Bronx Noir

She used to feel in control. She’d get into a car with some guy and feel like she was holding the cards. She had what she wanted, and when it was over she still had it, while the guy was fifty bucks poorer. (Or forty or thirty or whatever it was that night that moment.) She liked seeing some guys over and over, a stable of “steadies” like her mom had, young dudes who cruised with booming hip-hop cars. They had flashy gold rings, gold chains, big gold watches with diamonds glittery, big belt buckles, and she so sparkling pantyhose girl, so high-heels clingy skirts, she looked so young, she looked so edible, and the business did not show on her. They’d take her to parties in the early days before gangs became posses. She would give them group rates so they wouldn’t have to fight over her. She liked them. In their arms she imagined being with a lover, and sometimes she might cum.

A few months later, and things started to change. Posses became strict; she couldn’t go from this boy to that without some other boy getting mad. You can’t go from posse to posse and do business; a girl that fucked someone in TTG would not be touched by someone in FNB. Iris found she couldn’t stay with a posse either, as all of a sudden posse boys weren’t so interested in hookers. There was plenty of fresh girl meat out there eager to get “tagged” by a posse, to be owned and belong, and they refused to have Iris anywhere near them. Iris couldn’t be tagged; not only was it bad for business to confine herself to a select group, but no one would tag a puta anyway, so she had to hit the streets again and kiss the pretty boys with the fine rides goodbye.

After six months she was tired. Sleepless eyes. The young guys who would fuck her were abusive, pounding into her like hammer-thrust speed is of the essence, the great twitching shudder coming so fast. She’d sit on the stoop and not even look at their cars anymore. There were fat old greasy types waving bills, men who stank of cologne and cigarettes. She’d give them hand jobs while they talked about their wives, slipping their palms up her thighs in the cuchifriteria where she went to get lunch. She’d overcharge them in hopes of discouraging them.

“I have this weird dream,” she told Pacheco one night on the stoop. “I’m with this older trick, and we fuck an’ all. I’m sleepin’ with him in Ma’s bed, when she comes in an’ starts screamin’. ‘My Gaw, whachu doin’ in bed wit’cha father?’”

Pacheco started sending her out on cushy assignments, dates where she’d end up at some hotel like The Penta, all spruced up like an office lady, to meet some flaky spick borough president or some shit like that. Those kind of people pay a lot for a fifteen-year-old. It meant not working so many tricks but the bastids did wear her out, all those pretzel shapes and that stripping shit they love. After one of those, she’d take the day off, sit around and watch TV. Row after row of soap operas, her mother lying on the bed behind her. Pizza delivery, and Pacheco’s visit to bring the crack. The hurried breath of Angie’s torch, the suck of cold white flame. A curl of freeze and then the glassy fishtank haze.

The soap operas put a lot of stupid ideas into Iris. She thought about the rest of her life, and how much she didn’t want to end up like her mother. It was starting to hit her, those nights when Angie sat there blind-eyed in float-daze, drool hanging drip—she was the only support her mother had. She was trapped. It was going to be tricks and tricks and tricks. The wear-and-tear was starting to show, those circles under her eyes, for starters, that rough feel to her skin that face creams and makeup would not hide.

“And in my old age,” she whispered to Pacheco while her mother slept, “I’ll have to have a daughter just to take care of me.” Tears tracked mascara down her cheeks. Pacheco could only add that he had no more cushy jobs for her. Those “jaitones” only want girls who look like virgins.

The week she went back to street duty, the first hooker body appeared strewn over empty fish crates behind the Hunts Point market.

“I want a boyfriend,” she told a Jose, a young trick she shared a joint with, after she heard about the second body, found seven blocks from her stoop. “Someone to take care of me.” She looked at Jose, but he wasn’t buying, just renting. There seemed nothing to hold her in her world, no handles no grips and no brakes to slow the speed.

“I’m saying I want all of you to keep your eyes peeled,” Pacheco told all the girls one Friday night, after the third hooker turned up barely three blocks away. “The guy is close. You stick together, an’ if you see anybody actin’ weird, you get me. Okay?”