Mat Johnson - Drop

I got bit. Lord have mercy, got bit two times. Got all excited about the first one, planning my office and running off to the travel store on 22nd Street to search for Lemonlight’s address in an A-Z (I could take the Circle Line to the Victoria Line from Durban Road, Back to Brixton, Back to Brixton). When, boom, I come home two days later and there’s another letter in the box asking for Christopher. This time, a major player. Sublime Advertising. Ain’t that something? Both letters with the same message for me: interested, possibility, make an appointment when I cross the Atlantic, soon. Look at that. Two pieces of paper from fairyland, one for each back pocket. All I had to do was win the Lionskins contest, collect the prize money, get my ticket, and the world was mine again. As tight as she probably was, Margaret would probably buy me a ticket if she knew that prize money was coming to pay her back. So, again, all that was left was doing this. All that was left was to win.

Selling men condoms was too easy. There was so much shit out there you could catch, it was a wonder boys didn’t have them grafted to their foreskins. A book in the library, amid the section on infectious diseases, featured a whole centerfold of clinical shots of inflicted genitalia. Thick multicolored secretions, pus-filled blisters, painful bloated distortions as virus-mutilated flesh. There was one disease that bore canals from your urethra through your dick’s head. They showed a picture of the afflicted taking a piss. The top of his cock shot liquid from twenty different holes like a sprinkler. Forget death, that shit was scary. If I could have, I would have had that photo scanned and laid out. Even the British ad council wasn’t that lenient. What I needed was an image that invoked the same unmentionable dangers of unprotected sex without resorting to shameless scare tactics and putting people off their tea. More than that, what was needed was an image that could put forth the unquestionable ‘reality’ that Lionskins was the only condom to get the job done. An image that immediately represented sex, illicitness, and expertise of the intimate. It was hooker-hunting time.

Clive was a big help: he was the only one in the office not pissed at me since they found out my check was the sole one that cleared. Lack of funds had forced him into detox; broke never looked so good on a man. Reggie, on the other hand, was coming back from lunch with nothing to eat but a bag of barbecue potato chips and a peach soda. He wouldn’t even look at me. Loose, well-worn Help Wanted sections from the Daily News and Inquirer were strewn carelessly around the office, but nobody had quit so far. A job you might get paid at was better than no job at all.

Clive provided me with a thirty-minute lecture on the history of prostitution in the Delaware Valley, not stopping till Natalie sat down next to us and he got embarrassed. There were five-hundred-buck-an-hour hookers doing private visits on the Main Line, there were two-hundred-dollar-hookers in brothels on Race and Vine that you could look up in the phone book, there were fifty-dollar-an-act hookers on Spruce Street after ten o’clock, and there were five-bucks-a-tag crackheads under the El in Kensington. When I told Clive what I was planning, and my price range, he suggested buying a token, head over to Kensington tonight. Monday was usually slow, they might even lower their price to three bucks a pop.

Alex hooked me up with equipment, making me promise on the grave of my moms that I would get it back intact. From her crib, I walked down to the El on 46th Street past homes that begged to collapse, shedding paint and splinters and concrete chunks the size of cupcakes. On their porches sat clothes, newspapers faded by light and rain, and poor people. Hair sticking out over their heads like black cotton candy (if you took it into your mouth, it would taste like the popcorn on the floors of movie theaters). Looking back at me walking down the street, too broken even to pace their cells, knowing nothing I can do (dance, sing, give out free cigarettes) is going to change that.

On the El, I sat alone, pretending to be too bored to be mugged, arms folded across my lap and my head down. By my feet, liquid ran along the black grooves of the flooring, ebbing to and fro with the momentum of the car. I kept touching the camera to tell myself that it was still there, rubbing my finger over its smooth sides until the plastic was warm and I felt like I could bend it like a tin spoon.

We were aboveground, then we were underground in Center City and screaming through the hollow, then we were back aboveground again, in the white ghetto now, among the white hungry folk. Ghetto to ghetto, negro to trash, and all for a dollar fifty. Forget the Chunnel.

Kensington? This isn’t Kensington. The real Kensington was down Notting Hill, over from the Royal Albert. Kensington was travel agents taking you anywhere in the world, the backyard of the queen, cute little shops and American tourists young and loud and buying things. Philly-Kensington was all wrong. It was people with bad skin and brown cooked teeth and thin gold chains, hair forced to attention high over female heads and violent boys with harsh mouths. Hooded sweatshirts covered with flannel shirts, jeans too tight and sneakers too dirty (but still brand-name, baby). Mouths spitting out ‘you’se’ and ‘we’se,’ a community subject to its own internal grammar. This is a place where niggers die, where field reporters come on TV talking about tragedy and then interview neighbors who stand in the cold and say ‘It’s a shame’ in steamed vocals into the camera, then rush home to see themselves on television for the first time. Front Street, under the blackened frame of the El tracks. I walked for near an hour, determined to either get the picture or get mugged. Streetlights extinguished by gunfire or shame provide bubbles of darkness, sections between functioning poles where reality was soft and crack ghosts haunted. Cars came down the road and crack hos emerged from the shadows like cats to can openers. Clusters of them, hiding in the vacant lots and buildings that lined the road, waiting in shadows, whispering to their habits that the next headlight was going to be the one. Dreaming about a bit of cash, a taste of food, another pebble in the pipe to remind them why it was all worthwhile. Me walking down the street was nothing to them because tricks came in cars and I was too big to rob, weak as they were. If they had ever had a gun or knife they would have smoked it by now. Buy now. More love. Suck it down with a Bic lighter.

I needed one alone but couldn’t get them to come out, and I was scared to get close to a group for fear of being pulled into the darkness by a collective of bony hands. Getting desperate, when the next car pulled up and one of the creatures climbed inside, I followed it around the block to the alley between 2nd and 3rd. A close distance behind, listening for the footsteps I expected to come after me, I waited in the doorway of an abandoned deli for the car door to open, for the crackhead to emerge. The vehicle actually bounced. As soon as it was still, the white Buick opened its big-ass wing and she got out. Drinking water out a Pepsi bottle as she walked my way. I stepped towards her.

‘Excuse me, miss?’ My voice weak from hours of neglect and fear. I cleared my throat. She jumped. Aqua blue velour V-neck with grease stains on stomach and black denim cut-offs (its gray strings bouncing when she did). She was a man, I could see from her neck, and from her feminine walk. The real women out here moved like stiff-kneed infants on their first strut.

‘Watchu want? I didn’t do nothing,’ she whined, stomping her foot down.