I read Proust and waited for the phone to ring, or a letter to come in response to my résumé. It took six months to read all of Proust, during which time not one phone call or letter came. It is my unshakeable conviction that À La Recherche du Temps Perdu is the greatest single work of art of the twentieth century. It is also my unshakeable conviction that all debt collectors, of whom I got to know many, were bullied in grade school.
So I read Proust and got mugged. Those were my principal activities that year. Both were deep and lasting learning experiences.
I also learned that it was safer, when walking home drunk from the bars, to walk in the middle of the street. At two in the morning, there was little traffic and, in the street, it was more of an effort to pull you into a doorway and put a knife to your throat.
Which is how I got to know the hookers.
Thirty-Fifth Street was a United Nations of hookers. Women of every ethnic and cultural and sexual variety walked the streets, usually down the center, scattering when a car raced past, then returning to their languid stroll on the asphalt. They carried tiny purses. They sucked on lollipops. There was one year when they all, strangely, sucked on baby pacifiers. They would yell at the passing cars, show lewd body parts, make irresistible offers to taillights racing home to New Jersey.
Some cars crept down the street, on the prowl, and the hookers would walk alongside the creeping cars making deals with the skill of a Wall Street trader selling junk bonds, and, often, the car would stop and the girl would get in, twitching her behind in victory for the other girls to see, and the car would speed off into the dark, only to deliver the hooker back to the flock half an hour later.
One girl stood head and shoulders above the rest. Literally. She must have been six four. In addition to which she wore cork platform shoes with the highest heels I’ve ever seen. And she was not petite. She was gargantuan. Vast. Enormous.
She was probably nineteen and still had the loveliness of a child.
I would walk past her and she would call out in a soft voice, “Don’t you want to have a really good time? Let Holly show you a really, really good time.” I didn’t acknowledge her entreaties, although every now and then it would occur to me that, hell, yes, I actually would like to have a really good time. I would like to have a good time if I had the money to have a really, really good time.
Holly was magnificent in every way. On chilly nights, she wore a short coat of fake fur, pink, which did nothing to keep her long legs warm, and you could tell she was cold, must have been, but, in the face of this or any other vicissitude, Holly didn’t show discomfort. She walked like she was strolling on a summer’s night on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach, Florida. She was the tree topper on the Christmas tree of Thirty-Fifth Street hookers. When cars approached, Holly just kept on languidly strolling down the center of the street, forcing the cars to slow down, to take life at Holly’s pace, until, finally, with utter insouciance, she veered slightly to the right or left to let the vehicle pass her by. Sometimes the drivers would reach out to grab her ass, but she would just swat their hands away like gnats on a summer sandwich, saying, “Oh, child,” with a breathy sigh.
One night, after massive numbers of cocktails at P. J.
Clark’s with Fanelli, who still called, he and I stood in a drunken embrace on the street, weeping over my ill-fortune, and then we parted, him in a cab uptown, me downtown on foot since I was completely broke. When I put my hand in my jacket pocket, I felt and then pulled out five $100 bills that Fanelli had slipped in while we were weeping over the injustice of life in general and our deep and abiding affection for each other in particular. I felt like the Emperor of Ethiopia. I hadn’t had that much cash on me in months. I wept at his kindness and subtlety, and hailed a taxi, an actual yellow cab. I was too drunk to say my full address, so I had him let me off on the corner of Fifth, and walked down Thirty-Fifth, the street of muggings and broken dreams, although it wasn’t walking in the normal sense by any means.
Holly called out and something struck. I had five hundred dollars and I did want to have a really, really good time. I staggered toward her, and realized, up close, that Holly was a man in drag. A boy, actually. A tall boy. Well, I thought, so what.
Before I could speak, however, I fell flat on my face. Flat. In the middle of the street. Felt the crunch as blood gushed from my broken nose.
“Oh, baby,” said Holly, towering over me. At least eleven feet tall. “Baby’s had one too many.” She hoisted me from the street like a rag doll, 185 pounds of dead weight, and held me upright. “Holly’s going to take you home, baby, and fix you up. Don’t worry about one little thing.”
Blood gushed ruinously down my shirtfront, one of the last six good shirts I had, worn especially so Fanelli wouldn’t think I was totally pathetic. Now I only had five. A Sea Island cotton shirt and blood are not friends.
For a fleeting moment I thought of the squalor of my apartment—the dishes in the sink from last week’s attempt at cooking, the dirty shirts and socks, the rats—and then I thought, oh, what the hell. She’s a $50 hooker. She’s seen it all. I let her drag me to my apartment building’s street door, on which the lock was broken, and somehow we made it up the five flights of stairs to my apartment.
After three inept tries with my key, I had to let Holly open the door. She took one look inside and said, “Baby! What explosion happened here!?” Everything Holly said had an exclamation point after it, as though she had just discovered a new planet or a new law of thermodynamics. Baby! The kitchen! Where’s the bathroom! Do you have any cotton balls! The idea that I would have cotton balls is kind of like the idea of Marie Antoinette having blue jeans. Not likely.
“What a dump! A nice young man like you! Why do you live here amidst this ruination!?” Holly’s way of speaking, like Holly herself, was wholly manufactured, out of old movies and romance magazines.
Meanwhile she was rushing around, stuffing toilet paper up my nose to stanch the bleeding, wiping my face with a clean washrag she miraculously found, getting me out of my shirt. “My God, what a stomach!” she exclaimed. I did three hundred and fifty sit-ups a day to maintain a vestige of what the trainer had worked so hard to create. My body, once a work of art, was collapsing, atrophying, but I did what I could. Push-ups, one fifty. It passed the time, of which there was an infinite amount, even given the amount of time I spent reading Proust, and it made me feel that, when the call came, this soldier would be ready to answer. Not that any calls came, except from Mr. McDermott and Ms. Willoughby, of their respective collection agencies, and others of their ilk, but I kept up the habit. Sometimes, I put them on speakerphone, and did sit-ups while they told me of all the dire things that were about to happen to me. I didn’t mind talking to them. They were sort of pleasant, actually. It passed for conversation in the Proustian silence.
Holly was the first real person who had been in my apartment in months. Not that Holly was a real person, as I had heretofore understood the term. Holly was an imagined creation, from the ground up, not real in any way, in the strictest sense. The whole point of being Holly, I suppose, was to outsmart reality, to become something wholly other.
I finally stopped bleeding. Holly helped me to the bed, first straightening the sheets and plumping the pillows. I offered her one of Fanelli’s crisp hundreds, 20 percent of my entire worldly goods, and she said, “What do I look like? A nurse! Keep your money, baby! What’s your name anyway?”
I mumbled a response.
“That your real name?”
“It’s what people call me . . .”
“You really need a cleaning woman or something! A mammy!” she said. “Man was not meant to live like this.” I passed out, and when I woke up in the dead of night, bleeding again all over my pillow, Holly was gone, and the apartment was as clean as my apartment was ever going to get. Dirty shirts in the hamper. Shoes put away. Dishes done. A big lipstick kiss on the bathroom mirror. The bloodied shirt was gone.
I looked out the wi
ndow, and there she was, strolling under the sputtering streetlights in the middle of the street, swinging her baby-doll purse. Also pink, with rhinestones. A nurse. A hooker. A Good Samaritan. A drag queen.
I didn’t see Holly for several nights, but when I did, I walked up to her to thank her for her ministrations. She shrieked as though she had just seen her long-lost father. “Baby! Hold on a sec! I have something for you!” She ran off to some secret cubbyhole she kept somewhere on the street, and returned with a bag from Bergdorf’s, and a box with the familiar ribbon around it, in which there was a pristine, brand-new Sea Island shirt exactly my size.
“I couldn’t get the blood out from the old one. I scrubbed and scrubbed! Look at these hands! So I bought you one I thought you would like. You can always take it back for another one. If you don’t, like, like it, I mean.”
“Holly,” I said, “it’s too much. You shouldn’t . . .”
“You don’t understand a thing, do you! Money means nothing to us girls. To me at least. I’m like a walking bank! They stick it in, and out comes money, and it never stops!” She opened her purse to show me the wads of balled-up cash. “It’s virtually endless! I’m a human ATM machine! Open twenty-four hours a day!”
It was a beautiful shirt, and it had been so long since I had a new anything I almost wept. I thanked her, the thanks seeming paltry and inadequate beside her generous gesture, and then the thought of Holly in Bergdorf’s hit me, the unlikelihood of it all, of any mercantile exchange happening between Holly and one of the sad, splendid salesmen.
“Honey, when I die just lay me out at Bergdorf’s! Everything is so beautiful there! I just put on my Chanel suit, and yes, I have a Chanel suit, I used to have this, like, boyfriend, well . . .” and a wistful look crossed her face, and she said with dignity, “. . . well, I used to have a boyfriend, and he was so sweet to me, so sweet, and then . . . well, there’s always a then, isn’t there? Nothing bad could ever happen to you at Bergdorf’s! Well, actually, my friend Larice had something bad happen to her but that was only because she had a Halston dress under her coat at the time, and that was bad, but I would never do a thing like that. I bought this shirt with money I earned with my . . . charm and beauty. And now it’s yours.”
“That’s so kind.”
“Could we be friends? I don’t have any gentlemen friends, and maybe I could come up to your apartment every now and then and warm up. It’s cold as a witch’s tit out here, and the nights are long and my feet start hurting and . . .”
“Of course. Any time. Although I have to say it makes me a little nervous.”
“Of course it does! You’re a regular person. I’m like, I’m like a freak of nature! But you’ll get used to it. I’m smart. I know a lot of stuff. I’m just not educated. You’ll like it, and I won’t bother you if you don’t want to be bothered. But I will come.”
And she did. She did come up to my apartment, not often at first, but within a month she made an almost nightly visit to see how I was, to describe her lewd and peculiar adventures. I never realized you could do so many extraordinary things in the front seat of a car parked on a dark out-of-the-way street. Sometimes the men would take her to the Hotel Carter, but not often. Usually the encounter was over in fifteen minutes or less, and the men would drop her where they found her and she would follow their taillights as they raced home to safety in New Jersey.
There is such need in the world. It is constant and never changing. It is eternal, and it is worth far more than fifty dollars to find some respite from the hunger and the wanting and the need, so deep it is. We grow engorged and enraged with need, and the relief we find with people like Holly is at best temporary, because the suffocating need is there again in the morning, ravenous and all-consuming. The need was prevalent on Thirty-Fifth Street, sexual desire behind the wheel of every car, real bodies, the flesh, the hairy forearms, the penis, center of gravity for the need that never goes away.
And Holly was there to take it on, the bodies and the pricks and the grasping, hurried hands, the zipper and the smell and the taste, to make the hunger go away for a minute or two, like a snack before dinner, and all she asked was fifty dollars and safe return to her place on the street.
The need died in me when I lost my job, my way, lost my place in the world, and the romance division of my personal enterprise shuttered its doors forever, and no one has ever gotten in again. My life is my fault. I made it. They did the best they could.
Carmela once asked me, “What is it you really want?”
I shouted at her: “I want to be completely loved and completely left alone!”
But life has taught me in the harshest ways that such a thing is not possible, and so I ended up getting the latter, no matter how much I might need or want the former. Poor Carmela. Such a lovely girl. The sweetheart of my youth.
So I let Holly in for a minute, for a time in my life when there was nothing else, and she would show up, always breathless with news of her adventures, and we would sit and drink Scotch and talk into the night, sometimes with only the light from the television to pierce the darkness. We would drink Scotch and watch almost naked men and women dance ineptly on cable television. The hostess of the show, Robin Byrd, would introduce these dancers as though each were the second coming of Christ, and she would actually interview these morons after they had jerked and slithered their way through two minutes of disco dancing, and they would tout their careers in porn films. Once they even had a she-male like Holly, and as Holly watched she drank her Scotch and made derisive comments. “My breasts are not only bigger, they’re masterpieces compared to hers! The best on Park Avenue! Want to see?”
I did not, and Holly seemed to understand and respect this. I was an invalid, in her eyes, and she took care of me like a man dying of cancer, always cleaning, straightening, putting my life back on some kind of recognizably human track. I had lost all bearings.
There was one guy on the TV show, a swarthy Italian guy, Gino or Claudio or something, oiled, massive legs, hairy chest and huge pecs, who was so ripped and built he could barely move, let alone do anything that any sane person would call dancing. He always stopped Holly dead in her tracks, and she would watch his every awkward move with fascination. He was on all the time; apparently he did, like, a porno movie almost every week and always had some product to push. Holly was transfixed, every time.
“He looks exactly like my boyfriend, my one true love!” she said one night. “That’s all. My one true time of happiness before I was just another bereft hooker in the street! I had a place, then! I had somebody! Him! Well, not him, but somebody who looked just like him, sort of, if you squint your eyes and don’t listen to that disgusting voice.”
“We both had somebody, once,” I said. “I haven’t been like this forever.”
“Neither have I. I was somebody with somebody. A couple, I think they call it. His name was George. Giorgos. Greek. He worked on the printing presses at the New York Times. I was sixteen, almost seventeen. I was a boy, then. Just a runaway boy from Cleveland, and George was thirty-three, and he took me in and, man, did he love me. And I guess I loved him back. I was on my own since fourteen, what did I know about love? About anything? When my ride let me off in New York after hitchhiking for five days, I slept on a bench behind the New York Public Library! I thought it was Central Park! Then I stood on the street corner, and I got in the first car that stopped for me, and I did that for two years and one night the car that stopped was George. And I was tired of that life and, well, like, I guess he was just the lucky one. Fate! But I felt for him, in my deepest heart I had feelings for him, and I guess that’s love, right?”
“When you feel it, you know it. It’s like stepping off a cliff.” It was all I could think of to say.
“Can you turn off the TV? I can’t watch this and tell the story at the same time. Freaks me out.”
I turned it off, and the apartment went from blue to gold, as the light from the streetlight flooded in. Holly moved, gho
stlike and golden, around the room, sipping her Scotch. I had never felt so weird in my life. Holly’s eyes were moist, as though she was about to cry, and they glistened in the golden light of the room.
“I’m going to tell you this once, and then you’re not going to say anything, and we’re never going to talk about it again. OK? Deal?”
“Cross my heart.”
“Anyway. Well, anyway.” Holly had dropped her usual exclamatory way of talking and spoke from a softer, more vulnerable place. From the heart. From her childish heart, which suddenly seemed, in that odd light and in the deep part of the night, like a lovely thing.
I kept my mouth shut, as I was told.
“He wanted us to live together. He got an apartment in Brooklyn, in a Greek neighborhood, but it was very conservative and he didn’t want his neighbors to know he was living with a boy, so I shaved my legs, and put on a blouse and skirt he bought me—he bought me a lot of clothes—and I was a girl. I grew my hair long, and I was pretty, really pretty. It was like I had been waiting all my life to be somebody’s girl. I even got a job as a fitting model for Oscar, and I started taking hormone shots. God, it’s hot in
here!”
As she talked, she began to remove her clothes, piece by piece, and I didn’t object, until finally she was naked in her heels, and I saw the whole thing, the deal, what it was like to be Holly underneath her clothes. She made no mention of it, I guess whores are used to taking their clothes off. It was both bizarre and beautiful, in its way. Maybe a trick of the light. The other. The entirely other.
“He found the doctor. He arranged everything. I loved having breasts. He liked big ones, so he found a plastic surgeon and bought the finest pair on the East Coast. And things were so nice for a while. So nice. He was the sweetest man, and I loved everything about him. I loved to feel the weight of him on me in the night, his kisses, like garlic and cigarettes, but sweet somehow. He was a real man. He was a fierce kisser. It was like being devoured by some wild beast. Heaven.” Her mascara was starting to run down her face, and she looked, even in the golden light, like she was a million years old.