The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
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Copyright © 2017 by Janet Capron
Image Copyright © 2017 by Leland Bobbé
ISBN: 978-1944700423
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940509
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover Photograph by Leland Bobbé
Cover design & typeset by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of creative nonfiction.
Names, identifying details, and places have been changed.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
In loving memory of my mother
Contents
Author’s Note
PART I
Initiation
The Traveling Medicine Show
Escape
No Frills
Waiting
The Visit
City Island
Mystery Plays
Outcast
Highcrest
PART II
Highrise
Felix’s
Makeover
The Comanche
Bordello
The Gentleman Player
Slim’s Wide Missouri
Love in the Afternoon
A Short Engagement
Covenants
Casa Pacifica
The Mohican
Island of Women
PART III
Eddie Apollo
Gravity Knife
Hopheads
The Rescue
End of the Line
Foxhole
Blackout
Park Bench
Another Rescue
Bellevue
The Wake
Epilogue
About the Author
I grew up on Park Avenue with my mother and a series of live-in maids. My grandfather, a retired liberal newspaper publisher and quixotic champion of the workingman, supported us in style. I mention my grandfather not only to show the source of my mother’s and my good fortune but also to help the reader understand my fall from grace. I translated his lifelong fight for the underdog to mean I should become the underdog. I went to a good private school and to camp in the summer, and spent Easter vacations at my grandparents’ winter home in Palm Beach. But I was destined to join, for more than a decade, the ranks of the marginal and despised.
By the time I got to a progressive women’s college in the mid-sixties, I was drunk almost every day and barely functioning. The dean of students seemed genuinely sorry when she had to ask me to leave. I started to rebel more pointedly after that, experimenting with drugs in addition to booze and exploring radical feminism, all of which took me to the threshold of the time of this book—the summer of 1971.
Blue Money is a memoir written in the guise of fiction. Everyone’s name has been changed except my own. While the book is drawn directly from my life on the streets of New York City in the seventies, a few characters are composites and timelines may not be entirely accurate.
In spite of these novelistic details, all of Blue Money, at its heart, is true.
Well, you search in your bag
Light up a fag
Think it’s a drag, but you’re so glad
To be alive, honey
Live, honey
Say, when this is all over
You’ll be in clover
We’ll go out and spend
All of your blue money
Say, when this is all over
We’ll be in clover
We’ll go out and spend
All your blue money
Blue money
Juice money
Loose money
Juice money
Loose money, honey
What kind of money, honey
Juice money
Loose money
Blue money
Van Morrison
The doorman tipped his hat. That was strange. I was seven blocks south on Park Avenue, seven short city blocks from my mother’s house, my childhood home. I thought it was odd, too, that I was wearing the old, low-cut black crepe cocktail dress with little capped sleeves my mother had bought for me at Miss Bergdorf’s more than five years ago on my eighteenth birthday. The length of my dress came just to the knee, no longer fashionable in 1971, but I didn’t mind. I told myself I looked like one of those gamines in a black-and-white New Wave movie. I was glad to be who I was that evening in mid-August: no coat, no wrap of any kind, no gloves obviously, no stockings even. Just lots of pink lipstick. Anyway, the doorman deferred to me here as my own doorman Joe—seven blocks north, on the same side of the avenue, too, the east side—had never done. “Take that ball around the corner, gowan now, get.” Joe had more important things to do than mind kids was I’m sure how he saw it. He was still there, over twenty years. Well, Joe certainly never tipped his hat to me, and I would have been shocked if he had. Now, here I was, about to turn my first trick—I was a whore, or about to become one any minute—and the doorman, who had been instructed in advance to let me up—who, in fact, conveyed hookers to 17D on a regular basis—was treating me as if I were a lady.
My tongue was sticking to the roof of my dry mouth, and the palms of my hands were damp. I was actually shivering, and not from the air-conditioning. I was crazy with nerves, in a stage-fright frenzy. Even so, the exquisite symmetry, the beautiful irony,