Charles De Lint - Dreams Underfoot

So Rob thinks I’m being, like, so fucking weird—I mean, it’s easy money, he tells me. Easy for him maybe. We have this big fight and then he hits me. Tells me if I don’t get my ass out on the street and make some more money, he’s going to do worse, like cut me.

My luck, I guess. Of all the guys to hang out with, I’ve got to pick one who suddenly realizes it’s his ambition in life to be a pimp. Three years later he’s running a string of five girls, but he lets me pay my respect—two grand which I got by skimming what I was paying him—and I’m out of the scene.

Except I’m not, because I’m still a junkie and I’m too fucked up to work, I’ve got no ID, I’ve got no skills except I can draw a little when I’m not fucked up on smack which is just about all the time. I start muling for a couple of dealers in Fitzhenry Park, just to get my fixes, and then one night I’m so out of it, I just collapse in a doorway of a pawn shop up on Perry Street.

I haven’t eaten in, like, three days. I’m shaking because I need a fix so bad I can’t see straight. I haven’t washed in Christ knows how long, so I smell and the clothes I’m wearing are worse. I’m at the end of the line and I know it, when I hear footsteps coming down the street and I know it’s the local cop on his beat, doing his rounds.

I try to crawl deeper into the shadows but the doorway’s only so deep and the cop’s coming closer and then he’s standing there, blocking what little light the streetlamps were throwing and I know I’m screwed. But there’s no way I’m going back into juvie or a foster home. I’m thinking of offering him a blow job to let me go—so far as the cops’re concerned, hookers’re just scum, but they’ll take a freebie all the same—but I see something in this guy’s face, when he turns his head and the streetlight touches it, that tells me he’s an honest joe. A rookie, true blue, probably his first week on the beat and full of wanting to help everybody and I know for sure I’m screwed. With my luck running true, he’s going to be the kind of guy who thinks social workers really want to help someone like me instead of playing bureaucratic mindfuck games with my head.

I don’t think I can take anymore.

I find myself wishing I had Rob’s switchblade—the one he liked to push up against my face when he didn’t think I was bringing in enough. I just want to cut something. The cop. Myself. I don’t really give a fuck. I just want out.

He crouches down so he’s kind of level with me, lying there scrunched up against the door, and says,

“How bad is it?”

I just look at him like he’s from another planet. How bad is it? Can it get any worse I wonder?

“I ... I’m doing fine,” I tell him.

He nods like we’re discussing the weather. “What’s your name?”

“Jilly,” I say.

“Jilly what?”

“Uh ....”

I think of my parents, who’ve turned their backs on me. I think ofjuvie and foster homes. I look over his shoulder and there’s a pair of billboards on the building behind me. One’s advertising a suntan lotion—you know the one with the dog pulling the kid’s pants down? I’ll bet some old pervert thought that one up. The other’s got the Jolly Green Giant himself selling vegetables. I pull a word from each ad and give it to the cop.

“Jilly Coppercorn.”

“Think you can stand, Jilly?”

I’m thinking, If I could stand, would I be lying here? But I give it a try. He helps me the rest of the way up, supports me when I start to sway.

“So ... so am I busted?” I ask him.

“Have you committed a crime?”

I don’t know where the laugh comes from, but it falls out of my mouth all the same. There’s no humor in it.

“Sure,” I tell him. “I was born.”

He sees my bag still lying on the ground. He picks it up while I lean against the wall and a bunch of my drawings fall out. He looks at them as he stuffs them back in the bag.

“Did you do those?”

I want to sneer at him, ask him why the fuck should he care, but I’ve got nothing left in me. It’s all I can do to stand. So I tell him, yeah, they’re mine.

“They’re very good.”

Right. I’m actually this fucking brilliant artist, slumming just to get material for my art.

“Do you have a place to stay?” he asks.

Whoops, did I read him wrong? Maybe he’s planning to get me home, clean me up, and then put it to me.

“Dilly?” he asks when I don’t answer.

Sure, I want to tell him. I’ve got my pick of the city’s alleyways and doorways. I’m welcome wherever I go. World treats me like a fucking princess. But all I do is shake my head.

“I want to take you to see a friend of mine,” he says.

I wonder how he can stand to touch me. I can’t stand myself. I’m like a walking sewer. And now he wants to bring me to meet a friend?

“Am I busted?” I ask him again.

He shakes his head. I think of where I am, what I got ahead of me, then I just shrug. If I’m not busted, then whatever’s he’s got planned for me’s got to be better. Who knows, maybe his friend’ll front me with a fix to get me through the night.

“Okay,” I tell him. “Whatever.”

“C’mon,” he says.

He puts an arm around my shoulder and steers me off down the street and that’s how I met Lou Fucceri and his girlfriend, the Grasso Street Angel.

7

Jilly sat on the stoop of Angel’s office on Grasso Street, watching the passersby. She had her sketchpad on her knee, but she hadn’t opened it yet. Instead, she was amusing herself with one of her favorite pastimes: making up stories about the people walking by. The young woman with the child in a stroller, she was a princess in exile, disguising herself as a nanny in a far distant land until she could regain her rightful station in some suitably romantic dukedom in Europe. The old black man with the cane was a physicist studying the effects of Chaos theory in the Grasso Street traffic. The Hispanic girl on her skateboard was actually a mermaid, having exchanged the waves of her ocean for concrete.

She didn’t turn around when she heard the door open behind her. There was a scuffle of sneakers on the stoop, then the sound of the door closing again. After a moment, Annie sat down beside her.

“How’re you doing?” Jilly asked.

“It was weird.”

“Good weird, or bad?” Jilly asked when Annie didn’t go on. “Or just uncomfortable?”

“Good weird, I guess. She played the tape you did for her book. She said you knew, that you’d said it was okay.”

Jilly nodded.

“I couldn’t believe it was you. I mean, I recognized your voice and everything, but you sounded so different.”

“I was just a kid,” Jilly said. “A punky street kid.”

“But look at you now.”

“I’m nothing special,” filly said, suddenly feeling selfconscious. She ran a hand through her hair. “Did Angel tell you about the sponsorship program?”

Annie nodded. “Sort of. She said you’d tell me more.”

“What Angel does is coordinate a relationship between kids that need help and people who want to help. It’s different every time, because everybody’s different. I didn’t meet my sponsor for the longest time; he just put up the money while Angel was my contact. My lifeline, if you want to know the truth. I can’t remember how many times I’d show up at her door and spend the night crying on her shoulder.”

“How did you get, you know, cleaned up?” Annie asked. Her voice was shy.

“The first thing is I went into detox. When I finally got out, my sponsor paid for my room and board at the Chelsea Arms while I went through an accelerated high school program. I told Angel I wanted to go on to college, so he cosigned my student loan and helped me out with my books and supplies and stuff. I was working by that point. I had parttime jobs at a couple of stores and with the Post Office, and then I started waitressing, but that kind of money doesn’t go far—not when you’re carrying a full course load.”