Small Town

Now he frequented the bars only in the morning, to sweep and mop and straighten up, and on his way out he’d pick up the twenty dollars left for him. The management of Death Row, perhaps overcompensating for the relentless squalor of the premises, tucked his payment into an envelope with his name on it; at Harrigan’s and Cheek, they just left a $20 bill on the back bar, next to the register.

Then the whorehouse, which took longer, but he was still in and out of the place in not much more than an hour, and his envelope, with Jerry in purple Pentel in a precise feminine hand, held a hundred dollars. Always a single bill, and always a crisp new one, and, when you thought about it, an outrageous payment for the time it took.

Then again, he sometimes thought, look what they got for a simple blow job.

Marilyn Fairchild’s apartment was on the third floor of a four-story brownstone on Charles Street off Waverly Place, not a five-minute walk from Joe Jr.’s. The sky, overcast at daybreak, was clear now. It was the second week in June, and the weather had been glorious for the past several days, and on the way to Marilyn’s he realized he’d had a melody running through his head, just at the outer edge of consciousness, and sometimes that was how he sent himself a message, found out what he was really feeling. Now he registered the song, and it was the one about loving potato chips and motor trips, and especially New York in June.

Well, he thought, who wouldn’t? He’d lived briefly in San Francisco, where every day was spring, and in L.A., where every day was summer, and had decided the trouble with Paradise was you got tired of it. If the weather wasn’t lousy a fair proportion of the time, how much of a charge could you get from a beautiful day? Here the weather could be genuinely shitty in a rich variety of ways — rainy, drizzly, bleak, freezing, raw, windy, hot, muggy, stifling. Every season had its own characteristic unpleasantness, and every season sported the occasional perfect days, and how you treasured each when it came along! How your heart sang!

I love New York
More than ever...

The new slogan, the post-9/11 slogan, with the Milton Glaser logo adapted to show the heart scarred, like a human heart after a heart attack. First time he saw the new version, on a T-shirt in a shop window, the damn thing moved him to tears. But then for a while there almost everything did. The capsule biographies of the dead that ran every day in the Times, for instance. He couldn’t read them, and he couldn’t keep from reading them.

It wore off, though. You were scarred, like the heart, you took a licking and kept on ticking, and you healed.

More or less.

The entrance to Marilyn’s brownstone was a half flight up from the street. He mounted the steps and rang her bell, gave her plenty of time to respond, then used his key. He took the steps two at a time — three years ago, bottoming out on drugs and alcohol, it was all he could do to drag himself up a flight of stairs, and baby, look at me now — and poked the buzzer alongside her door. He got the key ready — he carried more keys than a super these days, and rather liked the butch effect of it all — and when there was no response to his buzz he let himself in.

Place was a pigsty.

Well, that was an exaggeration. It wasn’t filthy. He cleaned for her once a week, and the apartment was never seriously dirty, but sometimes it was a mess, and it was certainly a godawful disaster area this morning.

Ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, some of them lipsticked, some of them not. A pair of rocks glasses, one holding a half inch of pale amber liquid, the other dry. The dry one showed lipstick, the other didn’t.

Yesterday’s Times, in all its many sections, was scattered all over the living room. An oblong pocket mirror, and he’d bet anything there was cocaine residue on it, lay on the mahogany coffee table, next to an uncapped bottle half full of Wild Turkey and a plastic ice bucket half full of water. A bra was on the other side of the ice bucket, half on and half off the coffee table, and yes, there was her blouse, lime green raw silk, he’d seen her wearing it once, and now it was tossed on the Queen Anne wing chair. Could her skirt be far off? No skirt, he determined, but there was a pair of black slacks on the floor next to the club chair, and were those black panties wedged into the corner of the club chair?

Egad, Holmes, I do believe they are.