A raspy yet youngish voice answered—“Oh, thank gawd someone is fucking calling, I need to rent this shithole ASAP”—and told Lucy to come over right away, not that she guaranteed anything, they had to get acquainted before she signed on to living with someone she didn’t even know.
“Okay,” Lucy said. “Can you tell me how to get there?”
“You know the Chinese laundry place with the big cat in the window?”
Lucy said she did not know.
“Right off Tompkins Square Park, the place with the cat? Still no? Jesus, what are you, new here?”
“Yes,” Lucy said shyly. Yes she was.
“Tell you what,” the voice said. “Just get to Avenue B and Seventh Street, I’ll come down.”
Despite the ridiculous heat and the difficulty of the suitcases, the walk to Jamie’s was thrilling. There was the feeling that a school bell had just been rung and everyone had rushed out of their classes and into the streets, and they were now out to partake in whatever the world could offer them. There were incredibly short-shorts and there was incredibly large hair. One woman’s torso was entirely exposed aside from one band of her unitard that covered each nipple; she also wore a large black hat. There was UNIQUE CLOTHING and COMING SOON EAST VILLAGE VIDEO and BEST PORN IN TOWN XXX. Everything — walls, telephone booths, sidewalks — was painted on or marked, in unfamiliar, intriguing scribbles that said cryptic things like DESTROY or LOVERS WANTED. She passed a place called the Aztec Lounge, where a sign read: REFRESHING! ECLECTIC! SOOTHING COCKTAILS! ANCIENT AMULET KEEPS OUT DEMONS! This both frightened and excited her, and she wondered what demons lived here that would require an ancient amulet to keep out.
Lucy wove among the new streets, unnoticed. The feeling of it — of not being recognized or watched — made her giddy and terrified. She could do whatever she pleased. She could take any turn. She could write on a wall herself, if she wanted; who was there to see her besides all these people who didn’t care? There was no Mick telling her to sweep the floors and no mother asking when she would be home. She could answer an ad she found blowing in the wind. Everything awaited her. The buildings soared. Kids played in the streets in their underwear. She was arriving. This was her arrival.
Jamie, who was standing on the corner in what looked to be lingerie, was smoking the longest and thinnest cigarette Lucy had ever seen. Though it was only 10:00 A.M. and she was still in her sleep clothes, Jamie’s lips were already painted a bright red, the same red as the paper kiss. Lucy had lugged her suitcase what seemed like a hundred blocks, and the sweat trickling from her armpits was making its way down to the waistband of her jeans, which, faced with Jamie, seemed highly unfashionable. Jamie was all legs and lipstick, wearing an intimidating musk perfume, and Lucy wondered if her trail of fate had failed her, if she should follow this woman at all. But then again, she did need a place. And a hotel would be expensive; she had only her mother’s quarters, a book of checks linked to a new bank account she had started with the money she’d made at Mason & Mick’s: twelve hundred and fourteen dollars, which seemed like a lot until you began to calculate how long it would actually last. She smiled tentatively and followed smoking Jamie upstairs, watching her black, skimpy chemise work its way up the stairs and up her thin thighs.
The stairwell smelled of urine, paint, and cigarettes: the New York stairwell smell. Not the Idaho stairwell smell (old wood, mud, pine). Then she thought: but Idaho doesn’t even have stairwells! Had she ever been in a stairwell? This thrilled her: a new physicality; a new layout for her life. “Hope you’re in the market for a walk-up,” Jamie called back to her. Lucy smiled. Walk-up. This was her new language. These stairs were her new portal.
“Welcome to Kleindeutschland,” Jamie said breathlessly when they got upstairs, to a dismal, white-walled apartment furnished with nothing but an old orange couch, whose material reminded Lucy of a clown’s suit.
“Thank you,” Lucy said nervously, not understanding Jamie’s reference, but not wanting to seem stupid by asking about it.
“Little Germany,” Jamie clarified. “This street? Used to be the German Broadway. The storefront downstairs? Used to be a cobbler. Now, of course, it’s a porn shop. Personally I like to imagine the Germans phasing in to the new biz. You know, cobbling dicks for a living.”
Jamie laughed roughly as she inhaled on her cigarette. Lucy forced herself to laugh a little bit, too. She pulled her suitcase into the tiny room — closet-size, with no closet of its own — looked up at the ceilings, which were, oddly she thought, made of tin, indented with a flowery pattern. A crack ran from the central light fixture down to the bedroom’s door, where it was dead-ended by a loose piece of finishing. The crack made Lucy feel nervous, and then, as she followed it down to the floor, where a glinting black bug scurried around the baseboard, she was pushed into full-blown panic. She looked to Jamie for some sort of explanation, but her new roommate was unfazed.
“The love shack,” Jamie said dryly. “Space for a bed, and hey, that’s all ya really need, right?”
Love shack? Dick cobbling? Enormous, foreign insects? Lucy felt the blood drain from her face. She felt as white as the paint on the walls. Cracked as the paint on the walls. Hair as bright as the moon out the window of the plane that got her here. That one window to open. She did, impressing herself with her decisive action, how easily the glass shot upward. Hot air flooded in. Wood floors covered in splatters of paint. She stood in her new home.
Jamie pulled a cigarette from her blue-and-white pack and held it out for Lucy. She took it, slowly, and put it in her mouth. She had never smoked a cigarette before, and had never wanted to. But now, with no one watching her, it felt exciting and novel and right. The flame of Jaime’s match moved toward her; she could feel the heat on her face. Jaime lit the bright white end of the cigarette and Lucy inhaled.
“So tell me everything,” said Jamie. Her voice had changed almost entirely, from intimidating to intimate, nearly sexy, her face so close to Lucy’s as she blew out the match. Lucy felt the panic again — what could she possibly tell this woman, this woman wearing practically nothing but lipstick, who had most likely heard every story ever told, seen everything there was to see? But Jamie smiled suddenly, and there was a gap in her teeth, and the gap told Lucy things were going to be okay.
“What do you want to know?” Lucy said, taking another drag.
“Just everything,” Jamie said. “Everything you’ve got.”
This is how New York began. A willingness, and then a pause. An attitude, a confidence, and then this: cracked walls and huge bugs, your first cigarette, the taste of your own fear. Fear not for what might be in store but for what might not be, that your bravery, which looked so big in your hometown, would not amount to anything, that New York City would not deliver on its promise, for something grand and glamorous, unknown and unknowable. Suddenly it was as if everything you knew about space before (the V-shape of a highway that went on forever, expansive wooden decks, backyards that never ended, the shapes between the leaves where the sun filtered through and made stars) has been discarded, put in a box that you cannot unlock until you go back.