“So you want the big story,” Leni says.
“Huh?”
“My life. You want the unabridged version. You want triple X, right?”
Sylvia doesn’t know what to say.
“You’re curious,” Leni says. “Don’t worry about it. That’s how we learn, right?”
Sylvia takes a mouthful of meat. There’s a sweetness she doesn’t expect, nothing cloying, but a definite sugary tang.
“I was born twenty-four years ago,” Leni begins and right away Sylvia doesn’t believe her.
“My mother was originally from around here. Couple towns out. Came from a family used to work the apple orchards, you know, out on route 34. She married at, I don’t know, maybe seventeen. Guy was a salesman from an auto parts company. That’s what she used to tell me. He moved her out to Indiana right away. I think it was Lafayette. She was pregnant with me in the first year.”
Leni stops, takes a sip of coffee.
“You’re hoping I’ll cut to the chase, right?” she says, then before Sylvia can answer she adds, “Sorry, you have to sit through the previews before the main attraction. Remember that. There’s got to be buildup.”
“Is your mother still alive?”
Leni shakes her head no and swallows. “The old man took off a month before I was born. Never heard from again. No letter. No phone calls. Just gone. He was a sweetheart, huh? Mom had to come back here. And though I only know her side of it, her people weren’t exactly sympathetic. A little I told you so going on there, I guess. She moved in with her older sister and her family. That’s where I lived for the first six or seven years. Then there was some huge blowup. I’ve got no idea what it was about. But we left and moved here into the city. Mom got us a little apartment on Froelich Way. You know those row houses over there? I actually loved it there. Great place to be a kid.”
“How’d you get by?”
“You’re an intuitive woman, Sylvia, aren’t you? You know the right questions to ask. You should’ve gone into law, you know that? Mom got a job at the old Viceroy Theatre. She sold tickets. She sat in a little booth just like you’ve been doing.”
“The Viceroy,” Sylvia says.
“That’s right,” Leni says. “The bells go off. One of the city’s first adult theatres. I mean the features were pretty soft-core compared with today. This was early seventies. I think they still called them ‘nudies’ back then. That was before the industry really took off.”
“She couldn’t get anything else?”
“You mean a job? I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want anything else. It got complicated. She started dating the manager, a real, original greaseball, you know. One of these dicks who always wanted me to call him uncle. I couldn’t stand the bastard.”
“Was there a problem—”
“Abuse question, right? No, it was nothing like that. The guy was just a jerk. Mort Greneway. Never forget his name. He used to slick his hair back. Had terrible breath. He treated my mother like shit. But after my father’s little act, you know, I think she felt kind of desperate … I don’t know. She started drinking. Old story. She aged like crazy. Looked twenty years older than she was. I think about it now …”
She breaks off and Sylvia picks up her mug and holds it to her lips without drinking.
“Things went progressively downhill. We changed apartments a lot. They got smaller and smaller. By the time I hit high school it was all over with Morty and Mom was out of a job and nursing Johnnie Walker for breakfast.”
“What did you do?”
“C’mon, Sylvia. Think about this. Where did you meet me?”
“I mean, how did it happen? How’d you end up making films?”
Leni plants her spoon in the remains of her lunch, pushes her bowl away from her, and wraps both hands around her coffee mug.
“I was about fifteen, sixteen. I wasn’t getting to school much anyway. I dropped out. Went down to the Zone one afternoon. This was back when a few of the factories were still open and they had those strips of bars down on Grassman. This was just before the first boho kids moved in. I got a job waitressing at this little dive called the Wintergarden. Year later the owner sold out and they changed it to a topless place called Lodge 217. The new guys asked me if I wanted to dance. I said sure.”
“Dance?”
“Yeah, dance, Sylvia. You know what I’m saying. They put in a runway and wrapped the bar around it. Doubled the price of the drinks. Hired half a dozen dancers and hung red and blue spotlights from the ceiling. We’re talking a tacky place here. The runway was made of little mirror tiles and they’d chip and crack but nobody would replace them. Cheap. These guys — Doug and Jerry — these were very cheap guys. And no business sense whatsoever.”
“How did you learn how to dance?” Sylvia asks and sips some coffee. She wants the whole story.
“What’s to learn?” Leni says. “This is not the Bolshoi, okay? It’s pretty rote. You’ve never seen a strip show?”
Sylvia shakes her head.
“Piece of cake. You’d learn it your first time out. It never changes. You go across the whole country, okay, you’ll see the same setup. Only the accents change. The 217 had this three-dollar cover charge, then you could stay as long as you wanted. The bar seated maybe twenty-five people and there were a dozen or so cocktail tables beyond it. I’d do five sets a night. Six if it was a weekend night. You’re on a total of about two and a half hours.”
“What did you do the rest of the time?”
Leni raises her eyebrows. “Well, you’d have to put some time in during the breaks hustling foam. Not what you think. That’s what we called this horrible booze they sold by the bottle. This industrial carbonated shit. They called it Schmitz Champagne, but it was like this blend of grain alcohol, club soda, and pink food coloring. Unbelievable. They brought it off the truck at twenty bucks a case, made us sell it for twenty a bottle. Just shameless. It’s an old-time scam now, but back then Douggie thought they were so innovative.”
“Who’d you sell it to?”
“The droolers. You’d find some schmuck just couldn’t take his eyes off you. Then when you’d break you’d ask him to join you at a back table and once he sat down you’d ask him to buy you a bottle of Schmitz. They always went for it. Really sad. But when I wasn’t dancing or hustling foam, I was reading.”
“That explains it,” Sylvia says and then regrets it, but Leni isn’t going to let the comment go.
She says, “There’s a real attitude there, Sylvia. It’s the only unattractive thing I’ve seen about you so far.”
“I didn’t mean anything. It was a compliment—”
“No, no,” Leni says, “don’t hide behind that. You find me intelligent and confident and you couldn’t figure out how a slut like me came to have a brain. Have opinions and ideas and everything.”
“You’re overreacting,” Sylvia says. “I didn’t mean to sound condescending. You said you’d dropped out of high school and—”
“There are all kinds of classrooms if you look for them, Sylvia. I’d sit in the dressing rooms down Lodge 217 and I’d always have a book with me. I hit the library every morning on my way down the Zone. I read everything I could get hold of. The owners teased the hell out of me. Stupid grunts.”
“You were supporting your mother at this point?” The question comes out somehow harsh.
Leni nods. “For a while. She didn’t last long. But what you really want to know, Sylvia, is — did she know? Did my mother know how I was earning a living? Right?”
Sylvia just shrugs.
“The answer is no, Sylvia. She never knew. She was beyond caring about things like that anyway. If you haven’t lived this kind of thing, you haven’t lived it. What can I say?”