Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

That’s long before I went to Hunts Point. And that’s long before I ended up under the Deegan. And that’s long before Jazz and Corrie rode that van to doom.

But if I was given one week to live, just one week again, if that was my choice, that week at the Sherry-Netherlands is the one I’d repeat. I was just lying on the bed, naked and reading, and him being nice to me, and telling me I was fine, that I’d do well in Syria and Persia. I never seen Syria or Persia or Iran or whatever they call it. Someday I’m going to go, but I’ll bring Jazzlyn’s babies and I’ll marry an oil sheik.

Except I been thinking about the noose.

Any excuse is a good excuse. When they ship you off to prison they give you a syphilis test. I came back clean. I was thinking maybe I wouldn’t be clean this time. Maybe that’d be a good excuse.

I hate mops. I hate sweeping brushes. You can’t trick your way outta prison. You have to wash windows, clean the floor, sponge the showers. I’m the only hooker in C-40. Everyone else is way upstate. One thing for sure, there ain’t no pretty sunsets out the window.

All the butches are in C-50. All the femmes are where I am. The lesbians are called jaspers, I don’t know why — sometimes words are weird. In the canteen, all the jaspers want to do is comb my hair. I’m not into that. Never have been. I won’t wear no Oxfords. I like to keep my uniform short, but I won’t wear a bow in my hair either. Even if you’re going to die, you might as well die pretty.

I don’t eat. At least I can keep my figure. I’m still proud of that.

I’m a fuck-up but I’m still proud of my body.

They wouldn’t serve the food to dogs anyway. The dogs would strangle themselves after reading the menu. They’d start howling and puncture themselves dead with forks.

I got the keyring with the babies on it. I like to hang it on my finger and watch them twirl. I got this piece of aluminum foil too. It’s not like a mirror, but you can look in it and you can guess that you’re still pretty. It’s better ’n talking to a mouse. My cell mate shaved the side of the bed in order to put the mouse in wood shavings. I read a book once about a guy with a mouse. His name was Steinbeck — the guy, not the mouse. I ain’t stupid. I don’t wear the dunce cap just ’cause I’m a hooker. They did an I.Q. test and I got 124. If you don’t believe me, ask the prison shrink.

The library cart squeaks around once a week. They don’t got no books I like. I asked them for Rumi and they said, “What the hell is that?”

In the gym I play Ping-Pong. The butches go, “Ooohh, look at her smash.”

Most of the time, me and Jazz, we never robbed nobody. Wasn’t worth it. But this asshole, he took us all the way from the Bronx to Hell’s Kitchen and promised us all sorts of scratch. Turned out different, so all we done was we relieved him of the chore, that’s the word, relieved him. Just lightened his pockets, really. I took the rap for Jazzlyn. She wanted back with the babies. She needed the horse too. I wanted her off it, but she couldn’t go cold. Not like that. Me, I was clean. I could take it. I’d been clean six months. I was banging coke here and there, and sometimes I sold some horse that I got from Angie, but mostly I was clean.

In the station house Jazz was crying her eyes out. The detective leaned across his desk to me and said: “Look, Tillie, you wanna make things right for your daughter?” I’m like: “Yeah, babe.” He said: “All right, gimme a confession and I’ll let her go. You’ll get six months, no more, I guarantee it.” So, I sat down and sang. It was an old charge, robbery in the second degree. Jazz had jacked two hundred dollars from that guy and syringed that straight off.

That’s how it goes.

Everything flies through the windshield.

They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his heart.

I’m a fuck-up. That’s what I am. I took the rap and Jazzlyn paid the price. I am the mother and my daughter is no more. I only hope at the last minute that at least she was smiling.

I’m a fuck-up like none you’ve ever seen before.

Even the roaches don’t like it here in Rikers. The roaches, they’ve got an aversion. The roaches, they’re like judges and district attorneys and shit. They crawl out of the walls in their black coats and they say, Miss Henderson, I hereby sentence you to eight months.

Anyone who knows roaches know that they rattle. That’s the word. They rattle across the floor.

The shower stall is the best place. You could hang an elephant from the pipes.

Sometimes I bang my head off the wall long enough that I just don’t feel it anymore. I can bang it hard enough I finally sleep. I wake with a headache and I bang again. It only stings in the shower when all the butches are watching.

A white girl got sliced yesterday. With the filed-down side of a canteen tray. She had it coming. Whiter than her whiteness. Outside the pen it never used to bother me: white or black or brown or yellow or pink. But I guess the pen is the flip side of real life — too many niggers and not many whiteys, all the whiteys can buy their way out of it.

This the longest I ever spent inside. It gets you to thinking about things. Mostly about being such a fuck-up. And mostly about where to hang the noose.

When they first told me ’bout Jazzlyn I just stood there beating my head against the cage like a bird. They let me go to the funeral and then they locked me back up. The babies weren’t there. I kept asking about the girls but everyone was saying: Don’t worry about the babies, they’re being looked after.

In my dreams I’m back in the Sherry-Netherlands. Why I liked him so much I don’t really know. He wasn’t a trick, he was a john — even with the bald head he was fine.

Men in the Middle Eastern life dig hookers. They like to spoil them and buy them things and walk around with the sheets wrapped around them. He asked me to stand by the window in silhouette. He positioned the light just so. I heard him gasp. All I was doing was standing. Nothing ever made me feel better than him just looking at me, appreciating what he saw. That’s what good men do — they appreciate. He wasn’t fooling with himself or nothing, he just sat in the chair watching me, hardly breathing. He said I made him delirious, that he’d give me anything just to stay there forever. I said something smart-ass, but really I was thinking the exact same thing. I hated myself for saying something disrespectful. I coulda had the floor swallow me up.

After a moment or two he relaxed, then sighed. He said something to me about the desert in Syria and how the lemon trees look like little explosions of color.

And all of a sudden — right there, looking out over Central Park — I got a longing for my daughter like nothing else before. Jazzlyn was eight or nine then. I wanted just to hold her in my arms. It’s no less love if you’re a hooker, it’s no less love at all.

The park got dark. The lights came on. Only a few of them were working. They lit up the trees.

“Read the poem about the marketplace,” he said.

It was a poem where a man buys a carpet in the marketplace, and it’s a perfect carpet, without a flaw, so it brings him all sorts of woe ‘n’ shit. I had to switch on the light to read to him and it spoiled the atmosphere, I could tell straight off. Then he said, “Just tell me a story then.”

I turned off the light and stood there. I didn’t want to say nothing cheap.

I couldn’t think of anything except a story I heard from a trick a few weeks before. So I stood there with the curtains in my hands and I said: “There was this old couple out walking by the Plaza. It was early evening. They were hand in hand. They were about to go into the park when a cop blew his whistle sharp and stopped them. The cop said, ‘You can’t go in there, it’s gonna get dark, it’s too dangerous to walk around the park, you’ll get mugged.’ The old couple said, ‘But we want to go in there, it’s our anniversary, we were here forty years ago exactly.’ The cop said, ‘You’re crazy. Nobody walks in Central Park anymore.’ But the old couple kept walking in anyway. They wanted to take the exact same walk they took all those years before, ’round the little pond. To remember. So they went hand in hand, right into the dark. And guess what? That cop, he walked behind at twenty paces, right around the lake, just to make sure them people weren’t tossed, ain’t that something?”