Manhattan Nocturne

by Colin Harrison

  An hour later she had put her hair in a very tight braid and was in a coffee shop two miles down the boulevard asking an old woman for a job. I worked in a truck stop back in South Dakota, lied Caroline. Girl pretty as you never worked, the woman answered. Hair like that. Let me wait tables for a week, and if I’m no good, then you don’t have to pay me. Just give me some food. She could keep herself clean for a week, she figured, and she was right.

  In this way she successfully rented a room for a hundred dollars a week and could just get by, but it was never going to get her anywhere. One of the patrons of the restaurant, a trim man in his thirties, already going a bit gray, gave her his number at the hotel; he would be there a week, he said, please come see me if you wish. She did, lying around the room while he conducted business on the phone. He bought her some clothes and was kind to her. She watched him do push-ups and sit-ups in the mornings. There was something about him that was safe. He was clean. He had an American Express Platinum card. At the end of the week, he said that he knew he would never see her again but that he wanted to give her a little unsolicited advice. You need a plan, he said. You’re beautiful, but there are a lot of beautiful girls out here and most go in the wrong direction. I know, she said. You don’t, he said, not really. If you don’t have a plan, you start to go hard. Little by little, and it takes you places you don’t want to go. How do you know all this? she asked. I know, believe me, I’m old enough to know. You’re going hard already. How do you know? Tell me how many men you’ve slept with. She paused to think. Including him, maybe about ten. That’s a lot already, he said. You need to go to school, get on that track, you’re plenty smart enough. Where did you go to school? she asked. I went to a place called Yale, he said. And the law school there. Am I smart enough to go to Yale? she asked. Yes, he said, but you don’t have the preparation. I could get the preparation. He looked at her sadly, and all of a sudden she despised him. I hate rich people, she declared. They think they are better. They are better, in some respects, said the man. And you want to be rich, right? Yes, of course, she said. All right, one last piece of advice, he said. What? She found the conversation exasperating. Men will always want to take from you, he said, remember that. I already know that, she told him. Maybe you do, he shrugged. Did you want to take from me? she asked. Of course, he said. And did you? Yes, absolutely. Yeah? Yes, and I’m trying to give a little back, too.

  She decided that he was a self-important jerk, and she regretted the time with him—but what he had said also made her anxious. A few weeks later she heard of the bars and clubs in other areas of the city, and she was as intrigued by the action there as by the possibility of making money. One of the waitresses knew of a place near the airport called Club Comanche; by day it was little more than a door in a wall with a guy standing outside, but by eleven P.M. the night crawled in—bikers, Iranians, off-duty cops, local businessmen who didn’t wear a tie to work, washed-up screenwriters, and black guys in good suits. Girls were there for three reasons; either they were somebody’s girlfriend, or, by the benevolent permission of the club, they were looking to be somebody’s girlfriend, if only for a night, or they sported short little red dresses and black fishnet stockings and carried full glasses on trays one way and cash and empties the other. On Saturday night, as many as fifty women worked the men and thirty worked the alcohol. Within a year, the place would become a real strip club, Caroline said, and too bad for her, because they tended to be better run, but for now the essence of the place lay somewhere between hell and breakfast. She called ahead and was told to come in when Merk was there, Merk being the guy who interviewed all the new girls. She spent the morning trying to decide what to wear, and finally showed up on a rainy Saturday afternoon in a sweater and jeans, her long hair pinned up. A man and a woman were arguing in the alleyway, and that didn’t inspire her confidence, but she knocked at the door, a curtain moved, and she was let in. Merk wasn’t there, she was told, but she could wait for him in the back where the waitresses kept their things. There were some uniforms hanging in a closet, and she might as well try one on, since Merk would ask to see how she looked in one. So she set her things down in the room, which was nothing more than some lockers, a torn-up couch, three sinks, three toilets, and an exit door. A wastebasket was filled with cigarette cartons, Tampax boxes, and beer bottles. She picked out a size-six uniform that didn’t look too dirty and was down to her panties and bra when Merk came in, his penis already in his hand, and told her to get on the couch. He was not tall, but he had that sort of fattened bulk that suggests violence. Oh, you are just about the sweetest thing I ever saw, he said, big tits like that, oh shit, and when she resisted he took her arm and pulled her onto the couch. Put up your legs, he commanded, and she didn’t think it was worth a fight. He had known all along, he must have been watching, the others had set her up. Take off your bra, too. She did, and again he said, Oh shit. It won’t hurt too much, he added, I got Vaseline here. And indeed he did, and he slowly pushed himself into her with far more skill than she had actually yet experienced with the boys in South Dakota and the boys on the Santa Monica pier, there being two already since she had arrived, but that didn’t mean that she liked it, and because he was above her she stared at him defiantly. What’re you looking at? he demanded between breaths. Hello, she said, my name is Caroline Kelly, and I’m applying for a job here. Merk smiled, and his teeth had been everywhere he had. Hold on there, little girl, just let me—and he went at it pretty hard then, so that it hurt her back, and she knew enough already about the refill capacities of men’s reproductive systems to know that he had fucked someone else recently enough that he was going to have to labor a bit to get his shot out, and that was exactly what he did, labor at it, banging at her with a sort of wheezing determination to finish what he had started, club life not being the healthiest of living, and when the bicycle was just about at the top of the hill, the confidence flowed back into his face, and he started to tell her that he was going to have to fuck her every day she worked there because she was just about the most beautiful thing he had ever—and that was when the screams in the alley behind the club began. It was a woman crying out as a knife entered and exited her just about that quick, and she was begging, Please don’t do it, please, I’m begging, but whoever he was he did it again three times and Merk yelled shit and immediately lost his erection, there being some tattered morality still hidden in his loose gut, and with his pants unbuckled and a gun now in his hand he slammed open the fire door, and that was when the woman whom Caroline had seen arguing outside slumped into the doorway, her neck bubbling blood from the side, her face white, her eyes falling in frantic sisterhood upon Caroline’s.

  The police asked her what she saw, and, standing next to Merk, she told them, never mentioning the rape. When they left she turned to him and said, “Now you have to give me the job.” He nodded, and he did. Thus was the first part of Caroline’s Los Angeles education completed.

  She sat with her knees drawn up, remembering it to herself. It was a very bad story, and I appreciated that, but I needed to ask her about the Hobbs tape, I needed to force our conversation back to that question. Yet my instinct was to wait a little longer; perhaps her story might find its way there. But first I had to clear away the other problem. I excused myself and went into the kitchen and finally made a short tortured phone call to my house, intent on leaving a message that Lisa would hear in the morning. Josephine picked up on the third ring.

  “Wren residence,” she said sleepily.

  “It’s Porter,” I said, surprised.

  “Lisa called me in,” Josephine responded softly. “Somebody’s little girl got her finger cut off.”

  Somebody important enough to get a specialist in the middle of the night. This happens—if the victim is rich or important enough, he or she can get a top Manhattan surgeon on demand. The distraught party will call someone who will know a hospital board chairman through social circles, who will then call the hospital’s president of staff an
d explain that they have a VIP situation. In the case of a hand injury, the president of the staff will phone the chief of the orthopedics department, who will then figure out which microvascular surgeon to call, one who’s got a good hand at night, who is not drunk, who will present well to the parents. Hence a call to Lisa. The process can happen so fast that the surgeon may arrive at the hospital before the helicopter. I know Lisa had nodded yes when the call came, cursed me for not being there, and dialed Josephine.

  “I’ll be home very late,” I said. “Please tell Lisa. Tell her I’m fine, just working on a story.” Josephine, I have always feared, knows every thought that runs through my mind.

  “Yes, Porter.”

  “Well, good night, then.”

  “Good night.” As I hung up I passed my eyes around Caroline’s kitchen and found myself looking at the refrigerator; again there was nothing on the door, not a magnet or a photo or a calendar or a postcard, nothing. Like the rest of the kitchen, it was spotless. I felt an urge to pull open the drawers and fling open the cabinets, to see what all this stark cleanliness might be concealing.

  But then Caroline’s voice came from the dark hallway that led to her bedroom, and when I returned she asked, “You called home?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Lies.”

  She nodded. She had opened the second bottle of wine.

  “You were describing your descent into the L.A. pretty-girl life. I assume you then got the job at the club, and that for a couple of years you screwed a lot of people, including maybe a few other girls—as a relief from the men—and did a lot of drugs and saw a lot of pools in Bel Air or Malibu. Maybe a few movie stars or producers or pro athletes.”

  “Oh, fuck you.”

  “Am I wrong?”

  “You’re not right, not exactly.”

  “No?”

  “Well, there was Magic Johnson.” She sighed, as if trying to remember a movie she once saw. “With me and this other girl named Shari. He told us to call him Earvin. He was very nice, actually. We all rolled around in a big bed. I don’t really remember much about it, except that I was really, really sick from Mexican Quaaludes. I went into the bathroom, and there was a pair of bedroom slippers, and I put my feet in them and laughed they were so big. I think I got sick then, right on his slippers.”

  “Very beautiful.” I pulled on my socks. It was after one A.M. I had to get this around to Hobbs. “Why did you come to New York?”

  “It was sort of from knowing Merk.” They had fallen into something like a friendship, strangely enough. Caroline said, “I really liked him. Actually, he gave me my tattoo. Paid for it. It took a long time to get it done; the wings had lots of different colors. It was beautiful.” She laughed. “I miss it.”

  “Why’re you having it taken off?” I said.

  “Oh, Charlie. That whole world, you know.”

  “Merk was saying he was sorry.”

  “I guess. It got a little complicated, actually.”

  Merk provided her with the one drug she really liked, crystal methedrine, she went on, and soon they could even laugh about his rape of her. “I was really into the crystal, you know, doing it and then cleaning out my purse for five hours, stuff like that,” Caroline remembered. “He was into smoking crack, too. We went for the double master blaster a couple of times, where, you know, I did him with my mouth, and when he was about to come, he took a huge hit off the pipe. He got it once. We tried it with me, he went down on me, but it didn’t work. He wasn’t really concentrating on me. Besides, what I wanted to try was heroin, but I told him I wouldn’t shoot it. He got some of the stuff you could smoke. You can do it once or twice, maybe three times, you know, without getting hooked.”

  “How many times did you do it?”

  She giggled. “Three.”

  It was while doing drugs one April afternoon before the club opened, Caroline said, that a biker Merk knew, known as Chains, arrived and suggested they take a ride down to South Central. Chains had heard that some riots were starting at the intersection of Florence and Normandie Avenues and he wanted to have a look. The niggers were burning down the city, Chains said. You never knew when you might see a riot again, might as well take advantage of the opportunity. And to see a riot while you snorted crystal—chance of a lifetime, bro. They loaded up in Merk’s car, with a friend of Chains’s, and rolled through one gang territory after another: the East-Coasts, the Brims, the Hoovers, the Underground Crips, the Raymond Avenue Crips, the Watergates, the Rollin’ Sixties, the Eight Treys. Except for the red of the Bloods and the blue of the Crips, no one who wasn’t a gang member or a cop could keep them all straight. The sky was full of smoke and helicopters, sirens near and far. Anybody else beside me got a gun, man? Merk asked. The others shook their heads. They rode past burning cars and looters, and then a black kid with a blue bandanna taunted them from the curb. Gotta stop here and deal with this, announced Merk. No, man, said Chains, it’s not—But Merk rolled to a stop and that was when a can of beer hit the hood. Then another black kid came up with a shotgun, butted Merk with it through the open window, yanked open the door, pulled Merk from the car, and began kicking him, keeping the gun trained on everyone else. Chains jumped out of the passenger side with a knife, came around the front of the car, and, with a smile on his face, the kid fired: Chains’s hand was blown off. Now Caroline was screaming and trying to hide in the backseat. Another blast of the shotgun blew out the side window. She knew it was double-barreled from Ron’s gun collection and popped her head up to see if the boy was reloading. He wasn’t, so she jumped out of the car while the boy stood calmly lecturing Chains about respect for the black man. Caroline dragged Merk into the backseat, his face dripping. His gun fell out of his shirt and she picked it up. Yo bitch, laughed the boy with the shotgun, what’s up with that? Caroline fired, without aiming. The shot missed the boy, but across the street another man grabbed his ankle and screamed. Chains, meanwhile, had the presence of mind to jump back into the front of the car, clutching the bloody stump of his hand, already looking for a tourniquet. People were running across the avenue. The gunman was now patting his pockets for more shells. With Merk in the backseat, Caroline put the car in reverse and ducked her head down. She did a U-turn in the middle of Normandie Avenue and drove directly to the hospital. That night she watched the riots on television with the other girls in her house, smoking pot. Merk had a blood clot in his eye, and they wanted him to stay in the hospital for a couple of weeks. She called her mother to tell her that she was okay and listened to the weeping on the other end. There was no particular reason for this; her mother did it almost every time they talked. Ron came on and said he had watched the riots on television, then checked a map to see that she wasn’t close by. No, she said dreamily. I’m fine.

  Two days later, as Los Angeles counted its dead and put out the last fires in South Central, Caroline arrived in New York.

  I have found in my years as a reporter that people don’t seem disturbed by genuine surprises as much as by events that they themselves have created. The occurrence that is unforseeable cannot really be regretted, whereas the occurrence that one has helped to author can cause remorse or anger indefinitely. So, too, with Caroline. Her rape by Merk in the club was a cruel surprise but not in any way her fault; subsequent incidents, however, derived from a sequence of conscious actions. Yet the two events are related; the two types of events are related. The first was brutalizing, and yet it demonstrated to Caroline that she could be brutalized and survive—if not utterly intact, then at least functionally intact. The spectrum of experienced abuse was thus widened. If she still feared being raped, she did not fear it in exactly the same way. If she had seen herself understood by another human as just a thing, then, if she wanted, she could understand herself as just a thing; in the words of feminist theory, she could “internalize her objectification,” which is concise and correct. If she had been brutalized, then at least she could now measure th
e distance between the experience of being brutalized and the imagining of it. There are people who enjoy degradation, or who seek it thinking they will enjoy it, or who seek it because it is the way they know how to have pleasure. After all, the experience is theirs. Perhaps they lived through the degradation and found pleasure in that realization. Or perhaps they found that in degradation there is a releasing of oneself; one is powerless; responsibility is taken away. I am not describing what occurs during the actual event but the subsequent thought about the event that accumulates in a person’s mind. A fellow reporter once told me that as a seventeen-year-old boy he had been raped in a park by three men. They did everything that three men could do to him, and he was hospitalized for two weeks. The man was now grown, had four children and a content wife. He had in no way elicited the attack; he was on his bicycle on the way to the grocery at the request of his mother; the men dragged him off his bike and into the park. The odd thing is this: he didn’t regret the incident. He admitted that if he had the chance to erase the event from the blackboard of his memory, he would keep it there. He still thought about the event; it was important to him and had allowed him to contemplate other expressions of sexuality. He had, in fact, become a true voyeur, a fact that he traced, not unhappily, to the incident.