I was trying to figure out how I could bring the evening to an early end.
Fifteen minutes later, we pulled up in front of a decaying, sunken low-rise whose only exterior illumination came from a streetlight. The front lawn was scuffed bare and littered with ripped and shredded green garbage bags whose rancid contents spilled out onto the sidewalk. A dry wind lifted the open end of one of the garbage bags. Rodent eyes stared out blindly from inside the bag. A poinsettia in a red plastic container sat on a downstairs window ledge.
The lobby’s interior was covered in graffiti, the walls were pockmarked, and the linoleum floor, orange and brown, was heaving.
“What apartment are you in?” I asked her.
“The third floor, apartment 306,” she said as we approached the elevator.
The doors struggled open to reveal an older guy—he had to be sixty—fondling a young girl—she may have been eighteen.
“You going up?” he growled. No teeth.
“We’ll take the stairs,” I said, eyeing the circle of vomit in the corner of the elevator.
“Holy shit,” I exclaimed, repulsed, as Bingo, captivated as a kid at the zoo, neatly navigated a pair of denim cutoffs abandoned on the bottom steps of the staircase.
Her place smelled of cat, the air stale as the indiscriminate crackle of TV noise. She asked us inside. I started to refuse, I’d had enough, but Bingo overruled me. I glared at him, but he just glared back, unmoved.
I was watching from a broken La-Z-Boy as she rooted through her cupboards, a consumptive gravel-voiced raconteur in a micro leather skirt.
“It was too bad. He was a nice guy,” she said insincerely about her notorious conviction, offering me a coffee, which I declined with thanks. Cracked CorningWare.
Bingo, on the sofa across from me, eagerly accepted what I rejected. I watched disapprovingly as he casually added spoonful after heaping spoonful of sugar to his cup.
“Don’t get too comfortable. We’re out of here in five,” I whispered as she left the living room to go into the bedroom. He made a face at me. I rolled my eyes in exasperation.
“Fuck off, Collie,” he said quietly but good-naturedly as she came back into the room and sat beside him. She was right next to him. Their shoulders were touching. She kicked off her shoe and rested her stocking foot on his running shoe. He was humming offhandedly. Singing softly to himself.
I recognized it. He was singing “Beat Out Da Rhythm on a Drum.” Pop had been singing that song for years. She didn’t notice. She was too busy simulating intercourse. He caught my eye. He was so pleased with himself, he might as well have been tingling. She started playing with his hair, winding it through her fingers as if it were long grass and she were an evening breeze. She was sending ripples through the long grass and out into the room.
He grinned over at me. He kept singing, full of mischief . . . I ignored him. He loved that.
“I admit I was an enthusiastic recruit,” she was acknowledging huskily, referring to her choice of work, knowing that to say no was to risk a lifetime behind a cash register.
“Initially, I slept with the guys in the band, who were happy to supply me with dope, then when they got bored with me, our roles were reversed. If I wanted to remain part of the entourage, I had to supply them. So that’s what I did.” She shrugged.
“How old were you?” I was asking all the questions.
“Sixteen. In retrospect, I think that I was a stupid, selfish girl, looking for trouble, craving a way of life I hadn’t earned but felt some entitlement to.” She had obviously availed herself of counseling in the Big House.
“I was mixed up, but they . . .” She inhaled lightly, exhaled deeply. “They were evil.”
I didn’t respond. I was thinking. I glanced over at Bingo. She ran her finger crudely along his pant leg, from his knee to the top of his inner thigh. “Just like you—”
“Let’s go, Bing,” I interrupted as he sank deeper into the fraying foam back of the sofa. “It’s late.” I reached for his arm, grabbed, and pulled him forward to emphasize my point.
“Hey,” she interjected, pulling him back down, abruptly beseeching Bingo, who was preparing to argue with me. “Can you loan me a hundred bucks? I’ll pay you back. I just really need it—like yesterday.”
Bing looked mildly surprised and hesitated before answering. She had nothing to worry about. All