In the Slammer With Carol Smith (17 page)

Next, unless wary, I’ll be living by the calendar. Giving each of these entries a date.

It was Saturday night. Top o’ the week for all the prom kids in colleges in all the boroughs. For the high school goonies shifting their platform sneakers and twenty-inch hairdos on line for the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood. For the prossies on lower Park, poking their silky-shiny breastpoints at passing motorists. For the oldie couples foxtrotting for a fee at Dance-night, Lincoln Center. And tired mom-poppas in McDonald’s, wiping off the baby’s milk-moustache.

And for me, to sleep over here.

What I wanted, like anybody, was to celebrate—even if I didn’t know what. To kick responsibility in its doughy, daily face. And to stay Out, as late as possible, from this glassy prism where all the colors of the world seemed to have churched themselves. What’s with the color spectrum that once you have it again, the eye can’t limit that wily profusion everywhere? Like at the disability office, where I still must check in. Once, the clients and their garments were dun, their dependency drizzling down on them like rain. Now their civil rights have exploded into opera, jungle-striped; the aisles crawl with pink-and-brown babies, inching into what one has to hope is a top life.

It takes grit to face the multiple. That’s why they put you on pills, and put the hospitals out of town. To simple things down.

Bottom line—I find myself hankering for that old quagmire—pill-land. Bury the head?

Pervasive underneath all my days is the image of the person whose quarters these are. I’ve studied the wall-clips until I could recite them, charting Martyn’s and his troupe’s circuit home and abroad, and much of the formal circumstances of his life, historical and pictorial. And no—his mother doesn’t look like me. But Martyn, the understander, is still about, still occupying this room. And the best side of that may be the worst. Still gentle if compelling in my memory, he doesn’t try to corner me. What woos me is that he never will.

Stop the pills cold turkey, and the body doesn’t yet know why, craves a little sweetening.
Hack hack,
a legal drug can say, as you swallow it, alerting the nurses and your body too. A whole ward, dulling its crazy-quilt anguishes all at the same time in order to save staff, can sound like a gaggle of fowl. But if you are remanded, you steal away, stiff-legged, with the belly-ache they tell you is sanity.

On the ward the scuttlebutt was that when off pills, sex was the best substitute. But too many like me had gone cold turkey on that too. You are counseled then to marshal other satisfactions. Yardages of fudge. Or those lessons in martial arts. Or go shopping in safe pairs on your weekly passes, even though one of you might be reported on return: ‘He asked to see what they had in space suits.’

Or the dose is yours again, if you beg; or bribe.

I couldn’t believe my body wanted to go back to that hypnotic balancing act. But addiction is a nostalgia of the flesh.

So I sit here in my glass cage, thinking—for what? It’s more than being house-sick; maybe I’m even getting over that. What is it that would allay this hollow in the throat? This rictus in the jaw, like before you wail?

Then it comes to me. Perhaps it’s the window that does it, with this Sunday quiet seeping in. Where I would like to be is sitting in a bay window, through which a breeze is rustling the pieces on the card table. What I would like to do is to be playing a game.

T
HE DOOR AROUND
the corner from Christopher Street was still open. That pair who lived there must still peddle those showers. What a neat way to earn.

I peer in. The room looks the same, with those broad armchairs nobody could carry off. Pillows, the same taupe as the shadows. Floor was once battened down basement earth; maybe still is, under that linoleum, a sawtoothed pattern you blink away from and come back to. And there’s the card table in front of that cozy pot-belly stove. No fire behind its bull’s eye pane. Wasn’t then, either. I haven’t hit the season for it maybe. But, ‘Come back,’ they said. ‘Anytime.’

Just then the same older man shuffles in from a door in the rear. And now I remind me. I have stepped on a buzzer just inside the entry. When I shift my feet the buzz stops.

‘Want a shower, do you,’ he says. ‘Singles only. No sharing allowed.’ Then he halts. ‘You been here before?’

‘Yeah. You said I could come back.’

‘Right. You know how it works then. Go ahead. There’s soap.’

‘Thanks. I have a pad. Temporary.’

‘Ain’t they all. You just hit town?’

‘Not really. I just kind of thought—you said stop back any time. And I’d like to. For a game.’

His hand goes to his teeth, rubbing them. ‘Hey. I know you. You’re that girl.’

I nod.

‘You beat him. I recall.’

Then I see the table. His eyes direct me to it. Bare. ‘Where’s the checker board?’

He goes through those well-known minor motions. Toss of the head. Mouth turned in. Good-looking guy for maybe sixty, but moused up some since I last saw. ‘It died.’

‘Died? Oh you mean—yeah, they do wear out.’ Like the parcheesi board we had to coddle, it was so cracked. But you can surely replace a checker board? ‘Ah, you lost the habit.’

He’s not answering. People can get petulant about a game.—‘Can’t stand that Chinese puzzle with the missing triangles made out of construction paper. Can’t stand it. Not one more time,’ my music aunt huffed, tucking it well back in the cupboard under the window-seat, where it stayed. ‘Makes you lose the rhythm,’ she’d said.—

‘No, it’s there in the drawer,’ the man said. ‘Just went dead. After him.’

‘He’s dead? Oh, I’m sorry. And he was still so—’

‘Not that young. But younger, yes. Months ago. And here I am. “Healthy as a rat”—he said.’ And I could almost hear the other one. ‘Yop, I am. Eee-eye—o—Negative.’

He sits down. ‘Have a visit.’

I sit on one of the armchairs.

‘You’re admiring the floor,’ he says after awhile. ‘People do. He laid that pattern. Fourteen years ago. After we knew we were going to stay.’

After another pause I say: ‘When do you light the stove?’

‘Never.’ He half smiles. ‘Has no stovepipe. He just liked the look of it.’ He speaks slow, like doing it singly is still new. ‘Fools ’em all.’ I see that pleases him. ‘I remember how you beat him. He talked about it for days.’ By now he’s on his feet, fiddling at a counter. ‘Coffee?’ In a couple of minutes he serves it, from a tray on the pot-belly. The espresso is neat, with a thick cuff of foam.

On one wall is a wastebasket in a hoop of iron, so you don’t have to bend down. My chair has a side-pocket with mail in it. ‘You have lots of nice arrangements. Nice to look at.’

‘And for comfort. All his,’ he says, following where I look. ‘That’s why I keep on with the shower. Don’t need the income. I’ve a pension. And he was always doing it for free. Did it for the company that came in, he said. And because he never had showers as a kid.’

He’s talking better. In between he stares at the black-and-tan zigzag floor. ‘Started it when the public baths were banned.’ Glancing at me, eyebrows raised, to see if I know what that meant. Smiling when he sees I do. ‘You’re not gay though? No. I remember those two characters who brought you in. Took you for a patsy. They were wrong.… They’re gone.’

‘Scrammed?’

He shakes his head. ‘Gone.’ It echoes. Like from a battle.

I say, ‘Let’s have a game.’

‘Me? He could always beat me. And you beat him in three moves. I can remember him saying it.’

‘This’ll take longer. Like when you’re thinking of alternatives. Like—this game, it’s for me. That’s why I came.’

He’s interested, like maybe nothing new has happened to him.

The board comes out of a drawer. Same old beauty, old-style crimson and shiny black, the counters grooved deep, and cool to the touch. He says: ‘Gadroon-edged.’

I take the red counters, laying them along the board. Leaving him the black. Finally, he sets his up. We sit.

After a while, when neither of us moves, he says: ‘What are those alternatives of yours?’

Why did I choose the red? We hadn’t tossed for it. Or for the first play. ‘The red—I guess that’s me up to a certain time.’ My hand hovers over that line up.

‘And the black?’

‘Where it stopped. Or I did.’

‘How come?’

‘I told somebody I was twenty-eight. Only last year. I thought I was. Because I’d stopped there. Out of circulation. And later—just not calculating.’ But that’s over. ‘I’m thirty-six.’

‘Nothing like a dame,’ he says. ‘But you still look very good.’

‘Wasn’t vanity. Or else, so down deep—’

‘Hah—I know that kind. He was in his twenties, me in my late forties, when we bumped into each other. “I’ll always be younger,” he said.’ He spreads his hands. And now he is. Always will be.’

‘I remember that ring you’re wearing.’ Darting across the table at me with its gold-flecked, flamy eye. ‘That was his, wasn’t it?’

‘I’m not for rings on a man. But he asked me to. So I do. “Twist it,” he said, “and I’ll be there. You won’t get rid of me.

‘Never seen a stone like it.’

‘Fire opal. Not sure it’s real. He went for the red. Sure enough did that.… So, the black’s me, huh; you saw that. Somebody had to be, around him.’

‘We’re not playing for him.’

‘I can’t play for you, gal. Besides, I’d lose. Whyn’t you play against yourself? Seen people do that. Not him. He never would.’

‘You played a lot?’

‘Only when he wanted to win at something. Because I supplied the bread.’

‘Oh?’

‘Salesman, church supplies. I had the whole top field, city wide. Votive statues, priests’ albs; you name it. No greeting card calendars, none of that small stuff. Maybe a breviary now and then. No, I stocked the big stuff. Ciboriums—you know what they are?’ He sees I don’t. ‘For the reservation of the Eucharist’—he almost chants it. ‘Thuribles—he said the catalogue was like a church service, when I recited it. And what do you know, he asked to be buried from one of my customers. That church they call “Smoky Mary’s.” Pounds of incense they must use, yet not a soul coughs. Beautiful. And they’ll bury those from that line around the corner here, even. By special dispensation. Bar none.’

‘That line. I walk past it sometimes.’ All types, like in a play. Male prossies mixed with yearners. Habitués of the sex fix. ‘Still going. People watching say they can’t believe it, given the times. But I can. For some it would be because there would be no place else. But for some it would be—because you join the street.’

‘For the principle of the thing, hah. He said that. He joined that line openly in the end. I knew he’d been sneaking around the corner for years. Joined it with a bandage on his bare skull and walking with two canes. “They still pick me—” he said.’ He bends over his row of counters.

The checker board is still neatly aligned. I could hate it for that.

‘Wasn’t so long ago you were here, gal; he went quick. “Beaten by a dame,” he said, “—how’d she ever get so good?”’

‘Taught by dames,’ I say. Not to make anything of that. ‘They would play against each other. Only in demonstration. Not to win. They were teaching me.’ And they did. That I was the game.

‘So play. Be the red, be the black. I’ll be kibitzer.’

‘Star salesman?’ I can hear that push. ‘Thanks, no. I better go.’ I make like consulting my wrist, where a watch used to be. Had the days of the week on it as well. Gave it to the boy in the halfway house; laid it on his bed, he asleep when I scrammed. ‘It’s Sunday, by now.’

‘Got somebody, huh?’

‘No.’ All of a sudden, bending over the board, I move a red. ‘I used to swing.’ Stretching across the board, I move a black. ‘Now—I don’t even date.’ I look at the two chips, positioned blind. ‘Only right now with a—I dunno. Not a diary really. But those years I lost, I got recorded by other people up to here. Now it’s my turn.’

‘Hah. You the manifesto type, huh? The Village wouldn’t be the Village without you.’

I can laugh. ‘Come on. You yourself keep an open door.’

‘With a buzzer under the mat.’ He lies back in his chair, squinting at me. ‘Can’t tell what you’re carrying the torch for, but you sure are. But it wouldn’t be just for dames or guys—right?’ He looks me over. ‘And something tells me—let me walk on eggs here—that it’s not—just for skin?’

‘No. Walk on. But I don’t know how to say it, really. Except that it’s not a military campaign.’

‘They all get to be. Anybody who isn’t like yours truly gets to be a gook. Like in that war.’

‘Your friend. He favor the streets?’

‘Him? Not on your life. He wanted to rise. Wanted us to. And we did. Some. Classy dinners, travel. Little jobs he got to have; he had his crowd. At the end, true, he wanted to be out there, on line. He’d get ripped off now and then.’ He looked down at the big ring. ‘That’s when he gave me it.’

The dead guy hadn’t played that well. All stylish moves, like he was fencing. At checkers! ‘It took me more moves to beat him than he said,’ I say. ‘He was pretty good.’ I get up to go.

‘You remembered us, dolly. That’s nice.’

‘Yes—’ I say, ‘I remember.’

‘We were never in the closet, God knows. Except uptown, at my job. Last time he went on the line he said, “Go with me. It’s not just for pickups I go anymore. It’s like you say your stuff is. Votive.” He could tell I thought he was shitting me. But he was almost blind. I went.’ He’s smoothing the checkers into their bag. ‘“If somebody latches onto me, Joe, let him,” he says to me. “Compassionate visit, Joe. They get us home.” So we walk out there. Seen it, haven’t you?’

I have to nod. The men, boys, walk round and round the block. Getting picked off. Getting left out. Maybe you’re votive. Maybe you’re not.

The checkers are in the bag. He pulls the string tight. ‘I walk with him on that goddamn line, thinking maybe he’s just showing off what he’s still got at home. But then, somebody latches on to me, by God. And Lee feels for my wrist and says, “You fool, you must have worn that watch he’s after. Go on home.”’

He’s folding up the checker board. ‘So, not much later, two of them bring him in. Right through that door, they dump him. And one of them steps on the buzzer. “It’s a plant!” he yells, and they scram.… I shouldn’t tell a woman this.’