Blue Money Read online

  The Unnamed Press

  P.O. Box 411272

  Los Angeles, CA 90041

  Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.

  13579108642

  Copyright © 2017 by Janet Capron

  Image Copyright © 2017 by Leland Bobbé

  ISBN: 978-1944700423

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940509

  This book is distributed by Publishers Group West

  Cover Photograph by Leland Bobbé

  Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely

  This book is a work of creative nonfiction.

  Names, identifying details, and places have been changed.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].

  In loving memory of my mother

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  PART I

  Initiation

  The Traveling Medicine Show

  Escape

  No Frills

  Waiting

  The Visit

  City Island

  Mystery Plays

  Outcast

  Highcrest

  PART II

  Highrise

  Felix’s

  Makeover

  The Comanche

  Bordello

  The Gentleman Player

  Slim’s Wide Missouri

  Love in the Afternoon

  A Short Engagement

  Covenants

  Casa Pacifica

  The Mohican

  Island of Women

  PART III

  Eddie Apollo

  Gravity Knife

  Hopheads

  The Rescue

  End of the Line

  Foxhole

  Blackout

  Park Bench

  Another Rescue

  Bellevue

  The Wake

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  I grew up on Park Avenue with my mother and a series of live-in maids. My grandfather, a retired liberal newspaper publisher and quixotic champion of the workingman, supported us in style. I mention my grandfather not only to show the source of my mother’s and my good fortune but also to help the reader understand my fall from grace. I translated his lifelong fight for the underdog to mean I should become the underdog. I went to a good private school and to camp in the summer, and spent Easter vacations at my grandparents’ winter home in Palm Beach. But I was destined to join, for more than a decade, the ranks of the marginal and despised.

  By the time I got to a progressive women’s college in the mid-sixties, I was drunk almost every day and barely functioning. The dean of students seemed genuinely sorry when she had to ask me to leave. I started to rebel more pointedly after that, experimenting with drugs in addition to booze and exploring radical feminism, all of which took me to the threshold of the time of this book—the summer of 1971.

  Blue Money is a memoir written in the guise of fiction. Everyone’s name has been changed except my own. While the book is drawn directly from my life on the streets of New York City in the seventies, a few characters are composites and timelines may not be entirely accurate.

  In spite of these novelistic details, all of Blue Money, at its heart, is true.

  Well, you search in your bag

  Light up a fag

  Think it’s a drag, but you’re so glad

  To be alive, honey

  Live, honey

  Say, when this is all over

  You’ll be in clover

  We’ll go out and spend

  All of your blue money

  Say, when this is all over

  We’ll be in clover

  We’ll go out and spend

  All your blue money

  Blue money

  Juice money

  Loose money

  Juice money

  Loose money, honey

  What kind of money, honey

  Juice money

  Loose money

  Blue money

  Van Morrison

  PART I

  Initiation

  The doorman tipped his hat. That was strange. I was seven blocks south on Park Avenue, seven short city blocks from my mother’s house, my childhood home. I thought it was odd, too, that I was wearing the old, low-cut black crepe cocktail dress with little capped sleeves my mother had bought for me at Miss Bergdorf’s more than five years ago on my eighteenth birthday. The length of my dress came just to the knee, no longer fashionable in 1971, but I didn’t mind. I told myself I looked like one of those gamines in a black-and-white New Wave movie. I was glad to be who I was that evening in mid-August: no coat, no wrap of any kind, no gloves obviously, no stockings even. Just lots of pink lipstick. Anyway, the doorman deferred to me here as my own doorman Joe—seven blocks north, on the same side of the avenue, too, the east side—had never done. “Take that ball around the corner, gowan now, get.” Joe had more important things to do than mind kids was I’m sure how he saw it. He was still there, over twenty years. Well, Joe certainly never tipped his hat to me, and I would have been shocked if he had. Now, here I was, about to turn my first trick—I was a whore, or about to become one any minute—and the doorman, who had been instructed in advance to let me up—who, in fact, conveyed hookers to 17D on a regular basis—was treating me as if I were a lady.

  My tongue was sticking to the roof of my dry mouth, and the palms of my hands were damp. I was actually shivering, and not from the air-conditioning. I was crazy with nerves, in a stage-fright frenzy. Even so, the exquisite symmetry, the beautiful irony, didn’t entirely escape me, not even in the final moments when the elevator operator and I ascended to the seventeenth floor in the noiseless, velvet, vacuum plush of the Otis, a grand car with a gold carved wood ceiling, and the elevator operator kept his hand on the old-fashioned lever as if he were running something, as if he were guiding this upward-bound Jules Verne capsule through open space to its destination.

  These male servants valued discretion to such an extent that, I was sure, all knowledge of the foul goings-on of their tenants would die with them. I was high on a few Dexamyls, ups, and so, a captive of my own inflamed imagination, I began to entertain a wild thought. As I rode up in the elevator, I made the sudden discovery there was an ongoing conspiracy of men, older than the Masons, older than religion, that closes around the whore, hides and even honors her.

  As I considered this, I stared at four doors in the dimly lit corridor and wondered which one was marked “D.” I found a mirror on the wall and ran my fingers through my short hair. I took out my compact and powdered my nose. I sucked in my cheeks and pursed my pink lips and posed in front of the mirror to remind myself I was pretty. Unfortunately, as soon as I stopped looking, I forgot again. Meanwhile, I kept thinking about how I was about to step outside of society into the unknown.

  Suddenly I remembered Lillian Maurice. While I was still in grade school, my libertine mother, Maggie, and I invented Lillian Maurice, who lived in the most extreme luxury. Whenever we passed a store on Madison Avenue that struck us as particularly grand, such as a lingerie shop featuring feathered silk negligees, we would say, “Almost good enough for Lillian Maurice.” Our exalted character lived in a social vacuum without a husband or children, exactly as a kept woman would. Apart from the roguish example of Lillian Maurice, I didn’t have much to go on. I was beginning to warm to the theory that a lot of men really don’t like getting it for nothing. They want to pay for it one way or the other. But I was afraid I might find it difficult to sell that which, up until now, I’d always been so eager to part with for nothing.

  The john’s sumptuous
apartment was a standout even for me, who had spent a lot of time growing up around my grandparents and their rich friends on Fifth Avenue. The decor could hardly have been called understated—too much oak paneling and Wrenaissance mahogany for that—but the living room was elegant, furnished sparingly with good Georgian pieces. The surface of the high-top desk, open to reveal nothing but a Montblanc pen resting on a blank sheet of linen stationery, seemed to be suffocating under a thick coat of wax, as if it had been too frequently polished by a maid with nothing else left to do. Two green-and-white-striped silk upholstered chairs stood on either side of the fireplace, and a luxurious sofa covered in the same material had been situated equidistant between them. I thought I spied an original Beardsley to the left of the (original) mantelpiece. The apartment was sensual and guarded at once, a masculine confection of a home, perfumed with a lingering trace of sweet Maduro cigar smoke and cognac.

  He had greeted me at the front door in evening slippers and a floor-length paisley silk dressing gown thrown over trousers and shirt, the studs removed, his sleeves hanging loose. His wrists were too delicate, I thought. He offered me a drink, which I accepted, of course, scotch on the rocks. We sank first into his ripe sofa, side by side, like old friends. He was a gaunt man with high cheekbones, and his eyes flashed with a forced intensity when he spoke. I reassured myself he wasn’t scary looking; in spite of the backdrop, in spite of me and why I was there, I told myself he just looked spiritual, ascetic even. I took him to be about fifteen to twenty years older than I was.

  He said with his perfect diction that he liked my hair, “Very gamine.”

  It was short, the Jean Seberg look, a novelty in those days, left over from my recent submersion in a sect of radical feminists. Just about a week before, I had decided to forsake that calling for this one.

  I was trying not to smile too much, because I knew I had the warm, spontaneous grin of an ingenuous fool. I had a young, expressive face, the kind that registers every wisp of emotion like a sunny day at the seashore that passes instantly into shadow each time the smallest cloud approaches, and I was afraid my face would betray me now. I tried to act cool, but acting cool is difficult to do when you’re not. After a few more light stabs at small talk, I couldn’t bear it any longer. I blurted out that this was my first time, my first professional engagement. I felt compelled to confess because no one had told me what to do. Corinne, the madam whose job it should have been, had only said, “This trick is a cinch—the perfect introduction—nothing to it. You’ll see.”

  But what was expected of me? Surely I was there to provide something that ordinary nice girls wouldn’t, or couldn’t, at the very least an attitude: friendly, chirpy, distant. Instead, I sat frozen in the depths of his sofa like a timid virgin. I needed to be guided through it. I apologized. I was apologizing for my freshness and innocence in the same way I now feel obliged to apologize to men for my experience.

  Naturally, Maitland, the worldly john, beamed. He actually flushed pink with delight and maybe also with a soupçon of delicious shame. He did exactly as I had hoped, leading me by the hand through the living room and down the hall to his dark bedroom. More polished wood in here, and tapestry throw pillows, too.

  He tossed the pillows on a straight-backed chair and lay back on his bed underneath the white silk canopy. Then he pulled me on top of him and flipped me over and kissed me. Oh, I knew that was wrong. Whores aren’t supposed to kiss. I wriggled out from under him and he laughed.

  “Good instincts,” he said. “I suppose you want your money now, too.”

  Corinne’s only explicit instruction had been to always, always get the money up front. That was the single commandment of hooking then. Maitland handed me two one-hundred-dollar bills. I stuck the money in my little black brocade evening purse, which was also left over from my childhood days of privilege.

  Immediately, I felt suffused with glowing calm. Money was power; it freed me. I was free of the man, of men. I could take him or leave him, or anyone now. I was in control. This stranger had just paid me two hundred dollars in advance for doing practically nothing. The idea excited me. I stood there offering my high little breasts that were poking against the scratchy crepe. In my mind, I had become the object of unacknowledged worship.

  ‘No wonder they go out and work for us,’ I thought.

  Not that I was even subliminally interested in finding a breadwinner. This was 1971, remember, and the nuclear-family scam had just recently been exposed. A housewife was merely a whore who was selling instead of renting herself, so the pundits had declared. I took this popular notion to heart. I decided I would rather make my way freely and directly. I wanted to get paid up front and be up front, as in the currently popular expression “be up front with me.” Be honest.

  Anyway, I was never trained in my fancy dilettantes’ college to do anything, nor could I remember any discussions at home about how I might eventually make my own way. Oh, I heard a lot of vague, impractical talk about how I should “amount to something,” and it is true that there was no shortage of career women around my mother’s house, even back in the fifties, but collectively, the usually divorced career women served as a cautionary tale. It made a lasting impression when they got tight and cried like little children who were being punished. I remember watching transfixed from my secret vantage point behind the living room door as the black dirt of their mascara ran down their faces. They were extremely unhappy because they were without men. They looked everywhere for men. That was not going to happen to me.

  Once I put down my little purse, suddenly, like an actor onstage who hears herself speaking the lines, I knew what to do. I slipped out of my dress, letting it fall to the floor. I stood naked except for my bikini underpants. I imagined that I towered over him, my john, who was lying back on the bed watching me with amusement. With the casual authority of a distracted mother engaged in her mindless routine, I opened his dressing gown, unbuttoned his shirt, tugged off his slippers, and unzipped his fly. After he yanked off his pants, he reached for me and pushed me back on the bed. There I pretended to surrender my power. He was wearing a touch of cologne, a restrained scent of sandalwood mixed with a pungent male smell like sea spray that I had not noticed before, until, on top of me, his pores opened.

  It was not unpleasant under there, canopied by his clean, spare flesh. It wasn’t uncomfortable or difficult. If you took the act we were performing out of context, nothing could have been more benign, I thought.

  He fumbled with the rubber, a Day-Glo grape color it was. Then he put himself inside me. Before he could get off one stroke, he came. It was over. At first, I was flattered: ‘Am I that hot?’ I asked myself.

  “Now you know,” he said as we lay there in some kind of parody of the intimate aftermath. “I’m a premature ejaculator. I tried for years with women, but they won’t put up with it.”

  I was being taken over to the far side where women are “other,” initiated into the genderless center, the neutral world of men.

  Maitland needed to explain his affliction, perhaps especially because I was new, in other words, full of compassion. Or is it that ladies of the evening are, as legend would have it, full of compassion? Anyway, by now I wasn’t really listening to what he was so earnestly whispering to me. My heart had started pounding too loudly once it was over. Somewhere in there, though, I did hear him say, “Finally, after my last girlfriend left me, I got too lonely to stand it. That’s when I hit on this solution.”

  He turned on his side and propped his narrow head on one bony hand like a monk, an anhedonist monk, no longer seeking the things of this earth, and he looked right at me with his mechanically bright eyes. I didn’t ask him why he never tried to fix it. What for? Anyway, maybe he had. That he still needed and wanted this, that he was willing to pay a stranger for the brief contact, for the nudity, for the humble semblance of heterosexuality, touched me. So I kissed him. He didn’t respond. As I pulled away, I caught in those open eyes the look of absolute resig
nation you would expect to see on a dying man’s face.

  The tall doorman was down on one knee, feeding a doggie candy to a bouncy, fluffy Lhasa apso straining at the end of its leash. When the man saw me approach, he jumped up and fairly ran to the big glass door to open it for me. Once again, he tipped his hat. This time, I thought I detected a slight exaggeration of style, an obsequiousness that bordered on a leer.

  But who could tell? I had been surrounded by doormen and elevator men, servants in uniform, all my life, and their ways, their devotion to duty, their strange enthusiasm for the job, remained inscrutable to me. I continued down the avenue, August in New York, the air close and intime the way I like it, the doormen, all dressed in summer-weight gray or sky-blue uniforms, nodding as I passed, a few of whom I recognized. They stood outside in the twinkling night like familiar trees, landmarks from my childhood.

  Of course, not all servants are so proudly humble. Maids are traditionally begrudging. Governesses temper their affection with a no-nonsense approach. Chauffeurs act like union men who have been hijacked off the assembly line, or mercenaries between wars. Cooks lord it over everybody else. Laundresses, usually the only black member of an all-white cast, at least at my grandparents’ house, slink in and out the back door like noiseless visitations.

  And what pose does the whore assume? Lazy. That’s the trick. It aroused me just thinking about it. I remembered the joke my Edwardian grandfather used to tell in mixed company, and in front of me, about the man who goes into a whorehouse. He picks a woman out of the crowd, and she takes him upstairs to her room. Over the bed hangs a Vassar diploma.

  “Is that yours?” he asks.

  “Yup,” she says.

  “But I don’t get it. What would a girl like you be doing in a place like this?”

  “Just lucky I guess.”

  Once outside, I felt giddy with relief, dissolute and free. I turned left and headed east to Corinne’s house, a large one-bedroom corner apartment overlooking the East River. Corinne was about fifteen years my senior, and although she had renamed herself after a French heroine in an old Charles Boyer movie, she was really a slightly overripe Irish American woman. I knew her from the bar scene. We both fooled around with Michael McClaren, the pied piper of women, sometimes separately and sometimes together. She was tall, auburn haired, and luscious in a damp way that suggested perversion. Like so many whores I would meet, she didn’t get into it only for the money. If you asked her she’d say it was the money, but Corinne belonged to the not-so-rare breed that did it just as much for the sake of pleasure. Corinne dedicated herself to pleasure. She believed in it in the same way Republicans believe in free enterprise. In her spare time, she screwed professional athletes: big-name stars on football teams, basketball teams, and the occasional good-natured baseball player, too. Corinne was a jock groupie.