The Perfume Burned His Eyes

by Michael Imperioli

  I stopped and listened, debating whether I should check it out or not. It was still and quiet again; too quiet. I started to walk back to the door when the silence was broken by Lou, who laughed long and loud. Eleven forty-five and all was well.

  thirteen

  Veronica told me she was a witch right after the Christmas break was over. She claimed to be the current heiress to a magical (or magickal as she preferred to spell it) lineage passed from mother to daughter over twenty-one generations. A line unbroken for over five hundred years. She said her family traced its roots to the Carpathian region of Romania and that her mother’s ancestors arrived in America over two hundred years ago.

  I found it hard to swallow that a succession of women gave birth to baby girls without fail for hundreds of years. I suppose stranger things have happened on this planet, and when you are operating in the occult world the unpredictable becomes more likely—maybe—if you believe in that stuff.

  Perhaps there were times when only a male was born and they had to fudge the records and the wife of the witch’s son would become the inheritor of the “art,” as Veronica called it. I told her this theory of mine and it pissed her off.

  She explained that her great-great-great-great-(etc.)-grandmother had sworn an oath and with her last breath pledged a curse before she was burned at the stake in Romania. Having had the prescience to send her only daughter to France before her arrest, Great-Grandma the Witch made a dying promise that this female line would last for a thousand years to “right the wrongs of her murderers and punish them and their progeny for centuries.” As Veronica told me this, she stared into my eyes for a long time without blinking.

  I’d like to believe the purpose of her deep gaze was to emphasize the gravity of the story rather than an intimidation tactic, but I must admit that a chill ran through me. I sensed a queer sort of power emanating from her. I never felt it from her again and she never looked at me in quite the same way, but on that very gray January afternoon, sitting on a bench with our backs to Central Park . . . I believed she was a witch indeed.

  I asked her what kind of things she did with her witchcraft powers.

  “We call it art, not power. And all I can say about it is that I am able to assert my will in a certain way that can have a subtle influence over the way events unfold.”

  “Can you give me an example?”

  “No. I don’t know you well enough. I’ve probably told too much already . . . But you have nothing to worry about. You’re my friend, so don’t be scared or anything.”

  “I’m not scared at all.” That was not entirely true.

  “Good,” she said as she took my hand in hers for the first time.

  We stared straight out toward Fifth Avenue and watched the cars, buses, and taxis flow downtown. She didn’t look at me for a long time.

  As I held onto her hand, I felt certain that she was telling the truth and I never needed to worry about her harming me. Anything she did to me that seemed challenging or confrontational was only to test me and train me into being more like she was: confident, strong, and fearless. All things that I was not. She took this on as a mission or duty. She said that the city was going to eat me alive if I didn’t wise up, that Jackson Heights and Manhattan were as far apart as Bumfuck and Hollywood. I agreed.

  When I walked her to the subway later that afternoon, she told me that she had turned her first trick right around this time last year.

  fourteen

  The dictation session never happened.

  I didn’t make it to Lou’s apartment for several weeks after that first delivery. He had gone to Europe to play some concerts, I was told by Kenny the doorman:

  “Mr. _____ is quite the character, isn’t he?”

  Mr. _____. He wasn’t Jones. Now I put it all together and I realized who he was. I did not know much about his music, except for the chorus of the one song, but I knew his name.

  I ran into him in the lobby a few days after he returned. He was happy to see me and brought up the dictation again and I agreed to stop by the next afternoon.

  I arrived about four o’clock. The door was open a crack so I knocked on the jamb.

  “Come on in!” he shouted from inside.

  There was a window wide open and it was cold in the apartment. The place looked like I had never left it except Rachel wasn’t there and Lou was talking quietly into a red telephone on the kitchen counter. He held up a finger signaling he’d be right with me. I stood awkwardly in the living area until he finished his call.

  When Lou hung up, he invited me to sit on the floor and then offered me a Hershey’s bar. “If you don’t want it, save it for later.”

  I put it in my jacket pocket. He dropped a yellow legal pad and a pen onto the floor next to me. He explained that Rachel had gone up to the Bronx to visit her mother: “A mother and her daughter, you know . . . they can’t be apart for too long. It’s a deep bond.”

  I gripped the pen and was waiting for him to start dictating. He explained that he was working on a biography of one of the saints, I don’t remember which one, though it was not a factual, historical biography but more like an imagined interpretation of this holy man’s life. He explained further that it was to be the book or libretto of an opera that he was also writing the music for.

  “Okay, okay, okay . . . do you have a cigarette? . . . No, you don’t smoke . . . Good, don’t . . . it’s a filthy habit.” He found his pack under a leather jacket that was tossed over a cardboard RCA-marked box. “So we were just in Amsterdam, don’t write this down . . . and you know in Amsterdam—” The phone’s ringer interrupted him. “Be right with you, pal.”

  He stayed on the phone for over an hour. I couldn’t hear what he was saying because he was speaking in hushed, low tones. In the meantime, I ate the Hershey’s bar and read from a book of short stories on one of his stacks. It was about an Englishman who gets captured by some North African tribespeople who cut out his tongue and keep him chained up. They force him to be the jester in the court of the bedouin king. It was a horrifying story and the image of the man dressed in cut-up cans of Coca-Cola stayed in my mind for weeks.

  When Lou finally got off the phone he acted as if the call had taken no more than a minute. “Okay, okay, okay . . . you got the pad? Good . . . Oh, wait, you know what’s funny? Don’t write this down . . . I was walking by my old house on the Bowery and I see this old man sitting against a wall—” The phone rang again and he dashed to the kitchen. This time he spoke for only about forty minutes or so.

  I picked up another book, this one about a man who was in love with a beautiful Mexican woman with a serious addiction to heroin. This story was not nearly as disturbing as the first one I’d read. I got through about twenty-five pages when Lou came back.

  “You can borrow any of those, by the way . . . Okay, okay, okay . . . Act one, scene one . . . Wait, I didn’t finish my story . . . don’t write this down . . . So I’m down the Bowery and I see this old guy sitting against a wall near my old house, he looks kind of familiar but he’s a bum, you know, a piss-in-the-pants drunk, but I know I’ve seen his face before . . . and he’s looking at me and he goes, What are you looking at, faggot? I’m about to go step on the fucking guy and I realize—”

  Ring ring ring.

  “Shit. Hold my place.”

  The call lasted less than a minute.

  “I gotta split. Can I borrow you for a few minutes?”

  I never found out what was realized on the Bowery or who the old man was. Lou was on to something else. I agreed to let him borrow me for a few minutes. What I would eventually realize was that he was very afraid of being alone and needed someone by his side at all times. I had suddenly become one of those trusted few.

  fifteen

  I had never been in a bar before. I should say I had never been in a bar without my father. He would bet baseball games with JR, a local bookie my dad went to grade school with. JR’s office was in the Piper’s Kilt, a little Irish pub in Woodside
that I think is still open to this day.

  The place Lou took me to was a narrow, dark joint near the 59th Street subway. It smelled like old beer, mold, cigarettes, and sweat. The bar was on the left side of the room as you entered. It was long and high. About a dozen men and no women sat on tall stools in quiet contemplation of alcohol, nicotine, and regret. Lit by strands of half-burned-out holiday lights along the length of the back of the bar: the ghosts of Christmas past.

  There was a row of four or five red vinyl booths along the right side. They were all empty. The booth closest to the entrance was sealed off with tape. There was a hole the size of a toilet seat in one of its benches. The hole was stuffed with newspaper, matchbooks, empty cigarette packs, and broken glass. It looked like they were in no rush to repair it.

  We sat in the rear booth, the pay phone and the bathrooms just beyond us. A jukebox stood right next to the phone. Lou sat on the bench facing the entrance, I sat opposite. He took out a pack of Marlboros and lit one up.

  “You got any change? I want to play some music.” He started combing through his thousand pockets.

  “I have a quarter.” I handed it to him.

  “Get me a gin and tonic. And get yourself something too.”

  He stood up and took a deep drag. I waited for him to give me the currency to pay for his drink but that custom didn’t seem to apply to his world.

  “I don’t have any more money on me,” I said. I felt guilty that I couldn’t buy the man a drink. Which made no sense, of course, since he asked me to accompany him as a favor, not to mention I was strictly prohibited by law from purchasing alcoholic beverages. I guess it was just the way he said it, like we were pals and had gone drinking together many times before. I felt very mature when I walked into the bar with him and now I was just a kid again. A measly, shrimpy kid who couldn’t afford to buy his buddy a cocktail.

  Lou stared at me like he had forgotten who I was and why I was there. “Oh.” He said it like he regretted bringing me along. Then he took off his boot and searched inside. Finding nothing, he took off the other boot and extracted a crumpled bill. “Here ya go, and get some more quarters.”

  It was a ten-spot. I unfolded it and walked to the bar as Lou scanned the titles on the juke. The bartender came and stood across the bar from me.

  “What can I get you?” He said it neither friendly nor unfriendly.

  I hadn’t done much drinking in my life and was not partial to any particular alcoholic beverage. I was sure the bartender would refuse me because of my age anyway, so I just ordered two gin and tonics. “And some quarters, please.”

  “How many?” His voice was scraped with years and years of booze and smoke.

  “Two.”

  “Two quarters?”

  “No, two gin and tonics.”

  “Yeah, I know, but how many quarters?”

  “Umm . . . four, please.”

  Some fifties doo-wop started playing on the jukebox. It was sad. Sad and perfect for this afternoon. I’ve heard the tune many times since: “Angel Baby” by Rosie and the Originals. Every time it plays I go right back to the rear booth of the Subway Inn on that long gray day, with Lou’s black-leather-covered back to me as he studies the songs on tap.

  I brought the drinks and the change back to the booth. Lou was on the phone and it looked like he was faking a conversation. He was laughing, chatting, and smiling, but in this forced and stilted way. It seemed so phony to me that if I didn’t know him, I would have taken him for a lunatic. A bona fide Creedmoor case who wandered the streets in deep discussions with invisible friends and enemies.

  He hung up the phone and sat across from me. He was still smiling and drank half his gin and tonic in one big gulp.

  “She’ll be here in ten minutes,” he told me, as if I had been in on the arrangements. I assumed it wasn’t Rachel because he’d said she wouldn’t be back till the next day. He gave me two quarters from his pile of change. “Play us some tunes. This is the best jukebox in the city. It’s the only reason I come to this shithole. I mean, for a shithole it’s a cozy shithole and I do happen to like shitholes.”

  He didn’t say my name at all. I don’t think he knew what it was anymore. Since that first night he hadn’t called me anything but kid once in a while. I couldn’t even remember if I’d told him my name or not, but it didn’t matter to him anyway. He just needed somebody next to him.

  I stood at the jukebox rolling through the many songs and intimidated by the possibility that I would choose something Lou didn’t like. I was not musically hip or savvy. My favorites were the Beatles and I listened to a lot of Top 40 stuff on the radio. I liked the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here but I only had it because I’d won a contest at King Karol’s record store. They had a fishbowl of jelly beans and I made the closest guess of how many were inside. (I said 41,111 and the real amount was 42,505.) It was the only contest I’d ever won. So Pink Floyd was as cutting edge as I’d gotten. I had not been exposed to the underground scene and I really had no desire to seek it out.

  I was at a loss and didn’t know what to choose. I finally settled on “Mrs. Robinson,” which I’d always liked a lot. I meant to punch B491 into the keypad but because I was so nervous and scared of fucking up, I mistakenly entered B419. I didn’t even realize I had done it until I sat back down and Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” began to play.

  Lou looked at me like I was something stuck to the bottom of his boot, like a wad of dog shit he was about to scrape off with a sharp stick. “Tiny Tim?? Did you play Tiny Tim??!!”

  “No. It wasn’t me. I played Simon and Garfun—”

  “Tiny fucking Tim!!” He laughed his ass off, and with more good nature than I had ever seen from him.

  Now he knew what my name was. I was no longer Matty, Jack, or Kid. I was now Tiny Tim and usually just plain Tim. That was what he called me from that day forward and he would never forget it. Soon the memory of how he came up with the name would fade and both he and Rachel assumed it was my real name.

  I abhorred being called it but was too timid to protest or correct him. So Tim I became.

  sixteen

  I knew she was lying to me. It was a posture, a way to distance herself and rise above the things she did. She wasn’t gathering experience for writing, no . . . Sorry, that’s not completely true. She had a poetic soul. She was a writer, an artist in her heart, and eventually the horrible reality of what she was doing would become the raw material for whatever literary or artistic form or discipline she would dedicate herself to. I was convinced of that.

  This may be putting the cart before the horse, though. She turned tricks because she was poor and it was a way to make money. But not every person who needs money is going to sell their ass or pussy.

  No. Something has to bend you that way first. Add to that an example, an introduction, or a possibility, and you have all the necessary components. Motive, means, and opportunity.

  My theory is that there was a damaged sexual component in her psyche somewhere; an uncle, her father, a family friend . . . somebody fucked her up. And most likely when she was very young. I’m sure she was always pretty, precocious, and smart; her consciousness lit up as far back as five or six years old. An easy and enticing prey for the disturbed and deplorable individuals who would exploit an innocent and defenseless little girl. There is no limit to the evils of the world and if you can imagine it, it’s been done. And worse.

  What I came to learn was that her sister Sonia (or Sanoo as she was called by her family) was her entry point into prostituting herself. Veronica’s sister introduced her to three or four men (it wasn’t any more than that) Sanoo had already tricked with. Veronica said they were men who worked at the newspaper with her sister. This was the big factory press where they printed the newspaper, not the offices where they wrote it.

  Sanoo was a beauty like her sister, but where Veronica was slim and petite, Sanoo was curvy and voluptuous. She had worked at the newspaper for a few years and
guys were always asking her out on dates. A lot of these men were married. Sanoo started sleeping with a few of her suitors and if they were generous enough she made it a semiregular thing. One or two of these guys would give her number to a friend and eventually she became popular enough to quit the newspaper, making the same amount of money working a fraction of the hours.

  When the law of diminishing returns asserted its inevitable influence, Sanoo’s dates would ask if she had any friends she could introduce them to. She couldn’t come up with any girlfriends she thought would be interested in such an arrangement, but when she mentioned she had a sixteen-year-old sister who was as pretty as she was, well . . . it was music to their perverted ears.

  Barry was a friend of one of the newspaper guys and a chef in a fancy steakhouse down near the fish market on the East River. (Veronica would later reveal that in truth Barry was a short-order cook in a shitty coffee shop near the ferry.) Barry lived with his mother on Morton Street in the Village in a fifth-floor walkup that had no doorbell or buzzer out front. You had to call him on the phone and then he’d throw keys out the window in a little white glove that “could have been peeled off of Mickey Mouse’s arm.” He had lived in the little apartment with his mother his entire life.

  Mama Ro, as she was called in the neighborhood, would often travel to Schenectady to visit her sister over long holiday weekends like Memorial Day or Labor Day. Barry would take advantage of this temporary freedom by having a girl climb the five flights of stairs and pay him a visit.

  Veronica said that Barry had a strange relationship with his dog, an old, unkempt bitch named Duchess. While Veronica would be getting dressed after doing whatever it was she did with Barry, she would watch as Duchess curled up next to her naked master. She said that Barry would stroke Duchess around her breasts (do dogs have breasts, or are they just considered nipples?) and between her hind legs.