Spanish Nan tossed him the stud’s left shoe. It was a brown oxford. Benjamin fingered it shyly.
“I used to rassle, too,” he explained, as if to apologize for his enormous strength.
“Where did you wrestle, Benjamin?”
“At the rasslin’ place,” he assured them all.
One night a middle-aged dude, who’d gone to fat around his middle, but whose arms and legs still looked thin, walked in. He entered so expensively dressed that he looked cheap.
“I wonder what he’s so scared about,” went through Dovie-Jean’s mind.
He bought two tickets and handed both to Fortune, who nodded to Dovie-Jean. The three of them crowded into Fortune’s small room, decorated with plastic dogs and cats off Woolworth’s novelty shelf. An ad for a condom guaranteed to prevent “premature ejaculation” was thumbtacked to one wall.
“Tell us what you want, honey,” Fortune asked him.
“Whatever you girls do, do it,” he instructed them, and handed a hundred-dollar bill to each. Then added, “I’ve never been in a whorehouse before.”
It appeared, the way he lay stretched naked and smiling innocuously, that he may never have been with any woman at all before.
Dovie-Jean had had a dream the night before: she’d been on some kind of a houseboat, among many people whom she did not like. She had gone into a cabin and had had a baby without pain. Sitting on the bed’s edge, washing it, she saw its mouth was filled with feathers and it began to gasp for breath. She began taking them out, but there was always more and they kept coming until she wakened.
When Fortune used her mouth on this trick, he smiled down with faint amusement yet did not react. Finally she reached for the bottle of Signal and told Dovie-Jean, “You try, honey.”
Oral sex was something Dovie-Jean could handle, when paid for it, but for which she had no strong desire. For the sake of the hundred dollars the trick had paid, she tried it now.
It was like munching a moldy turnip.
“You want to go down on one of us, honey?” Fortune asked, trying to find some way to give the fellow his hundred dollars’ worth.
For a full half-hour they tried by turns to rouse him. He watched with a smiling detachment, as though they were nurses searching for the cause of some obscure illness. Nothing availed.
“We’ve done everything we know how, honey,” Fortune finally advised him.
He sat up then. “What I’d really like,” he confessed at last, “is for one of you to blow me, hold it in your mouth and put it into mine.”
Dovie-Jean felt herself cringe inwardly. Fortune didn’t cringe for a moment.
“Put on your clothes, mister,” she told him, “you don’t want a whorehouse. You want a hospital.”
“I wish they were all that easy,” Fortune observed after he had gone.
“I don’t understand,” was all Dovie-Jean could say.
“The man is dying, that’s all,” Fortune assured her. “They die inside years before their time. They know they’re dying and they try to make themselves feel alive inside again, and there ain’t no way. No way at all. They’re dying because of the way they lived and it’s too late to fix that.”
The next day Dovie-Jean saw the trick’s photograph on the inner pages of the Daily News. He had shot himself in the head, in the hotel directly across the way, shortly after leaving them. The story mentioned missing racetrack funds.
“It looks like we finally got a winner off the Big A,” Fortune said cynically.
“Why be so hard about it?” Dovie-Jean reproached her.
“It’s why they call me Fortune, honey,” the Chinese woman explained, “because I’m a hard little cookie.” She laughed and asked Dovie-Jean, “What do you do on your days off?”
“Just set around thinking how things are going back home.”
“Where is ‘back home’”
“Jersey City.” Then she added, “I got no real hometown. I’ve just kicked around here and there.”
“Why don’t you take a bus ride and find out how things are in Jersey City?”
“I’ve got a small legal problem it’s best to stay away from.”
“Is that why you came to New York?”
“My old man told me that if we went to New York we’d have all kinds of fun. I think if we’d stayed in Jersey City it would have been even funnier. Using the plural of course.”
Dovie-Jean was cautious about telling Fortune that she was working the Carousel on her week off. She had no specific reason for holding this back; it was only that she’d learned that the less information a person gave out about himself, the better off he’d be.
“What do I do with this?” King Benjamin asked Spanish Nan, holding out the stud’s shoe.
Spanish Nan shrugged. “What does anybody do with one shoe?”
“Give it to me,” Fortune asked, “I’ll have it bronzed,” and she took it from the big bouncer.
“You can come with us to the big zoo, King,” she added.
At the Bronx Zoo’s bird theater a girl was displaying two great green-and-gold parrots.
“Folks,” she addressed the half-filled little open theater, “I want you to meet Lucifer and Robert, two very nice boys. Now we’re going to give Robert a head start.”
She placed Robert at the top of a pole from which a tin cup was hung by a cord. She put a peanut in the cup and Robert began hauling it up.
Lucifer sat calmly atop his pole and paid no heed to the peanut in his cup until the girl urged him, “Lucifer! Robert is way ahead of you!” Upon which Lucifer flew down, snatched his peanut and flew back atop his pole.
“Lucifer!” the girl cried, feigning indignation, “Lucifer! You bad bird! You cheated! Come here immediately!”
Lucifer trundled over to her, rolled over on his back and raised his claws pleadingly.
“Lucifer says he is sorry,” the girl assured her audience, “he wants to be forgiven. Shall we forgive him?”
The crowd applauded and a couple of children cried, “Forgive him!”
Lucifer struggled to his feet and acknowledged his appreciation by bowing to the audience.
“Now,” the girl announced, “we’re going to have another contest. We’re going to see who can pick up these hoops and put them over the stakes the fastest. Robert, you begin.”
Robert trundled to a hoop, picked it up and placed it over a stake and trundled back for another; placed it over the second stake. Lucifer swept down, picked up all three hoops at once and placed them over stakes before Robert had completed his chore.
“Lucifer!” the girl denounced the smarter bird, “you bad bad bird! You cheated again!”
The children were immensely pleased with the disobedient Lucifer.
The girl then went into a plea for funds, for conservation of endangered species in the South American jungles, and Benjamin became restless. He left them and returned, grinning with pleasure, at a small silver-and-blue pinwheel he held in his hand as it whirred. The women smiled at each other.
He led them to a line of carriages below a sign saying:
WILD ASIA
Benjamin bought the tickets and they climbed into one of the open carriages, where a black family was already waiting to start the trip high across the African plain. This was a family of one small girl, a mother and an elderly man, apparently the little girl’s grandfather, who was gray-haired and two sheets to the wind.
As the train began to move, the driver began describing a herd of deer grazing below. “Oh!” the old man cried out, “if I had a gun! Bang! Bang! If I had a gun!”
“Sit down, grampa,” the little black girl ordered him. “We can’t hear the driver with you hollering!”
The old man sat down. The little girl’s mother nodded her approval.
“Looka them rhinoceros-eros!” The old man was on his feet again upon the sight of two great beasts almost submerged below.
“They aren’t rhinoceroses, grampa,” the little girl corrected him, “they’re
hippotami—and we all want you to shut up!”
The old man sat down looking abashed and the carriage rolled on. Benjamin’s pinwheel whirled green, silver and blue and he looked so foolishly happy that Fortune nudged Dovie-Jean to look at him: his big face was beaming like a child’s taken to the country for the first time.
The carriage stopped directly above a great striped alley cat that looked like any cat looking for a home. “Siberian tiger,” the driver announced. “When you see him face-to-face there are only three things to do: Remain calm. Second: Run like hell. Third: Keep running like hell.”
The old idiot was on his feet again. “Oh, if I had him at home nobody bother me then! Oh, I’m gonna take you home with me! Oh …”
Big Benjamin stood up and his pinwheel was whirring madly.
“Shut you opp!” he commanded the old clown. “Shut it opp right now! Sit down and shut it opp!”
The old man looked up at this huge dude towering above him as if he didn’t quite understand.
“You don’t sit down,” Big Benjamin warned him, taking a step toward him, “I t’row you over down to tiger!”
There was the rail. There was the tiger. There was the big man with huge hands. It looked perfectly possible.
The old man sat down and said not a word the rest of the trip. The little black girl smiled up at Benjamin as she left. “You scared my grandpa!” she told him and seemed pleased that he had.
Dovie-Jean and Fortune led the way, pausing to look at a dreaming polar bear, monkeys one could hold in the palm of one’s hand, elephants with children riding them, and Big Benjamin following them with his pinwheel.
He stayed so long staring at the elephants bearing children that Fortune nudged Dovie-Jean, “He wants to ride but he’s scared to ask.” Dovie-Jean looked at the big dimwit’s open-mouthed face, the pinwheel whirring as he watched, and saw it was true. They led him to the camels that also gave rides to children, but he wanted to go back to the elephants.
“Let’s eat,” Fortune suggested, and all three sat at a picnic table under a great green tree, and ate chicken and french-fried potatoes.
After lunch they wandered into a great open square, where a red-and-gold Chinese dragon, made up of two boys, on all fours, carrying the silken costume above their backs, fought with a sword-bearing warrior, consisting of one boy, while a masked fellow leaped about the pair. It had a battle to the death, one judged by the great booming of drums, and the masked man was, apparently, the referee.
Big Benjamin didn’t seem able to make sense of the dance. He looked troubled by it, shaking his head in bewilderment.
It didn’t make sense to Dovie-Jean either. The beating of the drums was so monotonous she became bored.
“What’s it all about?” she asked Fortune at last.
“How in God’s name would I know? I’ve never hung around clowns like these in my life,” and she walked away, Dovie-Jean following and Big Benjamin still holding his happy pinwheel above his head.
Fortune was a slight woman with an alert, bird-like habit of cocking her head to one side.
She had been orphaned early and had gone to work, in her teens, on Mulberry Street.
“I was the only girl in that shop who could speak English,” she remembered, recalling her early life to Dovie-Jean. “It was piecework on big, black, beat-up Singer machines. Their lights had been broken, so we worked by desk lamps placed on tables behind us. Noise? You have no idea how much noise thirty sewing machines, behind locked doors, can make. It sounds like a battle. Mr. Lee locked us in. Mr. Lee was boss. The place was airless and women had to bring in their kids and keep them there all day. How could they complain? To who?
“Seventy-two hours a week, forty-fifty cents an hour. The women would do nothing to help themselves, they were that afraid of losing their jobs. Without English, there was no other work for them. If they took off for being sick, they got fired. Lee worked those women like he was an old-timey villain.
“He wasn’t the real villain. He was running scared from the apparel firms uptown. The minute he let his shop get organized, he was ruined.
“Every time we’d finish a dozen pieces we’d get a receipt and a time card with instructions on how to fill it out. If a woman had worked eighty hours and had earned fifty dollars, the card said she had worked thirty hours and that made her appear to be earning the state minimum of a dollar sixty-five. She was getting a bare half of what she had earned. Lee was stealing fifty hours, every two weeks, from every woman in the joint.
“The women knew, of course. But where else could they go for work? They were all off the boat from Hong Kong except me. If I got up a petition, which I did, who would sign it? In their homes they’d talk your leg off about what a terrible screwing they were getting, but they dummied up in the zone, on shop premises. There they wouldn’t even say good morning to me; they were that scared of being fired.
“I got sick and applied for unemployment insurance. They told me I’d have to have a letter from Mr. Lee and he refused to give it to me. ‘The sickness is all in your head,’ he tells me. This much we had in common: we were both born in New York City.
“‘If you don’t give me the letter,’ I told him, ‘I’ll sue.’ ‘So sue,’ he tells me.
“I went to the ILGWU. I had proofs of my time and the ILGWU got me eleven hundred dollars in back pay and Lee had to pay a fine also.
“That was the last job I took seriously. I was sixteen by then and I had learned how much easier it was to hustle a dollar than to sweat it out at a sewing machine.
“The first job I got was sitting with a phone booth for a furnace outfit, calling homeowners. I’d tell them this time of year, summer, was the best time to think about their furnace because it would cost them a lot more come winter. ‘What would a checkup cost me now?’ the furnace owner would want to know.
“‘Not a dime, mister,’ I’d tell him, ‘we’re giving free check-ups now in order to create goodwill; so you’ll call us in case anything should go wrong in the future.’
“‘Fair enough,’ he’d tell me, ‘how long will a checkup take?’
“‘Only a couple hours, sir. All our team does, in weather like this, is to remove vital parts so that, when the cold sets in, you’ll have to call us to reinstall them. That’ll be a neat fifteen hundred dollars for parts you can buy in any hardware store for twenty-five dollars in cash. What time would you like our team to drop by, sir?’
“He’d hang up very slow. The boss has put in ten years building up that business and I drove it into the ground inside of two weeks. That was when I went to the Walrus.”
“The who?”
“Walrus. He was in art films. ‘New-Wave Classics’ he called them.”
“New what?”
“‘New Wave.’ I called this dude I worked for the Walrus because he was big and heavy and had a walrus mustache and wore ground-gripper shoes. That was to help him keep his balance when he was drunk, which was every day. He never used shoe trees, so his toes bent upward like a clown’s.
“What was so awful about those ground-grippers was that they were yellow! I’m telling you, Dovie-Jean, they were yellow! When I tell you he carried a briefcase with nothing in it but a fifth of Cutty Sark, you can believe me.
“The Walrus was wonderful at inheriting money, but that was all he was good at. Every six months he’d inherit a new bunch and every six months he’d go broke. What he was trying to do, he told me, was to see if he could go broke in five. ‘That’d save a full month,’ he told me, ‘with your help, sweetie, I think we can do it.’ The art-film business was just his way of seeing if he could go broke in five.
“I rented an old retail-outlet store that had a big window onto the street, but no front door. The door was in the alley. People could look in all day, but they couldn’t get inside.
“Film festivals were real fun. I strung paper pennants, every color, like gas stations put out on opening day, and hung life-size photographs of Laurel and Hardy, W.C.
Fields and Hubert Humphrey. I got old posters: Return Of The Vampire with Bela Lugosi. Mary Burns, Fugitive with Sylvia Sydney—she loved a psychopathic killer—that was Alan Baxter. I got a poster showing Chester Morris saying to Jean Harlow, ‘Your hair is like a field of silver daisies. I’d like to run barefoot through your hair.’ I was glad he was going to take off his shoes.
“We got fair-sized crowds at the big window. People trying it out, wondering if they might not be missing something. One woman brought a signboard that asked, ‘What about Frances Farmer?’ Frances who? Never heard of her. I just looked up and smiled sweetly.
“‘You’re sure booking some ungodly stinkers, sweetie,’ the Walrus congratulated me. ‘Don’t think I don’t appreciate it.’ ‘I have to give credit where credit is due,’ I told him. ‘You were the one who booked Hurry Sundown.’ ‘Yeah,’ he agreed, ‘but you were the one who got Kim Novak and Kirk Douglas into the same picture! And who else could have thought of renting a place without a door?’
“When New-Wave Classics went broke I went to work for Far-Ways, a travel agency. I’d sell a couple of airline tickets to a pair of newlyweds and book one to Bermuda and the other to Trinidad. I figured that, down there, they were both going to latch onto someone else anyhow so what was the difference, in the long run? Probably both would wind up better off.
“Once I put a twelve-year-old girl onto a plane for Jamaica and her uncle onto one for St. John’s. I’m sure somebody has found work for that kid by now.
“But I still have bad dreams,” Fortune confessed in a changing mood, “the worst one is when I’m back in Chinatown and I’m at one of those big, black beat-up sewing machines, with a desk lamp behind me, and the doors are locked.”
As the early afternoon hours moved toward dusk, the voices of the women in the little parlor above Forth-eighth street, became quieter. Spanish Nan played the slot machine once or twice but got no return. Tracy went on the nod with her head on Ginger’s shoulder. Big Benjamin’s small radio kept murmuring behind his shadowed screen.
Flash came in but not in his usual exultation. He merely sat and smoked a cigarette and listened to the dull murmuring of Big Benjamin’s radio.
The Devil's Stocking Page 14
