Drop (21 page)

Alex hooked me up with equipment, making me promise on the grave of my moms that I would get it back intact. From her crib, I walked down to the El on 46th Street past homes that begged to collapse, shedding paint and splinters and concrete chunks the size of cupcakes. On their porches sat clothes, newspapers faded by light and rain, and poor people. Hair sticking out over their heads like black cotton candy (if you took it into your mouth, it would taste like the popcorn on the floors of movie theaters). Looking back at me walking down the street, too broken even to pace their cells, knowing nothing I can do (dance, sing, give out free cigarettes) is going to change that.

On the El, I sat alone, pretending to be too bored to be mugged, arms folded across my lap and my head down. By my feet, liquid ran along the black grooves of the flooring, ebbing to and fro with the momentum of the car. I kept touching the camera to tell myself that it was still there, rubbing my finger over its smooth sides until the plastic was warm and I felt like I could bend it like a tin spoon.

We were aboveground, then we were underground in Center City and screaming through the hollow, then we were back aboveground again, in the white ghetto now, among the white hungry folk. Ghetto to ghetto, negro to trash, and all for a dollar fifty. Forget the Chunnel.

Kensington? This isn’t Kensington. The real Kensington was down Notting Hill, over from the Royal Albert. Kensington was travel agents taking you anywhere in the world, the backyard of the queen, cute little shops and American tourists young and loud and buying things. Philly-Kensington was all wrong. It was people with bad skin and brown cooked teeth and thin gold chains, hair forced to attention high over female heads and violent boys with harsh mouths. Hooded sweatshirts covered with flannel shirts, jeans too tight and sneakers too dirty (but still brand-name, baby). Mouths spitting out ‘you’se’ and ‘we’se,’ a community subject to its own internal grammar. This is a place where niggers die, where field reporters come on TV talking about tragedy and then interview neighbors who stand in the cold and say ‘It’s a shame’ in steamed vocals into the camera, then rush home to see themselves on television for the first time. Front Street, under the blackened frame of the El tracks. I walked for near an hour, determined to either get the picture or get mugged. Streetlights extinguished by gunfire or shame provide bubbles of darkness, sections between functioning poles where reality was soft and crack ghosts haunted. Cars came down the road and crack hos emerged from the shadows like cats to can openers. Clusters of them, hiding in the vacant lots and buildings that lined the road, waiting in shadows, whispering to their habits that the next headlight was going to be the one. Dreaming about a bit of cash, a taste of food, another pebble in the pipe to remind them why it was all worthwhile. Me walking down the street was nothing to them because tricks came in cars and I was too big to rob, weak as they were. If they had ever had a gun or knife they would have smoked it by now. Buy now. More love. Suck it down with a Bic lighter.

I needed one alone but couldn’t get them to come out, and I was scared to get close to a group for fear of being pulled into the darkness by a collective of bony hands. Getting desperate, when the next car pulled up and one of the creatures climbed inside, I followed it around the block to the alley between 2nd and 3rd. A close distance behind, listening for the footsteps I expected to come after me, I waited in the doorway of an abandoned deli for the car door to open, for the crackhead to emerge. The vehicle actually bounced. As soon as it was still, the white Buick opened its big-ass wing and she got out. Drinking water out a Pepsi bottle as she walked my way. I stepped towards her.

‘Excuse me, miss?’ My voice weak from hours of neglect and fear. I cleared my throat. She jumped. Aqua blue velour V-neck with grease stains on stomach and black denim cut-offs (its gray strings bouncing when she did). She was a man, I could see from her neck, and from her feminine walk. The real women out here moved like stiff-kneed infants on their first strut.

‘Watchu want? I didn’t do nothing,’ she whined, stomping her foot down.

‘No, I’m sorry, I’m a photographer, I’m trying to get—’ Camera lifting up, she didn’t like that. Pepsi bottle came flying, hitting me over the eye, making me certain it was a brick despite the fact I saw the blue logo before impact. Realizing the camera wasn’t in my hand, I dove forward. Sliding into the ground, somehow Alex’s baby was safe in my palms. Just the skin under my arms was gone. Crackhead ran in front of me, back towards the shadows of Frankford Avenue. Not too fast either. Pausing repeatedly to turn around and see if I was dead.

Retreating, I hit a pizza joint back by Kensington station. The guy wouldn’t give me the key to the bathroom without buying something, so I got a slice. Going on two
A.M
., there was nobody in there but coffee drinking SEPTA workers and the two crack hos sitting by the window. Sharing a medium soda a sip at a time, their ashy hands pushed it back and forth between turns.

‘That’s what I’m saying. That’s what I’m saying. I go up there and I’m like, “Yo”, banging on the door and shit and the bitch don’t answer, right? Yelling her name and shit and nothing.’

‘How you know she there?’

‘I know this shit. Bitch don’t go nowhere, she don’t, that’s why I gave her my kids in the first place: bitch don’t go out. So I’m like, “Yo”!’ Hand drumming against air. Her arm was scraped like mine was. ‘ “I’m here to get my babies, open the fucking door,” right? Nothing. And I can hear the TV on, so I know she’s in there. Trying to keep my babies, tackhead bitch can’t get a man to make her own, okay? Bitch too fat to even get down the stairs, and you know that elevator don’t be working, right?’

Laugh. ‘Yeah.’ She couldn’t have been more than sixteen’, she even wore an adolescent’s gumball band to hold the bit of hair that stood atop her head, giving her dome the shape of garlic.

‘So I’m like, fuck this shit. I’m beating the door, I’m kicking it, I’m like Bruce Lisa, ha ha. You know what I’m saying? You don’t know me, I’m crazy. I don’t care how long stank bitch got my kids, they mine, I’m the one that birthed them. Ain’t no amount of babysitting going to change that. Can I get some respect up this mawfucka? That’s what I’m saying.’ Mama had no front teeth. With nothing to stop her S’s, they flew past her wrinkled top lip and sizzled before her.

‘You say you got toys?’ the girl asked.

‘I yell it. I’m out there with that whole bag a stuff I bought with Saturday’s money. Jelly Babies, Thundermen, a bootleg of
The Wonder World
. I’m saying that, right, into the door. I’m pulling shit out of the bag and holding it up to the peephole in case somebody’s looking. But nobody there, right? She probably got my babies in her room, locked up, hands on their ears. Telling them all type a lies on me. It’s my daughter’s fifth birthday. How you not going to let me up in there for my daughter’s fifth birthday? Then some nosy bitch from down the hall tells me she called the cops, they coming. What’s that about? So I just leaves. Forget her.’

‘You still got them toys?’ the young one asked, hopeful.

Only air coming up the straw, Mama went back to work. Out the door and across the street, staring up Frankford Avenue for headlights. The girl she left behind turned to an old exhaust-coated SEPTA worker sipping his coffee and said, ‘You buy me some food?’ I got up and headed for the street, taking off my lens cap.

The shot: wild woman hanging out by the curb, leather dress on, red T-shirt stretched so much that her left shoulder hung out the top. Little blue supermarket sneakers at the end of charcoal legs. You couldn’t even tell that her shoes didn’t have laces, that she had no stockings on, or how bad her ashy skin thirsted for lotion. It was across the street, it was dark, but most important it was real. The face that stared back at you, that hunger, desperation, the sex and danger, that was real, too. And that was all you cared about. At the bottom of the page, the copy provided the mortal blow.
This is Karen. Karen services six men an hour, thirty-two men an evening, 192 men a week, 9408 men a year. If Karen trusts Lionskins Condoms to protect her life, don’t you think you should, too
?

It took nearly two weeks to get the picture developed, scanned, and sent back to me in a digital format I could negotiate. Sitting up in Kinko’s on 40th and Walnut, trying to rush their slow-ass, money-grubbing computers to get the layout done. Then there it was, emerging from my long-dormant womb, another Chris Jones original in my classic style: knockout image with deadly copy that jabbed you bye bye as you fell to the mat. Follow that with the roaring Lionskins logo in the bottom left corner along with a miniature photo of the product’s box, and we definitely have a winner.

‘Yo Al, check it out.’ She’d just come in to give me the contact info for the Philly tourist board.

‘I’m double parked. Take this and call Saul. He’s good people. I talked to him yesterday so he knows who you are.’

‘Look at this, love of ages, and glance upon the face of genius.’

‘Shut up. What? Where is it?’ I pulled it up, the hard drive struggling to assemble the file. God, it was even better than I remembered. What a sublime choice of fonts.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Alex asked.

‘This is the condom thing, the Lionskins contest. This is only one shot, I got a ton more. I told you about this.’

‘But what the fuck is this?’ Alex demanded, pointing at crack ho mama’s face, at those eyes staring from the screen at everyone in the room.

‘That’s what I shot the other night, when I went to Kensington. You get it? I’m using the projected sexual risk of prostitution to plug the product.’

‘No, you’re not, you’re using her,’ Alex said, still pointing.

‘Al, it’s just a contest, nobody is going to see it but me and the judges.’

‘And what if you win?’

‘When I win it will be over there, in Britain. Lionskins don’t even sell in the States. Nobody this woman knows will ever see this. Ever.’

‘So tell me then, make me understand this: how is that not fucked up? This is how you’re going to represent us to the world?’ God I wished she would put her finger down. ‘You couldn’t just use some clip art instead?’

‘The point is that this shit is authentic. I didn’t hire a model and have her pose for this shit: this is reality. That’s what gives it its power. I mean look at you, you’re mad. That’s why you’re mad.’

‘You know why? You’re a fucking sellout.’

‘What!’ Copy center boys looked nervous behind their counter. Security man was talking on the payphone, annoyed that he might have to get off. Now Alex was yelling too.

‘There’s not enough sick, destructive images of us out in the world that you got to go put out another? She has to be black? She has to be from Philly? Why didn’t you just come take a picture of me getting out of the shower?’

‘So if it was a picture of a white hooker from Boston, you wouldn’t be bugging?’

‘You’re bullshit,’ Alex said, getting up and walking out. I popped out the precious Lionskins disk and followed. Running next to her, talking to her face even though she wouldn’t look at me.

‘How am I bullshit? How am I bullshit, Alex? Explain that to me.’

‘You know what? You been talking down Philly for years, busting on the place, bugging on the people, and I’ve always tried not to take it personal, okay? Even though sometimes it’s been really hard, Chris, really hard, I’ve always tried to take it in stride, I’ve always tried to remind myself that you’re just as much a part of this place as I am, and that deep down you love it as much as I do. Right? But you know what? The truth is you would sell it all out in a second to get away from here.’

‘What is it that you think I’m doing, Alex?’

‘You know what you’re doing,’ she said, trying to grab at the Santa-red diskette that I quickly pulled away from her.

‘That’s right: I know what I’m doing,’ I told her. ‘I’m creating. I’m giving everything I have, my world, myself, to do it. That’s the only way I can. I’m not good enough to hold anything back. Everything or nothing. That’s the only way I’m going to escape.’

‘Escape what? Getting up and going to a job you hate, just like everybody else? You’re so special, that’s too much for you? You have to do whatever you can to get ahead? Even if it makes us look like animals?’

‘To who? White people? I don’t care what stupid white people think. And really, I don’t give a shit what stupid black people think either. The image is a negative statement about humanity, and, yes, we’re human. If they want to jump in with their coon issues, that’s their problem. Honestly, do you think it’s really possible to click a lens in this shit-hole town without the subject being offensive?’

‘You wrong,’ Alex said, and as mad as she was, you could see it was as if I had offended her personally, which just made me madder.

‘That’s it, Alex. That’s what I don’t understand about you. How the hell can you, a smart, educated, somewhat rational human being, love this.’ I motioned. Arms wide, I motioned to everything. The telephone poles crucified with endless staples and pamphlets waiting for rust or rain to release them, the knuckleheads bobbing down Chestnut with their shirtless, chain-gang struts, fucking yam-man, who was standing in front of Burger King pretending to be the door-man and now (Oh God) coming over here: I held it all out to her. ‘How?’ I demanded, not surprised by the tone of jealousy seeping through.

Alex was writing me off with sideways nods. ‘You look around here and as soon as you see ugly, damn if you see extra. All those things that you should appreciate, all those things you should be thankful for, you can’t see any of it. You go blind. It’s pathetic. If I was like that, how the fuck could I love you?’ And as if this was a play and that was his cue, yam-man appeared beside her.

‘Hey, can y’all hook a brother up with—’

‘Yo, just get the fuck away from me!’ I was suddenly yelling. The throat-shredding, barely intelligible kind. So loud that I was as surprised as he was by my reaction. When the echoes of my scream had died, my face offered a demonstrative apology to yam-man as he shrugged an understanding forgiveness my way, but then both silent gestures were enveloped by the next scream. Female this time, the simple conjunction ‘Ass-hole!’ followed with the punctuation of a slam from a rusty car door.