This season, Inky says everyone is wearing their wigs backward. Mismatched shoes. Cut a hole in the center of a soiled blanket, she says, wear it as a poncho, and you're ready for a night of fun on the street.
To be safe, the evening they check into the midtown Sheraton, Evelyn takes three suitcases full of army surplus. Yellowed, stretched-out bras. Sweaters thick with balls of lint. She takes a jar of clay facial mask to dirty them up. They sneak down the hotel fire stairs, fourteen flights to a door that opens on a back alley, and they're free. They're nobody. Anonymous. Without the responsibility to run anything.
No one's looking at them, asking for money, trying to sell them something.
Walking to the bridge, they're invisible. Safe in their poverty.
Packer starts to limp a little, from his shoes being on the wrong feet. Evelyn lets her mouth hang open. Then she spits. Yes, the girl taught to never even scratch an itch in public, she spits in the street. Packer sways, bumping against her, and she clutches his arm. He swings her around, and they kiss, reduced to just two wet mouths while the city around them, it disappears.
That first night on the street, Inky comes over with something reeking inside a black patent-leather purse webbed with cracks. It's the smell of low tide on a hot day at the shore. The smell, “It's the new anti-status symbol,” she says. Inside the purse is a cardboard takeout box from Chez Héloise. Inside the box is a fist-sized lump of orange roughy. “Four days old,” Inky says. “Swing it around. The smell beats a bodyguard for keeping people away.”
Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor.
You can get used to any smell, she says, no matter how bad. Inky says, “You got used to Calvin Klein's Eternity . . . ?”
The two of them, Inky and Evelyn, walk around the block, getting a little chill time away from the party. Up ahead, the entourage of some miniskirt statue is piling out of a limousine, thin people with headsets wired between their mouth and ear, each person holding a conversation with someone far away. As the two waddle past, Inky stumbles, brushing the purse full of rotten fish, pressing it against the sleeves of leather and fur coats. The bodyguards in dark suits. Personal assistants in tailored black.
The entourage crowds together, pulling away, all of them moaning and pressing a manicured hand over their nose and mouth.
Inky, she keeps on walking. She says, “I love doing that.”
In the face of this new money, Inky says it's time to change the rules. She says, “Poverty is the new nobility.”
Up ahead is a herd of Internet millionaires and Arab oil sheikhs, all of them smoking outside an art gallery, and Inky says, “Let's go pester them for pocket change . . .”
This is their vacation from being Packer and Muffy Keyes, the textile CEO and the tobacco-products heiress. Their little weekend retreat into the social safety net.
The Global Airlines wino happens to be Webster “Scout” Banners. Him, Inky, and Muffy, they meet up with Skinny and Frizzi. Then Packer and Boater come join them. Then Shoe and Bones. They're all drunk and playing charades, and at one point Packer shouts out, “Is there anyone under this bridge not worth at least forty million dollars?”
And, of course, you only hear the traffic passing by above.
Later, they're pushing shopping carts someplace industrial. Inky and Muffy pushing one cart, Packer and Scout walking a ways behind. And Inky says, “You know, I used to think the only thing worse than losing at love was winning . . .” She says, “I used to be so in love with Scout, ever since school, but you know how events . . . disappoint us.”
Inky and Muffy, their hands wearing those gloves without fingers so they can sort old cans better, Inky says, “I used to think the secret to a happy ending was to bring down the curtain at the exact right time. A moment after happiness, then everything's all wrong, again.”
Those social climbers who think they have it tough—their fear of using the wrong fork, or panicking when the fingerbowls are passed—the homeless have so much more to fret about. There's botulism. There's frostbite. A flash of capped tooth could expose you. A whiff of Chanel No. 5.
Any of a million little details could give you away.
They've become what Inky calls the “Commuting Homeless.”
She says, “Now? Now I love Scout. I love him as if I'd never married him.” On the streets like this, it feels like they're pioneers starting a new life in some wilderness. But instead of bears or wolves to worry about, they have—Inky shrugs and says—drug dealers and drive-by shootings.
“This is still the best part of my life,” she says, “but I know it can't last forever . . .”
Already her new social calendar was filling up. All this social diving. Doing anything on Tuesday is out of the question, because she plans to go rag-picking with Dinky and Cheetah. After that, Packer and Scout are meeting to sort aluminum cans. After that, everyone's stopping by the free clinic to have our feet looked at by some young, dark-eyed doctor with a vampire accent.
Packer says the aluminum can is the Krugerrand of the street.
Standing at the top of a ramp, where cars come off the freeway, Inky says, “Think high concept. Pretend you're doing a single-line movie pitch to network television.”
On a sheet of brown cardboard, using a black felt-tipped marker, Inky writes: Single Mom. Ten Kids. Breast Cancer.
“You do this—right?—” she says, “and people just give you money . . .”
Muffy writes: Crippled War
