Blue Money Read online

  When she opened her door, she was dragging a telephone cord behind her, the receiver tucked in her ear. She raised her forefinger as if to say, “One minute,” and then returned to the sofa, draped over with swatches of satin, where she plopped herself down in her flowing caftan and continued to speak.

  “Is that how you want it, honey, long and slow? You want me to tell you what I’m going to do? Yes? First I’m going to run my tongue up and down, up and down that big, hard shaft. Then I’m going to put it in my mouth one inch at a time until the head of your great, big cock is rubbing up against the back of my throat...You want to hear more? I’m going to suck it, sweetheart, suck it and suck it. Oh so good...”

  But her voice betrayed no enthusiasm. Instead, she barely modulated her tone, speaking in measured cadences, in the dead-level affectless calm of an overseas telephone operator.

  I sat down in one of the satin-covered easy chairs, its material slipping and sliding around underneath me like unruly morning-after bedsheets, and waited for Corinne to finish priming her john. “Yes, darling, I’m dying for it, yes, yes, all wet, oh, I’m so wet. Till tomorrow at six o’clock. Don’t keep me waiting. That’s a good boy.”

  I wanted to ask her why he gets turned on by her monotone voice, by the detachment that makes clear everything she says is a lie? Does he like surrendering his power? Or is it the shame and humiliation of being reminded she’s in control? But I wasn’t about to draw attention to my stupidity. Instead, I decided to ignore the whole thing. Business, that’s all it is.

  “Thanks, Corinne, the trick was a cinch, just like you promised.” I handed the madam one of my hundred-dollar bills. She made change. Her cut was eighty.

  “I told you. I wouldn’t steer you wrong, honey.” She came over to where I had perched myself at the edge of her slippery chair and slapped me hard across the back. “Congratulations. You are initiated. You are officially a ho. Now we’ve got to drink a toast to your new professional standing.”

  After she had poured us both full snifters of Grand Marnier, Corinne took me by the arm and pulled me up, directing me to a spot in front of her large picture window. Below us, the East River ran, and to the north and south, the bridges outlined in bright lights seemed to celebrate the city itself, as if every day were a festival.

  Once again, the propinquity of it all struck me as ironic, as wonderful and strange. I was separated from my childhood by time but not by space. A life so remote from any I could have imagined was, nevertheless, happening to me on the same ground where I had been raised. “What a small-town girl I am,” I thought. Here I was, about to drink to my initiation into the priestesshood of the socially damned, looking out on the same view of the same sparkling river I had been staring at when, ten years ago, I had my first drink: champagne at the former senator Foley’s townhouse on Sutton Place. My grandparents always brought their family along to the traditional New Year’s Eve party. I was just thirteen, and I was wearing my first pair of stockings, a Christmas present from my mother. I had hitched them on with a big, lumpy garter belt, and the stockings bagged at the knees, but I felt beautiful and grown-up, as if I had crossed some invisible line into adulthood.

  It was nearly midnight. The senator himself, then very old but still with the wicked twinkle in his faded blue eyes powerful men never seem to lose, had grabbed an extra glass off the passing tray and handed it to me as we stood together on his marble balcony, rejoicing in the bitter wind that charged up from the river. After I polished off the first drink in one gulp, which amused my corrupter, I immediately went indoors and searched through the crowd for more. Outside on the balcony again, delicate glass in hand, I found myself alone. I hung backward over the low wall, my face turned up to the pale glimmer of stars, their neglected presence a dim reflection of the brightly lit bridge to my right. Then I downed that drink. The bubbles teased my palate, my nose. The sugary, sour taste of the champagne surpassed even the velvet sweetness of the white icing on the gingerbread cookies that Hilda, the Foleys’ cook, baked every year. Alcohol made chocolate seem like an insult to the intelligence. I remember no longer feeling the cold. My spirits leapt higher than they had ever been.

  “So this is what’s been missing,” I said out loud to the night.

  Now the stately Corinne, in her loose caftan with its flowing hood, stood against the backdrop of the black sky above the river. When she raised her glass, her wide sleeve dangled from her white, dimpled elbow. Her face shone in the semidarkness.

  “What’s your full name—your handle? I want to make this official.”

  “Janet.”

  “Janet? That’s it? Never mind...OK, here it is: To Janet the whore!”

  The Traveling Medicine Show

  After Corinne’s, I cut over to the Traveling Medicine Show, a saloon on Second Avenue and my old hangout. I had been avoiding it for a year—that is, until a week ago.

  In the late sixties, we had a real St. Vitus dance going there, a whirling dervish of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Not only did I believe in magic then, I sought evidence, praying for signs, such as the supernatural handwriting that leisurely spelled God’s message to me, carving words in the sawdust across the barroom floor. Miracles of this kind only happened when I was whacked on methamphetamine, which was also when the divine order of things revealed itself, when inanimate objects gathered together to portend, when colors became backlit with the unseen rays of the moon, and jukebox tunes reverberated against the otherwise undetected, hollow sound of nothing. Crystal meth charged the circuits of my brain, leaping over synapses, chasing L-dopa down sleepy channels as sluggish as damned rivers until the banks of my mind flooded with revelation.

  I did not fear this state, the drug-induced madness rightfully called “amphetamine psychosis”; I pursued it, guided by my own benign, urbane Charlie Manson, Michael McClaren.

  Michael believed in crystal methedrine. Speed is to cocaine what heroin is to morphine—a very strong, very hard drug. But we cherished the tattered government brochure always circulating somewhere in the bar classifying methamphetamine as a psychedelic. This confirmed for us that it was a sacrament. After a few sleepless nights, I would grow preternaturally calm, and the high began to seem indefinite the way love does when it’s good. Michael administered lines of this powerful substance like a kind and watchful small-town doctor who runs a makeshift clinic full of locals come in for the cure. He believed and infected us with the belief that crystal methedrine could heal. We were all convinced. About this we were not cynics in the slightest degree.

  Michael had invaded like a missionary from Greenwich Village in the spring of 1967, transforming a dreary Upper East Side singles parlor into what was for me a palace of the night. The corner saloon was lit by an eerie copper glow; the place oozed with drugs, and the small stage rang out with free music played by friends of Michael’s who dropped by to try out new material. The barroom walls were festooned with photographs of these local and world-famous regulars. There were mostly black-and-white head shots of the men, musicians, along with bartenders and drug dealers, all caught in deep and inscrutable contemplation, while the women were displayed in garish color: go-go dancers spinning their tassels on tabletops, or young uptown girls, myself included, wearing tiny bikinis and sunglasses, sprawled over the hoods of shiny cars.

  Nothing checked, no restraint, unless it was Michael’s intriguing silences, especially intriguing because probably not a soul uptown or down consumed more speed than he did. And speed made most of us talk and talk in a shorthand of free association, broken sentences tumbling back and forth like flaming torches. But Michael stood out against the pack; he expressed himself in elaborate pantomime instead. He was always tacking something on the bulletin board with his staple gun, or spray-painting a lightbulb crimson red, or brushing his lips with the harmonica he never played, or tinkering with a mike onstage, or just running loose, a marvelous rhythm to his jerky step, the speed spinning him from wall to wall. All of us, his unabashed follow
ers, loved to watch him. His long black hair streamed behind him. His skin was as white as candle wax, except for his flushed cheeks. His wide-set eyes were transparent ice blue, fixed with the vacant stare I once saw in a timber wolf’s eyes. You could almost hear his mind, as high as a whistle pitched for wildlife, and his mind drew us there night after night, all the young girls you could imagine, and the boys, too: we were enchanted.

  That was the sixties, before male charisma got discredited. Sometime during the past year, while I was avoiding the place and trying to be a practicing radical feminist, the Traveling Medicine Show had turned seedy. Its lights were too bright now; the jukebox played the same numbers over and over, and Jimmy, the bartender, looked wearily at his watch. The place was changing back into just another local gin mill, but when I returned, all I could see was that Michael was still at his post where I’d left him the summer before. I reluctantly noticed he had acquired a slight potbelly, in spite of the fact that I was sure he continued to snort mountains of crystal meth (it was the daily quarts of rum and Coke, I guess). And the mortal growth of hair that poured out of his open work shirt, obliterating his once smooth chest, was thicker and ruder than before. But what mattered was that Michael was still there. The sight of my old hero and the stench of beer—old, sticky stale beer—lured me past the door.

  I didn’t expect him to throw his arms around me after my year of pointed neglect, and sure enough, he went out of his way to shun me the first night back. He behaved as though I were a stranger all through the long evening, right up until last call. Even in decline, he had pride. You think you can just waltz in here after a year and expect me to fall all over you, bitch? But the truth is he had nothing better to do. The truth is he was happy to see me. I could tell from the way he immediately started stapling something to the bulletin board. Then he abruptly went and sat down at his long table, where he put his feet up on the neighboring chair and pulled open a copy of the Village Voice with a deliberate thrust of paper. He hid his face behind it, as if he had gone inside his house and slammed the door. All of this was for my benefit, I thought, but I wanted to make sure.

  “I guess Michael isn’t talking to me,” I said to Jimmy. It was almost four by that time, and I was hanging on with both hands to the cool glass full of ice and booze and practically no soda.

  “Of course he is. He’s real happy to see you,” Jimmy said, wiping the bar down with his wet, filthy towel.

  “You could’ve fooled me,” I said.

  “Oh, Janet, c’mon now, you’ve been away too long. This is how he always acts when he’s happy to see someone, you remember that much, don’t you?” he said.

  A little while later, I noted with gratitude that Michael had switched to Penthouse, which he was reading with a half-smile on his face. A good sign. I walked over, careful not to stand too close. He looked up and smiled outright, as if I had just come through the door.

  “Have a seat,” he said, getting up. “Want a drink?”

  All of a sudden, after not having seen me for a year and then ignoring me all night, I was his guest.

  He went over and got us both drinks, his a tumbler full of rum and Coke, and my umpteenth scotch and soda. When he came back, he sat down next to me and put his feet up again and stirred his drink with his long, graceful finger.

  “You look like you could use a line,” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m dying for a line. It’s been a year at least,” I said.

  “How’d you stay awake?”

  “I didn’t, really. I was walking around in a daze the whole time.”

  “Here, I’ll put a little of this in your drink. It’s not the quickest way to get off, but it’ll do the trick.”

  He took a square of tinfoil out of the breast pocket of his red shirt, a dark red that made his eyes look extremely light blue. Then he tapped some of the tinfoil’s contents, a thin trickling stream of white powder, into my glass.

  “Try not to overdo it. I’m very clean, remember,” I said.

  “Yes, but when you drink it, it’s gradual. Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.”

  As soon as the Traveling Medicine Show closed that first night of my prodigal return, Michael hurried me down the block to his apartment, as if there were urgent business to discuss. He lived right on Second Avenue, above a hardware store. His studio faced the back where an ailanthus tree had presumed to grow in the alley, forcing its way through the concrete and up past his window. Michael’s house was the most hallowed cell, the most beautiful, whimsical shrine in the whole of the material world, as far as I was concerned.

  For months, while I was out on the street picketing, or stuck inside the freezing offices of the radical feminist paper Gutter, sitting on a metal folding chair and hammering out policy with the other women, I dreamed of this forbidden little bunker with its dark red corduroy bedspreads, like something a college boy’s mother might have sent, and the billowing white cotton curtains that hung down from the ceiling behind the two beds. The effect these closed curtains had was to make you feel, lying there, as if you were backstage. The beds were arranged in an L shape so that they might lend themselves to a variety of offbeat positions, but not to sleeping together all entwined and sweaty. Which was fine with me on a couple of counts. First of all, who slept? And then, even if you did crash there, who, crashing, wants to share a bed?

  Crashing is a serious business. It is the other side. Speed whisks away revelation when at last it departs the body. The profoundest truth, the one you thought would change your life, evaporates as if it had all been just a shimmering, whimsical dream. You are a husk, and if you are wise, you do not stir for days. Your senses dulled to the point of uselessness, you might as well lie prostrate in your open grave-bed until life creeps back in, or, more likely, until you decide to do more speed. The apostates couldn’t take it; they tended to get suicidally depressed. Speed never affected me that way, or Michael either. What happens, if you allow yourself to surrender to it, which is what you have to do, is that you go into a mild coma. This was no big deal as far as I was concerned.

  But of course, when the time arrived, I would want to come down by myself. At that point, you are feeling so fragile, you had better surround yourself with the familiar. When you come to, it’s as if you were sleeping in the womb and then had to bust out of the birth canal all over again. You look ugly as hell when you wake up, puffy, gray, dried spittle plastered over the entire side of your face.

  The atmosphere in that small, hot room, with only one fan whirring in the window, bore down on us. It was charged with the unexpected, electric weight of intimacy. The drenched air, ringing with silence, wouldn’t let us speak or even, for a minute, move.

  At last, as if someone had started the reel spinning again, Michael stripped, always the first thing he did. He made us both a rum and Coke, and then he took a bubble bath. I sat by the tub and blurted out a lot of inane things. The drug was starting to hit, and I was caught off guard. I had forgotten how liberating it was.

  “The speed’s working,” Michael said.

  “I’ll say it is,” I said. “I feel like a fool.”

  “We’re all fools,” Michael said, lifting his leg out of the bubbles and soaping it the way starlets used to do in the movies. Finally, he got up and pulled a towel around his body, the front of which was covered with black hair. This made him seem human to me. I loved him even more for the humility his giant spirit had assumed stuck inside the lowly flesh of manhood.

  Ah, speed, mother of hyperbole. The drug has left its mark, as if the machine of my mind lost a knob. Even now, I find it difficult to measure in degrees. When I am moved, the emotion wants to fly to its limit like an old horse making its way back to the barn. Back then, I was altogether blind to the subtleties of feeling and impatient with them.

  I wanted to touch him. All those days and weeks and months I berated myself because I, a genuine feminist, I thought, could not stop wondering about the de facto harem I had left behind on the Upper East Side
, of all places, and now here I was, overjoyed just to be watching Michael trail soap bubbles into the other room. He sat naked on his towel under the pin light, put his drink down on the table in front of him and then started to fiddle with the tuner on the radio. After a few minutes, he settled in and picked up Penthouse again, while I, recalling the order of our ritual, stayed behind and ran a bath for myself.

  “Drink some of your rum, that’ll take the edge off,” Michael called out to me.

  I lay back in the tub and drank the alcohol and felt myself float off, until I was hovering for an instant over the deserted street outside. Just a little out-of-body experience, nothing to get alarmed about, I told myself. Then I saw some writing form out of the cracks in the plaster on the bathroom wall. It said GET WELL over and over in big script, a very personal hand. This was not as odd a hallucination as it might sound. Remember, we were all preoccupied with healing ourselves. And we thought there was a better chance of achieving mental health if we became psychotic first than if we just stayed mired in our neuroses. Michael put it this way: “There is no cure for the common cold, but if you catch a cold and then go stand in the rain, you might get pneumonia, and that they know how to cure.”