Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  Nineteen seventy-nine. Seemed like such a long time ago. I missed the old Abbey, a grand old middle-class hotel in midtown Manhattan, along with the Taft, the Wellington, and a handful of others. The revolving doors at the entrance led to a dozen marble steps and up into a large marble lobby with chandeliers and bellmen in red uniforms and bellboy caps. The clerk behind the desk wore a bow tie. The Broadway-tour ticket agent chomped on a cigar in a dark, cluttered cubbyhole of an office with fading posters of Lunt and Fontanne and Helen Hayes on the walls. All the fixtures, from the old-fashioned switchboard to the brass-and-glass letter chutes between the elevators on every floor, were from another era. If it weren’t for the guests, in their decidedly 1970s clothes (there was a big disco convention in town), I would have thought I’d just stepped into another decade.

  The hotel was struggling to survive and it was, I now realized, kind of down in the mouth, a bit seedy and frayed at the edges—our window looked out into a sooty brick windshaft—though it seemed very big-city and glamorous to me back then. It must have been a bear to maintain that huge hotel, especially for the largely aged staff. I remembered the old, shrunken bellman who took me and my friend Julie up to our room. Imagine Conan O’Brien if you freeze-dried him. He wheezed dramatically, stopping every ten feet or so to sit atop our bags and catch his breath. When we offered to carry our own bags, he refused to allow it. We felt so guilty we tipped him $10 each, a lot of money to us.

  After I moved to New York, I used to get a kick out of going down there and standing in the lobby, reliving my first exciting days in New York City. Then they tore it down to put up a big square box of an office building.

  I said to Tamayo, “You know, this is the first New York bar I went into during my first trip to New York.”

  “This place?”

  “Yeah. I came here with my friend Julie and we met two rich guys who were just so nice to us. Well, one of them was, George. He dazzled us with New York. God, and we just abused him and his friend Billy, told them a bunch of whoppers.”

  Funny, that used to be a pleasant memory, but now I felt lousy and guilty about lying to those guys.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That my friend Julie and I were half-sisters and ironworks heiresses. We talked about the horsey boarding school we’d attended, country-club balls, and—oh, man—I think we may even have told a few amusing stories about our loyal and lovable old servants.”

  “Ironworks?”

  “I come from iron country.”

  The manager came back with the address of Chez Biftek. Tamayo wanted me to call. But you get more information face to face, and it was another short walk over to 47th Street and Eighth Avenue.

  The name was different, so I didn’t realize until we got there, but I’d been to Chez Biftek before too, or, rather, another restaurant just off Restaurant Row in the same narrow little townhouse with a red awning and red shuttered windows.

  “Cosmic that you were at both these places,” Tamayo said.

  “Not cosmic, just an amazing coincidence,” I replied, though I got a weird chill when I went down the stairs and opened the wooden door. It was a pretty amazing coincidence, because I’d been here right after being at Paddy Fitzgerald’s the first time.

  When it was Table Bas, I’d been terribly impressed by the cosmopolitan flavor of it, a real French restaurant in New York. But, boy, had it changed. Now it was one of those places that paid the tour companies to herd tourists in beneath Paris travel posters and made the poor tourists eat rubbery snails and tough cuts of meat smothered in sauce, prepared by Guatemalans and brought to them by Polish or Russian waiters with fake French accents.

  In keeping with the spirit of the night, the maître d’ and all the waiters were dressed like harlequins. The maître d’ called someone, and then directed us through the kitchen to the back office. There was no answer when we knocked on the manager’s door, but the door was half open, so I pushed it and stepped into the room. As soon as I did, a man in harlequin costume with bloody eyes fell forward onto me, revealing the knife handle sticking out of his back.

  I screamed. Tamayo screamed.

  Then the dead harlequin with the knife in his back screamed.

  We all screamed.

  “Haaaappy Halloweeeeen,” the man said, laughing.

  For a moment there, I was so stunned that I couldn’t feel my heart beating. I had to check my pulse to make sure I hadn’t had a coronary. It wouldn’t have been the first time I’d walked into an office and found a dead person, an experience I wasn’t keen on reliving.

  “You scared the … What was that about?”

  The man was laughing his ass off as he peeled off the bloody eyeballs. Tamayo thought it was pretty funny too.

  “Part of the mystery,” he said. “It has worked … both times tonight. Ha-ha-ha.”

  When he managed to regain his composure, he gave us the same charity-murder-mystery story. Kathy had come in and picked up an envelope after answering a skill-testing question about the year the ANN Special Reports unit won an ACE award for our series on vigilantism.

  “Okay, so then you gave her the envelope and she opened it.”

  “… and pulled out a photograph and a folded paper square with a note inside.” He didn’t see what it was, but she asked him if he could look up the address of Joy II for her.

  “That was around five-forty-five-ish, thereabouts,” he said.

  “Did she talk to any strange men, leave with anyone?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Mind if I talk to the rest of the staff?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “No, don’t get up. We’ll see ourselves out.”

  “Happy Halloween,” he said again, still laughing.

  While I quizzed the staff about Kathy, Tamayo was recognized by a couple from Indiana who had seen her on television. This improved her already blithe mood considerably.

  I felt a little less blithe. Chez Biftek made me uncomfortable, and not only because of Kathy, the undead harlequin, and the poor tourists forced to eat expensive bad French food prepared by illegal aliens. I felt hugely embarrassed by the memory of Table Bas. The rich guy George, I remembered aloud to Tamayo as we departed, insisted on coming here, and he ordered in French, which impressed the hell out of us. “Robin speaks French,” my friend Julie had said, adding that I’d learned it while we modeled in Paris the summer before. This was another joke/lie, like the one that I was an ironworks heiress. Beyond “Où est la discothèque?,” “Aimez-vous les sports?,” “Voulez-vous couchez avec moi çe soir?,” and a few other phrases I’d memorized phonetically before a four-day school trip to Montreal, I spoke NO French back then.

  Encouraged, George spilled off a waterfall of French, and his friend Billy asked me what George was saying. I was so afraid I was going to be exposed, but George jumped in and said, “I told her she is a very pretty and very smart young woman, and she could do well in New York.” And he winked at me.

  Oh God, I realized now, he must have known I was faking the French. I was so naïve, I thought I’d gotten away with it. Now I was experiencing retroactive embarrassment. But even if they didn’t buy the French part, I thought, maybe they bought the rest of it. People believe what they want to believe. Just ask the woman in Tulsa who had sex with a video-store owner because he told her he was an extraterrestrial who’d adopted human form. According to the video-store owner, she wasn’t the only woman who’d fallen for it, but she was the only one who admitted it. Even scarier: the woman voted regularly.

  “So now what?” Tamayo said.

  “On to the next stop.”

  “I hope we can go downtown to the parade after that,” Tamayo said wistfully.

  She started singing the Petula Clark song “Downtown” at the top of her lungs to me, hamming it up to the nth, while I shook my head in a mildly amused, mildly embarrassed grownup way. Out of a dingy-looking apartment building wedged between a deli and a clos
ed-up gay porn place on Eighth Avenue came a gaggle of fine-looking drag queens, dressed to the nines—bouffant hair, false eyelashes, and shimmering dresses in bright colors that looked like they were made with the pelts of mythical creatures. One of them, a black queen, was doing Marilyn too.

  “Sing it, girl,” he said to Tamayo, and he chimed in. Tamayo and the black Marilyn danced ahead of the rest of us, mirroring each other’s movements like on “The Patty Duke Show.”

  I wished I could be that carefree, but I couldn’t quiet my anxiety about Kathy. That dead harlequin must have scared the shit out of her too.

  Kathy didn’t sound worried on the phone, Tamayo wasn’t worried, there had to be a logical explanation, all this I was willing to accept. I know I have a tendency to push the panic button at times, so I was trying really hard to keep my finger off the button as we approached Joy II and I saw its giant neon naked-woman sign.

  4

  “THIS IS A STRANGE place for a charity murder mystery to benefit kids,” I said. “This has to be a mistake.”

  “Politically incorrect at least,” Tamayo said.

  A strip joint set on 45th Street just off Eighth Avenue, Joy II was one of a diminishing breed. This stretch of Eighth used to be a complete sleaze strip, one nudie joint and peep-show palace after another in a sea of neon X’s and flickering marquee lights, but it had been cleaned up a lot, largely through attrition. When a sleaze joint’s lease ran out, it was kicked out to make room for a more “respectable” business, and the landlord got some kind of big redevelopment tax break. It was part of the Disneyfication of Times Square. I know it sounds strange, Disney and Times Square, but if they can make Quasimodo “cuddly,” maybe they could clean up Times Square. Personally, I prefer the monstrous beauty of Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo, but to each his own.

  Behind the ticket window was a woman, about sixty, with bright-red lips and silver hair piled on her head and held in place with a mesh of hairspray. Some large drops of hairspray had hardened like tree sap and were glistening in the marquee lights.

  “Rochelle, it’s Goldie. I got my stitches out yesterday,” she was saying to someone on the telephone. In her bulletproof glass capsule, her voice sounded like it was coming from Apollo 13.

  “Excuse me,” I said.

  She ignored me. “Maybe you should see a doctor. What color is your sputum?”

  “Excuse me …” I said, this time more urgently.

  She put her hand over the phone. “What?!?”

  “Can I ask you some questions? It’s fairly important.”

  She sighed deeply, hugely annoyed at my intrusion, and swatted at a fly that was buzzing around her booth. “Goldenseal is good, I hear. I’ll see you at dinner Sunday. Gotta go.”

  She hung up the phone, and looked at me hard, resentful because I’d interrupted her conversation about Rochelle’s phlegm.

  “What?”

  “I’m looking for a girl who came here about a murder mystery. I can’t find her now.…”

  “You’re too late. Someone was already here for that. Went in and spoke with the manager, then left,” Goldie said. The fly landed on her hair and got stuck there. I was distracted for a moment watching it try to extricate itself from the sweat and hairspray.

  “Can I speak to the manager?” I asked. “Find out where …”

  “Admission is ten dollars a head,” said Goldie.

  I slapped a twenty down and shoved it through the money slot.

  She pushed it back and pointed to a sign that said “No Unescorted Women.”

  Some people just get off on fucking with other people, and Goldie was clearly one of them. But I guess if you’re nearing retirement and you’re working in a ticket booth in a Times Square strip joint, your life probably hasn’t worked out the way you planned and you have to find your amusement where you can. You could sort of see, through the deeply etched wrinkles, all pointing down, that she had had a hard life but could have been really pretty at one time. Probably, she wanted to be Marilyn Monroe.

  “You’re holdin’ up the line,” she said.

  There was no line, but we stepped away all the same.

  “I’m amazed that Kathy, coming this far, bothered to go in for the clue, even if she didn’t have to ask a strange man to escort her in. God, I hope she didn’t ask a strange man to escort her in. Then he abducted her and took her to his apartment. That’s when his wife walked in and pulled out her revolver and …”

  “Robin, calm down.…”

  “Naïve or not, she is not completely aware of all the terrible things that can happen to you in a big city like New York on a night like Halloween.…”

  “You’re starting to sound like your Aunt Maureen.…”

  Boy, did that put the fear of God in me, being compared to my Aunt Maureen. As soon as Tamayo said that, I heard the voice of my Aunt Mo in the back of my head, before I came to New York the first time, saying, “Don’t go to New York! It’s full of atheists and perverts just waiting for a lamb to stumble into the slaughterhouse.” She was so sure I’d be set upon by white-slavers and pornographers and people who would hide drugs in my suitcase to be smuggled back to their nefarious contacts in northern Minnesota. For two months before the trip, she sent me clippings from newspapers about bad things happening to young women in New York.

  On the other hand, she wasn’t completely wrong about New York. At various points in my life here, I had been set upon by pimps and perverts and murderers.

  “I should have taught Kathy how to scream her way out of a jam, or bought her that lupus book, or a glue gun …” I said to Tamayo.

  “That woman said Kathy was just here. That means she got out of the apartment, came here, and should be calling you soon,” Tamayo said.

  Tamayo had cruised through life on laughter and good luck, so she tended to see things as a little rosier than I suspected they were. Tonight she was in her transcendentally confident mode, her belief that, if you keep a light heart, ultimately everything will work out as well as it possibly can in a life that ends with death.

  But she had a point too. A couple of hours had elapsed between Kathy’s stop at Chez Biftek and her stop here. That would account for her time in the closet. But why hadn’t she called me yet?

  “Did you come here that night in 1979?” Tamayo asked.

  “God, no. The amazing coincidences have ended,” I said, punching in Kathy’s apartment phone number on my cell phone to see if she’d called Donna. Donna had gone out and turned on the answering machine. There were no new messages for me at home or at work.

  Two guys came up, both with baseball caps pulled low over their eyes. Tamayo grabbed one. “Will you guys take us into this place?”

  “Uh, wow! Yeah,” one said, sounding like he was making his voice lower than it was naturally. “Good costumes.”

  As soon as we got inside, we cheerfully and unceremoniously ditched them to talk to a bouncer, who told us we wanted to speak to Candy, who was MC’ing the show in the Pussycat Room.

  It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the dark. There are classy strip places in New York, male and female, if that’s what you’re into. This wasn’t one of them, but it was far from the worst place I’d been in, and it even had some artistic pretensions. On a stage in front of a backdrop painted, badly, to look like a jungle, several extremely big-breasted “dancers” were taking off their faux animal skins in front of a room of men in baseball caps. I recognized the music, it was Yma Sumac singing some 1940s jungle-movie song—Yma’s operatic voice against the background of thumping drums and deep-voiced chanting men. It’s very primal stuff, and made me think of my occasional boyfriend Eric, because he loved Yma Sumac and liked to play her CDs during sex. Great take-me-now-wild-man kind of music, and this display was ruining the memory for me. The place smelled of I don’t know what. I hoped I didn’t smell this smell from now on whenever I heard Yma Sumac.

  “This is every horny little straight boy’s Saturday-matinee dream come true,” I whis
pered.

  “Yeah! Like a Tarzan movie where Jane takes her clothes off.”

  “It’s almost … Disneyesque.”

  “Why would any woman want breasts as big as regulation basketballs? Think they knock a lot of stuff over with those?” Tamayo asked, exaggerating slightly. Her eyes swept the shadowy audience. “And look at all these bottle-fed babies.”

  “Sssh,” said a man ahead of us.

  This was a different crowd from the yuppies who went to upscale clubs like Scores on the Upper East Side and The Platinum in the Flatiron District, or boho strip joints like Billy’s Topless A-Go-Go or Blue Angel. This was strictly what les snobs call bridge-and-tunnel traffic, mama’s boys from Jersey and the outer boroughs who come in to 42nd Street looking for something very specific to their tastes. In this instance, very big breasts.

  “Are these guys jerking off?” Tamayo said, peering around. “Oh God, they are.”

  “We’ve seen guys jerk off before. Don’t act so impressed.”

  “It never fails to impress me, though,” Tamayo said.

  “I can’t watch,” I said, and turned away. “That woman in the middle? An accident waiting to happen.”

  All that hardened silicone was dangerous, and I knew it was silicone, because they were just too big and round to stand up that way on their own. I was afraid she’d swing ’em a bit too briskly, and the weight would throw her into the audience and injure some poor sap. I was fairly certain she could kill a man with those enormous tatas.

  My phone rang, drawing several ssssh’s, so I went back through the heavy black curtains to stand in the foyer until the show was over.

  “Robin? Claire. Kathy called you from 555-0318,” she said very quickly. She was between shows and hadn’t much time.