Spider-Man: The Venom Factor

  "It could have been worse," June, one of her cohorts on Secret Hospital, told MJ dryly over their last lunch, "you could have married an artist." She was married to one, the kind of wildly creative "conceptual artist" whose idea of a meaningful installation was to cover the inside of a plain-walled room with slices of bread stuck to the walls with peanut butter.

  At such times, while sympathizing with June, MJ knew that her situation was worse, and there was no way to explain it to the others. So she let them console her on the rising price-per-credit at ESU and the cost of textbooks, and otherwise held her peace on the issues which really concerned her, like patching her husband up after he came home badly messed up following yet another brawl with some intransigent caped kook.

  Now, while she knew that one of the worst of them was seemingly in the neighborhood, she had to concentrate on other things, and specifically, work. It was hard enough for Peter to be out and about his personal quest against evil without him having to obsess about the rent as well. That concern, at least, she had been able to keep off his mind while she'd had the job with Secret Hospital. But that job was gone now, and it was her responsibility to get employed again as quickly as possible, to leave Peter once again free to concentrate on his work.

  MJ checked her face over one last time. Theoretically, she was just going down to the store for the trades, but if she saw something likely in one of them, MJ had to look good enough to walk straight off into an interview or a cold reading with confidence. Not too bad, she thought, for a woman who was up half the night wondering if her husband had/alien off a tall building.

  She went back through the living room, where Peter was still snoring under the quilt, and paused a moment to look at him thoughtfully. I don't like those circles under his eyes. But then his hours have never been exactly what you'd call regular.

  She picked up her keys and her purse, and headed for the door, locked up, and went down in the elevator.

  Their street was still fairly quiet, this time of morning. MJ didn't hurry: there was no need, and the weather was too pleasant. This was the only time today when it was likely to be: the weather report claimed it was going to get up in the high 90's again, and with the humidity they'd been having, the climate would be no joke later.

  The thought kept her sighing down to the open door of the store at the corner.

  "Morning, Mr. Kee," she said as she passed the owner at the counter.

  "Morning, MJ," he said, glancing up from behind the lottery tickets and the chewing gum. "Got your papers in, today."

  "Thanks." She paused by the rack, picked up Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, and turned to the back to have a quick look at the classifieds. There was nothing much in the Reporter, and she tucked it under her arm.

  "Hey, MJ, you gonna buy that?" Mr. Kee called from the front of the store.

  "Oh, no," she said, "I was just planning to stand back here and bend all the pages." She grinned. Mr. Kee was not above teasing her as if she was one of the comics-reading ten-year-olds whom he claimed were the bane of his existence.

  That was when her eye fell on the boxed ad almost at the back of Variety.

  OPEN CALL

  Young-looking females, 22-25, for episodic work:

  reading & look-over. August 12, 445 W 54th St,

  10 AM-2 PM.

  MJ blinked and looked up hurriedly into the mirror to see if she looked 22-25. Then she smiled at herself, but the look was wry: these days, it seemed, 22-25 meant "just out of the cradle" to some of the directors she had auditioned for, and despite the fact that she was between the ages in question, the odds were no better than fifty-fifty that she would manage to be cast as such. Still—nothing ventured, nothing gained—

  She made her way up to the checkout, still staring at the copy of Variety. Ten o'clock . . . there's plenty of time to get back up to the apartment, pick up a couple of eight-by-tens and a CV or so . . . then get down there. . . .

  "Going to walk into a post or something, reading like that," Mr. Kee said, eyeing the two papers. He tapped at the cash register for a moment. "Mmm . . . three forty-five."

  She fished around for the change. "You find anything?" Mr. Kee said.

  MJ raised her eyebrows. "I'm not sure. Do I look between twenty-two and twenty-five?"

  He shook his head at her, smiling, his eyes wrinking. "Eighty at least."

  MJ grinned. "You're no help. If I'm eighty, what are you, chopped liver?"

  "Good luck, MJ!" he called after her as she went out.

  MJ, equipped with copies of her resume and publicity stills and dressed in interview clothes, got on the subway. A half-hour later, she was at the address where the open call was being held.

  It looked like any other somewhat-aging office building in that part of the West Side: no air-conditioning, grimy linoleum, broken elevators, windows that appeared to have been last washed around the time the Mets won their first World Series. The only clue to anything interesting was the hand-scrawled sign taped to the elevator which said AUDITIONS—SECOND FLOOR.

  MJ found the stairs and climbed them slowly: it was already getting warm, and she didn't want to get all sweaty. She could hear a soft mutter of voices upstairs. Not too loud, though. Maybe not too many people. That would be good luck for me.

  She pushed open a fire door at the top of the stairs, and the wall of sound, about a hundred voices, hit her. Well, so much for that, she thought, as she pushed her way into a hall full of women twenty-two to twenty-five years old, or purporting to be.

  A harried production assistant was pushing through the crowd. "Anybody who doesn't have a number yet," she yelled to the assembled actresses, "take a number, will you? Numbers over on the table, ladies."

  Iam not a number, MJ thought, somewhat ironically, pushing her way over there through the crowd, I am a free woman. She grabbed a card, one of only a few remaining on the table. Free woman number one hundred and six. Oh, joy. There was no hope of finding anywhere to sit; she resigned herself to leaning carefully against the cleanest piece of wall she could find, and pulled out her much-thumbed copy of War and Peace.

  An hour and a half later it was about twenty degrees warmer, and all around her the remaining thirty or so women were wilting. MJ was not exactly cool herself, but the combination of images of a Russian winter and the likelihood that absolutely nothing would come of this interview were helping her somewhat.

  "One oh four," came the voice from the next room. One oh four, who was certainly no more than eighteen and dressed in the most minuscule possible shorts and a halter, vanished into the room and came immediately out again, looking morose. This had been happening with increasing regularity over the last while, MJ had noticed. The heat, she thought, was beginning to tell on the interviewers as much as on the interviewees. "One oh five," the voice said, and no question that the PA at least sounded weary of the day, if not of life.

  One oh five raised her eyebrows at MJ and went in. The door closed. About three minutes later it opened again, and she came out. "One oh six," said the tired PA's voice from inside.

  MJ slipped her paperback into her bag and strolled into the room, looking around. The room was bare, except for a table which held the first PA and two other people, a middle-aged woman and a younger man, all of whom looked at her with various degrees of loathing.

  Except the middle-aged woman, whose expression changed abruptly. "You were on Secret Hospital, weren't you?" she said.

  MJ smiled. "Was, yes."

  Glances were exchanged at the table. The young female PA held out some sheets of paper. "Would you mind reading from this?"

  Cold, MJ thought, not losing her smile in the slightest. I hate cold reading. But she took the pages, and started reading after no more than a glance.

  It was something to do with social work, some dialogue about homeless people. Typecasting, MJ thought, do I mind? I should think not! She threw as much feeling into it as she could, recalling the compassion in the voice of one of her friends, Maureen, who
had been doing some volunteer work with the homeless and had told MJ some dreadful horror stories about the situations they got into these days. When she finished, the three were looking at her with interest.

  "Can you come back Thursday?" the young man said.

  "Certainly," MJ said.

  "Do you have a CV?"

  "Right here," MJ said, and handed it over, along with her still.

  And a few minutes later she was out on the street again, staring with mild bemusement at a five-page premise for something called Street Life, which was apparently intended to be a dramatic series with a comic edge, and involved a starring role for a female actor who was to play a crusading social worker. There were three more sets of dialogue and half a script to study as well. On Thursday she would read for real.

  What happened to the interview? MJ wondered as she walked down the street, trying to recover her composure after the abrupt excitement of the past few minutes. Never mind: she hated interviews. She preferred job tryouts that seemed to actually have something to do with her acting ability, rather than her life experience.

  She stopped at the corner, waiting for the light to change, while traffic streamed by in front of her. This, she thought, could be something. Now, is that a phone over there? Okay—

  She crossed hurriedly, pulling out her address book. By the time she reached the phone, someone else was using it already, but the guy in question was mercifully brief. A few moments later, she was dialing.

  The phone at the other end rang, picked up. The first thing MJ heard was a yawn.

  ''Mau-reeeeeeeeeen" MJ said, very amused, for this sound she had heard often before. Maureen liked to sleep in.

  "Oh, MJ," her friend said, "what's your problem? Where are you, anyway? It sounds like a parking lot."

  "Nearly. Seventh Avenue, anyway. Look, are you still working at that soup place?"

  "The shelter? Yup." Another yawn. "I have a shift this afternoon."

  "That's great. Can I come with you?"

  Another yawn, mixed with an ironic laugh. "Having a sudden attack of social conscience?"

  "I should, I know. But no. Listen, this is what it's about—" She quickly told Maureen about that morning's job-nibble. "It would be real smart if I went into this reading Thursday knowing what I'm talking about as regards homeless people, anyway."

  "Stanislavsky would approve, I guess. Listen, no problem. How's your cooking?"

  "My cooking? Not bad."

  "Good. I can always use another hand in the kitchen. Come on by and I'll take you in to the shelter with me, and you can help me out while I'm getting ready. Then you can do your research while we're serving."

  "Sounds great. Maureen, you're the best." "You just keep telling me that. See you in a while." About two hours later MJ and Maureen were walking in the front door of the Third Chance Shelter on the Lower East Side. MJ had had a mental picture of a dreary, spartan kind of place, but Third Chance totally overturned it. The outer brick wall was blind, true, but inside the front door MJ found herself in a courtyard full of green plants with an open skylight, and beyond that lay several stories' worth of meeting rooms, workrooms, a cafeteria, bedrooms, game rooms, and offices.

  "We don't have a lot of beds," Maureen said, leading MJ into the kitchen area of the cafeteria, where people were finishing the cleanup after lunch. "Mostly we're about feeding people, and after that, teaching them new job skills—office work, computing, things like that." She paused a moment by one of the big stainless-steel industrial stoves, tying up her long blonde hair. Maureen was small, with one of those faces that people usually called "severely pretty," and her gorgeous hair went almost down to her knees, causing envy in everyone who saw it.

  "That was how you got into this, then?" MJ said. "The job part."

  Maureen nodded, pulling out a long apron and handing another to MJ. "They brought me in as a consultant on the computer end. Came to teach, stayed to serve." She chuckled. "Here—"

  She pulled a paperback down from the shelf, handed it to MJ. "Potato soup today," Maureen said.

  MJ turned the book over. "Alexis Soyer. Why is that name familiar?"

  "He was the founding chef of the Reform Club in London. Also the last century's greatest expert on nutrition on the cheap—he got started working in the soup kitchens in Dublin during the Great Famine. 'A Frugal Kitchen' there is still one of the best sources for recipes designed for maximum nutrition and minimum money."

  MJ smiled as she put on her apron. "Better than macaroni and cheese?"

  "Much. There's the potatoes. Let's peel."

  For at least an hour, they did just that, potato after potato, hundreds of them, until MJ didn't want to see another potato for the rest of her life. Then they started making the broth—chicken broth, as it turned out, using stripped chicken carcasses donated by one of the local places that did "fast-food" roast chicken. Herbs went in, and both sliced and pureed potatoes, and when the soup was done about two hours later, MJ could hardly stay out of it. "Old Alexis," Maureen said, "he knew his stuff. You've got time for just one bowl before the customers start arriving."

  MJ was almost drowning in sweat from working over the hot stove in this humidity for two hours. All the same, her stomach growled assertively, and when Maureen handed her the bowl, MJ grabbed a spoon and finished it right to the bottom.

  Maureen looked up approvingly. "It's just four-thirty," she said. "First shift will be in shortly. Help me get that pot onto the trolley. We'll take it up front by the serving window."

  Together they handled the big twenty-gallon pot onto the low trolley and trundled it forward. As they passed the serving window, MJ saw that there were already a lot of people gathering out on the cafeteria side. She shook her head slightly. "Why do so many of them have their coats on?" she said. "In this weather—!"

  Maureen looked, shook her head. "Some of them are just old. Others—you can't carry the stuff in your hands all the time, and most of them don't have anywhere they can leave things. Simpler to wear them—even though in heat like this, they get so dehydrated sometimes that they pass out. We go through a lot of bottled water here. Come on—here comes the first shift."

  The two of them grabbed ladles and started filling bowls and putting them out on the cafeteria side of the serving window. Other workers were filling water pitchers, or putting out pitchers of homemade Gatorade-type drinks. "Electrolytes," Maureen said. "This weather, you can sweat all your salts out before you even notice, and die of it."

  The soup quickly vanished. MJ lost count of how many shabbily dressed people came up to the counter, took a bowl and a spoon, nodded, said a word or two, and went off. She knew that there were a lot of homeless people in the city, but had never had it borne in on her so straightforwardly how many of them there were. She started feeling somewhat ashamed of herself for not having noticed. The single lone figures on a streetcorner, in a doorway, you could ignore, turning your head as you went by. But not these.

  When she realized there wasn't any more soup, MJ found herself suddenly not having any idea what to do. She looked up into the face of the person standing outside the serving window with an empty bowl, and could only stammer, "Uh, I'm sorry, we're all out—"

  The man nodded, walked off. MJ almost felt like crying. "Maureen—" she said.

  "I know. Take a break. There's some iced tea out here. Then we'll go out and have a chat with people."

  "Do they mind?" MJ said a little shakily, sitting down with the iced tea.

  Maureen looked at her with a small quirk of sad smile. "You mean, do they think you're patronizing them? No. Do they know that this hurts, on both sides? Yes. But it's better than doing nothing. Drink the tea."

  She drank it. Then they went out into the cafeteria.

  It did hurt, talking to people who had had busy lives, and proud ones, and who now spent most of each given day working out in which underpass, tunnel, or doorway they would spend that night. But Maureen's example made it easier to listen to them. By and lar
ge, though there were angry people in the cafeteria, and sullen ones, most of them were curiously and consciously kind to the first-timer, as if they were more embarrassed for their predicament than for MJ's.

  A few of them were people she felt she would have been pleased to meet socially, and the knowledge made her ashamed, considering that had she today met them in the street, MJ knew she would have looked away. The least I can do is look at them now, MJ thought, and concentrated on doing that.

  Three of the people finishing their soup at one table had waved at Maureen, calling her over: she and MJ sat there, and Maureen made the introductions. "Mike," she said, indicating one big redheaded, broad-faced man, "our newest computer nerd. He's learning C++ during the days. Marilyn—" This was a little old lady of about seventy, from the looks of her, well wrapped in coats and sweaters, thin but apple-cheeked and cheerful. "She's a few months ahead of Mike. Writes the fastest code I ever saw. "

  "Only problem is," said Marilyn, "to get me employed, we're going to have to pass me off as a twenty-year-old."

  "On-line," Maureen said, "who'll know the difference until it's too late? And Lloyd." Lloyd was a young handsome black gentleman with a face that reminded MJ of something from Egyptian monumental art, noble and still, except for when the rare smile broke through. "Lloyd is still seeking his metier. Typist, possibly. He's got good speed."

  The chat came easily enough after that. MJ was instantly recognized and teased about her own job loss: the others seemed to think it made her more accessible, and shortly she found herself talking to them about the difficulty of getting an apartment and keeping it, the fear of losing it, how tough it was to hang on.

  They told her how they did it. All of them used shelters when they could: all of them wound up in the occasional favorite doorway or tunnel. Lloyd favored the tunnels under Grand Central. "They keep trying to clean them out," he said, "trying to get rid of us and the cats. Us and the cats, we keep coming back."