31. A Desirable Job, continued (2021)
After the sweeping license fell through, Lottie had one of her bad spells, sleeping up to fifteen hours a day, bullying Amparo, making fun of Mickey, living for days on pills and then demolishing the ice-box on a binge. In general she fell apart. This time it was her sister who pulled her out. Living with January seemed to have made Shrimp one hundred per cent more human. Lottie even told her so. “Suffering,” Shrimp said, “that’s what does it—I suffer a lot.” They talked, they played games, they went to whatever events Shrimp could get freebies for. Mostly, they talked; in Stuyvesant Square, on the roof, in Tompkins Square Park. They talked about growing old, about being in love, about not being in love, about life, about death. They agreed that it was terrible to grow old, though Shrimp thought they both had a long way to go before it got really terrible. They agreed that it was terrible to be in love but that it was more terrible not to be. They agreed that life was rotten.
They didn’t agree about death. Shrimp believed, though not always literally, in reincarnation and psychic phenomena. To Lottie death made no sense. It wasn’t death she dreaded so much as the pain of dying.
“It helps to talk, doesn’t it?” Shrimp said during one magnificent sunset up on the roof with rose-colored clouds zooming by.
“No,” said Lottie, with a sour. here-I-am-again type smile to say to Shrimp that she was on her feet and not to worry, “it doesn’t.”
It was that evening that Shrimp mentioned the possibility of prostitution.
“Me? Don’t be silly!”
“Why not You used to.”
“Ten years ago. More! And even then I never earned enough to make it worthwhile.”
“You weren’t trying.”
“Shrimp, for God’s sake, just look at me!”
“Many men are attracted to large. Rubens-type women. Anyhow I only mentioned it. And I was going to say that if—”
“If!” Lottie giggled.
“If you change your mind. January knows a couple who handle that son of thing. It’s safer than doing it as a free lance, so I’m told and more businesslike too.”
The couple that January knew were the Lighthalls, Jerry and Lee. Lee was fat and black and something of an Uncle Tom. Jerry was wraithlike and given to sudden meaningful silences. Lottie was never able to decide which of them was actually in charge. They worked from what Lottie believed for months was a bogus law office, until she found out that Jerry actually belonged to the New York State Bar. The clients arriving at the office behaved in a solemn deliberate way, as though they were after all here for a legal consultation rather than a good time. For the most pan they were a son of person Lottie had had no personal experience with—engineers, programmers, what Lee called “our technologically ee-leete clientele.”
The Lighthalls specialized in golden showers, but by the time Lottie found this out, she had made up her mind to go through with it, come what may. The first time was awful. The man insisted that she watch his face the whole while he kept saying, “I’m pissing on you, Lottie. I’m pissing on you.” As though otherwise she might not have known.
Jerry suggested that if she took a pink pill a couple hours beforehand and then sank back on a green at the start of a session it was possible to keep the experience at an impersonal level, as though it were taking place on teevee. Lome tried it and the result for her was not so much to make it impersonal as to make it unreal. Instead of the scene becoming a teevee screen, she was pissed on by one.
The single largest advantage of the job was that her wages weren’t official. The Lighthalls didn’t believe in paying taxes and so they operated illegally, even though that meant charging much less than the licensed brothels. Lottie didn’t lose any of her regular MODICUM benefits, and the necessity of spending what she made on the black market meant that she bought the fun things she wanted instead of the dull things she ought to have. Her wardrobe trebled. She ate at restaurants. Her room filled with knickknacks and toys and the fruity reek of Fabergé’s Molly Bloom.
As the Lighthalls got to know and trust her, she began to be sent out to people’s homes, often staying the night. Invariably this would mean something beyond golden showers. She could see that it was a job that she could grow to like. Not for the sex, the sex was nothing, but sometimes afterwards, especially on assignments away from Washington Street, the clients would warm up and talk about something besides their own unvarying predilections. This was the aspect of the job that appealed to Lottie—the human contact.
32. Lottie, in Stuyvesant Square (2021)
“Heaven. I’m in heaven.
“What I mean is, anyone if he just looked around and really understood what he saw … But that’s not what I’m supposed to say, is it? The object’s to be able to say what you want. Instead, I guess what I was saying was that I’d better be happy with what I’ve got, cause I won’t get any more. But then if I don’t ask for more … It’s a vicious circle.
“Heaven. What is heaven? Heaven is a supermarket. Like that one they built outside the museum. Full of everything you could ever ask for. Full of fresh meat—I wouldn’t live in any vegetarian heaven—full of cake mixes and cartons of cold milk and fizzies in cans. Oh, the works. And lots of disposable containers. And I would just go down the aisles with my big cart in a kind of trance, the way they say the housewives did then, without thinking what any of it was going to cost. Without thinking. Nineteen-fifty-three a.d.—you’re right, that’s heaven.
“No. No, I guess not. That’s the trouble with heaven. You say something that sounds nice but then you think, would you really want it a second time? A third time? Like your highway, it would be great once. And then? What then?
“You see, it has to come from inside.
“So what I want, what I really do want… I don’t know how to say it. What I really want is to really want something. The way, you know, when a baby wants something? The way he reaches for it. I’d like to see something and reach for it like that. Not to be aware that I couldn’t have it or that it wasn’t my turn. Juan is that way sometimes with sex, once he lets loose. But of course heaven would have to be larger than that.
“I know! The movie we saw on teevee the other night when Mom wouldn’t shut up, the Japanese movie, remember? Do you remember the fire festival, the song they sang? I forget the exact words, but the idea was that you should let life burn you up. That’s what I want. I want life to burn me up.
“So that’s what heaven is then. Heaven is the fire that does that, a huge roaring bonfire with lots of little Japanese women dancing around it and every so often they let out a great shout and one of them rushes into it. Whoof!”
33. Shrimp, in Stuyvesant Square (2021)
“One of the rules in the magazine was that you can’t mention other people by name. Otherwise I could just say, ‘Heaven would be if I were living with January’ and then describe that. But if you’re describing a relationship, you don’t let yourself imagine all you could and so you learn nothing.
“So where does that leave me?
“Visualize, it said.
“Okay. Well, there’s grass in heaven, because I can see myself standing in grass. But it isn’t the country, not with cows and such. And it can’t be a park, because the grass in parks is either sickly or you can’t walk on it. It’s beside a highway. A highway in Texas! Let’s say in nineteen-fifty-three. It’s a clear, clear day in nineteen-fifty-three, and I can see the highway stretching on and on past the horizon.