In the Slammer With Carol Smith Read online

  Now comes the bad moment of the morning, the tug. Will she take to the outside, or the in? When you’ve had a little warmth you want more. That’s the rub.

  Three mornings she went to lean on the stone wall. Turned out, so had he, never on the same days. When they finally met and exchanged this she said, ‘Pure coincidence.’ She had combed her hair through. ‘That’s a great ornament you wear,’ he said. She stood there feeling the breeze the phrase made. He had on an orange sweater instead of the brown. ‘Orange looks good on you,’ she told him.

  He said: ‘It’s my other one.’

  So all was understood.

  When he said ‘Want to join the Cat Club? It’s where some of us crash?’ she said, ‘Why not?’

  On the subway she said, ‘It’s not a halfway house?’

  ‘No way.’

  ‘Can I just visit?’

  ‘That’s what we all.’

  The Cat Club was a storefront in the Village. The tenement above had been condemned as unlivable. ‘Until the landlord comes back from Florida and fixes it up. She won’t; she’s notorious. Her former husband or her brother—we don’t know which but he hates her guts—comes in from Long Island City now and then to check the building.’ Along with his girlfriend. ‘Older even than him, and all in fur. Hil-ari-ous. He’s a broken down gigolo; in his day the Village must have been steamy with them.’ Alphonse had stopped to buy a bottle beforehand. He took a swig, swinging his long haircut, which was tidy but not greased. ‘Long Island City. On a Sunday. They live in the carpet-cleaning warehouse the girlfriend owns. No wonder we’re their bright errand.’

  She watched the stations foam by; this was an express. ‘That from Shakespeare?’

  ‘Dunno. Never did him.’

  ‘Could be a film title. Maybe should be.’

  ‘So you went to college,’ he said. ‘So did I. Adirondack Community College. My cousins still own land up there. Buy their kids snowmobiles. Hunt wild turkey in the fall. Can’t see why they never catch any. Turkeys have the last word.’

  She is quiet, searching for what she can say next. Not what kind of actor is he. Nor if he ever really has—acted. Nor what had brought him to the city. No questions asked is only fair; he hasn’t asked her that much. What you can’t ask really tells you what you want to know. One foot up on the wall, elbow on his knee, he hasn’t forgotten her, merely recognized her, in the same trust. If you haven’t been on the inside somewhere, why would you make such a business of being out?

  ‘You’re not a gigolo,’ she said. Neat. Took care of everything. And she made him laugh.

  ‘If you’re so smart, why’re you such a—a pixie?’

  She didn’t need to answer that. They were safe in the routine. He was blunter at it though than she was.

  The club was on a street so meager and crooked that the city still disdained it. Once the storefront had sold wallpaper that still patterned the inside in faint pinks and greens, so the window looked frugal and occupied. The cat, a yellow tom, sunning in the window by day, he said, and now shining its eyes at them in the dark, completed it.

  He could tell she didn’t want to go in.

  ‘Not afraid of cats, are you.’

  ‘Not—categorically.’

  ‘Oh wow, Carol.’

  But she still stood there. Then she too began to laugh. That cat looked so much like a nurse, the ones at the Receiving Desk, who do just that, and no more. With a stony purr.

  ‘We go in the back, Carol. Just we.’ He touched her hand but didn’t take it. ‘In or Out is always optional. Nobody has a key. Nobody.’

  The back alley was murky, offering anybody that dead-end feel of being at the bottom of trouble until morning. No garbage cans though, no smell. Attached to the rear of the house was an old added-on wooden shed, dank with weather but still firm. Its iron bolts were gored deep in, two sets of them. He tripped them, one-two and a three. ‘Couldn’t have done it, on brick.’ Inside the shed the back door to the house proper was ajar. It was all so flimsy, so outdoor connected that she still felt safe.

  ‘We’re in the basement.’ They crept down the battered steps.

  All along she’d wondered whether the ‘we’ meant only a friend, man or girl, though she’d plumped for girl. It wouldn’t be one of those imitation pads, though, that she’d encountered in her singles-bar days. It would be a real one.

  It was. But communal.

  ‘Floor’s concrete, or we couldn’t have done it. The city socked a sewage violation on the old girl once, when there still were tenants.’ He smacked his lips: ‘Pure poured concrete.’

  An odd rejoicing. But she could see what he meant.

  Only one of the bed-downs set at intervals along that poured gray was really a bed—an old painted-iron one with a naked metal spring, underneath it what might be sleeping bags. The other bed-downs were more like piles of preferences. Some of the stashes were familiar ones. Army blankets went with knapsacks, and a predictable owner. Tartan coveralls, stolen from the city shelter, or the churches. Old moth-holed polo-coats, once royalty in the thrift-shops. A couple of beach umbrellas neatly stacked, by some nomad capable of carrying two, or unable to pass either of them by, wherever found. She’s seeing all the angles, once again. Boots and more boots of course, everywhere. One cane, leaning up against a pile covered with the grand-daddy of capes—or the grandma. Each heap is one person’s answer to winter. Not always a barricade. Sometimes an embrace.

  Nothing thin enough for summer? Yes, there—a wash-line hung with shirts of all sorts drying stiffly in the chill.

  ‘We been hanging the shirts over the underwear. Neater.’ Alphonse said. ‘What you looking for, hey?’

  The walls have no pin-ups. ‘Rules.’

  ‘No rules, though. People change.’

  ‘Oh. The membership. Or you mean—in themselves?’

  ‘Hey. Don’t look so terrified. We don’t do anything. Strictly come and go. Maybe we’re the only club in the world with no membership.’

  He saw that she was soothed. She could belong.

  THAT SUMMER IS a game of pick-up sticks: those long slivers of wood, tinted magenta, frog-green, pumpkin and dragonfly-blue, which one shook into a teepee, from which each player by turn tried to extract one sliver without making the whole feathery shape slide. If one succeeded, the heart flew. If not, the sticks lay, a malevolent nest. The airy heap, each time tossed, was never the same as before. The failed nest always was.

  The yellowy stick, safely pulled, is for when she got her prescription refilled in the neighborhood pharmacy after all, where no one looked at her cross-eyed. The blue and the green were for her first shopping tours, the one for the vegetables, at a stall, easy, the other at the supermarket, on a kind of catch-all sortie for boxed goods. So many she’d never seen, they helped pull her along the aisles. Sometimes she even purchases for Mrs. Lopez—‘You going A&P, carita, buy me Armour Baking Soda. Not just for the bugs. Make-a the cold-a box no stink.’

  In her own hoard under the sink she now had a line of cleansers, with names either out of woolly-bear country: Soft-Scrub, Easy Fluff, or from flash television: Electrosol, which was for the dishwasher she didn’t have. Imitating Carmen Lopez, she was loathe to reveal she had never cleaned a house or stocked one, until she realized that Carmen knew. ‘No, I can’t buy you bleach, Carmen,’ she dared to say to her one day. ‘I’m an environmentalist.’ Behind her, memory unfurled a line of Boston faces at her back, dim but strong.

  The red match-sticks were for the painfully long bus ride to the Club, during which she’d clench her fingers onto the seat in order not to jump off and away. At the end of that first run, when the only riders by then, a tourist couple, said to the driver: ‘Is this SoHo?’ he answered, ‘No-ho, this is No-ho,’ including her in his jolly black-and-white smile. Puzzled though, when she said with a relieved gust of breath, ‘Puns are everything.’ Meanwhile, with each ride another color bloomed at her, returning: the happy, fuzzy peach of a girl’s sweater, the
seal’s-fur shine purpling a raincoat, a man’s camouflage jacket, toad-spotted or brown. Dogs too were said to see only in shades of gray, as she had been doing up to then; if a person had acquired dog-seeing, or been immured in it, could that be called a ‘skill?’ She knows better than to ask Gold.

  The night Alphonse had first brought her to the non-club—her own term for it that she kept secret—the man who belonged to the iron bed was already there. ‘We don’t come ’til dark,’ he said to her, nodding at Alphonse. ‘But it is already dark.’ Though it wasn’t quite. He lent her a blanket so that she could sit on the cold floor, like the other people shortly to drift in would soon do. ‘Name’s Mungo.’

  The name went so well with his bluff red face, walrus mustache and worn safari khaki, that it took her some while to catch on that he might have tagged himself with it. He had twitched the blanket off the bed, then immediately pulled out another from beneath the bed to make it up again. His orderliness was several times interrupted by his itch to lend. He never ate at the club, never stayed longer than it took to finish the two bottles of fizzy water he brought with him, but came earliest in order to clean out the night’s collection of milk cartons, paper cups, take-out boxes, soda cans and wine bottles, that others had left.

  Nobody brought food that looked like it came from a home. It would have saved money for her to raid her own shelves, but she too purchased on the way. Mungo never slept on his bed; it was his hallmark, his bike. As his self-assurance wore off, usually with the last of his water ration, his sporty get-up and otter mustache wilted also, making for an uncertainty whether he was the hunter or the animal hunted. She suspected that like her, he too had a pad. Nothing in his talk ever indicated so. Nor was it ever noted aloud by any there that Mungo, like Carol herself, and above all like Alphonse, was in fact a regular. Or at least a ‘faithful’, a word once dropped by Alphonse himself, to mark someone long gone, who had again turned up. In the eyes of all the Cat Club was committed to serve the drifter, occasional or serial, which each of them still was. Or had once been. If she could understand the balances here, she would maybe better understand her own, but that was not why she came.

  Whenever anyone new came, one of the others stayed with him or her for the night, ministering to whatever needs. Sometimes a regular slept over but never steadily. Now and again one disappeared, forever, far as the Club knew. There were crises, violences, but, in the phrase of one of the occasional, a woman who called herself Mavorneen, ‘Those always valve out. Like a bath-tub don’t run over.’ Many of the names here were elaborately self-pointing; you call yourself Mavorneen surely because you want to hear people calling you that. Ordinaries like Carol were happy just to be—’ as she once said, when pressured, ‘—echoed enough.’

  Preferences could be loud here, and mostly abided by, if remembered, but it was easier to forget, rather than rebuff. Forgetting was natural here. The past wasn’t forbidden altogether, but habitually ignored. Little blurts gave you inklings of a person. Now and then somebody let loose with a wild riff.

  ‘On medical know-how, you people could run a health column,’ a transvestite said, after a lively general discussion as to whether he should soak his swollen high-heeled foot or bind it, and at which clinic he would be best served. Hard drugs were not barred; nothing was. But most exaggerated conduct, not finding much of that at the Cat Club, eased itself out. Medications, on the other hand, were rife; comparisons could be made as at a bazaar, and even swaps. While it was okay to exhort against medical aids, including the psychological, to proselyte for those was frowned on. No one here would ever remind her to take her pill, although once she and Mavorneen, shrugging at each other, had gulped theirs at the same time. Though never repeating that. Sex happened. People went upstairs for it, to the least shaky parts of the condemned house.

  Little was repeated here, individually. Instead there was a flow.

  ‘It’s a halfway house,’ she said to Alphonse.’ ‘Only—only not to get to the other side.’

  Rumor persisted that he had started the place after his girlfriend O.D.’d. Nobody could corroborate. ‘Not everybody’s a sex nut,’ Mungo said. ‘Though I fathered two children myself.’ After that blurt he had not been seen again.

  ‘It’s my ace-in-the-hole,’ Alphonse himself said. ‘Case I get thrown out of the Y.’

  Everybody there laughed. When she was a kid, the Young Men’s Christian Association was the norm. Or the Young Women’s, in college, for those who were too square. Now, whether or not it was the norm again, it wasn’t for those here.

  ‘He could almost qualify, Arturo could,’ a girl said. A dancer who did ruffly steps while she was talking to you, she Hispanicized all names. ‘Lucky he drinks.’

  Everybody fed the cat. It was the only one who had rules, in the form of a calendar you checked once you’d done it, over which was scrawled DON’T FORGET THE WATER BOWL. All this was done behind a screen that separated the front window from what had been the store proper, in which there was also a narrow stall with a rear toilet better than the basement one, and a sink. Alphonse bought the cat food, anyone who could contributing, and whoever volunteered did the cat’s box. The cat didn’t seem to care who took care of it. Sometimes it prowled the vandalized upper house, where a window was left open for it. There was no light in the store window, but by night the cat was there, paws folded, eyes slitted, under the street lamp. Daytimes, children tapped to it, through the pane.

  Now and then Carol too disappeared from the Club, if only so that she could drift back. Once, after such an interval, Alphonse said on her return, ‘You have good manners,’ so there was no need to explain. On very hot nights she might go to one of the docks on the lower river, a family one, not the gay one where she might be unwelcome. By day she might stay in the pad, cleaning herself, keeping up her Lopez connection. To Angel, who wanted to know where she went, she said—after a gap meant to show she was making things up: ‘Turkey country. I have a brother there.’ He asked if he could come along. After which she answered: ‘Not on the bike.’ Kids understand the future; it propped up the now. They didn’t really believe in it.

  The summer went, like a picture she was in.

  GOLD TOOK VACATION all of August, like she always did. Time out for me, else I might have told her about the Cat Club, which I must not do; that would be joining up with her, over the long-term case that is me. Last time she comes, end of July, I am there of course, though I had spent the night before on the street. I do that the day before she comes; it keeps me limber against her influence. Summers though, the pad itself has a pull. Carmen gave me a window-blind that grades the sun down to lemony. ‘I only have one window,’ I grudged at her, but she has such courtesy you find yourself saying thanks. Lopez could fix the jammed window in the back, that opened on the air-shaft—she said. ‘Only put a security grill, so nobody can come down from the roof.’ So, since her husband don’t work Wednesday, that has been done and afterwards she is introducing me to the tea called mate; she is not Puerto Rican like him but South American.

  She has brought the black gourds you drink it from, and the metal straws. The gourds have metal bases. I look closer—‘Silver.’—and she nods; the Club has made me talk more. The gourds were a wedding present from her six aunts when she married Lopez after Angel came. She is wearing her hair very high these days, in a basket of curls which her face is too strong for, and has bought a couple of housedresses in too small a size; Lopez has a woman in the bar downstairs.

  ‘I had aunts,’ I tell her. ‘They had a house full of games.’ Telling her is only dropping it down a slot, like you do the lapel clip-on the museums give you on entry; when you leave it vanishes, but you’ve paid. I could almost say where the house was; the location would mean nothing to her. It was like an old nag of a horse, that house, its bones poking up like haunches from the lawn, and had a real horse to match, so old that we never got to ride, but there was a game of parcheesi always set up and ready for us in the window-bay.
r />   The mate is bitter, which I like. Sipping, I see the iron cage Lopez has put over the air-shaft window in the back half-room, which is now a tiny cell. ‘Looks like I keep a gorilla here.’ Angel, who is oiling the bike he now comes to see every day after school, and nagging his mother for money to buy an ice-cream stick with, says, ‘Would the gorilla be touched by God?’ Carmen, mouthing him to hush, says ‘Get out of here, Angel. Go ask your father for the ice-cream money. You know where.’

  We both stare at her. She doesn’t like him to go in the bar.

  He runs up again to say, ‘Carol’s lady is sitting on the stoop.’

  ‘Hah, she don’t know we have bells now,’ Carmen says. Lopez fixed the old wires. She is still building him up, for me to hear. ‘We go now. Come, Angel.’

  ‘No, stay. You never met the SW.’

  So she is still there, in her high-collared, no-sleeve starchy pink when Gold walks in. Out of breath, and the way the summer city can do to people—creased and lowdown from what they usually are. But also more faded on her own. I want to build her up. ‘Carmen, this is my social worker; she knows about the roach campaign. Gold—you met Angel; he’s her boy. This is Carmen; she—.’ Knows about the medicine in the fridge, though I have never said. I see I don’t have to say any of it. They both know their place in my life.

  ‘You give her some mate,’ Carmen says. ‘I bring another cup.’

  Gold knows what mate is but has never had it. ‘Not too addictive. Like coffee. And other kind substances.’ She makes a face. But when Carmen comes back she accepts the tea, extra-polite lady-style—like she’s accepting it.

  ‘Carmen’s six aunts gave her these cups,’ I say. ‘For her wedding. They are gourds really. What you call them, Carmen?’

  ‘Calabash.’

  We sip. The straws are silver all the way. ‘Those aunts—’ I say ‘—were they all on one side?’