Dope by Sara Gran Page A

floor.
    â€œDid you go to bed with him?” I prodded.
    She looked up. “Yeah, I did. And when I woke up in the morning, all my money was gone. Two hundred and twenty-five dollars. I was saving it in a little tin on my dresser.”
    â€œYou ever see him again?”
    She shook her head, relaxing back into a slouch, her eyes turning back toward the floor. “Boy. It took me a long time to save up that two hundred and twenty-five dollars.”
    I talked with Tony for a while before I left. When I was getting ready to go a group of five businessmen came in. They were fat, with shiny pink faces, and they were laughing like going to spend money on taxi dancers was the funniest thing they had ever done. Like that’s why they were doing it—for laughs. When the girls by the bar saw them come in they pulled themselves up a little straighter and stopped making jokes and put on demure, hopeful smiles. Like they were just waiting for the right fat businessman with the right red face in the right cheap suit to come and save them.
    On my way out I saw that Clara was still sitting at the table where I left her, alone, looking down at the floor.

Chapter Seven
    I slept late the next day because I could. If I was going to the Royale there was no point in going before the sun went down. I’d thought I’d heard something about April showers bringing May flowers but it must have just been a rumor, because here we were in May and it was pouring like hell. It was raining when I woke up and still raining after I cleaned up my room and picked up my wash and put away my clothes and went shopping for new stockings and gloves and got ready to go out.
    Late in the afternoon I took the subway up to Times Square, where I went to the Automat for lunch. I’d grown up just outside the Square, in Hell’s Kitchen, and coming down to the Automat was a big treat. It was always loud and busy and full of regular working people—stiffs, my mother called them. People with regular jobs, people who owned houses, or at least I imagined they did. In Hell’s Kitchen we’d moved from one tenement or rooming house to another every few months. My mother would get us kicked out for one reason or another—too many parties, too much noise, too many men coming and going all night, and of course the rent was always late. I couldn’t remember half of the rooms we’d lived in, which was probably for the best. Sometimes I’d walk by a run-down building on Fifty-fifth Street and think it looked familiar, but I was never really sure.
    In the Automat you’d put a nickel or a dime in a machine and open a little glass door and get a sandwich or a dish of macaroni with cheese or a piece of cherry pie. I never knew until I was older that there were ladies working behind the machines, putting the food in. When I was a kid I’d come and get a Coke. I could never afford anything good, and it’s hard to steal from the Automat—you could do it if you caught the door just after someone had gotten their dish and you reached far back, but then a man would come over and kick you out. Those ladies saw everything, I guess. When I got older I learned that if you hung around with a cup of coffee and looked hungry a man would always come along to buy you something. The trick then was to leave before the man wanted payback for the nickel he’d spent on pie.
    But now I had plenty of dough, and I had two pieces of pie without having to look over my shoulder. When I
    left the Automat it had stopped raining and I walked around for a while. Times Square was full of tourists looking up at the lights. Maybe they didn’t have electricity back at home. On the corner of Forty-second and Seventh a group of queer boys hung around in tight dungarees, waiting for tricks, insulting each other and laughing at their own jokes and trying to pass the time. In front of the dime museum on Forty-second Street a barker in a coat and