Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  “He only loves me for my money,” I wailed.

  “That’s right,” our bar chums nodded agreeably.

  “What money?” Eddie scowled. “You call those few lousy bucks you got money?”

  On that bitter night in February when he stabbed me, we had been yelling, or I had, in Chester’s. I used to shake my index finger at him and harangue him. But why? We won’t ever find out now. No one remembers. We were at Chester’s. And then he just took a powder, silently slipping out into the night in his black leather jacket and his noiseless PF Flyers. Mid-sentence gone. It was too cold to look for him in the other gin mills, in the shooting gallery on Seventh and B. So I cabbed it to the Mohican. I’m sure I was really upset by that time, because I hated to lose him, even for a minute. He was so young and cagey. Graceful the way only streetwise boys can be. I missed him, I realized as I searched for my keys.

  When I pushed open the door, he was hiding behind it, hiding there in monkish silence and had been for I don’t know how long. He jumped out, pushed me on the floor facedown, and stabbed me to the hilt in the back of my thigh, right up into the muscle. Pinned with my face to the floor, I felt, of all things, neutered. What I remember most was the humiliation. I remember thinking it would have been better if he had stabbed me in the stomach, so I could have contracted, thrown my head back, and fainted. Some dignity in that pose at least. This way, I felt like a kid in a schoolyard. It was funny how little blood there was. All gristle there, I guess. Didn’t hurt too much either, not a sharp pain, more like an ache.

  The next day it was hard to walk, but after I convinced him not to leave me, Eddie held me up, and we made it over to Dr. Schrein’s office around the corner. Dr. Schrein, a man of true Aesculapian calling. Once my trick, now my friend, he administered vitamin shots and scripts for Dexosyn on a weekly basis. In the meantime, he continued to get fatter and fatter and suffered from gout. But he treated everything that came his way, like a good country doctor. He attended to the old, the outlaws, actual sick people. When I told him that I had been mugged, he simply nodded over his receptionist’s squeaky objections.

  “Make her go to the police,” the properly horrified young receptionist said.

  I think she wanted to hear me confess, but Dr. Schrein told her to mind her own business.

  “She’s a big girl. She knows what she’s doing,” he said.

  He put a bandage over the hole in my leg, told me it was clean, and lent me a cane.

  For as long as I hobbled around, Eddie hovered by my side, solicitous. “I got to hand it to you, you got guts,” he said with love in his eyes. He walked me to the hospital, where he sat by himself in the lobby reading Creem, the rock ’n’ roll magazine, while I went upstairs to see my father. Eddie ran me hot bubble baths. We lay in our old sagging beds at the Mohican at night, attached to each other at the lips for hours, not moving. Funny what bonds you to someone.

  All during our first year together, we had celebrated in public, staying very much on view, as if we were an enviable couple, paragon lovers. We wined and dined each other across Hudson Street, at Chester’s, where we ran an endless tab. Eddie could do that. He was the most disarming con man I’d ever met. He would stand at the bar, thumb hooked into the waist of his jeans, one leg on the brass footrail, and rub his face and the top of his close-cropped curly hair like a man who needed to feel something. He had a guileless way of getting intimate, as if he and the mark (which was anyone else) were on the inside track, hip to some kind of sacred knowledge that the world was not privileged to share. “Life’s tough,” he used to say. He had compassion.

  Then, he rarely if ever lied. He would tell someone like Donna—the owner of Chester’s, who knew how to swagger like a man, with a real black beauty mark on her un-made-up face—he would tell her how he beat so and so out of such and such, and until the day he cleaned out her cash register in front of a pack of regulars two deep at the bar, she persisted in her belief that Eddie would never do that to her. Because Eddie was her friend. So, when he finally did take people, it had the effect of seeming like retribution. They had not heeded their neighbor’s misfortune.

  Eddie was a marvelous master of betrayal. After years on the street, I still had not cultivated that kind of loner mind that distrusts and cons equally all of humanity. I tried to determine whether this was a skill that could be acquired or whether one had to be born with it.

  “I just tell people what they want to hear, that’s how I get over,” Eddie would say.

  He couldn’t explain how he did what he did because he was a natural. Grifting was all he had ever known. Eddie had one distinct advantage over most of us: he was born and raised outside the law.

  That first spring, the spring of 1977, found us both out of work, my trust fund only months away. It got manic. He began to lend me his clothes: shirts, hats, scarves. My favorite article was the red-and-white broad-striped T-shirt, which I wore over his black jeans. He convinced me to dye my hair even lighter, which I did, but the cheap over-the-counter shade was too orange I decided. On top of the dye, then, I stripped big swatches of platinum. I was blond-on-blond.

  Rather than try to resist each other, we stoked it, our neediness, the killing dependency. We twinned, merged with a vengeance. Eddie insisted that we smoke the same brand, said it would be cheaper that way, and we both switched to Kools. I let him take me over. I liked his taste in music. I stopped wearing makeup and heels. If we could mirror each other—better yet, become each other—then there was a chance we would stay together. Eddie’s gift for betrayal did not extend as far as our relationship. He gave and he demanded total fidelity. I began to warm to this other philosophy, this foreign ethos. When two people are willingly, enthusiastically monogamous, the result can be exciting, erotic. A revelation to me.

  The first time I saw Eddie shoot up in the bathroom around Thanksgiving, he’d been clean (off heroin, anyway) for over a year. I watched him pass out, fall backward, banging his head on the porcelain sink, then the toilet, then the tub, before he hit the tile floor. It was a petite mort, the most erotic surrender I had ever seen a man make: total. His swollen lips, his eyes like empty white satin jewel boxes that had been robbed of their contents, and his prostrate, limp body reminded me of paintings I’d seen of a saint’s final passion. I couldn’t bear anyone getting higher than I did or Eddie going so far away without me, so I made him cop me a bag. Right away, it wasn’t enough.

  After Michael and I split up, I assumed that I would have to destroy myself by myself. Apart from a certain animal hesitation—an appetite that would feed itself—the lower I fell through my haze of drugs and alcohol, the lonelier it got. Then, when it seemed as if the bottom were rising up to meet me, I found Eddie. He was like a benighted cleric who longed to perform last rites. Michael had been content to stand by and watch me drown, but Eddie was the whirlpool itself. He sucked me under with no warning and no regret.

  Hopheads

  On bright mornings and rainy mornings, come what may, at least three times a week, I took a cab uptown to my branch of Banker’s Limited at Fifty-Seventh and Park, where I would first have to see Ms. Greyson, VP, to get her to OK the checks I cashed for $500 each. I had no other identification besides her brisk, urbane signature. She did not make it part of her business to pass judgment. She dressed in suits with tight skirts and high heels. Her nails were short and bright red. Her hair was frozen in an irreproachable upsweep. She had known me all of my life. She smiled from the other side of her desk like someone handing the potential suicide victim the rope.

  “There you go,” she always said as she returned my check.

  It would never have occurred to either Eddie or me to resist. The money I came into—lucked into—on my thirtieth birthday, the trust fund that couldn’t be rescinded, was like blue money. It had to be spent, and it had to be spent on dope. We went about this inexorable business, this joyless ritual, with the air of two bowed workers on a tough and boring mission, two bullocks yoked together in
the rice paddy. Bad enough to be handed the unearned dough, money you didn’t even have to con someone out of, but to revel in it, that would have been too much. Eddie and I suffered from an aching conscience, which we defied with a teeth-clenching sense of purpose. We were exploring this groove. It would never have occurred to us not to follow it down. Anywhere, so long as it was down.

  While I was out there hooking, I stayed free of pimps. I was a maverick, screwing for kicks and running away. I was too slithery, too wide-awake to be worth the bother. Now it had caught up with me. The other side: sooner or later you search out the balance. What had I been selling anyway? The lure of open cupidity. The humiliation that comes from knowing you’re the mark and still you can’t resist. Lascivious pleasure—one-sided, intense pleasure—the essence of anonymous sex. This is what men crave. The whore’s contempt teases below the surface like scratchy sackcloth. Satisfaction runs correspondingly deep.

  Jasmine, the redheaded Hispanic from the Sultan’s Retreat, understood this. She was soft-spoken, calm, ever the lady, even when she was jerking off that young Japanese boy while several of us stood around and watched. He lay on his back on the massage table in the tiny cubicle like a patient about to go under the knife. We stood there because he had paid us all. She pulled on his penis (too hard, I thought, making it difficult, surely) and repeated over and over again, “Come on, honey, come, come. You can do it. Come on, baby...” Hurry up, in other words. And he held back, out of fear, out of pleasure, out of shame. That’s what it was like, that second year with Eddie. Responding to his quick friction-stroke, I took his passion, even what might have been his uncertainty, for impatience. I heard Jasmine: “C’mon, baby, c’mon, you can do it.”

  Disgust, contempt, self-loathing, and, under that, curiosity. Where does this go? Where will it take us? Is it irrevocable, the damage we’re doing? So much the better. Make it count, make it tell.

  But in the flat, still hours before dawn, when the bravado had vanished like the illusion it was, Jasmine’s stone cold rhythm would haunt me. I couldn’t shake the image of us standing around the boy lying prostrate on the massage table as if he were some kind of ritual sacrifice. When this and other stark memories muscled their way in, I would reach for Eddie, throw my arms around him, lock myself against him, stripped of everything but need. Eddie always turned and faced me and hugged me back. He’d stroke my face, look into my eyes, and whisper, “It’s OK, doll. Everything is OK. Go back to sleep.”

  He understood; he knew about demons. After comforting me, he’d lie there staring into the darkness as if he’d been awake all along. We’d lie there together in some kind of vigil, staring at the old cracked-plaster ceiling becoming visible in the dawn light.

  When I turned thirty, he was a month away from twenty-four, after all this time still so young. I was captivated by that. I have an image of Eddie: his shining junkie-white skin, his heavy-lidded eyes, his full mouth drooping. On the nod, he is sitting with his back against the wall in the dust on the floor of our suite at the Mohican, plucking at the steel strings of his Stratocaster—temporarily out of hock—which he never bothered to plug in.

  Or Eddie wheeling around the room in hophead mode searching for our works. The windows are covered with blankets. The bedroom is dark and hot and airless. Eddie is oblivious; he is about to get off.

  “Here they are, honey, on the windowsill.”

  He never called me “honey” except in that heightened moment of anticipation.

  Heroin was the most glamorous drug I ever did, in the sense that death, sister of the night, is glamorous, because it truly was a sojourn with the sacred dead—it was incandescent silver-blue forever twilight on the horizon of nowhere: painlessness. Speed was a Western escape. It vivified; it enhanced everything. Heroin was an Eastern good-bye to even the light. The drug put you on the other side, beyond speculation.

  And meanwhile, I had descended into the pool of disease, into bloated flesh and uncharacteristic summer pallor. I was glistening white, with rippling flanks and, for the first time, a weak belly. When I looked at myself in the old, flaked mirror of the Mohican, I saw this buried thing. The eyes peered out of watery flesh, as if I were a baby at a christening wrapped up and bewildered inside blankets. Eddie’s body grew flaccid and weak as well. But his green tone seemed to belong to him. I understood that he owned it. He might not be passing through as I was. I was always just passing through.

  “You’re so young,” he said to me on the street one day, when he caught me laughing, still laughing.

  He took my open face in his hands and looked into it as if my expression had betrayed something, a basic soundness, a whole-someness that nothing, no punishing detail of this sordid life, could completely smother.

  “You’ll always be younger than I am,” he said.

  And it’s true that Eddie indulged me, played with me, as if I were a child whom he was being paid to keep amused. He led me into strange bars that suited his whim. Sometimes he deliberately took me to gin mills in unfashionable neighborhoods, devoid of any kind of appeal, except the allure of old men drinking boilermakers. Worse even, we would go to some obscure Chinese restaurant in midtown and pour down sweet, warm vodka martinis.

  I thought that he must be ashamed to be seen with me, who wore rags now, ill-fitting unfashionable clothes that were a far cry from the all-black uniform of jeans and T-shirt of the winter before. I had begun to dress myself in a methadone-clinic-waiting-room series of outfits: khaki cotton pants from Hudson’s Sporting Goods and acrylic T-shirts in those cheap opaque shades of acid green and yellow, a canvas pocketbook, dirty sneakers. The pants might be too tight, the crack of my ass showing through the heavy, shiny material, or they might be too loose, hanging down at the crotch. My haircut had lost its shape, and I parted it in the middle, tucking the wisps behind my ears. The bleached patches were starting to break off now in strange places. I looked poor, and the worst thing about looking poor is that it renders you invisible. But I was nodding, on the nod; my eyes were delicate pins. I might be invisible, but then so was the world.

  The Rescue

  Later that summer, Eddie and I decided to make a real home together. We rented a U-Haul and dragged Eddie’s old furniture out of its cool vault and piled it into the van. I couldn’t see the point of it.

  “Come on, Eddie, really, let’s chuck the junk, take the van back, or better yet, go for a ride in the country now that we got wheels. But let’s forget about this junk. Why can’t we do it like other young couples starting out? Buy things piece by piece, things we care about? Let’s just dump this garbage, let’s, c’mon, Eddie. Please. New furniture for our new life, our new beginning.”

  “Janet, you’ve got a bourgeois streak a mile wide, you know that? Who here would be willing to cough up the bucks for furniture, for Chrissake? I’m not shelling out any dough for furniture. Anyway, we’ve been over this and now it’s too late. What’s wrong with what we got? We’re not moving to Scarsdale, you know. You think you got to impress the neighbors on East Sixth Street? Get hip, Janet.”

  “We’ll keep the bed, of course. That’s OK. But the rest of it stinks! I don’t want to live with that crap.”

  “Fine, fine, then don’t. I’m getting my furniture out, and I’m moving to Sixth Street, and you can go fuck yourself.”

  Eddie disappeared inside.

  The apartment Eddie and I had found was formerly a storefront, a floor-through, with one window in the back that looked out on a concrete courtyard. Next to it there was a door, its faded coat of black enamel paint unsuccessfully hiding deep gouges in the wood. There was only a sealed showcase window in the front, which was wide and bare, but an ancient glaze of soot filtered out the north light and afforded some privacy from the street. And if we opened the front and back doors, we figured, we would get a cross breeze, a real luxury. Our immediate neighbors, on both sides of us, and for most of the way up and down the block, were Indian restaurants. ‘Indians are law-abiding and they mind their
own business,’ we thought. What we didn’t get is that five or six little kitchens attract industrial-sized vermin: roaches as long as your arm, rats and the spraying toms that follow them. These animals had us pegged for chumps, for the same kind of shiftless interlopers they were. In the back, our one window had bars but no screen. Wild alley cats immediately reclaimed their turf, stinking up everything: clothes, shoes, the armchair, our double bed. The roaches, too big to kill, occupied the walk-in closet a former tenant had installed during a previous era, when the block had still been inhabitable. The hot water boiler sat right underneath us, in the basement. It was like living on top of a furnace in the middle of a desert. Once we moved in, we just lay there on our reeking double bed until the sun went down. It was too hot to move. We lay there, awake but motionless, steeped in this perfect hell.

  But it was hard to admit that we had screwed up. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary, for a long time we insisted to our chums in the local gin mill a few blocks away that we had plans for the place. We were going to build a wall here, put a couch there. When winter came, it would be fine. The cats would die of the cold; the roaches would retreat.

  In the meantime, there were a few unexpected benefits. We were suffering too much to fight. Victims under siege, we began to draw closer to each other. I sweated off the winter’s bloat. It was good for that, too. The most we ever ate was a few slices of plain pizza, or we’d split some kind of meat sandwich from the old Jewish deli down the block.