by D. Foy
She had a web of tribal-style ink creeping from beneath the collar of her vintage coat, some Channel cut with a damask print. She worried her hands on the counter before her, smoothing out a piece of invisible cloth.
If I hung around too long, Alex’s slippery doings might go to waste. My little fiend could materialize anytime now, slurp, slurp.
“Maybe I could tell you what it looks like,” I said. The girl paged through a magazine. “I can tell you what’s in it,” I said. “Whatever you want.” She kept up with this dumb act until pretty soon a sleek Cleopatra-type gal approached. Of course she had her ticket. The check girl disappeared behind a rack and returned a minute later with a leopard fur coat. “Don’t you remember me giving it to you?” I said.
“You give me a ticket,” she said, “I get your jacket. Capiche?”
If the word capiche was bad enough from the mouth of a guy, it was ten times worse from the mouth of some poseur of a girl making six bucks an hour. “But what,” I said, “if I never find my ticket?”
The girl shrugged. “What if?”
I wanted my coat, but out even more. Cammy hadn’t surfaced. I gave the room a final sweep, then checked my pockets. Turns out the fiver I’d slapped on Alex was the last of its kind. All told, I had some matches with a phone-sex girl, a smattering of lint balls, and $2.50 in change, pennies included. That at least would get me a pack of smokes. If nothing else I could hunker down against some warehouse to wait for the return of Bruno and Co.
Gillian the Peachy Puff girl appeared like a nicotine angel. She laid a hand across my wrist as I began to count my change.
“Stop it, AJ,” she said. “Before I get embarrassed.” I always did like her cutesy hat and those creamy thighs jacked up on stilettos. She handed me a pack of Camel Lights. “It’ll be our little secret,” she said, and I could’ve married the girl on the spot.
“I’ll tell you all about it over coffee someday,” I said.
Her smile hadn’t budged. “If it’s anything like the rest of your stories, I’ll be getting off cheap.”
“It’s better,” I said.
“You watch out,” she said.
Sweet, sweet girl! She pecked me on the cheek and wobbled through the crowd. I tore out a smoke and clottered past a couple of bouncers, a gang of jeans-and-leather tough boys, two dykes creaming uglies in the photo booth. Some girl I’d dumped because of her shit-for-breath squealed my way, but I rolled through, faker of oblivion. The doorway was there, the night cheered me on.
Cattycorner from me a Dashiell Hammett lamp sprayed its glow onto the cab beneath it, a Luxor it looked like through rain, beige and purple as it was. Cars and bikes lined both sides of the street, north to south, and yet for the life of me, I couldn’t spot a single crummy soul. No way I was going to stand around waiting for Cammy to show her darling face. Fifteen minutes: if Bruno hadn’t appeared by then, I’d split like a banana.
The rain came down in mantles. The street looked like a mirror or pool. A line of traffic signals, steadily diminishing, cycled through their colors until far away, ten or twelve blocks, they merged into that familiar anonymity of concrete, wire, and fog. I took a breath and stepped out from my niche. The storm came down, thick with the odors not just of rain on concrete and paint and metal and wood, but of rain on scum, as well, breaking through that crust of dog-day vomit, and piss and poop and oil. A garbage truck drew into a phalanx of dumpsters with its tusk-like prongs. Out near the bay a klaxon lowed. At first it felt good, the cool and the wet. For one slippery moment I seemed to’ve been blessed with clarity. The world was truly gorgeous! The world had become a special place! But soon I was shivering, and I saw the streets for what they’d been, rows of cars like great sleepy turtles, pigeons huddled along the warehouse sills, all hyper-graffiti and brick. The billboards over the highway, eerie with faces beaming at banks and cars. The strands of mist about them. The endlessly strobing lights.
A white stretch limo inched toward the club. When finally it stopped before me, the last tinted window in a row of tinted windows began to disappear, until Bruno with his chill-blue eyes gazed dopily out.
“Me and Andre,” he said, nervously it seemed, for his loss of words at my new look, or for ditching me, I couldn’t tell, “were saying how you’d probably busted a nut or two by now.”
“Wouldn’t you and Andre like to know.”
Andre was kicking it regal as a Space Age potentate. A ginormous mirror lay across his lap, covered with a mound of wings. “Hop in, brother,” he said, “and spill your woes.”
We rolled on down to another club, monotonous and droll. We did this three more times before I had Andre’s driver leave me at my flat on Clinton Park. The rain had ceased, the sun plodding up the East Bay clouds.
At that time I was living with Lucille and a dude named Roper, George, that is, a fattish plucker of banjoes who worked in the mailroom for a stock-broking firm up on California Street. First thing he did each night when he got home in his thrift-store suit was change it for his tie-dye and spin some Dead or other such crap, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, or Joplin, or maybe even Dylan’s whiney ass. But always it was LPs, and that’s because Roper, aspiring Luddite that he was, had long ago made a point to boycott advancing tech, CDs, too, no doubt. Lover of bongs packed with green and steins full of lukewarm Guinness, he was, more or less, a grody son of a bitch.
I crept up the stairs and squatted on the throne to empty out my day’s worth of living. A rueful song slippery with clarinets and trumpets had seeped in by way of the neighbors. It made me think of La Dolce Vita, that scene where Marcello and his old man are sitting drunk with Paparazzo, watching a carpet of balloons follow the clown once he nods their way. The only thing I wanted now was exceeding dreams. But just as I was masking the proof of my deed with a squirt of the trusty freshener, I heard a low giggle, and then a voice in turn. Thinking these to’ve hatched from the street, I slithered nearer that way and heard them again, a crazy mix of childish giggle and executioner snarl. They, whoever, were in Lucille’s room. I stepped softly now, lest the floorboards creak. This guy, whoever, made it El Numero Cinco for the girl in two days under a fortnight. I placed my ear to the door.
“Mommy wants Daddy to lick her jam jar,” Lucille said. The man’s voice grumbled something I couldn’t get. “Come on, Daddy,” she said, her words both vampy and firm, “lick my jam jar.”
“Not this jam jar,” said the man.
Holy holey, I thought, it’s Roper! Now I’d never cared what Lucille banged, but this surpassed all bounds. It wasn’t so much her shanking eight million dudes that did me in—I’d coped with that plenty—but of her shanking Roper in particular, in secret, no less, after she’d sworn to the world till her face ran blue he was so grotesque she wouldn’t kiss him with a taze. The image of Roper’s hairy ass jiggling round Lucille, a-pumping and a-groaning like the porker he was, well, it about drove me to the edge.
With my ear to the door, I couldn’t help but see the painting Lucille had hung on the wall beside it. A naked woman lay on a plain, her neck inhumanly bent. And though her face held enough of grief, its grimace revealed some pleasure, too, a thin, canine joy. But it was her eyes that conveyed the bulk of this sense. They’d rolled up in Spartan bliss, half angel, half wolf. Her face, still scarier, showed Lucille’s twenty years down the line, the younger in the old, defeated and sad, and the once-full breasts like moribund flowers, and the bulge of stomach, and the veins in the pit behind the knee, and the clefts of her pappy ankles. Roper’s voice grumbled on, louder than before.
“Damn it, Lucy, let go of my head.”
“Just one tiny lick,” Lucille said.
Blankets rustled, springs groaned. “I’ll do all kinds of shit,” Roper said as Lucille giggled, “but that’s not one of them.”
“Since when was a big man like you afraid of a little blood?”
“I’m telling you,” Roper said. “I don’t lick jam jars while the jam’s still in them.”
Of cou
rse the next day I told Basil what I’d heard.
“Lick my jam jar, Daddy?” he said. “Are you serious?”
“I just about cried,” I said.
When I told Dinky about the incident he took the Blow-Pop from his mouth and whistled. This was before his head had swelled up like a snake-bit horse, back when he still had hair. “Isn’t she the rambunctious little harlot,” he said.
That night we went to The Trophy Room. Dinky and Basil and I, and two chicks named Tina and Jimmy Sue, had set up camp near the pool table, waiting for Lucille to return with drinks.
“I don’t believe you,” Jimmy Sue said to Basil. “I know Lucy, and, unfortunately, I know Roper, too. She just wouldn’t do it.”
“Talk to Mr Jackson,” Basil said. “He was there.”
“I don’t care if you heard it from J. Edgar Hoover. There’s no way it’s true.”
I cast a look round the bunch. “If I told you the shit I know about our friend Miss Bonnery, you’d run to the clinic for a shot in the ass and a couple of cartons of bug juice.”
Basil laughed so hard he coughed up his drink, right there on the table. Tina did her damnedest to freak me with her stink eye.
“Wait till Lucy hears this,” she said. “She’ll claw your fucking eyeballs out.”
“She is the Hatchet Lady,” Dinky said.
Jimmy Sue tapped the table. “First of all,” she said, “Roper looks like Deputy Dog. Second of all, he’s a fat greasy pig with a case of dandruff and breath like rotten chicken. I mean, the guy still wears tie-dye.”
“That’s true,” I said, “every bit. But still.”
“Still nothing,” Tina said.
“I heard what I heard.”
“You’re disgusting,” Jimmy Sue said.
“You think I like it? Cause I don’t. I don’t like it a bit. In fact, the shit’s already a ghost.” I expected one of the girls to come back with some lip, but they only sat there huffing on their smokes. “Listen,” I said. “Once I had to take a crap in a public restroom, right? I’ve never done it before in my life, because next to a hippie, public toilets are about the filthiest, most repugnant things I know. And after you hear this little tale, you’ll see why. The commode in question happened to be down at the Kabuki. It’s Dan Aykroyd and Bill Murray in Ghostbusters, fucking up the monster that looks like the Pillsbury Doughboy on PCP. But I have to pinch a loaf so bad I can’t sit still. I do my best to stay, the flick is awesome, only to scurry from the scene like a clam. So there I am, doing my thing, praising the gods and their minions for not making me shit the bed—you can ask Basil the details there—when by the TP hanger I see a hole in the wall. And I’m not talking about some pinhole here. This thing was big as a can. But of course that’s not all, because inside this hole, like a picture in a goddamned frame, is a little pink cock with a little pink hand just whacking away, going at it like there’s no tomorrow.”
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”
Anytime I ever told this story I got the standard communal howl. The table was absolutely cringing.
“That’s right,” I said. “How do you think I felt?”
“I would’ve kicked that guy’s ass so bad,” Basil said.
“And why is that, mon frère?” I said.
“Are you kidding? My space, man, my mind. The little shit, he invaded you. That’s how he was getting off. Thinking about you watching him through that hole.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And now I’ve got this disgusting image in my head. That I’ll never, ever be rid of. And every time I see a public restroom, that’s what I’ll see—a little pink hand jerking away at a pink little ugly cock.”
“That’s all very splendid,” Tina said. “But what’s it got to do with you lying about Roper and Lucy?”
“From now on,” I said, “I have to think about Roper with his head between Lucy’s legs, trying to get away from her kooch. And every time I want some jelly on my toast, I’m going to hear Lucy’s voice saying, Lick my jam jar, Daddy, lick my jam jar. Now if you think that’s sick, so be it. All I know is I wish I hadn’t been there to hear it.”
“I would’ve kicked his faggot ass so, so bad,” Basil said.
“The masturbation thing I get,” said Jimmy Sue. “That you couldn’t help. But this other thing, it’s your own fault.”
“What’s a lad to do,” Dinky said, “when he’s living with such a rowdy minx?”
“Keep away from her door when he hears noise behind it,” Tina said.
“Like you wouldn’t’ve done the same,” Basil said.
“Bellissima!” Jimmy Sue said, and kissed her fingers. Lucille had returned with our tray of margaritas.
“You,” I said to Lucille, “are a doll.”
“Wait a minute,” Basil said, and paused very dramatically, a strained pinch to his face, studying Lucille’s wares. “Where is it?”
“Where’s what?” she said.
“You know.”
“No,” she said, “I don’t.”
“The jam jar,” said my friend The Prick, taking us into uncharted lands. “You forgot the jam jar!”
Lucille would’ve dropped the tray had she not already placed it—her eyes had expanded like yawning mouths.
“Pardon me?” she said, Hatchet Lady on her way.
“He’s asking,” Dinky interrupted, “why you didn’t bring the jam jar.”
“You guys,” Tina said. “Don’t.”
“Yeah,” Basil said. “Cause Daddy wants to lick it.”
A Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show-Type goobus at the next table over was busy doing magic tricks for his Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show-Type goobus friends, the three of them slouched in their booth with their dyed black hair and big black coats and tight black pants tucked into black Doc Martins and patent leather Beatle boots. They were all glopped up with lipstick and mascara, and Goobus #1, Lord Fascination, had a pink toy dinosaur, Barney, from what I could tell.
“How much do we owe you for the drinks?” I said.
Lucille’s eyes were burning. “I thought they were on you,” she hissed.
“Did I say that?”
“That must mean you get to lick the jam jar!” Good old Basil. He’d seen my ploy to change the tune and was having not a jot.
“What is this crap, anyway?” Lucille said, playing dumb to the end.
“Come, come, Lucille,” Dinky said. “The time for charades has long passed. Andrew Jackson, your roommate, we might remind you, heard the goings-on between you and blubber boy last night.”
“Pardon?”
“When was it you forgot how to speak English?” Basil said.
“I heard him, all right. I don’t think I understood him.”
“Don’t even worry about it, Lucy,” Tina said. She held up a glass. “Who had salt?”
“Right here,” Jimmy Sue said.
“Me, too,” I said.
“All right, you bastards. Out with it.”
Jimmy Sue stirred her drink and licked a blob of salt from the rim. She wasn’t looking at Lucille. “AJ said he heard you with Roper last night.”
“But we didn’t believe him,” Tina said.
“You’ve got to be kidding. You’re kidding, right?”
“Only a miserable twerp like AJ would make up a story like that,” said Jimmy Sue.
“It’s no big deal really,” I said. “Just surprised me is all.”
Lucille stood back, her eyes hopelessly, frantically shifting. “You little runt,” she said. “You puny little runt.”
“Look at him,” Jimmy Sue said, pointing my way. “He’s shit faced.”
“Take it back. Tell them it’s a lie.”
Tina glared at me. “He’s so full of shit.” She held up her glass. “Forget about it, Lucy.”
“I won’t forget about it. What exactly did you tell them?”
“Mommy,” Dinky said in his best hot-to-trot vixen’s voice, “wants Daddy to lick her jam jar. Please, Daddy, lick it.”
“Maaaaa-m
mmyyyy!” said Basil with his hands out before him like a baby at the breast.
Lucille flicked her smoke into my eye, and then, to The Clash’s “Stand By Me,” dove across the table screaming, “Liar! liar! liar!”
We fell into a wall hung with ribbons and trophies and pictures of athletes retired. The drinks went flying, in my hair and down my pants—Lucille even took a chunk from my face with her nails. I could see The Rocky-Horror-Picture-Show-Type goobs blurry behind the rest, with their capes and sneers, mumbling stuff like, “She’s nothing at all like Pam Grier,” and “Violence is so mundane.” But Jimmy Sue and Tina got the biggest kick of all. Jimmy Sue’s distaste for me I could understand. On a date a few months back, we’d quibbled over sushi at Ibisu, bickered to death the secret of great art, and snarled through choosing the show we’d hit, my pick Monkey Rhythm and The Plimsouls, hers The Misfits and a Sex Pistols wannabe act. When later she announced with a toss of her bob that Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was the twentieth century’s greatest book, I had to take her home. Tina, on the other hand, unless I could be blamed for having brought her into the Buddy mix way back when, six or seven months before the night in question, and whom I’d recently given a book of Diane Arbus photos for her b-day, hadn’t so much as dandruff to put me down. I could hear the two of them cheering Lucille on as she pummeled away. “Fuck him up!” Jimmy Sue cried. “Yeah, Lucy,” Tina shouted, “get him!”
In the end some mondo bastard with a vest full of patches dragged us to the street. Next to the Kodak booth on the corner, an ancient bum was hollering at passersby. His old Schwinn bike, a masterpiece, really, had a banana seat and two-foot sissy bar, and ape hangers, too, with long-tasseled grips. The guy was bedecked in leather, head to foot, and sported a helmet from Germany strapped with vintage goggles.
“Now don’t spaz out over there,” he shouted when he saw us. “If you can’t dance, don’t start off with the funky chicken!”
The night may have gone sour, but that hadn’t kept the gang from stepping out to the tune of Hatchet Lady! and Oh Mommy, Mommy! and Daddy still wants to lick the jam jar! The Trophy Room’s neon bathed the street in sad pink light. I thought of Lucille’s painting, the woman collapsed in her fruitless world. Her head hung low, Lucille was a spooky premonition.
