Lawrence Block: Chip Harrison Scores Again

The papers in that wallet weren’t important enough to wrap fish in. There were a couple of cash register receipts from unidentified stores and a Chinese laundry ticket. There was a head-and-shoulders snapshot of an ugly high school girl signed Your Pal, Mary Beth Hawkins. Judging by the hair style, Mary Beth was either (a) the squarest teen-ager in America or (b) forty-five-years old by now. Either way, I would have rather had my comb than her picture.

There were a few other things, but none of them mattered except for the bus ticket. It was in one of the secret compartments, and I guess that had kept it a secret from the pickpocket. A Greyhound bus ticket, good for one-way passage in either direction between Boston, Massachusetts, and Bordentown, South Carolina. It said it was valid anytime within one year from the date stamped on the back. The date was March something, and it was now December something, so the ticket had another three months to go before it became even more worthless than it already was.

I got rid of the rest of the wallet, Mary Beth’s picture and all. I dumped it in a trash can — what else? — and I was as slick as possible about this, because I didn’t want any other poor clown to waste his time doing what I had just done. If you’re going to steal a wallet, you ought to get it from its original owner. After that the depreciation is fantastic.

Then I walked around for a while, which kept me warmer than standing still, if just barely. Now and then I would take the ticket out and stare at it. It was that or stare at the quarter. Sensational, I thought. If I happen to be in Boston between now and March, I can catch a bus to Bordentown. Or, should I some fine morning find myself in Bordentown, I can hop on a Greyhound for Boston. Wonderful.

I wound up on Broadway looking at whores. Not in a particularly acquisitive way. Not that I wasn’t tempted. I had been in New York for almost three months, and my sex life during that time could have been inscribed on the head of a pin with plenty of room left for the Lord’s Prayer and as many angels as felt like dancing there.

(I had been living with a girl for one of those months, but she had just had a baby and couldn’t do anything for six weeks, and by the time the six weeks were up she had gone away. At least she took the baby with her.)

I have always had these ethical objections to patronizing a prostitute, but in this case I might have overcome these objections if I’d had more than twenty-five cents to overcome them with. We’ll never know.

So I went window-shopping, and the girls seemed to know it. They would look me up and down, and disapproval would glint in their eyes, and they would turn away, as if there was nothing so obvious as the fact that I couldn’t possibly afford them. None of this was very ego-building.

And then one girl, who was either less experienced or a poorer judge of character, gave me a smile. An actual smile. So I stopped dead and smiled back at her, and she asked me if I’d like to go to her apartment.

“Is it warm there?”

“Honey,” she said, “where I am, it’s always warm.”

I told her it sounded great. She asked me if I could spend twenty-five dollars.

“No way.”

“Well, see, I like you. Could you spend twenty?”

“I wish I could.”

“Well, shit. What can you spend?”

I could spend twenty-five cents, but I was damned if I was going to tell her that. I said, “Where are you from?”

“What do you want to know that for?”

“I just wondered.”

“Well, I have this place on Fifty-fifth Street. How much can—”

“I mean originally,” I said. “You’re not from New York, are you?”

“From Memphis,” she said. “And never goin’ back there again, thanks all the same.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Why?”

“I thought maybe you were from Bordentown, South Carolina,” I said. “Or maybe from Boston.”

“You been drinkin’, honey?”

“Because I have this bus ticket,” I said, and showed it to her. “So if you had any interest in going to Boston or Bordentown—”

“That good?”

I showed her the date. “Perfectly good,” I said.

“You want to come home with me?”

“To Memphis?”

“Shit. I tol’ you. Fifty-fifth Street. You want to come?”

I tried on a smile. “All I really have is this ticket,” I said. “I don’t have any money. Just twenty-five cents and this ticket. I’m sorry for wasting your time—”

But she had my arm tucked under hers.

“You know something? I like you. I really do. What’s your name?”

“Chip.”

“Yeah? I’m Mary Beth. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I knew a girl named Mary Beth. I had a picture of her in a wallet that I carried for a while.”

“Girl here in New York?”

“No,” I said. “I think she lives in Bordentown. Or in Boston. Or she used to.”

“You sure you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. She was still holding onto my arm, and we seemed to be walking uptown, sort of toward Fifty-fifth Street, actually.

“I do like you, Chip,” she was saying. “You just come home with me and I’ll do you like you never been done. You ever had something called the Waterloo? That’s a specialty of mine. What I take is a mouthful of warm water, see—”

She told me quite a bit about the Waterloo, and while she talked we walked, and while we walked she held onto my arm and rubbed it against her breast. My pants began getting very cramped.

“You just forget about no money,” she said. “Don’t make no never mind.”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. I can’t believe this.

Because I couldn’t. I mean, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t had thoughts along this line before. I don’t suppose it’s the rarest fantasy ever. The ultimate sexual ego trip — that a prostitute, a girl who spends her life getting paid to have sex, will find you so overwhelmingly attractive that she’ll want to give it to you for free. And she would know tricks you never dreamed of, and do all these fantastic things, and do them all for love.

Who ever thought it would actually happen?

Her apartment was pleasant in a sort of dull way. I couldn’t tell whether or not it was a typical prostitute’s apartment, but it seemed to me then that it couldn’t be, because it seemed to me then that she was by no means a typical prostitute. By the time we got there I had already decided that she wasn’t basically a whore at all. Just because a girl was whoring didn’t make her a whore. After all, in the past year I had sold termite extermination service, picked fruit, posed for pornographic pictures and written a book, and I didn’t think of myself as a writer or fruit picker or any of those things. Life deals unpredictable cards, and you have to play each hand as it lays, and little Mary Beth might be walking the streets but that didn’t make her a streetwalker. It might not make her the Virgin Mary, either, but it didn’t make her a whore.

I really had things all figured out. I would Take Her Away From All This. She already loved me, and by the time I got done balling her she would love me to distraction, and at that point the idea of ever having sex with anyone but Chip Harrison would positively turn her stomach. And I would live with her and land a Job With A Future, and we would screw incessantly while I made my way in the world, and we would, uh, Live Happily Ever After.

The thing is, see, that when a fantasy starts coming true before your eyes, it’s natural to go on taking the fantasy to its logical (?) conclusion. Did I really expect all of this would happen? Not really, but remember that I never expected it to start happening in the first place. If someone goes and repeals the Law of Gravity and you find yourself flying to the Moon, it’s no more unreasonable to plan on flying clear through to Mars.