The girls and boys standing on line outside were talking noisily among themselves, trying to look supremely confident about their chances of getting into the place. The man in charge of granting admission was about six and a half feet tall, and Michael guessed he weighed at least three hundred pounds. He had bushy black eyebrows, curly black hair, wide shoulders, a narrow waist, and hands like hamhocks.
Despite the cold, he was wearing only a black jacket over a white turtleneck shirt, black loafers, white socks, and gray trousers that were too short. Michael heard one of the kids on the line referring to him as Curly.
There was a sudden buzz of excitement when what earlier had appeared to be part of the building’s seamless facade now parted to reveal two green panels that served as entrance doors. An intense green light spilled out onto the sidewalk.
There was the blare of heavy metal rock. Two youngsters walked out—the girl dressed as a somewhat precocious Dorothy in a pleated skirt that showed white panties and half her ass, the boy wearing a gray suit and a funnel on his head. Both were wearing grins that indicated they’d been allowed to meet the Wizard and all their wishes had been granted.
On the line, all faces turned expectantly toward Curly, who was now parading the sidewalk like a judge at a dog show. He chose two people at random, pressed a button that snapped the doors open again, and, with a surly nod, admitted the couple. The girl was dressed as a Munchkin with a frizzed blonde hairdo.
The boy was wearing blue jeans and a long cavalry officer’s overcoat. Apparently, then, admission to the club was not premised on fidelity to the film. The doors swung shut again. The sound of music was replaced by the keening of the wind blowing in fiercely off the Hudson. Nobody on the line complained, not even the kids standing at the head of it. This was simply the way it was. Curly decided who would go in, Curly decided who would stand out here in the cold. Nor was there any way of knowing upon which criteria he premised his choice. Either you waited for his approving nod or you went home with your dreams. That was it, and this was Oz, take it or leave it.
Michael walked over to where Curly was disdainfully glaring out over the crowd.
“Mama’s expecting me,” he said.
Curly looked him over.
“Expecting who?” he said.
“Silvio,” Michael said.
“Silvio who?”
“Just say Silvio.”
“Mama ain’t here yet.”
“I’ll wait. Inside.”
Curly hesitated.
“Push your button,” Michael said.
Curly shrugged. But he pushed the button.
The panels sprang open. Connie and Michael stepped together into the interior of the jewel, and were immediately inundated by a mortar explosion of battering sound and emerald-green light. The place was thronged with Tin Men, Cowardly Lions, Flying Monkeys, Dorothys, Wicked Witches, Munchkins, Wizards, Glindas, Scarecrows, and even ordinary folk. Green smoke swirled on the air. Bodies twisted on the small dance floor. On the bandstand, five blond men wearing black leather trousers, pink tank-top shirts, and long gold chains played guitar and electric-keyboard backup to a young black woman standing at the microphone and belting out a song that seemed to consist only of the words “Do me, baby, do me good” repeated over and over again. She had a big, brassy gospel singer’s voice. She was wearing brown high-heeled boots and what appeared to be draped animal skins. The thudding of the bass guitars sounded like enemy troops shelling the perimeter. The room reverberated with noise, skidded with dazzling light. Out of the deafening din of the music and the refracted green glare of the lights and the dense hanging fog of smoke, a young man in a red jacket materialized.
“Sir?” he asked. “Did John admit you?”
He looked extremely puzzled. Had the system somehow broken down?
“Mama’s expecting me,” Michael said.
“Who’s Mama?” the young man asked.
Michael winked.
“John knows,” he said.
“It’s just that I haven’t got a table,” the young man said.
He seemed on the edge of tears.
“We’ll wait at the bar,” Michael said.
“But how will I know her?” he asked.
“Don’t worry about it,” Michael said, and winked again.
He took Connie’s elbow and led her toward a bar hung with rotating green floodlights that restlessly swept the room like the eyes of Martians, striking the tables around the dance floor, exploding upon them like summer watermelons and then moving on swiftly as if there’d been a prison break, Michael’s motion-picture associations recklessly mixing similes and metaphors, the probing green searchlights in a London air raid, the sky-washing green klieg lights outside Graumann’s Chinese, green tracer shells on a disputed green killing field—but in reality the shells had been yellow and red and the world of Oz was green and loud and somewhat frightening in its insistence on colorization. They sat on high-backed stools alongside a young man dressed as a Cowardly Lion whose mane, awash in the overhead light, looked as green as wilted asparagus.
He turned to Michael and said, “You’re in the wrong movie.”
Ever since Christmas Eve, Michael had been thinking exactly the same thing.
“What are you, Twelve O’Clock High?” the lion asked.
“A Guy Named Joe,” Michael said.
“She’s The World of Suzie Wong, am I right?”
“Shanghai Gesture,” Connie said.
“What’ll it be?” the bartender asked.
“Lost Weekend,” the lion said, and nudged Michael with his elbow.
Michael figured that in this splendidly green place a person should order either creme de menthe or chartreuse.
“Do you know how to make a hot rum toddy?” Connie asked.
“Come on, lady,” the bartender said.
“A Beefeater martini then,” she said, “on the rocks, two olives. Green.”
“Tonic with a lime,” Michael said.
“Green.”
“Hard or soft, the minimum’s the same,” the bartender said.
“That’s okay,” Michael said.
“And besides, the tonic costs three bucks.”
“Fine,” Michael said.
“Hello, darling,” a voice behind him said.
“You’re out of costume.”
He turned.
Glinda the Good Witch of the North was standing there in a diaphanous blue gown, wings on her shoulders, waving a wand. Wings on his shoulders, actually, since Glinda was in reality Phyllis from the Green Garter, with whom Michael had danced earlier tonight, oh what a small world Oz was turning out to be, not to mention the city of New York itself. Phyllis was with a Scarecrow who under all that straw turned out to be Gregory who had rescued Michael from the bad guys and then admired his buns, curiouser and curiouser it was getting to be.
“A Pink Lady, please,” Glinda, or Phyllis, or both, said to the bartender.
“And a Whisper, please,” Gregory said.
The room was stultifyingly hot. Michael took off the bomber jacket and draped it over the high back of the bar stool. The music was still deafening, but the beat was slower now, designed for dirty dancing, the bass guitar chords jangling insistently into the room like the bone-jarring sound of bedsprings in a cheap hotel, the black girl’s gospel-singer voice soaring to the roof where the air was thin and clear, high above the poisonous green smoke, setting the rafters atremble the way it had back home in Mississippi, where Michael imagined she used to sing with the Sunday choir.
“Dance with me,” Connie said.
There was—for him in the next several moments, and perhaps for Connie as well—the certain knowledge that they were the two most beautiful people in the joint, perhaps in the entire city, glowing with an inner light that shattered the emerald-green myth and illuminated them as sharply as if a follow-spot were leading them out to the dance floor. In the movies, this would have been Ginger and Fred, he in elegant tails rather than Levi’s and a sweater, she in a long pale gown rather than jeans and leg warmers and a long-sleeved blouse. And in the movies, they would glide out onto a crowded dance floor—just as the dance floor here was crowded with people pressed against each other, sweating against each other, pumping against each other, dry-humping to the thud of the guitars and the angelic voice—and the crowd would part as Fred stepped out and Ginger followed, those first graceful steps indicating to the mere dancers on the floor that here were italicized dancers, here were goddamn capitalized DANCERS to be reckoned with! And the floor would clear at once, and they would be alone at last, a heavenly mist rising from beneath their feet, and they would dance divinely on clouds, oh so easy, oh so beautifully airy and light and incredibly easy, the way Michael and Connie were dancing now.