“I’ve never seen round ones like that. They look like potato chips with a thyroid condition.”
He chuckled manfully. Now we’re getting somewhere, kiddo. But keep it loose as a goose. Nothing heavy. And move slow, for God’s sake, move slow….
She folded her napkin across her plate. Shit! She was going to ask for her check!
She smiled again. “May I …?”
“Do you know you look exactly like Lola Falana?” Subtle as shit. If that didn’t scare her off, nothing would. Her face didn’t change, though. She was still smiling. “You want to buy me a drink, don’t you?”
“Uh … yeah, as a matter of fact.”
“What time do you get off work?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“It’s a date, then?”
“You bet. My name is Brian.”
“I’m D’orothea,” she said.
Across town at The Endup, Michael Tolliver threaded his way through a forest of Lacoste shirts. Mona was with him.
“Well, this clinches it, Mouse.”
“What?”
“I am definitely a fag hag.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”
“Look around the goddamn room, would you? I’m the only woman here!”
Michael grabbed her shoulder, spinning her around to face the bar. A robust-looking woman in Levi’s and a work shirt was tending bar. “Feel better now?”
“Terrific. Look … are you gonna change or what?”
“I think I’m supposed to register. Will you be all right if I leave you here?”
“Probably. Goddammit.” She winked and slapped him on the behind. “Give my regards to Bert Parks.”
The bartender directed Michael to a man in charge of registration. The man took Michael’s name and vital statistics and issued him a numbered paper plate on a string. He was Number 7.
“Where do I … uh … change?”
“In the ladies’ room.”
“Figures.”
There were already three guys in the ladies’ room. Two of them had stripped down to their jockey shorts and were placing their clothes in plastic bags provided by the management. The third was smoking a joint, still decked out in recycled Vietnam fatigues.
“Hi,” said Michael, nodding to his fellow gladiators.
They smiled back at him, some with more calculation than others. They reminded him of his competition in the 1966 Orlando High School Science Fair. Artifically flippant. And hungry for victory.
Well, he thought, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks.
“Can we … are we supposed to stay in here until our turn comes up?”
A blond in Mark Spitz briefs smiled at Michael’s naïveté. “I don’t know about you, honey, but I’m gonna mingle. They might be giving out a Miss Congeniality award.”
So Michael slipped into the crowd, wearing only his paper plate and the jockey shorts he had bought at Macy’s the day before.
Mona rolled her eyes when she saw him.
“It’ll pay the rent,” said Michael.
“Don’t get too cocky. I think I just saw Arnold Schwarzenegger come out of the ladies’ room.”
“You’re such a comfort, Mona.”
She snapped the elastic in his shorts. “You’ll do all right, kid.”
D’orothea’s Lament
AS ARRANGED, BRIAN MET HER AT THE WASHINGTON Square Bar & Grill.
She was draped decoratively against the bar, brown eyes ablaze with interest as she chatted with Charles McCabe. The columnist seemed equally fascinated.
“You know him?” asked Brian, when she broke away to join him.
“I just met him.”
“You work fast, don’t you?”
She gave him a playful shove. “Haven’t you figured that out yet?”
D’orothea was a model, he learned. She had worked in New York for five years, peddling her polished onyx features to Vogue and Harper’s, Clovis Ruffin and Stephen Burrows and “everybody else who was hopping on the Afro bandwagon.”
She had made money, she admitted, and lots of it. “Which ain’t half bad for a girl who grew up in Oakland B.A.”
“?.A.?” asked Brian.
She smiled. “Before Apostrophe. I used to be Dorothy Wilson until Eileen Ford turned it into Dorothea and stuck an apostrophe between the D and the o. “ She arched an eyebrow dramatically. “Verrry chic, don’t you think?”
“I think Dorothy was good enough.”
“Well, so did I, honey! But it was either the apostrophe or one of those godawful African names like Simbu or Tamara or Bonzo, and I’d be goddamned if I’d go around town sounding like Ronald Reagan’s chimpanzee!”
Brian laughed, noticing that her face was even more beautiful when animated. He was silent for several seconds, then asked soberly: “Was it tough growing up in Oakland?”
She did a slow take, staring at him through heavy-lidded eyes. “Oh … I get it! A lib-ber-rull!”
He reddened. “No, not exact …”
“Gimme a hint, then. A Vista Volunteer, maybe? A civil rights lawyer?”
Her accuracy annoyed the hell out of him. “I did some work for the Urban League in Chicago, but I don’t see what that …”
“And all that guilt exhausted you so much that you decided to hell with it and chucked it all for a waiter’s job. I hear you, baby. I hear you.”
He downed his drink. “I don’t think you’re hearing a goddamn thing but your own voice.”
She set down her glass of Dubonnet and stared at him expressionlessly. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I guess I’m nervous about being back here.”
“Forget it.”
“You have a nice face, Brian. I need somebody to talk to.”
“A therapist.”
“If you like. Does that bother you?”
“I’d hoped for something more basic.”
She ignored the implication. “Sometimes it helps to tell things to strangers.”
He signaled the bartender for another drink. “Go ahead, then. The doctor is in.”
She told her story without embellishment, seldom meeting his eyes.
“Four years ago, when I was just beginning to catch on in New York, I met this person who was working on a swimsuit campaign at J. Walter Thompson. We were together almost all the time, shooting at locations all over the East Coast. It took us about three weeks to fall in love.”
Brian nodded, abandoning his hopes.
“Anyway, we moved in together, fixing up this wonderful loft in SoHo, and I experienced the happiest six months of my life. Then something happened … I don’t know what … and my lover accepted a job in San Francisco. We corresponded some after that, never completely losing touch, and I just kept on … making money.”
She sipped her Dubonnet and looked at him for the first time. “Now I’m back home, Brian, and all I want is to have this person back in my life again. But that’s completely up to …”
“Her.”
She smiled warmly. “You’re quick,” she said.
“Thanks.”
“This drink’s on me, O.K.?”
The Winner’s Circle
THE MASTER OF CEREMONIES FOR THE JOCKEY SHORTS dance contest was someone called Luscious Lorelei. His platinum wig hovered over his rotund frame like a mushroom cloud over an atoll.
Michael groaned and readjusted his shorts. “What the fuck am I doing here, Mona? I used to be a Future Farmer of America!”
“You’re paying the rent, remember?”
“Right. I’m paying the rent, I’m paying the rent. This is a recording….”
“Just take it easy.”
“What if I lose? What if they laugh? Jesus! What if they don’t even notice me?”
“You’re not gonna lose, Mouse. Those assholes can’t dance, and you look better than any of ‘em. You’ve gotta believe in yourself!”
“Thank you, Norman Vincent Peale.”
“Cool it, Mouse.”
“I think I’m gon
na throw up.”
“Save it for the finale.”
Five contestants had already vied for the hundred-dollar prize. Another was competing now, thrashing across the plastic dance floor in nylon leopard-skin briefs.
The crowd howled its approval.
“Listen to that, Mona. It’s all over.” Michael chided himself silently for selecting the standard white jockey briefs. This mob obviously went in for flash.
“C’mon,” said Mona, pulling him through the crowd to the edge of the dance floor. “You’re next, Mouse.” She stayed by his side as they waited in the glow of an electrified American flag.
Luscious Lorelei moved to the microphone when the applause for Contestant Number 6 had subsided. “How about that, guys? Could you BUHLIEVE the pecs on that humpy number? I mean, PULLEASE, Mary!” He gripped the contours of his sequined bosom. “Rice bags never looked so good.”
Michael felt the color leave his face.
“Call Mary Ann,” he whispered to Mona. “I’m going back to Cleveland with her.” Mona reassured him with a pat on the rump.
“O.K.,” bellowed Lorelei, “our next contestant is … Contestant Number 7! He hails from Orlando, Florida, where the sun shines bright and they grow all those BEEYOOTIFUL fruits, and his name is Michael … Michael Something … Honey, I can’t read your handwriting. If you’re out there, how ‘bout telling Lorelei your name?”
Michael raised his hand half-heartedly and said, “Tolliver.”
“What, honey?”
“Michael Tolliver.”
“OKAAY! Let’s hear it for Michael Oliver!”
Now bright red, Michael climbed onto the dance platform as Lorelei slipped back into the darkness. The revelers at the bar turned in unison to assess the newcomer. The music began. It was Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band doing “Cherchez la Femme.”
Michael slipped his body into gear and his mind into neutral. He moved with the music, riding its rhythm like a madman. He was merely having that dream again, that ancient high school nightmare about appearing in the senior play in his … jockey shorts!
His eyes unglazed long enough to see the crowd. The shining, tanned faces. The muscled necks. A hundred tiny alligators leering from a hundred chests …
Then his blood froze.
For there in the crowd, somber above a silk shirt and Brioni blazer, was the one face he didn’t want to see. It linked with his, but only for a moment, then wrinkled with disdain and turned away.
Jon.
The music stopped. Michael leaped off the stage into the crowd, oblivious of the congratulatory hands that grazed his body. He pushed his way through a fog of amyl nitrite to the swinging doors in the corner of the room.
Jon was leaving.
Michael stood in the doorway and watched the lean figure retreat down Sixth Street. There were three other men with him, also in suits. A brief burst of laughter rose from the foursome as they climbed into a beige BMW and drove away.
An hour later, he got the news.
He had won. A hundred dollars and a gold pendant shaped like a pair of jockey shorts. Victory.
Mona kissed him on the cheek when he climbed off the platform. “Who cares if there’s a doctor in the house?” Michael smiled wanly and held on to her arm, losing himself in the music.
Then he began to cry.
Fiasco in Chinatown
LEAVING THE GATEWAY CINEMA, MARY ANN AND NORMAN headed west up Jackson toward Chinatown.
When they reached the pagoda-shaped Chevron station at Columbus, a thick pocket of fog had begun to soften the edges of the neon.
“On nights like this,” said Norman, “I feel like somebody in a Hammett story.”
“Hammond?”
“Hammett. Dashiell Hammett. You know … The Maltese Falcon?”
She knew the name, but not much else. It didn’t matter, however.
The only Falcon in Norman’s life was parked at the corner of Jackson and Kearny.
“Do you have to get home right away?” He asked it cautiously, like a child seeking permission to stay up late.
“Well, I should … no. Not right away.”
“Do you like Chinese food?”
“Sure,” she smiled, suddenly realizing how much she liked this bumbling, kindly, Smokey the bear man with a clip-on tie. She wasn’t particularly attracted to him, but she liked him a lot.
He took her to Sam Woh’s on Washington Street, where they wriggled through the tiny kitchen, up the stairway and into a booth on the second floor.
“Brace yourself,” said Norman.
“For what?”
“You’ll see.”
Three minutes later she made a discreet exit to the rest room. There was no sink in the cramped cabinet, and she was halfway back to the table before she discovered where it was.
“Hey, lady! Go wash yo’ hands!”
Thunderstruck, she turned to see where the voice had come from. An indignant Chinese waiter was unloading plates of noodles from the dumbwaiter. She stopped in her tracks, stared at her accuser, then looked back toward the rest room.
The sink was outside the door. In the dining room.
A dozen diners were watching her, smirking at her discomfort. The waiter stood his ground. “Wash, lady. You don’t wash, you don’ eat!”
She washed, returning red-faced to the table. Norman grinned sheepishly. “I should have warned you.”
“You knew he would do that?”
“He specializes in being rude. It’s a joke. War lord-turned-waiter. People come here for it.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Can we go, Norman?”
“The food’s really …”
“Please?”
So they left.
Back in the dark canyon of Barbary Lane, he took her arm protectively.
“I’m sorry about Edsel.”
“Who?”
“That’s his name. The waiter. Edsel Ford Fung.”
She giggled in spite of herself. “Really?”
“I meant it to be fun, Mary Ann.”
“I know.”
“I really blew it. I’m sorry.”
She stopped in the courtyard and turned to face him. “You’re very old-fashioned. I like that.”
He looked down at his black wing tips. “I’m very old.”
“No you’re not. You shouldn’t say that. How old are you?”
“Forty-four.”
“That’s not old. Paul Newman is older than that.”
He chuckled. “I’m not exactly Paul Newman.”
“You’re … just fine, Norman.”
He stood there awkwardly, as her palm slid gently along the contour of his jaw. She pressed her cheek against his. “Just fine,” she repeated.
They kissed.
Her fingers moved down across his chest and clutched at the ends of his tie for support.
It came off in her hand.
Starry, Starry Night
THERE WERE MORNINGS WHEN VINCENT FELT LIKE THE last hippie in the world.
The Last Hippie. The phrase assumed a kind of tragic grandeur as he stood in the bathroom of his Oak Street flat, fluffing his amber mane to conceal his missing ear.
If you couldn’t be the first, there was something bittersweet and noble about being the last. The Last of the Mohicans. The Last Supper. The Last Hippie!
He had mentioned the concept once to his Old Lady, just hours before she had run off to join the Israeli Army, but Laurel had only sneered. “It’s too late,” she said, lifting the hair on the left side of his head. “You’re only seven eighths of The Last Hippie.”
She hadn’t always been that way.
During the war, she had been coming from a different place. Her Virgoan anal retentiveness had been channeled into positive trips.
Astral travel. Sand candles. Macramé.
But postbellum, things had got heavy. She had enrolled in a women’s self-defense course and would practice
holds on him while he was saying his mantra. Later, despite the efforts of her instructors at an Arica forty-day intensive, she developed an overnight obsession for Rolfing.
But not as a patient. As a practitioner.
That budding career came to an abrupt end when a dentist from Marin threatened to have her arrested for assault and battery.
“He was paranoid,” Laurel claimed afterward.
“He said you were getting into it,” Vincent replied quietly.
“Of course I was getting into it! It’s my job to get into it!”
“He said you said things while you Rolfed him.”
“Like what?”
“Let’s drop it, Laurel.”
“Like what?!”
“Like … ‘Bourgeois pig’ and ‘Up against the wall.’”
“That’s a lie!”
“Well, he said …”
“Look, Vincent! Who are you gonna believe, anyway? Me or a goddamn paranoid bourgeois pig?”
Well, she had gone now. She had left Amerika for good.
That’s the way she had spelled it. With a k.
The very thought of that quirk made him tearful now, clinging desperately to the last vestiges of their life together.
He shuffled into the kitchen and stared balefully at his Day-Glo “Keep on Truckin’ “ poster.
Laurel had put it there. A hundred years ago. It was yellow and cracked with age now, and its message seemed a cruel anachronism.
He had stopped truckin’ a long time ago.
Lunging at the poster with his five-fingered hand, he crumpled it into a ball and hurled it across the room with a cry of primal anguish. Then he stormed into the bedroom and did the same to Che Guevara and Tania Hearst.
It was time to split.
The switchboard, he decided, was the best place to do it. It was neutral ground somehow. Public domain. It had nothing to do with him and Laurel.
He arrived there at seven-thirty and made himself a cup of Maxim from the tap in the bathroom. He tidied the desk, emptied the wastebaskets and cleaned his scalpel with a Wash’n Dri.
Mary Ann would arrive at eight o’clock.
There was time to do it properly.
Tales of the City Page 17