As her vision adjusted itself, Cora could see that there were only two or three couples seated at the tables around the stage and watching the show. Most of the action was up front, behind the velvet rope, where the bar was. Here some thirty-odd men were clustered, looking over the B-girls, who looked them over right back, only much more knowledgeably.
A tuxedo’d plug-ugly loomed up in front of Cora. “Sorry, miss, no ladies allowed wit’out they got an escort,” he told her.
That was a laugh! The joint was crawling with B-girls on the make, and here was the management acting all tough and virtuous. Of course, what he really meant was that if any hustling was going to go on, it would be house-hustling and the house would take its split. But Cora was in too much of a sweat to dwell on the irony.
“I’m not going to stay. I’m just looking for a friend,” she explained.
“Sorry. You’ll have to look for him some place else.”
“Relax. The friend is female. I’m not trying to move in on your little racket. Oh, there she is. Hey, Zelda, come here and rescue me.”
“With you in a sec, honey.” Zelda waved at her from the other end of the bar.
A brassy, over-bleached blonde, Zelda stood with her belly thrust out and grinding against the man with whom she’d been drinking. The black silk of her short skirt stretched tightly over her rotating buttocks. The slit in her skirt revealed one of her fleshy legs almost to the hip. Now, impatient to get to Cora, she turned away from the man, pulling his arm around in front of her so that his hand gained easy access to the extremely low-cut, golden-sparkle blouse she wore. With no bra to hinder him, he was soon fondling her over-ripe, melon-size breasts eagerly. She reached behind her, fumbled at the zipper of his pants, found what she’d been groping for, and proceeded to expertly pay him off for the split of champagne he’d bought her at three times the legitimate price. It only took a moment, and then she patted his cheek and moved off toward Cora.
“What’s up, honey?” Zelda ignored the hand that reached out to pat her buttocks and lingered to caress them. “I ain’t seen you in along time. Where you been keeping yourself?” She reached behind her, and the intimate hand deposited two dollar bills in her palm. Zelda turned long enough to flash a smile at the paunchy man to whom the hand belonged. “Wait for me at the bar, sugar. I’ll be with you in a minute.” She turned back to Cora. “So what’s the pitch?”
“I have to make a connection.” Cora came right out with it.
“Easy! Not so loud.” Zelda looked around nervously. “Lotsa bulls come in here, you know.”
“How about it? Can you help me?”
“I ain’t got no connection. I kicked it. Two months I ain’t had a fix — well, almost. Anyway, I’m outa contact. What happened? Your pusher get boxed?”
“Yes. They picked him up last night. Please, Zelda, I’m half out of my mind. You have to help me.”
“I would if I could, kid. You know that. Nobody knows better than me that cold turkey ain’t no fun. Particularly if you ain’t even tryin’ to call a halt. But I don’t know nobody, an’ that’s a fact.”
“Well, thanks anyway,” Cora sighed. She turned to leave.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Zelda called after her. “You know who you might try? Mickey.” She stepped close to Cora and her voice was low again. “I saw him on Broadway about an hour ago and he was really flying. He’s gotto be gettin’ it somewhere. You know where to find him?”
“I know. Thanks, Zelda. I’ll be seeing you around.”
Cora walked, hopscotching the store-fronts to try to avoid the rain that was coming down. It didn’t do too much good, and she was wet and shivering when she finally got to the Forty-Second Street grind house where Mickey hung out when he was H’d up. The movie theatre was three-quarters empty, and she didn’t have any trouble spotting him in the last row of the balcony.
“Greetings and salutations, Cora-Cora-Cora,” he said aloud as she slid into the seat beside him.
Mickey was a light-skinned Negro, a college graduate with a Master’s in finance. Once he’d worked as a teller for a large bank. He’d worked for them for a long time before it dawned on him that there would never he any promotion for him. A promotion meant he’d be working in the bank’s offices, out of sight of the customers, and that would never do. It would defeat their whole purpose in having hired him in the first place. They wanted him out front where his acceptably tan face with its acceptably Caucasian-styled features would serve as a public badge of their tolerance. “So,” as Mickey himself put it, “I jes got bone-weary of bein’ that little ol’ bank’s house nigger, an’ one fine day I he’ped myself to some o’Mr. Charlie’s white man money an’ made tracks. Alas”—the switch from dialect to an archaic sort of classical speech was typical of him— “my flight was in vain. The minions of the laws apprehended your truly before I could even begin to spend my ill-gotten gains. Thus the constahulary, aided and abetted by the judiciary, saw to it that l was incarcerated in a penal establishment. ’T was there I fell prey to the evil habit which holds me to this day.”
“I need a connection, Mickey,” Cora told him now. "I can see you’ve got one.”
“Yes-yes-yes. Indeedy, I do. We’s friends, Cora-Cora-Cora, so I put you onto him if you like. But it gonna cost. So tell me, milady, fairest-of-the-fair, heart-of-my heart, how y’all fixed for bread?”
“Not good,” Cora admitted. “I was hoping you might help me out.”
“Sorry, sugar, it took all my crumbs jes to get this fix. I-would-if-I-could-but-I-can’t,” he sing-songed. “An’ this pusher I got’s strictly cash-and-no-carry. On the line, sans credit.”
“All right. I’ll get the money somehow. Just tell me how I make the connection.”
“South Ferry, down near the pier there’s this all-night cafeteria he hangs out in.” Mickey went on to tell her how to recognize the man and approach him.
Cora thanked him and left the theatre. She took the subway downtown to West Fourth Street. Then she walked the narrow Greenwich Village streets for some seven blocks in the rain until she came to the coffee house which was her destination. She took a table in the rear and waited for Lucas to finish his round.
Lucas was a folk singer. “His troubles is he’s for real,” a Village wag had once said of him. “So naturally he’s a flop. Twanging away at the genuine American ethnic doesn’t pay off. The squares want the Burl Ives-y crap, or the Bellafonte dressing. Lucas only puzzles them.”
He’d wandered down from the Cumberlands a year before, when he was only seventeen, and hitch-hiked to New York with his guitar slung over his shoulder. He hadn’t a nickel to his name, but somehow he managed to live on the tips he cadged from the customers in the coffee houses where he sang. Half the time they threw him some coins just to make him go away and quit bothering them while they were making time under the table. Lucas didn’t care. The joke was on them. He was singing for his own pleasure, not theirs.
Now, spying Cora, he finished his song in a hurry and joined her. He liked Cora. She was one of his few friends, one of the few people who really appreciated his singing. “Hey there,” he greeted her. “How be you?” He looked at her more closely and answered his own question. “Cruddy, hey? What gives, Cora? Y’all look like almighty hell.”
“I need some money, Lucas. Can you let me have some?”
“Sure. Anythin’ I got. Which ain’t much thought, I calc’late.”