The Lonely Hearts Hotel(44)

“Why don’t you come down to Chinatown?” Poppy asked. “We can get high together. It’ll be my treat. It’s quite lovely. That always makes me forget about my problems.”

“No, I don’t want to get mixed up in that.”

“I’ve been doing heroin since I was fourteen. I never get hooked on it. You can do it once in a while if you want to.”

Poppy lifted up her skirt to show Rose that she had track marks on her thighs.

“Are most of the girls on drugs?”

Poppy screwed up one eye, pretending she was giving it some considered thought.

“Yes. Tulip overdosed last month. She was really pretty. She was only working at the brothel for three months. She started to get so stoned. She went out on the street corner naked and started blowing kisses! She woke up blue one day. It’s a better way to go than Magnolia. She cried all the time. She jumped off the roof. You think it’s easier than working at a laundry because you can go out on Sunday nights and read magazines, but it’s not. You never make any money. You can’t save up because you have to spend all your money on rent and their crummy food. It’s all a big swindle. Gets some of the girls too down.”

This was how McMahon made all that money, Rose thought. This was what paid for his mansion and his big meals and his cars and his clubs. This was what his flashy universe looked like backstage.

“Do you want to get out of there?” Rose asked.

“They’re going to kick me out, and I don’t know what I’ll do. I met McMahon when I was fifteen. I was cuter then. Just because I make less money than the other girls doesn’t mean I’m worth nothing, you know?”

They were both working for McMahon. That was why Rose had gone to her. Not only for birth control but to see who she actually was, who she would be when her currency on the dating market plummeted. Rose unbuckled her roller skates and handed them back to Poppy.

“Will you come back and have your fortune read?” Poppy asked.

“Yes, I promise.”

Rose walked for a few steps, then spun around, came back and squeezed her mouth up against Poppy’s in a kiss. Then she ran off.

“The condoms! The condoms! The condoms!” the curly-haired girl called out after Rose.





24


    POPPY SINGS A LOVE SONG



Poppy had been kicked out of the brothel for that day with Rose. She had been robbed and raped a few days later while turning a trick on the street corner. She had two black eyes and a little bandage on the bridge of her nose when she ran into Pierrot again. He had been sleeping in the park and had a couple of twigs in his hair but seemed to be doing better than her. She was like an injured deer. She knew that violent men were watching her every move. She knew they only acted the way they did in secret, with only women and children witnessing their actions. She wanted to walk down the street and not be murdered. When she saw Pierrot, she remembered he owed her a favor.

“I want you to pretend to be my pimp,” Poppy told Pierrot. “I always feel I’m in danger because I don’t have a husband or a boyfriend. You don’t have to do anything. You just have to exist.”

“Thank you. I will try to live up to your expectations.”

“Oh, I haven’t set them very high at all. You’ve got that fancy suit. People will think that you’re a pimp. They’ll leave you alone. They’ll assume you’re crazy and that you have a gun.”

She found a small room in a cheap hotel. It had blue wallpaper. She had cut some photographs of movie stars out of the newspaper and stuck them on the wall above her bed frame. She said they didn’t have to touch each other. She said he could stay in the same bed as her because it was convenient. She had a black ribbon tied around her neck.

“Your ribbon is pretty but odd. I keep thinking that if I untied it your head would roll right off.”

After he said this, Pierrot looked rather terrified.

The mattress was lumpy. She left on her undershirt and tights at his request. Her tights were white with brown stripes, like the wallpaper in a basement that had been flooded often. She couldn’t sleep all night because she was so excited. Pierrot fell asleep right away.

In the alley below, a raccoon dragged his tail behind him like a kid pulling along its favorite blanket.

? ? ?

PIERROT ASKED HER ONCE how many men she had slept with. She stuck out her arms in front of her, her fists closed. She then opened and closed her hands in rapid succession, the fingers spread out wide, like a child’s drawing of a sun that has a bunch of lines for rays.

He had trouble counting how many times she did this. He wasn’t sure whether it was five or six. And then she ended with three fingers stuck in front of her.

He knew she was exact about the figure because she believed that if you kept track of how many people you slept with, then you weren’t a prostitute. You were some sort of Casanova. It was a philosophical stance. Or perhaps it was a scientific stance.

? ? ?

WHILE PIERROT SWEPT UP POPCORN and played the piano at the movie theater, Poppy would go out and pick up men on the street corner. She tried not to make conversation, because they might see her teeth and try to find another girl. She just smiled demurely. She would do a little swirl and hold up her coat at the back, as she had been told that her ass was her best feature. She had a little bottle of Lysol. She would mix it with water and then douche with it in the evening to kill what the men had left inside her. She still had her high heels on. They were boots that laced up to her knees. The heroin made her so lazy that she couldn’t take them off for days. She used more when she was with Pierrot. She was able to quit when she wanted to, or go for days without it, unlike Pierrot. He needed it every single day, which was very expensive.