Going, Going, Gone Page 3

  Hard to slouch walking up stairs, but he pulled it off. ‘After you,’ I said to the beauteous one, keen to see what lay under that doily she’d wrapped around her waist, but my chivalry went begging.

  ‘My turn to take the scenic route,’ she said, pointing upwards. ‘Scamper.’

  I did. Once we topped out we parked ourselves next to sweet Candy and ever-charmless Ondine, near the front. The band kicked off Venus In Furs and we let our heads fill up. The usual goofball light show was in progress, the band looked as if it were being attacked by yellow amoebas. Sterling stood there strumming away, Cale did his Bob Wills on Seconal bit, crazy Angus wandered back and forth whacking that Tibetan oildrum and weaselly Lou glowered like a nine-year-old looking to get spanked. Blondie sat off in the corner slapping her tambourine and making with the teutonics. I was just starting to settle in for a long decadent night when I heard Trish shouting at Borden.

  ‘New girls in town, must be.’

  ‘Tres wild,’ Borden shouted back. ‘Canadian?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Candy said; even though she tried to whisper, her voice always carried. I turned in what had become an unexpectedly popular direction. That was it, listeners. I saw them, and I was sunk.

  ‘Check the ensembles,’ Trish told Candy. ‘These girls can shop,’

  The little one – five four, near as I could tell – was severely mod, and radiated cuteness. Hair Sassooned, eyes raccooned. The white go-gos were strictly 1967 but I wasn’t going to argue with the Nancy Sinatra look. Her mini kept riding up over the shoreline but that gave her something to do with her hands. Most inviting indeed, but that night it was hard not to savour the lure of the economy size. At first I thought Little Mod’s gal Friday was tall as Sterling, maybe six four. Then I realized she was taller.

  ‘What’s that on her hip?’ Borden asked.

  ‘Looks like a whip,’ Trish said. ‘Gerard’s understudy?’

  ‘Nobody told me,’ Candy said.

  Big Girl’s queenly strut distracted the audience and even the band, but they kept playing. As she and Little Mod crossed stage front Lou swallowed his lines but recovered nicely and nobody really noticed. For the first time in her life Nico demonstrated a facial expression. I guided my mouth towards charming Miss Darling’s ear. ‘Candy, my brother sister. Is that a him?’

  She shouted into my own receiver. ‘Goodness, no. She’s real.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘The hands,’ she said, glancing at her own, frowning.

  ‘Muchas thankas, my angel.’

  Where she wasn’t black, Big Girl was blonde. She drew her crowning glory up in thick golden ropes tied in a topknot. Over her birthday buxotica she wore beatgirl tights, though hers covered arms as well as legs. She hid her hands in fingerless gloves and her stems in boots of shiny shiny leather. No question she was blessed in the torso department. The plastic shell she’d squeezed herself into clung to her soft centre like frozen chocolate. Knobs big as desk erasers tipped her rocket launchers. Sunnyside up, she was unsinkable, and miraculous to behold, but I favour mine over easy. When Little Mod aimed for the stairs, Big Girl followed and I caught the full rear view in Cinerama. You could stack a week’s dishes on that shelf.

  ‘My brothers. My sisters,’ I mumbled, feeling that the window for action was a narrow one indeed. ‘The pink ray’s nailed me. Please excuse.’

  ‘Don’t waste valuable resources, Walter,’ Trish said.

  ‘Rugmuffins,’ Borden muttered, giving them the fisheye as they headed downstairs. ‘Tag team, I’d guess.’

  ‘You’ll be sorry if you try,’ she said. ‘Those praying mantises will bite your head off.’

  ‘Tiny tiny,’ I shouted as I left. ‘Tiny whips of leather.’ Once I’d barrelled back down to the first floor I swivelled in every direction, trying to pick them out in the crowd until I caught them in my beam. Wasn’t hard to spot the big one, archons willing. The ladies looked like they were still fishing, and hadn’t seen that I was ready to take the bait. I was just circling in for the thrill when some Long Island desk jockey who’d mistaken the place for an Automat came out of nowhere and made a move on Little Mod.

  ‘You got a pencil?’ I heard him ask her. She shook her head. ‘I need to write down your phone number.’

  The little one looked at him like he was a dead cat. For the first time I noticed she was packing some kind of transistor in her hand. New model, I supposed, all black and shiny as Big Girl’s boots. She had turned around to see what delayed her little friend. El Dopo, figuring out that he wasn’t getting anywhere with his original target, now turned his attentions to the secondary, with as much charm and success. ‘How’s the weather up there?’

  I was close enough now to hear the full script. ‘Exit,’ the big one told him. She had the voice of an eight-year-old but the lung power of a nursery. ‘Presence undesired.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ he said, pulling a Bennett and going all smirky. Just as I was ready to cut in on this dance my gut told me I should hesitate, and I did.

  ‘Fly the coop,’ Little Mod said. ‘Offer service elsewhere.’

  ‘You’re the ones look like you’re selling,’ I heard him say, obviously taking the wrong turnoff. ‘What is this, sugar? Only dykes need apply?’

  Big Girl raised her little voice. Half the room turned to look, and then the same half of the room turned deaf mute. ‘Motherfuck you,’ she broadcast. I looked around for Max’s bouncers, but they’d evidently taken the hen’s teeth route. The would-be charmer deflated, somewhat, but he puffed back up in no time at all. That was his mistake. He put his paws on Big Girl’s knobs as if wanting to tune in the ballgame. ‘Look, honey,’ he said, pinching them, ‘you come prancing around like this and you might as well put a sign on your ass saying, for sale –’

  Big Girl clicked her elbows against her sides as if getting ready to have her posture checked. Two small metal umbrellas suddenly appeared on the backs of the wiseguy’s hands and snapped open. Looked like it was a carnival trick until I saw the blood start to run down onto his cuffs. Big Girl licked her lips. His knees buckled, but he was held in place. Maybe he wanted to scream; maybe he couldn’t feel it, yet. My own interest in the ladies was fading fast, and I thought I’d better get out while the getting was good. I nearly had but as her would-be inamorata’s knees started buckling, my personal interest faded like ink in the sun. I’d nearly sneaked by them when Little Mod spotted fresh prey. Looking in my direction, she tapped her moll’s arm.

  ‘Him,’ I heard her say, staring directly at me. Big Girl made with the elbows again; Casanova came loose and hit the floor. Only then did he let out with a wail that would have deafened a banshee. Onlookers gave him the Kitty Genovese treatment, and pretended to sleep standing up. Before I could get any closer to the door Big Girl had put me in her vice, and no matter how hard you run, you can’t get traction on air.

  ‘Pacify,’ she said, hauling me up like a side of beef. ‘Presence essentialled, comprendo?’

  ‘Klaatu barada nikto,’ I stuttered, unable to elaborate.

  ‘Your place,’ said Little Mod, leading the way. ‘Let’s go.’

  TWO

  Time was if the census man came rapping on my door to do the rundown and happened to ask how I preferred to spend nighttime in my blue heaven, I’d have said working the dusk-to-dawn shift, being held in a lovelock by a brace of pussycats. Nothing like experience to set you straight. Let me be truthful, my brothers, and pass along some useful advice: theory beats practice when it comes to tag-team action, take my word for it.

  Nobody tried to stop us when we busted out of Max’s. Didn’t know how Casanova was dealing with his new stigmata but figured somebody was giving him aid and comfort. ‘Ease up, sugarplum,’ I pleaded. ‘Pretty please?’

  Big Girl showed me no mercy; just snarled like a werewolf and kept me snared in a full nelson till we’d passed under the Third Avenue El. Not fifteen minutes earlier I’d fancied going to the mat with her two falls out of three
but that was before I knew I’d be wriggling with Gorgeous George. She gripped me like an industrial press.

  ‘Shorty, please, let me out on parole,’ I bleated to Little Mod, but she pulled a Helen Keller on me and didn’t stop the parade, rolling those hips like she was a state champ baton twirler. ‘Uncle,’ I cried. ‘Aunt. Cousin. Hey –

  Eyeing our retinue a rheumy-eyed coot out for an evening stroll gave us a headshake. ‘Kids,’ he muttered. ‘Wait till you’re drafted.’

  ‘Mute yourself,’ Big Girl growled. Even under these outré circumstances I wasn’t going to say her high-pitched howl didn’t possess a certain unique appeal. ‘Submit identifiers.’

  ‘Smith’s the name,’ I swore. ‘One of the Smith boys. You picked the wrong man out of the lineup, girls.’

  ‘Truth us!’ she roared. Sounded like Shirley Temple with rabies.

  ‘I’m truthin’!’ But she wasn’t buying it, and tied that anaconda tight. Big Girl could have strangled a dray horse one-handed. Unpleasant feeling to know the street was somewhere underfoot, but try as you might you couldn’t reach it. ‘Ixnay. Lungs. Need ‘em.’

  ‘Where’s your padding?’ Little Mod asked me, still eyes front. ‘Pad, meant. Where do you pad?’

  I gurgled and burbled like it was titty time for mother’s angel and that finally caught her ear. Way her eyes bugged when she turned and saw me made me guess my face was blue as new dungarees. ‘Chlojo!! Nya!!’ she shouted. Soon as Little Mod made with the kibosh, Big Girl let the choke out. She shouldered me hard with those concrete blocks she swung and kept me in the express lane as we hit Second Avenue.

  ‘Qua?’ said Big Girl.

  ‘Don’t rip him,’ said Little Mod, circling round as she stepped, shooting daggers at her pal. ‘Keep viable. Briskfoot yourself.’ I’d always considered myself a lingo major but I might as well have been from Fiji for all I could decipher of their frisky banter. ‘Your address?’ the wee one asked. ‘Specify.’

  ‘275 East 18th. Number 8.’ The ongoing shortage of oxygen I suffered sent me into bendsville, and made me think tapping the molasses would work. ‘Ladies,’ I said, ‘your beauty steals my senses. If you’d –’

  Big Girl put the airlift on me. ‘Mute!’

  ‘Stop already with the clobberin’ time,’ I choked out as she continued girlhandling my poor frame. ‘Give me a break –’

  ‘This it?’ Little Mod inquired, bouncing up the stoop of my abode. I nodded, flashing a goonpuss. Big Girl finally let loose of me long enough that I could catch my breath, step forward and part the waters.

  ‘Come up and see the etchings,’ I said, seeing nowhere to go but upstairs. They let me lead, keeping me from making a break for it. My shack was a standard walkup the landlord redid in the late forties, after they ferreted out the last of the Gashouse Gang in order to cram in a few more cash-heavy Europeans. Ten years later I lucked out, and found the place two weeks after first setting foot in NY. Came here straight from Seattle, trying to make my way to Morocco while it was still paradise, but of course everybody knows that unhappy ending. Never caught the Marrakesh train but breaks come and breaks go, and it wasn’t long after when I overcame my disappointment when I happened upon my natural metier, that is to say, pharmaceutical improvisation. As I threw open my door that evening, giving these ladies full entree to wonderland, I tried to guess how long before I’d know if the breaks I’d get that night would be metaphorical or actual.

  ‘Here’s the castle,’ I said. ‘Make yourself at home. Not that I’ve got much sayso.’ After the rehab the kitchen was still meet and greet central, and the first room you stepped into. The bathtub, thankfully, was long ago banished to the far end of the flat and therefore no longer pulled double duty as dish drainer. The hens gave my place the deadpan, looking like cotillion debs at an Irish wake. ‘Squalored,’ said Little Mod.

  ‘Squaloriffic. One ten a month, can you beat it?’

  Big Girl filled the place like it was a dollhouse. A one-woman mystery spot, she somehow took up twice the space than would have seemed natural. After a fumble or two at the wall I found the overhead. In Max’s my guests had profiled perfect, but landlord halos tend not to bestow a Hollywood glow. Little Mod took on five or six years between blinks, and it surprised me to see how dark pint-size was – Greek or maybe even Arab, probably, but in the wrong states that wouldn’t cut enough slack to get served. A northerner, no doubt, or from the great west. As for Big Girl, once I got up close her looks and her demeanour made me sure she’d spent more than one summer in the Ladies’ Cooler over on Tenth Street. She plastered on the warpaint but it couldn’t hide the scars. Poor girl had an express line running along her neck and her face practically in HO scale. Shanked in the shower, no doubt, by a short, jealous lifer.

  ‘Forgive impolitesse,’ Little Mod said, throwing me a half smile like she wanted me to catch it. ‘Haste wastes.’

  ‘What doesn’t?’ Once they stopped trying to hurt me I started feeling those manly tingles they aroused in me anew. ‘Let’s get comfy.’

  ‘Where’s your public space?’ she asked, seeing the single kitchen chair.

  ‘Baby, once I’m across the threshold it’s all off-limits to the declassé.’ Big Girl elbowed me, not accidentally. ‘I’ll lead on.’

  We criss-crossed my crib, which was in its usual state of dishabille. In the frontest of the two front rooms I kept my books, a couch, a lamp, the standard domestic accoutrements. The other room was sanctumville, where I housed my shellac. These old walls may have worn plaster couture but the frillies underneath were nothing but chicken wire. I’d spent big moolah having solid oak shelves fitted to the brick underlay so as to avoid collapse. Even so, whenever I came home with a new find I feared the new disc would tip over the line, and my little blue heaven would sink down to China.

  ‘Weight load’s borderlined,’ said Little Mod, eyeing my warehouse.

  ‘Six thousand, three hundred and four. All 78s.’

  ‘78 what?’ Big Girl said, seizing a prize. There aren’t many on the ball these days when it comes to America’s priceless heritage, but that’s not news. It wasn’t her ignorance of the once well-known that made me break out with nervous tics, but the way her baby-voiced peeps counterpointed the sound of a dry branch underfoot. Definitely didn’t please me to see her suddenly giving the onceover to the black half-moons in her paws. She held them like a two-fisted pie eater.

  ‘Babycakes, you got to use silk when you’re shining up the master’s voice.’ I relieved her of her burden, fearful to see what she’d sent to the hangman. My luck held, though. Bennie Moten’s Kansas City Orchestra, She’s Sweeter Than Sugar. One copy down, press-fresh at that, but I’d laid away three more in stock in event of April showers bringing tears in May. In this case it was still a heartbreak. Didn’t matter how many copies of the record there might be, Bennie wasn’t going to come up out of the ground with anything new.

  ‘Unintentioned,’ said Big Girl. ‘Classify.’

  ‘Museumwear, Chlo. Populacra,’ Little Mod said. ‘Records.’

  When she said records she might as well have been saying polly want a cracker. Strange to say but somehow I just knew in my bones that until she actually saw my prizes, wax platters had been nothing but some philosophical concept she’d needed to read about in college. Of course nobody pays attention to 78s anymore except for those in the know, and you know who you are.

  ‘Soundbites?’ Big Girl asked. Before I could suggest that she shouldn’t, Eulie nabbed one from the shelf and slid it loose. She petted the disc like it was her favourite kitten. I turned on the deathray but didn’t blow, not until I saw the label. Then I lunged, and managed to wrestle it from her grip before she started playing pattycake.

  ‘Ladies, ladies,’ I said. ‘Toss me around, but not these.’

  I let out one king-size sigh when I realized how terminal the damage might have been. Black Pattis are scarcer than dodos these days but this beauty was ne plus ultra. Matrix number 8045, Hi
ghtower’s Night Hawks, Boar Hog Blues backing Squeeze Me. Sounds like it was recorded underwater but nobody kissed a cornet like Willie Hightower, and this was all that was left of him. Snatching a shammy and a bottle of cleaner I started lifting Little Mod’s prints. The gals gaped in my direction, fixated, as if I were pulling diamond rings out of my sleeve.

  ‘Purpose?’ Big Girl asked, almost broadsiding me with her veranda as she swooped down for the kill. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have minded tumbling into that great divide but the task of maintenance required focus. I emerged from her shadow and checked the surface – clean as a bald head.

  ‘Hand oil clogs the grooves,’ I said. ‘Eats into the wax. Dig, I’m not just a packrat but a preservationist. Just call this place Preservation Hall.’

  I never saw two grown women look so stupefied and so annoyed at the same time, but I was rolling, and kept up the spiel. ‘Libraries toss these babies out with the bathwater. Orphans in the storm till those with a heart take ’em in. History in the hand, only place it won’t get away. These aren’t like LPs, these bleed. Scratch ’em and you cut out their tongue. Break ’em and one more gets thrown over the side.’

  My audience seemed to get my drift, so I segued before the yawns started. ‘Well, seat yourself, my dears. Let me tender some perky libations.’ They both stepped into the living room and unsherpaed, putting their black bags on the floor. Big Girl plumped down on a chair my grandmother left me and her big keister smashed right through the rattan. She started wiggling but it looked like a no go situation. I was wondering what to tell the rescue squad when the chair frame cracked open like a pecan, and she hit the floor with a powerful thump.

  ‘Hurt?’ asked Little Mod. Big Girl hauled herself up, frowned and kicked the two halves of the chair straight through the apartment into the kitchen. Didn’t want anyone to trip over them, I supposed. I didn’t so much appreciate her thoughtfulness as I did the fact that she hadn’t aimed the pieces at me.