Trolley No. 1852

A sudden surge in the coal-gas intensified the streetlamp’s brightness, just as the idea had surged in my mind: I could go to this brothel… and investigate… Indeed, and not that I suspected Selina might work in this particular bordello but surely there stood a more-than-minute chance that some of the women therein had seen or even knew of her. I could show my picture around whilst maintaining the appearance of a “john,” as I believed the suitors of prostitution were called.

For the first time in months, I had hope!

But, lo, even as the trove of my hope may have just trebled, simple realities proved another matter. Came my whisper, “I’d be interested in attending this ‘Red House’ with you, Mr. Erwin, but I’m afraid I’ve precious little money for such indulgences.” My fingers fished through stray coins in my pocket. “How, uh, how much would be requisite on my part for, say, minimal services?”

Erwin’s face loosened in a manner of relief. “Thank you for not disowning our friendship, Mr. Phillips. I thought sure you’d think me a cad for admitting this—”

“Not at all. We all have our occasions for urges oft beyond our force of will. But, hear me. How much will I need?”

He paused at the distant bay of a foghorn from the harbour, a seemingly unearthly dirge of murky, falling notes; but when it passed, he answered, “Well, the place I’ve been to, it’s called the 1852 Club, and it’s a strange place, I’ve got to say. You see—and you’ll find this hard to believe—it’s free.”

I eyed him in the wavering pallor of gas-light. “Did I hear you right? Free?”

“It’s free, all right, Mr. Phillips,” he assured in a whisper. “I been there three times, like I said, and haven’t spent a penny.”

How could I not scoff now? I argued, “That makes no sense whatever. Any commercial enterprise, licit or illicit, exists through the conduction of services or merchandise rendered in the exchange of some monetary source! A bordello that doesn’t charge for the services of its women would be the uttermost negation of logic.”

“You’ll get no argument from me, Mr. Phillips,” he maintained his whisper as if in fear of being overheard on the vacant street. “I’m just tellin’ ya how it is. I know it sounds like a tall tale but… ,” and then all he did was shrug.

A tall tale, yes, but I trusted in my judgment of men to be convinced that Erwin was no such teller. “Well,” I said next. “Where exactly is this 1852 Club located?”

Erwin spread out his hands. “To tell you the truth, I’m not sure. Sometimes I think it must be near Old Greenwich and other times it seems it must be Lower East. It’s the trolley that takes us, see—maybe a ten, fifteen-minute trip, but the route…”

“What about the route?” I insisted.

“It’s all this way and that, and up and down, and through alleys I never seen before. It moves through these courtyards that look so old, and, and… Even a tunnel, where there’s no light at all. Gettin’ on by mistake one night’s how I even found out about the place.”

“That’s very… strange,” I uttered.

“Well like I first mentioned, it’s a strange place.” Suddenly he looked dreamy even in the smudged darkness. “The women, Mr. Phillips, it’s just one looker after the next, and they don’t wear nothin’ about the house, I ain’t kiddin’ ya.” His whisper grew heated. “And they do anything, and’ll have ya as many times as you can go.”

“All, as you ensure, for nothing,” I reiterated.

“For nary a red cent.”

By now the proposition seemed farcical, but I simply refused to believe Erwin would lie so cockamamily. “In that case, I’d like very much to join you tonight.”

He seemed to shudder. “I just feel so… guilty, Mr. Phillips—”

“Oh, for goodness sake!” I complained. “Guilty?”

“It’s hard enough staying on a Godly course, and I do try, but sometimes… sometimes—” He shook his head in remorse. “It’s been more than six months since I’ve… well, you know…”

Six MONTHS? I thought all too stridently, It’s been more than six YEARS for me!

Erwin composed himself out of his conflicting sentiments. “I only do it when I have to, but I see I’ve brought you right along into it. Not only are my sins on my hands but your sins, too.”

I was losing patience now with the fulcrum on which Erwin’s self-perceived “sin” teetered. But I needed him now. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Erwin. Nature, just the same as your god, is what made us men, with the natural proclivities of men, so don’t get yourself in a swiver. Now, when does the trolley come? Surely it’s not the B-Line—”

“No, no. And it doesn’t come every night, but when it does” —he consulted his pocket-watch with a squint— “it would be very soon.” Another diverting pause cruxed his expression. “But that’s another thing ‘bout this place, Mr. Phillips, another strange thing, I mean.” He stared off into drab darkness. “Time.”

“Time?”

“I don’t know how to explain it”—he rubbed his brows—“but each and every time I been, it’s seemed like I been there for hours. I could get on with three or four different girls, too, and when I get out’a there I think it’s got to be noon at least… but then I look at my watch and it’s scarcely four-thirty in the morning or quarter till five.”

I staved off a chuckle, for Erwin was permitting his oblique sense of abstraction to supervene the much more primal reality that he must not be possessed of much sexual endurance! Then again, how much endurance would I be capable of given the sheer infrequency of my own sexual experience? Laughably little, I suspected, for so long ago it was that’d I’d been married.

Several more minutes passed, and my current hopes passed as well. The B-Line would be arriving shortly. “Drat,” I said. “It appears that tonight’s not our night, Mr. Erwin,” but no sooner had I spoken the words than Erwin turned with an enthused lurch…

At the end of the street, like something first semi-tangible slowly materializing from the dark’s secret ether, a bulk shape began to form. Crackling sparks grew less dim (no doubt the sparks of electric transference from the ever-present power wires looping overhead), companioned by a faint and very ghostly circle of yellow light at the shape’s forward-most area which made me think of a dying cyclopean eye. The squeal of bearings caught my ears, then the grate of an air-break…

Erwin uttered, “This is it.”

The vehicle’s forward lamp shined so faint it scarcely served a purpose, but finally there came another surge of gas into the closest street-lamp, and this is when I got my first full glimpse.

It was an older-style trolley, opened all around in a vestibuled fashion (in other words, lacking windows) and was of the antiquated twin-car, double-truck type whereas all city trolleys that I’d seen were single-carred. Flaking yellow paint, quite a murky yellow, covered all of the decrepit vehicle’s side panels.

“This is most definitely not a city trolley,” I muttered to Erwin.

“No, Mr. Phillips. It’s a private trolley. It’s not from the city transit system at all.”

A private trolley…

At the forward car’s head, I spied the motorman’s station, little more than a cubby; the capped motorman himself stood scarcely moving at the controller handle. In the drear, his face looked dead-pan, bereft of life; indeed, the darkness reduced his eyes and mouth to black slits amid a waxen pallor. Above the frame of his look-out, the car’s identification number could be seen in black-stencil letters: No. 1852.

The vehicle squealed to a halt. Erwin, in an excitement that seemed touched by fear, grabbed my arm and urged, “The conductor’ll size you up ‘cos you’re new, but don’t worry. He’ll let you on since you’re with me.”

“Size me up?” I had to question.

“They don’t let ruffians on.”

“Oh,” but in a city aswarm with ruffians and every other manner of human flotsam, the policy was to be expected. “But who enforces order, should the conductor mistakenly allow some roysterers aboard?”