Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  Eventually, still strangers, the gentleman player and I came downstairs again. The crowd had grown and included several sophisticated-looking black women dressed in long, tight skirts and high heels. A man was playing a horn at the far end of the big room in front of the windows. Everyone was listening. I found Felicity standing by herself at the back of the room. She was staring at the horn player, with slits for eyes.

  “Check him out,” she said.

  I moved a little closer, then I stood up on a leather ottoman, balancing myself by holding on to someone’s shoulder. He was beautiful. Like the man I had just been with, the musician was khaki colored, lean, long fingered. And he played the tenor sax in a now blitzing, now whispering way, with a rhythm so subtle it escaped me. But even so, it made me want to follow it.

  “What do you think?” Felicity asked.

  I was flattered that she wanted to know what I thought, that she was treating me like a confidante. “I think he’s hot, he’s a dream,” I said.

  “Yeah. He’s got my nose open. I’m going to get him,” Felicity said.

  Maybe it was because we were not far from Slim’s Wide Missouri, or it could have been the way Felicity had her eyes trained on the horn player, but I was reminded of how I used to watch Michael pad around his old gin mill. I think the real reason longing finally overcame fear was because when the pimp and I were upstairs, I felt so damn free, it made me shiver. Afterward, although he wasn’t unkind, it was as if he were shooing me off the plantation into the wilderness. There had never been any daddy, and now there was no man willing to look after me. I wasn’t the type you even tried to own anymore.

  Slim’s Wide Missouri

  There he was.

  The ambiance was new, but the impresario without portfolio was not: Michael with his long hair, in his blue jeans and moccasins, sitting with his legs propped up on a chair in his new saloon—all’s right with the world—on a Sunday night, one of his favorite nights, when the music played for the musicians and the straight world slept. My trepidation melted away at the sight of him. In fact, he looked downright homey and folksy compared to anything else in my life.

  I hung up my Ralph Lauren fleece-lined jacket inside an unattended coatroom and went to the bar, which, because it was early, was nearly empty. This place didn’t heat up until much later. The first set wouldn’t start until after ten. I looked around. The bar, tables, and chairs were oak with a natural stain—everything was light and serene. Michael had ingenuously designed it so there was a window instead of the traditional back mirror, through which, from your seat at the bar, you could see the entire live act in the auditorium directly behind it. Huge speakers hung on either side of the window. This way, you never had to pay for the music. Other than this sixties touch, I was impressed by how much Michael’s new place was in tune with the times, which had begun to celebrate sophistication.

  The bartender was a stranger. I ordered my Dewar’s and was about to put my money up when the man sitting to my right, who was very drunk—head-rolling drunk—said, “It’s on me.”

  I turned to be sure I had recognized the voice. Yes, it was 4-H Jimmy, wearing a suit, but deep in his cups. His normally pink face was flushed crimson. I had never seen him like that, either the suit or the advanced degree of drunkenness.

  “Guess you heard what happened,” he said.

  “I did. I was worried about you.”

  “Nah, nah,” he said, waving a hand around, his elbow still attached to the bar. “I’m cool.” He tried to focus on me, but he was too drunk. “OK, Janet. Good to see you,” he said, and turned away.

  And then Michael was standing there, as though we might have just seen each other yesterday. “Jimmy’s been through a rough stretch. He’s going to be all right, give it time.”

  There was no reference to the past, no airy “Where you been?” Not that I expected any conventional greeting like that from Michael. But it was spooky, his simply picking up as if in mid-sentence, and furthermore without the hours of scrutiny, without the preliminary judgmental distance I had expected. Nor was a single courteous reference made to my now streaked-blond hair or any other aspect of the polished new me. But that would have been out of character. Michael had often leered approvingly if he found me to be looking particularly hot, but he would never allow himself to become sidetracked by the trappings. And now it seemed his feral, moonbeam eyes were gazing into me, and it seemed, if I could trust myself at all, as if he were honestly thrilled I was there—for him thrilled, that is. I mean, he smiled. In spite of the slightly crooked teeth he never liked to reveal, he smiled broadly.

  “It’s really amazing you’re here tonight. I got a friend of yours booked to play. Wait till you catch this band, the Backbrains, they call themselves. They probably won’t live long enough to make it, but they’re good,” he said to me.

  “A friend of mine? Are you sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. That’s how he got to me, through you.”

  “Who is it?”

  “You’ll find out.”

  “But who would I know with a band that had a name like that? It sounds like heavy metal, the Backbrains,” I said.

  “Nope. They got a New Wave beat, but a real rhythm ’n’ blues sound, straight rock ’n’ roll. Go round to the front room when they start. Tell Willie I sent you,” he said.

  I was still in love with him. Why did this surprise me—hadn’t I pledged never to forget? But it did surprise me. I was in love with him afresh, and not my worn-out delusion of him, but the corporeal here-and-now Michael. He just got to me. There was no one else who had ever so completely swept the doubts from my mind. I revered his face, his hands, his walk, that small voice, like a shy boy’s, hiding inside, and his sense of the absurd. I believed in him. He was the real thing, an existential being. I imagined that everything he did, no matter how inconsequential seeming, he did deliberately, completely consciously. His very existence was an epic, I told myself. In his absence, the silver notes escaped me; I had become not color blind, but blind to color’s radiance and its intensity. Without him, life lost its savor. A wave of sweet relief poured over me. I had always loved him, I always would, the way some men love the flag or even the truth. The wrenching loneliness I experienced next came from the realization I would never get the chance to speak my feelings out loud. I didn’t dare to entertain the thought that he might feel anything even glancingly similar for me. He was like Jesus, asking not whom he loved, but who loved him. All right then, I loved Michael, loved him well enough for both of us.

  Later that night, Willie the ticket taker let me in the makeshift auditorium, pointing to the back rows. The room was pretty empty, though, so I moved up close. Three young guys were sprawled over their guitars, feet wide apart. A drummer was hammering out the four-four beat with the precision of a galley slave driver. The rhythm guitarist pulled his head up long enough to look at the few people scattered in the seats. His eyes were pinned, tiny dots. It was little Eddie, little Eddie Carnivale, or, as he called himself, Eddie Apollo—Evelyn’s beloved son. All grown up now, obviously. He leaned over his Stratocaster, slung just low enough to cover his genitals, and hit a chord. He was hunched over, his head hanging like a gorged spider. But a lot of the time, he played fabulously, pounding out some terrific licks, while the cunning boy up front growled into the microphone. Before they could leave the stage, I was calling to him, “Eddie, little Eddie!”

  “Yeah,” he said, already bored by stardom, not even bothering to turn in the direction of my voice.

  “Eddie, don’t you remember me? It’s Janet,” I yelled to him.

  He spun around and his face broke open with glee. He came bounding down the aisle, stopping a little way in front of me.

  “Janet, man, you look gorgeous. What a doll. I never woulda recognized you. Not that you weren’t a piece of work before. I know what’s good, but shit, you are fine now.

  “What’s up? You wanna join me and the boys out front? Cocktails on the house.” />
  “Sure. Michael told me you were good and you are. Really good. I’m proud of you.”

  “Michael?” Eddie lost it for a second. He was nodding and scratching his face. He rubbed his now close-cropped hair. Then he remembered. “Big Mike you mean? Oh yeah, nice guy. Knows music. OK, let me round up the rest of those lowlifes back there. See you out front. We got a lot of catching up to do. Not that you or I give a hoot about my folks, those losers—ever hear from my mom?”

  “Yeah, sure. I talked to her not too long ago, well, maybe it was a couple of months, but sure, we’re in touch. I really dig Evelyn.”

  “She’s a loser. It’s too bad, but she is. I got another loser tagging along with me tonight, my sister, Ava. She’s fucking Cornelius. He’s the lead singer. He’s an asshole, too. A perfect match. But then, Ava would fuck a snake. You remember my sis?”

  “Of course I do. She was just a kid then.”

  “She’s still just a kid.”

  I went out front, where, in the middle of a chattering crowd, 4-H Jimmy was asleep with his head on the bar. Michael beckoned me over to sit with him. Michael seemed changed—less paranoid, or more open, or something.

  “Little Eddie, Eddie Carnivale. I never would have guessed,” I said as I sat down.

  “What’s he now, seventeen? Anyway, you better watch out for that guy. He’s trouble. He’s a nasty little junkie,” Michael said.

  “Michael, you can’t be serious. Little Eddie? C’mon now, he can’t bother me,” I said.

  Just then, little Eddie, sporting a porkpie hat, came over to where we were standing. His fellow musicians were straggling in behind him. On the arm of the lead singer clung a moon-faced young girl. It was Ava, who’d grown since I saw her last. She was all legs with a long neck and a body like a grander version of her mother’s. Maybe she would be stunning someday soon. It was the just-hatched look that detracted. Her tangled hair hung loose down her back. She was wearing no makeup.

  Eddie pushed her away from the singer, Cornelius. “Go sit down. I’ll be there in a minute. He turned to us. “Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s a bimbo. The band can’t shake her.”

  “She looks fine to me,” Michael said, coming to her defense automatically.

  “I wouldn’t know, I’m her brother, but Cornelius tells me she gives good head,” Eddie said.

  “A very redeeming trait,” Michael said.

  Eddie asked me to join him again, but this time I declined. Michael had never seemed as accessible as he did that night. He was practically voluble. I wouldn’t have risked losing his company just then for anything.

  Love in the Afternoon

  Felicity and I were hanging out in Ginger’s room like little sisters watching their big sister get ready for a date. Ginger was dressing for Kenyon, her fiancé, who was picking her up for dinner and the theater. Her room across the way mirrored Felicity’s; it was the same kind of prosperous young matron’s boudoir with its canopied bed and curved and draped dressing table. Except, unlike Felicity’s bedroom, there were mountains of clutter: papers and books piled everywhere, clothes hanging out of drawers.

  Ginger was seated at her dressing table, while Felicity and I were sprawled on top of her rumpled quilt on the king-sized bed.

  “I guess I gotta go with understated. Oh, God, a whole bland life of understated ahead of me,” Ginger said. She was always complaining about her impending marriage.

  “Lots of tennis, though, and golf,” Felicity said.

  “Yeah, and fuck you, too. Listen, Janet, honey, would you do me a huge favor and look through that pile on the chair for the black silk dress and lay it out for me? I’m running so late,” Ginger asked.

  The phone rang and Felicity picked it up. She talked into it softly, as if she didn’t want the two of us to hear.

  “Who was that—Lionel?” Ginger asked.

  Lionel was the horn player from the party. Felicity and he had been seeing a lot of each other lately.

  “No, that was Gunther. You know Gunther, don’t you, Janet?”

  I knew Gunther all right. He was handsome—honey-blond hair down to his shoulders, deep-set hazel eyes, about six-two, and Aryan to the hilt, with the possible exception of his wide mouth. He had a slight overbite, a parrot mouth. One of the house’s chief connections, he dealt everything: coke, hash, pot, pills, even my old-time favorite, crystal methedrine. Sometimes Gunther would hang out with us upstairs for an hour or so, but that was it; he never took anyone downstairs.

  “Gunther must be having problems with his girlfriend, because he actually wants to do a trade—drugs for sex. What do you think of that? Here was one guy I figured couldn’t be had...Wants to know if anyone is working late tonight. I told him I was going out, but that you’d be around, Janet, and I’d ask you,” Felicity said.

  “That man is going to pay me to fuck him?” I asked, practically reeling from my own good luck.

  “So, it’s on, then? I didn’t think you’d object. I’ll call him back,” she said.

  Kenyon and Gunther arrived at the same time. Felicity went downstairs to let them in, and they stood like two gentlemen callers in the parlor, waiting.

  “How do I look?” Ginger asked me, primping in the mirror.

  “You look all grown up, you look glamorous,” I said.

  When we came down, the two men were exchanging a few polite remarks about the weather. Kenyon held a bunch of long-stemmed roses in one hand. He was tall, with a shock of white hair, and he was impeccably dressed in a dark blue pin-striped suit. In spite of that name, Kenyon, and what Ginger had told me, I still expected a swinging, greasy kind of operator wearing gold chains, the kind who would think nothing of marrying a whore. But Kenyon Edwards was what his name suggested: a distinguished-looking WASP.

  Once again, I found myself measuring this reality against everything I had ever been taught. Adults lied, I decided. While she was braiding my hair Josephine used to chant, “Whistling girls and cackling hens always come to no good ends.”

  Genuinely frightened, I stopped whistling.

  Now here was a supremely eligible man choosing Ginger, who may have been an award-winning whore, but who was a whore nonetheless, and not even a particularly young or beautiful one at that. No doubt about it, when the grown-ups told me to “be quiet,” “let him win,” and “he won’t respect you after,” they had all lied.

  Right next to Kenyon stood Gunther. He was wearing a black leather jacket and a pair of worn-out jeans, his long legs disappearing into engineer boots. His thick dark blond hair just grazed his broad shoulders. A perfect icon of a man. His eyes kept following me across the room; he was glaring at me like he was angry.

  “Want a drink?” Ginger asked both of them.

  “Thank you, yes,” Gunther said.

  “Bourbon and branch,” Ginger said, nodding at Kenyon, and then she turned to Gunther. “What’ll you have tonight?” she asked, going over to the wet bar.

  “Vodka on the rocks, please,” Gunther said.

  I was listening to the delicate clip of his accent. Just another client, I kept telling myself, but I felt that my obstinately eager face was probably betraying me. I tried to act cool. We all sat down there in the big, empty room. Gunther and I had not exchanged one word. Felicity, Ginger, and Kenyon were doing the talking. Finally Felicity said, “Well, go on, you two.”

  “Which room?” I asked.

  “The first one on the right—our best—nothing but the best for an old friend like you, Gunther,” Felicity said.

  I poured myself a highball glass full of scotch and led my john up the stairs. Inside the room, he went over to the windows and looked out on the street.

  “How do you want to get paid, all blow—I’ve got Peruvian flake—or maybe you are into something else?” he said, not looking at me.

  After a long deliberate abstinence, I surprised myself by asking without hesitation, “Do you have any crystal?”

  “Oh, yeah, I thought so. You like crank. I knew th
at. So do I. Want to do a few lines now? This stuff is pure. I had to cut it myself to keep it from melting,” he said.

  “How did you know I like speed?” I asked. After all, I didn’t look very much like a speed freak anymore.

  “Because I know you. I’ve known who you are for years.”

  “Years?”

  “You are a friend of Michael’s from the Traveling Medicine Show.”

  “Yes, do you know Michael?”

  “Who do you think sold him the methedrine that made you crazy? I am the one,” Gunther said with obvious pride. “I etherized that batch in my bathtub.”

  I couldn’t believe it. This gorgeous Aryan was the wizard who’d cooked up that stuff that drove me mad! It was meant to be.

  “All this time...How come we never ran into each other back then?”

  “Listen, I keep a low profile. But I’ve observed you over the years. You never noticed me. I was just another customer sitting at the table,” Gunther said, his slight German accent making him sound like a cross between a modern-day drug dealer and a man who should be wearing a monocle.

  While he talked, Gunther tapped out long lines of that same gooey white crystal I recognized. We snorted up the lines with a short straw. Bam, I got a rush. My teeth started to chatter. “This time I can handle it,” I kept telling myself. We were staring at each other now with our big black pupils like two ghouls from hell. I sucked down my scotch. He polished off his vodka. Still no action.

  “I don’t go with whores, you know that,” he said.

  “What happened to change your mind?”

  “I always wanted to sleep with you, a long time before you turned pro...And then I just caught my girlfriend in bed with my partner, Gabe, Michael’s dealer,” he said.

  I knew Gabe and I couldn’t understand why she would do that. Gunther was a lot better looking.

  “Well, I can make you forget for a little while anyway,” I said.