He stood at the old man’s bedside until he was sure it was safe, then carefully unscrewed one of the bedposts. He had the top of it in his hand when he heard Velma’s voice so close behind him he stiffened right where he stood.
‘That one is empty, son,’ he heard her say, ‘look under the hallway rug.’
From under the hall rug he pulled out a flattened parcel of bills and a minute later was losing himself in the shadows of that wide-palmed street.
And when he thought, later, of that strange-lit stair and the rubberish nights and days he had spent there he remembered it like a dream dreamt by somebody else.
Once he went back, out of curiosity, but could no longer find it. And began to wonder whether there ever really had been a place where O-Daddies hung on a wire line above a low-burning flame.
And a reddish dust hung over everything.
That was no town for the aged or the aging. There was love behind the curtains and love behind the doors. Love in the squares and circles and love along the curbs.
Particularly along those curbs west of the Southern Railway Station. Where every window framed some love bird lamed in flight. Where every screen door was a cage. What had been Storyville was now an aviary.
‘Come on in, daddy, we don’t bite,’ they invited the strolling voyeur, or pretended to vie with one another as he passed on. ‘I’ll take him.’
From wheatland and tenement, hotel and harbor, girls and women of a hundred feathers had come to nest both sides of South Basin. Girls downy as chicks who have just lost their mammas and chorus-line dolls who had long lost their down. Girls who came scolding like winter jays, ruffing their tail feathers and ready for battle. But some like little wrens of summer, seeking hollows to hide in forever.
At evening they watched the stricken street from their windows like sea-birds seeing a sunless sea darken and recede.
‘Daddy, if you don’t come ’n get me I’ll just throw myself away!’
‘Daddy, come in, we’ll have great fun’ – but it wasn’t great fun for a woman accustomed to Northern comforts to wake up on Perdido Street with the kerosene lamp burned out in the night, feeling drained and doomed in a stall whose floor looked as if customers might start coming up through the planks. The bedbugs that clung in grape-like clusters to the springs, the cracked enamel basin, the old-fashioned bureau, the greasy portiere that served as a door; the drawling in the hallway and the mosquitoes wanting out, all agreed – ‘Baby, you’ve been had. Baby, you’ve been had.’
Droning all night long.
You’ve been had, you’ve been paid for, you’ve been rented by the minute. Now anything goes no matter how wild so long as it keeps off the Storyville Blues. It was cocaine, it was whiskey – who wouldn’t get the blues? It was brawling in the alleys, it was falling on the floor. It was everything to give and not a thing to lose. It was men, it was gin, it was all night long. It was have a ball and spend it all – ‘Daddy, buy me one more drink and do just what you want with me.’ That was what they called fun on old Perdido Street.
Who wouldn’t get the blues?
Big-town girls found the anything-goes life of the cribs tougher going than the girls from orchards and barns. Farm girls could come on rough as cobs. But the coaltown and cotton-mill kids took to it easiest of all. Hard times didn’t mean a thing to them – they had never known another kind. They weren’t afraid of law, jail or even, seemingly, of infection. The anthractite had entered their hearts.
Every time an operator padlocked a mine or a mill in West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania or Southern Illinois, a fresh flock of chicks would hit town and start turning tricks for the price of a poor-boy sandwich and a bottle of Dr Pepper’s.
They were thin, big-boned girls, and when they fought they didn’t go for the hair or eyes. They went for belly or jaw, with fists. They fought like men. Out-fought, out-drank and out-hollered the farm and city chicks. To name only a few things they did with the greater will.
‘Give us your money – you’re drunk,’ with last night’s gin still crippling their tongues they taunted the teetotaling boys in tortoise-shell specs from Loyola and Tulane. Boys working on sociological theses who’d been told there was fun down on Perdido Street.
‘Professor! Let me talk to you! Did you come down for what I think you come? You just came to look? Girls! Specs came just to look! Okay Professor – look at what brought you here! Same thing that’ll take you away!’ – the women’s shrieks would deride the looking-man down the street and into the winding avenues of all his voyeur’s dreams: curious streets where he walked as the last of earth’s bachelors, hearing window-women snicker as he passed. In those dreams it was always the women’s turn to stare.
Hard lines, hard times, when soft girls grew hard and hard girls grew soft. Wise hands at the trade would invite with a whisper, ‘Daddy, you name it, I’m on my last legs.’ For men sometimes came down there looking for someone to push over the brink or someone to save – it was all the same. Play Christ or play Devil but pay your damned dollar. For two you could play both. For the lion that roars loudest at the bleat of the sheep there was lots of fun on Perdido Street. The sibilant hiss from the narrow dark was for a specialized clientele.
Not-Yet-Twenties bold or humble. Lost or captured, luckless or loose. The dark and the fair from everywhere who would have been safely married in Minneapolis or Seattle, Kennebunkport or San Francisco had Old Guard economics not demanded more Coca Cola love and less housekeeping.
Minnesota girls with hair heaped like ripe wheat: a Northern sun shone yet in hair like that. In the eyes of the girls from San Francisco big slow soundless ocean fogs rolled to their final shore.
Behind the eyes of the Oregon girls it was raining again in Portland. Somehow it was always raining behind the eyes of Oregon girls.
Girls with Western turnings in their talk and girls with the midland twanging. Who wore their hair long like Anna Q. Nillson or braided like Ann Harding’s. Bobbed or banged or flowing to the shoulders, rose-red girls or sallow, they wore their hair in all the styles, they softened their mouths in all the wiles that good girls did.
Sick or silly, maimed or strayed, fresh-fallen leaf or sear, the Storyville hustler chattered as cheerfully about husbands and wives, washday and landlords, lost chances and chances left as the good girls did. And kept souvenirs of their luckier hours, lockets and albums, letters and rings, exactly as good girls did. If she had married a ponce now doing a stretch, the girls who had married legitimate men felt a twist of envy toward her – but isn’t that what good girls often did?
She borrowed from one boyfriend to give to another, betrayed those who had helped her in order to do a stranger a gratuitous favor, let some pander debauch her as though she were something that ran on all fours and all the while had some mark completely convinced that she wouldn’t go to bed with a man to whom she wasn’t legally wed though he hung jellybeans on pineapple trees. Now wasn’t that just how good girls occasionally did?
Good girls and bad carried on so much alike, in the cheery old summer of 1931, a Yankee might well have been deceived.
The Southern boy was a bit harder to fool. The moment he saw a girl behind a door screen naked to her navel and lifting her breasts, he sensed something was up. When she did a slow spread-legged grind and threw in a blinding bump for good measure, he suspected it wasn’t free. When she opened the door and said, ‘Step in, I don’t bite,’ he went in, of course, out of simple courtesy. But he wasn’t fooled: she was after his money, that was all. No, it wasn’t easy to fool a Southern boy any summer.