by Janet Capron
And I made it. Here I was sailing high into the purple dusk. Below me, tugs and yachts bobbing in the channel teased the majestic skyline like jestering dwarves. I was nursing a Dewar’s, swilling the liquid around my mouth to savor the aroma, the bittersweet taste, its acrid tang incense to the palate, promising deliverance. My blood was humming with a lowly diet pill, a Dexamyl. I was playing it safe. The pill provided the energy I needed while sparing the visions the white powder induced. If you had told me then that I was living for booze and drugs, I would have laughed. It would be like telling me I was living for the sound of music. So what?
But I had never ceased to be political in my own skewed way. I did need to believe I was living for something. My life had to stand for something. Well, hooking stood for something. The profession had always been a form of de facto underground resistance to male control. Otherwise, once you let them prohibit experience, once you let them proscribe certain kinds of pleasure, then you might as well give up hope for self-realization. Once they control your desire, they hold your head in a vise. You don’t dare look too far off in any direction. And, because the breadth of experience is forbidden, you will have to rely on their word—on received knowledge.
Men had divided us, I realized. Like house niggers and field niggers, good women and bad women were kept apart. We were the victims of myth, of half-truths. No dialogue, no hope for understanding. I would build an arch across this ancient fissure. I would free myself from all the hobbling generalizations, past and present, which thrive on ignorance. We are not the rapacious bottomless pits of lust, the unreasoning animal half of humankind that the Middle Ages and parts of the Third World paint us to be. Nor are we the frail eunuchs of the late nineteenth century, and most certainly not the clitorally fixated pets of my time, the Penthouse era, waiting to be diddled to climax in a quaint echo of male virility. On any given day, I could feel like any one of these monstrous stereotypes or a combination of them—but no, none of what I heard about my sex was true, and I longed to discover what really was the difference. I had to explore; I craved experience. I thought that maybe if I just got around enough, took a broad enough consensus, I would understand the truth about men and women.
For a long time after Highcrest finally released me into her custody, my mother stuck close. She hovered solicitously, making no demands. She would gingerly broach the subject of meals, what to watch on TV, forcing her gaiety, only seeming to gladly embrace the shopping and cooking rituals of Weight Watchers if it would please me, anxious above all to please me. When I tried to talk about leaving, she would pat my shoulder and say there was time to think about all that. I later discovered the doctors had told her after I arrived at Highcrest that I was nuts: schizophrenic, or maybe it was manic-depressive, or both. It must be hell to love a cracked thing, a thing so fragile you’re afraid to touch it. Maggie humored me, waiting for signs of either recovery or another outbreak, she knew not which.
Meanwhile, I concentrated on dropping, week after abstemious week, the sluggish narcoleptic fat that felt like a pod sealing my limbs, robbing me of grace. And I plotted my next break. Eventually in March, after about six months of lying low and losing weight, I recovered enough confidence to call my two contacts, Evelyn and Corinne, who were more than willing to take my situation in hand.
The madam Evelyn sent me to was the eminent Annabelle, originally from New Orleans. Still living at home with Maggie at first, I slyly worked the afternoon shift. Annabelle owned a penthouse on lower Fifth Avenue overlooking Washington Square. She was a crone, with torrents of gray hair that she sometimes piled up and sometimes let fall any which way. But her girls had to be neat, pristine even. Annabelle would make us sit, shivering from the air-conditioning in her vast, sunken living room with our legs crossed. She made us wear skirts that at least covered our knees; nothing shorter would be tolerated. No false eyelashes, and not too much mascara either. When she wasn’t lecturing her charges, you could find the old lady pruning and watering on her wraparound terrace. The regular customers knew they would find her there. Annabelle had a green thumb. Trees and tall bushes grew in wild profusion outside the picture windows. At night it looked like a giant web, branches tangled and knocking against each other in the March wind.
And while she insisted on decorum from her girls, Annabelle herself was exempt. Nobody could accuse the old dame of being a priss. She loved to curse; she particularly loved the word ‘fuck,’ and she cackled a lot, especially when referring to the old days and what a great whore she had been. We were nothing; we were drips, but Annabelle had wowed ’em back then in the early twenties. She was proud of her adventures, the many times she had been squired to elite nightclubs and fancy-dress balls, the night she had flown up north on a private plane—and this was before Lindbergh crossed the ocean, she reminded us—with one of her more glamorous playboy customers. She called them all suitors, and they were as far as she was concerned.
“They loved to show me off in public,” she said, cackling. “Oh, I was beautiful then, beautiful. I wore gowns covered in beads...”
She wiggled her fingertips lightly back and forth across her sagging breasts, after which she let them travel like the spinning legs of a centipede down her midriff and over her bulging stomach. Then she paused to look at the parquet floor beyond the shag carpet, as if she were peering into a distant mirror, where she caught sight of herself fifty years ago.
“Somebody gave me one of them cloches, the ones that hugged your head”—she patted her crown—“encrusted with real jewels...and I can’t remember, I truly cannot remember, who that was...” Annabelle snapped back to the present. “I used to knock ’em on their ass...”
This last remark was accompanied by her doing the shimmy inside the big tent of a muumuu she always wore, at the same time running her gnarled fingers through the jumble of gray hair piled up with Spanish combs.
Sometimes, she would sit in the middle of one of her large sofas and draw all four of us girls around her as if she were about to let us in on a secret. Then she would start. “Listen to me, children, I knew how to fuck; I could do the lobster claw.” She made her fist open and close rapidly to illustrate. “I could suck the come out of ’em with my tight little pussy whenever I felt like it. I called the shots. Yes indeedy, I was the best. They never left me...”
This much was true, because many of these same johns, a seemingly endless array of distinguished silver-haired gents in dark pin-striped suits, were still in evidence. Only now as often as not, they brought their teenage sons and grandsons to be initiated.
I was struck by the deference they showed to the vulgar old woman. It was not exaggerated either, as I would have expected; no, this was genuine respect. And as far as I could tell, the madam did nothing to elicit it. She never modified her behavior one bit, never bothered to rein in her foul language. Annabelle had marked out a wide-open territory, quite literally a no-man’s-land, come to think of it, in which she was free to behave any way she liked. More than polite, these scions of business acted like cowed schoolboys around Annabelle. As I had from the first, I pondered this relationship between whores and men. I was taught that only respectable ladies had the right to command any show of respect, and such ladies were invariably those women who were the least excitable, the most quiet, the most repressed, is what I thought. To see these johns, these otherwise substantial citizens, sitting quietly at attention before the thoroughly louche Annabelle was a remarkable discovery.
They were the kind of Old World johns who believe that a man’s first experience should be with a whore, representing the last wave of a grand tradition that may have since become obsolete. Where today would one even begin to look for a teenage virgin? The ritual had become a sham. As often as not, when I thought I was supposed to be the boy’s first, he quickly made it clear he could teach me a thing or two and had tagged along just to get laid, out of curiosity, or because he didn’t want to disillusion poor old Dad.
Meanwhile, I was afraid of Anna
belle’s tongue, which could slice a girl’s vanity to shreds. If the old whore was in the mood, she could get reckless. “Oh, child, you do got a flat ass. Shame. Can’t go far with that.” Pat, pat on the girl’s behind. “Why don’t you stick that out some?” or “Brighten up, sourpuss. With a face like yours, you better learn to compensate. Personality, personality...” She stuck her face into the face in question, which belonged to a little streetwise tough from Sunnyside.
“Listen, Granny, you ain’t exackly makin’ ’em drop their drawers on sight these days yourself,” the girl said.
They both laughed, a cackle and a derisive giggle. Then I realized that Annabelle’s derision was meant to be all in good fun. I kept waiting for her to get to me, but during the months that I worked for her off and on, she never did. Probably I was exempted because it was obvious I was too tender and wouldn’t know how to handle it. Besides, I think she appreciated that I hung on her every vulgar word, listened carefully to every bawdy instruction—when she told us, for instance, how to “bust a cherry.”
“Be kind,” she said, “otherwise they going to shrivel up on you. So go easy with ’em.”
Dressed in my knee-length skirt, my brown hair pulled back, and wearing very little makeup, I saw myself as a bayadère, a maiden in an ancient temple—the temple of deflowering. I took the job very seriously.
Once, while going through my usual spiel, I got caught at my game. I was undressing slowly, pulling off the modest knee-length skirt (I never quite got the point of that—it was too dowdy for words). While I was stripping, I was telling the boy, “There’s only one first time. This is a special event, a rite of passage.”
“I don’t know about you, but it sure as hell isn’t my first time,” the boy said.
He was snarling. He looked, suddenly, adorable.
We connected. No longer john and whore, we were just two kids. The way we desired each other in that tricked-out boudoir made it feel strangely illicit and innocent at once, as if he were a lover stealing me from the harem. I remember gentle kisses.
Suddenly the bam, bam of the old madam’s knuckles rapping on the door. Too much time had passed, and then come noises from the wrong party. We emerged flushed pink with love, defiant.
But you know, I don’t think Annabelle entirely disapproved. She liked my enthusiasm. The popular idea that prostitutes obey strict rules about when to give themselves and when not is a total misreading of the average whore’s psyche, which is far from obedient to anything.
I discovered that spontaneous lovemaking, the unexpected victory of sexual chemistry over circumstance, did happen. It happened about as often as it does anywhere in life, which is to say rarely.
“Never forget one thing,” Annabelle would tell us every day in her carefully preserved southern drawl, “never forget: the sun rises and sets on those peepees of theirs, rises and sets.”
When I first got back to Maggie’s and my pink-and-cherry-red bedroom, I pictured the star of my dreams still sitting at his rectangular table with his feet up at the Traveling Medicine Show just as I had left him. But then one day a few months after I was released from Highcrest, out for a convalescent walk on Second Avenue, I ran into the big red-haired, pink-faced Jimmy, who threw his arms around me right there on the avenue, as if I were not the pariah I had convinced myself I was. I felt fat and awkward in my shapeless clothes and so shy in Jimmy’s presence, who was only one removed from Michael himself, that I could barely whisper hello. I had thought my throat was going to close when I tried to speak.
“Where you been, darlin’? My God, you look so healthy, I hardly recognized you. You look as crisp as a new head of lettuce,” he said.
“I’ve been in the nuthouse, Jimmy.”
“Well, sure, I knew that. But for all this time? Shit, what were they doing to you in there, experimenting on you or something?”
“Or something.”
Jimmy pulled me over to the curb, where he leaned up against a car. He grabbed hold of my hands and swung my arms back and forth while he looked me in the face. Then he started to play with my hands, examining my palms and my fingers as if he were a doctor conning them for symptoms. Finally he searched my eyes with an expression that told me he was afraid he was about to hurt me.
“Could it be you don’t know?” he asked.
“I promise you whatever it is, I don’t know. I’ve been out of it,” I said.
“Michael’s packed up his tent and moved downtown to Slim’s Wide Missouri. He’s really where it’s at now. He’s at the hub of everything. I was supposed to go with him, I kinda promised I would, but, hell, there’s no opportunities down there, if you know what I mean. All my contacts are up here. Besides, I’m used to walking to work. Yeah, I’m still behind the stick at the old Medicine Show; it’s like running a morgue these days.
“Oh, and, Janet, Michael’s living with someone now. You remember Roseanna? Yeah, the Italian one, you remember her, beautiful, yes, but not my type...Anyway, she went ahead and had his kid, just a few weeks ago as a matter of fact. Maybe it’ll be good for him, whaddya think...might settle him right down...don’t you think? I guess it would be all right for you to go and see him, but, honey, try not to stir things up. Don’t tempt him back into the old ways, all right? I mean, I have no idea what he does for fun lately, but I’d hate to see him blow his chance at happiness.”
He kept playing with my hands, flip-flopping them around in his big ones as if they were too hot to touch, and staring down at them while he spoke, as if my limp hands were the go-betweens that were meant to relay his message to my now impassive face.
“Oh good, Jimmy, I’m glad to hear it. Sounds like he’s doing great...Well, of course, I’ll drop by to see you real soon, although I’m not drinking a whole lot myself these days.”
“Doesn’t matter, have a ginger ale...The bar’s real quiet, Janet. There’s no more music; most of the old crowd is gone. We get an early shot now, neighborhood guys. We got a big TV on the wall. Everything’s changed but me and the sawdust on the floor,” Jimmy said, slowly brightening with relief as it came to him that this was to be the full extent of my reaction to his news. “Jeez, it’s good to see you, Janet. I was wondering this time if you’d ever be back...So, where you headed now?”
“Just out for a walk.”
“I better pick up my laundry before the damn place closes. Come around soon, won’t you? I missed your crazy little face, you fox you.”
Jimmy hugged me again, gently enfolding me in his big arms and slowly rocking me from side to side as if he exactly understood. I stayed there against his king-sized chest long enough to detect the beating of his heart. Afraid my generally guarded misery might take advantage of this warm moment to leap out in sobs like a shameful deformity, like a hidden stump loosed and waving suddenly in the open air, I finally had to pull away.
This was a lot to take in: Michael playing house with a baby and, possibly even worse, not where I thought he was. I slunk back to Maggie’s feeling shook up and betrayed.
Now that I knew Michael was downtown, after my shift ended at Annabelle’s penthouse on lower Fifth Avenue, I would hail a cab and direct it to turn on Thirteenth Street and drive slowly past his new club. I would pretend I was looking for someone, which in a way I was, in that I always hoped and feared I might catch a glimpse of him. Sometimes I got out and let the cab go. In the quiet evening that belied the frenzy to come, I would stand there in front of the dark window and breathe the air outside the club as if it were pure oxygen. Once or twice the big man working the door questioned whether I planned to go in, but I hurried away without answering him when that happened.
I was terrified of rejection. What if, as 4-H Jimmy had suggested, now that Michael was a father, he really loved this Roseanna? I couldn’t picture it, but even if he was the same old Michael, and even if he didn’t know how to love Roseanna any better than he did anyone else, he still might not want to have anything to do with me.
I longed for his tou
ch and just to watch him from across the room—his tender, sensitive mouth; his wistful, delicate expression—and, possibly, to receive one of his telepathic penetrating glances—that was what I missed most, how well I thought he knew me. His presence soothed me in a way nothing else ever had. But before I went to see him, I decided I would have to be so on top of things that whatever he said or did wouldn’t have the power to destroy me. I needed more time.
On this particular evening in my new apartment, I stood at the window watching the sky darken, sipping my drink, my mind starting to drift out over the river and down, dreaming as ever in Michael’s direction. Then the phone rang, jolting me back. It was Corinne.
“Hello, hon. Am I the first to ring you on your new phone?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact you are.”
“Good. I wanted to be. We’re pals. Don’t you forget it. Listen, I’ve been thinking, I’ve got an idea. Your next step. Very exciting. Come over tomorrow night and I’ll tell you about it.”
Felix’s
As I was strolling over to Corinne’s house on a warm spring evening that had leapfrogged into summer, making it almost too warm for my blue-jean jacket, I passed close to Felix’s, the other Upper East Side hang-out. Felix’s had been billed in a magazine a while back as “the place where the underground meets the underworld,” only I hadn’t seen much of the underground lately. This gin mill was just down the street from the often talked about and written about watering hole Irene’s, home to the intelligentsia. Irene’s bartenders drank at Felix’s. They made fun of their customers at Irene’s, the famous authors who were famous down the street at Felix’s more for their bumbling attempts to score cocaine than for any Pulitzer Prize–winning novels they may have written.