Skin Deep

by Timothy Hallinan

"I'd better," Saffron said, "or I'll be sitting on the sidewalk. Tiny's got the rag on."

  Toby looked nervous. "Does he?"

  "And how. Nobody's tipping, and they're making their drinks last until their birthdays. What a bunch of stiffs."

  "You wish," Toby said. "Go make them rise to the occasion."

  Saffron picked up the ten quickly, as though she were afraid it might disappear, and danced away in a leisurely fashion, focusing her charms on an embarrassed-looking Chicano with two crumpled dollar bills on the counter in front of him.

  "This must be someone's idea of fun," I said.

  "Loosen up, champ. You want to die before you even get tired? Here's the gorgeous Pepper."

  Pepper put a tall glass in front of each of us, her bracelets jangling. Toby gave her a tightly folded twenty and said, "Keep the change. Not much happening, is there?"

  "I've had a bigger time in a library," Pepper said, slipping the twenty into the front of her G-string. "Who's your sweet little friend?"

  "This is Simeon," Toby said. "He's my baby-sitter."

  "He's a baby himself," Pepper said. "Jesus, what'd you do to Nana? Is she ever pissed off."

  "Not for long. I've got some pink, Pepper."

  "Darling," Pepper said, brightening visibly. "I think I have to go to the little girls' room."

  "It's in the twenty," Toby said. "Don't hog it. I see a lot of hungry noses."

  "My sisters will get theirs," Pepper said, "don't worry. Nice to meet you, Simeon." Her beautiful bottom twinkled at us as she headed for nostril heaven in the ladies' room. I picked up my 7-Up and took a big swallow. Then I began to cough, and it felt as though several pounds of steam were billowing out of my ears.

  "Careful, champ," Toby said. "That's straight vodka."

  "Thanks for the warning," I said, my eyes watering. "How come it's disguised as Seven-Up?"

  "They can't serve liquor because the girls take their pants off. Go figure. Like I said, private stock for regular customers."

  I blinked back tears and became aware that the music had ended. There was a scattering of applause. Saffron climbed down from the stage. The girl who had been dancing on the other stage blew a sarcastic kiss at the customers and then walked across the club, elegantly and carelessly naked, to disappear behind the same crimson curtain that Saffron had lifted only moments before.

  "If they made twenty each, they're lucky," Toby said.

  His voice sounded abnormally loud. We were the only ones in the place who were talking. All the other customers sat staring at their drinks or at the counter in front of them. I realized for the first time that there was an empty chair separating each customer from his neighbor. Chair, customer, chair, customer. Except for three Asian men, an obvious group, no two men were seated together. No one had looked at Toby for the simple reason that no one had looked at anyone.

  "What do you care how much they make?" I took a careful swig of vodka. It tasted better this time.

  "Who says I care?" he asked belligerently and altogether too loudly. "They dance, they should get paid. You think I'd do what I do for free? Where's Pepper, anyway?"

  The music drowned out my reply, whatever it was. Then I forgot what I'd been going to say and leaned forward to watch.

  It took me a few bars to recognize the song, even though the Kinks had been my favorite band for years. I was too preoccupied. Then Ray Davies began to sing, and I placed it.

  Look at that lady dancing round with no clothes,

  She'll show you all her body, that's if you got the dough.

  She'll let you see most anything, but there's one thing that she'll never show.

  And that's a little bit of real emotion. ...

  Saffron came back onto the stage. She was wearing nothing at all, but I was watching the other stage. The girl on it was Nana.

  "And on the small stage," said a fat Tiny clone seated next to the entrance, "is our bit of spice from the Far East. Let's bring both hands above the table and have a big round of soy sauce for the lovely Cinnamon." Three men clapped.

  A little bit of real emotion, Ray Davies sang. In case a bit of real emotion should give her away.

  "Nana's first song," Toby said. "She always uses it. She thinks no one gets it."

  "Maybe nobody does," I said, looking at the customers. Most of them had their mouths open.

  Nana was almost fatally beautiful. Her T-shirt, slashed strategically here and there, ended a good ten inches above a pair of crimson hot pants that stopped just this side of the melting point of platinum. Her hair had been teased into a lioness's mane. She had sprayed her body with droplets of water. She looked like a feral animal mistakenly rereleased into polite society.

  Saffron did whatever she did, but it was wasted effort. Even the men around our stage—her stage—were watching Nana, or Cinnamon, or whatever her name was. If Nana had been wearing a tuxedo, an overcoat, a scarf, and a pair of hip-high wading boots, eighty men out of a hundred would have been watching her, no matter how naked Saffron was.

  "Maybe there is a God," Toby said. He didn't sound like he was kidding. For a couple of minutes we sat there like everyone else, staring at Nana.

  The song ended and Saffron picked up her tips, including another ten from Toby. Nana had already disappeared behind the crimson curtain that obviously led to the dressing room. Saffron worked her way clockwise, grabbing a dollar bill here and a five there. One customer, vaguely Middle Eastern-looking, tried to snatch back a few of the ones he had laid on the counter. Saffron kicked at the stage with her spike heels, and he gave up. She picked up the money and laughed.

  "Golly," she said. "Thanks, Ahmed."

  "Toby," said a gravelly voice. "Let's you and me talk."

  It was Tiny, looming white and mountainous above us. Toby looked at me apologetically.

  "Time to go," Toby said. "Have a good time, Simeon. Tip the girls with Norman's money." He got up and patted Tiny on the arm. "Lost some weight, Tiny? Six months from now you'll be wearing Yves St. Laurent."

  "Eve who?" Tiny rumbled.

  "New girl," Toby said. "Dancing at the Kama Sutra, up on Sunset."

  "I don't need girls. I need customers." He hauled Toby toward the back of the club.

  The music started again, anonymous heavy metal from a band whose idea of a good time was probably rusty iron spikes on the inside of their underwear. The intellectual theme of the song seemed to be "Get down and crawl."

  Crawling was exactly what Nana was doing on the other stage. Wearing nothing now but the hot pants, she moved on her hands and knees, arching her back, tossing her mane, and hissing like a cat. The lurid pink light caught her high cheekbones and defined the fine, straight gully of her spine. I realized that I was definitely interested.

  In fact, I was so interested that I didn't notice the newcomer on my stage until she lifted a foot and whacked the counter in front of me to get my attention. Snatched away from the vision of Nana, I looked up and then tried, without much success, to turn a cringe into a smile.

  At about five two, she couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds. Her face was tight and drawn, every muscle standing out in aggrieved relief. She was wearing more eyeliner than all the Egyptian queens in the Metropolitan Museum of Art put together, but it couldn't mask the infinite weariness in her eyes, the eyes of an ancient lizard glutted on spiders and flies. She wore a silk camisole over her bones, leopard-spotted panties, and elbow-length formal gloves. Her dancing consisted of shifting from foot to foot listlessly in front of me, her ravaged eyes focused on something in another galaxy a trillion light-years away.

  Pepper touched my arm and pressed a little packet into my hand. "Tell Toby thanks," she said, sniffing. "Where'd he go?"

  "He's with Fatso."

  "Tiny," she said severely. "You want to be careful what you call Tiny, okay? He's touchy. Put out a little money, huh? She needs it."

  I reached into my pocket, and my fingers encountered the serrated edge of Norman Stillman's check. Ten th
ousand dollars seemed excessive somehow, so I fumbled around until I produced a crumpled five. Pepper thumped the stage and hissed, "Amber." The girl named Amber tore herself away from whatever deep-space supernova she had been watching and contorted her mouth into a smile that missed me by a yard. Her teeth were stained and broken. "Shanksh," she said to the chair next to me.

  "Ahmed," Pepper said to her, and I saw that the Middle Easterner had dropped a couple of ones on the counter in front of him. Amber trudged in his direction and then leaned over and swung her long, lifeless brown hair back and forth in a gesture that had probably been sexy ten years and a million dances earlier. Trying to straighten up, she lost her balance and fell on her tail. She didn't seem surprised, and Ahmed laughed. Nana looked over from the other stage.

  "Wasted in excess," Pepper said. "She'll never make it until closing time."

  "Wasted on what?"

  "Name it, sweetie," Pepper said. "Don't give her any of Toby's coke, okay? Ambulances are bad for business."

  I put the coke away and turned to watch Nana.

  She was standing upright and toying with the top button of her hot pants, looking down at a hugely bearded customer who had put down a small mountain of money. With a smile that made me want to put on sunglasses, she undid the button and then swung her leg in a high arc over his head. He dropped a few more bills on the mountain and licked his lips, exaggerating the gesture to cartoon proportions. Nana gave him the classic "shame on you" signal, rubbing one forefinger over the other, and moved on to the next customer.

  The music came to a merciful halt, and Nana left her stage quickly. She threw me an appraising glance, helped Amber climb down the stairs, and then put a protective arm around her waist. They disappeared together behind the red curtain. Amber kept getting her feet mixed up.

  I took a long gulp of the vodka and, feeling its glow inside me, surveyed the room. In addition to Pepper, there were four women working as waitresses, all of them dressed for the first two pages of a Penthouse centerfold. Lingerie was conspicuously in evidence. Most of the girls seemed to be on the shy side, if that's the proper figure of speech, of twenty. Bellies were flat, buttocks were firm. Gravity was still lurking offstage, preening its villain's mustache. Cellulite and stretch marks were as absent as an intellectual at a Ku Klux Klan meeting. Despair was a decade away. At the same time, I felt as though I were watching balloons of bright hope passing through a sewing machine. On the other side of the needle was Amber.

  During the long pause between songs, nobody said a word.

  Then a cash register clanged to introduce Pink Floyd's "Money." The crimson curtain parted, and Amber's skeletal figure wobbled toward the stage with Nana's hand poised supportively in the middle of her back. Amber had taken off the camisole but retained the leopard-skin panties and the elbow-length gloves. Nana wore nothing but a slender gold chain that swaggered its way around her hips, about halfway between her navel and real trouble. She got Amber onto the stage and then, after a moment of concerned surveillance, went to her own. Her black hair, rippling and knotting as though it had a life of its own, cascaded down her back and brushed the dimpled cleft of her buttocks. Nana presented a new standard of nudity, like a third and, as yet, undiscovered sex. If all women looked like that, I thought, there would be no fashion industry.

  Amber teetered precariously in front of me and then, more to keep her balance than for any other reason, abruptly turned her back. I was staring at the backs of her knees, and their delicate tangle of wrinkles and blue veins reminded me of the sturdy, inviolate legs of my first love, who had helped me through the demanding mathematics of third grade. I thought of her name for the first time in twenty years, and for a moment Amber was a child named Lynn Russell.

  And then she turned back to face me, keeping her balance in defiance of all the laws of physics. Perspiration trickled down her face, taking vertical lines of mascara with it. Her elegant gloves had slipped down her arms, and I could see the tracks, red and angry-looking sores, that began on the insides of her elbows and reached almost to her wrists. Junkies often search for veins in the wrong direction. Down instead of up, farther from the heart instead of closer. I was watching a dead woman dance.

  A shrill yell from the other stage cut through the music, and I turned to see the bearded man grabbing at Nana's legs. She was flat on her back on the stage floor, and he was trying to pull her toward him by the ankles. I was out of my chair and halfway there before I realized I was redundant. An avalanche of white descended on the bearded man, and Tiny literally picked him up by the collar of his shirt. The man struck out awkwardly, and Tiny shook him two or three times, like a terrier killing a rat. The man went slack. Tiny flipped him over, slipped an arm under his knees, and, looking like a parody of Rhett carrying Scarlett upstairs, toted him to the front door and through it. Nana, still flat on her back, had managed somehow to move to the next customer. She didn't look particularly disturbed.

  Toby slid into the chair next to me. "Skip it," he said. "No one fools with the girls when Tiny's around. Anyway, Nana's used to it." His voice was controlled, but the muscles around his mouth and eyes were tight. "Having a good time?"

  "I haven't had this much fun since I was circumcised."

  Pink Floyd petered out, and Nana went around the stage collecting her tips. It looked like quite a wad. Amber had collected from no one but Ahmed and me, and now she sat on the edge of her stage and waited for Nana, her eyes closed. Nana took her arm, helped her to stand, and got her into the dressing room.

  Toby drained his glass and signaled for another, holding up two fingers. A different girl, a brunette with spiky hair who looked all of fifteen, took our glasses.

  "Toby," I said, "don't you think this is kind of sad?"

  "Come off it," he said. "It's a job for the girls, and it's a place for the guys to go. Jesus, look at them. Do you think there's anyone here who could ever see a girl like Nana naked without coming to a place like this? Who's getting hurt?"

  The spike haircut showed up with our drinks. Toby reached into his pocket, but the girl waved him off. "It's on Tiny," she said.

  "Whoa, Nellie," Toby said. "This is a first. Wait, darling, this is for you." He gave her a ten and put a hand out to me. "The envelope, please."

  I passed him the coke, and he palmed it and slipped it to the waitress. "Have a blast," he said. "It's pink. Just save some for the other members of the commune."

  As she headed for the ladies' room, the Stones blared from the speakers. Pepper emerged from the dressing room and took the other stage, and Amber, anorexically naked, made the long climb onto ours. At the same time someone pulled out the chair next to me and sat down. I turned to look at Nana.

  "Well, lookie who's here," she twanged. "The hero of Malibu." She was carrying a waitress's tray and wearing a sort of spangled bikini that featured her navel. She had a navel an orange would have written home about.

  "And I thought you were mad at me," Toby said, grinning.

  "Oh, hi, Toby," Nana said. "Are you here?" She turned away from him and looked down at the counter in front of me. "You're tipping Amber twenty bucks? Good for you."

  "No one else looks very enthusiastic," I said. "It seemed like the thing to do."

  "A romantic," Nana said. "The vanishing American."

  "I'm not a romantic?" Toby asked. "Remember Santa Barbara?"

  "Santa Barbara was two months and a couple of punches ago. Oh, I forgot. I'm not talking to you." She glanced up at Amber, who looked like someone who was trying to remember how to dance.

  There was a silence, if you didn't count the music. Toby fooled around with his watch again and tossed back four ounces of vodka. His face was setting into sullen lines that made him look ten years older.

  "Amber?" I said, just to say something. "Why Amber? Amber's not a spice."

  Toby remained silent, taking another pull off his drink.

  "Jeez," Nana said. "There are only so many spices. She didn't want to be called Garlic."


  "What about chamomile?" Toby said, trying to rejoin the conversation. "Or tansy? I've always wondered what tansy was."

  "Chamomile's an herb," I said since Nana showed no sign of replying.

  "Herb, schmerb," Toby said impatiently. "Who cares? As long as you can eat it."

  "Toby just drips class," Nana said to me. "Sometimes we have to mop the floor after he leaves."

  "I came here to say I was sorry," Toby said. "But maybe you two would prefer to be alone."

  "Honest to God, Toby," Nana said, "do you think you can just punch me out and leave me on the floor and then come back and make kissy-face? What do you think I am, a blow-up doll?"

  The Stones faded out as Toby sulked, and Amber crawled around to pick up her tips before going very carefully down the steps and teetering toward the dressing room.

  Nana shook her head, watching her. "Maybe six months," she said to herself. She caught me looking at her. "You can't junk like that and expect to collect an old-age pension."

  "Nana," Toby said as though it cost him an effort. "I'm sorry." He was staring at his lap. "That's why Simeon and I came here. So I could say I was sorry."

  "Sony's a word, Toby. Like caring. Like love, if you'll pardon the expression. When I want words, I'll read a book."

  The girl with the spike haircut put her hand on Toby's shoulder and tucked the coke into his shirt pocket. "Terrific, Toby," she said. "You've made my day. Maybe tomorrow, too."

  "Great, baby," Toby said. He gave her the grin.

  "So your name is Simeon," Nana said, lighting a cigarette and tilting her head up to blow smoke into the air. "I don't think I've ever met anyone named Simeon."

  "Swell," Toby said truculently. "A new name. Maybe you want I should leave with a new girl."

  "Why not two girls?" Nana said, turning on him. "Why not three? Why should you be a cheapskate your whole life?"

  "Fine," Toby said, standing up and pushing his chair back. "See you lovebirds later."