Let the Great World Spin (35 page)

—

Jazz came home one Friday and said: “Hey, Till, how’d you like to be a grandma?” I said, “Yeah, Grandma T., that’s me.” She started blubbering.

And then she was crying on my shoulder—it woulda been nice if it weren’t for real.

I went down to Foodland but all they had was a cheap- ass Enten-mann’s.

She was eating it and I looked at her and thought, That’s my baby and she’s having a baby. I didn’t even take a slice until Jazz went to bed and then I wolfed that motherfucker down, got crumbs all over the floor.

—

Second time I came a grandmother, Angie organized a party for me. She talked Corrie into borrowing a wheelchair and she wheeled me along under the Deegan. We were high on coke then, laughing our asses off.

—

Oh, but what I shoulda done—I shoulda swallowed a pair of handcuffs when Jazzlyn was in my belly. That’s what I shoulda done. Gave her a heads- up about what was coming her way. Say, Here you is, already arrested, you’re your mother and her mother before her, a long line of mothers stretching way back to Eve, french and nigger and dutch and whatever else came before me.

Oh, God, I shoulda swallowed handcuffs. I shoulda swallowed them whole.

—

I spent the last seven years fucking in the inside of refrigerator cars. I spent the last seven years fucking in the inside of refrigerator cars.

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Yeah. I spent the last seven years fucking in the inside of refrigerator cars.

—

Tillie Fuck- Up H enderson.

—

I get a call that I got a visitor. I’m, like, primed. I’m fixing my hair and putting on lipstick and making myself smell fine, jailhouse perfume and all. I’m flossing my teeth and plucking my eyebrows and even making sure my prison duds look good. I thought, There’s only two people in the world ever going to come see me. I was bouncing down the prison steps.

It was like coming down a fire escape. I could smell the sky. Watch out, babies, here comes your Momma’s Momma.

I got to the Gatehouse. That’s what they call the visiting room. I’m looking all ’round for them. There are lots of chairs and plastic windows and a big cloud of cigarette smoke. It’s like moving through a delicious fog. I’m standing up on my toes and looking all around and everyone’s settling down and meeting their honeys. There are big oohs and ahhs and laughing and shouting going on, all over the place, and kids screaming, and I keep standing up on my tiptoes to see my babies. Soon enough there’s only one spot left at the chairs. Some white bitch is sitting opposite the glass. I’m thinking I half know her, but I don’t know from where, maybe she’s a parole officer, or a social worker or something. She’s got blond hair and green eyes and pearly- white skin. And then she says: “Oh, hi, Tillie.”

I’m thinking, Don’t
Hi, Tillie
me, who the fuck’re you? These whiteys, they come on all familiar. Like they understand you. Like they’re your best friends.

But I just say, “Hi,” and slide onto the chair. I feel like I got the air knocked out of me. She gives me her name and I shrug ’cause it don’t mean nothing to me. “You got any cigarettes?” I say, and she says no, she quit. And I’m thinking, She’s even less good to me than she was five minutes ago, and five minutes ago she was useless.

And I say, “Are you the one who got my babies?”

She says, “No, someone else is looking after the babies.”

Then she just sits there and starts asking me about prison life, and if McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 221

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I’m eating good, and when am I going to get out? I look at her like she’s ten pounds of shit wrapped in a five- pound bag. She’s all nervous and stuff. And I finally out and say it so slow that she raises her eyebrows in surprise: “Who—the—fuck—are—you?” And she says, “I know Keyring, he’s my friend.” And I’m like, “Who the fuck is Keyring?” And then she spells i t o ut: “ C- i- a- r- a- n.”

Then the cherry falls and I think, She’s the one came to Jazzlyn’s funeral with Corrigan’s brother. Funny thing is, he’s the one who gave me the keyring.

“Are you a holy roller?” I ask her.

“Am I what?”

“You on a Jesus kick?”

She shakes her head.

“Then why you here?”

“I just wanted to see how you were.”

“For real?”

And she says: “For real, Tillie.”

So I let up on her. I say, “All right, whatever.”

And she’s leaning forward, saying it’s nice to see me again, the last time she saw me she just felt very badly for me, the way the pigs put me in handcuffs and all, at the graveside. She actually said “pigs,” but I could tell she wasn’t used to it, like she was trying to be tough but she wasn’t.

But I think, Okay, this is cool, I’ll let it slide, I’ll let fifteen minutes drift, what’s fifteen, twenty minutes?

She’s pretty. She’s blond. She’s cool. I’m telling her about the girl in C- 40 with the mouse, and what it’s like when you’re a femme not a butch, and how the food tastes terrible, and how I miss my babies, and how there was a fight on TV night over the Chico show and Scatman Crothers and if he’s a cardboard nigger. And she’s nodding her head and going, Uh- huh, hmm, oh, I see, that’s very interesting, Scatman Crothers, he’s cute. Like she’d get it on with him. But she’s hip to me. She’s smiling and laughing. She’s smart too—I can tell she’s smart, a rich girl. She tells me she’s an artist and she’s dating Corrigan’s brother, even though she’s married, he went to Ireland to scatter Corrigan’s ashes and came right back, they fell in love, she’s getting her life together, she used to be an addict, and she still likes to drink. She says she’ll put some money in my prison account and maybe I can get myself some cigarettes.

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“What else can I get for you?” she says.

“My babies.”

“I’ll try,” she says. “I’ll see where they are. I’ll see if I can get them to visit. Anything else, Tillie?”

“Jazz,” I say.

“Jazz?” she goes.

“Bring Jazzlyn back too.”

And she goes white at the gills.

“Jazzlyn’s dead,” she said, like I’m some fucking idiot.

She’s got a look in her eyes like she just been kicked. She’s staring at me and her lip is quivering. And then the goddamn bell goes off. It’s visiting time over and we’re saying good- bye to each other behind the glass, and I turn to her and say, “Why did ya come here?”

She looks down at the ground and then she smiles up at me, lip still quivering, but she shakes her head, and there are little teardrops in the corner of her eyes.

She slips a couple of books across the table and I’m like, Wow, Rumi, how the fuck did she know?

She says she’ll come again, and I beg her again to bring the babies.

She says she’ll ask around, they’re with social services or something.

Then she waves bye- bye, scrubbing her eyes dry as she walks away. I’m thinking, What the fuck?

I was walking up the stairs again, still wondering how she knew about Rumi, and then I remembered. I started laughing to myself, but I was glad I didn’t say anything to her about Ciaran and his little pork sword—

what’s the point? He was a good guy, Keyring. Anyone who’s a brother of Corrie’s is a brother of mine.

—

Nothing’s righteous. Corrigan knew the deal. He never gave me no shit. His brother was a bit of an asshole. That’s just a plain fact. But lots of people are assholes and he paid me well for the one time and I blinded him with Rumi. Corrigan’s brother had some serious scratch in his pockets—he was a bartender or something. I looked down and I remember thinking, There’s my dark tit in Corrigan’s brother’s hand.

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—

I never saw Corrigan naked, but I imagine he was swell even if his brother was a Tweety Bird.

—

First time we saw Corrigan, we just flat- out knew he was undercover.

They got Irishes undercover. Most of the cops’re Irish—guys going a little to fat, with bad teeth but still a sense of making the world funny.

One day Corrigan’s van was filthy and Angie wrote with her finger in the dirt: DON’T YOU WISH YOUR WIFE WAS THIS FILTHY? That had us crying we laughed so hard. Corrie didn’t notice it. Then Angie wrote a smiley face and TURN ME OVER on the other side. He was scooting around the Bronx with that crazy shit written on his van and he never even saw it. He was in a world of his own, Corrie. Angie went up to him at the end of the week and showed him the words. He got all blushy like the Irish guys do and he began stammering.

“But I don’t understand—I haven’t got a wife,” he said to Angie.

We never laughed so much since Christ left Cincinnati.

—

Every day we were hanging out with him, pleading with him to arrest us.

And he was going: “Girls, girls, girls, please.” The more we got to hugging on him the more he’d go, “Girls, girls, come on, now, girls.”

Once, Angie’s daddy broke us up and grabbed Corrie by the scruff of the neck and told him where he should go. He put a knife up under Corrie’s neck. Corrie just stared at him. His eyes were big but it was like he didn’t have no fear. We were like: “Yo, man, just leave.” Angie’s daddy flicked the knife and Corrie walked away with blood coming down his black shirt.

A couple of days later he was down again, bringing us coffees. He had a little bandage on his neck. We were like: “Yo, Corrie, you should get-the-fuck, you’ll get tossed.” He shrugged, said he’d be all right. Down came Angie’s daddy and Jazzlyn’s daddy and Suchie’s daddy, all at once, like the Three Wise Men. I saw Corrie’s face go white. I never seen him go that white before. He was worse’n chalk.

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He held his hands up and said: “Hey, man, I’m just giving them coffee.”

And Angie’s daddy stepped forward. He said: “Yeah well, I’m just giving you the cream.”

—

Corrie got the daylight kicked out of him seven ways to Sunday, I don’t know how many times. That shit hurt. It hurt bad. Even Angie was hanging off her daddy’s back, trying to scratch his eyes out, but we couldn’t stop him. Still Corrie came back, day after day. Got to where the daddies actually respected him for it. Corrie never once called the cops, or the Guards, that’s what he called them, that was his Irish word for the police.

He said: “I’m not calling the Guards.” Still the daddies knocked the shit out of him every now and then, just to keep him in line.

We found out later he was a priest. Not really a priest, but one of those guys who lived somewhere because he thought that he should, like he had a duty thing, morals, some sort of shit like that, a monk, with vows and shit, and that chastity stuff.

—

They say boys always want to be the first with girls, and girls always want to be the last with boys. But with Corrie all of us wanted to be the first.

Jazz said, “I had Corrie last night, he was super- delicious, he was glad I was his first.” And then Angie’d go: “Bullshit, I had that motherfucker for lunch, I ate him whole.” And then Suchie’d go: “Shit, y’all, I spread him on my pancakes and sucked him down with coffee.”

Anyone could hear us laughing, miles away.

—

He had a birthday once, I think he was thirty- one, he was just a kid, and I bought him a cake and all of us ate it together out under the Deegan. It was covered in cherries, musta been a million and six cherries on it, and Corrie didn’t even get the joke, we were popping cherries in his mouth left and center and he’s going,
Girls, girls please, I’ll have to call the Guards.

We almost wet ourselves laughing.

He cut up the cake and gave a piece out to everyone. He took the last piece for himself. I held a cherry over his mouth and got him to try to bite on it. I kept moving it away while he kept trying to snag it. He was step-McCa_9781400063734_4p_03_r1.w.qxp 4/13/09 2:34 PM Page 225

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ping down the street after me. I had my swimsuit on. We musta looked a pair, Corrie and me, cherry juice all over his face.

Don’t let no one tell you that it’s all shit and grime and honkypox on the stroll. It’s that, all right, sometimes, sure, but it’s funny sometimes too. Sometimes you just hang a cherry out in front of a man. Sometimes you got to do it, sometimes, for putting a smile on your face.

When Corrie laughed he had a face that creased up deep.

—

“Say fuhgeddboudit, Corrie.”

“Fergetaboutit.”

“No no no, say fuhgeddboudit.”

“Fergedboutit.”

“Oh, man, fuhgeddboudit!”

“Okay, Tillie,” he said, “I’ll fuh- get- bout- it.”

—

The only whitey I ever woulda slept with—genuine—was Corrigan. No bullshit. He used to tell me I was too good for him. He said I’d chuckle at his best and whistle for more. Said I was way too pretty for a guy like him.

Corrigan was a stone- cold stud. I woulda married him. I woulda had him talk to me in his accent all the time. I woulda taken him upstate and cooked him a big meal with corn beef and cabbage and made him feel like he was the only whitey on earth. I woulda kissed his ear if he gave me a chance. I woulda spilled my love right down into him. Him and the Sherry- Netherlands guy. They were fine.

We filled his trash can seven, eight, nine times a day. That was nasty.

Even Angie thought it was nasty and she was the nastiest of all of us—she left her tampons in there. I mean, nasty. I can’t believe Corrie used to see that stuff and he never once gave us shit about it, just dumped it out and went on his way. A priest! A monk! The tinkling shop!

And those sandals! Man! We’d hear the slap of him coming.

—

He said to me once that most of the time people use the word
love
as just another way to show off they’re hungry. The way he said it went something like:
Glorify their appetites.