HOOKER

 

 

HOOKER

By Gerard Thornton

© 2023

 

 

Coney Island in winter can be a pretty desolate place.  Whenever people talk about Coney Island, they think about the amusement park, Nathan’s hot dogs, and maybe the ballpark where the Cyclones play baseball in the shadow of the long-defunct parachute jump tower.  People think about the beach and the Stillwell Avenue subway station, which is the terminus of most of the Brooklyn train lines. Coney can be all those things in the summer months, but after Columbus Day, it becomes a bleak landscape.

Growing up in Coney, I saw the place at its best and its worst.  Commuting home from school, I’d sit on the B-36 bus, my knees pressed tightly around my book bag (I didn’t want someone to steal my calculator) and my face looking out the grime-streaked window.  I would sometimes even see pickpockets and purse thieves committing crimes right in front of me and the other passengers as they looked on as the bus rumbled on. Looking back on it now, I probably should have told someone. But who could I have told in that packed bus?  The other school kids? The driver?  Nah, back then you just kept your mouth shut, if you knew what was good for you.  In fact, as I think about it now, there were surely adult able-bodied men on that bus that watched those things happen, and instead of raising an alarm, they also watched, and pretended they hadn’t seen anything.  Later on, when they were amongst friends, they would probably create a false story about how they had done something to bravely intervene to protect the innocent.  Of course, if anyone listening to the story had been on that bus, they would have known differently.  They would have known the truth.

As bad as it could be on the streets, I always thought my building was kind of a safe haven.  Home Base, as we would say when some of us kids got together for a game of death hunt, or something like that.  Whatever was going on out in the streets, once you twisted the key of the lobby door and then heard it slam shut behind you, you made it, you were home.  Whatever menace walked the streets could no longer do you harm. 

Back when I was a kid, I lived in Elihu Root Houses, or The Root, as everyone from the neighborhood called the apartment complex.  That name was on the large tin sign fastened to the front of the building.  It turns out that Elihu Root had been the Secretary of State back in the days of President Theodore Roosevelt.  He also served as a Senator in New York State.  Not that any of that mattered to us.   Not back then, anyway.  We just knew that we lived in the Root.

My building was one of four identical structures built sometime in the 1960s that stood 14 stories high on 32^nd Street, between Surf and Mermaid Avenues.  Like so many other apartment complexes of its day, the Root had been constructed on a “superblock.”  This was a large sort of concrete island that contained a cluster of buildings with no streets going through it, sort of as if you had connected 3 or 4 city blocks together, and filled in the streets between them with concrete. 

The buildings were getting old and had not seen much maintenance other than having Plexiglas windows fitted in the lobby where the glass ones had been repeatedly smashed out by vandals.  Every once in a while, a maintenance man would show up at the apartment to clear the drain in the bathtub or fix a leaky faucet, but it always took a month or two before they ever showed up after you submitted a service order. 

I lived on the eighth floor alone with my mother. Our two-bedroom apartment was painted a drab, generic beige color, with windows that faced the ocean.  An ocean view was an elegant touch for such a lowly neighborhood, but I loved the view.  I liked watching the lights of the ships as they came and went all through the night.  I’d watch until the late hours, dreaming of one day setting sail aboard one of those ships, to see the mysteries that only a sailor could know.

Mom was a beautiful woman.  She was tall and had long reddish-brown hair and always wore a barrette.  It kind of made her look like she was from the 1960s.  I told her that, and she’d laugh.  She had a nice laugh and a big bright smile. But she seemed to smile less often each day. Mom was moody. She’d come home from work some days and suddenly just stop talking.  She’d sit in the kitchen at that crappy Formica-top table, smoking cigarettes and watching TV.  Half the time, it didn’t even look like she was really watching.  She seemed to be staring through the screen.  When she was in one of those moods, the apartment could be a very lonely place.  I mean, I’d go out and play with friends, but when I came back home, she’d still be sitting there, just as I had left her, a burned-out cigarette pinched between her fingers, just looking at the television.  It was then that I started staying out later, coming home after dark, even though it had always been a rule that I come home before the streetlights came on. 

            One day after school, I got off the bus early, down by Stillwell Avenue, so that I could play some arcade games.  My friend Josh said he might meet me at the Donkey Kong game.  After stepping down onto the sidewalk I bought a candy bar from the corner store and crossed the street.  As I passed the old Tilyou Theatre I saw two women standing in the shadows of the alleyway that led between the theatre and the parking lot of the next-door restaurant.  Both women were lightly dressed for the cold weather.  They had heavy makeup and wore short skirts and black knee boots. Even though I was only twelve years old, I could tell both were prostitutes. Whenever my bus drove past this part of the neighborhood, I always saw several hanging around. 

I don’t really know when I had first learned about those hapless women, with their tired, desperate faces peering from the shadows, but I remember seeing them from as early as I could remember.  A neighbor had once warned me about the hookers.  She said I should steer clear of them or else I’d catch a disease.  I didn’t fully understand the warning, but I wound up storing that advice somewhere I the filing cabinet in the back of my mind.  Prostitutes seemed to have a kind of uniform that always included boots.  Sometimes the women I saw were the same as the ones from the day before, and sometimes I saw new faces. As I approached the alley, I saw that one of the women in had frizzy hair and a lean, hungry appearance.  The other looked healthier, almost friendly, and seemed to be telling frizzy hair a joke.  I found myself wondering what kind of jokes hookers told.  Her eyes caught mine and I immediately looked away, my legs quickening their pace as I nearly sprinted for the arcade. 

            I got to the arcade a few minutes later and spent about an hour playing video games and stuffing quarters into the machines.  Josh never showed, so I cut my visit short.  Mom would be expecting me home soon.  I sent her a text to let her know where I was.  She didn’t respond.

            I headed back to the bus stop and as I passed the theatre, the friendly-looking hooker from before stepped out directly in front of me, and I was forced to stop short, so I didn’t slam into her.  She looked older up close, and not quite as friendly. Her eyes were circled with black eyeliner, giving her a mildly sinister appearance.   But even so, she was pretty. Propped up in her heels, she was easily as tall as me, maybe even a bit taller.  Standing only an arm’s length apart, I could see that her boots were scuffed on the tips, and I found myself wondering if she ever polished them.  She was all softness and curves, with every part of her body promising pleasure. I caught the scent of her perfume.  She was Exotic.  Dangerous.  To be honest, I found her intimidating.

            “Hi there, what’s your name?”  She smiled, and she looked friendly again.

            “I-I’m Kevin,” I stammered, realizing I had broken the cardinal sin of speaking to a stranger.  Not only was she a stranger, but she was a Hooker.  Mom would not be happy if she knew what I was doing at that moment.

            She reached down and smoothed the short patent leather skirt she was wearing.  Her fingers were slim and white, with long, red nails that glistened.  The motion was so natural and brief, it should have passed unnoticed, yet I found myself immediately entranced. 

            “I’m Rachel, nice to meet you.”  Her eyes lit up as she introduced herself, but I knew that it probably wasn’t her real name, and it wasn’t even a real smile.  It was a hooker smile.  I knew that I had to get away from her, or else she would somehow get me to do things, or maybe she would pull out a knife and rob me.  Not that I had much money, maybe just $5.00 left over from the arcade, but still, I had heard that sometimes men were robbed by prostitutes.  My heart began to beat faster.  Her hand moved up, towards the vee of her blouse.

            “Do you want to see tits?”

            Tits. That word suddenly broke the spell.  That single word triggered all the schoolboy fears I had ever known.  The well-meaning neighbors who warned me away from places such as this were screaming in my head at that moment, like the unheard chorus from some Greek tragedy. I mumbled an apology and started at once for the bus stop, not looking back.  I thought I heard a chuckle, but I wasn’t sure.  I envisioned the woman reaching out for me just then, her long painted nails clutching for me, in an attempt to ensnare me.  If she got hold of me, I couldn’t imagine what would happen next.  My mind shuddered at the thought.

            Luckily, I made it to the bus stop just as the B-36 came rumbling around the corner.  As soon as the front doors opened, I clambered aboard, paid the fare, and sat down at a window seat.  The bus doors closed, and the bus lurched forward.  The driver turned the big steering wheel, and we headed away from the dark alleyway and towards safety.  Towards Home Base. 

When I looked back towards where Rachel the hooker had been standing, I saw her getting into the passenger side of a blue car.  The car pulled away from the curb and disappeared around the corner, going to wherever hookers went to do their business. 

            Yes, Coney Island in wintertime could be a very desolate place.