I’m reading Cosmo: The Sex Issue. Someone underlined the words penis, ejaculation, and burgeoning in an article about male sterility. When the door opens I begin to read aloud, “‘Sterility, though it certainly affects a man’s sexuality, is a medical disorder . . .’”
I catch glimpses of him as he walks from the door to the chair across from mine and sits down: khaki pants; long, thin hands; and glasses.
“‘Bottom line,’” I read, “‘the penis ceases to function as desired. This will lead to anxiety. And here, ladies, is where you can help. . . .’”
“How do you like that?” I ask, and look over the top of the magazine. “I’m in the helping profession.”
He’s smiling. His skin is thin enough I can see through it. So I know he’s happy to see me. Or he’s happy with himself — he managed to fold up his body and fit it into the space of one chair pulled very close. Our knees almost touch. Either way he’s happy and not afraid to show it, and I begin to feel like I’m sitting in a tub of broken glass.
“We have something in common,” he says.
His hands are folded in his lap. He looks at me for a long time without blinking.
“I can do that, too,” I say. “I won the school staring contest in the fourth grade.”
He tells me, “You’re not what I expected.”
“Maybe you can return me. Exchange me for another señorita. We come in a lot of colors.”
He shakes his head and waves a manila folder in front of me. “Your file,” he says. “You don’t look like you’ve been on the street this long.”
I pull my shirt over my head. I’m not wearing a bra — no bra and no belt the first seventy-two hours of my stay, for my protection as well as theirs. I never heard of a girl hanging herself with her bra, or strangling her captors with it, but they say it can be done.
I’m a 36B and as I move my arms, my breasts wave at him. The doctor’s face shuts down. It’s like a magic wand passed over him. He stops what he was going to say and his ears, the part that light can almost pass through, turn pink. Before he can call for staff, I turn my back and show him the scar. It’s a capital C that begins at the top of my shoulder blade and stops at my eleventh vertebrae.
“That was from a knife. I stood on the wrong corner. I was still new then.” I put my shirt back on and pull up my pant leg. “See that? It’s a bruise that never goes away.” It’s faded to brown now but is as big as the day I got it. “From a boot,” I tell him. “It’s got to be a year old.” I straighten my pants and sit back. “You ever been in a fight, Doc?”
“Not since grade school.”
“You have any scars?”
He wants to know if surgery counts. The best he can do, he says, is a scar he got when they put a pin in his elbow. He doesn’t show it to me and says instead, “We all have scars.”
“Maybe you fell walking up the steps of your slum apartment in the barrio.”
No, he says. He got it skiing. “My elbow clipped a tree. I’m Dr. Dearborn.”
He puts a hand in front of me. His fingers are long and square and the nails are clean. “Good hygiene,” I tell him. “That’s important to a girl in my business.”
I make like I’m going to shake his hand but instead I use my index finger to stroke his palm. Goose bumps rise on the back of his hand and he pulls it away, closed now like a clamshell.
He tells me he’s sorry he kept me waiting and wants to know, am I comfortable?
“Like you’re someone I can tell my secrets to?” I ask him.
“Is it a secret if you’re comfortable? Or just if you’re not?”
I know how to play this game. The person who answers the fewest questions wins.
I shift in my seat and our knees bump. He’s as cool as rain. He doesn’t even flinch. “Excuse me,” he says, and pushes his chair back two inches.
I tell him I’m penniless.
“I can’t pay your bill.”
“The city’s picking up the tab.” He says not to worry. “Why don’t we start with how old you are.”
Not a question. Phrased to make me feel more like talking. He paid attention in class.
“Eighteen.”
“In three or four years?”
“I was born the day Bush became president.” The first Bush.
He takes a minute to think it out. “Seventeen.”
“Congratulations,” I say. “Your degree is a real one.”
He thinks this is funny. The lines around his eyes and nose deepen. “You’re not the first to question it,” he says.
I can read his face as easily as a traffic light.
“What do you want to tell me today?” he asks.
Green.
“Who cuts your hair?”
“My wife,” he says. “She does a good job of it, don’t you think?”
I tell him it’s a mistake. “When your job is getting people to trust you, you shouldn’t look like The Joker.”
He smiles, wide enough that I can count his teeth.
He is quicker than the others who have tried to split me open and look at my insides. Who have diagnosed me as a “product of an abusive home” or “mani[a]cally depressed” or “criminal element.”
“Is it my hair or my good mood that disturbs you most?” he wants to know.
“Why don’t we get down to business,” I say. “What will it take to get out of here?”
I slide off the chair and am kneeling at his feet. I’m so fast, I’m there a full five seconds before he reacts, but then his face rises above me like a red moon. It says STOP without him even having to speak.
“Get back in your seat,” he says.
His voice is tight but not angry. His lips are an even line, and I think about why this bothers me. The best I can come up with is that his frown weighs more than his smile.
I stand up so I can look down on him. I’m losing my edge, what keeps me alive on the street. Not caring. Pretending to not care. It’s an art and I’m da Vinci. I ease back into my happy-to-be-here face.
“Your hair,” I tell him. “It bothers me more than your good mood.” In fact, I say, a haircut would dramatically improve our doctor–patient relationship. “After that, we can work on your attitude.”
I stole his line and I like my cleverness so much that I smile at him and take my seat.
“OK,” he says, “now we have some real work to do. You don’t list a living relative.”
“I don’t have one.”
“Your mother’s not alive?”
I tell him I doubt it. “Some people die when they lose a loved one.” I believe this with my whole body.
“When was the last time you saw her?”
I’ve lost track of days and mark time now by the hour.
“Guess,” he says.
But I don’t need to. I remember the exact moment. I could give him month, day, and year. I could tell him the sky was the darkest I’d ever seen it. Even the lights in the homes of the people I knew seemed farther away than the stars.
“When was the last time you saw your mother, Doc?”
“Christmas. She stayed for two weeks.”
“A little hard on the wife and kids?”
“Harder on the son. When?”
“You think working out how I feel about my mother will cure me, Doc? You think she’s the key to my happiness?”
“You know how you feel about her. You’re mad. And that’s good. It means you know you deserve better than you got.”
I have one of those moments when you know someone’s standing on your shadow. He’s so fast, I didn’t see him coming. I look him in the eye, see he knows it himself. He’s got that look athletes get when they win the gold. He’s pleased with himself and the whole world.
“I’m not mad,” I tell him.
“Yes, you are.”
He’s so sure of it, my body gets hot and tight. I’m on my way to thinking I want to rip his head off and use it for an ashtray before I realize the psychology he’s using on me
.
“You’re pretty good,” I tell him. “But I’m not mad.”
Before he lets me go, he tells me what life looks like. “There’s the walk into battle. The battle itself. And the walk away.” It’s a cycle we repeat. Every day. Sometimes it’s over small stuff. Sometimes it’s life and death.
“Our goal is the peace that follows victory. I want you to spend the next week thinking about what that peace would look like to you.”
I want to tell him I don’t remember winning anything in my life, but my throat is dry and swallowing doesn’t help.
“I want you to think about what you have to give up to get it.”
The Secret to Creating You
In each room there are two beds, one long dresser, half to each, and a beveled mirror, the shatterproof kind, so we won’t kill ourselves or our neighbor.
They say, No fighting. No taking your prójimo, your roommate, your friend and putting her head through the wall, or the door or the window. We will behave like cuates, best buddies.
We have our own bathroom, with a toilet and a shower cubicle, a sink and a plastic tree for hanging our toothbrushes. Towels are distributed each morning and checked off a balance sheet when we hand them back: There will be no hanging, no strangulation, no desperate escape attempts out a second-story window.
The bathroom is small. You can’t stand inside it and take a deep breath. It’s like my old apartment on the Amtrak: a coffin.
The doors to our rooms remain open. There’s no exception to this rule. We dress at seven a.m., when we can expect a certain amount of privacy; male staff workers don’t check the halls, don’t stick their heads through an arch for a Hurry-up, until 7:20.
We eat breakfast at 7:30 and then have an hour of free time, to read the newspaper, watch Good Morning America, or talk to staff.
We can make special requests: for a TV show that evening, for some time in the hospital’s library, for a hairbrush, for apple juice instead of milk at lunch. They count your points.
Yes, you can watch Charmed tonight. Or
No, you’ve earned only enough for a diary or a turn with the hot rollers. You want that instead?
You want neither. You want your TV show.
Lo siento, they say. Come back when you decide.
Your points are only good for a week, and then you start over. There’s no saving up for something you really want. Like a bar of rose-scented soap.
There’s a list of fifteen items you can purchase with a week’s worth of earnings:
1. the pick of Friday’s rented movie — 18 points
2. use of the unit’s Walkman and the new Beyoncé CD — 18 points
3. your choice for weekly chore — 15 points
4. an extra hour before lights out — 15 points
5. an hour of your favorite TV show — 15 points
6. choice of dessert — 15 points
7. writing journal — 12 points
8. hospital library use — 12 points
9. hot rollers — 12 points
10. hairbrush — 12 points
11. toothbrush — 8 points
12. shampoo — 6 points
13. toothpaste — 6 points
14. bar soap — 6 points
15. visitors — 2 points
The morning is for private therapy — there are seventeen girls to be heard and only five days in the workweek. We meet with our self-help groups and our social workers. With visitors from the outside.
The afternoon is lunch, group, chores, and a little free time to think about where we are and where we’d like to be.
We are assigned one day a week to wash our laundry, unless there are emergencies.
We set out plates, cups, and plastic forks and knives for dinner. They don’t miss a chance to protect us from ourselves. We, who are unlucky in love, who might use the prongs of a fork to pierce our hearts.
We watch the evening news with Brian Williams.
We bargain for the right to a vegetarian diet when we see it’s meat loaf.
More TV.
We thumb through Cosmopolitan and Us magazine. We sew buttons onto our shirts.
Write letters to friends who have forgotten us.
We talk among ourselves about what we miss the most: the clean, fresh air of our lives on the outside.
We read: Salem’s Lot, The Hanson Brothers: A Biography, The Secret of Creating Your Future, Love’s Savage Embrace, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?
We count how many days, and has it grown into months, that we’ve been here.
On Fridays we have occupational therapy: we use the computers to build a résumé; learn how to sit for an interview (legs crossed, hands folded, smile, even if it takes all you’ve got); we learn how to dress, no flashy colors and nothing above the knee on show; they teach us a proper handshake; we role-play the perfect scenario.
Business leaders from the community come and tell us what they like to see in an applicant: nicely groomed, smile, know your stuff, be polite. They’ll be trusting us with their livelihood — their customers. We’ll be the front people, representing the business. We can’t chase away their only source of income.
On Tuesdays and Thursdays we have recreational therapy. Physical exercise is important for a full recovery. The endorphins are a natural high. You can’t be unhappy when you’re running three miles around the gym floor. You’ll feel better physically and you’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll like who you are. Exercise is the key to changing your future. It’s control.
We play basketball and learn the importance of a team spirit. Of cooperation. People depend on you. You don’t want to let them down.
Do something wrong and you lose. You’ve let down your team. You feel shame, if you’re any kind of team player.
This kind of lesson works in your everyday life, they say. Teamwork will help you get along with others. You’ll love your neighbor. You’ll stop at the scene of a car accident and give first aid. You’ll develop a world conscience — you’ll want to recycle, you’ll stop using plastic, and you’ll shut off the light when you leave a room.
On Wednesdays we have art therapy. The first week we made greeting cards. They went to all the carrozas in the nursing home down the street. We learn to crochet or knit. We sew holiday crafts: wreaths that went to the local churches and ornaments that went to hospitals. We paint with watercolors. We mold clay into ashtrays or hot plates. Some of our things are sold at the hospital auxiliary.
They tell us we do the art to vent our frustrations. To provide a welcome hello to forgotten people. To let someone who’s suffering know there’s someone who knows. We do it as an outlet for bottled pain and violations.
Lights-out is ten p.m. We lay in our beds and wish we could fall asleep without remembering other times we lay in bed and wished we could just fall asleep. Or play dead. In our homes, where we had maybe a mother who was blind and deaf and a father who stole our secrets.
Made in America
Today is my first time in group and all the other chicas with their long nails tap-tap-tapping against the arms of their chairs are waiting for my story.
“I’m one of the best,” I say. I can nickel-and-dime them down to the lint in their pockets.
“That’s why I do what I do, Doc. I’m a natural.” I was born into my trade.
“I have talento.”
A real gift.
You get them really hot. You get them so all they’re thinking about is getting off, they’re begging for it, Baby, baby, now! And I say, That’s going to cost you a little more. We’ve already run through the sixty-dollar happy hour.
By then they’re willing to pay.
That’s one of the benefits of the job. Any extra is yours. Manny Marquez never knows. And what he doesn’t know is good for me.
Dr. Dear leans forward in his chair. “Tell us more,” he says. Tell us a typical day in the life of Chloestreetwalker, he says. “What is it like? What concerns you the most?”<
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Today he’s playing dress-up in a white coat like the other doctors. I like him better when he shows a little of himself. When he looks less like he’s practicing and I’m the mouse in the spin wheel.
Here it is, I say, my autobiography.
There are some troubles in my line of work. Sure. Things that make you wonder if you’re ever going to get ahead.
AIDS. You worry about that all the time. Even while you’re suiting up. Even when you have him all wrapped up in a gold-seal Trojan, you worry if this is the one that’s got the hole. Is this the one that’s going to break? Is he poison? Is this one seventy-five-dollar trick going to have it in for me?
Then I say to myself, Can’t be. That’s not the way I’m going. I had a premonition: death by drowning.
I dream about it. I feel it inside like it’s happened to me before. In another life maybe. Or did I drown when I was a baby, was saved, and remember only the feeling of it? Like suffocating. Tumbling, and then the sweet oblivion. Not caring if I get a last breath. I’ve found what I’ve been looking for all my life.
So I figure it’s got to be drowning. Or maybe strangulation. Maybe some twisted john’s going to get me with an extension cord. But he’s not going to kill me off slow.
My death is decided and AIDS doesn’t come into it. But it’s something that’s always at the back of my mind. It’s got to be. It keeps me careful. It’s enough of a worry that any john that looks sick, any beyond skinny, any with scabs on his face or hands, and I say, No, thank you. I tell him, unless he has a bona fide, signed and sealed certificate of health dated yesterday, I don’t do it.
“Not for a hundred dollars?”
Not for a thousand. Not for ten thousand dollars and your Cadillac. I’ve still got things to do with my life.
Another thing is junkies. They’re so hooked on smack, they’ll break your hundred-dollar trick by doing it for twenty.
It’s robbery. They undermine the business. You get ten crackheads out on the street on a good night and your take is half what it should be.
Chloe Doe Page 3