Madison came in, went over to the bed and poured bourbon into a glass. I put my bell-bottoms on, buttoned my studded shirt. “So was it horrible?” she asked. It was a question similar to the kind my father used to ask when he first left my mother. “Are you O.K.?” he would ask and the only answer would be yes. “It's hard the first few times,” she said handing the glass to me. “They haunt you like one-night stands, but if you just relax, it happens. It gets to be like passing people on the street.”
“It wasn't really that bad,” I said. And it seemed true. Watching the skinhead beating was more riveting and I cried the time my mother called me a bitch. This feeling was so familiar, what happened to me was never real. Emotional experiences happened to others. I got the picture in my head of my mother, brooding, dangerous. And me leaning toward her, caught up in the aura of her pain.
“So now you know what it's like to do the thing most repulsive to women.” She took two hundred dollars from her pocket and passed it to me. I started to talk. . how good it would be to make a lot of money. How I would get my own apartment and a car so we could drive down Highway 1 to L.A.
Madison's cheeks flushed, she looked into her glass. “It's not about money, it's about death.”
“Of course it is,” I said. “I know that.” I was quiet, thinking it over. The glitter in her hair caught light and for a moment there in the half light she looked demonic.
She asked if I'd seen Pig.
“Not since I started,” I told her.
Madison wound the top of the bottle down. “I met Pig at a titty bar south of Market. If I let her touch my tits she would give me twenty dollars. Eventually she offered to pay me to come over and walk up and down her spine.”
“Then you lived with her?”
“Only after she begged me. I was a lap dancer and lived with a guy who sculpted naked ladies. He got hooked on heroin and started stealing from me. I holed up at Pig's. It wasn't so bad until she started to get that look whenever I went near her. One night she was looking at me.” Madison burlesqued Pig's dreamy eyes. “And I realized if I slept with her, she would think of it forever. So I did her and it was O.K., till she started moaning.”
Madison laughed. I knew I should too, but her attitude toward Pig was cruel and adolescent. It was one thing to say Pig had taken advantage of her, another to make fun of her sexuality. She doubled over laughing. I felt uncomfortable and watched the street light move on the curtains. Madison was acting crazy, but I didn't trust my observations because the chair ribs hurt my back and the rug was rough on my bare feet. My bourbon looked like a flame—I have done the thing I was most afraid of.. what will happen now?
AFTERWORK MADISON TOOK ME TO A PLACE IN CHINATOWN JUST off Grant Street called the Buddah Bar. High black-vinyl stools and a sagging string of blinking paper lanterns lined the bar. When the bartender saw Madison he nodded hello and hit a little brass bell attached to the cash register. A slim woman appeared in an electrician's jumpsuit wearing round wire frames with rose-colored glass. She led us silently down the back stairs and along a narrow hallway to a metal door fortified by several dead-bolt locks. I swayed woozily. . time no longer held me. I felt lucky, freed, as I had been, by a fifth of bourbon. I watched a vein in Madison's temple pulse, stepped back so I could mouth, without her seeing me, “She is wild. . she is dangerous.” Madison pounded the door with the side of her fist.
“Open up,” she said. “It's me.” The eyehole darkened and then a melodious voice, I thought at first it came from inside my drunken head, said. . “Madison dear, hold on.” The tone was deep, but slightly tilted like a woman's. Keys jangled and the first of many locks clicked back.
“Habee is a hermaphrodite,” Madison whispered. “If you're nice to him he may show you.” She licked her fingers and smoothed her eyebrows. The door opened and there was Habee, a Lebanese man in coffee-colored silk pajamas, his long hair held in a braid down his back. He had small breasts like a teenager and was deeply tan like people who live out-of-doors.
“Delighted,” Habee said, swinging his hands open and kissing Madison. “If Madison hasn't told you,” he said, turning to me, “this is where it all leaves off.”
“This is a friend of mine,” she said as we stepped inside. “Isn't she lovely?”
Habee held my chin between his thumb and forefinger, forced my head to the left for a profile. Then took my hands, turned them over and back. He shook his head.
“I haven't seen anything like her since I was in Amsterdam.” He led us to one of the low tables in the middle of the room. Sweet smoke hung near the ceiling, the walls were tiled in mosque patterns of blues and greens, and maroon Orientals covered the floors. Four high standing candelabras gave the place plenty of light. No hard furniture to sit on, just pillows and several short wooden tables for hookah pipes. There were shadows behind the drapes dividing the room into private compartments and a soft smell of sweat. A man in a tuxedo was lying down with his hand propping up his head. His hair was slick and black and when he sat up to greet me, he kissed my hand.
“Better to search for heaven than not,” he said.
“Oh loosen up,” Habee said. “You're behaving all wrong.” The man got up, bowed, put one arm over his head and the other elegantly out to the side and tiny-stepped on his tiptoes away from us toward another group of people talking near the gold tile fireplace on the far side of the room.
“What'sa matter with Georgie?” Madison said.
“Oh, you know, he doesn't really like girls.”
“I do,” she said, pressing her shoulder against mine. I could tell she was glad I was here. She'd matched me shot for shot at Carmen's, but had gotten only more dignified. . more prophetic. She'd told me I'd eventually regret every night of my life except for this one. And with the bourbon surrounding everything with a lovely halo of melancholy, I thought, She is so right.
Habee lit the opium in the glass bottom of the hookah pipe and the perfumed smoke wafted toward me.
“I must tell you both,” Habee said, taking short puffs to keep the smoke coming, “about a trip I just took to Mexico. I went to see an old friend of mine. I had no idea it would be so fantastic. He and about twenty others stay in caves by the water. All day they swim and fuck. A woman brings their food. They just stretch out in the sun like otters, it was the most remarkable thing.”
“Sounds like you found your calling,” Madison said, accepting the pipe, adjusting the hose so the smoke could move easily into her mouth.
“No, my best times were in the circus. I had a lovely gown. . silk with blue roses. And there was a boy who gave me flowers. Really, he got quite obsessed with me and would wait until late to walk me to my trailer.” Habee took the pipe himself, puffed a thoughtful pigeon of smoke. “Anyway, it had to do with a rainy day and a back rub.”
“Sounds lurid,” I said, taking the mouthpiece and putting it to my lips. The smoke was smooth as milk.
“Yes?” Habee said, opening his eyes wide and waiting.
“Well.” I exhaled. “Did you hurt him?”
Habee smiled and took the pipe. “I assure you I did not. But that reminds me of a theory I'm developing. I think if men still hunted for deer or bear, more of them would be happy with their wives. Because now, you see, all men can hunt is women. It's terrible for them, their last connection to that savage wild man. They hunt. They kill.”
“Kill?” Madison said.
“You know, the moment a man comes, he's taken what he needs to feed himself.”