Dope (6 page)

Right. He'd been saying the kid was going to be a doctor since the kid was knee high. He put my sandwich up on the counter and we talked some more. He told me the youngest was going to be a lawyer and the girl in the middle was going to marry a nice Jewish banker she'd met at temple. The fellow was all right but Abe was a little disappointed because he'd only gone to City College.

“You know how it is,” he said. “He's a nice guy. But everyone wants the best for their kids, right? So I don't know why she couldn't find a fellow from Harvard.” He shook his head. “At least NYU.”

“Sure.”

“Hey,” Abe said, suddenly serious. “Did I tell you about Saul? Old Saul from Ludlow Street?”

I shook my head. I was sure I knew a Saul from somewhere, but . . .

“Sure,” Abe said. “You know Saul. Old Saul on Ludlow Street. See, Saul, he was in the
schmata
business. Lived right here on Ludlow Street. Then he retires and he goes down to Florida. And every day he sits on the beach and he reads the anti-Semitic newspapers. You know the type. All about how the Jews are taking over the world.”

“Sure,” I said. I started to laugh already. It was a joke. “One pastrami shop at a time.” I took another taste of corned beef.

But Abe kept it completely deadpan. “So Saul's reading the papers every day,” he said. “Finally his wife, Sadie, she says, ‘Saul. Saul,' she says. ‘What are you reading this crap for?' And Saul smiles and he says, ‘'Cause I like to see how good we're doing. See, Sadie, right here, it says Jews control the banks, we own all the diamonds, we're running the government. . . . What more could we ask for?'”

I laughed so hard I almost spit out my corned beef.

“Sorry,” Abe said to the man behind me. We'd been talking too long. “What can I get for you?”

I turned around and I got a start. I knew him, the man on line behind me. I couldn't place the face, but I

was sure I'd seen him before. I got a strange feeling, like when Abe had first mentioned old Saul from Ludlow Street—I was supposed to know who it was, but . . .

Then I realized: it was the man who had been waiting across the street from Paul's. Guess he didn't have any luck finding his girl. I wasn't surprised. Once a girl spent a little time in Paul's, it was hard to get her out.

A
fter lunch I took the subway up to Midtown and then walked a few blocks to Fifty-third between Broadway and Sixth. There in the middle of the block was a door between a theater and an office building with a sign painted on it: “ROSE's—Hi Class Lounge—COCKTAILS—Dancing—Right Upstairs!” The door opened up into a small, narrow staircase that reeked of booze and marijuana and cigarette smoke. The stairs took you into a room ten times the size you would have guessed—it was built on top of the theater next door.

In Rose's, taxi dancers would dance with a guy for a small fee; for a bigger fee they'd dance a little closer, although no one took their pants off and Tony, the manager, made sure everyone kept their hands where he could see them. It was a tough job, dancing in a dive like Rose's. But it paid okay and it beat the hell out of Wool-worth's. It was close enough to Times Square to get the tourist trade and close enough to the better part of Midtown to get the local businessmen.

I worked there when I was hooked on dope. It was my husband who got me into it. Easy money, he said. Wear a low-cut dress with long sleeves to cover the track marks and the sores on your arms and they'll never know. You dance with a guy, spend some time with him, and then whatever happens after the club closes is your own business. Yours and your husband's. Except after a while, even with the long sleeves, they do know. And even the men who come to Rose's don't want to hang around a junkie. She might be good for one thing, but they're not going to pay her to dance and make conversation.

The place hadn't changed at all. Tony was right up at the cash register, like always, sitting on a stool, scowling over a pile of papers. Toward the left side of the room was a tiny stage where a three-piece band played “Blue Moon.” It seemed like every joint in the world like Rose's played “Blue Moon,” over and over again. The musicians looked like they were having trouble keeping their eyes open. There wasn't much else to the place; a dozen tables and two dozen chairs, a bar along the back wall, long red curtains keeping out the light, and a big open space for dancing. The lights were down almost low enough to make the girls look pretty and the men look handsome. Almost.

It was a slow day. There were more girls than customers, and only three couples were grinding away on the dance floor. The rest of the girls were up at the bar drinking cocktails.

“Joey!”

Tony stood up and came toward me with a smile. “Joey! Look at you! You look great, Joe, you really do.”

“Thanks, Tony. How's everything around here?”

“Eh . . .” He had a list of complaints. The girls didn't look good, the guys were cheap, and the price of liquor was up. “So what brings you by,” he finally asked. “Looking for a job?”

“Sure,” I said, laughing. “How do you think I'd look in that?” I nodded my head toward a girl in a tight blue number I was around ten years too old for.

“Gorgeous,” Tony said. And something about the way he said it choked me up a bit. But only for a second. I showed him the picture of Nadine and McFall.

“You ever see her in here?”

Tony took a good long look. “She looks like a girl who might have worked here for a couple of months. Not for long.” He squinted at the picture. “Raquel?”

I shrugged. None of the girls at a spot like this used their real names.

Tony thought for a moment. “Raquel, I think. Maybe Roxanne? I don't know. The girls'll know, they'll remember. But honestly, Joe, I'm not even sure it's the same girl.”

“How about the guy?”

Tony shrugged. “After a while, they all look alike.”

I knew what he meant. I walked to the back, where the girls sat on stools by the bar. They were laughing and complaining over their half-price drinks, probably talking trash about Tony and the customers and the girls who were off that evening.

I recognized one of the girls, a brunette in a bright red dress, and I walked over to her. “Daisy,” I said. She turned and looked at me. I could tell she didn't recognize me. The laughter quieted down. “I worked here for a while, maybe eight years back. I'm not surprised you don't remember me,” I told her. “I spent most of my time in the first stall in the ladies' room.”

That got a laugh from her and the rest of the girls. The first stall was bigger than the rest, and all the dope fiends preferred it for shooting. So now they knew I was telling the truth.

“Looking for work again?” Daisy asked, a bit friendlier now.

“No, actually, I'm looking for them.”

I gave her the picture of McFall and Nadine. She looked at it and then back up at me. “Did she work here?”

“I don't know,” I told her.

“She kinda looks familiar. . . . Gina, come here and look at this.” A tall slim girl in a pink dress came down from the end of the bar. She looked at the photo over Daisy's shoulder.

“I don't know,” Gina said, with a rough Brooklyn accent. “Isn't she the girl who left to go work at the Royale?”

“Maybe,” Daisy said. “What was her name, anyway?”

Gina shrugged. “Jeez, they come and go so fast. Roxy?”

“Nah,” Daisy said. “That ain't it. That was the girl who moved to Alaska.”

A dark Puerto Rican girl leaned over and looked at the photo. “No,” she said, with a Spanish accent. “That's the girl who went to the Royale. I went there once with a girlfriend—don't tell Tony, for Christ's sake—and I saw her there.”

“When was that?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Over a month ago.”

Gina pointed at McFall. “I dunno. But him, I think I've seen him before. Hey, Clara,” she called. “Clara, come take a look.” Clara was a pretty, curvy blonde in a fancy strapless white dress, like a girl might wear to a formal. She looked too young to be here. She hopped off her bar stool and came over to look. When she saw the photo she blinked and pursed her lips, just enough to see it if you were looking real close.

“No,” she said quietly. I imagined that she always talked like that, quiet and soft. “I've never seen either one of them.”

Daisy passed the photo down the bar. The rest of the girls said they hadn't seen either of them. I thanked them, and they went back to their drinks and their chatter. Except Clara, the blonde. She sat on her stool and looked at the floor.

“Hey,” I said to her, smiling. “Let's have a drink.”

She nodded. I took her by the arm and led her over to a table a few yards away from the bar, where we sat across from each other. She didn't resist. Her arm was soft and practically limp and it sort of made you feel like crying to touch her.

“How do you know him?” I asked.

She shrugged, defeated. Her pretty face looked young and tired. She looked down at the floor again. “We went out to dinner a few times, that was all.”

“You meet him here?”

She nodded. “Yeah. We went out to dinner a few times, that was all.”

But that wasn't all. She was still looking down at the floor. “Why'd you only go out a few times?”

“That guy,” she said, sighing. “He seemed different, you know? Nice. He really seemed like
somebody.
”

“And then?”

She kept her eyes down at the floor.

“Did you go to bed with him?” I prodded.

She looked up. “Yeah, I did. And when I woke up in the morning, all my money was gone. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars. I was saving it in a little tin on my dresser.”

“You ever see him again?”

She shook her head, relaxing back into a slouch, her eyes turning back toward the floor. “Boy. It took me a long time to save up that two hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

I talked with Tony for a while before I left. When I was getting ready to go a group of five businessmen came in. They were fat, with shiny pink faces, and they were laughing like going to spend money on taxi dancers was the funniest thing they had ever done. Like that's why they were doing it—for laughs. When the girls by the bar saw them come in they pulled themselves up a little straighter and stopped making jokes and put on demure, hopeful smiles. Like they were just waiting for the right fat businessman with the right red face in the right cheap suit to come and save them.

On my way out I saw that Clara was still sitting at the table where I left her, alone, looking down at the floor.

I
slept late the next day because I could. If I was going to the Royale there was no point in going before the sun went down. I'd thought I'd heard something about April showers bringing May flowers but it must have just been a rumor, because here we were in May and it was pouring like hell. It was raining when I woke up and still raining after I cleaned up my room and picked up my wash and put away my clothes and went shopping for new stockings and gloves and got ready to go out.

Late in the afternoon I took the subway up to Times Square, where I went to the Automat for lunch. I'd grown up just outside the Square, in Hell's Kitchen, and coming down to the Automat was a big treat. It was always loud and busy and full of regular working people—stiffs, my mother called them. People with regular jobs, people who owned houses, or at least I imagined they did. In Hell's Kitchen we'd moved from one tenement or rooming house to another every few months. My mother would get us kicked out for one reason or another—too many parties, too much noise, too many men coming and going all night, and of course the rent was always late. I couldn't remember half of the rooms we'd lived in, which was probably for the best. Sometimes I'd walk by a run-down building on Fifty-fifth Street and think it looked familiar, but I was never really sure.

In the Automat you'd put a nickel or a dime in a machine and open a little glass door and get a sandwich or a dish of macaroni with cheese or a piece of cherry pie. I never knew until I was older that there were ladies working behind the machines, putting the food in. When I was a kid I'd come and get a Coke. I could never afford anything good, and it's hard to steal from the Automat—you could do it if you caught the door just after someone had gotten their dish and you reached far back, but then a man would come over and kick you out. Those ladies saw everything, I guess. When I got older I learned that if you hung around with a cup of coffee and looked hungry a man would always come along to buy you something. The trick then was to leave before the man wanted payback for the nickel he'd spent on pie.

But now I had plenty of dough, and I had two pieces of pie without having to look over my shoulder. When I

left the Automat it had stopped raining and I walked around for a while. Times Square was full of tourists looking up at the lights. Maybe they didn't have electricity back at home. On the corner of Forty-second and Seventh a group of queer boys hung around in tight dungarees, waiting for tricks, insulting each other and laughing at their own jokes and trying to pass the time. In front of the dime museum on Forty-second Street a barker in a coat and tails with a turban on his head tried to talk the people passing by into seeing Professor Thaddeus's Educated Fleas. I declined. I'd seen them before and they weren't all that educated. A group of sailors in navy whites stood around and watched the barker, wondering over it all, and an old man in a trench coat, worn at the cuffs, was watching along with the sailors. The old man's face hung down with age, and a few gray hairs were left under the rim of his hat. Under the trench coat he wore a suit that had been pretty sharp ten years ago, when he'd bought it, but now it was faded and shiny from being cleaned too many times. The old man kept his eyes on the barker, but slowly, one step at a time, he was moving closer to one of the sailors.