Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  She had no use for any of them.

  The great part about the Retreat was the lack of overhead. This is what attracted women from all over the world, women like Colette from Marseilles, who was saving up for a beauty parlor in Queens; Lorelei, originally from West Berlin; and Rachel from Tel Aviv, who planned to go back, buy a big house on the water, and marry a professional man. I couldn’t figure out Rachel’s scam to save my life. She was a large, stocky woman with oily skin. In other words, she was homely, but somehow, she did a pile of business, all regulars. Michael had a theory that it was the nice, assimilated Jewish boys who had married shiksas.

  “They like to sneak back home once a week for a little of Mama’s old-fashioned chicken soup,” he said.

  But even Rachel was sitting around on her billowing behind with nothing to do on Tall Ships Day.

  “Well, I know Charlie’ll be here. He needs me,” Cally-Ann said. She spoke with an Ozark drawl: “he naids mah.”

  “I don’t see how you can stomach those zits all over his body,” Molly said.

  “I don’ even notice ’em, pooah man. He’s the loneliest critter on this earth. I feel so sorry fer ’im. You know, Jake is jes after me and after me to quit the Life, but I cin’t, not so long as there’re pooah boys like Charlie comin’ around, naiding mah so,” Cally-Ann said.

  “Yeah, and if you quit, where’s Jake gonna come up with his fig? He don’ want you to get out, I don’t care what kind of pillow talk he’s talking. You’re the best thing ever happened to that gambling deadbeat,” Penny said.

  But even the zit-riddled Charlie was taking a powder. Things had never been this dead at the Retreat. At last, the women lapsed into silence, watching tall ship after tall ship crawl up the Hudson. The sky on the television screen turned a deeper, more brilliant blue. We watched the sailors hugging their wives and children, boys in the crowd mugging for the camera, faceless potentates waving from terraces high above the river. All of us sat there in the dark, watching and waiting. No one came at all.

  PART III

  Eddie Apollo

  It was late August 1976, five years after I turned my first trick. Ava had moved away and Michael with her. I found myself feeling lost. I couldn’t make sense of things anymore. In one fractious, lucid moment, I looked around and discovered that I was sick and tired of casual sex. Without my Svengali around to supply an audience and cheer me on, hooking suddenly lost its appeal. I felt like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One morning I woke up to discover my life was wearing a donkey’s head. Without Michael around, being a prostitute was no longer a gorgeous metaphor, no longer a Baudelaire poem.

  In spite of my disillusion, I had a hard time giving up the Life. I was accustomed to the everyday adventure of how much money I could bring in and the friendly competition with the other members of the harem; beyond that, just as I had been warned, blue money was easy money. In little more than a year I would be coming into $40,000, the principal of the trust fund my grandfather couldn’t rescind, and as it was, I had close to $10,000 saved, rolled up in a wad of fifties and hundreds in the top drawer of my bureau at the Mohican. But I kept telling myself I needed to go out and turn tricks. I had become a garden-variety capitalist coward. I was too used to having and getting easy money. I didn’t want to stop.

  Sad and restless, I started to wander around downtown after my day shift ended. I was drawn back again and again to a hoary old saloon in the West Village. It was the logical place to go, the Alamo, because drinking was a serious business there, and drinking was starting to appeal to me more than ever, in a new way. I was fed up with speed and even with cocaine. I was fed up with staying awake. I had been awake for years now, and it occurred to me I might be missing something. What drew me especially to this hangout was that most of the old beats there were also burned out. These people lived to drink; the mirror behind the bar seemed to suck your face into its murky brown depths; the floor was coated with a millennium of solid dirt, which could have been sacred seeing how undisturbed it was. The denizens, mostly men in their forties and up, were honest-to-God left-over bohemians, which means they were ex-marines who knew Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady personally, and who could recite whole poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. They were given to drunks that lasted days. And they went out of their way to ignore me.

  My first friend there, Horace, was a senior editor at a very old and dying independent publishing house. The token gay man in that otherwise homophobic Alamo—the kind of homosexual who chose the company of straight men for some masochistic reason, but maybe also because he was getting a little long in the tooth and, like the rest of these old warriors, preferred to drink without the harsh interruption of sexual challenges—Horace explained to me why the regulars were so hostile. There were a couple of reasons, he said:

  “To begin with, they don’t appreciate strangers. A very provincial crowd down here, you’ve got to understand that. An outsider is like someone who comes to the theater so late, he misses the first act. They think it’s rude of a young person such as you to break in on their lives, especially when you consider that for all intents and purposes those lives are over.

  “But maybe more important is that you’re a woman. They don’t like women, you see. Oh, I don’t mean they don’t fuck them—of course they do when they can get it up—but they just don’t like them.”

  Horace waved his hand like he was shooing flies.

  “Now that I’ve made you feel thoroughly welcome, have a cocktail on me,” he said in his high tenor voice, with its very clear diction. No matter how in his cups he got, Horace never slurred. He slumped, and his face folded up like an abandoned beach ball in the rain, but his talk never got fuzzy. It was a point of honor with him.

  Every boozehound had one, I discovered. Some of the regulars prided themselves on being able to sit very erect like good schoolboys at attention. Others made a show of going to the jukebox, stiff-legged, walking a maniacally straight line; still others never talked at all, but sat demurely in the corner, as if to show that drinking themselves quietly to death was their own damn business.

  The music behind the bellowing and the free-floating monologues that passed for conversation was still vintage jazz, classic cuts by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, a little Zoot Sims thrown in. “I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” was a song you frequently heard.

  There were only a few other women who drank at the Alamo besides me—real camp followers they were. One had been a lieutenant in the navy, which meant she was the highest-ranking officer in the joint. And with her perfectly knotted bun, stockings, and heels, she was dignified, too, always accorded a respect, at least to her face, the rest of the women were outright denied. Most of them had supported one or the other of the guys over the years, when the guys were still young enough to get away with pretending to be musicians or writers, and now, as often as they could, these old dolls, their wide rumps spread across the barstools, were content to hang out alongside their exes until closing time. Usually, they couldn’t. Once they got soused, they liked to yell at the incorrigible old bums, the erstwhile loves of their lives, until Arthur, the scowling Irishman behind the stick, his drooping mustache wet with beer foam, glared at them with a baleful look of world-weary disdain and banished them out into the street. For it was the females who unfailingly got eighty-sixed, never the males. A self-evident truth at the Alamo: women were the troublemakers of this earth.

  Naturally, I felt at home. Lately my version of feminism amounted to drinking with men, whether they liked it or not, until all hours. And it took only a couple of nights to get over on Arthur, the tall, rugged-looking bartender with his doleful mustache and his flashing, angry black eyes.

  It was a balmy September evening when I walked into the Alamo with Arthur, and who should be sitting there in the midst of a crowd of adopted fathers doing his silly Bing Crosby imitation—“Bohm bohm, bohm bohm”—to amuse the old folks, but the snide rock ’n’ roller himself, little Eddie Carniva
le.

  “Hey, Arthur, my man, you’re a sight for sore eyes. What’s the matter with this dildo behind the stick? I been here for days and he won’t buy me nothin’, not even a draft. Tried to tell him you got a buy-back policy, but I don’t think he gets it,” Eddie called out.

  “C’mon, Eddie, you been practically drinking on the house all day,” the day bartender said.

  “When’d you blow back into town?” Arthur said, acting not surprised or happy to see little Eddie, but willing enough to acknowledge him all the same.

  “My mom had enough of me,” Eddie said.

  “She had enough of you going through her purse,” Arthur said.

  “Yeah, something like that,” Eddie said cheerfully.

  I just stood there, waiting for him to recognize me. Finally, I gave up.

  “Hi, Eddie, how is your mother?” I asked him.

  “Janet. Janet, man, what are you doing in this dive?”

  “I live here.”

  “Nah, don’t tell me you’re doing this scene now. My crib is just around the corner, so I gotta drink here, but what could possibly be your excuse?”

  “I’m with that guy.”

  “Who you talking about, not old Arthur?”

  “Yes, old Arthur.”

  “That’s a shame,” Eddie said, and he sat there, leaning on both elbows with his back against the bar, looking at me. First he stared at my breasts, which were naked underneath my translucent peasant blouse, and then he lifted his head slowly until he was peering right into my eyes. “That’s a real shame.”

  About a week later, I was coming out of Chester’s, which was the other hangout, a few blocks away from the Alamo. People bounced back and forth between the two bars all night long. There was a constant wobbly stream of drunks cutting through Abingdon Square, turning up Eighth Avenue one block, and then walking east on Jane to West Fourth Street. I did this myself when Arthur was working. Chester’s had a different, more civilized ambience. For one thing, a woman owned it, Donna Vickers.

  Anyway, I was careening out of there around two in the morning, on my way back to cause a scene with Arthur at the Alamo, when, in passing, I heard a couple of guys on the stoop next door talking. One of them spoke my name. It was Eddie and his young buddy, the cook at Chester’s. Eddie was wearing what looked like a Sherlock Holmes hat. They were passing a joint.

  “See that chick? She’s got a crush on me,” I thought I heard Eddie say.

  What? C’mon, really. Here I was, wearing my new sea-green cashmere sheath, with its own little hood bouncing behind me. The dress stretched over my body to about the middle of my calf, meeting the tops of my stacked-heel tan leather boots. I had tied back my streaked-blond hair in a ponytail to show off my neck. Since when did hot numbers like me go for juniors, for little punks like Eddie Carnivale?

  Then one night in late October, when the sudden chill of autumn was kicking in and the city takes on an expectant air, as if it were winding itself up, I was turning the corner on Bank Street. Eddie came out the front door of his building. He was wearing nothing but a black T-shirt, black jeans, and white sneakers. It was a little too cold for that. All the same, he looked at home in his tight boy-body, his biceps jumping as he braced himself against the gusts of wind that were now charging off the Hudson River. And he looked alone. I don’t mean simply all by himself for that moment, but really alone. Eddie was fine, very fine. I was seized by a whim, a pure and captivating whim. I went up to him, held him by the arm, and turned him around until we were both facing the open door leading to his lobby.

  “It’s cold out here. Let’s go inside,” I said.

  His junkie friend Louise was crashed out on the floor next to the bed. Ignoring her there, Eddie poured us tumblers full of scotch, which we downed like Gatorade before the big game. When eventually we got around to having sex, we used the presence of that inert body right below us to measure our oblivion. We thrashed and pounded, slamming against walls, drunk and wild, raping each other. Blood from my period smeared all over the sheets. Nobody came. Too much at stake. It was an assault, a street fight, no kidding around.

  “You’re not going to turn tricks anymore. Never. Never again. No more fucking around. No more seeing Arthur. I’m going to stop you, Janet, I’m going to stop you right here,” Eddie said.

  His words stoned me. I adored him. The next day, I stuffed my huge wad of bills, the almost $10,000 worth, into my pocketbook, packed up my clothes, paid up my bill at the Mohican, and swooped down on little Eddie, Eddie Apollo, who sat waiting for me for some unknown reason in the dark in his apartment on Abingdon Square.

  Gravity Knife

  “You don’t just stab a person and leave,” I said.

  But that morning, little Eddie wanted to split. He sat up in his bed, which was a cot really shoved next to my cot, and pulled the old, scratchy sheet up to his chin. Eddie stared straight ahead at himself in the cracked mirror on the far wall above the bureau, his smoke-gray eyes wide. He looked like an animal caught in the high beams crossing a country road.

  “I don’t believe what I did,” he said.

  By this time, more than a year had passed and we were back at the Mohican, three floors directly below my original suite.

  The day Eddie went out and bought the knife, I knew that he meant it for me. I was with him, as a matter of fact, when he picked it out: a gravity knife with a blade about eight inches long, thin and double-edged. The whole time I kept shaking my head and telling him it was dangerous to carry a knife when we were both so drunk and stoned and generally violent, but it was his birthday.

  It was the winter of ’78, a lot of snow on the ground. The routine now was to go down to Avenue D, cop six bags of heroin for a hundred dollars, cab it back to the Mohican, split the glycine envelopes, three each. First Eddie cooked up his three, and after he got off, he cooked up mine. He hardly used any water at all. He liked to boot it forever, which is why I preferred to have him get me off instead of doing it myself. I wouldn’t have had the guts to boot three barely diluted twenty-dollar bags of dope into my arm, over and over, until, as often as not, I swooned and sometimes overdosed. (The longest I was out was two hours once: Eddie hauling me, dragging me back and forth to the bathroom, throwing me in the tub, slapping me around, while my lips turned Kool-Aid electric blue and then dulled to a dead-leaf magenta.) He never missed either, never pierced the vein through to the other side. He had a touch; he knew the angle. Eddie was a master, he was a dope genie. And he was fervent, a purist, a passionate junkie. It was like living with a Talmudic Jew, or some other kind of religiously dedicated male, who has his purpose bent higher than love, higher than the mortal, petty concerns of everyday men.

  I tried to be as single-minded as he was. For instance, I had come to the conclusion that it was immoral to read. Many people in the ghetto didn’t know how to read, so it wasn’t fair that I actually enjoyed it. I used to read with shame. That was the only thing I did in those days that made me feel ashamed. It was a bourgeois pastime, a luxury, like being a liberal or going to a Caribbean resort. If Eddie caught me with a book in my hand, I’d throw it down and say I was sorry. Otherwise, my policy was the standard street credo: never apologize.

  And to whom would I apologize? To my father, poor, stoic Rayfield, who was now dying of cancer in the hospital a few blocks away? To my father, wheeling the saline solution plugged into his nose on its metal stand into the visitor’s room, while the puss oozed through the gauze bandage covering his tracheotomy, to join me so I could have a cigarette? I remember the day the pain was so bad the tears were streaming down his face, while I sat there trying not to nod on him. Should I apologize for that? I was his favorite, he told me so on his deathbed. Well yeah, I was the only one of his kids he even vaguely knew. But Rayfield and I understood each other. I think it was because, finally, I learned never to demand anything from him he couldn’t give. I sensed in the end that you had to be kind to Rayfield. He was a depressive. I didn’t try to get blood
from a stone.

  I happened to call, which is how I learned that Rayfield was right nearby at a local hospital. Watching him give me the slip once and for all, I felt the old unrequited longing kick in, but I just sat there by his bed, sometimes holding his hand, nodding on the dope that Eddie had minutes ago pumped into me. He never cried out. All the hair on his legs had disappeared, from the chaff of his riding boots, he said. I recognized my legs; we had the same-shaped legs, along with the same black eyebrows and the same wide-set green eyes, which were deeply set, belonging to two brooders, two solitary dreamers. My father, Rayfield, Ray, and me—he drifting on the fresh inroads of his morphine injection, I awash in cheap Mexican brown dope—in the twilight, that agonizing time of day in winter, when everyone in the city suddenly discovers that he or she is alone, abandoned. While we communed like this, the man with two stumps for legs in the wheelchair across the way poured forth an elegiac wail of curses, on and on, until it ceased to have meaning. Toward the end, when it hurt Rayfield to talk, he wrote slowly on his yellow pad in his meticulous backhand script, “Don’t worry, pet. We’re all waiting to die.”

  That was part of the routine in the winter of ’78, checking in with my father, when I could make it, for a couple of hours. But those hospital visits ate up my high. I came out of there stripped and starving. I would join Eddie and we would hit the first bar on the corner on the way across town to the West Village and the refuge of Chester’s, where we passed every night drinking ourselves blotto, sometimes scoring a gram of coke and splitting that in half and shooting it all up in one shot, and then back out into the night, the after-hours joints, sometimes making love, too, maybe on very cold nights, or in the morning when the combination of withdrawal and a hangover made every nerve sing. That was the routine.

  I can’t say I loved my life, but I loved Eddie so fiercely, it compensated; it was like being happy all the time, to love someone that obsessively and be able to hold him to you. Thanks to the money, I thought. Once I came into the $40,000, I had him. It didn’t even matter really whether he loved me. He used to love me, before I got the money. He loved me once, and now it didn’t matter. Oh, not to say that I wasn’t always whining and crying about it to him and everybody. In the middle of Chester’s I suddenly broke down.