Bad Deal
(This was written as a treatment to a film that was eventually supposed to be “how I got in this mess” flash back tale)
A twilight hung over the street as she crossed towards her favorite watering hole. The bar looked small from the outside, its brick face exactly like the two or three others on that block, down to those 1940s style glass bricks that served the joint as windows. All had neon lights blinking madly to attract customers. This bar's neon fizzed a little, and winked, and threatened to burn out at any minute, but never did.
Most people thought the place an eye-opener for the bums, the breakfast place of doorway champions. Sherry knew better, and she sailed through the door grinning, as if she had a secret no one else did, and loved the idea.
Inside, she came upon the swankest slumming place in the whole city, a jumping joint where all the yuppies came to sample the underside of life -- or what they thought was how the poor half lived. She knew the place designed itself to look the way it did, the swank more design than outcome. Many of the hard-knockers who sat around with their bulldozer faces and their arms of steel, were bouncers, not dock workers. Most of the whores who sat at the bar came by invitation of management, hired out of some swab uptown escort service -- clean as glass.
Maybe some of the yuppies knew. Or at least suspected. No one ever got into a serious fight here, where their attitude would have gotten them killed anywhere else. Sometimes, words got said. Sometimes people stood up. But always an arm came out, hanging around a shoulder, yanking this fool back from that fool,
whispering that they didn't want to wind up dead. Those who insisted got put out to suffer their own fate on the street. No sneaky petes there. If they got hurt, they did it on their own, messing with the wrong folks-- who weren't employees of the joint. It was all one big pretense.
And Sherry liked that, pulling up her panty hose as she to the door. She didn't go in. She had to straighten out her face first, and studied her reflection in the dark glass. She made out very well with those crazy people, even though most girls said they didn't.
"You have to know how to milk a yuppie," she always told the others when they hung out in the ladies room. "You can't just expect them to give you their money."
"Give nothing," one of the other girls always said. "They want too much for what they're willing to pay."
Yes, they wanted a lot, Sherry admitted to herself. Sober. But get them drunk enough, get them flopping over and bragging about their super efforts on Wall Street and they were no more immune than any other man, maybe less so, maybe more like little kids bragging about what they did in the school yard.
She always urged them on, always told them how great she thought they were, always urged them to break out their cocaine, even when she always politely refused, watching them snort the stuff up the way she used to lick up powdered candy when she was a girl, coughing slightly as they leaned back, their heads so full of it they couldn't think about not giving her everything and anything she asked them for.
After all, she'd tell them. How important could they be if they couldn't afford to buy her a little this or that, and how did they expect to get her into a hotel room if they wouldn't show some kindness in the bar.
They always came across.
Then, just as she was finished with her hair, she noticed the boy's reflection in the glass, his dark shape hovering between the fish market and the dry cleaners across the street. He was not alone, standing with a white uniformed woman on one side (whom Sherry guessed was a nurse) and another, more eloquently dressed older woman (perhaps his mother).
"Oh God," Sherry thought, turning around to face them. "What is he doing here? The boy lacked Sherry's light hair color, but maintained all the slight features she remembered when she gave him up, almost more a girl's than a boy's. Still, she almost didn't recognize him, he looked so big.
"He must be ten years old by now," she thought.
She had looked in on him from time to time, of course, coming up to the fence when he came out into the yard, she with her fingers stuck through the spaces, gripping hard to keep herself from shaking, and he, on the inside, frowning at her, shaking his head as if to draw out the memory of her face from his foggy thoughts. His illness -- that mental thing that the doctors talked on and on about -- had served as a convenient excuse to be rid of him. She had not wanted him as part of her life. She would have aborted him, except for the belief she could actually live with him, shape him into someone, do her part in making him a man -- unlike the Goddamn sailor who had helped her create him, who had zipped up his pants and walked away, without a name, without a glance back, without even a clue as to where she might reach him to get his help in paying for the birth. "He said he would be back," Sherry thought. "He said he was just going back to his ship to talk to his commanding officer.
"`You know I'd never leave you like this,' he 'd told her, and she like the young fool she had been, believed it, believed in love, counted on him and love to make things right in her very, very wrong life.
She hadn't even pulled her first trick then, though she had been through a bunch of men, listening to their lies as they spread her legs, watching them walk away throwing promises over their shoulders at her, and she, had believed them all until the last one, that Goddamn sailor, had left her knocked up at fifteen. Sherry eased deeper into the doorway and watched as the two women helped the boy across the street, guiding him up onto the sidewalk. The women held him by the shoulders as he held the long stick that allowed him to tap out his progress, an act that startled Sherry more than seeing him.
"What's wrong with his eyes?" she thought. "He can't be blind. He wasn't blind when I left him."
Yet the closer the boy came, the more clearly it became that he was indeed blind, his eyes wide open, his eyes no longer peering with the intensity that had drawn such guilt from her.
"He was mad when I left him," she thought, remembering how she had faced off with the doctor, refusing to deal with the issue.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with a mad baby?" she'd demanded. "What every parent does with any baby," he said.
"That's bullshit and you know it."
"Is it?" the doctor said, taking the instrument from around his throat to sit on the couch beside her. "The boy needs love like anybody else." "Not from me!" she snapped, wishing the doctor would keep his distance, wishing he didn't look as good as he did or make her feel towards him the way she had toward the baby's father. "I've got a life, too, and I'm not going to spend it dragging a Goddamn vegetable around."
"He's not as bad as you make out," the doctor said, his hand falling on her knee. She stared at it, then up at the man, both hand and man seemed out of place. "What do you think you're doing?" she asked.
"You know," the doctor said, with that same glint. "I can help you with your baby if you're good to me."
"Help me? How?"
"Find a place for you to put the kid," the doctor said, slowly licking his lips as he stared at her chest. "You don't ever need to worry about him again, if you treat me right."
That was her first trick -- and she didn't get a cent for it. She and he, in a hotel room, a series of encounters that lasted a few weeks, long enough for him to make arrangements, and then, she walked away, crying about her decision, hating herself for making the choice.
But what else could she do?
The two women walked the child towards Sherry, and then, Sherry realized they hadn't recognized her at all.
"Just a coincidence," Sherry thought. "Just one fucking bad joke." She watched the boy hobble passed, watched him vanish into the twilight, the nurse's uniform glowing long after the boy had ceased to exist. Then, with a shudder, Sherry pulled open the door to the bar.
She needed a drink. She needed a man. She didn't care what variety of either she wound up with either.
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