After Delores Read online

  “We make love here in the afternoons while Beatriz is away. Charlotte says she likes the smell of young flesh. She says it smells like white chocolate. Old flesh smells like the soap you use in the morning until it’s really old and then it starts to rot. My grandmother used to smell that way but I loved her so it smelled good. One time Charlotte and I came up here and an old man passed us on the stairs. ‘I can’t stand that smell,’ Charlotte said. ‘It’s weak and worse than garbage.’ But I was happy because it reminded me of my grandmother. When you love someone, they always smell good. Want to hear a record?”

  She was smoking Camels without filters and playing albums by groups I had never heard of.

  “Listen to this version of ‘Fever.’ It’s Euro-trash, you know, French New Wave? Instead of the word fever, she says tumor. ‘Tumor all through the night.’”

  We sat and listened. My Punkette sprawled out on the floor. Me, freezing in the only chair.

  “That was great,” she said, pouring more beer. “Let’s hear it again.”

  Her hands were short and white with badly painted black nails.

  “I’m so in love with Charlotte,” she said.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Well, she’s strong and she’s a good lover. You think I’m young but I know the difference. Plus she has good information about life. Like, you know what she told me? She told me to tell all my secrets but one. That way you invest in the world and save a little something for yourself.”

  She grabbed on to one of the longer strands of her hair and started splitting the split ends.

  “I know that she and Beatriz love each other and I’m trying hard to see it from Beatriz’s point of view, so that someday we can all be friends. But for now I don’t mind seeing her afternoons, I guess. I have to work mostly nights anyway, just a couple of lunches. I go-go dance in New Jersey. I told you that, right? On New Year’s Eve, I was so coked up after work and wanted to spend the night with her so badly that I wandered into The Cubby Hole at four-thirty in the morning and they still made me pay.”

  She had drunk all the beer by that time and smoked all her cigarettes. I gave her some of mine.

  “Thanks. There was this yuppie girl there talking to me and I was so desperate I would have gone home with her but she didn’t ask. Charlotte encouraged me to take that job, dancing. It’s not too bad. Want to see my costume?”

  She went into the next room to change and I started smoking. It was so cold. I had on a sweater and two blankets and was still chattering.

  “Okay,” she shouted from behind the door. “Now sing some tacky disco song.”

  “Bad girl,” I sang. “Talking ’bout a bad, bad girl.”

  Then she came go-going in her little red sparkle G-string and black high heels. Her breasts were so small that she could have been a little girl showing off her first bikini. She bit her lip, trying to look sexy, but she just looked young. I segued into the next song.

  “Ring my bell, bell, bell, ring my bell, my bell, ring-a-ling-a-ling.”

  “Sometimes they hold up twenties,” she said, still dancing. “But when I boogie over to take them, they give me singles instead. ‘Sorry, honey.’”

  Then I saw her eyes. They were smart. They were too smart for me.

  “Charlotte says there’s a palm at the end of the mind and it’s on fire. What does that mean?”

  And I thought, This kid can get anything she wants, anything.

  She saw me staring at her eyes and got scared all of a sudden, like she was caught reaching into her daddy’s wallet.

  “I’ve never done that for someone I respected before.”

  Those breasts, I thought. How could anyone make love to those breasts? There’s nothing there, nothing at all.

  “Do you think Charlotte will leave her? What do you think?”

  “You really believe in love, don’t you?” I said.

  She looked up at me from her spot on the floor, totally open.

  “I don’t know what you want from me,” I said. “I’m the last person in New York City you should be asking about relationships.”

  “Do you think she’ll leave her?”

  Then I realized she saw something special in me. She trusted me. And I was transformed suddenly from a soup-stained waitress to an old professor. We were sitting, not in a Lower East Side firetrap but before a blazing hearth in a wood-lined brown-stone. Charlotte was my colleague and Punkette, her hysterical mistake.

  “Look, sometimes you have to cheat on your wife and sometimes you have to go back to her.”

  I looked into her eyes again. They were really listening.

  “Maybe you’ll get what you want,” I said. “But you have to be patient.”

  And suddenly I wanted her so badly. I wanted to throw off the blankets and be vulnerable again, to roll on the rug with a little punkette in a red G-string and I wanted to show her a really good time. Nostalgia.

  5

  PUNKETTE HAD MENTIONED a bar called Urgie’s in East Newark where she was working nights and some go-go lunches. I telephoned ahead the next day just to be sure and the bartender said a girl fitting that description was working that afternoon under the name Brigitte. I called in sick to Herbie, which wasn’t a lie, and decided to go see Punkette dance. The phone machine actually worked so maybe we could be friends.

  When the guy started screaming on the subway to Penn Station, I felt for Priscilla’s gun in the pocket of my spring coat. When the second guy started screaming in the Amtrak waiting room, I felt it again. The terminal reeked of urine-soaked clothing and roasting frankfurters. It was repulsive. Danger lurked everywhere.

  It wasn’t until I got on the train to New Jersey that I found Delores’s old lipstick in my jacket pocket, which brought back the fact that she still had my keys. Maybe that was a good sign.

  Across the street from the Newark station was a rundown diner where I stepped in to check myself out in the mirror. Sometimes you just need to know what’s going on with your face, to find out for sure what is showing. It was the same old me. I took out Delores’s lipstick and put it on real thick until I had a mouth like a movie star—so caked and shiny that no one looks you in the eye. I slipped the gun into my right hand and posed, Wyatt Earp style, in the ladies’ room. I wanted to see exactly what Delores would see if I stepped in front of her one afternoon clutching that little piece of metal. Except for the mouth I looked exactly like myself, but happier somehow. And it was all because the machine in my hand could make her shut up and listen for once. Boy, would she be surprised.

  It was raining in New Jersey that day, everything typically dismal. The sky was so full of industrial shit and car exhaust, it was all the same color, the color of sweat. New Jersey is a very sweaty state. The only reason girls truck out there to dance anyway is because they don’t have to go topless like they do in the city and for the ones trying hard to maintain some distinct sense of limit, it’s worth the commute.

  Urgie’s was a regular place, filled with regular guys from the bottling factory and some construction workers wearing baseball caps. It had fake wood paneling and pink and green disco lights like any tacky family business. Nothing about it was glamorous of half scary. Some of the customers were black, most were white, and three had suits on. They drank beer and ate salami and provolone sandwiches. Everything smelled of yellow mustard. Punkette was right, it’s not as bad as they make it out to be.

  The stage was also on the tacky side and consisted of a hard plastic sheet laid over the pool table in the center of a circular bar. That way the guys could eat and watch at the same time. After all, they only had an hour. Some girl in a white bikini was dancing around like it was nothing. She had nice legs and smiled a lot, but just a little smile. Every once in a while she’d untie the top of her bra and flash her nipples. Mostly the guys were busy talking and chewing but sometimes they’d look up. Sometimes they’d reach over and give her a dollar, which she’d tuck immediately into her panties. I calculated that
if every guy in the place gave her one dollar, it would be exactly the same money as waitressing lunch.

  I thought about what it would be like if I started hanging out with Punkette on a regular basis, or eventually got a girlfriend who was a dancer or a stripper. You’d have to stay up late at night keeping an eye out for her and spend a lot of money on cabs. You’d have to bullshit with asshole men all the time and worry about being paid right. That dancer had a smooth belly, but it was flat, not like Delores.

  I remember sitting in the bathroom in the morning when she’d come in to brush her teeth. She’d bend over the sink and I’d watch her ass hanging out of her baggy underpants. I loved it so much, I would kiss it. Then, when I took a shower, Delores would come in too. She’d get clean first, but continued to hang out with me in the water so we could both dry off together. What gets me the most of anything is that I really thought Delores was my friend. I thought she’d love me even when she got mad. That’s what hurts the most, being violated when you trust someone. Everything gets poisoned.

  “Two IDs.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You gotta be over twenty-one.”

  The bartender had a tattoo of Andy Capp on his forearm.

  “I’m way over twenty-one. Look at these wrinkles on my forehead. No twenty-one-year-old has wrinkles like that. Ask me the jingle of any game show that was on the air in 1960.”

  “Two IDs.”

  I dumped the contents of my pockets out onto the bar.

  “Well, I don’t have a driver’s license and I don’t have any credit cards. I don’t have cards of any kind.”

  “Then you have to leave.”

  I stuffed it all back in my coat, leaving a crumpled five lying face up next to the coasters.

  “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for a little girl who works here on and off—blonde tips, red G-string. It’s my sister.”

  He picked up the five and pulled me a draft.

  “She ain’t here. It’s two bucks for the beer.”

  I put down another five. Didn’t get any change. He belched in my face and went off to pour drinks around the bar. I drank down the beer and checked out the dancer. She was probably a psych major from Barnard. Then the bartender came back.

  “Hey bartender, you know the one I’m talking about? A punk girl, goes by the name Brigitte?”

  “You want another round? Got to keep drinking if you want to sit at the bar.”

  So I had one more and tipped him three dollars. He started to soften up a bit. This is America, after all.

  “Let’s see … Brigitte? Is she the one with the spic boyfriend?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s more the independent type, clear eyes, kind of naïve, but sharp as a fresh razor blade, real hopeful, someone that you’d want to be around.”

  “Flat-chested?”

  “Yeah, that’s her.”

  He wiped the spit off his fat mustache with a mustard-stained bar cloth, leaving a nauseating streak of yellow across his already ugly face.

  “She’s got a spic boyfriend. He comes in here all the time.”

  “No, that’s not her.”

  I drank some more beer and tried to decide whether or not to tip the dancer. I didn’t want to make her feel uncomfortable in front of all those men, but I did like the way she danced. Plus her cash flow seemed a bit slow. At a particularly dull moment, when I caught a flash of “boy, is this boring” pass across her face, I stretched out over the bar, reached toward the dance floor/pool table, and held out a dollar. Everything kind of stopped. One by one, the guys weren’t talking anymore and started paying attention until all you could hear on top of the disco music was the sound of them chewing salami and her feet shuffling against the plastic. But that little darling, bless her heart, gave me a big one-dollar smile, took the cash, and stuffed it into her panties like I was a regular anybody. Well, I guess a dollar is a dollar, even if it’s queer.

  It took about thirty seconds for everything to get back to normal and soon the growl of men’s voices took over again. That’s when it occurred to me that Punkette, being nobody’s fool, probably got a better gig in a higher-paying place. She didn’t need that dump. If I looked around long enough, I knew I’d run into her again and we could be friends. If she and Charlotte and Beatriz could work out a three-way thing, maybe Delores and me and Asshole could do it too. I was feeling light and ready for one more beer when the bartender came over my way smelling like a rotting Blimpie.

  “I’m not running no dating service for you, sweetheart. You’re drunk. Now get the hell out of here before I call a cop.”

  I cursed myself all the way back to the station, getting drenched in the slimy drizzle. That asshole, pushing me around. Everybody’s always pushing me around or walking out, or not showing up or somehow not coming through. And I’m the worthless piece of trash that’s hurting like hell because of it.

  It was just then that I jammed my hand into my jacket pocket and smashed my knuckles on a cold piece of metal. Then I remembered that I had a gun in my possession. I could use it any time I chose. I clutched it first and then tapped it slightly, running my forefinger along its chamber. I knew I didn’t have to worry anymore, because the next time somebody went too far, I had the power to go farther. I had a gun. Now everyone had to pay attention. Nothing bothered me for the rest of the afternoon, as I stepped over the broken concrete, the New Jersey dirt turning to mud. It was the new me. I had Priscilla’s gun in my pocket and if I’d wanted to, I could have turned around and shot the eyes right out of that fucking bartender’s nasty head. But why use up a good thing? There would be better opportunities later on, and more deserving victims. Besides, this gun was a trump I could only play once.

  6

  WHEN THE NEWS came the following Wednesday, it came the hard way, during lunch in section two. At first, things were fairly normal. The place was empty until the noon rush brought the operators and the one o’clock brought the lawyers.

  None of the phone people actually earned enough to eat out every day, but it was too depressing to eat a sandwich at the same desk you sat at watching your life go down the drain. So they scrimped and ordered a lot of little things, like a cup of soup with extra crackers and a small salad with dressing on the side and tea with extra lemon and water, no ice, which was three trips for me. I often got the feeling that the waitress was the only person in their lives that they ever got to push around, so they took full advantage of the opportunity. Joe always says that working people should help each other out, but the sad truth is that most people never think about who they serve. They just accept it. But every waitress knows that a lot of side orders is a lot of work.

  The lawyers were different. They lived defeats and victories every day, so there was always something to get over or to celebrate. That meant a cheeseburger deluxe, which is one trip and a dollar tip, guaranteed. They’d wolf down the burger and a fattening dessert and then run off somewhere, so you could get two tables of lawyers for the same hour that one of the operators took.

  By the time things slowed down on the floor, the guys behind the counter would go crazy with boredom. Joe had been drinking rum for an hour and had already picked out his horses. Rambo and Dino were usually deep in conversation.

  “I know you suck dick.”

  “I do not suck dick. I eat pussy.”

  “Do you suck ass too, or do you only suck dick?”

  “You suck dick, I don’t suck dick.”

  I took a look at Dino’s Daily News. US ships were firing on the Gulf of Sidra. Reagan said, “I am a Contra,” and on page seventeen, next to a Macy’s ad, was an old photograph of Punkette. She was standing over a cake, smiling. She was a brunette and her hair was long with little bangs. She wore a gold cross around her neck and too much eye makeup, even then. The caption said her name was Marianne Walker, photographed at her fifteenth birthday party. She had come to New York City from Allentown, Pennsylvania, on the Greyhound bus and she was dead. The article said she’
d worked as a call girl and a stripper up until the night that someone squeezed her neck until it broke. Then they dumped her in the East River behind the projects on Avenue D.

  I looked at the picture and I just lost it. I lost it so bad I couldn’t even walk out of the place. I kept on picking up tables and placing orders. When you hear something too awful like that, your whole body gets frightened. It jumps.

  I looked around at the customers pouring ketchup on their French fries and drinking Cokes. Urgie’s customers in East Newark were just as tame. They weren’t dangerous. They were normal. Punkette wasn’t a hooker. The paper got it wrong ’cause it’s all the same to them. No one was going to take the time to find out what really happened. People watch real life the way they watch TV, sitting in an armchair drinking a beer and talking during the commercials. They love brutality, it’s so entertaining. They hate victims. Victims make them feel weak. But I cared about Punkette and someone else out there did too. Maybe it was the girl on the telephone who didn’t need an abortion after all. Or Charlotte, who was almost forty and filled with passion and wise thoughts. I was sure, at that moment, we were all three sad.

  After that I wanted a drink, so the second that work was over I headed for the bar. But I couldn’t step in the door of The Blue and the Gold. It stank. I found myself walking east again until the dirty bodega shined like a star from the corner of Avenue C just like it did that night with Punkette. I bought a beer and sat on a milk crate in the back, drinking it in the store while the Puerto Rican woman on the register watched TV. I don’t exactly understand Spanish, but you get used to hearing it and I could tell what was going on because the emotions were so huge. Men and women in fabulous costumes were fretting, threatening, falling passionately in and out of love. The characters yelled and screamed and cried and danced around. They felt everything very deeply. American TV actors just stare at each other and move their mouths. Sitting there watching those people on channel forty-seven let it all out, I learned something very personal. I learned that sometimes a person’s real feelings are so painful they have to pretend just to get by. That’s what I’d been doing. When you get hurt and can’t trust people, they stop being real. Of all the people I’d been running into lately, Punkette was the most real because, in the middle of a lot of sordid business, she still had faith in love. I could picture her dancing away at Urgie’s thinking about Charlotte, glowing. She probably even found something to relate to in that ugly bartender, because she certainly found something to relate to in me. When Delores was home, I loved her every day, even when I was sick of her. Then she changed too fast and I was so used to loving her that I let her get away with it. There was a moment, in the bodega, when I loved Punkette instead, but it was too late for that.