Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

That was my story. I stayed still. The curtains were all damp in my hands. I could almost hear the Middle Eastern man smile.

“Tell it to me again,” he said.

I stood a little closer to the window, where the light was coming in real nice. I told it to him again, with even more details, like the sound of their footsteps and all.

I never even told that story to Jazzlyn. I wanted to tell her but I never did. I was waiting for the right time. He gave me that Rumi book when I left. I shoved it in my handbag, didn’t think much of it at first, but it crept up on me, like a street lamp.

I liked him, my little fat bald brown man. I went to the Sherry-Netherlands to see if he was there, but the manager kicked me out. He had a folder in his hand. He used it like a cattle prod. He said, “Out out out!”

I began to read Rumi all the time. I liked it because he had the details. He had nice lines. I began saying shit to my tricks. I told folks I liked the lines because of my father and how he studied Persian poetry. Sometimes I said it was my husband.

I never even had a father or a husband. Not one I knew of, anyways. I ain’t whining. That’s just a fact.

I’m a fuck-up and my daughter is no more.

Jazzlyn asked me once about her Daddy. Her real Daddy — not a daddy Daddy. She was eight. We were talking on the phone. Long-distance from New York to Cleveland. It cost me nothing because all the girls knew how to get the dime back. We learned it from the vets who came back from ’Nam all messed up in the head.

I liked the bank of phones on Forty-fourth. I’d get bored and ring the phone right beside me. I picked it up and talked to myself. I got a big kick outta that. Hi, Tillie, how you doin’, baby? Not too bad, Tillie, how you? Swingin’ it, Tillie, how’s the weather there, girl? Raining, Tillie-o. No shit, it’s raining here too, Tillie, ain’t that a kicker?!

I was on the drugstore phone on Fiftieth and Lex when Jazzlyn said: “Who’s my real Daddy?” I told her that her Daddy was a nice guy but he went out once for a pack of cigarettes. That’s what you tell a kid. Everyone says that, I don’t know why — I guess all the assholes who don’t want to hang around their kids are smokers.

She never even asked about him again. Not once. I used to think he was gone for cigarettes an awful long time, whoever the fuck he was. Maybe he’s standing around still, Pablo, waiting for the change.

I went back to Cleveland to pick Jazzlyn up. That was ′64 or ′65, one of them years. She was eight or nine years old then. She was waiting for me on the doorstep. She wore a little hooded coat and she was sitting there all pouty and then she looked up and saw me. I swear it was like seeing a firework go off. “Tillie!” she shouted. She never really called me Mom. She jumped up from the step. No one ever gave me a bigger hug. No one. She like near smothered me. I sat right down beside her and cried my eyes out. I said, “Wait’ll you see New York, Jazz, it’s gonna blow you away.”

My own mother was in the kitchen giving me snake eyes. I handed her an envelope with two thousand dollars. She said: “Oh, honey, I knew you’d come good, I just knew it!”

We wanted to drive across country, Jazzlyn and me, but instead we got a skinny dog all the way from Cleveland. The whole time there she slept on my shoulder and sucked her thumb, nine years old and still sucking her thumb. I heard later, in the Bronx, that was one of her things. She liked to suck her thumb when she was doing it with a trick. That makes me sick to the core. I’m a fuck-up and that’s all. That’s about all that matters.

Tillie Fuck-Up Henderson. That’s me without ribbons on.

I ain’t gonna kill myself until I see my baby’s baby girls. I told the warden today that I’m a grandmother and she didn’t say nothing. I said, “I want to see my grandbabies — why won’t they bring my grand-babies?” She didn’t bat an eyelid. Maybe I’m getting old. I’ll have my thirty-ninth birthday inside. It’ll take a whole week just to blow them candles out.

I begged her and begged her and begged her. She said the babies were fine, they were being looked after, social services had them.

It was a daddy who put me in the Bronx. He called himself L.A. Rex. He didn’t like niggers, but he was a nigger himself. He said Lexington was for whiteys. He said I got old. He said I was useless. He said I was taking too much time with Jazzlyn. He said to me that I looked like a piece of cheese. He said, “Don’t come down by Lex again or I’ll break your arms, Tillie, y’hear me?”

So that’s what he did — he broke my arms. He broke my fingers too. He caught me on the corner of Third and Forty-eighth and he snapped them like they was chicken bones. He said the Bronx was a good place for retirement. He grinned and said it was just like Florida without the beaches.

I had to go home to Jazzlyn with my arms in plaster. I was in convalescence for I don’t know how long.

L.A. Rex had a diamond star in his tooth, that’s no lie. He looked a bit like that Cosby guy on TV, except Cosby has some funky-ass sideburns. L.A. even paid my hospital bills. He didn’t put me out on the stroll. I thought, What the fuck is up with that? Sometimes the world is a place you just can’t understand.

So I got clean. I got myself housing. I gave up the game. Those were good years. All it took to make me happy was finding a nickel in the bottom of my handbag. Things were going so good. It felt like I was standing at a window. I put Jazzlyn in school. I got a job putting stickers on supermarket cans. I came home, went to work, came home again. I stayed away from the stroll. Nothing was going to put me back there. And then one day, out of the blue, I don’t even remember why, I walked down to the Deegan, stuck out my thumb, and looked for a trick. I got a thump in the back of my head from a daddy called Birdhouse — he was wearing a surefire fuck-off hat that he never once took off ’cause he didn’t like anyone to see his glass eye. He said, “Hey, babe, what’s shakin’?”

Jazzlyn needed school books. I’m almost sure that’s what it was.

I wasn’t a parasol girl down on Forty-ninth and Lex. The parasol was a thing I started in the Bronx. To hide my face, really. That’s a secret I won’t tell nobody. I’ve always had a good body. Even for all those years I stuffed junk into it, it was good and curvy and extra delicious. I never had a disease I couldn’t get rid of. It was when I got to the Bronx that I took up the parasol. They couldn’t see my face but they could see my booty. I could shake it. I had enough electricity in my booty to jump-start the whole of New York City.

In the Bronx I got in the car quick and then they couldn’t say no. Try kicking a girl out of your car unpaid: you might as well suck raindrops from a puddle.

It’s always been the older girls that work the Bronx. All except Jazzlyn. I kept Jazz around for company. She only went downtown now and then. She was the most popular girl on the stroll. Everyone else was charging twenty, but Jazzlyn could go all the way to forty, even fifty. She got the young guys. And the older guys with the real bread, the fat ones who want to feel handsome. They came on all starry-eyed with her. She had straight hair and good lips and legs that went up to her neck. Some of the guys they called her Raf, ’cause that’s what she looked like. If there’d’ve been trees under the Deegan she’d’ve been up there giraffing with her tongue.

That was one of the nicknames on her rap sheet. Raf. She was with this British guy once and he was making all these dive-bomber sounds. He was pumping away, saying shit like: “Here I am, rescue mission, Flanders one-oh-one, Flanders one-oh-one! Coming down!” When he was finished he said, “See, I rescued you.” And Jazzlyn’s like: “You rescued me, is that right?” ’Cause men like to think they can rescue you. Like you got a disease and they got the special cure just waiting for you. Come in here, honey, don’t ya want someone to understand you? Me, I understand you. I’m the only guy knows a chick like you. I got a dick as long as a Third Avenue menu but I got a heart bigger’n the Bronx. They fuck you like they’re doing you a big favor. Every man wants a whore to rescue, that’s the knockdown truth. It’s a disease in itself, you ask me. Then, when they’ve shot their wad they just zip up and go and forget about you. That’s something fucked up in the head.