A Matter of Conviction

(The clouds are banking high over the Hudson, spreading in a black canopy over the tenements of Spanish Harlem. A wind is starting in the canyon, sweeping through the street. It lifts the skirts of the two girls standing on the front stoop, talking in Spanish. Louisa is fully made up now, but she does not look cheap or garish. Neither does Terry. Both are well-dressed, perhaps two of the best-dressed girls in Harlem. Both look fresh, both look passionate, with a dark-eyed, dark-haired exotic beauty that promises much to the seeker of erotica. It is common knowledge along this street that they are prostitutes. The boys have very little to do with Terry or Louisa, except to bandy sex talk about. The boys consider it beneath them to sleep with a prostitute, and even the virgin boys on the Horsemen would rather pretend to experience than to find that experience with a prostitute. The girls’ friends are usually men who drift uptown because they have heard you can find girls like Louisa and Terry in Spanish Harlem. They very often go home with something more than a gratified sex appetite. Muggings are common in the streets of Harlem, and a man who has come there for sex is not likely to complain later to the police about a criminal assault. The girls do not encourage the muggings, nor are they affiliated with the muggers. Theirs is a strict business operation, a body for a bill. They euphemistically, and in an unbusinesslike way, refer to their bed partners as “friends.” This applies to anyone with whom they commit the act of intercourse, except the man they happen to be living with at the moment, if they are indeed living with anyone. This person serves as part-time pimp and part-time lover. He is referred to as “my old man.” Some of the girls’ friends are respectable businessmen from New Rochelle or the suburbs of Long Island, but they are never entertained in Spanish Harlem. These men are visited at various places of assignation throughout the city. One of Louisa’s friends is a book publisher who maintains an apartment in Greenwich Village away from his large home in Roslyn. He likes the fresh young look about Louisa. Terry can remember going on a party in the stockroom of a machine-parts factory in the Bronx. There was no bed. She entertained twelve men, one after the other, on a blanket spread on the stockroom floor.