Jump to the realtor in Santa Barbara shaking my hand and saying my name, Daisy St. Patience, over and over the way you do when you want to make a good impression but not looking at me in my veils. He's looking at Brandy and Denver.
Charmed, I'm sure.
The house is just what you'd expect from the outside. There's a big scarred mission-style trestle table in the dining room, under a wrought-iron chandelier you could swing on. Laid across the table is a silver-embroidered, fringed Spanish shawl.
We represent a television personality who wishes to remain nameless, Denver tells the realtor. We're an advance team scouting for a weekend home for this nameless celebrity. Miss Alexander, she's an expert in product toxicity, you know, the lethal fumes and secretions given off by homes.
"New carpet," Denver says, "will exude poisonous formaldehyde for up to two years after it's been laid."
Brandy says, "I know that feeling.”
It got so that when Manus's crotch wasn't leading men to their doom, Manus was three-piece-suited in court on the witness stand, saying how the defendant approached him in some lurid exposed public masturbating way and asked for a cigarette.
"Like anybody could look at me and think I smoke," Manus would say.
You didn't know what vice he objected to more.
After Santa Barbara, we drove to San Francisco and sold the Fiat Spider. Me, I'm writing on cocktail napkins all the time: maybe your sister's in the next city, she could be anywhere.
In the Santa Barbara hacienda, Brandy and me found Benzedrine and Dexedrine and old Quaaludes and Soma and some Dialose capsules that turned out to be a fecal softener. And some Solaquin Forte cream that turned out to be a skin bleach.
In San Francisco, we sold the Fiat and some drugs and bought a big red Physicians' Desk Reference book so we wouldn't be stealing worthless fecal softeners and skin bleaches. In San Francisco, old people are all over selling their big rich houses full of drugs and hormones. We had Demerol and Darvocet-Ns. Not the puny little Darvocet-N 50s. Brandy was feeling beautiful with me trying to O.D. her on big Darvocet 100-milligram jobbers.
After the Fiat, we rented a big Seville convertible. Just between us, we were the Zine kids:
Me, I was Comp Zine.
Denver was Thor Zine.
Brandy, Stella Zine.
It was in San Francisco I started Denver on his own secret hormone therapy to destroy him.
Manus's detective career had started to peter out when his arrest rate dropped to one per day, then one per week, then zero, then still zero. The problem was the sun, the tanning, and the fact he was getting older and he was a known bait, none of the older men he had already arrested went near him. The younger men just thought he was too old.
So Manus got bold. More and more his Speedos got smaller, which wasn't a good look, either. The pressure was on to replace him with a new model. So now he'd have to start conversations. Talk. Be funny. Really work at meeting guys. Develop a personality, and still the younger men, the only ones who didn't run when they saw him, a younger man would still decline when Manus suggested they take a walk back into the trees, into the bushes.
Even the most horny young men with their eyes scamming everybody else would say, "Uh, no thanks."
Or, "I just want to be alone right now."
Or worse, "Back off, you old troll, or I'll call a cop.”
After San Francisco and San Jose and Sacramento, we went to Reno and Brandy turned Denver Omelet into Chase Manhattan. We zigzagged everywhere I thought we'd find enough drugs. Evie's money could wait.
Jump to Las Vegas and Brandy turns Chase Manhattan into Eberhard Faber. We drive the Seville down the gut of Las Vegas. All that spasming neon, the red chase lights going one direction, white chase lights going the other direction. Las Vegas looks the way you'd imagine heaven must look at night. We never put the top up on the Seville, had it two weeks, never put the top up.
Cruising the gut of Las Vegas, Brandy sat on the boot with her ass up on the trunk lid and her feet on the back seat, wearing this strapless metallic brocade sheath as pink as the burning center of a road flare with a bejeweled bodice and a detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves.
With her looking that good, Las Vegas with all its flash and dazzle was just another Brandy Alexander brand fashion accessory.
Brandy puts her arms up, wearing these long, pink opera gloves, and just howls. She just looks and feels so good at that moment. And the detachable long silk taffeta cape with balloon sleeves, it detaches.
And sails off into Las Vegas traffic.
"Go around the block," Brandy screams. "That cape has to go back to Bullock's in the morning."
After Manus's detective career started downhill, we'd have to work out in the gym every day, twice on some days. Aerobics, tanning, nutrition, every station of the cross. He was a bodybuilder, if what that means is you drink your meal replacement shakes right out of the blender six times a day over the kitchen sink. Then Manus would get swimwear through the mail you couldn't buy in this country, little pouches on strings and microfilament technology he'd put on the moment we got home from the gym, then follow me around asking, did I think his butt looked too flat?
If I was a gay guy, did I think he needed to trim back his pubic hair? Me being a gay guy, would I think he looked too desperate? Too aloof? Was his chest big enough? Too big, maybe?
"I'd hate for guys to think I'm just a big dumb cow is all," Manus would say.
Did he look, you know, too gay? Gay guys only wanted guys who acted straight.
"I don't want guys to see me as a big passive bottom," Manus would say. "It's not like I'd just flop there and let just any guy bone me."
Manus would leave a ring of shaved hairs and bronzer scum around the bathtub and expect me to scrub.
Always in the background was the idea of going back to an assignment where people shot at you, criminals with nothing to lose if you got killed.
And maybe Manus could bust some old tourist who found the cruisy part of Washington Park by accident, but most days the precinct commander was on him to start training a younger replacement.
Most days, Manus would untangle a silver metallic tiger stripe string bikini out of the knotted mess in his underwear drawer. He'd strain his ass into this little A-cup nothing and look at himself in the mirror sideways, frontways, backwards, then tear it off and leave the stretched, dead little animal print on the bed for me to find. This would go on through zebra stripes, tiger stripes, leopard spots, then cheetah, panther, puma, ocelot, until he ran out of time.
"These are my lucky lifeguard 'kinis," he'd tell me. "Be honest."
And this is what I kept telling myself was love.
Be honest? I wouldn't know where to start. I was so out of practice.
After Las Vegas, we rented one of those family vans. Eberhard Faber became Hewlett Packard. Brandy wore a long, white cotton pique dress with open strappy sides and a high slit up the skirt that was totally inappropriate for the entire state of Utah. We stopped and tasted the Great Salt Lake.
This just seemed like the thing to do.
I was always writing in the sand, writing in the dust on the car:
maybe your sister is in the next town.
Writing: here, take a few more Vicodins.
It was after Manus couldn't get guys to approach him for sex that he started into buying man-on-man sex magazines and going out to gay clubs.
"Research," he'd say.
"You can come with," he'd tell me, "but don't stand too close, I don't want to send out the wrong signal."
After Utah, Brandy turned Hewlett Packard into Harper Collins in Butte. There in Montana, we rented a Ford Probe and Harper drove with me squashed in the back seat, and every once in a while Harper would say, "We're going one hundred and ten miles an hour."