by Colum McCann
The bald spot was very white, like a little ice rink on his head. He got a room in the Waldorf- Astoria. The first thing he did was he pulled the curtains tight and fell on the bed and said: “Let’s get it on.”
I was like, “Wow, do I know you, honey?”
He looked at me hard and said: “No.”
“Are you sure?” I said, all cutesy and shit. “You look familiar.”
“No,” he said, real angry.
“Hey, take a chill pill, honey,” I said. “I’m only axing.”
I pulled off his belt and unzipped him and he moaned, Ohyeah -
yeahyeah, like they all do, and he closed his eyes and kept on moaning, and then I don’t know why, but I figured it out. It was the guy from the weather report on CBS! Except he wasn’t wearing his toupee! That was his disguise. I finished him off and got myself dressed and waved good-bye but turned at the door and said to him, “Hey man, it’s cloudy in the east with the wind at ten knots and a chance of snow.”
There I was, cracking myself up again.
—
I used to love the joke where the last line was: Your Honor, I was armed with nothing more than a piece of fried chicken.
—
The hippies were bad for business. They were into free love. I stayed away from them. They stank.
The soldiers were my best clients. When they came back they just wanted to pop—popping was the only thing on their minds. They’d had their asses handed to them by a bunch of half- baked slanty- eyed motherfuckers and now they just needed to forget. And there ain’t much better to help you forget than popping with Miss Bliss.
I made up a little badge that said: THE MISS BLISS SOLUTION: MAKE WAR, NOT LOVE. Nobody thought it was funny, not even the boys who were coming home from ’Nam, so I threw it in the garbage can on the corner of Second Avenue.
They smelled like small little graveyards walking around, those boys.
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But they needed loving. I was like a social service, word. Doing my thing for America. Sometimes I’d hum that kiddie song while he scraped his fingers down my back. Pop goes the weasel! They got a kick outta that.
—
Bob was a pross cop with a hard- on for black girls. I musta seen his shield more’n I had hot breakfasts. He arrested me even when I wasn’t working.
I was in the coffee shop and he threw the badge and he said, “You’re coming with me, Sambette.”
He thought he was funny. I said, “Kiss my black ass, Bob.” Still he took me down the pen. He had his quota. He got paid overtime. I wanted to slice him up with my nail file.
—
Once I had a man a whole week long at the Sherry- Netherlands. There was a chandelier surrounded with grapes ’n’ vines in the ceiling and violins carved outta the plaster and all. He was small and fat and bald and brown. He put a record on the player. Sounded like snake music. He said,
“Isn’t this a divine comedy?” I said: “That’s a weird thing to say.” He just smiled. He had a nice accent.
We had crystal cocaine and caviar and champagne in a bucket. It was a blow date, but all he had me do was read to him. Persian poems. I thought maybe I was already in heaven and floating on a cloud. There was a lot of things being said about ancient Syria and Persia. I laid out on the bed buck naked and just read to the chandelier. He didn’t even want to touch me. He sat in the chair and watched me reading. I left with eight hundred dollars and a copy of Rumi. I never read nothing like that before. Made me want to have a fig tree.
That’s long before I went to Hunts Point. And that’s long before I ended up under the Deegan. And that’s long before Jazz and Corrie rode that van to doom.
But if I was given one week to live, just one week again, if that was my choice, that week at the Sherry- Netherlands is the one I’d repeat. I was just lying on the bed, naked and reading, and him being nice to me, and telling me I was fine, that I’d do well in Syria and Persia. I never seen Syria or Persia or Iran or whatever they call it. Someday I’m going to go, but I’ll bring Jazzlyn’s babies and I’ll marry an oil sheik.
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—
Except I been thinking about the noose.
—
Any excuse is a good excuse. When they ship you off to prison they give you a syphilis test. I came back clean. I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t be clean this time. Maybe that’d be a good excuse.
—
I hate mops. I hate sweeping brushes. You can’t trick your way outta prison. You have to wash windows, clean the floor, sponge the showers.
I’m the only hooker in C- 40. Everyone else is way upstate. One thing for sure, there ain’t no pretty sunsets out the window.
All the butches are in C- 50. All the femmes are where I am. The les-bians are called jaspers, I don’t know why—sometimes words are weird.
In the canteen, all the jaspers want to do is comb my hair. I’m not into that. Never have been. I won’t wear no Oxfords. I like to keep my uniform short, but I won’t wear a bow in my hair either. Even if you’re going to die, you might as well die pretty.
—
I don’t eat. At least I can keep my figure. I’m still proud of that.
I’m a fuck- up but I’m still proud of my body.
They wouldn’t serve the food to dogs anyway. The dogs would strangle themselves after reading the menu. They’d start howling and punc-ture themselves dead with forks.
—
I got the keyring with the babies on it. I like to hang it on my finger and watch them twirl. I got this piece of aluminum foil too. It’s not like a mirror, but you can look in it and you can guess that you’re still pretty. It’s better ’n talking to a mouse. My cell mate shaved the side of the bed in order to put the mouse in wood shavings. I read a book once about a guy with a mouse. His name was Steinbeck—the guy, not the mouse. I ain’t stupid. I don’t wear the dunce cap just ’cause I’m a hooker. They did an I.Q. test and I got 124. If you don’t believe me, ask the prison shrink.
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—
The library cart squeaks around once a week. They don’t got no books I like. I asked them for Rumi and they said, “What the hell is that?”
In the gym I play Ping- Pong. The butches go, “Ooohh, look at her smash.”
—
Most of the time, me and Jazz, we never robbed nobody. Wasn’t worth it.
But this asshole, he took us all the way from the Bronx to Hell’s Kitchen and promised us all sorts of scratch. Turned out different, so all we done was we relieved him of the chore, that’s the word, relieved him. Just light-ened his pockets, really. I took the rap for Jazzlyn. She wanted back with the babies. She needed the horse too. I wanted her off it, but she couldn’t go cold. Not like that. Me, I was clean. I could take it. I’d been clean six months. I was banging coke here and there, and sometimes I sold some horse that I got from Angie, but mostly I was clean.
In the station house Jazz was crying her eyes out. The detective leaned across his desk to me and said: “Look, Tillie, you wanna make things right for your daughter?” I’m like: “Yeah, babe.” He said: “All right, gimme a confession and I’ll let her go. You’ll get six months, no more, I guarantee it.” So, I sat down and sang. It was an old charge, robbery in the second degree. Jazz had jacked two hundred dollars from that guy and syringed that straight off.
That’s how it goes.
Everything flies through the windshield.
—
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
—
I’m a fuck- up. That’s what I am. I took the rap and Jazzlyn paid the price.
I am the mother and my daughter is no more. I only hope at the last minute that at least she was smiling.
I’m a fuck- up like none you’ve ever seen before.
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—
Even the roaches don’t like it here in Rikers. The roaches, they’ve got an aversion. The roaches, they’re like judges and district attorneys and shit.
They crawl out of the walls in their black coats and they say, Miss Henderson, I hereby sentence you to eight months.
Anyone who knows roaches know that they rattle. That’s the word.
They rattle across the floor.
—
The shower stall is the best place. You could hang an elephant from the pipes.
—
Sometimes I bang my head off the wall long enough that I just don’t feel it anymore. I can bang it hard enough I finally sleep. I wake with a headache and I bang again. It only stings in the shower when all the butches are watching.
A white girl got sliced yesterday. With the filed- down side of a canteen tray. She had it coming. Whiter than her whiteness. Outside the pen it never used to bother me: white or black or brown or yellow or pink. But I guess the pen is the flip side of real life—too many niggers and not many whiteys, all the whiteys can buy their way out of it.
This the longest I ever spent inside. It gets you to thinking about things. Mostly about being such a fuck- up. And mostly about where to hang the noose.
—
When they first told me ’bout Jazzlyn I just stood there beating my head against the cage like a bird. They let me go to the funeral and then they locked me back up. The babies weren’t there. I kept asking about the girls but everyone was saying: Don’t worry about the babies, they’re being looked after.
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—
In my dreams I’m back in the Sherry- Netherlands. Why I liked him so much I don’t really know. He wasn’t a trick, he was a john—even with the bald head he was fine.
Men in the Middle Eastern life dig hookers. They like to spoil them and buy them things and walk around with the sheets wrapped around them. He asked me to stand by the window in silhouette. He positioned the light just so. I heard him gasp. All I was doing was standing. Nothing ever made me feel better than him just looking at me, appreciating what he saw. That’s what good men do—they appreciate. He wasn’t fooling with himself or nothing, he just sat in the chair watching me, hardly breathing. He said I made him delirious, that he’d give me anything just to stay there forever. I said something smart- ass, but really I was thinking the exact same thing. I hated myself for saying something disrespectful.
I coulda had the floor swallow me up.
After a moment or two he relaxed, then sighed. He said something to me about the desert in Syria and how the lemon trees look like little explosions of color.
And all of a sudden—right there, looking out over Central Park—I got a longing for my daughter like nothing else before. Jazzlyn was eight or nine then. I wanted just to hold her in my arms. It’s no less love if you’re a hooker, it’s no less love at all.
The park got dark. The lights came on. Only a few of them were working. They lit up the trees.
“Read the poem about the marketplace,” he said.
It was a poem where a man buys a carpet in the marketplace, and it’s a perfect carpet, without a flaw, so it brings him all sorts of woe ’n’ shit. I had to switch on the light to read to him and it spoiled the atmosphere, I could tell straight off. Then he said, “Just tell me a story then.”
I turned off the light and stood there. I didn’t want to say nothing cheap.
I couldn’t think of anything except a story I heard from a trick a few weeks before. So I stood there with the curtains in my hands and I said:
“There was this old couple out walking by the Plaza. It was early evening. They were hand in hand. They were about to go into the park when a cop blew his whistle sharp and stopped them. The cop said, ‘You McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 214
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can’t go in there, it’s gonna get dark, it’s too dangerous to walk around the park, you’ll get mugged.’ The old couple said, ‘But we want to go in there, it’s our anniversary, we were here forty years ago exactly.’ The cop said, ‘You’re crazy. Nobody walks in Central Park anymore.’ But the old couple kept walking in anyway. They wanted to take the exact same walk they took all those years before, ’round the little pond. To remember. So they went hand in hand, right into the dark. And guess what? That cop, he walked behind at twenty paces, right around the lake, just to make sure them people weren’t tossed, ain’t that something?”
That was my story. I stayed still. The curtains were all damp in my hands. I could almost hear the Middle Eastern man smile.
“Tell it to me again,” he said.
I stood a little closer to the window, where the light was coming in real nice. I told it to him again, with even more details, like the sound of their footsteps and all.
—
I never even told that story to Jazzlyn. I wanted to tell her but I never did.
I was waiting for the right time. He gave me that Rumi book when I left. I shoved it in my handbag, didn’t think much of it at first, but it crept up on me, like a street lamp.
I liked him, my little fat bald brown man. I went to the Sherry-Netherlands to see if he was there, but the manager kicked me out. He had a folder in his hand. He used it like a cattle prod. He said, “Out out out!”
I began to read Rumi all the time. I liked it because he had the details.
He had nice lines. I began saying shit to my tricks. I told folks I liked the lines because of my father and how he studied Persian poetry. Sometimes I said it was my husband.
I never even had a father or a husband. Not one I knew of, anyways. I ain’t whining. That’s just a fact.
—
I’m a fuck- up and my daughter is no more.
—
Jazzlyn asked me once about her Daddy. Her real Daddy—not a daddy Daddy. She was eight. We were talking on the phone. Long- distance from McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 215
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New York to Cleveland. It cost me nothing because all the girls knew how to get the dime back. We learned it from the vets who came back from
’Nam all messed up in the head.
I liked the bank of phones on Forty- fourth. I’d get bored and ring the phone right beside me. I picked it up and talked to myself. I got a big kick outta that. Hi, Tillie, how you doin’, baby? Not too bad, Tillie, how you?
Swingin’ it, Tillie, how’s the weather there, girl? Raining, Tillie- o. No shit, it’s raining here too, Tillie, ain’t that a kicker?!
—
I was on the drugstore phone on Fiftieth and Lex when Jazzlyn said:
“Who’s my real Daddy?” I told her that her Daddy was a nice guy but he went out once for a pack of cigarettes. That’s what you tell a kid. Everyone says that, I don’t know why—I guess all the assholes who don’t want to hang around their kids are smokers.
She never even asked about him again. Not once. I used to think he was gone for cigarettes an awful long time, whoever the fuck he was.
Maybe he’s standing around still, Pablo, waiting for the change.
—
I went back to Cleveland to pick Jazzlyn up. That was ’64 or ’65, one of them years. She was eight or nine years old then. She was waiting for me on the doorstep. She wore a little hooded coat and she was sitting there all pouty and then she looked up and
saw me. I swear it was like seeing a firework go off. “Tillie!” she shouted. She never really called me Mom. She jumped up from the step. No one ever gave me a bigger hug.
No one. She like near smothered me. I sat right down beside her and cried my eyes out. I said, “Wait’ll you see New York, Jazz, it’s gonna blow you away.”
My own mother was in the kitchen giving me snake eyes. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars. She said: “Oh, honey, I knew you’d come good, I just knew it!”
We wanted to drive across country, Jazzlyn and me, but instead we got a skinny dog all the way from Cleveland. The whole time there she slept on my shoulder and sucked her thumb, nine years old and still sucking her thumb. I heard later, in the Bronx, that was one of her things. She liked to suck her thumb when she was doing it with a trick. That makes McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 216
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me sick to the core. I’m a fuck- up and that’s all. That’s about all that matters.
Tillie Fuck- Up Henderson. That’s me without ribbons on.
—
I ain’t gonna kill myself until I see my baby’s baby girls. I told the warden today that I’m a grandmother and she didn’t say nothing. I said,
“I want to see my grandbabies—why won’t they bring my grand
-
babies?” She didn’t bat an eyelid. Maybe I’m getting old. I’ll have my thirty- ninth birthday inside. It’ll take a whole week just to blow them candles out.
I begged her and begged her and begged her. She said the babies were fine, they were being looked after, social services had them.
—
It was a daddy who put me in the Bronx. He called himself L.A. Rex. He didn’t like niggers, but he was a nigger himself. He said Lexington was for whiteys. He said I got old. He said I was useless. He said I was taking too much time with Jazzlyn. He said to me that I looked like a piece of cheese. He said, “Don’t come down by Lex again or I’ll break your arms, Tillie, y’hear me?”
So that’s what he did—he broke my arms. He broke my fingers too.
He caught me on the corner of Third and Forty- eighth and he snapped them like they was chicken bones. He said the Bronx was a good place for retirement. He grinned and said it was just like Florida without the beaches.