“Seriously, this better be a for-real deal or I’m gonna be one pissed-off zombie.”
“Karkaroff was very specific that this was a priority meeting.” I could imagine her making air quotes in the cushy office chair, leaning back with her ankles crossed on the desk, admiring her trophy shoes.
My business partner was already fuming from our recent clusterfuck with Necrophilique. How was I supposed to know the fecal content of the cosmetics? Do I look like a chemist? Still, we needed the money after word spread and the launch tanked. What was the saying, beggars can’t be choosers? Not that I was a beggar by any count, but…shit, mama’s got bills to pay.
“Fine.” I gripped the phone to my ear as she yammered on about her day and I started loading my purse with all the important undead accoutrements. Flesh-tone bandages (you never know when you’ll get a scratch, and humans are normally surprised when they don’t see blood seeping), cigarettes (why the hell not) and lastly, Altoids, of course, because dragon breath doesn’t even begin to describe the smell that escapes up this rotten esophagus.
I did take a moment to wonder if I was dressed appropriately for the venue. The Gucci skirt was definitely fitted and might draw some roving hands, but I could certainly handle those. My big concern was the white silk blouse.
It was Miu Miu, for Christ’s sake.
The Hooch and Cooch didn’t look like the kind of place that any white fabric could escape without a stain, let alone designer silk.
As if on cue, two drunken slobs slammed out of the swinging doors and scattered out onto the red carpetless cement.1 One landed on his ass with his legs spread, an expanding dark wetness spreading from his crotch outward. His buddy clutched at his stomach in a silent fit of laughter, but then fell against a truck and puked into the open bed. The rest dribbled off his chin and down his loosened tie as he slid to the concrete. I guess that answered my question about fashion choices. Pretty much anything will do if your competition is piss and puke stains, though clearly the blouse was in danger and the stains were much more dubious than I’d imagined.
“Ugh. Christ. Call me in ten minutes. I know I’m going to need an excuse to get out of here.”
I stuffed the phone in my Alexander McQueen red patent Novak bag—yes, you need to know that, if for no other reason than to understand that I’ve moved on from the Balenciaga; it’s a metaphor for my personal growth—and headed in, stepping over the passed-out figure on the threshold. The urine smell was unbearable. Someone had enjoyed a nutritious meal of asparagus.2 I shoved the splintery doors into the strip club’s lobby and was greeted by a wall of palsied antlers, Molly Hatchet blaring some ’70s bullshit, and my mother’s pasty dead face beaming from behind the hostess stand.
“Darling.” She crossed the room in three strides, cowboy boots crunching on the peanut shells coating the floor and arms reaching—the effect was more praying mantis than loving mother, I assure you. “You should have called.”
I submitted to a hug and, over her shoulder, caught a glimpse of Gil, arms crossed and leaning on the open bed of a Ford F-150 that seemed to have been repurposed as the gift shop—how they got it in there, I have no clue. A pair of those ridiculous metal balls dangled between his legs from the trailer hitch behind him. I couldn’t help but giggle. He tipped his Stetson in my direction and winked.
“You’re right, Mother. I’ll definitely call next time.”3
She pulled away, concern spreading across her face. The vamping achieved the kind of freshening a top-dollar Beverly Hills facelift aimed for, but no amount of magic could revive Ethel’s sincerity.
“It’s just, we haven’t had a whole lot of time to sort out this…tension between us, and I’d like us to be a family, again.”
Again. Just like that. Like there’d ever been anything remotely resembling a “family.” Unless her definition of family was the people one ridiculed, judged, and rejected, then yeah, I guess we had a “family.”
I clenched my fists. If blood flowed through my veins rather than thick yellow goo, I might have turned beet red. But instead of appearing angry, I took on a sickly jaundice, which is never cute.
I decided to stuff it and pushed past her to find Johnny Birch. “Sure, Ethel, let’s work on that.”
“I don’t appreciate your sarcasm.” She sang the final word, as she did when pretending something didn’t actually bother her. I grinned, triumphant.
I bounded up to Gil. “How do you put up with that bitch?” I stabbed a thumb in Ethel’s direction.
“Who, your mother? Oh please, she’s wonderful to work for and so funny…”
His voice trailed off, replaced by the twangin’ guitar of Southern rock. Mother had obviously brainwashed Gil to spout this pro-Ethel propaganda, and I wasn’t about to listen to it. “Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. A real peach.”
“A better question is, how do I put up with this seventies-ass rock.”
The music changed. “Slow Ride,” by Foghat. “Seriously. What’s the deal?” I asked.
“Part of your mom’s plan; it’s all she’ll play here. She says seventies rock forces guys to buy beer. Something in their genes. Oh…and look at this.” Gil reached into the truck bed, which was lined with various Hooch and Cooch promo items, T-shirts, CDs, pocket pussies—that sort of thing—and retrieved a DVD. A sleazy, greasy-haired dancer grinned from the cover, one of her front teeth was missing, and she wore a wife-beater that didn’t do a good job hiding the fact that her boob job looked like two doorknobs. It read: Learn to Strip with the Girls of the Hooch and Cooch (see inset).
* * *
Music from the DVD…
Learn to Strip with the Girls of the Hooch and Cooch*
Thin Lizzy • Jailbreak
Foghat • Slow Ride
Heart • Barracuda
Ted Nugent • Cat Scratch Fever
War • Low Rider
Nazareth • Hair of the Dog
The Runaways • Cherry Bomb
Blue Oyster Cult • Burnin’ for You
Kansas • Carry on Wayward Son
Boston • More Than a Feeling
* * *
“Jesus. Like one of those Carmen Electra striptease workouts?”
“Yep.” He tossed it back in the truck. “Sells like hotcakes.”
“I bet.”
I looked past Gil into the club for the first time and witnessed the horrors of uncontrolled testosterone production. A drunken mass of homely men and a few semi-doable ones, surprisingly, crowded around two spotlit islands, shouting obscenities and waving dollar bills. It was nearly impossible to distinguish them as individuals; they’d reverted to some sort of quivering gelatinous state. A few appeared near death, eyes rolling in the back of their heads as though they’d never seen a used-up hooker—I mean, nude woman—writhing in a metal washtub, scrubbing herself with a moldy bath brush and kicking suds off dirty feet at her sweaty admirers. Maybe it’s because we were indoors.
Between the two performance spaces—though really I’m being overly generous with that description—was a large shack built into the back of the club complete with everything you’d expect to find in the backwoods of the Ozarks, or in a typical Northwest suburb, for that matter—a covered porch, rocking chairs, even a butter churn.4 Everything, that is, but a little inbred blind kid playing the banjo and showing off the graveyard of teeth in his mouth.
He must have been on a smoke break.
Booths lined the edges of the room, where hillbilly chicks chatted up customers under the watchful glass eyes of various stuffed animal heads. Fog lights on truck grills jutted from the walls lighting up the tables and the assorted (or sordid) activities taking place there.
“This place is a regular Rainforest Café. Only instead of cute plastic animals, you’ve got dirty whores.”
“Absolutely.” Gil crossed his arms and beamed, as proud as a new father—sure, he had a stake in the place, but he was overdoing the satisfaction considering the place reeked of bleach and I’m pretty sure
it wasn’t emanating from a big load of laundry.5
“Pays the bills,” he said.
“Listen. I’m supposed to be meeting a guy. Johnny Birch, that fame whore from TV. Have you seen him?”
“Um.” He scanned the room. “Totally. What a freak. I think he’s just finished up with Kelsey.” Gil pointed to a hallway flanked by two columns of chicken coops. A lanky, dark-haired man emerged with a jug of moonshine in one hand and a skanky redhead in the other.
“Christ.”
The guy was tonguing the girl’s ear as I approached.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you Mr. Birch?”
He spun the girl away like a Frisbee, absolutely no regard for where she might land. She twirled a few times, collapsed in some other perv’s lap, and started gyrating. Birch measured me in long, sweeping stares. Head to toe, lingering on the tits and back to the head. “Sure am.” He extended his hand. “And you’re Amanda. Lovely to meet you.”
He pulled at my hand as though planning to pull off a gentlemanly knuckle kiss, but I snatched it back, wishing for a Clorox wipe. “Yeah. Um, you have some sort of business proposition, I’ve been told. Do you want to talk about that here, or do you have a table somewhere? Maybe a private booth they reserve for regulars.”
“You mean V.I.P.” He winked.
“No.” I shook my head. “Just regular.”
Birch nodded and chuckled off the jab under his breath.
The next moment, the blaring ’70s rock was silenced, an apparent signal for the strippers to make way for the principal dancer in this redneck ballet. They scrabbled off on bruised knees, wet hair dangling in clumps, and bulldozing collapsing pyramids of dollar bills in front of them.
Birch pointed toward the shack.
The lights dimmed, and a jaundiced glow rose behind the dirty shower curtain covering the front door of the facade. At the edges of the porch, slobbery men set down their jugs and hushed each other as though in reverence to approaching royalty. It became so quiet, I could hear the chickens scratching in their cages and crickets chirping or rubbing their legs together or whatever the fuck they do. Though that last bit was probably being pumped in through the speakers to set the mood. The stage light brightened until columns of dust motes stabbed into the audience from between the rusty metal curtain rings, stretching across the waves of corrugated roofing above and the five o’clock shadows of drooling businessmen below.
And then she stalked into silhouette—no…shuffled is a better word—to the opening cowbells of Nazareth’s “Hair of the Dog”—’cuz really, what else would you expect?
“Harry Sue!” I could have sworn someone yelled.
“Harry Sue!” the crowd shouted back in liturgical response.
“Harry Sue?” I asked Birch.
“Short for Harriet, maybe?” He shrugged without taking his eyes off the dirty play unfolding.
When the guitar roared in, Harry Sue snatched back the curtain and stomped out onto the porch in Daisy Duke overalls and the most hideous high heels—since when did Jellies make a heel? Her blond hair was teased and tortured into massive pigtails, hay jutting from the strips of gingham holding them in place. Her face was pretty enough, if you could get past her wild eyes, bee-stung lips, and the mass of fake freckles that sadly recalled the broken blood vessels of an alcoholic more than the fresh sun-kissed face of a farmgirl.
She didn’t tease the crowd of howling men much, making quick work of the denim overalls with two rehearsed snaps at each shoulder; they slid off her bone-thin frame and pooled around her ankles. The ensuing slapstick of Harry wrestling her feet out of the denim mess would have been charming had my eyes not been stuck to her undergarments. Not satisfied with a dirty wife-beater and some holey panties, the stripper wore cut-off Dr. Dentons complete with the trapdoor. Of course, in true trashy stripper fashion, Harry Sue wore hers backwards.
The room was filled with redneck boner and there I stood in the middle of it, without a vomit bag, a designer cocktail, or a canister of mustard gas. You couldn’t move through the room without rotating aroused men like turnstiles and I had no intention of doing that. I did notice that Johnny Birch was standing awful close to me.
Glad to see you, close.
Too close.
“That’s my asshole, asshole.” I jerked away from his probing fingers.
Johnny grinned in response, totally deserving the punch I threw into his kidneys.
“Ow!” He ran his fingers through his hair, eyes darting nervously at the men around us, as if any of them were looking for anything other than a beaver shot. “Jesus. It’s all in good fun.”
“Touch me again and we’ll see who’s having fun.”
“Aw.” He scowled.
Harry Sue slunk down in one of the rockers, and the men whimpered in unison—apparently prepared for what Harry Sue had in store for us. She rocked slowly, pivoting her ass forward on the edge of the chair until the flap was front and center. She toyed with the buttons, tweaking them like nipples.
I glowered. Shot a glance at Birch. Wished I were drinking.
The stripper got my attention when she unbuttoned one side of the flap, then the other, finally, exposing the biggest 70s bush I’d ever seen.6 It was massive. Afro-like. Harry Sue needed to be introduced to the wonders of Brazilian waxing, though she’d likely be charged extra. And then it clicked. The men weren’t yelling Harry Sue.
They were shouting Hairy Sue.
Still. It didn’t make sense.
I’ve read Cosmo. I know men prefer shaved to bouffant. Yet they were clearly enthralled by this stripper. I watched more closely.
Hairy (let’s just drop the Sue part; it never had any real value, anyway) reached for the butter churn and pulled out the plunger dripping melted butter down the front of her jammies.
She peeked at the mess, frowned, then licked the end of the plunger before returning it to the churn. In one motion, she slipped out of the Dr. Dentons and reached into an aluminum pail next to the rocker and retrieved an ear of corn, which she preceded to shuck using her teeth. She sprinkled her breasts with corn silk. With the ear she traced circles across her belly, her thighs, and then, as though by accident, she dropped the cob on the porch, gasped, and then slipped from the chair into a full split, hovering briefly above the ear before nestling it against her buttery crotch.
I shifted from one foot to the other.
There was absolutely nothing sexy about this. These guys were all perverts.
Hairy Sue rose then and bowed to the wild applause and showers of dollar bills. She posed there like she owned that porch, corncob dripping and a fat smile spread across her face.
The lights dimmed.
“I’d sure like to see your bush.” Birch again. His lips curled into a lewd smile.
I nearly vomited up my dinner (let’s not go into what that might have been, just yet). “Is that some kind of wood nymph joke? ’Cause I’m done with your poor impulse control.”
“Hey.” He stepped back, spread his arms, and wiggled his fingers. “I can control the trees and stuff.”
I let my eyes wander down to the tent in his pants. “But not the wood?”
He sagged.
“Maybe we should just talk.” He covered his crotch with cupped hands, a flush rising in his cheeks.
I followed him back to a booth underneath a monstrous moose head, where he laid out the scenario. It was the first time I’d seen his face in full light. He wasn’t hideous, though his features were sharp and his nose a bit too thin. The brown of his eyes shimmered with veins of gold, and his lips, though pale, were full and unexpectedly alluring. He looked much better on TV, but that was probably the makeup.
Mmm. Makeup.
“The calls started coming about three months ago,” he said. “At first the caller wouldn’t say anything. Just hang up after I’d answered. The phone company said they were always from phone booths. I didn’t even know those still existed, but they do.”
I nodded, though I
couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen one, either. Still, why do people feel the need to tell me the most random crap? Like I care. I’m dead.
“About a month ago, they started getting threatening. Not overtly so, just freaky. Like letting me know that I was being monitored. ‘You’re at the Texaco on First.’ Like that. And then they’d just hang up and I’d be standing there at the pump, not just worried that my cell was going to spark and blow me up, but now that someone was nearby watching. Then a couple of weeks ago I get the first one.”
“First what?”
Johnny reached into a briefcase he must’ve stored under the table before his lap dance and pulled out a plastic shipping envelope, the kind lined with Bubble Wrap. He placed it on the table between us and leaned forward, searching the room for observers. Half the crowd had been culled into the back rooms, and the other half were busy drinking themselves into stupors.
I made eye contact with Gil across the room. He looked concerned. It must have been my expression of pure boredom. My eyes dropped back to the envelope.
“I’m not a private detective, Birch. I’m in advertising. Can we get on with this?”
“I know. I know. But, I don’t need you for that. I need you for your celebrity.”
Celebrity?
Oh, yes. He’d snared my attention with that. “Go on.”
He opened the end of the envelope and pulled out a thin shingle of wood. Stretched across it and attached with thick pins was a creature like none I’d seen, almost insect-like, with wings that clung to its sides like a termite. Its flesh was as black as obsidian and shiny from toe to its segmented abdomen to its horribly humanoid head. The creature’s waxy face was frozen in a torturous silent scream.
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