by Barbara Bell
“Too scrawny,” he said to Mandy, then looked at me. “But there’s a little more meat.”
I was already backing off when he jumped me. He was such an underfed, wiry thing I never thought he could have moved so fast, but he had me and I screamed.
He stunk like a dead possum, and I bit him on his teeth, because he had his mouth on me. I only chipped my right front lower. He lost two teeth. They just cracked off in my mouth like they were made of rotten wood or saltines. Mandy was hitting him over the back with a stick, and he was saying words I’d never heard before like he was hexing me. Mandy and me ran, me spitting out those teeth.
Ben had said the same to me. That was why he favored me. “You’ve got enough meat,” he said, “but not too much. Not fat. Straps don’t look good on fat. The scrawny girls can’t fill a cuff, don’t wear it tight. It’s your muscles pushing up, pressing against. It fills a man’s eyes.”
This is a chit, remembering Ben like that out of nowhere and what he did to me.
Ben was an artist. Ben was a playwright. It was Ben and his dark Sicilian eyes that I remembered most as I turned my corner.
He could devise theater strong enough to make men’s hearts fail. One time it really happened. The guy was some CEO up out of Philly. After he collapsed over me, his driver and Ben got him lifted up onto a cart that Ben used to move some of his equipment. They wrestled his dead body into the guy’s limo, and away the driver zoomed. I read the obit later that week, but didn’t recognize his picture. I wasn’t able to see him that night.
Ben started out just a regular pimp in Manhattan. Before that he’d worked the park taking tricks, but gave it up when he started “the bleed.” He was much better as a pimp, carefully choosing his batch of girls and guys.
By the time he tagged me, he was already making his way into pimp history.
Ben wormed his way up, attracting clients from the sleazy clubs, but getting a reputation. He didn’t just sell vaginas and assholes. He sold the whole show. It was his calling. And he kept getting better. He was already well known around the Manhattan hot spots with the wealthier set when I showed up.
Ben got all his business by word of mouth, refining his clientele as he went along. He picked me up on a corner in SoHo. I hadn’t eaten in four days. When I think about it now, I’m surprised he bothered. I was only sixteen and must have looked like shit.
Ben liked his players a little older. They worked the plays better. But no matter what their age, he never took the blank ones. That was the reason he kept me for so long. Ten years.
“With you, it’s always fresh. You’ve got a gift. If you were in Hollywood, you’d knock them dead.”
I never did tell him the truth, that I wasn’t acting a lot of the time.
Most prostitutes last five years tops. It’s the monotony and the disease. And if I’d been tagged by anybody but Ben, I would have had that same dull expression, that “I’ve screwed you a thousand times” look which shuts down a man’s excitement. They can still fuck, but it doesn’t grab, doesn’t scratch its way in.
Ben’s customers were, for the most part, regulars. One night with Ben and his kids, and they were hooked, coming back as often as they could afford it.
Ben was pricey. That’s how he did it. He was also a genius for timing and choosing his players. We didn’t get worn and dull, because we only worked one trick a night. Sometimes it was a long night as we raised the pitch of arousal like Hitchcock worked fear.
I craved it.
I loved the feel of the straps binding, the unknown cocks (a new one every night), the forced strippings. The whip I could have gone without, and the clips, but not all his clients wanted that. I was great at faking the beatings. I learned that from Daddy.
Daddy beat Vin and me so often that we got good at his rhythm, how he moved from the face to the stomach. We knew the timing of his kicks. We’d compare notes afterward, one with a nose bleeding, the other with lumps rising along the back or the side.
“He went from the face to the back this time,” or, “Watch his eyes. Watch his eyes. The hands follow.”
I got to be an expert at absorbing the blow, but not the brunt of it, falling back hard when it was expected, crumpling prematurely, and taking the kicks. He only meted out three or four of those. When you were on the floor, he just got disgusted and bored.
“Hit the floor,” I told Vin. “Act like he broke your nose. Squall like a baby and drop. The kicks are candy.”
That’s how I got through the first couple months with Ben. When he gets you, they lock you in the basement and call you a newborn. And after they dragged me up into the lights after what they did to me down there, I worshipped Ben with the vehemence of a good honest hatred. Ben was the only man I ever loved.
I guess that’s love in a nutshell.
Remembering Ben like this, experiencing an unusual bout of nostalgia, and having turned a corner, I got suddenly exhausted. It was two thirty. So I did what I’d been doing every night. I curled up on the floor of my closet to finish off the night, leaving the door cracked just enough for me to see. Jeremy slept like a log, so he never noticed. To tell the truth, Jeremy didn’t notice much.
The closet seemed the safest place to sleep, since I knew that the man would come some night and that he’d be wearing gym shoes. I hoped he wouldn’t think to look for me in the closet.
I dozed off for about an hour and drifted back to my nightmare, then woke up in a sweat. Gym shoes, I thought. Watch out for the gym shoes. Then I had a flash of something. It was almost a memory, but I couldn’t catch it. And it scared me so much, I got to shaking all over.
I pushed open the closet door a little and lay looking at my tastefully appointed studio.
Out, I thought. I’ve got to get out.
Then I heard Jeremy’s alarm go off. The alarm was a recording of dogs barking. I promised myself each morning that someday I was going to get a gun and shoot that damn alarm clock.
I ripped downstairs, hit the button on the coffee machine, and prepared my wife face again.
But that particular morning it cracked, it poured, it drained away, and I knew that I couldn’t take my life one more minute, the nightmares, Jeremy’s damn alarm clock, and the buying undercurrent pressing on me.
Jeremy didn’t even notice my lack of a smile.
He looked down at Pussy, his chihuahua stray. “Honey, do you think she looks sick?” he asked me.
Personally, I thought that little rat dog looked sick from the day he brought her home.
He worried over her all through his breakfast, me just nibbling at my piece of crumpet. Then he jumped up and kissed me, racing the engine of his Porsche in the garage and squealing off to a day on Wall Street.
I sat at the table in a daze, trying to imagine a way out, a clean escape.
When I look back at it now, I think that moment was touch and go, because the only thought that made sense was that I wanted to die. I have to admit, I wasn’t surprised. I just wondered why it took me so damn long to figure out that kind of thing. I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d only thought it sooner.
And as soon as I had my thought about dying, I felt better. So I threw on a very short skirt and a pair of heels, revved up the Porsche, and hit the gun stores.
The better the novel sold, the less I ate and slept. The less I slept, the more antsy I got, going for drives in the morning after Jeremy left. I did a pawnshop junket, fascinated by the knives. That’s when I saw my first Smith and Wesson with a long, sleek barrel.
“More accurate at a distance,” the pawnshop guy assured me, brushing his hand over mine as he handed it to me.
I wasn’t concerned about accuracy at a distance. I thought of the barrel in my mouth, pressing up against my tongue. I desired that gun. I fantasized. I thought of it like a lover, because of the thing that chased. The push behind was growing more insistent.
I soon became bored with the lack of firepower assortment in the pawnshops, so I visited gun
stores, taking in the incredible array of weaponry needed to preserve democracy and a safe society. And ammo. I discovered a diversity of bullets that would have made any ecosystem proud.
That morning, I was in a buying frame of mind. No jogging. No trip to the spa or pumping iron. No wearing out of stationary bikes or NordicTracking myself toward tranquility. I had a suicide to attend.
My favorite gun store was Bob’s Guns.
What an original name. Bob thought it up.
I tooled into the parking lot, walked inside, and waved at Bob. We’d become something like friends.
“Today I’m in a buying mood,” I said.
“The Smith and Wesson?”
“You got it.”
“With that nice long barrel,” he added, looking me up and down like he’d figured out my other talents, the ones Ben was so crazy about.
I’d thought ahead and brought my tote bag. So into the bag with my lipstick and blush, I dropped a box of bullets and a Smith and Wesson with a long barrel. They lay neat and cozy beside the seven-inch switchblade I’d picked up at Johnny’s Pawn. (Another original name.)
So much for a safe society.
It was high noon just like in the movies. I had a good seven hours to go and get the job done. I sang along with a CD of Hendrix on my way home, happy as a bee. Stacking in Rivertown, I belted out to “Hey Joe” while the garage door closed behind my Porsche. As I keyed in the alarm and opened the door into the house, the heat from the engine warmed the back of my thighs. It gave me another flash of memory. But it didn’t make any sense. I saw a knife pointing at my stomach. Dizzy now, I shook my head to make the picture go away. And the push got sharper, driving into me.
I skirted through the kitchen, leapt the back stairs, then floated, trying to prepare. I wafted into my studio, all the while assailed by the fine colonial house, the white carpeting, the dandelion-free lawn, the maid, and Jeremy.
I walked to my desk and sat in the great swivel chair, shoving six shiny cartridges into the chambers of the desirable S&W for my fabulous suicide. The phone rang and the answering machine picked up with my fake happy voice regretting our absence, pleading for a message, promising a call.
It was my agent telling me of two book signings, one in Manhattan and one in Philly, both next week. In my mind, everything went dull gray.
It’s this feeling of future that I get. I never had this future problem until I met Jeremy. There was something about him and his friends and their “tomorrow” this and “planning for the future” that. They harped about newer and bigger houses, brighter cars, new babies, preschool enrollment, private school costs, and projected college tuition. It socked my brain in, poking and pricking me like I’d got the ghosts in Ben’s basement.
Ben I could take, even on a bad day. But not Jeremy. Not interviews. Not a house big enough for twenty.
I turned the S&W around in my hands so that it was pointed at my face. I stuck the muzzle back near my throat, aiming toward my brain.
What a metaphor, I thought, remembering all those cocks I sucked working for Ben. That’s what reminded me of Violet.
Oh, lovely Violet. I thought of her then because Violet had “teeth.” She could suck a cock right off a man and swallow every drop of his mystery.
We all said, oh yes, Violet. Now Violet has teeth. That was the term. The really good cocksuckers had teeth. Never made any sense to me.
When Ben used us together, I was always in some grand strapped-down position of welcome. Violet was made to suck cock. Clients were always asking for Violet. Not only did she suck cock, she did it like she was terrified, struggling with her hands cuffed back.
They loved that, those men with their fat bellies, with their silly little drooping sacks, their powder puff skin, and their twitchy arrogant eyes. They were nothing but meat to us. We’d see the picture of one in the paper and laugh, saying, remember his thighs? They flapped. They trembled. His belly’s too high.
I still see their faces in magazines and newspapers every now and then. Some of them are presidents of corporations, or chairmen of boards of directors, or elected to some public office.
So, another chit that. Remembering Violet, I mean. And I thought of her wearing green and that she had teeth as I sucked in that gun barrel.
I waited. I counted one to five.
But something was wrong with me. I couldn’t get myself to do it.
I checked the clock. Four o’clock was coming on fast. I’d wasted a good four hours of a potentially excellent death. I sucked in the muzzle again, trying to concentrate. Nothing doing.
I guess those years with Ben, working myself into a state just to keep my head above water, had created a habit. On nights with Ben whipping me while some bumbling CEO screwed from behind, I thought I might stop breathing. The gag choked. And the blindfold. I hate blindfolds.
I gained a penchant for struggling. I fought. I survived.
So no wonder I couldn’t pull the trigger.
All that pushing got to be a habit, a routine supported by special sayings, rituals performed before my act to ward off disease and to keep me safe from the fruitcake clients wanting more than sex, wanting blood.
Ben never left us unwatched. As he got more sophisticated, the rooms had a one-way mirror somewhere and a secret door. If Ben wasn’t in the room, he watched from behind the mirror, interfering if things got too nasty. Ben was the best daddy a kid could ask for.
He kept us locked in most of the time. When I first came, the only players Ben had were Kat, Toni, Matt, and myself. He didn’t pick up Violet until later.
I loved our rooms. They were tall and airy, at the top of a warehouse he’d renovated. A wall of windows looked out over the East River. The water glittered on sunny days. I had a pair of binoculars that I used to watch the boats go in and out the river. Pigeons roosted on our window ledges. We had a small patio on the south roof where we could lie out in the sun. Ben thought the air did us good.
I began to remember how Toni always tried to cheer me up with little gifts he picked up here and there. Matt was quiet, like me, but he always let me curl up in his lap when we watched scary videos together. For some reason I could never put my finger on, he reminded me of Vin.
I thought of Kat for the first time in five years. Kat’s body and face came the closest I’ve ever seen to what I would call perfect. No man ever just glanced in her direction. But it was her inner grace, a sense of timelessness, of all the days gone by, that captured you. Kat was the one that mothered me, coaxing me back to life after Ben’s basement.
As I began remembering them, I almost started to cry. I missed them so much.
And we had Charles and Princess Di, two cats Matt found in a Dumpster one day. Eventually, we caught on that Charles was really a girl. It didn’t matter to us. Di was disappointed. And there was Buster. Good old Buster. He must have weighed in over one hundred pounds and was part mastiff, part St. Bernard. Ben gave it away as a reward to be able to take Buster out to Central Park. Ben had Buster trained as an attack dog. For our protection, he said.
I have to keep my family safe, Ben said over and over. That’s how we said it. We said we were family. On nights we had off, we’d make popcorn and watch videos. We celebrated holidays and made up birthdays, spending weeks agonizing over gifts for one another. Kat posted charts of the cleaning duties. We bought groceries and cooked, spending mealtime niggling back and forth. And we cared for each other like our lives depended on it.
I laid the gun on top of my keyboard.
Why me? Why did I have to get a cult following and an undercurrent? Why couldn’t they have just ignored me?
So that was when I thought to take out the shoebox again. I lifted the top off it and found Ben’s business card. Beneath that were all my old IDs, all fake. I pulled them out, staring in amazement, the wheels turning in my head.
I couldn’t even remember what my name was when I lived by that river. But during my ten years with Ben, I was Elizabeth Boone.
“You’re Clarisse Broder. Remember that. And when the police ask, say you were Ekker’s girl. Don’t mention me.”
I couldn’t get it in my head why, and I asked him if I had appendicitis. At first he laughed, but when I kept asking about the surgery, he got to looking pale. I’d never seen him like that.
“Yeah. Appendicitis,” he said at last. And he took my hand with that gentleness that he showed sometimes, and told me the story about falling down the stairs. I remembered the ballroom and the black strapless, but I didn’t remember falling.
