Valerie in New York Ch. 02

[Chapter One is in my profile. The scene on the roof is an expansion of a much shorter one in the movie.]

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Rooftop Sojourn

In late May of 1967 Valerie wanted to change rooms but she had a couple of weeks until a new rental became available. She stowed most of her possessions with her friend Stevie but she figured she could get through the gap by sleeping rough outdoors. The weather was mild that month so she had confidence that she could get through this period even though Stevie tried to discourage her from attempting it. Valerie saw it as a challenge and an adventure instead of a hardship.

On the day before she had to move out she was walking through the Chelsea neighborhood on the West Side of Manhattan. She was carrying a jimmy bar that would open the more flimsy types of locks on various doors. Her idea was to find a building rooftop that might give her a degree of privacy and protection that she couldn't get at street level.

On her third attempt to find a place she was able to open the door of a four-story apartment building on West 25th Street. The roof door was unlocked so there was no need to force it. Valerie looked around and decided that this would be a good place to hang out for the duration of her homelessness. There was a little brick headhouse at the top of the stairwell that would give her shelter from the elements if she needed it. But the roof itself would make a fine patio on warm days such as this one.

When she was settled there everything seemed to go smoothly for a while. The tenants of the building, on the rare occasions that she passed them, made no comments to her. When she needed to shower, she could walk a few blocks to Stevie's single-room occupancy building and use the bathroom off the hallway. She couldn't cook or store perishable food but she worked around that for the short period she was there.

On most days Valerie wrote on her typewriter which she had placed on a makeshift table made of a board and two cinder blocks. She had to type while sitting on the surface of the roof but that didn't bother her. When she needed a break to think she could look east to the skyscrapers of two big insurance companies, New York Life and Metropolitan Life. She understood why people had penthouses or terraces if they could afford them. Being up there, above the disorderly streets, gave her a sense that the city was somehow within her control.

There was one rainy afternoon and evening when she had to stay inside the stairwell. But on most nights she spread out her quilt and slept outdoors. A fantasy grew that she could build her own penthouse on the roof by snatching various items lying around from the city's many construction and demolition sites. She had never attempted anything more ambitious than fixing a loose doorknob but she speculated that maybe she could learn by doing. She did realize how impractical all that was; even if the owner never discovered her it would be very difficult to create something impervious to New York winters. Nevertheless she felt the pull of having a real home for herself.

One item she missed having was a radio. It would be great to be able to listen to music but there was also the matter of getting reliable weather reports. Shoplifting one was an option, but her skills at thievery were amateurish. Snatching toothpaste or a packet of cheese was one thing, but a more valuable object like a radio was another matter. She had never been arrested but in her recent life on the edge it was always something to worry about.

If there was a serious charge against her there was no one, not even Stevie, who could make bail for her. Valerie had seen the gray tower of the Women's House of Detention down on Greenwich Avenue. The women inside would gather at the windows and call out to people on the street below. She didn't know what the interior looked like and she didn't want to think about it.

Her lack of information about the weather caught her by surprise one night. She was sleeping next to her typewriter and two piles of her writings held down by bricks. Sometime after midnight a heavy rain started suddenly. The downpour struck her full in the face and within seconds she was scrambling to get her papers into the stairwell. Then she went back for her typewriter.

As she huddled on the landing she assessed that the damage from this interruption wasn't too great. The old manual Smith-Corona could survive a lot of abuse. Yet she was jarred by the sudden awakening and it took her a while to fall asleep again on the landing. Her expansive mood of the past several days was gone and she ruminated for a while.

She thought about her difficult childhood with her parents and then her grandparents, her short shotgun marriage more than a decade earlier and the son she hadn't seen in years. During her final student days at Berkeley she already had a degree and she had no interest in spending more time and money on further study. Academia was another trap of conventional society and even if she could attain it the bullshit of faculty life repelled her. There had to be some place in this city where she could fit in with others and yet be true to something she couldn't quite define yet.

1964 Pontiac Bonneville

Valerie was short of money so she had to be out on the streets again one Sunday night in February, 1968. It had snowed a few inches three days before, then there was a thaw followed by a quick freeze. Now there was frozen slush all over the sidewalks were owners had neglected to shovel when they had had the chance.

Tonight it was down to thirty degrees when Valerie had taken her place at 48th and Twelfth Avenue just before midnight. She wore a short coat over a sweater and wool skirt, boots, thigh-high wool stockings and a wool hat instead of her usual cap. Even dressed that way she was still not comfortable and she vowed to use more of her earnings for warmer clothes.

It was a very slow night and she only had three customers in the next four hours. All of them had used their cars; none had offered to pay for a room. Twice she had gone to the tavern on the northeast corner to get coffee. She had been tempted to hang out in there and just watch traffic pass by, but she hadn't worked in a while and she needed to get out in the cold streets and earn some cash.

By the early morning hours of Monday the bar had closed and Valerie's mind wandered as she leaned on the light pole. One of the things she hadn't expected before getting into various street hustles was the tedium that was often involved, the waiting around for opportunities to appear. It was like war, perhaps, as someone had told her: periods of nothing mixed in with moments of craziness and fear. It was a war she seemed to be always losing.

She was considering giving up and going home when a big Pontiac sedan pulled up to the curb. Valerie had gotten used to noting car makes and models because those would give her clues to who she was about to deal with. The driver leaned over and cranked down the window on the passenger's side. He was a black man in his mid-thirties.

"Hey, honey, you must be working."

For comments like that she was tempted to have a sarcastic answer like, no, I'm waiting for the Queen Elizabeth to dock, a reference to the liners that used the piers across the avenue. But often she reined herself in based on whatever quick impressions she could gather. Now she just shrugged and nodded. She approached the open window, expecting to negotiate with him about what he wanted and how much she'd charge him.

There were two other black men of about the same age in the back seat; they looked back at her mildly. She thought they would have had the same expressions if she was a gas jockey asking about an oil check. In any case, she preferred not to get into any car with more than one man in it - unless perhaps if they were all more than sixty-years-old, a situation which hadn't happened yet.

The driver said, "Okay, get in the back there." She pondered whether to wave them on or not. The bar was not open if needed for a quick retreat. She resolved to get out here earlier in the evening to have that option available. Right now, however, she needed to make a decision. They seemed to be ordinary working guys, but that was mostly a guess. She decided to get in, and she pulled the back door open. The two men there guided her to a place on the seat between them.

As the car started up Twelfth Avenue Valerie said something to make contact with them, "Man, it sure is cold out there."

The driver said, "Well it's nice and warm in here baby. My name's Oliver, by the way. And that's Fred." He indicated the man to her right, who raised his hand a few inches. "And that's Caesar."

That one said, "Yeah, Caesar, as in Julius," and he laughed. Valerie had no idea if johns used their real names but she supposed they did at times. She thought they might ask her name but she was surprised that Oliver launched into a political topic.

"You've see this thing in Vietnam, this Tet offensive? Old LBJ got his ass handed to him."

She offered her true opinion, "This whole war is stupid, I hate it."

Oliver said, "Oh you do? Well, how about the war here at home?"

He had a magazine on the front seat, a Life, and he handed it back to her. It was from the previous July and the cover photo showed a black boy, about twelve or so, bleeding on an asphalt pavement. The caption said, "Newark: The Predictable Insurrection." Fred was looking at it too and said, "If it was so predictable then how come no one predicted it?"

Valerie looked through the windshield and saw that Oliver had stopped at a light at 57th but was aimed towards a ramp to the West Side Highway. She said, "Where exactly are we going?" There had been a few times when she had been left at some far-off place in the outer boroughs. Then she had to ride back by subway or use her precious cash for a taxi.

Oliver said, "I wasn't really thinking. We'll turn around at 72nd." As the light changed he said to her, "Go ahead, look at the pictures inside."

"I've seen it, I know what's in it."

"Look at it again."

She flipped through to the section. A series of photos showed a cop in a yellow helmet firing a shotgun at a looter down the block. He killed the looter but also wounded the boy who was standing nearby.

Caesar said, "The boy lived, but that dude . . . imagine, a case of beer is worth more than a man's life."

"I hate cops too," Valerie said. For a moment she wondered why Oliver happened to have this old issue lying around. Had he planned to show it to whatever white girl they picked up tonight? Was it an attempt to intimidate her?

He said, "What are you, some kind of a liberal?"

"No, I'm a radical." The three of them chuckled, but not too loudly. Oliver asked her, "So are you part of some group?"

"No, I'm going to start my own group." She hoped that they were just teasing her, but not in a really menacing way. She continued, "It's going to be entirely of women, I think."

Oliver said, "Oh, you're one of those, huh?"

"And where do we fit into all this, you know what I mean?" Fred asked.

"I haven't thought that through yet, the thing with other oppressed groups." The three men made scoffing noises. Meanwhile, Oliver had brought the Pontiac up to about seventy-miles per hour. At this time of night the highway was almost empty and he quickly reached the 72nd Street exit.

He said, "All this talk is interesting but we've got to find a place to get down to business." He turned back south and drove down Eleventh Avenue. "There's some blocks in here that are good." Somewhere in the West 60s he turned left into a street that sloped upwards. It was lined with garages and other small buildings and was completely deserted. "Yeah, I knew it, nobody's around here at this hour." He found a place to park and turned off the engine.

Then the four of them discussed what was wanted and a price was quoted. The basic setup was that she would handle Fred and Caesar at the same time while Oliver watched. Then he would take a turn with her by himself.

Caesar said, "He gets you for himself because he's the foreman."

"The what?"

"He's our boss, we work for him."

She attempted a joke, "So what is this, employee appreciation night?"

They did find that quite funny. Oliver said, "Not really, they all got to pay their share here."

She was grateful that there would be no haggling over money or attempt to trick her out of her earnings. Once she was paid she got down to work. The actual sexual part of turning a trick was sometimes the least anxiety-provoking aspect of the whole deal. She was able to turn her mind down and deal with the matters at hand. Sometimes the phrase "tools of the trade" would come to her and she imagined a factory worker at a lathe or drill press.

What she had to do now was get up on her hands and knees and blow Caesar to her left while Fred took her from behind. Oliver just peered over the seatback and watched. He said, "Mind if I play the radio?" He was asking his friends, not her, and one of them responded, "Sure, go ahead." He got the key into the accessory position and turned the knob; the station was in the middle of "Nowhere to Run" by Martha Reeves and the Vandellas.

Fred had lifted the back of her skirt as she faced away from him. "Hey, this little chick has those old-time bloomers on."

Valerie explained for him, "That's because it's cold out tonight."

He lowered those and commented, "But she's also got these cute polka-dot panties." He took those down too; in the next few moments he took a condom from his pocket and put it on. Valerie knew she just had to keep her rump up and let him worry about the motion as he braced one leg in the foot well. Meanwhile she was aware while sucking on Caesar's cock that all men seemed to taste and feel the same now. Perhaps that was because she had done this so often that any chance for novelty was completely gone.

What didn't surprise her was how fast the whole deal was completed. Fred came first and that perhaps inspired Caesar to do his thing seconds later. Valerie noted that many of the johns seemed just as emotionally detached as she was. A few tried to pretend that love or passion was involved, but they were not the majority. Sometimes she wondered why they just didn't masturbate and save themselves the money. Magazines and porn theaters were a lot cheaper than real women.

Oliver had just sat there looking bemused. She had seen men who liked to masturbate while watching but he wasn't one of them. As his two companions pulled their clothes back together he said, "Okay, gents, I need some time alone now."

Fred complained, "Hey Ollie, man, it's cold out there. Where are we supposed to go?"

"You knew about this." He pointed up the hill, "Up there, 10th or is it Amsterdam? There's an all-night deli and a coffee shop too."

Caesar said, "How much time do you need, chief?"

"Give me a half-hour, I think, to be on the safe side." Valerie expected that that would be more than enough. The two guys grumbled a bit but they got themselves together and soon they were trudging uphill. Oliver said to her, "Now baby you just stay there and daddy will come back and take care of everything." He got out and reentered through the back door. It became apparent that he wanted his session to be on top of her. That was okay with Valerie; if anything it was a more comfortable position for her.

He didn't use a condom, but she was prepared for that. Many months ago she had herself fitted with an IUD. Even if a lot of men used condoms, the sheaths had a tendency to break at the worst possible moment. The possibility of getting the clap was always there, but she hoped to be out of the business before the end of this year and maybe her luck would hold out. If not, she'd miss a week or two of work while taking the pills.

Like his friends, Oliver was quick and didn't have much to say about it all. During the act she stared at the ceiling and pondered the shape of the dome light. She had looked at a lot of dome lights over the months and she was struck by how different car companies varied the designs. By the time Fred and Caesar were approaching Oliver was again sitting in the front listening to the radio. They opening the doors and started handing in coffees, sodas and snacks. "You only were gone for twenty minutes," Oliver said. One of them replied, "We knew it wouldn't take you that long, boss."

The two of them guided Valerie towards the opposite door so she was now at the end of the seat. Fred offered her a Diet Rite and a bag of potato chips, "Here, honey, you must be hungry." She would have liked something more substantial after being outdoors for hours, but she did appreciate any gesture of kindness.

In a few minutes she was driven back to the same lamppost where they had started. When she got out Fred waved at her and closed the door. Then the car drove off and it was quickly gone from her sight.

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