Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  That was the Help for Kids number.

  “Next break you get, can you check out this charity for me? Where is it, who is involved. I’ll explain later.”

  “Okay. I’ll call youse guys soon,” she said, and hung up.

  That was when I saw the word “Malabar” inlaid in the foyer’s tile ceiling. Of course. This used to be the Malabar Theater, and then later the Malabar Disco. After we’d gone to the French restaurant that night in 1979, we’d all come here. We danced and drank with Billy and George. We danced and drank with a Saudi prince and a Finnish mogul. Julie told the mogul I spoke Finnish. Lucky for me the music was so loud I was able to pretend I didn’t hear her or him. I should have just told him she was lying, but I was afraid, after all the lies we’d told that night, if I confessed one I might just keep going and confess them all. It was a burden keeping up that multilingual-heiress persona.

  Three different places from that night in New York. Celestine Prophecy notwithstanding, I was beginning to think this was no cosmic coincidence.

  The curtains parted and a stream of men in lowered baseball caps filed out, followed by a bouncer, followed by Tamayo and an extremely buxom, fully dressed brunette in her thirties or forties.

  “I’m Candy,” she said. “You wanna talk? Come with me.”

  Tamayo went outside to smoke while Candy and I went into her grotesquely girly office, a bright-pink room with lots of flowers, heart-shaped things, and posters of “Candy Apples” in her heyday as a stripper.

  “If you do a story, I hope you’ll do a positive story about the charity work we do. And that we do a whole theatrical production here, costumes, sets, music.… It’s, whaddya call it, like burlesque, Gypsy Rose Lee. We’re classy. We’re completely out of the live-sex business, have been for almost a year.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said, as I tried to figure out the decor. She had kind of a Barbara Cartland-meets-Al Goldstein thing going in here. (Barb and Al, that’s a live-sex show I’d pay money to see, but only on an empty stomach.)

  “A woman came by not long ago to pick up an envelope?”

  “Yeah, and it was over a half hour ago, before the eight-thirty show.”

  “Over a half hour ago?” Then she certainly should have called me by now. “Was she alone?”

  “As far as I knew. Someone must have escorted her in.…”

  “She left alone—”

  Candy cut me off. “Alone and in a big hurry,” she said.

  “Did she open the envelope here? Do you know where …”

  “No.”

  “How did you get mixed up in this, who …”

  “Why not? It’s for charity, for kids! We do a lot for charity. We like kids. Lots of us here have kids. We’re a woman-owned business. We pay our taxes. We vote,” she said, a tad defensively. As this unsolicited recitation of her good-citizen credentials showed, she was feeling the Disneyfication pressure.

  “What do you know about Help for—”

  “I checked them out with New York State. It’s a legit nonprofit corporation, okay? I got a call a while back asking if we’d take part. Then I got a FedEx today with an envelope and a receipt for a donation to charity.”

  “What was the skill-testing question?”

  “The what?”

  “Wasn’t there a skill-testing question attached to the envelope?”

  “I didn’t see one,” she said, leaning over to dig through her trash. When she did, she knocked a pencil cup off her desk with her breasts.

  She found a FedEx envelope and handed it to me. “Help for Kids,” it said in the “From” space, and gave a P.O. box. Inside, stuck in the crease, was a slip of paper with a paper clip attached.

  “Who broke the dress code at Hummer High school in 1975?” it said, referring to a time when we fought passionately for the right to wear polyester shirts, gold chains, blue eye shadow, and platform shoes.

  On the other side of the paper, it said, “Answer: Lucky Jake.” Lucky Jake was me, or, rather, the male pseudonym under which I wrote humor for the school newspaper (since it had become clear to me that boys didn’t seem to go for the funny girls, and I liked boys a lot). I didn’t break the code alone, though my reports on the goofy clothes the teachers wore when they were our age and what teachers and parents thought about it then helped galvanize the dress-code liberals, and we won the right to wear really ugly clothes if we so chose.

  These charity people had gone to extraordinary lengths to kiss my ass.

  “Did the woman who picked up the envelope open it?”

  “Not here,” Candy said.

  Now I sized her up. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who would give an envelope to someone without first checking what was inside it.

  “Did you happen to see what was in the envelope?”

  She didn’t answer right away, and I said, “Look, my intern, this twenty-year-old girl from rural Florida, she’s been following these clues, and now I’ve lost her. It’s really important to me that I find her.”

  Candy located a small key on the crowded key ring, opened her top desk drawer, and pulled out a sheet of paper.

  “I can’t be too careful,” she said. “I have enemies. I didn’t want anyone to set me up.”

  She handed me two sheets of paper. The first was a photocopy of a typed note that read:

  Robin, thanks for coming this far. It’s for a good cause. The newspaper clipping will explain some of it, and you’ll understand the rest later. Backslash Cafe.

  The second sheet was a handwritten note dated August 7, 1979, which said, “Where the Blue Moon burned down.” It was signed “Putli Bai.” The Blue Moon was a supper club in my hometown, and Putli Bai an alias I was familiar with.

  Holy shit, I thought.

  The first photocopy had what looked like creases copied into the paper. I asked Candy about it and she said, “It was all folded up, like one of those thing kids used to have. Whaddya call ’em? Cootie catchers.”

  Even if I hadn’t known about the cootie catcher, or seen the trademark signature or the skill-testing question, I would have known by the handwriting on the second sheet that this was from Julie Goomey. God, it was strange to see Julie Goomey’s handwriting again, which hadn’t improved much over the years, with its t-crossing flourishes and extra-loopy loops that shifted whimsically from left to right as if blown back and forth by the wind.

  Looking at it brought back the memory of a thousand notes covertly exchanged during classes. One time in eighth grade, Julie got me out of my dreaded sewing class by saying she had a note from the principal. Thank God Mrs. Hobbins, the sewing teacher, didn’t read the note, which said, in Julie’s unprincipallike blue scratch, “Tell Robin Hudson to get her ass down to the office before I kick it to China. Signed, the Principle.” Of course she had misspelled “principal.”

  “Where’s the clipping?” I asked.

  “There was none,” Candy said.

  No clipping—that was a classic Julie-esque stroke. Something she often did when someone didn’t write her back promptly was send an empty envelope to pique the person’s curiosity—or worse.

  One time she sent me a letter from Ohio, where she was looking after a sick relative, with the last page of a three-page letter that began midsentence with, “to get her letter and hear some of the news from Ferrous. I hope you don’t take what she said about you the wrong way. You know how she is and have to consider the source.” I was of course so frantic to find out who had said what about me and why I might be offended that I picked up the phone and called her, running up a $30 long-distance bill. Actually, I’d always kind of resented that particular tactic of hers, but Julie never knew that, so she probably thought the clipping was just a cute variation on it.

  Then there was the time, in tenth grade, when I found a typed love letter signed “Doug Gribetz,” this boy I was mad for, in my locker, asking me to talk to him and let him know if I felt the same way about him as he felt about me. When I told Julie about it, she admitte
d that she had written the note. Come to think of it, I had always resented that little joke too, though I was grateful Julie told me before I went to Doug and completely embarrassed myself.

  Candy knew no more than what she’d told me, or so she said. After thanking her, I handed her my card and said, “If anyone else comes by, or you remember something else, call me.”

  “Sure.”

  Now I could relax. Obviously, this was all an elaborate stunt of Julie’s, and Kathy was in on it, if not from the beginning, then certainly by now. There’d probably be a big celebration at the end, just like the time Julie set up a series of clues that led me to my surprise sixteenth-birthday party. Once I finished throttling Julie for making me worry so damn much, we’d have a hearty laugh and reminisce about the good old days. Many was the story I told Kathy about the pranks my friends played at ANN. She knew I had a good appreciation for a quality prank. Still, it surprised me that Kathy, sweet Kathy, could be so inconsiderate, scaring me like this.

  But if she’d hooked up with Julie … well, Julie could be very persuasive. Just ask our childhood torturer, Mary MacCosham, whom Julie once sent to Minneapolis on a fake modeling audition at a nonexistent address.

  Better yet, ask the rival Valhalla High football and pep squads, who, with the help of our high-school drama club and some very official-looking party posters, were lured to a “beer party” and ended up fifty miles out of town at a tent revival while we stole their mascot, the Iron Maiden, whom we thoroughly degraded.

  Julie and I had had some great Girls’ Nights Out, legendary. It kinda felt like old times, having her play a part in this one.

  5

  TAMAYO WAS OUT on the street smoking. A man either not in costume, or in costume as a seedy Times Square lowlife, was leaning on the wall next to her, trying to pick her up under a faded sign promising “Air Conditioned Comfort,” painted on the brick wall of the old Malabar building.

  “Hey, Bob,” Tamayo said to me, in her deepest, most masculine voice, which she was able to pull off somewhat better than the lonely little men inside Joy II. Our friend Sally claimed this was due to Tamayo’s being someone called Ruby Helder, girl tenor, in her last life.

  “Aw, c’mon, you’re not really men,” the guy said to me. “Are you?”

  “We’re cops on undercover duty. No time for idle chitchat now,” I said, using my tough sailor voice and quickly flashing my NYPD press pass. “There’s a perp on 42nd.…”

  The guy looked like he wasn’t sure, and these days you can’t be too sure, especially with a half-Asian in a blond wig and a tight sequined dress on Halloween. Then he said, “Sorry,” walking away a few steps casually before beating a retreat.

  “You have to stop doing that,” I said. “One of these days we’ll get gay-bashed by one of these freaks.”

  “There’s something about me that attracts these guys. I’m giving off a pheromone,” Tamayo said.

  “That, or the fact that you’re gigged up as Marilyn Monroe and standing outside a strip joint.”

  “I dunno. I’ve been hit on by a lot of guys in ratty brown shoes lately. So what did Candy say?”

  After I filled her in, she said, “So, if this is a stunt, we don’t have to worry anymore, right? We can go down to Sam Chinita and grab a quick bite, then see some of the parade on our way downtown,” Tamayo said.

  “A quick bite, sure. I’m starving. That vitamin hasn’t kicked in yet.”

  “This Julie was a good friend of yours?” Tamayo asked.

  “My best friend for years since just after she moved to Ferrous in fifth grade until the summer before I moved to New York. Haven’t seen her since 1979. We had a big falling out.”

  “But why a murder mystery?”

  “When we were kids, we used to do these mysteries,” I said. “My mom started it, as a party game for my twelfth birthday. We followed clues until we solved the mystery and got to a treasure. Julie and I did this a lot for birthdays, and whenever we had a falling out and needed to make up.”

  “Instead of just saying you were sorry and talking it out or anything crazy like that,” Tamayo said.

  “Well, this way you didn’t have to actually say you were sorry or admit out loud that you were in the wrong. It was also more fun.”

  “It is pretty funny,” Tamayo said. “But you haven’t talked to her in all these years, and this is the way she gets back in touch with you, inviting you along on a charity-mystery thingie? She couldn’t pick up the phone and call you?” She sounded just like her Jewish grandmother on Long Island when she said that, which is just a bit jarring, hearing that voice coming out of her.

  “Yeah, I thought that too. But this is Julie. And I think it must be like overdue-library-book syndrome. You leave something so long that you’re embarrassed to take the book back, or pick up the phone, whatever. She was always really good at these things.”

  “You want to see her after all these years?” Tamayo asked.

  “Yeah. She was a pistol. She’d laugh at a quality fart joke,” I said, growing suddenly sentimental. “Taught me a lot, Julie Goomey. She taught me how to draw a perfect three-dimensional horse head, taught me double dutch. She taught me how to pee standing up.”

  “You can pee standing up?”

  “Yeah. It’s easy, all you need is a simple kitchen funnel, in whatever size is appropriate for you.”

  This is particularly handy if you’re on a camp out in the woods and want to avoid brambles, bugs, or embarrassing sneaker splatter. With a little funnel manipulation, you can even write your name in the snow.

  “Damn. Julie Goomey, after all these years. It’ll be good to see her and catch up, give me a chance to thank her.”

  “For what? Teaching you how to pee standing up?”

  “If it wasn’t for Julie Goomey, I would never have moved to New York.”

  For that reason alone, I owed her. I owed her for a few other things too.

  Speaking of accidents that send one’s life spinning in an unexpected direction, my life would have been so different if it wasn’t for Julie Goomey. In 1979, Julie Goomey and I were in Ferrous, Minnesota, going to community college part-time and working full-time, me managing a Burger King, Julie in accounting at Groddeck Motors. Every Friday night, we put on our Calvin Kleins, so tight we had to lie down on the bed to get them on, and went with our boyfriends Chuck and Lance to Ye Olde Pizza Factory, then to a movie or the roller disco, where we drank Boone’s Farm strawberry wine in the parking lot because the disco was dry. I admit that I never liked disco, and even now the strains of “Stayin’ Alive” bring a green tinge to my skin, but it was fashionable then, so I went along with it, secretly listening to country rock on my eight-track player while obsessing over my Rubik’s Cube at home.

  (Funny, but what I most remember about the period before we decided to go to New York is not Chuck, college, disco, or even the hostages in Tehran, but Rubik’s Cube. I was addicted to it. It got so bad I took my Cube with me everywhere, to parties, to work, to my boyfriend Chuck’s sporting events. When he looked up from the ice after scoring a game-winning goal in a pickup hockey game and saw me not watching him but clicking my Cube, he gave me a choice: him or the Cube. After that, I worked on it secretly, ducking into the john, taking it out of my purse, and giving it a few spins. I think one of the reasons I was so obsessed with it was that Julie had solved it pretty easily, whereas I was baffled. Only when my grades started to suffer did I finally drive my car over my Rubik’s Cube to remove the temptation. I never picked up another one.)

  By this time, Julie Goomey and I had abandoned our adolescent dreams—I had wanted to be a television reporter (which had replaced crime-fighting cowgirl) and she had wanted to be a painter (which had replaced bandit queen)—and, spurred by the illusion of True Madness, we now dreamed the same dream, to marry our boyfriends, buy nice houses in Ferrous, and raise nice kids. Except for the part about marrying my then boyfriend, that dream still sounds pretty decent to me, though for me it is
no longer achievable.

  Then we went to New York, and it changed everything.

  When Julie first suggested going to New York for spring break in 1979, I balked. Our boyfriends had been planning since fall to go to Florida to cheat on us, and naturally I wanted to go down there too and spy on them. But Chuck got wise to my spy plan and made it clear that not only was I forbidden to set foot in Florida, but he would look unkindly on my going to any warm-weather place. I know, I know. Hard to believe that I, Robin Hudson, was ever so docile, but I was going through a powerful conformity phase, so, rather than upset him, I agreed to stay off beaches.

  That’s when Julie said, “Let’s go to New York and shop.”

  The boys found this to be an inoffensive alternative. Better to have us shopping in parkas in chilly New York than dancing drunk in bikinis on a tropical beach somewhere. So, while they planned their “Daytona Drunk,” as they referred to it, Julie and I planned our trip to the Big City. I was still worried about Chuck’s trip to Florida, but Julie’s enthusiasm for New York helped motivate me. The New York trip was the first thing to excite me since I’d given up the Cube. I went to the library and photocopied whole chapters from guidebooks, clipped out magazine articles, wrote away for all sorts of brochures.

  Back in the 1970s, New York boasted three bank robberies an hour and five murders a day. Affluent Manhattan parents gave their kids “mugger’s money” when they went out, so they had something to hand over in case they got held up. Clearly, Julie and I needed “street smarts.” We studied up on the rules, so we wouldn’t look like the complete rubes we were. Hold your purse close to you, the advice to out-of-towners went. Don’t make eye contact, don’t talk to strangers, don’t look up at the buildings.

  We followed the “rules”—for about an hour. There was so much to gawk at. I mean, if you followed those rules you could visit New York, spend a week here, and leave without really seeing any of the sights or talking to anyone. Anyway, all the trouble we took to learn those rules, and people in New York instantly knew we were from out of town. Go figure.