by Steve Amick
He wasn't a big fan of it, as unbelievably popular and widespread as it was, never being particularly fond of unsigned art. He'd always admired that about Gil Elvgren—signing all his pinup illustrations with a big swooping Elvgren, right up in the meat of the canvas, not the slightest bit timid or cautious about it.
It was true that he himself had used pseudonyms for the girlie photos—when they'd bothered to ask for credits. But that was different: he could tell by scanning the masthead of all those girlie mags that none of those contributors' names were real— Ima Wolf, Lenny Lens, Mr. Snapp, O. G. Whillikers, Barry Medeep, I. C. Lovelies, Scopes Magillicuddy … Besides, he was saving his actual name—both Winton S. Dutton and Wink Dutton—for his real work, for the legitimate photography and, if he ever got his hand working properly again, illustration work. So he used things like W. S. Dee or Win Studdon or Winston St. Johns or just Mr. Winston or Mr. Wink for photo credits. Often the editors just made something up on their own (once it was Dusty Sink), but at least he provided a name when asked. It wasn't like cave drawings, like this Kilroy crapola.
But beyond the anonymity angle, this Kilroy business, at its core, maybe also didn't grab him the way it seemed to grab so many others because, if he were to be completely honest about it, he really just didn't get it. It felt, a little, like an inside gag or like he'd stepped away too soon from a group of jokers yucking it up at a cocktail party and missed the big punch line. It reminded him, frankly, that he'd been discharged early. Maybe if he hadn't injured his hand, this would be yet another thing he would have been included in, and though he suspected most of the vandals and scribblers out there were just as in the dark about what the galloping Jesus it meant, unreasonably, when he saw it growing around him like a spreading mold—on the alley wall beside the camera shop, on a drainpipe at the corner, scratched into the side of the cigarette machine at the Zim Zam—he couldn't help but feel as if he'd been left out; that he hadn't served the way the other guys had.
But in terms of a girlie shoot, Kilroy seemed as good a gimmick as any—topical, even, without being political. And now that they didn't have the more blatantly military themes to fall back on, this felt connected to that—of the service if not in the service—and maybe that was why the vets were doing it in the first place. Maybe they were trying to scratch out something that connected them to what they'd known for the past four years as they now jumped feetfirst into the world of the civvies.
Reenie's premise was simple: she would be the vandal, trying to paint the Kilroy message wherever she could. They didn't have a lot of set dressing, of course, so “everywhere” in this case would mean the canvas drop cloth on the floor and a cartoon picket fence he'd made to her specifications from a piece of piano crate she'd found in an alley a few blocks east, behind Orchestra Hall. It made a fine picket fence. The only other prop was an apple crate, which she stood on to get a better angle—not to draw her Kilroy graffiti so much as to cock her calf muscle and tip her pelvis, presenting the stretched expanse of “accidentally” exposed underpants to the camera. There were various poses she had planned, culminating in a few capper shots that would be a cop arriving just as she exposed herself, popping the buttons on her blouse and flashing a graffiti-painted bare torso, at which point the cop would lean back in shock, followed by shots of him cuffing her, wrestling her to haul her off to jail. In the last shot, with the kicking and screaming “Winkin' Sally” flung over the cop's shoulder, the reader would see that she'd managed to Kilroy him across the back of his dark cop uniform, the message written in white chalk.
Before they got to these shots, Reenie raised the idea that they shoot a couple where she scratched out KILROY and scrawled in WINKIN' SALLY instead.
“Yeah. Or WEEKEND SALLY?” he suggested, still confused about these names. “Which one, you think?”
Reenie shrugged. “Make any difference, really? I mean, especially now….”
She was right. The names would be more interchangeable than ever now that there was only one girl playing the part. He was hoping Sal would pipe up and vote on this idea, but it was left hanging there, unsettled, as they shifted attention to the role of the cop.
The plan was that he himself would play the cop, a role he wasn't so keen on, though she assured him if they shot it just right, his face would never be seen.
Sal was helping out, of course, minding the props and overseeing his camera settings and lighting, and she was still sitting over on the bottom step of the stairs in back, when he heard her getting to her feet and caught, out of the corner of his eye, the gymnastics of a woman reaching back and trying to unhook her own dress.
“I'll be the cop,” she said. “It'll be funnier.”
He liked it. And not just because it got him off the hook. The whole thing was so clearly a fantasy, adding the goofiness of a lady cop to the mess couldn't hurt.
Glancing at Reenie, hoping to decipher what she thought about this, she appeared to be okay with the plan, shrugging, giving him a small smile. But she looked a little puzzled as well, like she was probably as unclear as he was as to what exactly Sal was offering here.
And he wasn't sure till she had the uniform on—or the parts of it she'd opted to use: no pants; the blue tunic tied up around her belly button, Bahamian style; the hat tipped at a rakish angle—but she'd decided, apparently, that she was back in the game. She would be showing skin, he realized, when she laid out her adjustment to Reenie's storyline.
It would go like this now: in the end, after wrestling to cuff the vandal, the lady cop would look down her own shirt, show exaggerated heights of horror and surprise, then open it to reveal the KILROY WAS HERE painted across her own bare bosom.
It made no sense, but it didn't have to. The main thing was she was back.
“I love it,” Reenie announced. “Really, really love it!” and she gave Sal a little hug before they got started.
It wasn't clear to Wink if she really loved it or she just loved that Sal was in again.
He wondered if it had something to do with the sack of fan mail that had arrived the other day. Sal had seemed different since then. He wasn't sure why or how this would have motivated her to share the shoot with Reenie, but whatever the reason, he was very glad.
Reenie would have pulled it off alone just fine, he had no doubt, but this way, there was actual laughter, female laughter ringing through the camera shop, carrying out into the dark street, along with the music he found on the radio—delicious, brassy, pre-army Harry James—and he wouldn't have been anywhere else on a bet.
54
There was a lawyer who'd been frequenting the shop for years now, named Doerbom. She'd seen the name on the claim slips for his prints (mostly of statues in Grant and Lincoln parks and the occasional policeman) and had only recently learned his first name was Mort and that he was a lawyer. At some point in the time since they'd returned from burying Chesty, he'd begun signing with Esquire at the tail end—which she at first took as a clue that he worked at the men's magazine of that name. When it did finally hit her that he was announcing his field of work, not his specific place of employment, she experienced just the smallest moment of wonder—had he possibly added it on to impress her? She was widowed now and had only just begun to slip away, slightly, from the darker dresses, but maybe he was looking ahead, laying the groundwork for down the line.
It was a silly notion, and it left her, for a short breath or two, remembering the sweet unattached adventure of high school.
But that was too silly. And anyway, she wasn't interested in him in that way. He was decent enough looking, though not exactly filled to the gills with what she would call pizzazz.
Still, if he was an attorney, she might want to talk to him about the business of registering both Winkin' Sally and Weekend Sally as some kind of trademarks. After all, he was a camera buff of the first order. He might take it out in trade.
55
It was Reenie who called the meeting. She'd managed to get them in on a pitc
h for a so-called after-hours client her friend Cal, over at Lampe, Deininger & Monroe, had tipped her to.
They were gathered around the kitchen table in Sal's apartment. Sal had made ranger cookies, now that she was able to finally get some decent coconut. Reenie laid off, saying she needed to watch her weight, but Wink couldn't see how either was possible—Reenie needing to watch her weight or anybody being able to lay off Sal's ranger cookies.
“Cal's moved up from junior copywriter since I was there,” she said, laying her fingers on Wink's knee, “and since you were there, too—same day, right? Anyway, Cal's moved up and up, from junior copywriter to senior copywriter to assistant creative director—even though, according to Cal, I was the one who should've gotten the credit for all our best work together. But hey, did you know I'm a girl apparently, and he's not?”
“We knew,” Sal said dryly.
“On account of your underwear's usually pink,” he said.
“Smart mouth!” Reenie said. “Anyway, Cal says, this man Mr. Price does all kinds of big business ‘after hours,' with a few in the know at LD&M—stuff that competes with the stuff coming out of France, with most of the dough going directly into the pocket of Mr. Rollo Deininger.”
“Our old friend,” Wink said.
“Yes, the man with the hands.”
Wink didn't think this was a crack at him and his own limited ability to get quite as “handsy,” having restricted use of the right to the point where he actually couldn't caress a nipple the way he once had. She'd never complained, but then, he'd always managed to keep her going in some other way.
Though, of course, lately such run-ins had grown pretty inconsistent.
“Anyway,” she said, “word is Mr. Price puts out a girlie card deck every year or so, and this year he's looking for a doozy.”
“Going more nude?”
She nodded like he'd answered the winning round on Quiz Kids. “He's going more nude. The boys are home now, they can handle knowing their gals occasionally need it, their sweethearts have actual blood running through their veins….”
She had packets for her presentation, and she handed them out now. Her cozy chum Cal had slipped her not only the budget requirements and all the facts and figures that Sal would be most interested in but also a couple packs of playing cards Mr. Price had produced in the past, so they could see what they were trying to top.
She said she even had a plan. “First, we need fifteen models.”
Wink snorted. “How do you figure?”
“I figure we want to do it better and bigger than they normally do it, that's how I figure. And the client, this Mr. Price, he's also looking to have his socks blown off. So … we don't just put a girl on the back. We put one girl on the back, yes, but also one girl on the other side, for each of the face cards—four jacks, four queens, four kings—”
He finished the math for her. “Two jokers.”
“Right. Fifteen girls. Thirteen, plus us.” Reenie gestured to herself and Sal.
“Whew!” was all Sal said.
“They're paying a lot,” Reenie reminded them.
Still, a lot minus thirteen more model fees wouldn't divvy up very impressively.
“We don't need any fifteen girls,” Sal said, speaking up finally. “Please! We just need some more wigs. And costumes and props.”
She was right. She usually was.
56
The photo ran in a Sunday edition in late May, over a comprehensive, multiauthor piece called “Where We Are Now”—the kind of extra-effort story, she thought, that meant someone up in the Tower was bucking for a Pulitzer. Which made it even more of a triumph—to have his photo attached to a big, serious article like that.
She'd actually gotten wind of it before him, her editor friend Bob calling the shop the night before.
“Congrats!” he'd said. “Your guy's up there with the big boys now!”
She thought for a second he might possibly be implying that Wink was her guy, but she decided not to correct him. Even a rough slob like Bob wouldn't be hinting she had a boyfriend so soon after her husband's death. Doubtless, he'd meant it the way she decided to take it: that they should all be proud of Wink, which, of course, she was.
The next morning, the three of them—she and Reenie and Wink—camped out in front of the news shop to watch the grumpy old man open up the roll gate and cut the band on the newspapers. Bundled like that, she thought of Christmas presents waiting to be opened, full of wonder and promise.
57
The two men strode into the shop, checking left, then right, as if they were crossing Adams, not simply crossing from the door to the counter where he stood. They flipped their badges too quickly to properly inspect, and Wink wasn't about to ask for seconds. The names they gave, Agent Something and Something-else-ski, were equally rushed.
“Right,” Wink said. “You're back for more. Okay: no, I'm still not a subversive.”
This stopped them up short, and they exchanged a frown that he took as one of confusion with just a hint of annoyance.
They were pretty convincing in their claim that they had never been by before, that that must have been some other agency back in the fall.
“You people need to have regular weekly meetings, so you can get it straight. I already told him, no, I am not a subversive. Don't you have some sort of easy form—if I suddenly become a subversive, I can check the little box and mail it in?”
“Oh, don't worry,” the slim one said. “We've got eyes out there much faster than anything you could send through the U.S. mail—believe it. Now, is there a reason you've made this your headquarters—”
“Headquarters?”
“Being rather close to the site of the Haymarket Riot, isn't it?”
Wink was confused. History had never been his long suit, but he was pretty sure that happened back in the days of handlebar mustaches—maybe 1880-something. Did ladies take their clothes off in olden times? Probably they were calling him a political subversive, not that other kind of subversive. A socialist, maybe? But if they were implying he was cooking up bombs in the back, printing out Commie leaflets or the like, then this had to be a different bunch from the last visitors. Those two had poked their noses in the darkroom, upstairs, even the basement. It had to be on file somewhere that he was harmless, not up to any nonsense. But this one seemed stupid on top of just nosy.
“Are you asking if I'm a … a labor organizer or something?”
“I'm asking are you a Red, are you a Wobbly—what the Jesus are you, friend?”
The stouter of the two had a pad out, and he seemed less concerned with intimidation and more with the gathering of facts. “This picture you created for the Tribune, ran the other day—there some sort of hidden message in that? Were you trying to do something with that?”
He was tempted to tell them he'd intended to snap only the pretty flag in the window, but he still hadn't mastered framing the shot properly, and all that “extra” stuff just got in the way. But he remembered seeing men, ever since the government men had visited him about Chesty's cake-flour shots, dressed in this same overly insignificant way, walking a few blocks behind him or across the street, glancing at him funny, and though he could have been imagining it—and so never mentioned it to the girls— it felt a little like he was being followed. So he answered as forth-rightly as he could manage and then steered the conversation over to the Argus and the other examples they'd recently stocked of the latest in miniature handhelds, and they seemed interested in this, professionally, and eventually put the notepads away.
“Okay,” the slim one said, after they played with several cameras and listened to his spiel on each one, “I wanna think you're a good egg and maybe you are—you seem to be an upstanding businessman here, trying to make an honest sale, but just so we're clear, because believe you me, we had trouble plenty with these Red types back twenty years ago, not to mention going back even further—though there's folks alive still recall it like it was Wednesday—the
Haymarket Riot with your Bolshevik types, like I said, which was right around here, just a bomb's throw away … Coincidence? Anyway, we do not want to go through all that again, now do we?”
Wink shook his head like it was too ridiculous to even answer and mentioned instead that they gave a twenty percent discount on merchandise sold to government employees, and that seemed like enough.
58
She might not have known at all about the editorial that followed if it hadn't been for the old grouch at the news shop. He'd grown curious a few days before when they'd been waiting for him early that morning the photo ran—even more so when they bought six copies (she'd put one clipping in the store window; one on the glass case at the register, where customers were certain to see it if they'd rushed past it on the way in; one went in her scrapbook; one Wink sent to his uncle who lived on a farm in Michigan; and Reenie snatched up the last two), and he asked them what was so damned special they needed to run down his supply for the day.
When they'd shown him, he studied the photograph for the longest time, not showing any signs of approving or being impressed, but more like he was trying to make certain they weren't trying to pull one over on him. Finally, he just tipped his head in almost reluctant recognition. “Eghh. Mr. Big Shot! So not just a fella likes to look at the girlie pictures. Dimension, this guy has. Multifaceted, this guy. I guess one never truly knows what goes on, does one?” She thought for a second he might grace them with an impression of the radio announcer from The Shadow, but he laid off and returned his mouth to its interrupted activity regarding a cigar.
But today, a few days later, he seemed expectant, anxious to show them there'd been a follow-up to the photo. The editors had placed what amounted to a retraction or an apology:
