bartenders. Work nights at a place called Cheeks. Over here'-he gestured toward a bungalow tucked away behind the hot tub- 'that's Wendy and Marsha's place. They have an antique store. And back there'-he did a little pirouette-'that's Luke and Lucy. He's a reggae musician and she's a mailman. Nice people. Considerate.'
It was only at this point, when Steve was maneuvering around the swimming pool, that Joey realized he was naked. Dwarfed by his big, stretched belly, his submerged private parts looked like baby birds left home in a nest beneath an overhanging cliff. Of buttocks he had virtually none.
'And whadda you guys do?' Steve asked. Then he smiled.
Joey hesitated. This was not a question that was asked among his circle of acquaintances, nor was he accustomed to chatting with naked guys in mixed company. 'Well,' he said, 'Sandra here is in banking. And me, well, I do this and that.'
'This and that,' Steve said. 'Well, that's what most people do down here. You'll fit right in. Anyway, you wanna think it over, think it over. This is where I'll be.'
Sandra tugged at Joey's sleeve.
'Excuse us a minute,' said Joey, and they retreated to a shady alcove in back of the gas grill. Joey took off his sunglasses and put them on again.
'I don't know about this, Sandra. I came here to be a businessman, not a goddamn nudist. I mean, you gonna get naked with these people?'
'Me?' said Sandra. As if by reflex, she reached up toward the high collar of her blouse. 'Joey, I'm the original prude, you know that. I blush if someone sees my slip. But if other people wanna take their clothes off, I got no problem with that.'
'I dunno,' said Joey. 'And I'm not crazy about the idea of living with a Fed right here.'
'Who's a Fed?'
'What's 'er name? Lucy.'
'Joey, she's a mailman.'
'A Fed's a Fed. You think they don't all work together? They all wanna know your business. Right away it's the IRS, the FBI.'
'Joey, admit it. You're just uptight about the naked part.'
He languidly dug a toe into the compound's white gravel. 'Awright, I admit it. I didn't bring you down here to hang around a bunch of guys with their dicks out. Am I weird? No, I'm not weird. Sandra, this is a weird town.'
'You're the one who wanted to come here,' she said. 'I was perfectly happy to stay in Queens. Say what you want about Queens, Joey, at least people don't go around with nothing on.'
Joey raised his hands up around his temples. It was a gesture of surrender but also a warning that he didn't want to hear any more. 'So, Sandra, you're telling me you wanna live in this freakin' nudist camp?'
'I'm telling you we haven't seen anything better we can afford. I'm telling you I don't wanna go back to some depressing motel that stinks of mildew. And I'm telling you that if we don't make a decision, I'm gonna scream.'
Joey tapped his foot; the gravel dust did not come off his black loafer. Then he walked back to the pool.
'So, Steve,' he said. 'We're innerested. But eighteen hundred-it's a little steep for us. Take fifteen.'
Steve looked at the broker. The broker looked at Steve.
'Fifteen if it's year-round,' said the naked landlord. 'If you'll sign a full-year lease.'
'Deal,' said Joey. He felt like he'd gotten away with something, and it cheered him up. Three hundred bucks off just for signing a stupid piece of paper.
'I'll get the lease,' Steve said, but Joey stopped him with a gesture before he could wade to the stairs. Underwater was bad enough. He wasn't ready for full frontal in the glaring light of day.
'We'll go get our car and stuff,' said Joey. 'We'll sign the papers after.'
— 5 -
On a breezy morning at the end of January, Joey Goldman stood in front of his bathroom mirror and tried to figure out how best to display his sunglasses on those rare occasions when he wasn't actually wearing them. Some guys, he'd noticed, hooked them around their second shirt button, and let them hang straight down. This was stylish, Joey thought, but maybe, well, a little feminine. Of course, he could simply drop them in his breast pocket, but then they were invisible, he got no benefit at all. Maybe the suave compromise was to put them in the pocket, but with an earpiece looped outside.
Joey spent about ten minutes on this problem, and told himself he wasn't killing time, he was working on his image, which after all was an important aspect of his business. He wasn't hiding out inside the compound, inside the cottage, behind the bathroom door. Or maybe he was. Had he ever in his life had a more frustrating few weeks? He couldn't say for sure.
He hadn't made a nickel, and it was a damn good thing Sandra had right away found a job. Seems there was a shortage of bank tellers in south Florida, and considering what they were paid, that was not surprising. Her salary at Keys Marine was just enough to halve the pace at which they were going broke.
Meanwhile Joey had a lot of time to himself, to think, to organize, to set things up. But all he'd really accomplished was laying down the base coat for a glorious tan. That, and meeting the neighbors.
The neighbors were very Key West, and Joey, who was not, had a tough time figuring out how he was supposed to feel about them. Take Peter and Claude. They couldn't have been nicer or more welcoming, but they were, after all, queer. Claude was blond, very tall and thin, and walked like he was modeling mink coats. Peter had bleached his hair but kept his eyebrows dark, as if trying unsuccessfully to look sinister. They worked late, and would emerge from their cottage around two P.M., wearing sarongs. They'd offer Joey herb tea and cookies that didn't snap, they bent: Key West was a humid place. Then they'd ask him questions about the theater, the opera, downtown clubs, stuff like that. Questions about New York, but not the New York Joey knew. Joey couldn't deny that he appreciated the company, the chitchat, but he also couldn't deny that there was something faggoty about herb tea, about a drink where you could see the bottom of the cup. He couldn't tell if he was pretending to like Peter and Claude but didn't, or pretending not to but did.
With Wendy and Marsha, it was the opposite. They were cordial enough, but Joey had the distinct impression they didn't like him. They made him feel like he was intruding from a distance. They had a cat they took for walks, and they held each other's arms while they walked it. They always seemed to be deep in conversation on deep subjects-art, politics, whatever. Wendy, or maybe it was Marsha, had the hairiest legs Joey had ever seen, legs with ringlets. His eyes were drawn to them as to the stump of a missing arm, and this made conversation awkward.
With Luke the reggae musician, conversation was awkward for a different reason. Luke didn't talk. He lived with a Walkman clipped onto the waistband of his shorts, and would sometimes sit for hours with his feet dangling in the pool and his eyes narrowed in concentration. When Lucy the mailman came home from work, she'd plop down next to him on the cool tiles, still wearing her post office shorts, slate blue with a navy stripe at the side. Lucy was extremely beautiful, for a Fed, with huge dark eyes widely spaced and skin as even and inviting as the morning's first cup of creamy coffee. But even this caused Joey some unease because he hadn't been raised to find black women, or letter carriers, attractive.
So the compound, all in all, was diverting, a relatively inexpensive form of foreign travel. But Joey hadn't come to Florida in search of the exotic, he'd come to make his fortune, and the fact was that three weeks into his new life, he was no closer to a payday than on the morning he'd bolted Queens. Not that he'd been lazy. No. Especially in the first ten days, two weeks, he'd been enterprising as hell. He'd really put himself out there. But nothing had worked. He'd been laughed at, kissed off, insulted, threatened, and if he hadn't caught a beating, that was only because of his well-developed feel for the moment when he should back off and scram.
First, there was the disaster of the numbers game, what the Cubans call bolita. It was a nice little operation, pegged to the track at Hialeah but locally run, and Joey didn't see why he shouldn't have a piece of it. He wasn't looking to muscle in, and he wasn't looking for a handout. He wanted a partnership, and he'd give value for his cut. Numbers was something he knew; he knew it big-city style. So he'd bring some sophistication to the racket, expand
