how many of her there are. The first time she tore me apart. I
bled and bled.
*
Women want her. So do men. She fucks everyone. It is always
easier for her to than not to. She has perfect courtesy and rare
grace. She is marvelously polite, never asking, never taking,
46
until licensed by an urgent request. Then she is a hooligan, all
fuck and balls.
*
She is slightly more reserved with men. When a man fucks me,
she says, I am with him, fucking me. The men ride her like
maniacs. Her eyes roll back but stay open and she grins. She is
always them fucking her, no matter how intensely they ride.
Me I get fucked but she is different, always just slightly outside
and on top: being him, fucking her. The men are ignorant and
entranced.
*
She dresses like a glittering boy, a tough, gorgeous boy.
She is Garbo in Queen Christina but run-down and dirty and
druggy, leaner and tougher: more used: slightly smelling of
decay and death, touched by the smell of the heat and the
smell of the piss and the smell of the men: but untouched
underneath by any human lust not her own.
*
She is ardent and intense, entirely charming, a grimy prince of
the streets, tough and fast: destitute and aloof, drawn to the
needle: edging toward the needle: but she fucks instead most of
the time: she likes the needle though: you can see it in her eyes,
all glazed over: she stops grinning and her lips get thick with
sensuality and dirty with greed: she loses her courtesy: she is
finally taken over: the needle is not her fucking her: it is something outside her fucking her: and she dissolves, finally. I could lose her to this. I never think about losing her or having her,
except around the needle. It is the only thing I am afraid of. I
would do anything for her. I want to shoot up with her: her do
it to me, tie the rubber thing, heat the spoon, fill the needle,
find the vein, shoot it up. She demurs politely. She keeps away
from it: except sometimes: she does not draw me in. She does
it away from me: with other lovers: now and then: glassy-eyed
and elated: not aloof but ecstatic: sated: when no one could
even see, from day to day, that she had been hungry.
Or I couldn’t see.
Or she wasn’t: the needle just gutted her with pleasure: so
afterward, in retrospect, one inferred that there had been a
lack, a need, before the needle: but in fact she had been complete before and now was simply drenched in something extra: 47
something exquisite, heavy and thick like some distilled perfume, sweet to the point of sickness, a nauseating sweetness: something transporting and divine: something that translated
into eyelids weighed down and swollen, lips puffed up, the
cracks in them spreading down, the body suddenly soft and
pliant, ready to curl, to billow, to fold: a fragile body, delicate
bones suddenly soft, eyes hiding behind lush eyelids: the hard
tension of her hips dissolved, finally. The way other women
look when they’ve been fucked hard and long, coming and
coming, is how she looked: the way other women look fucked
out, creamy and swollen, is how she looked. The needle gave
her that, finally: dissolved.
*
The jazz club is on a rough street, darker even than ours. It is
low down in a cellar. It is long and narrow. The walls are
brick. The tables are small, brown covered with a thick shellac,
heavy and hard, ugly. They are lined up against the brick walls
one right next to the other. You have to buy two drinks. There
is a stage at the end of the long, narrow room. Jazz blares,
live, raw: not the cold jazz, but belted-out jazz, all instruments,
all lips and spit. There is no chatter. There is no show. There
is just the music. The musicians are screaming through metal.
Or there is waiting—glasses, ice, cigarette smoke, subdued
mumbling. The music is loud. No one talks when the musicians
are on stage, even when they stop for a minute. Everyone waits
for the next sound. The smoke is dense but the sounds of the
horns punch through it and push it into the brick. We are
listening to the legendary black musician who according to
some stories turned Billie into a junkie. I am wondering if this
is as awful as it seems on the surface and why it is whispered
in a hushed awe. He is a sloppy musician by now, decades
later. He is bent over, blowing. He is sweating like a pig. His
instrument screams. There is not a hint of delicacy or remorse.
The music rouses you, the volume raises hackles on your skin,
the living, breathing sound makes your blood jump, but the
mind is left bored and dazed. Other musicians on the stage try
to engage that lost faculty: they solo with ideas or moods,
some sadness, some comic riffs. But the legend blares on,
interrupts, superimposes his unending screech. We can only
afford two drinks but the legend makes us desperate for more:
48
to take the edge off the blowing, blowing, blowing, the shrill
scream of the instrument, the tin loudness of his empty spasms.
The set ends. We want to stay for more. It is live music, jazz,
real jazz, we want as much as we can get of it. We cannot
come here often. The two required drinks cost a lot. We are at
a small wooden shellacked table against a brick wall. On one
side is a bohemian couple, dating nonetheless. On the other
side, the direction of the stage, is a man. He is huge. His
shoulders are broad. He is dressed very straight, a suit, a tie, a
clean shirt, polished shoes. He is alone. I hate his face on sight.
It has no lines. It is completely cold and cruel. There is nothing
wrong with it on the surface. His features are even handsome.
His skin is a glistening black, rich, luminous. He is lean but
nevertheless big, broad-shouldered, long, long legs. His legs
can barely fit under the small table. He is solitary and self-
contained. He has been watching N. He offers us drinks. She
accepts. They talk quietly between sets. I can’t hear them, don’t
want to. I can see something awful in him but she is fascinated.
I can’t name it. His expression never changes. It shows nothing.
I am instinctively afraid of him and repelled. N listens to him
intently. She looks almost female. Her body softens. Her eyes
are cast down. The music starts. He leaves. The legend sweats
and blares and spits and screams. He is even sloppier now,
more arrogant too, but we are drunker so it evens out. We