by Janet Capron
“C’mon, kids, eat up. I worked my ass off and this is good food. You gotta eat! Janet, I know that’s not your bag, but you probably need the calories. Eddie, you, too. You’re going to disappear if you don’t eat. And, Ava, I’m sick and tired of your anorexia or whatever the hell it is. Eat, eat. Capiche?”
We tried to oblige, pushing the meat in its heavy gravy around and around on the plate. I was shoving food into my mouth one carrot at a time, which I would then chew and chew in the hope I could break it down enough to swallow it.
“You kids are crazy. You don’t know what you’re missing. Great dinner, Evelyn! We got to do this more often,” Danny said, taking a big long drink of wine.
“Seems sacrilegious to be eating when my boa is out there somewhere starving to death,” Eddie piped up. He was using the snake as an excuse not to eat. Can’t hustle a hustler.
“Yes, I know, Eddie, but you won’t bring him back by starving yourself,” Evelyn said. She probably knew he was playing her but liked being his foil all the same.
“What about you, Ava, are you mourning the snake, too?” Evelyn asked.
Ava barely looked up. “No, of course not. I’m glad it’s gone. I’m just not hungry, that’s all.”
“You’re never hungry. What, you think that’s sexy, the skeleton look?”
“Honestly, Mother, you are such a drag. Did anyone ever tell you that?”
“Hey, Ava, cool it, man.” This from Eddie.
“I don’t understand you two girls—why can’t you get along?” Danny said, helping himself to another round of food.
“May I be excused?” Ava asked, her tone as hostile as she could make it.
“No, that’s rude to Janet, our guest. Besides, I want to see you eat something.”
“OK, Evelyn, Mom, let the little bitch go. We don’t need her around anyway, bringing me down for sure,” Eddie said.
“Maybe Eddie’s right. You’re bringing us all down,” Evelyn said.
Ava left the table immediately and went upstairs, where she disappeared inside her room and slammed the door.
I had moved on to my second carrot, which I was chewing endlessly like it was a tiny bone. The gravy was starting to congeal on top of my largely untouched meat and pasta. Lucky for me the family was dysfunctional. I was blending in.
Finally, Evelyn, with Danny as helpmate, took all the platters and our food-laden plates back into the kitchen.
Evelyn came out and said cheerfully, “Judging from your plates, I see that no one wants dessert.”
“What’s for dessert?” Eddie wanted to know.
“Ice cream and cookies,” Evelyn said.
“I’ll have some of that,” he said.
“Oh, that’s nice, you can’t eat all that food I prepared, but you’re suddenly hungry for dessert,” Evelyn said, but she went back into the kitchen, where Danny was loading the dishwasher, and came out again with bowls, ice cream, and a box of Entenmann’s chocolate chip cookies. I could tell that nobody expected me to have any. I was off the hook.
“You don’t want to go home in an old crate like that,” Eddie said.
We were standing behind Evelyn’s old Mustang. The moon hung over us, low and full.
“Why not?”
“Nah, this ain’t the right kind of short for a girl like you. I can do better. C’mon.”
He fished a metal wire about a foot long out of a pile of junk at the back of the shed. Then I followed him onto the road, where we turned right, passed the fancy neighbors, and came to a parking lot. A lit-up sign said MEMBERS PARKING ONLY. It belonged to the yacht club. Eddie darted ahead of me and trotted up and down the mostly empty rows. Now and then he circled the occasional car and peered in its window. He stopped, put his hands on his hips. His curly locks, his skin, the white T-shirt and blue jeans, turned a monochromatic gray in the moonlight. I came up and stood beside him. He pointed to the far corner.
“That one.”
As little as I knew about cars, it was unmistakably a Corvette, a cream-colored Corvette. Eddie went to the edge of the lot and motioned for me to get behind him. I stood in the weeds just beyond the asphalt. The crickets around my feet stopped singing. I could hear the tiny scratch of wire in the lock. Once the door opened, Eddie stuck his head in and leaned over the front seat. He connected something up underneath the dashboard. Then the engine began to hum. He went around and opened the other door for me.
“You should always ride in style,” he said.
We were both drunk, and Eddie must have still been tripping, too, but the road was empty. He gunned the gas pedal right away and did not slow down to a fast cruise until we reached the main part of the little town. We swerved all over the Throgs Neck Bridge. On the highway, the cool air assaulted me steadily from the wide-open window. I felt giddy. I couldn’t keep from grinning.
“Smokin’, ain’t it?” was all Eddie said.
I turned to look at him. The wind was blowing his hair back away from his determined face, and for the first time, I could really see it. He was much less ethereal than I had supposed. In fact, his face was bottom-heavy, dominated by a strong chin. His lips were sultry, his nose straight and a bit wide. Thick lashes framed his gray-blue eyes, which were splintered with tiny specks of white like a hundred blind spots. The bone above his eyebrows was strangely prominent, and his forehead was smooth and low, with a clearly marked widow’s peak. While I stared at Eddie’s profile, he ignored me, keeping his eyes on the road, both of his white-knuckled hands gripping the wheel. He knew he was stoned and drunk.
The air turned acrid and warm and stung our eyes and our noses even before we entered the midtown tunnel.
“Where to?”
“Seventy-Sixth and Second. And thanks.”
When we got to the Traveling Medicine Show, Eddie pulled up with a squeal of the tires, then burned rubber again after I slammed the door. I watched him tearing off down Second Avenue, just making the graduated green lights. I remember thinking he was hip for a kid.
Mystery Plays
Evelyn held me over for yet another week. She liked having me around, and, in all modesty, I was good for business. Meanwhile, Frank, the enamored john, was coming to see me once in a while in the evening. He was my first regular client. By the time I got through at Evelyn’s, without trying, I had saved almost $2,000, which I kept under my mattress. After finishing my third straight week of steady employment, I took out the bills and counted them for the first time. Damn. I didn’t know what to do with all of it. I had been buying clothes here and there: jeans, lace-up boots, a cashmere sweater that caught my eye on Second Avenue, and one of the first midis to appear that season, a long, subtly flared black skirt that made me look like a wisp. Even so, I was still rich.
I decided it was time to stop depending on Michael. It was time, in other words, to buy an ounce of speed on my own. I left the whole transaction up to him, and he was glad to do it. He approved. He got me a special price—what he paid, which was practically wholesale—seventy-five dollars an ounce of what was barely stepped-on liquid meth. Considering a matchstick end’s worth would keep a three-hundred-pound man awake all night, an ounce would go a long way—or should have.
“A lot of girls don’t know how to be on their own out here,” Michael said.
When he handed me the tinfoil, he told me the stuff was so clean I had better keep it cool. Otherwise, it was liable to melt. And the dealer had etherized it, which made it seem milder than it really was. He warned me not to overdo it.
“You know how you are. Be careful,” he said.
“Yeah, well, try not to patronize me, will you?” I said.
I could smell the sweet ether in my nostrils. The speed was so pure, it was an aromatic paste that stuck in the short straw and stuck in my nose. I put a dollop on my tongue; it disappeared. Where did it say in the New Testament “and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them”?
I careened on foot uptown and down. I found a black-magic bookstor
e in the East Village and read Aleister Crowley sitting as if frozen there on my bed at Sigrid’s. She began to avoid me, I thought. Or maybe I was imagining it. Anyway, I couldn’t take her where I was, and she was too bound to those feeble three dimensions for me to want to be where she was. I even stopped going around to the Traveling Medicine Show. It didn’t matter, because Michael and I were connected telepathically by that time, I was sure. I began to talk to him out on the street. Then I began to talk to God and His Consort/Mother. They laughed at me a lot and cheered me on.
Later, I started zigzagging up and down the island of Manhattan in taxicabs at all hours, ready to explore other scenes. I can remember, for instance, one early morning some old drunks in the West Village depositing me into one of these taxis and waving after me as if I were leaving their country to go on a long trip. I sailed up Eighth Avenue just before dawn, past the sunburst of marquees and billboards around Forty-Second Street that advertised girls with great, ponderous breasts, girls masturbating, girls leaning over with their backs to the street and spreading the cheeks of their behinds, all in living color, and I felt like Lilith on a rampage after she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
Back at the apartment, Sigrid began to eye me suspiciously. Now I knew she was avoiding me. She kept to her side of the plywood partition. When she brought someone home, she no longer bothered to introduce me. I could hear them whispering.
Jesus, it felt great to be thin. After what I thought of as the girlish flesh on my face had fallen away, high cheekbones emerged. Nothing could be more captivating than that spectral look, I thought. I could feel the knobs of my hips, the outline of each rib. I was in control of my body at last. Every curve now obeyed me. I became amazingly limber: I could do backbends all the way to the floor; I could sit in lotus position for hours.
Somewhere in there I asked Sigrid to take me to the Times Square emporium because I wanted to do the live sex show she had told me about. I was suddenly in the mood. She raised an eyebrow when I announced this and shrugged.
“What the hell, you’re so wacky these days, Janet. Flaky is what you are. But if it weren’t this, I guess it would be something else, so, OK, you’re a big girl. But why, Janet?”
“What difference does it make? Something to do. A little adventure,” I said.
What I didn’t say, because I knew it wouldn’t go over too well, was that God and His Mother, my now constant companions, had suggested I might look into it. Acting in Vincent’s morality plays would be good for my moral education, they said. It is true these two had a serenely cosmic sense of irony. They were not bound by conventional mores, that’s for sure. And, as if usurping the devil’s job, they goaded me on. Playfully, gleefully, the two of them teased me, exhorting me to go after experience. “Be wholehearted,” they said. Even Michael couldn’t have whisked me down and through this netherworld as fast as God and His Mother seemed to want to go.
Sigrid led me up the narrow staircase to Vincent and Candy’s emporium, where Vincent sat behind a front desk taking money off an assortment of men, from the look of it, poor men. This was the massage parlor part of the operation. Before we went inside, we could hear one of his employees around the corner hawking tickets to the “mystery plays,” the two one-act dramas shown back-to-back. “Live sex, live sex,” he kept barking over and over into the street. Behind Vincent, Candy stood in stiletto-heeled boots, all of at least five-foot-ten solid brick of her, dressed in a merry widow with a black leather jacket draped over her shoulders. Her hair was ice blond, not a particularly common shade at that point in time. She was lavishly made up, with thick black eyeliner, another anomaly in 1971. The eyeliner extended, Cleopatra style, into sweeping wings. She had a smirk on her face, a twisted, sardonic grin. It gave me the impression she was performing. I guessed that she was the shill.
When Sigrid had finally called the two of them to tell them she was bringing her roommate along, Vincent’s only question was “Is she white?” Now he stood up and grinned at me. He was obviously pleased that I was indeed white, and young, and certainly not too fat. I felt like a winged insect crawling out of its husk, supple, thin: I weighed now under a hundred pounds. It was the first week of autumn, still warm by day, but cooling off at night, and I was wearing a long-sleeved, full-length bodysuit (no bra, of course) and a leftover micromini. Sigrid stuck to her jeans-and-old-shirt outfit. Unlike the rest of us, she didn’t believe in dressing for the occasion.
Vincent walked over to me and extended his hand. Here was another charismatic leader, in this case the guiding light, the impresario, of Times Square. His handshake was firm, like a salesman’s. He was wearing a T-shirt and black jeans, and his arms were covered with luxurious tattoos, spirals of jewel-colored serpents and dragons. I took the opportunity to examine his nose, which Sigrid had told me he had fixed. It was a trifle on the small side. He smiled again, a smile that you’d expect to see in an eight-by-ten glossy. His front teeth were all perfectly uniform caps, except for one incisor, which was pure gold. He had pomaded his straight, dyed blue-black hair into a DA, one lock hanging over his forehead, fifties style.
“I hear you want to be in my play. That’s great. I’m always hoping for someone who might be able to understand the material. Let me introduce you to your fellow cast member. Then I’ll explain the plot to both of you and rehearse you a few minutes before the first show. There isn’t much time. National Broadcasting’s studio is headquartered just down the street, so we get a big lunch shot, all them horny execs. Sigrid, you know what to do,” he said, leading me away.
“I’ll be fine,” Sigrid said as she and Candy stood close together, whispering.
The men who had just paid for their hand jobs seemed content to hang around. Inside the sunny, large room next door, with the massage tables and the screens, there were only black girls and Puerto Ricans working, girls like the men themselves. They preferred to wait, staring at the two blondes.
My costar sat in the last row of the balcony of the huge theater, an abandoned movie palace. He had his feet up and he was smoking a doobie the size of Manhattan. It was the first time I’d seen a Rastafarian joint, or dreadlocks either for that matter. It shook me up. Vincent introduced him as Elijah. He was a Jamaican who was quick to tell me that he managed a reggae band back home. I had never heard of reggae. Vincent told me it was religious rock ’n’ roll. Rastafarians believed they were the descendants of Sheba and, therefore, one of the lost Hebrew tribes.
“Which is why Elijah is such a good person to interpret my play. He has a sense of its mystical dimensions,” Vincent said.
Elijah nodded. He looked solemn. “I don’t go with white women,” he said.
“What do you mean, you don’t go with white women? Why didn’t you tell me that sooner? Anyway, Janet isn’t white, she’s Jewish—same as you—c’mon, we haven’t got time for this,” Vincent said, starting to panic.
Elijah stood up. He towered over me. He looked at my body, then he cupped my face in his hand, tilting my chin until we were within kissing distance. There was a glint in his eye. Was it humor? Anyway, he had a lovely build, so lean, broad shouldered. I could overlook a lot, even the snakes coming out of his head. ‘I’m really a good sport,’ I thought.
“All right,” Elijah said, pulling on his sweet cigar, like he was doing us both the biggest favor.
Vincent went limp with relief. “Thanks, Elijah, thanks, brother,” he said, patting the man on the back.
Vincent was showing signs of being a truly great director. At least he knew how to placate his actors. He sat us one behind the other in aisle seats. Then he ran down to the small stage bathed in pink lights. A fake Christmas tree with a real apple hanging off it stood drooping to the side in one corner, the only prop. He ran back up again.
Vincent raced through an explanation of his mystery play in two acts. “This is how you make your entrance, from back here. Most of the customers will be in the front, but they always get a little thrill when the actors come down
from the balcony, especially since the actors are naked. You won’t run, of course. Adam will be leading Eve by the hand.
“See, the first act is the Adam and Eve story. In the beginning, you have to look lost, lost and innocent. It’s the Garden of Eden. You wander around the stage, oblivious. Then I yell from up here—I play God—you can eat every fruit but the apple. That’s OK with you. Adam lies down to take a nap. Eve just wanders around some more by herself. Joe, he’s the ticket taker, comes on stage right and talks to Eve from behind the tree. He’s the Serpent, convinces Eve to take a bite. Well, you know the story. Have to rush through this part, because the second act takes more explaining. She turns Adam onto the apple. How she does this is with a sexy dance. You know, seduce him. He goes for it finally. But, Elijah, man, you gotta pretend to be reluctant at first.
“They are suddenly aware of each other, of each other’s bodies. They stare, they begin to touch, and so on. Then they make love. You can simulate that part, of course. Finally, after they’re finished and are lying in each other’s arms, I yell down again, curse them, and drive them out of Eden. Adam cries out in agony, ‘Woman, what have you done?’ Then you exit, your heads bowed in shame, up the aisle.
“OK, here’s act two. It’s called ‘Salem Witch Trial.’ Elijah, you play Cotton Mather, who, in case you don’t know who that is, was an uptight prude. Janet is being condemned as a witch. You lead her down to the stage, her hands bound in a big chain. When you get there, you condemn her to burn at the stake. She pleads for her life. She says that if only you would let her dance for you, the dance would prove, by its beauty, that she is no witch. She pleads and begs, writhing in your grip. Finally, you say OK and unravel her chain. She begins this dance. It is really lewd. She seduces Cotton Mather. You make love (simulated, of course). He is undone; all his power is stripped. He becomes putty in her hands. At the end, he is lying exhausted on the stage. Janet, you wrap his hands in chains and then, triumphantly, you put your foot on his head.