Evelyn held me over for yet another week. She liked having me around, and, in all modesty, I was good for business. Meanwhile, Frank, the enamored john, was coming to see me once in a while in the evening. He was my first regular client. By the time I got through at Evelyn’s, without trying, I had saved almost $2,000, which I kept under my mattress. After finishing my third straight week of steady employment, I took out the bills and counted them for the first time. Damn. I didn’t know what to do with all of it. I had been buying clothes here and there: jeans, lace-up boots, a cashmere sweater that caught my eye on Second Avenue, and one of the first midis to appear that season, a long, subtly flared black skirt that made me look like a wisp. Even so, I was still rich.
I decided it was time to stop depending on Michael. It was time, in other words, to buy an ounce of speed on my own. I left the whole transaction up to him, and he was glad to do it. He approved. He got me a special price—what he paid, which was practically wholesale—seventy-five dollars an ounce of what was barely stepped-on liquid meth. Considering a matchstick end’s worth would keep a three-hundred-pound man awake all night, an ounce would go a long way—or should have.
“A lot of girls don’t know how to be on their own out here,” Michael said.
When he handed me the tinfoil, he told me the stuff was so clean I had better keep it cool. Otherwise, it was liable to melt. And the dealer had etherized it, which made it seem milder than it really was. He warned me not to overdo it.
“You know how you are. Be careful,” he said.
“Yeah, well, try not to patronize me, will you?” I said.
I could smell the sweet ether in my nostrils. The speed was so pure, it was an aromatic paste that stuck in the short straw and stuck in my nose. I put a dollop on my tongue; it disappeared. Where did it say in the New Testament “and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them”?
I careened on foot uptown and down. I found a black-magic bookstore in the East Village and read Aleister Crowley sitting as if frozen there on my bed at Sigrid’s. She began to avoid me, I thought. Or maybe I was imagining it. Anyway, I couldn’t take her where I was, and she was too bound to those feeble three dimensions for me to want to be where she was. I even stopped going around to the Traveling Medicine Show. It didn’t matter, because Michael and I were connected telepathically by that time, I was sure. I began to talk to him out on the street. Then I began to talk to God and His Consort/Mother. They laughed at me a lot and cheered me on.
Later, I started zigzagging up and down the island of Manhattan in taxicabs at all hours, ready to explore other scenes. I can remember, for instance, one early morning some old drunks in the West Village depositing me into one of these taxis and waving after me as if I were leaving their country to go on a long trip. I sailed up Eighth Avenue just before dawn, past the sunburst of marquees and billboards around Forty-Second Street that advertised girls with great, ponderous breasts, girls masturbating, girls leaning over with their backs to the street and spreading the cheeks of their behinds, all in living color, and I felt like Lilith on a rampage after she was kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
Back at the apartment, Sigrid began to eye me suspiciously. Now I knew she was avoiding me. She kept to her side of the plywood partition. When she brought someone home, she no longer bothered to introduce me. I could hear them whispering.
Jesus, it felt great to be thin. After what I thought of as the girlish flesh on my face had fallen away, high cheekbones emerged. Nothing could be more captivating than that spectral look, I thought. I could feel the knobs of my hips, the outline of each rib. I was in control of my body at last. Every curve now obeyed me. I became amazingly limber: I could do backbends all the way to the floor; I could sit in lotus position for hours.
Somewhere in there I asked Sigrid to take me to the Times Square emporium because I wanted to do the live sex show she had told me about. I was suddenly in the mood. She raised an eyebrow when I announced this and shrugged.
“What the hell, you’re so wacky these days, Janet. Flaky is what you are. But if it weren’t this, I guess it would be something else, so, OK, you’re a big girl. But why, Janet?”
“What difference does it make? Something to do. A little adventure,” I said.
What I didn’t say, because I knew it wouldn’t go over too well, was that God and His Mother, my now constant companions, had suggested I might look into it. Acting in Vincent’s morality plays would be good for my moral education, they said. It is true these two had a serenely cosmic sense of irony. They were not bound by conventional mores, that’s for sure. And, as if usurping the devil’s job, they goaded me on. Playfully, gleefully, the two of them teased me, exhorting me to go after experience. “Be wholehearted,” they said. Even Michael couldn’t have whisked me down and through this netherworld as fast as God and His Mother seemed to want to go.
Sigrid led me up the narrow staircase to Vincent and Candy’s emporium, where Vincent sat behind a front desk taking money off an assortment of men, from the look of it, poor men. This was the massage parlor part of the operation. Before we went inside, we could hear one of his employees around the corner hawking tickets to the “mystery plays,” the two one-act dramas shown back-to-back. “Live sex, live sex,” he kept barking over and over into the street. Behind Vincent, Candy stood in stiletto-heeled boots, all of at least five-foot-ten solid brick of her, dressed in a merry widow with a black leather jacket draped over her shoulders. Her hair was ice blond, not a particularly common shade at that point in time. She was lavishly made up, with thick black eyeliner, another anomaly in 1971. The eyeliner extended, Cleopatra style, into sweeping wings. She had a smirk on her face, a twisted, sardonic grin. It gave me the impression she was performing. I guessed that she was the shill.
When Sigrid had finally called the two of them to tell them she was bringing her roommate along, Vincent’s only question was “Is she white?” Now he stood up and grinned at me. He was obviously pleased that I was indeed white, and young, and certainly not too fat. I felt like a winged insect crawling out of its husk, supple, thin: I weighed now under a hundred pounds. It was the first week of autumn, still warm by day, but cooling off at night, and I was wearing a long-sleeved, full-length bodysuit (no bra, of course) and a leftover micromini. Sigrid stuck to her jeans-and-old-shirt outfit. Unlike the rest of us, she didn’t believe in dressing for the occasion.
Vincent walked over to me and extended his hand. Here was another charismatic leader, in this case the guiding light, the impresario, of Times Square. His handshake was firm, like a salesman’s. He was wearing a T-shirt and black jeans, and his arms were covered with luxurious tattoos, spirals of jewel-colored serpents and dragons. I took the opportunity to examine his nose, which Sigrid had told me he had fixed. It was a trifle on the small side. He smiled again, a smile that you’d expect to see in an eight-by-ten glossy. His front teeth were all perfectly uniform caps, except for one incisor, which was pure gold. He had pomaded his straight, dyed blue-black hair into a DA, one lock hanging over his forehead, fifties style.
“I hear you want to be in my play. That’s great. I’m always hoping for someone who might be able to understand the material. Let me introduce you to your fellow cast member. Then I’ll explain the plot to both of you and rehearse you a few minutes before the first show. There isn’t much time. National Broadcasting’s studio is headquartered just down the street, so we get a big lunch shot, all them horny execs. Sigrid, you know what to do,” he said, leading me away.
“I’ll be fine,” Sigrid said as she and Candy stood close together, whispering.
The men who had just paid for their hand jobs seemed content to hang around. Inside the sunny, large room next door, with the massage tables and the screens, there were only black girls and Puerto Ricans working, girls like the men themselves. They preferred to wait, staring at the two blondes.
My costar sat in the last row of the balcony of the huge theater, an abandoned movie palace. He had his feet up and he was smoking a doobie the size of Manhattan. It was the first time I’d seen a Rastafarian joint, or dreadlocks either for that matter. It shook me up. Vincent introduced him as Elijah. He was a Jamaican who was quick to tell me that he managed a reggae band back home. I had never heard of reggae. Vincent told me it was religious rock ’n’ roll. Rastafarians believed they were the descendants of Sheba and, therefore, one of the lost Hebrew tribes.
“Which is why Elijah is such a good person to interpret my play. He has a sense of its mystical dimensions,” Vincent said.
Elijah nodded. He looked solemn. “I don’t go with white women,” he said.
“What do you mean, you don’t go with white women? Why didn’t you tell me that sooner? Anyway, Janet isn’t white, she’s Jewish—same as you—c’mon, we haven’t got time for this,” Vincent said, starting to panic.
Elijah stood up. He towered over me. He looked at my body, then he cupped my face in his hand, tilting my chin until we were within kissing distance. There was a glint in his eye. Was it humor? Anyway, he had a lovely build, so lean, broad shouldered. I could overlook a lot, even the snakes coming out of his head. ‘I’m really a good sport,’ I thought.
“All right,” Elijah said, pulling on his sweet cigar, like he was doing us both the biggest favor.
Vincent went limp with relief. “Thanks, Elijah, thanks, brother,” he said, patting the man on the back.
Vincent was showing signs of being a truly great director. At least he knew how to placate his actors. He sat us one behind the other in aisle seats. Then he ran down to the small stage bathed in pink lights. A fake Christmas tree with a real apple hanging off it stood drooping to the side in one corner, the only prop. He ran back up again.
Vincent raced through an explanation of his mystery play in two acts. “This is how you make your entrance, from back here. Most of the customers will be in the front, but they always get a little thrill when the actors come down from the balcony, especially since the actors are naked. You won’t run, of course. Adam will be leading Eve by the hand.
“See, the first act is the Adam and Eve story. In the beginning, you have to look lost, lost and innocent. It’s the Garden of Eden. You wander around the stage, oblivious. Then I yell from up here—I play God—you can eat every fruit but the apple. That’s OK with you. Adam lies down to take a nap. Eve just wanders around some more by herself. Joe, he’s the ticket taker, comes on stage right and talks to Eve from behind the tree. He’s the Serpent, convinces Eve to take a bite. Well, you know the story. Have to rush through this part, because the second act takes more explaining. She turns Adam onto the apple. How she does this is with a sexy dance. You know, seduce him. He goes for it finally. But, Elijah, man, you gotta pretend to be reluctant at first.
“They are suddenly aware of each other, of each other’s bodies. They stare, they begin to touch, and so on. Then they make love. You can simulate that part, of course. Finally, after they’re finished and are lying in each other’s arms, I yell down again, curse them, and drive them out of Eden. Adam cries out in agony, ‘Woman, what have you done?’ Then you exit, your heads bowed in shame, up the aisle.
“OK, here’s act two. It’s called ‘Salem Witch Trial.’ Elijah, you play Cotton Mather, who, in case you don’t know who that is, was an uptight prude. Janet is being condemned as a witch. You lead her down to the stage, her hands bound in a big chain. When you get there, you condemn her to burn at the stake. She pleads for her life. She says that if only you would let her dance for you, the dance would prove, by its beauty, that she is no witch. She pleads and begs, writhing in your grip. Finally, you say OK and unravel her chain. She begins this dance. It is really lewd. She seduces Cotton Mather. You make love (simulated, of course). He is undone; all his power is stripped. He becomes putty in her hands. At the end, he is lying exhausted on the stage. Janet, you wrap his hands in chains and then, triumphantly, you put your foot on his head.
“‘You fool,’ you say, ‘I am a witch. I was a witch all along. You fool,’ and so forth. Then the stage goes dark. The end. Got it?”
“Yes, we’ve got it,” Elijah said.
“Can I run to the loo first?” I asked.
Vincent looked over the seats. A few customers were starting to file in, one at a time, most of them dressed in suits and ties.
“Make it snappy,” he said.
As soon as I shut the bathroom door, I whipped out a small mirror, a short straw, and the tinfoil of crystal meth from my bag. Even though the adrenaline was racing, I didn’t want to take any chances, run out of energy and suddenly lose heart. I knew if I hesitated now, if I started to think, I would lose more than heart, I would lose the power of momentum that was promising to carry me and my psyche further out than anyone had ever been. I was by now deliberately going crazy, under the aegis of God and His Mother, or so I told myself. Then better to sail drug-ridden through this event, zoom through it mindlessly stoned if possible.
When I got back to our ‘dressing room’ high up in the dark balcony, Elijah was already naked. I pulled off my clothes, and we both just stood there, shivering slightly in the big, cool auditorium, waiting for our cue. Finally the orchestra section was about full. The lights went dark, just like real theater, I thought. I got a rush of stage fright and looked over at Elijah. He was stroking his beard in an agitated way. Vincent nudged us.
“Go on,” he said.
Elijah took me by the hand and led me down the center aisle and up a small flight of stairs at the edge of the stage. His hand was cold and moist, but his grip was gentle and firm. It inspired confidence. The audience was so quiet it was hard to remember they were out there. The two of us wandered around, trying to look lost and innocent. Then Elijah did an inspired thing. He sat at the edge of the stage and let his legs dangle, as if he were splashing his feet in a stream. I hovered near the tree. God yelled down to us, as promised.
“Eve,” he said, “stay away from the apple. You, too, Adam.”
Adam jumped up and pulled me to him. We both quaked. I couldn’t get over what a fine improvisational partner Elijah had turned out to be. Except that he already had a huge hard-on, long and lean like he was. So much for prenubile innocence.
He went and lay down to take his nap. As soon as he did, the Serpent stepped out from behind the curtain at the back of the stage and started calling, “Eve, Eve.” Adam was lying there with his penis sticking straight up, and I had to wake him and convince him to eat the apple. He did shake his head appropriately and turn away, but before we knew it, we were clasped in each other’s arms. A combination of circumstances precipitated our sudden embrace: our fear; the hot pink lights; the exciting contrast between the dark brown and white of our skins; both of us being stoned literally out of our minds on our respective drugs—and the fact that we were Adam and Eve at the time didn’t hurt either. Adam scooped me up in his arms and carried me to the center of the stage. He lay me down slowly on the wooden floor and gingerly spread my legs out. We made love, noiselessly, as if by keeping quiet, we could shut out the forty or fifty pairs of eyes that were fixed on the action. In other words, we no longer cared where we were.
No fool, Vincent in his role as God waited for Adam onstage to come. As soon as he did, God started thundering from the balcony. He banished us from Eden. Elijah lifted me in his arms again and carried me offstage and up the aisle.
An eerie silence hung over the huge theater. The men in the audience weren’t even shuffling in their seats, let alone applauding. Vincent seemed unperturbed.
“Fine, fine,” our director said when we reached the balcony, “but listen, Elijah, man, you’re not supposed to get a hard-on before you eat the apple.”
“I don’t see why not. Anyway, it couldn’t be helped,” Elijah said.
“Another thing. If you keep fucking like that, you’ll never last through four shows,” Vincent said.
“It’s all right, mon, it was worth it,” Elijah said, smiling at me.
Vincent wrapped my hands in a big chain, and Cotton Mather pulled me down to the stage. As excellent an Adam as Elijah had been, this next role was a real stretch. Elijah as Cotton Mather stood there condemning me to the stake.
“You got to die, woman. You’re a witch. No, no, you got to burn,” he said in a deep voice.
I found myself dancing tentatively, more the suggestion of a dance than the real thing, my hips swinging back and forth slightly. As halting as my movements were, I could sense the audience responding to them, and Elijah gave me plenty of time to seduce him with my supposedly irresistibly lewd performance. Together, we managed to drag out the second act, building suspense, if there could be any suspense left. Finally, I stood in a pose of witch’s triumph with my foot on Cotton Mather’s head, and the stage went dark. When the lights in the theater came up, one or two men in the audience started to clap, but most of them filed out in a hurry.
Word of mouth must have spread through the corridors of National Broadcasting, because the orchestra for the next show was just as full as it had been for the last. It was unusual, Vincent said, to draw that big a crowd in midafternoon. Elijah and I dallied in foreplay now that we had overcome the worst of our stage fright. Basking in the pink light of Eden, we began to caress. I finally got up the nerve to touch his dreadlocks, which were as soft as knitting yarn. Later, freed from my chains, and according to the spirit of Vincent’s morality play, I took the lead, straddling the defeated prude Cotton Mather and riding high.
While I was wiping the sweat off my body with a Warwick Hotel towel that Candy had given me, Vincent gestured to Elijah, taking him off to the side where he said something to him. They shook hands, and Vincent handed him some money. Elijah came back and started putting on his clothes, bell-bottoms and a tie-dyed T-shirt. He tucked his mad hair into a big woolen cap. Then he sat down and began lacing up his sneakers. I went over to him.
“Why are you leaving? I thought we were doing great,” I said.
“Ask Vincent. He’s got his regular player back. Besides, you wasted me, darlin’, I’m all used up. But it has been grand, just grand, girl,” he said in his Island-English accent.
He stood up, pulled me to him, and kissed me on the forehead. Then he was gone.
Vincent came over to me with another man. This one was white and beefy looking. His name was Lester. He had to be the original Midnight Cowboy, but there was something threatening about him. A gray shadow hung over his snub nose and popping eyes.
“Lester’s my buddy from the gym. He’s a regular now, been doing this all week,” Vincent said.
“I thought Elijah and I were good together. We were packing them in.”
“Yeah, sure, honey, but you’re a killer. You wore him out. He was spent, finished.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I liked Elijah.”
“Don’t worry about it, Lester’s a pro. Anyway, look at those muscles. Ever see muscles like that?” Vincent asked me, poking Lester, who was stripping now. I took Vincent by the hand and pulled him away from Lester, out of earshot.
“No, no thanks. I got to pass. He’s too creepy, sorry.”
Vincent looked over at the naked, exceedingly white hulk of a man and nodded.
“He does seem a little sinister at that, now that you mention it. But hey, thanks, Janet, man, you are very hot. Maybe you’d be willing to do this again sometime if I can find the right partner,” he said.
I was touched and gratified by his words. Thanks to my psychotic state, I was beginning to find myself ostracized almost anywhere I tried to go. When I was particularly high, I wandered and chatted to the invisible, I laughed and sometimes cried out loud in the street, and even when I wasn’t behaving like that, I was now giving myself away just by my dilated pupils; my long, electrified straight hair that shot out from my temples; my increasingly odd outfits; and my unnaturally skinny body. But there were always certain people, certain nonjudgmental people who were either as crazy as I was or close to it, or simply very kind, who accepted me as a whole human being. Vincent seemed to be one of these sympathetic allies.
I went to check on Sigrid, to make sure she was still on the premises. I poked my head around a screen in the massage parlor room, and there she was, chatting casually in Spanish with a customer while she stroked him absentmindedly.
“Just wanted to see how you were doing,” I said.
“Racking it up,” Sigrid said. “How about you?”
“Lost in the footlights,” I said.
“Any time you feel like leaving, let me know,” she said.
The customer must have been turned on by the sound of us talking. He groaned and started to dribble semen into Sigrid’s hand. She grabbed a tissue and wiped him off with the calm and aloof air of a nurse bending over her patient.
I stood around in the front room, trying to summon the courage to go behind one of those screens with a patient. Just wasn’t up to it. Anyway, I’d had enough for one day. Candy was behind the desk, ordering the men to sit down and wait their turn as if they were schoolchildren. I went back out on the balcony, where Vincent was talking to Lester, who was putting his clothes back on.
“Don’t worry, I got another pair to finish the set for today,” Vincent said, as if I might be concerned about letting him down. “No really, it’s going to be fine. Yeah, they’re a couple of Okies, two young kids, just married and fresh—I mean fresh—off the boat. They’re sitting down in front...say they’re flat busted, could use the bucks...I don’t know.”
“Oh, let them try it,” Lester said. He seemed perfectly content not to be appearing today.
“OK, but would you two mind waiting around just in case?” Vincent asked. He pulled out a wad of twenties and handed them to me.
“Hey, Vincent, this is a hundred bucks for two shows,” I said, counting out the twenties.
“A bonus. You deserve it, kid. You’re a star. When you shine, nobody shines brighter, Janet,” he said, grinning his prefab grin.
Vincent called out to the couple, Jeff and Lee Ann. They came running up the aisle, hand in hand. He started to explain the plot and they nodded vigorously.
“Yes, sir,” they said.
The seats began filling up.
“Take off your clothes,” Vincent said.
The couple undressed quickly. They stood there, buck naked except for the shining gold crosses they both wore around their necks. Lee Ann took a minute to fold their clothes neatly in a pile. She stared up at her husband, all trust.
Lester had disappeared by this time, but I stayed to watch. The two of them marched brazenly to the stage. Jeff jumped onto it and then lifted up his bride. It was immediately obvious that they hadn’t paid attention to any of Vincent’s directions. No point in God sounding his warning, it was already too late. They started to soul kiss, and then Jeff went down on Lee Ann, just like they always did. She yelped and moaned. He pushed her onto the floor.
“Oh, great. What a pair of rubes,” Vincent said. He threw his hands up. “Fuck it.”
Jeff started humping with a regular, married-style rhythm.
“Oh God, oh God,” Lee Ann started screaming, “I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come. Oh God!”
All of a sudden, the place was thick with cops. It reminded me of the time termites in nuptial flight hit my grandparents’ home in Palm Beach. One minute, the house was still inside, the next minute it was moving, swarming with twitching insects. Cops were everywhere: cops on the stage, pulling the couple apart like they were two dogs; cops on the balcony surrounding Vincent and me.
“You go by the name of Vincent Damone?” one of the cops said. He slapped cuffs on Vincent’s wrists before he could get an answer. He read him his rights.
“Who are you?” another cop asked me, pulling me through the door into the massage parlor waiting room. As he did, I watched the audience full of suits stampede for the exit.
They were holding on to Candy. She was screaming, “That Lester son of a bitch. He set us up, that motherfucking rat bastard!”
Three cops were holding her now. She kept crying out and thrashing her head from side to side like some kind of modern-day Sabine woman. The cops meanwhile fell right into their roles, behaving like perfect Roman-style straight men, gripping her by the arms and the back of the head and standing fast with grim expressions on their faces.
“All right, Candy, cool it,” Vincent said as they dragged him through the room.
My cop threw me down into a chair, and I found myself sitting next to a very composed Sigrid.
“You don’t understand, officer, if you’d been here earlier, you would have seen for yourself. This play is a work of art. It has redeeming social value,” Vincent was saying as they hauled him and a kicking Candy out the door.
“OK, girls, what’s your story? Your blond friend here says you was just visiting,” my cop said.
The massage parlor workers from the next room had been lined up in a row. A short little cop was pushing the last one along, as if they were all attached. They filed out in an orderly manner, looking bored.
“So, girlie, your friend tells me you two are roommates,” my cop said. He was plainclothes, dressed in slacks, a corduroy jacket, and a tie. “You should be ashamed of yourself. Well, what were you doing here?”
“Visiting, officer, visiting our friends Vincent and Candy,” Sigrid said.
“I’m not talking to you. I asked your little friend.”
“That’s right, officer. I’ve never been here before. I thought it was kind of an adventure, you know?” I said.
“Adventure. That’s pitiful. A nice girl like you, like both of you.” He was shaking his head.
There were only a few other cops left in the place, along with Sigrid and me. The bust happened so fast. I worried for a moment about Vincent, then thought better of it. He could take care of himself. But Jeff and Lee Ann, the poor kids.
“Here’s how it is. I’ll let you two go this time. But if I ever catch either one of you in my precinct, I’m going to make it real tough. Get it? Names, please.”
While we gave him the information, another plainclothes cop took it down. He kept looking up at us and shaking his head.
Two cops in uniform put Sigrid and me into the back of a squad car. As we headed up Broadway, they seemed to be making a point of ignoring us, perhaps to show what honorable, upright officers they were. This made us giggle. Here we were getting chauffeured home by the law.
When we reached Sigrid’s apartment, one of the cops got out of the front seat and actually came around and opened the door for her. She took the policeman’s outstretched hand and alighted from the car. I followed. The cop stood in the street, his eyes trained on Sigrid’s behind. Maybe it was only in that instant it hit him: this elegant white girl was a whore after all; she could be had.
“See you around, hot stuff,” he called to her. “You little slut,” he said under his breath.
When Sigrid heard that, she turned around and winked.