Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  As I came out of the subway station at Astor Place, a film crew was there shooting a movie, a period piece set in the 1960s, judging by the costumes and the cars. It looked almost like the real Astor, just off enough to make me uneasy. There were actors, spectators, and lots of film people with walkie-talkies and clipboards. I walked through the faux Astor, passing through fantasy on my way back to reality. That seemed an apt metaphor for the blurring of reality and fantasy tonight. When I entered the faux Astor, I was still trying to give Julie the benefit of the doubt, convincing myself that her intentions were good, if misguided.

  By the time I got to the other side of the faux Astor, my view had changed. In between, I heard one of the guys with walkie-talkies say, “Ginger, can you bring some scrim?”

  One time, late at night, when most good kids and good parents were in bed, we were playing a game known variously as Ring and Run and Knock a Door Ginger at Mrs. Johannsen’s house. We were thirteen.

  Though I was usually up for Julie’s pranks, this one gave me pause, because Mrs. Johannsen’s husband was away on business in Duluth, and Mrs. J. was home alone. I didn’t want to scare her. But Julie said, “Don’t worry.”

  We rang the doorbell several times, and then hid behind the caragana hedge. The curtain opened in the little diamond window on the front door. Then nothing.

  Julie ran back up to the house and rang the doorbell again a bunch of times. At the time, I remember thinking, She’s crazy. She’s gonna get caught. I almost hightailed it out of there then. I would have, if I hadn’t been frozen in place.

  This time, instead of coming back, Julie hid by the side of the house, peeking at the back door. I stuck my head up, trying to signal Julie, and when I did, Mrs. J.’s face was in the diamond window, staring at me. I’d been caught. I started walking towards the back alley, as casually as possible, whistling out the side of my mouth for Julie, trying to signal her to meet me in the alley. I looked back. The curtain was closed.

  I was stationed in the alley, Julie behind the house. She saw me and put her finger to her mouth. The back porch door opened and a man came out. It was Mr. Groddeck, who owned the Ford dealership on the interstate.

  When Julie saw him, she said, “Hello, Mr. Groddeck,” and then she took off like a bat out of hell to the alley, grabbing my hand and saying, “Come on.”

  Groddeck chased us for two blocks, but somehow we got away. I was scared shitless Groddeck would call the school, or my mother, or, worse, my Aunt Maureen. But he didn’t. In fact, every time he saw Julie or me after that, he smiled and gave us money.

  “He’s really a nice guy,” was Julie’s explanation.

  So nice that one night in high school, when Julie was feeling her oats, as they say, and she stole a car from the Groddeck Motors lot, Mr. Groddeck didn’t press charges. It’s terrible, but I had to laugh at Julie’s nerve. Her uncle, with whom she lived, was an auto mechanic, and Julie picked up a lot from him, including how to hot-wire a car. One night, she showed up outside my house, honking her horn. She’d “borrowed” a car and wanted to take me for a drive, cruise the boys in Newton. We hit every hangout in Five Towns before the cops grabbed us on the interstate, frisked us and everything. Julie told the cops she’d just borrowed the car, that Mr. Groddeck knew about it, and when the cops told Groddeck who was involved, he apologized, said of course he’d told Julie she could borrow a car, and we were released. Only afterwards did Julie gleefully confess that she had stolen the car, and she knew Groddeck was “too much of a sap” to charge her. I was kind of ticked about her putting me through that, but there was something exhilarating and outlaw about it too.

  Now I was completely pissed off. Now I understood. Julie knew that Groddeck would be at Mrs. Johannsen’s house that night. She and I were blackmailing him and didn’t even know it. Or I didn’t, at least. Julie obviously did. She’d enjoyed making Groddeck twist in the wind like that. Maybe it had something to do with her dad. Maybe she was just cruel. But she milked Groddeck for a long time, and he gave her a job doing his books after she graduated from high school.

  Who was she now?

  Suddenly, I had to question everything. What else had I misunderstood, misinterpreted? That note she brought to sewing class in eighth grade, ostensibly from the principal—it seemed so hilarious at the time. But what if Old Hobnail had insisted on reading it? I could have been in a lot of trouble because of that. Still, it was funny. Telling George and Billy I spoke French, setting me up like that, that wasn’t too nice. Yet that too was pretty funny.

  But that note she typed and signed “Doug Gribetz,” that was downright cruel. Getting my hopes up for a brief moment, then telling me she wrote it. Man, that was mean. There was nothing funny about that.

  This was a pretty mean joke too. I’m pretty good at seeing the hidden menace in things. But I’m not always so good at seeing the hidden menace in people.

  How could I hold it against her, though? She’d had such a shitty childhood. Julie’s mother would bring strange men home, men she met at her brother’s gas station on the interstate. The men would give Julie money to go away, and she’d show up at my place at all hours with money in her pocket. Get-lost money, she called it. She’d climb up the fire ladder to my window and knock. More than once, we’d gone out after my curfew to ring doorbells or smoke cigarettes with dark-eyed juvenile-delinquent boys behind the elementary school.

  And here I was again, thirty-eight years old and out after curfew because of Julie. Despite the late hour, or maybe because of it, St. Mark’s Place—which is, numerically, East 8th Street—was fully alive. The colored carnival lights strung up and down the street for Halloween created a corridor of artificial brightness through the darkness. This street never sleeps, at least not at night. The lights were still stark in the T-shirt and earring shops, in Cappuccino & Tattoo and the leather bondage-clothes place, dim inside the bars and coffeehouses. The sidewalks were full of people, a lot of them in costume waiting to get into late-night joints. Punked-out kids were clustered outside Coney Island High, a retro punk-rock club. Homeless guys sold books and magazines and other stuff from card tables. Tamayo once said this neighborhood’s nocturnal commerce made her think of the last carnival on a dying star, a feeling intensified tonight by all the people in bizarre costumes.

  “Beware the asparagus,” some nutball screamed as he ran past me.

  Loony toons? Or ahead of the curve?

  About thirty years ago, I remember seeing some nutball standing on a corner in Duluth raving about how spray cans were going to burn a hole in the sky, and people thought he was toons. We put everything in spray cans, shaving cream, hairspray, even cheese. Then we found out how fluorocarbons in spray products helped destroy the ozone. So that guy wasn’t crazy, at least not about the spray cans. He was just ahead of the curve. After you’ve lived long enough, you gotta wonder which things that serve and delight us today will turn around on us later. When I was a kid, figure skaters were national sweethearts, postal workers were noble, sleet-fighting heroes, spray cans were the greatest invention since sliced bread, and Julie Goomey was my bosom buddy.

  15

  NEON HAND WAS ATTACHED to a pagan-witchcraft store. There was a big neon hand in its window, just like the kind in gypsy fortune-teller windows, only at the Neon Hand it was flanked by a neon Budweiser bottle on one side and the word “Guinness” in red on the other.

  I went to the bar to see if the bartender knew what was going on, and she didn’t, though she signed me up to speak with the resident fortune-teller, who was “scrying” with someone in a back room at the moment and wouldn’t be available for a while. Scrying, I knew from Sally, is the ancient art of staring into crystals or other shiny surfaces in order to receive prophetic visions. It was perfected by Nostradamus.

  It was a lighthearted kind of place, Neon Hand, no pentagrams, or anything too dark and creepy, in this joint. The place was decorated in very soothing pale green. Aside from the bar lights, the only lights were hund
reds of rows of tiny Christmas bulbs in soft pastel colors, pink, yellow, blue, green, and white, blending to give the room an iridescent cast. There were shelves filled with books about magic, and old-fashioned looking jars of herbs, and the walls were lined with an eclectic selection of magic celebrity photos. Most of them I recognized—Aleister Crowley, Gerald B. Gardner, Austin O. Spare, even Elizabeth Montgomery, Sabrina, and Kim Novak. It was a Gen-X/Y bar, so you had to expect a few ironic pop-cultural references to lighten things up.

  “I know you,” said a man leaning on the bar. “Small world. You look different, though.…”

  It was Greg, a guy we’d interviewed for our ANN special report on the paranormal. He heads a group of middle-aged warlocks called the Viziers, who use their “magical powers” to get twenty-year-old women to sleep with them, which my neighbor Sally saw as a shameful squandering of power and I saw as just plain nuts.

  “Yeah. Robin Hudson, ANN. I’m sorry. I don’t have time to talk right now.…”

  “Aw, you have time to talk to me.” The guy fancied himself to have quite a mesmerizing stare, and he fixed his eyes on me, like he was trying to make me fall under his spell. As if staring into his eyes would somehow block my brain, my libido, my peripheral vision, and, most important, my sense of smell, since he had breath like the inside of Jeffrey Dahmer’s refrigerator.

  I was a tad over the hill for this loser, and I looked like a redheaded version of an unholy mating between Don King and Madeline Kahn (at the end of Young Frankenstein), but it was late, he was drunk and obviously desperate. Funny thing, though: When I’d met him out of costume during our special report, when I was a lot more attractive, he hadn’t vibed to me at all. Now I looked dead and he was all charged up. Maybe he had a thing for dead girls.

  What a lousy time to get hit on. Because I suspected that magic had less to do with whatever conquests this guy could claim than Pfizer, I was careful to watch my seltzer and lime as the bartender brought it to me. What I didn’t need right now—any time, but especially right now—was Dr. Bombay slipping a roofie or ’lude or something into my seltzer. Roofies, or date-rape pills, are many times stronger than Valium and have the scary side effect of inducing temporary amnesia, so you don’t even remember what happened. I didn’t need one. I felt like I’d been under the influence of one for twenty-plus years.

  “I can’t talk right now,” I said, more insistently. “I’m waiting for someone.”

  “Waiting for me?”

  “No, I’m not waiting for you.”

  I stopped.

  Maybe I was waiting for him.

  “Do you know Julie Goomey?” I asked. “Or Anne Winston?”

  “Should I?” he said.

  “Do you have a clue for me?”

  “I have a clue for you right here,” he said, putting his hand on his crotch.

  Loser. No wonder he needed “magic” to meet women.

  “A woman doesn’t generally go into a bar alone unless she’s looking for something,” he said.

  “Yeah, a seltzer and a seat alone,” I said, walking away to a booth, thinking, Right, gotta go, the microchip in my buttocks is beeping. Amazing. It’s the nineties, and a woman still can’t walk into a pub to quaff a refreshment without its being seen by some dinosaur as a blatant attempt to get laid. Every time I thought the human race was evolving, I’d meet some Missing Link who’d been left behind—and who was probably spreading his seed around and polluting the gene pool.

  I wanted to say to the guy, Why don’t you just lose the magic and whatever else you use and just talk to women? Why do you have to control them? Don’t you want to find a nice woman your own age who shares your interests and appreciates you for who you are?

  But then I remembered that I am the last person who should be giving advice.

  The place smelled faintly of burning herbs. Not too much, though. It’s a floral, funereal smell that wears on you quickly, I’ve found, and the Neon Hand had dealt with this by burning all spells in closed fireplaces that vented upward through charcoal filters, installed because of neighbor complaints.

  According to the booklet about magic tucked into the menu at my table, there was always a fortune-teller on duty at Neon Hand to do palms, tea leaves, computer astrological charts, even mix a “nontoxic”—i.e., positive—spell for you. Black magic was not allowed.

  I was hungry again, so I ordered a veggie burger. More out of nervousness than anything else, I read through the booklet, a brochure really, while I ate. The cover bore a drawing of a woman identified as Hecate, goddess of the dark side of the moon, queen of ghosts and other dark and hidden things, ruler of magic and wisdom. Did that ever resonate with me tonight.

  “Magic,” the booklet said, “is understanding of, cooperation with, and respect for nature. Traditional Science is the attempted manipulation and mastery of nature.” Scientists were at this very moment growing human hair in test tubes and human ears on the backs of white mice without immune systems, concocting all sorts of molecular monstrosities meant to approximate fat, and combining genes from pigs and tomatoes. I couldn’t help thinking how provident this last could be. Add a lettuce gene and you have a BLT. Or combine a gene from those French pigs that sniff out truffles with a gene from the truffle, and create a truffle that finds itself.

  Lucky truffle.

  Meanwhile, the booklet went on ominously, auspicious albino crocodiles appear in Cambodia, a thousand-mile column of migrating toads makes its way through provincial China, a green cat is born in Denmark, bunches of frogs shower down from the sky in several places in Scotland, and in Iowa a farmer reports a cow who tracks, captures, and eats chickens. Here in New York, coyotes roam the Bronx, wild boars had been sighted in Staten Island and Queens, and a large alligator was pulled from a pond in Brooklyn. Mother Nature is coming back, the booklet warned.

  And, boy, is she pissed.

  Just then someone said, “Hi, Robin, how are you?”

  It was Sally, standing by my booth.

  “Hi, Sally. I’m fine. You?”

  “Well, the PMS medication I’ve been taking has caused a slight numbness in my left arm.…”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “And I broke up with Joshua. Actually, he broke up with me.”

  “Who is Joshua?”

  “Oh, you didn’t meet him. He was my most recent boyfriend. Robin, why can’t I meet a nice guy?”

  I wanted to tell her—Sally, get into therapy and grow your hair out to cover your baldness and your tattoo. You have a big scorpion up the back of your bald head! Some men, believe it or not, consider this a turnoff. But I didn’t know how to tell her this without hurting her feelings and sending her off the deep end, and subtler expressions of this sentiment missed their mark. For a week in the spring, she’d worn a wig, and she looked very pretty with hair, which I mentioned to her. But that phase didn’t last long.

  The one time I was able to get her to talk about her appearance, she told me that the man of her dreams would see through to her soul and that’s how she’d know he was the right one, which sounds lovely in theory, except a succession of right ones had come through her doorway and turned out to be wrong. Despite all my subtle and non-subtle hints, she refused to see a shrink, though she did consult with one of her nutty gurus, Sister Delia, a reader of past lives whose real name was Norma Finsecker.

  “I dunno, Sal. I’m the wrong person to ask. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m waiting for someone. And while I was waiting I was assisting the resident fortune-teller. It’s been busy tonight—Halloween and all. Hey, you know what? I saw Louise Bryant about an hour ago. At the window here.”

  “Oh,” I said. “No shit.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m waiting for someone too.”

  “Who are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know.” I suddenly got it. “Who are you waiting for?”

  “Somebody to pick up an envelope for a murder mystery,” she s
aid.

  “Who hired you to do this?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “Sally, this is a scam, and my intern Kathy has been sucked up into it, so you’d better tell me what you know.”

  Sally chewed her lower lip. “Her name is Anne Winston. She’s a client and had become a friend. Don’t you remember? I mentioned her last week, the friend I wanted to bring along tonight. But she said she couldn’t make it, and then she hired me to do this delivery.”

  “I remember you mentioning a friend, the one who was having an affair with a guy who was going to jail, and the wife was on to them. But I don’t remember you mentioning her name,” I said, as I opened the envelope.

  “Psychic-client privilege,” she said. Ever since I chewed her out for telling people she advised me, she had been keeping client names confidential. It was her theory now that you could tell anything about someone as long as you didn’t reveal who the person was.

  “You’ve met her, this Anne?”

  “Yes. She came by a few times. Mostly we talked on the phone, for two months, maybe a little more. She read about me in the newspaper.”

  “She read about me,” I said. I was catching on. “She read that I was one of your ostensible clients. She was coming to you to get info about me.”

  The envelope contained a key, a newspaper clipping, and a cryptic clue. The story, from summer 1991, was about the bones of a Perrugia-family thug, Frankie “the Fish” DeMarco, being found in the old Brooklyn dunes. The guy had been a numbers runner, a hijacker, a procurer, and was suspected of a couple of hits before he vanished. He’d been missing for over a decade. It jarred me. Was there really a murder? Or was this another red herring?

  “Who the hell is Frankie the Fish?” I asked. Sally didn’t know.

  The clue was baffling. “Grand Four-Eyes cousin with leg braces.” At first I didn’t get what Julie was trying to say with this gratuitously strange imagery. I wracked my brain trying to come up with associations or allusions that decoded it, but it made no sense. It sounded like something that was badly translated from English into a completely incompatible language like Hindi, and then translated (badly) back into English.