by John Boyd
Again he was wondering why Diana had chosen such a place, since Ruth was so thrifty, when it occurred to him that Diana might have trouble recognizing him with the music casting such weird shadows against one’s eardrums and the lights blaring against one’s eyeballs.
With sudden insight Ward realized what planning had gone into these small tables, because his across-the-table continuing dialogue with Margie ran concurrently with his under-the-table continuing dialogue with Dolores, who was saying, “Wow.”
“I’m looking for a man named Big John,” he said casually.
“Freddie the Hustler can introduce you,” Margie said, turning to the mass of dancers to send a keening through the vibes.
“Fred-eeee the Hust-lerrrr!”
The name almost panicked one Ward, the depression-reared Establishment graybeard from Palo Alto and New England for whom money represented a cherished value. Anyone called “the hustler” in this milieu must be king of con men.
But the other Ward, communicating with Dolores under the table, inwardly shrugged off the name. Within him, the generation gap was narrowing, and in great measure from the example of generosity Dolores showed when she took his hand and cupped it against her. But then she suddenly removed his hand and placed it firmly back in his lap.
“Now,” said Dolores, “that’s for your two dollars.”
The times, they were a-changing, he thought. In his day, two dollars went a lot farther.
CHAPTER FIVE
Out of the flickering lights came a Negro young man, pelvis jerking fore and aft to the rhythm of the juke, fingers aloft and snapping. If his Afro had been any bushier, he would have needed more head.
“Freddie, this is Al from Atascadero. He wants to meet Big John.”
Freddie’s eyes flicked toward Ward with an expression verging on insolence, flicked down at the dollar and quarter on the table, grew calculating, and looked again at Ward.
“How bad do you want to see Big John?”
“About a dollar’s worth.”
“African pride won’t let us Watusis work for peanuts any more.”
“Stick a bone in your nose and I’ll go two dollars.”
Freddie’s arrogance turned to wheedling. “Make it a dollar and a quarter, man. I’ll take you to Big John personally.”
“Are you selling your pride for a quarter?”
Trapped by Ward’s logic, Freddie grinned.
“I’ll take the green and we’ll make the scene,” he said, palming the bill. “Follow me.”
As they shouldered their way through the crowd, Ward asked, “Does Margie get a percentage of your take?”
“Naw. I don’t like the company she keeps.”
“What about Dolores?”
“That’s the company I’m talking about. Dolores looks clean and she’s not too lean, but she runs around with boys who are mean, like hog jockeys.”
“What’s a hog jockey?”
“Motorcycle rider.”
It occurred to Ward that he had much to learn about status symbols of the young, but Freddie’s rhymes intrigued him.
“I noticed you use rhyming jive. I thought that went out of style in the Thirties.”
“I’m warming up for Big John. If you want to post a message, throw him a rhyme. He’ll give you top billing every time.”
Suddenly Freddie was leading him into the men’s room, past two swinging doors separated by six-foot intervals. Past the second door, they entered a sanctum of urinals, stalls, and white silence. Floors, walls, ceilings, and the doors of the stalls were all white-tiled, and the place was spotless.
“A woman runs this joint,” Freddie said. “Her name’s Miss Frost and she’s queer for white and clean. But I don’t take it personal. Excuse me.”
As they stood side by side, Ward asked casually, “Freddie, how would you like to make five easy bucks?”
“That depends, man.”
“When we get back to the table, get rid of Margie for me.”
“Forget Dolores,” Freddie said. “She’s the Big Papa’s girl and he’s head of the Orange County Patriots.”
Ward had read scholarly analyses of the so-called “Orange County Syndrome,” and he had heard his share of liberal jibes in that area, but regardless of what the liberals said, he still considered patriotism a virtue.
“I thought you were a hustler.” Ward was deliberately sarcastic.
“They call me that because I work two jobs, one here in the morning and one down the street after eleven, but I’m not setting you up with Dolores. She’s high on speed and headed for a crash.”
Speed was the lure Ward intended to use to get her behind him on his motorcycle, and he feared no accident on the short drive to the motel.
“All you have to do is take Margie onto the dance floor for about five minutes.”
“Give me the five, but stay alive. Don’t split with Dolores while we’re away from the table.”
It was not his intention to split with Dolores, rather the opposite. He handed over five dollars, and Freddie said, “Let’s meet Big John.”
Standing beside a blackboard at the far end of the rectangular room was an old Negro man, tall, slender, gray, but as erect as a guardsman, wearing a smock.
Freddie swayed up to him, saying, “Big John, this is Al Atascadero. Got a Mexican name but he’s a gringo.”
With a dipping swing, Freddie swirled away, snapping his fingers. The old man watched him leave, saying, “Freddie’s learning but it’ll take time. He’s got to get the beat as well as a rhyme.”
Big John turned to Ward. His left eye was covered by a milky cataract, but his right flicked up and down appraisingly. For a second Ward regretted his white silk bandana, pink suede shirt, genuine leather jacket, and kangaroo boots, because he was marked as a pigeon and he had a strong feeling he was going to be hustled again.
When Big John spoke, his voice quavered slightly with age.
“I don’t push horse and I don’t sell gage, for I can’t risk narks in my old age; but if you’ve got a yen to write on the wall, then step right up and buy a ticket to the ball.”
He pulled a piece of chalk from his right pocket and motioned toward the board. An interesting gimmick, Ward thought, like legalized prostitution, but Ward felt no compulsion to write on toilet walls.
“I’m looking for a young woman, Big John. Her name’s Diana Aphrodite and she told me to ask for you.”
“She didn’t mean it in a personal way,” Big John explained. “You write on the board what you got to say. Then word gets around, all over town.”
Now the tile had a new significance to Ward. Big John used the owner’s desire for cleanliness to establish a monopoly. He had the chalk. He stood watch on the board, and from the left pocket of his smock jutted a chalk eraser.
“I assumed the management was keeping the walls free of graffiti,” Ward said.
Big John snorted. “On this John Miss Frost never lays her eyes. The board’s my private privy enterprise.”
He pointed to the board, which had a painted line dividing it horizontally a fourth of the way from the top.
“For ten words or less left one whole day, a dollar is all you have to pay; unless you want a message easier to view, then above this line will cost you two.”
Ward remembered Freddie’s advice, that Big John gave rhymsters top billing.
“Big John, I’d like to give your system a whirl, but I’m trying to get a message to a girl. As a business man, you’ll have to face it, the boy’s room wall is no place to place it.”
Big John shook his head. “All the little foxes have deposit boxes. Word gets past the wall in no time at all.”
Ward was reasonably sure no long-haired hedonist would make a deposit in Diana’s box, but young girls whispered secrets to each other. Besides, Diana would be waiting for his message.
“I’ll pay the two for a message with a view.”
The old man handed him the chalk with an admonition as he pocketed W
ard’s two dollars. “Write it plain and keep it clean because I erase anything obscene.”
Glancing over the board, Ward mused aloud, “Since humor’s the nitty-gritty of graffiti, it’s easier remembered when it’s witty, but this girl is fond of myth so I’ll make ancient lore the pith.”
“Man, you’ll pass,” Big John blurted in admiration. “That’s classic gas.”
Above the line, someone had out-hustled the hustler with a compound word to cut down the count: “Filmore, I’m becoming dreadfully afraid of Virginia Werewolf. Please, rescuemefromherpad.”
Above the plea for help, Ward lettered boldly, “APHRODITE, DIONYSUS IS HERE AND IS LONGING FOR YOU.”
When Ward returned to the table, Freddie seemed to be in an argument with Margie, for he was saying vehemently, “Dolores, I’m no bagman and I don’t handle dolls. It’s like I’m tired of hearing ‘Up against the wall.’ ”
“What wall?” Ward asked.
“Man,” Freddie said, “I could be rock-hunting in the Mojave and out would come a helicopter, full of pigs and dangling a wall. Next thing I’d hear would be ‘Up against the wall, you black mother-lover!’ ”
Freddie finished the phrase, shouting into silence because the jukebox had suddenly gone dead.
“Glamorgan cometh,” Margie said.
Ward groaned aloud at this delay. He had forgotten the premiere of the Welsh Bard in the United States in his concentration on Dolores.
Margie heard him. As the lights dimmed, she said, “I dig all Glamorgan’s platters. His voice is like touching in a nude sensitivity-encounter group. It’s way out.”
In total darkness, Dolores leaned over and whispered to Ward, “Dionysus, wow.”
Ward was amazed and disconcerted. At this rate of progress, his message should be in Venice West in another five minutes, and Diana might find him before he escaped with Dolores.
But the room was pitch dark, now, and silent with expectancy. Ward found himself tensing forward in the dark, waiting.
Suddenly a lute sounded three clear notes. A pencil-thin spotlight scratched the black and diffused slowly around Glamorgan, seated on a stool on the go-go platform, from which the cage had been lifted. Profile to the audience, hunched forward over his three-stringed lute, he gazed down in awe and wonder at his own instrument.
“Get a load of those eyebrows,” Margie whispered.
Somewhere a girl screamed as Glamorgan turned to his audience, a gentle half-smile on his lips. His hair fell to broad shoulders and curled under a page boy hairdo which framed a wide and rugged face tapering to a delicate, pointed chin. A pink shirt opened to show his marble neck.
Gazing down on his audience, Glamorgan’s eyes glowed with a sweetness—Ward couldn’t think of a better word—and his sensitivity mixed with his massiveness to project the impression of a masculine angel.
Glamorgan spoke.
In lilting Welsh accents, the Bard explained that he had come to “Amerikah” to sing of simple yet enduring things, the touch of hands, butterflies fluttering, of mayflowers blooming on Brecon, and of a love once found and lost on the road between Merthyr Tydfil and Ebbw Vale.
Glamorgan sang.
His voice was an alto sounding tones of purity and simplicity which swung his audience into rapport with his sentiments, and, strangely, Ward felt himself drawn by the singer’s tenderness and delight in simple things. However, Ward parted company with Glamorgan after they reached Ebbw Vale.
Glamorgan sang a ballad, about a lass picking berries in the bracken, which he announced as his own composition, but Ward recognized the melody from an old English folk song, “Strawberry Fair.” Ward’s sense of fairness so turned him against the otherwise pleasant lyrics that he failed to applaud the performance.
At the finale, Glamorgan sang to his lute another “original” composition:
My lute, awake! Perform this last
Stanza which we have now begun,
For when this song is sung and past,
My lute, be still, for I have done.
In a ritualistic bow, Glamorgan bent before his audience, and, in the silence before applause, indignation wrenched a shout from Ward’s throat.
“Your galley is loaded with forgetfulness, Glamorgan. That envoy was written by Thomas Wyatt, 1503-1542.”
The dimming spotlight was focused on the bowed head of Glamorgan, who raised his luminous eyes toward his heckler’s voice. His lips twisted and his alto screeched in accents which Ward, who had spent a sabbatical at Cambridge, recognized as Liverpudlian.
“Up your bloody arse, perfesser!”
Then all was dark. Ragged applause arose and died with the rising lights, and Glamorgan had vanished.
“You ruined his act, Al,” Freddie said. “Miss Frost is up yonder, watching. If it hadn’t been dark, she’d have you whiteballed from one end of the Strip to the other.”
“Not unless management countenances literary and artistic theft,”
“Wow,” said Dolores.
Freddie nodded to Ward, and said, “Hey, Margie, I learned a new Afro dance. Like to do it?”
“Groovy.”
As the jukebox blared again and the lights started to spin, Freddie led Margie onto the dance floor.
Ward stretched lazily and turned to Dolores.
“I had a bad trip down from Atascadero and I’ve got to spin rubber back to my pad. Could I see you home on my BMW 280?”
“BMW 280, wow!” Dolores was dreamy with excitement. “But my papa wouldn’t like it.”
“You have to declare your independence sooner or later.”
“But he’s coming to get me.”
“Maybe I could talk to him. I’m not a bad sort.”
“Maybe you could, Al. You talk different.”
“Let’s try it, anyway,” Ward rose and took her arm.
Through flickering darkness where strobes danced to the vibes from the juke, he led her into the quietness of the corridor. As his eyes adjusted to the steady light from the wall tapers, Ward looked at his prize. She seemed to float, her feet barely touching the carpet, as if helium filled her breasts.
He said, “Dolores, you have a lovely face, and you walk with buoyant grace.”
“He’s been to the John,” she said, explaining his inadvertent rhyme to herself. “They always talk like that when they’ve been to the John… But he said you had a pretty face… Nobody ever says nice things about my face… He’s not a teat man, Dolores.”
A mild touch of schizophrenia, Ward decided. A spin in the night air would be just the thing to bring her all together again. He could understand her feeling. He had felt a schism within himself after their communal smoke.
At the checkroom, he picked up his helmet and enjoyed the comments on his pink suede shirt when he tipped the girl a dime.
Outside, the moil of sidewalk people again formed a lane for them, but now the youngsters looked on Ward with sadness. From somewhere, he picked up a feeling of final things and held Dolores closer to him, thinking perhaps his mood sprang from a subconscious fear of hepatitis.
As they turned up the side street, Dolores asked, “What day is it, Al?”
“Tuesday.
“I mean like is it yesterday or tomorrow?”
“Today’s today.”
She looked at him with a concern approaching fear. “That’s what I was afraid of. I got to meet Papa. I was hoping it was yesterday. I didn’t see Papa yesterday, because I’m fresh and sweet.”
Ordinarily Ward might have wondered about her confusion, but his hand supporting her arm was far enough down that his knuckles touched her breast, and Ward felt like some prehistoric saurian with two nerve centers. The message from his knuckles warped the impulses from his brain.
In her innocence, Dolores had lied to herself in the corridor. He was a teat man. Ruth Gordon had been right about his obsession, but Dolores was in worse shape.
“Your attitude’s abnormal, Dolores. Your father shouldn’t be so protective, and y
ou shouldn’t let him be. An Electra complex can lead to complications. Your father should see a psychiatrist.”
“My father is a psychiatrist.”
“Then he lacks insight… Freddie told me your papa was in politics.”
“He is.”
Well, Ward thought, the two professions did overlap in certain areas, and perhaps her father needed more help than she. Buoyed by the thought of making love to this splendid girl in a three-way manner, therapy for him, for her, and for her father, Ward was prancing when they rounded the corner of the building and headed down through the parking lot.
Suddenly Ward spotted a Schweinjaeger 605, first in a line of motorcycles angled backwards against the wall. He whirled Dolores around to inspect the machine, all of its details visible in the overhead light of the parking lot. It had double chrome mufflers with a bank of triple headlights, the center one a spot, and a tandem seat with a leather-upholstered backrest and safety belt. Instead of the conventional chain drive, it had a stainless steel differential rod.
“Look at this,” he breathed in admiration to Dolores, noticing below them three motorcyclists lounging against the wall, each with his right boot sole propped against the bricks in identical fashion, each with helmet slung on the right side of the belt.
The Schweinjaeger’s speedometer was set for r.p.m.s rather than miles per hour, the mark of a quality product, but Ward thought the owner had overdone the decorations. Raccoon tails dangled from the handlebars. A decal of an American flag was pasted on the side of the gas tank, and, circling, he could read on the mud guard: SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL HARD HATS.
One of the loungers left the wall and approached Ward and Dolores, walking with a crab-like sidling, keeping his left thigh forward. Probably a victim of a traffic accident, Ward thought, as he drew nearer. He wore a crew cut, Ward noticed before the man put on his helmet. Most of his hair was in his heavy, scarred black eyebrows and tufting from his nose and ears.
Deference seemed appropriate, as the man was almost thirty, over six feet tall, and nearly half as wide across the shoulders.
