bar saw them come in they pulled themselves up a little straighter and stopped making jokes and put on demure, hopeful smiles. Like they were just waiting for the right fat businessman with the right red face in the right cheap suit to come and save them.
On my way out I saw that Clara was still sitting at the table where I left her, alone, looking down at the floor.
Chapter Seven
Islept late the next day because I could. If I was going to the Royale there was no point in going before the sun went down. I’d thought I’d heard something about April showers bringing May flowers but it must have just been a rumor, because here we were in May and it was pouring like hell. It was raining when I woke up and still raining after I cleaned up my room and picked up my wash and put away my clothes and went shopping for new stockings and gloves and got ready to go out.
Late in the afternoon I took the subway up to Times Square, where I went to the Automat for lunch. I’d grown up just outside the Square, in Hell’s Kitchen, and coming down to the Automat was a big treat. It was always loud and busy and full of regular working people—stiffs, my mother called them. People with regular jobs, people who owned houses, or at least I imagined they did. In Hell’s Kitchen we’d moved from one tenement or rooming house to another every few months. My mother would get us kicked out for one reason or another—too many parties, too much noise, too many men coming and going all night, and of course the rent was always late. I couldn’t remember half of the rooms we’d lived in, which was probably for the best. Sometimes I’d walk by a run-down building on Fifty-fifth Street and think it looked familiar, but I was never really sure.
In the Automat you’d put a nickel or a dime in a machine and open a little glass door and get a sandwich or a dish of macaroni with cheese or a piece of cherry pie. I never knew until I was older that there were ladies working behind the machines, putting the food in. When I was a kid I’d come and get a Coke. I could never afford anything good, and it’s hard to steal from the Automat—you could do it if you caught the door just after someone had gotten their dish and you reached far back, but then a man would come over and kick you out. Those ladies saw everything, I guess. When I got older I learned that if you hung around with a cup of coffee and looked hungry a man would always come along to buy you something. The trick then was to leave before the man wanted payback for the nickel he’d spent on pie.
But now I had plenty of dough, and I had two pieces of pie without having to look over my shoulder. When I
left the Automat it had stopped raining and I walked around for a while. Times Square was full of tourists looking up at the lights. Maybe they didn’t have electricity back at home. On the corner of Forty-second and Seventh a group of queer boys hung around in tight dungarees, waiting for tricks, insulting each other and laughing at their own jokes and trying to pass the time. In front of the dime museum on Forty-second Street a barker in a coat and tails with a turban on his head tried to talk the people passing by into seeing Professor Thaddeus’s Educated Fleas. I declined. I’d seen them before and they weren’t all that educated. A group of sailors in navy whites stood around and watched the barker, wondering over it all, and an old man in a trench coat, worn at the cuffs, was watching along with the sailors. The old man’s face hung down with age, and a few gray
hairs were left under the rim of his hat. Under the trench coat he wore a suit that had been pretty sharp ten years ago, when he’d bought it, but now it was faded and shiny from being cleaned too many times. The old man kept his eyes on the barker, but slowly, one step at a time, he was moving closer to one of the sailors.
The old man was just getting ready to relieve the sailor closest to him of his wallet when the barker spotted him. The barker opened his mouth to say something when I stepped in and took the old man by the arm. “Grandpa!” I said, loudly. “I’ve told you a thousand times, I don’t want you spending your relief check on the naked girls in the dime museum!”
The old man was Yonah Ross, probably the oldest living junkie in New York—he wasn’t all that old but it was still a pretty big accomplishment. Part of it was due to the fact that he never sold it, like most do at one time or another, so no one ever had a beef with him. Instead he stuck to street cons, from pickpocketing and shoplifting to three-card monte, selling fake opium to tourists and leading sailors to fake hookers. He had lived with my mother for a while when I was a girl. A lot of men had lived with my mother but Yonah was different. He liked kids and he taught me a lot.
The sailors looked at each other and decided that naked girls and educated fleas were worth a dime. They went inside. The barker took their money and then turned around to hiss at Yonah. “You’re lucky she showed up,” he said, “or I’d have the coppers here. Now beat it, and don’t come back.”
Yonah looked glum as we walked away. “Jesus,” he said, after he thanked me for getting him out of there. “That son-of-a-bitch carney. Who’s he think he is? You know I knew his old man, and him, he never gave me a hard time. I used to steer guys to the museum and they let me have the crowds out front. We used to work together back then, everyone in the Square. The hookers would let me know who had the rolls and I’d let them know who I’d already gotten to, so we wouldn’t all be wasting our time. Now it’s every man out for himself. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out here.” He shook his head at the immorality of it all. We walked past Howard Johnson’s. Yonah had his eye on a couple of out-of-town businessmen standing in front, but I walked him past them. He smiled at me. “Jesus, Joey, you look great, just great. How you feeling these days? You doin’ good?”
“Great,” I said. “I’m doing great. But listen, Yonah, let me buy you a drink. Maybe you can help me with something.”
“Sure, doll, sure. But I gotta go back to my room for a bit just now. You want to come?”
I went along with him to his room on Forty-second and Ninth. We talked about the good old days on the way there. All the fun times we had when he taught me how to grind up oregano so it looked like weed, and you could sell it to suckers for a dollar or more. Those grand old times when he sat me down and explained to me what a badger was, and introduced me to a man who would pull it off with me—I’d pretend to be a hooker and the man would pretend to be my angry father. I’d find a trick and just before we did the deed Pa would bust in, and the trick would give Pa all the cash he had on him to stop him from calling the cops. Yonah had meant well, though, and I’d probably be a lot worse off now if I had never met him. You needed something to fall back on in this life.
He lived in a hotel called the Prince Alexander. It seemed like half the fleabag hotels in the world were called the Prince Something-or-Other. And all of them used to be nice. When you walked into the Prince Alexander there were marble floors covered in enough filth not to need rugs, and a wooden desk for registration that was wrapped up in a chicken wire cage. That was something you could count on in any Prince hotel. The desk would be wrapped in chicken wire.
Behind the desk was a skinny young guy reading a girlie magazine. He nodded at Yonah when we came in. In the lobby a group of men around Yonah’s age, drunks and nutcases, hung around watching life go by, or at least the slice of it that came through the Prince Alexander. We stopped to say hello. I knew some of them: One-Eyed Fred and Fifty-third Street Jackson and Nuthouse Jim. It was hard to believe it now but once they’d really been something, the old men in the Prince Alexander—con men and hustlers and stick-up men. When I was a kid we all wanted to be just like them when we grew up. And now it was looking more and more like I would be.
Off to the side sat an old gent wearing a brown suit and a white shirt with a high collar and a bowler hat that looked like it was from 1915. He was tall and thin and sat perfectly straight, talking to himself softly without stopping. From what I heard it was about a woman named Emily.
“Emily said she would be home in five minutes but it wasn’t five minutes it was six, six and a half, a half dozen doughnuts . . .”
Yonah led me through the lobby to the elevator, which he ran himself to take us up to the third floor. At the end of a long hallway lined with peeling wallpaper and dim bare-bulb lights and locked doors was Yonah’s room. It pretty much made my room at the Sweedmore look like a suite at the Plaza. There was just enough room for a single bed—a cot, really—and an old green chair with the stuffing poking out. The cot had dirty grayish sheets on it, tangled up with each other in a knot. Clothing hung from nails on the wall.
“Sit, doll.” Yonah smiled and took off his hat and coat and put them on the bed. I sat on the chair. The room smelled awful. On the floor was an overflowing ashtray. “I’ll be right back,” he said.
Yonah left the room to get his works and his dope, probably hidden in the hall somewhere. It was safer there. If the cops tossed his room it’d be clean, and if anyone found his stuff in the hall they couldn’t prove it was his. I looked around. A yellowed sheet was hung over the window but it sagged on one side, and I could see that the sun had come out just in time for it to go down, turning the sky yellow and gray. A minute later Yonah came back with his kit, wrapped in a dirty white handkerchief, in his hand.
“Excuse me for a minute, Josephine,” he said. He sat down at the head of the bed, facing the door. His back was to me but I could hear everything he was doing. First he took off his right shoe and let it drop to the ground, and then his sock. Then he measured a little junk from a paper envelope into a spoon. Next he used his works to suck up a few drops of water from a glass I guessed he kept under the bed and squirted it into the spoon. Then he lit a match and heated up the mixture in the spoon until it was a good smooth gold-colored liquid. Finally he pulled the whole mixture up into his works through a little piece of cotton. Then he poked around for a while, cursing a few times as he looked for a good vein. “Ah, all right, here we go,” he said as he found a good one. Then he injected into a vein in his foot. The veins in his arms were probably gone twenty years ago, collapsed from overuse. He was lucky to still have his feet left—for most of the old-timers it was the crotch or the neck.
He sat quietly for a minute. It wasn’t that being high felt so good, especially not when you’d been shooting as long as Yonah had. You could hardly even call it being high. It was that nothing else felt bad. There were no aches, no pains, no memories, no shame. Nothing mattered now. It was like junk took you up just a few feet above everybody else, just enough so you didn’t have to involve yourself in all the petty problems of the world. Those weren’t your problems anymore. Let someone else worry. You could watch it all and feel nothing. For that little piece of time you had everything you needed, everything you had ever wanted.
He put his sock and shoe back on and turned around to face me, swinging his legs over to the side of the bed.
“Jesus, Joe, are you okay?”
I realized I had been holding my breath. My jaw was clenched so tight it hurt to let it go. I took a deep breath.
“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.” Yonah hadn’t taken a big shot, just enough to maintain, and so he was good for a couple of questions. I showed him the picture of Nadine Nelson and Jerry McFall and asked if he knew them.
Yonah thought for a moment, nodding his head. Then he got a look on his face, like he had just tasted a quart of milk and found out that it had spoiled. “Yeah. Him I know. He
r, no, I don’t think so—maybe I seen her, but I ain’t sure. But him, I know who he is. Jerry McFall.”
“What’s he all about?”
Yonah shifted position on the bed, making himself comfortable. He sighed with contentment. “He’s an ass-hole. A pimp.”
I had guessed as much, but I hadn’t been sure. I didn’t know exactly where Nadine was now, but at least I knew what she was doing. “Does he use?” I asked.
Yonah nodded. “Yeah, he’s been a junkie for years. But he’s a real swell, you know,” he said sarcastically. “Goes out on the town, hangs out with all the punk hustlers trying to make good. Wears fancy suits, makes like a real big shot. Says he’s in pictures.” Yonah laughed. “Sometimes he takes pictures of the girls to sell to magazines. You know what I mean. But how the guy makes a living is, he’s got girls working for him. All on dope. And he sells, too. Not much. Just to the girls mostly, the girls he’s got working for him. You know how it is. He’s gotta take care of ’em or they’d find someone else.”
“Does he sell good stuff?” I asked.
Yonah shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t buy from him. He’s got a whole crowd, young folks, I don’t really mix with them.”
“Seen him around lately?” I asked Yonah.
“I ain’t seen him,” Yonah said. “But I’ll keep my eyes open. What do you want with a punk like that, anyways?”
“Not much,” I said. “Someone just asked me to find him, that’s all.”
“Eh,” Yonah said. “It won’t be too hard. Guys like that, they’re always out and about, painting the town red.” He closed his eyes for a minute. I looked down at the floor. There was a newspaper, two weeks old, open to an advertisement for a ladies’ dress shop.
I picked it up. Yonah heard the paper rustle and opened his eyes. He smiled. “Hey, did you see? That’s Shelley, in the paper. You can have it if you want.”
“No,” I started. “That’s not—” But then I looked again. He was right, it was Shelley. I hadn’t recognized her. She was wearing a black dress that was tight at the waist and full on the bottom. Just two little straps held it up on top. Her hair was combed so smooth it shone, done up in a big thing on the top of her head, and she had on more makeup than a hooker, although somehow it didn’t look whorish at all. Under the picture was printed: Just in time for spring!
