Read Online No Lease on Life by Lynne Tillman - Free Book Online Page A

when the walls came down, and the vermin came out and bit them, the tenants’ legs became swollen and inflamed and covered in red itchy wounds, and, marked by disease, they fled, yelling about bugs and rats, about hardy roaches. They were driven out, and the landlord could raise the rent. Or the drilling and banging every day ended their relationships, decimated their tenuous loves, and they broke up, broke their leases, or they developed respiratory illnesses, living in dust for months, and they fled their homes, and the landlord had its way, forced them out. The landlord could raise the rent the way it planned, and the landlord did raise the rent on the smaller, blighted apartments, on the newly fixed-up, reconditioned hovels.
    That was a while ago.
     
Two women are at a hotel in the Catskills. One says, The food is terrible here. Yes, the other says, and there’s so little of it.
    Now a few people were leaving their floor-throughs or one-bedrooms, or studio apartments, to go to work. The blue collars. The housekeepers. The train conductors. The nurses. Some people were coming home. The prostitutes, the bartenders, the club managers, the clubgoers, the musicians, the alcoholics, the night people. There weren’t as many of them as those going to day jobs. There were several taxi drivers.
    One night a taxi—a checker—was parked across the street. Elizabeth noticed some movement in the front seat. She couldn’t tell what it was. She watched. The driver was getting a blow job. The prostitute’s head went up and down, up and down, up and down. Then it stopped, the movement stopped, and, like an animal stuck in the mud, the taxi driver, who was large, rolled over and lay on top of the poor prostitute.
    The taxi driver had a huge ass. The moon was out, a full moon, and the moon lit his ass, spotlighted it. If it was done in the movies, no one would believe it.
    He starts to fuck her and his big white ass, all lit up, goes up and down, up and down, up and down.
    Three people come out of the front door of a building. Two men, one woman, maybe coming from a party, maybe they’d had a menage a trois. They looked preppy. Maybe they’d had coffee. one of the men immediately spots the taxi driver’s big ass humping up and down, up and down, the moon shining on it, but he doesn’t want the woman to see. He positions himself between her and the taxi. But finally they all see it. The three stand there, spellbound on the sidewalk, watching until the taxi driver comes. Then the driver sits up, the prostitute sits up, and he starts the car and drives away.
    The hooker was probably from the next corner. It was before AIDS hit big-time. There were a lot more hookers on the next block. They all had habits and most of them were gone now, dead. The serial murderer Joel Rilkin killed at least one of them. The mother of one of the murdered hookers said in the
Times
, “Think of her as a girl, my daughter, not just as a whore.” There were always ripe, new working girls. They faded fast.
    It was pretty late the night Elizabeth and Ernest left the cute guy’s hideous hole. But that night, and it was the only one, Ernest and Elizabeth went for a serious cup of coffee in a nearby cafe. Elizabeth’s regular, the Pick Me Up.
    Even though it was late and cold, the crusties—that’s what Roy called them—weren’t far away. They were never far away. They were lying on the street near the Pick Me Up with their dogs and their dogs’ puppies. Elizabeth liked the puppies. They would be raised to be vicious. The crusties were probably already training them to go for people’s throats when they didn’t give them money. The crusties thought of themselves as road warriors, except they never moved, they sat or lay on the sidewalk, and then in a group they’d move off, they never walked alone, they were terrified kids who talked shit to everyone in the neighborhood, they looked miserable, they smelled terrible, they didn’t shower even in the