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.They weren’t women to me but meat in a butcher window.Not that I’ve got anything against whores.Everybody’s entitled to a living.But there are whores and whores.Did you ever know one with a heart of gold?You’re a cynical bastard.You Madison Avenue punks.I’m sorry if I’ve offended you.But you hired this agency to do a job for you.We can’t forget the public.I want to know about the women in your life.The woman you married, Edith Kincell.And this woman Annabelle.The first whore I was with.She had a heart of gold.The public ought to know about her.She made me what I am today.If you want to be humorous.What’s wrong with a little humor? This was back in McKeesport.We went into her room and she said, “Three bucks.” She didn’t give a damn if I was a snotnose kid or an old rip, sober or drunk.I was just part of the Saturday night parade.She took my money and put it in a dresser drawer.Then she got out of her clothes.I’d never seen a naked woman before.Her breasts big and round.Her belly.She said, “Ain’t you ever been with a woman?” And where I’d been all my life.Where? That was a good one.When I wasn’t working I was home.I was like a horse pulling a milk wagon.I had my route.That whore saw it all on my face.She put on her robe and sat down on the bed and patted the place alongside.“Sit down,” she said.She took my hand and told me about her old man who’d worked in the mills until he was knocked down by a switch engine.Maybe she was kidding me.Trying to make me feel easy.Anyway, when she kissed me I wasn’t afraid any more.Her body wasn’t all white any more like meat in a butcher window.It felt dark and warm.Her lips dark and warm.And me, I was falling, falling like in a dream, only her fingers moving.I guess she’d taken my dumb hands in hers.That whore, tired like she was.Saturday night and all.That’s a long long night in a steel town.Anyway she had the time for me.Hell, what did I know? I was the best son a mother ever had.I can say that but I paid for it.You pay for everything.The times I’d walk up and down my room like a crazy animal, wondering if I should go out with the fellows.I didn’t go.Not for a long time.I’d walk up and down and look out of the windows.The Bessemers on the river turning the sky all red.Like red golden fields or something, making me dream of some girl who’d love me like in the books.I was seventeen.I was a great book reader.But I couldn’t read those spring nights.I’d hear the voices of the fellows, telling about the women they’d been with and what they’d done.The night I went with the fellows my mother guessed it.She said, “Billyboy, where are you going?” — “For a walk,” I said.She said, “What’s that perfume I smell on you?” I said, “That’s tonic for dandruff.” She come back with, “No self-respecting dandruff could live in the grit that gets in your hair.” She was getting old but she still had a tongue in her head.It was a relief to get away from the house.I walked over to the terrace.Down below you could see the lights of the town.The mills on the river like a regular fireworks.I rushed down the stairs a mile a minute over to Fifth Avenue.That’s the big street in McKeesport and Saturday night it was crowded.The girls were there, and I went crazy looking at them.They wore their skirts high.All flattened out in the flapper style of those years.I met the fellows.There was Rearden and Antonoff the Bulgarian and Savela.These fellows didn’t have a wife in the lot.Buckos of the boarding houses.Our first stop was a speak.It was my first speak, and I hated spending my good money.I wouldn’t drink a second round.Not me.I said I didn’t live alone the way they did.I had a whole family to think of.That got them sore.Antonoff hollered how he sent money to the old country, and Rearden was supporting a divorced wife and two kids.It was Savela who calmed us all down.He was a joker.He said those drinks were just like cough medicine.One part slag, one part river water, one part alky.Cough medicine and cheaper than a doctor.We had a second round and then we went into a back alley where the women were tapping at the windows.Billy, let me interrupt.Do you mind finishing up that stripper party?You couldn’t use it.People wear a blindfold in this country.There are no strippers, no whores.Only the little wife waiting at that picture-window ranch house.The important thing about that stripper party was this.That I was whoring with men who made a living out of breaking strikes.To Harry Holmgren it was just another good time but I saw it different.“We paid for that party,” I said on the train back to Cleveland.He argued we hadn’t paid a lousy cent.I asked him where the money came from if not from some union those finks’d licked or sabotaged.Harry got sore.He didn’t curse or yell.When a free-cursing character like that’s quiet, watch yourself, brother.He was sore enough to fire me and I wondered where I’d take my hat.I’d walked out of steel and where could I go? I said, “Harry, ease up.I can still see you dancing around those strippers.” I buttered him up
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