May-be I should buy some old tab col-lars.
Wel-come back to the age of jive.
The working guy was looking at Salisbury now, sizing him up. Looking at a blow-dry haircut that was a little too precise for a place like this. Clean shaven, skin still glistening like he’d just spanked his face with Aqua Velva at two A.M., as if the girls in a beat-your-meat joint really care. The hair was starting to show some early gray, the features pleasant, if not matinee idol stuff. A professor at Miami-Dade maybe, the working guy figured.
Salisbury knew the guy was looking at him, now at his hands, just as he had done. Funny how hands can tell you so much. Proud of his hands. Broad and strong. They could have swung a pick, except there were no calluses. He had washed off the blood, scrubbing as hard after surgery as he had before the endless night began. Seventy- two hours with only catnaps and stale sandwiches until the hospital cafeteria ran out. But he stood there the whole time, one of the leaders, the chief orthopedics resident, setting broken bones, picking glass and bullet fragments out of wounds, calming hysterical relatives.
After showering at the hospital, he had tossed the soiled lab coat into the trash and grabbed a blue blazer from his locker. Now he was nursing a beer and trying to forget the carnage. He could have gone home. Twenty- seventh Avenue was finally open after the three-day blockade. But too tired to sleep, he wound through unfamiliar streets and was finally lured out of the night by the neon sign of the Tangiers on West Dixie. He would think about it later, many times, why he stopped that night, what drew him to such a strange and threatening place. Pickup trucks and old Chevys jammed the parking lot. Music blared from outdoor loudspeakers, a rhythmic, pulsating beat intended to tempt men inside just as the singing of the Sirens drew Greek sailors onto the rocks. It might have been the flashing sign. The throbbing colors got right to the point -- NUDE GIRLS 24 HOURS… NUDE GIRLS 24 HOURS -- blinking on, blinking off, proof of bare flesh moment after moment after moment.
The working guy was talking to him: “I say let’em burn colored town down to the ground if they want to, no skin offa my nose. I mean, the cops was wrong, killing one of the coloreds, had his hands cuffed behind his back, no need for that. But some of ‘em just looking for excuses to behave like animals. They burned a poor Cuban alive in his car, heard it on the radio.”
“We tried to save him,” Salisbury said quietly.
The guy gave him a look. “Sure! You’re a doctor. Should have known. Jesus, you musta seen it all. Wait a minute, Sweet Jesus, here comes Miss Poster Ass. She’s worth a twenty-dollar dance, or I’m the Prince of Wales.”
Roger Salisbury watched her walk toward them, an inviting smile aimed his way. The other men around the small stage hooted and slapped their thighs. Roger Salisbury lowered his eyes and studied his drink.
“Your first time?” the man asked. Silence. “Yeah, your first time. Loosen up. Here’s the poop. First the girls dance out here on the bar stage. No big deal, they take it all off, you stick a dollar bill in their garter and maybe one’ll kiss you. In the back, where it’s darker, you got your table dances, twenty bucks. That’s one-on-one and I may buy me an up-close-and-personal visit with Miss Poster Ass. Haven’t been able to get here all week what with the jungle bunnies staging their block parties.”
On stage now, grinding to the music, no longer the Kansas cheerleader. Ev-ry-bod-y’s talk-in’ ’bout the new sound. Funny, but it’s still rock and roll to me. In a few moments, the bikini top was off, firm breasts bounding free. The G-string came next, and then she arched her back, bent over, and propped her hands on her knees looking away from the men. The poster ass wiggled clockwise as if on coasters, then stopped and wiggled counterclockwise. Salisbury stared as if hypnotized. The ass quivered once, fluttered twice with contractions that Roger Salisbury felt deep in his own loins, then stopped six inches from his face. His fatigue gone, the swirl of blood and bodies a dreamy fog, Roger Salisbury fantasized that the perfect ass wiggled only for him. He didn’t see the other men, some laughing, some bantering, others conjuring up their own steamy visions. None of the others, though, seemed spellbound by an act as old as the species.
The dance done, the girl smiled at Roger Salisbury, an open interested smile, he thought. And though she smiled at each man, again he thought it was only for him. She sashayed from one end of the small stage to the other, collecting dollar bills in a black garter while propping a red, high-heeled shoe on the rim between the stage and the bar. Other than the gaiter and the shoes, she was naked, but her face showed neither shame nor seduction. She could have been passing the collection plate at the First Lutheran Church of Topeka. Roger Salisbury slipped a five-dollar bill into her garter, removing it from his wallet with two fingers, never taking his eyes off the girl. A neat trick, but he could also tie knots in thread with a thumb and one finger inside a matchbox. Great hands. The strong, steady hands of a surgeon.
Her smile widened as she leaned close to him, her voice a moist whisper on his ear. “I’d like to dance for you. Just you.” And he believed it.
Roger Salisbury believed everything she said that night. That she was a model down on her luck, that her name was Autumn Rain, that all she wanted was a good man and a family. They talked in the smoky shadows of a corner table and she danced for him alone. Twenty dollars and another twenty as a tip. He didn’t lay a hand on her. At nearby tables men grasped tumbling breasts, and the girls stepped gingerly from their perches in four-inch spikes to sit on customers’ laps, writhing on top of them, grinding down with bare asses onto the fully clothed groins of middle-aged men. “Didja come?” the heavy girl at the next table whispered to her customer, already reaching for a tip.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Roger Salisbury said, shaking his head. “It’s half prostitution and half masturbation.” He gestured toward the overweight girl who was gathering her meager outfit and sneaking a peek at the president’s face on the bill she had glommed from a guy in faded jeans. “You don’t do that, do you?” Salisbury asked.
She smiled. Of course not, the look said.
He asked her out.
Against the rules, she said. Some guys, they think if you’re an exotic dancer, it means for fifty bucks you give head or whatever.
But I’m different, Roger Salisbury said.
She cocked her head to one side and studied him. They all thought they were different, but she knew there were only two kinds of men, jerks and jerk-offs. Oh, some made more money and didn’t get their fingernails dirty. She’d seen them, white shirts and yellow ties, slumming it, yukking it up. But either way, grease monkeys or stockbrokers, once those gates opened and the blood rushed in, turning their worms into stick shifts, they were either jerks or jerk-offs. The jerk-offs were mostly young, wise guys without a pot to piss in, spending all their bread on wheels and women, figuring everything in a skirt-or G-string-was a pushover. Jerks were saps, always falling in love and wanting to change you, make an honest woman out of you. Okay, put me in chains, if the price is right. This guy, jerk all the way.
I’m a doctor, he said.
Oh, she said, sounding impressed.
He told her how he had patched and mended those caught in the city’s crossfire, how he wanted to help people and be a great doctor. She listened with wide eyes and nodded as if she knew what he felt deep inside and she smiled with practiced sincerity. A doctor, she figured, made lots of money, not realizing that a resident took home far less than an exotic dancer and got his hands just as dirty.
She looked directly into Roger Salisbury’s eyes and softened her own. He looked into her eyes and thought he saw warmth and beauty of spirit.
Roger Salisbury, it turned out, was better at reading X rays than the looks in women’s eyes.
D E C E M B E R 1 9 8 8
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When the witness hesitated, I drummed my pen impatiently against my legal pad. Made a show of it. Not that I was in a hurry. I had all day, all week. The Doctors’ Medical Insurance Trust pays by the hour and not
