I never saw the landlord or had any idea how much the rent was. Money was never discussed with me. That was part of the life—all the money went through Moses. I was just the person who made it and handed it over.
I turned on the stereo and tried to think of ways to amuse April. I desperately wanted her to like me. As music flooded the room, I suddenly remembered that Moses had a small handgun hidden in the chest of drawers in the bedroom. I took the gun out and showed it off, waving it in the air.
“Look at me, April,” I sang, dancing around, pretending to shoot my cat clock, then aiming the gun at the television set in the corner.
“Oh my God, woman! Put that thing down before you kill us both!”
I set the gun on the kitchen table, and we sat in the living room and listened to music. After a while she fell asleep on the floor, and I drifted off to my tiny bedroom.
***
That afternoon I woke to a loud banging on the front door. It was Moses; he was back early from Texas, and for some reason he didn’t have his keys with him.
I jumped out of bed and panicked, looking around the living room for April. She seemed to have left, but Moses’s pounding on the door didn’t give me time to think. I rushed over to the door, but then hesitated.
While he had been gone, I had realized that I liked being by myself. Without his constant presence and control, I had started to wonder what it might be like to live without Moses. Besides, if I wanted to buy more drugs, I couldn’t keep giving all my money to his dumb ass.
Moses startled me out of my fantasy. “Open this damn door! Is you crazy, bitch? I’m gonna kick your damn ass, ho!”
I didn’t want to open the door, but my fear of him made me open it anyway. It felt like my hands were moving all on their own. I watched as my right hand reached down to the knob and pulled the door open.
The first thing he did when he walked into the apartment was slap me hard across the face. “Don’t you ever do some stupid shit like that again, you hear me? You crazy not opening my damn door, you stupid bitch. You gonna be a dead ho!”
I just stared at him. I knew better than to disagree.
The second thing he did was check his money, the money I was supposed to have waiting for him when he returned. He wasn’t happy when he found what was left of it.
“What the hell is going on with my money, bitch? Where’s it all at?”
I had been spending more and more money on heroin. When I had gone out to work the night before, I had made a bit of money, then left the track to get some drugs to keep me going through the night. That’s where all of the money had gone. But I knew what would happen if I told him the truth, so I decided to just act dumb.
“I don’t know what’s wrong. All the money should be there,” I mumbled.
He sat down and counted the money again. Then he went back into the bedroom to hide it in the locked safe in the closet.
I breathed a sigh of relief until I heard Moses’s voice again.
“Bitch, come in here.”
What was wrong now? I tried to figure out why he was so angry. There was something in his tone that scared me.
Moses was standing next to the chest of drawers, and one of the drawers was wide open. “Where in the fuck is my gun?” he shouted.
“I don’t know! Didn’t you take it with you?” My mind was racing. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about, until I remembered what I had done with the gun the night before. Shit. I ran out of the room to look at the kitchen table where I had left it before falling asleep. No gun.
April must have taken it. I tried to think fast, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
“I don’t know where your gun is,” I said, shaking and starting to cry. “I don’t know. I swear, I don’t. I don’t.”
Blood began to run from my nose. Moses stared at me, trying to decide if I was lying or telling the truth. He hadn’t had any trouble out of me so far, but now he was pissed.
“Barbara, tell me where the fuck my gun is, and I won’t be mad no more.”
I knew better than that. He never called me by my name. But what could I tell him? I wasn’t allowed to bring anyone to the apartment. That was one of his rules. If he found out about April, I would be in big trouble.
Moses walked over to the closet and pulled out a coat hanger. He twisted it in his hands, stretching it out. It formed a deadly metal line.
I watched him, my eyes widening and my heart pounding. Moses had hit me before, but this time I knew it would be different.
“Please, please, please, Moses!” I half screamed the words. “I swear I don’t know where your gun is!”
He drew back his arm and struck me hard across the back with the coat hanger.
It made a swishing sound in the air before it hit me. I jumped and fell back, landing on the floor. I thought of screaming so loudly someone would help me, but I knew I was alone. No one was coming.
He hit me again and again and again. “Don’t move, bitch!” he screamed as I put my hands up, trying to shield myself from further blows. “Put your damn hands down, ho! Tell me where my fuckin’ gun is, Barbara.” He towered over me.
Tears and mucus streamed down my face. “Stop, Moses, stop. I’m sorry!” I screamed.
The more I begged, the more he struck me with the hanger. I crunched my body into a ball and tried to go to a place deep inside where he couldn’t get me. I prayed for someone to come and rescue me. And when I couldn’t escape and no one came, I prayed that I would die.
After what seemed like an eternity, I started to shake uncontrollably. Urine ran down my legs and mixed with the blood from my broken skin.
“Stop it! Stop that shit!”
A bright red stain blossomed through my white T-shirt.
Then Moses spoke to me in a quiet, deadly voice, a voice that made me cold inside, like I’d never get warm again. “You got one more chance, bitch. Who has my gun? Where is it?”
I finally murmured in a shaky voice, “I think April does.”
He was silent for a moment before he asked, “Who the fuck is April?”
In a halting voice, I told Moses about the night before, and how I thought the drag queen had stolen his gun.
Moses was looking a little worried about my back as he watched the blood form a small puddle on the floor around me. Now his voice changed. “Now come here and let Daddy see your back. Now you see you made me do that. You should have told me the truth, baby.” He pulled me up from the floor and touched my back gently.
I flinched.
Moses was good at that. Every time he beat me, it was always the same; he would call me his lady and treat me like I was actually his girlfriend. He had never beaten me like this, though, only slapped me around and punched me when I disobeyed him or didn’t make enough money.
“You know where this April bitch lives at?”
I did, and I told him. I thought he might be going to kill her, but I couldn’t even feel sorry for her. I was broken, inside and out.
“Let’s go. We gonna get my gun—right now.”
Moses flung an old coat over my back and led me down the stairs outside to his new car. “Don’t get no blood on my damn seat, either.”
I shifted my weight on the leather seat, keeping my head low, my eyes on the floor.
When we got to April’s hotel, we rode the shaky elevator in silence. Moses put his arm around my shoulder; to anyone else, we probably looked like a couple in love. I tried not to squirm away from his touch. My skin was on fire from his beating, but I knew that if I pulled away from his arms, he’d beat me even worse when we got home.
Moses pounded on the door. No one answered, but I heard small noises coming from inside.
“I know y’all in there! You better answer this door. I ain’t got all day, now!” Moses shouted.
There was complete silence from inside the room.
“Please, April,” I sobbed, wincing in pain from Moses’s touch. “Open the door! He knows you have his gun. P
lease open the door.”
After a few minutes, the door opened slowly. “What you want with me?” April stood in the half-open doorway. She didn’t have her wig on, or any makeup. I had never seen her like this; she seemed so strange and sad. She looked from me to Moses and back again.
“I want my gun back, bitch. I know you have it, and look what you done! Look at this shit.”
Moses turned me around roughly, pulled the coat off, and lifted up my T-shirt. The blood had started to dry a little, and when he pulled the shirt up, it stuck to my back. Long bloody stripes covered me. I sucked in my breath across my clenched teeth. My back pulsed with pain.
“Oh God, child! Oh my God, what he done to you?” April started crying.
“I ain’t done shit.” Moses shook a finger, pointing at my bloody back. “This here is yo’ fault, bitch! Now give my fuckin’ gun back.”
“I don’t have your gun no mo’, ’cause it’s in the pawn shop over on Eighth Avenue.”
“Give me the damn pawn ticket, you fucking dope fiend bitch!”
April continued crying and sniffling as she rummaged through her purse, looking for the pawn slip. When she found it, she held it out to Moses, but stared at me and silently mouthed the words, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
I looked at the floor, my back throbbing with pain.
Moses snatched the ticket from April and said, “You better hope I get my gun back, bitch. Now give me some money, too.”
As she shook her head, backing up into her room, Moses waved the ticket in her face and started yelling. “What, you think I’m gonna pay to get my own motherfucking gun back? Give me yo’ money now, bitch, or you’ll look worse than this bitch here.”
April had a pretty bad dope habit, and she had no money lying around—everything went to drugs. But I think she knew better than to argue with this crazy pimp after what she had just seen. She reached into her bra and pulled out a few dollars.
“That’s all I got,” she said. “Please, I swear.”
He grabbed the money and turned to leave. “Stay away from my bitch, you hear me?”
April nodded her head and slowly shut the door.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I never saw April again, but there was a constant reminder of her: I was hooked, mind and body, on heroin. Time after time, I would crave the numbing peace the heroin gave me, and the way it took away all the abuse I had suffered as a child and all of the pain and worry of life on the track. Heroin, I thought, was saving my life and keeping me sane. Unfortunately, it was highly addictive.
One of the downsides to my new habit became clear very quickly. Heroin wasn’t cheap. I had to have money to buy drugs, and I had to have the drugs to make the money. The fact that I hadn’t brought in enough money while Moses was gone to Texas was only the start. It was a vicious circle. As the months passed, I lived in terror that Moses was going to catch up with me and find out about the drugs.
Then I met Mr. Klein.
Robert Klein was a wealthy man who owned a lot of property in the city. He was in his eighties, but he took a liking to me and became one of my regular customers. He seemed to want to support me in his own way, and I began asking him for more and more money to pay for the heroin I desperately needed.
Mr. Klein was not a stupid man. One day, after I had asked him for another hundred dollars, he confronted me. “Barbara, I know why you need all the money. I’ve seen the marks on your arms, and I know you must be addicted to drugs. What is it? Heroin?”
“Fine, then,” I told him, my hands shaking. “If you won’t give me the money, no problem. I can get a hundred dollars in five minutes.” I was feeling really bad from lack of drugs and needed to go uptown to get some more as soon as possible.
He looked sternly at me, yet underneath his words I sensed something I had long forgotten, something from another time, another world. Why would this old man care about me? All he wanted was my fifteen-year-old body; he had proved that to me time and again. I didn’t understand how he could care for me and have sex with me at the same time.
I turned and began to walk out of his apartment. He was just a trick, someone I was supposed to trick out of his money, yet he was also showing me kindness. That was so strange to me, and I was confused about how to handle it or how to respond. Who else in my life was showing me any kindness? Certainly not Moses.
“Barbara, wait, wait. Just hold on.” He reached out to me. “Look, I have a friend who works with Beth Israel’s detox program. I already talked to him.
He says there’s a bed waiting for you at the hospital. If you let me, I want to help you. After you get off the drugs, you can work at my son’s restaurant and maybe go to school. What do you think?”
Think? What did I think? I thought I needed some drugs, that’s what I thought, and I needed to feel better. My back was killing me, and I knew that if I didn’t get some kind of drug into my system soon, I would go into full-fledged withdrawal. Working in a restaurant sounded like a horrible thought to me, one I couldn’t even imagine. I had never had a legal job in my entire life, and I had no idea how to work at one or deal with all the square people who did.
But my habit had been growing daily, and by that point I needed at least two hundred dollars a day just to get enough drugs to survive. I no longer got high; I only felt not sick after I injected my daily heroin. And I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if Moses found out where my money was going.
“Okay, okay, I’ll do it. I’ll go to Beth Israel.” I shocked myself as the words came out of my mouth.
Mr. Klein smiled. “Let’s go now right now, then. No changing your mind. I’ll call my friend, and then we’ll go get a taxi.”
My resolve began to waiver. “I don’t know if I can do this.” I stared at my feet, my nose running. I was so scared of so many things.
“Don’t worry. I will help you. I will call you every day and bring you cigarettes. It’s all paid for. You don’t have to worry about a thing, only about getting better and getting off of that terrible drug.” He paused. “And getting away from that parasite of a man, not even a man.”
I looked quickly at him. He knew. I think he had known all along about Moses. I hadn’t been fooling anyone.
***
Kicking my heroin habit took about a week and a half of sleepless nights, upset stomach, leg cramps, and running eyes and nose. Drug-free for the first time in months, I felt raw and open, and my emotions were all over the place. Everything was intensified; all the sounds of the city and the noise of traffic were incredibly loud to me. Even the food I ate seemed sharper. It was as though the heroin had kept me so numb and insulated that after detoxing, everything seemed that much stronger. I could not stand for anyone to touch me now; the thought of working the track was horrible. I didn’t know how long I would be able to hold out without going back uptown and getting some heroin.
I also was in terror that the first time I saw Moses, I was in for a beating for being absent for so long. I had not given him much thought while I was in the throes of drug withdrawal, but once I was out of the hospital I began to worry. I had already planned on telling him I had been in jail, maybe even at Rikers Island. I had saved up a small amount of money and hoped it might keep him from killing me.
I let myself into my small apartment, sat on the beige couch, and waited. I knew who was there as soon as I heard the sound of the door opening slowly. Moses came into the apartment, and I got up and shielded myself, ready for a fight.
But this time he seemed different somehow. His hair was messy, and his clothes were not as pressed as usual—or even clean. I took a chance and searched his green eyes for some telltale sign of what state of mind he was in.
“I been in jail, bitch.” Moses barked out the words. “What the fuck you lookin’ at, ho?”
I immediately lowered my eyes to the floor.
Satisfied, Moses continued. “That damn bitch Cindy called the police after I kicked her ass out of the apartment. She k
ept saying she was sick, but I know better. If that bitch could walk, then the ho could get my damn money. They locked me up for domestic violence, stupid goddamn police.” He sighed and sat down on the small couch next to me. He actually seemed tired, and he stank of cigarettes and something else I couldn’t figure out. Maybe he really had been in jail. At that point, I didn’t care; all I knew was that this time I’d been saved from getting my own ass kicked.
That night, though, something changed. Seeing Moses so messed up and dirty after being in jail made me begin to see him as an ordinary human being, not the all-important person he pretended to be. Somehow I could allow myself to think about moving away and out from under his control. I just needed to figure out how.
***
The answer came a few weeks later.
After sex one night, Mr. Klein asked me, “What do you think about having your own apartment?”
He kept stroking my hair as I turned on my bare stomach to look at him. “You better not be joking with me,” I said slowly. I couldn’t really allow myself to believe this was even possible.
“I’m not, my shaina maideleh!” he said with affection. “I want to do this for you, if you say yes.”
I stared at him for a moment, then started bouncing up and down on the bed and squealing like the child I was supposed to be. “Yes, of course, yes,” I said, giving him a hug. I’d learned that when he started calling me his “pretty girl” in Yiddish, I could probably get whatever I wanted.
He laughed and told me he would make the arrangements and let me know when it was ready.
As I was leaving Mr. Klein’s place, I realized I had totally forgotten about Moses.
“No,” Moses said with a frown when I told him about Mr. Klein’s proposal. He stared me down with those glowing eyes of his. “Hell no, ho. Just tell him no.”
Somehow I knew, and I knew Moses also knew, that by allowing me to have this little bit of individuality, he would lose some power over me. And he couldn’t have that. But because of this, I wanted it even more.
Nobody's Girl Page 6