Authors: Lawrence Block
I just took a walk around the neighborhood and I felt like a complete stranger. Not just since the abortion, but when I was tricking uptown I found myself spending less and less time around here.
I guess there’s no real point in having an apartment down here anymore.
I wonder where Eric is. And Susan. People keep walking in and out of my life. He might be around—I haven’t been here to answer the phone.
I could go over to his apartment and ring the bell and see what happens. But I won’t do that because I’m afraid he might be there.
There’s an argument for moving. I would just as soon be unfindable by him.
Though I have this irrational feeling that if he really wanted to find me there’s no place on earth I could hide. Like he has this all-seeing eye. I know it’s nonsense but I can’t dismiss the feeling.
There’s a vacancy coming up as of the fifteenth in Liz’s building. The superintendent showed it to me this afternoon. Just one room and a vestigial kitchen. The bathroom is big enough to turn around in if you plan your moves carefully in advance. Not a bad view, though, of Fifty-fourth Street.
It’s two hundred and ten dollars a month, and I have to take it as of the fifteenth, and my place downtown is paid through the first, not to mention the security, so there’s a lot of money I’m throwing away. But the hell with it, I’m taking it.
If the super had his way he’d rent to no one but whores, according to Liz. She told me how much she gives him at Christmas, and the doormen, and everybody else connected with the place. She really throws money around, and as a result they fall all over themselves to do her favors and open doors for her, and of course she has no hassle about men coming to her apartment. The respectable tenants, meanwhile, sometimes have to wait three months to get a leaky faucet fixed.
I went crazy yesterday and made a hundred and thirty-five dollars.
I met Howard yesterday. Walking downtown on Lexington between Forty-eighth and Forty-seventh. He was walking uptown, I was walking downtown. And there he was.
Talk about awkward.
Miss Plastic Tits was nowhere to be seen. He was alone, carrying that attaché case that I used to think was welded to his hand. We just stopped in our tracks and stared at each other, each waiting for the other to be the first to say something. When we finally started a conversation it went something like this:
“Well, what do you know.”
“Well, hello.”
“I always wondered when I’d run into you, Jan. A few months ago there was a time when I kept thinking I saw you around town, but I would look and it was never you. You’re looking good.”
“Thank you. You look good yourself.”
“You’ve lost a lot of weight.”
“I’ve been gaining a little back lately.”
“Well, you look good.”
“Well, I—”
“I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Actually I have an appointment.”
“I said I’ll buy you a drink. We have some things to discuss, Jan.”
“I have this appointment.”
“I’ll make a scene.”
“Huh?”
“Listen, bitch. You walked out without looking back. You gave me some bad nights, bitch.”
“I’m sorry about that. Let go of my arm.”
“I will like hell let go of your arm. We have some things to talk about. I want a divorce. I don’t want to wait to talk about it until we happen to run into each other again. No, you can’t brash me, Jan. I’ll raise my voice, I’ll attract attention, I don’t really give a damn.”
“You want a divorce?”
“I’m sure it’s impossible for you to believe that anybody could want a divorce from you. Jesus, you’re sick, do you know that? You’re a sick person, do you know that?”
“Of course I know it.”
“Huh?”
“I don’t especially want a drink, Howard. We can go across the street for coffee. All right?”
We went across the street and had coffee. He had to have my lawyer’s name and address. That was nice, except I didn’t have a lawyer.
“Just a minute.”
“You’re not going anywhere yet.”
“Oh, fuck off, Howard. I have to make a phone call. I won’t go out of your goddamned sight.”
I called Liz. She was back at her place and had just finished turning the first trick of the day. She works a lot by telephone, and gets morning people quite frequently. She calls them the coffee-break crowd.
“Who’s my lawyer?”
I told her why I wanted to know, and she told me the name of her lawyer, who she said is reasonably good. Jason Silverblatt. I love that name. I like to write it, the way it looks on the page. Jason Silverblatt. Jason, wherever you are, whoever you are, I’d ball you for free. I love that name.
“Jason Silverblatt,” I told Howie, and gave him the address. He wrote it all down. “And what else is there to say besides
See my lawyer?
“I want your address and phone, too.”
“Up yours.”
“I don’t see how in hell you’re the injured party, Jan. Why come on so strong?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re the one who walked out. Not after a fight, not because I did anything that I know about. You just walked out.”
“I know. You were right before, I’m a bitch.”
“Well, people have problems.”
“Problems. Are you getting married again, Howard?”
“Eventually, I suppose.”
“I mean is that why you want the divorce?”
“Oh. No.”
“Just to get it over with, I suppose.”
“To get rid of loose ends.”
“Sure.”
“There are some girls that I see, one more than the others, but I suppose I’m a little reluctant to get too deeply involved with anybody right now, Jan. Once bitten and all that.”
“Sure.”
“Well, I don’t want to keep you—”
“We might as well finish our coffee.”
“All right.”
So we sat there and finished our coffee, but nothing much else got said. And then he paid for our coffee—poor men, they always pay for everything. And we went our separate ways.
I haven’t even called Silverblatt myself yet. I suppose I ought to. I told Liz I don’t want any alimony from him, or even anything from the house. She told me to take a cash settlement then.
“If you don’t take it, you’re throwing money away. You know what you could get? About half of what he earns from now until the day you remarry, and you’re not going to remarry.”
“But I’ve treated him badly enough already.”
“Men and women always treat each other badly. It’s a law of nature.”
“You know, I think that might be true.”
“Of course it’s true. Would I lie to you? Listen, at least talk it over with Jason Silverblatt. I’m sure you can get five or ten thousand dollars in cash just for signing a paper saying
good-bye, Charlie.
”
“I looked at him today and I wanted to take him home with me.”
“You’ve got the hots for him all of a sudden? For your own husband?”
“No, it wasn’t that. A pity thing, I guess. He looked so pathetic.”
“Terrific. You screwed him up and you feel sorry for it and now you want to screw him up some more.”
“I know it doesn’t make sense. That’s why I didn’t do anything about it. It was just an impulse.”
“You have to watch these impulses.”
“I know.”
“You take the money. He had the best years of your life, the son of a bitch.”
Maybe she’s right.
I had an orgasm whipping a John.
I thought it would be impossible to come with a John. It isn’t. Every once in a while one of them gets to you. Of course they never know the difference, because you fake it anyway, so it all comes to the same thing.
I don’t too much love the S-and-M stuff. I had this one a few days ago who wanted his balls spanked. That was what he wanted. I was supposed to suck him into a state of magnificent erection, then take my mouth away and hold his cock out of the way with my one hand and slap him across the scrotum with the other until he got his gun. He kept wanting me to hit him harder, and I was certain I was going to hit him too hard and ruin him for life. I kept hitting him and eventually he got where he was going. He shot all over himself, the hair on his chest and everything. I let him take a shower, the poor son of a bitch.
This one today, it was more ordinary. I whipped him with his leather belt across the behind. Maybe because I wasn’t touching him and he was just whimpering quietly I was able to trip way out on my own private thoughts and associations, and I got into various similar experiences I had had, things with Susan and Eric, and it got to me, and surprise! I came.
It’s funny when that happens when you didn’t expect it.
The weather has been really impossible lately. It’s just too hot to breathe. Of course the apartment is air-conditioned and so is Liz’s place but even so the heat has to get to you. You take one step out of doors and you literally wilt.
You would think, or at least I would think, that the men would wait for cooler weather. Who wants to screw in weather like this?
But nothing stops them.
I can almost pay Liz back already. Not for the kindness, that will take a long, long while to pay back, but for the actual cash.
It constantly amazes me how much money there is in this line of work. There is really a tremendous amount of money involved. I keep thinking about those jobs I once considered, five days a week of nine to five for a hundred and ten dollars a week.
Girls prettier than I am have jobs like that, and for what? Self-esteem?
Still no break in the heat.
I keep thinking, when I’m with one man or another, that here’s one I’ll want to write about in my diary. A couple of times I find myself sitting down determined to write about one of them and then I change my mind and don’t write anything at all, I close the book and go out or go upstairs and talk with Liz or something.
Evidently I don’t want to write about them.
I guess what it amounts to is they cease to have anything going for them, any aura, that has sufficient impact upon me to leave me with something I have to get rid of by getting it all down in pen and ink. I mean getting it down in black and white. Pen and ink is what I use to get it down in black and white. (Except that the pen and ink are sort of a stable entry, this being a ball-point pen, so that when you’re out of ink you’re out of pen. And the ink is more blue than black. Technology kills clichés.)
Today is the day I’m officially delinquent in my rent down in the Village, which is nothing to worry about since I moved out of there two weeks ago. I wonder what happens now. Is the sculptor hung for the dough because it was a sublet? Well, if he’s in Bolivia or wherever the hell he went to, I don’t see how they can bug him for it. Let them worry.
You know what I miss most about the place? That there were a few dozen cheap restaurants close by that you could go to without worrying how you were dressed. Little Chinese and Italian and Spanish places you could go to in slacks. Here it’s either plastic coffee shops (home of the dollar eighty-five hamburger!) or class restaurants where you have to be dressed and you wind up spending ten dollars, and you feel awkward going there alone anyway.
All in all, though, I like it better here.
I had a nice high last night. I had a John during the afternoon, an advertising man who decided that he would rather bitch than screw. Mainly about his wife and his ingrate kids and life on Long Island, the whole suburban trap. By the time he got around to balling I was very depressed.
Why, I wonder. I guess there were just too many echoes, it was as if he was Howard talking to me, or even a male version of me talking to me. I don’t know. He brought me down very badly and I didn’t see anyone else that afternoon and didn’t go to the bars that evening.
Around ten the phone rang. It was Liz asking me to come on up if I had nothing better to do. What I had plenty of was nothing better to do, and I went.
She gets this sensational grass from one of her steady Johns. He’s something in advertising or public relations and he’s also a constant pot-smoker, and he’ll come over now and then and get high with her and leave her a couple of ounces of grass because he buys in quantity and has it to spare, and then she’ll fuck him for free. Tit for tat, you might say.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ll get high.”
“I don’t know.”
“You look like you could stand it.”
“I could. I’m so low.”
“Anything special?”
“I don’t know. Looking in mirrors. I don’t know. I had a trick that was a real bringdown.”
“Something he made you do?”
“Something he said.”
“I know the type.”
“No, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t bad mouth me. It was, oh, he got me thinking. I don’t want to talk about it, it’ll just get me deeper into it.”
“So we’ll get high and cure all that.”
“The last time I got high all I got was low.” The last two times, actually. I had bad-tripped, thought I was dying, having a heart attack, everything. Very scary. “The mood I’m in, who knows where it’ll go?”
“I will guarantee a good trip.”
“How?”
“Simple. First we smoke, then we take us some ups. Nothing easier.”
“I thought speed and grass were a bad combination.”
“Then so are carrots and peas. Believe me, Jan, would I do you a bad turn?”
“You wouldn’t.”
“Because we love each other like sisters, right?”
“Right.”
“And even more.”
“Right.”
“And believe me, I am very anxious to ball you. I am very anxious to do something related to sex that doesn’t have a man or a dollar involved in it. Let’s smoke.”
“Sure.”
“Gimme a cigarette.”
I told her she only likes to smoke with me because I have the cigarettes. I gave her one and she dumped all the tobacco out and replaced it with grass. We smoked it in deep desperate drags. I started to feel it almost instantly and knew it was going to be good.
We got giggly high and laughed about everything. Liz got us each a small handful of pep pills and we washed them down with wine. They were Dexamyls, with the Dexedrine balanced by a tranquilizer so you don’t get too paranoid or jittery. I swallowed them and drank a little wine and smoked a tobacco cigarette and sat there waiting for the ups to hit. They hit like little bombs going off in the forehead. Kapow! Kapow!