Revenge of the Cootie Girls

by Sparkle Hayter

  Two Joes, the one place that could always be relied on to bring on that delicious feeling of déjà vu … gone, because the city needed one more mediocre pizzeria, I thought.

  How unfamiliar the city looked to me now. I couldn’t remember anything. I felt like one of Homer’s lotus-eaters in the Odyssey, who ate sweet lotus fruit on a strange island and forgot about the past, forgot about home, just wanted to stay and eat sweet lotus fruit with the natives.

  Somehow, Claire’s voice broke through. “Robin, can you talk about it?”

  It took me a moment to spit it out.

  “My whole life here was built on an illusion. My best friend wasn’t my best friend. I wasn’t squired around by a rich, sophisticated man and his friends, I didn’t dazzle fashionable people who, won over by my natural charm, gave me free stuff. I was squired around by a gangster, who on at least one occasion bought me a date with a male prostitute, and whose mere appearance in a designer showroom caused people to fearfully dish out free stuff.

  “And the Saudi prince and the Finnish mogul Julie and I danced with, they were probably just a couple of guys from Queens trying to impress us.

  “Frankie the Fish did a turn as a procurer. Just like the white-slavers my Aunt Maureen warned me about before I came to New York. God, is she going to enjoy this.”

  Tamayo was laughing.

  “It’s even better that you were squired around by gangsters,” Tamayo said. “Rich guys are a dime a dozen in this town. But gangsters—that’s an adventure.”

  Then I started laughing and crying, alternately.

  “And we are all free women on a great adventure,” I said, quoting one of Tamayo’s favorite expressions.

  “Oh, I’ve revised that,” she said. “I’m a struggling demigoddess on a great adventure. Ha! Tell me again how you tried to beat that Perrugia sister with her own granny.”

  Just then, a cab pulled up and the driver hopped out and ran past us into the all-night pizzeria, where he slapped two bucks on the counter, asked for something, then ran into the bathroom for patrons only. A few minutes later he came out, much becalmed, and almost walked out without his pizza, which was not his priority. But then the guy behind the counter called out to him, “Hey, man, your slice.” Another pizza guy took it, steaming hot, out of the oven and slapped it onto a plate. The cabbie seemed happily surprised to remember the slice, and picked it up from the counter, walking out as content as I’ve seen a man in quite a while. He’d had a good pee, and he was eating a nice hot slice of pizza.

  Tamayo, Claire, and I all looked at each other. We laughed.

  “Even though Two Joes is gone,” Claire said, “what it represents is still here.”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t fall in love with the city because of those rich mobsters. Maybe they helped it along. But it was that déjà vu you had here that first night. If you hadn’t met those guys, hadn’t got all that free stuff, it wouldn’t have mattered. You would have ended up here anyway. I know it.”

  “You belong here. In New York, you can be as weird as you are, and it hardly matters,” Tamayo said.

  “Funny that we all had cooties as kids,” Claire said.

  “Hilarious,” I said.

  “Geeks and nerds are cool now, you know? Even models have been rebelling. Did you see the last Prada show? No makeup, models slouching, walking gracelessly with stringy hair. It’s like revenge of the cootie girls. Geek chic is in. It’s the new model of beauty, trying not to look conventionally beautiful.”

  “If only the models would rebel a little more and put on some weight,” I said.

  The sun was up. Claire said, “Let’s go to Ol’ Devil Moon for a Southern breakfast. Mmmm. Grits. And you meat-eating thugs can have eggs and biscuits with pork-chop gravy. It’s in your neighborhood, Robin.”

  “Claire, I love you. I love my girlfriends. But I’ve had enough sisterhood for a while. You know what I need right now?”

  “A man.”

  “Yeah. There’s something about men, you know? I can’t put my finger on it. Whenever I try to name it, I can think of a bunch of women with the same quality.”

  “It’s called a penis, Robin,” Tamayo said.

  “Besides that. There’s something a good man has, some mysterious thing.…”

  “Yeah, she needs a man,” Claire said to Tamayo.

  “But which man?” Tamayo said.

  Oh, shit.

  Tamayo said, “Well, we’ll go downtown with you.”

  “You want to go to Madison Avenue with me later?” Claire asked Tamayo. “Those Tommy Mathis paintings I bought Monday? They’re framed and ready for pickup today.”

  “Okay. We could get Susan Brave’s shower present today too. Robin, you want to go in on a present for Susan’s bridal shower?”

  “What are you guys getting for her?”

  “It’s great. Well, you’ll probably find something wrong with it.…”

  Claire broke in. “One of those mechanical toilet seats. You push a button and it goes up, and then it automatically goes down when the toilet is flushed. So Susan and her husband won’t ever have to worry about him leaving the seat up.”

  “Mechanical toilet seat. Uh-oh,” I said.

  “What’s the problem with a mechanical toilet seat?” Tamayo asked.

  “An ugly accident waiting to happen.”

  “How so?”

  “A mechanical malfunction, a short circuit, and the toilet seat could go berserk. Some poor sod taking a crap could find himself hammered into the wall like a pancake,” I explained.

  “You know, I never did get that, why women complain about the toilet seat being up,” Tamayo said. “After you’ve fallen into the bowl once, you learn not to do it the next time. You turn on the light in the bathroom, you check to make sure the seat is down, and before you leave, you put it up out of consideration for the man in your life. Or men, as the case may be. But I thought it was a funny gift. It was either that or the six-pack of Hungarian singing condoms.”

  “Jeez, I was thinking of giving her a gift certificate for a facial, or maybe some Tupperware.”

  “Tupperware, Robin?”

  “That’s what we always did back home. China and fancy stuff for the wedding, practical stuff at the shower.”

  “Tupperware is great,” Tamayo said.

  “It really is,” Claire agreed.

  “But Susan won’t want Tupperware. The old Susan maybe, but the new Susan would much rather get the Hungarian singing condoms.”

  The old Susan was a nebbishy doormat to Dr. Solange Stevenson. The new Susan was a happy, confident producer at ABC, about to marry a cute doctor. Though assertiveness training and therapy helped, what really turned her around was Prozac. Made ya think.

  “So what do the condoms sing?” I asked.

  “Huh? Oh, there are three instrumentals, ‘William Tell’ Overture, Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy,’ something else, and then a couple of pop songs with vocals—I can’t remember what they are,” Tamayo said. “The way it works is, there’s a microchip at the base of the condom, which is coated with heat-sensitive stuff. When the body heat rises, the condom sings. You can’t see a safety problem with those, can you?”

  “Safety, no. But opportunities for pranks at the factory level … Instead of programming it to sing, programming it to say, ‘Hey! Who turned out the lights?’”

  “Or ‘Remember the Alamo!’”

  “Do they sing in Hungarian, Magyar, whatever it is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That would be scary, if the woman didn’t know it was a singing condom, and then all of a sudden, during penetration, her partner’s penis started singing in Hungarian. That could conceivably cause a heart attack.”

  “But no safety problems with Tupperware?” Claire said.

  “No. Wait. You could put someone’s eye out with the thing inside the lettuce crisper, and you could get cut up pretty badly if you got a finger caught in the salad spinner, but o
ther than that …”

  “Robin, it’s amazing that you ever leave your bed,” Tamayo said. She turned to Claire and said, “Do you want to go with me to visit my Grandma Scheinman on Long Island tomorrow?”

  “Okay,” Claire said. On they went, making plans. I tried to warn them that, as the old saying goes, when people make plans, God laughs. Or cries. I always get those two confused.

  “Do you guys know the playmate song?” Tamayo asked.

  We both looked at her, not sure what she was talking about.

  “Playmate, come out and play with me, and bring your dollies three, climb up my apple tree, holler down my rain barrel, slide down my cellar door, and we’ll be jolly friends forever more,” she sang.

  “She couldn’t come out and play, it was a lovely day, with a tear in her eye, I heard her sigh, and then I heard her say,” Claire chimed in.

  “Playmate, I can’t come play with you, my dolly’s got the flu, boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo. Ain’t got no rain barrel, ain’t got no cellar door, but we’ll be jolly friends, forever more,” Tamayo sang.

  She especially liked the part, “My dolly’s got the flu, boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo.” She also sang the variation, “She might throw up on you,” over and over as we walked down Fifth Avenue, looking for a taxi.

  I still had one crappy decision to make, Mike or Eric. But then I realized I’d made that decision, when my future flashed in front of my eyes and I saw myself with Mike, for the weekend at least. When I got home, I saw those cheesy Mecca souvenirs, and it confirmed my decision. Still, it was hard, because Eric was important to me, and incredibly sexy, and it meant slamming another door on the past. He was my transitional man. But that transition was over.

  Louise Bryant was at the window. I opened it and she came in, looked up at me, and then walked over to her food dish.

  “Had a good night, did you?” I asked her. I took her silence for a yes.

  After I fed her, I collapsed on my bed in my clothes. I’d been going on adrenaline and a senior-citizen megavitamin all night, and now I felt like every cell in my body had been drained of life force. I slept for about an hour, and Eric called. I told him I couldn’t see him. He was distressingly okay about it.

  I fell asleep again. The next time I awoke, Mike was there, leaning over me, kissing my eyelids. I wasn’t tired anymore. I pulled him down to me and we mated in the most unholy ways. Nearly dying is a great aphrodisiac. Afterwards, I was about to go back to sleep when the cops came. Local cops, NYPD. They wanted to speak to me about a stolen taxicab.

  EPILOGUE

  THERE’S A CULTURAL GROUP, Native American, East Timorese, something like that, who believe there comes a point in the middle of your life when you meet your own ghost. You might not recognize your ghost, but how you treat it, the lessons you learn, determines how the rest of your life will turn out.

  Something like that. When I read about it, I didn’t know it was going to come in handy one day, and so I didn’t pay as much attention as I should have. But that’s true of a lot of things in life, little things at the time that turn out to be huge things later. If only you’d known back then.

  Anyway, I think that’s kinda what happened to me on Halloween.

  Because of cooties, I had the distinction of having an actor play me on an episode of “America’s Most Wanted.” More directly, it was because Julie Goomey got away with forty million of the Perrugia family’s closest friends. But as I explained earlier, cooties were at the bottom of all this. If it weren’t for the cooties, Julie and I wouldn’t have bonded, my self-esteem would have been higher, I wouldn’t have let Chuck boss me around, and I would have spent spring break ’79 frying, drunk, on a beach somewhere instead of with mobsters in New York.

  The actress who played Julie did a good job, but the one who played me was too short and had an annoying nasal voice. Our episode was on the special Interpol show. Since then, Julie Goomey has been sighted all over the place, but Interpol hasn’t grabbed her yet. I don’t think they will. She could dye her hair, wear glasses, disguise herself. With white-blond hair, she could blend in in any of the Nordic countries. With a bit of a tan, she could lose herself in India, home of the bandit queens.

  Anyway, she reportedly has $40 million to keep her until the heat blows over.

  Help for Kids was a legit charity she set up with Perrugia-family money and it did some good stuff, in addition to serving as one of Julie’s money-laundering transit points. Meanwhile, everyone in the city is trying to find out who made an anonymous donation to the Boys and Girls Clubs of America. The note that went with it was unsigned, but I saw a picture of it in the newspaper and, guess what, I recognized the handwriting.

  About a month after all this happened, I got a note from her myself, written inside a cootie catcher, with a parcel containing a costume. It was Munch’s The Scream.

  Dear Robin,

  Sorry I put you through all that. I didn’t know the Perrugias would grab your intern or friends, and I had arranged for the feds to meet up with you to help you out. I am having a ball. I’m painting again. Hope you’re well too.

  Thanks for being such a good sport. No hard feelings, huh?

  Putli Bai

  Sorry. I still had hard feelings. I believed her when she said she didn’t know Kathy would get caught up in it. She gave me an insurance policy, Granny, she gave us a scoop, and I guess we learned a few things along the way. On the other hand, she fucked with us and put us at incredible risk.

  The voices in my head keep arguing about her. The jury is still out. One thing I am pretty sure of, I don’t think this is the last I’m going to hear of Julie Goomey in this lifetime.

  The whole Perrugia clan, sans Granny, is going up the river for a very long time. Unfortunately, they still haven’t found the body of Johnny “Nostrils” Chiesa, or, as I now know him, Johnny “Burgers.”

  It’s almost enough to put a girl off red meat.

  I guess I did learn something about recognizing the hidden menace in people. In a way, that’s what I did with Granny, when I turned her into a weapon. That was resourcefulness. The bonding between my ’fro and the earring-faced boy, that was dumb luck. A happy accident. I may be living under a curse, but I seem to have enough dumb luck to keep me going.

  I was not charged with grand theft auto. It seems the cursed cabbie came back a while later looking for his cab. The dispatcher I’d called hadn’t understood me. The cab was eventually found in front of my building and hauled off. Once I explained the situation, they let me go.

  The earring kid came forward to get his share of the reward money, which I insisted he get. He claimed he didn’t have a gun, so apparently it was illegal. It’s funny, I’ve always been for gun control, but my life was saved by a gun-law violator, and, of course, by the fact that I’d stopped relaxing my hair and gone natural. But, you know, you get older and things aren’t so black and white anymore. I used to be completely against capital punishment, for example, and I still am philosophically, but I don’t miss Ted Bundy. You know what I mean?

  Claire’s “taking the cure” on her grandmother’s farm in Mississippi. Two weeks of up at dawn, slopping hogs, milking cows, and generally just living off the land might be just the ticket for her. I wouldn’t mind two weeks like that myself. Except without the hogs, the cows, and the up-at-dawn stuff.

  All our talk about name-callers, bullies, troublemakers, tattletales, liars, cheaters, and prideful self-righteous gossips made Claire nostalgic for that unruly playpen, Washington. So she’s going back to D.C. to report, until she can get herself overseas. I know how this choice may haunt her, how, when she’s down about her work, or down about her love life and her work doesn’t seem to provide enough compensation for the sacrifices she’s made, she might think of Jess, or her and Jess in a parallel universe, and get a little sad. But she’ll get through it okay, because she has a lot of strong people in her life who love her, and she has a really big ego.

  Kathy has decided to finish the se
mester and then go back to Florida. I don’t blame her. I mean, getting kidnapped by a bunch of strange women with green wigs and guns can put anyone off a place long-term. Still, she wasn’t too much the worse for wear, and I heard her telling a friend on the phone about all of it in a very excited manner, as if she was proud to have gone through it and come out of it okay. She’s already turning it into a personal legend. A good outcome puts a whole different spin on events, you know?

  So I figure, Kathy will be telling that story for a long time to come, and not only to a series of therapists.

  Tamayo is still Tamayo. She finished her UFO screenplay and now she’s writing one under contract about our Girls’ Night Out. Everything is going very well for her. Somehow, she talked me into taking a torch-singing class with her. Who knows? One of us could be the next Yma Sumac, if not in this lifetime, maybe in the next one.

  Phil, our super, is going to Africa, but just for a couple of months, then he’s coming back to us. I suspect it has something to do with Helen Fitkis. She’s going with him, but she didn’t want to go indefinitely, so they compromised. I admire them, in their seventies, going off for an adventure that way.

  And get this: Tamayo’s talking about taking a month and going over to Africa with Phil and Helen. To do comedy! For refugees! I’ve never heard of such a thing, but she says refugees need to laugh too, and it’s a chance for her to work on her physical comedy, which is universal. Phil promised her she’d learn as much from the refugees as they would from her. As Tamayo figures it, somewhere out there is a funny cootie girl like her in a society that oppresses women, and she needs to find her.

  (“And then kill her,” she jokes.)

  Sally died.

  While she was in the hospital, she died and was dead for all of three minutes. Although they were very long minutes, she still claims to have seen an awful lot in that brief time. And what she saw was so pleasant that, when she came to in the hospital, she screamed in horror at the faces of the doctors and nurses.