After Delores (5 page)

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.

In the back of the store, they had three shelves filled with devotional candles covered with drawings of the saints. I bought one for Saint Barbara and lit it right there. The woman didn't blink. People probably made novenas on the spot every day, next to the cans of Goya beans. On the back of the candle was written

¡O Dios! Aparta de mi lado esos malvados
.

O God! Keep the wicked away from me.

I had to laugh at myself, going to all the trouble of praying and then only asking for less of something. I didn't want more of anything, no money or love or sex. I was praying to Saint Barbara to take the pain away. When Punkette died, something changed in me. That's when I decided to have a talk with Charlotte.

7

THE NEXT MORNING
I tried Priscilla's one more time. Even though I realized that she was probably crazy as a loon, I had to admire her because she had the courage to live out her fantasy. She wanted to be Priscilla Presley instead of whoever she really was, some word processor named Ann Brown from Cincinnati or the like. So she didn't let other people's opinions stand in the way of her pleasure. Pris was as brave as a drag queen, and just as tough. Even though no one was home, I went back happy Pris was in my life. Then I got ready to meet Charlotte.

I wasn't sure whether it was gift wrap or disguise but I knew to decorate myself for Punkette's lover. I powdered and primped, and put on long dangling earrings with silver filigree. It was almost a party mood, light and dancing, grooving all over the apartment. I was hopeful, like riding the open highway on a motorcycle with your hair streaming out behind you in the hottest heat of summer.

For the last month there hadn't been any clothes in my life, just five days of the same pants, with or without a waitress apron. But that afternoon in early spring, I searched for something pretty to put on my body. Tucked back in a corner of the closet was one of Delores's shirts, overlooked in her last-minute packing. Maybe she'd left it for me as a warning, maybe as an excuse to come back in case she needed one. She probably didn't want it anymore. The material was silky and billowing, the color, a rich teal. In her shirt I looked, all of a sudden, touchable and breezy.

Charlotte's block was different in the daylight. I recognized that particular brand of dingy that's not at all the same as poor. There was a special kind of neglect that felt like sabotage, and a lack of self-love evident everywhere. No mothers yelled to their kids from tenement windows. No music floated down from the lips of thin musicians in crowded apartments. No teenagers cut on the radio to dance and flirt in lots and hallways under the nostalgic eyes of old people in their ancient folding chairs. No. Too many junkies had taken over too much territory. When the sidewalk belongs to the junkies, it lies cracked and bland. When there are people, but no signs of life, the buildings that carry them sag with the loss of expectation.

The lock had been torn off the front door of her building, a sure sign of rooftop shooting galleries. The stairs were covered with burn scars from men and women nodding out, cigarettes hanging from their mouths, then dropping to the floor with spit. I hadn't seen any of it with Punkette. The night was too cold and I was too drunk. Two skinny teenagers in oversized jackets passed me on the stairs discussing crack hits, three for ten. A woman in tight pants, holding a large-sized bottle of Pepsi, let herself into an apartment, leaving behind the stench of menthol cigarettes.

I knocked at Charlotte's door and waited, then knocked again. The only sign of life came from the neighbor two doors down, who was busily installing a conspicuous contraption onto his front door.

“Excuse me, do you know Charlotte?” I asked.

“Hold this, will you?” he said, talking me over to his side of the hall, where I pressed two pieces of metal against the door.

“Putting in a new lock,” he added, grimier than this job suggested. “They came in through the window the first time so I had to put in bars. Then they walked in through the front door. Try that again, cocksucker. See, all you have to do is tamper with the door and there's a little shock in store for you.”

He waved me away without looking in my direction, flicked a switch inside the apartment and I jumped back as a sudden sharp vibration buzzed through the door, followed by an equally sudden silence.

I knocked at Charlotte's door with a little more urgency, ready to get away from that guy. Her peephole was blocked with a matchbook cover, taped from the other side. When I looked through it, I could make out the words
You too can get a high school equivalency
…

“She's probably at the theater,” he said in a wasted drawl. This time he turned and faced me, so I had to look at him more closely and saw a wild mustache and bushy old-fashioned sideburns, like an antique image from a sixties album cover. He wore a torn, stained, leather-fringed cowboy jacket, the kind that hadn't been around for a long time until yuppie stores started carrying them in purple suede for girls. He had these shit kickers that were too heavy for the weather and too redneck for the territory. They were boots that could really kick ass and weren't good for much else besides attitude. This guy wasn't a leftover hippie. He was more Hell's Angels without the colors.

“Which theater?”

“Where they work. A few blocks up the avenue, next to Cuchifritos. Want a lift? I'm taking my cab out in a minute.”

I've trained myself to avoid all potentially unpleasant situations with men even though I walk into them constantly with women. Once I realized women could be pretty nasty, I actually considered boys for about five minutes until I remembered that they bored me very quickly, and if someone you love is going to bring tragedy into your life, you should at least be interested in them. So my “No thanks, I'll walk” was part routine behavior and part deliberate avoidance.

The theater was a boarded-up storefront on the ground floor of a tenement. It was quite large and long for what it was and had very low ceilings. You could tell it had once been an old-time bakery because the oven marks were still visible, scarring the worn-out brick walls. I came in quietly through the front door, which opened into the back of the audience area. There were soft lights up on the playing space, where two women seemed to be involved in a rehearsal. The one onstage was very tall, especially against the low ceilings. Her skin was the palest white and she was draped in soft black clothing that made her comfortable and classical, like the beautiful woman in a wine commercial stepping out of her lover's bed in the morning wearing his coziest sweater. It made you want to watch her. Another woman was sitting with her back toward me. All I saw were her curls of brown hair. She was watching too and taking notes as the actress recited her lines.

“I used to babysit for this family over by where the main road is before they put in the highway. I was babysitting for their son and afterwards, Allen, that was the father, he would drive me home. Sometimes, though, we stopped off at Nick's for cheeseburgers and played the jukebox. I liked being out with a grown-up man. It made me feel sexy. Anyway, one night, instead of driving me home, I just sat around in the living room and talked with him and his wife Jackie. And then they talked me into bed with them. So that's how it went. After babysitting, I would go to bed with them. Only I would never let Allen put it in. The thing that used to kill me was when I would make love with Jackie and he would screw her right in front of me. I hated it. I would sulk the whole way home in the car. I started going over there in the day when I knew he would be off working. Jackie was usually reading or in the garden. We'd chat, but nothing happened. Finally one afternoon she said to me, ‘You know, I thik you're a lesbian. You'd better not come round here anymore.' They moved soon after that.”

It was only when she finished that I remembered it wasn't real. I felt like a spy in a private conversation, and when the conversation was over, I had a stake in it. When the actress dropped her hands and stood quietly onstage, I missed the character that she had become, and felt sad to watch her disappear. So, I let myself stay hidden there in the shadows, waiting to be thrilled again.

“That was shit,” said the curly-haired woman.

“Fuck you, that was great,” said the actress.