by Tom Wolfe
Out the side of his mouth, without any inflection one way or the other: “No, thanks.”
“Oh, come on,” she said. She began caressing his groin and said, “I can just feel it.”
Nestor turned toward her for the first time—and gave her a look. “I said no thanks, which means no thanks.”
The Cop Look. “Ninotchka” withdrew her hand and didn’t dare utter another sound. Nestor immediately returned to his vigil. He looked toward the far wall, where he and John Smith had entered the club… All at once—an electrical lurch in his heartbeat. ::::::Jesus Christ! There he is in the back, by the bar… the guy in the black shirt… I swear to God that’s gotta be him… He’s got a girl on his arm, literally on his arm… looks like a proper Sunday promenade except she’s a half-dressed stripper, and right over there is the door!::::::
Nestor spun about on the seat of his jacked-up chair and sprang to the floor. “Ninotchka” was so frightened, she threw her body backward and hit “Belinka,” who was leaning over John Smith’s thigh. Bam! Both girls landed on their backs on the floor with their feet in the air. John Smith sat petrified upon his high chair. He stared at Nestor, with his jaw dropped.
“I see the guy!” said Nestor. “Heading for that door! Come on!” he said over his shoulder to John Smith and got blip a glimpse of him… sitting straight up on the bar chair—frozen stiff. Furniture Land. ::::::Gotta run!:::::: But in the sofa sea of Furniture Land… too much fat upholstered furniture arranged too helter-skelter… too many men with their legs sprawling out as they lounged back in the upholstered billows… too many whores with their rear ends sticking out because they were standing with their heads bent down over the customers… too many little coffee tables clogging up the floor space that was left… his only hope was to hurdle over men’s legs… veer around the whores’ tails… leap over coffee tables… bango!… he was off…
The men sunk in their plush billows—they’re startled… they’re insulted… they’re furious—and they’re not the most genteel crowd in Miami-Dade County, either!—black shirt, hairy chest!… Nestor turns his head for a split second—::::::It’s him!—I’m sure! I know that’s Igor! Igor with almost no mustache!:::::: Some almost-dressed whore has him by the arm! They’re walking around Furniture Land to the rear where he and John Smith started out!… They’re heading for the door!
Getting to the door before Igor suddenly became as urgent a problem as he had ever faced in his life. In the instant before he turned his head forward again, he sped up—Jesus Christ!… He was going to crash into them!… three men and two whores facing one another across a coffee table… no room, no way to stop in time… Only thing possible—he hurdled across the coffee table… brushed a whore on this side and a big tub on that side… “FOOKIN’ EHHOLE!” It’s the tub… ::::::Where’s he from!… He’s old, but he’s got a hell of a voice!::::::
… “FAGGOT!”… It’s one of the whores…
“PIECE A SHIT!”… Another man… high on lust…
… Now they’re all on their feet yelling… “PUNK!”… “SHITBALL!”…
Sky-high on adrenaline, the springing leaping punk ::::::How could they call me that?!:::::: makes it to the other side of Furniture Land… That door is—what?—ten yards away… Oh, shit—a bouncer… and he’s left the door… he’s coming straight at me… he’s a mile wide… big flat face like a Samoan… No way can I get around him… the Cop Look?! The brute is right in front of him, blocking his way—
“What’s the big hurry, Big Boy?” Guy had the voice all right.
The Cop Look? Nestor had about half a second to decide—bango!—this one’s a hard case! Not a chance! Could be an off-duty cop moonlighting… Before his decision could even take the form of words in his brain, he turned the real Nestor Camacho inside out. He twisted his body into a cringe and pointed toward the ruckus in Furniture Land… In a high-pitched voice, agonized, shaky, frightened, “They’re killing each other in there! They’ve gone crazy! Coulda got myself killed!”
The big bouncer eyed Nestor. He didn’t necessarily believe him—but the commotion in Furniture Land was a bigger problem… Cries of “NO MO’ THIS SHIT,” “OH, NO, YOU DON’T!”… “GEDDIM!”… “YOU SKINNY FUCK!”… So many cries, they drowned out one another… All this commotion. “You stay right here!” he told Nestor. He kept jabbing his finger at the floor where Nestor stood. “You don’t move!” And then he went rocking into the ruckus with a big gorilla stride… He held his arms and his hands a good gorilla foot and a half from each hip… Big Man—now he was about five King Kong steps into Furniture Land… basso profundo… he’s roaring, roaring, “Okay! What the hell’s this all about?!”
“That PUNK!”
“That ASSHOLE!”
“That PIECE A SHIT!” they screamed in response, pointing beyond the Big Man in the direction Nestor had gone.
Just like that Nestor started running running the ten or fifteen yards to the door… to the lair of the luscious loins… and look!… right in front of him… barely one step from the door… the one… black shirt… he’s stopped, he and his whore, staring toward the ruckus in Furniture Land.
“—was that little shithead!”
“—cocksucker hit me right here with his elbow!”
“If I hadna jumped back, those assholes woulda—”
“—didn’t come here to get pissed all over by a couple a—”
“—’s wrong with you, motherfucker? If y’all just let those little pricks run—”
Sounds of a scuffle THOOMP! THOP! EGGGGHUH!
::::::Pricks PLURAL?::::::
“AWRIGHT! SETTLE THE FUCK DOWN! I’M GONNA KNOCK YOUR FUCKING HEAD OFF FOR YOU AND SHIT DOWN YOUR WINDPIPE, NEXT ONE A YOU CALLS ME A—”
Igor ::::::Now I know this is him! I know it’s him!:::::: Igor! He’s got one arm around the whore’s waist… They’re barely two steps from the door. They stop! He’s checking out the beano in Furniture Land. Whatever’s going on in there, he loves it… so much that he keeps pulling her, hard, right up against his thigh and his chest… over and over… She just smiles and takes it and takes it and takes it and takes it and takes it MEAT BEAT MEAT BEAT MEAT BEAT MEAT BEAT What’s the matter with him? He looks drunk—but that’s okay! Just stay there, don’t move! Nestor breaks into a full sprint… he’s sprinting for all he’s worth across the floor of a strip club. TOO LATE! Igor—if that’s him—and the girl step inside the door and disappear… ¡Coño! Nestor comes shuddering to a dead halt… He’s stymied stymied stymied… but what’s to keep him from just going inside? He inspects the door. There is no door per se. Three steps inside the doorway is a baffle wall. There’s nothing to keep him from walking in, but he can’t see in first. He looks over his shoulder… ¡Coño! Here comes the bouncer, back to his station. ::::::How can I get in there?:::::: His eyes pan about the immediate vicinity… Not ten feet away—what’s that? A whore’s bottom! He sees her from behind as she leans over a man in a sofa seat—pink short-shorts she’s wearing, so short that each of her buttocks has halfway popped out… buttocks décolletage, John Smith’s term, and now Nestor got it. They were popping out like upside-down breasts. She had on a sleeveless shirt made of some thin lustrous material almost the same color pink… frilled arm openings… two large oval-shaped openings in the back. For what?—to show that she wore no bra? God only knew… Her torso was slightly turned… that way… But of course! She had one hand on the inside of her mark’s thigh.
No time for niceties and protocol. Nestor leaned over beside her. He put on as ingratiating a smile as he could manage and said, “Hi! Don’t mean to interrupt, but I need a lap dance. I really need a lap dance.”
Maintaining her grip on the other guy’s thigh, she turned her head toward Nestor and eyed him quizzically… then, in defense, skeptically. She was a brunette with dyed-blond streaks in her hair—at the Honey Pot, be blond no matter how you get there! We’ll give you your Russian or Estonian name… but you’ve got to bring your own
blond hair and sexy-ecstasy expression and lawless labial lips.
He could hear the digits clicking 0, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0 in her head. <<
With that, she put her free hand inside Nestor’s standing thigh—and held on as if she didn’t intend to let him go—ever—and removed the other from her sofa prospect’s thigh. Nestor got his first good look at the man. He looked almost distinguished… had a gray beard… meticulously trimmed… a thick head of gray hair, well groomed, a go-to-the-office shirt unbuttoned at the collar, no jacket, no tie… a pair of pale-tan pants you could tell were a lot more expensive than khakis… Why would a man like that come to a place like this and listen to a whore’s entreaties? Even Nestor realized he was asking a naive question.
The girl looked down upon her sofa quarry and put on her most mischievous and lascivious expression and said, “Now, you stay right here! I’ll be back in a minute!”—whereupon she stood up straight and let her hand slip from between Nestor’s legs. The man looked at her and Nestor dumbfounded. But Nestor knew he wouldn’t say a word or anything else to call attention to his real—meaning proper—self.
She took Nestor by the hand forcefully and led him the four or five yards to the door. The bouncer was back at his station. He looked Nestor up and down, dubiously, but being in the hands of a bona fide whore made you legitimate. She led him—still by the hand—around the baffle wall. Nestor found himself in what looked like a long, narrow, dingy, and dimly lit locker room with a row of stalls right on top of him, right in his face. He felt like he could reach out and touch them, although in fact they were about six feet away… They were an endless row of cheap partitions about five feet apart and maybe a foot higher than an airport restroom’s… and instead of doors, the stalls had dark-brown-and-tan-striped curtains of Transitester that went with a wall-to-wall carpet in a jumble weave of dark brown, light brown, and tan Streptolon industrial carpet you couldn’t dent with an axe… all of it rather the worse for wear but at least a stab at interior decoration at the Honey Pot. The same BEAT thung BEAT thung music that pounded the rest of the club tenderized you in this room with its congestion and low ceiling and total lack of windows. In the tiny intervals between the BEATs and the thungs Nestor could hear human sounds nearby, not words but sounds… from behind the curtains of the stalls… unhh, ahhh ahhh, ooom-muh, ennngh ohhhhunh… all of them the moans of men—not the girls… moans that sometimes did cross the border into meaningless verbiage… ohhhyes ohhhyes, dohnstop dohnstop dohnstop, yes yes yes yes, diiiig harder diiiig harder, bring it home, bring it home and then back to a lot of unhhh uhnnn ahhh ahhh oooweh oooweh oooweh sounds. Nestor listened to them all with intense interest.
The girl looked up at him with as lascivious a smile as he had ever seen in his life, and in words that slid out of her mouth as if labially, lubriciously, lubricated, “What’s your name?”
“Ray,” said Nestor. “What’s yours?”
“Olga” slid out of her mouth.
“Olga… I’ve met so many Russians here tonight. You don’t have any accent.”
As if offering him the key to Paradise, “I’m Russian on my mother’s side. I grew up here.” Her lips took on the contours of unspeakable ecstasies. “You probably already know the… uhhh… guidelines. A basic lap dance is twenty-five dollars, not touching. Touching brings it up higher, depending on what. And, of course, cash is up front whatever it is. You still want a basic lap dance, Ray?”
“Great!” said Nestor. “Terrific!” He dug twenty-five dollars… of John Smith’s money… out of his pocket, and she put it into a side pocket of her pink shorts.
“Okaaaay… thank you,” said “Olga,” and she took his hand and led him to a stall with the curtain pulled back. The interior was just big enough for a cot-sized bed apparently, composed of a frame, a mattress, and a self-striped tan coverlet… a modernistic lounge chair made of a fiberglass shell with a dark-brown seat cushion… with no arms… a matching stool with a brown cushion, and in the rear a Formica shelf with a basin and two taps set in… and a double-doored cabinet beneath… Just before “Olga” pulled the curtain shut, Nestor heard a man moaning far louder and more ecstatically than any other so far.
“Oh, govno… oh, govno… oh, govno… oh, govno… oh, govno!”
And then a woman’s moans, not that loud but loud enough to rise above the BEAT thung BEAT thungs and the rest of it… moaning sighs, they were, ending in prolonged breathless sighs that went, “Ahhhhh… ahhhhhh… ahhhhhh”… and then they began speeding up… “Ahhh… ahhh… ahhh” and then faster still… “Ahh… ahh… ahh… ahh…”
So did the man’s Oh, govno Oh, govno Oh, govno Oh, govno.
Then a convulsive sigh from the girl that went ahh ahh ahh ahh ahh and dived into a lake of sobs sobs sobs Oh, God sob sob sob sobbbbbb ungh ungh ungh Oh, God, oh God oh God-d-d-d…
Thereupon the man topped that with “Oh govno Oh dermo Oh govno DERMO DERMO DERMO! BOZHE MOY! GOSPODI…” By the end he was loud as a tenor in the opera.
“Olga” had turned away from the entrance. A single movement of her hand, and her shirt fell to the floor and then she took a deep breath and sank back toward Nestor to present her popped-out breasts.
Nestor gave her a happy smile as if to say, “Oh, good. That’s nice”—no more than that, because he was already at the curtain, pulling it back just an inch or two… so he could hear more grumbling audibly inside several stalls… He could swear he heard one man complaining, “Whaddaya mean, I don’t get to go all the way?” He must have been talking to his whore, because he said, “Oh, don’t give me that! Don’t you stand there telling me your fucking rules—or no-fucking rules!”
Another man was apparently shouting from his stall at the operatic-climax man, because Nestor heard Climax Man yelling back, “You dohn’t talk to me like zat, you vorm!” He sounded good and drunk. His adversary yelled, “Who the fuck you think you are!” And the big voice said, “You don’t eefen vant to know! You down zere, a vorm, and I up here! I am artist!”
Boos, hisses, gimme-a-breaks, and other cries of sarcastic denigration.
“You zshut ze mouzzz! You dohn’t belief me? I am een ze museum!”
“Hey, can it, you guys! What the hell’s going on in here?” It was the bouncer. He sounded like he was on a tear. The place quieted down.
“Olga” with the bare breasts was saying, “What are you doing, Ray, standing by the curtain? I thought you were hot for a lap dance.”
“I am,” said Nestor, “but I think I just heard something.”
“Olga” stared at him, bare breasted and speechless.
::::::He looks exactly like Igor with a measly mustache. He speaks with a Russian accent. He says he’s in a museum. That’s one way to put it!::::::
John Smith was waiting outside the door. What happened to him? He was standing there with a big black eye. His blue blazer was smeared with dust and dirt and had a big wet splotch on a lapel.
“¡Dios mío! What happened?”
“I tried to catch up with you in Furniture Land—and they took it out on me.”
Nestor whistled between his teeth. “I heard something going on behind me and saw a bouncer heading that way—but I had no idea it was you. “You look a little… messed up, I guess. Are you… are you okay?”
“I’ll survive… except there are three bastards I’d like to kill. How did you make out?”
“He’s our man, John.”
“How do you know?”
�
�Let’s get away from this goddamned door,” said Nestor, “and I’ll tell you all about it.”
The Honey Pot’s four-story-high backlit sign created an electric twilight out here on the street in front of the strip joint. It was an artificial twilight, but light enough for Nestor and John Smith to surveil both the club and the entrance to the parking lot behind it from inside the Camaro… when Nestor lifted, even a few inches, the SPTotal reflector screen that covered the windshield. SPTotal was the Apprehension Unit’s brand of choice—¡Coño! Everything conspired to make him relive the day he and Hernandez were surveilling that crack house in Overtown.
Nestor had backed the Camaro into the driveway of a shop across the street, Buster’s BoostersX, now closed, since it was going on 3:00 a.m…. John Smith was a soldier now, but surveillance still made him squirrelly. He was afraid Igor had somehow departed without their seeing him, or maybe there was some exit they didn’t know about… or maybe Igor, being such a regular customer, could sleep over in the Honey Pot if he felt like it… maybe there were girls willing to stay and play with him… Maybe this and maybe that… but one thing Nestor knew from working the Crime Suppression Unit: You had to learn how to wait for the action. Without your heart trying to break out of your rib cage, you or a superior had to decide on the plan the odds favored and have the discipline to stick to it… the way Hernandez had planned the stakeout in Overtown… ¡Coño! Why couldn’t he stop thinking about it? There you had it. That was his Deep Worry.
But now it was himself and John Smith waiting in his Camaro for the quarry… and John Smith was no Sergeant Hernandez.
“Suppose he’s not even going home,” said John Smith. “What if he’s going to a girlfriend’s or something? What do we do then?”
“Maybe there’s somebody who spends three or four nights a week at some strip club and then goes home at three or four in the morning to see his girlfriend, but I don’t think the odds are very good. This guy strikes me as a little pathetic. His idea of a love life is the Honey Pot?”