looking back

she was always a night person. the city, she noticed, never truly became dark. the sky turned pink overhead and all the streetlights, the lights of the public garden, the common, glowed like magical beacons floating in the air. sometimes the city was beautiful at night—especially when monica was tripping on something—all the trails and points of light extending, swirling, sparkling, merging together, connecting the dots over the public garden; darkened statues softly glowing, uplifted, elated, amazing.
other times it was evil and ugly—unnatural. its wild spots were infested with dangerous people; the victory gardens, the beautiful river defiled by fags ass-fucking in the bulrushes, ruining any illusion of innocence or solitude she may have wished to hold to as she beheld them. the people she met every night were always using her for something; never cared that she was a unique person with a brain; would have exploited her if they could know how horribly and painfully alone she felt. she had put herself in this position. still, she felt like she was haunting her own body sometimes.
generally night was fraught with danger: policemen everywhere, rapists, robbers, rip-off artists, sadistic johns, violent and unpredictable associates. monica had to constantly be on guard, in her line of work. drugs never seemed to bring out the best in people, especially crack. since that was what monica lived for, it was inevitable that she would sometimes have to share it with others, although ideally, she did her thing alone in her grimy white-tiled bathroom, outside door barred and inside door locked. then she knew nobody was stealing from her. plus the bathroom had no windows.
monica spent her nights dressed to the nines, trotting around the block in eight inch heels, makeup slathered on her young and pallid face, mouth dry as a bone, heart racing, palms sweating, stomach flip-flopping. you know how hard it is to do decent “work” when you are between hits off a crackpipe? it’s like your saliva glands have been shut off or something, and nothing restarts them for about half an hour after your last puff. bite your tongue all you want, it ain’t gonna help. plus you are half-whacked still from all the other fun chemicals in those rocks, making you about as good a conversationalist as a shrink from the looney bin.
jittery, too, man—disjointed movements, shaky hands—hard to keep your cool with a john like that. sometimes monica just wanted to scream, “come, already yet, you cheap dink so I can get back to my rocks!” but she never did. generally they got off within five minutes anyhow, and were fairly scantily-endowed besides. it may not be the best for unpaid relations, but having a three-inch weenie sure does make for an easy job on the hooker’s part. and sometimes a hooker really deserves a break, all the shit they have to go through.
monica knew about that—she was lucky, because she had managed to stay alive and well through the bad situations she had been in. not everybody does, you know—phil had known a pretty black working girl a few years back who turned up floating in the charles, bound with an extension cord. whoever did that is still out there, most likely—you can pick off whores for decades and stay under society’s radar. ain’t nobody gonna report them missing until their mama does, if she ever bothers.
monica had been robbed a bunch of times. there are two kinds of robberies, as she figured it, in her line of work—those in which money is stolen, and those in which sex is stolen. these are accomplished in any of several ways—various con games, implied threat of force, actual threat of force, and then blatant force. monica had become quickly savvy to the con artists, and she was careful to avoid situations which lent themselves to the other sorts of robbery, but again, in her line of work, such events are just the inevitable price of doing business. convenience stores get robbed; hookers get raped. it happens, you go on. if you can’t deal with it, you aren’t suited to the job.
at least that is what monica thought. after awhile, it doesn’t hurt the same, anyway. with practice, monica became almost detached from herself in such situations, watching things happen to her in relative numbness, as from above. she had learned to take robberies in stride, and the occasional beat bag. beat bags were the hardest, though. all that shit you went through for a chip of soap. fuck that.
in fact, monica never even realized that what happened to her could be considered rape. the thought never crossed her mind until years later, when she saw it discussed in “law and order: s.v.u.” on tv. it was like a revelation. “wow, i got raped, like, a hundred times before the age of twenty.” holy crap, huh. and to think, all the shit some women go through after being raped only once.
of course, monica learned quite soon how to deal with situations in which you are clearly overpowered and cornered. you don’t risk your life for your hookerly chastity, that’s for damn sure! you need not leave the scene of the crime with broken bones if you could get out of it with your health intact, just by smiling and going along with some crazy, mean motherfucker. once, monica turned on the charm for a dude who robbed her at the top of the lonely stairway to the rooftop playground of an elementary school near chinatown. it worked. she got away less $40, with the rest of her money and body intact. plus, she could talk any scumbag into wearing a condom—she had become a shrewd little girl. she’d learned the hard way, though.
once she had woken up with a splitting headache, next to a granite bench in the darkest corner of the public garden. she had vague memories of walking towards the general area, but after that, things faded out. as monica tried to figure out how long she had lain there, passed out from being bashed headfirst into the corner of that granite bench, she looked down and realized that half a ripped twenty-dollar bill was still clenched in her hand. the larger half. she couldn’t help but smile, knowing that she had kept her money, but it didn’t make up for the serious head injury or her being unable to remember a few hours of her life(how many, she was unsure).
still fading in and out of consciousness, she had walked akwardly home and passed out on the bed while her boyfriend phil humiliated her and told her she deserved whatever she got, and that she was stupid to let herself get robbed. monica knew the speech by heart.
that was the last time she had been injured by anyone, though. after that, monica took a more conservative approach. one time, a lady in roxbury whose housing-project apartment monica was smoking in with a nasty fat john, went all batty and started threatening monica with scissors. monica pretended that she didn’t even know that she was being threatened, and because she seemed so sweet, young, and harmless, the woman ended up telling monica she liked her instead of stabbing her.
monica’s apparent innocence was one of her most valuable assets, both with scary people and with perverted johns. she really did look like an overgrown twelve year old girl—innocent face, flat chest, skinny body. she dressed like one, too—seemed to be a turn-on for the guys who came to see her. they always asked for her again. monica had a lot of repeat customers.
of course, she had some other tactics up her sleeve, if the whole sweetness bit didn’t work. when she got kidnapped by a crazy black pimp, she quietly acquiesced while he held her for a day and a half, all the while observing “his” girls(a sad lot they were, too—voluntarily staying in some loser named “chance”’s little harem—isn’t that a name for a dog or something? chance—hah!) and waiting for her opportunity to break out. it came on the second night, in mattapan, when Chancie and she were alone in the basement of the housing project it turned out she was being kept captive in.
she scared the piss out of him, when she turned into a screaming, punching, crazywoman, armed with a large shovel. “chance” left that building so fast, he must have been running the whole way. finally free, monica made her way through mattapan, carrying her shovel, the only white girl for miles around at two in the morning, walking down the sidewalk and whistling a little tune, her tiny short skirt all ruffled up and wrinkled, her shirt half-torn off, smiling because she was free once more. had to do a cab driver for the ride home, but it was worth it, getting out of that dump. plus, the cabbie smoked some nice herb with her afterwards. he was alright.
when she got back onto her home turf at last, it was light out and she had been gone for two days. phil wasn’t home, but monica missed him so much that she went walking around looking for him. she saw him on the sidewalk near FAO schwartz in copley, and was so glad of it that she ran up to him, arms outstretched. phil backed away from her, acting disgusted and unconcerned. monica knew she would have been worried to death if phil had been gone for two days. she couldn’t understand how phil could just not seem to care about her wellbeing.
“did you have fun, partying out there?” phil spat reproachfully.
“fuck you! you know I don’t pull this kind of shit for fun,” monica’s smile wilted and she began to cry—the tears started rolling before she could stop them. how embarrassing. phil snorted. he laughed and kept on walking. apparently, he wasn’t convinced, or he didn’t care—either way, monica shouldn’t have expected anything different from him.
that was what he always did, the prick. monica never got the benefit of the doubt at home—the shit he gave her, she wouldn’t have put up with from some john, that’s for sure; they were always very polite to her, if they knew what was good for them.
phil had been a boy-toy back in his day, living off some fag and everything, just to keep himself in dope. so how come she always got shit when she went out and tried to earn a living for the both of them? it wasn’t like phil had much selling power, nowadays. at twenty-nine, he was just too old to walk the boy-block. plus, he always said he wasn’t gay, though monica sure was starting to have her doubts after a few years with “his highness”.
as far as she could see, she was the one doing him a favor with her continued presence in his life—hell, she didn’t need to buy HER sex, now did she? nobody else seemed to think so…. she could have lived quite comfortably in any old sugar-daddy’s gilded cage in the ritzy suburbs; it wasn’t like she didn’t get plenty of offers, but to her, freedom was far more valuable than money. she could never have left her lover to be somebody’s kinky housepet. just because she was a hooker didn’t mean she wanted to sell her soul.
perhaps that was the main cause of friction in her and phil’s relationship: the one thing that monica was unwilling to do, had, at one time, been phil’s trademark, beginning when he first came to boston from los angeles, back when he was seventeen. he just moved from the drab life of one old fag to the next, when the drugs and money dried up. that made him the ultimate “kept” boy. then he even managed to pull that same scam on some older ladies, in his mid-twenties, just before little teen-queen monica, legal only thru lack of parental reporting, moved into his life. boy, was livin with her a different ballgame—he was certainly not the more sought-after member of his new relationship, and monica detected a hint of jealousy there, if she was not mistaken. poor thing missed his days of being ‘fresh meat’.
monica had seen pictures of him from when he was about her age; god, what a cruel world, to take such a cute young thing and, in twelve short years, turn him into the dude he was today. in some ways, monica was in love with the kid he had been, more than anything. she knew she wanted to reach back into phil’s past, grab that poor sweet child, and save him from himself. that was monica. born and bred with a good alcoholic mommy-complex. only person she didn’t want to save was the one person she could, and that was why she was out there, selling her ass, smoking crack, and chasing around a mean sack of shit, thinking she loved him.
but mornings were always the worst, as monica knew that day long ago, standing, crying, in front of the big brass teddy bear by f.a.o. schwartz. squinting in the harsh sunlight, she followed phil home to their dark basement cave, got stoned on a fat joint rolled from the cheapest of schwaggy low-grade weed, and passed out on the bed, exhausted, looking forward to the evening’s promise of another hit off the old crackpipe. she repeated silently to herself, “this is over, I am here. last night never happened.”
adeptly, she shoved the little vignette as faraway as possible into the back of her mind, with all the other garbage, all the other times that…..but she wasn’t about to pull any of those old horror stories out of the library. she couldn’t, and keep on living. as jim morrison so succinctly put it: “learn to forget.”