'I'm just wondering if you know where you're going.'
'I know where I'm going.'
'White girl going up to Diamondback...'
'I said I...'
'This hour of the night.'
'I know where I'm going. And it's morning.' 'By me, it ain't morning till the sun comes up.'
Yolande shrugged. It had been a pretty good night for her, and She was exhausted.
'Why you going to Diamondback?' the cabbie asked. His name on the plastic-enclosed permit on the dashboard to the right of the meter read MAX LIEBOWITZ. Jewish, Yolande thought. Last dying breed of big-city cabdrivers. Nowadays, most of your cabbies were from India or the Middle east. Some of them couldn't speak English. None knew where Duckworth Avenue was. Yolande knew where it was. She had blown a Colombian drug on Duckworth Avenue in Calm's Point. He had given her a five-hundred-dollar tip. She would never
Duckworth Avenue in her life. She wondered if Max Liebowitz knew where Duckworth Avenue was. She wondered if Max Liebowitz knew she herself was Jewish.
'I didn't hear your answer, miss,' he said.
'I live up there,' she said.
'You live in Diamondback?' he said, and shot a glance at her in the rearview mirror.
'Yes.'
Actually Jamal lived in Diamondback. All she did was live with Jamal. Jamal Stone, no relation to Sharon, who had built a career by flashing her wookie. Yolande flashed her wookie a thousand times a day. Too bad she couldn't act. Then again, neither could a lot of girls who were good at flashing their wookies. 'How come you live up there?' Liebowitz asked. 'I like paying cheap rent,' she said.
Which wasn't exactly true. Jamal paid the rent. But he also took every penny she earned. Kept her in good shit, though. Speaking of which, it was getting to be about that time. She looked at her watch. Twenty-five to six. Been a hard day's night.
'Worth your life, a white girl living up there,' Liebowitz said.
Nice Jewish girl, no less, Yolande thought, but did not say it because she couldn't bear seeing a grown man cry. A nice Jewish girl like you? Giving blow jobs to passing motorists at fifty bucks a throw. A Jewish girl? Suck your what? She almost smiled.
'So what are you then?' Liebowitz asked. 'A dancer?'
'Yeah,' she said, 'how'd you guess?'
'Pretty girl like you, this hour of the night, I'm a dancer in one of the topless bars.'
'Yeah, you hit it right on the head.'
'I'm not a mind reader,' Liebowitz said, chuckling. 'You were standing in front of the Stardust when you hailed me.'
Which was where she'd given some guy from Connecticut a twenty-dollar hand job while the girts onstage rattled and rolled.
'Yep,' she said.
Tipped the manager two bills a night to let her freelance in the joint. Pissed the regulars workin there, but gee, tough shit, honey.
'So where you from originally?' Liebowitz asked.
unlo, she said.
'I knew it wasn't here. You don't have the accent.' She almost told him her father owned a deli in Cleveland. She didn't. She almost told him she had once been to Paris, France. She didn't. Yolande Marie was her mother's idea. Yolande Marie Marx, Known in the trade as Groucho, just kidding. known in the trade as Marie St. Claire, which Jamal had come up with, lot of difference it made to the johns on wheels. My name is Marie St. Claire, case you're interested. Nice to meet you, Marie, take it deeper.
She had nightmares about a john pulling up in a blue station wagon and she leans in the window and 'Hey, hiya. Wanna party?' and she gets in the car and unzips his fly and it's her father. Dreamt that on average twice a week. Woke up in a cold sweat every time. Dear Dad, I am still working here in the toy shop, it's a shame you never get out of Cleveland now
that Mom's bedridden, maybe I'll be home for Yom Kippur. Sure. Take it deeper, hon.
'So do you have to do anything else at that bar?' 'How do you mean?'
'You know,' Liebowitz said, and looked at her in the rearview mirror. 'Besides dancing?'
She looked back at him. He had to be sixty years old, short bald-headed little fart could hardly see over the steering wheel. Hitting on her. Next thing you knew he'd offer to barter. Fare on the meter was now six dollars and thirty cents. He'd agree to swap it for a quickie in the backseat. Nice Jewish man. Unzip his fly, out would pop her father. 'So do you?' 'Do what?'
'Other things beside dancing topless.' 'Yeah, I also sing topless,' she said. 'Go on, they don't sing in those places.' 'I do.'
'You're kidding me.'
'No, no. You want to hear me sing, Max?'
'Nah, you don't sing.'
'I sing like a bird,' Yolande said, but did not demonstrate. Liebowitz was thinking this over, trying to determine whether or not she was putting him on.
'What else do you really do?' he asked. 'Besides sing and dance? Topless.'
She was beginning to think it might not be a bad idea to turn another trick on the way home. But not for the six-ninety now on the meter. How much cash you carrying, Zayde? she wondered. Want a piece of nineteen-year- old Jewish-girl ass you can tell your
grandchildren about next Hanukkah? She thought her father again, decided no. Still, talk old Max into a hundred for a quick blow job, might be worth it. Twice the going price for a street girl, but oh such tender goods, what do you say, Granpa?
'What'd you have in mind?' she asked coyly.
The black man in the black jeans, black leather jacket, black boots, and black watch cap appeared in front of them like an avenging angel of death. They almost all three of them peed on his boots, he was standing that close.
'Now what do you call this?' he asked rhetorically.
'We call it pissing in the gutter,' Richard the Second said.
'I call it disrespect for the neighborhood,' the black man said. 'That what the letter P stand for? Pissing.'
'Join us, why don't you?' Richard the Third suggested.
'My name is Richard,' Richard the First said,
zipping up and extending his hand to the black man. 'So is mine' Richard the Second said. 'Me, too,' Richard the Third said.
'As it happens,' the black man said, 'my name is Richard, too.'
Which now made four of them.
Bloody murder was only an hour and sixteen minutes away.
Abdul Sikhar lived in a two-bedroom Calm's Point apartment with five other men from Pakistan. They had all known each other in their native town of
Rawalpindi, and they had all come to the United States at different times over the past three years. Two of the men had wives back home. A third had a girlfriend there. Four of the men worked as cabdrivers and were in constant touch by CB radio all day long. Whenever they babbled in Urdu, they made their passengers feel as if a terrorist act or a kidnapping was being plotted. The four cabbies drove like the wind in a camel's mane. None of them knew it was against the law to blow your horn in this city. They would have blown it anyway. Each and every one of them could not wait till he got out of this fucking city in this fucking United States of America. Abdul Sikhar felt the same way, though he did not drive like the wind. What he did was pump gas and wash cars at Bridge Texaco.
