Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

We drove down to Times Square, howling. “Cut the crusts off ’em, baby!”

I got the most beautiful things from Jigsaw. He had an apartment on First and Fifty-eighth. Everything was boosted, even the carpets. Vases all over the place. And mirrors with golden edges. The tricks, they liked coming there. They walked right in and said, Wow. It was like they thought I was a businesswoman.

All the time they was looking for the bed. The thing is, the bed came down out of the wall. It was on electronic control.

That place was flash.

The guys who paid a hundred dollars, we called them Champagnes. Susie would say: “Here comes my Champagne,” when a fancy car pulled up on the street.

One night I had one of them football guys from the New York Giants, a linebacker with a neck so big they called him Sequoia. He had a wallet too, like none I ever seen, fat with C-notes. I thought, Here comes ten Champagnes all at once. Here it comes, bubbly, the mighty G.

Turned out he just wanted a freebie, so I got down on the ground, bent down, looked between my legs, said, “HIKE!” and threw him a room-service menu.

Sometimes I just crack myself up.

I was calling myself Miss Bliss then, ’cause I was very happy. The men were just bodies moving on me. Bits of color. They didn’t matter none. Sometimes I just felt like a needle in a jukebox. I just fell on that groove and rode in awhile. Then I’d pick the dust off and drop again.

The thing I noticed about the homicide cops is that they wore real nice suits. And their shoes were always polished. One of them, he had a three-legged shoeshine box right under his desk. Rags and black polish and all. He was cute. He wasn’t looking for a freebie. He only wanted to know who iced Jigsaw. I knew, but I wasn’t telling. When someone buys it, you keep your mouth shut. That’s the law on the street, zip zip goes your mouth, zip zip not saying a word, zip zip zip zip zip.

Jigsaw walked into three neat bullets. I saw him lying there, on the wet ground. He had one in the center of his forehead, where it blew his brains open. And when the paramedics opened up his shirt it was like he had two extra red eyes in his chest.

There was blood spatter on the ground and on the lamp post and on the mailbox too. This guy from the pizza shop came out to clean the passenger-side mirror of his van. He was scrubbing it with his apron, shaking his head and muttering under his breath, like someone had just burned his calzones. As if Jigsaw meant to leave his brains on the guy’s mirror! Like he did it deliberate!

He went back into the shop and the next time we went in the shop for a slice, he was like: “Hey, no hookers in here, get outta here, get your sellin’ asses O-U-T, especially you, you N-I-G-G-E-R.” We said, “Oh, he can spell,” but I swear to God, I wanted to twist his Guinea balls up in his throat and squeeze them into one and call it his Adam’s apple.

Susie said she hated racists, especially Guinea racists. We laughed our heads off and marched right on down to Second Avenue and got us a slice at Ray’s Famous. It was so delicious we didn’t even have to dab the oil off. After that we never went back to the place on Lex.

We weren’t gonna give business to no racist pig.

Jigsaw had all that scratch, but he was buried in Potter’s Field. I seen too many funerals. I guess I’m no different than nobody else. I don’t know who got Jigsaw’s money, but I’d say it was the syndicate.

There’s only one thing moves at the speed of light and that’s cold hard cash.

Couple of months after Jigsaw got scrambled, I saw Andy Warhol coming down the block. He had eyes that were big and blue and schizoid, like he just came from a day of token-sucking. I said, “Hey, Andy honey, you want a date?” He said, “I’m not Andy Warhol, I’m just a guy wearing an Andy Warhol mask, ha ha.” I pinched his ass. He jumped back and went, “Ooohh.” He was a bit square, but then he talked to me must’ve been ten minutes or more.

I thought he was going to put me in a movie. I was all jumping up and down in my stilettos. I woulda kissed him if he put me in a movie. But in the end he didn’t want nothing except to find himself a boy. That’s all he wanted, a young boy he could take home and do his thing with. I told him that I could use a big pink strap-on and he said: “Oh, stop, you’re getting me hot.”

I went around all night, saying: “I turned Andy Warhol on!”

I got another trick I thought I recognized. He was young but bald on top. The bald spot was very white, like a little ice rink on his head. He got a room in the Waldorf-Astoria. The first thing he did was he pulled the curtains tight and fell on the bed and said: “Let’s get it on.”

I was like, “Wow, do I know you, honey?”

He looked at me hard and said: “No.”

“Are you sure?” I said, all cutesy and shit. “You look familiar.”

“No,” he said, real angry.

“Hey, take a chill pill, honey,” I said. “I’m only axing.”

I pulled off his belt and unzipped him and he moaned, Ohyeahyeahyeah , like they all do, and he closed his eyes and kept on moaning, and then I don’t know why, but I figured it out. It was the guy from the weather report on CBS! Except he wasn’t wearing his toupee! That was his disguise. I finished him off and got myself dressed and waved goodbye but turned at the door and said to him, “Hey man, it’s cloudy in the east with the wind at ten knots and a chance of snow.”

There I was, cracking myself up again.

I used to love the joke where the last line was: Your Honor, I was armed with nothing more than a piece of fried chicken.

The hippies were bad for business. They were into free love. I stayed away from them. They stank.

The soldiers were my best clients. When they came back they just wanted to pop — popping was the only thing on their minds. They’d had their asses handed to them by a bunch of half-baked slanty-eyed motherfuckers and now they just needed to forget. And there ain’t much better to help you forget than popping with Miss Bliss.

I made up a little badge that said: THE MISS BLISS SOLUTION: MAKE WAR, NOT LOVE. Nobody thought it was funny, not even the boys who were coming home from ’Nam, so I threw it in the garbage can on the corner of Second Avenue.

They smelled like small little graveyards walking around, those boys.

But they needed loving. I was like a social service, word. Doing my thing for America. Sometimes I’d hum that kiddie song while he scraped his fingers down my back. Pop goes the weasel! They got a kick outta that.

Bob was a pross cop with a hard-on for black girls. I musta seen his shield more’n I had hot breakfasts. He arrested me even when I wasn’t working. I was in the coffee shop and he threw the badge and he said, “You’re coming with me, Sambette.”

He thought he was funny. I said, “Kiss my black ass, Bob.” Still he took me down the pen. He had his quota. He got paid overtime. I wanted to slice him up with my nail file.

Once I had a man a whole week long at the Sherry-Netherlands. There was a chandelier surrounded with grapes ‘n’ vines in the ceiling and violins carved outta the plaster and all. He was small and fat and bald and brown. He put a record on the player. Sounded like snake music. He said, “Isn’t this a divine comedy?” I said: “That’s a weird thing to say.” He just smiled. He had a nice accent.

We had crystal cocaine and caviar and champagne in a bucket. It was a blow date, but all he had me do was read to him. Persian poems. I thought maybe I was already in heaven and floating on a cloud. There was a lot of things being said about ancient Syria and Persia. I laid out on the bed buck naked and just read to the chandelier. He didn’t even want to touch me. He sat in the chair and watched me reading. I left with eight hundred dollars and a copy of Rumi. I never read nothing like that before. Made me want to have a fig tree.