The Shark-Infested Custard

by Charles Willeford

  He took out his wallet, flipped it open, and displayed the photostat of his private investigator’s license.

  He said: “The idea came to me this morning when I saw the ad in the Herald. Instead of taking a chance on picking up a broad in a bar or a party who might turn out to be a drag, or a professional virgin, or a husband-seeker, I can get a date through the computer that fulfills most of my requirements in a woman. When I sent in the coupon and the check, I started a new file at the office. What I’m doing, you see, is investigating the possibility of using these woman who sign up with Electro-Date as part-time operatives, to employ when we need them at National Security for special assignments. After each date, I’ll fill in a mimeographed form I’ve devised on the girl, and put it into this new folder. I can then take the expenses of the date, padded, naturally, off my income tax.”

  “Did your boss authorize this?”

  “The Colonel? Hell, no! He’d never okay anything this reasonable. This is my own idea, and I’ll spend my own dough. But the point is, if I’m called down by the IRS, I’ll have the folder with the info on the girls to show them. I am a private investigator, and one of my duties at National is to check background reports on possible employees. My reason for doing this, officially, is personal enterprise. I’m showing initiative, and if the Colonel ever finds out about my plan he’ll have to back me up with IRS because he’s a great advocate of personal initiative. Besides, it isn’t costing National a dime.”

  “What’s the real reason?”

  “Compatibility. As I said, the girl who signs up for Electro-Date has to pay fifty bucks for five dates. The male client only pays ten bucks for his five dates. So much for Women’s Lib, you see. But she will be favorably disposed to me from the beginning because she has put down on her form what kind of man she wants to date, or thinks she wants to date, which is the same thing. And on a first meeting, we won’t need any elaborate setting, nor will I have to spend a lot of dough. We’ll want to talk, to explore each other, discover our likes and dislikes. No movie, no Miami Beach first-date crap, with the big stage show and champagne cocktails. No. Just me. Honest Larry ‘Fuzz’ Dolman, and the sincere here’s-what-I-think-what-do-you-think heavy rap. One hamburger, two cups of coffee, at Howard Johnson’s, let’s say, and I can take fifty bucks off my income tax for a so-called investigation. If I like the woman, and if she likes me, on the second date I’ll have her in the sack in my apartment. “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know, Fuzz. In a way, it sounds almost brilliant. But it seems to me that women who would sign up for a computer date are either going to be dogs or desperate for a husband.”

  “That used to be true. The older dating services were mostly match-making matrimonial set-ups, but that isn’t true any more. Women have changed…”

  “When it comes to wanting marriage, women never change.”

  “The form will avoid such problems. All I have to do is put down that I want to date a woman who doesn’t want to get married. A career woman, or something. Anyway, when I get the questionnaire, I want you to help me with it. You’re the man with a degree in psychology, and these data forms have probably got a few catch questions.”

  “Why not?” I said. “We’ll have some fun with it, and you can hardly go wrong on a ten-dollar investment. But if IRS ever calls you down, don’t count on me to go down there with you.”

  However, you can go wrong on a ten-dollar investment, as Larry found out on his first date.

  6

  The questionnaire, when it arrived, was not what we expected it to be. What Larry thought, and was led to suspect, was that the form would be a series of multiple choice questions, all of them concerned with the personality traits and characteristics he wanted his ideal girl to have—like the tests they run occasionally in the women’s magazines, with the things you like least versus the things you like best in a “mate.” Cosmopolitan magazine has tests like these all the time, and any person with a fair grounding in psychology, and mine is a good one, can score a hundred every time on such tests.

  I was particularly good on testing, anyway, because of my two years as station psychologist at the U.S. Army Pittsburgh Recruiting Station. It was my job then to weed out military misfits, to interview admitted homosexuals, actual and phony, and to make decisions on whether to accept borderline enuresis cases or to send them home. The testing department was also under my supervision, although I had a Master Sergeant who ran this section for me. I was smart enough to let him alone and allow him to do things his own way, and as a consequence I learned a lot from him.

  The only disagreement we ever had was about my attitude toward draftees who asked to see me because they were homosexuals, or claimed that they were. Sometimes, oftentimes, they were not, and it was easy enough to tell when they were lying.

  When you ask some innocent eighteen-year-old, “What do you do together, you and another man?” and he is unable to tell you because he has no idea of what two men do together, it is obvious that the prospective draftee is lying to avoid the draft. But I would reject him anyway, much to the annoyance of my NCOIC of Testing. The way I figured, if a man was so terrified of the Army that he would say that he was a homosexual, even though he wasn’t, he wouldn’t make much of a soldier. And the first sergeants, down on the line somewhere, who would have to make a soldier out of him, had enough problems already.

  But the questionnaire Larry received from Electro-Date had no questions whatsoever about his preferences in women. It was all about him—his age, his religion, his hobbies, and so on. This information would be transferred to a card, the card would be run through the computer, and then the cards that women had filled out—those that were similar in information to his—would drop out. He would be matched with one of them, and a date would be arranged between the two of them on the telephone by someone at the Electro-Date office.

  “What you’re going to have to do, Larry,” I said, “is lie.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the women who fill out their questionnaires are going to lie, that’s why. For example, what’s the upper age limit you’ll agree to date?”

  “Thirty, I suppose. I don’t mind dating a woman my own age.”

  “There you are,” I said. “If a woman’s thirty-five, and she thinks she can get away with it, she’ll put her age down as thirty. So you’d better put down that you’re twenty-eight instead of thirty. You still might get an older woman, but at least you’ll have some leeway.

  “What’s your religion, Larry?”

  “None, really, but I used to go to the Unitarian Church once in awhile in Gainesville.”

  “You can’t put that down. That’s the last thing you want, a date with a Unitarian. They’re weird, man.”

  “I know. They were weird in Gainesville, but they weren’t inhibited, either.”

  “Put down Church of England.” “Episcopalian?”

  “No. Church of England. That way they can match you with Episcopalians and lapsed Roman Catholics. If you happen, by chance, to get a real Church of Englander, they aren’t concerned with morality, anyway. Episcopalians are all time-servers, and lapsed Catholics have a sense of guilt they’re always trying to deny. A girl who thinks that sex is dirty, and feels guilty about it, can be a damned good piece of ass. If you were sincere about this questionnaire, I’d say to put down Roman Catholic, because you’d probably get a lot of nubile Cuban girls. But they’ll all be looking for a husband.”

  “How young?”

  “Look at the newspapers. Usually, Cuban girls are married by the time they’re sixteen. If they’re nineteen and still single, they’re desperate, Larry.”

  “Let’s change Church of England then, and put down Roman Catholic.”

  “Why?”

  “A desperate girl is ready for anything.”

  “You’ll be flooded, Larry. Except for priests you’re probably the only single thirty-year-old ‘Catholic’ in Miami who’s eligible and unmarried.”

 
“I like that. What about occupation?”

  We had some fun with that one, but finally decided upon “Dietician.” We figured that he would probably get a few nurses that way, or at least some healthy girl who was an organic food freak. We added an extra degree, making him an M.A., and provided him with some interesting hobbies: making models of World War I airplanes, collecting old bottles in the Keys, and spelunking for buried treasures.

  Three days later Larry dropped by my apartment to have a drink, on his way to his first arranged date. We are about the same height, but he weighs twenty pounds more than I do. In his new white sharkskin suit, red silk shirt, with a white-on-white necktie, red socks, and white alligator-grained Ballys, he looked like a friendly giant.

  “How do you like the suit?” he said. “Coat and trousers, four hundred bucks. If it wasn’t for the expense account, I couldn’t have afforded a suit like this.”

  “You’re really pushing the IRS to the wall,” I said.

  “Not at all. The new suit comes under the allowance for uniforms, and a man has to dress for his job. If I have to date these women, in the pursuit of my investigations, I have to make myself attractive. Right?”

  “What’s the girl’s name?”

  He looked at a slip of paper, and grinned. “Shirley Weinstein.”

  I laughed. “That sounds like a nice Catholic girl.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” he said. “She might even be a Catholic, for all we know. A lot of people think my name is Jewish, you know. Dolman sounds Jewish, if you don’t know any better. But no one would make that mistake with my old man, especially on St. Patrick’s Day when he used to go around town wearing an orange tie and looking for trouble.”

  “Where does she live?”

  “Miami Beach. Where else? In the Cresciente condominium on Belle Isle.”

  I whistled. “Those apartments start at a hundred thousand, and that’s for a one-bedroom, with one-and-a-half baths. I’ve seen the ads.”

  “What’s the easiest way to get there?”

  “The Venetian Causeway is the quickest, I think. Another short one?”

  “I’d better not. What are you doing tonight?”

  “I thought I’d call Eddie. Maybe we can get together for some pool at the White Shark. If he can’t get away, I’ll probably take in a flick. But report in when you get back. I’d like to know how it goes.”

  I called Eddie, but he was flying to Chicago at eleven p.m. and couldn’t drink. He said he’d call me when he got back. This was his last flight for the month, and then he would have at least three days off.

  After hanging up, I found myself envying Larry. It was such a strange and formal way to meet a woman it was bound to be interesting. I didn’t envy him the girl—Shirley Weinstein—I could pretty well imagine what she would be like, but the formality of the idea was attractive.

  Women were not a problem for me. I could telephone two girls I knew in Hialeah, and if they were home, I could drive over and have a three-way orgy. There were a dozen names or more in my book, and half of these girls, if they had a date, would break it to go out with me if I called and asked them. Or, if I wanted some stranger, I could cruise around and pick up a new broad within an hour or so.

  But lately, it seemed, the women I screwed were all alike, as if they were cut out of the same batch of cookie dough. The stewardae were alike, and practically interchangeable. Their apartments looked as if they were all furnished by the same decorator. The clear plastic air-filled chair, the Budweiser bottle pillow, the Rolling Stone Mark Spitz poster (the one with Spitz lifting his trunks to reveal his pubic hair), the bottle of Taaka vodka, the tall stack of plastic glasses on the Kentone coffee table, the Port-au-Prince voodoo doll on the pillow, and the bed made up with garish Peter Max sheets—never with a bedspread—and the fresh uniform; always a clean, fresh uniform in a plasticene bag just back from the cleaners, hanging on a black wire hanger on the closet door; never inside the closet. Only the color of their eyes, hair and uniform was different. After a while, a few months back, while I was on my stewardess kick—with one leading me into another as I met the roommate, and she moved, and then I met her new roommate, who introduced me to her best friend, and then onto the next—they all blurred together.

  They were even the same in bed, as if they had attended the same sex classes and had to pass an examination on The Sensuous Woman, The Joy of Sex, and the collected novels of John O’Hara.

  Stewardesses never wanted to screw; with them it was all A.C.F.—anilingus, cunnilingus, and fellatio. You were lucky if one in ten would let you put it in. And there were more than 25,000 stewardesses living in Miami, all hot-eyed and eager to get a husband. They even smelled the same. Like milk. They usually wore musk oil, the scent that is supposed to bring out a true and personal odor, and that odor was milk; raw unpasteurized milk.

  Nurses were a little better, but they had their peculiarities, too. At least one hand, but usually both hands, had to be touching you at all times; on the arm, the shoulder, the leg, and an arm was always around your waist when you walked. And a nurse’s taste in civilian clothes was abominable. They looked great in their white uniforms, brisk, clean, and iodoformy, but then they would put on a red dress or a purple pants suit, or a peasant blouse and a plaid skirt, and they looked as if they had closed their eyes and grabbed something out of a Goodwill clothing bin. But nurses were all right, much better than stewardae. They were earthy, dependable, predictable, and almost always on time.

  The problem, of course, was me. Not the stewardesses, not the nurses, but me. I was bored with their conversational subjects, flying schedules and ports of call, hospital schedules and patients. I had been through the same conversations again and again, and I didn’t want to listen to them any longer. But people always talk about their work, and it was only natural for them to talk about their flying and floor schedules. I just didn’t want to listen to them, that was all.

  With Rita and Tina, the two Cuban girls in Hialeah, there was no talk at all. I didn’t even know where they worked, or what they did for a living, although I had a hunch that they were divorcees on alimony. I would bring over a bottle of scotch, undress as I fixed a drink, and then we went to it, all three of us, without any discussion. It didn’t cost me anything, but a man has to be in the right mood for an orgy…

  I left the apartment and went out to a John Wayne re-run, The Train Robbers, probably the worst western the Duke ever made.

  7

  I had just finished watching the eleven o’clock news when Larry knocked on my door. He took off his jacket, refused a drink—he was already a little tight—and put a pot of water on to boil for instant coffee. He spooned two heaping teaspoonfuls of instant into a cup, and I asked him how it went.

  “It was different,” he said, after a long pause. “I’ve never had a date quite like it, and I had a much better time than I expected. It was weird, and gross, and yet I had a hellova good time.”

  He removed his tie and began to roll it around his finger the way I had taught him to do. I always do this, no matter how drunk I am when I get home. By rolling your tie into a tight roll, and putting it away in a drawer all rolled, it will be ready to use the next time without a wrinkle.

  “This apartment,” Larry said, “the Weinstein apartment, is on the top floor, the twelfth—not the penthouse, but the top floor. The Cresciente is on the bay side of Belle Isle, not on the ocean, but up this high, and on the southeast side of the building, with a screened veranda on both corners, there’s a beautiful view of the Miami skyline and the ocean too.

  “One hundred and fifty thousand hard ones, it cost.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Irv told me. Mr. Weinstein. He was happy to tell me. He could hardly wait to tell me. Three bedrooms, three-and-a-half baths, a living room, a dining room, and a recreation room with a snooker table.” “A pool table…”

  “No, a snooker table, regulation size, and two high pool room chairs, too. Irv had them
made of rattan and fitted with custom cushions.”

  He stirred his coffee, and sat down across the coffee table from me.

  I pointed the gadget at the TV set and switched it off. Larry

  said:

  “The date didn’t cost me a dime. I’d planned on taking Shirley to Wolfie’s, or some place like that. I was a little nervous about this idea when I saw the Cresciente, but I was going to go through with it, anyway. But they had other plans. Mrs. Weinstein had fixed dinner, and on this first date they thought it would be best if we all just sat around and got acquainted with each other. Oh, yeah, they kept calling me ‘Doctor.’”

  “Did you go along?”

  “Sure. Except I told them I was a Doctor of Philosophy. They didn’t know the difference. I think the people down at Electro-Date must’ve told them I was a doctor. If it had been you, instead of me, you could’ve passed yourself off as an M.D. easy because you got all that medical jargon down. But they were just as happy with a Ph.D. They figured I was a college professor, at first, but I told them I was working as a private investigator for National Security, and that I was planning to write a book later on the philosophy of security.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How do I know? You’re always saying I can’t think in abstract terms, but it went down okay with the Weinsteins.” “What about the girl?”

  “I don’t know about the girl. Shirley didn’t say much. Her mother dominated the dinner conversation, and then I played snooker with Irv. So Shirley didn’t get to say much of anything.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “It’s hard to tell, really. These Jewish girls all look alike to me, you know, at least the ones on Miami Beach. She’d had a nose job but they took off too much, as they usually do. Somehow, that Irish rétroussé nose never quite fits a Jewish face. If you’d studied as many mug shots as I have the last few years you’d know what I mean. She had nice hair, though, black, long, and straight down her back—almost down to her ass. She wore round, lightly tinted blue glasses, and a full-length granny dress. She had a weight problem, I think—at least her face was chubby—but she was fighting it. She hardly ate anything at all at dinner.” “What did they feed you?”