I could extend both arms inside my cubicle, if you included the window slot that I delivered the cigarettes through. Candy too but mostly cigarettes bought in some Southern state near the tobacco fields and smuggled over state lines for cheap. Basil didn’t do the smuggling. Balding, bellicose, and most of the time beaming, the closest he came to clandestine was using a paper bag to hold the take, reasoning that carrying a zippered cash purse had dollar signs all over it, and his bag said “Lunch.”
I was not eating lunch in those days, too expensive, maybe a Mars bar that I had to report. Lunch also took time away from slapping packs into the hands forever sticking themselves through the slot, something I did almost maternally rather than for money, given that the job paid maybe five bucks an hour. Again and again those hands beseeched, wriggling their impatient, addicted fingers. I worked in Times Square, long before the area was covered with moving images rather than the lurid static. Businessmen, not just the down-and-outs, were customers, men slumming for pleasure, starting with nicotine. It never occurred to me that I was being sold too, standing inside my glass-fronted box. Wearing peasant skirts and long-sleeved tops, without makeup, not even lipstick, I represented less the gateway drug of nicotine than the loss leader, virtue. How could the peep shows be so bad if she was here?
