I DROVE BACK to my office. My home. Let Pansy out onto her roof. Lit a cigarette and looked out the window, feeling the airborne sewage the yuppies called a river breeze.
I think her real name was Renée. Or Irene. She always called herself Candy. I couldn't bring her face into my mind but I'd never forget her. She was just a kid then. Maybe thirteen years old. But you could run Con Ed for a year on what she wanted.
She didn't have what she wanted then. None of us did. So we fought young animals just like us- fighting over what we'd never own. We called things ours. Our turf. Our women. The street forked at the end. Where we found what was really ours. Mine was prison.
Girls like Candy were always around. We didn't have pistols or shotguns then. Just half-ass zip guns that would blow up in your hand when you pulled the trigger. But you could break a glass bottle into a pile of flesh-ripping shards. Squeeze a thick glob of white Elmer's Glue into your palm. Twirl a rope through it until it was coated end to end. Then twirl it again, through the glass. Wait for it to dry and you had a glass rope. When you got real close, you could use half a raw potato, its face studded with double-edged razor blades. Car antennas. Lead pipes. Cut-down baseball bats with nails poking through them. Sit around in some abandoned apartment, drink some cheap wine, pour a few of the red drops on the ground in tribute to your brothers who got to the jailhouse or the graveyard before you did. Toke on throat-searing marijuana. Wait for the buzz. Then you meet the other losers. In a playground if they knew you were coming. In an alley if they didn't. The newspapers called it gang wars. If you made it back to the club, the girls were there. If you got too broken to run, you got busted. And if you stayed on the concrete, maybe you got your name in the papers.
When I went to reform school, she wrote me a letter. A poem, just for me. Signed it that way. "Love, Candy. Just for you." Nobody had ever done anything like that for me. The feeling lasted until I found out it was the words from some song she'd heard on the radio.
Little Candy. A whore in her heart even then. Just what I needed to cheer me up.