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 course 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.”