A Walk on the Wild Side (27 page)

They were thin, big-boned girls, and when they fought they didn’t go for the hair or eyes. They went for belly or jaw, with fists. They fought like men. Out-fought, out-drank and out-hollered the farm and city chicks. To name only a few things they did with the greater will.

‘Give us your money – you’re drunk,’ with last night’s gin still crippling their tongues they taunted the teetotaling boys in tortoise-shell specs from Loyola and Tulane. Boys working on sociological theses who’d been told there was fun down on Perdido Street.

‘Professor! Let me talk to you! Did you come down for what I think you come? You just came to
look?
Girls! Specs came just to
look!
Okay Professor –
look
at what brought you here! Same thing that’ll take you away!’ – the women’s shrieks would deride the looking-man down the street and into the winding avenues of all his
voyeur’s
dreams: curious streets where he walked as the last of earth’s bachelors, hearing window-women snicker as he passed. In those dreams it was always the women’s turn to stare.

Hard lines, hard times, when soft girls grew hard and hard girls grew soft. Wise hands at the trade would invite with a whisper, ‘Daddy, you name it, I’m on my last legs.’ For men sometimes came down there looking for someone to push over the brink or someone to save – it was all the same. Play Christ or play Devil but pay your damned dollar. For two you could play both. For the lion that roars loudest at the bleat of the sheep there was lots of fun on Perdido Street. The sibilant hiss from the narrow dark was for a specialized clientele.

Not-Yet-Twenties bold or humble. Lost or captured, luckless or loose. The dark and the fair from everywhere who would have been safely married in Minneapolis or Seattle, Kennebunkport or San Francisco had Old Guard economics not demanded more Coca Cola love and less housekeeping.

Minnesota girls with hair heaped like ripe wheat: a Northern sun shone yet in hair like that. In the eyes of the girls from San Francisco big slow soundless ocean fogs rolled to their final shore.

Behind the eyes of the Oregon girls it was raining again in Portland. Somehow it was always raining behind the eyes of Oregon girls.

Girls with Western turnings in their talk and girls with the midland twanging. Who wore their hair long like Anna Q. Nillson or braided like Ann Harding’s. Bobbed or banged or flowing to the shoulders, rose-red girls or sallow, they wore their hair in all the styles, they softened their mouths in all the wiles that good girls did.

Sick or silly, maimed or strayed, fresh-fallen leaf or sear, the Storyville hustler chattered as cheerfully about husbands and wives, washday and landlords, lost chances and chances left as the good girls did. And kept souvenirs of their luckier hours, lockets and albums, letters and rings, exactly as good girls did. If she had married a ponce now doing a stretch, the girls who had married legitimate men felt a twist of envy toward her – but isn’t that what good girls often did?

She borrowed from one boyfriend to give to another, betrayed those who had helped her in order to do a stranger a gratuitous favor, let some pander debauch her as though she were something that ran on all fours and all the while had some mark completely convinced that she wouldn’t go to bed with a man to whom she wasn’t legally wed though he hung jellybeans on pineapple trees. Now wasn’t that just how good girls occasionally did?

Good girls and bad carried on so much alike, in the cheery old summer of 1931, a Yankee might well have been deceived.

The Southern boy was a bit harder to fool. The moment he saw a girl behind a door screen naked to her navel and lifting her breasts, he sensed something was up. When she did a slow spread-legged grind and threw in a blinding bump for good measure, he suspected it wasn’t free. When she opened the door and said, ‘Step in, I don’t bite,’ he went in, of course, out of simple courtesy. But he wasn’t fooled: she was after his money, that was all. No, it wasn’t easy to fool a Southern boy any summer.

When the white rain ran with the red-lit rain and Perdido Street doors stood wide. Where here and there, between dance hall and dive, some nightingale stood with the weight of her shame so fresh upon her that she couldn’t as yet invite someone even though she hadn’t that day bitten food.

(Nobody knew where these silent girls came from. Nor whether their eyes, searching inward, saw a disheveled and bloodstained bed or a new cash register. Whether they were eaten alive by regret as they stood or merely counted in indifference to everything: one dollar, two dollars, three and four, when I get eight I’ll get me a dress of tropical pink. When I get twenty-two I’ll get pink slippers too.)

Birds of a hundred varied feathers, hooters, hissers, howlers, quackers – it was a new kind of zoo wherein the captured foraged for themselves.

Some were feebs and some were loonies, some were tattoed girls. There were peep shows and side shows, fat girls and gawks and a dwarf who called herself the Princess.

There weren’t enough keepers to handle the stock. Panders who had never had more than two women tapping, found themselves without enough windows to go around. Five or six all yammering at once for her turn at door or pane, vying with one another to be top broad for daddy.

It was a daddy’s market, but daddy had to take care all the same.

Oliver Finnerty, ex-exercise boy and currently proprietor of six peepholes on the second floor of Spider-Boy Court, once having incurred a debt of ninety days to the parish jail, had turned over a girl to a friend in the trade for safekeeping. Oliver had expended a great deal of time and thought on this child, for he’d seen her promise early. He had told her, ‘Baby you go with this man, and when he says, “Walk pretty,” you walk pretty all the way.’ And to the friend: ‘Don’t whip her where it’ll leave her marked, or she’ll use it as an excuse for laying off work. Now good luck and God bless the both of you.’

Ninety days later, his debt paid in full, Finnerty had returned to reclaim his property only to find her wearing a long black dress and a pince-nez, and his colleague out digging ditches. Something had gone wrong. Finnerty had had to spend that whole day talking the girl back into her lounging pajamas. By the time the friend returned from work, a black lunch bucket under his arm, Finnerty’s patience had been exhausted.

‘Just look what you
done
to his girl,’ he berated the Benedict Arnold of Panderdom. ‘You took a nice sweet kid and twisted her all up. You undone all my good work.’ Then he raised the girl’s hair off her neck and began cracking her patiently, without hatred or heat, but mechanically, with contentment in a job he was the right man for. And like a good little whore she stood and took it, for she knew very well she had it coming. And that, once done, she had a chance for full pardon.

But Benedict Arnold would never be pardoned: when this sort of thing happened it wasn’t the girl’s fault. Now he could only sit mute and miserable, knowing he’d never be allowed to drink among honest pimps again. But would instead drink in crumb-dump taverns where working men play dominoes for nickels and envy those who get to work on Saturday too. Oh, if only Oliver would give him one more chance!

Oliver wouldn’t violate his principles. When the whipping was done, the pince-nez crushed and the long black dress in the garbage can, he turned to his ex-colleague and finished him crisply. ‘
You
. Pick up your lunch bucket and get back in your ditch.’

Dishonored, disbarred, a disgrace to right-thinking procurors, the Man-Who-Would-Be-A-Pander shuffled wearily, without a word of goodbye, out onto a street that other lunch buckets had laid long ago.

And was never seen in respectable circles again.

Finnerty, who looked like one of those little Australian foxes with ears half the length of its body, claimed to be five foot but had to be wearing his cowboy boots to make good the boast.

‘Aching Chopper’s giving me trouble again,’ he would complain of the girl who had been with him longest, the moon-faced Chicago blonde. ‘I know she been faithful as a broad can be but her teeth give me trouble. It’s a new plate now near every month. I’m supporting half the dentists in town.’

‘If you’d stop busting her in the mouth you wouldn’t have to support that many,’ the mulatto woman once called Lucille suggested.

Oliver owned five women, a single-motored plane and a captive mouse. He claimed to be the first pander in the entire South to transport women by plane. A claim making every single one of the five proud of their five-foot daddy.

He’d crowd all five into the single motor, deposit one on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, two near Hammond (where a fast track was operating at the time) and take the other two to Gulfport. To the women he pretended that his motive was to save time, but to his brothel brothers he readily admitted that the idea was really to save listening to all that yakking – ‘I can’t bear to be with one broad a whole half day, not to mention five.’

He had the identical weakness, as a pilot, that he had had as an apprentice jockey. He’d get so high on Panama pot that he couldn’t make up his mind. On a horse he had never known whether to go for the whip or tighten rein so that sometimes he had done both at once. In a plane, with five silly women high as himself and every one giving him orders, he wouldn’t be able to decide whether to land on roadway or grass. The road burned up the plane’s tires so badly it would mean a new set – but the risk of flipping over on the grass, inviting loss of his working principal, was even greater.

The second the women saw that Daddy was in the switches, they fought to be first to help. One would decide for the roadway and grab for the stick simply to have her own way. But one of more economical habits, wishing to say later she had saved him a whole set of tires, would scream right in his ear, ‘Idiot! On the
grass!
The
grass!
’ At the very last possible second he would holler, ‘I can’t please everybody,’ fling out both fists and make earth in a shrieking, careening lurch like a chute-the-chutes hitting water. Road or grass, the women loved it. It was a kind of thrill not another pimp living could provide. Small wonder that to say ‘Finnerty swings her’ afforded a girl real distinction among the women of Perdido Street.

The mouse was one that had barely gotten away from Hallie’s lame brindle cat. The cat, that belonged to one woman who would have nothing to do with Finnerty, had been going on three legs so long that it no longer killed, it crippled. After she had crippled it, the mouse had dragged itself into a corner behind the juke. Finnerty had fished it out and given it a home in a little box with a cellophane window that had once held face powder. When he had to induct a new girl, or to straighten up an old one growing recalcitrant, he took her to watch the mouse. His own face would be expressionless as he and the girl saw it trying for freedom in spite of all pain. He said nothing while it hauled its wrecked hindquarters around and around. Just as it seemed the animal had made good its escape at last, he would plop it back in its box and say to the girl, ‘When you get as much sense as this mouse we’ll get along better, little baby,’ and close the box. It was a warning that she ought to try to do better by her little daddy, lest he had to put his mittens on.

‘Daddy dear,’ his Chicago blonde once complained, ‘take me to the hospital, I got to get a little something or other took out.’ And leaned her head on her hands.

‘I can’t afford to be carting you in and out of operating rooms twice a month,’ her pander told her, ‘every time you go you’re out of action for days. One more visit and by God you get
everything
took out. Make up your mind to
that
, Aching Choppers – I said
everything
. This piddling around with part of a gut at a time disgusts me.’

‘But Little Daddy, why get
disgusted?
’ the girl wanted to know, ‘if you went to a doctor about a little prostate trouble, say, you wouldn’t want the man to cut off your balls, would you? A woman got things she don’t want to lose neither, Little Daddy.’

‘Don’t give me that,’ her little daddy closed the discussion, ‘you can get along without all that crazy stuff.’

‘That’s no way to talk to a girl, not even a pimp ought to be that hard,’ Mama scolded the pander in front of everyone. ‘The good book tells us “A woman is as a precious fruits in a garden shut up.”’

‘Shut up is correct,’ Finnerty commanded, ‘and anyone who says I ever hit any woman with anything bigger than a small housebrick is a coon-assed liar.’

He was as heavy in the shoulders and arms as a well-grown six-footer and the right arm bore a strange tattoo: A narrow cigarette whose smoke formed a burning boast: KING WEED-HEAD.

How much good this would do him in event of a pinch he never explained, and modestly disowned the implication of the tattoo. ‘It don’t really mean I’m the king
of
the weedheads, or course,’ he pointed out, ‘it just means that
as
a weedhead I’m a king.’ His distinctions were sometimes too fine to follow, and actually weren’t worth the bother of following anyhow. He’d been known to trade off a woman no older than thirty-five for a twenty dollar bill and a spring-blade knife, but explained he had reason to think she had been unfaithful to him. Faithful or not, if you threw in half a can of greenish tea with the twenty, he was ready to let loose of almost any one of his women. Except, of course, Reba, for to her Finnerty had been true: hadn’t he once been offered a cartload of green bananas plus a full can of potoguaya for her and turned the whole deal down?

But before letting that offer go he had taken a look at the tea, that had been of a light greenish cast. ‘If it had been the real
boge
,’ he admitted later, ‘I couldn’t have answered for my actions.’

Meaning, by
boge
, the deep-purple plant that only grows on Mount Popocatepetl.

He went in for broad stripes and coats almost to his knees, sometimes draped out and sometimes semi-clad – a man a full ten years ahead of his time with eyes as pale as the whiskey in his glass.