The tone in her voice was the same as though she was talking about a cockroach or maggot.
Jilly shook her head. “More like a storefront counselor. Her name’s Angelina Marceau. She runs that dropin center on Grasso Street. It’s privately funded, no political connections.”
“I’ve heard of her. The Grasso Street Angel.”
“You don’t have to come,” Jilly said, “but I know she’d like to meet you.”
“I’m sure.”
Jilly shrugged. When she started to clean up, Annie stopped her. “Please,” she said. “Let me do it.”
Jilly retrieved her sketchpad from the bed and returned to the windowseat while Annie washed up.
She was just adding the finishing touches to the rough portrait she’d started earlier when Annie came to sit on the edge of the Murphy bed.
“That painting on the easel,” Annie said. “Is that something new you’re working on?”
Jilly nodded.
“It’s not like your other stuff at all.”
“I’m part of an artist’s group that calls itself the Five Coyotes Singing Studio,” Jilly explained. “The actual studio’s owned by a friend of mine named Sophie Etoile, but we all work in it from time to time.
There’s five of us, all women, and we’re doing a group show with a theme of child abuse at the Green Man Gallery next month.”
“And that painting’s going to be in it?” Annie asked. “It’s one of three I’m doing for the show.”
“What’s that one called?”
“‘I Don’t Know How To Laugh Anymore.’”
Annie put her hands on top of her swollen stomach. “Me, neither,” she said.
I Don’t Know How to Laugh Anymore,
I started running away from home when I was ten. The summer I turned eleven I managed to make it to Newford and lived on its streets for six months. I ate what I could find in the dumpsters behind the McDonald’s and other fast food places on Williamson Street—there was nothing wrong with the food. It was just dried out from having been under the heating lamps for too long.
I spent those six months walking the streets all night. I was afraid to sleep when it was dark because I was just a kid and who knows what could’ve happened to me. At least being awake I could hide whenever I saw something that made me nervous. In the daytime I slept where I could—in parks, in the back seats of abandoned cars, wherever I didn’t think I’d get caught. I tried to keep myself clean, washed up in restaurant bathrooms and at this gas bar on Yoors Street where the guy running the pumps took a liking to me. Paydays he’d spot me for lunch at the grill down the street.
I started drawing back then and for awhile I tried to hawk my pictures to the tourists down by the Pier, but the stuff wasn’t all that good and I was drawing with pencils on foolscap or pages torn out of old school notebooks—not exactly the kind of art that looks good in a frame, if you know what I mean. I did a lot better panhandling and shoplifting.
I finally got busted trying to boost a tape deck from Kreiger’s Stereo—it used to be where Gypsy Records is. Now it’s out on the strip past the Tombs. I’ve always been small for my age, which didn’t help when I tried to to convince the cops that I was older than I really was. I figured juvie would be better than going back to my parents’ place, but it didn’t work. My parents had a missing persons out on me, God knows why. It’s not like they could’ve missed me.
But I didn’t go back home. My mother didn’t want me and my dad didn’t argue, so I guess he didn’t either. I figured that was great until I started making the rounds of foster homes, bouncing back and forth them and the Home for Wayward Girls. It’s just juvie with an oldfashioned name.
I guess there must be some good foster parents, but I never saw any. All mine ever wanted was to collect their check and treat me like I was a piece of shit unless my case worker was coming by for a visit. Then I got moved up from the mattress in the basement to one of their kids’ rooms. The first time I tried to tell the worker what was going down, she didn’t believe me and then my foster parents beat the crap out of me once she was gone. I didn’t make that mistake again.
I was thirteen and in my fourth or fifth foster home when I got molested again. This time I didn’t take any crap. I booted the old pervert in the balls and just took off out of there, back to Newford.
I was older and knew better now. Girls I talked to in juvie told me how to get around, who to trust and who was just out to peddle your ass.
See, I never planned on being a hooker. I don’t know what I thought I’d do when I got to the city—I wasn’t exactly thinking straight. Anyway, I ended up with this guy—Robert Carson. He was fifteen.
I met him in back of the Convention Center on the beach where all the kids used to all hang out in the summer and we ended up getting a room together on Grasso Street, near the high school. I was still pretty fucked up about getting physical with a guy but we ended up doing so many drugs—acid, MDA, coke, smack, you name it —that half the time I didn’t know when he was putting it to me.
We ran out of money one day, rent was due, no food in the place, no dope, both of us too fucked up to panhandle, when Rob gets the big idea of selling my ass to bring in a little money. Well, I was screwed up, but not that screwed up. But then he got some guy to front him some smack and next thing I know I’m in this car with some guy I never saw before and he’s expecting a blow job and I’m crying and all fucked up from the dope and then I’m doing it and standing out on the street corner where he’s dumped me some ten minutes later with forty bucks in my hand and Rob’s laughing, saying how we got it made, and all I can do is crouch on the sidewalk and puke, trying to get the taste of that guy’s come out of my mouth.
So Rob thinks I’m being, like, so fucking weird—I mean, it’s easy money, he tells me. Easy for him maybe. We have this big fight and then he hits me. Tells me if I don’t get my ass out on the street and make some more money, he’s going to do worse, like cut me.
My luck, I guess. Of all the guys to hang out with, I’ve got to pick one who suddenly realizes it’s his ambition in life to be a pimp. Three years later he’s running a string of five girls, but he lets me pay my respect—two grand which I got by skimming what I was paying him—and I’m out of the scene.
Except I’m not, because I’m still a junkie and I’m too fucked up to work, I’ve got no ID, I’ve got no skills except I can draw a little when I’m not fucked up on smack which is just about all the time. I start muling for a couple of dealers in Fitzhenry Park, just to get my fixes, and then one night I’m so out of it, I just collapse in a doorway of a pawn shop up on Perry Street.
I haven’t eaten in, like, three days. I’m shaking because I need a fix so bad I can’t see straight. I haven’t washed in Christ knows how long, so I smell and the clothes I’m wearing are worse. I’m at the end of the line and I know it, when I hear footsteps coming down the street and I know it’s the local cop on his beat, doing his rounds.
I try to crawl deeper into the shadows but the doorway’s only so deep and the cop’s coming closer and then he’s standing there, blocking what little light the streetlamps were throwing and I know I’m screwed. But there’s no way I’m going back into juvie or a foster home. I’m thinking of offering him a blow job to let me go—so far as the cops’re concerned, hookers’re just scum, but they’ll take a freebie all the same—but I see something in this guy’s face, when he turns his head and the streetlight touches it, that tells me he’s an honest joe. A rookie, true blue, probably his first week on the beat and full of wanting to help everybody and I know for sure I’m screwed. With my luck running true, he’s going to be the kind of guy who thinks social workers really want to help someone like me instead of playing bureaucratic mindfuck games with my head.
I don’t think I can take anymore.
