Homeboy Read online

  “Beats the shit out of me.” Glori’s titter reminded Rings of a gerbil’s death chatter. She yanked shut her ruffled curtain, darkening her world to the horror.

  “His soul,” she heard the Fat Man hiss. “Only not with you alive. Then it’s just another diamond … Quick, will you do the honors?”

  Rings couldn’t help it, the same way she couldn’t help peeking at the frogs her brother used for batting practice. She parted the bedspread to see Quick drop a pair of pantyhose over Glori’s head, snapping the legs tight, noosing her neck with a static shriek of nylon. He lifted her, toppling the loveseat.

  Again Rings shut her curtain, to keep from getting sick. In a moment she heard the door close with a casket’s muffled click. She counted to ten, then squirmed out from beneath the bed and stood shakily. Picking a rubber from her hair and another from her leg, she stepped on tingling legs into the livingroom.

  Above the overturned loveseat, Glori’s feet twitched like a girl’s about to come. Gnawing her lip, Rings circled slowly, then froze.

  “Gag me with a DC-9!”

  Glori girl lay on her back, blood like sherry syrup pumping from both nostrils. One rolledup eye bulged big as a pingpong ball. The other was sprung from its socket, hanging by optic fibers the way a button hangs from threads where once a doll’s eye smiled.

  Forgetting completely the outfit planned to wow Marty’s momma, Rings rushed from the apartment, though she did remember to use her sleeve closing the door so as not to leave her prints. No way was Rings going to mix herself up in this scene. She knew what happened to girls who fucked with the Fat Man. Die for the birdie, that’s what.

  Down the hall she ran and jabbed the elevator button. It took like a week to groan upstairs. Before it swallowed her in its expensive scents leavened now with lavender, through an open hallway window breathed the first chill breath of night bright with a cable car’s brass syncopated carillon, a streetsweet elegy that dingalinged for whom Rings just didn’t want to know:

  Lights Out for Glorioski.

  CHINESE RITHMETIC

  Other lights were just then coming up only a few blocks down the hill, along the Strip once known as the Barbary Coast. In countless flophouse rooms countless girls painted on faces as lurid as the sinking sun slung hugely in the Golden Gate’s cats cradle. The Strip itself was awakening; dressing itself in lights, cloaking the stink of backbar rot and curbside garbage with a fresh admixture of popcorn, beer, stray bottled scents. Spitting banks of neon began their nightcrawling, hissing and humming the names: The Casbah, Blue Note, Gaslight Follies, Pepper Patch; Kyoto’s Oriental Massage, Fleur de Lis Nude Encounter Clinic, the Tender Trap, Lucky Louie’s Sexporium, the One-Stop-Smut-Shop. Everywhere red, yellow, blue, and green bulbs flashed promises as old as they were empty.

  The purveyors of these promises were arriving with the rise of a gibbous moon. Dropped from cars and cabs, on foot; strippers lugging gym bags, hookers out for early luck, sleevegartered bartenders masked with professional boredom, barkers wearing loud clothes and practiced leers.

  One of these last, a pale joker in his late twenties with slickedback hair, squashed nose, and a nervous smirk, was already at his station in the laserblue neon haze fogging the entrance of the Blue Note Lounge. On the back of his black velveteen jacket was embroidered a dragon amid constellated Chinese characters. A toothpick traversed his mouth in sync with the restless eye gunning the street, identifying in less time than it took to name the hookers, hustlers, thieves, and thugs; pennyweight ponces and flyweight flimflammers; diddyboppers, deadbeats, and dopefiends. Cops he could feel with every sentient fiber; highrollers scent as a shark does blood.

  One pallid cheek bulged big as a baseball pitcher’s, though it was hardly a chaw of Beechnut wadded there, but a dozen tightly rolled party balloons the size of jawbreakers packed each with a gram of brown Mexican heroin guaranteed to hitch any hype a ride on that tragic magic carpet.

  “Murder one,” is how Joe Speaker pitched his merchandise to the evening’s first customer, a bloatchested dwarf in top hat and tails who barked at the Pepper Patch; adding “Knock yer dick inna dirt,” as if Rigoletto’s had far to go. A special munchkin was Rigoletto, twice a freak by virtue of a monstrous member which qualified him to moonlight for Climax Produxions, the porno movie mill owned by Baby Jewels Moses.

  “Whip me a deuce, homeboy,” piped the dwarf.

  This familiarity bunched Joe’s nostrils. A homeboy was someone you trusted more than money, and Joe trusted Rigoletto less than himself. Not that he hesitated spitting twice in his fist and shaking the dwarf’s nubby hand, palming in exchange for his folded twenties the balloons Rigoletto stashed in his mouth by covering it to cough. They stood side by side surveying the populating Strip like livestock bidders sizing up cattle chuting into auction pens.

  “Dentist convention in town,” the dwarf noted. “Fat City tonight.”

  “Every night’s the same to me,” said Joe. By which he meant that Maurice, the Blue Note’s manager, no matter how often or eloquently he promised a bonus percentage of gross receipts over a certain figure, always kicked the same lousy fifty dead presidents across the bar at closing. Not that Joe cared. He would have stood each night in the Blue Note’s door for free, talking more shit than a Chinese radio—because in between felonies he supported his own oilburning habit slinging the same dope he shot. Barking at the Blue Note was a license to stand in one public spot for eight straight hours without attracting police attention, a pusher’s wetdream.

  And there was a further bonus. Kitty Litter, his squeeze, stripped at the Blue Note, and Joe pimped her to its customers to make up the nut when he shot more dope than he could sell. For this heroin absolved him of guilt, becoming its own morality. Its fleet sweet spell reprieved Joe of the conscience he couldn’t otherwise abide.

  “Our girls really clean up when dentists or doctors are in town,” Rigoletto was chirping. “The only bigger marks are lawyers. The ABA convention is some kinda bustout Christmas.”

  Nodding at a passing whore in lemonyellow Capris, Joe shrugged. The Pepper Patch girls always made money because they freelanced handjobs under the tables and blowjobs in the backbooths. That’s why it was called the Snatch Patch: it was a scumbucket. Yet every strip needed one to lay off their scum action.

  Not that the Blue Note rated even a single star in the Michelin Tour Guide. Their girls weren’t exactly on the Vegas circuit. But they didn’t jerk just anyone’s joint under the table for the price of a drink. Un-unh. To shlep a girl back to a hotel cost two hundred up front. One yard for Maurice, one for the girl. The Manager had some sense of propriety. But if they were savvy enough to confer with the bentnosed Barker, well …

  As if on cue the Manager’s dinged and dusty Coupe de Ville careened to the curb, and Rigoletto made dwarf dust down the street. Once he’d worked the Blue Note door and Maurice caught him hustling French ticklers and dropkicked the do-wrong dwarf into the middle of the Strip. Ever since, Rigoletto gave the Manager his share of air.

  Out popped the Manager, swirling over his shoulders a motheaten furtrimmed cape that made him a ringer for a thirdrate magician shooting for a comeback on the cartoon napkin circuit. Clung to his arm was a dragqueen named Oblivia DeHavilland. Like most shemales on the Strip, Oblivia’s forte was B-drinking. She wore mirrored contact lenses and a sequined sheath splashing kaleidoscopic neon. Her ratted platinum hair burned an electric blue nimbus.

  Maurice smirked seeing Joe, “Cops were looking for you last night. Had warrants for you and your sidekick, Rooski.”

  “I know. Kitty put me wise, she pulled my coat already. Must be a mistake.”

  “Right. A mistake,” sniffed the Manager. His lip was chewed, his eyes brittle and birdbright with cocaine. “Maybe you should catch a southbound freight.”

  “Barker’s too slick for that,” husked Oblivia, her chrome eyes lubing Joe with Crisco�
��d surmise, flashing back his twin miniature reflections. “He knows the best place to hide’s in plain sight. He’s been doin it all his life.”

  “You dont get it,” Joe blithely insisted. “Aint been misbehavin.”

  “They’ll carry you to jail until you prove it,” said Maurice.

  “They’d be doing me a favor. I need some fucking rest.”

  “Ha! You’ll get plenty of both in there.”

  Inside swept Maurice with Oblivia slinking at his heels, raking metallic eyes across Joe like barbed wire.

  The joints were juking open throttle now, up and down the Strip bass notes spilling out the doors like ladles of hot grease. Joe added his own voice to the barkers’ caterwaul: “Walkin n talkin n crawlin on their bellies like reptiles … You, sir. Dont be no meanie to yer weenie. Dont pass by, give us a try”—though barking with a mouthful of junk balloons was as hard as hogcalling while gargling ball bearings, Joe netted the night’s first rube; by his highwater Sears Roebuck slacks and hickified overbite, a Future Farmer of America.

  “Got money fer yer honey,” a voice at Joe’s shoulder huskily echoed his spiel. “Got cash fer yer trash.”

  “No time fer yer line,” Joe answered looking down into tombstone eyes leaned between temples scooped deep as shooter spoons. “You still owe for last night, Fay.”

  Fay DuWeye tugged his velveteen sleeve, pleading, “I just need one to take off the sick.”

  Joe sighed. Once upon a long ago the Strip’s own neon heart skipped a blink when the emcee growled her intro: “Love is real not Fay DuWeye.” Now her G-string was traded in for a jar of K-Y jelly and a hand towel; and when the parlors were finished with her, she was into the streets until none would buy even a nickle blowjob behind a backalley dumpster from a drooling scabrous junkette; then—and Joe knew she hoped, prayed she wouldn’t survive that long—she’d hijack a shopping cart and join the Tenderloin’s mad hag legions, hank and hair like her of what had once some dim yesternight been dream flesh. And when at last they zipped her in a welfare bag and dumped her in some forgotten hole on the backside of Colma, the coroner might note heroin addiction on his report, though that powder was just the bitter seasoning of her direful days. Fay was strung out on hotel and dressing rooms and sex metered to the hour; hard times and easy money and fast thrills that could only be spoken in the language of the street. She was jonesin’ on that carnal metaphor for her soul: the Life—in a minor key, played on a G-string tourniquet.

  “If you dont tighten me up I’ll be too sick to work, Joe. Then you’ll never see your money. Look at it like protectin your investment. Please …”

  Joe ducked his head, ruefully wagged it and whitelied: “Fay, you still got what it takes to make me go out robbing 7-Elevens, busting hot checks, throwing good junk after bad …” He slipped her a single sack with a kiss, thinking some pusher.

  Turning, Joe rebounded two feet off the fortyfour triple-D bionic bumpers attached to Bermuda Schwartze, the Blue Note’s headliner—“headshiner,” the Manager would crack, obliging Joe to demonstrate her lesbian preference by jamming together forked fingers and grinding the conjoined V’s. “That bimbo dont buff penis helmets, Manager. Pussy’s her game.”

  “What’s the forecast?” Joe asked now, reaching to honk a Schwartzian hooter.

  Bermuda’s barometric bazooms were a standing joke on the Strip to all but her. She’d gotten her boobjob back in the days before implants. A Van Nuys surgeon had simply injected a couple of gallons of silicone into her chest with a syringe the size of a cake decorator. And all he asked in payment was to be strung up by an engine hoist in his garage and sodomized with a caulking gun. “But you get what you pay for,” Bermuda philosophized: the first cold snap, the miracle mammaries lumped up like two sacks of golf balls. Only when both the thermometer rose and barometer dropped would the silicone decongeal and jiggle as it ought. Put simply, Bermuda’s tits looked approximately real only when it rained cats, dogs, and fleas, and the Strip was deserted of the rubes to relish them.

  Not that this whiffle ball in heels cared. Ironies were things girls used to curl their hair. She even liked playing the bustout meteorologist. “Just quit callin em leche bags,” she’d beg the Manager. “Be a mensch. Show some respeck. They’w bwests.”

  This neon dawn she slapped Joe’s hand away and squeezed one herself, rolling up her eyes and sweeping a speculative tongue like a windshield wiper across her polished upper lip.

  “Fair to partly cloudy,” she decided. “Business should be aw-reety.”

  Then she got down to her immediate concern: the whereabouts of Dwan Wand, her neo-Nazi roommate. The perfect homo companion for a junkie diesel dyke who relaxed listening to CD’s of the Ontario 500 while selfirrigating with homemade herbal colonics. Together they performed the Blue Note’s “Love Act.” Dwan would fluttertoe down the runway, handcuffs and thumbscrews twinkling from his studded leather G-string, swishing a whip fashioned from strips of cherry licorice. “BEAT ME, EAT ME,” Bermuda would shriek where she lay lashed to a ratty stage chaise. The geeks were the ones to eat it up. How could they know the mere sight of a male member tossed Bermuda’s cookies? “Like old turkey necks,” is how they looked to this bulldagger fitted with boobs bigger than her head.

  Joe said he’d seen neither fifi’d hide nor moussed hair of Dwan. “What’s he done this time?”

  “Silly little fruitloop woke me up this mawnin all excited. Said he had a mission. Asked me would I call n see if the peace corpse would take him …”

  “Whose corpse?”

  “Peace corpse. Yuh know, the folks teach niggers in Africa how to use rubbers. That’s his mission, come to him in a dream. Though I speck he’s what cum in the dream.”

  “Corps. Peace Corps. Like in apple.”

  “Yeah?” She snapped her gum. “So how come there’s an S?”

  “It’s silent. French.”

  This made sense: the only French Bermuda knew cramped conversation. “Awreet. So I call n ask, could they use Dwan? They sez, what can he do? I sez, dance, exotic like. They sez they meant vocation n I sez, gee he couldnt carry a tune in a bucket n they sez they meant trade. I asks, how bout shepherd? I know them sand niggers got all kinda sheep and camels runnin loose. And you know what they did? They hung up on me. Can you imagine? Upset Dwanny so bad he run off to one of his bondage bars … Phew! It aint a pretty picture when those Folsom Street fistfuckers get done with him, I’m tellin ya … Say, you holdin that dandy candy?”

  “Is a pig’s pussy pork?”

  This stumped Bermuda for a moment while she reviewed her knowledge of porcine anatomy. She stood hipshot fixing Joe with a slantendicular dogeye. Wiseass barker dopeslingers, particularly ones with girlfriends she’d trade her entire David Bowie record collection to bump bellies with, bulleted straight to the top of Bermuda’s Bummer Parade, right after turkey necks.

  Maurice poked his permed head around the doorway curtain, breaking up the romance by reminding Joe he wasn’t being paid to bump gums with the weather girl. Joe and Bermuda consummated their business pronto.

  “SsshOAH time!” Joe howled into the hurlyburling night. The humanscale pinball machine was ringing fulltilt now: gridlocked traffic, squalling barkers, roaring drunks; from everywhere fevered rockenroll and somewhere a saxophone’s bestial arabesque. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s rodeo. No cover, no minimum, take a free look. She’s doin what her mama tol her not to, bendin over n shakin a tail feather. And gents,” orbiting his eyes, growling, “it’s jist gotta be jelly cuz jam dont shake lak that—”

  Joe sliced off his spiel in midbreath; a turf challenge was slanting across the Strip, a precision patrol of crackoids swivelhipping between stalled bumpers straight for the Blue Note. They wore full gangbang gear: designer jogging suits, unlaced Reebok hightops, baseball caps fixed askew over clear plastic shower caps, and sunglasses blacker than their skin. They a
dvanced with the dip and slide stride rehearsed on project sidewalks for performance on prison yards.

  It was going to be a facedown. Joe took a half step back into the doorway. He sidled his legs apart, hooked his thumbs in his belt, and ducked his chin. The troop leader hopped the curb. Rap music hectored from the boombox on his shoulder. He reached over his head to turn it down, then snapped his fingers, and the rest of the troop dressed out in a rank facing Joe. Now the leader lifted his atomicblast shades up his brow, holding them there with a peculiar female daintiness, pinky out, staring with blinkless boreholes Joe was careful to look into but not see.

  How alike we are, Joe thought to keep himself distracted—yet how alien. Both addicts, but I to escape the life I was given and he to gain the one withheld. It’s no coincidence that cocaine and heroin are called boy and girl on the street. This youngblood staring at me exalts the ego that I shun, surcharges the reality I dim, uses the violence that sickens me to get his dick hard.

  “Yo!” woofed the leader finally. “You got group rates?”

  Slowly Joe shook his head, keeping a bead on the eyes that seemed to boing now, as if attached to his skull with springs.

  “Yo mama did.”

  What! How did he know? Tears of mirth irrigated Joe’s parched eyes. The effort to constrain his laughter spazzed the corners of his mouth, making him tremble. With rage, Joe hoped the leader would believe, not fear.

  But the subtleties of body language were lost on the crackedup leader. Men whose mothers were called whores should attack, reckless of odds. He turned to his cohorts, lifting his palms as much as to ask, What I gotta do to get a rise out of this whiteboy? The troop laughed and highfived, declaring victory by default. The leader dropped his shades, shuttering the toxic stare. He cranked up his San Quentin briefcase, reawaking its raging rhymes. As one the blood pack swung out, dipping and sliding down the sidewalk, backslamming phantom Cadillac doors, swiveling their heads like gun turrets. They measured their warrior cakewalk to a boombox beat as deadly and mechanical as automatic fire.