Ruby held the furrier’s coin tighter. When she reached the maid’s room she rented in the Roger Williams Hotel on East Thirty-first she clinked the man’s quarter into an empty Band-Aid tin in the medicine cabinet, behind the aspirin and the Dixie Peach.
After the furrier, Sherman Monty, the owner of Monty’s delicatessen on Fifty-third, gave Ruby a case of provolone and five dollars for a blow job. The night manager of the Roger Williams Hotel gave her free towels and sheets for the use of Ruby’s hand and her bottle of lotion. Her neighbor Mr. Moskowitz gave her five pairs of panty hose for Vaseline sodomy. She gathered their change as well.
Ruby thought about walking along the Hudson, but the other women had razors, better shoes and pimps. She had seen the women on corners, dangling like coat hangers — wearing deep V-necks, red bandannas around their necks, and purple bruises barely hidden from view.
Unwilling to trade sovereignty for the brutality of protection, she passed three years walking into bars where, sitting on silver gray stools, she could hide her feet in the shadow of the bar. She learned what to wear, how to speak, and shifted and slipped into and out of the mouths of men and darkened her beauty spot and lips and brows and uncovered the night Village throb. It was 1953. The hip and the beat crowd pretended to pretend that skin color was a frock you donned for the evening. Ruby was more than beautiful, causing men and women to pause in their stride, to bump into light posts and whistle long and low. She was younger than everyone and dangled easily and brightly from ears and throats. Until one night a stocky White woman at a table in Jim Atkins’s Restaurant invited her to Julia’s Place, a hidden, second-string lesbian club. There she learned about Swing Rendezvous, Stonewall, select house parties and the Pony Stable, where women in seersucker suits smoked like steam rising from a boiling kettle.
Ruby would never have discovered Page Three and Abby, had it not been for the ease of older women. Nothing to wash. No gummed knots to comb out of her hair. No lipstick cum on her gloves. And they were kind, most of them, and when they were not, how easy to defeat them. One glance at a man, a pair of slacks, a pillow of breath in the right direction and they crumbled. The slackest, firmest mountain would quake and the avalanche always brought compensation.
Then there were the arms. Firm, cuffed, creamed, soft, wide, beneath crisp white and linen. Elbows bent against brass or wooden bars. Or stretching for a filterless behind a ducktail, pomade darkening a narrow strip of tobacco roll. Reaching for bourbon and melting ice. Arms rising, banded, weighted and swift. Ready for protection and pain.
Then there were the hands. The old dykes carried countries in the valley of their palms. Rivers ran from the rise of their fingers, the blunt of their nails. Thumbs jutting out, peninsulas coasting the sweat of a glass or thigh. Pinching the edge of a Camel or clit. They walked sex in the crook of their smiles, in the cut of their eyes. Ruby discovered that they were the best men she had ever known. For their manhood coagulated in the raw shimmer of spirit, not groin. It electrified the thrust of their tongues and fingers.
Abby Millhouse, the Page Three’s bouncer and the club manager’s best friend, was tall, plain and crackled white. She had let Ruby into the club after barring her for a long nice beat. Ruby had flashed the kind of smile that let her know that tonight, if Abby played it just right, she might have company. That night Ruby called Abby her “Little Jack Horner.” Because at forty-seven, Abby was the first woman to slip her wide, crooked thumb past Ruby’s panties, bury it and twist slowly, steadily and with firm deliberation, until, in a gush of slick awareness, Ruby learned the true magic of opposable thumbs. Ruby loved to trace the mighty chip in Abby’s front tooth with her tongue. She kissed the healed carvings along Abby’s legs, and her missing kneecap, which Abby revealed with pride after four bourbon and sodas. She’d nearly been beaten to death by the infamous Batman and Robin, two cops notorious for attacking and killing old butches, fairies and drag queens near Washington Square, and in hidden alleys of the West Village. The doctors had told Abby she would never walk again. Ruby smiled at the thought of such a pronouncement over the angry body of her Manby, Ruby’s word for Abby, which she would caw softly during sex, as the gristle warrior became melted cheese under the dome of Ruby’s thighs.
When Ruby told Abby that she’d come to New York to find her mama, Abby pressed into her heart and said, “Maybe you already have.” So one week after they’d met Abby came to the Roger Williams Hotel and watched as Ruby packed her life into two paper grocery bags. She filled them with: one midnight dress, one rabbit stole, one pair of black pumps, two Peter Pan padded bras, three pairs of panties, one pair of capri slacks, a black turtle-neck, hair supplies, toothbrush, makeup and an old clinking Band-Aid tin filled with quarters. Abby carried the tan bags seventeen blocks to 275 East Twelfth, apartment 7. Ruby rented her body to Abby now, curled her life into Abby’s warm lap.
Inside Abby’s skinny railroad apartment, there was a naked mattress lopsided on the floor tiles, a single ceiling bulb skitting dim then bright. One foldout tin chair and a card table with one weak leg jimmied against the wall to keep it from spilling over. Only a hot plate and a pot for boiling. Ruby quickly spent Abby’s savings on a Westinghouse stove, and ate the meals that Abby prepared for her. She took down Abby’s torn sheet and hung new mint voile curtains instead. Introduced Abby to installment payments and finance charges in only four weeks. They painted the walls Pistachio. Ruby decided. Abby painted.
Ruby chose many things. Under her tutelage Abby went to a barber for the first time in her life, instead of snipping her own brindle-colored hair. It lay down and cooed against the width of her neck. She began sporting ties and jackets that Ruby had selected, and took on a new distinction at Page Three. Ruby played her part so well that all the girls in the club saw Abby in a new light. Ruby glittered against her in the dark. And when the police came at two o’clock one Saturday in June, as Abby and Ruby were leaving after closing, it was Ruby who chose to give the boys a blow job in the backseat so they’d leave Abby alone.