“Yeah, well, I got horny,” I said.
“Let’s drink to that,” Bruno said, waving his glass.
I turned away from Bruno to listen to Tommy’s cri de coeur pouring out over the stoned dive after midnight. I had a new status: I was a whore. In other words, past human redemption now, I didn’t have to be nice to anybody. Bruno sensed that he had been dismissed and retreated sideways again, guiding his drink along the length of the bar, back to his pals in the corner.
What I told Bruno about being horny was true as far as it went. In fact, I was chastened over the past year by the persistence of my desire. When I left the scene, I had been in a fury, a sweet, blind rage at men. I was tired of being pretty and playing a minor role. During the year that followed, I took to wearing hiking boots and a motorcycle jacket, I stopped shaving my legs and under my arms, and I joined up with a group of radical feminists who published Gutter. I practically never went to bed with anybody during that time, since, after a few abysmal experiments and to my dismay, I was clearly an irrevocable heterosexual. Too bad, especially when so many of my colleagues were gleefully coming out. And then, not long ago, my libido started to rise like a gorge inside of me, ripping up into my brain, until all I could think about was getting a man, and I didn’t care anymore whether I, the self, the person, was obliterated in the process. I needed rapture I decided, and fuck equality and fuck justice.
I had to come back. I missed Michael. Beyond that, I was a city kid who was used to hanging out. By the time I was thirteen, I was standing around with other delinquent teenagers on Madison Avenue street corners. There, as I posed coyly in front of Hamburger Heaven, I learned how to congregate. This is what I craved: the scene. Plans that normal people made, God, it was too much like work.
Having turned around to face the room, I leaned back with my elbows propped on the bar and, in my old black crepe dress, tried to convey the languorous attitude of a call girl. After a while, Michael removed his earphones. I was about to go over to his table when Melissa sailed in, dressed as usual in her halter top and cutoffs, her wild red hair shooting off in all directions, her scarecrow gait exaggerated-sloppy from quaaludes. She, too, had originally intended her destination to be Michael’s table, but, her head leading the way, she overshot the mark. Windmilling by, Melissa lurched instead into the middle distance, somewhere perilously close to the stage.
“Just another falling sparrow,” Michael said, sniffing the air, as she careened past him.
“The honeymoon’s over,” I said to myself. “Now I’m going to have to compete with this cunt. Well, fuck it. Maybe I won’t. Let him have her. Yeah, let the motherfucker wet-nurse her back to life all by himself.”
“Serves him right,” I said out loud as I twisted my body around to face Jimmy. I had eaten no dinner; the two Dexamyls I swallowed hours ago, before I turned my first trick, were starting to wear off, and Jimmy had already refilled my glass with barely diluted scotch. I was pretty drunk.
Eventually, Tommy Shelter stopped playing, gently laid his guitar down on the stool, climbed off the tiny stage, and began moving through the crowd in my direction. Right away, Michael was up pumping quarters into the jukebox, which was crammed with sleeper hits he had recorded off his favorite albums at a friend’s sixteen-track studio. A work of art, that jukebox. Michael panicked when there was no music. Keith Richards started singing, “You got the silver, you got the gold...” in his reedy voice. The smoke curling in the air seemed to be turning into incense, an ethereal blue. The whole room lurched into a downbeat rhythm. A kind of benign knowingness settled over the crowd, as if we had all been quietly blessed.
“You look fine, healthy. Your skin has a glow to it. The break from this scene did you good,” Tommy said, taking my elbow in his palm. He was wearing a long, flowing dashiki. He could’ve been some visiting African dignitary.
“What’ll you have?” Jimmy asked him.
“Oh, I don’t know, just a ginger ale,” Tommy said politely, modestly. “Would you like to come outside for a minute for a smoke?” he asked me, still cradling my elbow.
His bodyguard, Nighttrain, had moved up behind him, hugging the guitar now in its case, and was standing at his back.
“Sure,” I said.
The three of us stepped outside. Michael had followed us as far as the doorway. He kept peering at us until we disappeared around the corner. We were worthy of stares from any quarter: two black men, one in an African dashiki, the other one in loose overalls, and me in my cocktail dress. It was late and dead quiet, except for the sound of crickets chirping in the potted trees. Tommy lit up a joint. We passed it around for a while, gazing at the shiny pavement, wet from a brief shower, which shone green, red, green, red, under the changing walk/don’t walk light.
“Do you want to come home with me?” Tommy asked.
Nighttrain ignored us and stood watching the empty side street.
“The last time I went to your house, he was there the entire time, right in the room with us,” I said, nodding in the direction of Nighttrain.
“Let’s go to your place then.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have a place right now. Crashing at my mother’s house. As a matter of fact, I’m looking.”
“That’s no problem. Let me think, there’s Jade, but no, she’s too street for you. I know, Sigrid, just right! She’s got a big pad on the West Side, right off the Park. I’m sure she’d put you up for a while if I asked her,” he said. “Oh, Sigrid, she’s a dream. You two will get along, I promise you.”
“Is she straight?”
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, she likes boys, right?”
Tommy laughed. “Right,” he said.
“That’s good, ’cause my last roommate kicked me out for being straight,” I said.
“Don’t worry, those days are over,” he said, sounding as if he knew.
Tommy took my number, or rather, my mother Maggie’s number, and promised to call. He didn’t ask me to go with him again. That impressed me.
After we finished smoking the reefer, which on top of the booze knocked me out, Tommy Shelter and Nighttrain took off, while I, sensing I was about to vomit and hoping to make it to the privacy of the toilet, marched myself back inside.
“Get up, get up!” my mother screamed, alarm in her voice, as she shook me. “It’s Saturday afternoon already. You’ve been sleeping since you got home yesterday. I thought maybe you were dead. Hurry up, somebody’s on the phone.”
I turned over. “What’d you say?”
Maggie continued to shake me. “I said there’s a call for you. Says his name is Tommy. Tell your street friends I don’t want them calling here. I don’t want them making their drug deals on my phone.”
I jumped out of bed and started running to the phone in the big front hall. On the way I said, “Mother, that’s Tommy Shelter, the singer, the one who was at Woodstock, you know?”
“Oh, no, I didn’t know,” she said. But she sounded chastened, even impressed. After spending her youth in the theater, she still worshipped fame, secretly of course.
“Hi, Tommy, sorry it took me so long, I was crashing.”
“Your mother told me. She said you’d been asleep since yesterday.”
“She told you that? What a pal, huh?”
“Don’t worry about it. You can get out of there now.”
“Really?”
His low voice was soothing. I hung on to the receiver and started to nod. I was dreaming.
“Janet,