Cat in an Aqua Storm

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Lindy wanted to pay the cabdriver, but Ruth wouldn’t hear of it. They spent a couple of minutes dividing the tab three ways, and Temple needed a receipt. The cabdriver was shaking his head and counting change by the time he watched them pussyfoot toward Kitty City.

  Only a few vehicles dotted the asphalt parking lot—pickup trucks, a van or two, older coupes with their vinyl tops sun-blistered to a leprous peeling skin the color of a rusted orange.

  Even from outside, Temple heard the brutal bass thump-thump-thump of a sound system at full throttle.

  A canvas awning over the door featured a cat’s-eye graphic up front. The leering, green-eyed black feline face had none of Midnight Louie’s dignified intelligence, Temple thought somewhat smugly.

  In the awning’s shade, Lindy pulled open a heavy, coffered door and moved into a blast of icy darkness throbbing with ear-piercing rock music.

  Temple and Ruth followed, then stopped in the disorienting dimness, glimpsing clumped tables, the silver sheen of the obligatory slot machines and the glitter of a bar.

  “It’s midday,” Lindy shouted. “Not too many customers. Come on.”

  Leaning into the chill interior dusk and the wave of noise as if facing a north wind, Temple and Ruth followed Lindy to the relative haven of a table and chairs.

  Temple exchanged her sunglasses for her regular glasses. As her vision adapted, she began to make out slim pale figures moving rhythmically in the darkness. One pranced on a low stage some twenty-five feet away, shadowed by her reflection in a semicircle of mirror behind her. Another was writhing around a chrome pole on the bar. Yet another danced on an empty table in the middle of the large room.

  The scene reminded Temple of an Old Master’s evocation of a Renaissance Hell, especially when she inhaled and drew in the scent of stale smoke.

  Gradually the room and its few inhabitants came into focus: men seated alone or in pairs at the scattered tables, and a glass-enclosed DJ’s booth above and left of the main, mirrored stage. True to the emblazoned but pallid TOPLESS! on the exterior sign, bare-breasted maidens writhed to the mind-numbing music on the various stages while a Big Mama of a giant-screen TV flickered images from a Western at the main stage’s right side.

  A waitress wearing a long-sleeved French-cut black leotard whose bottom barely covered hers appeared from the dimness. A perky pair of cat—bat?—ears topped her brown shoulder-length hair. She had the fresh-faced appeal of a girl in a Clearasil TV ad after the medication had worked.

  “Anything for you ladies to drink?”

  Lindy ordered a screwdriver, Ruth passed, and Temple asked for a white wine spritzer, hoping that a wine buzz would help drown out the high-decibel rock music, not that one drink would do the job.

  The dancers undulated in their own little worlds, cocooned in overpowering music. Some wore—shades of the long-gone sixties—white patent-leather boots. Others black high heels. Their G-strings were glitzy versions of thong-back bikini bottoms.

  Temple didn’t know what your average red-blooded male mused upon when viewing this skimpy item of undress. She always wondered what kind of depilatory aid such scraps required, and how often. Did the women wax, pluck, shave, or simply napalm any offending body hair away?

  After the waitress returned with the drinks, Temple insisted on paying for hers—and nearly choked to find out it cost six dollars. The wages of sinning, she guessed.

  She was beginning to recognize patterns in the women’s movements—not the tried-and-true burlesque bump-and-grind announced by an emphatic drum roll, but a fluid undulation half belly dance and half sexual pantomime. Pelvises swiveled clockwise and counterclockwise. Arms lifted to show off torsos doing likewise. Bare breasts, less imposing than she had expected, pulsed like gentle molds of Jell-O to the motions.

  It didn’t do a thing for her. She checked out the men at the other tables. It didn’t seem to be doing much for them either. They sipped long-neck beers and lowballs, watching quietly. God knows that there was no point in talking against the pounding music.

  Then the big front door opened, splashing in an oblong of blinding sunlight and a bristle of silhouettes. Five new paying customers felt their way into the dark.

  These guys headed straight for the stage and sat down. Temple saw now that the stage was ringed with a slightly raised lip and chairs, and that the room’s other small dancing areas were merely tables with the centerpiece of a living, dancing doll.

  On the main stage, the dancer had turned to offer her audience a rear view while she dreamily watched her mirror image brush the back of one hand over forehead and hair, run the other down her breast and hip. An air-conditioning vent in the floor lifted the hair at her nape, fluttered the flimsy scraps of fabric covering her G-string.

  Next to Temple, Ruth stirred uneasily.

  As the dancer exited without turning through a shaggy curtain of aluminum fringe, the DJ’s voice—a big, booming, carnival-barker kind of voice—blared out over the slightly muted music.

  “Now, gentlemen and ladies”—Ruth and Temple cringed in tandem to realize that their table hosted the only women in the place beside the strippers—“a special treat. Please welcome the delectable Dulcey!”

  As his words died the recorded music revved up to eardrum-bursting intensity. “Wild Thing.”

  A thin red beam of light lanced the entrance area, while the silver streamers shimmied as if shaken by an irresistible force. Then a woman sashayed through. She wore thigh-high black leather boots and a black-and-white zebra-striped spandex dress cut low across the shoulders, high across the derriere, and sparkling with random rhinestones. Her hair was a bleached platinum fountain exploding from a clip at the crown of her head. Black-and-white zigzags of opalescent and black glitter shadowed her eyes.

  The lights shifted, painting the white stripes an unearthly blue-white. Temple glanced above the stage to a black-painted ceiling mounted with fluorescent light fixtures holding bright purple bulbs—the ultraviolet lights that painted what was already exotic with another layer of intensified artifice.

  This lady moved. No languid, sensual sways for her. She strutted, she swung her assets fore and aft, she ground her shoulders and her hips in every direction on the compass, each movement threatening to dislodge the dress’s tenuous cling to her torso.

  Ultimately, however, she actually had to shimmy out of it, which she accomplished by turning her back and peeling it off inch by inch, facing the audience only when some great revelation had been accomplished. Given the shortness of the garment, this didn’t take long.

  The zebra dress crumpled to the floor, ignored, while she strutted around the perimeter in her rhinestone-strewn white thong-back bikini bottom, jumping up on the foot-wide serving area, then pouncing back on the stage and casting herself onto the dark floor in contortionist positions.

  Temple heard an old-time barker’s singsong spiel unwinding in her head: Ladies and gentlemen, she slinks, she shimmies, she crawls upon her belly like a snake, she bends like a bow and thrusts back her head and her leg until one black spike heel meets her white-lightning hair. She does the splits six ways from Sunday and ten ways that wouldn’t be legal the other six days of the week, either. She—

  But Z-bra Woman wasn’t the main performer now. A man at the stageside seats jumped up and lay grinning on his back atop the stage rim. A small cylinder protruded from his mouth like a periscope.

  Ruth leaned closer until she could shout into Temple’s ear. “Is that a cigarette?”

  Temple pushed her glasses’ bridge tight to her nose. About as long as a cigarette, about as thick as a cigarette, but...

  The smiling dancer noticed the man, came over, straddled his head with her Wicked Wanda boots. She began gyrating her hips and twisting downward.

  “No,” Temple shouted back. “It’s a rolled-up bill.”

  “A what?” Ruth screamed.

  The dancer’s bending knees brought her pelvis lower and lower, bit by bit.

  “A bill
. Money,” Temple screamed back.

  “That’s disgusting!” Ruth shrieked in turn.

  Temple watched, running various possibilities through her head. She was relieved when the dancer dropped to the floor behind the man and slowly extracted the bill from his mouth with her teeth.

  “Not sanitary,” Temple agreed at the top of her lungs.

  Ruth gave her an incredulous look.

  The woman tucked the rolled-up bill in the side of her G-string, then repeated the performance with another man who had cast himself faceup on the stage, “smoking” a greenback. Temple contemplated the likely denomination of those bills—ones? Too cheap. Fives, maybe. Tens, twenties? Irrelevant curiosity often distracted her from maintaining a strong moral posture at all times.

  As for taking strong postures, period, the dancer had faced the mirrors, dropped down on her hands and stretched out her legs to demonstrate an exercise that Temple had viewed intimately many times in aerobics class. The men seemed to find it vastly more interesting than she did, especially when it was performed without benefit of leotard and tights. A man from an outlying table had come quietly to stand before the stage. Temple didn’t notice him until the performer did. She must have been watching something else.

  Smiling, the dancer moved to his position, pulled up her pale hair with both hands, and began to gyrate her significant parts in a sort of presentation package. Since the stage was only at table level, her athletic ability to move up and down gave the expression “in your face” a whole new dimension.

  Then the dancer dropped down to sit on the stage rim, putting her arms around her one-man audience’s shoulders, whispering in his ear, lifting the G-string over her hip almost coyly, allowing him to place a rolled-up bill in its elasticized safekeeping.

  “Garters,” Temple said sagely to no one who could hear her, “have come a long way, baby.”

  Beside her, Ruth Morris just shook her head.

  By the time Miss “Wild Thing” left the stage, bending provocatively to retrieve her bit of elasticized dress, her G-string sides bristled with bills, which added a piquant savagery to her costume.

  Within a minute, a successor was announced, and then another. Some performers’ names sounded like a yuppie parent’s dream: Berkeley, Madison, Tracy. Others fancied liquor names: Champagne, Brandy, Tequila. Temple was struck by how many adopted place-names—Miami, Phoenix, Wichita—established both anonymity and a stage persona tied to place, to a possible home. Nobody picked Tampa, probably because it sounded too much like “tampon.”

  Each act lasted only the four or five minutes of a song. Then the main stage performer rotated to bartop or tabletop, writhing for the solitary men who occupied the stools and seats. After several acts, Ruth indicated she was decamping. Temple rose to accompany her, and Lindy followed.

  Instead of leading them to the big front door, Lindy threaded a path through the tables occupied by a sprinkling of men. Ruth was as nervous as Temple about their passage blocking the audience’s view of their entertainment. They scurried after Lindy like ducklings not about to abandon Mama, and dove in relief through an open doorway to the right of the main stage.

  They found themselves in rest room so unglamorous that the phrase “ladies’ john,” however oxymoronic, best described it. Temple took in graffiti-tattooed, generic cubicles, a single sink, a mirror above a powder-strewn shelf. On one cubicle door, the words “Theda’s Throne” were picked out in transfer letters and adorned with the iridescent metallic decals so popular among teenage girls.

  Besides the standard wall-hung tampon dispenser, this john offered a wall-hung perfume dispenser, mute testimony to how hard a girl had to labor to make disrobing look easy.

  The irregularly shaped room, obviously chopped from whatever space was available, also served as a hallway. Lindy passed through to a long narrow room equipped with lockers on one end, and with the stock mirrors and makeup lights lining both long sides.

  Only a couple of chairs occupied the space, abandoned far from the mirrors. This was not a dressing room where one sat and applied makeup with leisurely care.

  Three or four slim, small-breasted dancers in a state of stage undress stood before the mirrors fussing with their getups. Nylon gym bags gaped open on the countertops before them, disgorging hair spray, makeup and pins.

  Female visitors were immediately drafted as dorm sisters.

  “What do you think?” a blonde with Madonna-black roots asked the newcomers, ankling over on high heels. A purple satin garter belt frosted with black lace was all the coverage her thong-back G-string got, and was the only thing holding up her black lace stockings.

  She turned. The garters were absent from the back set of black satin streamers. “Can I get away with tucking these suckers up?”

  While she demonstrated what she had in mind, Temple wondered how long the energetic pelvic motions required on stage would keep anything tucked up, including the presumably private portions of her anatomy.

  “Looks stupid,” said a towering redhead wearing a Day-Glo G-string-plus-suspenders outfit. It mimicked a teddy that had been left in the rain too long and had shrunk beyond belief. “Pin the ribbons to the stockings.”

  “No pins!” the first woman wailed.

  “Let me check.” The redhead rooted through her huge bag, but despite unearthing a vast quantity of makeup and costume fragments, dredged up not a single safety pin.

  The blonde turned to regard her bare, unbestreamered rear in the mirror. “I need the stockings held up in back,” she decided. “Besides, it looks better.”

  In the name of full coverage, such as it was, Temple dropped her tote bag to a chair and began rummaging. From her fat paisley cosmetic bag she took the big-mama safety pin with all the little baby safety pins hanging on it that she always carried.

  She flourished this find like an enemy scalp. “Voila.”

  Blondie ambled over, loose garter streamers swaying pertly aft like a show horse’s tail.

  “Great, thanks.” She accepted the pins that Temple detached, then twisted her agile torso to fasten the garter streamers to her stocking backs, and straightened. “How do I look?”

  “Uh, terrific,” Temple said.

  Ruth said nothing, apparently being in a state of shock. “Okay, babies,” a new, full-bodied voice announced, “Mama’s here with a brand new bag.”

  A plain-faced, heavyset, middle-aged woman wearing loose black knit slacks and matching top swung into the room on an invisible raft of energy and good humor. She slung her camouflage-colored bag to an empty countertop and pulled over a chair, onto which she plopped.

  Blondie and Scarlet hustled over.

  Lindy remained leaning against a banged-up locker, smoking. For a moment, Temple thought she had heard a muted thump from within it, but Lindy remained unmoved. Temple decided she was imagining things, which was better than standing like Ruth in the middle of the floor, her purse clutched in both hands, as if she feared contamination from the cheerfully tacky surroundings.

  Temple was as curious as the next woman, and possibly more than most. She approached the newcomer, who had whisked a chrome belt-ring bigger around than a bowling ball from her bag. Dangling from the ring was a glittery, colorful, lacy array of thong-back G-strings sewn from spandex pieces the size of Band-Aids. A young black dancer arrived wearing an elongated forties-patterned jacket that served as a dress, and was also swept into the whirlpool of interest eddying around the Bag lady.

  “Oh, Wilma, those are so cute,” thin, tall Scarlet cooed. “Have you got any bigger ones? The last T-back I bought almost made Kitty City live up to its name.”

  Wilma thumbed through her supply before pulling a magenta flocked-velvet number off the ring.

  Scarlet dropped everything to wiggle into the equivalent of a slingshot. She adjusted the skimpy elastic over her narrow hips.

  While Scarlet considered, beautiful Blondie of the impeccable makeup was paging through the selection with bitten-off fingernails de
corated with chipped fuchsia polish.

  “This will go with a gauze float I have.” She snatched at a lurid lime green leopard-print T-back that Temple wouldn’t have tried to sell to a desperate chameleon.

  Off the ring the item came. Going, going, gone—for twenty-five dollars. Scarlet paid thirty-five bucks for hers, which fit just right, not that Temple could tell. Ebony stripped off her street jacket on the spot, and nearly everything else, to model a metallic-spangled copper-colored G-string-cum-straps that she bought for fifty flat. The trio scattered to separate mirrors with their booty.

  Wilma didn’t need to be a hard-sell artist. She glanced at Temple from under unruly gray brows. “Anything for you?”

  “Huh? Me? Oh, no... just browsing.”

  “That’s okay. Look all you want. Say, kids, I got some hot new cosmetics, too.”

  The ducklings came clucking back to look at glitter-embedded body gels, metallic powders, at transfer tattoos and jet black lipstick, and at nail polish in every color from green and purple to pale pink. Temple hoped that Blondie would buy some lacquer to disguise her tattered nails, but she seemed oblivious to this telling chink in her beautiful body armor.

  Besides, Blondie was apparently new to the club. She was more interested in frantically filling out a form so the disc jockey could personalize her introduction.

  “Favorite actor,” she fussed, reading the line. “Who was the guy in Roadhouse?”

  “I didn’t see it,” Temple answered, “but Patrick Swayze.”

  “P-a-t-r-i-k. How do you spell ‘Swayze’? Quick! Anybody.”

  Silence.

  “S-w-a-y-z-e,” Temple said. A PR person couldn’t stop herself from giving out information on any occasion.

  Blondie jiggled on her high heels. Showtime was coming. “Actress, actress, actress—who’s big?”