Colum McCann - Let the Great World Spin

“It’s not my call, but Albee here wants servicing.”

“I told ya not to tell ’em my name,” shouts the old guy.

“Shut up,” says Corrie, and he walks away.

Then he turns around once more and looks at Angie and says: “Just don’t rob him, please.”

“Me, dice him?” says Angie, with her eyes all starry and shit.

Corrie raises his eyes to heaven and shakes his head.

“Promise me,” he says, and then he slams the door of his brown van and sits inside, waiting.

Corrie turns on the radio real loud.

We get down to work. It turns out Methuselah’s got enough scratch to keep us all going awhile. He musta been saving for years. We decide to give him a party. So we lift him into the back of a fruit-and-vegetable truck and make sure his brake is on, and we take our clothes off and get to dancing. Shaking it in his face. Rubbing him up and down. Jazzlyn’s jumping up and down on the fruit crates. And we’re all naked, playing the Hike! game with bits of lettuce and tomatoes. It’s hilarious.

The funny thing is, the old guy, he’s about nineteen hundred years old at least, just closes his eyes and sits back against his wheelchair, like he’s breathing us all in, a little smile on his face. We offer him whatever he wants, but he just keeps his eyes closed, like he’s remembering something, and he’s got that grin on his mug the whole time, he’s in heaven. Eyes closed and nostrils flaring. He’s like one of those guys who likes just to smell everything. He says to us something about being hungry and how he met his wife when he was hungry and then they crossed some border together into Austria and then she died.

He had a voice like Uri Geller. Most of the time when tricks say anything, we just say, “Ah-ha,” like we understand them perfectly. He had tears rolling down his face, half of them were tears of joy, and half of them were something else, I don’t know what. Angie shoved her titties in his face and shouted: “Bend this spoon, motherfucker.”

Some girls like old guys because they don’t want a lot. Angie don’t mind them. But, me, I hate old guys, especially when they got their shirts off. They got these little droopy tits like icing off the side of a cake. But, hey, he was paying us and we kept telling him how good he looked. He was getting all red in the face.

Angie was shouting, “Don’t give him a heart attack, girls — I hate the emergency ward!”

He let the brake on his wheelchair go and when we were done he paid us all twice as much as we asked. We lifted him out the truck and this old guy started looking for Corrie: “Where’s that pussy asshole?”

Angie said: “Who you calling a pussy, you pussy-ass, shrivel-dick?”

Corrie switched off the radio and came out of his brown van, where he sat waiting, and said thank you to us all, and just pushed that old guy back to his van. Funny thing is, there was a piece of lettuce stuck to the old guy’s wheelchair, inside the wheel. Corrie pushed him to the truck and the piece of lettuce went round and round and round.

Corrie was like: “Remind me never to eat salad, ever ever ever again.” That cracked us up. That was one of the best nights we ever had under the Deegan. I suppose Corrie was helping us out. That old guy was made of cash. He smelled a bit bad, but he was worth it.

Every time I get a piece of lettuce in the prison chow now, I just have to laugh.

The boss matron likes me. She had me in her office. She said: “Open your jumpsuit, Henderson.” I opened it up and let my tits hang out. She just sat in her chair and didn’t move, just closed her eyes and started breathing heavy. Then after a minute she said: “Dismissed.”

The femmes have a different shower time than the butches. That don’t make no difference. There’s all sorts of crazy shit goes on in the showers. I thought I’d seen it all, but sometimes it looks like a massage salon. Someone brought in butter once from the kitchen. They had it already melted down. The matrons with their nightsticks love getting off on it. It’s illegal but sometimes they bring the guards in from the male prison. I think I’d jerk them off just for a pack of cigarettes. You can hear the oohs and ahhs when they come around. But they don’t fuck or rape us. They stop at that. They just stare and get off on it, like the boss matron.

I had a British trick once, and he called it getting me jollies. “Hey, luv, any chance of gettin’ me jollies?” I like that. I’m gonna get my jollies. I’m gonna hang myself from the pipes in the shower room and then I’ll get my jollies.

Watch me dance from the jolly pipe.

Once I wrote Corrie a letter and left it in his bathroom. I said: I really dig you, John Andrew. That was the only time I ever called him by his real name. He told it to me and said it was a secret. He said he didn’t like the name — he was named after his father, who was an Irish asshole. “Read the note, Corrie,” I said. He opened it up. He blushed. It was the cutest thing, him blushing. I wanted to pinch his cheeks.

He said, “Thanks,” but it sounded like Tanks , and he said something about how he had to get himself good with God, but he liked me, he said, he really did, but really he had something going with God. He said it like he and God were having a boxing match. I said I’d stand ringside. He touched my wrist and said, “Tillie, you’re a riot.”

Where are my babies? One thing I know, I used to sugar them up way too much. Eighteen months old and they were already sucking on lollipops. That’s a bad grandmother, you ask me. They’re gonna have bad teeth. I’m gonna see them in heaven and they’re gonna be wearing braces.

First time I ever turned a trick I went and bought myself a supermarket cake. Big white one with frosting. I stuck my finger into it and licked. I could smell the man on my finger.

When I first sent Jazzlyn out, I bought her a supermarket cake too. Foodland special. Just for her, to make her feel better. It was half eaten by the time she came back. She stood there in the middle of the room, tears in her eyes: “You ate my goddamn cake, Tillie.”

And I was sitting there with icing all over my face, going, “No I didn’t, Jazz, not me, no way.”

Corrie was always talking that shit about getting her a castle and all. If I had a castle I’d let down the drawbridge and allow everyone to leave. I broke down at the funeral. I shoulda kept my ’posure, but I didn’t. The babies weren’t there. Why weren’t the girls there? I woulda killed to see them. That’s all I wanted to see. Someone said they were being looked after by social services, but someone else said that it’d be all right, they said the babies got a good babysitter.

That was always the hardest thing. Getting a babysitter so we could hit the stroll. Sometimes it was Jean and sometimes it was Mandy and sometimes Latisha, but the best of them all woulda been nobody, I know that.

I shoulda just stayed at home and ate all the supermarket cakes until I couldn’t even get outta the chair.

I don’t know who God is but if I meet Him anytime soon I’m going to get Him in the corner until He tells me the truth.

I’m going to slap Him stupid and push Him around until He can’t run away. Until He’s looking up at me and then I’ll get Him to tell me why He done what He done to me and what He done to Corrie and why do all the good ones die and where is Jazzlyn now and why she ended up there and how He allowed me to do what I done to her.

He’s going to come along on His pretty white cloud with all His pretty little angels flapping their pretty white wings and I’m gonna out and say it formal: Why the fuck did you let me do it, God?

And He’s gonna drop His eyes and look to the ground and answer me. And if He says Jazz ain’t in heaven, if He says she didn’t make it through, He’s gonna get himself an ass-kicking. That’s what He’s gonna get.