The Price of the Ticket Page 7

  But the accessories were picked at the Affliction warehouse, and boxed separately by the shipping department. So all Pauley had to do was bore the holes for them, as per spec.

  And shrug off the moral burden, of course.

  He put a little fire into the chain saw.

  Chapter Six

  IF YOU WORK FOR US, MS. BONNARD, YOU WILL WEAR THIS dress.”

  “Go climb a rock.”

  “Ms. Bonnard.…”

  “You couldn’t pack the mind of a Republican president in that dress, let alone the business end of a woman.”

  “Ends,” the man hissed.

  “Speak for yourself, Train-time,” Celeste snapped.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, he’s wounded. He’s at a loss for antiphonal slurs.”

  “Aside from the fact that only a Catholic girl would have the least notion of antiphony, if you were hired, you’d be fired!”

  “Yeah? Well maybe if I was hired already I’d sit still for this shit.”

  “Fat chance.”

  “My sentiment exactly.”

  One man chuckled. The other, who’d been doing the talking, emitted a histrionic sigh.

  “Another counter-suggestive piercing freak.” They had twelve of them on the payroll. He turned to his partner. “I can’t do a thing with this piece of talent.”

  “Let me try.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Ms. Bonnard–Celeste–you understand, Clive here likes your look.”

  “I understand I look just like I looked the first day I walked into this place. What’s a trick-suit supposed to do for me?”

  “Oh, really. And you didn’t notice what the other girls were wearing?”

  “What’s that to me? I have enough trouble noticing what I’m wearing.”

  “Come, come, Celeste. A woman with a look like yours, with, I should add, your decorations, the tasteful piercings, zippers in all the right places–this little uniform serves but to emphasize and to compliment that fabulous, tidy body. And those tats! Moreover.… A crowded club like this one.…Your uniform provides the club with a certain amount of panache and you with a certain amount of cachet, not to mention a certain amount of visibility, which might serve in a pinch to protect you from a certain amount of ahm er.…”

  “Fists up my backside?”

  “Well–I wouldn’t.…”

  “I know you wouldn’t.”

  The man called Clive arched his eyebrows. “Miss Bonnard, do I detect a certain homophobia in your attitude?”

  “Oh, no,” Celeste replied sweetly, immediately. “I’m not prejudiced. As far as I’m concerned, an asshole’s an asshole no matter how you stretch it.”

  “Well!” Clive uncrossed his legs and recrossed them the opposite way. “I told you she was a bitch.”

  “Sounds to me like she can talk her way into anything,” said the other. “And such a fox! Get a load of this look! That bone in her hooter alone.…”

  They contemplated Celeste as if she were something on the other side of a glass wall at the snake house.

  “Boned hooters aren’t exactly rare as the dodo these days,” Clive sniffed.

  Since they spoke as if she weren’t in the room, Celeste lit a cigarette as if they weren’t in the room.

  “Please, Ms. Bonnard. We’re trying to work out a deal here, and Clive is deathly allergic to cigarette smoke.”

  “Then he ought to be running a day-care center instead of a nightclub.” Celeste exhaled smoke in Clive’s direction.

  “Sometimes this business is exactly like a day-care center,” Clive said, waving at the smoke.

  “Please, Ms. Bonnard. Four hundred a week is good money. You’ll double it in tips. In return, we expect a certain level of… performance.”

  Celeste scratched her tongue with her ring finger, examined the nail briefly, and flicked off it whatever may or may not have been on it straight between her two prospective employers. “Of course, if I had a college education, you’d pay me more.”

  “Oh, much more,” Clive assured her. “College girls are much more hard up than you apparently seem to be. Much more … grateful … for the work, I mean. I mean, I’ve never met a single college girl who would object to standing nude on her head while whistling the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence through her money maker. No, sir. Not at these prices.”

  Celeste was hardly listening. She sighed and pinched between thumb and middle finger the two ends of the sliver of scrimshawed whalebone piercing her septum, and tapped the bridge of her nose with her forefinger, in order to think or, more accurately, brood. “I know it’s good money.”

  “And,” the other man wheedled, “it’s not like it’s a straight gig.”

  Celeste stared past her finger at nothing. What did this guy know about straight? Plenty, probably. No doubt he had himself a nice neighborhood to reside in, a nice car that slept inside at night, nice friends who gave dinner parties, season tickets to the symphony, a little retreat in the wine country. He probably voted Republican and went to Mass and even confessed occasionally. It’s late in the century and everybody’s getting straight–except for her and Pauley, and Pauley has been coming home nights not himself. Straight, but not himself. He makes decent money and is his own man. But at fifty-five the labor is caving him in. He is reminding her of her own father, who’d come home from the warehouse lower and lower to the ground until one day he simply hadn’t come home at all. It wasn’t like he’d wanted to run away. But that’s what he did. Being a father just worried him until he couldn’t do anything but look for another line of consciousness. Get drunk and pull his little girl up onto his lap and tell her all about the good old hippie days in the good old Haight-Ashbury. Of course the chump’s way of starting over again was to move to another town and, well, start over again. By the time she’d run him down to ask him how come he’d left, he’d procreated his way into a duplicate of his first version of life. Same number of kids; his wife was a Pisces, Just like Celeste’s mother; warehouseman’s local was a couple of digits different; he was coming home off the forklift to the television stupider than ever.

  With brains like that running in the family, looking down on four hundred a week plus tips was true to form. What would she do if she had kids? Sit them on her lap and tell them all about the Haight-Ashbury? It’s genetic, right? Procreate, then mollify.

  The question remained: other than a few tart remarks, what else would be expected of her mouth?

  “Look,” she said, grinding out the cigarette on her heel. “You can just about see my asshole from the back of that dress. So the fact that it might almost cover my pubic hair after a good wax doesn’t compensate for much.”

  “Shave already,” the Clive said distantly.

  She resisted an urge to flick her cigarette at his face, and dropped it to the floor. This Clive guy was going to make her earn her money, no mistake. “So my question is,” she continued less patiently, “just exactly what is it that I’m selling out there? Am I going to be able to go home and look my old man in the eye at 3 A.M.? Without going straight for the mouthwash I mean? Just level with me, is all I’m asking. Jesus Christ, this dress is practically giving it away!” The dress in question hung from a nail. It covered the wall behind it like a butterfly covers a bus.

  Clive smiled unpleasantly. “A girl has her self-respect.”

  Celeste looked straight at him. “I’ll bet she does.”

  “Now girls,” said his partner.

  Clive made his mouth very tiny. “It’s not like we’re asking you to do anything you’ve never done before, darling.…”

  Bingo. “And another thing,” Celeste said, pointing to Clive but addressing the other man. “Is this asshole in charge? Does he have anything to say to me during work hours? Or is he just hanging around the toilets?”

  “Well.”

  “It’s not like I’m asking you to do anything you haven’t done before,” she parroted.
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br />   The other man pulled the skimpy uniform down from the wall and laid it over his knees. He began smoothing the ruffles in its tutu, which looked about the size of one of those paper cuffs six thin cookies come in. Probably made of paper, too. Probably designed to be incinerated at the end of a particularly fun evening, for hygienic purposes. “Clive is in charge of taste,” the man said, careful not to look at Celeste. “The girls are not in his charge, per se.”

  “Ohhhhh,” Celeste nodded. “Taste. And what brand of mouthwash do you use?”

  Clive barely sat still for it. The other man must indeed have a firm hold over the major elements, money for instance. Other than the good partner/bad partner act, she could see no other reason for him to put up with or even indulge in such a spitting contest. Come to think of it, money was why she was putting up with it. Money or the potential for money was why she’s blowing off an otherwise fine afternoon sitting in a dingy room in the back of a cavernous warehouse nightclub, primer black from the throat of the girls’ toilet to the chords in the roof trusses and outside, too; sitting here trying to augur the hairball that was the mechanics between a money-man, his “taste-maker,” and how much flesh was involved.

  But what a waste of time. When you’re broke your life is full of otherwise fine afternoons, but she could be sitting on a sunny bench in the park, reading Backlash.

  “Look, guys.…” she began. “You’re right. I need a job. Tattoos, cosmetics, birth control, meaningful non-fiction–things cost money. I got a sweet old man who’s killing himself doing the right thing eight hours a day, and I’d like to do my share. As we all know, a straight eight doesn’t make it in this world anymore, it’s not enough, it barely makes the rent and dues to Amnesty International. Not to mention the phone bill and heroin. It’s more like a straight sixteen.”

  Clive studied a fingernail. “That’s why they call them DINKS.”

  Celeste frowned-and-pouted, interrupted but curious. “ ‘Dinks’?”

  “Double-Income-No-KidS.”

  Celeste fitted the acronym to the syllables, moving her lips.

  Clive sighed knowingly. “They’re thoroughly covered in my monograph on the subject, Bioeconomic Neuroses in Breeders.”

  “Self-published?”

  Clive’s jaw tightened.

  Celeste returned to the subject. “But if what you’re asking me to do is to go out there in hardly any clothes and let guys put their fingers in me, or let musicians and fire inspectors sit real close to me in the green room, or go out on dates with them after the show–no dice. I did a little of that when I was a kid, but I’m not cut out for it. When a pig with bad teeth and eel on his breath paws me, all I want to do is kill him, or myself, I don’t care how much talent either one of us has or how big his clipboard is or how much I’m getting paid for it.”

  Clive raised an eyebrow on the word, ‘kid’. “I know a guy could turn you in a week,” he said levelly. “You’ll never look back.”

  Celeste sighed wearily. Four-hundred a week, plus tips, adios. “Fuck off.” She stood. “Thanks for a real opportunity.”

  “You should have gone to trade school,” Clive called, as she slammed the door behind her. “Rough trade school!”

  She wandered north, not paying any particular attention to where she was going. In little-girl mode. All dressed up and lost in little-girl mode. Any remotely womanly thing she did from now until she snapped out of it would do nothing for anybody but a pedophile. Her cowgirl boots felt outsized, ridiculous. The black knit miniskirt—in fact only marginally more conservative than what “Clive” had been asking her to wear—the bracelets, the lipstick, the teased hair, even the bone in her nose–all were lost to little-girl mode; all were hip, womanly accessories orbiting a kid playing dress-up.

  It wasn’t like she needed to appeal to anybody, certainly not to strangers on the street, nor, for that matter, strangers in a night club. She had Pauley. But something had him. Nearly everything he’d ever tried in his life had gone queer, he was turning fifty the last time he’d gotten out on parole. But now he was straight, and all it was doing was killing him. They hadn’t talked about it much. But he knew it, and she knew it, and he knew she knew, and a spirited so-forth. If they were cool and watched the dimes and maybe she got some kind of job, any kind of job, they might be able to retire in twenty years. Jesus Christ, Pauley would be seventy-five, you’re talking bibs at all meals, you’re talking teeth in a glass on the nightstand and a tumescent prosthesis in the drawer. She would be forty-five, older by eighty percent, an age which seemed vertiginously distant. And retire to where? To do what? Pauley often repeated what he’d heard a guy in the bar say: that, whereas the 20th century had opened with the human body as its romantic landscape, it was closing with the paycheck as its romantic landscape. And no matter what their other characteristics, romantic landscapes all have one specialty in common: they shrink. The notion haunted Pauley, who both reviled and believed it. She’d seen him cracking. He was plenty tough, too. But the grind was getting to him. They don’t call it the grind for nothing, and there’s only so much enamel between the burr and the nerve. Sure it’s America. Land of the free, so long as you don’t drown or starve or get run over by the government. Fair enough, really. Pauley was never going back to prison—that much they both knew. But building torture racks with a chain saw in a basement hardly looked like fresh air and forward motion to either of them. Still, as Pauley generally observed, it beat building state park picnic tables in the joint. At least he thought it did. He knew it did. But at what point in recent history had it become impossible to make a living just by making a living?

  Presently she found herself on upper Sixth Street. Bums, derelicts, hustlers, pimps, drunks, addicts, madmen and madwomen milled or stumbled or lay collapsed as far as the eye could see, all dazed or delirious in the California sunshine. Two cops strolling their beat were the best dressed people on the block. Most of the denizens hid behind shades like she did, sensitive personalities. Just a couple of blocks from here that power tool called a newspaper pumped out lies and single-celled culture 365 days a year, seemingly helpless to do otherwise. They had a socialite working for them with the longest-running newspaper column in the history of fishwrap, who liked to claim he walked his hangover through this devastation practically every day. He probably did. Most people think they do what they do so they won’t wind up here, and that’s about all most of them know about it. The late-breaking problem is, you can do what you do and still wind up here. Even so, this neighborhood was enough to give anybody with a will to live the stomach to go to lunch and Hollywood matinees and even the opera at least long enough to find out how bad the unemployed filthy rich needed to read their names in your column in the paper, and whether or not they could wait a week, there’s only so much room. What a gig. Lend your mind not to the meshing of the gears, but just to the noises they make–permanently. Maybe in his last column he’ll have the guts to hold the whole town up to its own ear and say–Listen: hear the ocean?

  The westerly had come up hot and dry. Market Street was a wind tunnel. Brilliant sunlight in a cloudless sky could do nothing to alleviate the chill bluster coursing through the canyons of blind windows. Where did all these poor bastards go at night? There couldn’t be enough ice plant in the entire state to bed them down. For that matter, where did they go in the daytime? It didn’t seem possible that every single one of them was walking down Sixth Street to put the iron back in their ambition. It didn’t seem possible that so many as ten of them had any reason to walk down any street at all. Celeste certainly had no need of them. If she were to put on that little double-slitted dress four nights a week, would any of them have need of her? There’s a thought. Would it be possible to develop the character necessary to become a hooker? So as to do a little good in the world? Was character the right word? Did she really need to spend any time at all worrying about what it would take to get any of these assholes walking up and down the street to give her some of their money?<
br />
  Well, she thought, the short answer is survival. So is the long one. She realized she was showing a lot of leg in this wind.

  No sooner had she thought this thought than a short guy with glasses waiting next to her in the crosswalk smiled and said, “Hi.”

  And, just like that, little-girl mode switched off. Highly specialized and professional mannerisms debouched the mothership in fleets.

  “Hi,” she said. Shorty, she thought.

  “Like a drink?”

  She looked at him. He wasn’t much taller than she was. He wore a skinny red tie, a business suit cut from a happening textile, a briefcase just large enough to carry a pink entertainment supplement folded around a sprout sandwich, slimly-framed glasses with no apparent optical purpose, a watch that lied to him about how deep he was. He smiled matter-of-factly. Then he removed the glasses, put them in his jacket’s breast pocket so that one temple bar hung outside, and fixed her with his naked stare.

  Jesus, thought Celeste, this guy paints the broad stroke.

  The light turned green. They walked, she quickly, he to keep up with her, dodging people going the opposite way. But already she felt it, that mechanism, for lack of a better term, whose signature pulse declared, Here’s one.

  “Sure,” she said, slowing down as they reached the curb. She removed her own sunglasses and looked at him. “Know a place?”