Chip Harrison Scores Again

One

At first i didn’t pay very much attention to the guy. I was washing my hands in the men’s room of a movie theater on Forty-second Street, and in a place like that it’s not an especially good idea to pay too much attention to anybody or you could wind up getting more involved than you might want to. It’s not that everybody is a faggot. But everybody figures everybody else is a faggot, so if you let your eyes roam around you could get (a) groped by someone who’s interested or (b) punched in the mouth by someone who’s not interested or (c) arrested by someone who’s a cop.

If any of these things happened I would have had to leave the theatre, probably, and I didn’t want to. I had already seen both movies, one of them twice, but I still didn’t want to leave. It was warm in the theater. Outside it was cold, with day-old snow turning from gray to black, and once I went out there I would have to stay out there, because I had no other place to go.

(Which is not entirely true. There was this apartment on East Fifth Street between Avenues B and C where I could stay if I really had to. Some friends of mine lived there, and while it wasn’t exactly a crash pad they would always let me have a section of floor to sleep on and a plate of brown rice to eat. They were into this macrobiotic thing and all they ever ate was brown rice, which is very nourishing and very healthy and very boring after not very long. I could go there and eat and sleep and even talk to people, although most of the people you found there were usually too stoned to say very much, but the thing was that I only had a quarter, which is a nickel less than the subway costs. It was too cold to walk that far, and it was just about as cold inside that place as it was outside, because there was no heat. My friends had been using the stove to heat the place. That hadn’t worked too well in the first place, and it worked less well when Con Ed turned off the gas and electricity for nonpayment. They burned candles for light and cooked the rice over little cans of sterno. A couple of times Robbo had burned old furniture in the bathtub for heat, but he had more or less given this up, partly because heating the bathroom didn’t do much for the rest of the apartment, and partly because there was a good chance the whole building would go up sooner or later.)

The point of this is just that I was washing my hands and not paying much attention to anything else until I happened to notice this guy take a wallet out of his pocket and start going through it. He was sort of hunched toward me, screening the wallet with his body from the washroom attendant, who I think existed to make sure that if anybody did anything dirty, they did it in one of the pay toilets. The guy with the wallet went through all the compartments of the thing, taking out money and plastic cards and things, and jamming everything into his pockets. Then he put the wallet in another pocket, took out a comb, combed his long dark hair back into a d.a., and left.

I turned and watched him, and on the way out his hand dipped into a pocket and came up with the wallet and dropped it into the wastebasket. There was this huge wastebasket on the opposite side of the door from the washroom attendant, and the guy with the d.a. did this whole number in one graceful motion, and the attendant never saw what happened.

I have to admit that it took me a minute to figure this out. Why would a guy throw his wallet away? And why be so slick about it? I mean, if you grow tired of your wallet, you have a perfect right to throw it away, right?

Oh. It wasn’t his wallet. He was a pickpocket or a mugger or something, and he had emptied the wallet, and now he wanted to get rid of it because it was Incriminating Evidence.

How about that.

My first reaction was just general excitement. Not that I had been an eyewitness to the most spectacular crime since the Brink’s robbery. I would guess they get more wallets in those wastebaskets than they get paper towels. In fact, if you ever want a used wallet, that’s probably the best place to go looking for one. But my own life hadn’t been that thrilling lately, and it didn’t take much to make my day.

The next thing that struck me was that I, Chip Harrison, had just been presented with an opportunity. A small one, perhaps, but I was as low on opportunities as I was on excitement. And that wallet was an opportunity.

It might hold important papers, for example. You might argue that people with important papers in their wallets don’t spend all that much time in Forty-second Street movie houses, but one never knows for sure. Perhaps the owner would pay a reward for the return of the wallet. (Perhaps he’d call the police and have me arrested as a pickpocket.) Or perhaps there was some small change in the change compartment, if there was a change compartment. Or a subway token. Or a postage stamp. The Post Office won’t redeem unused stamps, but at least I could mail a letter, if there was someone I wanted to write to. Or perhaps — Well, there were endless possibilities. I mulled them over in my mind while I was drying my hands on a paper towel, and I looked at the attendant and at the wastebasket, and then I went out and combed my hair again. I had just done this before washing my hands in the first place and while my hair tends to need combing frequently it didn’t really need it now. But I was about to Take Advantage of Opportunity, and thus I had to Think On My Feet.

I dried my hands again, and I carried the used paper towel over to the wastebasket, keeping the comb in the same hand with it, and I dropped them both into the basket.

Then I took a step or two toward the door, stopped abruptly, made a fist of one hand and hit the palm of the other hand with it.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “I dropped my comb in the wastebasket.”

“I seen you,” the attendant said.

“All the stupid things.”

“You want another comb, there’s a machine over on the side.”

“I want that comb,” I said.

“Prob’ly dirty by now. You wouldn’t believe the crap they throw in those baskets.”

“I think I can get it.” I was leaning into the basket and pawing around through old Kleenex and paper towels. The wallet had plummeted through them to the bottom, and I was having a hell of a time finding it.

“Over there,” the clown said helpfully. “You see it?”

I did, damn him. I pawed at some paper towels and made the comb slip away. “Almost had it,” I said, and went diving for it again. I had my feet off the ground and was balanced rather precariously, with the edge of the can pushing my belt buckle through my stomach. I had visions of losing my balance and winding up headfirst in the trashcan, which might provide some people with some laughs but which wouldn’t provide me with the wallet, the comb, or much in the way of self-respect.

And self-respect, at that point of time, was as hard to come by as excitement, opportunity, and money.

I kept my balance and after another few shots I got the wallet. I can’t swear that it’s the same wallet I saw go in. For all I know there were a dozen of them somewhere down there. I got a wallet, palmed it off, and slipped it inside my shirt, and then I had to go through the charade of getting the fucking comb. It just didn’t seem right to leave it there.

On my way through the lobby I dumped the comb in yet another wastebasket. And did it very surreptitiously, as if I were, well, a pickpocket ditching a wallet. Which is nothing but stupid.

I went outside and walked down to Broadway and watched the news flashing on the Allied Chemical Tower. It was cold, and there was a miserable wind blowing off the Hudson. I stood there shivering. I was out in the cold with no way of getting back into the warm, and I had traded a perfectly adequate pocket comb for a wallet that someone else had already gone through once, and I wasn’t entirely certain I had come out ahead on the deal.

The papers in that wallet weren’t important enough to wrap fish in. There were a couple of cash register receipts from unidentified stores and a Chinese laundry ticket. There was a head-and-shoulders snapshot of an ugly high school girl signed Your Pal, Mary Beth Hawkins. Judging by the hair style, Mary Beth was either (a) the squarest teen-ager in America or (b) forty-five-years old by now. Either way, I would have rather had my comb than her picture.

There were a few other things, but none of them mattered except for the bus ticket. It was in one of the secret compartments, and I guess that had kept it a secret from the pickpocket. A Greyhound bus ticket, good for one-way passage in either direction between Boston, Massachusetts, and Bordentown, South Carolina. It said it was valid anytime within one year from the date stamped on the back. The date was March something, and it was now December something, so the ticket had another three months to go before it became even more worthless than it already was.

I got rid of the rest of the wallet, Mary Beth’s picture and all. I dumped it in a trash can — what else? — and I was as slick as possible about this, because I didn’t want any other poor clown to waste his time doing what I had just done. If you’re going to steal a wallet, you ought to get it from its original owner. After that the depreciation is fantastic.

Then I walked around for a while, which kept me warmer than standing still, if just barely. Now and then I would take the ticket out and stare at it. It was that or stare at the quarter. Sensational, I thought. If I happen to be in Boston between now and March, I can catch a bus to Bordentown. Or, should I some fine morning find myself in Bordentown, I can hop on a Greyhound for Boston. Wonderful.

I wound up on Broadway looking at whores. Not in a particularly acquisitive way. Not that I wasn’t tempted. I had been in New York for almost three months, and my sex life during that time could have been inscribed on the head of a pin with plenty of room left for the Lord’s Prayer and as many angels as felt like dancing there.

(I had been living with a girl for one of those months, but she had just had a baby and couldn’t do anything for six weeks, and by the time the six weeks were up she had gone away. At least she took the baby with her.)

I have always had these ethical objections to patronizing a prostitute, but in this case I might have overcome these objections if I’d had more than twenty-five cents to overcome them with. We’ll never know.

So I went window-shopping, and the girls seemed to know it. They would look me up and down, and disapproval would glint in their eyes, and they would turn away, as if there was nothing so obvious as the fact that I couldn’t possibly afford them. None of this was very ego-building.

And then one girl, who was either less experienced or a poorer judge of character, gave me a smile. An actual smile. So I stopped dead and smiled back at her, and she asked me if I’d like to go to her apartment.

“Is it warm there?”

“Honey,” she said, “where I am, it’s always warm.”

I told her it sounded great. She asked me if I could spend twenty-five dollars.

“No way.”

“Well, see, I like you. Could you spend twenty?”

“I wish I could.”

“Well, shit. What can you spend?”

I could spend twenty-five cents, but I was damned if I was going to tell her that. I said, “Where are you from?”

“What do you want to know that for?”

“I just wondered.”

“Well, I have this place on Fifty-fifth Street. How much can—”

“I mean originally,” I said. “You’re not from New York, are you?”

“From Memphis,” she said. “And never goin’ back there again, thanks all the same.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Why?”

“I thought maybe you were from Bordentown, South Carolina,” I said. “Or maybe from Boston.”

“You been drinkin’, honey?”

“Because I have this bus ticket,” I said, and showed it to her. “So if you had any interest in going to Boston or Bordentown—”

“That good?”

I showed her the date. “Perfectly good,” I said.

“You want to come home with me?”

“To Memphis?”

“Shit. I tol’ you. Fifty-fifth Street. You want to come?”

I tried on a smile. “All I really have is this ticket,” I said. “I don’t have any money. Just twenty-five cents and this ticket. I’m sorry for wasting your time—”

But she had my arm tucked under hers.

“You know something? I like you. I really do. What’s your name?”

“Chip.”

“Yeah? I’m Mary Beth. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I knew a girl named Mary Beth. I had a picture of her in a wallet that I carried for a while.”

“Girl here in New York?”

“No,” I said. “I think she lives in Bordentown. Or in Boston. Or she used to.”

“You sure you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. She was still holding onto my arm, and we seemed to be walking uptown, sort of toward Fifty-fifth Street, actually.

“I do like you, Chip,” she was saying. “You just come home with me and I’ll do you like you never been done. You ever had something called the Waterloo? That’s a specialty of mine. What I take is a mouthful of warm water, see—”

She told me quite a bit about the Waterloo, and while she talked we walked, and while we walked she held onto my arm and rubbed it against her breast. My pants began getting very cramped.

“You just forget about no money,” she said. “Don’t make no never mind.”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. I can’t believe this.

Because I couldn’t. I mean, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t had thoughts along this line before. I don’t suppose it’s the rarest fantasy ever. The ultimate sexual ego trip — that a prostitute, a girl who spends her life getting paid to have sex, will find you so overwhelmingly attractive that she’ll want to give it to you for free. And she would know tricks you never dreamed of, and do all these fantastic things, and do them all for love.

Who ever thought it would actually happen?

Her apartment was pleasant in a sort of dull way. I couldn’t tell whether or not it was a typical prostitute’s apartment, but it seemed to me then that it couldn’t be, because it seemed to me then that she was by no means a typical prostitute. By the time we got there I had already decided that she wasn’t basically a whore at all. Just because a girl was whoring didn’t make her a whore. After all, in the past year I had sold termite extermination service, picked fruit, posed for pornographic pictures and written a book, and I didn’t think of myself as a writer or fruit picker or any of those things. Life deals unpredictable cards, and you have to play each hand as it lays, and little Mary Beth might be walking the streets but that didn’t make her a streetwalker. It might not make her the Virgin Mary, either, but it didn’t make her a whore.

I really had things all figured out. I would Take Her Away From All This. She already loved me, and by the time I got done balling her she would love me to distraction, and at that point the idea of ever having sex with anyone but Chip Harrison would positively turn her stomach. And I would live with her and land a Job With A Future, and we would screw incessantly while I made my way in the world, and we would, uh, Live Happily Ever After.

The thing is, see, that when a fantasy starts coming true before your eyes, it’s natural to go on taking the fantasy to its logical (?) conclusion. Did I really expect all of this would happen? Not really, but remember that I never expected it to start happening in the first place. If someone goes and repeals the Law of Gravity and you find yourself flying to the Moon, it’s no more unreasonable to plan on flying clear through to Mars.

I stood there working all of this out while she closed the door and turned four or five locks. Doesn’t want us to be interrupted, I thought happily. We might be here for days. Weeks. And she wants to make sure we have privacy.

“Well,” she said. “Not much, but it’s home.”

“Mary Beth,” I said.

“Hi, Chip.”

“Mary Beth.” And I put my hands on her shoulders and drew her close. Somewhere along the way her head turned to the side and I was kissing a gold hoop earring.

“Uh-uh,” she said.

“Huh?”

She rubbed her breasts against my chest and bounced her groin playfully against mine. I had this tight feeling in my chest.

“I don’t kiss on the mouth,” she said.

“Huh?”

She gave me another happy bounce, then moved away. “Just something I don’t do,” she said. “Kiss you anywheres else, kiss you like nobody ever, but not on the mouth.”

“But that’s silly.”

“Shit—”

“But—”

I remembered reading that some prostitutes refused to kiss their clients mouth-to-mouth. They would do anything else, but they reserved that intimacy for the men they loved. It had never made much sense to me at the time, because if you stop and think about it, well, it’s pretty ridiculous. Especially since I had spent the past year with a lot of girls who would kiss you mouth-to-mouth until Rome fell but wouldn’t do anything more exciting than that. It seemed as though the whores had their value system turned upside down.

But what I couldn’t understand was what this had to do with me and Mary Beth. She didn’t want money from me. She was doing this for love, so by rights she should be particularly keen on kissing me on the mouth.

And then I got it. The poor kid, I realized, had never really had any sex life to speak of outside of prostitution. So naturally that was her frame of reference. Here she wanted to ball me for the sheer unadulterated pleasure of it, but her mind was so conditioned by the life she led that she had to act with me in much the same way as she acted with her paying customers. It was weird, and sort of disheartening in a way, but there was also something sort of sweet and pathetic about it.

She has never known love, I told myself. But I shall change her. I shall fulfill her.

“Well, now,” she said. “And what have we here?”

That must have been a rhetorical question, because what she had there was something she came into contact with quite frequently in her profession, and where we had it was in her hand. She had opened my fly and taken me firmly in hand, and she was stroking me rhythmically. Her wrist did everything; the rest of her arm stayed motionless.

“You come with me,” she said. “We’ll just wash you up first.”

We stood at the bathroom sink and washed me up. The editorial we was bugging me a little. Nurses talk like that — ”How are we feeling this morning?” — but I never figured whores did, too. Anyway, she soaped me up and rinsed me off, and it was sort of pleasant and unpleasant both at once, pleasant in that it felt good, and unpleasant in that it sort of implied that I was fundamentally too dirty to deal with otherwise. But then I thought of some of the things she had in mind, and some of the things she had done with other people, and I decided I was just as glad that she tended to wash this portion of a person beforehand, and also, to tell the truth, just as pleased that she didn’t believe in mouth-to- mouth kissing.

When she was done she filled a glass with hot water and carried it into the bedroom.

“For the Waterloo,” she explained. “You’re gonna love this.”

“Uh.”

“Don’t you want to take off your clothes, Chip?”

“Uh, sure,” I said, and started undressing. I was feeling unbelievably dizzy and stupid, and it wasn’t just the excitement. That was a part of it. But another part was the feeling that none of this was really happening. It all I seemed so thoroughly unreal. I took off all my clothes and looked up and she was just standing there, with her clothes on.

“Your clothes,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Why don’t you, uh, get undressed?”

“You want me to?”

“Well, sure.”

She shrugged. A very strange girl, I decided. Maybe it wasn’t just that she hadn’t had any real sex life outside of prostitution. Maybe she was equally inexperienced in prostitution. Maybe she just read about the Waterloo in a book or something.

I stood there watching while she got undressed. She didn’t make the process particularly seductive, just shucked off her clothes and draped them over a chair. Her body was skimpy everywhere but the breasts, which were on the large size. I haven’t described her too much because I have trouble picturing her now in my mind. She was sort of mousy, really, hair somewhere between blond and brown. I suppose she was around my age, although she seemed older, maybe because she was more at home in this scene than I was.

She left on her stockings and garter belt. I asked her if she didn’t want to take them off and get comfortable, and she gave me an impatient look. “Most men like ’em on,” she said. “Don’t you think they look pretty?”

I thought they looked like something out of those whip-and-chain movies, but I said sure, they were pretty.

“Because it’s wasting time, you know, taking ’em off, putting ’em on.”

“Then leave them on,” I said, and she nodded, and I reached out for her and drew her in close. I went to kiss her again, out of habit, but she turned away automatically and I didn’t press the point. I sort of felt like apologizing but couldn’t think of an intelligent way to do that, so I kept my mouth shut and let my fingers do the walking. I felt various parts of her, and she did a little deep breathing and such, but nothing that really assured me I was driving her out of her skull.

“Let me,” she said, disengaging herself. “You just lay down, Chip, and let me do you up.”

I got on the bed. She reached for the glass of water, then stopped with it halfway to her lips. “You tell me if it’s too hot,” she said.

Then she took a mouthful of water and bent over me.

It was really very nice. She just did it for a second or so, then pulled away and looked at me. I was waiting for her to ask me whatever the hell it was she was going to ask me, and then I realized that she wasn’t going to ask me anything because she couldn’t because she had her mouth full of hot water.

“It’s not too hot,” I said. “It’s just right.”

She nodded and started doing it again. And, as before, it was really very nice indeed. It was strange, too, because I felt totally unconnected with the whole process. I decided that it was a great technique, and it was really great that she knew these great techniques, but that it would be infinitely better when I taught her how to put some love into the whole process. Or at least to make it obvious to me that she was enjoying what she was doing.

Then she stopped again.

“Believe me, it’s not too hot,” I said, and started to push her head back in place. But her head wouldn’t push. She leaned over and spat the water out onto the linoleum.

“The ticket,” she said.

“Huh?”

She looked impatient again. “The bus ticket, man. You better give it to me now. I want to make sure it’s still good.”

“The bus ticket?”

She sat up and stared at me. “Shit, the bus ticket,” she said. “What’s the matter with you? You got to give it to me and I got to make sure I can cash it before we do any more. All I need is—”

“Cash the bus ticket?”

“Take it over to Port Authority and cash it,” she said. “I told you you didn’t need money. Just the ticket is all. If it’s good I’ll get twenty-thirty dollars out of that ticket.”

I suppose you saw it coming all along, but I’m not going to apologize for my stupidity. After all, it was my fantasy that we were acting out.

The Waterloo, I thought. I had already had the hot water part, and now I was getting the cold water. Buckets of it, all over all my enthusiasm for little old Mary Beth.

“Hey! Where you goin’?”

I was putting on my clothes. Not too quickly, not too slowly. Very mechanically, actually. Tucking the shirt into the pants, getting my socks right-side out and then putting them on, then the shoes—

“You crazy?”

“I have to go,” I said.

“Go? Where to?”

“The bus station,” I said. “I have to cash the ticket.”

“Shit, I said I would cash it. Just hand it on over here.”

“Fuck you,” I said.

“Are you out of your mind?”

I turned toward her, and I guess I must have wanted to kill her, or at least I looked as though I wanted to kill her, because her face drained of color and she backed off fast. I turned away from her again and went to the door.

The whore with the heart of gold. You didn’t need money. All you needed was a negotiable bus ticket.

I almost went crazy unlocking all those locks. She never said a word, which was lucky for her. I’m normally about as nonviolent as it’s possible to get, but I wasn’t feeling very normal just then. Nothing makes you hate a person quite so much as being made an absolute asshole out of.

The last lock cleared just as I was about to give up and kick the door down.

It was as cold as ever out there, but I walked three blocks before I even noticed it.

Two thoughts kept me from running around and screaming. One was that, if and when I calmed down, I was certain to see the humor in the situation. I didn’t see any humor in it now, but I knew I would sooner or later.

The other comforting thought, and it was the more comforting of the two, was that I had that bus ticket in my pocket. And I could cash it in.