by Janet Capron
“Janet, you sweet fox you—here again. I guess you really are back. And you do look fine tonight in that little black number...Dewar’s,” he said, pouring a glass with a few chips of ice in it full of scotch, spritzing the top with a little soda.
Then Bruno spotted me and broke out from a small crowd of regulars that hung wedged together in the corner. He sidled along the bar sideways like a crab, pushing his drink as he went, until he was standing next to me. He leaned over to Jimmy and whispered loudly in his ear, “She’s a feminist now.”
Bruno had cut one album about three years earlier that had produced one hit, the kind of upbeat pop tune lounge singers love to cover, and he’d been drinking in a steady, quiet way ever since, like an old railroad worker on a pension.
“A feminist? Nah. I never would have figured you for a feminist, Janet,” Jimmy said.
“It’s a fact. I saw an article she wrote for Gutter last year. That was you, am I right?” Bruno asked me, like a cop on the case.
Jimmy picked up the sticky bar rag and started pushing it around. “Is that true, or is he making it up?”
“It’s true, it’s true,” I said.
“No, no,” Bruno said, waving his hand and leaning over slightly as if to gather a thought from the sawdust on the barroom floor. Tommy Shelter was grinding away at his guitar. The rest of the customers were quiet.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Bruno said, pulling himself up. “She wrote about how men objectify women. How we use them like meat.” He turned to me. “But I gotta say, you do look pretty objectified yourself tonight.” He glanced at my breasts, still poking out of the low-cut black crepe dress, then at my crotch. “Pretty objectified.”
“Yeah, well, I got horny,” I said.
“Let’s drink to that,” Bruno said, waving his glass.
I turned away from Bruno to listen to Tommy’s cri de coeur pouring out over the stoned dive after midnight. I had a new status: I was a whore. In other words, past human redemption now, I didn’t have to be nice to anybody. Bruno sensed that he had been dismissed and retreated sideways again, guiding his drink along the length of the bar, back to his pals in the corner.
What I told Bruno about being horny was true as far as it went. In fact, I was chastened over the past year by the persistence of my desire. When I left the scene, I had been in a fury, a sweet, blind rage at men. I was tired of being pretty and playing a minor role. During the year that followed, I took to wearing hiking boots and a motorcycle jacket, I stopped shaving my legs and under my arms, and I joined up with a group of radical feminists who published Gutter. I practically never went to bed with anybody during that time, since, after a few abysmal experiments and to my dismay, I was clearly an irrevocable heterosexual. Too bad, especially when so many of my colleagues were gleefully coming out. And then, not long ago, my libido started to rise like a gorge inside of me, ripping up into my brain, until all I could think about was getting a man, and I didn’t care anymore whether I, the self, the person, was obliterated in the process. I needed rapture I decided, and fuck equality and fuck justice.
I had to come back. I missed Michael. Beyond that, I was a city kid who was used to hanging out. By the time I was thirteen, I was standing around with other delinquent teenagers on Madison Avenue street corners. There, as I posed coyly in front of Hamburger Heaven, I learned how to congregate. This is what I craved: the scene. Plans that normal people made, God, it was too much like work.
Having turned around to face the room, I leaned back with my elbows propped on the bar and, in my old black crepe dress, tried to convey the languorous attitude of a call girl. After a while, Michael removed his earphones. I was about to go over to his table when Melissa sailed in, dressed as usual in her halter top and cutoffs, her wild red hair shooting off in all directions, her scarecrow gait exaggerated-sloppy from quaaludes. She, too, had originally intended her destination to be Michael’s table, but, her head leading the way, she overshot the mark. Windmilling by, Melissa lurched instead into the middle distance, somewhere perilously close to the stage.
“Just another falling sparrow,” Michael said, sniffing the air, as she careened past him.
“The honeymoon’s over,” I said to myself. “Now I’m going to have to compete with this cunt. Well, fuck it. Maybe I won’t. Let him have her. Yeah, let the motherfucker wet-nurse her back to life all by himself.”
“Serves him right,” I said out loud as I twisted my body around to face Jimmy. I had eaten no dinner; the two Dexamyls I swallowed hours ago, before I turned my first trick, were starting to wear off, and Jimmy had already refilled my glass with barely diluted scotch. I was pretty drunk.
Eventually, Tommy Shelter stopped playing, gently laid his guitar down on the stool, climbed off the tiny stage, and began moving through the crowd in my direction. Right away, Michael was up pumping quarters into the jukebox, which was crammed with sleeper hits he had recorded off his favorite albums at a friend’s sixteen-track studio. A work of art, that jukebox. Michael panicked when there was no music. Keith Richards started singing, “You got the silver, you got the gold...” in his reedy voice. The smoke curling in the air seemed to be turning into incense, an ethereal blue. The whole room lurched into a downbeat rhythm. A kind of benign knowingness settled over the crowd, as if we had all been quietly blessed.
“You look fine, healthy. Your skin has a glow to it. The break from this scene did you good,” Tommy said, taking my elbow in his palm. He was wearing a long, flowing dashiki. He could’ve been some visiting African dignitary.
“What’ll you have?” Jimmy asked him.
“Oh, I don’t know, just a ginger ale,” Tommy said politely, modestly. “Would you like to come outside for a minute for a smoke?” he asked me, still cradling my elbow.
His bodyguard, Nighttrain, had moved up behind him, hugging the guitar now in its case, and was standing at his back.
“Sure,” I said.
The three of us stepped outside. Michael had followed us as far as the doorway. He kept peering at us until we disappeared around the corner. We were worthy of stares from any quarter: two black men, one in an African dashiki, the other one in loose overalls, and me in my cocktail dress. It was late and dead quiet, except for the sound of crickets chirping in the potted trees. Tommy lit up a joint. We passed it around for a while, gazing at the shiny pavement, wet from a brief shower, which shone green, red, green, red, under the changing walk/don’t walk light.
“Do you want to come home with me?” Tommy asked.
Nighttrain ignored us and stood watching the empty side street.
“The last time I went to your house, he was there the entire time, right in the room with us,” I said, nodding in the direction of Nighttrain.
“Let’s go to your place then.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a place right now. Crashing at my mother’s house. As a matter of fact, I’m looking.”
“That’s no problem. Let me think, there’s Jade, but no, she’s too street for you. I know, Sigrid, just right! She’s got a big pad on the West Side, right off the Park. I’m sure she’d put you up for a while if I asked her,” he said. “Oh, Sigrid, she’s a dream. You two will get along, I promise you.”
“Is she straight?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, she likes boys, right?”
Tommy laughed. “Right,” he said.
“That’s good, ’cause my last roommate kicked me out for being straight,” I said.
“Don’t worry, those days are over,” he said, sounding as if he knew.
Tommy took my number, or rather, my mother Maggie’s number, and promised to call. He didn’t ask me to go with him again. That impressed me.
After we finished smoking the reefer, which on top of the booze knocked me out, Tommy Shelter and Nighttrain took off, while I, sensing I was about to vomit and hoping to make it to the privacy of the toilet, marched myself back inside.
Escape
“Get up, get up!” my mother screamed, alarm in her voice, as she shook me. “It’s Saturday afternoon already. You’ve been sleeping since you got home yesterday. I thought maybe you were dead. Hurry up, somebody’s on the phone.”
I turned over. “What’d you say?”
Maggie continued to shake me. “I said there’s a call for you. Says his name is Tommy. Tell your street friends I don’t want them calling here. I don’t want them making their drug deals on my phone.”
I jumped out of bed and started running to the phone in the big front hall. On the way I said, “Mother, that’s Tommy Shelter, the singer, the one who was at Woodstock, you know?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t know,” she said. But she sounded chastened, even impressed. After spending her youth in the theater, she still worshipped fame, secretly of course.
“Hi, Tommy, sorry it took me so long, I was crashing.”
“Your mother told me. She said you’d been asleep since yesterday.”
“She told you that? What a pal, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. You can get out of there now.”
“Really?”
His low voice was soothing. I hung on to the receiver and started to nod. I was dreaming.
“Janet, Janet, are you still there?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“I said I just spoke to Sigrid. She wants to meet you. Call her. Here’s her number. Got a pencil? She mentioned something about this afternoon.”
“It already is this afternoon,” I said.
“Her pad is right across the Park from you. Are you busy?”
“Busy? Let me think. Hold on a minute. Tommy? Hold on, I’ll be right back. Tommy?”
“Yes, I’m here,” Tommy said.
I ran in my room and went straight for my little black brocade purse. A dim memory was pushing its way to the surface. I was hoping I hadn’t just imagined it. But no, there it was, a square of tinfoil, a care package of speed that Michael had slipped into my bag before I left, whenever that was. Wonderful Michael, in my life again. I sighed with contentment. Then I ran back to the phone.
“Tommy?”
“Are you OK?”
“Absolutely OK. I can go anywhere anytime. What’s her number?”
The Sigrid solution came my way not a moment too soon. Maggie and I hadn’t been hitting it off very well lately. It might even have been that she was preparing to kick me out. In the beginning, a couple of months before, when my roommate took in her new lover and asked me to leave, and I had to go home (no place else to go as usual), Maggie was undeniably delighted to have me back. I was her only child, and she and I had always been a smidgen too involved, according to every shrink I ever knew. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that when I first returned, Maggie was spilling over with an inappropriate amount of enthusiasm. She started laughing at her own jokes, buying tickets for us to Broadway matinees, ordering steamed lobsters from Rosedale Fish Market. She was full of hope. We joined Weight Watchers and cooked chicken livers stirred up with apples and onions in Pam and did the crossword puzzle together on Sunday. She honestly believed that I was turning over a new leaf.
Then I remembered to pull myself out of this jolly stupor.
My mother had been seducing me, as was her wont, and I’d been falling for it. My biggest nightmare was that, unless I fought it, she and I would float off into the sunset together like something out of Tennessee Williams, like Sebastian and his mother in Suddenly, Last Summer, only the single-sex version.
So my tactic was to turn churlish and mean. I never left the house. Maggie came home after doing the grocery shopping, and I was sprawled out on the sofa, my hiking boots—left over from the radical feminist stint—propped on the upholstered pillow. Maggie stood there in her low-heeled Florsheim “comfort pumps,” shifting her weight from one foot to the other. Then she wrinkled her nose as if the air smelled and looked longingly at her sofa.
“I don’t have a place to sit in my own house,” she said.
“What’s wrong with the club chair?”
“But you can’t see the TV from there.”
“You don’t want to watch anyway. The movie’s almost over,” I said, wishing she would shut up.
“Yes, I do. I want to see the news,” Maggie said, standing there in her miracle-fiber skirt-and-blouse ensemble, a big clumsy pocketbook hanging off one shoulder, still carrying two shopping bags full of groceries, one in each hand.
“It’s OK,” I said, never taking my eyes off George Raft, “this movie will be over at six. You won’t have to miss a minute of Vietnam, Ma.”
My attitude wore her down. She looked so miserable by the end of the day—her soft, reddish-blond-dyed hair matted to her forehead, a faded housecoat thrown over her wilted body—a weaker child might have taken pity. Not me, though. I wasn’t about to fall into her clutches. Just because I had to be there didn’t mean I belonged to her, I told myself. As far as I was concerned—and several of my shrinks had backed me up on this—my mother was out to get me.
Before Tommy and I got a chance to hang up, Maggie came out into the hall where I had draped myself over the loveseat and started gesturing to me.
“That’s enough now. Tell him you’ll call him back later. I want to talk to you.” Maggie spoke loud enough for Tommy to hear.
I waved her away.
“That’s enough I said.” The volume was pitched even louder now.
I put my hand over the mouthpiece. “Don’t bother me when I’m talking on the phone. Go away,” I hissed.
“How dare you speak to me like that. You are on my phone in my house.” The volume was turned up full blast now, to shrieking level.
“Tommy? I have to go. Thank you.” I slammed down the receiver. “You love humiliating me, don’t you? It’s how you get your jollies, isn’t it, humiliating me. Always was, you sadist bitch. All my life.”
“That’s it! That’s enough. You can just pack your bags and leave right now. I don’t care where you go. I’ve had it!” Maggie screamed.
She looked ridiculous as usual, I thought, standing there little and pudgy in her shapeless, chocolate-colored miracle-fiber pants and a lavender T-shirt, which had, coincidentally, a chocolate-colored stain on the front of it. Were the pants and shirt supposed to go together? Never exactly chic, Maggie had been extremely glamorous when she was young. Daddy’s little girl, the gay divorcée about town, sexy and colorful; she was a lush, sweet orchid that bloomed at night. This was so right up until lately. Then I don’t know what happened. Once she passed fifty, she simply let the whole thing drop as if it were a stage role that had ceased to amuse her.
“It just so happens I was planning to leave today anyway,” I said.
“And go where?” she asked. Her voice fell so fast, she sounded almost timid by comparison.
“Never mind where. It’s none of your business.”
“Oh yes, it is. How do I know you won’t come creeping back here when this one doesn’t work out. Is it that man you just talked to? Are you going to live with that man? Fine with me, as long as he’s willing to pay for everything. Does he know how spoiled you are? How messy you are?
“And, Janet, put some clothes on. Maybe he won’t mind, but I don’t like you parading around my house naked.”
“No, Mother, it isn’t that man,” I said, ignoring the last part but feeling, suddenly, naked. “It’s a young woman, around my age. She lives off Central Park West and she’s looking for a roommate.”
“Who is she? Someone you know?”
“Not yet, but I understand she’s very nice.”
“You’re going to move in with some stranger sight unseen?”
“I thought you wanted me out, no matter what.”
“Yes, but I think you should leave here the right way. Get a job first, then find an apartment when you have some money saved. I know your father, if he were ever willing to take any interest at all, would agree with me. I’d call him right now, but he absolutely refuses to get invol
ved. Might as well face it, whenever there’s a crisis, I’ve got to handle it alone. He’s useless, your father.”
I was tempted to tell her that my handsome Yankee cavalier of a father, with his history of wives—four of them, present one included—had just been passing through. He was an empty well, I wanted to say to her, an empty well. Instead I said, “But you’re doing fine all by your lonesome. Didn’t you just kick me out?”
“Maybe I did. And probably that’s what I should do, but you know I’d worry. OK, I’m sorry. I lost my temper. You can stay.”
“Tough shit. I’m going.”
“Please stay, Janet. I think you’d better stay, Janet. You’re asking for trouble. This isn’t right. You’re not going about this the right way.”
“Too bad. I’m already gone,” I said.
“What are you going to do for money? That girl isn’t going to put you up for free.”
“I said none of your damned business.” This over my shoulder. I was eager as hell to just split. Suddenly, the desire to break free was acute. Must get out quick, before she destroys me. Must get away from the cloying pink-and-cherry-red bedroom of my childhood, the ever-widening mesh of private jokes, shared Weight Watchers recipes, and heated after-theater discussions. This was a warm and easy life but not the one I chose. Help. A few more tricks and I’d have the rent. God, hooking was great, the money changing hands in a flash. Hooking was my ticket to ride—ride or otherwise fall into the great gaping maw that was Maggie.
It could only have been a bullet hole smack in the middle of the plate glass oval in the front door of Sigrid’s apartment house. This was right before gentrification, when the West Eighties still looked like the working-class neighborhood it once was, only worse, dilapidated. No buzzer system, so, as we had arranged over the phone, I banged on the ground-floor window, which was where Sigrid lived. The face of a princess, of a blond Rose White, peered at me through the venetian blinds.
“It’s plenty big enough for two,” she said once we were inside.
The apartment was one room, with a homemade plywood partition about five feet high that ran down the middle. Sigrid had decorated her home with beds. Beds were everywhere. One queen-sized number was made up with sheets, the others, three or four single beds, were draped with tie-dyed cotton coverlets in various hues of green and purple, big pillows in psychedelic primary colors thrown around on top of them. Besides the extensive bed collection, there was a card table with some metal chairs over by the kitchenette.