Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,101
make things right for your daughter?” I’m like: “Yeah, babe.” He said: “All right, gimme a confession and I’ll let her go. You’ll get six months, no more, I guarantee it.” So, I sat down and sang. It was an old charge, robbery in the second degree. Jazz had jacked two hundred dollars from that guy and syringed that straight off.
That’s how it goes.
Everything flies through the windshield.
—
They told me Corrigan smashed all the bones in his chest when he hit the steering wheel. I thought, Well at least in heaven his Spanish chick’ll be able to reach in and grab his heart.
—
I’m a fuck-up. That’s what I am. I took the rap and Jazzlyn paid the price. I am the mother and my daughter is no more. I only hope at the last minute that at least she was smiling.
I’m a fuck-up like none you’ve ever seen before.
—
Even the roaches don’t like it here in Rikers. The roaches, they’ve got an aversion. The roaches, they’re like judges and district attorneys and shit. They crawl out of the walls in their black coats and they say, Miss Henderson, I hereby sentence you to eight months.
Anyone who knows roaches know that they rattle. That’s the word. They rattle across the floor.
—
The shower stall is the best place. You could hang an elephant from the pipes.
—
Sometimes I bang my head off the wall long enough that I just don’t feel it anymore. I can bang it hard enough I finally sleep. I wake with a headache and I bang again. It only stings in the shower when all the butches are watching.
A white girl got sliced yesterday. With the filed-down side of a canteen tray. She had it coming. Whiter than her whiteness. Outside the pen it never used to bother me: white or black or brown or yellow or pink. But I guess the pen is the flip side of real life—too many niggers and not many whiteys, all the whiteys can buy their way out of it.
This the longest I ever spent inside. It gets you to thinking about things. Mostly about being such a fuck-up. And mostly about where to hang the noose.
—
When they first told me ’bout Jazzlyn I just stood there beating my head against the cage like a bird. They let me go to the funeral and then they locked me back up. The babies weren’t there. I kept asking about the girls but everyone was saying: Don’t worry about the babies, they’re being looked after.
—
In my dreams I’m back in the Sherry-Netherlands. Why I liked him so much I don’t really know. He wasn’t a trick, he was a john—even with the bald head he was fine.
Men in the Middle Eastern life dig hookers. They like to spoil them and buy them things and walk around with the sheets wrapped around them. He asked me to stand by the window in silhouette. He positioned the light just so. I heard him gasp. All I was doing was standing. Nothing ever made me feel better than him just looking at me, appreciating what he saw. That’s what good men do—they appreciate. He wasn’t fooling with himself or nothing, he just sat in the chair watching me, hardly breathing. He said I made him delirious, that he’d give me anything just to stay there forever. I said something smart-ass, but really I was thinking the exact same thing. I hated myself for saying something disrespectful. I coulda had the floor swallow me up.
After a moment or two he relaxed, then sighed. He said something to me about the desert in Syria and how the lemon trees look like little explosions of color.
And all of a sudden—right there, looking out over Central Park—I got a longing for my daughter like nothing else before. Jazzlyn was eight or nine then. I wanted just to hold her in my arms. It’s no less love if you’re a hooker, it’s no less love at all.
The park got dark. The lights came on. Only a few of them were working. They lit up the trees.
“Read the poem about the marketplace,” he said.
It was a poem where a man buys a carpet in the marketplace, and it’s a perfect carpet, without a flaw, so it brings him all sorts of woe ‘n’ shit. I had to switch on the light to read to him and it spoiled the atmosphere, I could tell straight off. Then he said, “Just tell me a story then.”