In my dreams I’m back in the Sherry-Netherlands. Why I liked him so much I don’t really know. He wasn’t a trick, he was a john — even with the bald head he was fine.
Men in the Middle Eastern life dig hookers. They like to spoil them and buy them things and walk around with the sheets wrapped around them. He asked me to stand by the window in silhouette. He positioned the light just so. I heard him gasp. All I was doing was standing. Nothing ever made me feel better than him just looking at me, appreciating what he saw. That’s what good men do — they appreciate. He wasn’t fooling with himself or nothing, he just sat in the chair watching me, hardly breathing. He said I made him delirious, that he’d give me anything just to stay there forever. I said something smart-ass, but really I was thinking the exact same thing. I hated myself for saying something disrespectful. I coulda had the floor swallow me up.
After a moment or two he relaxed, then sighed. He said something to me about the desert in Syria and how the lemon trees look like little explosions of color.
And all of a sudden — right there, looking out over Central Park — I got a longing for my daughter like nothing else before. Jazzlyn was eight or nine then. I wanted just to hold her in my arms. It’s no less love if you’re a hooker, it’s no less love at all.
The park got dark. The lights came on. Only a few of them were working. They lit up the trees.
“Read the poem about the marketplace,” he said.
It was a poem where a man buys a carpet in the marketplace, and it’s a perfect carpet, without a flaw, so it brings him all sorts of woe ‘n’ shit. I had to switch on the light to read to him and it spoiled the atmosphere, I could tell straight off. Then he said, “Just tell me a story then.”
I turned off the light and stood there. I didn’t want to say nothing cheap.
I couldn’t think of anything except a story I heard from a trick a few weeks before. So I stood there with the curtains in my hands and I said: “There was this old couple out walking by the Plaza. It was early evening. They were hand in hand. They were about to go into the park when a cop blew his whistle sharp and stopped them. The cop said, ‘You can’t go in there, it’s gonna get dark, it’s too dangerous to walk around the park, you’ll get mugged.’ The old couple said, ‘But we want to go in there, it’s our anniversary, we were here forty years ago exactly.’ The cop said, ‘You’re crazy. Nobody walks in Central Park anymore.’ But the old couple kept walking in anyway. They wanted to take the exact same walk they took all those years before, ’round the little pond. To remember. So they went hand in hand, right into the dark. And guess what? That cop, he walked behind at twenty paces, right around the lake, just to make sure them people weren’t tossed, ain’t that something?”
That was my story. I stayed still. The curtains were all damp in my hands. I could almost hear the Middle Eastern man smile.
“Tell it to me again,” he said.
I stood a little closer to the window, where the light was coming in real nice. I told it to him again, with even more details, like the sound of their footsteps and all.
I never even told that story to Jazzlyn. I wanted to tell her but I never did. I was waiting for the right time. He gave me that Rumi book when I left. I shoved it in my handbag, didn’t think much of it at first, but it crept up on me, like a street lamp.
I liked him, my little fat bald brown man. I went to the Sherry-Netherlands to see if he was there, but the manager kicked me out. He had a folder in his hand. He used it like a cattle prod. He said, “Out out out!”
I began to read Rumi all the time. I liked it because he had the details. He had nice lines. I began saying shit to my tricks. I told folks I liked the lines because of my father and how he studied Persian poetry. Sometimes I said it was my husband.
I never even had a father or a husband. Not one I knew of, anyways. I ain’t whining. That’s just a fact.
I’m a fuck-up and my daughter is no more.
Jazzlyn asked me once about her Daddy. Her real Daddy — not a daddy Daddy. She was eight. We were talking on the phone. Long-distance from New York to Cleveland. It cost me nothing because all the girls knew how to get the dime back. We learned it from the vets who came back from ’Nam all messed up in the head.
I liked the bank of phones on Forty-fourth. I’d get bored and ring the phone right beside me. I picked it up and talked to myself. I got a big kick outta that. Hi, Tillie, how you doin’, baby? Not too bad, Tillie, how you? Swingin’ it, Tillie, how’s the weather there, girl? Raining, Tillie-o. No shit, it’s raining here too, Tillie, ain’t that a kicker?!
I was on the drugstore phone on Fiftieth and Lex when Jazzlyn said: “Who’s my real Daddy?” I told her that her Daddy was a nice guy but he went out once for a pack of cigarettes. That’s what you tell a kid. Everyone says that, I don’t know why — I guess all the assholes who don’t want to hang around their kids are smokers.
She never even asked about him again. Not once. I used to think he was gone for cigarettes an awful long time, whoever the fuck he was. Maybe he’s standing around still, Pablo, waiting for the change.
I went back to Cleveland to pick Jazzlyn up. That was ′64 or ′65, one of them years. She was eight or nine years old then. She was waiting for me on the doorstep. She wore a little hooded coat and she was sitting there all pouty and then she looked up and saw me. I swear it was like seeing a firework go off. “Tillie!” she shouted. She never really called me Mom. She jumped up from the step. No one ever gave me a bigger hug. No one. She like near smothered me. I sat right down beside her and cried my eyes out. I said, “Wait’ll you see New York, Jazz, it’s gonna blow you away.”
My own mother was in the kitchen giving me snake eyes. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars. She said: “Oh, honey, I knew you’d come good, I just knew it!”
We wanted to drive across country, Jazzlyn and me, but instead we got a skinny dog all the way from Cleveland. The whole time there she slept on my shoulder and sucked her thumb, nine years old and still sucking her thumb. I heard later, in the Bronx, that was one of her things. She liked to suck her thumb when she was doing it with a trick. That makes me sick to the core. I’m a fuck-up and that’s all. That’s about all that matters.
Tillie Fuck-Up Henderson. That’s me without ribbons on.
I ain’t gonna kill myself until I see my baby’s baby girls. I told the warden today that I’m a grandmother and she didn’t say nothing. I said, “I want to see my grandbabies — why won’t they bring my grand-babies?” She didn’t bat an eyelid. Maybe I’m getting old. I’ll have my thirty-ninth birthday inside. It’ll take a whole week just to blow them candles out.
I begged her and begged her and begged her. She said the babies were fine, they were being looked after, social services had them.
It was a daddy who put me in the Bronx. He called himself L.A. Rex. He didn’t like niggers, but he was a nigger himself. He said Lexington was for whiteys. He said I got old. He said I was useless. He said I was taking too much time with Jazzlyn. He said to me that I looked like a piece of cheese. He said, “Don’t come down by Lex again or I’ll break your arms, Tillie, y’hear me?”
So that’s what he did — he broke my arms. He broke my fingers too. He caught me on the corner of Third and Forty-eighth and he snapped them like they was chicken bones. He said the Bronx was a good place for retirement. He grinned and said it was just like Florida without the beaches.