When the white rain ran with the red-lit rain and Perdido Street doors stood wide. Where here and there, between dance hall and dive, some nightingale stood with the weight of her shame so fresh upon her that she couldn’t as yet invite someone even though she hadn’t that day bitten food.
(Nobody knew where these silent girls came from. Nor whether their eyes, searching inward, saw a disheveled and bloodstained bed or a new cash register. Whether they were eaten alive by regret as they stood or merely counted in indifference to everything: one dollar, two dollars, three and four, when I get eight I’ll get me a dress of tropical pink. When I get twenty-two I’ll get pink slippers too.)
Birds of a hundred varied feathers, hooters, hissers, howlers, quackers – it was a new kind of zoo wherein the captured foraged for themselves.
Some were feebs and some were loonies, some were tattoed girls. There were peep shows and side shows, fat girls and gawks and a dwarf who called herself the Princess.
There weren’t enough keepers to handle the stock. Panders who had never had more than two women tapping, found themselves without enough windows to go around. Five or six all yammering at once for her turn at door or pane, vying with one another to be top broad for daddy.
It was a daddy’s market, but daddy had to take care all the same.
Oliver Finnerty, ex-exercise boy and currently proprietor of six peepholes on the second floor of Spider-Boy Court, once having incurred a debt of ninety days to the parish jail, had turned over a girl to a friend in the trade for safekeeping. Oliver had expended a great deal of time and thought on this child, for he’d seen her promise early. He had told her, ‘Baby you go with this man, and when he says, “Walk pretty,” you walk pretty all the way.’ And to the friend: ‘Don’t whip her where it’ll leave her marked, or she’ll use it as an excuse for laying off work. Now good luck and God bless the both of you.’
Ninety days later, his debt paid in full, Finnerty had returned to reclaim his property only to find her wearing a long black dress and a pince-nez, and his colleague out digging ditches. Something had gone wrong. Finnerty had had to spend that whole day talking the girl back into her lounging pajamas. By the time the friend returned from work, a black lunch bucket under his arm, Finnerty’s patience had been exhausted.
‘Just look what you done to his girl,’ he berated the Benedict Arnold of Panderdom. ‘You took a nice sweet kid and twisted her all up. You undone all my good work.’ Then he raised the girl’s hair off her neck and began cracking her patiently, without hatred or heat, but mechanically, with contentment in a job he was the right man for. And like a good little whore she stood and took it, for she knew very well she had it coming. And that, once done, she had a chance for full pardon.
But Benedict Arnold would never be pardoned: when this sort of thing happened it wasn’t the girl’s fault. Now he could only sit mute and miserable, knowing he’d never be allowed to drink among honest pimps again. But would instead drink in crumb-dump taverns where working men play dominoes for nickels and envy those who get to work on Saturday too. Oh, if only Oliver would give him one more chance!
Oliver wouldn’t violate his principles. When the whipping was done, the pince-nez crushed and the long black dress in the garbage can, he turned to his ex-colleague and finished him crisply. ‘You. Pick up your lunch bucket and get back in your ditch.’
Dishonored, disbarred, a disgrace to right-thinking procurors, the Man-Who-Would-Be-A-Pander shuffled wearily, without a word of goodbye, out onto a street that other lunch buckets had laid long ago.
And was never seen in respectable circles again.
Finnerty, who looked like one of those little Australian foxes with ears half the length of its body, claimed to be five foot but had to be wearing his cowboy boots to make good the boast.
‘Aching Chopper’s giving me trouble again,’ he would complain of the girl who had been with him longest, the moon-faced Chicago blonde. ‘I know she been faithful as a broad can be but her teeth give me trouble. It’s a new plate now near every month. I’m supporting half the dentists in town.’
‘If you’d stop busting her in the mouth you wouldn’t have to support that many,’ the mulatto woman once called Lucille suggested.
Oliver owned five women, a single-motored plane and a captive mouse. He claimed to be the first pander in the entire South to transport women by plane. A claim making every single one of the five proud of their five-foot daddy.
He’d crowd all five into the single motor, deposit one on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, two near Hammond (where a fast track was operating at the time) and take the other two to Gulfport. To the women he pretended that his motive was to save time, but to his brothel brothers he readily admitted that the idea was really to save listening to all that yakking – ‘I can’t bear to be with one broad a whole half day, not to mention five.’
He had the identical weakness, as a pilot, that he had had as an apprentice jockey. He’d get so high on Panama pot that he couldn’t make up his mind. On a horse he had never known whether to go for the whip or tighten rein so that sometimes he had done both at once. In a plane, with five silly women high as himself and every one giving him orders, he wouldn’t be able to decide whether to land on roadway or grass. The road burned up the plane’s tires so badly it would mean a new set – but the risk of flipping over on the grass, inviting loss of his working principal, was even greater.
The second the women saw that Daddy was in the switches, they fought to be first to help. One would decide for the roadway and grab for the stick simply to have her own way. But one of more economical habits, wishing to say later she had saved him a whole set of tires, would scream right in his ear, ‘Idiot! On the grass! The grass!’ At the very last possible second he would holler, ‘I can’t please everybody,’ fling out both fists and make earth in a shrieking, careening lurch like a chute-the-chutes hitting water. Road or grass, the women loved it. It was a kind of thrill not another pimp living could provide. Small wonder that to say ‘Finnerty swings her’ afforded a girl real distinction among the women of Perdido Street.
The mouse was one that had barely gotten away from Hallie’s lame brindle cat. The cat, that belonged to one woman who would have nothing to do with Finnerty, had been going on three legs so long that it no longer killed, it crippled. After she had crippled it, the mouse had dragged itself into a corner behind the juke. Finnerty had fished it out and given it a home in a little box with a cellophane window that had once held face powder. When he had to induct a new girl, or to straighten up an old one growing recalcitrant, he took her to watch the mouse. His own face would be expressionless as he and the girl saw it trying for freedom in spite of all pain. He said nothing while it hauled its wrecked hindquarters around and around. Just as it seemed the animal had made good its escape at last, he would plop it back in its box and say to the girl, ‘When you get as much sense as this mouse we’ll get along better, little baby,’ and close the box. It was a warning that she ought to try to do better by her little daddy, lest he had to put his mittens on.
‘Daddy dear,’ his Chicago blonde once complained, ‘take me to the hospital, I got to get a little something or other took out.’ And leaned her head on her hands.
‘I can’t afford to be carting you in and out of operating rooms twice a month,’ her pander told her, ‘every time you go you’re out of action for days. One more visit and by God you get everything took out. Make up your mind to that, Aching Choppers – I said everything. This piddling around with part of a gut at a time disgusts me.’