After their turns in the spotlight, the women demurely donned lingerie before mingling with the customers. Buy one a twelve-dollar mixed drink and she’d sit with you and place your hand on her thigh. For fifty dollars, she’d lead you to a booth, remove her top, ask you to sit on your hands, and give you a lap dance that would last the length of a single song. Private rooms lined the back wall, and when I poked my head into an empty one, I found it was more enticing than the semen-stained sewer Whoosh had described.
“Your first time here?” one of the bartenders asked as I settled onto a stool to peruse the beer menu.
“It is.”
“Like to know how it works?”
“I would.”
“Two hundred gets you a half bottle of champagne and fifteen minutes in a private VIP room with one of the girls. For four hundred, you get a magnum and a half hour. The girls aren’t allowed to hustle you. You have to approach them. Don’t be offended if one of them turns you down. Not all of them are full-service girls. Some of them just dance for tips.”
Last night I’d hit the second club, Rogue Island, and found the door blocked by six pickets from the Sword of God, a local group of right-wing religious zealots. They brandished hand-lettered picket signs proclaiming “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery,” “Hades Is for Whoremongers,” and “God Hates Fornicators.” A pair of bouncers roughly shoved them aside and ushered me in. As the door banged closed behind me, I could hear them out there, howling about hellfire and immortal souls.
Inside, I paid the ten-dollar cover charge and took a stool at the bar. A few discreet inquiries determined that most of the girls were locals—single moms trying to make a living and college girls hustling for tuition. The bartenders served a good variety of decent bottled beer. The customers wore Dockers and button-down shirts, and it was apparent that some were regulars. The girls welcomed them by name, giving them the same greeting Norm used to get when he waddled through the door at Cheers.
The girls performed naked on a single stage, swinging from stripper poles and thrusting their hips in crude imitation of the sex act. The bills tucked into garters here were mostly fives. When their fifteen-minute sets ended, the girls pulled on G-strings and skimpy bras to mingle with the customers. Topless lap dances were thirty dollars, two for the price of one before five P.M. A Franklin bought a blow job in a dark booth, or for a hundred and fifty dollars you could take the girl of your choice to one of those private rooms Whoosh described and do whatever you wanted for fifteen minutes.
I was sitting alone at a cocktail table with a good view of the stage when a slim brunette beauty approached and said, “Hi, Mulligan. Need another beer?”
“Marie? Don’t tell me you’re working here.”
“Don’t go all Oral Roberts on me. I just waitress.”
“Nice outfit,” I said. Her body stocking fit like a condom.
Marie used to wait tables at Hopes, and last year I took her to bed a couple of times, but it didn’t lead anywhere. She was looking for a guy to raise a family. I told her to keep looking.
“Tips good here?”
“Very.”
“But not as good as if you were stripping.”
“Of course not,” she said, and sat down at my table.
“What kind of money do the strippers make?”
“The hookers, you mean?”
“Well, yeah.”
“On a good night, the best girls take home a grand or so after expenses.”
“Expenses?”
“Yeah.”
“What expenses?”
“They have to pay a hundred fifty a night to dance here.”
“The girls pay the club? The club doesn’t pay them?”
“Uh-huh. Candy, who used to strip at Shakehouse until she put on a few pounds, says it’s three hundred a night there, but the hottest girls can make five or six grand on a big weekend.”
“Any other expenses?”
“The girls pay the house twenty dollars every time they take a customer into a private room, and they’re expected to tip the bouncers at the end of the night. Sometimes the bouncers take it out in trade, if you know what I mean.”
“I do.”
“On the plus side, the club buys condoms by the gross and provides them to the girls for free.”
“Condoms?” I said. “The Maniellas are Catholic. They’ll be saying Hail Marys till Easter if Pope Benedict finds out about this.”
I had more questions, but the bartender bellowed from behind the bar, “Socialize on your own time, Marie. Orders are stacking up here.”
“Gotta go,” she said. “I’ll bring you back a fresh beer on the house.” A few minutes later, she did.
Tonight at the Tongue and Groove, admission was free. A lone bartender served two brands of beer, Bud and Bud Light. The customers wore jeans and T-shirts with Boston Bruins and New England Patriots logos on them. Most of the girls were fresh off the boat from Haiti, Russia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic. They wore nothing but G-strings and smiles as they strolled among the cocktail tables to tempt the customers.
Garter tips were one-dollar bills here. Lap dances ran twenty bucks a pop, blow jobs were forty dollars, and for a hundred you could drag a girl into a private booth and make whoopie for twenty minutes. On a slow night like tonight, you could get two girls for the price of one.
Vanessa Maniella had built bordellos to suit every Rhode Island wallet. At each club, I asked for her and was politely informed that she was unavailable. When I asked if anyone had seen Sal lately, I drew icy stares.
I was standing now in the doorway of the Tongue and Groove’s “all-nude room,” waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. By the time 50 Cent stopped rapping, I could just make out the rows of cocktail tables, all of them empty. I chose one by the back wall and took a seat. It was shift-change time onstage. The girl who’d received the dollar tip slid down onto the lap of her benefactor and whispered in his ear. Then she dismounted, took him by the hand, and led him toward a row of private cubicles that lined the wall to my left.
The other girl pranced naked down the stage stairs and scanned the room for prey. I could barely see her when she moved out of the light, but I sensed she was heading my way. Two new girls strutted onto the stage on long legs made longer by fuck-me heels. You couldn’t call them strippers because they didn’t have anything to peel off.
“Bonsoir, beebe. Waz you name?”
“Mulligan. What’s yours?”
“Destiny,” she said, but it came out more like “DEZ-tin-ee.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “That’s what all the Haitian mamas are naming their babies these days.”
That made her giggle, and I noticed for the first time how young and pretty she was. She was still giggling when she wrapped her arms around my neck.
“Buy me a drink and mebbe I tell you my real name.”
I pulled a twenty off the small roll of bills in my jeans, handed it to her, and asked her to bring me back a Bud. She snatched it and swung her hips as she walked to a little bar that I hadn’t realized was there. When she returned with our drinks, she didn’t give me change. I used my foot to push a chair away from the table for her, but she straddled my lap and pressed her small breasts against my neck.
“Marical,” she said. “My name ees Marical.”
“How old are you, Marical?”
“Ay-teen.”
The same age as Teresa, the clerk at Zerilli’s store, if she was telling the truth. I’d been trying to figure out what to do with my hands. I placed them now around her narrow waist.
“I show you a good time, beebe. Eef you get wit me, I make you world go round like craysee.”
She moved her crotch in a circle against the front of my jeans, and I felt myself stiffen. Paul Simon’s line from “The Boxer” popped into my head: “There were times when I was so lonesome I took some comfort there.” But I’d never paid for something I could get for free, and I was too poor to start now.
“I got big love f
or you, beebe. I do you half price.”
I shook my head no, and her shoulders slumped.
“Tonight I make no moany.”
“Slow night.”
“Slow, yes. The weekend be better, I hope so.”
She twisted away from me, and I thought she was getting up to go. Instead, she reached behind her, plucked our drinks from the table, and handed me my bottle of Bud.
“How long have you been in Providence, Marical?”
“Tree muntz.”
“Do you like it here?”
“Better than Haiti. I have no work dere.”
“What do you have to pay to dance here?”
“I pay one hundred dollas a night. Tonight so far I loose moany.”
Marical set her drink back on the table and ran her fingers through my hair, working on my sales resistance. She flicked open the buttons of my Dustin Pedroia Red Sox game jersey. Then she draped her arms around my neck, pressed her breasts against my bare chest, and humped the front of my jeans. That had to be worth something. I peeled off a five and slipped it in her garter. My hand had a mind of its own. It lingered on her inner thigh.
“I know you want me, beebe.” And that was no lie.
She took my hands in hers, placed them on her ass, and humped some more.
That’s when two guys shouldered through the door. I pegged them for college students—Providence College, maybe, or URI. They stood there until their eyes adjusted to the dark and then took seats at a table near the stage to study the action. Marical twisted around in my lap to look them over, then turned back to me.
“Love you, beebe, but I go to work now. Come see DEZ-tin-ee again when you have some moany, okay?”
She got up from my lap and walked toward the college boys, swinging her hips again as she went. She sat down at their table, and for a minute or two I listened to them laugh. Then I watched her bounce up, take them both by their hands, and lead them into one of the private rooms.
I wanted to kick the door in, pull her out of there, and take her away from all this. But I didn’t.
* * *
Later I was sitting on a barstool downstairs, sipping another Bud and feeling vaguely guilty, when the bartender turned up the house lights and announced closing time with a twist on an old familiar refrain: “Time to go, dudes. You don’t have to fuck at home, but you can’t fuck here.”
That’s when I got a good look at one of the bouncers. His eyes were small and pale blue. His hair was the color of wet sand. At six feet three, he was my height but wider at his bulging shoulders, his torso tapering to a slightly pudgy waist. He looked familiar, but I couldn’t come up with a name. He saw me, too, and headed my way as I drained my bottle and clunked it on the bar.
“Hey, Mulligan. Ain’t seen you in a while.”
The high, gravelly voice gave him away.
“Hi, Joseph.” I hadn’t seen Joseph DeLucca since his house burned down during the arson spree in Mount Hope last year. “How’d you lose all the weight?”
“Cut my fuckin’ drinkin’ to two six-packs a week. Gave up doughnuts and pizza. Stopped chuggin’ Coffee-mate from the bottle at breakfast.”
“You drank Coffee-mate from the bottle?”
“It’s fuckin’ good, Mulligan. Oughta try it sometime.”
“Looks like you’ve been working out, too.”
“Most every day, yeah. Vinny Pazienza lets me use his private gym. Love pounding the heavy bag, man. Vinny says I got fuckin’ talent. Started sooner and I mighta gone pro.”
You lost, what, fifty, sixty pounds?”
“Closer to a hundred.”
“Good for you, Joseph. So how long you been working here?”
“Since June. First time I had steady work in more’n three years.”
The bartender wandered over and tapped Joseph’s swollen, pasty forearm. “Friend of yours?” he asked.
“Yeah. Give us a couple of brews, Sonny.”
“Sure thing,” he said. He drew two Buds from the ice chest, popped the tops, and slid the bottles onto the bar. “Take your time. It’ll take me a half hour to clean up.”
I pulled a roll of Tums from my pocket, peeled off a couple, chewed them to calm my stomach, and chased them with beer.
“So whatcha doing here, Mulligan?” Joseph said. “Guy like you oughta be able to get his pussy for free. Never figured you for a John.”
“I’m not. I’m workin.’”
“Saw you upstairs with Destiny on your lap. Nice work if you can get it.”
“The Dispatch doesn’t pay much,” I said, “but the job does have fringe benefits.”
“Mine, too. I watch out for the girls, make sure nobody gives ’em a hard time. And they take care of me.”
“Complimentary blow jobs?”
“Complimentary means free?”
“It does.”
“Then yeah, every fuckin’ night.”
“Do customers give the girls a hard time often?”
“Nah. Most of ’em know better. But every now and then, one of them South Providence pimps comes bopping in and tries to squeeze the girls for a cut. Miss Maniella don’t allow that. Says the girls got a right to keep what they make.”
“Good for her.”
“Last month King Felix came in. Heard of him?”
“We’ve met.” In fact, Felix and I went way back.
“Couple of the girls, Sacha and Karma, used to be in his stable. He seemed to think they still were.”
“What’d you do?”
“Told him he was mistaken.”
“How’d that work out?”
“Asshole went for a little silver pistol stuck in his waistband, so I took it away from him. Always heard he was a tough guy, but when I grabbed him by his fuckin’ dreads and dragged him outside, he screamed like a little girl.”
“Knock him around a little, did you?”
“Nothin’ major. Smashed his nose. Cracked a few ribs. When I was done, I told him to go back out on the street and spread the word. Then I tossed the fucker in the Dumpster.”
Joseph picked up his Bud and drained half the bottle in a swallow. The bartender wandered back our way and mopped a wet spot with his bar rag.
“You ain’t told me what you’re workin’ on,” Joseph said.
“I’m looking for Vanessa Maniella. Seen her around lately?”
He frowned, and his blue eyes turned to slits. “I don’t want to read my name in your fuckin’ paper.”
“Okay.”
“’Cause if I do, I’ll kick your ass.”
“Understood.”
The bartender was still mopping that same spot. Maybe he was eavesdropping. Maybe he was just being thorough.
“Ain’t seen Miss Maniella in weeks,” Joseph said. “She’s got people what run the place for her. She don’t come in much.”
“How about her father?”
“Ain’t never seen him in here.”
“Think he’s dead?”
“All I know about that is what you put in your fuckin’ paper.”
“No scuttlebutt about it around the club?”
“Scuttlebutt?”
“Gossip.”
“Nah. Nobody here knows a fuckin’ thing.”
“That beating you gave King Felix. You said it was last month?”
“Yeah.”
“Before or after the shooting on the Cliff Walk?”
He took a moment to think about it. “’Bout a week before.”
“Think he was mad enough about it to go gunning for Sal?”
“Wouldn’t have been in any condition to go after anybody,” Joseph said.
“He could have sent one of his peeps.”
“King Felix is a fuckin’ moron,” Joseph said. “I doubt he even knows who Sal is. And the retards who work for him? They wouldn’t be able to find Newport on a map. Besides, if they had the balls to come after somebody, it would have been me.”
“They still might,” I said, “so watch your back.”
9
That night I logged on to iTunes and built a new thirty-song playlist: “Love for Sale” by Ella Fitzgerald, “Teen-Age Prostitute” by Frank Zappa, “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, “Roxanne” by the Police, “Call Me” by Blondie, “What Do You Do for Money Honey” by AC/DC, “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle, “The Fire Down Below” by Bob Seger, “Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” by Tom Waits, and a bunch more.
Musically, the sound track for my latest obsession was a mixed bag. My favorite was “867-5309/Jenny,” by Tommy Tutone, who screeched about finding the number written on a wall—“for a good time, call.” When the song hit the top of the charts back in 1982, pranksters all over the country called the number and asked for Jenny. I’d dialed it a few times myself, when my kid sister wasn’t hogging the phone, and reached a humorless functionary at Brown University. Brown, like scores of other annoyed phone company customers, responded to the onslaught by changing phone numbers.
Next morning, I sat at the counter at my favorite Providence diner and skimmed the Dispatch’s sports section while sipping coffee from a chipped ceramic mug. Jerod Mayo, Matt Light, and Wes Welker were all doubtful for the Patriots’ game on Sunday, making me regret the latest bet I’d phoned in to Zerilli.
Charlie, the short-order cook who also owned the place, bent over the grill and cracked eggs for my breakfast. Somebody’s pancakes looked about ready. Beside them, strips of bacon popped and sizzled.
I flipped to the front page and saw that Fiona was back in the news, calling the governor a whoremaster because he wouldn’t back her antiprostitution bill. Blackjack Baldelli and Knuckles Grieco, the two lunkheads who ran the Providence Highway Department, also made page one. A jury had convicted both of grand larceny, conspiracy, and income tax evasion for buying fifty thousand dollars’ worth of manhole covers with city money, reselling them to a scrap dealer for fourteen thousand, and pocketing the cash. Two members of the Sword of God had been arrested for throwing rocks through the windows of the Planned Parenthood clinic on Point Street. And the Rhode Island unemployment rate had reached almost 12 percent, second highest in the nation after Michigan.
Charlie turned toward the counter to top off my coffee and noticed the headline on the unemployment story. “Damn,” he said. “Why can’t we ever be number one at anything?”
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