Pixie
How to Become a Pimpless Whore
“Do you have a gun?” I asked the psychiatrist, the windowless room artificially cool.
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
“First, you should buy a gun,” I told her. “It’s the best way to keep order and balance.” I told her the story; how I’d bought mine in a pawn shop on Avenue C in downtown Bayonne where Ezra and I were living at the time. The owner was a little Italian man, and Ezra, a big-eyed child with a curly head of hair and a little sunken chest, stared at him without blinking. The glass case came up to the owner’s chest. He had to get up on his tiptoes to lean over the glass case, and when he did, he held out a yellow lollipop wrapped in cellophane. But Ezra was a perfect child and the man was a stranger offering candy. This was back in the days when the only thing anyone knew about bad guys was that they were strangers with candy, before we were willing as a culture to admit that bad guys could be with you day in and day out, someone you trust. I nodded. Ezra took the lollipop, unwrapped it, and shoved it in his mouth. Then he pulled it out and said, “Thank you, sir.” Ezra was a good kid, really. The owner asked me what I wanted a gun for and I said, “Personal protection.” I didn’t go into the particulars. He showed me a little handgun, and as soon as I held it, it felt so good, the weight of it, the black shine. I bought it.
This was after I emerged from my two weeks on the nappy sofa in the Bayonne apartment with little Ezra, where I lived on the peanut butter sandwiches that he made for me and Dixie cups of water. I stared at the wallpaper until the water stains became shapes and then the faces of my family—my mother, Cliff, Russell, Ezra, even my father, smoke-darkened, bubbling from the wall. Russell had taught me many things in a bungled secondhand way, Buddhism and Hinduism and Marxism. But I was tired of men, of how each culture seemed to have its version of how man created mankind, how we came from Manu’s head, hands, thighs or feet, or how we were lice on Pangu’s body, or that old white rib of Adam’s, a story my mother never really much cared for, what with her strong belief that we come from fish. I know how people came to be, the way they still come to be: a woman’s body swells up, the belly hardens, there’s blood and pain, and finally a baby. This obvious fact gets overlooked. In the stories men have made up and handed down you’d think that they were the ones to give birth, that they can create a human being with almost any part of their bodies until one day they’ll think each sinew, each blood vessel, each of their little cells can procreate, until they shrug and infants drift to the ground around their feet like snow, when really their only contribution is a grunt and a cupful of sperm, those invisible tail-flicking fish, more like my mother’s theory after all.
After failing to become Miss America and after having found my husband in bed with another man, I was tired of people not being what they’d set themselves up to be. Russell hadn’t wanted what I thought he wanted, but he’d wanted something all the same, not me, but the idea of me, because it lent some credibility to a certain idea that he wanted to have of himself. I decided that I would become pure, but in a new sense of the word—that I would be honest in my society, a society based on sex and money. I was actually thinking these words in my head: I want to live like Thoreau, truthfully, essentially. I thought of myself as a country almost, one that had existed and had been ruled by natives in a way that I’d come to see as barbarians, and I was claiming that land, forming my own newly empowered government, writing my own constitution. I was philosophical about it all, talking to myself in the mirror, giving little speeches while brushing my teeth. I was deluded, if you want the honest truth. I was in some kind of dream. I decided that I was a whore and that the best way to be a whore was to be in complete control, to be a pimpless whore. It was the truth of my life. And so I exploited the native in me, I suppose. I exploited myself for the ideals in my new self-made government. I wasn’t Miss America. No, I’d given that up. I was my own United States of America, just starting out, though, with its fledgling colonies. And I had a dizzying spirit, a relentless pride. I walked around like a conqueror, having conquered my native self. It was convoluted at best.
I never had to pull the gun out and take aim, not until recently that is, and as I’ve said, that was a mistake. I was careful in the men I chose. I was after a certain kind of man. I didn’t care if he was married or not. Marriages had become trivial matters and personally none of my business. I hadn’t vowed anything to a stranger’s wife. Sometimes it was a pinky ring, or a chain necklace, something to indicate pride. But also I looked for a weakness in the eyes—not too weak; the weakest men are the most capable of cruelty. The expression I wanted was something closer to surprise. I had to decide right off that I could shoot them if I needed to. The answer always had to be yes without hesitation. When I went looking for them, sometimes there was more to it than that. Sometimes there was a clitoral twinge, like a forked stick, a divining rod trembling when it’s held over a spot of water underground, the right spot for a well if you were willing to dig. It was about the picking and choosing, the surge of control.
I never went to crowded bars where the men were so immediately up close and too hard to discourage if they weren’t quite right. I chose quieter places. I never had to wait long. I let them make the first move, sidling up, elbow on the bar, one foot on a rung of my bar stool. Eventually, I’d tell them what I proposed, always making it sound like the idea was just dawning on me for the first time. I’d explain to them they could wine and dine me, perhaps entice me to a hotel room at the Chalfont. They could spend X amount of money, maybe $25 or $30 back then. Or, I’d say, we could just be straightforward. “It’s money and sex, isn’t it? Let’s just make it a fair exchange without the middleman—the waiter, the doorman—without strings attached.”
Some of the men would say that it sounded illegal, because these were the types of men I chose. I’d shrug. “It’s my body. It’s your money. What could be illegal between two grownups? Why would they make a law like that? To keep the restaurants, the flower shops, jewelry stores, and hotels in business? Sounds like a conspiracy.” I remember their smoked-down cigarettes, the way they tamped them in a quiet bar’s crystal ashtray before taking my arm. I know that some people would wonder if I wasn’t just interested in degrading myself, perhaps only subconsciously, but really, I’ll say that I was doing what seemed only extremely sensible at the time.
When we got to my apartment, I’d pay the sitter, a sweet kid watching TV on the sofa. I’d make the man a drink, and sometimes Ezra would stumble from his room in his baggy pajamas. He’d ask for a glass of water. I’d give it to him and carry him back to bed. The men would get nervous. They’d sit at the kitchen table with the drink I’d poured them and say, “Maybe I should go.” I’d hear them from Ezra’s bedroom. But when I came back into the kitchen, I’d take off my itchy sweater, pull it off over my head. I’d unclip the pins from my hair, letting it fall to my shoulders. They’d follow me to the bedroom, where I lit candles and played soft music on the record player . . . It was that simple. And when I was in bed with them, I’d listen for Ezra. I wasn’t a good whore. Sometimes if I heard Ezra cough, I’d tap the man on the shoulder and excuse myself to check on Ezra. But sometimes, too, I’ll admit, I was caught up in it, and I was just a woman, not a mother, and it was like that spot with the twitching stick but beneath it, there wasn’t water but longing, something that I had pushed from my mind, and when I was having sex, it was like just beginning to dig.
I walked the men to the door after it was over, wearing my long satin Asian robe, the folded bills left on the kitchen table. Sometimes they’d say they’d want to see me again and I’d say, “A deal’s a deal.” But I was good at picking the ones who wouldn’t come back, drunks banging at the door till I called the cops, and a lot of the time, they didn’t really want to come back. As I said, I wasn’t very good at being a whore anyway. Once they were gone, I’d go into Ezra’s room, brush the hair from his forehead to see if he was hot. I’d smell
the sweat of men on me, the smoke in my hair, and I’d think, somehow, that it made sense, that this was a real world and a real woman living in it. I hated the world and the woman, too, I guess. But I felt it was the only truth, in all of its ugliness, my thighs, for example, still wet. I could hear my brother’s Vietnam dog, moaning inside me, a low aching moan and nobody to save me. And maybe I was waiting for someone to save me, in some way, although I’d have said the opposite then. I was waiting for my father, as I thought he once had saved me from the stranger, or Cliff; how Jamison had told me that he’d wanted to save me and the whole world while he was at it. I admitted to the psychiatrist, “I didn’t know then what I know now.”
“And what do you know now?” the psychiatrist asked.
I looked around the walls, thinking that there should be a window in one of them, some way to see outside. I didn’t tell her that Cliff wanted to kill my father, that my father never saved me, although this is when it started to change, the moment that what my mother had told me in the hospital started to become true. But instead I said, “Ezra, my sweet son. One night I was with him after a man had left, to check on him, as usual, and his head was hot, his chest laboring. I walked quickly to my bedroom and rummaged for the thermometer in my bedside table alongside the gun, note paper, pencils. ‘Ezra,’ I was calling out, ‘Wake up, wake up.’ The sleeve of my Asian robe caught a candle, flame still lit, as I turned back to his room, but I hadn’t noticed it. I smelled the small scent of something burning, but I thought it was Ezra, his hot body against the sheets. I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. I ran back to him, sitting up in bed when I walked in.
“‘Mommy,’ he said, his eyes blinking and then wide. ‘You’re on fire.’ And I looked down and saw my sleeve, like a flag catching, like the limb of a tree in full bloom. Do you know what I mean?” I asked the psychiatrist. I’d started to cry, talking about it, real tears sliding down my cheeks, splotching my silk top. “And the heat seemed to be coming not from the fire but from my chest, a fire that had been there for a long, long time, who knew how long? But now it was true, suddenly, spreading out from my heart, a bright, hot flare.”
Ezra
Rule #11: It’s better not to try at all than to try and fail.
When I woke up in the morning, my father was already gone, his side of the bed neatly made. He was out in the world, I supposed, trying to find a way to finance gayness. I got dressed and went to the bathroom. When I stepped out, Richard and his mother jumped up from the sofa and began bustling around in the kitchen. They were both in waist-tied cotton bathrobes, Richard, a thick version of his mother. Mr. Pichard was watching a commercial—a family extremely happy about margerine—on an old tube-run TV. He had a satchel in his lap and a cardigan slung over his arm, obviously ready to go somewhere.
“Here’s orange juice,” Richard said, handing me a small glass, a jelly jar from the ’70s.
Mrs. Pichard gave me toast wrapped in a butter-stained napkin. “Mr. Pichard has decided to invite you to his gym,” she said.
Richard nodded. “It’s an honor. I’ve never been invited.”
Mrs. Pichard gave me a satchel, too. “There are a pair of Richard’s swim trunks in there from when he was a boy your age.” I was curious if she’d ever caught on to what my age was exactly. There’d been such strange confusion about that fact. I imagined that the swim trunks might fit an eight-year-old who’d love a roomful of toy trucks. “And goggles, too.” She called to Mr. Pichard, “He’s ready!”
I hadn’t said a word.
“You swim?” Mr. Pichard grumbled.
“No, sir, not really. I tried to learn once but didn’t, and then my mother filled our pool with dirt.”
“It’s not important,” he said. “C’mon.”
We drove to the gym in Mr. Pichard’s enormous Buick, so big and black I felt like he was driving his own hearse, and I wondered what it would have been like if my mother hadn’t just hit Dilworth’s shoulder, but instead if she’d lodged a bullet just a few inches over, into his heart. I was scared not only of what things were happening in my life but also of how I had no control over anything. I was suddenly aware that any assortment of strange combinations of unknown things could collide on someone at any moment with no warning. Mr. Pichard and I didn’t talk.
It was an ancient gym that smelled like old paint and dirty laundry. Mr. Pichard signed in at the front desk with a pen tied to a string, the string taped to the desk. He paid a few bucks extra for me and then walked stiffly to the locker room. It had open-stall showers in a row, their giant industrial-looking nozzles of scalding water spraying down on the mole-covered, wrinkled and pocked backs of two old men at opposite ends. It was an old man’s gym. That was obvious.
Mr. Pichard opened a curtained changing stall for me and stepped into the one next door. The curtains, thick white with blue stripes, hung on a metal curtain rod with metal curtain clips that screeched each time someone tugged them. Luckily, Richard’s suit wasn’t for an eight-year-old, but he’d obviously been a chunky kid, because it was wide for me. The trunks were also much too short, exposing the whites of my upper thighs that hadn’t gotten tan in the Pinkerings’ deck chairs because of my long swim trunks. I imagined that Richard had wanted to show off his legs, could see him strutting around some pool. I pulled the drawstring tight, left the goggles in the satchel, which Mr. Pichard put in a locker, and followed him to the pool with the towel Mrs. Pichard had packed draped in front of me.
It was a greenish indoor pool. A group of older ladies in rubber swim caps, some ornamented with rubber flowers—which embarrassingly reminded me of Janie Pinkering’s father’s French tickler—were finishing up an aquacize class. One by one they heaved themselves out of the buoyant water. I waited by the ladder.
Mr. Pichard walked around to the deep end. His elbows cocked at his large ears, he dove in and swam a few slow strokes underwater, his humped back making him look like a giant sea turtle before surfacing. We were the only ones in the pool area except for the aquacizers now disappearing behind the women’s locker room door. I looked down at my webbed toes and sighed, thinking of Janie and her dad, and how close I had been to becoming a Pinkering myself—although I knew I hadn’t really been that close, not really—and wondering if I’d get a second chance. I stepped down one rung of the ladder, but I didn’t go in.
“What’s the matter?” Mr. Pinkering asked, his voice echoing.
“Too cold,” I said.
“It’s piss warm! It’s a baby’s bathwater!”
“I guess I just don’t feel like it,” I said and I padded to the bleachers while Mr. Pichard did laps. I’ve always felt strange in water, out of place, awkward as a frog on land. I was feeling out of place enough. I didn’t need to remind myself that I couldn’t really swim, how vulnerable I was, bested by an old man with a humped back. I wrapped myself in the small faded bath towel and sat on a short row of bleachers while Mr. Pichard swam on his back, pulling down armfuls of water, so evenly that it seemed like he was flying, not swimming. And then Mr. Pichard, back-floating, began to sing, a soft hum at first, but then slowly louder, richer, a beautiful Italian operetta, his voice bouncing around off the ceiling, the walls, the water’s rolling surface. It was a sad song, and I wondered if this was the reason that he’d invited me to the gym, if he was telling me something, a secret that no one knew about him. His arms pushed him through the water; it rippled over his bony body, past his slowly kicking feet. He was graceful and beautiful, his voice pressed from his lungs to the ceiling and back again. He held one long note, so sweet that my eyes stung, and then he stopped. He reached the edge of the pool in the shallow end and climbed the ladder.
He said, “Let’s go. It’s time to go.”
But he didn’t take me home. Instead he drove a couple blocks and parked at a metered spot near PJ’s Pub where, he told me, he was a regular. It was a dark bar, a couple of steps down from the street. It was mostly empty, except for a few college kids, eating fr
ench fries and drinking beer, and a few older men watching TV at the end of the bar.
“I’ve got a guest with me today, Hiram,” he told the bartender. We sat at the bar, and he ordered us Reubens and gin-and-tonics. The bartender glanced at me and then back at Mr. Pichard. He didn’t say anything, though, or ask for ID. I imagined that he knew that Mr. Pichard could raise his voice, could cause a stink, that he was the type to start yelling about lukewarm soup. The drinks were clear with lots of ice, a small straw, and a chunk of lime. I stirred mine like Mr. Pichard and the pale green pulp rose up and swirled. It tasted sweeter than I thought it would, much better than the drinks Janie concocted at her dad’s bar. We ate the sloppy sandwiches and drank, both of us sucking on the limes. I felt old, almost like an old man myself, like Mr. Pichard and I were buddies from high school who’d walked to school with our books held together by a leather belt.
He talked about local sports and local politics, neither of which I knew too much about. He was still sore about the Colts sneaking out of Baltimore and the talk that they were going to tear down Memorial Stadium to build some ritzier stadium somewhere, probably out by the highway.