Up in Harlem where lust is the easiest moneymaker, where the white men go to buy the sins they are ashamed of. In the dark hallways choked with the odor of decay; in the alleys where nameless passions lurk and scuffle in the night-there is where Sara Jackson walks, in her tight sweater and skirt, drawing no color lines, turning down no sin job if the price is right. Sara Jackson, tall and lovely and young-too young to be rotting in the cesspool of moral decay. Sara Jackson, hooker, turning over her night's earnings to a fancy man who beats her up, lies to her, gets her started on the dope trail to oblivion. Sara, experimenting with the delights offered by Lu, the platinum-haired dusky lesbian tramp who loves men for men and women for joy. Meet Sara-meet her soon-for her life is measured in months-months of sin and shame, torment and degradation that will leave her husk of humanity
CHAPTER ONE
Her name was Sara Jackson. She had white teeth and dark eyes and red lips and brown skin. She was seventeen years old. She wore a straight black skirt and a snug black sweater and a pair of white tennis sneakers-she sat by herself in a straight-backed wooden chair and thought how all alone she was.
One day ago, one short day ago, she had not been alone. A day ago she had been in the same room but the room had not been empty. A day ago her mother had been alive. Today her mother was dead and she was alone in the room by herself.
She shivered.
For years she had lived with her mother. Her mother was named Cora Jackson, and every morning her mother got up at six-thirty and made breakfast on the little two-burner stove that was sitting in the corner of the room right now. Her mother made breakfast, and she and Sara ate together, and then her mother left the room and walked to the corner of Eighth Avenue and 116th Street and turned at the subway arcade and walked down the stone steps and bought her token from the anonymous man in the booth and took the CC train to 72nd Street and Central Park West. Then her mother, Cora Jackson, got off the train and climbed more stairs and walked two blocks uptown and went into a huge brick building and rode up eleven flights in a gleaming elevator. There, from eight in the morning until six in the evening, Cora Jackson washed floors and scrubbed Venetian blinds and cooked meals and entertained children and polished silverware and otherwise performed menial tasks for white people.
At six-or later, if there was extra work for her-Cora Jackson said good night sir and good night ma'am and left the large and spacious apartment and took the elevator downstairs and walked two blocks downtown and took the CC train uptown to 116th Street. She walked to her own building and climbed stairs and prepared dinner for herself and Sara. Sara would sit and eat in silence while her mother told her what the Madam had said and what the Mister had said and what women had come over to play mah-jongg and what the children had done. After dinner there was very little for Cora Jackson to do. Sometimes she went to a prayer meeting. Sometimes she sat reading her Bible. Most of the time, though, she was so tired that she went to bed as soon as the dinner was done and the dishes washed and put away.
Now she was dead.
For three days she had been sick. A sudden sickness, something about the heart, something that meant she had to stay in bed and get plenty of rest. For three days she had stayed in bed and had gotten plenty of rest while Sara took care of her. Then, despite the staying in bed, despite all the rest and all the care, she had quietly and inoffensively died.
Now she was in the ground, buried upright in Potter's Field with no marker, no headstone, no flowers. Can't even die without money, Sara thought. Can't live and can't die. When a rich man died they buried him in a pretty cemetery with green grass growing and a big piece of granite to tell who he was and when he was born and when he died. When a poor black woman died they stuck her in a hole and forgot she ever drew breath.
How old bad her mother been? Sara did not know.
It was funny, she thought, funny not to know how old you were. Her mother never knew Her mother bad been born in a Georgia shack, had come to New York with a sweet-talking man who left her while she was carrying Sara. Nobody had told her when her birthday was. She never knew.
And now Sara was alone.
She wondered what came next. With her mother alive, there was never any question as to what came next. From Monday to Friday she went to school She came home, did her homework. She sat in the room and listened to the radio and went to sleep. Saturdays she went to the library and read a book or went to the movies or met one of the girls and had a coke at Glick's candy store. Sundays she went to church with her mother.
It was all planned. She was a senior at Alexander Hamilton High School now, and in June she would graduate with an average in the low nineties. She would go to college at CCNY and she would get a bachelor's degree and she would earn a teaching certificate and she would get a job teaching school. "That's the finest thing in this world," her mother had said, time and time again. "To be a teacher, to have a good steady job doing something useful. People look up to you when you're a teacher."
She sat in the chair, closed her eyes. Sometimes she would dream about what it might be like-a classroom filled with cute little boys and girls, and Sara Jackson standing at the front of the room holding a piece of chalk as white as snow, writing on the blackboard, helping the boys and girls with their coats and leggings in the winter, going to the teachers' room for a break between classes to talk about books and plays and the problems of teaching the children. She would dream about Yes, Miss Jackson and No, Miss Jackson and Can I go to the bathroom, Miss Jackson? and You're my favorite teacher, Miss Jackson. She thought about them now, and her lips turned upward at their corners in a smile that had no humor in it.
She would never be a teacher.
Her mother was dead. Even though the tuition was free at CCNY, it took money to stay alive, money for food, money for rent, money for books and clothes. Even if she took a part-time job, stinting on sleep and stealing study time from herself, she would not be able to manage it.
So she would never be a teacher.
What would she do? Oh, the answer was an easy one to come by. When she had called the white folks that her mother had worked for to tell them that Cora Jackson would not be in due to the simple fact that she was dead, they had been properly sympathetic. And then, later in the day, they had called her at the laundromat downstairs. Mrs. Peters had called her to the phone, and the white woman told her that of course she was very upset about what had happened to Sara's mother, but if Sara needed a job, she would be welcome to take her mother's place.
It was painfully logical. A colored woman had scrubbed their floors for years and now she was dead, and what made more sense than to hire her daughter to take her place?
She had told them, very politely, that she was not interested.
It made her feel good to turn them down. Big shot, she told herself now. Real haughty little gal, aren't you? She would wind up doing something like that, scrubbing somebody's floor and scrubbing her life away, and at least that job was steady and the people were good people to work for. So why be snooty about it?
She got to her feet. No, she thought. No, I'm not about to scrub anybody's damn floor. Not me, not Sara Jackson. No.
It was seven-thirty in the evening and the sun was gone. Somehow with the sun down the four walls of the little room had seemed to come closer and closer together until she thought they would squeeze right in and crush her. She looked at the walls and she looked at the ceiling and the floor and she wanted to cry out. Instead she went out of the room and down the stairs and walked along the street.
"Hey, Sara!"
She recognized the voice and turned. It was Jonah Rainey, a tall, skinny boy built like a beanpole; a beanpole topped with kinky black hair and wearing horn-rimmed glasses. If she had a boy friend, it was Jonah Rainey. He was in several of her classes at school. He walked from school with her, and he bought an occasional Coke for her, and once in a while he took her to a movie. He, too, planned to go to CCNY; afterward he intended to go to law school at Manhattan or Fordham and become a lawyer.
"Sara-"
She waited. He ran to her, caught her arm. "I'm sorry about your mother," he said. "I'm awful sorry."
"It's all right."
"All right?"
"Damn," she said. "I don't know what made me say that. It just came out, I guess."
He didn't say anything. He let go of her arm and they walked together along 116th Street. She looked around, seeing the neighborhood as though she had never seen it before, as though for years she had walked along that street without ever before taking any real notice of it. She saw the barbecue joints and the Red Rooster Cafe and a drug store that advertised contraceptives in the window and a phrenology parlor where an old black woman felt the bumps on your head and told you what the future would bring you. A men's shop where they sold purple shirts and lime-green draped pants and short-brimmed hats. A second-floor pool parlor upstairs of a dirty butcher shop where all the meat was an unnaturally bright red because they colored it with beef blood to make it look better than it was. An anonymous faded brick building that everybody knew was a three-dollar whorehouse, and another anonymous faded brick building that everyone knew was a shooting gallery where the junkies punched holes in their arms. Garbage in the gutters and grayness everywhere and tired men with half-lidded eyes and sharp pimps with hundred-dollar sport jackets and old women dragging shopping bags and younger women wearing too-tight skirts and the grayness, the drabness, and it was 116th Street and she lived there.
"Let's get some coffee," Jonah Rainey said. "I don't want any."
"What do you want?"
"I don't know."
"Let's get a cup of coffee, Sara." They went to Andy's and sat on plastic-covered stools and had coffee. The coffee was weak. She put two spoons of sugar in it and stirred it and waited for it to get cool enough to drink, and then she drank it in small quick gulps.
"You want a doughtnut or a piece of pie?"
"No."
"What're you going to do, Sara?"
"I don't know."
"Are you fixing to get a job?"
"I don't know."
"You going to college?"
"No."
The counterman at Andy's was a high-yellow about thirty-five with a ready smile and a mouthful of gold. The owner was a white man who never came into the restaurant except to tally the receipts every Saturday and pay the employees and take the profits to his home in the Bronx. Everywhere you look, Sara thought. Everywhere you look there's a black man sweating and a white man winning, and it's the same all over no matter where you look. When a white man wanted a woman he came up to Harlem and found one, when he wanted a whore who would do dirty things with him he found a brown-skinned girl and paid her money and used her and went away. When a white woman didn't want to wash her own dishes or scrub her own floors she called an agency and they sent up somebody black to do it. And the white woman paid the black woman and gave her old dresses instead of throwing them away and gave her leftover food to take home to her family. She remembered how her mother brought home dresses for her, and cake that was about to turn stale, and meat that wouldn't keep. And how she, Sara, had hated like poison to wear those dresses and eat that cake-
"Sara-"
"What?"
"You want anything more? Another cup of coffee?" She shook her head. She hadn't even wanted the first cup.
Then let's go, Sara."
She walked out with him, walked back along 116th again. This time she tried not to see the street as she had seen it before, but she couldn't help it A whole life of this, she thought A whole lifetime of living like an animal. She saw a cream-colored Cadillac convertible go by, a brown man at the wheel, a brown girl at his side. The man was jiving the girl and she was laughing. A pimp and his whore, she thought. A sweet man and one of the cows in his stable. And they rode in a Caddy and she lived on 116th Street.
Jonah Rainey walked her to her door. He stood there for a moment, and she thought about climbing the stairs and going to the room that was her own room now, and something chilled her inside and she almost shivered because she did not want to be alone. "Come up with me," she said. "Should I?"
"Please, Jonah."
He wasn't the usual sort of boy, she thought She fed him up the stairs, going slowly because the stairs were steep and she was tired inside, and she though how different he was from most of the boys in the neighborhood. The neighborhood ruined most boys. They looked around them and they saw two things; they saw men making it by being fast and sharp and ugly inside, and they saw other men growing old and dying and never getting anywhere. So they stole what they wanted and they smoked pot or sampled heroin and they got to all the girls they could. But Jonah wanted to do things the way you were taught to do them; to be good and pure, to go to school, to be a lawyer. So be wasn't the usual sort of boy. But she wasn't sure now whether that made him better or just foolish. A day ago she could have said with assurance that he was better than the others, that he was right and they were wrong, that he would make something out of himself while they went slowly but inexorably to hell. Now she was not so certain. Now her mother was dead, her mother had lived a meaningless and joyless life and had died of it, and she was not so certain about a great many things any longer. "My home," she said.
The sarcasm was strong in the two words. He smiled, looked at her, forced another smile.
"I'll make you coffee," she said. "If you want some."
"If you got some milk-"
"Sure."
"I'd like some, then."
She went to the refrigerator. There was half a quart of milk left. She took a glass and poured milk into it and handed it to him and he sipped it.
"Thanks," he said. "Too much coffee makes me nervous."
She looked at him. The milk had made a white circle around his mouth and it looked a little funnv. She said: "Do I make you nervous?"
"What?"
"Me. Do I make you nervous, Jonah?"
"Sometimes."
"Like now?"
"Like now, Sara."
"Finish the milk," she said. "And kiss me."
He had kissed her before, not often and not passionately. A meeting of lips after a movie date, quick and chaste. He put the glass of milk down without finishing it and started to give her the same sort of kiss this time. She threw her arms around his neck and changed the kiss into more than he had planned on. She hugged him and ground her mouth against him and felt him warm to her, then felt him start to pull away and held on all the harder.
Oh, she thought. Oh, yes, damn, kiss me, kiss me hard. Hold me, touch me, warm me, make me alive.
Then he was drawing away from her, eyes wide behind the heavy glasses, hands trembling slightly.
"Sara," he said.
"Do you want to, Jonah?"
"I don't know."
"I never did," she said. "I thought about it, everybody thinks about it. I never did."
"Neither did I."
"Do you want to?"
He didn't answer her. He had turned a little away from her, sitting beside her on the edge of the bed with his hands cupped over his bony knees. The glass of milk was on the floor between his feet and she thought that it looked remarkably silly there. She put her hand on his hand and moved closer to him.
"I think I want to," she said.
"It ain't right."
He was nervous, she thought. He wouldn't say ain't otherwise. His grammar was always perfect and he talked just like a white person, pronoucing all of his words correctly. Her own mother had drawled like a southern Negro and Sara herself had a fairly strong Harlem accent, but Jonah spoke like a white person. Only now he said ain't because he was too nervous to concentrate on talking right.
"Why not, Jonah?"
"You're a virgin," he said. "Later on if we get married then we would do it on our wedding night and it would be right. You're a good girl and a virgin and it wouldn't be right to do it now."
They had never talked about marrying. She had never really thought of marrying him, or of marrying anyone in particular, but now that she did think about it, it seemed to her that he had always more or less taken it for granted that she would marry Jonah Rainey or someone very much like him. It seemed to fit with the dream of standing at a blackboard with chalk in her hand and Yes, Miss Jackson and No, Miss Jackson and Can I go to the bathroom, Miss Jackson? Only then it would be Can I go to the bathroom, Mrs. Rainey?
Dreams.
"We should wait," he said. "I don't want to wait."
"Sara-"
"It's all the time wait," she said. "Wait till you're older. Wait till the cow jumps over the moon. A person gets sick of waiting, Jonah. You wait long enough and you get old and you die and you never get away from 116th Street. Like my mother."
He didn't say anything.
"You know what she cooked all the time? Greens. Collard greens and black-eyed peas and side meat and fatback and all that. Things not fit for a human person to eat. I don't like collard greens, Jonah. I never did."
"Sara-"
"Just don't like them," she said. She was excited; her accent was stronger now, and she was shifting into the speech patterns of Harlem. "Got no use for nigger vegetables and nigger meat. Got no use for living like a nigger, Jonah."
"Don't use that word."
"Why not? Ain't I got the right? You think only white folks got the right to say nigger?"
He got to his feet. His eyes were very wide and his hands were shaking. She stood up, moved close to him.
"I am so cold inside," she said. "So damn cold inside. You know what I want? I want you to kiss me and hold me and touch me. I want you to make me so hot I forget who I am. Now you sit down, Jonah. You sit down on the bed."
He sat down. She sat next to him.
"Now kiss me."
At first he was hesitant. But she returned his kiss with passion, bruising his lips with hers, and she felt the stirrings of desire within his body. She pushed at him and he fell back on the bed and she lay down beside him, her arms still around him, her mouth still glued to his.
All of this was new to her. She wasn't quite sure what you did next, how you got things going, what exactly you were supposed to do. She wondered, and her body gave her the answers. It was as though her body had been born with this knowledge burled somewhere deep within its flesh, and that now, the occasion having arisen, her body was passing on the information to her brain.
Her lips opened, her tongue came between them, forced its way into his mouth. She kissed his open mouth and played with her tongue and he gasped in a breath and then moved his hands over her back. She lay on top of him now, her breasts pressing down on his chest. She kissed him all over his face and she felt passion building within her loins like a brush fire, building and growing and blossoming. She took one of his hands and put it on her breast and felt the hand clearly through the thin black sweater.
His hands cupped her breasts, handled them. She felt her flesh warming with life, coming entirely alive, making urgent demands she had never known before. She was no longer herself, not really. She was more than herself; a girl turned now into the shadow of a woman, a girl on fire with something totally new.
There had never been anything like this before.
Never.
When he let go of her she pulled away quickly and suddenly. She thought that it would be nice if he undressed her but she didn't have time to wait for him to do it. She pulled her sweater up over her head and cast it aside and showed her bare breasts to him. His eyes widened and his mouth made an O and he gasped.
"Do you like them, Jonah?"
"Yes."
"Touch them."
Her breasts were the breasts of a girl and the breasts of a woman at once. They were large and shaped like cones, firm and vibrant with the bloom of youth. They did not need the support of a bra. They were a warm coffee color, lighter than the rest of her body.
And when his hands touched their silkiness she thought she was going to die.
He had never been with a girl before, but his hands acted with a skill all their own. He cupped the large mounds of flesh, stroked them, caressed them, felt their weight and teased their soft sensitivity With the tips of his index fingers he traced tiny circles around her nipples until she shook and quivered with ecstasy.
This was the world, she thought. This was life, this was living, this was being entirely alive. This took you away from 116th Street, away from the drab grayness of Harlem. This got the smell of poverty out of your nostrils and the taste of poor man's food out of your mouth. This was life.
"Kiss them, Jonah."
She rolled away, onto her back, and he hovered over her and found her breasts with his mouth. He planted wet kisses on them and he took her nipples between his lips and kissed them. Her eyes were closed and her heart was pounding. She opened her eyes for an instant to glance at him, his lips fastened to her breasts, looking like an infant equipped with incongruous horn-rimmed glasses. Momentarily she thought she might laugh, but then passion overwhelmed her like a high and massive wave and the moment of laughter was past.
And then they were scrambling together, flesh hungry for flesh. Her hand went to him and found him. Firm with his aching, burning need for her.
She held him. She looked at him, and she thought that this was what a man had to please a woman with. She held him and she could feel his excitement. Her hands moved and he shook and quivered and her passion zoomed upward and she released him and threw herself down again. She pulled her skirt up over her hips and shoved her panties down and off and lay like that; legs up and breasts heaving, thighs trembling.
"Do it," she gasped.
He was there, close to her.
"Do it!"
He crawled to her. His shirt touched her breasts and his pants rubbed her bare thighs. He touched her.
She was ready. She felt her heart pounding and the blood surged through her veins, and she was ready, so ready, so very ready.
He touched her again.
And then, with a violent wrench, he was off of her, away from her. She lay on the bed, hips moving involuntarily and automatically, and saw that he was leaving her and her eyes brimmed with tears and her heart sank.
She said: "No-"
"I can't," he told her. "Sara, Sara, I can't."
"Damn it-"
"I can't," he said. "I can't, it's wrong, it ain't right, I can't do it to you. Sara, I'm sorry. Sara, I hate myself."
"You lousy nigger!"
He didn't answer. He looked at her, one final time, and then he turned and ran. He yanked open the door and raced down the stairs and out of the building. She lay on the bed, and she heard nothing on earth but his fast and furious footsteps as he hurried down the flights of stairs to the street.
She cursed him, softly, steadily. She thought of a thousand vulgar names and applied each and every one of them to JONAH.
And then, finally, she cried.
She cried for almost an hour. She lay on the bed, skirt around her waist, nothing else on, and she cried and cried for all that was lost. She cried for her dead mother and her own lost innocence and because Jonah Rainey was gone. She cried because she would never go to City College, would never be a school teacher, would never stand in front of that blackboard with that stick of chalk in her hand.
Jonah would not come back. She knew this, knew it for the fact it was. He would not want to return to her and could not even if he wanted to. In the first place, his pride would not permit it. Whether or not he had done the noble thing, the fact remained that he had failed her as a man, as a lover. So he could not come back to the scene of his failure.
And, on top of that, he could not help knowing now that she was not the girl for him. Maybe she might have been if things had been different. But she was not.
He was steady and bright and honest and moral. She had been that way, had thought she would always be that way. But her mother had died, and she had seen 116th Street as it really was. A boy's warm hands had taught her how passionate she could be, and she was no longer the girl she had been a few days ago. Her name was still Sara Jackson. She still looked, walked, talked, and dressed the same.
But she was someone different.
She thought of her mother, dead and buried upright in Potter's Field. She thought of Jonah, who would have married her, maybe, in another world. She thought of the white woman on Central Park West who expected Cora Jackson's daughter to take Cora Jackson's place and cook her meals and wash her dishes and scrub her floors and wear her cast-off dresses. She thought, inexplicably, of the man and the woman in the cream-colored Cadillac convertible; the pimp and the whore who had probably forgotten what collard greens tasted like and how poverty stank in your nostrils.
Oh, God, she thought.
Oh. God.
CHAPTER TWO
Harlem started with a family feud.
It wasn't always a Negro neighborhood. The area is at the northern end of Manhattan Island, and at the beginning it was a class neighborhood, with plush brown-stones and then-modern apartment houses and trees and fresh air. There was a family that owned three adjoining brownstones and one of the heirs got mad at the other heirs. He took out his emnity by renting his particular brownstone to Negroes freshly arrived from the South. Building by building and block by block, Causacians moved out and Negroes moved in. Harlem, slowly but surely, became the Harlem it is today.
Now there are three sections, or maybe three-and-a-half. There is Negro Harlem on the west, running east from the Great White Way of Broadway. There is Spanish Harlem in the middle, overflowing with Puerto Ricans, packed with bodegas and carnecerias and ripe with the odors of beans and rice and wine. On the extreme east is Italian Harlem. The Italians, earlier arrivals and unhampered by racial differences, have had time to prosper, and the Italian Harlem holds only the old stalwarts who have never entertained the desire to move out of the old neighborhood and into the Bronx or New Rochelle. And there is a half-area, a pocket of Irish Harlem with a handful of saloons called the Emerald Isle and the Shamrock and Paddy's Place.
Harlem is a study of contrasts; a collection old and young, rich and poor, and good and bad. Harlem is Sugar Hill, where the walls of the black ghetto are edged with gilt and where Harlem's rich pretend they're on Park Avenue. Harlem is 116th Street, gray and poor and lifeless. Harlem is where nine-tenths of the population bets ten cents or more on a three-digit number every day of their lives. The number goes off at odds of nine-ninety-nine to one and pays off at five-ninety-nine to one, and no one ever went broke running a numbers bank.
Harlem is too much bad liquor, too much pot, and too much hard junk. It is too many gutter crap games, too many bopping gangs, and too many girls pounding the pavement. Harlem is where every cop is a potential enemy and every squad car a Russian tank. Harlem is streets like 125th and Lennox; glowing with life at night, banked with night clubs, jazz joints, and sleek bars. Harlem is side streets where a blackjack moves with the speed of light and a switchblade snicks out, catches a glimmer of street-lamp light, and finds a soft underbelly and draws red blood.
Harlem is a hundred sorts of Hell.
It was Sunday morning and Sara Jackson woke up coming out of a bad dream. She sat up in bed, panting to catch her breath. Her face was beaded with sweat and her chest was heaving as though she had just finished running the four-minute mile. She blinked at daylight, shuddered, then got to her feet.
That dream. Something running-running down a dark street with the whole world on her tail, chasing her and giving her no peace at all. Dreams meant something, she thought. They meant something to doctors and they meant something to the little gnarled black women who would listen to your dream and tell you what number to play. But they didn't mean anything to Sara, and this one only made a swift chill run up her back and bother her. So she pushed it from her mind and got out of bed.
She bathed down the hall; a quick dip into the tub, a rub with soap, a rinse, a towelling-off. She got dressed in her room, putting on fresh underclothes and the same outer clothes she had worn the day before. She made herself breakfast; toasted two slices of bread, spread them with margarine and grape jelly and washed them down with the remaining half-glass of milk in the refrigerator.
Her mother had always told her to drink all the milk she could. It made you grow, whitened your teeth, and strengthened your bones-it was good for you. But who knew anything nowadays? They were testing atomic bombs somewhere, and she had heard that if you drank enough milk you got Strontium 90 in your bones and it rotted them from the inside out. You couldn't be sure of anything any more. You never knew what was good for you and what was not.
She washed her plate and her glass in the sink and hurried down the flight of stairs to the street. 116th Street was no better than it had been the night before, but staying in her room was worse. And the weather was good outside. The sun was high in the sky and the wind was blowing warm air around, air as fresh as it would ever get in that neighborhood. She filled her lungs with it and started down the street.
There was a store church halfway down the block. It had been a fundamentalist church for the past four years; before that it had been a dress shoppe, and before that a cigar store. She stood in front of it and looked through the big store windows at the prayer meeting.
They were singing hymns. There were maybe a hundred people in the store; sitting together on little folding chairs, singing hymns at the top of their lungs without having to look up the words in hymnals. They were mostly old people, she saw, and they were mostly women. A batch of white-folks' maids at a Sunday service. A batch of Cora Jacksons not yet dead.
Real foot-washing Baptists, she thought. Let's all have an A-men. Let's have a hallelujah. And another A-men.
The preacher wore a light grey flannel suit and a Madison Avenue tie. He smiled out through the window at her, showing a mouth filled with solid gold teeth. He motioned for her to come inside.
She hesitated. They hymn ended. She heard the preacher's voice calling to her now; a fine voice, full and rich and melodic, "Come in, sister! Worship with us."
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. It might not hurt, she thought
"We welcome you, sister."
No, she thought. No, none of that jazz, not for Sara. Her mother had gone religiously to church. Her mother had played along with God every day of her life and where had it gotten her? Nowhere, she thought. Or maybe in some white man's heaven where the streets were paved with gold and where the colored folk had a special area reserved for them. A heaven divided into two parts; one black and one white, both separate-but-equal in the eye of God.
Thank you.
But no thanks.
She walked quickly, passed the store church and hurried along. A seedy wino with a few days worth of beard on his jowls looked up from a pint of Sweet Lucy to ogle her bouncing breasts. She brushed on past him, rushing along now; head down, arms held rigid at her sides. She didn't know where she was going but she knew she was in one perfect hell of a hurry.
She had taken three sips of her coffee before she recognized the man sitting halfway down the counter from her. She saw him turn his head very slightly to look at her, eyes cool as dry ice. She sipped her coffee and thought private thoughts until, all at once, she realized who he was.
Jubal Bryce.
She knew him, all right. Everyone on 116th Street knew who Jubal Bryce was. Everyone on the street saw him nearly every day; they knew who he was, what he did, and how well he did at it.
Jubal was a pimp.
In other societies, a pimp prefers it if no one knows what he does for a living. In other societies a pimp is the lowest form of human life and is universally regarded as such. In Harlem a successful pimp stands between a preacher and a narcotics peddler in the social scale, a little lower than the first and a little higher than the second.
Harlem men have trouble finding work. Harlem women have less trouble, because the world is overflowing with white women who don't like to wash their own dishes or scrub their own floors. Harlem men are quite often unemployed, and the jobs they can find are rarely the sort you can support a family on. But there is one way in which a Harlem man can come into a great deal of money with no discernible amount of effort; the world's second oldest profession, pimping.
Say you're at the bottom of the ladder, a one-girl pimp with a girl who earns a short ten dollars a trick. If she's any damn good at all she turns seven to twelve tricks a night, with an average of around ten. That comes to a hundred dollars a day, seven days a week, or seven hundred dollars weekly. The girl turns over all her earnings to you-otherwise you belt the crap out of her. Out of the seven hundred you keep her in a ratty apartment, pay off an occasional cop, and buy food and clothes for her. If that takes a hundred a week it's a lot. That leaves you, the pimp, with six hundred bucks to play games with. Two or three hundred may go for heroin if you and the girl are on the needle, which is more than probable. The rest goes for sharp clothes and a Caddy convertible and expensive liquor.
If you've got five girls in your stable, the profits are incredible. Just multiply the working figure by five. And figure that it's all tax-free, too.
See?
Jubal Bryce was a pimp, and he was a successful one. At any given moment he had from four to seven girls on his string and most of them were good enough to bring in twenty dollars every time they parted their thighs. The girls were not all Negro. They ranged in color from white to black, with all shades of brown in between. There was a Polish girl from Chicago and a poor-white girl from Tennessee who rebelled against her family by lovin' for a colored man. They were all types and all colors-one of the current ones had majored in Sociology at Sarah Lawrence, strangely enough. And they brought a great deal of money to a man named Jubal Bryce.
He looked again at Sara. She turned her own eyes back to her cup of coffee, forcing herself not to glance at him. But out of the corner of her eyes she saw him get up from his stool with the grace of a dancer or prize fighter, scoop up his coffee cup deftly, then move down the counter toward her. Go 'way, she thought.
He took the stool beside her. He set his cup of coffee down in front of him and stirred it very methodically with his spoon. He put the spoon in his saucer and sipped the coffee.
"Sara," he said.
She very nearly jumped.
"Sara, I heard about your mother. My sympathies."
She couldn't ignore him. "Thank you," she said.
"She was a fine woman."
"I didn't know you knew her."
"I know everyone," Jubal Bryce said. "I make it my business to know everyone, Sara."
She didn't say anything. She wanted a cigarette now but she didn't have any and she didn't want to ask Jubal for one. She just sat there and felt the little hairs bristling on the back of her neck.
"Sara."
She turned, slowly. He held a pack of Philip Morris in his left hand, one cigarette extended from the pack toward her. She took it automatically, forced a smile to her lips. He took a cigarette for himself and lit first hers and then his own with a solid gold cigarette lighter as flat as a fifteen-cent hamburger.
"It must be hard," he said. "Being all alone."
"I manage."
"But it must be lonely."
"I suppose."
"You're a pretty girl," he said. "You know that, don't you? A pretty girl."
It was good that Negroes couldn't blush, she thought She took a quick drag on the cigarette and sucked smoke down into her lungs. Go 'way, she thought.
Leave me alone, Jubal Bryce. "You working, Sara?"
"No."
"Going to look for work?"
"Sure."
"Be a shame to have you tucked away in some sweatshop," he drawled. "A shame to see you on your hands and knees scrubbing a floor. And all for too little money to live on. It's an awful waste of woman, Sara."
She didn't say anything.
"The way I see it," he said, "it's a damn sin to be poor."
"The whole neighborhood's poor."
"Oh?"
"Harlem's poor. All of it"
"Oh?"
"Sure," she said.
"Well," he said. "Well, it is like hell, girl. Bet you think money don't grow on trees. That what you think? If it is, you're about as wrong as you can be. This is a rich little world, Sara. Real rich. Dirty rich. There's a stack of folding green on every tree and under every flat stone. All you have to do is take it."
She looked at him now. He was a very good-looking man-a distinct asset for a pimp. His features were not particularly Negroid. He had a Roman nose and thin lips and a strong jaw and a pair of soft brown eyes set wide apart. His hair was long and he had it combed back flat on his head, soft and smooth and not held down by tons of brilliantine. His nails were manicured and his hands were smooth and clean. He was wearing a cocoa-colored suit, all soft flannel, and a pair of yellow deerskin shoes. A pink pearl tie-tac held his wool challis tie in place, and the knot at the collar was properly small.
"Money all over," he was saying. "Just waiting."
"Waiting for me?"
"Sure, Sara."
"Is that an offer?"
He started to laugh. The laugh was as cool and light and easy as everything else about him, soft and liquid in tone. She wished he would stop laughing. She didn't like it.
"Is it?"
"Take it anyway you want," he said. "Anyway at afl."
She didn't say anything. She was starting to sweat, could feel the perspiration on her forehead and under her arms. She forced herself to drag on the cigarette and sip the last sip of coffee but neither one did much to help her.
"Sara?"
She didn't look at him.
"We could be happy, Sara."
"You and me and six other girls?"
"They don't count. You and me, we'd be living on what they brought in."
The old nonsense. What every sweet man told every last one of his whores. And the whores always believed it. They had to believe it, it was all they had to believe in. One day they would stop hustling and they would marry the pimp and live in some small green town and raise children and open a store together. The pimp was saving the money, the money all the girls earned, but you were the special girl and he was just jiving the others along.
Sure.
In a million years.
"I won't press on you," he said. "You just think it over."
"Leave me alone."
"Why sure, Sara."
"Just leave me alone," she said. "Please."
"Sure."
He stood up, loose and free and graceful. He motioned to the counterman, pointed to Sara's empty cup, dropped a crisp dollar bill on the counter. Then he turned and walked out before she could say anything.
The counterman gave her a new cup of coffee. She didn't really want it but she forced herself to stay there and drink it. She had a sip, then thought that she could use a cigarette. She looked around. He had left the pack of Philip Morris on the counter, and she smoked two of the cigarettes with her coffee.
The counterman gave her ninety-cents change from the dollar Jubal had left for her. She didn't want to take it. It seemed as though she was already being paid for something she had no intention of doing. But there was no reason to leave the ninety cents for the sullen counterman, no reason to throw the silver coins into the gutter.
She scooped them up and put them in her purse along with the remainder of the cigarettes. She left the restaurant and went outside again.
Outside, the wind had a little edge to it. She started to head back toward her room, then changed her mind. There was nothing there for her.
She just walked.
She wasn't sure what time it was. Three o'clock, four o'clock, something like that. She was in the candy store, Glick's candy store, and she was at the counter nursing a glass of Coca-Cola and looking at a movie magazine. Everyone read the movie magazines at Glick's. Nobody ever bought any, and the magazines went back to the distributor all dog-eared and with pictures torn out. Solly Glick knew better than to complain. He sold Cokes and candy and coffee and contraceptives and thanked God he lived in Washington Heights and not in Harlem.
There were other people there, some her age, some younger. Sara didn't talk to them. She was in a sort of fog and she looked at the pages of the movie magazine without noticing what she was reading and drank her Coke slowly, through a straw, without tasting it.
When Jonah Rainey sat next to her she didn't even notice him. He said her name two times, three times, and finally it penetrated and she turned around slowly and saw him.
For a moment, she wanted to hop off her stool and ran. She remembered the night before, the almost-but-not-quite, the passion building and building and then Jonah cutting and running and her all alone by herself in the middle of nothing much.
He said: "Hello, Sara."
He was embarrassed, she saw. She felt sorry for him now, and she forced a smile and asked him how he was. He said he was fine. He ordered a coke and she took another sip of her own and looked at him over the brim of the glass.
"What've you been doing, Sara?"
"Not much."
"About last night-"
"Don't say."
"I'm just sorry. That's all."
"Sorry?"
"Yes. I shouldn't have started anything."
"You should of finished what you started, Jonah."
He looked at her. She tried to read his eyes through the thick lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses, but she couldn't tell what he was thinking.
"I wanted to, Sara."
"So?"
"It would have been wrong."
"Why?"
"Because-"
He was so young, she thought. He was young, a schoolboy, and now she felt years older than him. He was innocent, she decided. That was what it was. He was still a little boy who believed in God and goodness, and she had managed to learn that nothing on earth was all that good and that if there was a God he surely didn't care much about one Sara Jackson. If there was a God, he was white.
"If it feels so good," she said, "how's it wrong?"
"Sara-"
"If you want to do it-"
"Don't talk like that, Sara."
"Why not?"
"Because-"
"Why because?"
He started to say something, then closed his mouth and shrugged his shoulders expressively. She finished her Coke. He drank half of his, then pushed his glass away.
"Let's go," he said.
"Where?"
"I don't know."
She shrugged, stood up. She walked out of the candy store and he followed behind her, hurrying up to open the door for her, then moving up beside her. She glanced at him and compared him mentally with Jubal Bryce. One was a good boy and the other was a bad man, she thought. One was a pimp and the other would some day be a lawyer. One offered her the moon on a pure white platter and told her money did by God grow on trees, and the other just wanted to work hard for her and love her and be pure and sweet with her. A world of difference.
"You want to marry me," she said. "Don't you, Jonah?"
For a long time he didn't say anything. They kept on walking and he didn't say anything, and then he said: "Not right away."
"But sometime?"
"Sometime."
"Why?"
"Because I want to. Because I love-you."
"Well never get married, Jonah." He didn't answer her.
"We never will," she said. "Not you and me. It won't happen, not on this earth."
"Why not?"
"Just won't."
"But-"
"Maybe it could of," she said. "If my Ma lived, if things worked different. Not now. My life went and took a turn on me. It's all turning still. I can feel it. I don't know how it's fixing to come out for me, but it's gonna be all different. You and me, well never work ourselves out together, Jonah."
He didn't say anything.
"Do you want me, Jonah?"
"I just said I did. And you just said I can't have you."
"I don't mean for a wife. I mean like last night."
"Oh."
"Well? Do you?"
"Of course I do. I wanted you last night."
"Do you want to do it? Do you want to go up to my room and do it this time?"
"Now?"
"Now."
He looked at her. "I want you forever," he said.
"You can't have me forever."
"Then I'll take what I can get, I guess."
She smiled. It was an easy smile, not especially happy, with a little trace of irony in it. "No backing out," she said. "No copping out, not this time. I ain't made of wood, Jonah."
"I know."
"I'm made of flesh. Soft, warm flesh."
"God-"
"Do you want me, Jonah?"
"Yes!"
Past buildings, past stores, up steps, up flights of stairs. Turn a doorknob, step inside, close a door. Stand awkwardly, facing one another, waiting, wondering, worrying. Then step up close, each to each, and reach for each other-lips together and arms around and hold on and away we go and stop the world because I want to get off-
She pulled all the covers off the bed. She stood at the side of the bed and took off every stitch of clothing that she was wearing. He stood and watched her while she stripped herself quickly and coolly, and she saw her nude perfection mirrored in the hunger of his eyes.
His hands reached slowly out for her, drawn by the magnetism of her large brown breasts. She drew in her breath, her eyes on those hands of his, and when they touched her breasts she started to shake and shiver. Different feelings coursed all at once through her system. There was passion, building up slowly but surely in her body. There was fear; the deep dark fear of the unknown, the fear of pain and the fear of sin. There was adventure-this was something new, something different, something that was part of a world she had never-een before. There was all of this, and it stimulated her.
And he was holding her bare breasts, his hands urgent but gentle with the large globes of firm flesh.
Oh.
Ohhh!
"Get undressed," she said.
He got undressed in a hurry. He stripped off his clothes and she watched him, her eyes alive with interest. He dropped his pants and stepped out of them, Look off his underwear. She saw him then and he seemed embarrassed by the way her eyes roamed his body. She reached out, touched him, and she felt the warmth surging through him. Oh!
Then she was moving slowly backward, moving to the bed, sitting down at first and then stretching out. He lay beside her, placing his body tentatively next to hers, rolling toward her. There was a barren moment at first, and then their two bodies touched from head to toe and a shiver of pure passion shot through her system with electric fury. It killed completely the awkwardness and fear and worry for both of them. It set them on fire.
She ran hot hands over his hairless chest, threw her arms around him, rubbed his back and moved her hands down onto his buttocks. She stroked him and he stroked her and she was flaming now, aching for him, burning for him, wanting him more than she had ever wanted anything or anybody in her life. She had to have him now. Last night he had excited her and left her and she had lived through it, but today she had to have him or die.
And he had to have her.
He kissed her breasts and lust tore through her body with the speed of light and the force of a tidal wave. His hand touched her ready thighs, finding new lands to explore, touching and seeking.
Ohhhh!
She was on her back, body assuming automatically the posture of passion. He was upon her, ready, touching her with firmness, touching her with urgency. He touched, and he probed, and the world of her being opened to him and he moved toward her and then, then, then-
Pain.
A knife in her body, a thousand knives, a knife tearing her in half. She screamed shrilly with the pain, shrieked in a mixture of agony and animal need, and he was moving against her and with her and the pain ebbed like last night's tide and her body picked up the rhythms of passion and she was moving too, under him, around him, with him, and it was getting better and better and better.
Ohhhh!
Ohhhh!
His chest crushed against her breasts, pressed against them by her arms gripped around his body His body surging pleasure into her body, filling her, overpowering her. Oh!
And the world swimming, and pain gone forever now, pain an absent component, and pleasure all around, pleasure that was so intense that she thought she was going to die from it. Now the world was good again, now the streets didn't look gray in the sunlight and the halls didn't stink of beer and urine, now Harlem was heaven and God was there and all was well and ohhhhh!
More, then.
More-
And better and better and better, and faster and faster, and her head swimming and her body racing and her heart pounding and her body rocking with passion, and then-
Then the peak
Maybe she passed out. There was warmth for a long time, and then she felt him leaving her, leaving her, and he stooped once to kiss her cheek and straightened up and dressed and left. She stayed on her bed and never stirred or opened her eyes. She was warm and happy and tired, dead tired.
She knew she would never be with him again. And she knew something else:
This beat the hell out of scrubbing some white woman's floor.
CHAPTER THREE
When she finally got up, it was dark. She sat up first, stayed seated for a moment or two, then finally got to her feet and walked over to the light switch. She turned on the light, blinked a few times, then went back to the bed and threw herself down on it. She felt all warm and drowsy and funny inside.
She had always wondered how you would feel afterward, whether or not you felt different when you stopped being a virgin and became a woman instead. Now she tried to analyze how she felt. A little different, she decided. Years older, and no longer so curious about it Not guilty, not mad at herself for doing something wrong. If it felt that good, it couldn't be so bad. If it made your heart pound and your blood sing in your veins, it couldn't be the sin they made it out to be in the churches. Nothing that good could be that bad and that was all there was to be said on the subject.
She did feel different though, and there was no getting around it. She rolled over onto her back and ran her hands over her own body, feeling herself, marvelling at the texture of her skin and the feel of her flesh. She had a genuine awareness of her body now, an understanding of what it was and how it worked and what made it tick, and the awareness was the sort yon could only get in one way. You had to use your body, had to let a man play on it as a violinist plays on the strings of a violin. Only then you could know what you were and how you were put together.
Older.
More aware.
A woman, at last.
She got out of bed again, put on a robe, grabbed soap and a towel and went down the hall to the bathroom. She had showered that morning but she needed another shower, needed to wash the sick-sweet smell of past lust from her flesh. The odors of love hung on her body like old cigar smoke in the drapery of a men's club. She got under the shower and soaped herself up and washed herself clean, scrubbing her brown skin until it squeaked with cleanliness. She got out, shut off the water, dried herself, went back to her room and got dressed.
This time she put on skin-tight toreador pants and a silk blouse. The blouse was lime green, with a turned-up collar and a deep V neckline and sleeves that went halfway to her elbow. The pants were black, glossy black. She tucked her feet into high-heeled black shoes, lipsticked her mouth, mascaraed her eyes.
Sexy, she thought. She studied herself in her mirror, struck a series of poses, then tossed back her head and laughed at herself. She pictured herself dressed and made up as she was in front of the mythical dream classroom, standing at the blackboard with white chalk in her hand and a flock of boys and girls in front of her.
Yes, Miss Jackson.
No, Miss Jackson.
Can I get in your pants, Miss Jackson? She laughed.
Outside, the streets were alive. Sunday is a big night in Harlem. Harlem treasures its weekends, trying to pack into them enough vitality to make up for the deadness of the rest of the week. Sunday night is Harlem's last chance; in the morning it will be Monday, and Monday is Blue Monday no matter what color your skin is. Harlem enjoys Sunday night and sends the weekend out with not a whimper but a bang.
She got away from 116th Street. She walked over to Eighth Avenue, glanced at the subway kiosk, hesitated, then decided to save fifteen cents. She wasn't rich, not yet. In time she wouldn't think of walking the nine blocks to 125th Street. Damn, she wouldn't even ride the grubby subway. She's pop for half a buck and take a cab. But now, tonight, she could walk.
She walked. Eighth Avenue was a commercial street-stores, hockshops. used furniture outlets, barbecue chicken joints, rib joints, clothing stores, an occasional run-down residential hotel. The neighborhood got imperceptibly better as she drew closer to 125th, and then the bright lights of that particular street filled her eyes and dazzled her. She walked on 125th, read the marquee at the Apollo, studied some dresses in a brightly-lit store window, kept walking.
There was a bar near 7th Avenue called the Blue Moon Lounge. She had never been there before, had only once or twice walked past the place. But she knew what it was. The high-class hustling chicks, the fairly expensive hookers who turned twenty-dollar tricks and wore good clothes, they went there. So did their pimps. It wasn't a pick-up joint, and any John who tried to hit on a girl there was in for a cold shoulder. It was a place for the sweet men to buy each other drinks and talk shop while the juke box gave out with Miles Davis records.
She found the place easily enough. She stood outside for a moment, lit a cigarette. Her knees were shaky and she wanted suddenly to turn around and head for home, on the run.
She smoked half the cigarette and went inside.
Heads turned. Pimps, cool-eyed and calculating, turned to give her the once-over. A few hookers looked at her' and sized her up. She scanned the place quickly, looking for Jubal Bryce. He wasn't there. She went to the bar, took an empty stool, ducked ashes from her cigarette into the white porcellain ashtray on the bar top.
The bartender was a white man in a bright red jacket. He had been tending bar in Harlem for almost eight years, and he had learned to look without staring and to see without letting it show. He moved in front of Sara and asked her what she wanted.
"Beer," she said. "Any special brand?"
"Anything cold."
He brought her a bottle of Miller's, uncapped it, poured half of it against the side of a beer glass. He put the glass on a pressed paper disc and moved it in front of her, set the bottle at her right. She put a worn dollar bill on the top of the bar. He took it away, rang up the sale, brought back two quarters and put them next to the bottle of beer.
She had had beer a few times before, had neither liked nor disliked it very much. She sipped it now. It was good and cold and she decided that she liked it after all. There was a Budweiser clock behind the bar, a blue affair that revolved slowly with a clock face on one side and an advertisement on the other. She caught the time on one of its round trips. It was almost ten o'clock, and she and Jonah had gone to her room at four or so in the afternoon. She had slept for a good five hours after their love-making had finished.
Better than sleeping pills, she thought.
Much better.
And more fun.
She took another sip of her beer. Two stools to her left, a pair of sweet men in sharp clothes were arguing about the chances of the New York Mets. On her right, another pimp was sweet-talking a high-yellow hooker. The girl wore a bright red dress and a pair of yellow shoes, and her complexion was almost white. She seemed to be mad about something. The pimp had one hand high on her thigh and was stroking the side of her face with his other hand, talking slowly and gently all the while. The girl relaxed, finally, and the pimp went right on stroking her.
There was a hard bop record playing on the juke. It sounded like Coltrane. Sara listened, let the harmonies catch her and pick her up and swirl her around. She drank more beer, emptied her glass. She filled it from the bottle and sipped at it. The barman was looking her way; she crooked a finger and he hurried over.
"I was looking for Jubal Bryce," she said.
The barman nodded.
"You know him?"
"Sure. I know him."
"He been in?"
"Not yet. Half an hour, maybe an hour, hell be here. He usually comes around between ten-thirty and eleven."
"Fine," she said.
The bartender went away to fill somebody else's order. She sipped a little beer. Then somebody tapped her on the shoulder and she turned around.
It was the pimp who had been discussing the Mets. "Jubal Bryce," he said. "You want him?"
"Yes."
"What for, baby?"
"I have business with him." The man grinned. His eyes moved from her face to her knees, then came back up slowly. "Nice," he said. She didn't say anything. "Very nice."
"Jubal," she said.
"Baby, like you don't need Jubal. Won't I do?"
She started to turn away. He laughed, low and easy, quite like Jubal's laugh. "Easy, baby," he said. "Maybe I can reach him. You stick right here while I see. And if Jubal don't pan out, you just look up a stud named Lonnie Lace. Which is me, baby."
He walked to the r-ear of the bar, went into a phone booth. He made a call, talked for a moment or two while she finished her beer and ordered another. He came out smiling.
"He's on his way," he told her.
"Thank you."
"Don't mention. Your name Sara?"
"That's right."
"That's what he said. Said he was sort of expecting you, baby. Sara's a nice name. I used to know a girl named Sara. Nice girl, too. Just about your color."
He went away. She sipped the new beer. That was one thing about beer, she thought. The more you drank of it, the better it tasted. The first glass had seemed a little bitter, but now it was sweet as sugar candy and went down as smooth as milk.
So Jubal was expecting her. The louse, she thought. The damn nigger louse, he had his damn nerve. Expecting her? And sure enough of his damn self to tell about it?
Suddenly she was laughing. All right, she thought. All right, so what was the matter with that? He was a smart man, Jubal was He could take a look at her, talk with her for a moment, and he could know that she was ready to play his game. It wasn't his fault that he was a good judge of character. She couldn't blame him for something like that.
More beer.
Cool, dry, smooth
"Hello, Sara."
It was Jubal. of course. She turned around, her head light and loose with the beer, and her lips curled in a smile. He was smiling, too, his teeth bright, his eyes sure of themselves. He held out a brown hand and she took it. He helped her down from her stool and led her out of the bar.
The fresh air and the bright lights hit her like a ton of flagstones. She started to stagger and he caught hold of her and held her up.
"You stoned, baby?"
"No."
"Not a bit?"
"Well-"
"What you need is air," he said. "Fresh air. Yon need a ride in a car, baby."
His car was parked at the curb next to a fire hydrant and a few feet from a No Parking sign. It was a Caddillac, of course, A convertible, of course. Powder blue, with a million extras and real leather seats and power everything. He opened a door and she got in. He walked around the big car, opened the door on his side, got behind the wheel. He didn't say anything and neither did she.
He started the car, pulled away from the curb. The top was down and the wind rushed against her face as the big car surged forward, motor purring effortlessly, heading west on 125th for the river.
They picked up the West Side Drive at 125th and went north along the Hudson. The air was clearer and cooler. She looked across the river at Jersey, looked at trees and shrubbery and green grass. It was a different world entirely from 116th Street, a world she had never had a chance to know.
The car's radio was turned to a station that supplied a lot of soft music and hardly any commercials. Up past the George Washington Bridge Jubal braked the Caddy and cut the motor and pulled off into a parking area. He fixed the key so that the radio would go on playing. He leaned back in his seat, lit two cigarettes, gave one of them to her. She smoked and looked at him and listened to the music.
He said, "I dig it up here."
She nodded.
"Cool," he said. "Peaceful, like. You know?"
"Sure."
"A person can think. Relax, like. Talk without a million people tuning in and making noises of their own."
"Uh-huh."
"Sara? Why'd you come looking for me?"
"Because."
"Why?"
"Because I'm so damn sick of being poor," she said. "Because I had a bellyful of collard greens and black-eyed peas."
"Greens," he said. "Man, don't I remember. I ain't had greens in years and don't care if I never taste 'em again. There's a place I know serves up a steak an inch thick that makes your mouth water to think on it. You ever have a steak like that? With a big baked potato and beer to wash it all down?"
She didn't say anything.
He said: "Being poor ain't no picnic."
"I know it. And that one little room, and the dirt, and nobody there to be with me, and-"
"Come here, Sara."
And he kissed her. It was not much like Jonah's kiss. The warmth was there, all right, but it was a different sort of warmth. His arms were around her, warm, gentle, protective. His tongue was in her mouth, arousing her expertly, making her warm and gently passionate. She held onto him and one of his hands moved to cup one of her breasts, holding it tenderly but firmly.
"Nice," he said.
She was silent.
"You're as pretty a girl as I ever saw," he told her. "You're sweet-talking me."
"Uh-huh. Don't you like it?"
"I guess I do."
"Sure you do. A woman needs a little sweet talk to make her know she's a woman. But you're pretty, Sara. Pretty face. And I love your hands, baby."
"My hands?"
He took one of them, ran the tips of his fingers over it. "Soft," he said. "Soft and nicely shaped. Fine."
No one had ever told her that she had pretty hands.
"And your body. Such a fine body. These breasties. You got the nicest pair I ever touched, Sara."
She was leaning back on the seat now. Her eyes were closed. He brushed her lips with his, then put his face between her breasts. The lime-green blouse plunged at the neckline to expose some of her cleavage, and his lips came between the tops of her smooth breasts and touched the silky skin there. It sent a shiver through her body that was a pure delight.
"And your legs," he said.
"My legs?"
"Your legs."
"Touch them, Jubal."
A hand settled on her ankle, squeezed. The hand moved up slowly, held her calf, stroked the smooth nut-brown skin.
"Like silk," he said.
She wanted to moan, to cry, to scream. She sighed and her breasts rose and fell and he planted another kiss between them. She put a hand on the back of his head and pressed his face between the two large breasts.
The hand moved higher on her leg. The hand stroked and patted and squeezed her knee, then came up higher onto her thigh. Every time the hand moved she started shaking more and more inside, and when the hand crept high up on the inside of one thigh she thought she was going to turn to butter. She was all soft and creamy inside and she couldn't stand it, it was too much, too sweet, too wonderful.
Higher.
Higher-
"Never wear panties," he whispered. "They just get in a man's way, Sara."
She could feel his hand through the sheer material of the panties. He touched, probed.
His fingers crept under the panties. And he was touching her with skill, probing, fingers finding her and inflaming her.
His lips were at her ear. "There's an apartment," he said. "Clean white linen sheets on a great big bed. You about ready to go there, Sara?"
"I can't wait."
"We won't do it here," he said. "Not in a car. An ordinary gal, I might take her here, right in the car, take her and finish her and to hell with her. Not you, Sara. With you it's a big bed in a clean place or nothing at all."
And he left her, moved again behind the wheel, started up the car She didn't pay any attention to where they were going. She stayed as she was, head back, eyes shut, while the car hurried south again and found a place to park. When he led her from the car she didn't know what street she was on and she didn't care.
It was a wide street, with tall apartment buildings equipped with canopies. Most of the buildings had doormen in attendance decked out in livery. There were tall trees in front of the buildings. The street was clean and quiet
"This can't be Harlem," she said. "Where are we?"
"In Harlem."
"You're jiving me."
He laughed. "No jive," he said. "You think every black man has to be poor? You think every black man has to live like a damn pig? This is Harlem, Sara. The good part of Harlem."
A silent self-service elevator carried them to the ninth floor. They walked through a carpeted hallway to a door that Jubal opened with a key. He took her inside and she looked at good furniture and expensive carpeting. He led her straight to the bedroom, put jazz records on a stereo rig, turned down the lights.
The bed was the biggest one she had ever seen. It was at least nine feet square, and it was covered with a pale green spread. Jubal took down the spread, folded it, put it on a boudoir chair. He pulled back the top sheet, propped up a pillow in the middle of the bed, "Take off your shoes," he said.
She took them off.
"Now lie down on your back. And close your eyes, Sara, my baby, my Sara. Close your eyes and let Jubal do everything there is to do. That's all, girl."
She did as he said, lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. She heard him undressing in the half-light but she didn't open her eyes to look at him. She felt funny now. The tremendous wave of excitement he had generated in the front seat of the powder-blue Caddy had passed, but at the same time she wanted him to make love to her, wanted every caress he would give her. She wasn't excited actually but she was warm inside, ready, prepared.
And then it began.
He was like a soft warm wind in the summer. He was beside her, his hands on the sides of her face, stroking gently and knowingly. And his fingers found the buttons of her lime green blouse and opened them one by one. He slipped her arms out of the sleeves and took the blouse away and her body was bare to the waist.
He drove her breasts wild.
He used his hands and his lips. He drew circles around her stiff nipples with his lips until the nipples stood up and ached. He pressed the nipples all the way in with the tips of his fingers and the combination of pain and pleasure was so intense that she gasped. He opened her toreador pants and tugged them down and off, and he pulled off her panties and rolled them into a fluffy ball and hurled them across the room.
And then-
Then-
God, what happened then?
Then he did things to her legs that she never would have believed possible. He made them itch and he made them tingle and he made them burn, and he touched every bit of her and kissed every bit of her and-
And he threw himself on her, and he took her with a fury that was impossible and inconceivable and irresitible and delicious and wonderful and God God God and he powered against her and upset her and burned her and boiled her and devoured her and consumed her and inflamed her and turned her upside-down and inside-out and around and around and around and-
When it was over, all over, entirely over, completely over, she was limp and weak and sick and fulfilled and half-dead and all-alive and everything, everything, everything all at once. She lay still and silent in a pool of soggy passion while he touched her and caressed her and brought her slowly but surely back to life.
His lips, at her ear.
He said, "Now you belong to me, Sara." And he was right. She did.
She slept. He woke her by making love to her again, and he taught her new things to do that she had never even known about, and he showed her more ways and byways of love than she had ever dreamed existed. He wore her out, broke her on the wheel of love, and put her back to sleep once again with the surging power of his entire masculinity. This time she slept thoroughly and completely and dreamed no dreams at all, and when she opened her eyes again it was morning.
"I'll cook breakfast," she said.
"To hell with that."
"I'm a good cook."
"I eat out, girl. Get dressed."
She got dressed. He drove to a ham-and-eggery on Upper Broadway and they had plates of scrambled eggs with country sausages and glasses brimful of fresh orange juice and mugs of strong black coffee and toast with butter and jam. They smoked cigarettes and drank more coffee and he grinned at her.
"I got a place for you to live," he said.
She was disappointed at first. Wasn't she going to live in his apartment with him? Of course not, she thought. She was just one of the cows in his stable. When it was her turn to spend a night with him, then she would go to his place. Otherwise she would stay in her own place. She knew the rules. She had lived in Harlem all her life, and you couldn't very easily live there without knowing the rules of pimps and whores.
"You'll go out tonight," he said. "You'll cruise around and see what kind of money you can come up with, Sara. Good enough?"
"Sure."
"And you're my woman, understand? You do what I say and you bring me your money. I'm your manager. I take care of your rent, I make sure the fix is in, I handle all your expenses. That way you don't have to be bothered with details."
That way she didn't get to keep a nickel, she thought! But did it matter? She would have a fairly decent life. The money he would let her have might be damn little in relation to what she would earn, but it would still be three or four or five times what she could make scrubbing some white woman's floor. And the work would be a damn sight easier A man paid you twenty dollars to lie on your back and toss your hips around while he dumped his passion into you. Where else could you make so much money with so little sweat? Nowhere that she knew about.
"You better start on the streets," he said. "Get you going nice that way. Pick up a little experience and we'll have dates coming right up to your apartment and you won't have to hustle. But the streets is the best place to learn the ropes."
The streets. That part didn't sound all that good to her. She tried to imagine herself walking on 125th Street and shaking her hips at the white men who came there hunting brown fun. Damn, she could manage it. She could con a white man and not feel bad about it. It might be embarrassing to turn a trick with a colored man, but with a white man it would be a cinch.
"Come on," he said. "I'll show you the place I got for you."
The place was on 128th Street just off Saint Nicholas Avenue. It was nothing like the place where Jubal lived but that only stood to reason. Still in all, it was a world away from 116th Street. The building was fairly clean and her place was not one cramped room but three rooms, a living room and a bedroom and a kitchen. It got her a little creepy to look at the bed in the bedroom; the bed was there to ball tricks on, and that got to her a bit. But she managed to get used to it quickly enough.
He told her when to start work and how to conduct herself and how much to charge and where to go looking for tricks, told her a million and one little things that she would have to know. He told her all of this in a perfectly business-like manner, as if they were just manager and client going over procedural matters. Then, when he had finished, he shifted gears as smoothly as you would shift them in a Ferrari and started filling her ears with love-talk all over again. She thought he was going to take her to bed again but he didn't, just told her where to meet him at four or five in the morning when she was done working. Then he kissed her-just a quick peck on the lips-and he left.
And she was alone in her new apartment.
She cleaned it up, first of all. The furniture was all passable and the place was fairly clean, but she made it shine. She went to her old room, took along all the clothes that were any good at all, and left everything else for. the landlord to throw out on his own. She took them home to her new apartment, hung them in her new closet or folded them and placed them in the drawers of her new bureau. She went out to a Food Fair and stocked up the refrigerator and the cupboards. She stopped at a five and dime and bought pots and pans and dishes. As an afterthought she ducked into a delicatessen and picked up a six-pack of beer.
She drank a can of beer at home. It was Miller's High Life, the same brand she had had at the Blue Moon Lounge the night before, and this time she drank it straight from the can and liked it even better that way. She finished the can in a hurry and was about to have another when she changed her mind. No sense getting bombed, she thought. Not so early in the day.
She had come a long way, she thought. All the way from 116th Street to 128th. She laughed. It would be better now, she thought. And Jubal did care for her-she was sure of it. After all, he couldn't make that kind of love to her if he was only interested in the money she would bring in. He liked her, he thought she was pretty-
Cool it, she thought. Don't get carried away. Don't dream impossible dreams.
She smiled.
CHAPTER FOUR
It wasn't hard for Sara to get to work. Her mother, Cora Jackson, had had considerably more difficult commuting. She had to take the CC train some four stops. Sara, living at 128th and Saint Nicholas, had it easier. She walked downstairs, first of all. She walked to the comer of Saint Nicholas. She walked three blocks south to 125th Street.
And then she was in business.
If you are a Harlem fly chick who pounds the pavement, there are three main places you can choose to display your wares and contact prospective clients. First is midtown Whore Row, a location which may vary with the political climate. It used to be Eighth Avenue. At the moment it is that stretch of Seventh Avenue from 49th Street to 52nd Street, give or take a block in either direction. There's a hotel there, and a dance studio, and a few restaurants of varying degrees of plushness. And, after midnight, there are a tremendous number of hookers per square inch. The few blocks of Whore Row teem with them, mostly colored with a sprinkling of Puerto Ricans. They are tall and short, light and dark, queens and pigs, clean ones and diseased ones. Some of them hustle every man who passes by. Others stand still or walk slowly back and forth while their pimps line up customers and handle financial arrangements.
That's one place. Second is a certain block in lower Greenwich Village. The ordinary traffic is thinner there, and the men who walk that block have come there in search of the women who are walking the street. There are sailors on shore leave, uptown types hot for Village fun, perverts who figure the area is the right place to find a girl who won't mind something out of the ordinary. White hookers predominate on this street, but a few of the Harlem girls are always around.
And then there's Harlem itself.
If Harlem were nothing but a Negro ghetto, half its mystery would be instantly dispelled. It is much more than that. For the white whore-chaser, native New Yorker or tourist, Harlem is the happiest of hunting grounds.
Whatever a man is seeking, he can generally locate it uptown. And, because of the persistence of myths which hold that Negro girls are more passionate, more experimental, more willing to please and what have you, the Negro prostitute is very much a creature of romance and intrigue.
A psychologist or a sociologist could tell you why.
The night had a wind, and the wind had an edge to it. The night picked up the hem of the deep orange dress Sara was wearing and tugged at it. The wind snapped at her legs-she was not wearing stockings; her only decent pair had a run in them-and the wind was cold on her face and cold under her arms and cold everywhere. She stepped into a doorway, fished in her patent leather purse for a cigarette She found one, put it in her mouth, and struck three matches before she managed to get it going The wind blew out the first two matches and she cursed the wind silently.
Maybe she should have worn a coat. She wondered about that. Jubal hadn't said anything about a coat, and so she hadn't worn one. The tricks would probably want to see her body and the coat would hide her body, so that was one good reason not to wear one. But the wind, the damn wind-
She dragged on the cigarette. The window of the closed dress shop served as a mirror and she studied herself in it briefly. Not bad at all, she decided. The lip rouge, the dangling (and cheap) ear-rings the pencilled eyebrows-she looked fine, and she looked older than she was. That was another reason to pass up the coat, she thought. It was a little kid's coat in style and it would make her look young, and she wanted to look old enough to be a hustler. That, she thought, was probably fairly important.
Another drag on the cigarette. Then she stepped out of the doorway and turned the corner onto 125th Street. The whole block was a beehive of activity, with girls walking slowly to and fro or standing singly or in pairs in doorways. This was no surprise. It was early yet, not quite midnight, and Jubal had told her that the compitition was keen at that hour. Before twelve-thirty or so, the police didn't permit hustling on Seventh Avenue. Too many respectable citizens were around at that hour and it didn't look good, so a hustler who hit Seventh Avenue's Whore Row before twelve-thirty or one stood a good chance of getting busted. The early birds would try to catch a few tricks uptown before they went down to work Seventh Avenue.
Sara waited, watching. She saw a John moving down the block toward her. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a pair of brown shoes, and he carried a top coat over one arm. He looked young, not more than twenty-five. He had a pasty white face and nervous eyes. A tall, sure-of-herself hustler moved out of a doorway, cut into his path. The girl's hand landed on the boy's arm and the girl said something in a low voice.
From where she was standing, Sara couldn't follow the conversation. She could only see the action. The boy was nervous, anxious to connect with a hustler but manifestly unsure of himself. The hustler was loaded for bear-this was a live one, a scaredy-cat who would shell out with long bread because he didn't know which end was up. Sara saw the chick nuzzling her face into the boy's throat, rubbing her breasts against his arm. The boy was in a sweat. The hustler's hand moved between their two bodies and did something to the front of the boy's body. The hand moved, slowly but surely, very surely, very sure of itself. The hand won out.
Sara stepped back into a doorway. They were coming her way now, the boy with his arm around the brown-skinned gal's waist, the chick letting her hip sock into his side every time they took a step together. That was smart, Sara thought. She wasn't letting him off the hook, wanted to keep him as eager as she could. Jubal had told her about that. The hotter you got them on the way to your pad, the easier it was to get things started, the easier to get a good price. And, most important of all, the faster they ran their course and finished.
The two of them drew up closer. Sara caught a good look now. The boy was even younger than she had guessed and he was really in a sweat, his brow all beaded with perspiration. The girl looked at Sara. She wasn't young-thirty if she was a day-and she wasn't particularly good-looking, although her body stacked up nice enough. The hustler dropped one eyelid at Sara in a broad wink, then mouthed two syllables without making a sound. Two-oh, she mimed. Twenty, Sara thought. A pick-up on 125th was rarely worth that kind of money. And by the time the girl gouged the kid another five for the "hotel room" and a few bucks more for this and that, it would run close to thirty, maybe even better than that.
She was envious.
Time to get to working, she thought. She stepped out again, began walking along the street. The important thing, Jubal had told her, was to make damn certain she looked like a whore. The average trick was a timid man, he said. Scared to make a mistake. The more you looked like a cheap randy slut, the better chance you stood of scoring. If there was anything innocent in your appearance, a lot of tricks would be afraid to make a pitch for you.
She tried for fifteen minutes. But the competition was too keen and the tricks were too few and far between After fifteen minutes she called it quits and took a break, ducking into a cheap bar for a glass of beer. She sat at the bar and nursed a glass of Rhinegold and smoked a cigarette, wishing it would hurry and get late so the downtown broads would get their butts down to Seventh Avenue and make a little room for her.
It was twenty to one and she was out on the street and a man was coming her way. She stepped right out onto the sidewalk, ready now, hungry now. Her eyes took him in at a glance-loud sport jacket, wide tie, shined shoes, pleated pants. A square from Hicksville, she decided. A hot-pants square looking to score.
"Hello," she said. She made her voice as throaty as she possibly could. She moved forward, meeting him, and her hand went out and settled on his arm.
"Such a nice night," she murmured.
He didn't say anything.
"'Cept it's a little cold," she said. "Little on the cold side. Now us two could make it kind of warmer, don't you think?"
"Well, now," he said. He smiled, showing about sixty-four big white teeth. He had a broad face and a Midwestern drawl, and he was a Swede or a Kraut or something, and she thought that he would be as easy as rolling off a log.
"Want some company, honey?"
"What'll it cost me?"
"Less than I'm worth," she said. "I'm good as gold, baby."
He grinned. "How much?" "Twenty."
"For twenty bucks," he said, "I can have a movie star."
Oh, great, she thought. She had to get a bargain-hunter. "That's what I get," she said. "Man, like I could be a movie star, if'n I wanted. But I'd just rather go to bed with white men."
Put on the nigger-talk, Jubal had told her. That's what they pay to hear. Put a handkerchief on your head and make like you just came out of the jungle. Give it to 'em the way they want to hear it. That's where the bread is.
"Ten," he said.
She took his hand in her hand and rubbed his hand against the front of her skirt, for luck. "Twenty, baby."
"Ten."
She sighed heavily, let his hand drop, turned from him. She started to walk away, knowing she would settle for ten if that was all she could get from him. But he didn't let her get away. He caught her arm and stepped after her.
"Fifteen."
"Man," she said, sounding angry, "this ain't an auction, you dig? You want to buy quality, you pay for it. I been getting thirty plenty of times. I made you a good price from the beginning and you can take it or pass it up."
He took it, of course. She had known he would as soon as he was so quick to jump to fifteen. She had him pegged now. He wanted to bargain because someone had told him you could bargain with hookers, but he was green enough not to know how to go about it. He'd make a token show of bargaining and then he'd give you just what you asked for. Well, fine. He was her first trick and she was getting a good price for him.
She let him feel one of her breasts in a doorway, more or less to seal the bargain. Then she walked to Saint Nicholas Avenue with him and turned the corner and headed uptown. Should she try to gouge a buck or two for the room? No, she decided. This was her first trick and she wanted to make it run smoothly. And twenty was plenty.
He got shaky on the stairway. He was in a Harlem building now and he was afraid of what might suddenly happen to him. For all he knew, there was a big man with a razor just waiting to take all his money and cut his throat for him. She was glad he was scared. By the time he got in the room he'd be so grateful to be alone and safe with her that he wouldn't give her any trouble at all.
They climbed the stairs, went to her apartment. She let him inside and went in after him and locked the door. He took out a battered old wallet, counted out four five-dollar bills, and gave them to her. She put them in a dresser drawer and closed it and they went into the bedroom together.
It was easy from there on in. He was just an old Kraut farmer and all he wanted was something to tell the boys about back in Wisconsin. He wasn't a pervert, didn't have any fancy ideas in his head. She got out of her clothes and she gave him a few minutes to play with her breasts and tease her nipples a little. It didn't do a thing to her, of course, didn't even make her feel the least bit funny inside, but she had the sense to put on the right sort of act and make him think she was getting warm as a two-dollar pistol.
He was a farmer, all right. He didn't even get out of his clothes, just dropped his pants and piled on top of her There was a bad moment when she felt herself tensing up and thought that she might have a hard time going through with it, but then she relaxed and shifted gears and slipped easily into her act, and he slipped just as easily, and it began.
She gave him a hell of a ride. She turned him upside down and inside out, and by the time she was through with him he was happily exhausted. It didn't take long at all. He was quick like a bunny, on-again off-again Finnegan, and in less than two minutes it was time for him to pull up his pants and go home.
"You colored girls," he said.
She smiled at him. The smile was supposed to look as though she was wonderfully satisfied and had enjoyed every minute of it. She didn't know whether or not it was effective.
"You colored girls. You just love it, don't you?"
"I reckon," she said.
"Hotter'n hell."
"Sure thing."
"Well, now," he said.
She propped herself up on the bed letting her breasts hang temptingly before him. "Want to go again?"
"How much?"
"Just ten Bargain time."
"I guess not," he said.
"I got this little trick I learnwl." she said "This sailor taught me. He picked it up in Egypt, something like that. It'll drive you nuts, man."
He was hesitating. Slowly, temptingly, she spread her legs apart and put her hand between them, touching herself like a teen-ager after dark.
That did it.
He gave her ten more dollars and dropped his pants again. She did something with him that Jubal had taught her the night before. It was a little out of the ordinary and she had never even known about it before, and it was a cinch that the farmer had never heard of it. He was almost screaming by the time he was done, and he went out the door happy and she had thirty of his dollars instead of twenty.
Jubal would be proud of her.
She put the thirty bucks behind the stove in a little hiding place she had figured out for herself that afternoon. She went into the bathroom, washed, got dressed, smoked a quick cigarette, and went outside again.
By three-thirty in the morning there was a hundred and fifteen dollars in the hiding place behind the stove She had turned a total of eight tricks, counting the farmer as two. Four had been ten-buck jobs, one was fifteen, and another was twenty. The twenty-dollar had been something special, a pervert from Long Island who wanted to be whipped with his belt. She flogged him for ten minutes until he dampened her bedding and left smiling, and that was the easiest twenty dollars anybody ever earned.
At three-thirty she left her apartment and walked back to 125th Street. Halfway down the block two girls were double-teaming a bald white man, offering him a parlay, possibly making it a two-for-the-price-of-one deal. She smiled to herself. It was hunger time for the tricks-who hadn't scored yet. It was getting late-in two hours the tricks would be very few and very far-between. And the girls who had not had any luck had to hustle like crazy to make a decent night's pay in the little time that remained. No point in competing with them, she decided. Not with so much money tucked away already.
She ducked into a coffee bar and took a small booth by herself in the rear of the place. She ordered coffee and a sliced chicken sandwich and an order of fries. The fries were greasy but the sandwich was good and the coffee was properly strong.
When she was finishing the sandwich a girl came over and sat with her. Sara had seen the girl before, outside, but she looked different in the bright coffee-shop light. Hollow-eyed, haggard, old: Her fingernails had been bitten down to the bone and her hair was frizzy and washed-out.
"You're new," the girl said. "I'm Mildred Catton."
"Sara Jackson."
"You new in the life?"
"I started tonight."
"New as a shiny penny," Mildred Catton said. "Who you with?"
"Jubal."
"Jubal Bryce?"
"Uh-huh."
"I know Jubal," she said. She had a far-away look in her eyes and they were slightly glazed. A junkie, Sara realized suddenly. A junkie, and stoned right now.
"I know Jubal," she said again, voice dreamy. "I used to be with him, you know? He used to be my man."
She tried to picture Jubal with this junked-up wreck. It seemed impossible.
"Couple years ago," Mildred went on. "I was new to the life, just a hincty little kid with nothing in her head but cotton batten. And old Jubal was my man.
He traded me off, though."
"He traded you?"
"Don't sound so surprised, baby! Yeah, like he traded me with Johnny May. So I'm in Johnny May's stable. He's a good man, baby. Treats me so fine. He's saving all my money and all the money the other chicks earn. You know that?"
She nodded.
"Saving it all," Mildred went on. "Them other chicks, they are just a-long for the ride. Soon as there's enough money in the bank, Johnny May and me are cuttin out Cuttin' out and cuttin' loose. You know that, girl?"
She nodded again.
"He has this bowling alley he's got his eye on," Mildred said. "Out on the Island, dig. Johnny May, he'll be the manager, and I'll serve beer and sandwiches and all. And we'll both go down to Lexington first and shake our habits, on account of you don't need no heroin habit once you're out of the life. You on the needle, Sara?"
"No."
"No? You will, though."
"No, I won't."
Mildred laughed bitterly. "Another month and you'll be popping now and then," she said. "And another month and you're on the mainline, and a week or two of that and you're hooked through the bag and back again."
"It won't happen."
"Bet?"
"Listen-"
"I gotta split," Mildred said. "Got. To. Split. You just see there, Sara. And you tell Jubal ... tell him-"
"Tell him what?"
"Tell him I wish he was dead," Mildred said. "Tell him to drop dead and go to hell for himself."
She picked up one more trick after she left the coffee bar. She picked up a college kid from Columbia and took him back to her apartment. He only had ten dollars, so she took that much and dropped it in a dresser drawer and took him to bed. He was a virgin, and he was a fairly drunk virgin, and it took him a long time to get ready. She finally stole his virginity from him and sent him back to his dormitory, a man now in name if not in fact.
At a quarter to five she met Jubal in the Blue Moon Lounge. The juke box was giving out with a Monk record and Jubal was standing at the bar, looking razor-sharp in a camel-hair cashmere sport jacket and a pair of cocoa slacks. His shoes were lizard, his tie a Countess Mara original, his tie-pin solid gold. He turned to her and smiled broadly, and when she went to him he put his arm around her waist and hugged her close and kissed her throat. She felt all warm inside, all warm and tingling and she was glad that he was her man and she was with him. She hoped he would be proud of her.
She thought he would ask right off how much she had earned, but he didn't. Instead he set up a beer for her and drank with her and talked to her, introducing her to some of the sweet men and some of their girls. Then he took her outside and she sat beside him in the front seat of the Caddy and he pulled the car away from the curb and drove.
"How much, Sara?"
"One-twenty-five."
"Good baby," he said. "Good girl."
"Are you proud of me?"
"Real proud," he said. "Why, for a first night's work-"
But he didn't sound that proud, she decided. The way he said it, it sounded as though it wasn't bad for a first night but she ought to do better than that once she got in the groove. Well, he was right. She would do better once she got the hang of it. She told him, proud of herself, about the way she had managed to get thirty bucks out of the farmer. He oohed and ahhed a bit and patted her on the leg and she beamed.
"You got that bread on you, Sara?"
"It's back at the apartment."
"Then let's get it, girl."
He drove her back to her place and parked out In front, and she led him up the stairs thinking how much nicer it was to go up the stairs with your own man than with a trick. She unlocked the door and took him inside and showed him her hiding place behind the stove.
"I never let the tricks see me stash the bread here," she explained. "I just throw it in a dresser drawer, and I hide it once they're gone."
"Good girl," he said.
He counted the money twice. He started to tuck it away in his alligator wallet, then hesitated and drew out twenty dollars and gave it to her.
"You did pretty good," he said. "I figure, well, here's a little present from me to you."
"Twenty?"
"It's your first night. Hell, baby, buy yourself something pretty. I want you looking swell all the time."
He was being good to her, she thought. Actually he didn't have to give her anything. She thanked him and kissed him and took the twenty and put it in her purse. She went to put the purse away in her dresser and he came up behind her while she was bending over and put one hand on her buttocks while he leaned over to kiss the back of her neck. She felt herself getting all funny inside and she turned to him and threw her arms around his neck. She kissed him and ground her groin against him and thrust her tongue halfway down his throat.
"Those tricks," he said. "You didn't waste any of this on them, did you?"
"Course not."
"You better not," he said. "You do and I'll cut you bad, girl."
She knew what he meant. You could do anything in the world with a trick as long as you didn't feel a thing. But a fly chick who let a trick get to her was cheating on her sweet man and she deserved anything that happened to her. You could take on twenty men a night and you were all right. But let one of them give you a thrill and you weren't fit to sleep with boys.
"You don't have to worry on that score," she said.
"I hope not."
"No white man could get me warm, Jubal."
"No black man either. Nobody but me, Sara."
"You know it."
"Come here, then."
She thought he was going to make love to her. He didn't, though. He kissed her some, and he felt her breasts a little, and he put his hand under her dress to touch her briefly for luck. Then he chuckled and straightened up, kissed her a final time and left.
And she was alone.
It was late, close to five-thirty. The sky was light with false dawn and the sun was set to rise soon. She didn't feel tired yet but she knew it was time for her to get to bed and grab some sleep for herself. She undressed-I she was getting damn good at that, she thought, getting out of her clothes a million times a night. She undressed, went into her bathroom and ran the tub brimful of hot water. She got in and soaked, letting the fingerprints of all the men float from her skin, letting the residue of their dispelled lust soak from her flesh. She lay in the tub with her eyes closed and let her mind wander free and easy all over the map. Tired.
Very damn tired.
The bath was doing that to her, soaking her through and through, easing her, pacifying her mind. She took a deep breath of steamy air and let the day go through her mind again. She thought about each trick in turn. She still remembered some of them in detail, but it was funny the way they could sort of run together in your mind so that you couldn't recall exactly what it was you did with which man, so that they all got to looking alike and acting alike in your mind.
Funny.
She thought about Mildred Catton. There was a girl who was on her way to hell, she thought. First Jubal had strung her along, and now this Johnny May fellow was stringing her along, and meanwhile the heroin was rotting her system and she was on the way to the grave. There was no excuse for letting yourself go like that, she thought. No excuse in all the world. A girl who let herself fall apart that way deserved damn near anything that happened to her.
According to Mildred, she would be on heroin in no time at all. A lot of the hustling chicks used it, she knew, but she was damned a dozen times over if she was going to let herself be one of them. As soon as you were hooked, then you were through. And the cost-hell, it ran you something like thirty or forty dollars a day, and you got so you were working half the time for your man and the other half of your habit, and that was no damn good at all.
For a moment, a bad moment, she thought of Cora Jackson in her grave in Potter's field. Cora Jackson would turn over in that grave if she knew what her daughter was doing. Cora Jackson would turn over and over, sick inside. Cora Jackson had not raised her daughter to become a whore for white men.
But her mother had lived the good life, the right life, and what had it ever gotten her? Nothing but heartache, she thought. Nothing but a dirty room on 116th Street and collard greens and black-eyed peas and the smell of poverty and work all day and pray all night and die die die a day at a time.
This was better, wasn't it?
Of course it was. It had to be.
Finally she pulled the plug and sat in the white tub while the water ran out. Then she got up and dried off and went to her bedroom. The sheet was dirty with the by-products of lust and it bothered her a little to sleep in the same bed where she had entertained all those men. But she pushed this out of her mind and got under the covers and closed her eyes and slept.
CHAPTER FIVE
At one in the afternoon, she woke up. She blinked a little, started to sit up, then realized there was no reason to get up yet. She had nothing to do and no place to go and a little more sleep wouldn't do her any harm. She closed her eyes and slipped back under the covers again, nestling her head on her pillow and shutting out day.
She dozed, half awake and half asleep, for another hour or so. Then she got up and got dressed. She put on slacks and an old sweater and cooked some eggs for breakfast and made some instant coffee. Then she went out.
She had the twenty dollars Jubal had given her plus a few more dollars from before. She went over to a good block of 125th near Lenox and did some window shopping, looking at dresses and skirts and sweaters. She wound up buying two seven-dollar dresses and taking them home and hanging them in her closet. One was a black cotton cut low in front, a good working dress. The other was red, also cut low in front, and cut so low in the back that another sort of cleavage showed. Jubal would like it, she thought. He really liked her behind, and this way he would be able to pat it without any cloth in the way. He could just reach down and put his big hand between her buttocks and goose her a little.
She giggled. It was three-thirty when she left her apartment for the second time and she still didn't have much of anything to do. She wound up going to a movie on Lenox Avenue and killing a few hours that way.
The movie was a love story, a period piece set around the time of the French Revolution. There was a young count, a supporter of the Old Regime who was going to be guillotined by the revolutionaries unless he managed to get out of France. There was a beautiful young peasant girl, busty and lusty, who fell in love with the count although she knew he was considered an enemy of the people. There was the sincere young revolutionary whose younger sister had been trampled to death under the hooves of a nobleman's horses. The sincere young revolutionary hated all nobles, and the count hated peasants, and the lusty busty peasant wench was caught somewhere in the middle.
The movie was in cinemascope and in technicolor. It had a cast of thousands. It also had an execrable script, routine direction, and stereotyped acting, and it was abysmal.
Sara enjoyed it very much.
She left the theater and stopped at a rib joint for a basket of ribs and a coke. She was hungry and she ate everything in front of her, paid her check and left.
At midnight she went to work.
It was a slow night. It started nicely enough-she caught a quick trick after only five minutes on the street, and she picked up a fast fifteen dollars lying on her mattress and moaning theatrically while a hairy-chested man kissed her breasts and drove his passion into her. She put the fifteen dollars in her hiding place and went back to the street, and this time she waited for half an hour with no luck at all, and then it started to rain.
The rain fell in big lazy drops that made marks the size of a silver dollar on the pavement. At first she tried sticking it out in a doorway, ducking out now and then to try making a pitch for a passer-by. It didn't work well at all, and all she managed to do was to get herself wet each time she made a play for a prospective trick. She might have stayed there another half hour if it hadn't been for Lu.
Lu was a high-yellow chick with platinum hair and tremendous breasts. Lu was walking by, a newspaper held over her head, when she saw Sara standing in the doorway. She ducked in, ran her eyes over her, tossed back her head and laughed.
"Wow," she said. "You must be awfully hung up, hustling in this kind of weather."
"What am I supposed to do?"
"Supposed to have enough sense to come in out of the rain," Lu said.
"And not turn a trick?"
"There's a way to do both," Lu said. "Come along, now. Walk between the raindrops, girl."
Lu led her to a cellar bar on Saint Nicholas Avenue near 124th. The bar was downstairs of a two-buck hotel named Jem's Place. There were eight or nine girls in the place when they got there, and one look told Sara what business they were all in.
"You can hustle all you want here," Lu said. She had a soft West Indian accent, what Sara's mother had always called monkey talk. "You can hustle up a storm."
"Hustle? There's nothing but chicks to hustle."
Lu laughed. "The. Johns'll come," she said. "Don't you be worrying about that. The cabbies bring 'em here and the bartenders send 'em here and they find the place themselves. You don't have to cut the bartender in on the take or nothing. Just one rule."
"What's that?"
"You got to ball the tricks here. No taking them back to your room. It ain't allowed. You just go upstairs and get a room and the trick pays two bucks for it. That's how the joint makes its money."
"Can they make money that way?"
"You don't know a thing," Lu said. "You been in the life long?"
"I started last night."
"Wow Dig, they get two bucks a room They turn over a room fifteen, twenty times a night That's thirty or forty bucks a night for a two-buck room. Even with the bread they have to lay off on the cops, that puts 'em way out in front. Dig?"
She nodded. She walked to the bar with Lu, bought the girl a drink. Then she sat on a stool and waited for something to happen. She had a fairly long wait. When it is raining cats and dogs and pitchforks and buckets and so forth, the average man is far less likely to be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable desire to scurry up to Harlem to get his ashes hauled What men call gallantry and gods adultery is much more common where the climate's sultry, as the poem has it: by extension, whores are more apt to be toiling busily, when skies are clear and not all drizzly.
Anyway, the tricks were few and far between In addition, the cellar bar at Jem's Place had the added disadvantage of holding a bevy of hookers all in one spot. A man got to make his choice, and he got to do a lot of bargaining, and a hard-up chick might cut in on you while you were haggling over a price and promise your man more loving for less money.
It was a hang-up.
A colossal hang-up.
She made money now and then. She spoke French to one man and Greek to another, and those little games were worth twenty dollars each She added a ten-dollar straight trick, and that fifty bucks added to the fifteen she had earned at the evening's start gave her sixty-five for the night.
And that was all.
She spent a lot of time talking to Lu. "You're a damn, damn fool," Lu told her cheerfully enough. "You work your rear off and earn a pile of dough and give it all to a no-good pimp. That makes you a double-damn fool no matter how you stare at it."
"Jubal ain't a no-good pimp."
"So he's a good pimp. A first-class pimp. That there is the worst kind of all. If a man's good at being a pimp, then he's no damn good at all."
"Jubal's not like that,"
"No?"
"No."
Lu arched an eyebrow. "How much did you-all earn last night, Sara?"
"Hundred-twenty-five."
"And how much did he take?"
"I gave it all to him. But he gave me back twenty."
"Twenty," Lu said. "You earned $125, and he gave you twenty."
"But he pays the rent and buys me things and takes care of the cops and-"
"And all of that comes to maybe twenty bucks a day, on an expensive day," Lu told her. "So that means he made something like eighty-five bucks off of you last night, and all for nothing. You ought to get wise, girl. You ought to show some sense."
"What do you do? Don't you have a sweet man?"
"I'd shoot my head off first."
"Then-"
"I'm a free-lance broad," Lu said. "Strictly on my own hook. I got no man and I want no man. I make my own money and do my own fixing and pay my own rent. I save my money, Sara. I stick it in the bank. If I wanted, I could go out tomorrow and buy me a brand-new Cadillac. And pay cash on the barrel for it."
"But-"
"And I don't smoke pot and I don't use a needle and I don't drink too heavy. And five years from now I'll haul my butt out of Harlem and go to some quiet little town upstate and marry some good man and won't nobody ever know how I earned my dowry. You think I'm being stupid, Sara?"
"No."
"Then why don't you get smart? You could do the same thing."
"I love Jubal," she said.
"You off your head?"
"I love him. I can't help it."
"So be a damn fool," Lu said. "It's your life, Sara."
She wound up staying at the bar until almost six. The last hour was desperation and nothing else. Most of the girls went home and the rain was still coming down and the tricks just didn't show up, and at five-thirty she finally dropped her price and let a drunken longshoreman have her for five dollars. She stopped at her own apartment to pick up the extra fifteen from before, and she went into the Blue Moon at six and handed the seventy dollars to Jubal.
"All right," he said. "Now gimme the rest."
"That's all there is," she said.
"What!"
"That's all," she said. She turned away, unable to face him. Even after what Lu had told her, the idea that she had let him down by earning too little money made her feel all rotten inside. "It was raining," she said, "and nobody came looking, and I just couldn't get any money, and-"
"You come with me," he said. "Where?"
"To your pad. C'mon!"
He snapped his fingers and started for the door. He walked straight on out without holding the door for her the way he usually did and the door slammed back and hit her. She pushed it open and hurried after him. The big Caddy was parked at the curb a few doors away but he headed in the opposite direction.
She said, "Aren't we taking the car?"
"With what you earned I can't afford to waste gas. You come on and walk."
She walked as fast as she could. She hurried after him all the way to her apartment building and ran up the stairs after him. She opened the door and he pushed through it and began ransacking her room, looking behind the stove and under the frigidaire and everywhere, hunting angrily and furiously for money.
"I didn't hold anything out," she said. "I swear."
"Why should I believe a word you say?"
"I swear," she said. "I wouldn't hold out on you. Not a penny, Jubal. I wouldn't!"
He didn't take her word for it, looked everywhere, made a merry mess of her place. Finally he stopped looking and straightened up and walked toward her.
"All right," he said. "I believe you."
"Jubal-"
"But you got to get a taste of what you'll get if you ever hold out a penny. You got it comin."
"Jubal-"
"This is to show you, Sara."
"Jubal-"
He beat the hell out of her. He did it coldly and dispassionately, and there is nothing as frightening in the world as a beating that is dispatched in such a manner. There was no fury in his treatment of her, no anger, nothing but absolutely cold-blooded brutality. And in with all of that his commercial instincts never let go. He never struck her in the face, careful not to mark her so that she would be unable to earn money. He didn't do damage to her breasts-they were too vital a commodity.
Instead he concentrated on her belly and backside. At first he just pushed her up against the wall and drove his fists into her tender stomach, slugging her in the belly until her whole body ached and her stomach throbbed horribly. Then he made her take her clothes off, and when she was stark naked he gave her a shove so that she fell down and sprawled before him on her hands and knees.
He was wearing the lizard shoes again. They had sharp toes, and when he kicked her in the buttocks with all of his strength she moaned as though she were dying. He kicked her twenty or thirty times until she itched forward on her face and lay there sobbing quietly.
Then he walked out of the room.
When he came back she was curled up on the bed crying into her pillow He sat beside her and stroked her forehead with his cool soft hands. He washed her face with a scented cloth and whispered love-words to her, and she was dizzy with the beating and the loving and she didn't know what was happening.
"I can't leave you any money," he told her "Not with what you earned tonight. It ain't enough anyway, and I can't spare any of it for you."
"I don't want it."
"It's good you don't, girl."
"I'll do better tomorrow, "You better."
"I will," she said. God, she would hustle her damn tail off tomorrow, she thought. She would beat every trick around and nail down every penny she could lay her hands on. Jubal was mad at her, so mad he might try to get rid of her, and she didn't want that to happen. She loved him, and after the beating she loved him more than ever, and she would do anything in the world to keep him loving her. Anything in the world.
"I gotta go," he said. "Do better tomorrow, you hear?"
And he was gone.
The next day she was a dynamo.
She started off by turning three tricks in the afternoon. This is not impossible, but it is not the easiest thing in the world either. A high-priced call girl who works by appointment will often earn half of her income in the daytime hours, having little matinee sessions with ad men from Fairfield County. But a streetwalker has a different sort of set-up. The man who hires streetwalkers prefers the cover of darkness; he rarely wants to mix lust with the cold gray light of day. He wants to prowl in the night and find himself a harlot and take his pleasure with her, and the prowling aspect of it, the adventure, is often more of a kick to him than two or three minutes of soggy sex in a broken-down bed in a room in a tenement.
Where there is a will, however, there is also a way. The harlot looking for daytime clients can't expect them to come to her. The men she finds will be men who weren't originally out looking for tail, but men who are willing to spring for a joyride when it is offered to them.
You don't find these men in Harlem. You find them in mid town Manhattan, which was where she went.
She found the first one in a bookstore on Times Square. He was a pimply stock-boy type who was looking through a bin of cheesecake photos, and she sidled up next to him and looked at the pictures over his shoulder. He was studying a blonde with fair-sized breasts and no clothes at all.
"Man," she whispered, "I got boobs a lot bigger than her."
The kid turned and stared at her.
"I got a better body," she went on, nonchalant as all hell. "And I'll do anything in the world with it."
"Anything?"
"Name it. I'll do it."
The kid had fifteen dollars in his pocket. They went to a hotel on West 44th Street that Sara had heard about, and five of the fifteen dollars went to the weasel-faced room clerk. Then, in a broken-spring bed, she took the pimply kid's ten remaining dollars.
He had a special way he wanted to do it. The kid was breast-happy, as it turned out. Maybe he had been bottle-fed and had never gotten over it. Maybe he was resolving his oedipal leanings in the accepted fashion of the twentieth-century male. Maybe he was a laten faggot, and his interest in breasts was symbolic of his secret desire to have contact of sorts with male anatomy. Depending upon your orientation, you can make what you will of the pimply kid's preference, but no matter how you see it, one fact is evident.
He liked breasts.
He especially liked Sara's breasts.
There was nothing strange about that. Sara had great breasts, and the attention they had received in the past couple of days had done nothing to lower their value. They were fuller now, firmer and larger as a result of the constant massaging they had been receiving. And the kid went wild over them.
He told her to strip to the waist. She left her skirt on, because he didn't care about anything that was under it.
He was only interested in her breasts. Very much interested. Tremendously interested.
He had her lie down on the bed on her back. Then crouched over her, cupping her big boobs in his hot little hands, stroking and pinching and fondling and caressing. For a moment, when he was kissing her firm nipples, she almost felt herself beginning to stir with desire. She had never had quite so much physical attention paid to her breasts and it was slowly but surely getting to her. But she remembered in time that this would mean being unfaithful to Jubal, and she knew better than to do that. So she turned herself off and stopped getting excited. It took a little effort but she managed it.
The kid kept it up for a long time, and then he as ready.
He got his clothes off. He went back to her breasts. And began.
And went on. And on.
It was the way the kid wanted it and it really sent him wild. He was on her for ten minutes, moaning and groaning with his passion. And then it ended.
He got dressed.
He left.
And Sara went to the sink to wash her face.
There were two more that afternoon. There was another man whom she picked up in a bar He was an ordinary type with ordinary tastes. All he wanted to do was give her a usual sort of bang, and he did, and that was ten more dollars. There was another man that she caught in a movie theater, and that was even better. She sat next to him in the darkened balcony of the Pix on 42nd Street and put her hand on his leg and rubbed, and he looked at her and grinned and asked her how much she wanted. She told him twenty and he didn't even balk at the price. He hauled out a wallet and handed her a twenty dollar bill and she started to head for the aisle.
"Right here," he said.
"Here?"
"Sure," he said. "Why miss the picture?"
So he didn't miss the picture. She did, though, because she had to get on her hands and knees and her back was to the screen all the while She was a little worried that an usher without a sense of humor might spot them, but this didn't happen. In five minutes she was on the way out of the theater with twenty dollars in her purse.
Those were the three tricks for the afternoon. She took time out to eat dinner downtown, then headed back for Harlem. Jubal had told her not to start before midnight or so, but she wanted to do all the business she could before the night was over If things kept going right for her, she would show him just how good a hooker she could be.
And she had already decided not to hold out a cent, ever. He was her man and he loved her and she loved him, and she knew he would take good care of her just so long as she was careful to take good care of him.
She couldn't expect all of his time and attention, of course. He had other girls on the string, and he had to spend a night with each of them in turn so that the other girls wouldn't tip to the fact that he was in love with one Sara Jackson. She didn't mind. She knew that the other girls didn't mean any more to him than her tricks meant to her. She was the one he cared about.
She hustled in a bar on Lenox and she hustled in two bars on Eighth. She hustled from dinnertime straight on through to four-thirty in the morning, and she grabbed every tricks she could find and took every extra dollar she could lay her hands on. She was good, all right.
She was great.
She was the best there was.
Once, she met Lu. She recognized the girl a block away by her platinum hair and she headed over toward her, glad to have somebody to talk to. Lu gave her a smile. She remembered what Lu had said the night before about pimps in general and Jubal in particular, and she thought at first that Lu might not have any use for her now because she thought she was stupid. But the girl was friendly enough. She gave Sara a big hello and offered her a cigarette.
"How you doing?"
"Good enough," Sara said.
"Making money?"
"Uh-huh." At first she had decided not to tell Lu, but then she changed her mind. "I'm up close to three hundred dollars," she said. "That's for today alone."
"What!"
"You heard me."
"Man," Lu said. "Who'd you sleep with? The Mayor?"
"Not him. Just about everybody else, though."
"I guess. What happened?"
She told her, told her how she had started early in the afternoon and how she had hustled without a break. The platinum-haired girl made a good listener. She frowned at the right parts and laughed at the right parts and smiled at the right parts, and Sara told her everything.
"Holy J. C," Lu said. "You are one hustling broad, all right. You take to the life like a duck to water."
"I guess."
"How old are you, Sara?"
"Seventeen."
"That all?"
"Uh-huh."
"Jesus above. Three yards already and the night's young. What are you going to do with all that money?"
She lowered her eyes.
"You givin' it to that pimp of yours?"
She didn't answer.
"Don't give him all of it," Lu said. "Use your head for more than a hat rack, Sara. Give him two hundred and he'll be so tickled he'll eat you up. Hold back a hundred or so. Suppose you get in a jam and need the dough?"
"Jubal can take care of me."
"Yeah, sure he can. What kind of cigarettes do you smoke, baby?"
"Philip Morris."
"The way you talking, it looks like maybe they put some pot in those Philip Morrises. Take some advice, will you? Save some of your money. You might need it some day."
But she knew better than to listen to Lu. Jubal was her man and he deserved every cent she could give him, and he would get it. What sense did it make to hold out on him? If she held out, he would beat her up, maybe kill her. But if she gave him everything he would love her so much for it that she would be miles ahead.
Lu was the crazy one. Lu thought you could get along all alone by yourself. Lu was crazy. And she was the smart one.
At four-thirty she walked into the Blue Moon Lounge and took a stool there. At four o'clock the Blue Moon Lounge was supposed to close, of course. That's the hour when bars close in New York City. The Blue Moon never closed before seven, which only goes to prove that S.L.A. inspectors are sometimes no more incorruptible than mere police officers. The Blue Moon stayed open whenever it damn well pleased.
So at four-thirty she took a stool and ordered a beer, and at a quarter to five Jubal came in. He walked straight over to her, put a hand on her shoulder.
"Finish up," he said.
She tossed off the remaining beer and walked out with him. He got behind the wheel of the Cadillac. She sat next to him, her purse on her lap, waiting.
"Well?"
She smiled.
"Have a good night, Sara?"
"Pretty good."
"How much?"
"It's all here," she said, handing him her purse. "You count it, Jubal honey."
He counted it, three times. He finished the third count, looked at her, let out a long low whistle.
"Three-seven-seven," he said. "Three hundred and seventy-seven doo-lars. You rob a bank, girl?" She was so happy she couldn't even talk. "What happened, Sara?"
"I had a good night," she said nonchalantly. "There's good nights and there's bad nights. Last night was a bad night and tonight was a good night and that's all there is to it."
"A hell of a good night," he said.
She didn't say anything. He stuck the key in the ignition, got the car going, pulled away from the curb fast enough to leave a rubber patch on the pavement. She ran a hand through her hair and asked him where they were going.
"Out," he said.
"Where?"
"My place."
Her heart jumped.
"When a girl like you has a night like this." he said, "I think a celebration is in order. And you and me are gone to celebrate, Sara. We're gone to ball!"
She was the happiest girl in the world The car sped on into the night and she leaned against Jubal Bryce and put her head on his shoulder and told herself over and over again just how tremendously lucky she was.
And she believed it.
CHAPTER SIX
Jubal's apartment was even nicer than she had remembered it. He took her inside, closed the door, led her straight to the bedroom. He opened a closet and took out a red silk nightgown, trimmed with black, sheer and luxurious and lovely. She caught her breath when she saw it. It was nicer than anything she had ever seen before.
"Get naked," he said. "And put this on."
He went out of the room while she took off all her clothes and put on the red silk nightgown. It felt delicious on her bare skin, all smooth and silky and luxurious. Barefoot, she stepped daintily around the room, her toes sinking into the high pile of the wine-red carpet. The gown swished over her nut-brown skin and she giggled with sensual pleasure.
Then the door opened. Jubal came in, wearing a Japanese lounging robe and a pair of raffia sandals. The robe was prussian blue, rich silk, belted with a black sash, and Jubal matched the color of the robe with the star sapphire ring he wore on the little finger of his left hand. He stopped in the doorway, ran his eyes over the silken curves of her body, and whistled long and low.
He said: "Fine, Sara."
"You like?"
"I like, woman."
She moved toward him, slowly. She figured that he was about to make love to her, that the gown and the robe were simple preludes to a wild time in his huge bed. But she was wrong. Instead he moved toward her, took her by the hand, and led her out of the bedroom entirely.
In the living room, in front of a non-functioning fireplace, he set a pillow on the floor and motioned for her to sit on it. She sat down. He placed a pillow beside her for himself, then went around the room turning out all the lights but one red-bulbed oriental lamp. He went to the hi-fi, slipped four or five records from their jackets, stacked them and started the player up. The first one to play was something weird, oriental sounds with an afro-cuban rhythm base. She had never heard anything quite like it before.
From a drawer in a walnut table he brought out a small wooden cigar box. He sat cross-legged on his pillow at her side and opened the little box. She glanced inside, Winked once or twice, and then realized what it was.
There were three items in the box. There was a small cone of dark sandalwood incense. There was a stack of thin brown cigarette-papers. And there was a little tin container filled with a substance the color and size of parsely flakes.
And she knew.
Marijuana.
At first she couldn't say anything. She sat mute and watched him light the cone of incense with a wooden match and place it on top of a near-by table. The incense would neutralize the smell of the burning marijuana and eliminate the possibility of discovery. Then, carefully and deliberately, he took a cigarette paper with the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, curved it, and dropped two pinches of marijuana into it. He rolled a very thin cigarette in a few deft movements, licked the gummed edge of the cigarette paper and sealed it by twisting the ends slightly.
And she said: "No, Jubal."
He looked at her.
"I don't want to."
"You ever blow pot before?"
"Never."
"So you're in for a treat instead of a treatment. This is how a soul cuts loose, Sara. This is how you fly."
"Maybe I don't want to fly."
"Why not?"
"I don't want to get hooked."
"Ain't nobody never got hooked on pot. Didn't you know that?"
"Not on pot, maybe. But you go from this to something stronger and then you're putting it in a vein and-"
"Sara."
She looked at him.
"I been turning on regular since I was thirteen," he said. "You see any pinholes in my arms?"
"But-"
"Listen," he said. "Listen, I'm giving you a treat, you hear? I'm being good to you. You had a good night, you been a good girl, I'm trying to do something right for you. I spend good money on this pot, Sara. I'm doing you a favor."
She still didn't want it. But she couldn't think of a way to avoid it, not without starting a fight or something. And it wasn't as if pot itself was habit-forming, and besides, just one taste wouldn't hurt anybody.
"You was a virgin once," Jubal said. "Then you got vourself laid and you found out how nice that was. Why not give pot the same damn chance?"
It was an unanswerable argument. She told him all right, thank you, she was being silly and she would try it and see how she liked it. After all, she didn't want to hurt his feelings. He was all excited about treating her to a big celebration and she was bringing him down by throwing his treat right back in his face. That, she thought, wasn't too very nice at all of her.
So she waited while he finished rolling the marijuana into small brown cigarettes. The music was alive in the room now, rolling and swelling and echoing between the walls, and the incense smell made the air thick with the odor of sandalwood. He finished rolling the cigarettes, closed the little tin of marijuana, closed the cigar box, and put it back in the drawer it had come from. He sat down once more on the pillow and showed her how to smoke the reefers.
"You hold the joint like this, baby. You don't exactly close your lips around it because you want to take in air along with the smoke, like a mixture. You know in a car your carburetor gives that old engine a mixture of gas and air, like. Same with this. You get this mixture of smoke and air. You don't just puff on it like a cigarette. You do this straight inhaling so it goes right straight back and down into your lungs without stopping to say hello to your mouth. Just goes straight back in, like taking a real deep breath of air. And you hold it in as long as you can so you don't waste it, and then you blow out and start over."
He lit the first joint. He sucked in smoke, taking a long, long drag on it and shaking out the match absently with one hand. He passed the joint to her and she took a drag of her own, but the smoke was hotter than hell and it burned her throat and she coughed it out. He laughed at her.
"Can't do that, Sara-girl. Waste it. Try again and keep it down this time."
She tried again. There was a tickle in the back of her throat and she wanted to cough again but she managed to hold the cough back and keep the smoke down in her lungs where it belonged. She passed him the cigarette. He smoked, passed it back. She smoked more and they passed it back and forth until the joint was so small that she couldn't hold it without burning the tips of her fingers. Then he took it from her and stubbed it out in a shallow copper ash tray.
They went through three cigarettes and she didn't feel a thing. Then he told her to lean back a little, to let her eyes close, to concentrate on her neck and her throat and to feel all the groovy things that were happening. Pot was like that, he said; you had to learn to get high on it, not like horse or alcohol where it would work on you all by itself.
She followed his instructions, waiting, and then she began to get the message. Her head was all light and airy and her skin was tingling and she could feel her heart beating and could feel the blood in her veins. She kept her eyes closed and she concentrated on her own body and her superb awareness of it, its texture, its form, its touch and feel and sight and smell. She felt as though she could see with her eyes closed, and she listened to the oriental music that was playing and heard the notes and the spaces between the notes, heard wild harmonies and beautiful assonance she had never heard before.
Wow, she thought.
Wow!
"You getting there, Sara?"
"I'm there," she said.
"Stoned," he said, solemnly. "You're stoned out of your head, baby-o."
It wasn't an especially clever line, just a simple statement of fact. But something seemed to be very funny about it, something really knocked her out, and she started giggling and couldn't stop, started laughing like some kind of a nut, laughing and giggling and crying and rolling around crazily on the floor.
"Stoned, Sara."
"Oh, you know it."
"Stoned out of your head."
"Yes, Jubal."
"You dig pot now?"
"I I-o-o-o-ove it."
"You glad old Jubal turned you on?"
"Oh, glad. So glad."
"You want more?"
"What happens if you smoke more?"
"You get higher."
"Can't happen," she said, giggling again. "Can't happen. I'm so damn high. So very damn high that if I go up any more I'll break when I come down."
"You want more, girl?"
"Course I do, Jubal."
They finished the rest of it. And he was right The more you smoked, the crazily higher you got higher and higher, always seeking and finding a brand new level. There didn't seem to be any ceiling to the highness. It just went on.
The floor swam, turned to liquid. The music was so loud that it no longer seemed to be coming from the hi-fi. It was a part of her now (or she was a part of it, or something) and it was just there and so was she and time and space lost there conventional meanings. Time lagged on and space spread out and the world was the prettiest place in the world and-
"Sa-ra-ra-ra-"
He was touching her. She had her eyes closed but she could see him anyway and he was leaning over her, touching her, and she let herself fall back on the floor with her legs out in front of her and her arms at her sides and her head on the floor and the pillow under her butt, and him, wonderful him, glorious him, beautiful him, lying on top of her and seeking her mouth with his. He kissed her, burned her mouth with his kiss, and her lips parted for his tongue. When he frenched-kissed her she knew that she was doing the most beautiful thing in the world. She could taste his tongue with every part of her mouth and every atom of her being. The pot worked that way, increased and broadened and deepened every aspect of perception, made everything a thousand times more vivid and real.
It was great.
Greater.
The greatest.
He stretched out on top of her. They were both wearing silk, and when his body moved across her body the sensation was the most wholly delicious thing in the world, sensual and sexy and good.
Ohhh!
He ran his hands over the sweet brown smoothness of her, let his hands touch her through the sheer silk of her gown. She had a double thrill-the thrill of the silk, the thrill of his touch. He tweaked the nipples of her swollen breasts and a tingle of delight raced from the tips of her breasts all through her system, thrilling her everywhere, making her arms and legs shiver, starting a trembling sensation in her groin, burning her up with all-consuming lust.
Oh!
His hand was on her knee, and then his hand was on her thigh, and she could feel his hand so clearly that she could even identify the swirls and dips in his fingerprints. And then his hand was creeping higher and higher, under the gown, and he was touching her, and he was putting his fingers nearer her, and moving them, and her whole body boiled and bubbled like a witch's cauldron and her legs churned like butter in a tub and she began to moan his name in a hoarse and passionate chant.
He lifted her gown, bunched it up around her waist. He stooped to kiss her belly and his tongue darted into her navel like a snake striking with furious fangs. He rubbed his cheek down across her belly, and his tongue flicked out again, and she was flaming.
Then he unbelted the sash, the black sash holding his prussian blue robe shut. His robe opened, and she opened her eyes to look at him. and she saw him come to her and touch her, and she felt every bit of him, and she opened for him, and he was with her.
It was the end of the whole world.
It was heaven.
It lasted almost forever. Pot changed the time sense, for one thing. For another, it changed a body's entire response to sex. It made you able to hold out forever, made you able to go on and on and on and on without coming too swiftly to a conclusion. And they went on and on and on and on, her on her back with her knees wide and a pillow elevating her rump, and he upon her and against her, slamming at her with the approximate force of a pile-driver, filling her and fulfilling her and driving her mad.
On. And on. And on-
She saw the end in sight then, and she felt the very floor rolling underneath her, and she saw stars and moons and comets and asteroids and a whole host of unidentifiable celestial bodies. The world raced on, tuned flip-flops, took a dive, came up grinning, pitched higher, dipped, soared....
Until his movement came faster and faster, and her breath came harder and harder, and her passion came stronger and stronger, and the world came wilder and wilder, and all at once both he and she followed the example of thrusts and breath and passion and the world itself and, quite understandably and altogether quite perfectly, at last and forever came.
Pot doesn't leave you with a hangover. If you stay up all through your high, when you come down it's simply a case of the effect wearing away and being all at once wholly gone. If you go to sleep while you are still pretty well up in the clouds, it's even better. You sleep like a log, and you wake up refreshed and not hung, and feeling better than ever.
They went to sleep after the lovemaking. This was natural enough. As you may have gathered, their love-making was a pretty hard act to follow. After their little session on the living room floor, World War II would have been anticlimactic. They curled up on the floor in front of the non-functional fireplace and closed eyes and slept like tops.
When she awoke he was already up. She rolled over onto her back and yawned and stretched and sighed and felt wonderful from the top of her head to the tips of her toes. She put her hands on her breasts, cupped them, gave them a few little squeezes that felt wonderful. She let her eyes close again and ran the night before through her mind like a newsreel.
He came into the room, already dressed, cleanshaven, immaculate. "You got to get up and gone," he said. "I got somebody coming over today, be here any minute."
"A girl?"
"Hey," he said. "You getting sassy?"
"No, Jubal."
"This is a business deal. Man I got to see. I don't even have time to drive you back to your place. You just get up and dressed and I'll give you a couple of bucks for a cab."
She washed up, dressed quickly. She was tremendously relaxed through and through, as though the pot had remodelled her system and had taught her body how to calm down inside. When she was dressed he gave her twenty-two dollars and a little tin box that had once contained DuMaurier cigarettes. She opened it; it now contained a handful of joints.
"That's ten bucks worth of pot," he said. "Compliments of the house. Any time you want to get an edge on, just close up your windows and blow off the top of your head with this. It's good stuff, baby. Same as we had last night."
"I wouldn't smoke it alone."
"Sure you would, Sara. You get dragged, you feel low, this picks you up nice."
"Well-"
"Take it," he said.
She took it, put the tin box in her purse along with the money. She kissed him good-bye and went to the door, turned the knob, opened it, then hesitated.
"See you tonight," he said.
"Same time?"
"Same time and same place. Baby, you keep having good nights and we'll be in clover. We'll be saving money soon. I'm getting some debts paid off, setting up a good deal here and there. You keep turning them tricks and bring home that bread and we'll be sitting on top of the whole damn world."
Her heart swelled with pride. She stepped quickly out into the hallway, rang for the elevator, rode downstairs to the lobby. The doorman gave her a knowing glance, a look that said he knew just what she was and that he'd love to slip it to her himself sometime. Louse, she thought. All decked out in a red uniform and he thought he was the king of the earth. Louse.
She hailed her own cab and stepped into it like a queen. She settled back into her seat and told the cabby to take her to 128th and Saint Nicholas.
The rest of the week was easy.
Easy? Maybe that's a bad word here. The life of a ten-dollar whore can never be called easy, not really. When you are turning better than ten tricks a night, night after night, ease is not one of the ingredients of your living pattern. So, for the sake of that sort of accuracy for which we are justly famous, let's start over.
The rest of the week was routine.
There were no good nights, or none anywhere as good as the night on which she had brought home the phenomenal total of three hundred seventy-seven dollars. But at the same time there were no bad nights either. She earned a steady hundred to two hundred dollars a night, a good wage in any league. She managed to avoid the hazards that a streetwalker faces every time she picks up a John. No one robbed her, no one tried to cheat her out of her price, no one beat her up, no one burned her breasts with lit cigarettes, no one kicked her viciously between the legs. These things could have happened-they happen all the time to streetwalkers-but they did not happen to her. She was lucky.
She went out every night from midnight to five, stuck to her regular beat, had one repeat customer (the one who liked to be whipped) and did relatively well. The weather stayed clear, avoiding the fiasco of the night she had spent in the cellar bar at Jem's Place. She spent her mornings sleeping, spent her afternoons shopping or sitting in a movie theater or talking with one of the other girls in the life. Early evenings-before working hours-were open. One night she and Lu and another dark-skinned girl named Cindy taxied down to the Village and sat in a coffee house drinking bitter espresso and listening to folk singers and talking glibly to a batch of white college kids who would have been stunned to find out that the three pretty colored girls they were talking with were a trio of hard-boiled Harlem whores. It was nice down in the Village, though. Nobody knew they were prostitutes, nobody stared at them, nobody gave them a hard time. It was a kick.
She went three nights before she smoked any of the pot.
There was a reason the third night. She was out on the street, cold and a little tired, and a trick hit on her on 125th and she took him back to her room He didn't even take off his clothes, just opened them and told her what he wanted her to do. She did it and he smiled and finished and went, and she was alone, and all at once she felt dismal.
She washed but it went deeper than that. She thought that she was just a cheap and lousy whore and not worth a damn at all, and that she ought to take a step out of the window and end it all.
Lu had warned her about the feeling. "It comes on you all at once," the platinum-haired girl had said. "You're grooving along fine and then the blue mood hits and you wonder why you was born Maybe a man has you do something dirty and it justs turns your stomach. A lot of fly chicks kill themselves, Sara. Just up and kill themselves, do themselves in and get buried and rot. You got to guard against a blues like that. You got to spot it the minute it comes on you and you got to get rid of it in a hurry before you do something bad."
So she closed her windows and locked her door and smoked two sticks of pot. She didn't get screamingly high this time, but she got a nice edge on that chased the blues out the window and made everything all right again. She hollowed out the end of a regular cigarette and tucked the stubs of the joints-the roaches-into it, then smoked them as an added boost. She didn't have any incense, but she opened her windows before she left to air out her apartment. Then she floated down the stairs and went out to turn another trick.
Can't make a habit of it, she thought. Can't start getting high all the time. It gets to you, even if it doesn't form a habit for you. It makes you want to be high twenty-four hours a day and then you can't take the world unless you've got that little edge on, and that's bad.
But how could it be bad? It felt so very groovy.
It was a Saturday night when she met Jonah Rainey.
It was a Saturday night, and she was right where she belonged, standing in a doorway on 125th wearing a dress that showed almost all of her succulent breasts. She heard male footsteps, and she stepped out to see who it was, and it was Jonah.
She didn't recognize him at first. It had only been a week or so since he had taken her virginity and pierced it, but since then she had hardly thought of him at all and since then there had been so many men, so very damn many men, that he had not been on her mind much. And she had done so much and changed so much since he made a woman of her that she felt as though she hadn't seen him for six months or a year.
He stood still, staring at her, eyes wide as saucers. And then of course she did recognize him and she tried to force a smile to her lips. But the smile didn't come off.
"So it's true," he said.
She looked at him.
"They told me," he said. "They told me about it. I didn't believe it. I guess I just wouldn't let myself believe it, Sara."
"That I'm in the life?"
"The life?" He looked at his feet. "One hell of a life," he said. "One hell of a life."
"I don't mind."
"You damn well should."
"Because you're a whore."
She wanted to slap his face. She wanted to step up close to him and haul off and hit him so hard that they would hear the slap all the way to Sugar Hill. But why? She was a whore, all right. He wasn't telling her anything she didn't tell herself a hundred times a day. Why be mad?
Because it was coming from him, she thought. "You don't have to do this," he said. "You don't have to ruin your life this way, Sara."
"No?"
"No. You could still go back to school-"
She pictured herself again, standing at that blackboard with that snow-white chalk in her hand. Yes, Miss Jackson. No Miss Jackson. How about a quickie in the coat room, Miss Jackson?
"-and work part-time and get where you want to be. We could still be good for each other, Sara."
"You and me?"
"That's right."
"I'm a whore," she said bitterly. "Don't you remember? You must forget pretty fast, because you just told me all about it a couple of seconds ago."
He turned away. "You don't have to be a whore forever."
"Once a whore, always a whore."
"That's not true-"
"No."
She took out a cigarette for herself. She offered the pack to him but he shook his head. She lit a cigarette, smoked nervously. She wished he would get off her back, wished he would go away and leave her alone. Hell, she had let him have a piece of her; the first piece, too, the first time anybody ever got to her. Wasn't that enough? Couldn't he just let her go to hell in her own way?
"Sara-"
"We balled together," she said. "Remember?"
"I remember."
"And you were the first one."
"Sara-"
"The first one ever. You were pretty good, too. Was I good, Jonah?"
"Yes."
"Did you enjoy it?"
"Sara-"
"Answer me, damn you."
"I enjoyed it, then."
"Would you like to ball me again?"
He was staring at her.
"But I'll have to charge you," she said. "I only had one colored trick so far. He gave me ten dollars. I'd be willing to do it for you for five, Jonah. For old times sake. Anyway you want it and all for just five bucks."
For a moment she thought he was going to hit her. His hands were balled up into fists and the muscles were knotted in his arms. But she watched as he forced himself to relax, to calm down. Then he took a step away from her.
"I don't want you," he said levelly.
"Not even a little?"
"Not a damn bit. You used to be good inside, Sara. You used to be the finest person I ever knew But you turned rotten, Sara. You aren't any good any more."
And he walked away.
The blues came, then. They came on strong and Ihey came on ugly and they scared her.
But a little taste of pot chased them all away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It was a dark night, moonless, starless. The winking neon of 125th Street punctured the darkness, stabbing at her eyes. She was in the doorway of a store named Solly's Pawn Shop The window guarded by a heavy iron grill, was cluttered with watches and cameras and typewriters and binoculars and musical instruments. The owner, a man named Solly Kline, was known throughout Harlem as a man who gave top dollar for good merchandise and didn't much worry whether or not the owner and the person pawning the article happened to be one and the same person. Solly's reputation was aces-high among thieving junkies. To know him was to love him.
His shop was closed now, and Sara was in its doorway, waiting Two doors down the street Lu was leaning up against Woolworth's window, waiting also. It was early-twelve-thirty, one, somewhere in there.
The car was a Lincoln Continental, black, glossy, chauffeur-driven. The car cruised slowly along on 125th and pulled to a gentle and noiseless stop in front of the Woolworth's window that Lu was holding up. A man in the back seat crooked his finger to summon her and she went to the car like a trout to a well-tied fly.
Sara watched her, envied her. That was a good one, she thought. That was twenty dollars if it was a dime, and it might even be more. People who could afford to ride around in chauffeur-driven Lincolns didn't worry about ten bucks here and ten bucks there. They didn't have to.
The rear window rolled down. The man in back-Sara couldn't see his face-was talking to Lu. He spoke to her for a few minutes. Then the platinum-haired girl turned around and began walking away from the car, heading for Sara. She was grinning and she walked very fast.
"What happened? I thought you scored?"
"I did," Lu said.
"Then-"
"Girl," Lu said, "how'd you-all like to make a hundred dollars? There's this rich old stud who wants to have a party. One girl ain't enough for him, dig? He wants two, asked me if I had a friend. I figure you're as good a friend as I've got handy, baby."
"A hundred-"
"Uh-huh."
"What do we have to do for it?"
"A lot. Make the great man happy. And put on a show for him, first."
"A show?"
"Uh-huh."
"What kind of show?"
"You know. A girl show."
"You mean dance around in our panties or something?"
Lu shook her head. "You know," she said. "You mean-"
"Do things to each other. Like that."
Sara turned away. A hundred dollars was nice to think about, but doing things with a girl wasn't nice to think about at all. It wouldn't be so bad if she didn't know the girl. Then it would just be another trick, and when you were turning a trick she didn't suppose it made much difference whether you did it with a man or a woman. Either way it wasn't much fun, and either way you very simply turned yourself off and let your body do things while your mind was floating around in some other world.
But it would be different with Lu. Lu wasn't a trick. Lu was a friend, and to put on an act balling a friend while some fat old white man sat there watching you-
But a hundred dollars! And besides, it wasn't like they would be really balling. Just an act, just a little act to please the old gent.
"Well," she said finally.
"You ready?"
"I guess."
They sat in the back seat of the Lincoln, one on either side of the John. He wasn't really that fat or that old, Sara thought. He was white-haired and sedately dressed, and she guessed his age at somewhere around fifty-five or so. His skin was a pale pink, his face was marred here and there by the network of blue veins that are the badge of the dedicated alcoholic, and his features were the clean aristocratic features of the tenth-generation white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
His name was Bullwer Trove.
He snapped his fingers, once. The chauffeur-an expressionless Negro just about Sara's color-started the car and headed for home. Bullwer Trove turned to Sara, smiled, turned to Lu, smiled, then turned straight ahead and talked in a low, crisp voice.
"I'm glad to have you both for company," he said. "I'm sure we'll have an enjoyable evening."
"Ah hope so," Lu said.
"My quarters are rather comfortable," he said. "My bar is well-stocked. It should be pleasant."
That was all he said. They rode the rest of the way in silence-real silence, because the motor of the plush black Lincoln was quite inaudible. Sara wanted to say something. The silence was starting to get on her nerves, but she didn't know how to start a conversation without saying the wrong thing. So she kept her mouth shut.
The chauffeur took the West Side Drive all the way north to Riverdale, that westward extension of the Bronx just across the Henry Hudson Bridge. He drove through the Fieldston section and parked in front of the largest house Sara had ever seen. It was all stone and four stories high, with jutting balconies and impressive statuary and magnificently landscaped grounds.
"We are here," Bullwer Trove said. Unnecessarily.
The chauffeur took the West Side Drive all the way and disappeared. Bullwer Trove climbed the steps to the door and poked briefly at the bell. Within the house, chimes sounded. A neat and proper butler opened the door and stood aside.
"This way," Bullwer Trove said.
He led them into a room, up a flight of stairs, and into another room. In a less impressive house you could have said at once what room they were in Less impressive houses have living rooms and dining rooms and kitchens and bedrooms and so on. Bullwer Trove's house had rooms by the dozen, and it was hard to identify some of them. This one would have been a living room in most houses, but they had already walked through another larger room downstairs which obviously functioned in that capacity.
To hell with the room's name. Whatever the room was, it was plush. There was an inch-thick carpet on the floor, and there was a fire roaring in the fireplace, and there was a polar-bear rug set on top of the regular carpeting in front of the fire. There were massive Edwardian chairs and massive Edwardian tables and majestic paintings in gold frames. The paintings, Sara saw at a glance, were all ancestors of Bullwer Trove. They all had the pinched Trove nose and the pale Trove skin.
"Drinks," Bullwer Trove said. "What's your pleasure, Sara? And you, Lucille?"
Lucille? That must be Lu's full name, Sara thought. And a man like Bullwer Trove would never deal in nicknames.
"Cognac? I've some excellent Remy Martin if that appeals."
"That's fine," Lu said.
"Sara?"
"Fine for me."
Bullwer Trove filled three small snifters with cognac, gave one to each of the girls and kept one for himself. Sara started to gulp it down, then remembered that you didn't do that in polite society. She watched Bullwer Trove and took her cue from him, holding the glass to inhale the bouquet, then taking a small and aristocratic sip of the liquor.
It was smooth and warming, and it had a wonderful smell to it, she thought. She sipped it again, and all at once she wondered why in hell she was being so damn dainty about things. It wasn't like she lived there. It wasn't even like she was a guest. She was just a spade whore hired for the evening, a temporary plaything designed to amuse his royal majesty Bullwer Trove, and she might as well swig her cognac and hawk and spit on the floor for all it mattered.
But of course she did none of these things. Instead she minded her manners and tried to act like an actress in the movies and sipped her cognac and shifted nervously from one foot to the other. She set the glass down half-empty and looked in desperation at Lu.
Bullwer Trove was also looking at Lu, though not in desperation. He had tossed off his cognac and had gone to work on a refill, and his eyes were bright with the liquor and with anticipation as well.
"Lucille," he said. "I am going over to that leather chair. I will sit there, and you and Sara may disport yourselves at leisure. I think you will find the rug eminently suitable for your display of pleasure."
"The rug?"
"The polar bear rug," Trove said. "It's comfortable, , to be sure, and aesthetically gratifying. And I suspect the color contrast will be exhilarating. Brown bodies on a white rug in front of a glowing red fire. I'm rather glad your friend Sara is of a darker hue than you, Lucille. The contrast should be pleasant."
Sure, Sara thought. And someday maybe we'll get to watch you balling an albino in a coal mine. Solid, Mr. Trove, sir.
Bullwer Trove padded across the carpet and seated himself in a red leather chair, overstuffed and massive. There was a floor lamp at the side of his chair. Trove turned it out and sat in darkness, his eyes focused upon the polar bear rug.
The room was silent.
Lu came to her, whispered in her ear. "Play it like a head arrangement," she said. "You never made this kind of scene before?"
"Course not."
"Never balled with a girl?"
"Never."
"So I'll do all the work," Lu said. "Just be cool and make like you dig it and we'll make old Trovey happy. Let's get our clothes off first, baby. And give him a good look at everything you've got."
She was self-conscious about it. She got undressed, slowly, and she moved her body in every direction so that Bullwer Trove would get a fine view of everything he might be interested in. She turned to the side and her breasts jutted out from her chest in profile. She turned to face the fire and bent slowly from the hips in case Bullwer Trove took a delight in a girl's backside. She turned around again, facing him, and she bent backward to give him another interesting and entertaining look at her.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Lu removing the last of her clothes. If there had been any doubt in her mind, she now would have had convincing proof that Lu's platinum hair was artificially colored. But she looked at Lu's body, and she saw how very lovely the mulatto girl was, and she got a funny feeling inside her.
She stood, waiting. She half-turned toward Lu, and Lu came close to her and took her in her arms. "Just make a good show of it," Lu whispered.
And then Lu kissed her.
It was a funny feeling. The only woman she had ever kissed before was her mother, and that was a different sort of thing entirely. Lu had her arms around her, and Lu's lips were softer than satin, and Lu's huge breasts were pressing against her own large breasts, and Lu's body was close against her own, and-
Well, it was funny feeling.
Slowly, gently, they sank down onto the snow-white polar bear rug. It felt even funnier now, Sara thought. The soft fluffy rug under her back and legs and buttocks, and Lu's body hovering over her, and Lu's lips once more glued to hers. She felt Lu's hand-a hundred times softer than a man's hand, softer and smoother and gender-settling first on her shoulder, then moving to her throat, then slipping slowly downward toward her breast.
Lu's lips parted. Lu's tongue darted out, stroked Sara's lips. Now what was the point of that, she wondered. Bullwer Trove surely couldn't tell whether they were tongue-kissing or not. Why bother to do something like that?
But, after all, Lu was calling the shots. Sara let her mouth open and Lu's tongue snuck inside, moving around the insides of her lips, touching Sara's tongue, moving here and there and lighting persistent little fires wherever it touched. A wave of something-passion?-swept over Sara and caught her up.
And Lu's hand found her breast now, and cupped it, and caressed it, and Sara felt her nipple going all stiff and rigid against the soft palm of Lu's light brown hand. Lu kissed her some more, and then Lu's lips left her mouth and moved to Sara's throat and began kissing again, planting warm caresses that made her whole skin tingle.
Damn, she thought. Oh, damn, damn. She was getting warm, she was liking it, was loving it. It was more than an act, she thought, more than an act and more than a game.
It was real. Genuine. Real-
Real enough so that her own hands reached out for Lu's breasts, wanting them now, itching to hold them now. Her hands found the big breasts, and her fingers grabbed at them, and she heard Lu moan with delight the instant her hands fastened on their twin targets. Lu pushed her down and hovered over her, her lips working wildly at Sara's breasts, and it drove Sara halfway insane. She stood it as long as she could, then spun free and caught hold of Lu, fastening the high-yellow girl to the mat and heaving herself on top of her.
She kissed Lu's breasts, kissed them and handled them, and one of her hands moved down, and then their bodies were a tangle of lustrous brown, a mishmash of arms and legs and breasts and bellies and buttocks.
It was great.
It was perfect.
It was so good she forgot all about Bullwer Trove.
And, at the end, when Lu was kissing her and she was kissing Lu and they were literally head over heels in love, and the room swam and the fire light went out and the world moved, it was greater than she could ever have believed possible.
In a very real sense, it was unfortunate that she had actually responded to Lu's lovemaking. If she hadn't-if it had just been an act the way it was really scheduled to be-then the session with Bullwer Trove afterward would have been just another routine bit of business, another complex trick to be turned easily and as easily forgotten.
But that wasn't what happened. Lu had driven her crazy, and she in turn had driven Lu crazy, and the fulfillment they achieved was not an act in any sense of the word.
And that made it a little bit difficult.
Because it's tough to turn a trick right after you've had some genuinely enjoyable love. You have to shift gears, for one thing. You have to turn off the little connection that links sex with your mind, and you have to start performing like a machine again.
But there's more to it than that.
Because you also have to have sex when you very definitely don't feel like it. After you ball and enjoy it, all you want to do is lie down and relax and take things easy. You don't want to have anything to do with a fat old bit of flatulence like Bullwer Trove. It's sort of like entering a pie-eating contest after you've just finished a magnificent seven-course dinner. You just couldn't be less in the mood.
But business was business. They went, naked and ashamed, to Bullwer Trove's bedroom, and there they did everything that Bullwer Trove wanted them to do. He wanted quite a bit, as it turned out. First he made love to Lu while he caressed Sara with his hands. Then he kissed Lu intimately while Sara did the same for him. Then Lu lay down on the bed, and Bullwer Trove joined her, and Sara got on top of Bullwer Trove. And then-
Suffice it to say that they ran the entire gamut, playing this game and that until their repertoire-and Bullwer himself-had run dry. Then, at last, it was over.
"Wonderful," said Bullwer Trove.
They didn't say anything.
"Excellent," said Bullwer Trove.
They didn't say anything. They got dressed, slowly, and they stood before Bullwer Trove, waiting.
"I've called a taxi," he said. "Rather, Soames has called a taxi. And he has an envelope for each of you. Good day."
And that was the last they saw of Bullwer Trove.
They found their way downstairs, finally. Soames was there, Soames the butler, his facial expression revealing nothing whatsoever.
"The taxi is en route," Soames said. "And Mr Trove instructed me to give these to you young women."
He handed an envelope to each of them. Sara wanted to open hers and check it on the spot-for all she knew they were being shorted, by Trove or by Soames or by someone. But that didn't seem to be the way you did things in Riverdale. Lu was putting the unopened envelope in her purse and Sara did the same.
The taxi came. Soames held the door for them and they got in, giving the cabby 125th and Eighth as a working address. He had a puzzled look on his face; evidently he wasn't used to picking up whorish-looking spade chicks at Riverdale mansions. But he kept his mouth shut and started his cab up and drove.
In the cab, they opened the envelopes. The bills were all twenties, and there were ten of them in each envelope.
"Hey," Sara said.
"What?"
"He made a mistake."
"No mistake."
"You mean the cat meant to lay two yards on each of us?"
"It looks that way. Sort of a tip, like."
The two hundred dollars meant one thing right off the bat. It meant there was no reason on earth for her to do any more work that night. It was pushing three already, but ordinarily she would have tried to squeeze in a quick trick or three before it was time to meet Jubal and hand over the take to him. Tonight, though, she already had two yards in her kick which was more than she generally brought in.
So why work up a sweat?
They dumped the cab at 125th and Eighth and ducked into an anonymous little bar with a jukebox full of rock and roll. A dark Negro barman set up a pair of beers for them and they stood at the bar and drank them. Sara was lightheaded before she even had the glass in her hand. Things had been happening too quickly for her lately. She didn't get it.
"Sara-"
She didn't answer.
"You liked it," Lu said. "Didn't you!"
"You got to ask?"
"I'm asking but I already know the answer. You dug it, huh?"
"I guess."
"You mad at me?"
"You should of told me you were that way," Sara said. "That's all."
"What way?"
"Gay. A lesbian."
"I though you knew."
"How would I know?"
"I don't have a man You know that much, don't you? I never tried to hide it."
"So?"
"So where'd you think I got my loving, Sara?"
"I never thought."
"I'm gay," Lu said. "Hell, I'm not the only gay hooker in the world. You got two choices in this business. You can have a pimp or you can go the gay route, and that's all. A pimp takes all your money and don't give you a thing in return, and when you're gay you just find another girl and have a party when you feel like it. It works a whole lot better, Sara."
"But-"
"And feels better, too. You know it now. You felt it tonight, Sara. Didn't you?" She didn't say anything.
"You know Cindy." Lu said. "Girl we went down to the Village with. Remember?"
She remembered. "You mean-"
"I mean she's gay as a jay, girl. She had this man, he used to beat the hell out of her and take her bread and give her nothing. Then she got hip. Now she balls with another girl when she gets the urge and she don't have no pimp and she gets to keep the bread she earns. She's way ahead now, Sara."
She picked up her glass, drank the rest of her beer. It was good and cold but she tossed it right down without tasting it. This was one to knock you on your ear, she thought. This was really one to send you flipping your lid
"Sara?"
She looked at Lu. Damn, she thought, this was crazv! Lu was a friend, that was all. Lu was another woman, and she couldn't get excited for another woman, could she? Of course not. And she wasn't eager for Lu now. Tell the truth, Lu made her a little uneasy right now and she would just as soon be alone.
Still, there was no getting around the facts. Lu had shown her the other side of the moon on that snow-white polar bear rug in front of that roaring fire, and she hadn't been high on anything but oxygen at the time. You couldn't blame it on pot or juice or anything else. She had gone for Lu.
It was that simple.
"Sara, I like you. I dig you a lot." She still didn't say anything. "You like me, don't you?"
"I like you-"
"And you dig the way I make love, too." She didn't answer.
"Sara, you made two hundred dollars tonight. Wouldn't it be nicer if you could keep it? Save some, spend some on yourself? Maybe get a nicer place to live in so you didn't have to turn tricks in your own sleeping-bed?"
"That would be nice."
"You could do it easy."
"But-"
"All you got to do is use your brain a little. I'm as good in your bed as any Jubal Bryce is ever gone to be. And I won't ever take a cent off of you, and I'll be around when you want me to be around, and I won't beat the hell out of you when the mood hits me. I'm better for you, Sara."
"No."
"Why not?"
"I don't know," she said. She was dizzy, sick inside, all mixed up and no place to go. "I got to go," she said. "Got to split. I ... I'll see you. Lu."
"You think it over, Sara."
"Oh." she said.
"You hear me?"
"I will," she said. "I will."
She went straight back to her own pad and she smoked three sticks in a row without taking a breath. The pot had an unusual effect on her this time. Her mind was too knotted up for her to get high in the usual way, so the pot worked differently. She became very calm, very listless, very permissive. She sat in a chair in her bedroom and thought to herself that if the building were to catch fire she wouldn't even have the will to move. She'd just sit in her chair and dig the sensation of the flames burning her to ashes, just sit quietly by while she burned to death.
Funny.
Everything-the whole damn world-was so damn funny.
She was funny and Lu was funny and Jonah was funny and Jubal was funny and old Bullwer Trove was funny and all the nameless tricks were funny, and no matter how funny everything and everybody was she still couldn't manage to laugh.
Not at all.
Lu was right, she thought. Lu was right, she knew it deep down inside. She should either go gay or else just cut off sex altogether except for business, because being with Jubal Bryce wasn't doing her a bit of good. He beat her up that one time for no reason at all, and he only saw her to take her money, and he had God knew how many women on the string and didn't give a hooting damn about any one of them, herself included.
So what good was he? No good. No good at all.
And yet, despite all this, despite every last particle of it, she loved him. She thought of the girl who had told her she had once been Jubal's girl, and that she was now Johnny May's girl, and the stupid chick had had the gall to say that Johnny May really loved her and was going to marry her some day. It was nonsense, but was it any more ridiculous for her to be going with Jubal and giving him her money and loving him the way she did?
It was just as silly.
And she still couldn't help it.
Maybe Lu would make the difference. Maybe being gay was the answer. When you gave for men all night long, the only kind you wanted were the bad ones, the mean ones, the rotten pimps who took everything from you and gave you nothing in return. But maybe you could still love girls, love them and have a thing with them that was clean and decent and didn't hurt you.
Maybe-
But for the time being she still loved Jubal.
She saw him that night. She met him at the appointed time and at the appointed place, and she talked with him and jived with him and laughed when he kidded her and purred like a kitten when he rubbed the back of her neck with his big hand.
But she held back forty bucks that night. Held it out, kept it, told him she only earned a hundred and sixty bucks.
So maybe Lu had changed her outlook after all.
CHAPTER EIGHT
In summer the work was easier, for the most part. It was easier to wriggle your rear along 125th Street with a come-along smile on your face and a money-hungry glint in your eye when the cold of the night wasn't chilling you to the bone. And the pickings were better. Tricks were a weak-kneed lot, staying home when it rained, rarely willing to brave the cold in the pursuit of feigned passion. It was a lazy summer, almost rainless, with the heat hotter than hell during the days and with occasional nights every bit as bad. But there were other nights when the wind came up from the river, those were the good nights.
There was the very good night near the end of June. Jubal told her to quit working around two, there was a party and he was taking her to it. That made her feel good. If she quit at two, she would be passing up the bulk of her earning power for the evening. Didn't that mean that he really cared for her?
It didn't, as it turned out. The party was in a tenement loft on 132nd Street off Lenoz Avenue, a mob scene overflowing with people in the life in one capacity or another. And, among the couple dozen of hustling chicks on hand, four of them belonged to Jubal Bryce. He had a whole batch of his hookers there. It was an occasion for him to display them to his friends, a chance for him to give them all a break so that they would think he was a real big man.
A hi-fi blared out with afro-cuban stuff A thin and nervous girl with a knife scar on her cheek passed a bottle of Four Roses to Sara She found a paper cup, filled it brimful of the blended whiskey, then passed the bottle to someone else. She looked around the room, saw Jubal with his hand up another girl's dress, chatting friendly-like, and she drank off half the Four Roses in a swallow.
It went down pretty smooth. She drank the rest and asked a copper-skinned man for a cigarette. She had wanted a straight cigarette but he misunderstood and handed her a stick of pot, and she didn't see any point in arguing. She let the copper-skinned man light it for her and she wound up sharing the joint with the girl with the knife scar on her cheek. She never learned the girl's name. The girl did not speak at all, just smoked the pot and drank the Four Roses and looked as nervous as hell.
"Say now," a man was telling her. "You one of Jubal's gals, ain't you?" I guess.
"Met you over to the Blue Moon," the man said. "Took a liking to you right off the top. You sure a pretty girl, and stacked fit to beat the band."
"Quit jiving me, you hear?"
"Not jiving. Just talking some."
She looked him over. Damn, she thought, there was one thing about pimps. They sure as God looked like pimps, from the polish on their shoes to the cool-sure look in their eyes. This one, he could be made as a pimp from a mile off. Black hair so perfectly in place that it looked like a damn wig. A silk tie thin as a razor's edge. A pale blue mohair jacket with padded shoulders and a low-hung link button set-up and lapels as narrow as the silk tie. Pleatless pants of snow-white flannel, yellow suede shoes-portrait of a pimp, and who on earth could ever think he could be anything else?
"I know why Jubal likes you," he said.
So do I, she thought. I bring him all that bread, he damn well ought to like me.
"Prettiest gal at the party, Sara."
So he knew her name, too She drifted away from him, found the bottle of Four Roses resting half-empty on the other side of the room. She had somehow abandoned her paper cup in the course of the party and there didn't seem to be another one handy, so she up-tilted the bottle and took a long gurgling drink straight from it. Some of the blend missed her mouth and dribbled down her chin, but a lot poured straight down her throat and landed in her stomach and said hello to her. She took another slug and somebody took the bottle from her and she wandered to another part of the room.
A white girl, blonde-haired, blue-eyed, flat-chested, was standing up against one wall and smiling idiotically in ever direction Jubal was next to her, one arm around her waist, one hand playing with her corn-yellow hair. She started to giggle, and he moved his mouth to her ear and said something, and she giggled again, and he put a hand on her belly and moved it downward and her giggle went away and passion filled her bovine face.
So he's got himself a fay witch on the string, Sara thought. She hadn't known that, had somehow assumed that all of the girls in his stable were colored. Solid, she thought. Here's this white chick working her rear off to earn money for me and Jubal.
The myth persisted; myths in general die hard, especially when one wants so much to believe them. But she knew better. Scratch that, she told herself The white chick wasn't working to make money for her and Jubal. The white chick was just plain working for Jubal, same as she was.
The Four Roses was gone. But somebody had a bottle of Cutty Sark, and that was fine.
She never remembered leaving the party. She was there for a spell-hard to tell how long, what with the noise and the music and the people and the liquor and the pot, all of them distorting the time sense. She was there, and then all at once she was outside walking down a nameless street in the darkness of the night. She was smoking a cigarette and she was talking senselessly to herself and she did not know where she was or where she was going.
There was another blank spot. Then she was running, running top speed with half the world chasing her, turning a corner and bumping into an old wino and spinning away from him and racing onward. She stood at a curb and tried to hail a taxi, and a cabby took a look at her and sped onward. Somewhere she found a subway arcade and ran down the stairs, tripping, stumbling. She had only ten cents in her purse, nothing more, and tokens were fifteen cents. With cleverness born of desperation she waited near the turnstile until a train plowed into the station and pulled to a stop. The doors opened, and she vaulted the turnstile and scampered into the train just before the doors swept shut again. No one seemed to notice. She gasped for breath and tucked herself down onto a straw-covered seat and closed her eyes and let the darkness settle over her once gain. She awoke once, head spinning, stomach churning, awoke and got off the train at a local stop and found a quiet place to vomit. Then she sat down on a bench and waited for another train. One came and she got onto it and passed out again.
When she got out of the train it was morning, bright yellow morning, and she didn't know where she was. Her stomach was one big knot and her head was lighter than air and she left the subway arcade and wandered along a wide street in the daylight. She found out that she was in Brooklyn, on Nostrand Avenue She didn't know how she had gotten there or where precisely she was or how in the world you got back from there She found an Automat and went inside, then remembered that she had no money. But the dime was still there. She looked through her purse and couldn't find the dime, but she did find a ten dollar bill she had somehow forgotten the night before. She changed it, got rolls and coffee, took an empty table and ate breakfast.
The food came up again in the rest room. She bought a fresh order of rolls and tried again, and this time everything stayed down.
She bought a pack of cigarettes. You couldn't smoke in the Automat so she went outside and stood smoking a cigarette in a doorway She was in a white neighborhood in Brooklyn and all she wanted to do was get home.
Home?
Sure.
That was a laugh, all right Where was home? Home had once been a foul little room on 116th Street near Eight Avenue, but that was not home any more Home now was an apartment on 128th, but at the same time she couldn't really think of that place as home either. The apartment was where she worked. It was a place where she took her customers, and the whole layout of the place could only be thought of now in terms of her profession. There was the bed, where the work itself took place. There was the drawer in the dresser where she tossed the receipts as they were collected, and there was the special place behind the stove where she hid the money after the tricks went away and left her alone.
There was another hiding place now, too. There was a strip of loose linoleum in the kitchen, and under it she tucked the money she held out from Jubal. Five dollars one night, ten dollars another night, most of the time just a dollar or two or nothing at all. She wasn't managing to save any money, not really. She bought a dress, blew herself to a good meal. Or, ironically, she made the ultimate in fools of herself by holding out money from Jubal and spending it to buy him a present. It didn't make any sense, and even while she did it she could not help realizing how stupid she was being. But she couldn't help herself. Once she went down to an exclusive shop on Madison Avenue, a lovely place where the walls were paneled in dark wood and the clerks spoke with British accents and the whole shop smelled of fine leather. She bought Jubal an alligator wallet for thirty dollars and had it monogrammed with his initials, and that night she put her recipts in it and handed over her money to him that way.
He didn't even sleep with her that night.
Home-a bed and a couple of places to hide money, and her stash of pot in the night-table, and the bathroom where she washed carefully after each trick, and all the other components of the life of a Harlem whore. Home?
She didn't have a home.
She thought of the home she didn't have, and she thought of Jubal's fine apartment where they went when it was her turn to have his company in bed, and she thought how weird it was that the girls did all the work and lived in railroad flats while their pimps did nothing at all and lived like princes. When you first thought about it you saw that it made no sense at all. But when you lived it, day after day and night after night after night, it seemed to fit the pattern of your whole existence. You did dirty work and lived a dirty life and you wound up with nothing, and perhaps that was nothing more or less than the way it was all supposed to be.
The sun was warm and the heat began dizzying her. She leaned against the side of a building for support, threw her half-smoked cigarette into the gutter. Have to get going, she thought. Have to go somewhere, anywhere, can't keep standing like this or some cop'll come along and take Miss Jackson to jail. Got to move, and fast.
Somebody showed her how to get the A train. It was morning rush hour and she did not have to wait long for a train. She stood, packed in a tight compartment, and the train sped through Brooklyn and headed to Manhattan.
A white-faced shipping clerk pawed her on the train. She barely noticed it at first, knew only that there was a hand touching her buttocks, rubbing them. She thought it was accidental, but when a clever finger traced its course down her buttocks and caressed her she ruled out that possibility. Some whore son was trying to cop himself a free thrill, she thought. Some louse-
What was a feel worth? She tried to figure it out.
Now, she would let the man take her to bed for ten dollars. So what was a feel worth? Maybe half a Duck? Maybe a hot twenty-five cents? Not much, no matter how you looked at it. If she had been a frigid stenographer she might have dug her heel into his instep, and if she had been some happily monogamous housewife she might have screamed for a cop, but she was nothing but a Harlem hooker and she didn't want to make a fuss over it. It wasn't as if the feel disgusted her, or excited her, or anything like that. So let him have his kicks.
He did just that. When she didn't seem to notice what he was doing, the shipping clerk grew bolder. He used both hands now, placing one on either side of her, squeezing slightly. His hands moved to cup her buttocks, patting gently, squeezing experimentally, tugging them gently as if he would like to pierce them with the firm strength of his body. She almost laughed aloud. Damn, this cat was having himself a ball!
Might as well let him have all the fun he could, she thought generously. She took a small step backward, bringing her buttocks closer to him. And, to let him know that in the first place she knew what he was doing and, in the second, she did not disapprove, she began to sway her hips so that her buttocks moved to and fro against his hands.
He was delighted.
She heard his sharp intake of breath, almost muffled in the crowded subway car. Then she felt his hands grow surer of himself as he continued to caress her perfectly rounded posterior. One hand, the left, moved forward to hold the side of her hip. The other dipped down lower to find more surely what it wanted.
She squirmed in mock passion.
And he stroked, and prodded.
His left hand moved further forward to her belly. She looked down at the pale hand and covered it with one of her own hands. There was no need to hold onto the overhead strap for support. Bodies were packed sardine-style in the crowded car, so close together that even a corpse would remain standing. She took hold of his hand and moved it down and he held her with one hand in front and one hand in back and toyed with her frantically.
She moved her hips in bumps and grinds, and he pressed even closer against her, and she felt his hard body pressing up against her soft tender buttocks. His body began to move in time with hers and he moved against her and she could feel the flaming fury of his excitement.
The train stopped at Thirty-Fourth Street The crowd thinned slightly but the man stayed closer than ever to her. And, when the A train started up again, he moved furiously against her, hurrying, panting, straining.
His body shuddered with fulfillment. She felt him twitch against her. She smiled.
At 42nd Street the train stopped and the shipping clerk got out. She looked after him, hoping he would turn around and grin at her or something. But he never turned. He scurried out of the train and walked off withDut a backward glance. At 59th Street the crowd thinned out further and she got a seat The next stop was 125th Street; the train went steadily for sixty-six blocks, or about six and a quarter miles, and she sat in her seat and smiled like the Cheshire cat. Then the train stopped at 125th Street and she got off it and went upstairs to the street, feeling rather like a Boy Scout who has done his good turn for the day.
She was home by ten and in bed by ten-fifteen and asleep by ten-thirty. She slept for nine hours, waking finally at seven-thirty with her body bathed in cold sweat There had been dreams, bad dreams, entirely uncomfortable dreams. Dreams of knives and razors, dreams of men who hurt her and men who bit her and men who cut the nipples off her breasts. All sorts of dreams, maybe just one dream that never ended, one mad nightmare that held her and wouldn't let her go She woke up, finally, woke up in a sweat and woke up with the shakes.
A hot bath settled her a little, and a cold shower brought her back to life, and she went outside to kill the three hours or so before it was time to go to work.
She turned the usual number of usual tricks that night. Only one of them stuck in her mind. She wasn't sure why he did, but there was something about him that kept her from forgetting him. He was a heavy-set florid-faced Irishman with a mop of bright red hair and arms like legs of mutton. His eyes were bright and beady and his palms were moist with sweat.
She started by asking him for fifteen, guessing from the start that twenty was out of the question. She asked for fifteen and he laughed at 'her. She started to turn and walk away but his hand fastened on her waist and yanked her back. This didn't mean he was willing to pay the fifteen, not the way he was gripping her. It meant he was going to have her for his price and there wasn't a hell of a lot she could do about it.
"Ten bucks," he said levelly. "Ten bucks, you nigger whore, and for that price you do what I tell you to do."
She didn't even hesitate. She nodded, briefly, and he reached out to grip her nipple through her dress and tweak it. He grinned as he did it, but the pain that shot through her whole breast wasn't anything to grin about.
She took him to her apartment. She took off her clothes while he took off his clothes. She got on the bed, lay on her back in the classic posture.
"Hell," he said. "If that's the way I want it, I can get it from my own wife. But she's a good woman, not a whore like you, and she only does it decent ways."
She asked him how he wanted it.
"Hang on," he said. "Don't be in a hurry. I'm payfag for you, and I've a right to look you over first. I want to make sure I'm getting value for my dollars."
So she lay very still while he examined her He took her breasts in his hands and flexed them like a doctor checking for breast cancer, except that any doctor on earth would have been gender with her than he was. He squeezed the tender flesh hard and he pulled as if he was a sadist. He did it coolly, unemotionally, as though it was his pure power over her that gave him pleasure.
He examined other parts of her, and then he thrust his thick fingers at her and hurt her a little.
"Got to check you out," he said. "Got to make sure you haven't got a disease. All you nigger sluts are diseased and I gotta check you out."
He handled her some more. Then he told her what it was that he wanted her to do. It was common enough, but his particular frame for it, his little accompanying fantasy, made it just a little cruder than usual. Usually, when tricks wanted her to do that particular thing, they either sat or lay down on the bed while she worked on them. This man was different. He insisted that they go to her bathroom, and then he sat down and she knelt on the cold tile at his feet.
He talked to her, too. He called her names and he told her foul stories, but long ago she had learned to shut her ears to the things tricks said to her. Men were funny that way, she knew. Some of her customers liked for her to say vulgar words while they used her, and others liked to call her names; it was strange the way they combined passion with vulgarity.
This man, though, was a little different. It was not so much that his words and phrases were vulgar. They were also mean, cruel, nasty.
She couldn't shut it all out.
One part lingered. "This is all you niggers are good for," he said. "God had a reason for making everything on this earth, I'll tell the world. And there was just one reason he made you nigger girls. He made you to give a white man a moment's pleasure, and that's all you can do."
When it was over, he tried to add injury to insult. "You aren't much good," he told her. "You better let me have my ten bucks back or I'll take it out of your hide."
But he wasn't going to bluff her. Fury rose up in her, and she ran to the kitchen and came back with a bread knife, and when he saw it his ruddy face turned green.
"You get outta here," she said. He stared at her.
"You damn white bastard," she yelled. "You know what I'm fixing to do? I'm gonna cut you, man!"
He was fumbling with his clothes, struggling to get dressed. He put his underpants on inside out and she wanted to laugh. He stuck his feet right into his heavy shoes and didn't even bother with his socks. Then he grabbed up his socks and jammed them into his pants pocket. One pants leg was inside out, and he had to hop around trying to fix it, and she thought how nice it would be to take the bread knife and ram it into his gut until it came out the back.
"Louse," she said.
"Listen-"
"Fixing to take your bread back. I oughta cut you where you live, man. Ought to cut it off of you and use it for a book mark. Oughta-"
"I'm going," he said.
He went. He went in a hurry, racing out the door, taking the steps two at a time. She hoped he would trip on the stairs and break his damn neck, but unfortunately that didn't happen. He hit the street and started to run. She watched out the window, pleased that he was running up the street in the wrong direction.
Make a few wrong turns, she thought, and you'll never get out of Harlem, you Irish jerk. Make a few wrong turns, white man, and you'll be in a part of Harlem where white men aren't supposed to go. And I won't have to cut you then, man. Some black man'll cut your throat for a dollar.
He wasn't the last trick of the evening but he stayed in her mind even while she was with other men in her apartment, stayed in her mind while other men powered their passion into her, stayed in her thoughts while her body moved as bodies were supposed to move and while her mouth made the sounds and said the words it was supposed to make and say.
She couldn't forget.
Around two-thirty she ran into Lu, went with her for coffee and doughnuts. She told Lu about the man, told her what he had done and what he had said. And Lu nodded, understanding.
"We only get the bad ones," she said.
"Like him?"
"All of 'em. Why's a man come and get hisself a hustling girl? Because he wants something special. Or because he wants a broad to be dirt under his feet so that he can feel like a damn king. The good men stay home with their wives and make it that way, and the bad ones come up to Harlem with hate shining in their damn eyes."
"I like to kill him, Lu."
"Must of scared him, Sara." , "You should of seen him."
"I can imagine. Wonder if he's ever gone to put them socks on his feet?"
They laughed about it then. But later, back on the street, she tried to laugh and couldn't bring it off. The man was evil, the man was ugly, the man was sick inside, but she was no shining beauty inside herself. She was weak and sick, and she earned dirty money in a dirty business, and she smoked pot and in a while she'd be trying something stronger, because already pot was failing to take the edge off the ugliness of the life she led. Pot still had the same effect on her, still got her as high as it ever had gotten her, but it didn't make enough of a fundamental difference in the way she felt. If she was down, hung up about the life she was leading, a pot high didn't change things for her, not the way it ought to.
So sooner or later she would try heroin. Already, Jubal had offered to turn her on it. He made the offer in an offhand manner, giving himself enough room so that it wouldn't appear that he was forcing her on the stuff if she wasn't interested. But she had known at the time and she knew now that she would hear the offer again and again and again, until sooner or later it hit her when she was in just the right mood, and then she would be on the needle.
Not right away, of course. First she'd take a sniff. She had already seen that done. One night she had seen a fly chick and her sweet man turning on in a doorway; the pimp spilled powdered heroin onto a twist of paper, and snorted it, then fixed up the paper for the girl and let her sniff it in.
That was one way to start.
Then you joy-popped, just hitting it for kicks, shooting a little horse into the fleshy part of your arm. You didn't get hooked that way. You took your shots when you wanted them, and you balled, and all was well.
And then, well, the drug had a heavy tolerance to it. Joy-popping didn't have much of a boot to it, so you went on and swung the right way. You mainlined, sending the stuff straight into one of the main veins so that it would get to your heart and to your brain in a hurry instead of taking its time about it. From that point on it was no contest, and you were hooked, and you might as well ball yourself up and throw yourself away because, girl, you had had it.
And it wouldn't take long.
Not long at all.
Not the way she was going.
Maybe, she thought, maybe it was better not to fight it. Maybe it was better to give in and let herself be hooked on the needle as soon as she could, accept it the next time Jubal offered it, mainline right off the bat, let the white horse of heroin be the answer to all her problems. At least she could go on living that way. At least she would have that much of a kick in her life, if she had nothing else. It was a rotten life, but with Jubal holding up one of her arms and heroin holding up the other one, she just might be able to get through it.
Maybe.
She quit work at five. She went back to her room and changed her clothes and scooped up all the money except for the seven dollars she had decided to hold out. She put the seven bucks in the hiding place under the loose linoleum, tucked the rest into her bag and headed for the Blue Moon.
The minute she walked inside, she could tell that something was wrong. It was obvious, she could feel it in the air, it was all over the place. She looked around for Jubal and couldn't find him. People were staring at her. She walked straight up to a girl she knew and asked her what was wrong.
The girl said: "Sara."
"Tell me."
"It's Jubal," the girl said. And then she stopped and didn't say anything more. "What is it?"
"Now take it easy, Sara."
"Tell me!"
Her head was ringing and her heart was pounding and she couldn't see straight. She put one hand and held onto the bar for support. She was sick and frightened and she wanted them to tell her but she didn't know what it was that they would say and she was afraid.
And someone said, "It's Jubal, Sara."
"What happened?"
"Its Jubal. He ... he's dead, Sara."
CHAPTER NINE
Another girl pulled up a chair for her. Hands eased her into it. She sagged, collapsed in the chair. Somebody brought her a glass of water. She shoved it aside and it landed on the floor. The glass shattered into a myriad of fragments and the water spread in a tired puddle on the floor. Dead.
Jubal was dead. Jubal.
Her man was dead.
"Sara"
"How?"
"He was shot, Sara."
"Who did it?"
"A girl."
"Who, damn it?"
"Celia Jamison," somebody said.
"Who's she?" I
"One of his girls."
"Which one?"
"The white one," somebody else said. "Blue-eyed blonde. Maybe you saw her. She was over to the party last night."
She remembered, of course. The blue-eyed white girl with the corn-colored yellow hair. She remembered seeing the girl standing in the corner, dumb-faced and stupid, while Jubal jived her with his arm around her waist and his hand stroking that pretty yellow hair. Just last night, she thought. Just last night she had seen Jubal with that girl for the first time and now one day later he was dead and the girl had killed him.
"What's her name?"
"Celia Jamison."
"How ... how'd it happen?"
"Nobody knows for sure," someone said. "She was up at that fancy apartment of his. They both was smoking pot cause the cops said the place was so thick with smoke you couldn't see. And burning incense to hide the smell."
She remembered. Sandalwood, of course. He smoked pot and burned sandalwood incense with all his whores, evidently. She liked to think she was the only one, the special one. but that wasn't the way it worked.
"This Celia had a gun," someone went on. "Took it out and shot Jubal four times. Shot him three times in the chest, then put that pistol right up against the center of his forehead and pulled the trigger again and blew most of his head away."
She shuddered. Then, strangely, she pulled herself together. What did she feel, exactly? Grief? Loneliness? What?
Shock, she thought. Shock more than anything else. Shock, and surprise, and a tremendous amount of emptiness. But now that the shock and surprise were beginning to wear off, she realized that no deep feelings of grief were rushing in to take their place.
"The neighbors heard the shots," someone else was saying. "They called the cops and the fuzz came running. They banged on the door and damned if that Celia witch didn't walk over to open the door for them. They were just about coming in the door when she shoved the mouth of that gun in her own mouth and gave the trigger another squeeze. Blew her brains out all over the apartment. Killed herself right there in front of the nabs."
That did it. The picture was just too graphic, and Sara threw up. It came in one quick wave of nausea that tugged at the pit of her stomach and made her vomit all over her own shoes. And this somehow purged her. She stayed to clean up her shoes and to clean up some of the mess she had made, and then she got to her feet and walked quickly and deliberately out of the Blue Moon Lounge and into the night.
Except it wasn't right any more. It was turning to morning, and false dawn had already brightened the early sky. She went to a coffee pot and ordered black coffee and never even had a sip of it. She let it go cold in front of her, paid for it, left it. She walked some, and she thought about Jubal and about herself, and then, all of a sudden, she began to cry. She doubled up and sank down onto the stoop of a dingy brown-stone on 126th Street and lay curled up there, crying bitter tears onto the cold stone steps.
Grief?
No.
No, not grief at all. Anger.
The dirty damn whites, she thought. The damn whites, they got to hurt you every way they can. They make you scrub their floors, and they make you kiss their rears, and they make you spread your legs, and then they take your man and shoot holes in him. The dirty damn whites, they hurt you every chance they get. Every damn chance.
And she thought about the Irishman, and about what he had said to her, and then she thought about Celia Jamison and about what she had done to Jubal (and, by extension, to Sara) and she pounded clenched fists against the immovable stone steps and cried and cursed and moaned. The world let her be. People looked at her and looked away. Some of them didn't know who she was and didn't trouble to find out. Others knew she was a hustling broad who had lost her man and they kept respectful distance and silence.
Crying for Jubal? Crying for her loss?
No.
No, she thought, because what had she lost? What on earth had she lost? Very little, she told herself. Jubal had not been her lover. He had been the man who took everything she earned and who gave her nothing in return, and by all the rules in the world she was a damn sight better off without him. He was the man who had started her, he was the man who had turned her from a good girl to a harlot, and as a result he had had a powerful hold over her. But his death had broken that hold. She was a free woman now.
Free?
How free?
Not entirely free, to be sure. Not free enough to go back to that other room on 116th Street and go back to school in the fall and then go to CCNY and turn into a teacher. This wouldn't happen. That chorus of Yes, Miss Jackson and No, Miss Jackson and Can I Go To The Bathroom, Miss Jackson was a chorus she would never be able to hear. She was a prostitute, a streetwalker, and it was by now too much a part of her life for her to become anything else.
But she was free of Jubal.
She went up to her apartment, packed all the things she wanted into paper bags. She could stay on in the apartment if she wanted, she was fairly sure of that. But it was Jubal's apartment and Jubal had rented it for her and paid the rent each month, and she didn't want to live there now that he was dead. She would never feel right about it. In a day or so, maybe even this morning, she would get her clothes and stuff out of the place and never go back.
She packed half her stuff, then went out for breakfast. She felt better now; she had cried herself out and shivered herself out and cursed herself out, and from now on she was going to be all right. She found a restaurant and ordered a big breakfast-eggs and sausages and a corn fritter and hominy grits and lots of coffee. Before she had not even been able to drink a cup of coffee. Now she ate everything they stuck in front of her and could have eaten more.
A pimp found her in the restaurant. He was a pimp she had met before, a friend of Jubal's named Simmie Moore. His skin was close to jet black, and his arms and legs were very long, and he favored pullover shirts and beltless slacks. He was wearing a cashmere shirt now and a pair of corduroy slacks, and he came over to her and sat down next to her.
"Sara," he said, "I'm sorry to hear about Jubal." She nodded soundlessly.
"He was a fine man," Simmie Moore said. "He was a friend of mine, Jubal was. A fine friend."
"I know."
"We were close," he said. He held out two fingers, tight together. "Like this," he said. She nodded.
"And I am very sorry." She didn't say anything.
"Must be hard on you," he went on. "You're all alone now, Sara."
"That's right."
"Must be hard on a woman, being all alone. The Lord never meant for a woman to be by herself."
"Oh?"
"It's the truth. A woman needs a man. You know that song? Ain't nothing worse in the universe than a woman without a man. The Lord never meant for a woman to be alone, Sara."
He never meant for a woman to be a whore either, she thought. But she didn't say anything.
"You lonesome, Sara?"
"No."
"Will be, though. You and me, we could make a good team, Sara. Now, I don't want to rush you-"
"Damn," she said angrily.
"What's the matter?"
"You're a damn vulture," she said, eyes fierce now. "He ain't even cold yet, for God's sake, and you're running here and there trying to pick up fresh talent for your own stable. You're a damn grave-robber, Simmie Moore."
"Aw, now-'
"Just leave me be," she said.
"I didn't mean now. I meant like in the future."
"There's no future."
"Sara-"
"I'm not having a pimp any more," she said. "I had one and he died and now I'm on my own."
"You kidding?"
"No. Not one bit."
"Then you're talking foolish," he said. "If you're fixing to be an outlaw broad without a man to take care of you, then you're just plain foolish."
"Why?"
"Cause it never works, Sara."
"Why not?"
"Cause an outlaw chick don't have anybody to love her and care for her, Sara."
She threw back her head and laughed. The laughter didn't have any humor in it. It was harsh, bitter, and Simmie Moore recoiled from it as if she had struck him.
"Love her and care for her," she said, mocking him. "You mean take her bread and let her rot. That's what you mean, isn't it?"
"Sara-"
"You get off my back," she said. "I'll make it on my own, you hear? I'll make it on my own and I'll make it my own way and I don't want fou and I don't need you and I just want to be rid of you and all them leeches like you."
People were staring at her. Simmie got up, moved off. There was a funny look in his eyes.
"All right," he said.
"It better be all right."
"You change your mind, Sara-"
"Be a cold day in hell when I do I
"You change your mind," he went on, "you know where to find me. IT! be there."
She waited until he was gone, then left the restaurant and stood outside in the strong light of morning with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of her mouth. There was better than a hundred dollars in her purse, and she realized that it was her money, hers to keep, and if it hadn't been for Jubal's death she wouldn't have that money at all. And she had worked for it, had hustled for it, had done dirty things to get it. It was hers, and now because Jubal was dead she could do whatever she pleased with it.
She was damned if she would give it to some sweet-talking pimp who took everything and gave you nothing, some sweet man like Simmie Moore or like Johnny May or, Lord rest his soul, like one Jubal Bryce.
To hell with that noise.
So what would she do?
Hell, she knew damn well what she would do.
She went back to her place, finished packing, loaded her arms down with her stuff and walked out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street. She wouldn't be going back to that apartment, she thought. Not in a million years. She'd find another nicer place to live, and she's never again turn tricks in the same bed she did her sleeping in, not if she lived to be a million years old. It was not decent and that was all there was to it.
She stood on the street for a moment and looked up at the building, remembering the first time she had come there when Jubal had first started her up in business. She remembered climbing the stairs, remembered going into the apartment and thinking how much nicer it was than the room on 116th Street. It wasn't so nice any more. There was nicer.
She started walking.
She was in front of another building now. It was a building she had been to before, a brick building on 133rd Street near Lenox, a building a little better than the one on 128th Street though hardly magnificent. She opened the front door and went into the hallway and stood for a moment looking at the row of buzzers, finding the right one. She went to ring it, then changed her mind and walked inside and began climbing the stairs.
On the third floor she found the right apartment and stood for a moment or two in front of the door. Her arms were loaded down with the stuff she had dragged there from her apartment, and she stooped to set everything on the floor.
Then she knocked on the door.
She had to knock loud and clear for a few moments. Then a voice called from within, asking who it was.
"Sara," she said, "Sara?"
"Uh-huh."
Footsteps, bare feet padding quietly across the floor. A bolt slid back, a police lock released, a door opening.
Red lips poised uncertainly. High yellow skin. Platinum hair.
Lu.
"Come on in," Lu said.
She walked inside. Then she remembered her packages, and she went to gather them up. Lu helped her with them. When they were inside again she put them down and Lu stepped back to look at her.
"Well," she said. "I ... I heard about it, Sara."
"I figured you would."
"How do you feel?"
"All right."
"They said you were all broke up at first. Said you were all messed up about it."
"It knocked me out. But it was shock. I'm over it now. I don't feel anything but numb."
"You want a drink?"
"I guess, if you got something."
Lu got a bottle of Johnny Walker Black and a glass. She poured a few ounces of liquor into the glass and handed it to Sara. "I'd have one with you," she said, "only I just woke up. I was sleeping when you got here."
"I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I just dozed off, like."
She held the glass, looked at the amber liquid. She lifted it, tossed off the whole drink. It was smooth but it warmed her throat and made a pleasant burning sensation in her stomach.
"Another one?"
"Thanks, but no."
"Sara?"
She looked at Lu, looked at her, studied her. "What are you going to do now, Sara?"
She lowered her eyes. "I thought maybe I'd stay here with you," she said. "If you still want me."
"Oh, Sara!"
"Could I, Lu?"
"Oh, you come here, baby. Oh, you come here."
She took a step forward, hesitated. And then she was in Lu's arms and Lu was holding her, not kissing her, not petting her, just holding her close and warm. It wasn't love, she thought. It wasn't any great big sort of thing like that. It was just sweet warmth that kept you all nice and secure.
"Sara-"
"I want to, Lu."
"Now?"
"Now."
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"Kiss me, Sara."
She kissed Lu, took Lu's head between her hands and brought her lips to Lu's warm red mouth. Her tongue darted out, licked Lu's lips, slipped gently between them. She tasted the hot sweetness of Lu's mouth and her loins burned with real hunger now. She hadn't wanted anyone this much in ages. She wanted Lu more than she had ever wanted Jubal, because her desire for Jubal had been a different sort of thing, mixed up with all her sick and jangled needs for love.
And this was different. There was no question of love, no contrasting roles, just a mutual hunger for warmth and happiness and friendship and sheer unadulterated sex.
And she was hot as a stove.
She ran her hands over Lu's face, along Lu's throat. Lu's hands moved to Sara's shoulders, swept slowly down across her back to cup her buttocks. Lu pulled her, brought her forward so that their bellies pressed tightly together and their bodies were close. Lu's breath was coming faster now and Sara could sense the delicious excitement that was coursing through the mulatto girl's body.
They got to the bedroom. It wasn't easy, because the excitement was fierce now and they couldn't let go of one another. Lu was wearing a sheer wrapper and Sara could feel her breasts through it, large and ripe and warm, the nipples already stiffened with passion. She was aching to have a breast in her hand, a breast in her mouth, aching to rub and stroke and pet and fondle and nibble and kiss.
Even so, they got to the bedroom.
"Sara, I need it-"
"Oh, so do I, baby."
"Sara-"
She tore Lu's wrapper off. She opened it, pulled it over Lu's shoulders, and then she stepped back to look at the perfection of Lu's light golden body. Nothing had ever looked more beautiful. Lu's breasts were large, larger than she remembered, and the nipples at their tips were a deep scarlet. Lu's body flared in to a tiny waist, then widened for her amply rounded hips.
Lu's thighs, Lu's calves, Lu's feet.
Lu.
"Lie down," she said. "Lie down, Lu."
"Sara."
"I want to do you, you hear?"
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. I want to do everything, I want to make you cry, I want to make you scream, I want to turn you on and drive you wild, I want to do it all. You lie down now, Lu."
Lu lay down on her back. Her arms were at her sides, her eyes closed, her legs close together. Sara stood for a moment and looked at her, then tore her own clothes off. She wanted to tell Lu to open her eyes, wanted to see if Lu got excited looking at her naked body. But there would be time enough for that later.
She got in bed with Lu. She curled up beside her, her face inches from Lu's breast, and her hand moved out to settle on Lu's bare belly just above her navel. She moved her hand gently, tenderly, over the golden skin, moving it in a circle, then moving it higher and higher until she was stroking the extra soft skin just below Lu's perfect breasts.
And then she took hold of Lu's breasts.
Lu gasped. Lu sucked in a mouthful of air, and Sara's hands did all the things that only one woman could do to another. A man could never do these things, not in quite this way. A man wouldn't know how. You had to be a woman in order to know how to thrill a woman to the very core of her being.
And Sara knew how.
She knew how to stroke Lu's breasts. She also knew how to kiss them, knew how to raise Lu's passion with little lips-together pecks all over the surface of the huge globes of firm flesh, knew how and when to open her mouth and let her tongue join in the fun. She knew how to tease Lu by drawing little circles around the dark red nipples with her own hungry lips.
She knew a lot of things.
She did them all.
"You like this," she said softly. "Don't you?"
"Sara-"
"You love it. I thrill you, don't I?"
"Sara-"
"I do! I know I do!"
She moved on the bed, and her mouth moved down from Lu's breasts over Lu's stomach. She was so eager now that she couldn't bear it, couldn't take another minute of it. She was on fire. Her skin tingled and her breasts were burning and there was an unquenchable fire blazing furiously in her trembling body. She was on fire, and she ached to kiss and bite every bit of Lu, yearned to devour her with hungry kisses. More. More. More.
Until she was at the foot of the bed, holding Lu's knees in her hands, pressing her lips first to one knee and then to another. Her hands moved higher on Lu's thighs and she squeezed the girl's flesh so hard that Lu moaned as much with pain as with passion She looked at Lu, ran her eyes over platinum hair and monstrous breasts and flat stomach.
Now-
Now she was ready, and Lu was tossing fitfully on the bed, her whole body spilling over with desires too urgent to be denied. And now she was kissing Lu, kissing, kissing, doing what she wanted to do, doing what Lu wanted to be done, doing it and loving it and aching for it and better and better and better and the bedsprings groaning in metallic protest and the room rocking and the walls trembling and the earth shaking.
More.
More!
Until Lu's whole body strained and buckled, and the earth fell into the sea, and it was over.
They did not sleep much that day.
It was no time for sleep. They were both tired, both physically in need of sleep, but it was still no time for sleep. It was a time of physical joy, a time for passionate discovery, a time for two bodies to learn everything there was to know about one another.
They had made love before. That time they had each earned two hundred dollars with BuUwer Trove, that had been lovemaking and it had been good. But it was a different proposition entirely, Sara knew. Then it had begun as an act put on for Bullwer Trove's own private pleasure, and the fact that Lu wanted it was something she had not realized. The excitement of it had come upon her unaware, a little at a time, and it had been mixed with guilt and surprise in fairly large proportions.
Now the guilt was gone, the surprise out of the picture. She was not being unfaithful to a man now because her man was dead and she no longer had a man. Now she could devote herself wholeheartedly to the topic at hand, could enjoy every facet of it, could add new tricks to her repertoire and could have herself a ball.
Which, naturally enough, is what happened.
So they got very little sleep that day. They got plenty of bed, but very little sleep. Too much bed and not enough sleep may make Jack a dull boy, but it also made Sara a happy girl.
She learned things. She learned that she could lie right on top of Lu and they could put their arms around each other and put their mouths together and kiss, and if at the same time they moved back and forth a little their big breasts would rub together in a manner that was purely delightful, and that if at the same time they did little things with their hips another part of themselves would rub together, and that if they did it long enough the whole world would quietly explode.
She learned other things. Dozens of things.
Until it was after eleven at night, and she was propped up on one elbow looking at Lu, and, saying. "Damn, we got to get up and dressed."
"Why?"
"To work, baby. You know what time it is?"
"I know."
"Time to work, Lu."
"Hell," Lu said. "We can work tomorrow, girl."
"But-"
And Lu was grinning. "Honey," she said, "you ain't got a man to pay or a habit to feed. We got enough money for food and the rent is paid and there's not a reason in the world to haul our butts out of this here bed. So be cool, girl."
It was a revelation. There was no need to get up and go out and turn tricks, not now. There was no need to do anything but relax. Before she had sweated to earn a minimum of a hundred dollars a night, and it would have been unthinkable to pass up the opportunity to get her hands on some bread. Now she was her own boss and she could do what she damn well pleased.
Which meant staying in bed.
All night long.
"Lu?"
"Uh-huh."
"We don't need men, do we?"
"Course not."
"We got each other, huh?"
"You know it, baby."
"We can make it like this, can't we?"
"Sure," Lu said. "Easy."
She put her head on the pillow and closed her eyes. It would be easy, she decided. And she could save money, too. Hell, the kind of money a hooker earned, even if she took it easy and even if she lived high on the hog she made a fortune. If she kept it to herself and didn't pay off a pimp she could be rich. How much did Lu have in the bank? A lot, she guessed. And she could save, too. Maybe set money aside until she had enough to buy a car. It made a difference, having a car. You could really groove that way.
She smiled, leaned over to kiss Lu. And then, almost before she got her head back on her pillow, she was asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
It worked out neatly. In the morning, Lu set everything up. First Lu took her around to a fat old man named Hennessy. Hennessy ran a cigar store on 110th Street, but he did not make the bulk of his living selling cigars. Hennessy coordinated things. Pimps like Jubal and Johnny May and Simmie Moore got to Hennessy and arranged deals, and outlaw girls like Lu and Sara could work things the same way. The three of them stood in the back room of the cigar store for a few minutes talking things over, and when Sara and Lu left the place the deal was set. Every Wednesday, by noon at the latest, Sara would bring fifty dollars to the cigar store and give it to Hennessy. In return, she would not be arrested. There was no guarantee that she would be arrested if she didn't pay Hennessy. But the Vice Squad cops had to arrest somebody, and since Hennessy told them who not to arrest, they generally tried to pick up any available hustler who wasn't on the safe list. For fifty a week, the protection was cheaply bought.
That was the first step. Next was a rooming house on Seventh Avenue, the same rooming house that Lu used There, for the princely sum of two hundred dollars per month or fifty per week, Sara rented a second-floor room exactly ten feet square. There was room for a bed and a dresser and that was all.
It was enough. Now she had a room to work in that was separate from the one where she lived, and that was all she needed. The price was sky-high, of course-similar rooms went begging at a quarter of the price. But there is a premium involved when you are practicing the oldest profession in the world. For the rental received, Sara's new landlord agreed to ignore any complaints he might receive, to permit her to ball anyone in the world at any hour in the world, and otherwise leased the room not as a sleeping room but as an office for the specific practice of prostitution.
"Now you're set," Lu told her. "All set. You got protection from the law and you got a crib that's for turning tricks and nothing else. You know where girls fall on their faces, Sara? They think that just because they're hookers they got to be the lowest thing in the world. They start hating themselves, baby. So they live as bad as they can. And they hate the money they make so they look for a pimp and give it all to him. They go into it for the money and hate the money so they wind up with nothing but a big bad hate for themselves and nothing else in the world You know how to live, it ain't a bad life. You can get along, just so you know how to keep from spitting in your own face. That's what it is, baby, like spitting and having the wind blow it right back in your face."
Lu was right, she thought. Lu was right all the way down the line. She must have hated herself or she wouldn't have acted the way she did. It was hate for herself for being a whore that made her so anxious to please Jubal, so ready to do everything for him and ruin her own life in the process. That was why girls had sweet men, she realized. Not because the men could give them good loving. Not for any reason like that. It was so they could be lower than anything, so they could get rid of their guilty feelings about the money they earned.
People got rid of money in different ways. There was a man in her old neighborhood who jobbed heroin to the smaller pushers. He wasn't a junkie himself, just made his living out of it. There is a teriffic mark-up in heroin, and everyone connected with it makes a pile of dough. But this man never had very much. He gambled incessantly, gambled it away as fast as he made it, as though he wanted to get rid of it.
It was the same damn thing.
After the pad and the protection were taken care of, she went off on her own for the rest of the afternoon. Lu wanted to go to a show, but the movie was one Sara had already seen and she felt like being by herself a bit anyway. Things were happening quickly, she thought. Damn quickly. It took a little getting used to.
She did a little shopping. She saw a sweater in an expensive shop, a thirty-five dollar sweater, and she started to walk away from it automatically, knowing she couldn't afford it. And then she realized that thirty-five dollars was just three or four tricks, and that three or four tricks could easily be run off in a good hour, and that, in short, she could afford the sweater with no strain at all. Before, with Jubal alive, she could not have bought the sweater in a million years. Now it was simple-she went in and tried it on and paid cash for it and took it home.
She met Lu after the show. She wore the new sweater, and she couldn't help grinning when she saw Lu's eyes light up at the sight of it. The sweater was fairly tight around her breasts, and she had not bothered to wear an unnecessary bra, and she figured that she probably looked fairly sexy. And, if the expression on Lu's face was any indication, she looked about as sexy as possible.
Lu said: "Nice."
"You dig it? I picked it up the afternoon."
"You're spending money like a drunken sailor, girl."
"First chance I had."
"Just stash some of your cash," Lu said. "Open a bank account, something like that. Have a place to leave your bread. Because some old emergency can come along and ram it into you and you need some dough on hand in a hurry."
"I was going to start an account anyway," she said. "To save money."
"For anything special?"
"For a car."
"Well," Lu said. "You start saving, then. It takes a lot of balling to buy a car, baby."
They had dinner downtown, in a little Italian place in the Village. The Village had erased most of its color line years ago, and they were able to go to a decent place and dine in the same restaurant with whites without drawing any stares or hard looks. The waiter, a slender middle-aged Sicilian with manicured nails and thin mustache, took their orders and brought them their dinner. Lu had a bowl of minestrone and a dish of lobster in fra diavolo sauce. Sara had the minestrone too and followed it with calamari. She liked the sound of the dish and ordered it without knowing what it was, and it turned out to be squid. That put her off for a moment or two, but she tried it and found out that it was good and enjoyed it considerably.
There was a large bottle of chianti to wash everything down with, a basket of sesame bread with a hard rich crust on it, and, later, a pot of Italian coffee and pastry from a pastry cart.
Sara leaned back in her seat, took a small sip of the bitter espresso. "Lu-"
"What, baby?"
"You know how I started, don't you? I mean, I told you how I got started, didn't I?"
"How you got started hustling? You told me, baby."
"How about you?"
"Me?"
"Uh-huh."
"Oh," Lu said. "Wow, like it was a long time ago, you know? A few years."
"What happened?"
Lu dug out a pack of cigarettes, lit one. She took a drag and blew out a thin column of gray smoke. The smoke hung together and drifted very slowly to the ceiling, then spread out and rubbed itself along the top of the ceiling and disappeared.
She said: "I guess I started young."
Sara waited.
"I was only a kid when the first boy got to me," she went on. "Just a damn kid. Thirteen, fourteen, something like that. I had this big family, baby, and my old man cut out on my mother just about when I was born and my old lady worked all the time and I sort of got left alone. Wow, like I was the loneliest little kid, you know? We were living in Philly then, on the south side, and where we were was worse than Harlem. A slum, Kke. And we were damn poor and I was lonely and I started growing these boobs of mine even then, you know, and the boys always wanted me to go up on the roof with them."
"And you went?"
"Oh, baby, did II The first time I was thirteen or fourteen and the boy was older and he was like Man Of War and I like to thought he was going to tear me in half. But I lived through it and started to dig it and from then on I wasn't lonely any more."
"Did you stay with that one boy?"
"You kidding?" She laughed. "I was a real popular little kid, Sara. I did it for anybody. One time I took on a midnight revue for a passel of kids. I was balling this one kid and he was part of a gang and he wanted me to come across for the whole bunch of them, and I just didn't give a damn. They had this cellar club under an old warehouse and I went down there and I put out for every last one of them while the rest of them stood around digging things. There must of been twenty of them and I balled them right one after the other just like that."
"Did you like it?"
"I could take it or pass it up. Sometimes I didn't feel a thing, Sara, and sometimes I like to got a little turned on inside and it was sort of kicks. But mostly it was like turning a trick is now, just something your body did to make some stud happy while you didn't really feel much at all."
She nodded.
"And then one day I guess I got wise. I thought of what money I could make with what I was giving away for free, and I just shook my head and swore up and down to would never ball another cat unless I was getting paid for it. And I went and told all those kids. You don't get to me any more, I said. Not unless you give me a dollar first, man."
"A dollar!"
"Well," Lu said. "You know, I didn't know too much. I figured a dollar for something I was giving away free was a lot of bread. But I learned, I got wise. I came to New York and now I'm a ten-buck whore and you can't expect too much better than that. Not in this world, anyway."
She was alone now. It was night, dark night, close to a doorway on Seventh Avenue that was considerably closer to her new room, and she stood silent and still with a cigarette dropping from one corner of her mouth.
It wasn't much of a night. After dinner, when they had walked together in the Village, black clouds came to blot out the moon and stars and a short swift cloudburst followed. It didn't last long, but since then it had been drizzling lackadaisically off and on, just enough to make the evening moderately uncomfortable without doing anything much to cool the pavement. She dragged on her cigarette and blew out smoke and waited for someone to come by.
A man was walking, moving toward her. She stepped out from the doorway and let her lips curve upward in a warmly professional smile. Her eyes took him in-tall, broad-shoulders, last year's suit, old shoes, good hat. She moved toward him and laid a hand on his arm and he shook it off.
"A little love, baby?" A pound of passion in her voice, and a little more pressure of her hand on his arm. He said: "Beat it, sister."
"I'm good, honey. And I don't cost all that much."
"I'm sure you're great. Take off."
"I could take off my clothes, man. All my clothes. I could get naked and I could do anything in the world. You don't know a thing till you been to bed with a girl like me."
He sighed. His hand went into his pocket, and his hand came out with a wallet, and he flipped the wallet open and the light from a streetlamp glinted off a silver shield.
She stepped back as though she had been slapped.
"Police," he said. "Homicide, not vice. But you better get off my back anyway, baby, or I'll arrest you for the hell of it. Hustle somebody else, understand?"
She was still shaking long after he had moved down the block and crossed the street and disappeared. Damn, she was stupid! You had to be very damn stupid to hustle a cop, and she had hustled him so hard he had nearly busted her just to get her away from him. Stupid, she told herself. You don't hustle cops, not if you want to go on living in the fresh air. You give them a wide berth.
And she should have made him for a cop. He had that cop look, now that she thought on it. He had that cop sound and that cop look and the cop feel to him. She should of known.
She threw her cigarette away and lit a fresh one. She smoked it halfway down, and then she caught the first trick of the evening.
He was a pretty obvious John. He was thin and he was nervous and he was young, and he was walking quickly and trying to slow himself down, so that one look at him told you that he had come to Harlem to get laid and that Harlem scared the crap out of him. He was the kind she liked because he was so easy. You never had to be afraid of him, because he was too much afraid of you to constitute much of a threat to you. You didn't have to bargain with him because he would pay your price from the start if he possibly could. And you didn't have to give him a long sales talk-he was ready to buy, or otherwise he would never have come to Harlem in the first place.
She stepped out and latched onto him. He looked at her, eyes frightened and hungry at once, and she knew she had him.
"Hey, baby," she murmured. "Want to have a party?"
He swallowed. His Adam's apple, prominent in his long scrawny neck, bobbed up and down. He opened his mouth but didn't say anything.
She pushed it a little. She moved closer to him and tossed her brown arms around his neck. She moved her body in close, gave him a quick feel of her breasts, moved her body across the front of his body. Beads of sweat emerged on his forehead and he was trembling nervously.
"Baby," she said, "you got twenty dollars?"
That was the way to play it with this sort, she knew. You never do get around to asking a price, because that only tended to invite argument. You asked the stud if he had a certain amount. If he did, he wouldn't lie to you. And then you sort of took if for granted that that was the price, and there wasn't much he could do about it. He was afraid to contradict you on the price, afraid you would lose patience with him and he wouldn't get to ball you after all. Anyway, he nodded.
"Then we can have a real fine time," she said. "I can make you stand up and scream, baby. Now you just come with me."
Nothing could have been simpler. She hung onto his arm and she led him down the block to her building, took him inside and walked up a flight of stairs to her second-floor room. She opened her door with her key, sort of shoved him inside, went inside after him, closed and bolted the door. Then, before she got the money, she pressed up against him and kissed him and rubbed the front of his trousers to seal the bargain.
"The money, honey."
She said it gently, made it a sort of reminder. He nodded nervously and took out a worn pigskin wallet, drew out five old five dollar bills and handed them to her. She took them, spared him the indignity of counting them herself, and tossed them nonchalantly into a dresser drawer.
"Okay, baby," she said. "Come to mama, baby."
He got out of his clothes. He undressed very slowly and systematically, taking off all his clothes and arranging them on the bare top of her dresser. She waited, let him get undressed first. With the nervous ones, it sometimes helped to get them to help you undress, ask their help with zippers and like that It gave an illusion of intimacy and let them feel a little less sterile about the whole thing.
When he was naked she let her eyes run over his body, and he blushed. She smiled happily and walked toward him and put a hand on his shoulder She put her other hand somewhere else and held him and petted him.
"So nice," she whispered. "Oh, I'm gonna like you, baby. You and me, we'll get along just fine."
She stepped away, turned her back to him. "I have more damn trouble with this dress," she said. "Want to help me off with it?"
He wasn't much help. His fingers wouldn't behave, and he had a hell of a lot of trouble opening the hook-and-eye and unfastening the zipper. He managed, finally, and she turned to face him and told him to pull the red dress over her head. He tugged it up and off and underneath it there was nothing but her, nothing but her bare brown body perfect and beautiful in all its naked glory.
"Come on, baby."
He didn't move.
"Let's go to bed, baby."
He got on the bed with her and lay motionless, waiting for something to happen. This might be a tough one, she thought. He didn't seem to know what to do, just lay there waiting.
She rolled over onto her side, facing him. "Oh, touch me," she moaned. "Put your hands on me, sugar baby. Come on, baby. Touch me, honey."
He touched her breasts, her hips. He ran his hands over her body and she could tell that it was exciting him, that he enjoyed touching her. But it didn't seem to be having any demonstrable physical effect upon him. He was not responding. She rolled closer, let her breasts press against his thin chest and put her mouth to his. She kissed him, her tongue working furiously, and he wrapped his arms around her body and returned her kiss.
But nothing was happening.
Her hands found him, held him. Her hands did all the tricks they had learned over the months of happy whoring, did the tricks with consummate skill. And nothing happened.
"Baby," she whispered, "you been drinking?"
"No."
"You ... uh ... you have this trouble before?"
He turned away.
"You been here before, baby?"
"Here?"
"You been with a girl before, baby?" He couldn't answer her. He shook his head no, and then he turned away so that she could not see his face.
She wondered how old he was. Twenty-two, twenty-three, she thought. Just a boy. Older than she was, of course, four or five or six calendar years older than she was, but that didn't really mean anything. Inside, where it counted, she was years older than he was.
And he had never been with a girL
"You afraid, honey?"
He didn't answer.
"Honey," she said, "now you open your eyes and look at me. You hear? Look at me." He looked at her.
"I'm just a girl," she said. "I'm a whore you bought and paid for, and there ain't a reason in the world why you should be afraid of me. And you don't have to be afraid that you won't be a man or anything. You don't have to be all embarrassed in front of me. You just relax, you hear? Just be cool."
He nodded.
"What's your name, honey?"
"Ray."
"I'm Sara, Ray. You go to school in town?"
"NYU," he said. "I just started in the law school there."
"You from out of town?"
"Pittsburgh," he said.
"I had a cousin in Pittsburgh," she said. It wasn't true, so far as she knew, but it was something to say. "You been in New York long?"
"Just a month. I ... I don't start school until September. I came into town to get an apartment and get settled and maybe get a job. But I haven't been able to find work yet."
"That can be rough," she said.
"It's not too bad."
"You fixing to be a lawyer? You defend me if the cops arrest me?"
"Well, I won't be practicing law for a few years, Sara."
She laughed. "I wasn't fixing to get busted tomorrow, Ray."
They talked some more. Gradually she let him feel that he knew her, let him relate to her as a person rather than as a thing. She put him at ease, and she knew that now everything was going to be all right. He had been afraid of her, had been terribly afraid of failure, and all of this had conspired to render him impotent. But he would be all right. Now, certainly, he would be all right.
"Come here now, Ray," she said. "Come here and touch me some, okay?"
He came to her, and he touched her, and his hands marvelled at the texture of her body. She moved his head down so that he could kiss her breasts, and she ran her hands over his young body, and then she touched him and held him and kissed him and then, then, he was ready.
"Oh," he said.
She moved, and he moved, and although he had never been with a girl before he managed to acquit himself nobly once the chips were down. He moved, and she moved, and-
He said: "Ohhhh!"
It was an understatement.
He wound up giving her another ten dollars before he left. In turn she taught him a few more tricks that he could use to impress the girls back home in Pittsburgh. She showed him the ropes, taught him all the rules of the game, and when he finally left her little room he didn't even look the same as he had when she picked him up on Seventh Avenue. His gaze was keener and his step was firmer and his posture was straighter. He had come to her room as a frightened boy and he left it well on the way to manhood.
She felt good about it.
The thirty dollars was only part of it. There was a great deal more to it than that. Even though he had never reached her, had never touched her, had never done anything that excited her in the least, the experience had managed to spread a good, sweet, warm feeling through every portion of her being. Most tricks, almost all of them, were cold and cruel and sterile. Most bedroom bouts were ugly and sordid, with no human contact and no understanding and nothing afterward but a general emptiness and a general feeling of disgust.
This was different.
Because they had known each other, however briefly. They had known each other, and she had helped him, had solved a problem for him, and it was good to be able to help someone. When you were balling a drunken pig who just wanted to make someone other than his wife for a change, you didn't get that good feeling afterward. When you were accommodating some disgusting pervert who couldn't find a girl willing to take care of him for free, you were hardly left with a tremendous feeling of innate goodness.
But when you met a boy, and made that boy a man, and touched him and felt inside him, it was good.
She might have stayed in the room basking in the unfamiliar glow for hours. But the night was a young one, and she had more work to do, more tricks to turn. She went to the bathroom to perform the usual ablutions, combed her hair and put on fresh make-up, locked up her room and put the key in her bag and went down to the street again. There was another hustler in her doorway, a scrawny cocaine addict named Margie, and she talked with the girl for a few minutes, then moved on down the street.
Ten minutes later she picked up a bald-headed man who lay down on the floor of her room with his clothes off. He paid her ten dollars and left happy as a skylark, and the glow that Ray had left her with was gone completely now.
At four, she met Lu. They didn't go to the Blue Moon Lounge now. They were outlaw broads, free-lance hookers, and the Blue Moon was primarily a meeting-place for sweet men and their girls. They would have been out of place there.
Instead, they met at a sweet shop and had chocolate sundaes and mugs of coffee. The ice cream was sweet and the syrup was sweeter and the coffee, in contrast, was particularly bitter.
"Have a good night, Sara?"
"Good and bad."
"I did so-so too. I kept quitting to come over here and sip coffee. I made enough. Hell, I didn't want to burn myself out. I felt all hung-up, like."
"Why?"
"What we was talking about downtown. How it all started."
"Oh."
"It can drag you, thinking those thoughts. I like to act as though I been a whore all my life. Like I was born living this way. Sometimes it seems like that, Sara."
"I know."
"Sara? Let's go home, baby."
They walked back to their apartment, didn't talk on the way. It was still dark out and the air was chilly now, finally affected by the drizzling. Sara smoked half of a cigarette and threw the butt into the gutter. They got to their building, climbed the stairs together.
"Sara-"
"What Lu?"
"I need you tonight."
"Good."
"Need you bad."
"Good, Lu."
"You know what I almost did tonight? Jesus, I hate to talk about it. I just hate to think about it."
"Tell me."
"I was ... oh, I don't know. In my room, you know. I had this trick, and he left, and he was one of those Johns who just make you feel so damn dirty, and I had this razor blade-"
"Oh, Lu!"
"-and I was holding it in one hand, and sort of looking at my other wrist, and I thought how damn easy it would be, and I came kind of close to doing it."
"Lu!"
She shrugged, chuckled. "But I didn't. You come dose lots of times. Just so you cool it and come to your senses before you make that little old cut, that's all that matters. But I need you tonight, girl. So hold me, Sara."
They held each other and they kissed each other and they made fierce hungry love to each other, and that helped.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
If Horatio Alger had written this you would be able to follow Sara Jackson over a definite course of upward social nobility. She might start as a five-dollar tramp, might then move up to the ten-buck streetwalker category, would next begin booking appointments by phone, would become a sort of twentieth-century courtesan, and, for a finale, might wind up marrying the sop of the president of Amalgamated Widgets, Inc.
But this sort of Great American Success Story cannot be applied to the noble business of prostitution, which may partially explain why Alger never devoted his literary attentions to the world's most ancient of trades. There is a strict caste line in whoredom, an established system of static social classes, and it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a streetwalker to step upward into the ranks of call girls.
A call girl may begin being a call girl at age eighteen, and may continue to live the same life and service the same sort of clientele to age forty or thereabouts. With a good call girl, age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite bedroom variety, and she goes on charging the same price until she quits the game forever. Conversely, a streetwalking, hustling chick like Sara Jackson, no matter how hip she might grow and how knowledgable she might become in the horizontal ways of man, will never advance to call girl status. In time she may drop her price as age makes inroads upon her appearance, and if she really falls apart she may finish out her days with Bowery bums for a quarter here and a half-buck there. But, in the main, a harlot finds her level at the onset of her professional life and holds that level forever.
So, as you no doubt realize by now, Sara Jackson did not begin booking appointments by phone (since she didn't even have a phone, as it happens), and did not become a sort of twentieth-century courtesan, nor did she, for a finale, wind up marrying the son of the president of Amalgamated Widgets, Inc. It might make a good story, but it wouldn't be the truth, Instead, she became a junkie.
It was a surprise, too. She had figured that living with Lu would keep her safe from heroin, if for no other reason than that Lu herself was unalterably opposed to it. Lu didn't even blow pot, and in no time at all Sara had gotten to the point where she rarely used marijuana at all and never smoked it around the apartment. Occasionally she would buy a couple of joints from her friendly neighborhood pusher and take them to the room she used for turning tricks and blow up there, but she never turned on at the apartment. She had the feeling that Lu wouldn't approve, and she didn't want to bug Lu over something that unimportant.
If Lu hadn't brought another girl home one night, she might never have started.
Well, that was what she told herself, anyway. It's probably not true. If you take a person and put him in a situation where he is exposed to heroin on the average of twenty-four hours a day, and where the bulk of the people he knows are users to one degree or another, and where a person is more likely to be regarded with suspicion if he doesn't use drugs than if he does, you've made a potential addict of him from the start. And when his life is such that escape is always to be sought and depression is an occupational hazard, you've tripled or quadrupled his propensity toward drug addition. So it's probable that, sooner or later, any girl in Sara's position would have tried jabbing herself in the arm with a needle.
Still, it was Lu's act that set it off.
There was no agreement between them that they would be faithful each to the other. In fact, to save wear and tear on their nerves, they had agreed quite ceremoniously that each was completely free to bring home another girl (or a man, if it happened that way) and that this would cause no basic friction in their relationship. Still, they were living together for something like three months before this happened, and it stunned Sara.
It was morning, and she finished work and went to meet Lu. The platinum-haired girl didn't show up. She had a cup of coffee and a doughnut, then said the hell with it and went back to the apartment. The apartment was empty when she got there. She stashed her earnings for the night in a kitchen cupboard-later in the day she would take some of the money to the bank where she had an account. Then she kicked off her shoes and curled up on the couch to wait for Lu.
Lu arrived about half an hour later, not alone and not sober. She was pretty well drunk and she had another girl with her. The girl was Cindy-Sara knew her well enough, had gone to the Village with her and Lu back when Jubal was still alive. She thought at first that Lu had just brought Cindy along for a visit, but then she saw the way Lu had her arm around the girl and she knew it was more than that.
"This here is Sara," Lu was saying. "And this here is Cindy, Sara."
"I know," she said.
"Well," Lu said.
She lit another cigarette.
"You don't mind us," Lu said. "You Just go on with what you're doing, you hear? Cindy and me, we got business."
Bedroom business, evidently. She stayed there on the couch while the two of them half-walked and half-staggered to the bedroom, opened the door, closed it. She remained on the couch and tried to shut out the sounds of clothing being discarded and kisses being exchanged, and she might as well have tried to ignore an earthquake. It was not an easy matter.
After a time she moved to the closed bedroom door. Her mind was churning and her legs were shaking, and she acted almost without knowing what she was doing. Slowly, stealthily, she turned the knob and eased the door open a crack.
And watched.
Watching hurt. Cindy and Lu were naked, and Cindy and Lu were on the bed, and Cindy and, Lu were making love. All at once, three different emotions began to course through her system.
In the first place, she was jealous. Lu was her woman and Cindy was making love to her, and that made her mad. True, Cindy and Lu had been lovers before she herself had so much as entered the picture, so in a sense they were only renewing an old acquaintance. But this knowledge did little to ease the feelings of jealousy that bothered her.
Secondly, she was hurt. Hadn't she been everything Lu needed? Hadn't she given Lu everything Lu ever wanted? Wasn't she enough for Lu? It didn't make any sense to her. And they were close, genuinely close, and it hurt that Lu should do this to her. If she had to cheat, she thought, she could at least have the decency to do it elsewhere. She didn't have to bring Cindy back home and make it right in front of her nose.
And thirdly, and finally, she was excited.
That was the worst part of all. She slipped away from the bedroom door, closing it silently, and she tried to erase the memory of what she had just seen. This didn't work at all, needless to say. The little scene she had witnessed had served to get her own engine started, and she wanted to make love to Lu in the worst way. This seemed quite likely to fall under the category of ungratifiable desires, at least for the time being, since Lu was quite definitely occupied.
Which left her high and dry.
Well, high, anyway.
The answer was a simple one, if not an ideal one. Lu might be busy now, but Lu was not the only gay hustler in Harlem, not by a long shot. There were plenty of others. And while it had never occurred to her to cheat on Lu before, she had had plenty of offers. Turnabout was only fair play now; if Lu could be bouncing around in bed with Cindy, she could certainly go out and find someone to take care of her in the meanwhile.
So she went
It was late October, close to Halloween, and the streets were still dark when she hit the pavement There were some girls who were still working-junkies, mostly, and girls supporting pimps who were hooked Girls on the needle worked longer hours, and worked harder, and needed more money, and generally earned less money, and didn't have it easy. She walked past a batch of them, then stopped short when a girl named Mavis Mallory took hold of her arm.
Mavis Mallory was white.
She was also a whore.
She was also a junkie.
And, finally, she was also a lesbian.
Mavis, in short, had a great many things going for her. The surprising fact is that she was also quite attractive, in a sort of washed-out way. Her brown hair had been bleached so frequently-and so improperly, too-that it was as lifeless as the straw in a broom that no longer sweeps clean. Her eyes were dull brown, her face thin and heart-shaped, her lips thin and bloodless. She had a lithe, boyish figure, with small if well-shaped breasts and barely any hips at all. Her hair was cut short and she rarely wore much make-up. She made a great hit with latent homosexual tricks who liked to have her turn her back to them, to speak euphemistically.
"Say, Sara," she said.
Sara looked at her. Well, now, she thought. She had never made it with a white girl, of course-since Lu was the only girl she had made it with, period. But Mavis would do. She was even sort of pretty, in a cockeyed kind of a way.
"Sara, I saw Lu. She was with-"
"Cindy."
"Oh. I didn't know if you knew or not."
"I knew. They're at our place now."
Mavis nodded.
"You busy, Mavis?"
"No business to be busy with, honey."
"You feel like company?"
Mavis hesitated. "I got to take a shot first," she said. "I was going to go home, shoot up, then maybe just go on the nod and sleep for a few hundred years. I don't know."
"You want company?"
"If you like, Sara."
It was like that. No deep hunger, no tremendous attraction, nothing of that sort. Sara had a mood going and she needed someone to resolve it with. Mavis was willing to accommodate, maybe even get her jollies out of the deal.
That was all there was to it.
They walked quickly east and south to the place where Mavis was living. She worked and lived in the same room, and it was a poorer place than the crib that Sara used just for work. But Mavis was a junkie-she needed seven or eight shots a day at five dollars a cap to keep her going, and that amounted to something like thirty-five or forty dollars a day, and when you spent that much money on a drug habit you didn't have much left over for the niceties of life.
She fed her habit and let the rest of her life go to hell. She lived in the cheapest place she could find, got along on as little food as possible, and sank all her money into the pinholes that lined the insides of her arms and legs.
When they opened the door of Mavis's apartment building (or rooming house, or run-down tenement, or what you will) the smell of human degradation almost knocked Sara over. She was used to Harlem, was familiar with poverty. Still, there was a limit. The rancid smells of old urine and stale wine and human excrement and left-over sex was stronger than anything she had come into contact with, and she wanted to turn around and go home.
But home was where Lu and Cindy were making love. Home was nowhere now, and she stayed with Mavis, climbed the stairs with her, walked into the solitary-confinement cell where Mavis worked and lived, sat down on the bed and tried not to watch while Mavis prepared her shot.
First Mavis took off her cardigan. Sara saw the line of dots along the underside of each arm, called tracks in junkies' parlance. She saw Mavis's skimpy breasts in her small bra. She looked at Mavis, and she felt desire mingled with sympathy and balanced, at the same time, with a feeling of general emptiness.
Mavis searched the room, found the capsule of heroin that she had hidden there earlier. She propped up a bent spoon on her dresser, set the cap of horse in the bowl of the spoon. She was panting now, reacting to the sight of the drug as Pavlov's dogs reacted to the ringing of bells.
Mavis was sweating, anticipating the drug, needing it. Sara saw the naked need brightening her dull eyes. The white girl yanked a match from a book of matches, scratched it into flame, held it under the bowl of the spoon. The heroin melted. Then she found an eyedropper with its bulb replaced by the rubber tip of a baby's pacifier. She squeezed the bulb, filled the eyedropper tube with liquified heroin.
She opened her vein with a bent pin, scratched a hole in it, grabbed the eyedropper and pressed it in place. Every vein in her body was standing out then and her eyeballs were bulging from her sockets. For a moment it looked as though she was going to die before she got the drug into her system, but then she squeezed the pacifier tip hard and the heroin shot into her vein and, magically, the drug took hold of her.
It was something to watch. It wasn't a kick, really; when you're hooked completely heroin ceased to be much of a charge. Mavis was at the point where the shot didn't exhilarate her, but let her feel normal, which was pleasure enough. But the effect of the drug was reflected in every aspect of her appearance. Her muscles relaxed and her face calmed down and her nerves stopped jumping and her veins settled down. She was human again, alive again.
"Oh, Gee," she said.
She sat still for a moment, relaxing, letting the drug straighten her out again. And then, automatically, she moved toward Sara and readied herself for love-making.
They made love. Sara needed it, needed it desperately, and in that sense it was good. But in another sense it was no good at all. It was disjointed and empty and compulsive, and although it satisfied the physical ache it left her more hung-up then before.
Until she was sitting on the edge of Mavis Mallory's bed, nervous and jerky, hung-up and tense. And she heard herself saying, "I oughta try some of that stuff."
"Horse?"
"I guess."
"You want a shot, Sara?"
I guess.
"I didn't know you used it."
"I never did. A little pot, that's all. I never used the hard stuff, Mavis."
"You want to blast?"
"Maybe."
"I can fix you up if you want, Sara. I got enough stuff. I like to keep it so there's always a cap or two extra around, because sometimes you can't find The Man when you need him and it can be bad. I mean, you get all twisted and you get to twitching and all. That's bad. But I got a healthy stash, I can spare you some. And it wouldn't take much to turn you on. Not if you never had any before."
"I don't know," she said.
"Try it, Sara. It's a gas."
"I wouldn't want to get hooked."
"Nobody ever got hooked on the first shot."
"But sooner or later-"
"Maybe. You're gonna try it sooner or later, Sara. You know you will. Anybody stays in the life long enough, sooner or later they try everything."
She thought about it. She wanted it, she knew; she had this hang-up, this depression, and she wanted to lift it. But she had sworn up and down never to use heroin.
"How does it feel, Mavis?"
"Like heaven."
"Suppose you're all strung up and sick. What does it do for you?"
"It straightens you out. It makes you swing free and loose and easy, front to back and all the way. It's like heaven."-
She thought for a moment, then stopped thinking altogether. "All right," she said. "Fix me."
It was that very damn easy. Mavis got to her feet, hunted around, came up with another cap. She put it on the spoon and cooked it over the flame of another match. She sucked about half of it into the eyedropper, carried the full dropper over to the bed and sat next to Sara.
"Gimme your leg," she said.
She made a hole in the skin on the fleshy part of Sara's thigh. Carefully, she fit the end of the eyedropper into the hole.
"Just a skin-pop," she explained. "You don't need to put it into the vein. And I'm only giving you part of the cap because otherwise it would be too much of a kick, you might not be able to stand it. I'll use the rest to give myself a little boot."
And then she sent the heroin home.
It doesn't hit you as fast when you skin-pop. It doesn't go as directly to the brain. It takes a minute, maybe, instead of hitting home instantly.
But it works.
God, does it work!
It made pot seem like kid stuff. It came up inside her and exploded all over her and she fell back on the bed and closed her eyes and stared at heaven through the top of her head. She rolled around in fuzzy pink clouds and ate cotton candy with the angels, and the whole world was all good and all groovy, and life was one big gas, and she was happy inside and happy outside and happy all over the damn place.
Wow!
It was more fun than a barrel of apes, more of a kick than a quadruple climax. She blew a mental kiss to Mavis Mallory and closed her eyes and wandered off, hazy and soft, to Dreamland.
And it was the beginning of the end.
The rest came inevitably enough. She didn't treat herself to another pop for the next few days. Lu dropped Cindy and they went back together again, but it somehow was not the same. There had been a sort of innocence before, a naive kinship that almost passed for love, and this was of course gone now, pushed out of the picture by the act of infidelity.
And, ultimately, there was a bad day filled with ugly and evil men who had her do ugly and evil things to them, and when she was done she needed a boost in the worst way and there was only one way she knew of to get that particular boost. Sex wouldn't do it and pot wouldn't do it and liquor wouldn't do it. Junk would.
This time she bought a pop, paid Mavis five dollars for a shot. And, bit by bit, it became a steady thing. It didn't happen overnight, exactly, because it takes awhile even with a person who is culturally and emotionally prepared for drug addiction. It took her three weeks before she was at the stage where she got a little nervous when she went too long without a shot. It took her another week before she was mainlining.
About that time, Lu saw the tracks on her leg.
And threw her out.
"I don't pad down with no junkies," Lu said. "I don't go near that stuff and I don't live with nobody who does."
"Lu-"
"Now you listen," Lu said. "You know what you are now? You're dead You still walk around and you ain't got around to lying down in a grave yet, but you're dead just the same."
"I'm not hooked yet, Lu."
"The hell you aren't."
"Lu-"
"You're a junkie," the platinum-haired girl said. "A junkie, and nobody's a junkie without she's hooked. And you know what happens if you try to live with a junkie? It's like you're living in a cage with a wild animal. A junkie's got no use for nothing but junk. A junkie'll sell you out and cheat you and lie to you and steal from you and kill you. You find yourself another pad, girl. I got no use for you any more."
But it's your fault, she thought. If you hadn't gone with Cindy I wouldn't have hit the needle.
But she didn't say it.
"Out," Lu said. "One two three and out. I don't want you around here, Sara. I don't want to see you or talk with you or have any damn thing to do with you. I don't even want to think about you, you hear me? I don't want anything to do with you."
"Don't you want to ball me?"
"Ball a junkie? Don't make me laugh."
"Lu-"
"You know what you got in store for you, baby?" Lu's eyes were fierce, vicious. "You got a few years worth of dying to do, and you get to do it an inch at a time. Right now you make a hundred dollars a day and you spend twenty on a crib and protection and twenty more on junk. And in another month you'll have to sweat up a storm to make fifty a day because the junk'll eat up all your strength and ruin your looks and leave you hollow inside. You'll make fifty a day, and you'll spend thirty or forty on heroin, and you won't eat and you won't sleep and one week you won't be able to pay protection and you'll get busted for hustling or for possession or some such, and you'll land in the Woman's House of Detention and do cold-turkey until your case comes up.
"But you won't quit. Once a junkie, always a junkie. You can do cold turkey and come out of it wishing for a shot, and you can go to Lexington and take the cure and shoot up again the minute they let you go, because that horse rides in your bloodstream and dirties in your brain and hooks you through the bag and back again and never never lets you go. So you're dead, Sara. You hear me?"
She didn't say anything. It seemed impossible that Lu, her Lu, was saying these things to her. And the worst part of all was that deep down inside she knew damn well that they were all true, that everything Lu said was the truth and nothing but the truth.
"Dead," Lu said. "Far as I'm concerned, you're dead. Now get out of my life, Sara Jackson."
And she went.
Hooked.
Through the bag and back again.
Hooked, monkey on her back, monkey that never got off, monkey that rode her and held onto her and never went away and left her alone. She left Lu's apartment and didn't find another one. She used her crib on Seventh Avenue for living as well as for working. She saved money that way, and the money she saved was cooked on a spoon and injected quickly into a vein.
Hooked.
It took a while before she found out just how hooked she was. It took a while, because at first she had no problems, she bought the drug from her connection when she needed it and took each shot when it fell due, so she didn't know just exactly how hooked she was. But, of course, she found out.
At first she only knew that she got all ginchy when she needed a shot, that her nerves got tight, that her eyes watered, that her nose dripped.
That wasn't the half of it.
There was the day when the fuzz picked up her connection and carried him off to jail for possession of heroin with intent to sell. She didn't know this. She was out of junk, and she went to meet him at the appointed time and the appointed place, and he didn't show. And her shot came due and he still didn't show, and she got chills and fever, and the sweat poured out of her body, and her stomach turned over and she had to run to the bathroom and puke her guts out. And it got worse instead of getting better, and then some fellow junkie told her what happened to her pusher, and she had to go out and hunt the streets looking for a connection.
And not finding one.
She was doubled up in the gutter, body stiff, body wracked with pain. She was running down a street and stopping to hammer her fist against brick walls, behaving crazily, drawing stares, not caring, knowing only that she had to connect. Until finally she ran into a junkie who was willing-after she begged and pleaded and cursed and cajoled and threatened and cried and sank to her knees and sobbed like a baby-to sell her a five-dollar capsule of heroin for the trivial sum of twenty dollars. She was shaking too badly to fix herself with it, so he gave her a shot with his hypodermic needle and she closed her eyes and let the world straighten itself out.
And then she knew just what hooked meant. It meant she was a prisoner serving a life sentence in a little portable jail that she carried around with her wherever she went. It meant that junk was her fife, her religion, her everything. It meant that she was not a person any longer, because you cannot preserve one shred of humanity when a craving for a drug so thoroughly determined the pattern of your existence. It meant that Lu was right.
She was all right as long as the drug was on hand. She could function. In a sense, opium derivatives are less physically deleterious to the human system than, for example, alcohol. There are hundreds of doctors in this country who have unlimited access to morphine, and they are drug addicts in every sense of the word, but they never go through withdrawal symptoms because they never have trouble turning themselves on. And they function quite normally. Sara could function. She just couldn't be wholly alive.
She could still work, but she was nothing like what she had been before. In the first place, the junk scarred her. It put hollow circles under her eyes and it put lines at the corners of her mouth and, naturally, it left a network of tracks along all her major veins. This didn't endear her to her customers. Quite often it turned them off entirely. One man went to her room, saw the tracks on her naked body, told her he wasn't about to make a junkie and demanded his money back She fought with him, told him she needed the money He wound up hitting her in the mouth and knocking out two of her teeth and breaking another. She never did get the teeth replaced; it cost too much money.
The bank account that she had started was gone in nothing flat. The winter came and went, cold and evil. She celebrated her eighteenth birthday with her first speedball. A speedball consists of half a capsule of cocaine and half a capsule of heroin, taken together.
Heroin is a sedative and cocaine is a stimulant, and the combination is like riding two horses, each one going in the opposite direction.
When you're hooked firmly enough, an ordinary shot just straightens you out. If you want a kick, you need a speedball.
She usually didn't try for kicks. She was eighteen years old and close to dead, and she didn't try for kicks any more.
She just tried to stay alive, and it was a lost cause.
CHAPTER TWELVE
She opened her eyes, sat up painfully, felt muscles pull. She had sacked out junked up, naturally, and she had slept in an impossible position which might have been comfortable had she been an infant in her mother's womb. Since she was not, it was unbearable. Her spine felt as though she had spent the night on the rack and she yawned and stretched and stood up, trying her best to straighten herself out.
She looked at the clock on her dresser. It said it was twelve o'clock, and she had to think a minute before she knew whether it was twelve noon or twelve midnight. She solved the problem by looking out the small window. It was dark out, and that meant one of three things: either it was midnight, or the clock was entirely wrong, or there was a solar eclipse of the sun.
She left the room. She was already dressed, since she had gone on the nod with her clothes on. By all rules she should have bathed before going out, but you might be amazed to learn how easy it is to ignore or to suspend certain basic rules when you are a junkie. Besides, if she bathed every time she needed a bath, she'd be in the tub six times a day. When you inject an opium derivative into your system, your body releases some of it through the skin. The card-carrying junkie can be identified often enough by his odor; his skin has a sickly sweet smell to it which it acquires about an hour after each shot.
So she didn't bother bathing, didn't change her clothes. She walked down a flight of stairs and onto the street, and she stood shivering in the cold air. She got a cigarette into her mouth, lit it, sucked in smoke and exhaled.
She turned a ten-dollar trick in her room. She went back to the street and a man in a passing Ford pulled to the curb and offered her five dollars for a front-seat French lesson. Something like that was worth more than five, but the five would give her thirty bucks right on the nose so she didn't give him an argument. The car was a late-model Ford convertible, Black with a red imitation leather interior. She opened the door and got into the front seat next to the man. He handed her a five-dollar bill, she tucked it into the top of her dress, and he started up the car.
She thought at first that he was looking for a place to park. He wasn't. He put his hand on the back of her head and clued her in, and she got busy with him while he drove the car around the city. He drove for about ten minutes, never even looking at her, and then it was over and he dropped her in front of her doorway and drove off into the night. She spat in the gutter, counted her thirty dollars, and went off to meet her connection.
At two o'clock she took her shot and went on the nod again, shot up and closed her eyes and dreamed.
The bar was on Saint Nicholas Avenue, not too far from the apartment where Jubal had set her up in business. There were maybe thirty people in the bar, but no one was doing any serious drinking. Some people nursed beers and others sipped wine and others drank milk or Coca-Cola. Junkies don't drink heavily. Just something to sip, that's all.
A Monk record was grooving on the juke. Sara sat on a not-quite-comfortable stool and listened to it. She concentrated on the music, tried to anyway but found her mind wandering all over the place. She would just about manage to tune in on Monk's crazy solo when her mind would slip away and lose all track of the notes and wander down some other mental passageway entirely. She was very high now, with a ten-minute-old shot working on her, and at one point she felt herself starting to slip right off her stool.
She sighed and set her head down on the top of the bar. A lot of places, they threw you out if you started to go on the nod. But here they were used to it. All the customers were junkies. Nobody else ever walked into the place, except by mistake.
She took a long breath and let it seep out through slightly parted lips. Damn, she thought, what day was it? She didn't know. Come to think, she wasn't sure what month it was. She knew about the year, of course, but she'd lost the rest. It was getting close to summer, and that meant warmer nights, and maybe that was something. But it could be worse than bad to be all twisted up and aching on a hot day in the middle of the summer. You could go crazy when that happened.
She raised her head, caught sight of herself in the mirror. That ain't me, she thought at first. That can't be me, not Sara Jackson.
Can't be.
But it was. The hollow eyes, the sunken cheeks, the stringy hair-it all added up to Sara Jackson. The girl who had died awhile back, but who was still walking around and selling her body to white men. It was her, all right.
And she looked like hell.
Damn, she thought, those white men must be very damn hard-up, that was all. Because she sure as hell didn't look sexy. What was sexy about her? Not her face, certainly. Not her body, not now, not the way she walked all tired in the feet and legs, not the way her shoulders sagged and her breasts drooped.
What was it then?
Just one thing, she decided. One thing. She was available.
And that made them so damn hard-up it was hard to believe. Not that she got the good ones any more. She just got the perverts and the drunks and the nuts and the thrill-seekers and the cheapies, that was all, and those were all no damn good But the way she looked it was a surprise she got anybody And how old was she? Eighteen? And how would she look in five years if one year did this much to her?
Cheer up, she told herself. Cheer up, maybe you be dead in a year and there ain't a thing to worry about.
She listened to Monk some more. And a cat said, "Hey, Sara baby."
She turned. A junkie, she forgot his name, a nervous little cat with one eye knocked out and no teeth.
"Baby, you spare a deuce?"
She shook her head.
"A dollar, then? One dollar, I'll give it back to-row, I'm just so damn squeezed up now-"
She shook her head again. Never loan a pennie to a junkie, not unless you want to make a damn fool of yourself. You won't get it back. You want to give something away, that's your business, but don't expect it back. If you're a junkie yourself, then you know this. You know you yourself can't be trusted and neither can anyone else. Borrow all you want-and keep it. But don't lend.
"Baby, I'm so hot. I'm scared to be here, scared to be anywhere. I cut a man last night."
"Where?"
"Few blocks uptown. I got this cab at Times Square, I told him to take me uptown, we got on a dark street and I put this knife right in there under his Adam's apple and told him-to come up with his bread, like. And he starts telling me no. I should forget it, I should just get out of his cab and go away. And I cut him, baby. I put that knife in his neck and half cut his head off. He's dead, you know, and I figure they'll pick me up sooner or later because this cat ain't the first hack I held up. I never cut anybody before, but man, they'll catch me this time."
She didn't give him a dollar. She just went back on the nod, and when she came up for air again he was gone. She wondered if the police would get him, and if he would go to the chair. She didn't particularly care. She didn't even know his name.
When the major part of the fix wore off her mind cleared some and she started thinking, tracing it all the way back to the place where it all began. A room on 116th Street, very empty because she was alone there, all alone because they had just finished shovelling her just-now-dead mother into the grave. She tried to feel sad when she thought about her mother but she couldn't make it; it was impossible to feel anything, sorrow included. But she had mourned her mother then, and the sorrow had turned to bitterness, and the bitterness had forged itself into determination for a better way of life than her mother had had, and the determination-
The determination had made a junked-up tramp out of her.
She wanted to laugh. The laughter wouldn't come, laughing was hard lately, but it was pretty funny just the same. And she could have made it all right too. College might have been out, for the time being at least, but she could have taken a job and saved her money, and she could have married Jonah Rainey when he graduated from law school, and she might even have taken night courses at CCNY She could have made it, except for the bitterness that ate at her heart and turned her eyes upside-down and made her always and invariable do the wrong thing at the wrong time.
She thought about Jonah. He had been the first man to have her-but he wasn't even a man then, just a boy, and she had been a girl and not a woman And in a sense he had been the best, because he had truly loved her, and love was something that could be fine and beautiful if you yourself were good enough to deserve it. But she never did deserve Jonah, and she had not seen him in months, and if he saw her now he would probably not recognize her.
Jonah.
And Jubal.
She thought about Jubal now, thought about him sensibly and dispassionately, neither blinded by love nor infuriated by hatred She thought about him, and she saw that he was no better or worse than she, that she was his victim and he was the world's victim and, in the final analysis, neither of them came out the least bit ahead. Jubal Bryce. He had made some sweet love to her a few times, and he had taught her a great many things she might have been better off not knowing, and now he was dead and she wasn't far from it herself. And Lu.
And Bullwer Trove. And Mavis Mallory.
And the final lover, the ultimate, the last word in everything in this world or any other. Heroin.
It happened on a Thursday.
It was a nice Thursday, as Thursdays go. It was a Thursday in June, warm but not stifling, breezy but not windy. The stock market rose a little, if you keep tabs on that sort of thing, and there was civil war in Algeria for a change, and the Daily News ran its usual strongly worded editorial about how it was time to wipe the floor with the dirty Commie rats, and the sun was sunning and the birds were birding and the grass was grassing and God was in His Heaven and all was about as right with the world as it ever seems to get.
And Sara had fifty dollars in her purse.
That would have been all right, except for a few things. She had to pay fifty dollars to Hennessy to guarantee protection for the next little while, and she was a week overdue on her rent, so that was another hundred bucks she owed. And on top of that she was out of heroin, had blown her very last cap, and she needed a new supply. So she had fifty dollars, which doesn't sound bad at first listen, but she needed around two hundred, which does sound bad.
Bad?
It was Impossible.
It was especially impossible in view of the fact that it was ten in the mother-loving morning and it would be less than impossible to find a man interested in paying real money for the privilege of balling a broken-down strung-up hung-up junkie at that hour of the morning. She stood a chance at night, when men were hornier and the light was kinder. In the daylight she made Death Warmed Over look positively good.
She spent a buck on lunch. When you are on junk, you often get a strong hunger for something sweet. She went to a sweet shop and had a double banana split with hot fudge, and it looked every bit as revolting as h sounds, and she ate all of it. It was just what she wanted.
Then she went to look for her pusher.
After all, first things first. She was close to due for a shot, and in that situation the pusher has precedence over both landlord and fixer as far as money is concerned. She looked for The Man and found him right where he was supposed to be in a cafeteria on Lenox Avenue. The Man was drinking cold coffee. The Man always drank cold coffee, and he never spoke unless be had to, and he must have made a fortune.
"I got to cop," she said.
The Man nodded.
"Five-oh," she said.
The Man nodded again. The Man went to a room marked MEN and came back a few moments later He passed a balled up napkin to her under the table. She took it and shoved it into her purse and gave him all the money she had and left.
She went back to her room. Back to the building, up the stairs, into the room, shut the door. Put four-count 'em, four-caps of heroin on the bent spoon. Cook 'em over a match flame. Suck 'em up in a hypo-no eyedropper any more, because she had a genuine hypodermic needle stolen from Saint Luke's Hospital by a money-hungry orderly and sold to her for fifteen dollars. Suck up the caps, set the syringe aside, put four more caps on the spoon, cook 'em up, suck 'em up with the needle.
That left two caps. She cooked those, drew them into the syringe.
And she was ready.
She took off all her clothes. Let 'em find her naked, let 'em have a thrill, let 'em boff her corpse if they wanted to. She was going out big, going out with fifty dollars worth of horse in her body, going out all the way.
A skin pop? It would take longer. Spread the jolt out a little further.
No.
The main line.
She choose a spot on her leg. She jabbed with the needle, missed the vein the first time. She hit it the second time, waited a minute, a last minute, and then depressed the plunger all the way.
The stuff went home.
And, for the shadow of a second, it was the biggest kick in the world. It was an O.D, an overdose, a far-more-than-lethal jolt of heroin. It was boss kicks all the way, too big a kick, too much of a kick, and GOD GOD GOD GOD GOD-
