look said. Can't function? Just want to hear? Then the kind look was replaced by a mock scolding one and accompanied by a wag of the finger. 'I never tell tales on other clients,' she said.
'No, no, no,' said Joey. 'You don't understand. I don't mean what you do, I mean how you do it.'
The hooker giggled, rounded her shoulders to show off her collarbones, and managed a serpentine squirm in her chair. 'That's an art, baby. That's not something that can be explained over one drink.'
Joey took the hand that was cold from holding his glass and ran it through his hair. 'Look… what's your name?'
'Vicki,' said the hooker, managing to make the word sound like some forbidden body part.
'Look, Vicki, we don't seem to be connecting here. What I'm talking about is the business side. You see?'
Vicki's mouth came out of its bowed smile, collapsed for a moment into a confused pout, then hardened to a thin line; her tweezed eyebrows fell from their inquisitive arc to parallel the narrowed lips. 'No,' she said, 'I don't see.'
At that moment there came an unfortunate ebb in the noise level of the bar, and when Joey spoke again it seemed as if he was addressing the room at large.
'What I'm asking,' he said, 'to put it simply, is, well, do you have, you know, a pimp?'
'A pimp?' said Vicki, not softly.
The pool players put down their cues. Guys at the bar pricked up their ears.
'A pimp? What're you, crazy? You little piece of shit, what do you think I am? You think I'm a common whore, you little limp-dick shitass?'
Joey reached a conciliatory hand toward Vicki's wrist, but she yanked her arm away. Then she stood up, knocking over her chair and spilling the remains of her Kir. 'I'm an artist, you little scumbag. You heartless, gutless, sexless… oh sweet Jesus, how I hate people like you.'
A thick blue vein was standing out on Vicki's neck, and her lips were quivering in the effort to shape more words. None came, only a ferocious exhalation that seemed to rattle her teeth. Finally, with a green flame of loathing in her eyes, she reached into her blouse, pulled out a tit, and threw it at Joey. It was made of hard rubber, and it hurt his ribs as it bounced off them. The tit landed on the table, wobbled a moment like a twirled coin, and came to rest nipple side up. The red-tinted nub stared at Joey like a blind but accusing eye.
' Marrone,' he said.
The bouncer had arrived. He had a shaved head that was a smaller outcropping of his neck, a single sapphire earring, and he cleaved to the notion that the regular customer was always right and the firsttime visitor always wrong. He lifted Joey out of his chair with such deftness that Joey almost didn't notice he'd been levitated.
'Hey, bubba,' he said, casting a sad glance at the ersatz bosom on the table, 'can't you see you're upsetting the lady?' His face was close to Joey's and his breath smelled of nachos.
'Little misunderstanding is all,' said Joey. His arms were pinned to his sides.
'It happens,' said the bouncer, and he gave Joey a sympathetic squeeze that made him burp up some scotch. 'So why don't you just apologize, then go away and never come back.'
Joey looked across the table at Vicki, half of whose bosom was still heaving with rage. Apologize? Apologize in public? Apologize in public to a transvestite whore? He, the son, albeit illegitimate, of Vincente Delgatto? In New York this would never happen. But this was not New York, and it had gotten through to Joey that not one person in Workingman's Tropic was on his side. In a flash of pained and utter befuddlement, he was not even sure that he was on his side. 'I'm sorry, Vicki,' he managed to say.
The bouncer eased his grip and Joey filled his lungs.
Vicki straightened her wig, stuck out her chin, and mustered as much dignity as her empty bra cup allowed. 'I accept,' she said regally. 'But only because you've got such pretty eyes. You little douchebag.'
— 7 -
So all in all, it had not been going well for Joey, and as he sat poolside in his shaving robe and sunglasses, he pondered the narrowing range of his options. The bitch of it was that at every moment it seemed to him that he was very close to getting something started. All it took was for the first piece of the puzzle to fall into place. An income opportunity- any income opportunity-would allow him to go out and hire some muscle, and he'd be set. Or if he could somehow get some muscle behind him, the income opportunities would create themselves.
But how did you start? And how low could you go? Already Joey had faked car trouble on U.S. 1 so he could flag down a supermarket truck and propose to the driver that maybe a few hundred pounds of sirloin steak should fall out the back; the teamster had answered by producing a crowbar from under the driver's seat. Next, Joey had casually broached the question of insurance with the proprietor of a local surf-and-turf emporium; the restaurateur said he would check his policy and came back from the kitchen whispering to a pair of slathering Dobermans with stud collars. No one in Key West seemed the slightest bit afraid of Joey, and he found this disconcerting. It made him secretly suspect that even in New York no one had been afraid of him, only of the yeggs he ran with.
'Sandra,' he asked one night in bed, 'do you think I'm like, what's the word, intimidating?'
Sandra Dugan was not a woman of wide sexual experience, but the most basic of intuitions told her that if you cared about a guy, you didn't giggle at him when you were between the sheets. Instead, she seriously appraised his face. It was boyish, no getting around it. The blue eyes were lacking in threat, the half-curly hair was lamblike in spite of Joey's efforts to keep it slick and tough. Only the cleft in the chin suggested the possibility of violence, and the cleft in the chin was barely visible. 'No, Joey,' she said, 'I wouldn't call you intimidating.' Then, to soften the blow, she asked a somewhat disingenuous question. 'But why would you wanna be?'
Joey measured his need to talk against the tenets of his code. He couldn't say he wanted to look scary so he could shake guys down. 'Ya know,' he said, 'just so I could, like, persuade people to do things for me.'
'People do what they want,' said Sandra. 'You want people to do things for you, Joey, you have to make them want to.'
But what Joey wanted was for people to hand him large amounts of cash. This didn't happen by making nice. It happened by… well, Joey was close to admitting he didn't know how it happened. And in the meantime here he was, snuggled up in the sack, helplessly going broke. In the meantime he was feeling more guilty every day that Sandra was earning and he was not. No, he had to keep pushing.
But why? Where was the justice in it, the sense? Joey thought about Steve. He didn't push. All he did was stand bare-assed in the pool all day. And, unlikely as it seemed, Steve was in his quiet way a big shot. He owned the compound. He was a landlord in a town where rents were through the roof. How had it happened? Did he start off rich, or once do something very smart? Joey had to admit he didn't have a clue how most people made their livings, couldn't figure the logic that made the legitimate world keep turning. If he could figure it out… well, hell, he had his own angles to worry about.
And there were plenty of them he hadn't looked into yet. There was bed linen for the hotels and table linen for the restaurants. There was construction, union or otherwise. There was garbage. He just had to keep up his initiative. He'd get some sleep, drink some coffee, catch some sun; then, when he was feeling rested and looking prosperous, he'd drag his desperate ass downtown and try again.
–
Cliff, the daytime bartender at the Eclipse Saloon, smiled weakly and stifled a yawn. This was the sleepy time, coming up on four p.m. The lunch rush was over, the waitresses were smoking and yakking across the empty dining room as they filled the ketchup bottles and topped off the saltshakers for dinner. The bar was vacant except for a couple of lushes who'd been there since breakfast and the occasional regular who stopped by for one pop and some air-conditioning. Late afternoon was also when the dullest strangers wandered in, baffled tourists traveling alone, salesmen who needed a quick belt before opening the swatch book one more time. They always wanted to talk, these solitary ones. They talked about ex-wives, their time in the navy, the clogs in their fuel injectors. They talked about autumn in New England, winter in the Rockies, springtime in Amarillo, about everyplace they ever remembered being happy, but not happy enough to stay there. Now here was a guy who wanted to talk about garbage.
'So how does it work down here?' Joey asked, nursing his tequila. 'Is it city, or private, or what?'
