Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  “Sometimes, luv, people are only meant to take each other partway in life,” Phil said.

  “Yeah, so I found out on the ride in from the airport.”

  “Mike going to be ’ere this weekend?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s supposed to call and let me know. If his shoot finishes early tonight, he’s going to fly in, but if it goes late, he’s going to stay in Arizona for the weekend. And either way is fine with me. I have a lot of work to do.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Going out with the girls—Tamayo, Claire, my intern Kathy, and maybe Sally.”

  Our neighbor Helen Fitkis, unrepentant communist and widow, came out of the building and said, “I’m ready to go now, Phil. Hello, Robin.”

  “We’re off to the movies, luv,” Phil said. “Stop by tomorrow for tea.”

  “Okay,” I said, and watched them walk off together. At first, I couldn’t figure out what Phil and his new best friend Helen Fitkis had in common. He was apolitical, she was as red as they come, though since Phil moved in she had calmed down a bit and stopped distributing her angry, monthly leaflets calling for a RENT STRIKE in big black letters. He was lighthearted, she came off as seriously humor-impaired. But they were contemporaries who both spoke Esperanto and remembered World War II. You could tell how well they got on just watching them walk, neither too fast nor too slow but at the same pace, easy and comfortable with each other.

  Good, I thought, as I picked up my bags and went inside. Maybe it would turn into Love (or, as I know it, The Madness), and Phil would settle down here. The man had spent his peripatetic retirement working odd jobs all over the world to finance trips on his own nickel to work in refugee camps. He never stayed more than a year or two in any one place and he’d been in New York for more than a year now, most of that as our super. Recently he’d been seen with a Swahili grammar under his arm, a bad sign. Well, a bad sign for us, his neighbors, a good sign for Swahili-speaking refugees somewhere.

  The first lucky break I got all day was a note on my door from Sally, the bald witch downstairs. “Robin,” she wrote, “I fed Louise in the morning and stacked your mail in a box by your desk. I don’t think I’ll be able to join you tonight because of client business, but call me just in case I finish early. Sorry.”

  No apology necessary, I thought, with great relief.

  “I had a dream and you were in it. An old woman was leading you towards the horizon. A man was there. I couldn’t see his face,” her note went on, adding that she was fairly certain her dream fit into my daily horoscope, which she had done as a Halloween present and enclosed. I read the first line, about how communication problems were going to figure into my day, and ignored the rest. I’d had my fill of nuttiness on the ride in from the airport.

  If my new good luck held, she wouldn’t catch up with me. Sally had been a very taxing friend, always in the midst of a Huge Crisis or else driving me nuts with her New Age chatter and her psycho-romantic fantasies about True Love (The Madness). She’s one of those people who are always madly in love or madly looking for love, with often bad results (see Huge Crises, above).

  Even though her own life was a mess and she’d take no advice from me, she insisted on telling me what she saw in my “future,” and what I was supposed to be doing with my life, particularly my love life. Yeah, I’m going to take advice from a bald woman with a scorpion tattooed to her skull whose last True Love pulled a gun on her and then fled with her life savings. I was pissed at her too, because she had publicized the falsehood that I was one of her “clients” in a little write-up she got on the widely read gossip page of the New York News-Journal. Now that I was a semirespectable executive, I did not appreciate this kind of publicity.

  Sally’s beliefs were certifiably wacko and I hadn’t yet figured out how to tell her this, because if you challenged her delusions she had a breakdown.

  “E-Yowh E-Yowh E-YOWH,” my cat, Louise Bryant, said when I opened the door. Not to anthropomorphize too much, but I believe, loosely translated, this meant, “Where the hell have you been? Don’t ever leave me with the bald chick again.”

  She then walked to her food dish, where I noticed a mealy mixture of grains, egg, and vegetables, Sally’s special blend, which she used to feed her late cat, Pie. Before I did anything else, I fed Louise the one meal she liked, cat food sautéed in oyster sauce with bok choy. As near as I can figure, she acquired a taste for this in her youth, when she was a street cat in Chinatown.

  There was too much mail to go through, so I left it and checked my answering machine, which had been turned off. Louise had lately taken to sleeping on it. Sometimes her butt hit the personal-memo button, which meant either I’d hear two minutes of purring when I called in for my messages, or she’d turn it off completely. I turned it back on, called the cab company, and told them to come pick up their cab and bring spare keys, because I’d locked the one set in the glove compartment for safety. The guy on the other end had a pretty strong accent, and I was only guessing that he understood me.

  For many hours, I had been spared a glimpse of myself larger than that in a rearview mirror, so it was quite a shock when I went into the bedroom and saw myself full-length. My hair was totally out of control and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do with it. Lately, I’d been too busy to have my hair relaxed, and I hadn’t seen much need, since I hadn’t been on the air as a reporter in several months.

  Bad choice. The unseasonable humidity had brought out my thick red hair’s most pronounced corkscrew quality and puffed it up into a frizzy demi-’fro. I put on my costume, a black velvet dress, long black gloves, and a black scarf with a stuffed toy bat sewn on to it, so it looked like it was biting my neck. A healthy layer of waterproof white pancake, black eyeliner, and black lipstick, and I’d be all set to go out as a freshly undead person. My hair made me look like vampire Orphan Annie on steroids.

  Next, I needed some weaponry for the night. I see weapons everywhere, and I have a theory about this. See, my father was a safety nut, obsessed with locating and then neutralizing the hidden menace in things. He taught me how to find the hidden menace, but he died when I was ten, before he had a chance to teach me how to thwart it. So I can usually look at something, see the menace, and though I don’t know how to neutralize it, am pretty good at figuring a way to use it to defend myself. People laugh at me, but I’m a girl, a woman, whatever, alone in a big city, and—go figure—not everyone is well disposed towards me, so I feel better having this kind of knowledge.

  I hadn’t added any new weapons to the armory aside from upgrading to a new, improved industrial hot-glue gun, with three settings, spray, stream, and splatter, and with a rechargeable battery pack so I could go mobile with it. It weighed a ton. Normally, I don’t mind, because years in NYC have made me a master schlepper. My Aunt Maureen carries a huge, heavy Bible around with her so she is always aware that God is with her. I carry a big glue gun, because I’m not always so sure about God.

  But I was far too tired to schlep anything bulky or heavy like a glue gun. My Epilady hair-removal gadget was long gone and my pepper spray was empty. Screw it, I thought. I didn’t need to be so paranoid tonight. For a change, I had planned a fairly sedate Girls’ Night Out, on account of my young intern Kathy’s coming along.

  When I got back to the living room, Louise Bryant was mewling in an otherworldly way. Suddenly, she bolted off her spot and tore around the apartment, howling and jumping from the sofa to the top of a bookshelf, while I followed behind her, catching the books and things she knocked off, including a Mecca snow globe that belongs to Mike. It is not that easy to obtain a snow globe from Mecca, as you can well imagine, and this was one of Mike’s treasured possessions, a gift from a young guide who had taken him through Afghanistan a few times when Mike was covering the war there as a cameraman. Thanks to a couple of like-minded young Muslim pals of his, Mike had an astounding collection of cheesy Mecca souvenirs, which he kept at my place. Above my bed,
he’d hung a large painting of Mecca on black velvet.

  At the window, Louise rolled around, contorting her body, still mewling as if she were in heat. A pet shrink who examined her determined that, even though Louise Bryant was elderly and had been spayed, there was still something in her head sending a Seek Sperm message. It had been jarred awake in her, he figured, by the death of Sally’s cat, Pie. Since then, some wild thing had been calling her out into the night.

  It’s a big mean city out there, and she is an old cat with a lucrative career, so I hated to let her out. But she’d come from the streets, seemed to know her way around, and always made it home by morning. After replacing the books and the snow globe, I opened the window and carefully moved the planters full of poison ivy, which I grow to welcome unwanted visitors. Louise’s gray form darted out, the filmy curtains billowing in her wake. In a flash, she was down the fire escape and out on the street, where she stopped and looked both ways. She stuck her nose up, caught some appealing scent from the east, and headed that way without hesitation.

  After the day I’d had, the loudest voice in my head was telling me to take a pass on the night, make my apologies, and stay in with my entertainment system, a tasty TV dinner, and whatever was left in the Zubrowska vodka bottle in my freezer. I toyed with this idea for a while. All I had to do was call and leave a few messages on a few answering machines, and I was off the hook.

  But the massive inconvenience was outweighed by my moral obligation. Not only had I invited along my intern, Kathy Loblaws, to make up for my recent neglect of her, but my other friends had lots of problems and needed my company and support. I figured I’d kill a bunch of birds with one big boulder.

  I was definitely feeling a smoky, come-hither vibe from my big comfy bed. The way I saw it, I could do my mandatory friendship-and-mentoring stuff in three, four hours tops, and be in my bed by eleven.

  2

  “SERVE GOD TONIGHT, not the devil,” screeched a guy with a plastic bloody fetus on a chain around his neck, as I stood under the giant Eight O’Clock Bean Coffee cup in Times Square, crossroads of the cosmos, waiting for Kathy the intern, who was uncharacteristically late. The nutballs were out in force tonight. It was kind of hard to tell who was in Halloween costume and who was just looney toons. After apprising me of my mission to fight the Evil One, the fetus guy pointed his finger at me, shook it angrily, and then stomped off to do the same thing to a woman clutching her purse tightly to her abdomen and a man clutching her tightly to him.

  My location made me easy prey for every free-floating prophet with Mr. Microphone and a sandwich board. “Ya na goverim Engleski,” I said to each comer who wanted to save my soul. It’s the only sentence I know in Serbo-Croatian, but it’s a mighty handy one.

  By seven-twenty, it was seriously dark and the big bright lights were on all over Times Square. The giant Coke bottle popped its cap and a big straw came out at regular intervals. Neon blinked, sirens whined, horns honked, some guy drummed on an overturned plastic bucket, the preachers and firebrands screamed from their soapboxes. The whole city smelled like the inside of a bus station. It was giving me a headache.

  Where was Kathy the intern? I wasn’t sure what costume she was wearing, but I was easily recognizable. Hard to miss a tall, undead woman with rusty Brillo Pad hair, even in Times Square.

  The reason I had arranged with Kathy to meet here before going to Hojo’s was so I could brief her a little more, tell her not to mention NBC, rival comedian Noriko Mori, or sumo wrestling to Tamayo Scheinman. Claire Thibodeaux was anchoring tonight, and would be meeting up with us later, so I had plenty of time to tell Kathy not to mention Jess, Washington, or the British embassy to Claire. Since Sally wasn’t coming, I didn’t have to tell Kathy not to bring up dead pets, bad boyfriends, or medical experiments. Maybe I worry too much, but you never know what might come up in conversation and send a sensitive and vulnerable friend into a tailspin.

  By seven-thirty, after a full-frontal assault by the Jews for Jesus, one of whom answered me in Serbo-Croatian, I gave up and went to Hojo’s. Kathy would figure it out. We’d picked the Hojo’s restaurant in Times Square because it was central and we all liked it for different reasons, Kathy because it looked just like the one in her hometown in rural Florida, with the same decor, the same trademark orange-and-turquoise color scheme. She found it surprising to find anything in New York City that was just like back home. Tamayo and I liked it because it was such an anachronism. We liked to sit at the bar in the back, right out of 1962, and share a pitcher of anachronistic cocktails, like Rob Roys and sidecars, which were hyped on orange-and-turquoise placards on the windows.

  Kathy was nowhere to be seen, but Tamayo was at the bar, with her Walkman on, dancing in her seat, singing along audibly to every third word. She was dressed like Marilyn Monroe.

  “Hey, you old hooker,” Tamayo said, loudly enough that people in the restaurant turned to stare at me. It would have been nice to be unobtrusive, but hard to be, looking the way I looked and with Tamayo announcing me.

  We hugged. If anyone looked like a hooker, it was her. What a sight she was, Japanese face, platinum-blond wig, all five foot four of her poured into a replica of Marilyn’s Happy Birthday Mr. President dress, her thin arms in sparkly white gloves. We both had a fondness for long gloves. There just aren’t enough occasions in life to wear them.

  “We’re the only people in here in costume,” I said.

  “I’m not in costume.”

  I laughed. “Have you seen my intern Kathy?”

  “No, but I don’t know what she looks like.”

  “She knows what you look like. She’d introduce herself.”

  The bartender put a full pitcher of something greenish in front of Tamayo and she said, “Bartender, another glass for my dead friend.”

  “No thanks. I’ll just have a coffee.”

  “No gimlet?” Tamayo said.

  “I don’t want to get drunk. Not even tipsy.”

  “But it’s Halloween.…”

  Tamayo had that special light in her eyes, the “Let’s crash a debutante ball and then go throw money and roses at gay male strippers” light.

  “Listen,” I said. “Kathy is a nice kid, she’s very serious.…”

  “So what?”

  “I just don’t want anything like the dance-theater incident … or the bar brawl …”

  “But we didn’t start that brawl, Robin. We tried to walk away.…”

  “I thought maybe we could try being lower-key tonight. The kid looks up to me, no shit, and it wouldn’t do for her to see me drunk, swinging my bra above my head in a biker bar, for example.”

  “Hogs and Heifers isn’t a real biker bar,” Tamayo said.

  “Nevertheless, the keyword for tonight is ‘decorum.’”

  “Decorum,” Tamayo said, puzzled, cocking her head slightly like a dog, pretending she didn’t know what it meant. “What’s the intern like?”

  “Young, sweet, and twenty, so she’s not even old enough to drink.”

  “There are two kinds of women in the world, Robin, those who laugh at fart jokes, and those who don’t. Does your intern laugh at fart jokes? Quality fart jokes, I mean.”

  “I really have no idea. Pulleeze don’t get me into any trouble tonight. I’m really tired—it’s been a day from hell—and I just don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep up with you.”

  Going on a tear with Tamayo requires a lot of energy, and a working woman like me needs a course of B-12 shots in preparation. The last spree I went on with her started with her one-woman show at La Mama, segued into a raucous NYU summer-school party, cruised through a couple of weird East Village bars, and ended with us getting in a bar brawl with a bunch of no-neck recently thawed cavemen from somewhere in Staten Island where toxic waste had apparently contaminated the groundwater and caused stunted brainstems and general necklessness. (There ought to be a telethon.) The cops were called, and it ended up in the gossip columns the next day. I didn’t n
eed that kind of publicity either.

  Besides. I was getting a little old for barroom rough-housing.

  “Here, take one of these,” Tamayo said, slipping me a big fat pill.

  She showed me the bottle.

  “Doc Nature Seniors. Tamayo, these are vitamins for senior citizens.”

  “Mega, time-release vitamins for senior citizens. Really powerful. You can get a serious vitamin buzz off them,” Tamayo said. “They’re all natural, with important amino acids and herbs and all that. They’re even better than those special New York Formula vitamins.”

  I took it with my coffee.

  “I had a rough day too,” she said. “Got up at one-thirty, ate Count Chocula with chocolate milk, watched the cartoon channel for an hour, had a tarot reading with Sally, then did my Comedy Central taping,” Tamayo said.

  It was just a tad annoying to a grownup like me to be friends with people who could sleep until the afternoon and get away with it, especially at a time when I had been working very hard to get and stay in touch with my inner grownup. Nigh thirty, and Tamayo still lives like Pippi Longstocking, which is why she was rumored to be chapters one and seven in ANN TV psychologist and best-selling author Solange Stevenson’s upcoming self-help book, The Pippi Longstocking Complex: Girls Who Won’t Grow Up.

  “How was your taping?” I asked.

  “Good, did three promos, that’s where I got this costume. I’m up to cohost a new show for them.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Yeah, and a producer is interested in my movie.”

  “Man, when I left, things weren’t going so good for you.”

  “That was then. This is now,” she said, and she began to tell me about the UFO movie she was writing, inspired by one of the special reports we did on alien abductions. It was about a young woman who gets abducted by a UFO and is taken to a planet where she and other humans are farmed for bodily fluids used to make an inhalable aphrodisiac.

  “There are three genders on this planet,” she said. “All three are needed to procreate, and marriages are arranged by the government. Thus the need for aphrodisiacs, inhalable, because the creatures on this planet have a combination nose and mouth. A big face hole. Did I mention they communicate not with words but with a combination of high-pitched squeaks and foul smells?”