None of the tables and chairs matched.
Gigantic stills from the Bogart film covered most of the walls. Towering up one was a gigantic blowup of Bogart, with cigarette and snarling lip, standing in front of Rick?s nightclub in his white tux.
Nearby, Peter Lorre leered frog-eyed at a fezzed and arrogant Sydney Greenstreet, while on another
wall Claude Rains, dapper in his uniform and peaked cap, peered arrogantly at Conrad Veidt, who
looked like he had just swallowed same bad caviar.
And, of course, Bergman. The eternal virgin stared mystically from under the sweeping brim of her
hat on the wall opposite Bogie.
It wasn?t the movie posters that gave the place its macabre charm, it was the animal heads, mounted
like hunters? trophies between the blowups; psychedelic papier-mache animal heads painted in
nightmare colours. There was an enormous purple elephant with pink polka dots and a giant red hippo
with mauve eyes. An orange snake speckled with blue dots curled around one of the posts that held up
the ceiling, and a lapis lazuli parrot swung idly on a brass ring under a ceiling fan.
The waitresses were poured into tan leather pants tucked into lizard-skin cowboy boots arid wore
matching leather halters, which just barely earned the name, and safari hats.
Mondo Bizarro was a conservative appraisal.
The crowd was as eclectic as the decor: tourists, college kids, pimps, gigolos, gays, straights, local
drugstore cowboys, and what looked like every woman in town, eligible or otherwise.
We took a table opposite the entrance and settled down to watch the Circus Maximus. I wondered if I
could even see DeeDee Lukatis in the mob, or whether I would recognize her if I did see her.
It didn?t take five minutes for the action to start.
I felt the eyes staring at me first. It started at the nape of my neck and crept up around my ears. I let it
simmer for a while arid finally I had to grab a peek.
I saw her in quick takes, a tawny lioness, glimpsed between sweaty dancers weaving to a thunderous
beat that was decibels beyond human endurance, and through smoke thick enough to be cancerous.
Her sun-honeyed hair looked like it had been combed for hours by someone else?s fingers; long hair,
tumbling haphazardly around sleek, broad shoulders. Her gauzy white cotton blouse was open to the
waist and held that way by that kind of dazzling superstructure that makes some women angry and
others dash for the cosmetic surgeon. There wasn?t a bikini streak anywhere on her bronze skin, at
least anywhere that I could see. Her long thin fingers were stroking the rounded lines of the purple
elephant?s trunk. Her other hand held a margarita in its palm, the stem of the glass tucked neatly
between her fingers.
I watched her glide through the frenetic dancers without touching a soul. Did she practice her moves
in front of a mirror, or did they come naturally? Not that it mattered.
