“A hundred sheets at ten cents a sheet means ten dollars; seven for me and three for you.”
“Wow, that’s cool,” Gibbs said.
Three dollars was more money than Gibbs ever had in his pocket at one time. I got the bigger cut because the Pink Lady was my personal contact.
Gibbs and I split at the corner. I headed down the main street, passing the barbershop. The old guy waved at me from where he was reading the paper in his barber chair and I waved back. I didn’t like the guy much. He liked to talk about the size of a boy’s dick as he cut your hair.
At the café, Betty was standing at the end of the counter in her white blouse, black skirt, and white nurse’s shoes. A coffee cup with red lipstick smeared on the rim and a cigarette burning in an ashtray were in front of her.
Betty always looked the same to me, even though she was pretty old, about thirty-four. All the kids at school said she was the prettiest woman in town, though some of the mothers didn’t like her. Women were jealous of her because their men liked to go into the café and talk to her.
“Hi, there, Lucky. Want a roast beef sandwich?”
“Sure.” That was my favorite—thin slices of roast beef on top of white bread and covered with brown gravy. It always came with mashed potatoes and green beans in every restaurant I ate at, and I ate in a lot of restaurants. Betty didn’t do much cooking. About the only things in our icebox, which was what Betty always called a refrigerator and I picked up the habit, were a pack of baloney, bottles of Pepsi, chocolate cupcakes, and usually a box of Cream of Wheat and milk. Plus her boyfriend’s beer. We kept any foods that rats could get at, like bread and Cream of Wheat, in the icebox.
“Hey, Zack, come’er and rub my coins. I’ll split the jackpot with you,” yelled a guy playing a nickel machine.
“No thank you, sir,” I yelled back. I crunched down in my seat and ate fast. This rubbing coins stuff was Betty’s fault. She would tell the story about the big jackpot to anyone who’d listen. I was always being asked to rub coins and was really embarrassed because no one ever won anything.
You could tell customers liked Betty, just by the way they laughed and talked with her. And she knew how to take care of them. If eggs were runny, she told the cook to do them right. It made her good tips, but didn’t make her popular with the other waitresses or the cook, who was often also the café owner. After a few months working a place, the other waitresses would start ganging up on her, get her transferred to the breakfast shift, where tips were half as much, or even get her fired.
I gobbled up everything on the plate not because I was that hungry, but from habit. Betty had been working in Mina for nearly six months, almost a record for her, but you never knew when she’d quit her job and we would climb aboard a Greyhound for another town. I’d come home from school or she’d come and get me at school and we’d throw together our things and go down to the bus depot and wait for the next bus. Betty never did get a driver’s license. She told me she was too nervous to drive, but maybe it was because all the towns we lived in were small enough to get around on foot. And when we moved, we didn’t take much. She always rented furnished places and all I had to throw into a small cloth bag was a pair of pants, a cut-off, two shirts, socks, underwear, my portable radio with an eight-track cassette, and my collection of Superman comic books. The only shoes I had were the black high-top Keds I wore every day. When they wore out, I’d grab enough change from her tip jar to get another pair. That didn’t mean we were poor. Most people didn’t have much more than us, although some of them owned their own home and car.
Besides Mina, we’d lived in Reno, Carson City, Winnemucca, Tahoe, Elko, and Virginia City. Reno and Carson City we ended up at more than once. When we left town, there was never much left of Betty’s paycheck after buying bus tickets, so there wasn’t always enough to eat until Betty got working and bringing home tips. I made and lost friends quickly and never had a dog or cat. Betty was my only real friend. Kids like Gibbs and Gleason flew by like the Burma Shave road signs you see on long stretches of road.
“Gotta go,” I told Betty.
We lived across the highway and tracks just a few houses away from the Pink Lady. There was Hop, Betty, and me. Hop’s real name was Paul Hopkins, but everyone called him Hop. He was tall and what they called raw boned, with big hands, shoulders, and knees on a medium-frame body. He worked at the alkali lake mine about ten miles out of town, coming home caked with dry mud. After he came in from work and showered, he’d put on his cowboy hat, pointed toe boots, pearl button shirt, and Old Spice aftershave. He claimed to be a cowboy from west Texas, but Gibbs’s dad said he was an Okie from Arkie. He was okay when he didn’t have a belly full of beer, but he got loud and argued with Betty when he had a few too many.
I tried to take care of Betty, but it wasn’t easy. A neighbor once told me that some people don’t land on both feet when they jump from the cradle. Betty was one of those who was still hopping around.
When I reached the house, I tossed my schoolbook on my couch and grabbed a soda from the icebox. The place was a wood shack with a rusty corrugated tin roof. The outside walls had black tar paper and tacked-on chicken wire to hold a coat of cement stucco but the stucco was never put on. There was one bedroom, a bathroom that stunk because the septic tank in the backyard was backing up, and a combined kitchen-living room. The furnished place came with a yellow countertop, refrigerator, a square kitchen table with chrome legs and red plastic top, four chrome chairs with red plastic pads, a stuffed sofa, which I slept on, a stuffed chair, and a bed and dresser in the bedroom. Hop owned the black-and-white TV, but its rabbit ears only brought in one station, from Reno, and it was real fuzzy.
Mrs. Wormly gave us homework to turn in on Monday morning and I got right to it. It always amazed Betty when I did that. Betty always ate the frosting on a cupcake first and let the rest dry up. I ate the cake part first and saved the frosting to savor.
I heard the screen door open and Patty yell, “Anyone home?” as she came in.
“I’m here.”
“Hi, Zack. I need to use my iron and board. I’m late for work.”
Patty was a prostitute who worked at the Pink Lady. Some of the women lived in trailers in back of the house of prostitution, but Patty lived next door with her husband, who worked at the same mine as Hop. She was Indian, but not full blood. Betty was the only woman in town who was friendly toward her.
Patty was the reason I had an “in” with MaryJane, the madam at the Pink Lady. I had never been inside the Pink Lady, but I’d stood at the door while the girls gave me money and told me what to pick up at the general store and got a peek inside at men and women standing at the bar. I know some of the girls by name—Dixie the Pixie and Barely Legal Holly were names I liked best.
All the kids liked the Pink Lady because at Halloween they gave a big bag of candy to each of us instead of the apple or home-baked cookie most people handed out, but I was the only one who ran errands for the girls.
The ironing board was already set up by the kitchen table and Patty turned on the iron. “I don’t know where time goes. I just got up and now it’s time to go to work.”
I wasn’t exactly sure what Patty did at the Pink Lady. Gibbs said that she laid on her back and guys paid to stick their boners in her pee hole, but being told about it and actually being able to imagine it were two different things.
She slipped off her red dress and stood in black bra, panties, garter belt, dark hose, and black patent shoes with the highest heels I had ever seen. As I watched her from the couch, I got a boner. I didn’t know why I got the hard-on. I would get them once in a while, even at school, and once in a while I woke up with one or with my underpants wet.
Sometimes Patty would sit on my couch smoking a cigarette and talking to Betty with her legs spread apart enough so I could see a dark place between her legs. I dreamed of what it would be like to stick a boner in her hole. I had money, over twenty dollars hidden in the couch and another f
ive dollars in Betty’s tip money I was going to use tomorrow in Hawthorne. Gibbs said she’d do it with me for five dollars, but I wasn’t exactly sure what “doing it” involved. Besides, I was afraid of her husband, even though Gibbs said he wouldn’t care, that his father said Patty’s husband “rented her out.”
“Patty, how much does a fuck cost?” My mouth was dry and I could barely got out the words. When I heard them, I was shocked.
“What did you say, honey?” She stared at me in surprise as she struggled into her dress.
“Nothin’.” I bowed my head and put my book across my lap so she couldn’t see that my pants were bulging from my throbbing boner.
She turned off the iron and came over to the couch and grinned down at my book. “You’re becoming a little man, aren’t you, sweetie.” She sat down on the couch beside me and I smelled the lilac talcum powder she wore. It made the throbbing in my boner race faster. She moved the book and undid the buttons to my fly and slipped her hand inside and squeezed. “Pretty soon you’re going to be old enough to give girls a real ride.”
I was paralyzed with fear and wonderment at the feel of her hand, but my hard-on was going wild. She put her arm around my neck. Her breath hit me with a warm smell of whiskey.
“Do you want some relief, honey?”
She leaned down and slipped my erection through the fly hole. Her hot lips went on it and I almost screamed. Her wets lips made a sucking sound and I immediately exploded in her mouth. My hips jerked and I instinctively pumped back and forth, trying to shove it further into her mouth. She took her mouth off my boner and spat into a tissue she pulled from her dress pocket.
She put the book back on top of my erection and gave me a kiss on the cheek.
“You never forget the first time, sweetie. That’s why I did it. So I’ll always be remembered.”
She was right.
6
The next morning I met Gibbs and Gleason at the turntable where the train swung around and headed back toward Hawthorne. When the hard rock mines in the mountain had been operating full blast, Mina had been an important rail spur. Now the train only worked part-time and Gleason’s dad always said that pretty soon they’d shut it down entirely and the family would have to move to a town where he could find work. Gibbs and Gleason didn’t move as much as Betty and me, but Mina was the third school each had attended, and that was true about many kids. People moved to where the work was and little desert towns thrived when there were jobs. When a mine closed, so did the grocery store, barbershop, and clothing store. The restaurants, gas stations, and motels sometimes survived on the highway trade, but the rest of the town moved on.
I told Betty that Gleason’s dad was taking us to the carnival in Hawthorne. We were going to the carnival after we handed out the pamphlets, but would hitchhike home because the train would have already made its last trip to Mina. I learned that it was better to lie to her so she didn’t worry.
I had a hundred sheets of paper hidden under my shirt, ads for “pleasure services” at the Pink Lady, a “fully licensed and doctor-certified establishment.” I read one of the pamphlets and was surprised that it didn’t say anything about the place being a whorehouse. MaryJane wanted me to be sure and tell the man she thought would be passing them out not to worry about sheriffs deputies, “they’re my best customers,” but to watch out for the shore patrol. Hawthorne was in the middle of the Nevada desert, but had a navy base. For miles coming into Hawthorne we rolled by giant dirt mounds, extending out into the desert as far as the eye could see, looking like enormous burial mounds.
“My dad says there are dinosaur bones buried under those mounds,” Gibbs said, “and the army and navy’s keeping ’em secret.”
Gleason scoffed. “There’s ammunition in them, bullets and artillery shells for the army and stuff for big navy guns.”
Gibbs slapped him on the back of the head, nearly knocking his glasses off. “Yeah, well maybe you don’t know so much. Everyone knows there’s a sea monster in Walker Lake. Could be the dinosaurs are its cousins.”
Walker Lake was the thirty-odd-mile-long lake on the north side of Hawthorne. It was said the lake was bottomless. Occasionally a fisherman disappeared and they’d be a lot of talk about the sea monster. The navy had a big research and bombing range at the lake.
“The navy keeps the monster a secret because it’s using it for research,” Gleason said. “The monster is left over from the time when Nevada was at the bottom of a primeval sea, even before Lake Lahontan covered most of the state a couple million years ago. Back in those days dinosaurs swam in it, but they all died when the sea dried up, all except this one.”
“Naw,” Gibbs said, “The navy created the monster by feeding it radiation, like those giant ants created by the atomic bomb.”
The two argued about sea monsters and giant insects the rest of the way into Hawthorne.
We staked out the El Capitan Club, the only casino of any size in town. Even at that, it was a small fry compared to a place like the Harold’s Club in Reno. I sent Gibbs around to one entrance and I took the other, with Gleason hanging out with me. We each carried a shoebox with black and brown wax polish, a brush, and a shine rag, and offered a quarter shine to every man who came by, along with a Pink Lady pamphlet. Most of the passersby were sailors and marines and they were more interested in the pamphlet than a shine.
“Spit shine, just two bits,” I told two marines, handing them each a pamphlet.
“Okay, kid, but if I can’t see my face in it, you don’t get paid.”
The two looked over the pamphlets as I got down on my hands and knees. Gibbs’s old man had been in the army and he’d taught us how to spit shine. You put on polish, and get a shine going, then spit on the toe and keep applying more spit, polish, and elbow grease.
“Hey, kid, you get a bonus for every trick turned by guys who go there?” the one I was shining asked.
I spit on his shoe and looked up. “Naw, just a dime for each pamphlet I hand out.”
“You ought to ask for a bonus. Or offer extras. Sell rubbers.”
“He can take it out in trade,” his buddy laughed. “Hey, kid, you ever fuck any of them yourself?”
I flushed. “Yeah, all the time. Try Patty, she’s the best lay.”
After his buddy left, I thought about his comments. I knew what rubbers were. I heard Hop and Patty’s husband joking about them: Hop said it was like taking a shower with a raincoat. I was sure I could make more money selling rubbers to guys than handing out pamphlets and polishing shoes, but they were only sold behind the counter in drugstores and you had to be a grownup to buy them.
I passed out all fifty of my pamphlets and had made two dollars on shines by the time it was to hit the carnival. Gibbs had passed out only half of his.
“I threw the rest in a trash can.”
“You only get paid half,” I told him.
“Hell, no, just tell MaryJane you passed them all out.”
“You don’t cheat the customers,” I sneered, repeating what Betty had said many times. “You get half.”
“Up yours.”
“Up yours, too, you queer.”
“Asshole.”
“Dip shit.”
We kept it up until I ran out of insults and had to pay Gibbs a quarter. Gleason then took on Gibbs in cussing and lost. Gibbs had the dirtiest mouth in school. He even knew a Mexican word for a woman’s twat. You had to admire that kind of knowledge.
A carnival was my favorite of all things. Bright lights all over, with a rainbow of colors in red, blue, green, yellow, on everything, flashing and pulsating, the fun music that made you want to pick up your feet and open your wallet, the breathtaking Ferris wheel taking you up higher and higher, the big disk that spun while you sat in a compartment, the midway with its gyp games and hustlers urging you to “win a goldfish, just toss a dime so it stays on a plate, it’s easy, watch—”
Yeah, sure, the carnie’s dime stayed on a plate, but mine skidded of
f. Over where you threw baseballs at metal milk bottles to knock them off a stool, a woman no bigger than me was working the booth and could easily knock them off, but I swear I saw a guy who threw like Sy Young and couldn’t get all three to fall off no matter what.
I bought cotton candy and wandered down the midway alone as Gibbs and Gleason went up together in the Ferris wheel. I wanted to check out the freak show.
“Boy, come here,” a voice beckoned.
A Gypsy woman dressed in silks and scarves and gold chains, her dark face wrinkled, gray eyes faded, stood in front of a small canvas booth not much bigger than a telephone booth and gestured for me to step inside.
“I’ll tell your fortune for a dollar.”
“I don’t have a dollar.” I kept on walking.
“You’re a lucky young man.”
That made me stop. My mother called me Lucky every day of my life. It hung around my neck like Mrs. Wormly’s double chin.
“I’m not lucky,” I said defiantly.
“You’re lucky, boy, and you can have what you want.”
“I want everything,” I snapped back.
“You’re going to get it. But you’re going to lose something, too.” The old Gypsy woman gave a shrill laugh that got its claws into the skin of my back and clung there as I hurried away.
I didn’t know what she meant, but she put me into a foul mood.
“Let’s go,” I told Gibbs and Gleason after I saw the Alligator Man and a two-headed calf at the freak show. On the way to the highway to thumb a ride, I told them what the crazy old woman said.
“You’re going to lose your dick,” Gibbs said, “that’s what.”
Sin City Page 4