Her Mother's Daughter (77 page)

I had told Sonders I was going out at six the next morning, and he said “You fucking are not,” and I said “I fucking am.” And he said he was no such idiot as to get up in the middle of the night, and that he'd check out the areas I photographed later. I gave him a copy of the schedule I'd made up, but warned him I might deviate from it if I saw something special. He said, “You do that, girlie. You can fill me in tomorrow night. I'll meet you at the bar at ten, like tonight.”

I left before six the next morning in a rented car and got some great shots of sunrise over Flushing Bay, with sailboat masts in the distance near a few little houses still left along the water. I shot alleys and cracked sidewalks and old windbeaten trees and a bench, still and empty in the first light. I worked my way around the bay, searching for picturesque spots the researchers hadn't noted. Then I drove east along Little Neck Bay, sometimes getting out and walking, shooting as I went.

After lunch in a diner, I drove west to Flushing, then southwest to Forest Hills, the Gardens, not the section where I'd lived once upon a time, and then down to the water again, Jamaica Bay this time. It was getting late, the light was going, but I could not stop myself from driving into South Ozone Park and looking for my old street. The neighborhood was now completely colored; most of the trees were gone, and the houses were in disrepair. The house we'd lived in had been resided in asphalt shingles imitating brick. The hydrangea bush was gone, and so were the poplar trees that had bordered the backyard. Black boys wandered through the empty streets looking angry, and I locked my car doors. There were as few cars on the street now as there had been when I was a child—only a couple of dented, rusted cars left to rot in driveways. It was sadder than ever—no
World
shots here.

I was morose and frustrated by the time I reached Howard Beach—which had been on my schedule for the afternoon—and the light was no longer good. I walked down to the beach, but there was nothing interesting, or maybe I just wasn't in the mood to see what there was. So I drove back to the city, and fell asleep the minute I got to my room. I didn't awaken until 8:30—I'd forgotten to ask for a wake-up call—so again I just called room service for a hamburger.

Sonders wanted to check out some joints in Brooklyn. He'd gotten hold of a book called the
Amboy Dukes,
so he had me drive us to Amboy Street which is in Greenpoint or Williamsburg or Red Hook, or someplace. The population here was different from last night's—younger and rawer, just as hard-surfaced, but somehow less corroded inside. But the consequence of the softer inside was that these guys were trigger-happy, ready to offend or take offense at almost anything. I felt we should have had a bodyguard, but of course the mighty man mocked my fears, claiming to have wakened up bruised in alleys many times, and to have nothing but contempt for someone like me who was, as he elegantly put it, “a scaredy cat.”

I calmed my fear by concentrating on my work, and it is true I got my best pictures in these dumps—smelly, dark, grotesquely lighted, noisy with jukeboxes, tough talk, and Sonders slurping black Russians or rusty nails or whatever his drink was called. I used color film to catch purple shadows on the sides of young smooth faces, or the crimson cheek and neck on a fat one, the color of smoke drifting around heads like dispersed halos. I had brought my small telephoto lens, so I could get close-ups of people without their being aware of the camera—although of course, we had to get releases from everyone I shot. But, whatever my success, I didn't want to remain there any longer than I had to, and when Sonders started to whine and bully me to stay on for a nightcap, I said in a voice as tough as any around us that I was driving back, with him or without him, and he came meekly enough. He didn't realize I didn't know how to find my way back to the city alone.

I spent the next morning in Staten Island, which is still countrylike, really rural in places. It would be an ideal place to live if the trip there took less time. I even saw cows grazing, and a house with chicken coops. I drove around leisurely, deviating considerably from my list, and chuckling vengefully about the feet that Sonders would have to spend an extra couple of days finding the places I was shooting.

That night Sonders wanted to “do” the Village, and we went in a cab. There was a more interesting population down there, largely homosexual men and lesbian women who mostly did not look like drunks or addicts—although some people did—but just as if they liked to dress differently from the rest of the population. I got some interesting eccentric shots: women in twenties' outfits with turbans on their heads, women dressed in men's clothes, men dressed in women's and wearing makeup, and worn-faced Negro musicians, and quiet types who hung over their glasses as if they were drinking Pernod in Paris in 1925.

It came to me that many of these people were
acting
—not for us, not for anyone perhaps, but for themselves. And then I thought that maybe the kids on Amboy Street were acting too, acting out an image—and maybe the crowd on Seventh and Eighth were too. But if that was true, was there anyone who
didn't
act? Who lived the way they lived because they wanted to live that way, enjoyed it? Or did everyone act, just taking their images from different sources? Did
I
act? What about all those people in Penn Station, those men in suits, all alike? Was Sonders acting? This thought disturbed me, so I dropped it.

Sonders had plans to meet some friends for drinks at two, in a jazz club on Bleecker Street that stays open until four. His pals began showing up around one-thirty, while I was still shooting, and by the time I was finished, and went over to him to tell him I was leaving, there were four men and five women sitting at a scarred and shaky round wooden table with him. Sonders had to introduce me. The men stood up as they were introduced. All of them were journalists, I'd heard their names. One of them, Mike Boyle, dark, heavyset, and thick-faced, leered broadly. This was no doubt Sonders's first intimation that there was anything about me that anyone might find attractive, and his eyebrows shot up and he invited me to sit down. I excused myself—I was tired, it had been a long day, I'd been up since five. But Boyle grabbed my arm, and Sonders wanted to please his friend, so growled, “Wattsa matter, we're not good enough for you,” and I felt coerced and joined them.

The talk was of cities and city editors on large newspapers. The men talked to each other, in a kind of guffawing shorthand, spattered with banter. They did not address the women at all, nor had any of them been introduced. I looked directly at them, wanting to smile and introduce myself, but they were all focusing on the men, and never looked my way.

“Yeah, old Baldy Salvucci, remember him?” Sonders was yelling. The men laughed loudly, repeated fondly, “Sure, old Baldy Salvucci.” They continued to speak about old Baldy, although what it was that made him noteworthy, I could not tell. “Baldy was bald at fifteen,” Sonders continued, “balder than Joe here!” Great rounds of laughter.

One of the men got up to use the john, and I moved into his chair, which was on the women's side of the table. I introduced myself to them: “I'm afraid we weren't introduced, I'm Stacey Stevens.” They smiled and told me their names, showing no annoyance at all about the failure of courtesy. But then I didn't know what to say. I fell back on work: “I take pictures for
World,
what do you-all do?”

They-all were in journalism too—one did obits, two wrote “Lonelyhearts” columns, one covered society events, and one was a secretary who had worked for the
Daily News
for thirty-two years, and knew everything about everybody. They started to talk about the differences in working for various New York newspapers—differences in editorial policy, and editorial personalities. The men went on with their banter, ignoring us. The man whose chair I'd stolen sat happily down in mine—the table was now divided, four men on one side, six women on the other. Boyle was telling a story about a thirty-five-year-old stewardess with a cunt as big as a bucket who went around lamenting her dissatisfaction until she met a big black male stripper named Ten-and-a-half. Such howling went on throughout this story that the women were drowned out, and turned to look at Boyle, all smiling sweetly. When he was through, I turned to the woman next to me. She was the secretary, about fifty, with flaming red hair set so the curls stood up by themselves like tiny fingers.

“That man is really disgusting,” I said in a low voice.

“Oh, I don't know,” she said sweetly, nevertheless managing to convey her disapproval of me. “He's such a poor soul.”

“How can you say that when he talks the way he does? I suppose you have to deal with guys like this all the time, but I don't know how you stand it.”

She looked at me as if I had just made an anti-Semitic or anti-Negro remark. “Oh, I don't think that about them. Not at all! I only hear their pain, their yearning, their suffering!” She smiled benevolently at the bastards on the other side of the wooden board.

And I thought: yes, and those guys couldn't be such bastards if the women weren't complicit.

Sonders was really drunk by now, his head nodding slightly. The other men had their heads close together, and were howling about something. Sonders directed his gaze to the women.

“Whattya think, when I'm finished with this stupid job, should I take the plane or the train back to Chicago?” he asked loudly.

The women stopped talking. They gazed at him. They glanced at each other. One asked him what his problem was—short of money or time? Where exactly in Chicago did he want to end up? He rambled on about the fucking airlines, exorbitant rates (I knew
World
paid his plane fare). They advised him to take the train and returned to their conversation.

He nodded, his head bobbed, he yelled loudly to the waiter for another drink. He turned again to the women.

“Lissen, whattya think, should I take the train or the plane back to Chicago?”

Again the women stopped, looked, listened, and advised. Again they returned to their conversation.

This sequence was repeated, with only slight variations,
six
times. By then, the men were looking at their watches, declaring important destinations. It became clear that the women had been brought along and were not there on their own, for when their men stood up, so did they. Boyle left with the secretary
and
the obit writer. I tried to imagine the three of them naked in bed together, but it was so unattractive a picture that I banished it.

“Let's go,” I said to Sonders.

“'Nother drink,” he slurred. He waved his hand over my glass as if that would suffice to refill it.

“I'm going.”

“Who's better, men or women?”

I was startled. “I thought we were equal,” I said prissily. My mind was whirring, trying to outthink him: where was he heading now?

“Men!” he announced, inadvertently spitting in passionate assertion. “Men are better, you know why? There's this eighty-year-old man can still get it up, my friend tells me, not just for her but for two of the other girls too, friends of hers, you know. They laugh and pat him on the back when he finishes, pretty good, huh? But women are finished at sixty. All men want big firm tits, firm asses. Who cares if they're young and stupid, callow. Now a nice mellow thirty-five-year-old, you might take her over a young one. I'm not saying youth is everything. But a woman of sixty—her tits are hanging down, her belly's slack, who wants her? She's finished. But a man of eighty, he can still get it up!”

I leaned back in my chair. Sonders's wave had summoned a waiter and another drink. I gulped it. I couldn't speak. The whole evening revolved in my mind. I felt I was living in a version of hell, yet everyone around me, everyone in the world, was smiling and saying “Sure, sure. Right,” like the bartender that first morning in the Oyster Bar. I took another gulp. I leaned toward Sonders.

“Your comparison is illogical,” I said in a quietly lethal voice. “You can't compare unlike things—men's desire for older women with potency in an older man. You don't ask if women desire eighty-year-old men. You don't consider that if there were male prostitutes, women could also
get
it off at eighty!”

He didn't hear me. His eyes were wandering around the room idly, seeing nothing. They returned to me.

“I got three girls, you know? My special friends. Two of them are nineteen, one is eighteen. Nice and firm and ripe, you know, sweet. And they know their place. Whenever I want, I just call and they're there, day or night. If they're out and I call, they come in for me, ah, they're sweet. And Nichi, I call her Nichi, she's a Jap, she's exquisite, what skin she has, she's the best. And they know me, see? So they know what to do. See most of the time I can't get it up, it don't work right, see? and they really are great, especially Nichi, and they never try to make me feel bad, they make me feel good, they know how, see, they know their business.”

I stared at him: this was the tough guy, the manly man? But of course he can't get it up, he's always drunk.

Still, he was not ashamed, that was something, I admired that. On the other hand, he was so drunk who could tell whether he was ashamed or not?

We left the club together, and I had to sit in a cab with him stinking of booze and me terrified that any minute he was going to vomit all over me or the cab. I handed him a list of the areas where I intended to photograph the next day—the Village and Harlem. Actually, I tucked it in his handkerchief pocket since I doubted he would remember tonight tomorrow. He staggered off to find out if the hotel bar was still open, and I headed for the elevator. Halfway across the lobby, he stopped and turned and called out to me in a plaintive, frightened voice: “Hey, Stevens!”

It was the first time in our time together that he had called me by anything resembling my proper name: usually he addressed me as “girlie.” I stopped and turned.