Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

— Not me, says Compton. I’m going home. I haven’t slept in years.

— Sam? How about you?

It’s the Pentagon program he’s talking about. We’ve signed a secrecy agreement. It’s an easy enough thing to do. Any kid could do it. That’s what I’m thinking. You just use the radar program, key in the gravitational pull, maybe use some rotation differentials, and you can find out where any missile will land.

— Kid?

When there’s a lot of computers going all at once, the place hums. It’s more than white noise. It’s the sort of hum that makes you feel that you’re the actual ground lying under the sky, a blue hum that’s all above and around you, but if you think about it too hard it will get too loud or big, and make you feel no more than just a speck. You’re sealed in by it, the wires, the piping, the electrons moving, but nothing really moving, nothing at all.

I go to the window. It’s a basement window that doesn’t get any light. That’s one thing I don’t understand, windows in basements — why would anyone put a window in a basement? Once I tried to open it, but it doesn’t move.

I bet the sun is coming up outside.

— Toodle-pips! says Gareth.

I want to go across the room and hit him, a punch, a real punch, something that’ll really hurt him, but I don’t.

I settle down at the console, hit Escape, then the N key, then the Y key, leave the blue-box hack. No more phreaking today. I open up the graphics program, use my password. SAMUS17. We’ve been working six months on it, but the Pentagon’s been developing it for years. If there comes another war, they’ll be using this hack, that’s for sure.

I turn to Dennis. He’s already hunched over his console.

The program boots. I can hear it clicking.

There’s a high that you get when you’re writing code. It’s cool. It’s easy to do. You forget your mom, your dad, everything. You’ve got the whole country onboard. This is America. You hit the frontier. You can go anywhere. It’s about being connected, access, gateways, like a whispering game where if you get one thing wrong you’ve got to go all the way back to the beginning.

THEY DIDN’T LET ME GO to Corrigan’s funeral. I woulda walked the bakery line to get there. They put me back in the pen instead. I weren’t crying. I laid straight out on the bench with my hand over my eyes.

I saw my rap sheet, it’s yellow with fifty-four entries. Typed up not so neat. You see your life with carbon copies. Kept in a file. Hunts Point, Lex and Forty-ninth, West Side Highway, all the way back to Cleveland. Loitering. Prostitution offense. Class A misdemeanor. Criminal possesion controlled substance 7th degree. Criminel trespass 2nd degree. Criminal posession narcotic drug, Class E felony. Prostitution solicitation, Class A, Misdemeaner Degree 0.

The cops musta got a D in spelling.

The ones in the Bronx write worse than anyone. They get an F in everything except pulling us up on our prop’rties.

Tillie Henderson alias Miss Bliss alias Puzzle alias Rosa P. alias Sweet-Cakes.

Race, sex, height, weight, hair color, hair type, complexion, eye color, scars, marks, tattoos (none).

I got a taste for supermarket cakes. You won’t find that on my yellow sheet.

The day they arrested us, Bob Marley was on the radio, singing, Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. A funny-ass cop turned the volume higher and grinned over his shoulder. Jazzlyn shouted: “Who’s gonna look after the babies?”

I left the spoon in the baby formula. Thirty-eight years old. There ain’t no prizes.

Hooking was born in me. That’s no exaggeration. I never wanted no square job. I lived right across from the stroll on Prospect Avenue and East Thirty-first. From my bedroom window I could see the girls work. I was eight. They wore red high heels and hair combed high.

The daddies went by on their way to the Turkish hotel. They caught dates for their girls. They wore hats big enough to dance in.

Every pimp movie you’ve ever seen has them pulling up in a Cadillac. It’s true. Daddies drive Kitties. They like whitewall tires. The fuzzy dice don’t happen so often, though.

I put on my first lipstick when I was nine. Shiny in the mirror. My mother’s blue boots were too big for me at eleven. I could’ve hid down inside them and popped my head out.

When I was thirteen I already had my hands on the hip of a man in a raspberry suit. He had a waist like a lady’s, but he hit me hard. His name was Fine. He loved me so much, he didn’t put me on the stroll, he said he was grooming me.

My mother had religious readings. We were in the Church of the Spiritual Israel. You had to throw your head back and speak in tongues. She’d been on the stroll too. That was years ago. She left it when her teeth fell out. She said, “Don’t you do what I done, Tillie.”

So I done exactly that. My teeth haven’t fallen out yet but.

I never tricked until I was fifteen. I walked into the lobby of the Turkish hotel. Someone gave a low whistle. Everyone’s head turned, ‘specially mine. Then I realized they were whistling at me. Right there I began walkin’ with a bounce. I was turning out. My first daddy said: “Soon as you finish breakin’ luck, honey, come on home to me.”

Hose, hot pants, high heels. I hit the stroll with a vengeance.

One of the things you learn early on is you don’t let your hair fall down in the open window. You do that, the crazy ones grab you by the locks and pull you in and then they beat you silly.

Your first daddy, you don’t forget. You love him until he beats you with a tire iron. Two days later, you’re changing wheels with him. He buys you a blouse that makes your body go out and around in all the right places.

I left baby Jazzlyn with my mother. She kicked her legs and looked up at me. She had the whitest skin when she was born. I thought first she wasn’t mine. I never knew who her Daddy was. He coulda been any on a list long as Sunday. People said that he mighta been a Mexican, but I don’t recall no Pablo sweating on me. I took her up in my arms and that’s when I said to myself, I’m gonna treat her good all her life.

The first thing you do when you have a baby is you say, She’s never gonna work the stroll. You swear it. Not my baby. She’s never gonna be out there. So you work the stroll to keep her off the stroll.

I stayed that way nearly three years, on the stroll, running home to her, taking her in my arms, and then knew what I had to do. I said: “Look after her, Momma. I’ll be right back.”

The skinniest dog I ever seen is the one on the side of the Greyhound buses.

The first time I saw New York, I lay down on the ground outside Port Authority just so I could see the whole sky. Some guy stepped right over me without even looking down.

I started hooking my very first day. I went to the fleabag hotels over on Ninth. You can make a sky out of a ceiling, that’s no problem. There were a lot of sailors in New York.

I used to like dancing with their hats on.

In New York you work for your man. Your man’s your daddy, even if he’s just a chili pimp. It’s easy to find a daddy. I got lucky early on and I found TuKwik. He took me on and I worked the best stroll, Forty-ninth and Lexington. That’s where Marilyn’s skirt blew high. Up by the subway vent. The next best stroll was way over on the West Side, but TuKwik didn’t like it, so I didn’t go over there much. There wasn’t as much scratch to be made on the West Side. And the cops were always throwing their badges, strictly on a prop’rty basis. They’d see how long it was since you was in jail by asking the date on your sheet. If you hadn’t been inside in a while they’d curl their fingers and say, Come with me.