It’s 3AM and the Lollipop is empty, except for a few regulars. Everyone’s feeling good and it’s like this morning never happened. Piper’s sitting up on the bar, chain smoking Newports and laughing about something Chief’s saying; Myron’s in the back with a new dancer who believes him when he says he can make her a star, and me and Max are huddled across the bar trading insults. It’s what passes for flirting between us and I’m so into this game, I didn’t notice the Big Man come in; I don’t even know he’s in the bar until I hear the tap tap tapping of his diamond pinkie ring on the bar.
“Amaretto sour”, he says and smiles directly at me.
Everything stops, frozen. Then the floor falls away. White noise floods in, fills my ears. I’m deaf. I can’t hear the jukebox, the conversations. People are moving again, their lips move but I don’t hear anything.
This morning, as he was leaving, he told me that he loved me, that he’d never really hurt me, that he’d be there, watching over me for the rest of my life. That’s what I hear. Over and over. “I ain’t going anyplace, baby. I’ll be watching you, for the rest of your life.”
Everyone is far away. I am trapped in the wrong end of a telescope. Trapped in the silence. In the white noise. In the rest of my life. I’m trapped.
I don’t know where I am.
It’s not real.
He’s not really here.
He wouldn’t.
I can’t.
“I told you I can’t stay away from you, you’re my girl. ” He reaches out, stroking my face with the back of his hand. I step back, staring. I still cannot find my voice. “How ’bout that drink, now?” The Big Man smiles as he pulls out a cigarette, tamps it lightly on the bar. “Gimme a light, girl.”
I smell singed hair. I smell burnt flesh.
I grab a bottle of vodka and just walk away. I don’t say anything, don’t make eye contact, not with anyone, but I see him in the mirrors. There are mirrors everywhere, on every wall. I cannot not see him. He’s spun around, arms stretched out on either side of him, resting on the bar, leaning back. He owns everything.
For this minute, at least, he owns every piece of me.
My vodka keeps me safe, it is my vaccine, it is my shield, it is my bullet proof vest. My vodka is my body guard, my sword, my rosary.
“You’re mine now, girl,” he says from his spot at the bar. His voice reverberates off the narrow walls of the staircase, surrounding me, smothering me.
Vodka is my armor, I shall not be in want.
I reach the bottom step, crack open the bottle and crawl inside.
It guides me downstairs to the basement, it restores my soul.
Curled up on the cold cement floor next to the lockers, I try to listen to the muffled voices and footsteps from upstairs. The vodka helps stop the shaking, the little epileptic like spasms.
and I shall dwell in the house of the Vodka.
forever.
Half the bottle is gone by the time Piper sits down on the floor next to me and takes a swig. Big Maxie stands in the shadows on the wooden staircase watching both of us.
He loves us. I know he does, in his own way. We’re his A-Team, his moneymakers. He just stands in the shadows and watches.
“Is he still here, Piper?” I hand her the bottle.
“He’s gone. Maxie 86′d him for a couple of weeks.” She takes a swig and passes it back. “What happened J? Did he do this to you?”
~~~~~
You know, you don’t think this kind of thing happens to girls like you. This kind of thing happens to stupid girls, new girls, young girls, girls with no…affliation. Not you.
You have Huntsberry. You have the Ice Man. You have affiliations. He’d showed you where his baby daughter lived. You’d met his friends. Everyone had seen you out together. So when you said he could sleep on your couch instead of driving back to Jersey, you thought you were being nice.
You tell how you woke up when he was already halfway up in the loft bed. You don’t mention how you and your mom get matching robes for Christmas every year and he was wearing the red robe you got last year, the one with the hood. How seeing him in that robe made everything seem okay and not okay at the same time.
You tell how you right away figure he’s too big to fight off, too big to kill with the skinning knife you keep wedged between the mattress and the wall ever since you threw Red Wolf out. You say how you thought he would just fuck you and leave and that that was better than him beating you senseless, then fucking you and leaving. You remember thinking you need to get a bigger knife, a thicker blade.
You tell how you couldn’t breath with his weight on top of you. How you lay in bed after, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of him dressing, calling his baby daughter, getting his things together, getting ready to leave. You lay there staring at the ceiling, listening and waiting for the sound of the door closing behind him.
Then he starts yelling about the diamond pinkie ring you stole, he drags you out of bed. You know you didn’t steal anything and you thought he’d leave, but he isn’t. He isn’t leaving. He isn’t leaving without the ring he says, his girls sold good pussy to pay for that ring, he says, good pussy and your pussy ain’t shit, bitch and throws you against the wall.
You don’t remember getting dressed up. Or when he tied your wrists and ankles with the mens neckties you had hanging on the ladder to the loft, each one a romantic souvenir of some man whose name you’ve forgotten.
You tell how he shoved his fist in your ass looking for his ring, how he made you shit and piss in front of him, dragging you from room to room because your ankles were tied together so you couldn’t walk, couldn’t run away.
You tell about the cigarettes, the smell of burning flesh; the lit matches flicked at your hair, the smell of singed hair.
You tell how it went on for hour after hour. Two hours, three, four, more than that. It went on until it was over. You tell how the ring was in his cigarette case the whole time, how it was all a game, a turn out.
You tell how he untied you, kissed you gently on the lips, told you he loved you and left.
You don’t say anything about how even after he was gone and the door was closed you couldn’t move, couldn’t get up to lock the door after him and even if you could, what was the point, really? You don’t say if you cried or not, cause what’s the point, really?
You simply polish off the last of that bottle of vodka and say “That’s what I get for trusting someone.”
“That’s what you get for hanging around with niggers” Maxie mumbles as he turns, walks up the stairs and leaves the two of you on the floor.
It was the last time any one of us mentioned it.
This entry was written by , posted on February 14, 2010 at 11:50 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, Lollipop Lounge, partners in crime, pimps, rape, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
“Jesus, JJ. What the hell…?” Piper flips her hair away from her face and drags me into the light for a better look at my face.
“I’m fine, Pipes. Forget it.” I just want to get behind the bar, to get a drink, to work, to forget this happened.
“What? Are you crazy? J, you should really have someone look at that. What happened, baby? Does it hurt bad? Sit. I’ma make you a drink…Maxie said you had an accident?”
“Maxie says, this ain’t a freakin’ tea party. That’s what Maxie says.” How a big man like Max slips in and out of a room unnoticed is beyond me. But he does. You never notice him come in, and you never see him leave. “Behind the bar, both of youse.”
“Max,” Piper cracks a fresh bottle of Smirnoff for me and flashes her best St. Louis smile for him, “just let her sit for a minute. I can handle everything for a while. Don’t I always get you every last dollar and send ‘em to the bank for more?” She giggles at him, pushes a rocks glass full of vodka in front of me and heads towards the back room. She touches my hair as she passes, just a brief touch, a second, and for that one single second, I think, I’m safe now, and then it’s gone.
Maxie slides onto the stool next to me and looks at my empty glass. I’d swallowed it in one gulp.
“Here, kid. Ya look worse’n usual. You could use another.” He pushes the bottle towards me. I can always use another, I think. “Now, spill it,” he says.
I pour my own drink, skip the ice, and look up slowly into those watery Bassett hound eyes. I wish he could just make me his, look after me, protect me, make it all go away.
“What’re you my boyfriend now, Max? My father? What? Leave me alone, OK?” Finishing my cocktail in one swallow again, I get up to go behind the bar, still holding that bottle of vodka in my other hand. My bottle of vodka. The only thing that’s making me feel safe at the moment, my vodka.
Max grabs my free arm and pulls me towards him. “You want me to be your daddy? You’d like that wouldn’t you? Not that I give a shit,” I can feel his belly press against me, his stubble tearing at my cheek, his voice rumbles about my face and ears. “But tell me, who hit ya?” He pops bar nuts into his mouth and waits for my answer.
“Nobody, Max. I told you, I fell is all. It was an accident. Lemme go, you’re hurting me. You’re gonna leave a bruise. I gotta set up the bar.”
“I’m gonna leave a bruise? Take a look at yourself.” He flicks his head in the direction of the mirror behind the bar, but he doesn’t let go. “Do ya know the guy?”
“It was an accident.”
“Do I know the guy?”
“An accident Max, it’s nothin’.”
“Fine,” pushing me away, “You wanna protect some piece’a shit, then maybe you asked for it. Maybe you got what you deserved.” He spits on the floor and walks into the back room, still popping nuts into his mouth.
What could I say? How could I explain any of it? I invited him in. I’d offered to let him sleep on the couch. I didn’t think anything of it. I thought I was untouchable. Safe. I thought I had Nigger JJ on my side. I thought I had the Ice Man. I thought we were friends. I thought…
Glad to be alone and busy, I start setting up the bar.
Idiot work for an idiot girl.
I fill the tiny champagne bottles with ginger ale, screw the tops back on and tuck a new bottle of Smirnoff away under my cash register. I was sure Myron watered down the booze. Piper thought so, too. We set aside a fresh bottle every night. Tonight I wanted one all to myself.
“Take a look at yourself,” he’d said.
I don’t do that, look at myself. Not my whole self. Just the bits and pieces I absolutely have to. One eye at a time, or just my mouth. But I don’t ever look at my whole face in a mirror.
“Take a look at yourself,” he’d said.
I look up into the mirrored wall opposite the bar, behind the tiny platform the girls danced on. I see my reflection standing behind the bar, my body from the waist up, but I can’t see my head at all. I am the headless barmaid.
The clinking of quarters in the jukebox brings me out of my reverie. Customers. It’s Showtime.
This entry was written by , posted on February 8, 2010 at 6:47 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, drinking, Lollipop Lounge, partners in crime, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
flickr photo courtesy of nasrulekram
“J? I know it’s early, but…”
9 AM. I’d only just crawled into the loft bed when the phone rang; I was still playing solitaire, obsessively. I play three games, every night. I have to win, or lose, three in a row before I’m allowed to sleep. I was so wired even if I could get the cards to work right…but Laurie? She was never up this early, or this late, depending on which side of life you’re looking at it from.
“What’s wrong Lo?”
“Your friend. The guy…from last night? His car wouldn’t start, he said. He just wanted to use the phone. I thought, I thought you were still with him, out in the car… but you’re home. And, and he’s here…and… waiting for the tow truck, I guess, and I know it’s…I thought you could come back and…
“Lo? Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“No.”
“Scared?
“No. Maybe..yes.”
“Sit tight, I’m on my way. Say whatever you think you need to say to make him happy. He’s crazy Lo, you understand? Crazy. But, he’s just fucking with your head. He’ll leave with me, so, really, no worries, okay? He’s watching you talk on the phone with me, isn’t he?”
“Uh huh.”
Every time we go out, me and the Big Man, we stop at the diner on Eighth Ave, across from Piper’s building and around the corner from Possible 20. P20 is supposed to be a jazz joint, but it’s really just one more pimp bar. Piper’s building is crawling with pimps, too. My neighborhood has junkies, hers has got a pimp infestation. A pimpfestation. Anyway, the Big Man gets me broiled lobster with melted butter and a baked potato. To go.
Piper doesn’t want him in her apartment, P20 closes at 4am and he won’t let me eat in the car.
My girls worked hard to pay for this car, he says. You can’t be disrespecting them with that fish stank, spilling butter on my leather. Lots of good ass got sold to pay for that white leather and not a dollar’a that come from you.
So, I wait till we get to 366 or Harry Brooklyn’s or some other afterhours where I sit in a dark corner and eat lobster with my hands while he sits at the poker table.
We never just stay at the diner and eat like regular people.
366 is around the corner from Laurie’s apartment. I thought, just once, it would be nice to not eat in the dark. And she always has wine. We did line after line of the Big Man’s coke, washing it down with wine stolen from the Italian restaurant where she worked.
I meant to be generous, to pay her back for taking care of me. That’s what I meant to do. But once again, I’d brought crazy into Lola’s house. She had no business getting involved with Havasha. Lola was strictly a good girl. She was strictly Long Island Jewish. She didn’t know what to do with a crazy man, what to do when they turned on you. H fractured her cheekbone. You’d think she’d of learned after that, that my boys were out of her league. She should not be allowing them any one of them into her house if they weren’t with me.
Havasha’s crazy couldn’t hold a candle to the Big Man’s.
I was at her door before she could hang up the phone.
The door is unlocked. He’s sitting in a chair across from her; quietly crushing cigarettes into the bare skin of his chest and watching her reaction. One after another. He lights one, takes a few puffs, staring at her, then grinds it into the festering sore in the center of his chest.
His name was Michael and Sammy and JJ. He had other names, I couldn’t know them all, didn’t know if any were real. He was a big man, about six five and somewhere between 280 and 300 lbs. Maybe not. Maybe he’s just grown in my memories.
But he was big and I shoulda seen it coming.
Just another pimp doing just another pimp job. In the antiseptic halls of my intellect I know he didn’t have the right. But deep inside, in the darkness that hides my heart and soul, I know they were right.
I got what I deserved.
This entry was written by , posted on February 2, 2010 at 12:38 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, Chelsea, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, Lollipop Lounge, partners in crime, pimps, whores. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
What the hell, I thought, looking at Junior laying there on the floor rubbing himself, and remembering how he’d needed a firm tongue up his ass that one night, pussy can’t taste any worse than all the other things I’ve put in my mouth. I got off the couch and walked into the bedroom.
“Hey. Hello? Bored out here…” I sat at the end of the bed playing with Joey’s toes, working my hands up his leg, I took a deep hit off the joint in my hands and passed it over to him.
Joey looked at Piper for permission. She smiled and nodded. I kicked my shoes off.
“Do her first.” He locked eyes with me, like he was watching for my reaction, like we were the only two people in the room, and this was the only room in the world. Like there wasn’t a room full of men a few feet away, watching and listening. He locked eyes with me while he held the joint to Piper’s lips with one hand and started pulling on her nipples with the other. Getting them hard again. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you Piper-cub?” he said to her, all the while, looking at me.
“You don’t have to if …,” I was half way up her leg before she finished the sentence, “you don’t want to, JJ.”
We do everything together. Sex’ll be just one more thing. Like the princess she always wanted to be, Piper lays back and lets me do all the work. I run my hands up her short muscular legs. She’s so tiny, I can reach her whole body from wherever I am. My fingers reach into her pubic hair, naturally blond and softer than mine. My thumb finds her button and rolls it around gently. I slide my body up one side of her. Joey watches from the other side.
Her breasts are larger than mine, soft and pink and the nipples look sore. I put one hand on each and feel their weight, their silkiness, brushing my thumb across one nipple, gently. She lets out a little gasp and I lower my head to take it into my mouth. Turning it over with my tongue, flicking it around, nibbling only a teeny bit. Joey takes my hand and slides it back down between her legs. Piper inhales the smoke from the joint, moving her hips up to meet my hand. I feel around, tentatively at first, now bolder, parting her warm lips with my fingers. She starts to rock with me. I move my mouth to hers and take her tongue inside me. She tastes of pot and Joey’s Two Shoes’ semen.
“Fuck her, fuck her hard.” His mouth is right at my ear, his breath damp and a little sour. My finger is deep inside her, probing. I open my eyes and see Joey stroking himself as he watches us.
I slip a second finger inside her and pump. She rides my hand and we kiss. Sucking each others tongues and ears and necks. Her hands find my tits and pulls at my nipples.
“Eat her pussy,” he murmured, pushing my head down, shoving me off of her face.
Men are crude, but I wasn’t in a position to be offended by anyone’s choice of language.
I glided down between her legs and like that, the magic was gone. It’d been kinda fun. The coke and the vodka, the porn and Piper, not having to be at work. It was all fine. Fun even, until I found myself face to face with another woman’s chocha. Wet and red and smelly from being in a leotard all day and fucked all night.
And I remembered the audience in the living room. There was no way out of this; I’d never live down the humiliation if I chickened out now. I dove in and licked and sucked and prodded and nibbled like I thought I’d like it done to me, if I actually liked having it done to me, which I didn’t. I heard the glass crack of an amyl nitrate ampule and felt, more than heard, Piper suck the pungent odor in. Her body tensed, all of her contracting, then releasing.
Joey cracked another ampule, for me. I inhaled deeply and reached out for his cock. Sucking his cock. He’s kissing her. The audience cheering. The world spinning. My head expanding until it almost explodes. And contracting too fast. The amyl nitrate. My heart racing. Please, please, don’t let my heart explode. Everyone’s watching. I kinda like Eddie, but I don’t know how to talk to the nice guys….
The effect fades as quickly as it came and I worry about how I look to others.
Is my hair is messed up? Is my makeup smeared?
Do I look fat from this angle?
How I looked was like a whore.
Piper would always be the good girl. I was always the whore. It was never going to change.
That night in Little Italy when she walked into Stevie G’s restuarant, drunk? When she pulled a gun out of her pink leather clutch–the one that matched her pumps–and held it the head of the idiot bartender who wouldn’t serve her because she was already insanely drunk?
That was my fault.
Myron called me at home, angry. “Go fix this!” he says
“He’s an idiot Myron. Just tell him to give ‘er a fucking drink,” I say, “and she’ll put the gun away.”
“Fix it. You fucked this up, you need to go down and fix it.” Myron says, and slams the phone down. When I get there, everybody, except Piper, looks a little tense. The bartender is ghost white, standing frozen in a corner of the behind the bar.
“I knew you’d come,” she says, smiling, slowly batting her eyes at me. “They won’t give me a drink, J. I just want a little drink is all.” She hands me the gun–I don’t even have to ask. I order two vodkas from the idiot bartender, one for her, one for me.
When anyone else tells this story, anyone but me or Piper, I’m the one they’re mad at.
When Piper disappeared on a three day drunk, surfacing in some sleazy spade bar on 133rd Street, that was my fault too. When she got so fucked on ‘Ludes she kept sliding off the chair? My fault.
She was everybody’s darling, no matter what. She lived in a fancy doorman building on 55th Street and 8th Avenue. It didn’t matter that the building was chock full of pimps. I lived in a run down tenement in the East Village. It didn’t matter that half the tenants had been born in that building. No matter what, I was trash. It’d been like that since we met at the Butterfly.
Everybody loved Piper.
She had Myron, Joey Two Shoes, the Fat Man and me.
I just had her.
We never talked about
that night.
This entry was written by , posted on January 25, 2010 at 3:18 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, partners in crime, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Junior’s is the first face I see when we get to Joey’s. We lived together.
No, that’s not exactly true. Junior lived on my couch. Briefly.
Having Junior there was like waking up to fresh flowers every day – nice to look at the first day or two, but that’s about all and after a week it’s just a vase full of dirty water and dying organic matter. He’s on the rug, watching dog porn and rubbing himself –nothing’s changed, it’s pretty much all he did when we lived together he lived on my couch. In a little while he’ll head to the bathroom, jerk off into a towel and hang the towel back on the rack.
That part drove me crazy. Getting out of the shower, grabbing a towel and… “Junior! You motherfucker! Get me a clean fucking towel!”
We’d been together. Once. Before he moved in.
Thing was, cocaine makes men feel like sexual giants, like they can fuck all night. Okay, maybe they can, but not in any way I’ve ever found satisfying. There always needs to be something “extra” in the mix. Like a single girl and the usual holes are not enough and sex becomes something devised by Rube Goldberg rather than Mother Nature. You need extra hands, extra stimulation and sometimes you need an extra person or two. Junior’d needed me to do all the work, follow instructions, move this here, put that there, left, right, inside out, upside down, tongue here, okay, okay, now, now, wait, now…okay.
Sometimes, once is more than enough. But, he was still pretty, goddamn it, and he was connected. So I’d let him stay. On the couch.
Two Shoes and Trigger the Greek bookie hovered over the pile coke on the table. The more the Greek sniffed, the worse the spasms in his leg got. Hence, the nickname. Tonight, he was threatening to wear a hole in the carpet. There were two actors, A. was famous–but just for the moment, Eddie was not, a few unidentified wiseguys on the couch and a few unidentified guns on the table.
Piper brought the bottles into the kitchen and mixed us a couple of drinks. Vodka. Ice.And a splash of Seven-Up for color.
“Here,” I dropped the bullets between the guns, “we took ‘em off a cop at work.”
Joey looked up from his cocaine. “Five?”
Piper grabbed him by the arm, laughing and pulling him into the bedroom. “Stop it now. Come with me Daddy and let me tell you what a bad, bad girl I’ve been.”
I made drinks for the boys, settled next to Eddie on the couch, and to the background TV sounds of girls giving head to German Shepherds and horses, we watched through the open door as they undressed each other and made love, laughed, smoked, slept, got high, fucked some more. From our spots in the living room we watched them and we laughed, got high, smoked, slept, got high and laughed some more.
I liked Eddie. He was sweet and handsome. He paid attention to me like I was a regular girl. But, he was no one, going no where. Eddie’s only juice was being friends with Joey.
And the only way to Joey, was going to be through Piper.
This entry was written by , posted on January 21, 2010 at 1:23 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, drinking, drugs, partners in crime, porn, wiseguys. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
…………… (a little mood music)…
“Hurry up,” he grumbles counting the money in my register, “Two Shoes is waiting.” I shake my generous butt at Myron and smile over my shoulder as I flounce out of the bar and into the back room.
Piper and Carl are sprawled across one of the loveseats. The Lollipop “private lounge” is pitch black except for the high school stoner/head shop black lights. White clothing gleams, dental caps radiate pale blue, lipsticks glow bright orange and hair dye shines with a dull greenish hue, but black things, like Carl, are nearly invisible.
I don’t need to see to know there’s a loaded gun between Carl’s legs. Piper would be stroking it, saying oh baby, it’s so big, it’s so hard, pushing the gun up against the flaccid penis in his pant, the cock that never got hard. Sometimes he’d rub his “cock” over your face or your nipples. It made him harder, he said. He liked for you to stroke his cold metal “cock”, to push your tits up on him, whispering into his ear how big and black and hard he was, how you wanted it inside of you, tearing you apart, pushing, deeper & deeper. He wanted you to do that until the soft piece of flesh inside his pants exploded, leaving a small stain on his dark pants.
Piper & I trade on and off with Carl. He’s a good tipper, easy to work and a vice cop. Carl has the good drugs, all the time.
“Hey Carlos, my man, what up?” I drop down onto the couch besides him. He has a joint in my mouth before my ass hits the cushion.
That meant they were finished. The stain was already there. It was the way it went, part of the ritual, first the cocaine, then the “sex”, then the pot and a coupla drinks.
I don’t really like pot. The better it is, the more I hate the way it makes me feel. But, sometimes doing stuff I don’t like is just easier than saying No.
“Mmm. All the pretty white girls,” he mumbles into my hair, reaching inside my top to fondle my breasts. I take a couple of tokes as my eyes adjust to the darkness, and look down at Carl as he plays with my tits. I hear a sharp metallic click.
“You need help up front J, or you just need a break?” Then, a small quick series of clicks. “Carl, here. Your turn.” Click.
“Myron says we’re going up to Joey’s.” The clicks again. “What the hell is that?”
“Here, baby girl, your turn,” Carl slurs as he places his service revolver in my hand and nestles his face against my chest. “It’s OK – Piper took the bullets.” He holds up a handful of bullets, takes the gun back and puts it up to my neck, wedging it up under my jawbone, pointing up to my brain, the long way. Click.
“One of these days they’re gonna cut you loose on a psych Carl, you know that don’cha? You’re gonna be out on your pension, living in a locked ward, shuffling around in paper happy face slippers, spending your days playing dominos with the wet brains and waiting for the nurses to bring you your meds. You be lucky if you don’t wind up with electro-shock and a bite stick.” I take the bullets away from him with one hand, push the gun away from my neck, grab Piper by the wrist and stand up.
He smiles and lays down on the couch, “But you’ll always love me, won’t I?”
“Always, Carl. You sleep a while now, I’ll send someone back for you later, before your shift is over.”
Piper and I leave Carl to sleep it off and head down the stairs, back into our street clothes. Little Maxie’s taken our place behind the bar. There’s a hundred-dollar bill stuck to his forehead with spit, a stunt usually reserved for the afterhours. It cracked him up, the way the girls reacted to him then. We grab the booze–Black Label and champagne for the boys, Smirnoff for us–and a cab uptown. There’s a party at Joey Two Shoes’. Well, there will be when we get there.
Leaning back, I open my hand. “Pipes? Honey? If you took all the bullets outta the gun, how come I only got five here in my hand? Doesn’t that gun hold six?”
She just bats her eyes at me, tosses her hair over her shoulder and starts to laugh.
“Jee-sus,” I reach over, crack open a bottle of vodka and take a swig, “you’re gonna get me killed one day, Piper, you seriously gonna get me killed. Maybe I’d be better off in a locked ward.”
“Maybe, J, but it’s a helluva ride till then, ain’t it? It’s a helluva ride.”
courtesy of esc.ape
This entry was written by , posted on January 18, 2010 at 11:27 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, dirty boys, Lollipop Lounge, partners in crime. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
It was still early when the pay phone rang. Not even midnight yet, but the tiny joint was packed. Every couch and cubicle in the backroom was full, so were the eight bar stools and all the chairs surrounding the stage. Frat boys leaned against the new jukebox, a few more leaned across the bar, trying to talk me into leaving with them.
Myron and Maxie wandered around making sure everybody was drinking & everybody was paying. Some nights they’d practically give the place away, but when it got busy, they got greedy and the unspoken rule was nobody leaves while there’s still money in their pockets.
I barely heard the pay phone ring over the noise of the music, the laughter and the cash register.
Big Maxie hung up and went into a huddle with Myron. They walked over to the bar, and Maxie squeezed past me. “I got the bar. Go. Go get Piper.” Maxie tossed his head towards the lounge in the back of the Lollipop and pushed me out from behind the register.
I stood there smiling.
Myron shoved me towards the back room. “Go, you little slut, you got a delivery. Now. What are you waiting for?”
Legally, the Butterfly and the Lollipop were Myron’s joints. There was Winks and the Cookie Jar too, but that was before me. They’d been such a huge moneymakers everyone thought it’d never end. It was the 70s, fans and feathers were gone, there was a whole new breed of dancers and a whole kind of money. Guys crammed in to get a peek of pink and girls went home with a thousand bucks a day, clean. No tricks, no handjobs, no hustle. Myron rolled naked over a bed of cash, all his girls were happy and all their girlie habits fed.
When the liquor authorities started making rules about small spaces, booze and cooze, girls went back to wearing the g-strings they’d dropped. The novelty of the bars wore off. Furs, cars, condos, diamonds, cocaine, heroin; Myron’s girls had expensive habits. Suddenly he was deep in a hole of a different color.
Enter Joey Two Shoes. Shoes was in the Butterfly. And he was in the Lollipop.
When it was time to pay, Piper and I brought champagne, Johnnie Walker Black Label and each other. There was always a crowd watching porn and dipping into the mound of cocaine in the center of the table, no matter when we got there. The pile of coke never got smaller and there were never any other girls there.
I wanted a drink, a blow and Joey Two Shoes. He was handsome and mean. I wanted him to want me. He wanted Piper. Piper just wanted to be loved.
“Go, you little slut, you got a package to deliver. Now. What are you waiting for?” He was annoyed. Shoes almost always called when the joint was packed. Never when we were sitting around with nothing to do.
“I’m just imagining the two of you, working the bar in leotards and heels.” When we left, there wouldn’t be enough girls to go around. It killed them to miss even a dollar.
Myron wasn’t always a paunchy middle aged bar owner, in hock up to his neck, trying to hold the interest of underaged dancers with presents and drugs and lies. He used to be was a suit. Not a straight suit, but a suit nonetheless.
Myron was a shyster, a lawyer. Past tense. That’s why Mulberry Street hung around, he’d been their lawyer. Louie the Ice Man, Jimmy Peanuts, Rocky, Crazy Jimmy, BooHoo, Chief, Harry Brooklyn, Eddie Bug Eyes, Jack the Jew. Myron was a man who believed in going that extra mile in search of the holy grail, the fast and easy buck. If you rolled snake eyes and had to go directly to Jail? Myron stepped up to pass GO and collect two hundred dollars, even if he wasn’t exactly entitled to it.
Disbarred, but not imprisoned, he changed his name, scraped some money together and went into the always profitable business of tits and ass. In the beginning, everything he touched turned to gold. Then came the girls, the cocaine, the state liquor authority, the excess, the huge, huge debt–and Joey Two Shoes.
But Myron is a dealmaker, with an eye for a scam and a nose for a sucker. He always knew who he owed, how much and what they’d settle for.
He put a brown paper bag on the bar. Two bottles of Johnny Black and two bottles of not the worst champagne. “Go, get Piper, pack up and start moving. Shoes ain’t gonna wait all night.”
This entry was written by , posted on January 14, 2010 at 8:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, Butterfly, dirty boys, partners in crime, The, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
The sun sets behind me as we roll onto 46th Street, past guitar stores and half a dozen Brazilian restaurants and bars that make this single block into “Little Brazil.” Routing through my bag, through clothes, makeup, shoes and everything else I drag around everyday, I find my last softly crumpled fiver and hand it to the Paki cabbie. It’s always my last fiver as I roll into work. Doesn’t matter if I worked last night or I’m at the tail end of a five day run. Either way, the cabbie gets the last bill. But, as long as I have enough to get to work, it’s all good.
I pull open the heavy glass door to the hallway. Directly ahead of me, stairs lead to a cute little apartment with a two sets of French doors– one separating the living room and bedroom, the other leading out to the tiny terrace overlooking the Church of St. Mary the Virgin across the street, and Myron’s newest bar, the Lollipop Lounge, below. It’s very sweet and very French and Myron’s been trying to talk me into renting it. I’d save on cab fare, he says. But I’d one flight up from the bar, I think. No more screening calls or calling in ‘home in bed with the flu’ when I’m really home in bed with Mr. Just Got Home from Prison or Mr. On His Way to the Crazyhouse. They’d be knocking on my door all day and night to use the phone or the bed, for a quickie or to crash, using the whole place for making deals, cutting things up. I’d be the goddamned back room.
Nope. I pass. Not even for French doors. Not even for two sets of them.
I ignore the stairs, turning left and pushing open the door to the Lollipop.
I’d expected music loud enough to drown your sorrows, rumbling out of the old style jukebox. But there’s only some general mumbling and subdued laughter, clinking of glasses and ice, shuffling of bar stools and feet. The mediocrity of real life normally drowned out by blaring and repetitive disco beats.
“What the fuck…,” the carpet crunches as I step inside. “Jeez Louise.”
“Nice, right?” Piper laughs, leaning against a train wreck of multicolored plastic rubble and mechanical gizmos. She takes a drag of her Newport and pats what’s left of the jukebox with a perfectly manicured hand. Lights limp and sputter sporadically–yellow, red, blue, and glaring white through the broken plastic. Cracked 45’s and colored shards of thick plastic litter the floor.
It’s bad.
Myron loved his jukebox; I’m genuinely surprised he let this happen. Last time they’d all jumped to her defense, as if she were some fragile Southern belle. It was a sticky summer night in Times Square, one of those nights so hot the garbage starts cooking up into a stink stew. A muscle bound base-head wandered in, his eyes spinning, his body slick with sweat. He wasn’t interested in drinking, or naked women. But he fell in love with the flashing lights of that jukebox. He stood over her, watching her lights flicker and dance, for 20 minutes.
Maybe he was there an hour, I wasn’t paying too much attention. But I remember his arms, thick and strong, and the way he gripped each side of the jukebox firmly, the way you do a woman’s hips when you’re taking her from behind. He had a beautiful prison body, that perfection you get from lots of free time in the yard. After a while, I guess the flashing lights flipped a switch in his brain-stem. He leaned back, still clutching the box. Pushing his pelvis against the jukebox and dropping his head back, he let loose with a howl. It was primitive, boy oh boy, something that came from the very bottom of his beat-up Chuck Taylors. He howled again, curled back in toward the box and proceeded to lift it straight up, every muscle straining. I watched from the bar, waiting for the muscles of his arms to just…pop.
Big Maxie grabbed the wooden baseball bat from behind the bar and walked over slowly, dangling it out of sight just behind his thick leg. He stood with the bat swinging softly behind him like a metronome and talked the kid down, talked him into putting the jukebox tenderly back down on the floor. I know it’s easy to be calm when you’re holding a baseball bat, but if that kid could lift a full size jukebox straight up, there’s no telling what damage he could do to a man, even a bulldog like Big Max. But the basehead put the box down, and him and Maxie talked, drank and smoked a little while Myron sat at the bar, still shelling pistachio nuts and popping them one at a time into his mouth. His eyes’d never left his prized possession as Maxie talked the kid down and you could tell, he’d sit there and watch just the same if Maxie had to bash the kids head open to get him to put the jukebox back down. Myron watched, shelled and popped until the kid was gone, and that’s all that was worth remembering of that night.
So I wondered, what the hell could have happened here? The box was a goner; there was no repairing it, nothing worth saving except maybe a shard of blue plastic for sentimental reasons. It looked like it had been at the bad end of real old-fashioned beat down.
“What the fuck, Pipes?”
“Chief shot it,” she says. I look at her; she shrugs her shoulders and laughs. “I don’t know JJ, he was sitting at the end of the bar same as always, whispering his crazy Chief shit, then he pulls out a pistol and shoots the thing. Bang. Bang. Bang. Three times.” She takes another drag off the Newport. “He said it made a threatening move at ‘im.”
Chief is crazy, but not so’s you could tell by looking at him. Tall and balding, with a dark bushy mustache and glasses, he looks like an accountant. An annoying accountant, but still, he looked harmless. Chief’s brand of crazy was the kind you’d never see coming.
“Piper…?” I turn and hold my hands out, ala Carol Merrill on ‘Let’s Make a Deal’. This was more than three bullets worth of damage.
“Well, Myron & Max were outside, they come running in. Max looks at the box, looks up at Chief, looks at the box, then back at Chief again. Chief’s still standing there with the gun in his hand, he looks at them and says,” Piper starts to giggle, slightly insanely, “JJ, he looks at them and says, ‘It made a threatening move’. Max comes over to the bar, all pissed off, you know how he is, and grabs the bat. ‘It made a move on ya?’ he says. ‘Yeah, it made a move Maxie, I hadda do it, it made a move,’ Chief says. So, they all went after it. They took turns with the bat, Little Maxie’s in there with a car jack. I don’t know where the crowbar came from. Max, Chief, little Max, even Myron. Everybody. Hadda be done I guess – after all JJ,” she shrugs and starts to walk away, “it made the first move.” She laughs, heading behind the bar.
“Shit, I miss all the good stuff,…”
“That’s what you get for going home, J…”
“I’m thinking maybe I move upstairs.” I shake my head. I love this job. You never know what’s going to happen. I mean, really, everyone knows Chief is dangerous, so who’d expect a single unarmed jukebox would be the one that would try and take him out.
I scoot up onto the bar stool next to Chief for my standard pre-shift double Vodka, with just enough Seven-Up for bubbles. I’ll drink through the whole night, but I like one to start the night out right, for luck. The boys are all busy talking, rehashing the fight, who did what to the box, how it got what it deserved, and on and on. Chief leans over. He smells warm, of scotch and cigarettes, his lips soft to my ear, his mustache rough against the curve of my earlobe, “Tickle your ass with a feather,” he whispers.
“What? Say what, Chief?” I turn to my friend, this crazy man, this jukebox killer, and smile.
“I said, ‘How’s the weather?’” He signals for Piper to top off my drink.
The jukebox never should’ve made the first move.
This entry was written by , posted on December 31, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1981, Lollipop Lounge, partners in crime, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
“Well, JJ, you look pretty pleased with yourself.” Piper hands me a vodka & seven and leans back against the bar smiling like she knows what happened upstairs. She probably does, the Quarterback is not that good with secrets and besides, you can smell it on me. Myron closes out my register, ka-ching, almost seven grand tonight.
Tonight, I’m the golden child.
“Yeah. Look at ‘er.” Myron’s on the second count of my money before bagging it up. “One night. One night she brings in money instead of spending the whole, the whole, fucking night snorting coke, sucking down my liquor–my liquor–or creaming over some toothless loser…”
“Howie’s not a loser.”
Piper practically chokes on her drink. She looks up, “But, he is toothless, J.”
It’s true. I can’t argue that fact. He’s sweet, and fun, but there isn’t a single tooth in his mouth. I shrug, and go back to my vodka and seven.
“…creaming over some toothless LOSER and she thinks she’s the fucking queen.” He talks about me like I’m not here. At least he’s not trying to make me cry. That game only gets played when nothing’s going on. Some guys do crossword puzzles or scrape the dirt out from under their fingernails to kill time. Myron tries to make me cry. Some days it works. Some days I just look at him, with his little paunch and tinted avaitors–the posterboy for mid-life crisis and male pattern baldness. The reason he knows this business so well is that he’s a trick at heart, and I’ve got things I can learn from him. So when I can, I let it slide.
“Fuck you, Myron.” From my perch on top of the bar, I reach one leg out and poke him playfully in the belly with my foot. “I did good. I did good, didn’t I Max?” I don’t know why, but I’ve really got a thing for Big Maxie. He’s Jackie Gleason fat. Not adorable Honeymooners Jackie Gleason, but Minnesota Fats Jackie. Cold. Smart. With a face like a big ashy bulldog. Maxie says mean things and has never given me a second look. I’m kinda crazy about him.
“Yeah, you did good JJ. Don’t let it go to your head,“ bouncing his trigger finger against my temple. “You pull like this every night, then you got something. This,” he waves his hand around, ala Ralph Kramden, “was luck.”
“You’re sweet on me, ain’tcha Maxie.” I smile, take a drag off my cigarette and lay down stretching out on the bar, a satisfied kitten.
He slides a beefy hand from the middle of my back down to my ass, gives it a fast and painful spank and shoves me off the bar.
“Hey!” I hit the floor, ass first – thankful this once for my ample ass padding, cigarette still in hand. He smiles at me over the bar, turns and walks upstairs to make sure everyone has cleared out of VIP.
Maxie likes me. He’s like an eight year old boy pulling pigtails.
“So’d you suck his dick, JJ?”
“Shit Myron, don’t be an idiot. Suck his dick. Jeez. Me and Carrie up there, if anyone was gonna suck his dick, who’d you think it’d be?”
“So, the answer is yes, you did suck his dick.”
“Fuck off, Myron.”
The upstairs hallway is littered with dancers and floor girls sprawled across the floor waiting for the payout, waiting to go home. I step over a few on my way to the bathroom to change out of my sticky bar clothes. Bridget is applying yet another layer of a thick federal penitentiary orange lipstick that matches her hair. The smears and stains on her hands and around her mouth reveal just how much work her mouth has done tonight.
“Your hands, Bridge,” I point, reminding her to wash them. Bridget’s blowjobs are second only to Carrie’s, but Bridget’s are more, well, hands on. She says they can’t tell in the dark, that friction is friction and skin is skin and as long as everything is warm, wet and firm and there’s a mouth on one end it doesn’t matter if there’s a hand in the middle. Everyone goes home happy and she doesn’t have to deal with the whole gag reflex thing. That’s Bridget’s secret. I don’t know Carrie’s. Well, to be truthful, I guess I know a little bit more now than I did when the night started.
Piper, still pristine in her white leotard and ever present Newport, her hair still perfect, sits on the sink. Leaning against the mirror, she crosses one leg discreetly over the other and looks me up and down. I smooth down my skirt and check myself; lavender grey button down rayon blouse, matching knee length wool cigarette skirt, stockings and low-heeled grey pumps. If I’m wearing a straight office chick’s clothes, I can pass for a regular broad out in the world.
“I don’t know J, I’m not saying you are, but you still look like a whore to me. 
Not that there’s anything wrong with that mind you, but now you just look like a whore who mugged a straight broad for her clothes.” She hops off the vanity, tosses her cigarette into the toilet and flounces out the door. I look at myself again. She’s right. Fuck. She’s always right. No matter how much I clean up the outsides, my insides keep oozing through. I unbutton enough to expose my cleavage, reach in and rearrange my boobs for full effect, toss the pumps in the garbage in favor of my spikes, add another layer of lipstick and mascara, and head down the stairs.
It’s almost five a.m. by the time we settle onto the Brasserie’s red leather banquettes and start ordering– shrimp cocktail, pâté de foie gras, Perrier-Jouet, steaks. Me, Myron, Piper, Big Maxie, and Little Maxie – you’d think we hadn’t eaten for a week. The Quarterback and Nicky Fireplug broke off somewhere. I think the Fireplug’s got a wife somewhere in Queens. It’s almost dawn and the Brasserie isn’t full or even technically open, but men in dark suits and darker pasts drink cognac and smoke thick cigars alongside flawlessly dressed women in thin heels and flamboyant creatures of the night–
–each one of us getting rid of the money as fast as we made it.
courtesy scott fraser
This entry was written by , posted on December 17, 2009 at 9:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, dirty money, partners in crime, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
Carrie scoots under one arm, I slip under the other and we walk the suit up the stairs. He’s got his arms draped around our shoulders, Carrie’s left tit in one hand, my right tit in his other. I make a mental note to keep an eyeball out for Billie and Loretta. They’re like a couple of newlyweds, or, more accurately, bitches in heat. Call it what you will, it’s hard to keep them apart and they’ve laid claim to a little corner of carpet in the hallway that leads to the upstairs lounge. I’ve tripped over them more than once, curled in to each other, head to hole, buried up to their respective ears in the others cooch. But tonight, with this heavy drunken load on our shoulders, it’d be easier not to have to two-step over that particular lesbian love-fest.
It’s not easy maneuvering the staircase, but we finally drop into a soft blood orange velour couch. The room is all red shadows and a slight chemical scent; it has all the romance of a photographer’s darkroom. It’s dark enough to miss the worn fabric on the couches, stained with souvenirs of previous visitors; dark enough to overlook the threadbare carpet, a wig gone slightly askew, or the smeared makeup of a long night. And there’s just enough light to tell a single from a fifty.
Perpetual twilight makes you ignorant of time and place. Add booze– and as far as I’m concerned, adding booze improves any given situation–and you’re disoriented, your guard is down, your judgment impaired. It’s the same for Times Square as for Vegas. The difference is scale, sure, but the theory is the same. Hope, booze, sex & fantasy. Illusion and sleight of hand.
Chinese screens separate the couches from each other so each “lounge” feels private, but really you’re sitting in a giant mirrored room with four or five little enclaves and a former high school football player roaming around making sure none of it gets out of hand. Quarterback Jack or Nicky Fireplug are supposed to make sure everything’s safe and legal, so the Billie & Loretta chow down outside? That’s not supposed to happen, but a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do, and you can’t blame the boys for watching the show.
Some of the Butterfly girls sell keys to non-existent hotel room with the promise of future satiation; some stall for time till the next bottle hustle; others take advantage of the privacy selling a little of this or that. Last week I’d sold a second bottle to customer slurping away at a girl’s pussy like it was chocolate ice cream. She was perched on the couch back, legs spread, comfortably resting against the mirrored wall, already holding the cash. Reaching over his head, she handed me what I needed and what I wanted on top of that. I pulled the unopened bottle out of the bucket and then put it right back in. Tucking my tip into my leotard, I left and let them finish their business. It’s a win-win strategy.
Officially, that kind of stuff doesn’t happen. Unofficially, for the right price, everybody gets what they want. Upstairs is the illusion of privacy, an illusion of intimacy, an illusion of desirability and popularity. It’s all illusion.
Tonight’s illusion is that for five thousand dollars, Ronnie the Suit will finally get his dick wet. The illusion is we’re hot sisters, desperate to get our hands and our mouths on his solid gold dick. The reality is while not solid gold, it is the dick that laid the gold American Express card. That single unopened bottle of champagne cost him a total of five thousand dollars and between the foot of the stairs and the upstairs couch, Carrie’s managed to make her cash deal with him. I’m not so good at the back room transaction action. Given a choice, I’d rather pick a pocket than offer an honest trade – but what I’ve brought in from this suit alone totals just over thirteen hundred dollars for the night, I’m satisfied.
Ronnie is seated between us and he pulls us closer to him, closer to each other.
You gotta use what your mama gave you, so I tuck my legs under me and sit up, bringing my breasts up to eye level. For the record, even in my leotard, I have terrific tits. Let me revise that – I have good breasts, but I have terrific nipples. They’re as big as the last joint of your pinkie, and persistently erect. I can hang things from them, necklaces, ribbons, ties, you name it. If it hangs, it can be hung from my nipples. They are my only trick. Carrie, who actually has perfect breasts, upturned and firm, matches my pose and faces me. Mirror images facing each other over a drunken suit; we slowly lean towards each other. The suit has his hand between my legs, playing with my cooch through my red leotard; just for the fun of it, I fondle his semi-hard dick through the soft gabardine of his pants. As we lean into each other, Carrie reaches out and slides her hand inside the tight spandex of my leotard, thumbing my nipple roughly. We rise up on our knees, our bodies pressed against each other over the suit, his hand busy tugging at my cooch, then sliding back and caressing the cheeks of my ass.
In the dark, we find each other’s mouths and kiss. Slowly. Deeply. I am kissing the mouth that launched a thousand hard-ons, the best blowjob mouth in the bar, and I understand why. Her tongue, strong and warm, pries its way into the deep recesses of my mouth, making me want more, urging me on.
I wouldn’t do this in the daylight, kiss a girl. I’m just not that way. Or maybe I am, because I like it, I’m into it. I want to kiss her, touch her, feel her touching me. And I never have to admit that, because I’m being paid to be here. Well, in a manner of speaking, because actually, I haven’t made a cash deal with Ronnie. I’m not getting any extra for this show.
Out of the corner of my eye, reflected in the mirror, I see the Quarterback watching us.
Tonight is a good night to die. I’ve made enough money to pay 6 months rent, I’m kissing a beautiful woman and being watched by two men. The one with enough money to have paid for this show is getting me off with his hands; the other–thick, young and muscular–I simply enjoy performing for.
And there it is. I’m enjoying this. Enjoying their hands on me, enjoying being watched, enjoying the suits weakness. In the daylight, in the civilian world, there’s shame and labels and stigma about all this. Here, well, here no one thinks twice. I can do anything I want in the dark, I can let you do anything to me. So, it’s more than fantasy and illusion. It’s permission.
“Last call!” the Quarterback cries out, ready to hustle the suit out of the bar.
I hold up my hand towards him, index finger urgently raised. Not yet, God no, I think, I’m almost there. Our bodies grind against each other, hungry; I clutch Carrie around the waist, holding her tight to me, cupping her head in my other hand. She pulls at my nipple as the suit tugs at the lips of my snatch. I feel the Quarterback standing over the three of us watching as both Carrie and the suit work to get me off, and the Quarterback’s blatant voyeurism raises the bar, making the whole thing even steamier. The suit grinds his hand against my swollen puss, pulling the material to the side as he does. A thick musk rises off me, enveloping us. Carrie’s body, pressed hard against me vibrates with her own sexual excitement as I cup her breast, roll it in the palm of my hand, she lets out a little noise, a small gasp for air letting me know she’s as ready to explode as I am.
I slide my hand down between her legs, her pussy is moist through her leotard, I massage and push against her cunt—and the suit suddenly slips two fingers deep inside me and starts to pump them in and out.
“Shit. Last call,” the Quarterback’s voice catches in his throat.
The suit drives his fingers into me, Carrie tweaks my nipple and Quarterback Jack watches. Carrie slips her mouth down and bites me on the neck, hard, and I explode, dripping my juices onto the suit’s hand, grinding urgently down, impaling myself on his fingers, pulling Carrie tighter to me as my body spasms in orgasm and looking into the footballer’s eyes in the mirror.
“Last call.” Last call, indeed.
This entry was written by , posted on December 14, 2009 at 10:39 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, dirty money, partners in crime, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
So, you say you want to be alone with your party doll? You say you want to get away from it all? Away from the booths, the poles, the barmaids, the mirrors, the bouncers and managers, away from the unwashed masses who come here to try and staunch the flow of lonely, away from the religious zealots willing to pay for keys to non-existent hotel rooms? You say you want to get away from the freakshow and be alone with the girl of your wet-dreams?
Well, my friend, you’ve come to the right place. We accept all major credit cards.
“Ronnie?” I’ve got him by the tie, to keep him from flopping off the barstool. “Look at me, Ronnie.” I smack him lightly on the cheek a few times.
Everyone else has come and gone, but this suit’s been here for hours. His mouth is hanging open and his eyes are at half mast as he tries to focus on me. I’ve sent him upstairs with three different girls already, each time with the same unopened jeroboam of crap champagne and one of my killer speed-rack Georgi vodka martinis in a highball glass. Each time I run his card for a thousand dollars. Eight hundred dollars for the bottle, two hundred dollar tip for me. Whatever cash deal he cuts with the girls is their business. The credit card charges show up as a steak restaurant, the irony of which is not lost on us. A piece of meat by any other name…would never taste as sweet.
“Ronnie!” I’m loud and all up in his face, trying to make myself heard through the vodka haze and over the music.
“You’re losing him, JJ. Better give’m a blast.” Piper’s cleaning up the bar, my section as well as hers, getting ready to close up for the night. She smiles as she watches me struggle. She’s right about the blast too, of course she is. I take the vial of coke from her, come around the bar and slide onto the seat next to him.
“Ronnie,” softer now, my mouth right up against his ear, he reaches out and cups my breast in his hand and begins kneading it. “Here sweetie, inhale for me.”
I do not like sharing cocaine. I do not even like sharing your cocaine, but this is a necessary investment.
I pinch one nostril closed while I hold the tiny coke spoon up to the other, cradling his head with my other hand. He inhales, gently. I slide the spoon almost inside his nostril. “Quick now, baby, inhale again,” he does, “That’s it, there you go. C’mon baby, let the good times roll.”
The suit leans back in the chair and you can see the cocaine start to work, sobering him up just enough so he’s intelligible, but not so much that he’s no longer pliable. Not so much that he realizes how little he’s gotten for how much he’s spent. There’s a delicate balance that has to be respected, like mixing nitro-glycerin. Or making a chocolate souffle.
“Ronnie.” He looks at me, smiling slowly. “I’m gonna need my tit back now, baby.” He looks down, apparently confused as to how my boob wound up in his hand. He squooshes it like a wad of play-doh, and leans in for a sloppy kiss—he stinks of vermouth and cigarettes and sweat–and misses my mouth, resting his head on my shoulder.
“Gimme a blow-job. None-a these bishes will gimme a blow-job.” His head lolls to the side. “Willyousuckmydick?”
Piper laughs, grinding her cigarette out as she turns to make herself a fresh vodka. Myron shakes his head in disbelief, but never takes his eyes of the suit. I’ve run up over three grand for the house from this fish alone. I’ve wrenched eight hundred dollars in tips, plus my ten percent bottle commission, that’s another three hundred plus—means I’ve cracked a grand in tips and commission for the night. I’m finally making Winks money goddammit. I’m so fucking tired of hearing about how great it was and what an jerk I was for walking out.
It’s twenty minutes to closing; I need a new girl—the fish is drunk enough that I can recycle the bottle of champagne, but not girls. Three girls, three thousand dollars, and this poor john hasn’t even gotten far enough to get his own hand into his pants to pull on his limp dick.
Truth is, if he really wanted his dick sucked, if any of them really wanted what they say they want, they’d go two doors down to the Luxor Baths for a $10 “happy ending”, or pick up one of the street girls. But, after you’ve spent a couple of hundred dollars and no one’s even looked at your pud, no less pulled it, and you stay? You may as well admit that what you’re really looking for is the company and the fantasy.
I’ve got twenty minutes left to try and whack that gold card one last time. Over his shoulder I spot Carrie, smoking a cigarette, picking at her cuticles and leaning against the stage. I catch her eye with a nod and she snake-walks over, slides an arm around his neck, looks him right in the eyes and smiles. Hell, if he wants his dick sucked, she’s the one to do it. She’s the gypsy, the blow-job queen.
The suit looks from her to me, and back again, confused. We’re both tall, with short red hair, long faces and a certain rock and roll edge. “You sisters?”
Bingo.
“Yes,” I say, slipping his gold American Express card out of his wallet– I like to think of myself as a modern day gold miner. Myron rings it up, Piper packs the same unopened bottle of champagne and another vodka martini into the ice bucket. “Yes we are, Ronnie. We’re sisters….”
Myron coughs, loudly, reminding me that last call is only ten minutes away…
This entry was written by , posted on December 10, 2009 at 11:04 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, drinking, drugs, johns, partners in crime, strippers, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
I’m leaning on the bar sipping Harvey’s Bristol Cream Sherry, watching Sherry Cigarette blow smoke rings out her cooch. My cash register slows down when she’s on stage. No one is leaning over to chat me up once she lights that first cigarette. I don’t blame them. You really do want to give her your full attention. Even I forget about sipping my drink for a while when she’s working. It’s like cruising by just after a head-on collision on the Interstate. I don’t want to stare, but I can’t help myself.
They’re perfect. One after another, gently poofing out her snatch, perfectly symmetrical little white rings. Okay, not exactly perfect, or really all that symmetrical, but it’s smoke and it’s coming out of her god-damned vagina fer chrissakes. Piper’s watching too, from her spot behind the bar. Every time Sherry pops one out of her cooch, Piper pops a matching one of her own the old fashioned way, from her mouth. She catches my eye and winks. It’s like they’re singing in harmony. I take a drag off my own Marlboro and try to join in the smoke ring chorus. Nada. Nope. Nothing. Not without tapping my cheek with my finger, so I give her credit. Apparently I can’t even make my mouth do some of the things Sherry’s cooch can do.
I love being ringside at the Times Square freakshow. My father worked the burlesque houses and the carnival side shows. I was raised for this, I think to myself. I love being part of something untouchable, part of the crew, something citizens only get to gawk at from the outside, while I get to be inside. Okay, so I can’t do tricks. I can’t blow smoke rings out of my snatch, but still, I can’t imagine ever wanting to be anywhere else. Like that old joke about the man who’s job is sweeping up behind the elephants in the circus? He stinks so bad because of all the elephant shit he has no friends, gets no action. “Why not quit?” someone asks. “What,” says the man, “and leave show business?” I love it here like that. Just like that, elephant shit stink and all.
Last week, Myron brought in Bambi Woods, the infamous Debbie of “Debbie does Dallas” fame, to start working the bar. Customers think they like her because they’ve seen the movie. Even if they haven’t, they say they did. Either way she’s a porn star, they say. And? So? So she can fuck with a camera running, so what? we say. Get your ass on stage and do your thing like Sherry Cigarette or Patrice, but we don’t need another barmaid because that’s what I’m doing here, we say. She won’t last here much longer. Not because I don’t like her, which I don’t, but Myron could care less what I think. It’s pretty evident he keeps me around because he likes to make me cry. But, Piper doesn’t care for her either. Piper operates with a smile and a soft touch so except for telling me, she keeps that pretty much to herself while I scream and swing my metaphorical bat wildly. You will not be surprised when I tell you she get’s more flies with honey than I do with my baseball bat.
We’re friends now. We have things in common, like Vodka, girls we dislike–like Bambi, and girls we feel sorry for–like Patrice. Not sorry in that way that you want to pick up a stray kitten and take it home and feed it warm milk, or sorry in any way that makes you want to do nice things for someone. Sorry in that way when you look at someone and see how they’re wearing their broken and crazy on the outside, and you’re sorry for them because you know, you know the world is going to run them over–and you want to give them wide enough berth so that truck doesn’t hit you at the same time. That kind of sorry.
You can watch from the bar or get a ringside seat for the Vegas glitz and dazzle of Patrice. Each outfit more elaborate than the last, each headdress towering higher, with longer feathers, more sparkle and shine, she glides down our little stage, raised only one foot off the ground, her head held high, beauty queen smile plastered on her face, arms out, diaphanous glistening chiffon wings lofting behind her. What the Butterfly lacks in runway, Patrice creates in her mind as she struts the perimeter of the tiny stage on her way to Vegas celebrity. She is our very own Peggy Sawyer, waiting in the wings to be plucked from obscurity and Ruby Keelered to fortune and fame.
But, this is not Damon Runyon’s Broadway with its flamboyant criminals and wide-eyed chorines. This is my Times Square–dark and gritty the way God meant it to be. Every city needs a place tourists are afraid to go, a place they’re drawn to by that very fear. This is our Times Square. This is home.
Every night they come. Incredible shrinking men, the suicidally sad come to drown their misery, Hasidim slip in unnoticed to snag some shiksa tit, a battalion of lonely marrieds, brash cugines in gold chains and tight pants. They pack the bar each night, here for comfort or conquest, but not for costumes. No Virginia, this is not Busby Berkley’s 42nd Street anymore where small town girls find love, happiness and Dick Powell. Patrice makes some dollars here and there, tips from new meat who think there may be something more to her show. Her husband, picks her up at 4am–the end of each night; he helps pay for costumes that cost more than she will ever make in a night here. He brings their eight-year-old son, long past his bed-time, and carefully, methodically, the little boy packs each costume and headdress so as not to loosen even one of mommy’s precious sequins.
If I had a husband…wait a minute. I did. Nevermind.
This entry was written by , posted on December 7, 2009 at 1:03 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, drinking, partners in crime, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
She strode down the stairs and into the bar, a flock of toady girls behind her–not a single one of them worth remembering. But Piper, well, Piper was a star. Picture Doris Day. Her sweet smile, her All-American good looks. Now, picture Doris drunk, but not a hair out of place, blood on her hands and a twelve-gauge shotgun held causally out of sight behind her poodle skirt, still smiling.
I’d had very few girlfriends growing up, but when I did we were the girls most likely to be separated by teachers, the girls your parents won’t let you hang out with, the ones mothers warned their sons about and fathers offered rides to. But, Piper scared me. She could squash me with a look if she noticed me
She was short and solid, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, corn fed like a gym teacher. She wore white leotards & pumps, gold jewlery and pulled her shining blonde hair into a flawless bouncing ponytail. Faint traces of coral lipstick stained the filter of the ever present Newport dangling from impeccably manicured fingers. You’d think she was Miss Missouri, Miss Bible Belt or even Miss Family Values. Next to Piper, I was a metaphorical third runner-up Miss New York Subway. Miss Subway Token Booth or Miss Vaguely Urine Smelling Subway Platform. You get the picture.
Piper’d come from that part of America west of the Hudson River where there were no Jews, and Klu Klux Klan rallies are an acceptable after-school activity. While I was smoking pot, drinking beers and making out with Donnie Cacamis under the bleachers in the suburbs of Long Island, Piper was riding in the back of Bubba’s pick-up, rolling through the black ghettos of St.Louis, blonde hair thrashing in the wind, shooting up cars, windows, and mailboxes.
That was before Times Square, where her blond hair, tough skin and razor charm would be put to better use.
Joey Two Shoes bought her her own club and then they’d partied it into the ground. She was that kind of girl you bought things for. Big things.
The fat man in her life got her a suite in the UN Plaza hotel paid for by donations from his “Feed the Hungry Children” fund. Other than him, Piper was the only “child” being fed. Her fat man scammed the fat of the land and Piper siphoned the fat off Ellsworth and into her own pocket.
And she was Myron’s special girl, they’d been together since the standing room only days of Winks and the Cookie Jar, when money rained down from the ceiling, enough to wipe your ass with, if that’s what rocked your boat. Or, that’s what they said.
I’d missed the Cookie Jar entirely, and stupidly stumbled out of Winks after half a shift and a single whiff of someone else’s cooch. Bottomless before the Alcohol and Beverage Commission (ABC) started making all the rules, the nightly take for a Winks barmaid in the late 70s was at least a grand. A few months working for Myron at the Butterfly and I learned that cooch smelled like money.
I was finally catching on. I’d found my Fagin and my Artful Dodger, but by now the ABC had thrown on a lot of rules about distance and coverage and no matter how you sliced it, the really wild days were gone. There’d be an occasional big fish, but now you had to work three days to pull in a grand instead of just one.
It was unlikely that we would ever get along, me and Piper. I was the kind of girl men locked in motel rooms, she was the kind of girl men bought hotels for. I was disheveled even in just my leotard and Piper’d never left the house with so much as lipstick on her teeth or a chipped nail.
She was beautiful. I was broken. The kind that extends all the way down to your soul, the kind that you know no one anywhere can ever fix, but you never stop trying to patch that soul-hole up with something or someone, cause things keep slipping out through the hole, sanity, boundaries, faster and faster, dignity, principles, memories, everything oozes out the hole, so you try and fill it with a frenzied mélange of cocaine, boys, vodka, more anything, money, hurry up now, more boys, bright lights, hurry, sex, drugs, anything to make me dizzy so I don’t mind the slippage, don’t notice what I’m losing, don’t know I’m losing anything.
Piper had that same broken.
I wanted to be her best friend. She was everything I wasn’t.
And she was everything I was.
This entry was written by , posted on December 3, 2009 at 1:08 pm, filed under the diary and tagged 1980, Butterfly, partners in crime, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
There was no one else I’d even thought to call. Boyfriends & girlfriends came and went, but we always had each other. Michael was the original BFF, my go-to guy since that first hit of acid we dropped together.
I was safe with him around. No matter how much I drank, he’d never leave without me. He was the one who took me to the Raven’s Nest, my first topless bar. If my mother knew, maybe she’d have cut my father some slack in the “whose fault is it she turned out to be such a fuck up” department. Michael shot pool while I dropped shot glasses full of bourbon into mugs of beer, downing them in one gulp. I hate bourbon, but the long-haul truckers who packed the Nest every night thought it was cute. By fifteen, as long as you were buying, I was drinking.
He was with me at the Bon Soir too, charming underage Puerto Rican girls while I was getting ready to turn my first trick. He knew everything there was to know about me. If anyone could understand how I wound up broken, bloody and covered in flea bites on the floor of a garage in the Lower East side, it was Michael.
I wrap my arms around him and cramps shoot painfully through my lower body. It’s the beginning of a miscarriage, but I don’t know that, not yet. For now, I hold on to Michael’s waist as the spasms roll through me and he kicks the Harley to life. “Drive slow,” I whisper, “please, just take it slow.”
I spend a few days with my parents, recuperating from the last seven.
Communications are on a need to know basis and I don’t think they need to know much. They know I’m away from Red Wolf – I let him take the blame for all my bruises. They don’t know about the topless bars, the pimps or Havasha. No ones day would be made better by sharing that information.
They take the cat back to live with them. Apparently, I’m not responsible enough to care for another living thing. Truth is, I’m barely able to care for myself. My body agrees and a bloody worm is flushed down the toilet—the last traces of my storybook marriage, Red Wolf’s almost baby.
I’m tired. So fucking tired.
My father used to say “If you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, get a job in a restaurant,” which is pretty practical and it worked for a while. Lola gets me a gig with her at Mimi’s, an Italian restaurant with a piano bar, which keeps my belly full of lasagna. Lola keeps my tea cup full of Harvey’s Bristol Crème. I keep a used tea bag on the saucer & pretend no one can smell the sweet sherry on me. I sip at it non-stop and she refills it over & over.
But my bruises and flea bites heal. I forget that week and now what I remember is “If you don’t know where your next drink is coming from, get a job in a bar.”
Blink.
And just like that, I’m back to where nobody expects me to behave any better than I can. Where I don’t have hide my drinking in a tea-cup. I go back to where I belong. Home. Times Square.
And I still haven’t told you about my first trick, even though I meant to, that’s where this all was going. It’s just such a long story. And he was so very fat. So very, very fat.
This entry was written by , posted on October 22, 2009 at 7:01 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1979, blink, Bon Soir, drinking, drugs, family, Levittown, partners in crime. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
JJ the pimp, my JJ, wants me to be a lady, to have some real class. So we go to nice places, not like Tad’s Steak House, which is what passed for nice growing up. I’m learning how to talk to maître d’s & sommeliers, to get respect & service in return. We order fine wines. Honestly though, I don’t get beyond white is chilled & red isn’t.
I go through the motions of letting a wine breath without knowing why, or caring for that matter. If I play my part well, I can be silly and get Perrier Jouet just for the flowers. I don’t know if it’s better than Cristal or Moet, but it’s better than the crap champagne we hustle at work, I know that much. I order Stolichnaya because I like the way the word feels in my mouth, but really, I’m happy to drink Georgi and when no one is looking I swallow the crap champagne at work instead of spitting it out.
JJ says there’s a fine line between sleazy and sexy and teaching me to walk that line is an uphill battle.
I’ve discovered charming, but can’t master demure. I’m better with funny or tough but he says there’s no money in funny and tough is for street girls. I mingle when we’re out, drinking enough Stolichnaya (chilled or not, I don’t care) to shut the voices up when they start to blabber, everyone knows, everyone knows you’re a fake, you’re just a kid, just a chubby kid from the asshole of Long Island. When the voices start, I don’t care if the bottle has flowers or a skull and cross bones, as long as it’s there.
JJ starts to teach me the truths about men. What they think they want, what they really want. He says check the way a man dresses, walks, speaks, even the way he sits matters. This part is easy. Daddy was a con man at heart and long before Times Square, my father was teaching me how to size a person up with a glance. Did a man’s shoes need resoling? Missing buttons? Shirts frayed at the collar or cuffs? Nails manicured or ragged? Was there a ring of pale skin where a wedding band should be? What does he drink and how quickly or slowly? I need this edge to win, to get men to part with their cash. If you’re not pretty, you have to be smarter. This is all vital if I’m going to work for JJ. I’ve seen Sharon’s life. I want what she has and I want it with JJ. I don’t need any vintage Greta Garbo underwear, but I want that sleep ’til noon cash business is nobody’s business kinda business. I want to be fancy & desirable.
I want to feel wanted.
No one at home asks about the hours and hours I’m out of the house. They think I’m working the lunch shift in a restaurant in the city. No one asks much anyway, but life is easier with a lie. The lies I tell my family makes it easier for them to sleep. The lies I tell men make it easier for them to like me.
I don’t tell anyone the truth. I’m not even all the sure what it is.
dirtygirl wonders: What exactly is classy? Is it the way you dress, the way you act, something you’re born with? Is that whole Eliza Dolittle transformation even possible? Post your thoughts below. C’mon, talk dirty to me.
This entry was written by , posted on July 13, 2009 at 7:00 am, filed under the diary and tagged 1975, dirty boys, dirty money, JJ Huntsberry, partners in crime, pimps, Robbies Mardi Gras, Times Square. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink and follow any comments with the RSS feed for this post.
