Crackpot, page 31
Past the big railway hotel she trudged, where strangers and the rich hid behind long windows with thick, velvet curtains. That was where she’d thought that guy would take her, long long ago, that first time she’d come up town, that first time she’d discovered these other sleazy places were hotels too. Past the beer parlors, where, even at this time of morning, the half-breeds lounged patiently, waiting for opening time to cut the glare of their days. Hoda always hurried past the half-breeds, afraid because she knew that if she let herself she would know what they were like inside too. And in the face of knowing what sense did even Mr. Polonick make when he said, “Well Hoda, that’s progress. At least we’d cure them of T.B. and educate them to join hands with all the other oppressed, and take them off the reservations, and they’d become free men just like anyone else.” It irritated him when Hoda replied, “You mean we’ll cure them of being Indians one way or another.” And he’d explain once more how you can’t fight the future. You musn’t stand in the way of progress. Why not? What is this progress anyway? A word, that’s all, a word for what happens, and a word for what should happen, and a word for what doesn’t happen as well. If you stand in its way maybe that’s progress too. But it was not much fun teasing Mr. Polonick anymore. He never had had much sense of humour anyway, and as he grew older and all the bad things that he predicted would happen to the world if people didn’t wake up, actually happened, he grew more irritable. Once Hoda had said to him, “Maybe dumb fascists and those crazy German Nazis think that’s progress too, to run around killing people like us? Maybe they think you can’t stop progress too?” Well, she wouldn’t try that again, not with poor old Polonick. He nearly had a fit. You couldn’t really blame him. God himself must be a pretty dyspeptic kind of a guy by now. But she still didn’t like what happened to the Indians and the half-breeds, Polonick and progress notwithstanding. Nevertheless she hurried past them. Can you reply “I feel something special for you,” when someone calls out “fuck fuck jig jig” as you go by? From her they didn’t want something special.
Grim reflections were followed by considerations more tender, as Hoda passed three movie houses, one after the other, slowing down to go over, frame by frame, the stills of six not quite current movies. One day when she had some spare cash she was going to blow herself to an orgy, double feature in one, spill out on the sidewalk and blink her way into the next door double feature, and after that stagger into the next, and when she emerged finally it would be dark out except for the lights outside the movies, and maybe if it was Saturday, the strings of lights all lit up across Main Street. She’d stand there on the sidewalk, saturated, groggy, and someone would come up to her very naturally and say, “Hello big and beautiful.”
What then? She was getting sick and tired of stale old dreams. Maybe on the other hand three double features in a row would cure her of them once and for all, and she’d come out saying “phoney, phoney, phoney baloney” and that would be it. For all the toughness she had developed over the years, and the real disenchantment with all kinds of dreams that had once seemed endlessly exciting and always possible, Hoda still surrendered herself at the movies, sat alone in the darkness with her eyes glued to the magic light and shadows of “if only,” yearned and suffered and thrilled as the “why not” romance moved inevitably to the point where she knew, with an exquisite sense of illumination, ever new, that now…now…they’re going to…and for real, not for money, and forever and ever and ever more. And it was always like it was going to be the first time for them, and the first time always, even when you could see they’d been around, and it returned to her, too, a first-time feeling that made first times possible again for a little while. She knew it was all a cheat and false and that wasn’t how things happened even as she surrendered herself, and yet she fell, each time. Maybe that was why she still had kind of a soft spot for the little boys who came to her in groups; “God, they get younger every year!” She got a kick out of them: the ones that thought they were so experienced, maybe they’d been two, three times already, showing off how well they knew the ropes with her to the tyros, who tried to pretend they knew the ropes too. Hoda went along with it all. A lot depended on how you treated them. Hell, the first few times should be a memory. Even when you fizzed out, right away you would want to start again, and you knew you could never go stale, not for long. You knew a lot of things then that you didn’t know any more. Hoda could still remember her first few times, how they had felt, anyway, though some of the details were a little muddled up in her mind.
But she didn’t really delude herself that even three double features would keep her groggy enough long enough to believe that anyone who approached her in this area of town meant anything but simple business, and not very good business either, judging by the types who hung around. Even if someone offered her a turn in the big hotel, behind the velvet curtains, would she go? The cops bear down on you for hustling in a place like that unless you can afford to go dressed really classy, or so Hoda had heard. She had never had any kind of run-in with the cops in the course of her business career, and didn’t intend to begin now. Leave the big hotels to the rich amateurs. Hoda had never got over her mistrust of the downtown trade, where a girl really needed protection, and even so, with all her protection, look what had happened to Seraphina. That’s just it, what had happened to Seraphina? Nobody knew. Seraphina, and her pimp too, the flashy Les, had simply dropped out of sight a couple of years ago. Her mother didn’t know where she was, and was pretty rude about it when Hoda came, with the friendliest intentions, to enquire. And nobody else seemed to know or care either. Maybe Les had got restless and taken his girls, like he had always promised he would, out east and into the real big time. Or maybe he was serving time, and the girls were scattered. But where? Hoda hoped that Seraphina really had made it out east in the big time, like Hymie had. But she doubted. Serry would have sent a card, at least. One time she ran into one of Serry’s reform school pals, who told her that last she had heard, Serry wasn’t even with Les any more. Someone had seen Les and asked after her and Les had said he couldn’t afford to support a sick pig, coughing and puking blood all over his customers. Put that together with what Seraphina had told her towards the end, that Les was bribing her with little extras to take on specialty tricks and let them beat her up, and Hoda didn’t like it at all. She told Seraphina she was crazy to do it, but Serry had laughed a funny, frightened laugh, and said what could you do if those were all the customers he got for you nowadays, and maybe all you were good for anymore like he said, and a girl had to eat, and you know what a temper Les had; if you’re going to get beaten up anyway it might as well be on a full stomach. It’s unnatural to puke on an empty one; the doctors don’t like it.
Hoda had got mad and stormed at her and tush tushed the way she was running herself down, “You don’t need him! Why don’t you leave him and go to a house like you always said?”
But Serry, poor dimwit though she was, explained that Les was her only security, and nowadays she didn’t seem to look so good to the brothel keepers either. Anyway, she didn’t mind the beatings so much; they always stopped sometimes and then you felt better, and besides, she couldn’t run out on poor Les. “I’d worry how he was getting on. You get set in your ways, Hoda.”
Well, Seraphina might, but Hoda wouldn’t; that she promised herself. Nobody was going to call her a sick pig and abandon her. Where? Hoda had written a letter to the T.B. Sanatarium and called up the contageous diseases and chronic sickness hospitals in town, but they didn’t have any Seraphina, so all she could do now was hope that her old friend might just turn up again like she always had. As for Les, she hoped he was doing time, that’s what she hoped. Even if a guy was a pimp he should have a sense of responsibility. But when she caught herself thinking something like that, say about somebody like Les, Hoda laughed at herself, because actually, she did know better, though it still griped her, the way things were, the way people were, the way everything was.
Look, even the way the City Hall was; should things be like that right in the very centre of the city where you belonged? Concerned as Hoda was with very personal things on the one hand, and with large, universal political and humanitarian problems on the other, she always felt when she thought of the City Hall that this should be the place where everybody would feel the same concern for everybody else. But instead, it was from the top of the stone staircases out front of the City Hall that the mayor had read the Riot Act and given the order for the militia to charge on the workers in the general strike. And it was here that she herself came, fearfully, to perform her regular personal errand, and got a sinking feeling every time she caught sight of things she really liked to see, like the old trees, the landscaped lawn, and the pretty flower beds. She stood and looked at the large statue of the heroic soldier going out to get shot, and she knew that though she felt ever so close to them and sorry for them and everything, she would get little sympathy herself even from the old soldier bums and cripples who hung around here, if she were so far to forget herself as to ask for it, that is. What did she expect? If you’re going to peddle your arse you can expect to get sold sometimes, so why should they sympathize? And yet she sympathized with them, didn’t she, with all these listless figures of crippled and jobless old soldiers and down and outs who leaned against the City Hall fence and watched the pigeons and hardly ever looked up at the fine old dark metallic figure in full battle dress and pigeon shit, that stood for what they themselves had been like before gunshot and gas and government had brought them back to hang about the City Hall and the welfare offices because there was nothing else for them to do, good old soldiers who knew better than to disobey the green and white wooden signs that said, “Please don’t walk on the grass.” They’d peddled their arses too, hadn’t they? and cheap. And had they known any more what it was all about than Hoda had, when she had thrown all her innocent goodwill into pleasing and being pleased? Oh, Hoda was not afraid to say what she thought about it all, and she said it, too, inside, when she was waiting her turn. That was probably another reason why they rushed her out so fast, which was all right by her, better than being kept waiting all day, like they’d probably start doing to her again if she gave them half a chance.
Not that Hoda minded the City Hall itself. In a way she liked being somehow connected to a nice, big, ugly old building, and this one was maybe as big as a palace, the crazy, haunted kind you sometimes saw in pictures, gloomy but impressive, the way those broad, double-armed stairways led up to the front entrance, and all those bumps and protrusions and separate cockeyed little constructions rising up and up all over the place, with hundreds of little windows set into masses of stale old genital-coloured brick. Once you got in there you were lost right from the start, unless you happened to be familiar with all the little crooked byways of government. That much Hoda knew from experience. She didn’t often look in at that entrance nowadays, only sometimes when they wanted to warm up after a rally, maybe she and one of the comrades would slip in for a few minutes and pretend they were tourists. She was now far from the naive young girl who had first climbed up the staircase and tugged open the massive door and wandered about among unfamiliar musty smells and huge, dark paintings, and broad stairways.
At first she had thought that people just didn’t know, and you had to persist until you got hold of maybe the mayor himself, who must be the only one who knew anything around here. And since she was still pretty young at the time, she had felt called on to explain her perfectly simple errand confidentially to each one she asked, repeating painstakingly over and over again that she had been told that if you went to the City Hall, they would give you a free check-up to see if you had caught a dose or anything. All she wanted was to find the doctor. They sent her from office to office, and after a while people were popping in and out of office doors, and she was sure she heard giggling, and she was getting hot and sweaty, and she began to understand that they weren’t being as nice and polite as they sounded. She didn’t want to begin to cry in front of them, so she yelled out her errand into the next deceptively polite face, and he scuttled back into his office, and then the guard came and directed her curtly out the front entrance again and right around back to a mean little door that led into a cellar, and had a sign over it that said “Public Health.” Here at least you’d think the people knew what they were being paid for, and would treat you like any other patient. Well they didn’t. They acted as if she was something at the other end of a long stick. They kept her waiting for hours, and were a lot more polite to people who came in after her, and didn’t keep them waiting nearly as long either. Sometimes they even made her come back again in the afternoon, and kept her waiting then too.
Sure, and Mr. Polonick agreed with her; that’s how they treat you when you’re a charity patient. They wouldn’t keep a society lady waiting if she was afraid she had a social disease, but someone who had to earn her living and didn’t really want to spread anything bad around, like Hoda, her time could be wasted. Hoda bitterly resented their attitude, but at first she didn’t know what to do about it. If she made a fuss like she felt like doing, they might call in a cop or guard and start investigating and who knows what trouble they could get her into, if they wanted to, those cops.
Remember what Mr, Polonick says, she reminded herself. They may be doctors and nurses and educated goyem, but they’re still public servants, and you’re the public, and they’re at your service. Treat them nicely, even if they have no manners, like you’d treat any other servant. So she did; she ignored their frigid manners and their cold faces, and she chatted and joked at them, and during the time she spent in the waiting room, she entertained herself, and whoever else happened to be waiting, with conversation and jokes, and in general tried to cheer up the drab little anteroom. Sometimes it got pretty busy, and she met all kinds of interesting people. It turned out this place wasn’t only for checking against the dose; it was for pre-maritals, and vaccinations of all kinds, and other odds and ends of public medical service. Sometimes when a good-natured bunch happened to get together in there they had a very good time. Hoda, once she got going, could keep them in stitches for hours. The audience in the waiting room was usually fun to kibitz with, because they were all a little anxious about one thing or another, whether they were worried they might have got the clap, or thought they might be a little pregnant, or simply didn’t look forward to having needles stuck in them. So they laughed with a nervous readiness, an almost pathetic willingness to have their jitters turned to hilarity. Hoda actually began to enjoy these visits to the Public Health, at least the chatty waiting part.
Then she realized that they were suddenly rushing her through practically the minute she arrived, taking her first, interrupting her conversations just as they got started, pushing her tests through the lab, dismissing her before she hardly had a chance to open an acquaintanceship with anyone. It dawned on her then that there was something the staff didn’t like about her conversation. The minute they heard her voice, they couldn’t get her out quickly enough. That’s when she really began to enjoy the game. “Hi there!” she’d call out innocently to a young couple who sat facing her on the opposite bench, that you could see from miles away were green little pre-maritals, probably waiting to get vaccinated for their honeymoon trip. “You two been playing around?” Or else she’d fix the young man with a bright grey eye and say tenderly, all the while sloshing her yellowed retort gently to and fro. “Don’t I know you from some place?” Other times she teased and joked suggestively with the young louts who sat sheepishly clutching their own specimen bottles. She developed, over the years, a kind of sophistication, a public attitude, a way of outfacing whoever faced her. Deliberately, she would introduce the questions, “What do you do for a living?” so that she could work round to telling them, in her turn, still sloshing her specimen innocently, “Me? Oh, I make ends meet,” and her wicked chuckle would bust out of her and she could just feel the doctor and nurse squirming in the examination room, and imagine them muttering, “For God’s sake get her out of here!” Or she would say brightly, when she saw the expression on the doctor’s face when she appeared again, “Just keeping clean like you want me to, Doc.” And she was amused because, rush though they might, it still took them a little time to process her business, and it eased her own nervousness to know they didn’t have things all their own way.
All that had been in the early years. Now Hoda had been coming so long that she even had, as she jokingly put it, seniority over the doctor. Several young men and women had taken their turns in looking after her urine. She had even picked up the odd bit of biographical information about some of them, past and present, and could tell you where this one now had his private practice, or what hospital that other one worked at, and how his nurse had followed him there soon after, though his wife probably didn’t know it. She was free with these little bits of information, like a kindly hostess putting her company at ease. Sometimes a young staff member, hearing from Hoda’s lips some item of private information about a predecessor, cringed to think that somehow the odd little intimate fact about himself might find its way out of that great mouth and strip the cool white coat away from between himself and his patients. And regrettably, it happened occasionally that a patient was jabbed with unnecessary force, as a direct result of the fact that Hoda’s voice was coming through loud and clear in the examining room, and the patient went off convinced that the Public Health had the heaviest-handed doctors because, as the fat girl said, the city didn’t care about you if you couldn’t afford to pay.
