Going Public
There was a little street monkey named Alice whose breath was crystal when the sun done shone. Alice did her grinding out of The Old Mill number one Bowery the best. She placed her bets, soiled her woolens, fractured glass: tableau vivant of the neat street life. Under the inoperative sign of The Old Mill Alice carried a pair of pliers in case any of her a.m. customers gave her the screws. She engaged many a dalliance with horse and snort and friendly old beers. Leers and feels. Swapping wops for cops on the even exchange system. Radical laughter at the serious parts. A girl’s got to live.
Word gets around.
I talk to her. I know. I was poking my nose around downtown below stairs and she just glanced my way, gave me the beckoning call whiles I lapped up several different varieties of body juice. “Never know’d electrics,” was something she said and I said: “Keep talking. Right into my boutonniere.” She speaks regular into my tape recorder the one I use to gain entrance into clubs around the world. I’m an innocent. She speaks to me slowly sometimes, as if her mind’s on another john. She speaks to me quickly sometimes so’s I can hardly hear. “Just laying on the vocals,” she says. “Just chewing on my charms.”
I watch her face screw down then burst open like a rosebud on dexedrine. Alice sometimes makes accusations. “You live your life too neat, too slow.” I never listen ‘cause I got my playback button.
So for example, a gentleman walks up to me and he makes his proposition. It takes a while, this one. Do I want to sit down, natch. He wants me to impersonate his dead wife who contracted on the wedding night a paralysis, got humped by him anyway and died panting. He tells me it’s a spiritual experience. Then he tells me his name. A gent from congress, yeah, you guessed. I’m thinking that next I gotta see a guy who wants me to smuggle…ah I can’t say. But we done it with canned peaches. This guy’s a state senator. The consensus of opinion is that I live out on the street so how could I know from knowing. Ah, life looks the same no matter how you look at it. A john’s just a john, you know, a john’s just a man. And I’m just all my pieces put together.
Cash don’t come between us but the double tenskys I leave out of politeness in the corner of her mirror. I leave our sessions in a sweat, staring at her legs, her hands on her legs, her legs crossing, twisting, opening up. Oh she is smart. Those legs wrapped around your waist you don’t say no. She’s doing the pumping true.
Sometimes I misuse what Alice tells me. Sometimes I cut the tapes up and put words in front of words and words behind other ones just to see if I can subvert the meaning, just to ruin reputations, just to threaten exposure, just to collect my fair share, just to make men squirm like she can, just to make them sweat. I know what the Alice knows. They talk and give Alice information she transmits to me. We feel like spies. I mean, I do.
I know your game. Words on the line. Nothing bothers me but dirt. I just got a couple of habits I got to keep up, serious as a sick mom. Can you dig that? So I’m moving uptown. These city streets provoke me deadly. What kind of hootch they selling now? You think I want to end up dead? I got a reputation to consider. In my line a clean nose is paramount pictures incorp. You been spilling. My gents are dying off like bugs in ice. So arrivederci, Roma. Toodle-oo toots.
She disappeared. Underground was a good enough guess although dead didn’t seem too farfetched either. I ran an ad disclaiming responsibility. They lit candles on the street for her. I pretended not to know. I didn’t even have any friends left to turn trader dick on.
Safe.
Then:
Years later the calls begin, at first mere static, onto nightly sighs of implication. My aides are stymied. New number: no dice. I claw at my bedsheets, my teeth are ground to stumps. I’m without funds, my digestion fails. The telephone and the phone again. She’s on my spine, she’s in the water supply.
Then:
Her picture in the papers, hatted, gloved, knees apart and knowing.
Blood! She says. You killed me.
I beg. She laughs. Strip, she says. She says: I know everything.
Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. Capital A Alice went public.