Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  Park Bench

  I had to get back to Eddie fast. They were coming for him. It was hard to walk. I started to worry about how I was going to be able to move my bowels when the time came. But compared with the ripping agony of a few minutes earlier, what I was feeling as I walked slowly home was negligible. In fact, the first thing I felt after emerging from the dark basement would have to be described as pleasure. My whole body had gone numb, and I was experiencing this irrepressible lightness of being. Waves of gratitude swept over me for every scraggly braced-up tree, for the undisturbed quiet of that private hour, and for the gentle blessing of the wan morning light. Then after a block or two, exhaustion hit. The only thing that kept me going after that was Eddie. I was praying I would make it home in time.

  When I got back to the crib, Eddie was gone. God, I hoped wherever he was, he was safe. I realized I couldn’t look for him now. I was beat. I needed to get clean. While I dragged myself through the empty streets, besides worrying about Eddie, I had been dreaming only of sinking into a hot bath.

  Unfortunately, the bathtub at Sixth Street, coated with filth, had never been used for its intended purpose; it was simply the place you stood when you took a shower. So I would have to make myself stand up under the water for as long as it took to get clean, if I ever could. I wasn’t too sure about that. It wasn’t until I started to undress in the bathroom that I realized my shorts were wet with blood. I threw all my clothes in a pile in the corner and climbed underneath the shower. After a while, I leaned over until the feeble jet was hitting me between the cheeks of my behind. I watched the water, pink with blood, disappear down the drain. I collapsed right there, where I stayed for a while curled up into a ball. I think I slept. Finally, I climbed out of the tub and went over to the mirror above the sink to examine, as best I could, a place that was stinging on my head. I discovered a cut on my scalp, right above the temple. Slapped backhand with a ringed finger. I combed my broken hair very gingerly over the spot where the blood had congealed. Then I got scared. Maybe they had already killed Eddie. Maybe they had come back while I was under the shower. This time to kill me. For a minute I just froze. Finally I worked up the courage to leave the bathroom.

  I pulled on a pair of big cotton underpants that I rarely wore and stuffed them with toilet paper. At the bottom of a pile of clothes in the dark recesses of the walk-in closet, I found an apple-green circle skirt I had bought for a few dollars on the street. It was way too big for me now. I rummaged through the pile until I found a dirty silk sash from an old kimono. I tied the skirt around my waist with that. Then I put on a fresh black T-shirt, taking a minute to decide, even then, whether it would look better worn tucked in or hanging loose. Either way, it was a hideous outfit, I thought, but I should at least wear a skirt if I wanted to pass unnoticed when I went uptown to Park Avenue. And it had become obvious to me that this was where I must go. I needed to be safe, and I needed someone to take care of me; even Maggie would do.

  I had an easy time catching a cab on First Avenue. There seemed to be a fleet of them charging north on their way to pick up the uptown people bound for work. I found my voice and told the driver, an old-fashioned taxi driver, a Jewish grandpa from Brooklyn, that he would have to wait a minute while I got the money from the doorman. He didn’t object, seeing as I had given him a Park Avenue address. It occurred to me that I didn’t really have to beg for cab fare. I might very well still have a few hundred dollars in the bank, but I wasn’t sure. I never read those damn statements; they made me cringe. In the meantime, I fully expected to walk into the Fifty-seventh Street branch of Banker’s Limited one day soon and have Ms. Greyson tell me that I was broke. Not today, I decided. We cut over to the FDR Drive on the East River, and I sat back and watched the morning sun bounce across the silver water. The familiar spectacle of the gutsy, lively river, actually managing to look fresh as little waves skidded over its surface in the false hope of the early-morning breeze, never failed to lift my spirits.

  When we pulled up in front of Maggie’s awning, the doorman Oscar ran out, swiveling on his arthritic hips, and opened the car door for me. I had known Oscar nearly all my life.

  “Miss Janet, welcome home,” he said.

  “Will you wait a minute? I’ll just get the money from my mother,” I told the cabdriver.

  “I’m waiting,” he said.

  “Just a minute, Miss Janet, I’ll have to call upstairs. It’s seven in the morning. I’m not sure your mother is awake yet. I’ll have to let her know you’re here,” he said, sounding apologetic.

  Something was wrong, and I could feel the blood seeping through the toilet paper in my underpants. I needed to get inside soon.

  “Since when do you announce me, Oscar?”

  “Since your mother left strict instructions. I’m sorry, Miss Janet,” Oscar said.

  He rocked from leg to leg over to the house phone inside the front door. I followed him, preparing to take the receiver if there was any trouble. It rang for a long time. Finally, I saw him nodding into it, saying, “Yes, missus, yes, missus.” Then he hung up and turned to me. He shrugged his shoulders.

  “You’re not to be allowed up today. I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Whaddya mean? Let me talk to her,” I said, sounding a little frantic.

  Oscar turned back to the switchboard and pulled down one of the levers. When he heard Maggie at the other end, he handed the phone to me.

  “Mother, I need to come up. I’ve been raped, brutally raped,” I said.

  “Forget it, Janet, I don’t believe you. You can’t come around here with your stories any time you feel like it and disrupt my life. I’ve had it; I just won’t stand for it. Why can’t your boyfriend, Eddie, look after you?”

  “I don’t know where he is. The guys who raped me, they’re going to kill him when they find him if they haven’t already,” I said.

  “Janet, this sounds like more of your drug-induced hallucinations. I know I can’t help you by giving in. You have to check yourself into a hospital. Meanwhile, I told Oscar to call the police if you refuse to leave. That’s all. Good-bye.” She hung up.

  It occurred to me to mention that Rayfield had died, but what if she didn’t believe that either?

  Oscar and I stood there staring at each other.

  “Now what?” I said.

  “You’re in some kind of trouble, aren’t you?” Oscar asked.

  “Yeah, I guess I am,” I said, realizing as I said it that this would have been the ideal time to turn on the tears, maybe in the process win Oscar’s broadest sympathy, get him to appeal my case. Except I had forgotten how.

  God, I needed to lie down, I really needed to lie down. That was all. If only I could lie down someplace, everything would be all right, I knew it. In the meantime, I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there.

  Oscar had stationed himself a few feet away in his blue summer uniform and his little blue doorman hat, torn between all that costume meant to him and helping me, the bright-eyed little girl he had watched grow into this wasted specter of a human being. In spite of my suntan, I must have looked ominous to him against the backdrop of that pristine, gleaming marble lobby, my body swimming inside the big skirt, the blond-on-blond hair sprouting from dark roots. It was obvious he wanted me to go away, but he didn’t have the heart to call the police. Then, as if he had been debating it, he suddenly reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty.

  “Here, take this,” Oscar said, pressing the bill into my hand.

  “Thank you, Oscar, I’ll pay you back,” I said.

  “I know you will. That’s a good girl, go on now,” he said.

  He walked me back to the cab and opened the door for me. Once I was inside the car, he leaned over and peered at me through the open window. “Where are you going to?”

  “Tompkins Square Park, the southeast corner,” I said.

  Oscar leaned farther into the cab and gave the driver the address.

  I was hoping to find one o
r two of my drinking buddies from the local bottle gang still sitting out on the bench from the night before. Sometimes these old guys shared their Wild Irish Rose with Eddie and me, letting us chug back their wine while they regaled us with horror stories about their days in Sing Sing or their dirt-poor childhoods in the South.

  Sure enough, Whitey was there and one or two of the others. Whitey was the porter for the Monterey Bar and Grill. He was very fond of Eddie and me. On several occasions, after he had finished mopping the floor and tying up the garbage, the three of us would convene to this very spot to continue drinking.

  “Hello, girl, you up early this morning,” Whitey said.

  He was wearing, as usual, a T-shirt gray with age and a pair of heavy greased-up dungarees. He looked like a workingman out of the countryside.

  “I gotta lie down, I just got raped,” I said, and collapsed on the bench next to his.

  The few men who were there wanted to know what happened. I felt ashamed to tell them, but I sensed their concern was genuine. Without going into too much detail, I got the main points of the story across. Someone slipped a folded-up nylon jacket underneath my head. Someone else threw a smelly blanket over my body. Whitey sat down carefully on the edge of the bench.

  “Here, have a swig. You need it.”

  The hot whiskey from the pint bottle felt rough on my throat, but I kept drinking, because after it hit my stomach, the liquor spread through my insides like kindness itself.

  “You been pretty banged up. Take it easy. Rest here awhile,” he said.

  I looked into the shiny pug face covered with gray grizzle, into the warm black eyes, and farther up into the network of green branches high above me. “You get what you need in this life,” I thought. Then I passed out.

  A few hours later, Whitey was nudging me gently. “Here’s somethin’ fo’ you to eat,” he said.

  He had a quart of Schlitz tucked under his arm, and he was holding on to a big meatball hero wrapped in white paper with his free hand.

  Nobody had ever been that good to me, I decided. I couldn’t believe how hungry I was. And the beer—at last to be mine, given freely—what a blessing.

  “Please, take this,” I said, offering him the few crumpled dollars I had left.

  “Nah, keep yo’ money,” Whitey said.

  “How can I ever thank you?” I asked.

  “C’mon, it’s nothin’ you wouldn’t do fo’ me if I was the one who was down.”

  He handed me the sandwich first. I tore into it. The meatballs tasted luscious and sweet, the doughy bread even sweeter. Then, after I had finished most of the sandwich, Whitey passed me the quart. I poured that into my sore throat.

  “Well, you seem to be a whole lot better now. Why don’t you think about goin’ home?”

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “You gotta go sometime. This be no place fo’ a woman after it gets dark,” Whitey said.

  “I know,” I said.

  Damn, I hated that “no place fo’ a woman.” I hated how they kept us locked up inside with just the threat of those weapons of theirs, those penises. ‘Rape—ha! Big deal! Is that the best you got? Big fucking deal. You know what men really can’t stand? They can’t stand that we can take it. I can take it, motherfuckers! Damn, look at me. I’m not even bleeding anymore,’ I thought. I was about to start shaking my fist and cursing out loud but stopped myself in time when I realized Whitey was still there.

  “I was hopin’ you and I could leave together. See, I gotta get back to my room fo’ some sleep,” he said.

  “Of course, of course. You shouldn’t have stayed so long. I’ll be fine, I promise. Don’t worry,” I said.

  Whitey shook his head. “I don’t like leavin’ you out here by yourself,” he said.

  “Listen, I’ll be fine, OK?”

  “Well, all right. Here, you can have dis pint. Try to drink it slow,” Whitey said.

  “Thank you with all my heart.” I leaned over and gave him a kiss on his cheek.

  “Here take this, too. It’s not the best but them boys is out to harm. So take it. Better than nothin’.” He laid the whiskey down on the blanket and next to it a knife. Looked like a switchblade. I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t seen that many knives in my life. It was long. There was a button in the handle. I looked up to ask him about it, but he was gone. I hid the knife underneath the jacket I was using as a pillow.

  I was alone with a full pint, an afternoon breeze tickling the branches of the tree overhead, a hazy, gentle late-summer sky. I was at peace. Except I had to pee. ‘Every problem has a solution,’ I thought. I pulled off my underpants (the toilet paper by now stuck to them) while I was still under the blanket, and then I went and stood next to the trunk of the big sycamore. I looked around until I was sure that no one—not the old people on the benches across the path, not the basketball players in the distance—was watching. I spread my legs wide underneath my skirt and let the urine flow. Back to bench, under blanket, pull on pants. Tra-la. I really felt at home now. I took a swig of whiskey. Something shifted inside my head. Even though I knew better, it felt as if the world had righted itself, suddenly, and I was where I always should have been: back on top.

  Another Rescue

  As the afternoon wore on, I struck up a conversation with the gods—not God, mind you, only the gods. They appeared to me more imp-like than Olympian, their tiny wreathed heads poking through the low-hanging clouds. I felt as though, in this respect, I had come down in the world. These gods (a vague mixture of Greek and Roman) were not as protective or as intimate as God and His Mother had been. They were raucous, wearying, in fact. The more I defended the earthy simplicity of my current setup, the more they touted the glories of civilization.

  “Believe me,” Saturn said, “it’s better to contemplate a chair than a tree. And look at that skirt, what an affront!”

  “Why do you think people wear clothes?” Mars asked me. “To stave off the boredom, that’s why.”

  I was getting fed up with them, with their Old World decadence, with their very lack, if I may say so, of spirituality. I turned over on the bench and closed my eyes. Somewhere right above me a few sparrows were twittering, the sound of their two-note song muffled in the humid air. I was seized with an unexpected wave of pity for little Eddie. What would become of him? For the first time, it really hit me that his life was in danger. “Oh, but he can take care of himself,” I thought. But could he? I was beginning to wonder. I heard people walking by; they were avoiding me, I could tell. Which was fine with me...wonderful to be left alone. I marveled over how far I had come, “from Park Avenue to a park bench.” Where had I heard that? It’s a long way to travel in one short lifetime, I thought, not without considerable pride. I was free. I drank some more whiskey and fell asleep again, feeling as if I had finally arrived.

  “Janet! Janet!”

  “Shh, she’s over there, see?”

  “All right, I see. Fred, Dr. Monroe, I’ve found her!”

  It was Maggie, calling out through the park in her best theatrical trill, and behind her, Maggie’s longtime shrink and party-going friend, Fred Schuster. Another man, pretty bald with a double chin and dressed in a three-piece suit, was tagging along after them.

  Maggie was wearing a new matching flower-print skirt and top and low heels. There were yards of material in that skirt, which swirled around her as she marched over to me. It looked like she’d dressed for the occasion.

  I sat up fast and took a drink. This was going to be rough.

  “OK, what are you doing here?” I asked.

  “Oscar told me where you were going. He told me you looked terrible,” Maggie said.

  Maggie was standing over me now. Up came the doctor fellows.

  “Hi, Fred, I’d offer you a snort, but all I got is what you see here,” I said, taking another drink.

  “Thank you anyway, Janet. I’d like you to meet a friend of mine, George. George, say hello to Janet,” Fred said, smiling that unctuous smile of hi
s.

  It never ceased to amaze me what a cheeky little bloodsucker Fred was in his eternal cardigans, the white of his bony shin guaranteed to reveal itself whenever he crossed his legs. A real creep. Typical of him, he was trying to fob off his colleague as a casual friend, and this was supposed to be a casual meeting of friends, I suppose. How patronizing. It was insulting.

  “Hello, Janet,” the George character said.

  “Listen, I know why you’re here. Don’t pull this crap on me. I know it takes two doctors’ signatures to get someone committed. Forget it, I’ll go back to Sixth Street. I know when I’m beaten,” I said, starting to stand.

  Maggie had moved away. She was standing quietly behind the tree like a little kid playing hide and seek.

  “OK, Fred and what’s-your-name, you can split now. I don’t need you,” I said.

  “Not so fast, young lady,” George said. He took a few steps in my direction, hovering with the frightened bravado of an inexperienced lion tamer before he cracks the whip.

  Holy shit, the faggot in the three-piece suit was trying to get physical with me. With me! I hadn’t spent all this time on the street for nothing. I drained the pint.

  “If that’s how you want it,” I said.

  Then I reached under the jacket, pulled out the switchblade and pressed the button. It shot out like a snake. I stuck it next to the doctor’s face.

  “You better back off, unless you want one nostril,” I said.

  To my fierce delight, he jumped about a foot.

  But Fred grabbed my wrist and started to twist it. Then George grabbed my other arm. I was shouting and kicking. They had me, though, at least for the time being.

  “Somebody call the police!” Fred yelled.

  A small crowd of old people and little kids had gathered.

  “Help me, help me, I’m being kidnapped!” I screamed, but the crowd just stood there.