It was late August 1976, five years after I turned my first trick. Ava had moved away and Michael with her. I found myself feeling lost. I couldn’t make sense of things anymore. In one fractious, lucid moment, I looked around and discovered that I was sick and tired of casual sex. Without my Svengali around to supply an audience and cheer me on, hooking suddenly lost its appeal. I felt like Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One morning I woke up to discover my life was wearing a donkey’s head. Without Michael around, being a prostitute was no longer a gorgeous metaphor, no longer a Baudelaire poem.
In spite of my disillusion, I had a hard time giving up the Life. I was accustomed to the everyday adventure of how much money I could bring in and the friendly competition with the other members of the harem; beyond that, just as I had been warned, blue money was easy money. In little more than a year I would be coming into $40,000, the principal of the trust fund my grandfather couldn’t rescind, and as it was, I had close to $10,000 saved, rolled up in a wad of fifties and hundreds in the top drawer of my bureau at the Mohican. But I kept telling myself I needed to go out and turn tricks. I had become a garden-variety capitalist coward. I was too used to having and getting easy money. I didn’t want to stop.
Sad and restless, I started to wander around downtown after my day shift ended. I was drawn back again and again to a hoary old saloon in the West Village. It was the logical place to go, the Alamo, because drinking was a serious business there, and drinking was starting to appeal to me more than ever, in a new way. I was fed up with speed and even with cocaine. I was fed up with staying awake. I had been awake for years now, and it occurred to me I might be missing something. What drew me especially to this hangout was that most of the old beats there were also burned out. These people lived to drink; the mirror behind the bar seemed to suck your face into its murky brown depths; the floor was coated with a millennium of solid dirt, which could have been sacred seeing how undisturbed it was. The denizens, mostly men in their forties and up, were honest-to-God left-over bohemians, which means they were ex-marines who knew Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady personally, and who could recite whole poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. They were given to drunks that lasted days. And they went out of their way to ignore me.
My first friend there, Horace, was a senior editor at a very old and dying independent publishing house. The token gay man in that otherwise homophobic Alamo—the kind of homosexual who chose the company of straight men for some masochistic reason, but maybe also because he was getting a little long in the tooth and, like the rest of these old warriors, preferred to drink without the harsh interruption of sexual challenges—Horace explained to me why the regulars were so hostile. There were a couple of reasons, he said:
“To begin with, they don’t appreciate strangers. A very provincial crowd down here, you’ve got to understand that. An outsider is like someone who comes to the theater so late, he misses the first act. They think it’s rude of a young person such as you to break in on their lives, especially when you consider that for all intents and purposes those lives are over.
“But maybe more important is that you’re a woman. They don’t like women, you see. Oh, I don’t mean they don’t fuck them—of course they do when they can get it up—but they just don’t like them.”
Horace waved his hand like he was shooing flies.
“Now that I’ve made you feel thoroughly welcome, have a cocktail on me,” he said in his high tenor voice, with its very clear diction. No matter how in his cups he got, Horace never slurred. He slumped, and his face folded up like an abandoned beach ball in the rain, but his talk never got fuzzy. It was a point of honor with him.
Every boozehound had one, I discovered. Some of the regulars prided themselves on being able to sit very erect like good schoolboys at attention. Others made a show of going to the jukebox, stiff-legged, walking a maniacally straight line; still others never talked at all, but sat demurely in the corner, as if to show that drinking themselves quietly to death was their own damn business.
The music behind the bellowing and the free-floating monologues that passed for conversation was still vintage jazz, classic cuts by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn, a little Zoot Sims thrown in. “I’ve Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” was a song you frequently heard.
There were only a few other women who drank at the Alamo besides me—real camp followers they were. One had been a lieutenant in the navy, which meant she was the highest-ranking officer in the joint. And with her perfectly knotted bun, stockings, and heels, she was dignified, too, always accorded a respect, at least to her face, the rest of the women were outright denied. Most of them had supported one or the other of the guys over the years, when the guys were still young enough to get away with pretending to be musicians or writers, and now, as often as they could, these old dolls, their wide rumps spread across the barstools, were content to hang out alongside their exes until closing time. Usually, they couldn’t. Once they got soused, they liked to yell at the incorrigible old bums, the erstwhile loves of their lives, until Arthur, the scowling Irishman behind the stick, his drooping mustache wet with beer foam, glared at them with a baleful look of world-weary disdain and banished them out into the street. For it was the females who unfailingly got eighty-sixed, never the males. A self-evident truth at the Alamo: women were the troublemakers of this earth.
Naturally, I felt at home. Lately my version of feminism amounted to drinking with men, whether they liked it or not, until all hours. And it took only a couple of nights to get over on Arthur, the tall, rugged-looking bartender with his doleful mustache and his flashing, angry black eyes.
It was a balmy September evening when I walked into the Alamo with Arthur, and who should be sitting there in the midst of a crowd of adopted fathers doing his silly Bing Crosby imitation—“Bohm bohm, bohm bohm”—to amuse the old folks, but the snide rock ’n’ roller himself, little Eddie Carnivale.
“Hey, Arthur, my man, you’re a sight for sore eyes. What’s the matter with this dildo behind the stick? I been here for days and he won’t buy me nothin’, not even a draft. Tried to tell him you got a buy-back policy, but I don’t think he gets it,” Eddie called out.
“C’mon, Eddie, you been practically drinking on the house all day,” the day bartender said.
“When’d you blow back into town?” Arthur said, acting not surprised or happy to see little Eddie, but willing enough to acknowledge him all the same.
“My mom had enough of me,” Eddie said.
“She had enough of you going through her purse,” Arthur said.
“Yeah, something like that,” Eddie said cheerfully.
I just stood there, waiting for him to recognize me. Finally, I gave up.
“Hi, Eddie, how is your mother?” I asked him.
“Janet. Janet, man, what are you doing in this dive?”
“I live here.”
“Nah, don’t tell me you’re doing this scene now. My crib is just around the corner, so I gotta drink here, but what could possibly be your excuse?”
“I’m with that guy.”
“Who you talking about, not old Arthur?”
“Yes, old Arthur.”
“That’s a shame,” Eddie said, and he sat there, leaning on both elbows with his back against the bar, looking at me. First he stared at my breasts, which were naked underneath my translucent peasant blouse, and then he lifted his head slowly until he was peering right into my eyes. “That’s a real shame.”
About a week later, I was coming out of Chester’s, which was the other hangout, a few blocks away from the Alamo. People bounced back and forth between the two bars all night long. There was a constant wobbly stream of drunks cutting through Abingdon Square, turning up Eighth Avenue one block, and then walking east on Jane to West Fourth Street. I did this myself when Arthur was working. Chester’s had a different, more civilized ambience. For one thing, a woman owned it, Donna Vickers.
Anyway, I was careening out of there around two in the morning, on my way back to cause a scene with Arthur at the Alamo, when, in passing, I heard a couple of guys on the stoop next door talking. One of them spoke my name. It was Eddie and his young buddy, the cook at Chester’s. Eddie was wearing what looked like a Sherlock Holmes hat. They were passing a joint.
“See that chick? She’s got a crush on me,” I thought I heard Eddie say.
What? C’mon, really. Here I was, wearing my new sea-green cashmere sheath, with its own little hood bouncing behind me. The dress stretched over my body to about the middle of my calf, meeting the tops of my stacked-heel tan leather boots. I had tied back my streaked-blond hair in a ponytail to show off my neck. Since when did hot numbers like me go for juniors, for little punks like Eddie Carnivale?
Then one night in late October, when the sudden chill of autumn was kicking in and the city takes on an expectant air, as if it were winding itself up, I was turning the corner on Bank Street. Eddie came out the front door of his building. He was wearing nothing but a black T-shirt, black jeans, and white sneakers. It was a little too cold for that. All the same, he looked at home in his tight boy-body, his biceps jumping as he braced himself against the gusts of wind that were now charging off the Hudson River. And he looked alone. I don’t mean simply all by himself for that moment, but really alone. Eddie was fine, very fine. I was seized by a whim, a pure and captivating whim. I went up to him, held him by the arm, and turned him around until we were both facing the open door leading to his lobby.
“It’s cold out here. Let’s go inside,” I said.
His junkie friend Louise was crashed out on the floor next to the bed. Ignoring her there, Eddie poured us tumblers full of scotch, which we downed like Gatorade before the big game. When eventually we got around to having sex, we used the presence of that inert body right below us to measure our oblivion. We thrashed and pounded, slamming against walls, drunk and wild, raping each other. Blood from my period smeared all over the sheets. Nobody came. Too much at stake. It was an assault, a street fight, no kidding around.
“You’re not going to turn tricks anymore. Never. Never again. No more fucking around. No more seeing Arthur. I’m going to stop you, Janet, I’m going to stop you right here,” Eddie said.
His words stoned me. I adored him. The next day, I stuffed my huge wad of bills, the almost $10,000 worth, into my pocketbook, packed up my clothes, paid up my bill at the Mohican, and swooped down on little Eddie, Eddie Apollo, who sat waiting for me for some unknown reason in the dark in his apartment on Abingdon Square.