Canary

by Nathan Aldyne

  “It’s all right, Sean,” Valentine said. “Bander and I go back a few years—that’s all. Thanks for the lemonade.”

  “See you at eight,” Clarisse added with a parting smile.

  Once on Commonwealth Avenue again, Clarisse asked Valentine, “What’s the story?”

  “Bander and I go back a long way,” Valentine repeated ruefully. “In fact, Bander goes back a long way with most of the gay men in Boston.”

  “Does he really work for Boston Gas, or was that uniform just a costume?”

  “You know that old fantasy about making it with the man who comes to repair something?” Valentine said. “Well, for several thousand men in Boston, Bander has made that a fantasy come true.”

  “Is that how you met him?”

  Valentine nodded.

  “So why are you on such bad terms now—other than the fact that he’s one’s of the most unpleasant people on the East Coast?”

  “A few years ago Bander went home with a friend of mine named Gary. Gary was into mild bondage and discipline.”

  “Mild bondage?” Clarisse asked skeptically. “Is that like getting tied up with rubber bands?”

  “Just about. He liked to be tied up, but he always made sure he could get out of it in two seconds flat. He also liked to get slapped around, but no marks. It was just fantasy for him. Anyway, he went home with Bander once. They did some sort of drugs, and Gary ended up tied to the kitchen table with a black eye, a broken front tooth, and two cracked ribs. His landlady found him like that the next day.”

  “What did Gary do? Did he press charges?”

  “No. But one night he did confront Bander in the Ramrod. Bander just said, ‘Hey, man, that’s what you said you were into. And when you kept saying, “No, no, stop,” I figured that was just part of the scene.’”

  “That’s a pretty rotten attitude,” Clarisse said quietly.

  “That’s Bander all over,” Valentine said.

  They turned up Berkeley Street in the direction of the South End and walked on in silence.

  Chapter Nine

  ALTHOUGH VARIOUS POLITICAL organizations were sponsoring events on the evening of Gay Pride Day, it was the talent show mounted by Slate that attracted the largest crowd of the evening. The $350 prize for the night’s best act, to be determined by audience applause, had proved to be a wise crowd-drawing strategy on Valentine’s part.

  In the back area of the bar a small dais had been constructed before a red velvet curtain across the back wall. Behind this were concealed doors to the small kitchen and the ladies’ room, both areas being used as changing rooms for the various performers. Sean had persuaded two friends who were theatrical lighting technicians to donate their talents and equipment for the evening. A small portable stereo unit was set up to one side of the staging to accommodate those performers who’d brought their own music on records and cassette tapes. A woman friend of Niobe’s, who went by the name Regular Ethel, was stationed by the machine to make sure the right recordings were played at the right times. She was a sharp-featured young woman who wore a red sequined strapless minidress, black hose, and black heels. Her black hair formed a helmet about her head. She chewed gum and cracked it to irritating effect.

  By a quarter to ten Slate was filled to capacity. A number of performers in the show, some of them already in costume, mingled with their friends or leaned against the bar, conspicuously downing complimentary drinks. Rock music filled the barroom. Overhead the fans whirled, lazily stirring the artificially cooled, smoky air. Niobe had left at six o’clock in such haste that she had forgotten to take her pet canary. Someone had tied Rodan’s cage to one of the blades. Squawking continuously and littering the air with tiny tufts of yellow feather, the bird was still going around and around in slow, dizzying circles.

  At five minutes to the hour, Clarisse swept down the connecting spiral stairs into the empty coat-check room. She edged her way up to the bar as Valentine was returning with change for a customer. He stopped short, spilled the coins into the customer’s outstretched hand, and exclaimed, “Tell me that’s not a permanent.”

  A puff of curls framed Clarisse’s forehead, held in place by a white-on-maroon polka-dot silk scarf tied up into a bow atop her head. Her bolero-sleeved blouse was of cream-colored rayon. She wore a pair of maroon satin toreador pants and gold lamé sling-back sandals. Gold hoops dangling from her earlobes completed the outfit.

  Clarisse leaned sideways to check her image in the bar mirror. “It’s my Lucille Ball Cold War look. Like it?”

  “You want a drink before you assume your stage duties?” Valentine replied, not quite answering her question. “If you don’t need one, I think I do.”

  Clarisse looked at the clock. “Send one over to the stage. I have to get things rolling in a few minutes.”

  A tall wan man wearing a blond bubble-cut wig and a pink organdy prom gown with spaghetti straps thrust himself up to the bar next to Clarisse and addressed Valentine. “Is this the place where they’re holding the cotillion? I’ve been to Chaps, Buddies, and Fritz, but nobody knows where the cotillion’s being held. I know there’s a cotillion going on somewhere!”

  “We’re having a talent show here,” Clarisse offered.

  “Jacques,” Valentine explained. “Over in Bay Village. They’re having a cotillion tonight.”

  Clarisse started to say something, but the man exploded into a flurry of movement, pummeling customers right and left as he flounced out toward the street.

  Clarisse looked at Valentine with a tight smile. “Jacques is not having a cotillion tonight, as you very well know. Jacques is featuring Competition Transsexual Mud Wrestling. Not many contestants, but the ones they have are really into it.”

  Valentine shrugged. “Same thing in my book.” Valentine pointed to the bar clock. “Show time. Break your neck.”

  “That’s leg.”

  Clarisse made her way to the back of the bar. Regular Ethel handed her a wireless microphone and turned on the stereo as Clarisse stepped up to the edge of the stage. Clarisse nodded to Sean, and he snapped off the house music just as Regular Ethel dropped the stereo arm onto a record.

  Clarisse quickly straightened her blouse and flashed a bright smile. The bar’s lights were lowered, and a spotlight winked on, wavered a few moments, and then snagged on center stage. Clarisse strode across the dais, hitting the spot just as a recording of “Rabid Killer Mama” blasted from the overhead speakers wired into Regular Ethel’s stereo.

  Clarisse turned on the woman with a glare. “Ethel,” she shouted above the music, “that is not my theme music!”

  Ethel swiped the needle off the record. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” she called out, and frantically flipped through the stack of albums beside her stool, madly snapping her chewing gum.

  “Never mind now,” Clarisse told her with a patient sigh, and turned to the audience. “Obviously,” she said, her voice suddenly amplified by the microphone that had just been turned on, “that was not ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business.’”

  “It was the Slug Dogs,” came Ethel’s voice, tinny and distant and unamplified.

  “Thank you, Ethel.”

  “Anytime, anytime.”

  “I’m Clarisse Lovelace, and this is Gay Pride Day—and you’re all in Slate, I presume, because you’re all expecting to be knocked right down to the floor with the talent that’s going to be presented up here tonight for your consideration, your edification, and your incredible enjoyment. It’s a lineup you haven’t seen before—I can guarantee you that. You’re going to see talent you didn’t even know existed. People dug in the backs of the backs of their closets for these costumes, let me tell you. People took mail-order correspondence courses, people saw the Streisand A Star Is Born fifteen times just to get the gestures right, people made last-minute visits to their chiropractors, people have gone to just an astounding amount of trouble to make you happy tonight. So I am expecting audience response—has everybody got that? And got it g
ood? I want the needle on the Applause-O-Meter to go right off the scale!”

  The audience applauded riotously.

  Clarisse smiled. “Then let’s get this show on the road! Our first act is Joey Manzarello and Fifi Mandelbaum! Let’s give Joey and Fifi a big hand.”

  Applause rose and then petered out when Clarisse melted away and Joey and Fifi came on. Joey was a skinny, peroxided young man who brought a twelve-string guitar and a stool with him. He dropped the stool center stage and wriggled up onto it. Fifi was a small and dark woman with curly black hair and wore a loose coral smock over a pair of tight designer jeans. She carried another stool out with her. Arranging it slightly behind her partner’s, she sat down and gave Regular Ethel the cue. Regular Ethel dropped the needle down on a record. Neil Sedaka’s voice spilled out of the speakers, singing about unrequited love. Joey pretended to be playing the guitar as he lip-synced the words of the ballad. Just behind him, Fifi interpreted the lyrics in sign language as she swayed dreamily to the rhythm of the music.

  The audience was silent—out of astonishment, Clarisse suspected, more than out of admiration.

  The applause at the end was polite but uncertain.

  The second act was a tall, thin man who would give his name only as “Dallas Ralph.” Dallas Ralph was dressed as Dale Evans. He tap-danced and jumped rope at the same time to a lively recording of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” From the back of the bar a drunken man shouted, “My God, it’s a dancing asshole!” but the rest of the audience was more appreciative. Dallas Ralph received generous applause when he finished, and the only boos were from Joey Manzarello and Fifi Mandelbaum, who were now upset that they had had to go on first.

  The remainder of the first half of the talent show consisted of a man in a doctor’s uniform reading aloud from the Fleet Company’s essay “A History of the Enema”; an inebriated drag queen who passed out facedown on the stage halfway through a lip sync of “There Is Nothing Like a Dame”; two women, dressed as men, dramatizing a scene from John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire ; a frail young woman with black hair who sang a medley of Janis Joplin tunes as if they’d been written by Joni Mitchell; a standup comic who conducted an “on the street” interview with a plaster chicken; a man dressed in a sari and carrying a bottle of Heinz catsup who reenacted the assassination of Indira Gandhi, with Regular Ethel playing recorded machine-gun fire; three men, disguised as the Gabor sisters, singing “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy” with Hungarian accents; a female singer who did a throaty imitation of Billie Holiday; and a man costumed as Queen Elizabeth II who yodeled “God Save the Queen” and then sang the words in French.

  Clarisse announced the final act of the first half: “A new country-and-western band from Springfield called Patty LaParty and the Joy Boys.” The audience clapped in expectation but was obviously disappointed when a single guitar player shambled out on stage, plugged his instrument into the amplifier, and began tuning. But after a few moments a mustached man wearing a Loretta Lynn wig, a denim skirt, and a sequined blouse trounced up on stage, saying, “Hi, I’m Patty LaParty, and this is my Joy Boy. My first song goes out tonight to my ex-husband, Hank, and if he’s in the audience— and probably he is—then it’s all for him.” Patty LaParty had not gotten five bars into the song when the real Patty LaParty lurched up on stage—this Patty was a genuine female. She tore off the man’s wig and skirt, grabbed the microphone, and said, “Hi, I’m Patty LaParty, and these are the Joy Boys. My first song goes out tonight to my ex-husband, Hank, and if he’s in the audience—and probably he is—then it’s all for him.” At which point, the ex-husband, Hank—in chaps and cowboy hat and lasso—swung up on stage and joined his ex-wife. They sang of “A Book in a Plain Brown Wrapper” that had broken up their marriage.

  The audience demanded a second song. Patty LaParty, the Joy Boys, and Hank did a four-part a cappella rendition of “O Holy Night” while their bass guitar showered them with handfuls of glitter like snow. When the quartet reached the chorus, “Fall on your knees,” they actually fell to their knees, on small sequined pillows they had held concealed behind them.

  At the bar, Valentine and Sean had stopped serving drinks—simply because everyone in the room had crowded forward to watch Patty LaParty and the Joy Boys. It was a few minutes in which to clear away the accumulated glasses and bottles.

  A banging noise came loud and demanding to Valentine’s left. He looked down toward the front of the room and saw Bander in his Boston Gas overalls at the end of the bar near the entrance. He was staring directly at Valentine. He let go of an empty beer bottle, and it rattled on the mahogany surface of the bar.

  Valentine nudged Sean and arched his head in Bander’s direction. “The gas bag is here to see you.”

  Sean looked down at the bar, then back to the stage. “No, he’s not,” Sean said pointedly. “We had an argument this afternoon right after you and Clarisse left my place. You’re right; he’s a jerk.”

  Sean moved away to wait on a customer who was signaling to him. Valentine went down to the opposite end of the bar.

  “Sean doesn’t want to talk to you,” Valentine told Bander.

  “I don’t want to talk to him, either. I’m here on official business.” He flicked a finger against the Boston Gas logo sewn on his overalls.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Somebody here called repair. Said there was the smell of gas in an apartment upstairs. Second floor. I’m here to check it out.”

  Valentine looked doubtful. “Who called? I didn’t, and neither did Sean, and Clarisse didn’t say anything.”

  “I don’t know who it was,” Bander said. “If you don’t believe me, call repair yourself and check it out.”

  Valentine glanced behind him toward the stage. He could see no more of Clarisse than the top of her polka-dot scarf. “Maybe it was Clarisse,” he speculated, “and she forgot to tell me with all the excitement tonight.”

  “So, what’ll it be—I check it, or you risk blowing this place straight to hell?”

  At that moment applause erupted for the country-and-western group and the end of the first half of the show. Still clapping, the audience swerved around toward the bar, half of them already reaching out with bills clutched in their hands.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Valentine said with a sigh, “here they come.”

  “I need your keys,” Bander insisted.

  Valentine yanked them from a back pocket and tossed them to the repairman. “Outside and up through the stairwell entrance,” he ordered as he rushed down the bar to meet the oncoming tide.

  “What did he want?” Sean asked as he flicked on the tape machine. But the sudden music was so loud and the demands of the customers were so frantic that Valentine didn’t have a chance to reply. A few minutes later, when Clarisse finally worked her way up to the bar, asking for a bottle of Chivas Regal and a straw, the incident had gone right out of Valentine’s head.

  Clarisse spent the break in consultation with Regular Ethel, making certain that all the music was correctly marked and put in the needed order. The second half of the show was to be shorter in case the crowd was growing inattentive. After she was satisfied that Regular Ethel had a grip on the situation, Clarisse edged into the ladies’ room to talk to the second-act performers who were struggling into costume and makeup. As soon as she had prepared everyone, she hurried back to the bar and downed another scotch. As she was trying to make up her mind whether or not to have another, the lights lowered.

  Clarisse threaded her way back to the stage. She had one foot already on the dais and was about to step up on it when someone in the crowd jostled her and she fell backward. But not to the floor—hands caught her.

  “Thank you,” she was about to say, but didn’t. For the hands that had caught her did not let go, nor did they help then to raise her to the stage. The hands—and there were a number of them—were exploratory.

  She looked about sharply.

  It was a woman who had caught her around the
waist. B.J.—the initials flashed in Clarisse’s mind. The two men were there, too. Ruder and Cruder, on either side, and they had her arms.

  “Nice,” B.J. said, massaging Clarisse’s back, “like a strong, young boy.”

  “Good muscle tone,” Cruder said as he rubbed two fingers smoothly along the inside of her elbow.

  “Yeah,” Ruder agreed as he prodded underneath her arm.

  “Would you like to see my teeth?” demanded Clarisse, pulling away from all three at once. “They’re good, too.”

  Ruder looked at her, and one of the amber stage lights flashed in the lenses of his silvered dark glasses. “This better be a good show,” he said in a surprisingly resonant voice.

  “Yeah,” Cruder added, “this better be a barrel of fucking laughs.”

  Clarisse turned from them sharply and climbed up on stage. She turned around with a broad smile. “I know you’re all—”

  Regular Ethel slammed a finger onto the tape play button of the tape deck. Kate Smith singing “God Bless America” filled the barroom.

  “Not yet!” Clarisse screamed.

  Kate Smith shut up.

  “Oh, God,” cried Regular Ethel, “you are confusing me totally!”

  Clarisse closed her eyes for a moment and smiled a temporizing smile. It didn’t help that B.J. and her two boyfriends in black leather were standing right at the foot of the stage, staring up at her and whispering. Clarisse looked over their heads.

  “Let’s give a hand to Regular Ethel, who’s trying very hard!”

  There was applause, and during that applause Clarisse recovered herself.

  “Now, for the first act of this second half of the show, I would like everyone to give a great big hand to—”

  The curtain at the back of the stage opened dramatically, and in the darkness there was a glimmering suggestion of a figure.

  “Now Ethel,” hissed Clarisse.

  Kate Smith came back on in the third bar of “God Bless America.”