Let the Great World Spin (34 page)

This the longest I ever spent inside. It gets you to thinking about things. Mostly about being such a fuck- up. And mostly about where to hang the noose.

—

When they first told me ’bout Jazzlyn I just stood there beating my head against the cage like a bird. They let me go to the funeral and then they locked me back up. The babies weren’t there. I kept asking about the girls but everyone was saying: Don’t worry about the babies, they’re being looked after.

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—

In my dreams I’m back in the Sherry- Netherlands. Why I liked him so much I don’t really know. He wasn’t a trick, he was a john—even with the bald head he was fine.

Men in the Middle Eastern life dig hookers. They like to spoil them and buy them things and walk around with the sheets wrapped around them. He asked me to stand by the window in silhouette. He positioned the light just so. I heard him gasp. All I was doing was standing. Nothing ever made me feel better than him just looking at me, appreciating what he saw. That’s what good men do—they appreciate. He wasn’t fooling with himself or nothing, he just sat in the chair watching me, hardly breathing. He said I made him delirious, that he’d give me anything just to stay there forever. I said something smart- ass, but really I was thinking the exact same thing. I hated myself for saying something disrespectful.

I coulda had the floor swallow me up.

After a moment or two he relaxed, then sighed. He said something to me about the desert in Syria and how the lemon trees look like little explosions of color.

And all of a sudden—right there, looking out over Central Park—I got a longing for my daughter like nothing else before. Jazzlyn was eight or nine then. I wanted just to hold her in my arms. It’s no less love if you’re a hooker, it’s no less love at all.

The park got dark. The lights came on. Only a few of them were working. They lit up the trees.

“Read the poem about the marketplace,” he said.

It was a poem where a man buys a carpet in the marketplace, and it’s a perfect carpet, without a flaw, so it brings him all sorts of woe ’n’ shit. I had to switch on the light to read to him and it spoiled the atmosphere, I could tell straight off. Then he said, “Just tell me a story then.”

I turned off the light and stood there. I didn’t want to say nothing cheap.

I couldn’t think of anything except a story I heard from a trick a few weeks before. So I stood there with the curtains in my hands and I said:

“There was this old couple out walking by the Plaza. It was early evening. They were hand in hand. They were about to go into the park when a cop blew his whistle sharp and stopped them. The cop said, ‘You McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 214

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can’t go in there, it’s gonna get dark, it’s too dangerous to walk around the park, you’ll get mugged.’ The old couple said, ‘But we want to go in there, it’s our anniversary, we were here forty years ago exactly.’ The cop said, ‘You’re crazy. Nobody walks in Central Park anymore.’ But the old couple kept walking in anyway. They wanted to take the exact same walk they took all those years before, ’round the little pond. To remember. So they went hand in hand, right into the dark. And guess what? That cop, he walked behind at twenty paces, right around the lake, just to make sure them people weren’t tossed, ain’t that something?”

That was my story. I stayed still. The curtains were all damp in my hands. I could almost hear the Middle Eastern man smile.

“Tell it to me again,” he said.

I stood a little closer to the window, where the light was coming in real nice. I told it to him again, with even more details, like the sound of their footsteps and all.

—

I never even told that story to Jazzlyn. I wanted to tell her but I never did.

I was waiting for the right time. He gave me that Rumi book when I left. I shoved it in my handbag, didn’t think much of it at first, but it crept up on me, like a street lamp.

I liked him, my little fat bald brown man. I went to the Sherry-Netherlands to see if he was there, but the manager kicked me out. He had a folder in his hand. He used it like a cattle prod. He said, “Out out out!”

I began to read Rumi all the time. I liked it because he had the details.

He had nice lines. I began saying shit to my tricks. I told folks I liked the lines because of my father and how he studied Persian poetry. Sometimes I said it was my husband.

I never even had a father or a husband. Not one I knew of, anyways. I ain’t whining. That’s just a fact.

—

I’m a fuck- up and my daughter is no more.

—

Jazzlyn asked me once about her Daddy. Her real Daddy—not a daddy Daddy. She was eight. We were talking on the phone. Long- distance from McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 215

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New York to Cleveland. It cost me nothing because all the girls knew how to get the dime back. We learned it from the vets who came back from

’Nam all messed up in the head.

I liked the bank of phones on Forty- fourth. I’d get bored and ring the phone right beside me. I picked it up and talked to myself. I got a big kick outta that.
Hi, Tillie, how you doin’, baby? Not too bad, Tillie, how you?

Swingin’ it, Tillie, how’s the weather there, girl? Raining, Tillie- o. No shit, it’s
raining here too, Tillie, ain’t that a kicker?!

—

I was on the drugstore phone on Fiftieth and Lex when Jazzlyn said:

“Who’s my real Daddy?” I told her that her Daddy was a nice guy but he went out once for a pack of cigarettes. That’s what you tell a kid. Everyone says that, I don’t know why—I guess all the assholes who don’t want to hang around their kids are smokers.

She never even asked about him again. Not once. I used to think he was gone for cigarettes an awful long time, whoever the fuck he was.

Maybe he’s standing around still, Pablo, waiting for the change.

—

I went back to Cleveland to pick Jazzlyn up. That was ’64 or ’65, one of them years. She was eight or nine years old then. She was waiting for me on the doorstep. She wore a little hooded coat and she was sitting there all pouty and then she looked up and saw me. I swear it was like seeing a firework go off. “Tillie!” she shouted. She never really called me Mom. She jumped up from the step. No one ever gave me a bigger hug.

No one. She like near smothered me. I sat right down beside her and cried my eyes out. I said, “Wait’ll you see New York, Jazz, it’s gonna blow you away.”

My own mother was in the kitchen giving me snake eyes. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars. She said: “Oh, honey, I knew you’d come good, I just knew it!”

We wanted to drive across country, Jazzlyn and me, but instead we got a skinny dog all the way from Cleveland. The whole time there she slept on my shoulder and sucked her thumb, nine years old and still sucking her thumb. I heard later, in the Bronx, that was one of her things. She liked to suck her thumb when she was doing it with a trick. That makes McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 216

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me sick to the core. I’m a fuck- up and that’s all. That’s about all that matters.

Tillie Fuck- Up Henderson. That’s me without ribbons on.

—

I ain’t gonna kill myself until I see my baby’s baby girls. I told the warden today that I’m a grandmother and she didn’t say nothing. I said,

“I want to see my grandbabies—why won’t they bring my grand

-

babies?” She didn’t bat an eyelid. Maybe I’m getting old. I’ll have my thirty- ninth birthday inside. It’ll take a whole week just to blow them candles out.

I begged her and begged her and begged her. She said the babies were fine, they were being looked after, social services had them.

—

It was a daddy who put me in the Bronx. He called himself L.A. Rex. He didn’t like niggers, but he was a nigger himself. He said Lexington was for whiteys. He said I got old. He said I was useless. He said I was taking too much time with Jazzlyn. He said to me that I looked like a piece of cheese. He said, “Don’t come down by Lex again or I’ll break your arms, Tillie, y’hear me?”

So that’s what he did—he broke my arms. He broke my fingers too.

He caught me on the corner of Third and Forty- eighth and he snapped them like they was chicken bones. He said the Bronx was a good place for retirement. He grinned and said it was just like Florida without the beaches.

I had to go home to Jazzlyn with my arms in plaster. I was in conva-lescence for I don’t know how long.

L.A. Rex had a diamond star in his tooth, that’s no lie. He looked a bit like that Cosby guy on TV, except Cosby has some funky- ass sideburns.

L.A. even paid my hospital bills. He didn’t put me out on the stroll. I thought,
What the fuck is up with that?
Sometimes the world is a place you just can’t understand.

So I got clean. I got myself housing. I gave up the game. Those were good years. All it took to make me happy was finding a nickel in the bottom of my handbag. Things were going so good. It felt like I was standing at a window. I put Jazzlyn in school. I got a job putting stickers on McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 217

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supermarket cans. I came home, went to work, came home again. I stayed away from the stroll. Nothing was going to put me back there.

And then one day, out of the blue, I don’t even remember why, I walked down to the Deegan, stuck out my thumb, and looked for a trick. I got a thump in the back of my head from a daddy called Birdhouse—he was wearing a surefire fuck- off hat that he never once took off ’cause he didn’t like anyone to see his glass eye. He said, “Hey, babe, what’s shakin’?”

—

Jazzlyn needed school books. I’m almost sure that’s what it was.

—

I wasn’t a parasol girl down on Forty- ninth and Lex. The parasol was a thing I started in the Bronx. To hide my face, really. That’s a secret I won’t tell nobody. I’ve always had a good body. Even for all those years I stuffed junk into it, it was good and curvy and extra delicious. I never had a disease I couldn’t get rid of. It was when I got to the Bronx that I took up the parasol. They couldn’t see my face but they could see my booty. I could shake it. I had enough electricity in my booty to jump- start the whole of New York City.

In the Bronx I got in the car quick and then they couldn’t say no. Try kicking a girl out of your car unpaid: you might as well suck raindrops from a puddle.

It’s always been the older girls that work the Bronx. All except Jazzlyn.

I kept Jazz around for company. She only went downtown now and then.

She was the most popular girl on the stroll. Everyone else was charging twenty, but Jazzlyn could go all the way to forty, even fifty. She got the young guys. And the older guys with the real bread, the fat ones who want to feel handsome. They came on all starry- eyed with her. She had straight hair and good lips and legs that went up to her neck. Some of the guys they called her Raf, ’cause that’s what she looked like. If there’d’ve been trees under the Deegan she’d’ve been up there giraffing with her tongue.

That was one of the nicknames on her rap sheet.
Raf.
She was with this British guy once and he was making all these dive- bomber sounds.

He was pumping away, saying shit like: “Here I am, rescue mission, McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 218

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Flanders one- oh- one, Flanders one- oh- one! Coming down!” When he was finished he said, “See, I rescued you.” And Jazzlyn’s like: “You rescued me, is that right?” ’Cause men like to think they can rescue you.

Like you got a disease and they got the special cure just waiting for you.

Come in here, honey, don’t ya want someone to understand you? Me, I understand you. I’m the only guy knows a chick like you. I got a dick as long as
a Third Avenue menu but I got a heart bigger’n the Bronx.
They fuck you like they’re doing you a big favor. Every man wants a whore to rescue, that’s the knockdown truth. It’s a disease in itself, you ask me. Then, when they’ve shot their wad they just zip up and go and forget about you.

That’s something fucked up in the head.

Some of these assholes think you got a heart of gold. No one’s got a heart of gold. I don’t got no heart of gold, no way. Not even Corrie. Even Corrie went for that Spanish broad with the dumb little tattoo on her ankle.

—

When Jazzlyn was fourteen she came home with her first red mark on the inside of her arm. I as good as slapped the black off her, but she came back with the mark between her toes. She didn’t even smoke a cigarette and there she was, on the horse. She was running with the Immortals then. They had a beef with the Ghetto Brothers.

I tried keeping her straight by keeping her on the streets. That’s what I was thinking.

—

Big Bill Broonzy’s got a song I like, but I don’t like to listen to it:
I’m down
so low, baby, I declare I’m lookin’ up at down.

—

By the time she was fifteen I was watching her shoot up. I’d sit down on the pavement and think, That’s my girl. And then I’d say, Hold on a goddamn motherfucking second, is that my girl? Is that really
my
girl?

And then I’d think, Yeah that’s my girl, that’s my flesh ’n’ blood, that’s her, all right.

I made that.

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—

There were times I’d strap the elastic around her arm to get the vein to pop. I was keeping her safe. That’s all I was trying to do.

—

This is the house that Horse built. This is the house that Horse built.