by Jody Gehrman
“Sorry?”
“You little scamp,” Ohm scolded. “You haven’t been listening to a word. I swear L.A. girls have the attention spans of gnats.”
“Oh, please,” I said, rolling my eyes. “Don’t even start with the NorCal SoCal thing. I was born and raised in Sebastopol—I’m totally native.”
“But you chose L.A., didn’t you?” Ohm raised a scolding finger. “And now look at you. You’re L.A. to the bone.”
“And I should be ashamed of that?” I sipped my beer. “I live in the middle of the only city on earth where the major exports are sex and illusions. I love that. Nobody cares who you are, as long as you’re somebody. You can reinvent yourself every single day, if you feel like it.”
Joni turned to Ohm with a little sulky turn to her mouth. “Gwen thinks you should move there.”
Ohm laughed uneasily. “Really? Why?”
“Your talents are wasted here,” I said. “You need a bigger pond.”
“You don’t even know if I can act,” he said.
“I’m not talking about acting—I’m talking about living.”
“Great,” Joni said, “so what’s that say about me? I’m a little minnow who’s only good enough for this Podunk puddle?” Her tone was vaguely belligerent and irrational; I could see she was on the fast track to drunk, with no signs of turning back.
“You can move there, too!” I assured her. “I just thought you were happy here. I don’t think Ohm is.” It was an odd thing to say about someone I’d only known a couple hours and as many rounds—for that matter, I’d only met Joni this afternoon—but something about them made me feel so at ease.
“I see you’re married,” I said to Ohm, nodding at the ring on his left hand. “Any advice for the bride-to-be?”
He flashed a wicked grin. “Just lie back and think of England.”
“Seriously,” I said, “why do you wear that?”
He held out his hand and studied the plain gold band. “It’s supposed to keep the girls from hitting on me.”
“Does it work?” I asked.
Joni snorted. Ohm shook his head. “Hardly. I’m beginning to think it attracts them.”
“Maybe you should wear more pink, or leather chaps or something,” I suggested. “Pink leather chaps, maybe?”
He cringed. “Too subtle for the girls I meet. They’d think I’m being ironic or sensitive or something.”
Joni said, “You could get a tattoo of a couple guys doing it.”
“Yeah, where? On my forehead?”
We laughed. The beer was making the whole room glow with a warm, golden sheen. Voices lapped against each other gently in the background. A couple wearing his-and-her leather coats came in through the glass doors and a cool tendril of foggy air drifted in then was swallowed by the steamy warmth of all those bodies. I could feel a happy little buzz starting in my brain, inching its way down to my limbs. For a moment, the awkwardness of my stay at Chateau de Dog Hair, the cramped drive up Highway 1, even the weirdness between Coop and I this afternoon all seemed distant and small—miniaturized, even—like images on postage stamps.
Just as I turned my head in search of the ladies’ room, I caught another glimpse of Dannika. Her eyes were narrowed to slits as she sat watching me. Her face was quietly malicious. I told myself I was just getting paranoid. Still, I couldn’t shake the sense that she was stewing in her own ylang-ylang scented juices, planning my imminent doom.
On the way north, crammed uncomfortably into the twins’ backseat, Ohm explained to me the difference between Mendocino and Fort Bragg.
“Mendo’s the beautiful, older, bitchy sister—classy, arty, postcard-perfect. Fort Bragg’s the shit-kicking stocky chick with crooked teeth.”
“Which do you prefer?” I asked.
“Fort Bragg. I’ll take dirty fingernails over latte-swilling, pinot-loving tourists any day.”
“I’m surprised,” I told him.
“Why?”
“You just seem too sophisticated to be into dirty fingernails.”
He shrugged. “It’s kind of a ‘pick your poison’ situation.”
When we got to the Tip Top, a seedy little bar two blocks off the main drag in Fort Bragg, I could see what Ohm was talking about; the ambiance was noticeably different from the cheerful Irish pub we’d just left. We made our way past a clump of gray-faced, stringy-haired smokers huddled on the sidewalk and stepped inside. It was a decent-sized place—not huge, but at least twice the size of Dick’s—and you could tell it was popular. To our right was a large, horseshoe-shaped bar. Behind the chunky barmaid were several signs: Avoid Clean Living; Jägermeister and Complaint Department; 69 Miles Out, 2 Floors Down. There was a touch-screen jukebox blaring Shania Twain and a couple of pool tables where burly guys competed under cheesy lamps emblazoned with Miller Genuine Draft.
We got our drinks, and immediately a couple of hopeful bachelors in flannel shirts started chatting up Dannika. A flock of twentysomething women absorbed Joni, Miranda and Portia, squealing hellos. I decided I’d challenge Ohm to a game of pool.
“Ready to get your ass kicked?” I asked.
He smirked. “Whatever you say, Holly.”
Miraculously, one of the tables was free. We flipped a coin and he won the toss so I racked, arranging the balls carefully, solid-stripe-solid-stripe, the way my father taught me years ago. We used to play every night in the basement when I was a kid. It had been a while, but I was pretty sure my old shark instincts were just dormant, not dead. I sat down on one of the vinyl-padded benches that lined the walls, resting my feet. The go-go boots weren’t exactly my most comfortable footwear.
Ohm took a seat beside me, sipping his drink. “I’m actually a champion pool player,” he said. “No one in this town can touch me.”
“Small pond,” I said, “big fish.”
“I’m just warning you.”
“Fair enough.”
When he broke, he sent every ball flying in a burst of color. He sank a solid on the break, another on his first shot.
“So, Joni tells me you lived in New York.” I had to speak up so he could hear me over the Metallica blaring from the jukebox.
“Yeah.” He bent over and took a shot at the three. It was a difficult angle, but he sank it anyway. “Lived in the Village for three years.”
“Did you love it?”
He squinted at the five, lined it up and drove the cue ball straight at it with surprising force. The five slammed into the pocket. “It’s the greatest place on earth.” He tilted his head, considering. “Of course, it’s also hell.”
“Did you have a hard time there?”
He tried a tricky bank shot and made it. He was running the table. I’d have to work hard to catch up—if I even got a chance. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” He slid his cue behind his back and took aim at the seven. I just shook my head when it slid into the corner pocket without a sound.
“And what’s it like to be back home?” I asked.
He paused to rub chalk on the bulbous blue tip of his stick. “You want the truth?”
I nodded.
“I feel like a trapped animal.”
“Maybe you should bolt, then.”
He smiled sadly. “I’m afraid I’ll have to chew off my own leg to do it.”
“Why? What’s stopping you?”
Turning back to the table, he said, “Me, I guess. I’m stopping me.”
“But why?”
He took a shot at the four and missed. It was an easy one, compared to most of the ones he’d made so far. “You see that? I screw up when things are simple. That’s why New York was good for me. Everything was really, really complicated there.” He took a sip of his scotch. “Then again, that’s why I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“Maybe you need a balance of the complex and the straightforward,” I suggested. “L.A. for example.”
He scoffed. “I need L.A. like I need a hole in the head.”
“N
o, really!” I enthused. “It’s big and it’s sort of complicated—the freeways are, anyway—but it’s also pretty simple. Everyone wants eternal youth, an ocean view and perfect tits. That’s not exactly rocket science.”
“Interesting,” he said. “Something to consider. Now take your shot, so I can finish you off.”
I proceeded to sink every ball on the table, including his lonely four. “See? I’m a genius. You should listen to me.”
He raised his glass to me, smiling broadly. “Holly, baby, where have you been all my life?”
The jukebox was pounding out Vanilla Ice and the Tip Top was packed with a sweaty, enthusiastically inebriated crowd when Joni started taking off her clothes. The patrons at that point were overwhelmingly male. They lacked the youthful dewiness of the regulars at the Irish pub we’d come from; their faces were eraser-pink, their noses oily red, their eyes bloodshot. They radiated the grim recklessness of men who worked hard at soul-sodomizing jobs and expected a little bloodshed before daybreak. Whether she was inspired by this audience or simply felt it was time to get naked, I couldn’t tell you. All I know is, Joni jumped up on the bar and started swiveling her hips to the refrain, “Ice, ice, baby,” releasing an animal roar from the men below. Encouraged by their fervor, she pulled off her waffled Henley and started busting some serious moves in nothing but her faded Levi’s and a lacey black push-up bra. The crowd went wild.
“We’ve got to get her out of here.” Dannika was at my elbow, suddenly. “She’s sideways.”
“She’s so…” I searched for the right word as Joni unbuttoned her jeans slowly, looking like each movement brought her excruciating pleasure, “…professional.”
“Yeah, well, she was,” Dannika said, as if this was obvious. “She used to be a stripper.”
My eyes widened. “You’re kidding.”
“Look at her.” Joni was now inching her jeans off, revealing polka dotted panties. The men below screamed and whistled until they were hoarse. “She made good money at it.”
Ohm came over, looking alarmed. “We have to get her out of here,” he said. “She’ll start a riot.”
“That’s what I said.” Dannika tossed her hair over her shoulder impatiently.
“But how?” I was eyeing Joni’s thick-necked fans as they raised their hairy hands to her in supplication. I wasn’t quite sure how the three of us were going to free her of that mob without violence. I looked around for Miranda and Portia.
“They’re outside smoking up,” Ohm said, reading my mind.
“Great,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes. My SWAT team consisted of a D-list celebrity and a fairy who looked like a Calvin Klein model. The three of us were about as threatening as a bridge club.
I looked back at the bar, trying to formulate a plan. Joni was now slowly, teasingly starting to unhook her bra. Her hips continued to gyrate with the relentless grace and efficiency of a well-oiled machine. There was a guy who looked like a linebacker screaming, “Joni Greenfield! Baby! Come to me!” over and over. His face was purple with the effort and his big, hammy fists kept flying into the air in a vague gesture of victory. There was another guy planted directly below Joni whose face was so hairy, he could easily be mistaken for Sasquatch. He said nothing, just gazed up at Joni with worshipful bovine eyes, but didn’t hesitate to shove anyone who dared to infringe on his space, sending them flying back like torpedoes into the crowd. Joni was still toying with them, inching her bra straps lower as she batted her eyelashes and slowed her hips to a sinuous writhing.
Miranda and Portia appeared just as a plan was starting to crystallize in the dim corners of my brain. It wasn’t a good plan—I was perfectly aware of that—but under the circumstances, expedience was more important than brilliance and nobody else seemed to be stepping forward with the blueprints for another, more foolproof escape. We formed a quick huddle.
“Right, this is how it goes: when this song is over, Dannika and I will climb up on the bar while Ohm and Miranda drag Joni away. I don’t care how you do it, just get her out of here. Dannika and I will distract the crowd so they won’t complain too much when she disappears.”
Portia looked hurt. “What about me? What do I do?”
“I’m getting to that. We’re the red herrings, but then we’ll need to get down off the bar and out of here without incident. You know where the lights are?”
Miranda nodded. “They’re back there,” she said, nodding to the far corner, “by the bathrooms.”
“Did you hear that?” I said to Portia. “Your job is to trip the lights, then run for the door. We’ll climb off the bar in the dark and meet you all by the car, which Miranda should have started by then. You got it?”
“Fine,” Dannika said, unbuttoning her blouse one button and smoothing her glossy blond hair into place. “Let’s get this over with.”
When the final refrain of “Ice, Ice, Baby” started to fade and The Rolling Stones kicked in with “Emotional Rescue,” Dannika and I clambered up on the bar. Thank God I was wearing my white go-go boots—there’s nothing worse than being humiliated out of costume. As soon as we were in place, Ohm and Miranda yanked Joni off the bar none too gracefully and she cried out in protest as they carted her toward the door in her bra and panties. A few forlorn fans followed her with their eyes as she was carted kicking and screaming out the door, but then I saw their faces turning back toward us—or, more specifically, toward Dannika, since I was just standing there, frozen in place, wearing my car coat over my orange dress and looking, no doubt, more like a PTA mom than a stripper.
Dannika, on the other hand, was taking to her role quite enthusiastically. Eschewing Joni’s gradual, teasing style, she immediately ripped open her blouse, sending buttons flying and exposing a lovely blue silk bra that displayed her silicone wonders to great effect. One of the guys yelled, “Show us your tits!” and just like that she undid the front clasp, letting everything pop out. She slung her bra out into the crowd; only then did she start to dance.
That’s when things got truly surreal.
The ceiling was pretty low, so she had to hunch over slightly, and a couple times she almost whacked her head against the exposed beams. None of this stopped her from taking go-go dancing to an all new, totally manic level. Her hips became frenetic pistons that jerked spasmodically with no regard for the languorous rhythm. She shimmied her shoulders so her breasts jiggled, but the movement was more Easter Seals than burlesque. I cringed. The faces of the men below went from awe to confusion to cringing embarrassment in a matter of seconds.
Where was Portia with the damn lights? I looked over toward the bathrooms and spotted her talking to a rat-faced hippie in a striped rugby shirt. She looked like she was arguing with him, and each time she moved for the switch on the wall, he blocked her, smiling sadistically.
I had no choice; I had to intervene.
Against my better judgment, I started to dance. I stood there with my coat on, closed my eyes, and let my hips find the beat. Once I felt the bass line reverberating off my pelvic bones, I let the song travel up into my chest. Mick Jagger’s predatory growl was throbbing inside my rib cage by the time I took my coat off, folded it neatly, and placed it behind me on the bar.
Dannika was attempting some wildly arrhythmic hip-hop moves that lent her the air of a palsied mental patient in the midst of electric-shock therapy. The men were all looking to me now for some kind of relief. Though the social consciousness in that place was barely ankle deep, I really think they felt guilty about watching the retarded blonde take her clothes off, no matter how nice her tits were.
Suddenly I heard a dull thud beside me, and saw Dannika rubbing the back of her head with one hand. She must have hit it on one of the beams. She looked around the room in bleary confusion, as if trying to recall where she was. Sasquatch offered her a hand, and she crawled down off the bar. It was just me now and still Portia was trying to get around the vile hippie, to no avail.
You know I have to be in a certain mood to danc
e. Well, tonight I learned that in an emergency I can force that mood. By the time I got around to slowly unzipping the front of my dress a few inches, the electric guitar was in my bloodstream and my pulse was pounding in time with the snare. Those go-go boots were planted firmly on the bar, but the rest of me was filled with such a helium-dizzy lightness I thought for sure I would float away. It was the kind of hedonistic thrill only a good song, a four-beer buzz and a screaming mob of worshipful men can produce. I closed my eyes; it made it easier to concentrate on the elixir of their frantic voices mixed with the reds and greens of the neon lights. Somewhere along the way, Mick Jagger had morphed into Prince’s “Erotic City,” and I was letting my thigh muscles lead.
I don’t know if I heard his voice or sensed his presence or what, but just as the second chorus of “Erotic City” started up, my eyes flew open and I found myself staring directly down at Coop. I had just unzipped my dress all the way, and the screaming had reached a fever-pitch when it slipped off my shoulders, revealing my white balconet bra with matching panties, garter belt, and lace-top stockings. Okay, yes, it was a very good lingerie day; four beers aside, I’d never have gotten that naked in my fraying-elastic period-undies. Plus, I’d waxed. That was about all I had to feel grateful for as I stood there, eyes locked with Coop, boots planted in a wide stance, my face going from sultry to horrified, my hips freezing mid-swivel.
And then, thank God, Portia finally made it past the rat-faced hippie and the room went black.
We escaped in the ensuing chaos. I was glad I’d folded my clothes neatly and placed them on the bar; they were easy enough to locate, even in the dark. Still, there was plenty of yelling and confusion, spilled drinks and big, sweaty bodies to navigate.
Back in the Subaru, Joni kept popping her head through the sunroof, yelling, “Ice, ice, baby!” at the top of her lungs. Nobody had managed to locate her discarded shirt, so she was wearing only jeans and her black lacy bra. I tried to pull her back inside the car each time, but it was no use. In the front seat, Portia and Miranda were laughing nonstop, Portia kept saying, “I kneed him the balls!” as she gasped for air, hysterical.